Title: A Spirit of All Compact of Fire

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not. I claim nothing but the plot.

Rating: PG-13.

Summary: B:tVS, Dresden Files. "And your current intentions...?" Buffy asked without missing a beat. "...Are to ask a very lovely woman who has every right to tie me into a pretzel whether she'd like to have dinner with me instead," I ventured. 4600 words.

Spoilers: B:tVS AU/Dresden Files novels; post-series and post-"White Night".

Notes: Prompt: "Harry and Buffy go on a date", in the Handle With Care 'verse. This was supposed to be the actual date, complete with hijinks, but the setup grew legs and got entwined with how Book 9 might have taken place in this fusion. Title's a Shakespeare quote.

After the dust finished settling from the White Court upheaval, I took a drive to Cleveland.

It wasn't on the list of cities Elaine had given me, where the White Court malcontents had made a point of culling minor practitioners for their hideous plot. San Diego, San Jose, Austin, Seattle-- most of the reported deaths had been on the West Coast. But I knew the Watcher's Council still had contacts out there, and that even if they had lost people in Cleveland they may not have publicized it. They had even more reason to avoid grey cloaks than most; so I wasn't sure what I'd find when I arrived.

I was carefully not thinking about the possibility that like most of Chicago's practitioners, they may have thought Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard and Part Time Warden, had been involved with the deaths. Buffy and I weren't actually dating or anything-- though not for lack of desire on my part-- and she did have her own full-time supernatural organization to run. Given those qualifiers, I hadn't really let myself worry about it until I'd paused in the middle of one of our Paranet planning sessions to wonder if she'd want to be included and realized that it had been weeks since I'd last heard from her.

I'd kind of got in the habit of calling her after my minor cases to mock the weirdness of our business. Or tease her about her adventures in administration. Or practice my Latin with her mentor. I'm not sure Rupert Giles actually approves of my friendship with his charge, but he's generally politer than most of the senior wizards on the White Council, and despite his relative lack of power he's nearly as exhaustive a resource as Bob. Especially on the subject of unruly teenagers. He'd been a big help since I'd taken on Molly.

But I'd only spoken to answering machines and secretaries since just before Murphy had hired me to investigate a set of suspicious suicides in Chicago-- and I hadn't even done that since the ghoul attack on Thomas' boat. After that little dance of gunfire and ice, I'd picked up the phone to warn her... and then remembered rather abruptly that Buffy had once dated among the Malvora, the branch of White Court vampires that fed on human fear. And the Malvora were definitely part of the problem.

I'd told myself I hadn't wanted to dredge up bad memories for her. But it was just as plausible that her people had been targeted, too, for that very reason-- and that she'd fingered me as the culprit, just like all the others who'd seen a tall, pale man in a grey cloak and assumed the worst.

Or that she had been a target. She might be the most deadly thing I've ever seen with her Scythe unsheathed in her hands, but no one can be on guard every second of the day... and we all have our weak spots. If Vittorio Malvora had pulled one of the clan's wayward sons in on his scheme...

I remembered the look on her face when I'd seen her at her fiercest, remote as starlight and limned in autumn flame atop the ramparts of Arctis Tor. But then I pictured her facing someone she'd loved over that blade... and the stern image broke down in my thoughts. The woman who'd thrown her head back and laughed in delight when I got caught in the middle of her sister's prank on their publicist slash chef-- and let me just say, I haven't looked at a pancake the same since-- didn't strike me as the type who'd anticipate an old lover's betrayal, seasoned Slayer or not.

Buffy had asked me, once, if I knew the names Angelus or William Malvora. Ramirez' report had filled me in on their connection to her, but not their ranking within the White Court-- and I'd never got around to asking Thomas about them. My half-brother has a Juliet of his own; I hadn't felt like rubbing the situation in his face. I sincerely hoped I wouldn't come to regret that oversight.

The Council House was still standing when I got there; I decided to take that as a good sign. I hadn't visited frequently enough to know who drove what, but the cars parked out front looked familiar, and lights glowed in several of the windows. It was early evening, but the Watchers' business hours were frequently even more eccentric than mine, so that was another point in favor of business as usual.

I took a deep breath, then let it out again to calm my nerves. I might have, maybe, occasionally, been accused of impulsive behavior, but you can't make it through magical training without learning a lot about meditation and focus, and there was every chance that I was making mountains out of molehills. An awful lot of molehills, admittedly. But: perspective. That's not something I'm very good at, either.

I squared my shoulders under my duster-- Buffy's always teasing me about slouching, though given the foot and half difference in our heights you'd think she wouldn't mind-- and rang the bell.

Thirty seconds later, a girl a couple of years older than Molly with long dark hair and blue eyes threw the door open, scowling at me with her hands on her hips. "You," she said.

There was no use trying an innocent expression on a seasoned wielder of the canine eyes. I grinned at her, carefully not exactly meeting her gaze, and several tense knots in my shoulders started to unwind a little at this further evidence of normalcy.

"Me," I said. "Hey, Dawn. Is your sister around?"

She tossed a shiny fall of hair over one shoulder and crossed her arms, affecting indignation. "I don't know. Do you mean is she in the building, or are you asking whether she wants to talk to the guy who nearly got himself killed last week and didn't even tell her he was going to fight vampires?"

Put that way... I thought it over a second. Ah. Yeah, that put another spin on the continued silence. I winced, remembering certain conversations with Murphy.

Dawn rolled her eyes. "Moron," she said. "She's only the freaking Vampire Slayer. I thought you weren't going to be a Riley about it, but I guess I was giving you too much credit."

"It... wasn't about that?" I tried. Riley? What the hell was a Riley?

Dawn made a scoffing noise. "Yeah, and I might believe you if you sounded a little more sure of yourself when you said that. Tell me you at least brought her something shiny to make up for it."

That, at least, I had covered. "If by shiny you mean sharp and shiny..." I suggested, unsheathing the new knife at my belt to show her. It had a number of enchantments worked into it, most of them variations on subtle workings I'd been refreshing myself on before teaching them to Molly, and the base blade was one I'd seen Buffy stare at wistfully when we'd crashed through a medieval recreationist faire chasing Black Court the year before. I'd sort of hoped it would be a courting-type gift, not an apology-type gift, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

"Oooh," Dawn said, thawing a little at the sight of it. She was too much like her sister not to appreciate it, both their objections to the contrary; she unfolded one arm and skimmed her fingers through the air over the blade as though she were tasting its aura with her fingertips.

It was an endless mystery to me why Dawn hadn't shown the same supernatural gifts as her sister, given her presumably identical parentage; the White Council believed the Slayers were some sort of carefully regulated mixed breed, similar to half-fae changelings like Meryl who started showing traits of their nonhuman parent in their teens. Dawn had some wisps of tightly controlled power about her-- she was probably a minor practitioner of some stripe-- but she otherwise seemed like a perfectly normal human being.

"Okay," she conceded after a moment, and stepped off to the side, holding the door open. "I take it back; you're not totally hopeless. But I still can't actually invite you inside, you know that, right?"

"Right." I sighed. I hated the feeling of leaving my magic outside a threshold; I'd never liked being powerless. But the Watchers didn't do invites, for good reason, so I had to put up with it.

I took a step forward, pressing into the invisible field of the threshold like the wall of a glycerin-enhanced bubble, until it parted around me-- leaving my power firmly stuck to its surface. I could still cast inside, if I really tried, but I'd only be able to manage maybe one percent of my usual oomph. Which Dawn knew perfectly well, having barely escaped my syrup and feather covered wrath in the past primarily due to that particular anti-guest feature.

I resheathed the knife, then reached into my duster for the second thing I'd been thoughtful enough to bring. "That doesn't stop me from bringing a welcome gift, though, does it?"

The smirk slid sideways off her face as I pulled a body-warmed glass bottle from a pocket. "You wouldn't," she said.

"Genuine Vermont maple," I taunted her, waggling the bottle in my hand.

Several long, shrieking minutes later, I found myself standing in front of Buffy's office, syrup still poised and Dawn's nose tilted disdainfully at me. Her composed expression was ruined only slightly by the rapidity of her breathing, which I was gallantly pretending not to notice. She'd have fit right in with the Carpenter teens in more ways than one, if only her hair was a little blonder; the thought made me smile.

"Think I've got a chance?" I asked her, relenting at last and putting the bottle away.

She sniffed, but unbent a little, returning the smile. "I guess we'll see," she said. Then she knocked on the door and ushered me inside.

I'm always surprised every time I set eyes on Buffy Summers; like Murphy, she's a stunning case of the package not matching the wrapping. Not that there's anything wrong with either package or wrapping; far from it. But to look at the woman known as The Slayer, dressed in clothes Thomas wouldn't be ashamed to see draped on his arm, smooth skinned and lithe limbed and gracefully petite, you'd never guess she was all spring steel and sharp teeth in a silken glove. As much in character as in body.

Her green eyes were reproachful as she stared in my direction, and she'd crossed her arms atop her desk. Every line of her posture gave the impression that she was upset with me.

I didn't quite look her in the eye as I approached. We hadn't soulgazed yet, though I was sure when it inevitably happened, she'd handle it more like Marcone than Susan...

...Stars and stones, I really had shortchanged her when I'd stopped calling.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly. "Dawn said you found out about the mess with the White Court; I really should have called you in on it."

"I thought we had a deal," she said, coolly.

"You'd been out of contact for a few days, and when I figured out what the Malvora were up to..." I sighed, trying to think of a way to phrase it that wouldn't make me look like the chauvinistic ass people kept accusing me of being. "I remembered that you'd asked about William and Angelus."

"And you, what, thought I might be involved?" she asked, sharply.

"Hell's Bells," I blurted. "No, of course not. But--" I bit my lip. "You've met Thomas," I said. She didn't know he was my brother-- that secret was closely kept, as neither Thomas nor I could afford the White Council knowing that my mother had had another son, much less one who was an incubus-- but she did know I trusted him. "But you haven't met Justine. They-- well. Let's just say I have a pretty good idea of what can happen when a White Court vampire falls in love."

She swallowed and went a little pale at that. "I see," she said, in a startled tone of voice.

I cleared my throat and decided to fess up outright, if only to get that look off her face. "So it's been brought to my attention that I might have underestimated you. And slightly overreacted when I realized I hadn't heard from you since before the case fell in my lap."

I reached for the knife again, unclipping the sheath from my belt, and lay it across her desk. "Happy unbirthday, in unrelated news," I added.

"Oooh." She unsheathed the knife, then ran a finger over it, fingers following the same path her sister's had though in more tactile fashion. Her expression softened-- then turned wry, as she looked up at me again. "Bribery, sir; I cry foul."

"Just... appreciation," I said, "and a most sincere apology."

She considered that a moment; then sighed, and nodded. "And I guess I owe you one, too. An apology, I mean, not a knife!" She stroked a finger down the blade again, this time testing the edge, and looked surprised to see that it hadn't cut her finger. "Damn; you'll have to tell me what all you did to it, later."

"What makes you think I did anything to it?" I asked her, lightly. "It could just be dull."

"Because this is you," she said, dryly. "Mr. Wizard Who Likes Doing Magic So Much He Advertises In The Phone Book. Besides, it tingles." She lifted her finger and waggled it at me. "But you won't distract me from my apology, either. We were out west-- one of the deaths in Seattle was a Watcher, and her Slayer was taking it hard, so Giles and I went to deal with it personally. We thought it was just internal business, until Spike caught up with us and told us the Skavis were up to something."

The Skavis, the branch of White Court vampires that fed on human pain and despair, were very good at inducing suicidal depression in their victims. They'd killed more than thirty magically gifted women by making them look like they'd taken their own lives-- the first step in a campaign to demonstrate it was possible to win the war against the White Council by eliminating the unprotected gene pool rather than directly fighting the current generation of wizards. I'd bartered the help of John Marcone-- and Lara Raith, half-sister on the other side of Thomas' family and nominal head of the White Court-- in a drastic effort to prove the benefits of any such plot wouldn't be worth the risk.

We probably could have used the Watchers' help in the whole ordeal. It certainly would have been a lot more pleasant to fly out of that cavern on the wings of an explosion with the taste of Buffy's chapstick on my tongue, rather than Lara Raith's ravenous Hunger. But on the other hand-- the fact that I hadn't ever managed a date with Buffy, that the last woman I'd touched with intent had been one who loved me deeply, had probably saved my life that night.

"So I'm guessing you put the clues together, figured out the track pointed to Chicago, and then tried to contact me...." I sighed. Once events had started moving, I'd been a busy, busy boy.

She touched a finger to her temple. "Vampire. Vampire Slayer. These words are used together for a reason, you know," she said.

"Like peanut butter and chocolate, or sharp and shiny?" I asked, wryly.

She snorted, then looked down at her desk, touching the knife again. Then she resheathed it, and shifted her attention to a framed photograph positioned as though she'd been staring at it before I had arrived. It was a picture I'd seen before but never heard identified, of a smiling redheaded woman about college age with her arm around a more full-figured, serene blonde.

"Power and responsibility," she said, softly.

I frowned, wondering if one of the women was the Watcher who'd died. "Who was she?" I asked.

She stroked a thumb over the blonde in the picture, forehead furrowed, all the warmth in her expression fading to sadness. "Tara," she said. "Tara Maclay."

"She was the one who--?" I said.

Buffy blinked at that and turned her attention back to me, startled. "No; no, we lost her several years ago," she said. "All this just-- reminded me of her."

It had happened in Sunnydale, then; Buffy seldom talked about the years she'd spent living in a town where the divide between our world and the Nevernever was more like a chain link fence than a brick wall, but knowing what I did about her history, I didn't blame her. "I'm sorry."

"It happened right before-- well, right before. Tara was Willow's girlfriend." Buffy sighed, shifting her stroking thumb to the smiling face of the redhead.

I winced. Willow Rosenberg had been one of Buffy's closest friends-- but she'd also been a warlock, one who'd gone unrecognized by the White Council for far too long. The Wardens hadn't had any contact inside their group since the death of Janna Kalderash, but they'd seen the Watchers defeat one foe after another without help for years. So after the war with the Red Court had diverted their attention they'd left them to it, ignoring any supernatural events that didn't breach the city limits. They hadn't realized just how serious a mistake they'd made until Rosenberg had attempted to raise a temple to Proserpexa and the ripples from that working had alarmed practitioners all up and down the West Coast.

Thou Shall Not Reach Beyond The Outer Gates. Of all the Laws of Magic, the Seventh is the one least frequently broken, and the consequences of doing so are rarely minor. Human magic doesn't work very well against Outsiders, but they're not so hampered when dealing with us. Luckily-- if anything about that day can be called lucky-- Ms. Rosenberg hadn't been trying to make a deal for power, or curse an enemy, or any of the other typical reasons for breaking that Law. She'd simply wanted an ending... to everything. She'd had the raw ability to make it happen, too, but gathering that much power had taken time, and the Wardens had arrived before she was finished.

It was only afterward that they traced just how far back the roots of her corruption went. Black magic is addictive, exhilarating, and so corrosive to the human mind and spirit that the standard White Council response to even a first-time breach is execution. There are exceptions; I'd been one, and Molly, my apprentice, was another. But it had taken three years for Ebenezar McCoy to straighten me out, and I was sure it would take at least that long for Molly to stop automatically reaching for the easy out, despite the fact that she'd only stepped over that line a couple of times with the best of intentions. A warlock like Rosenberg, who'd broken all but one of the other Laws over a period of years before getting caught? There was almost nothing left in her of the shy, bright girl in Kalderash's reports. Still, she'd managed to keep up a façade for so long-- I ought to have realized something really significant must have happened between the lines of the official reports to trigger her final break with reality.

The death of a loved one would definitely do it. I remembered Elaine, and Justin, and the fire, and sat down in the chair across the desk from Buffy, laying my unscarred hand over hers. "You don't have to tell me the rest."

She gave me a pained smile. "Xander was talking her down, you know. When your people showed up."

Not my people, I wanted to tell her; except they were, now, which is why Buffy had contacted me in the first place. I was the first Warden-- at least the first I knew of-- to ever have taken up the mantle after serving a term under the Doom of Damocles for a black magic conviction. I didn't think it would have worked, no matter what Xander had said, either; but I also knew I'd have felt no different if Molly had been as far gone as Rosenberg was. She was my best friend's eldest daughter. She was family.

I squeezed Buffy's hand. "I'm sorry," I said.

She blinked, green eyes shimmering a little, then shook her head and squeezed back. "No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to unload all that on you; it's just that it still feels so close sometimes. I miss her. I miss Tara; I miss my Mom. And now Cath, and these other women-- they were all such senseless deaths."

I didn't try to touch that one, either. For all the warlocks like the Korean kid whose blood had spattered on my cloak last year, there were also practitioners like Charity, who'd pulled back and renounced their magic when they realized exactly where they were headed... and there were also wizards like Justin Du Morne, who'd had the best of training and knew exactly what he was up to when he chose to subsume another's will to his own. I wouldn't dare try to say what category Rosenberg best fit into.

"Hopefully, the network my friends and I are setting up will help people find support against predators like this in the future," I said, gently changing the subject.

"Right," she nodded, then let go my hand, crossing her arms on her desk with a smirk. "This Paranet thing-- we've already heard from Elaine Mallory. She doesn't know you're working with us, does she?"

"Ah--" I scratched at my chin. I didn't exactly have a good reason for not telling Elaine, but....

"Thought so," Buffy said, in satisfied tones. "She kept warning us that you're a bull in a china shop, but not to take offense because you generally mean well."

"She said what?" I shook my head, half-affronted and half-amused.

"She's an ex-girlfriend, I'm guessing?"

"Very ex," I nodded, ruefully. This latest case had stirred up a lot of those old memories and emotions, but neither of us had been ready to pick up where we'd left off, and it was just as well.

"And your current intentions....?" Buffy asked without missing a beat.

Because I'd known what I wanted where Buffy was concerned ever since we'd come back from our first real lives-on-the-line fight together, much to my consternation at the time. And given what seemed like encouragement from both Summers girls, I was hardly going to pass up such a gift-wrapped opportunity.

"...Are to ask a very lovely woman who has every right to tie me into a pretzel whether she'd like to have dinner with me instead," I ventured.

Delicate eyebrows flew up, and she eyed me up and down with a skeptically amused look.

"You'd make one very unwieldy pretzel, I think," she said slowly, little lines around her eyes wrinkling in amusement. She wasn't quite my age-- but she wasn't a teenager, either, and the moments in which her experience showed only made her more attractive as far as I was concerned.

"In the interests of scientific inquiry, you're welcome to try," I said, forging bravely on as I tried the looking-through-the-eyelashes thing out on her. "I think you'd be surprised just how flexible I am."

She flushed a little, but took that with sparkling eyes and a laugh trapped behind a shielding palm. "Okay, okay, feed me," she said, "But you'd better have something more than Pizza Spress or the Doublemeat in mind."

"Four stars enough for you?" I replied. Fortunately for the health of my pocketbook, Murphy had been able to continue paying me consultant fees while I collected Warden income, and my options weren't quite as limited as they'd been in the past. And I might have put my P.I. license to use and done a little investigating into the local restaurants, once or twice.

She sat up a little straighter at that, some of her amusement fading as the seriousness of the offer sank in. She stared at me a moment longer-- then really stared at me, making an effort to meet my eyes. I gulped; this was the moment of truth. So I let her.

There was a flash of raw heat up my spine at the naked intensity of her gaze before the soulgaze kicked in-- and then my Sight was triggered, and she really took my breath away.

I usually See people in terms of metaphor, confusing symbols and scenes meant to expose the true foundations of their character. Some wizards hear music, or some other more straightforward sensory representation, but I've never taken the easy route with my gifts. And what I've Seen, I can never unSee, just like every other use of my wizard's Sight. What I saw that day in Buffy....

Murphy, under my Sight, always appears garbed in light like a warrior angel, sometimes battlestained but always glorious. That's the closest approximation I can give to what I saw in Buffy's soul, except to say that she was like the sun to Murphy's bonfire, too bright to look at directly for long. But in the shadows cast by that brilliant, searing light, horrors boiled, monstrous faces too awful to look at. And from below, a thicket of hands tugged at her ankles: male models' hands with blistered palms, skeletal hands moldering with rot, and women's hands, bloody and torn, all trying to tug this magnificent creature down for the shadows to feast on. Her face, above it all, was torn with fluctuating emotion: ecstasy, pain, exhaustion, serenity... every emotion, and none, all drawn to extremes, and she was reaching upward with all her might.

She was a survivor. But she hadn't let it stop her from living. And she was far, far above my reach.

So, nothing I hadn't already known, I thought, blinking tears away as I came back to myself in her office.

"Oh," she said, staring back at me, what looked like wonder and horror warring in her widened eyes.

"So," I said shakily. "Dinner?"

She blinked again, then smiled, a small, satisfied curve of mouth that seemed somehow more genuine than any of her other smiles that day. "Give me a few minutes to get ready," she said.

She got up from behind the desk, then came around it, and leaned down for a sudden, unexpected, casual kiss as she passed by my chair.

Our lips met. And. Yes. It was every bit worth the wait.

Her dress was even more inspiring, when she came back thirty minutes later; I felt positively underdressed beside her, an ugly duckling in her wake. She laughed at me, though, and told me I was perfectly imperfect just the way I was-- and I got the impression she didn't just mean my clothing.

With such a spectacular beginning, though, of course the date itself was doomed to horrific mishap. But the anecdote of the steak, the ectoplasm, and the rain of pudding really belongs to another tale.

This is a tale of dramatic endings and beginnings.

The White Court is under new management, now. So is my heart.

And despite the potential dangers-- I can't find it in myself to regret either change.

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