Hey, Will

5:59 PM, Friday. October 31st, 1997(PDT)

Before the Janus curse turned everyone who shopped at Ethan’s Costume Shoppe into the costume they purchased, Xander was trick-or-treating with Willow in a suburban neighborhood. Like Buffy before her, he bribed the redhead with a thousand-dollar winning scratcher to wear the costume of her older self: a white wig, fake red reading glasses, a brown wool cardigan with her name written on a Bingo Night name tag, and a brown cane. Xander didn’t dress up for the night, but Willow had just as much fun with the costume as Buffy; walking slowly with a hunched back, pretending she couldn’t hear him, and moving her ear closer to his mouth.

Xander enjoyed the fun and peace being with Willow always provided, but he also thought about what he wanted to ask Future Willow. Since this would be his first loop with her older counterpart, he speculated on the number of loops he would need to get all the help she’d undoubtedly provide. Though learning all he could from Buffy took seven loops, he didn’t expect as many with his childhood friend. Willow always broke down complicated topics into easily digestible morsels.

In the fringe recesses of his mind, Xander entertained the possibility of manipulating Ethan into somehow making a costume of Buffy or Willow for him to wear. The treasure trove of knowledge more specific to his world than Sherlock, Achilles, Casanova, or Merlin could provide was incredibly tempting; Willow’s expertise on magic or Buffy’s fighting style. On top of that, understanding his friends more intimately than ever before was appealing. However, there were also memories he would never want in his mind; kissing Angel or Oz, fucking Spike, how they truly saw him. Those memories were enough to not proceed with that idea.

The pair were not far from Buffy’s house when the Janus curse began, and Willow’s transformation was just like Buffy’s. The white wig extended in length and turned copper. Though she should be a sixty-year-old woman, no cane was needed, and her face didn’t wrinkle or sag. She looked no older than mid-twenties, highlighting how absurdly different his elder years were from his super-friends. Old Man Xander could barely walk and was feeble, yet Old Buffy and Old Willow still looked like radiant young women.

Old Willow quickly observed the chaos violently unfolding around them: the howling of demons before giving chase to innocent civilians; the screeching of car tires as they came to a halt; and the destruction of windows, mailboxes, and cars. All around the pair of friends, innocent lives were screaming for help or threatening demons to stay away. It was as dire as ever, but Xander looked bored.

Willow noted all the mayhem with a curious face before remarking, “Well, this is interesting.”

From beside her, Xander raised his hand and casually waved as he greeted, “Hey, Will.”

“Xander?” She turned to him and her eyes widened. She inspected every inch of his face before voicing with mild appreciation, “Oh, young Xander.” It was like nothing surprised her and could take any new development in stride. Willow caressed the side of his face and gently thumbed around his left eye as she confessed, “I missed your eye.”

“Yeah,” he said, leaning into her warm palm. “It’s easier to tell if you’re winking or blinking when you have two eyes.”

Willow snorted laughter before looking around them and asking, “Is this Halloween? ‘97?”

Rolling his brown eyes in amazement, he answered, “Jeez, you and your memory.”

“How could I forget?” she put forth. “It’s the first time I dressed in anything remotely sexy. It was a liberating night.”

With a small smile, he freely admitted, “It’s definitely a treat to see every time.”

Picking up on the odd reply, Willow repeated, “Every time… What’s going on, Xander?” Inspecting her hands, she observed, “The magic flowing through me is barely a trickle compared to what I’m accustomed to, but I don’t feel spacial distortions, time variations, or reflective tapering.”

Unsure of what that meant, he nodded and agreed, “Uh, yeah. I don’t feel those either.”

Leveling him with humored disbelief, she happily summarized, “It means I didn’t travel back in time.” Xander nodded, wondering why it was that Merlin and Willow could feel magic and he couldn’t. Willow asked, “Was my future consciousness pulled back to this period somehow?” He was about to answer when she felt something. “Wait,” she said, looking up at the night sky and seeing radio waves for all he knew. “Never mind. I know this power… Janus.” Returning her attention to him, she asserted, “This is chaos magic. But how did I-”

“I convinced you to change your ghost costume to an older version of yourself,” Xander interjected.

Her expression looked like she was making complex calculations in her head, and then understood. “So long as the curse is active, I’ll exist in the past as my sixty-year-old self. But Janus isn’t powerful enough to imbue this younger me with all the potency of my power.”

Nodding, a jovial Xander added, “And I have to say, for a granny, you’re looking absolutely fabulous.”

Eying him closely, Willow asked, almost to herself, “How did you do this when you’re still… no.” The beautiful redhead moved closer, inches from his face as she inspected him thoroughly—as if peering into his very soul—and observed, “You’re… not just you, are you? You’re older. Much older. I can tell by your oscillating pattern.”

Taking her hands from his face, he cradled them gently as he softly explained, “Will, I’ve been stuck in a time loop for over a hundred years.”

Willow didn’t react to the chaos surrounding them, but at that, her eyebrows rose and she gasped. His childhood friend could see the weariness in his brown eyes, and hugged him as she softly voiced, “Oh, Xander.”

While navigating Halloween night for the umpteenth time, he explained the gist of what was happening to him and his theory of how to get out. However, he was thrown off when she inquired, “Wait. You went as far as New York, and you still looped back?” At his nod, she thought for a second before asking, “Have you checked the stars?”

Xander turned to her in confusion, asking with an expressive quirked brow and squinting eyes. Willow then explained, “Even the most powerful spells have a hard limit. For example, large spells can affect whole continents, but not necessarily the entire planet. But if there’s a spell that does affect the planet, it typically doesn’t affect other dimensions, or planes of existence. So we tend to check the stars.”

“Okay… How?” Then Xander recalled Merlin doing the same, and cited, “Oh! To see where they were in the sky.”

“Exactly,” she replied.

Still confused, Xander remarked, “I don’t see how that’s supposed to tell me anything.”

Happy for the teaching moment, Willow explained, “If there’s a hard limit, it would be in space. You’ve been in a loop for over a hundred years. If, for instance, there were regions of the Milky Way or beyond where the stars suddenly shifted over because they were in a different position a hundred years ago, that would mean that time is moving normally however many light-years away. That would be the hard limit.”

“I’d imagine astronomers would be freaking out from the sudden shift,” Xander figured. “But how does that help me?”

Willow reasoned, “If that’s the case, that narrows down the pool of suspects considerably; basically Old Ones, Gods, higher beings, and maybe—like a big maybe—me. But that’s only if I absorbed the Seed, which would probably kill me.”

“Okay, well, that’s…” Xander cleared his throat, thinking a mile a minute before asking, “Okay, there’s a list of potential suspects. That’s cool. I can go to each of them and figure out a way to beat the answer out of them.” After a moment of thought, he asked, “What if the stars are exactly where they should be?”

“If that’s the case,” Willow began, shaking her head in amazed disbelief. “That means this is far more powerful than should be possible. If the stars aren’t out of place, I wouldn’t be surprised if this affected other dimensions and realities. I’d have to study the problem for months to understand the source, and that might not mean I can do anything about it.”

Considering his luck, Xander deflated and sorely replied, “Since I’m not seeing crazy news bulletins from NASA about stars suddenly moving, why don’t we just go with the worst case scenario? Just in case. If by some miracle, the stars have moved, I’ll ask you later for that list of suspects.”

Scanning the skies, Willow voiced, “I’ll keep investigating, for now. Maybe there’s something I just haven’t thought of yet.”

The time looper finished explaining the rest of the time braid before reaching the first event of the night; passing on 18th-century Buffy over to Angel and Cordelia. The life-long friends had them take care of Buffy before Xander and Willow walked to Ethan’s Costume Shop. When Xander put a demon to sleep, Willow put all the demons within sight to sleep, making all the scary bodies drop at once.

Vexingly curious, Xander had to ask, “How is it that you’re not feeling sleepy? I get tired after one casting.”

“Mmmnnn,” Willow hummed in mild thought. She then told him, “The sleep spell you use was as basic as they come, which is more of an area attack rather than a targeted one. You need to counteract the effects by absorbing ambient magic into your system, kinda like magical caffeine.”

“Of course,” Xander groaned in annoyance. “That would be my luck.”

Giggling, Willow tapped his forehead. Her fingertips lit up a moment, and Xander felt much more alert. The teen boy thanked her and they continued walking. Her eyes glowed white as she looked around, and the talented witch couldn’t help but be impressed, proclaiming, “This is so interesting.”

“It’s really not,” Xander had to reply.

“Sorry,” Willow expressed sympathetically, losing the white light in her irises. “I just mean, we have time loops, sure. Even I can create a time loop. But I’ve never come across a time braid before. The amount of power it would take to affect the entire universe, and likely other dimensions, is just astronomical. I can hardly comprehend it.”

“Since I’m the target for some reason,” Xander began. “Merlin said my body/vessel doesn’t appear to be aligned with my spirit.”

Spinning on her heel, Willow’s hair whirled around as the surprised girl bellowed, “Merlin? As in the Merlin?”

Nodding, Xander elaborated, “In some of the loops, I dress up as him and get him to answer questions.”

“Nice move. Gimme a second,” she said.

Willow’s hazel-green eyes once again glowed brightly before waving rays of white light emerged around her body like a dancing aurora. Extending her arms out sideways, pointing her index fingers out, she rotated her limbs counter-clockwise until her left finger was pointed north and her right pointed south. Suddenly, the magical redhead wrote in the air bright geometric pentagrams and runic characters. They glowed like neon signs, but were not of a language that Merlin or Eitri recognized. After lettering six characters in the air, her practiced hands clapped together, causing the symbols to fly in and out of visibility before disappearing entirely.

As her glowing eyes and white aurora lose their luminance, Willow sighed before stating, “Well, this sucks.”

Peering from the clear night sky above to his tired best friend, Xander asked, “What?”

“Hmmm, I know all sorts of spells—can even invent a few—but the Janus curse isn’t anywhere near capable of giving me all my future magic.”

“So…”

“So, it means it’s a little harder to do what I want,” she replied as her eyes glowed white once again.

Like a doctor giving a patient a physical exam, Willow began prodding points on his face, maneuvering his limbs, and spreading his eyelids for a closer look at his pupils. As he let her do as she wished, Xander simplified her dilemma by saying, “So, like an athlete switching bodies with a couch potato and expecting to perform the same?”

“I mean, I’m no couch potato, but yeah, sure,” she accepted with a shrug. Willow observed the front and backside of his palms before noting, “I can still see… Oh, wow, you’ve learned alchemy and metallurgy. I can tell by the energy patterns fluctuating around you.” Stepping back to inspect him as a whole with her luminous eyes, she asserted, “It looks like magic really likes you.”

“Merlin and Eitri taught me to make magical weapons—which was not easy, by the way.”

With an ardent nod, the deeply canny redhead replied, “Oh, you don’t have to tell me. I know how super finicky the ethereal are about their homes. Magical weapons are notoriously difficult to make, so it’s incredibly amazing you can do this. I mean, the magic vibing around you would make you a grandmaster in some magical societies. If you trained in harnessing it, you’d be a pretty powerful wizard.”

“I’d settle for getting out of this,” he remarked. Raising his shoulders and lowering his head, a meek Xander asked his best friend with longing optimism, “Think you can help?”

Willow took a deep breath, and he can see uncertainty in her big expressive eyes. After a long pause, she sadly admitted, “Maybe if I was in my future body… or maybe not.” His shoulders sank before she quickly explained, “To do something about this would require an ungodly amount of power. Way, way, way, more than anything I can harness. I can’t even imagine… I mean… I guess I’m just wondering what ancient entity could be strong enough to create this? And why you?”

“I’ve been asking myself that question this entire time,” he strongly asserted. “Who does all of this just for me? Compared to all the other amazing people on the entire planet of this dimension, I’m a nobody. It makes no sense!”

“This time braid is beyond magicians, curses, and most deities,” Willow remarked like an academic observing a natural phenomenon. “The only thing not made of this universe is the soul of the living. This time braid feels like it’s on that level.”

“Great,” Xander sarcastically yipped. “You wouldn’t happen to have the Above Godly Power’s number, would you? Just want to check how many more centuries I have to stay stuck in the guillotine before the axe comes down.”

“Not funny,” she asserted before reasoning, “If they’re strong enough to create a time braid of this scale, they’re strong enough to conceal themselves. You may have to accept not knowing their plans until they want you to.”

“You mean until I go crazy and become the future ruler of earth?”

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Willow replied, as if dreading the answer.

“My first proclamation is to cleanse the earth of all the bad boys that girls go gaga over,” Xander declared dictatorially. “Only the meek shall inherit all the babes!”

An anxious Willow babbled, “Oh, no. No, um, well, Xander, let’s not forget that there is—there very much is—a way out of this. That’s the point of a time braid—to realign something—which means, you don’t have to, uh, rule earth, or anything. Getting out all comes down to you.” At his hopeless face, Willow cupped Xander’s cheek tenderly as she pleaded, “Just try to figure it out. Wherever you have to go, whatever you have to do—that’s not global domination, please—try. If I know anything, I know you can get through this. You’re a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for. I know it.”

Xander simply sighed, unsure he should risk his sanity entertaining the thought that she might be right. Like all the large demons slumbering around them, he also felt helpless. They couldn’t escape their dormant situation either, and it made Xander wonder if escaping the time braid involved more than simply getting physically stronger. He hadn’t figured the answer to the time braid out yet, and it was possible he never would.

“I’m going to help you, Xander,” Willow cutely asserted, feeding him a touch of hope.

With a raised brow, he cautiously asked, “How? You’re going to forget about this tomorrow.”

Nodding in agreement, she said, “True. I can’t—nor would I—change your soul; especially in this delicate state of realignment. And nothing done to your body would stick anyway. But I can make it easier for magical energy to find you—or I should say, find your pattern. They’re already following you, and love the vessels you create. What I’ll do will be like the best advertising campaign they’ve ever seen. You’re going to light up like the 4th of July! You’ll still have to forge your weapons, unfortunately, but they should be much more powerful.”

“Wow, that’ll definitely help. Thanks,” he told her.

Willow scanned their surroundings and as they moved through the neighborhood, she collected an orange leaf, a smooth rock, a broken shard of clear glass, and the metal cap from a bottle. The genius witch had Xander stand under a tree, widen his stance for better balance, and extend his arms. In his hands, she placed the items she had collected, then stood in front of him. The redhead placed her right palm on his forehead and her left palm on his chest before taking a deep, meditative breath and closing her hazel-green eyes.

Softly, the powerful witch voiced in Latin, “Gratis, libenter, ac sine expectatione, cognitionis bonae participes te cognoscendi, dili-genter te quaerendi, sapientiam inveniendi, et fidelitatem, ut te tandem mater Semen amplectatur.” Through Sherlock’s mental pattern, Xander understood her to chant, ‘Freely, willingly, and without expectation, share in the benefits of knowledge to know thee, diligence to seek thee, wisdom to find thee, and faithfulness so the Mother Seed may finally embrace thee.’

The magic swirling freely around them nearly became visible to Xander. There was a warping of the visible spectrum that looked as if flickers of fire were dancing just over his entire body. Barely visible magic was bouncing around him repeatedly, like excitable fireflies. The streaks of light gradually became brighter until pure light began morphing into a shifting pattern. Then, little by little, the light dimmed again—as if it was leaking out through the shifting pattern—until Xander could no longer see anything ethereal.

Stunned from the light show, Xander huffed, “Wow, Will.” Rotating his hands in front of him, the curious boy oddly remarked, “I don’t feel anything. Am I supposed to feel something?”

“Only with the proper training,” she happily answered. “But trust me: It’s there.”

Trusting her implicitly, Xander replied, “cool,” with a nod. “I’m actually pretty proud of my smithing. It just sucks when I have to start over.”

The pair began walking toward Ethan’s shop again—magically setting every vampire and monster asleep along the way—as Willow noted, “Well, you get better every time. And some people would kill to go back and fix their past mistakes, so it can’t be all bad.”

“Yeah, but after traveling back, they’d go on and live fifty or sixty years before the sweet release of death,” he replied. “In this hell, anything I do—get ripped, make a ton of money, sleep with celebrities, be one of the coolest guys in school—it all gets erased… over, and over, and over again. It makes you want to stop trying. Stop caring. Stop… l-living.”

Willow took his hand and pressed into him, walking side by side as she insisted, “You can’t give up, Xander.”

“I have one hope, Will,” he voiced. “And if that doesn’t pan out, I really will lose my mind and do the craziest things just to feel something.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she asserted, squeezing his hand. “I know you will. You didn’t survive the Scooby Gang on just your wicked good looks. You always saw what needed to be done, whether we did or not—whether we liked it or not. You always saw it. I believe in you, and I know you can do this.”

Accepting her supreme faith in his insight for her sake, Xander simply nodded before asking, “Is there anything you want me to do for you, if I get out-”

“When you get out,” she corrected him. “And, no. I don’t think you should. It wouldn’t be right. Just do what you have to and I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.”

After they destroyed the marble bust of Janus, Xander spent the rest of the night with Young Willow, talking about all sorts of memories they now shared, as well as the struggles he had been suffering through. Willow couldn’t believe she was a lesbian, but like puzzle pieces coming together, couldn’t believe how she didn’t realize it sooner. With Willow’s excellent memory, Xander learned more about the high school years he couldn’t recall, confirming there wasn’t anything else from the year loop that he was missing. Her constant and unwavering affection was such a relief to have, and Xander missed her as much as it was possible to miss anyone.

They hugged until Xander woke up alone, which hurt him more profoundly than he was expecting. Meeting Old Buffy and Old Willow made him feel less alive. Meeting his dearest friends from a future he should be a part of only served to separate the time bubble he lived in from the real life that was waiting for him, making him sick to his stomach. Xander was scared of the very real possibility that he couldn’t take any more looping. His mind felt so haggard and withered, he wasn’t sure how much longer he had before he stopped caring about anything. If his Buffy-key theory didn’t pan out, all the hope in him will be gone.

Dragging himself out of his disgusting bed, Xander proceeded to check with astronomy labs around the states. After pretending to be a grad student working on his thesis, the astronomers confirmed the stars were exactly where they were supposed to be. He checked with twelve observation labs who were gracious enough to help, telling Xander that the time braid was indeed, that powerful.

The only modicum of excitement in him was doing a day-loop with Cordelia’s older counterpart. He hoped she didn’t just fall to the floor as a corpse or disappear to the sky above. He wasn’t sure which would happen, but that curiosity was more than enough of a reason to proceed. Unlike Buffy and Willow, Cordelia needed two thousand-dollar-scratchers to be coerced into wearing what he wanted, but eventually, she accepted the bribe. The fashion-conscious brunette dressed as an old lady for Halloween and nailed the white hair and cardigan as easily as any other outfit.

At 6 PM, they were walking around the neighborhood with the kids, then he blinked, and suddenly, they were in the factory. While Buffy—dressed in her 18th-century red gown—left with Angel after beating Spike, Xander had no recollection of speaking to Old Cordelia or how they got there.

“The fuck,” he voiced to himself as he looked around the warehouse in confusion.

Xander thought it odd. One moment, it was 6 PM, then the next, he was standing next to Cordelia and a group of scared kids. He tried multiple loops to figure out the bizarre anomaly. The time looper made Cordelia dress as an older version of herself, the Janus curse began, and just as quickly, it was over. Xander was in the closed factory once again with Cordelia and a bunch of scared children. When he asked her about being her older self, the popular girl didn’t even know what he was talking about. He thought it so strange, and every time he tried, it would always end with the same outcome.

Eventually, Xander decided to move on. With Willow’s advertising and a wealth of new runes dancing around his head, he was desperate to implement his plan to break out of the time braid once and for all.