Title: Gift of a Future 22/?
Author: Gileswench
Feedback: Constructive criticism always welcome. Praise abjectly sought.
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Joss, Mutant Enemy, etc., etc., etc. I just let them have all the fun Joss won't. I own nothing except my twisted mind which you really don't want. Please don't sue.

"Captain!" Tybalt called. "Shall we not take the key now?"

Gregor smiled to himself.

"They cannot get far, and the vile one is well away."

"But sir...the key..."

"Mercutio's men have found it. One of the holy men has seen this. All will be over soon, and then, my friend, we may lay down our arms and rest."

"But we cannot allow these people to escape."

"They shall not escape," Gregor assured his impatient subordinate. "But they are not our priority now."

*****

"What do we do now?" Geordie asked nervously.

"Now," Xander said, "we wait until we see the whites of their eyes."

Beverly kept a firm grip on her son to keep him from wandering. She prayed he would keep quiet. The Buffybot turned to Data.

"I'm tense," she pouted. "Can't I just slay them and have sex with you?"

Xander smacked the back of Geordie's head.

"Ow! What was that for?" the engineer asked. "It's not like I did her primary programming."

"Sorry," Xander shrugged. "I had to hit someone and Spike isn't here."

"Will you be quiet?" Tara admonished. "They'll be here any minute."

There was a soft rustling in the trees behind her. A commanding voice spoke.

"Correction, wench," it said, "we are here now."

*****

Buffy slowly, painfully, lifted her head. Sand. There was sand everywhere. She began to shake her head to clear it, but quickly regretted the impulse. She took a deep breath and pulled herself to a kneeling position.

Captain Picard lay next to her in the sand. There was a nasty gash on his forehead, but he looked otherwise unscathed. Buffy almost smiled nostalgically.

"Coming to next to an older, English-sounding guy with a head injury," she muttered. "Wonder where I came in on this movie."

She crawled the two feet it took to get to Picard's side.

"You okay?" she asked nervously.

The captain blinked his eyes open.

"I believe - I shall live," he gasped. "Just need to catch my breath."

"Let me look at that cut," Buffy said. She grasped his chin to steady his head. Picard was briefly reminded of Beverly. Buffy was a similar combination of temper and tenderness, strength and fragility. More than anything, Picard wanted Beverly by his side now. He became aware that Buffy was speaking again. "It looks pretty yuck, but I don't think it's really all that bad. Can you stand up yet?"

"I can try," Picard returned wryly.

He drew himself slowly up. Buffy fluttered nervously by his side as she watched him wobble slightly. Somehow that brief moment of unsteadiness made Buffy wonder how many times Giles had done everything in his power not to show human weakness in front of her. How many times had she not seen that he'd been badly injured because he didn't want her distracted? How much pain had he hidden from her over the years?

Giles.

Her eyes widened.

At first, Buffy thought she and Picard had been thrown from the careening vehicle as it sped away, but now she turned and saw the hulking camper where it lay on its side. Worse than that, there was a long pole sticking out of the windshield. Buffy raced across the sand no longer caring if Picard was well enough to follow on his own.

Giles had been driving.

*****

Beverly held her son tighter still. The Buffybot got to her feet and faced the knight.

"You can't have Dawn," she said sternly. "She's innocent."

"She is an abomination in the eyes of our Lord," the knight retorted. "The unholy one must be prevented from finding and using the key. The key must be destroyed."

The knight turned at the tiny, yet deafening, click behind him. Xander stood with a shotgun aimed shoulder high.

"You are a fool," the knight sneered. "You cannot kill me aiming there."

"No, "Xander replied calmly, "but you can't take Dawn if you're too busy bleeding to get her. Now step away from her, nice and slow."

"You won't shoot," the knight challenged as he raised his sword to Wesley's throat. "You wouldn't dare."

Data calmly knocked the knight on the head from behind with a blackjack.

"Nice job, Robocop," Xander said. "I bet that guy wakes up in serious need of aspirin."

"What would you have done if Data hadn't knocked him out?" Beverly asked angrily. "Would you really have shot him?"

"If I had to."

"That's barbaric!"

"And slitting your son's throat isn't? At least I was only gonna wing the guy. Come on. There'll be more here soon. We have to keep going."

Without another word, and without waiting to see if anyone would follow, Xander headed deeper into the trees.

The others followed.

*****

Time seemed to slow almost to a halt for Buffy as she ran to the RV. For one, long, horrible moment, all she could think of was running into the Sunnydale High library to find Kendra dead, Willow horribly injured, and Giles taken by Angelus.

'If Giles makes it though this,' she thought, 'things are going to be different from here on in. No taking him for granted anymore. Please let him still be alive.'

After what seemed like hours, she arrived at the Winnebego. Anya and Dawn stood next to the defunct vehicle. The ex demon was doing her best to comfort the girl. It didn't look as if she was being very successful.

"Dawn!" Buffy cried, "Dawnie, are you okay?"

Dawn just sobbed harder and launched herself into Buffy's arms. Buffy's mouth went dry and her heart sped. She couldn't bring herself to say the words as she looked to Anya for an answer to the question she feared to ask.

"He's alive," Anya said.

Buffy felt her knees begin to give way with relief. She squeezed her eyes closed tight against threatening tears.

"For now," Anya added, undoing all the good she had done a moment before. "I don't think he's going to last much longer. You'd better get in there if you want to talk to him."

"Stop saying that!" Dawn shouted. "You're talking like he's...like he's already..."

"Dawn," Buffy said in the most reasonable voice she could muster, "we need to get away from here. There's an abandoned gas station over there," she pointed to the boarded up building in the distance. "When Captain Picard gets here, I want you and Anya to go there with him. Stay there and don't let anyone else in until the rest of us can get to you, okay? Can you do that for me?"

"But Giles..."

"Dawn, please," Buffy said a little harshly. "Just do as I say. I'm gonna see what the sitch is and I'll catch up as soon as I can. Go, now. Please. For me."

The girl nodded and allowed Anya to shepherd her to Picard who was fast approaching. Buffy watched for a moment to make sure they were all headed in the right direction, then climbed into the camper. She carefully let herself down as close to Giles as she could get. Deanna held a cloth to Giles' side in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Worf and Riker quietly discussed how to remove the spear without killing Giles immediately. Only Buffy's involuntary whimper alerted them to her presence.

"We're doing what we can," Deanna told her.

Buffy's eyes filled with tears.

"Giles," she moaned, "Oh God, Giles."

"Buffy...?" Giles managed.

"I'm here," she assured him. "And we're gonna fix this. Don't you give up on me."

"Don't worry...about me," he said. "Get Dawn to safety."

"I'm not leaving you here."

"As your Watcher, I'm ordering you..."

"Yeah, 'cause that always worked so well," she shot back with a shaky laugh. "We all get out or none of us do. So that means if you stay here we all get killed and it's your fault."

Giles whispered something under his breath that sounded remarkably like 'bloody stubborn woman' and promptly passed out. Buffy held her breath until she saw his chest rise unevenly with his next breath. She turned her attention to Worf and Riker.

"Can you break the spear? Without hurting him more?"

"Worf can break it," Riker assured her, "but it might cause more damage."

"I will try to be...gentle," Worf said.

Buffy nodded.

"Do it. I'm not leaving without Giles."

*****

Xander led his party deeper into the woods. He wasn't entirely sure where they were at this point, but he figured it was more important to keep going than to know their destination. Capture meant certain death for all. By comparison, wandering around lost in the woods seemed an almost reasonable fate.

He wished he had Buffy or Giles with him. They would know what to do so much better than he did. Or Anya. Her faith in him was so unshakable. Having her near made it easier to be brave. Not for the first time he wondered what the hell he'd ever done to deserve that kind of love.

His musings were interrupted by Tara.

"I think we're lost," she said quietly.

"Yeah," Xander agreed, "but at least we haven't been caught. As long as we aren't guests of the Knights who say Ni, we're giving Buffy a little breathing room. She needs every minute we can give her."

"I know that. I just...I have a spell that will tell us where we are and help us choose the best path."

"You can do that?"

"Yes, but there's a trade off. The spell will only take two minutes, but we have to be still while I cast."

Xander was caught on the horns of a dilemma. Did they have the two minutes it would take to do the spell? And if they didn't do the spell there was a good chance they'd walk straight into a nest of Knights of Byzantium. Giles was good at calculating odds, Buffy was the queen of snap decisions. What would Buffy do? Keep going, no doubt. And when Buffy made that sort of decision, how often had it turned out to be the wrong one?

"Cast it," he told Tara. "We need to know where they are."

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