He was back in Edna's garden.

The plants were scarred by fire. There were no butterflies. The concrete path between the ferns was split into sharply angled chunks that cut at his bare feet.

Only the arched stone bench was unmarred. Xander made his way over to it and sat down. His body ached and his muscles twitched uncomfortably. He glanced around for any sign of his great-aunt, but the garden was deserted.

He thought he caught sight of someone, a man, standing just outside his peripheral vision, but when he turned to look, there was only a charred, leafless tree where the man had stood.

"She's not here."

Xander twisted his head around. Edna's CNA sat to his left on the bench. Her scrubs were dark grey, and her eyes were covered by a sleep mask.

"Where is she?"

"She's gone." The CNA, Yasmine, he remembered, tilted her head away from him. "You killed her."

Xander let his head drop. "She wanted it."

Yasmine titled her head back toward him, seeming to regard him seriously even through the thick, black mask. "Why am I here?"

Xander shrugged. "I don't know." He ran his hands through his hair. "I don't--I don't know much of anything right now."

Another flash of person struck his retina, this time a teenaged girl. She vanished just as quickly as the man had.

"Am I here to help? You brought me in here, you have to tell me what's going on!"

"I don't KNOW!" Xander's hand moved before he could think, catching Yasmine across her jaw and sending her spilling to the cracked concrete. He stared at his fingers.

"You do know." Yasmine made no effort to get up off the ground. A long cut had appeared on her cheek when he'd struck her, leading close to her left eye. "You know everything that's going on here. You just won't admit it."

"No, no I don't, I don't remember, I don't--"

The flashes on his retina where happening faster. The man and a series of young girls appeared all around him, one moment there, the next not. They were all talking to him, some of them pleading, some of them crying. The man was smiling.

"Who are you?" He stood and squeezed his hands into fists, but the figures didn't stop. They didn't answer him. They fought each other, and bled, and screamed, and they were surrounding him, and Yasmine was pushed out of the way.

"Who are you?" He tried again, spinning in place. The figures flashed by faster, but he was somehow able to make out more detail. Two African teens wrapped their arms around each other in a strange, carnal embrace, one bleeding heavily from the stomach, the other seemingly sewn together at all her joints. A black haired girl and a woman in a waitress uniform bracketed the garden, bleeding from matching chest wounds. A latino girl, maybe twelve years old, was missing a good half of her skull, and a pale skinned teenager, wearing torn and battered clothing, clutched a long staff in her left hand, and her bleeding throat in another. They all stared at him.

Someone grabbed his shoulder and he spun. Yasmine's mask was gone, but her eyes were a blind, milky white behind her narrowed lids. She grabbed his other shoulder and shook him roughly. "Don't you get it? They're IN you, after what you've done. They're right here," She smacked the side of his head. "And it's all your fault. I can help you, I think, but you have to know the truth. This. Is. Your. Fault."

"No." Xander shook his head, trying to pull back, but Yasmine was stronger than she looked. "No, it's not, it's not my fault." He locked gazes with the man, who leaned against a scorched pillar, grinning. "It's his fault. I didn't want this. He did this to me. He did it!"

The man never stopped smiling as he slowly shook his head.

"Focus!" Yasmine smacked him again. "He didn't start this."

"It's his fault, his fault, I didn't want this," Xander kept shaking his head, and the garden started to spin sickeningly. His limbs kept twitching, and he couldn't break free of the nurse's aide's grip. He screamed.

"I don't remember!"

And the garden was empty again. He stumbled, and something crunched under his boot (when did he put on boots?). A dead swallow-tailed butterfly lay crushed against the pavement. Similar carcasses littered the entire garden. He swallowed.

"Will you let me help you?"

Yasmine was standing at the doorway to the garden, her hands gripping the back of an old fashioned, wooden wheel chair. Her eyes were their regular hazel, and her scrubs were bright blue, with brilliant red flowers scattered across the top. She curled her lips, showing her teeth.

Xander nodded, and slowly stumbled towards her. He lowered himself into the chair and she patted him gently on the head.

"There now." She spoke with Edna's voice. "That wasn't so bad, now, was it?"

Giles watched as two of the younger slayers carefully placed Xander on the cot in the council's strongest holding cell. He felt the urge to fidget, but carefully refrained from doing so. The situation was tense, to say the least, but he didn't want to compound the slayers' worry by showing his own.

Terry and Marguerite ducked back out of the cell as soon as they were done. They shot Giles twin looks of confusion, but he merely shook his head. "I will explain it to you upstairs."

The two nodded and scurried for the stone steps that lead up to the main level of the council. Giles turned his gaze back to his young friend and leaned back against the concrete wall before hissing the phrases required to put up a magical barrier over the door to the cell.

Xander himself had helped design the holding area. The building which housed the council was several stories, including the basement. It had originally served as a shelter during the blitzkrieg of World War II, and had been very much untouched when they first moved in, four years before. The basement was divided into ten large cells, each lined with two-foot concrete-and-steel walls on three sides. The fourth side was left open, with runes carved into the very rock. They created an impenetrable, yet invisible fourth wall, through which a prisoner might be observed and questioned, should the need arise. Each cell had a slightly different arrangement of runes, requiring a different set of words to activate and deactivate them. Only Giles and a select few members of the Devon Coven knew the words of power for Xander's cell.

It had been Willow's idea. Should the need arise that she be locked up--should she go evil again--this was the cell in which she would be placed. None of them had ever imagined, while they were under construction, that they would ever have to put Xander in it.

"Giles!"

He shut his eyes as Willow's voice echoed down the stairs. She was angry, and by the sound of the footsteps, she was not alone.

"Willow. Buffy." He turned his body towards them, but he continued to face the figure on the cot. "Dawn has informed you of what has occurred?"

"Why the hell didn't you tell us?" Buffy strode up to stand just in front of Giles. "You should have notified us the minute you knew Xander was here."

"There wasn't time." Giles removed his glasses. "Xander was in the lobby with Dawn and Andrew. I couldn't risk that he would become violent again." He turned to Willow. "If you would care to take the first watch, there is a group of young, distressed Slayers upstairs who deserve an explanation as to why one of their favorite watchers is currently unconscious and under lock and key.

Willow glared at him, but nodded. Buffy looked petulant.

"Buffy, please. I would like it if you would join me."

"Sure." Buffy crossed her arms. "Maybe this time it will make some kind of sense." She shot a dark look at Willow, then started up the stairs. Giles sighed deeply, then followed.

Willow twisted her fingers into her hair as she sat the floor and stared at her oldest friend. She wanted to talk to him. She knew he was sedated, and probably wouldn't be waking up for another few hours, but there were things she had to say. She was just having trouble finding the words.

"I'm sorry," seemed like a good start, so she said it. Then: "This is all my fault." Her breath caught in her throat as she tried to continue. "That spell--"

She cut herself off as she felt someone walk into the room. All of her senses were on high alert for movement. She had no desire to have an audience at her confession.

"Angel." The name drifted off of her lips, barely more than a whisper. The vampire heard it.

He lowered himself gracefully to the ground beside her without speaking. She shuddered slightly. He had placed himself so she sat on his "bad" side. She could feel the absence of his arm against her shoulder. She twisted her head to look at him.

"What are you doing here?"

"I just got back from Italy. We've uncovered some more information from Wolfram and Hart's files." He shrugged. Without his right arm it was a strange, asymmetrical gesture. The scars that covered the right side of his face masked his expression.

"Anything important?"

"An explanation, possibly." He glanced at her. "For what happened last year."

She nodded, then gestured vaguely in the direction of her friend. "You don't seem surprised."

"Buffy called me after she spoke with Giles this evening. She wanted to know if I thought it was true."

"What did you tell her?"

"The same thing I told you and Giles when you first asked me about it."

Willow laughed mirthlessly. "I think you're the only one of all of us who didn't have trouble believing that Xander could do it."

Angel nodded slightly. "I want to be the one who talks to him first. When he wakes up." Willow opened her mouth to protest, but he continued. "Xander's in a new position, now. I'm probably the only person here who comes any where near understanding what he's been going through."

"Because you've been to hell." Willow couldn't keep the cynicism out of her voice.

"Not just that."

"What, you've been killing slayers and haven't told us?" Willow started. "You haven't been killing slayers, have you? Because we've got nine more cells here, mister, and if you think--"

Angel laughed. "Okay, so Spike might have been better suited on that front. Too bad he seems to be staying dead this time." His expression went blank again. "I know what it's like to kill."

"So do I."

Angel shook his head. "Not on this level. You haven't got nearly the number of kills under your belt that Xander or I have. Not even Faith comes close. I'm not saying that you shouldn't speak to him. Everyone should try. I'm saying he's going to need to hear some things, first."

Willow turned back towards her friend. "Dawn says he doesn't remember any of it. She's not even sure if he remembers killing the slayers at the Hole."

"It'll come back to him. If he's at all sane when it does, it might drive him over the edge." Angel shifted slightly on the cold floor. "I have some experience with that, as well."

Willow sighed. "You're right. Fine. But I'm staying here until he wakes up."

Angel smiled slightly. "It would surprise me if you didn't."

Xander rolled over as he woke up. His mouth was dry, and his whole body ached as though he'd stuck his finger in an electrical socket. He'd actually done that, once, when he was little. At the time it had seemed an interesting alternative to listening to his father and mother argue. He groaned slightly before opening his eye.

"Welcome back."

His eye felt sticky as it opened. It took him a moment to place where he was. The council's holding cells hadn't changed in the slightest in the time he'd been gone, but he'd never really looked at them from this perspective.

Memories came back at a rush. Not the ones he'd been trying to find since Sunnydale, just the ones after. He felt sick.

Giles had shot him. Giles was supposed to help him, not lock him up and subject him to torture.

He peered blearily at the figure waiting beyond the barrier and stifled a laugh.

"Not really seeing the humor here."

Xander smiled, ignoring the way it made the muscles in his face twitch. "You always did have to one up me, didn't you, Angel."

The vampire rubbed self-consciously at his right side. His empty shirt sleeve flapped with the movement. "Well, you never really got anything right."

Xander shook his head. The vampire looked worse than he did. The scars across the side of his face looked like burns, and even the right side of his rib-cage seemed to be slightly caved in. The wounds were old, and probably as healed as they were going to get. "What the hell happened to you?"

"Wolfram and Hart happened. About three years ago. I was the only one who survived."

Xander closed his eye. "Great, another detail I've managed to forget."

"So I've heard." A strange sparking sound invaded Xander's head and he opened his eye again. Angel was resting his hand against the barrier, causing it to ripple. "Do you remember what happened to Jude and Amelia?"

Xander quickly shut his eye again.

//Dude, you feeling better?//

He shook his head. A denial squeezed itself out of his throat.

"You're sure about that?"

Red blood. A gurgling scream, then more blood, from her mouth, from her chest. Red everywhere.

"Yes."

"If you say so."

"I do."

They spent the next few moments in silence. Xander cracked his eye open. If he was going to pull off his lie, he had to make it believable, even if he didn't want the answer. "What happened?"

"They're dead."

Blood on the end of his staff. On his hands. He wipes his neck, and now it's there, too.

"Oh."

"They were killed. Taken by surprise. A stake through the heart. Or," Angel tilted his head. "Or a staff."

//Dude, you feeling better?//

//Easy, Tiger.//

//Where'd you get a magic hoopak?//

Xander's jaw clenched. "Fascinating."

"But you don't remember."

"NO."

"Xander." Angel dropped his arm to his side. "I know it doesn't seem like it now, but I do know what you're going through."

"Yeah." Xander rolled over to face the wall. "I'm sick, right? I need help? You're here to talk to the crazy man?"

"You don't seem that crazy to me."

"No, no," He curled up on himself, suppressing a giggle. "It makes sense. Runs in the family. Edna's crazy, Mom's crazy, Dad's a drunk . . . . Why shouldn't I be crazy, too?"

"Sounds like you remember more than you think."

"No, I don't."

Something shifted beyond the barrier. "I didn't know your mom was mentally ill."

"What are you, my psychiatrist?"

//Do you think it's funny that you feel that way, Xander?//

//Yes?//

//Are you asking me?//

//Um . . . no?//

"If you want me to be."

Xander sighed. "She took pills. Sometimes they worked."

"And when they didn't?"

Xander sighed. He really didn't want to be talking about his mother with Angel. On the other hand, if he didn't, then he'd have to talk about what happened at the Hole.

//They'll stop you. Stop them first. Have to die. Understand?//

"Then she was different."

"What did she have?"

Xander shrugged. "Nothing bad. Not like Edna. Something about Antarctica."

Silence again for a moment. Xander relaxed. He could handle silence.

"Bi-polar disorder?"

"Maybe."

"That doesn't mean you're crazy."

//ShutupshutupshutupshutupshutupshutupSTOPIT//

"How about the voices?" Xander laughed. "Do they mean I'm crazy?"

Angel's voice held a hint of surprise and a lot of urgency. "What voices, Xander?"

"I dunno. Edna had ‘em. She gave them to me." His body shook and his mouth twisted. "Nice little present. I give her flowers, she gives me voices."

"What do the voices tell you?"

Xander clamped his jaw shut. "Go away."

"Xander, please,"

//You did it, you killed them, did it help? Did it make it stop? The demons are still here. You need to work harder. You need to--//

"GO AWAY!"

Silence again, in the cell at least. In Xander's head, things were screaming at him. He shook with the force of them. Then people were talking outside again.

"What did you do to him?"

"He's getting worse. We'll either have to sedate him, or--"

"No! We can help him. I can help him."

"Willow--"

Xander jerked on the cot. "No no no no no no, she's evil, she's evil," He gripped his head harder.

"You should leave."

"I can do it."

"No no no no no, stop talking, no more talking,"

"Dawn, no, that's--"

"He's okay with me. He hates Angel and he thinks Willow's evil."

"Then I'll go in."

"Not a chance. Buffy, he could--"

"Maybe we should try asking him."

Xander forced his body still as the voices quieted. He wondered how many people were out there, watching him freak out.

"Xander," Dawn's voice drifted over him. It was soft, like the cloth on her walls. He'd been in her heart. "We're going to try to help you. Do you want that?"

"Help,"

//No one can help you.//

"Yeah. It means . . . ." Dawn's voice trailed off. Someone whispered, then Dawn spoke again. "It means getting into your head. Seeing if we can put the pieces back together. Do you understand?"

//Do you understand? You had to do it.//

Xander took a long, shuddering breath, trying to reclaim his equilibrium. "Help."

"Okay. No problem." More whispering, and a crackle. "Do you want me to do it? Or Buffy could."

Dawn made the voices be quiet. Willow was evil. "Dawn,"

Okay, he had to be crazy if he thought he could HEAR her smirking. "Okay. It'll take a little while to set up, but we're going to help you. Just try to stay calm, okay?"

Xander shivered. "Okay, just . . . help?"

"Yeah. We're going to help you."

"Dawn,"

Buffy was leaned against the door frame as Dawn stood by Willow's desk and emptied her pockets.

"We're not having this conversation again." She turned on her sister, a long chain clenched in her fist. "I'm going to help Xander. You can't do it, so I'm going to."

Buffy shook her head, her expression melancholy. "I know. I don't know why this is happening--" She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, then opened them again, her expression showing the hard, "in control" Buffy that Dawn hadn't missed after the fall of Sunnydale. "I just want you to be careful."

Dawn turned back to the desk, carefully unclenching her hand. "I know." She dropped Xander's medallion onto the wooden surface. "And I will be. We'll get Xander back, and we'll all be back to training slayers and sifting through old books and waiting for the apocalypse." She grinned slightly. "And now I understand why I can never have a boyfriend for more than, like, three months. Oxford boys soooo aren't ready for the facts of slayer life."

"Very few boys are." Buffy strode across the room and wrapped Dawn in an enormous hug. Dawn rested her head against the top of her sister's for a moment. "Did you find what we need?"

Dawn tapped the desk next to the medallion. She'd long since gotten over the squickness of the eyeball staring up at her. "I gave it back to him, but he just dropped it after we killed the grathnal. I don't think he even noticed when I picked it up."

Buffy stared at the necklace for a long moment. "God, Xander wouldn't leave that thing alone after he got it made. It took us forever just to convince him to wear it under his shirt when he came to visit. I can't believe he's forgotten about it."

"Not just about that." Dawn leaned against her sister again. "He's forgotten about all of it. He didn't even remember that Malia had died."

"Are you scared?" Buffy squeezed Dawn's shoulder. "I don't think Xander's brain would be a very nice place to be even if he was sane. Full of comic books and inappropriate sexual images of all his female friends. . . ."

Dawn laughed. "Somehow, I think I can handle that."

Buffy focused a hard look at her sister. "Hot damn, you still have a crush on him."

Dawn jerked away from her. "Nuh-uh,"

"Yuh-huh," Buffy grabbed both her shoulders and held her at arms length, staring into her. "I know that look. I watched that look get directed at half the male population of Italy. You're totally in to him, aren't you."

"Yeah, because the tortured slave look is soooo attractive--" Dawn closed her eyes and shook her head. "And I can't believe we're having this conversation. I'm about to go into the man's BRAIN to try and sort out his amnesia and psychosis, and you're trying to play Cupid."

Buffy shrugged. "I have some strange methods of dealing with stress. I blame Willow." She gave Dawn another appraising look. "Well, at least you're past the jail bait stage. Tell you what, if we get Xander back to his nice, sane, sweetheart self, I say go for it. Meanwhile, I'll go get Willow." She turned abruptly and strode out of the room, leaving Dawn open-mouthed behind her.

"I do NOT have a crush on him!" Her hand clenched around the chain of the medallion again. "Aw, crap."

Willow put the finishing touches on the chalk diagram on the floor. "Okay." She straightened, giving Dawn a hard look. Dawn stared back, refusing to be backed down. "You're sure about this?"

"Yes." She held out the medallion, letting it dangle from the chain. "I've got the personal object ready." She glanced sideways at Xander, who was still lying, curled up and facing the other wall. "Let's get going. I don't want him under any more stress than absolutely necessary."

"Yeah." Willow rolled her eyes. "And I'm the conductor of the Xander-stress train. Sit down in the center of the circle and hold the medallion between both of your hands." Dawn obeyed, steeling her nerves. Willow sat down to her left, out of view of the cell in case Xander decided to roll over and freak out again. "I'm going to put us both into a kind of trance. You'll go into his mind, and I'll play silent, invisible observer. He won't be able to sense me, but I'll be there to pull you out if it gets too dangerous."

Dawn bit down on an argument. She wanted to get this done, not get halfway there and then yanked out just when she was making progress. But arguing would just delay things. "Got it. Let's do this."

"Okay." Willow's voice dropped in pitch as she started chanting. Dawn cast a glance at Buffy and Angel, who would be keeping an eye out on the physical side of things, then turned back toward Xander in his cell. She focused on everything she knew so far about what Xander was going through. As Willow's chant picked up its pace, Dawn's hands gripped the medallion and her eyes slowly fell closed. She could feel her mind drifting, then surging suddenly forward.

She snapped open her eyes again, then felt them grow very wide as she took in her new surroundings.

She was in Xander's mind. Buffy was right. It wasn't a very nice place to be.

It made her head hurt. Everywhere she looked there was chaos. Bits and pieces of a thousand different locations all came together at odd angles. She could see the front door of her old house in Sunnydale, freestanding in the middle of what seemed to be a cross between the street of an African village and the library at the old highschool. Other places: the council headquarters, the Magic Box, his old apartment, his parents' house, and several locations she wasn't familiar with, all blended together into an incomprehensible mix of color, black and white, and negative images. Butterflies flapped everywhere, but when Dawn looked closer she saw holes in their wings, and long, wicked looking stingers jutting from their heads. Bits of people seemed to coalesce and then vanish against the background.

Dawn spun slowly in a circle, trying to take it all in without her brain exploding. "Willow," she hissed. "Can you see this?"

//Yes. Now be quiet. We don't want Xander to know I'm helping you.//

She nodded. "Xander?" She let her eyes scan the landscape, such as it was, again. "Xander? It's Dawn! Where are you?"

"Over here."

His voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, echoing and wrapping over itself until it was hard to make out what he was saying.

"Okay, that didn't really help. Can you come here?"

And then he was standing in front of her.

If the landscape of Xander's mind was disturbing, Xander's mental image of himself was downright horrifying. It was like looking at a Picasso portrait of her friend. His limbs were disjointed; one of his arms seemed to have been put on backwards. His torso flexed in ways that a human body just SHOULDN'T. Dawn began to feel dizzy.

His face was the worst. It was almost entirely normal, but instead of an eyepatch or a false eye, there was a dark hole in his face where his left eye had once been. It was disproportionately large and seemed, the more she looked, to draw his other features and even the objects surrounding them towards itself.

Dawn thought of the pictures of black holes in space she'd seen in her science classes, how the neighboring stars became stretched and bled into the vortex. Xander's right eye was like one of those stars. She swallowed.

"Hi." She said.

He stared at her for a long moment. One half of his mouth quirked up in a smile. The other half remained expressionless. "Hi."

His voice was still echoing, and she noticed his mouth didn't move in time to what he was saying. "Do you know why I'm here?"

"You want to help me."

"Yeah."

Xander shook his head. Watching him speak was like watching a badly dubbed movie. His lips moved, but they never matched his words. "I don't think I can be helped."

Dawn stepped towards him, trying to ignore how the strange collage of a world seemed to shift and twist around her. She held out her hand. "Let's try, okay?"

He just stood there. Every now and then his body would waver, twisting out horizontally in chunks. "How?"

"Um." Dawn was starting to regret not taking the introductory psychology course when she'd had the chance. Buffy had been against it, citing her own experiences with Professor Walsh, and at the time, Dawn had decided not to argue. She should have known better than to listen to her sister. "Can you tell me how this," she gestured to their surroundings, "happened?"

Xander's eye seemed to look at something over her shoulder. "He did it."

Dawn spun. A corner of the mindscape had settled into something resembling reason. It formed a bare, gray room with a chair at the center.

A form was strapped into it, apparently male. Its head was covered by a tight, black mask and strapped to the back of the chair by a metal band, and its wrists and ankles were similarly bound. The figure wore plain, dark gray clothing and was barefoot.

"Who is he?"

Xander seemed to become agitated. "Its his fault. He thought he could control us, but we showed him." He grinned. "Showed him."

Dawn stepped closer to the figure. While the rest of the mindscape shifted again, the room with the chair remained constant. She noticed a switch on one wall and swallowed.

She suddenly recognized what she was seeing. It was an electric chair..

The figure's wrists were burned and scorched and as she stepped closer it twitched, then started struggling against the bonds. She could hear Xander's voice echoing over her, more hollow sounding than before; more broken and definitely terrified.

"Pu-tch-ull-sw-pull-itch-p-the-ch. . . ."

"What?" Dawn spun again, but Xander had vanished. "I don't understand!"

//PULL THE SWITCH!//

Dawn jumped. That wasn't Willow, and it hadn't quite sounded like Xander. She spun again. "Who are you?"

//Dawn, please, pull it, stop them,//

"No!" She stared around at the broken landscape. "Who are you? Where's Xander? What have you done to him?"

//It's me, Dawn, please, pull it. Help me.//

Dawn spun back to the figure. It was struggling harder now, nearly toppling the electric chair. Dawn shuddered. "Why? What happens if I pull it? Xander, I want to help, but you have to tell me how!"

"Tch-ull-pl-sw-the-Da-ease-pull.. . . ."

Dawn was spinning constantly, now, staring around her. "Xander? Xander, I can hear you, but I don't understand,"

"Pul-tch-the-p-swi-ease-tch. . . ."

//Pull it.//

//Please!//

//Help him,//

Dawn shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears. She called out for Willow, not wanting to say her name, but needing help. "What do I do?!"

A darker, more sinister voice took over.

//Out. Not your place.//

"Okay, that's a bad voice,"

//Mine. Out!//

The figure let out a muffled scream of pain and anger, violently jerking in its bonds. One hand, still strapped at the wrist to the chair, seemed to reach for her.

"Okay!" Dawn crossed her arms and glared at the landscape. "We are NOT doing this! I am not getting scared out of here. So you'd better listen up and STOP THIS RIGHT NOW!"

The mindscape fell silent. The figure stopped struggling and slumped backwards. She still couldn't see its face, but the mask shifted slightly and she could almost feel it smiling.

"Pull the switch."

And THAT was Xander's voice. She narrowed her eyes.

"Why, what does it do?"

Picasso-Xander was standing next to her. He slipped his hand into hers. "Let's find out."

"I'm really not sure that's such a--"

But the switch was right next to them, suddenly, and Picasso-Xander reached out before she could stop him and yanked it down.

The mindscape exploded into bright white light, and something started screaming.