Chapter Two

Buffy checked her email box after she finished patrolling. Xander had gone with her, and that had been nice. They hadn’t done that too often over the last year. She had been busy patrolling with Faith when she came back to Sunnydale after she ran away. After Angel had come back from the hell dimension, and Xander had been so intent on dusting him they had said some things to each other that had created a bit of distance in their relationship.

Taunting him about being jealous of Angel had not been smart, but she had been so angry, at him for being so pigheaded about Angel, and at herself for hurting them by not trusting them with the truth about the miracle that was his return to her. Angry too, because no one seemed to get that. No matter what Angelus had done, for the few seconds before she had killed him to close the door to hell Angelus had opened, he was her Angel, returned to her, and she had killed him, to save the world. Getting him back was a kind of redemption for her. It was a miracle that she had been too shell-shocked to believe in.

Except Willow. Willow had understood that. She had been as upset as the others, but Buffy knew that she understood, in a way Giles and Xander, and to some extent, Angel, could never understand, what it meant to her.

Earlier that night Buffy and Xander had put together the computer Buffy’s dad had sent, even though it was meant for school, and it would have to be repacked and reassembled when she moved into her dorm room at the beginning of the fall term. She smiled to herself, remembering the day Willow had left for her internship. Oz had driven her to San Jose, and Buffy and Xander had gone to her house to see her off. She had looked so brave, and slightly forlorn, standing there in her size seven Keds and folded down crew socks, wearing a smock-like pale blue jumper with an orange t-shirt. Like a kid version of herself going off to her first day at school, clutching her parting gift from Xander—a Scooby Doo lunch box.

“I’ll stay if you want me to, Buffy,” she said.

Buffy had smiled. “Yeah. Because other people’s issues are more interesting than your own,” she reminded Willow.

She nodded appreciatively, her goofy, sage Willow expression in place. “Completely,” she agreed. They had passed that baton back and forth all through high school. “You’re okay?” she asked.

“No,” Buffy admitted. “I’m a disaster, but I’ll get there,” she said.

Buffy had been accepted to Northwestern. Willow had been accepted to every school that counted between California and Western Europe. She had decided to stay in Sunnydale, to attend UC-Sunnydale in the fall, because she wanted to continue studying magic and helping Buffy. After Faith went rogue, Northwestern was never really in the cards for Buffy. It was not possible to leave the Hellmouth without a functioning Slayer. The duty had chosen Buffy. Willow chose the duty. Buffy was glad that she was going to have a summer away from it, though it was kind of funny that Willow was nervous about an extra-normal summer minus demon hunting and slaying.

No email in her box. She turned the computer off. She would check again in the morning, maybe. She changed into her pajamas and took out her diary, tapping the pen on the clean page. She wrote the date and started recording the day. What she ate, the techniques she had practiced in training, her observations on patrol. It was still quiet in the post apocalyptic way that things tended to cool off for a while. She tapped with the pen. Ever since Angelus had stolen her diary, she had been a little more reserved in recording her most intimate thoughts and feelings. She wrote a little more, about patrolling with Xander. About friendships that changed and grew, but remained constant, and when she thought she was tired enough, she turned out her light and lay in her bed to sleep. Behind her closed eyelids, she did not weep, not even with the frustration of sleep eluding her. She just felt hollow.



Willow’s head pounded in time to the beat of her heart. She woke up in a room that was dark, cool, quiet, and unfamiliar in a disorienting way. She closed her eyes, fighting nausea and heard someone cross the room to place a warm, damp washcloth on her forehead, covering her eyes. Breathing made her head hurt. Thinking made her head swim. She tried without success to put both on pause.

“We need to get something in you,” a familiar voice said. Familiar in an uh-oh bad things are about to happen way that made her heart speed up, increasing the blinding pain in her skull.

“Where am I?” she asked. Her throat ached. Not sore throat achey. Gaping wound the size of Kansas achey.

The question was ignored. She lifted a hand that felt way too heavy to try to feel her neck. Her hand was brushed aside. “Leave it be. You aren’t bleeding,” Spike said. She felt her shoulders lifted, her neck supported in the crook of an arm, something cold and wet touching her lip. “Drink,” he ordered. Orange juice trickled into her mouth, over her lip, wetting her chin where it dribbled out of her mouth. She swallowed as much as she could before weakly pushing the bottle away, trying to catch her breath.

“A little fucking cooperation, Red,” he growled at her. “I’m trying to save your life, here,” he said. “You lost a lot of blood,” he said.

A woman’s voice, someone’s weight shifting at the bottom of the bed she was laying in. “She could have brain damage. Did you think of that?”

Willow whimpered. She didn’t want to have brain damage. “My head hurts,” she whispered. She had had a concussion before. This was worse in many ways. “My head is giant, isn’t it?” Déjà vu. She had said that before, under entirely different circumstances. Her eyes swum with tears as she tried to check her head. “Why are you helping me?” It did not make sense.

He snorted. “Yeah. It’s enormous,” he said sarcastically. “Drink your damned orange juice like a good girl,” he ordered.

The bottle clicked against her front teeth and she tried to drink some more, but it was too much and she started choking, feeling sticky orange juice spilling from her mouth.

“Let me do it,” the woman said. “You’re making a mess,” she said. “Just hold her, okay,” she said. Willow felt the mattress shift as she moved to the other side of her, using the washcloth to blot the spilled orange juice. She opened her eyes, seeing the blonde girl from the coffee bar. Vampire, she thought, tensing.

She directed Willow’s shaking hands to the bottle. “Now, I’m just going to help you hold the bottle, sugar,” she said. “You just take your time with it. Feeling pretty puny, huh?” she sounded sympathetic. “Don’t pay any attention to Spike. Your head is all normal sized, and no one’s hurting you,” she said, smoothing Willow’s hair.

She concentrated on sipping the orange juice. No more thinking. Just sip, swallow, sip, swallow. Coffee bar. Spike and more vamps. Save Harmony. Oops. Harmony is a vampire, too. When did that happen? How did that happen? Harmony hitting her, biting her. Why wasn’t she dead? Why was Spike trying to save her life? That didn’t make any sense. Had she lost so much blood that she was hallucinating. Maybe it was brain damage. Maybe she was dead—or undead.

She inhaled a small mouthful of the orange juice on that thought and started coughing, violent spasms racking her body. Wait. Pain, lots of pain, and she could feel her heart beating. Oh, thank the blessed Lady. She was not dead.

She had given blood often enough to know that she was not supposed to feel this bad. Over her head, she heard Spike and the blonde vampire girl talking. “No one seems to have noticed that she is missing yet,” Georgia said. “That’s good, right?”

“Won’t last,” Spike said. “I went through her stuff. She’s supposed to be at work on Monday morning,” he said.

“Call in sick,” Georgia said. “Buy some more time,” she suggested.

“Good thinking,” Spike complimented. “But, eventually someone is going to notice that she is missing,” he pointed out.

“And then?” Georgia prompted.

Yeah. And then? Willow wanted to know the answer to that one. She peered at Spike and found him looking right back at her. He grinned. She had been out for nearly twenty-four hours. Spike had been stuck with waking her up periodically to force orange juice down her throat. It had not been pretty. She was a lot more alert, though, worse for wear, but she was going to live. He had had time to work out some ideas of how to make her useful.

Before the Judge had killed Dalton, his favorite minion had been on the trail of something called the Gem of Amara. Dalton had found some references in ancient texts that led him to believe that it was somewhere in Sunnydale while he was looking for Dru’s cure. Angelus’ return from the land of the soul-having had taken precedence over everything else, but having little else to do but fume over Angelus and Dru while he healed, Spike had gotten acquainted with Dalton’s research and had filled that away for future use.

He had made a deal with the Slayer to leave Sunnydale, and he had, more or less, kept up his end of it, deciding that his fly by while drunk off his ass—two scared teenagers and one dead shop keeper to his tally—really didn’t count. If the Gem was in Sunnydale, he had just had one hell of a bargaining chip drop in his lap. Let the Slayer and her Watcher do all the work of researching and finding the Gem. He would trade the redhead for it, and keep his deal with the Slayer all in one fell swoop. It was genius. He was a genius, he thought smugly. He had limited patience for the kind of work it would take to find the Gem, so this really was perfect. Direct action was his milieu, not boring research over dusty old manuscripts written in execrable and ambiguous verse.

“Negotiation,” he said simply. It did not suit his plans for Red’s absence to go unnoticed any longer than it took to cover his tracks. He had already started making plans. They had to find a decent place to hide out. Somewhere close enough for him to get to Sunnydale within a few hours. He had Colin out scouting some locations. Unfortunately, it meant keeping Colin, Pete, Georgia, and Harm close. He didn’t want them passing potentially useful information on to the Slayer when she started looking for Red. Colin had a line on a place outside of town. It was an abandoned motel that had gotten lost in a highway construction plan that bypassed it, attracting a few squatters that could be dealt with and turned into something useful. Dinner. Minions. It did not matter. Harmony was bugging Pete about getting minions. Being the low dog on the totem pole was starting to sink into her teeny, tiny brain.

They would shift after sundown and set up camp. “Don’t worry, pet,” he told Willow. “We’re going to take good care of you.”

For some reason, that was not a comforting thought.



Willow’s Email (Unopened)

To: Rosenw@clangeek.com

From: b.summers@uscs.edu

Re: You-hoo! Part II

Wills? Write back, okay. I have no email. I feel like a loser.

Check this out-- @>------| Ooooh. Ahhhh. Pretty, huh?

Buffy :)



“Honey, what do you think of this?” Joyce asked, holding up a short plaid skirt with a shiny silver pin stuck through it kilt style.

“I’m thinking ‘plaid’” Buffy’s nose wrinkled.

“No good?” Joyce guessed. She was thinking plaid skirt, sweater tied around the shoulders, loafers, and a pearl necklace. She smiled at herself. When she was in college, it had been bell bottoms, tie-dyed t-shirts, and funky fringed vests.

“No good,” Buffy agreed. Her mother was treating her to a college wardrobe-building day at the mall with lunch. “Too teenage jail bait,” Buffy said, thinking plaid shirt, crop top, and thigh high stocking with chunky healed shoes. She grinned. “And, let’s face it, Mom,” she said with a shake of her head, “I’ve done that.”

Joyce glanced over at her daughter. She knew Buffy was having a hard time with Angel leaving, even though it was for the best, and at least a dozen times a day she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying something to that effect. The flash of humor was unexpected. Humor was good. Humor was a way of coping with the hard things that life handed out. She wanted more of that.

“Can we have a new rule?” Joyce asked. “No more boyfriends who are older than your Mom,” she said plaintively. “Unless they have gray hair, and wrinkles, and they look older than your Mom.”

Buffy snorted. “How about no hair, and dentures, and the minty freshness of Ben-Gay?” she joked.

“Even better,” Joyce agreed. “Ben-Gay and Old Spice,” she suggested. “And sock suspenders,” she added.

Buffy giggled. “Good one,” she complimented, looking over at her mother. “And no boyfriends for you younger than me,” she added. “Unless they have braces,” she added.

Joyce laughed at that. “I’m a man free zone,” she declared.

Buffy cocked her head to one side. “Is that because of Dad?” she asked tentatively. Her mother had not dated a lot since her parents had divorced and they had moved to Sunnydale.

Joyce took the question seriously. She was still a parent. There was no point in telling Buffy that sometimes she really did miss being part of a relationship. Mixed with her misgivings, she had gotten a small vicarious thrill out of Buffy’s relationship with Angel, because she remembered what it was like to be in love for the first time. Even more so, she had enjoyed Xander and Willow’s romances in their senior year of high school. She had been happy for Xander when he and Cordelia Chase had been dating, seeing how it vindicated him in some way to be found worthy of the most popular girl at school. It ended, but it was high school. That was just the way things happened in the normal world that Buffy spent far too little time in. Willow had looked so cute with Oz when the kids came back to the house after prom.

There had been too much sadness about Buffy’s prom date. Poor Angel, corralled into a teen ritual, and painfully aware of how inappropriate it was, and how it defined everything that was flawed about his relationship with Buffy.

“I’m a parent,” she said after a moment. “It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I just feel like my life is too full to make room for someone else. I have you, and a home to take care of, I have friends, and the gallery to run,” she enumerated. “My life is pretty full. It feels selfish sometimes. I don’t feel like I have enough left for someone else.” She frowned. “I don’t want to have anything else.”

“I’ve been married. I’ve done all of that. I wanted to work things out with your Dad, but there is a part of me that looks back on it and is relieved to be in a place where its just me,” she looked at Buffy, wondering if she could understand what it felt like to be . . . free. “I’ve never really been on my own. I graduated from college. Even in college, though, it was just Hank, and me and it was great. Hank and I got married, and then we started a family,” she smiled.

There were years in her marriage that had seem unendurably long, and in the same slipstream was the rapid passage of time that was her life with her daughter. I’m sending my daughter to college, Joyce marveled.

“I’m a little scared of it too, with you going away to school—not that you are going that far,” she pointed out, “but, still, I’m pretty sure I can be alone in the house and be okay with that, which is a little scary. It’s not what I expected for myself.”

Buffy thought about that. “Its not because of the thing that happened with Ted, is it?” she asked.

Joyce shook her head, and then stopped. “Well, maybe,” she allowed. “It was exciting to feel that way again, but it was also—“ she thought about it for a moment, “too much,” she admitted, her nose wrinkling. “This whole pairing up thing . . . when your grandmother was your age, she dated a lot of boys, you know,” Joyce said, smiling as she saw Buffy grin at the notion of Joyce’s mother, dubbed Grand-Anne by Buffy when Buffy was five, as a teenager, dating.

“You go, Grand-Anne,” Buffy’s tone was teasing. Her mother’s Mom was all about twin sets, pearls, bridge, and golf. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Barbara Billingsley, and she had great legs. She had seen pictures of her from the early fifties, looking confident and self-assured.

“It was expected. You didn’t fix your interest with one person until you were ready to get married,” Joyce explained. “And that makes more sense, because it was okay to make it known that that was what you were looking for, instead of just dating one person exclusively and then finding that you aren’t in the relationship for the same things. I think I’d like to do that,” she said. “Just date, just meet people, and have someone to go to the movies with and dinner, and not feel like it’s a big deal.”

Buffy flipped through a rack of tops, thinking about that. “I guess I understand what you are saying, but sometimes it does work,” she said. “Willow never really dated a lot of boys. She and Oz just fit together.”

Joyce’s eyebrows raised. “Buffy? They are eighteen. They have at least four years of college ahead, and given what Willow is capable of, maybe more. That’s a long time. Things happen. People change. Their lives pull them in unexpected directions. How many people actually end up with the first person they fell in love with?” she asked. “It happens,” she answered her own question, “but less often than you would think. Your father and I got married because we were in love and college was over and we thought we were supposed to get married at that point. We fell into it. I think, in retrospect, it would have been better if we had wanted to get married and then fallen in love, because we would have started from the same place. Your father loved me, and he adores you, but he didn’t really want to be married, and as time went on that was something he struggled with and it hurt him. It made him feel like he failed us,” Joyce said, her voice softening perceptively.

“He did,” Buffy pointed out tartly, with all the compassion of a teenager.

“He feels bad about that,” Joyce told her. “You want me to start throwing stones at Angel?” she asked. “I’m past feeling good about hearing anyone say bad things about your father. Even when I was mad enough at him to say bad things myself, it made me feel worse to hear them. It still does.”

Buffy frowned. “I think I get what you are saying.” She knew it didn’t really apply to her relationship with Angel. All the things that they could not be together were things that Angel longed for as much as she did. Possibly more. It wasn’t the same, but she didn’t argue. She reached out and squeezed her mother’s hand. It was Mom and Buffy time. This really wasn’t about Angel, or dating. It was about them talking, woman to woman, learning about each other. “I love you, Mom,” she said. “Next to Willow and Xander, you are my best friend.”

Joyce smiled back at her. “Thank you,” she said, pleased to be regarded that way. “But, I’m still your Mom,” she reminded Buffy, “and your Mom is saying ‘no’ to that,” she said, examining the price tag on a semi-transparent lace skirt Buffy was holding up.

“Too expensive?” Buffy concluded.

Joyce cocked her head to one side. “Too everything,” she muttered.



Willow’s Email (Unopened)

To: Rosenw@clangeek.com

From: b.summers@uscs.edu

Re: Do I Have the Right E-mail Address

Willow? Are you there? Hell-o? Is this your email address? If you are not Willow Rosenberg please reply so I can stop sending email to the wrong person.

If you are Willow . . . I’ve left you four messages and a bunch of emails. You don’t call. You don’t write. You are freaking me out. Sheesh. Are they keeping you that busy? Am I that bored? Are you mad at me?

Mom and I had a big shopping day. It was actually a really good day. We talked a lot about stuff, like woman to woman stuff, and it’s given me a lot to think about.

Miss you. Please call or write, okay?

Buffy