Title: Lost Slayer 1/4
Author: Sweetdoggie (stirling_summer@yahoo.com)
Pairing: Giles/Buffy
Rating: FRM
Summary: What was lost is found.
Spoilers: None
Note: set before season 1--AU.
Disclaimer: No permission has been granted to use the characters.. They are owned by their creator, Joss Whedon, Twentieth Century Fox, UPN, WB, and Mutant Enemy. This story is non-profit and is intended solely as entertainment. No copyright infringement is intended.
She was close. He could feel her. After tracking her for three years, he knew she was within yards of him if only he could spot her. The crowd ebbed and flowed around him like water, but he had fixed on her like a hunting dog going to point and he would not give up. Spinning in a slow circle, he let his gaze swing over the crowd of carnival goers. Suddenly he found his eyes locked on a small girl about ten feet to his left. She was standing in front of a ring toss game eyeing the cheap prizes with a look of faint derision on her face. The barker was riding her slightly.
“Come on, girly-girl. Anybody can win. It only takes three out of five to win a prize.” He kept up a string of annoying banter distracting her long enough for Rupert to come up behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder and felt her tense up. She turned around and looked up into his face. He saw her expression change from annoyance to surprise.
“I know you,” she whispered. “I’ve dreamed of you.”
“I’ve searched for you for years,” he told her, joy shining through his features. He looked around, taking in their surroundings. “We must talk.”
She nodded and reached out to take his hand.
“Hey little lady! Don’t you want to win your daddy a prize?” The barker wasn’t going to let an easy-looking mark slip away that fast.
The girl sighed and looked up at the man by her side. “Hold on a second, will you?” At his nod, she gave the carnie worker two bucks and received five smallish hoops in return. She smiled at the carnie and seemingly without looking tossed all five loops one after the other. She enjoyed seeing the smile on his face fade as all five loops spun out and hooked over the bottles. She grinned up at him and pointed to the sword that hung as prize and bait for rubes. “I’d like that, please.”
He tried to interest her in one of the cheap sawdust filled animals, but she held out for the sword. Finally, he gave it to her in disgust, telling her to go away.
They walked out of the carnival, silently assessing each other. “So, what’s your name, mystery man?”
“My name is Rupert Giles. I’m a Watcher, your Watcher, to be exact.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You are the Vampire Slayer. Into each generation is born one girl with the strength and skill to hunt vampires, demons, and other creatures of the night. You are she.”
“Slayer, huh? I’ve wondered what it was called.” She looked up into the darkness of the parking lot. Two men were pulling a struggling young woman behind a dumpster. Cautioning Rupert to stay put, she confronted them.
They were vampires about to feed. At her appearance, one of them stepped away from the terrified girl and stalked towards the Slayer. “Good. Now we won’t have to share.”
Rupert watched as the Slayer drew the cheap carnival sword and swung it in one blow, neatly decapitating the vampire. His companion let go of his prey and sprang at her but the Slayer produced a wooden stake seemingly from the ether and drove it into his heart. Both bodies had dusted in a virtual explosion of ash that made her sneeze. She helped the terrified victim off the ground. “Watch out when you go out at night. It isn’t safe.”
The girl nodded as if her head was on a string and ran as fast as she could go back to her parked car. Seconds later it peeled out of the parking lot as if it had wings.
The Slayer turned towards him with a grin. “That was fun. So, you’re Rupert Giles, huh? I like your name.”
“What’s your name, if I might enquire?”
“Oh, sorry. You can call me Buffy.”
“Buffy What?”
“No, just Buffy.”
He rolled his eyes at her joke. “Come. We need to get back to my hotel. We have much to discuss.”
“OK, but I’m starving and I need to get my stuff.”
He nodded. “We can order out when we get to my room, but you should retrieve your belongings at once.”
She smiled and walked over to a tree. In seconds she was more than twenty feet off the ground, propelled by her Slayer strength. She dropped back onto the ground, a backpack in her hand.
“That’s all you own?”
“It’s all I need.”
They arrived at his room and he let her proceed him. “We need to make plans,” he began. “First things first and all that. Once we get back to the Council, we’ll get you some decent clothes and get you enrolled in school. Just because you are a Slayer is no reason to be ignorant..”
“I’m not ignorant and I’m not interested in going back to school. And while we’re on the topic, who died and made you my boss?”
“Her name was Rose.”
“Huh?”
“The Slayer before you who died and made me your Watcher. Her name was Rose.”
“So there really is only one at a time?”
“That is correct.”
“Were you Rose’s Watcher?”
“No. That honor went to another.” He explained how when one girl died, another Slayer was Called. “Normally, it’s a girl we, meaning the Council, have raised from childhood. When Rose died, however, no new Slayer appeared to be Called. The Council checked all the oracles and signs pointed to a Lost Slayer living in the States. I could feel you. It happens that way for Watchers. We are mystically bound to our charges. I’ve looked for you for three long years. I was very close in New York and Montreal. I was too late in New Orleans, Chicago, and Omaha. I can hardly believe I’ve found you in this town barely big enough to deserve a name. Why do you move around so much?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been on my own for three years—since this happened to me, as a matter of fact. If you stay around in one place too long, you begin to attract attention. People learn to know you and then they start to question you: Where’s your folks? Why aren’t you in school? Where do you live? It gets to be a real problem. Also, it seems like whenever I stay anyplace for very long, vampires start arriving. Like I’m a draw of some kind for them or something.”
He nodded his understanding. “Actually, that is not far from the truth. As a Slayer, you radiate mystic energies. Watchers can feel it and unfortunately, so can many vampires and demons. You have been extraordinarily lucky to have survived this long with no training and no Watcher.”
“Hey! I might just be really talented!”
“I have no doubt of it, but you will now be given lessons and training and will become even more formidable in the fight against evil.”
She looked at him wryly. “Uh huh. You Watcher dudes think pretty highly of yourselves, don’t you?”
“Watchers have been the natural companions to Slayers for more than twenty thousand years. I have trained from the age of ten so that I can provide you with whatever you need.”
“Well, provide me with some dinner, guy, ‘cause I’m seriously hungry.”
He nodded but gave a tiny grimace. “Technically, you should call me Mr. Giles and I should refer to you as Ms…?”
“Call me Buffy and I’m not calling you Mr. Giles. How about a compromise? I’ll call you Giles.”
He sighed. “I suppose it will have to do. What do you like to eat?”
“Anything except liver—I’ll stretch that and say no internal organs at all, OK?”
“Would Chinese food be sufficient tonight? That seems to be the only restaurant that is open till ten and that will deliver.”
“Then that’s of the good.”
Giles ordered enough food for four people because he had heard that Slayers ate more due to their increased metabolism. While they waited for their food to arrive, he studied her. She was very young, very brash, and American. She seemed happy enough—he’d heard of Slayers who were morose or depressed constantly, but that certainly didn’t seem to be the case with this child. He wondered how old she actually was? He decided to ask her.
“How old are you?”
“I’ll be 19 in January.”
“Nineteen? Impossible. Why, I’d have a very difficult time believing you were even sixteen, but that I know you’ve been the Slayer for three years.”
She shrugged. “I know I’m small. It used to bug mom and dad because they’re both on the tall side.”
“Where are your parents?”
“As far as I know, they’re both back in LA. I haven’t been in contact since I ran away.”
He frowned. “You are from LA?”
Buffy sighed heavily. He was just going to persist with this boring questioning until he had his answers. She might as well just tell him.
“My name is Elizabeth Anne Summers, also known as Buffy. I was born on January 19, 1979 to Hank and Joyce Summers. I got this Slayer thing when I was fifteen. It was really weird too. I was just a normal teenage girl. Didn’t know what was happening to me. I was reading a book one night on the front porch and my dad came out and asked me why I was sitting in the dark. Up to that point, I hadn’t realized it was dark. I could sit there and read by the light of the moon, like it was daylight. I was always athletic. I ice skated, and did the whole cheerleading thing at school so I worked out a lot. When I started getting stronger, I thought it was just from that, you know?”
She tipped her chair back a bit. “Anyway, I was walking home one night and this guy attacked me! He had the weirdest face you ever saw—I didn’t know that was just Vamp face, then. Anyhow, he tried to kill me but I fought back—very girly too, I might add. I think I even slapped him. Geez! It’s a wonder he didn’t die from laughing at me. Well, I fell down and he leaped on top of me. I couldn’t hold him off but my hand found a branch laying on the ground. I stabbed him with it and the next thing I know—dust city.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how very freaky that whole thing was. I got home and my folks were fighting over something—they did that a lot. So, I just went to my room. They didn’t notice anything. People started disappearing from my school and I guess lots of other places. I went to the library and read everything they had on vampires. Most of that is pure crap, by the way, but the staking, sunlight, holy water shtick works.. I loaded up on crosses, holy water, and stakes. My mom eventually noticed something was up with me, but, you know, how could anybody suspect what was really going on? She thought I might have joined a religious cult.” Buffy shook her head sadly.
“Anyhow, long story short, vamps attacked my high school dance. I don’t know what they were thinking. They had set up a nest in the basement of the gym and came out to feed at the party. I nearly got eaten by this blond dude. Told me his name was Lothos and he’d killed a bunch of Slayers. Well, I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. He did that hypnotism thingy on me. I couldn’t move, figured my days were up, you know? Kids were screaming and running all over the place being chased. One of them ran into him and it broke his spell. We fought and fought. I didn’t have a stake. I looked all over but the only thing I could find made out of wood in the whole place was the flagpole. I broke it in half and rammed the pointy end right through him.”
“And then what happened?” Giles leaned forward, deeply interested.
“Then I started staking whatever vamp came within reach. I got all the surviving humans out of the place. By this time, sunrise was on the horizon. I knew that if the vamps came out again that night, they’d have a whole bunch more of new recruits from all the kids they had killed, so I torched the gym. I got them all,” she said with satisfaction.
“Of course, that wasn’t really the end of the story. I came home and told my mom what had happened and she thought I was crazy. The cops came less than an hour later and my mom told them I was having some sort of breakdown. I got hauled off to Juvie but they made me see a shrink. He thought I was totally nuts and the courts remanded me into the custody of a sanatorium. I was found not guilty of arson and suspected murder because of insanity, but I was to stay in a mental institution for a period of not less than three years till I reached my eighteenth birthday. At that time I would be reevaluated. They took me away to this nut farm. I was locked into a small cell with padded walls and a twelve inch, barred window. It took me two weeks to work the bars loose. I was on the sixth floor. I climbed down the outside wall with nothing but my hospital jammies on.”
He looked appalled. “Good Lord! How did you get away?”
“Once I hit the ground, I ran, all night and most of the next day. I stopped long enough to steal some clothes from a clothesline, but I didn’t have shoes for three more days. I found a school and snuck in to the gym while everybody was at class. I broke into a bunch of lockers and stole a pair of shoes and a couple of pairs of jeans and shirts and a backpack. Then I ran some more.”
“What did you do for food?”
She sighed. “I stole it when I could. I figured out that vending machines hold a ton of money and with my newfound strength; I could easily break them open and take the cash. I hated doing that. I was raised to be honest, but I didn’t want to sell my body which was what was left to me. I had a few money-making schemes—I would go door to door asking for yard work. If anybody questioned me, I’d tell them in a sort of sulky way that my folks thought I needed to work and that since I was too young to hold down a real job, this was the best way. I got lots of yard clean-ups and grungy jobs, but the pay wasn’t too bad. Eventually, I learned that you could pick the vamp’s pockets before you dusted them and they usually had some cash on them. I haven’t,” she told him with some pride, “had to steal since I figured that out.”
“But how do you get by in society? You need I.D. and a social security number.”
“And I have them,” she said with a grin. “They just aren’t the ones I started with. You can get as much fake I.D. as you can carry on any college campus in the country. Some of it is better than others, but with modern technology you can get something that really looks authentic. I even found a hacker to put me into the federal database. I’m legal, I’m just not who my I.D. says I am.”
“You won’t have to steal anymore, nor risk your life robbing vampires. I shall see to it,” he promised her.
Their food arrived and Buffy went to answer the door, first making sure that the visitor wasn’t a vampire. They ate and Buffy even ate the steamed vegetables he had gotten for her.
“I love broccoli,” she told him. “When I was little, my mom told me that they were little trees and that I’d be just like the dinosaurs if I ate my broccoli.”
He smiled. “I take it that being like a dinosaur is a desirable trait?”
“Totally, for a four-year-old.”
When they were finished eating, Buffy helped him clean up the leftovers. There wasn’t much. “I should take this to the trash,” he told her.
She put her hand on his arm. “Not alone and not at night. It can wait till morning.”
He looked at her seriously before nodding. “Quite right, of course.”
“Mind if I use your shower? I don’t normally have a place this good.”
He nodded. “Please, be my guest.”
She luxuriated in the warmth of the shower. It was wonderful to be clean and to not have to worry that somebody would try to rape her if she was caught bathing. She trusted this Giles guy. You could see in his eyes that he was all right. That felt pretty good too. At last, she emerged from the shower and dressed in a battered pair of sweat pants and a sloppy t-shirt. She towel dried her short, spiky hair and emerged from the steamy bathroom feeling refreshed.
“Your turn,” she told him with a grin.
He gathered his garments and walked into the lavatory. When he emerged, she noticed that they were wearing nearly identical outfits for sleeping. It made her grin. Giles walked to the motel chair. Even in the dim light, it looked uncomfortable.
“I shall sleep in the chair tonight, you may have the bed.”
She looked at the king-size mattress. “It’s plenty big enough to share.”
“It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“So? Were you planning on jumping me tonight?”
“No! Of course not!”
“Then come to bed and quit making a big deal out of nothing.”
He looked hesitant, but finally conceded that persisting in sleeping in the chair would look extremely silly. Sighing at her strength of will, he climbed into bed beside her and turned out the light, suspecting that he wouldn’t sleep a wink. In actuality, the soft rhythm of her breathing, the relief of finding her at last, and the slump from the adrenaline high, all caused him to sleep like a babe in arms.