You're shocked when you get a phone call from an unknown number and the voice on the other end says "Buffy? Buffy, it's Willow," but not as shocked as you are when she says "Faith's dead. You have to come back." She refuses to explain, says it's too complicated and sensitive to talk about over the phone. In a daze, you book the next flight to Cleveland.
You step off the plane and into Willow's waiting, tearful arms still in a state of total shock. You can't believe how much older she looks. Do you look that much older? You decide you don't; your skin is still smooth; your hair still a delicious honey blond. The lines around her eyes, the strands of gray mixed in with the red—those, you realize, are proof that in the eight years since you've last seen her, the ongoing fight against evil has aged Willow more than her share.
When you get into her little green hybrid and she starts the ignition, you ask her "Do you still have the same slayer compound?" Willow shakes her head no; explains that they're working out of a little three-bedroom just outside the city. "Where do the rest of the slayers live?" you ask, and Willow takes a deep breath and tells you that there are no other slayers. The world around you seems to freeze; you hear your own voice as though underwater as you ask as you ask what happened to them, visions of massacres and rivers of slayer-blood flickering across your mind.
Willow looks you in the eye, her gaze steely: "I deactivated them a few months after you left." Your whole body seems to go numb, you can't feel anything. All this time you've been in retirement, picturing when you bothered to picture anything at all Willow and Faith and the dozens or maybe hundreds of newly activated slayers running some large-scale operation, military almost, in your mind it was not unlike the Initiative; all this time it's just been Faith, with Willow, in a little three-bedroom on the outskirts of Cleveland.
"It was too dangerous," she's explaining, "We couldn't stay in control of that many girls, it wasn't safe. And," she swallows hard here, and you're not sure what that means, "And they were so young, Buffy. Ten, six, four. It wasn't right."
You hear yourself asking with a hint of relief in your voice if that means that the next Slayer has been called the old-fashioned way, who she is, where she is. Willow sighs and tells you that's where it gets complicated, that's why she called you. She says maybe she'd better show you, and asks if you mind waiting till you get home. You shrug—you've gone without information for eight years, what's another twenty minutes?
Willow switches gears and fills you in on all the news; her chatter reminds you a little of the Willow you remembered. Giles and Xander and Dawn are running the new Council and doing really well; they fly out from England a few times a year. She tells you proudly how grown-up Dawnie is now, how smart and organized and beautiful, and then she takes a deep breath and tells you that Dawn just got married.
The rush of emotion sweeps through you, lightening-fast, then disappears into the abyss where your heart used to be. Your baby sister, your one-time almost-daughter, with whom, like everybody else from your old life, you were forced to cut off all contact when you left your calling all those years ago, is married. You wonder if she missed you at her wedding, or if she's long since written you off. It was a horrible thing you did to Dawn: dragged her into this life when she was so young, and then abandoned her with it after she got attached to it and you wanted out. Wanted out so badly you were willing to give up contact with everyone you cared about: "For your own safety, Buffy, if this is what you really want. Anything could find you if we even know where you are."
You ask Willow to tell you about Dawn's new husband, and Willow cringes preemptively, already preparing for your outpouring of ire when she admits that it's Xander. Like everything else you've heard today, the news mostly just makes you feel numb. There was a time when the thought would have repulsed you, infuriated you—that's your baby sister, after all—but the time for such judgment has passed. You have no right to object to the choices the people you loved made after you left them with your responsibilities.
Willow changes the topic; asks you about your life, and you merely shrug. You wanted a normal life and you got one: a job you don't really like, a mostly unremarkable marriage, a couple of miscarriages, and then a divorce. You tell Willow all and none of this when you say, simply, "Ordinary." The two of you spend the rest of the ride in silence, halfway between the comfortable kind between old friends who don't need to talk and the painful kind between people who don't know how anymore.
You arrive, finally, at the house and when Willow shouts "I'm home!" as she walks through the door you wonder who she's talking to until a sweet-faced teenager with a backpack emerges. She says something to Willow that you don't hear, then Willow thanks her and hands her a few folded bills, but you don't notice because your eyes are fixed on the child sitting at the table in the other room, working on some kind of art project.
Willow leads you into the room, casually planting a kiss on the top of the child's head, saying, "Buffy? This is Angela. Angela sweetie, this is your Aunt Buffy. Say hello." The child slides off the chair and extends her hand. It's an unusual gesture for such a little girl, and you find it oddly touching. The child looks up at you out of Faith's dark, expressive eyes and smiles a little shyly with Faith's full lips. "Hi," she says.
"Hi, Angela," you manage to say as you shake her warm little hand, "What were you working on there?"
"A stake," she says nonchalantly, showing you the pointed piece of wood she's been sanding.
Willow looks over at you. "The next Slayer," she says, and for the first time since she called, your eyes fill with tears.
Willow brings you upstairs to the guest room to put your bag down—the guest room? you thought she said three bedrooms—then leads you into her room to talk and you freeze when you see the leather pants and denim jacket still draped over the weapons chest in the corner. You turn to Willow almost accusingly. Either she's developed a very different kind of fashion sense since you've been gone, or—
"We were sort of together," she admits, almost apologetically. "Not like that! Well, sometimes like that," you wince, and she hurries on. "What I mean is… we weren't in love or anything. I mean we loved each other, just not… it was just convenient, mostly." Willow shrugs and you notice for the first time how sad her eyes are. "I'm never going to get over Tara, Buffy, and she was never going to get over you."
Your eyes widen at that, you never knew that; except of course you knew that, you knew it all along; you knew it from almost the moment she arrived in Sunnydale as an undernourished, oversexed fifteen-year-old eager to share your life, you knew it when she stole your body, you knew it when she looked at you with that strange mixture of envy and restraint and thinly veiled concern in her eyes in the days before the fall of Sunnydale, you knew it by the look on her face when you announced you were leaving for good.
But now it's too late; she's gone forever, leaving behind some empty leather pants, your sad best friend, and a little girl sharpening stakes who no one's bothered to explain to you yet.
Once, back in Sunnydale, in the very early days before things went bad between the two of you, you walked her back to her motel room after a patrol so you could bandage a bad cut on the back of her shoulder. You were in her bathroom looking for antiseptic and gauze when you saw the positive pregnancy test in her wastebasket. You insisted on going with her to the clinic the next week, but she blew you off almost immediately afterwards, shoving you away with physical force and angry words and walking home alone, unsteady from the anesthesia and slightly bent from the cramping.
The memory plays on a loop in the back of your mind as Willow explains that she had dissuaded Faith from her intended abortion when she found out that the baby was Robin's—Robin who had died two days after Sunnydale. A baby with slayer blood on both sides was, Willow had insisted, the only way to ensure the continuation of the Slayer line even after the deactivation spell she was so desperate to cast.
Wistfully, Willow recounts the details of Faith's pregnancy and Angela's birth—"I delivered her myself, Buffy; Faith hated hospitals and witches have a long history of midwifery"—and all the while you can only picture barely-sixteen-year-old Faith, in the clinic, squeezing your hand and pretending she's not.
Willow's still blathering on about Angela; you have to admit that her parental bragging about her child's extraordinariness is probably more grounded in reality than most, but finally you cut her off by asking why she stayed in Cleveland; why she chose not to go with Xander and Giles and Dawn and instead stay with Faith, whom she always hated a little bit more than the rest of you did.
The proud light in her eyes dies and Willow sighs. "I belong with the Slayer," she says slowly. "I always have." She says some more things about the need for magic on the Hellmouth, about penance and her own trip to the evil side and she and Faith having more in common than they realized, about not being able to abandon Faith after insisting she keep the baby, but you're not really listening anymore because you suspect it's all secondary.
You ask how Faith died; you're not sure why you didn't think to ask before. "She finally just got bit," Willow says simply. It's not a glamorous death by any means, but it's a Slayer's death and for that you're grateful. You don't think you could handle knowing that so much life was snuffed out by human or natural means. Vampire, slayer, dead slayer. So the world goes.
Still, you have to ask. "There's no chance…?" You can't quite bring yourself to complete the question. Willow shakes her head—"I had her cremated"—and you nod, relieved. Willow's lower lip starts to quiver and she suddenly looks so young again. "I haven't told Angela yet," she confesses, "I just don't know how."
"We'll figure it out together," you tell your best friend, taking her hand in yours. And you know you will. You will stay here and take up your burden, your Calling once again. You will relearn this woman you hardly know now, probably you will eventually take Faith's place in Willows' bed—Willow will never get over Tara, and you realize, with sudden painful clarity, that you will never get over the loss of your faith.
But most importantly, you will get to know the beautiful, dark-haired Slayer downstairs and you will give her all the love and affection and attention you never gave her mother. And then you will die and finally, finally she will be the One Girl in All the World. And all will be at rights.