I have a clear image of this thing, but i've never been able to judge how long it will take to say the things which Must Be Said in a story. My first estimate was around 15K but I can tell already that is very much not enough room for this tale. I fear to hazard a guess, in case I curse myself lol

Hope you guys are interested in dark, moody, prickly, grief-stricken AUs? seriously though, tell me what you think!

The Master died. It was only a stroke of luck, but no fight she walked away from alive was a dishonor. Another tangled knot of combatants tumbled into into them at the right moment to break the great Vampire's cold, doughy grip on her skin and she was able, in the confusion, to plunge her stake into his back. Before she knew it she was looking down at a pile of the Master's bones. An old one then, very old, even Lothos hadn't left bones, and neither had Beauregard, or The Great Wolf. What stupid, grandiose names these elder vampires chose.

After that it was just a matter of disposing of the minions. And sending off the survivors. And calling in emergency services for the wounded, and seeing they hung on until she could hear sirens from the road. It was a hard evening's work. The slight young man with the spiky red hair helped her with the last couple of those, seemingly inured to the violence around him. He was capable and didn't make a fuss. Buffy liked him, and was glad he had lived.

He thanked her at the end, and told her that his name was Oz and that he and the librarian and some of the others had formed a little group to do what they could.

"If you need anything while you're here, we can help you out," he said. "Go to Giles. He looks out for us."

Oz got into an ambulance with a slender brown haired girl who had been one of the prisoners, the girl on the stretcher and the solemn faced boy ushered off by the shell shocked and grim looking emts. No police had shown up to ask questions. The road as she walked away was as deserted as the end of the world. This town is creepy, she thought, there's something so wrong in the air.

The stars were out though, the sky country-clear and high and dark. Not like LA, not like Chicago, not like Cleveland. Sunnydale was a tiny patch of houses and grocery stores and strip malls and a small town center, and an industrial area clustered around a small Port, a few skeletal cranes looming in the skyline by the abandoned factory. Lompoc was north of here and Santa Barbara south, but Sunnydale was in the middle of nowhere. She'd had to take a greyhound up from LA, and she hated busses, and LAX, and passing through the scenery of her past life, all of which made her predisposed to dislike the place. It was pretty and quaint and touristy, though, if it hadn't been rotted out from the inside by its vampire overlord, she would have thought it a nice place to take a break. There was a metallic tang in the air that left a taste on the back of her palette, a sensation she associated with a high concentration of magickal working or places of power. Not a pleasant feeling yet always thrilling or stirring, like a realization under her skin, like restless static.

It was unusual and pervasive enough that she wanted to stay and investigate even though the Master was slain. Reggie probably wouldn't go for the idea, but she had sent Buffy off to fight alone while she stayed home, so Reggie would have to learn to live with the disappointment.

She walked the deserted alleys of the industrial area, and the equally deserted streets of the town center. The shops were grilled and barred, the lights were all off. It couldn't have been later than 9 in the evening, but the whole town had locked up and gone to bed, or were huddled inside their dark houses like it was curfew at wartime. Sensible, she thought, what more people should do when there was a vampire King in town, but not something she'd ever seen before. Even in Cleveland the civilians were so ignorant of the dangers of the putative 'hellmouth' on top of the grubby little demon king that had been running his little gang, that no one had altered their habits. No one on the streets, anywhere she'd been before, had a clue what she protected them from. The veil of unknowingness seemed unnaturally thin here, in this quaint seaside town, these people weren't ignorant, they were scared. Just what was this place?

The lights in the spanish style courtyard to the Not-Watcher's small house burned warm and brave. Jeeves, she though, Giles, who talked with a wild light in his eyes about an amulet, a better world, a second chance. Whatever he'd done while she killed the Master hadn't winked them all out of existence. In spite of her skepticism, though, she didn't think he was like those 'experts' she'd met whose minds had turned and fermented from too long living in the dark. She didn't think that light she'd seen was the light of madness. She hoped he was still alive.

His door was unlocked. She had a moment's vision like premonition, that was memory, that was other scenes behind other ominously unlocked doors, the dead, the smell of the dead, former-people in various states of violent disassemblage. Something lurched and jarred in her chest. She put her cold palms on the door and hesitated. Slayer do thy work, she intoned within her head, as Linus used to say. It was Linus's voice she heard, though he'd only spent a year with her. She'd found him behind a door too.

Inside, all was calm. The lights were on. The place was a mess, papers and book everywhere, and a faint tang of the recently burnt, but over that the floral and bitter scent of bergamot tea wafted, not the scent of death. The Watcher sat on his couch, at ease. He looked up at her entrance but didn't go on guard. He eyed her with frank, exhausted curiosity but not suspicion.

"Hello," he said, "I didn't think you'd be back."

"You should lock your door," she snapped, bitten off with anger she couldn't place.

"No need," he said calmly, "I have wards. I invite no one in. Better that my friends can find shelter should they need it. They have needed it frequently of late."

"Yeah, well. I killed your monster. So that's done. Crisis over, yada yada, all quiet on the western front."

At this, he stood and tracked her path as she walked into his living room. He moved with the lassitude of slow belief, or of exhaustion, or maybe of drink.

"The Master is slain?" he asked. He used the Watcher-approved term for the final death of an undead thing. He didn't ask like he didn't believe she could do it, but like he couldn't believe such a thing could be done.

"Yep. Killed. Slain. Slew. Whatever. He's a big ol' pile of dust and bones now. The minions are either dusted or fleeing, too."

"That's… that's incredible. Well done, Buffy, that's fantastic. Oh my. The Master is gone. Do you mind if I ask how you…?"

"Stake through the heart," she said with a shrug, "Works just as well as on the less wrinkly and gross variety."

"Right."

The Watcher stood quietly for a while, lost in thought, of maybe studying her. She thought about what the Oz kid had said. She wondered if she should ask him for a place to crash, and if she did, if he'd take it as a signal or a sign. If he'd send her to a motel or put her on his couch, or offer her his bed, and if it was that last one, if he would expect to be in it or not. Buffy didn't know what she hoped. He was fortyish, tall, very tall, and broad shouldered, nice looking in a proud, raw boned way, a face that could have been mean but instead was kind. He was also scruffy, rumpled, pale, slouching and apparently dead on his feet. She didn't think he was going to make a pass, not in that state. Plus the Watcher training probably meant he wasn't planning on it later. Watchers were kind of like monks. Some of them drunken, irascible or vindictive monks, but still. Celibate, cloistered, superstitious and monk-like. Probably ex-watchers were the same.

Giles looked speculatively down at the jade glass mug he was holding, nodded, set it back on the table and then straightened, facing her squarely. He was suddenly alert and focused. About to prove her right or wrong, she thought. What he said was not what she expected.

"We have to go and retrieve those bones," he said.

"What?"

"The Master's bones," he said urgently, "We must take them, bury them or destroy them and bless the ground or his disciples may call him back to rise again."

"The guy's dead, the gang is in the wind. Vamps aren't that loyal. I've killed kings before, the gangs never stick around to mourn. They scatter or they pick a new head evil. That's it. No encores. "

"This one was unusual," said Giles with a gesture of his hand, emphatic and soft spoken. "His… his mesmeric powers over those of his kind were strong, perhaps amplified by the Hellmouth. He spent a hundred years stuck in a pocket created by the seal of the portal, and still his followers did not desert him. It was as much a cult as a.. 'gang.' We cannot take the chance that their loyalty still holds."

Hellmouth, she thought, if those things are real, then seem to be a lot more common than anyone likes to believe.

"Okay," she said, "I walked around for a couple hours patrol, so if those minions really wanted them, they could have taken them already. But whatever. If it means that much to you, I'll burn some bones with you. But you're driving."

"Of course."

"You are okay to drive, aren't you? There wasn't whiskey in that mug, right?"

He smiled a tight, blank, wry public school boy's smile. She recognized it from Linus. The polite, droll look wore differently on this man, with his funny, angular, northern face and his scruffy chin and his ridiculous height. Something like a working wolfhound who knew how to fetch your slippers and bring the paper. Slightly comic, an endearing but surprising juxtaposition.

"I am quite alright. My car and my mind are sound. Though I suppose you are well to ask," he said graciously, with humor, "And my tea and brandy really was mostly tea. It would be a waste of a decent brandy, otherwise."

How did he find the energy to be gracious, to joke and not snap? Reggie would have growled at her for aspersions cast, while also being almost certainly not okay to drive. Linus had been teetotal but Linus also had a tendency to start to shake at the end of a day of failures, and frequently had to take a prescription in order to sleep. Buffy sometimes wondered how long it had been since she had spent time with a whole and fully sane person. Giles seemed better off than a lot of them, but she was pretty sure that he wasn't one of those either.

"Good enough, I guess," she said calmly. She still thought it was a lot of fuss over dead bones, but Watcher superstition would not be argued with. She was tired, and as they were heading back out, she was wishing she'd brought a coat. Sunnydale nights at the beginning of December were cool and damp compared to how she remembered LA. "Let's just get this done. It's already been a hell of a day."

The matter of the bones took some hours. They were still laying on the floor of the factory where she had left them, the space hollow and echoing with complete abandonment. Giles barely spared a glance for the horrible machine the vamp king had had built. She was surprised at the single mindedness of his focus but then he hadn't seen it in use. They bundled the bones in a small blue tarp and put them into the trunk of Giles' funny space age car.

He took them out into the woods. They were a mild, tame woods, but it was a bit of a drive, and she was glad that her companion was a mild tempered, highly civilized man and that she was a Slayer. She had to take so much on trust in this business, in strange towns, with strange people. At least Giles drove competently and smelled okay, not like cigarettes or drink or unwashed demon fighter. She could tell he'd been doing magick recently but that was all.

Giles wanted the bones smashed, which she did with the flat of the shovel he'd brought. He did something that involved walking a slow circle around the small clearing and muttering. Wards, and good ones, a smell like hot copper in her nose. Every fine hair on her body rose. Reggie would be jealous of wards like this.

He built a fire and dumped the broken pieces into it. Then he fed it and prodded it until it burned hot and pale within its shallow-dug pit.

"This seems kind of excessive," she said, arms crossed and watching the proceedings with skepticism. For some reason the smell of the wood fire as it sparked to light had awakened in her a fierce appetite, but she had no food on her and she would not ask for handouts.

"I don't believe so," he answered and didn't elaborate.

While the fire burned, he taught her words to say. He didn't tell her what they meant, or even what language they were from, but none of that really mattered anyway. It was a prayer or a blessing or a seal, a good spell to ask for good things. She was to chant with him when the time came.

Buffy always felt silly chanting. Reggie believed that the wards and beseechings to old gods and rise-no-mores and protection spells were a necessary part of Watcher and Slayer life. She had trained as a Watcher during what she'd called a resurgence of the new-old age, when the better minds in the organization had decided that recent failings and waverings in the Slayer line over the last twenty odd years were the fault of over-scientific teaching and a turning away from tradition. Tradition was the one true faith of the Council, Buffy knew. The thing was, Reggie also didn't seem to believe in any of it. She did the rituals and lectured and bullied Buffy through them as well, but she treated it as a perfunctory annoyance, like keeping the official Diary or filling out field reports in triplicate. The results were poor and Buffy always ended up feeling like she'd been pushed into an embarrassing part in a school play.

This guy was a believer, she could tell that much. She learned the words. She didn't protest.

Buffy sat on the soft, dewy forest floor, several feet away from where Giles stood. She watched him watch the fire crack and flare. Their flashlights were off and it was now the depths of the night. Everything beyond the circle of firelight was deep, velvet black and featureless. Giles was a tall shape, shadowed and cast in sepia, and seemed locked in furious concentration even though this part was just waiting. He seemed suddenly austere, a deeply self contained force of energy, and perhaps only tenuously an ally. Alone in the woods, with this strange man and a long way til sunrise. She fidgeted, looped her arms over he knees.

"So that thing with the wish demon and the amulet," she said, challenging, "That was a bust, huh."

He turned sharply round to look down at her, as if just remembering her presence. Could he have forgotten she was there? She wasn't sure. With his back to the fire she couldn't read his expression. He was now an even darker shape, hands stuffed deep into pockets, his head and slouching shoulders edged around with faint goldenrod glow.

"I suppose you must be cold and bored out here," he said, ignoring her question, "I'm sorry. I have a clean blanket in the car, I ought to have thought to bring it. But now we can't step out of the wards. Not until it's done. Perhaps you'd like to come nearer to the fire…?"

"Sorry, I keep my distance from demon disposal fires," she said flatly.

"Sensible," said Giles, unoffended. "There was a girl in our little coalition, our little band, who liked to roast marshmallows when we had to set a pyre. I was never sure if it was an altogether sounds idea, but she and many of the others enjoyed it so much, I never had the heart to raise objections. They deserved a little fun. Willow was so young, you see. Oh lord, all of them were. When they started, anyway."

"How long?"

"hmm?"

"How long did that master guy run this place?"

"It will would have been three years, come next April. It's hard to say if that time feels longer or shorter. It's strange, I stand here watching these bones char and turn black, and even still I find it hard to believe that the demon and his network are gone."

Four months shy of three years, a long time for a vamp gang to run a town. A long time for a vamp gang to hang together, not tear itself up with infighting and destructive power plays fueled by demonic masculinity. Vampires tended to the stupid, vain, the selfish and impatient. They were instant gratification seekers whose more advanced plans were ruined more often than not by their ungovernability. When a gang started fracturing and fighting itself, it did a hell of a lot of damage to innocent bystanders, but they were easier to clean up. It had happened in Cleveland. Reggie had held them to stake outs and research for a month but then the intramural skirmishes began and Buffy'd had them mopped up in 48 hours of small fights and cornerings and stakings. She didn't think the supposed hellmouth there had amounted to much. But apparently Sunnydale was different. And apparently the bald, ugly, bulldogish thing she'd staked in a moment's unlikely coincidence had been different, too, stronger, more powerful. More enduring than most. She'd been lucky. It could have snapped her neck if that one of Giles' kids and the lesser vamp he was fighting had fallen another direction. She shivered with the near miss, feeling the reality of it. She thought about moving closer to the fire but didn't.

"There were five of them fighting for the good side in that warehouse," she said. It was habit to report to the nearest Watcher, the ordeal wasn't over without it. She should probably wait until she got a place to crash and call Reggie, but she would waste a lot of time yelling at Buffy about poor planning and failing to case the joint and what other little faux pas she'd committed while prioritizing saving people over procedure. This guy was an odd one, but he was there and he would care more about what happened to his people than about her bad planning. "They all made it out. Two of them went in ambulances, but it seemed more precautionary. Some civilians went down, but most of them got out."

"Who went to the hospital? Did you catch their names?"

"A short guy, really dark hair. He got banged up creating a diversion so the prisoners could get away. A tallish brunette girl who was casting some kind of spell. That Oz guy went with them, but he was fine."

"Jonathan and Amy. Well. I'm sure Oz would have called if it had been anything serious. The children have been through so much, I'm sure they needed some time to… To come to terms. Not that this isn't a wonderful development, but…"

"Amy? Not Willow of the marshmallows?" As far as Buffy could remember, there had only been one girl among the fighters earlier that night.

"No, not Willow. We lost her long ago. The Master kept her, turned her. The vampire who wore her face became one of his favorite disciples. She- it turned another of my little team…. They had best friends in life. Together as demons they were particularly inventive. It was… abhorrent. Still, none of us could manage to… put an end to it. If they are at peace now, I can only be grateful."

She fell silent. She knew her own losses too well. Nothing she said would change the facts. She knew they hadn't let any of the top minions get away. And she had no business prying into a stranger's grief.

"Why didn't you call for help sooner? Three years is a long time to let things go to shit."

"I did try. I am… a disgraced former watcher. Very disgraced. It was judged that I was lying or trying to trick them. Even my uncle would not back me. Their seers could not sense the hellmouth here, or the Master. The Codex which contained the prophecies of the Master was thought lost two centuries ago, and though it recently came to fall into my hands, the Council declined to believe that I had it, or that they were true. All that was left was to do what I could to protect this town and hope something might come along. Because of that poor girl who came here from the other reality two days ago, I had your name, and I was able to use my own resources to go around the Council and find you and your watcher. I was lucky, Regina and I overlapped for a year in training at the Academy so she was willing to trust me enough to send you. I'm not sure what the Council is going to say to you two about that, but I must say I can't regret the results."

"You went to Watcher school with Reggie?"

"Regina Talbott Pitcairn Burns lets you call her Reggie? She must have mellowed a great deal since the old days."

"'Lets' is a strong word. I don't know about lets."

"Ah. This begins to make more sense."

"But that woman is not a Regina. And I'm damned if I'm going to call her 'Ms Pitcairn-Burns' until one or both of us gets killed. Anyway, she started it. She only ever deigns to call me Elizabeth."

"I see. Well, that's only fair, I suppose."

"So. What did you do to make the Council hate you so much?"

He smiled that bland, public school smile, full of self depreciation and patience and shook his head. "Nothing that will hurt you here and now, don't worry," he said.

She felt patronized and nervous. She scowled and made a dismissive noise. She'd thought she'd been building a rapport of exchanged complaints about life on the line, the best way to make allies on long awkward nights - and the best way to check that everyone was who and what they'd said. Bitching about the bosses, the know-nots, the idiots with orders from on high, that's what she'd been aiming at. Instead, she'd tripped on something even more sensitive than vamped out high school students, a staggering feat if there ever was one, and he'd turned to her the polite equivalent of perfect blankness.

Buffy sat vigil. Eventually she did bow to stiffening muscles and the growing chill of inaction and moved nearer to the fire. She couldn't sense anything in the woods, nothing drawn to the fairly dramatic statement they were making with the hearty magicks and the bone-burning. The woods felt like the town had, charged, desolate, hollow. Three years was a long time for those people and animals who could to flee, or learn to hide. The were sitting in the scorched wake of an unnatural disaster. After a long stretch of silence and stretching her awareness as far as it would go, she accepted that there was nothing here to guard against. Her body was still on Chicago time, two hours ahead and primed for the soft unwinding after a night's patrol. She lay back against the ground, patchy long grass and moss, damp and cool with dew, and watched the occasional flake of glowing ash hit the barrier of the wards and extinguish, and drop. She wouldn't sleep, not out in the open like this, she never could. Sleep was too personal, too delicate, and too revealing. But she could rest, eyes on the changing, deep, unpolluted tones of the sky through the sparse trees.

When the fire burned low, as the fullest darkness of night had just begun to lighten again, Giles doused the flames with a jug of water from his duffle bag full of tricks. He waited for the smoke and steam to clear and then asked her to stand across from him over the charred pile and put out her hands for him to take. Then he had her say the first part of the blessing spell. His hands were hot around hers, the only warm thing, because as they spoke a cold, fierce breeze circled round them and every part of her felt touched with ice, electricity and ice. A heavy spell, saying the words made her tongue feel numbed, tingled in her skull, made her eyes go unfocused. There were never atmospherics when Reggie did these things.

When the first words were done, he let go of her, brisk and businesslike, and Buffy had to adjust her stance. Her legs felt badly overused. She missed the warmth of the fire.

She watched Giles with the shovel, breaking up the fire, turning the ashes under. She could have done it just as easily, Linus and Reggie both, maybe even Marrek probably would have passed it off to her - manual labor was the Slayer's purview after all. She didn't offer. She recognized the sharpness of this Watcher's movements, the determination in his set shoulders, the vicious thrust of the shovel-point. This man was furious, and fighting something that had hurt him. She knew it was a bad idea to get in the middle of something like that.

After that came more water from the plastic jug. "Distilled," he said, "Best to use the purest available when dealing with a magickal pyre. You never know what might…. React." Then blessed water from a large glass canning jar which he poured in a specific pattern she couldn't follow. Giles put out his hands again, which she took with more caution this time, and prompted her through the final phrases.

The wind didn't blow again, but Buffy still felt something drawn from her, a sense of motion or falling, as though they had spun around and around like the children's game, but they hadn't. Something distant and unknown snapped or let go with an echoing, almost inaudible crack. A stillness fell. She watched Giles tip his head up, as though scanning the sky, or else a gesture of relief.

Buffy took her hands back and wrapped them around her upper arms. She was shivering, deeply and internally. She recognized it as exhaustion, the end of her reserves.

"So," she asked, prompting, "That worked?"

"Yes. You couldn't feel it?" he asked, looking surprised.

She shrugged and looked away. Marrek hadn't had a chance to get into the magick much with her. Linus had many complicated, literate and precise arguments for why none of it was what they thought it was, he said things about personal strength of will and roving electricity and hypnagogic states, and how gods were myths and demons were only beasts after all, unusual kinds of animal. Reggie adhered strictly to the teachings from the COW, she took the accepted view as dubious but unavoidable fact. She said the words, but nothing happened. Buffy didn't like to dwell on any of it. Leave that stuff to the Watchers. It wasn't her area.

"Look, can get out of here already?" she said impatiently, tense and wrung out and tired of being left wrong-footed. "I'd already been awake forever when I staked the guy."

"Of course."

She was still shivering by the time they got back to the car. Giles pulled a blackwatch plaid blanket out of another duffle in the truck of his swoopy, space-bullet car and shook it free of imaginary dust and debris. She took it and rolled herself in it like a towel cape and climbed into the cushy back seat, curling onto her side. The bankette was plush and dry and leather-smelling, and deep enough that she could comfortably bend her knees without feeling she was about to fall off.

"I'm not sure," he protested, hovering nervously beyond the car door, "That doesn't seem entirely safe. There are seat belt laws in your country, you know."

"Look, it's at least an hour back to your dinky little town, and I've got to put my head down for a while. Your little magic trick was a doozy. You drive careful and I'll be fine. The roads are like, spooky deserted," she said, and tucked her spine up against the still sun-warmed leather of the seatback. There was a lap belt buckle under her hip but if she twisted a little she could avoid it without moving. "Close the door, would you?"

Giles gave a little humph but relented and shut the door. Maybe she should have asked if he was still okay to drive after that spell. But he hadn't seemed unsteady walking back. And it wasn't like she could offer to drive instead. Buffy had only gotten part of the way through learning how to drive way back when, at fifteen-and-a-half in the after school elective at Hemry in LA, before the Slayer thing hit her like a ton of bricks. Four years later, she'd only been put in charge of a vehicle a handful of times, and none of those instances had worked out terribly well.

She was pretty sure Giles wasn't going to fall apart before getting them back to town, anyway. What happened after that was anybody's guess, and whether she was going to be there to see it, she didn't yet know. She should go back. Buffy knew that's what Reggie expected. How it always worked. Demon dead, go back to base, make a report for the Diary, another day, another dollar. Not that the Council paid her. But she didn't want to. There was something unsettling about Sunnydale, and stupidly enough, she wanted to stay and poke it with a stick.

She wondered again what had happened with the amulet and the 'better world.' She hoped to god that Giles didn't think she'd delivered it by getting rid of his pest problem. She knew from personal experience that killing one vampire king did not do a hell of a lot to improve your lot in life.

Still chilled, she struggled with the blanket until she disappeared inside it, within a cocoon of fuzzy darkness, poking up just a little fold to breath through. The blanket smelled of clean, dry dust and faintly, incongruously of lavender. It made a stuffy, squeezing warmth, comforting and almost-personal.

She had gotten proficient, over the years, at making tiny corners in foreign places feel safe enough to be hers, just for the moment, for just as long as she absolutely needed. She closed her eyes, thought determinedly about nothing, and relaxed into the motion of the car.