A/N: This is a future fic in my Vampire/Slayer Archives universe. I explain everything, so you don't need to have read that series to understand what's going on, though it might be entertaining and informative!

I know I have too many fics going at once, but I've been working on this one all day, and I couldn't help but want to post it.


No One Can Walk Alone

Chapter 1 - Bad Decisions

"Con," my sister hissed at me from across the aisle, peeking around old boxes of Uncle Ben's rice and stacks of canned tomatoes. "Let's go back. There's nothing here for us."

"Joy," I growled, sick of her damn pessimism, "I came out today to kill a basilisk, and that's what the fuck I'm gonna do."

"Shit, Connor," she shot back, one eye on me and one down the main thoroughfare of the store, at the end of which, said basilisk sat, munching on frozen chicken sticks and pizzas. "You're not Dad, as much as you try to be. We need more! That spell..."

"Can't do the spell," I told her, for the thousandth time. "Not since we lost Brian."

"Then we need to back off, you prick!" she hissed, clamping her mouth shut when the monster started and turned, listening. After a moment, it went back to crunching around in the freezer section and Joy continued, "We need a different bloody plan! Please, Con? I can't lose you over somethin' this stupid."

Sitting back and letting my head fall against the shelves behind me, I sighed and asked Joyce, "Have you been talking to him again?"

Mimicking my posture and holding her slingshot close to her chest, Joyce frowned and said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Spike," I muttered, running two fingers along the flat side of my blade, testing the keen sharpness. "You've been talking to him behind my back, Joy. You always sound a little more like him afterwards."

"This is fucking bullshit, Connor," she spat, brushing the light brown hair out of her eyes. "I know when everything went down and we all chose sides I went with you. And I know why I did. But, Con? I miss Daddy. So I talk to him when I can get a signal."

"Does Dad know you're talking to Spike?" I asked gruffly, scratching my fingers through my three-day-old beard and wondering when any of it would start to go grey. Thirty-nine years old, give or take, and still no signs of aging. Hell, I'm old enough to be Joyce's father, but I barely look five years older than her. I know I'm mortal, that's not in question. Not after what happened with Katie. But how long until this mortality caught up with me? A hundred years? Two hundred? Would Joyce even last that long? Would I? This basilisk was a tough motherfucker – that I was sure of. He could have both of us dead and gone in a heartbeat, so maybe Joy was right. Maybe we should have backed off and tried another strategy. I wished I still had that rocket launcher from two months ago. That baby had been sweet.

"Don't think so," Joy replied to my question. "Daddy says Dad couldn't see a herd of elephants right under his nose unless they were wearing blonde wigs and screaming bloody murder. But you know how he likes to lie."

I chuckled, suddenly missing Spike's sense of humor in a way I hadn't in the almost three years since I'd last seen either vampire. "Fine," I whispered over to Joy, craning to take one last look at the monster. "We'll find another way." I got to my feet lightly, feeling just as nimble as I had twenty some years ago, when I truly was The Destroyer back on Quor'toth, and signaled Joy to do the same.

Carefully, we backed out of the abandoned supermarket, going exactly the way we came and fleeing silently. Even if the basilisk did latch onto our scents, he wouldn't be able to track us long. Not long enough to follow us back home, in any case.

Home those days was Cleveland, Ohio, where you'll find the last active Hellmouth on Earth. Funny thing about Hellmouths is that they're all connected. And once you shut down one, all that evil energy just starts bubbling out the others. Angel, that bastard, should have known what he and Buffy and Spike were doing. But the Powers, in their infinite and misguided wisdom, sought to unbalance things, to make things worse down here on earth so they'd have more glory in the fixing of it. Too bad their plans killed Buffy, causing Spike to get rid of his visions for good and thus sever their link, through him, to Angel. Now everything here in Cleveland was Hell on Earth, only contained by a shit ton of mages on the outside and Demon Hunters like me and Joy on the inside. We were born to do this, to rid the world of evil creatures, because we're two of them. Oh sure, Joy and I both have souls, me thanks to our dad, and her thanks to both Dad and her mother, Buffy. But we're not human. Not completely.

And that's one of the reasons we stick together, letting Angel and Spike run their little army of slayers on the outside, while we protect humanity from what's here, on the inside.

The last compatriot that we had here on the inside, Brian, was a warlock. And Joy's boyfriend. When he died, eaten by a mob of fast-moving locust demons, I thought maybe she'd crumble. But Joy, like me, has been around death all her life. Shit, she barely remembers her mother, who died almost fifteen years ago, when she was five. And I? Well, I lost the true love of my life in the Global War of 2018, eight years later. Fuck has it been that long? Seven years since she's been gone? Five years since he's been gone?

She was Tammy. Tamera. My wife. She was a slayer, like Buffy, and like all fucking slayers, she had a death wish. I should have known. Tam was too proud for her own good and though she was a brilliantly talented warrior, she too fell. Just like all the rest of them.

The only ones who don't die, who don't leave us in fucking peace, are those who are already dead. Angel and Spike. Gunn. Lung Bao. Iona. These are our undead. Our souled-vampire warriors. Last I heard, they were all still stationed out of Scotland, and I know that's where Joy wishes we could be. Back among family, back where she grew up. But she's a good sister; she sticks by me. She believed me when I said my son, Daniel, was still alive.

Angel, patriarch and righteous son of a bitch, went along with it for awhile, helping me lead the search. But eventually, two years later, he turned on me. He said enough was enough and we just had to accept the fact that Danny was gone. I just think he never forgave me for naming my son after my foster father, Daniel Holtz, Angel's most hated enemy and the man that stole me from him as a baby. But though I grew to love Angel and think of him well and truly as my father, I never forgot the man who shaped me into the warrior I am. Of course, Spike sided with him, when a line in the sand had to be drawn. Those two have been inseparable for twenty years, and nothing's prying them apart now.

So I left Scotland to find my son, and Joy came with me at the ripe old age of seventeen. Ostensibly it was to keep an eye on me, her big brother, but it was also because she wanted the adventure, I think. She may not be related to Spike by blood, but God damn did she pick up chunks of his personality. The need for a good fight, the swagger in her step, the surprising sensitivity. Everything about her sounds and feels and sometimes even smells like Spike, except for her smile. That's pure Angel, through and through.

As we got closer to base camp, I asked Joy again, "When did you last talk to Spike?"

"Jesus," she swore, rolling her eyes at me as we walked. "It was, like, Thursday, Con. Okay?"

"I just thought we agreed a long time ago not to talk to them."

Huffing and pulling up her arms around her chest, Joy said, "I get why you don't want to talk to them, I do. And I'm still mad at Dad for what he said to you. But, I miss them."

"Spike especially?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "Dad can be a real tool, but Daddy? He listens to us, Con. He's just too damn attached to Dad to do anything about it."

"And therein lies the problem," I pointed out, unlocking the wards around base camp so we could get in.

"How long is this going to go on?"

"You know," I told her, relocking the wards behind us and following Joy into the common area.

"Yeah, yeah," she said, flopping down onto an old couch heavily. "When we find Danny, we'll go back. I just don't know what killing this fuckin' snake-beast has to do with getting him back."

"You know that spell I told you about?" I asked, meaningfully.

"The inter-dimentional scrying spell?" Joy asked with a chuckle. "Yeah, I remember. It's all you've been talking about for the past month, Connor."

"Well, one of the ingredients is basilisk eye."

"Gross," she replied, setting the rest of her gear down on the floor at her feet.

"Yeah," I agreed, "but this is the only way I can find Danny. The only thing left."

"If it works," she said, rubbing her face with one hand, "and we figure out where he is, can we call in help? I'll follow you anywhere Connor, but I'd rather it wasn't a suicide mission."

"We'll see," I said angrily, walking away from her and back toward my room. She was getting worse about working on our own, and I'm sure Brian's death had something to do with it. She may not have broken when she lost him, but that didn't mean it wasn't affecting her. I knew her, better than anyone else these days, and I could tell she was close to abandoning me, too. Close to abandoning this mission and trying to find another somewhere else. What I didn't ever tell Joy was that if she gave up, the search for Danny would be over, and that would probably kill me.

Angel told me about how he dealt after Holtz took me away from him, like he knew exactly what I was going through. And maybe he did, for the first few weeks. But after the first year, and then the second? There's no way Angel could know the depth of desperation I was clinging to those days, or the absolute, overwhelming need to know the truth, to know exactly what had happened to Danny, whether or not I could get him back. And that desperation had led me here, to the Hellmouth.

I hated sitting around and waiting. I hated trying to come up with a better plan when there is no better plan. I hated living like this, from one fight to the next, one failed attempt after another, with no real purpose in the meantime. I hated being The Destroyer and still being unable to find my son. So later that night, when Joy was asleep, I slipped away from camp alone, making sure she couldn't follow.

Moving swiftly and silently through the night, a skill I inherited from my vampire parents and honed under Holtz's guidance, I tracked down the basilisk. It had moved on from the grocery store and had been making its way south, toward the University campus and one of the last vampire holdouts in town. Though Joy and I were good and we killed more and more demons every day, trying to keep things clear so that we could find where those bastards took my son, they just kept coming. See, the Hellmouth spits out new evils, like the recent resurgence of vampires, every day. And we just keep fighting.

Only one city on earth was still overrun with demons, and it was a good track record. After the wars seven and fifteen years ago, we're lucky to have come this far. And most of that good luck was due to Buffy's sacrifice. God, it took years and years for Spike and Angel to get over losing her like that. But I guess they have what you'd call a happy ending, more or less. Their lives don't really have a natural ending point, so maybe they have a happy continuance. Shit, I'm not even sure my life has a natural ending point.

Maybe that's why it's comforting going after this Basilisk alone. Despite my good health and lack of noticeable age, the only thing I've got left to live for is the slim chance that my son is still alive somewhere. Might as well go for broke here and now, rather than spend half an eternity wondering what might have been. I've already done enough of that thinking and I won't be able to stop. Not until this is finished and I know either way.

When I finally found the monster, after following its scent all over town, I found it lounging in a dried up fountain, playing with how the dead leaves beneath it scuffled and crumbled.

Deciding there was no time like the present, I pulled out my longbow, fitting it with a heavy duty silver-tipped arrow and drawing back. I made one tiny noise, a little cluck to get the snake to look my way and, closing my eyes to avoid its gaze, let my arrow loose. Two more arrows followed in rapid succession, and I heard them all squelch satisfyingly into flesh. Stowing my bow and drawing my sword, I stalked out of my hiding place and toward the still-twitching creature, keeping my eyes lowered carefully.

I got as close as I dared, going in for the kill, when suddenly the beast reared back to life, knocking me down with its tail. Its fangs poised to strike and I moved to roll out of the way, praying that even though I was sick of living, this wouldn't be the end of me. I still had to find him. If nothing else, I had to find my son.


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