Matilda The Vampire Slayer
Chapter One
Disclaimer – does not follow Season 8's every potential is a slayer plotline.
In every generation there is a chosen one...
She alone will stand against the demons, the vampires and the forces of evil...
She is the Slayer...
2007
Nine years had already passed since a slayer was called, nine years in which one girl was called, out of the billions of girls in the whole world and handed a destiny. This year, however that girl died. Now it's time for the proverbial torch to be passed, and this year, it's the turn of Matilda Imogene Vaughan.
Winston Jackson was a member of a very secret society, possibly the most secret society in the world. This society was made up of a small group of people with a single goal, to help the chosen one and to guide her as she stands between humanity and anything that might threaten them.
Long ago this society chose a poor girl and used her, much like a tool, to fight for them, to save them from the monsters that lurked everywhere by injecting a single girl with demon blood. With the demon blood flowing hot through her veins this girl developed powers, heightened strength, speed and agility were but a few of the girls special gifts. However with gifts came the curse, the curse of a life spent in battle and a very short life expectancy.
She is the slayer, and she was chosen to die.
This group, who so cruelly sealed that girls fate are called Watchers, simply because they do just that. Watch and train and prepare their slayer for the fights ahead until ultimately, she dies at the hand of a burden that should not be hers to bare. They reside in London, in their fancy buildings, with they're fancy books and spells and they try to control the supernatural from their cosy little nest, far from anywhere.
It had been years since Britain had a slayer, a long, long time with uncontrolled evil lurking, growing and flourishing, so when the news came to Winston that there was a slayer, ready and waiting in Wales that everybody had overlooked, he made it his personal mission to go and find her.
It happened more than they'd like. More often than not they had a very solid idea of who the next slayer would be; then they both found and trained her from birth, however with so many different girls it was impossible to judge which one would be blessed with the powers and with the population growing at an unsteady rate, the council was starting to fear that they were losing their control over the slayers.
This wasn't, however, a problem they'd confess to.
This was why, Winston Jackson was now sitting in a car, watching the entrance of a public secondary school in Cardiff, Wales. It was a pointless task, he was just assuming that he'd know her when he saw her. It was a shot in the dark, but short of going in and asking for her by name, he hadn't a choice in the matter.
His plan paid off. The second she came into view he knew instantly. She wasn't what he had expected, she had mousy blonde hair that looked a little straggly and was tied up haphazardly in a ponytail, strands falling out all over her face. She was pale and her blue eyes were sheltered behind glasses that were both a little wonky and a little too big for her small features.
The girl was short, Winston judged her at about 5'4 and he assumed it was pretty accurate since he had been trained to be able to judge things like that for descriptive purposes.
She walked with her eyes on the ground, alone in the sea of faces all rushing to exit the school gates. Matilda looked shy, quiet and reserved she also looked quite frail, skinny to the point of being lanky Winston had to wonder if she'd ever eaten a decent meal in her life. Bordering on the wrong side of podgy, Winston patted his ample belly self-consciously.
The watched knew she was sixteen, just turned, her birthday was the 1st of July, today it was the 6th. Barely over sixteen years old and this poor girls life was about to completely change,
"Poor thing," Winston muttered, "she has no idea how badly her world is about to be shaken."
His mind flashed back to the memo he received on his desk, less than twenty-four hours ago. He'd been home for the announcement so he'd missed the day of grieving the council had over a fallen slayer and he returned from his day off to find a lot of forlorn colleagues and a white, simple piece of paper on his desk.
4th July, 2007, the slayer Faith is dead, she was killed in battle in the state of Los Angeles. The cause of death is unknown as is the location of the slayers corpse. The new slayer currently resides in the Welsh city of Cardiff. This slayer's name; is Matilda Vaughan, she is sixteen. A watcher has not been assigned to this girl.
Melody McCutheon, High Council Member
Shaking off the memory, of which he had considerable due to having a photographic memory he once again raised his eyes to watch the girl. Matilda was nowhere in sight, he cursed and got out of the car. Heading the way she was going he saw an alleyway, taking a shot in the dark he turned down it.
He was lucky, in the distance he could see her, school bag slung over one drooping shoulder, he took a chance;
"Matilda?" she stopped, "Matilda Vaughan?" she turned,
"Who are you?" she sounded worried, looking around and seeing that the dark alley, was empty. Her eyes widened but the shrunk, he could tell she was trying to mask her fear. Her body language told him that she had been bullied.
"I'm Winston, Winston Jackson" he stepped forward, trying to look as none-threatening as possible, he didn't think he looked threatening at all. He was just over forty-years old, his brown hair was starting to thin on top, he was slightly tubby to say the least and he was red-faced and panting from chasing her. "I have some important news for you". He gauged her reaction which was wary, her eyes seem to scream 'dirty old man' and for a moment he was hurt. But then he remembered he had chased her into an alleyway and he was indeed, a lot older than her.
"If it's that you're my real father, or a long lost uncle or something" she paused, he was a little taken aback by her moxy, she didn't strike him as somebody who would say much back,
"No," he smiled warmly, "I'm a teacher, your teacher", the slayer tilted her head and he was once again struck by how fragile she looked. Is it possible he could have gotten the wrong girl?
"Teacher?" she queried, "teacher of what exactly?"
"Teacher of slayers" he spoke matter-of-factly, then her eyes widened and she shook her head violently,
"No, you're crazy,"
"I'm not crazy Matilda, you're the chosen one, you've been called. You're the vampire slayer",
"You wrong" she spat and then took off down the alleyway at a blind run and with her newly-instated powers, Winston knew that he didn't have a cat in hells chance of catching her.
Not far from them, another watched, watched. However, this wasn't a watcher from the council, this watcher was very old, much older than he looked and he had seen quite a lot of the world already. He was sent by the powers that be, his mission, to train somebody completely different.
Starting a new day and losing precious time Winston was getting desperate, he took a chance and entered the school and managed to get Matilda sent out of class, under the guise of being an uncle they accepted. It had been more difficult than expected, he'd had to verify some information about her parents but luckily he'd done his homework.
Matilda Vaughan, daughter of Joshua Vaughan and Rhiannon Roberts-Vaughan. Rhiannon was a famous Welsh lawyer who made a lot of money working from a law-firm here in Cardiff, however had recently been offered a job in another city. An English city. This city was called Chester. She was indeed planning to move and take Matilda, but it was unconfirmed whether Matilda's father, a main player of the infamous Welsh rugby team would be moving with them.
"Matilda" Winston pleaded as her face dropped as she saw him, "this is important, you can't run from this" as he saw her turn to do just that he decided to play his last card, "you've been having the nightmares, right? The monsters that come at you in your dreams." The girl faltered, stopping, "well if you don't let me help you, pretty soon those monsters are going to come at you, whether you want to be the slayer or not"
"I don't want to die" she said, finally, after minutes of silence, "like the girls in my dreams. I've seen them all die, some of them fight so hard and die anyways" she sniffled, "the last one, the one I keep dreaming about, she screamed so loudly and they didn't stop, she was crying by the end and she didn't want to, she wanted to be strong but it hurt so much" Matilda stopped,
"You've dreamed about the deaths of passed slayer?" Winston was shocked, that had never happened before, "well then let me train you, and don't become one of them."
It was a lie, but as the girl turned to look at him, he realised it was worth it.
In the distance somebody watched, or rather hadn't stopped watching the girl since she had been called. He had been told, told by the powers that be about the girl being called and he had commented many a time to his tall, dark and brooding companion how slow the council had been getting in touch with her.
The man looked human. Well, that is if you disregarded the slightly olive complexion and the ruby red horns jutting out of his forehead. But other than those slightly superficial things, he looks human enough.
"I want to help her" the tall, dark man next to him muttered, feeling the deja-vu of so long ago. He had said the exact same thing to a man years ago regarding a twice-removed slayer. Funny, how history had a way of repeating itself. Looking to his left he looked at the demon who was wearing a pretty awful coloured suit. Some things really didn't change. "As long as I don't have to wear an outfit like yours" he smiled.
Lorne looked confused for a moment but shrugged it off. In his opinion his friend had always been a few tools short of a shed and he wasn't about to comment. Lorne was from a dimension far away but his history wasn't important. What was important was that shortly after Angel, he and bunch of other people single-handedly stopped the world from being ripped apart by a little law firm called Wolfram & Heart, Lorne had received a gift.
He could receive visions, they came in the form of headaches in which the Powers That Be (affectionately abbreviated to the PTB) filled his mind with things that they thought their hero, aka Angel the vampire with a soul, should know.
Anyway, continuing, shortly after they had saved the world for the umpteenth time Angel had decided that after running a massive corporation, he needed to get back to basics. And to do that he felt he had to go back to were it all started, where the good of the world rested and to whom the responsibility was.
The chosen one.
"Well then cupcake-"
"Stop calling me pastries, I ask you nicely time after time-"
"Let's get this show on the road"
Coincidently, Winston was having more or less the same conversation with young Miss Matilda.
"We need to start your training immediately, I'm far too late as it is" He berated himself, pacing up and down the room under the scrutinise gaze of the young slayer. "I'll need to meet you, everyday!"
"I have school," she added, softly,
"After school then!" he demanded, turning on his heel, cursing himself mentally for letting himself get this worked up.
"I have gymnastics" she objected, Winston perked up a bit,
"You do Gym?"
"Yes, and kick-boxing, and violin" she spoke gently, "sir" she added quickly
"No need for the formalities" he attempted a warm smile to her but failed, he wasn't used to dealing with children.
"I'm sorry" she looked to the ground.
Winston analysed the situation, he had a small, untrained shy little girl sitting before him that he needed to make into a fierce warrior as soon as he could. However she had already proven that she had moxy whilst being threatened and she not only did gymnastics but she also practised kick-boxing.
Maybe this wasn't going to be such a hopeless cause as he'd started to anticipate.
It was his job to make sure this girl didn't die in her first battle. And he was determined that he would help this girl as best he could, for that's all a watcher can hope for his slayer; to prolong her life as best as possible.
"From today on you don't have those things" he spoke regretfully and she lost the inquisitive shy look and a look of pure stubbornness was forming, Winston acted quickly "we need to start your training as soon as possible before the vampire's come looking for you?"
"They'll come looking for me" queue fear, Winston thought to himself as the stubbornness dissolved and her eyes widened,
"Yes, this is why you need to find them first"
It was a direct lie, Winston knew that, he knew that the vampires wouldn't have any way to track her until she started killing them, but if she knew that he was afraid he'd never convince her to train. Fear was the key to learning; Winston's father had taught him that.
From the distance somebody else stood, looking. You might refer to him as a demon but he was not quite a demon, nor was he human. He had mastered many things over his life, which had been long, longer than one might expect when looking at him. He was in fact an Immortal. Immortals are a very rare thing but every so often one is born into a completely unsuspecting situation and are forced to carry on with life, watching those they love grow old and die around them. Immortals find themselves wishing for death more than anything else does, to be able to end their lives peacefully and join those they once loved. Anybody who wished to be immortal would be strongly advised to go and have a quick conversation with an Immortal and they would soon, more often than not, change their mind.
However he was not simply an Immortal for he had be born with two gifts. This man was also a necroscope which meant he could talk freely to the dead, who talked freely back to him.
This one fact alone saved him from the insanity that waiting each and every Immortal and allowed him to be the oldest known Immortal in the world. His ability to talk to those he lost helped ease the pain of losing them and their constant support willed him on. Somewhere around the one-thousand mark this man had developed a purpose, he had met a young girl and then he had watched her die. That helped him come to terms with the evils of the world and since then he had vowed to make his endless existence count.
He was fighting the good fight, and with the whole not being able to die thing on his side, he was doing pretty damn well.
" Yep, she's the one," a voice spoke to him tinted with a heavy Irish accent, "I'd bet me life on it, well ya know" there was a pause "if I wasn't dead already...". The Immortal smiled,
"Relax Doyle, I trust your judgement..."
And with that said all three parties separated.
At this same time, unbeknownst to Matilda, her mother, Rhiannon was already making plans to move her and her daughter out of the country. She had found a new opening at a Chester Law firm that was willing to pay twice as much as the one she was currently in, and was merging with a famous London practice in a years time and therefore opening the opportunity to move to the capital.
When Winston opened the door to his rented apartment, Matilda hovered on the threshold.
"Are you coming in?"
"To a strange man's apartment? I don't know" Matilda spoke gently. With everything on the news lately Winston understood her hesitation. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife then threw it at the young girl who caught it without a blink.
"Er" she paused, looking at the small blade, "what's this for"
"Protection" he spoke gently, "trust me," he opened the far curtains "today I'm going to prove you could easily kill me without using that knife,"
"But, sir I'm just a little girl" she muttered, holding the knife protectively,
"No Matilda" he sat down in an overstuffed armchair and pulled a thick, leather bound book into his lap. He tilted it up to show Matilda the title it read: 'Vampyre'. "You are so much more than a little girl."
"Prove it" she asked, seeking reassurance,
"In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer." He read from the first page of the book,
"And I'm the slayer?" she stepped into the room,
"Yes Matilda Imogene Vaughan, you have been chosen and thus begins your journey"
"What do I have to do?"
"Attack me"
And cautiously the young girl did just that.
© M&A Writing
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