Meeting… Awkwardly
Setting: Three years after Selene and Michael headed purposefully off into the sunset, Selene newly made into a new breed of vampire (half vampire, half pure immortal), and a year after Buffy saved the world from the Big One in Sunnydale.
Selene sat in a booth in a building full of jiggling, dribbling humans and sipped a little heavier from her whiskey flask. She breathed in a cocktail of hormones laced with smoke from people's breath and was content to ignore everything since there was nothing going on.
She watched a girl throw up into a corner of the sofas that lined the opposite wall. She ignored both the barman who was looking hopefully in her direction, and the man bear the bar with no shirt and below-the-hip trousers, giving her 'come hither' signals. Michael was playing pool in the next room, if she couldn't see, then she could smell him and hear what was happening. It seemed he was going to win again. He still had an attachment to money, even if he had the evolutional edge on every game.
And they were late. She hated it when people were late.
Another twenty minutes ticked by before they arrived. She didn't even twitch, but Michael, who was by the door, seemed to see how her attention had been directed at something and immediately won his game to join her. Well, not to join her, but to stay in the same room.
The lycans had agreed to meet here. This was their turf and they swaggered like they were bestowing everyone with a great honour, especially when they saw Selene.
The one who called himself 'Razor' rolled over and leaned on the sticky table.
"Sorry we're late"
Selene couldn't avoid the smell of blood on his breath. It explained his 'addict on a high' look.
'Is there somewhere quieter we could go?' she asked in a murmur. Razor held eye contact for a moment and hefted himself off the table, Selene noted his jacket had stuck briefly to the ancient alcohol stains and felt a stir of amusement. He called this his territory, like there should be bouncers at the doors and people with lists. She got up and discreetly signalled Michael.
"And the others?" she asked, halfway to the door, noting them sitting
"They're here to have a little fun, a bit of action and maybe something sweet; I came for business"
Selene felt inwardly appalled. This was awful; no wonder the mortality rate was so high, it was a miracle of human ignorance they weren't revealed. They barely kept themselves from being discovered, as it was, the city police were keen to get this crew behind bars. There were deaths in this area, all explained by things like bar fighting, drug addicts trying something, that kind of thing, but no one caught them. Selene was grateful, if so strong a word applied, so few had been turned.
Outside, Selene hoped Michael would stay in the club and keep an eye on things. A new gaggle of girls had just walked in, the kind of girls hunting animals liked to go for. They all gave them an odd look, which Selene ignored. She didn't care about their opinions of leather and Spandex.
"Was willst du?" asked Razor, what do you want?
"Truce" said Selene, wondering if news had reached his little hole yet
"I heard about it," said Razor, his eyes unfriendly, "and so you think because you killed the Corvinus brothers and that bastard you called your master, we'll forget the centuries of vampires hunting our kind for being nothing but what we are and daring to be free? You thought we'd hold hands and be Children of the World?"
He didn't know that Selene was now a full-blooded immortal. Very few did. She felt oddly responsible for the whole vampire history, she suspected it was a connecting theme from Corvinus' memories, now part of her subconscious.
She briefly wondered if he knew that Michael was here, or if Razor knew about him, and if that would make a difference.
There was a scream. Selene looked quizzically at the nightclub and looked back at Razor to see him calm and grinning.
"The party's getting warmed up" said Razor, but then behind the club, where the scream had come from now exploded with crashing bins, more screams and shouts of fighting. A terrified girl with dark hair ran out, tottering on her high heels.
They both ran to the alley behind the club, and halted as soon as they turned the corner.
There were four girls batting these fully matured Lycans as if their positions had switched. The blonde one in the middle, despite doing an equal amount of fighting, was the leader. Selene knew the disciplined, controlled expression. Razor was stepping uncertainly forward, unsure if he actually wanted to attack.
Michael had appeared behind her, and as if by accident touched her hand. Selene ignored this and strode into the bleeding mess of dead Lycans, until level with Razor. The blonde girl, eyes fierce as she recognised a new threat, immediately started forward.
Selene took out her gun (which had a silencer on these days), and casually shot Razor in the head. The shot made all four girls stop dead, including the leader girl, who watched the man fall to the floor, and Selene put her gun back in its loop. She then realised to human eyes, she was standing in shadow.
"How do you know what they are?" she demanded, stepping out into the light that came from the emergency exit, which the translator of the girls appeared to be leaning lightly against, but by the shouting and rattling was holding back at least three men. She heard a familiar rumble as Michael growled at the girls. He sensed it too; something strange.
All four girls, two brunettes, two blondes, had an aura in them. The leader, holding a silver, moulded stake, had stopped at the question and the girls immediately got in a kind of formation behind her, the girl at the door casually broke off the door handle before joining.
"She asked how we knew what they were" said a German-accented girl in English to the leader. The girl kept her eyes on the two newcomers and shifted her weight
"Tell her…" she began, in an American accent
"I speak English"
"It's my job to know what you are when I see you" she snapped
"You're human" said Michael, puzzled, coming forward
"Yeah, but somehow I don't make a good meal" said the girl lightly
Selene narrowed her eyes. She then took a step forward, noting how this made all the girls tense underneath their stance.
"Why do you hunt Lycans?" she asked, but the blonde cocked her head
"We hunt what-now?"
"Lycans" repeated Selene
"Werewolves" said Michael, taking a looser stance beside Selene. Selene wasn't sure what was happening here but one day she'd have to teach him about not letting his guard down so quickly. She was fairly certain it was because all four girls were pretty.
The two other girls had taken flanking positions just behind the leader, who was weighing Selene and Michael up.
"Ever heard of a Slayer?" she asked, half-threateningly
"No" answered Selene, she hated American posturing in their casual speech patterns
"It's our job to slice and dice the creature-features in town, which lands you in a bad place to be right now" said the blonde, her tone light, almost joking.
Selene pulled her gun from her holster before she had finished the sentence, at least bullets of any kind worked on humans, even if they were silver.
"What, you'll shoot all of us at once? You'll only have the time for one and we don't die easily" the blonde sneered, but the other girls appeared less certain. They seemed much more surprised by the gun than anything else.
Michael, whose eyes had gone dark and his hands had turned into claws, growled
The awkward pause, which had started the moment they noticed Selene, continued, but everyone had simply stopped talking.
"We're at least doing the same work" said Selene, taking the magazine out to show the bullets
"What, you kill these guys too?" asked the blonde, frowning
"We try to make truces first" said Michael, getting impatient and annoyed
"And that's why you ran in with him?" asked one of the brunettes, nodding at Razor
"It wasn't going to work out anyway" said Selene, allowing a trace of humour to creep in
The leader, still frowning, seemed to make a decision
'So who are you?' she asked, Selene felt like she was going to regret this.
"I'm Selene, this is Michael"
"Vampires icing other demons? What's the gig?" stated the blonde
"We kill Lycans who still think we're at war" snapped Selene impatiently, who privately hated words like 'gig' and 'icing'
The girl nodded and then waved a hand slightly, and the girls started going around with some bottled and matches.
"I can get that" said Selene, and walked past them with a small vial of fluid she had raided from Alexander Corvinus' and Tanis' collection of weapons. She and Michael tossed the corpses together and each smashed a vial on top, and watched as, within a few minutes, the Lycans dissolved and evaporated. All that was left was the battered, torn and somewhat singed contents of a second-hand Goth shop.
"Handy" said the blonde, who seemed to really accept Selene was at least a Lycan hunter.
"We get around" said Michael, grinning, the girl smiled back. Michael intrigued her, Selene could see it. She then decided she could at least assess the situation.
"How about we truce for now and explain? We have a flat near"
The blonde nodded and they walked back to a small flat, three rooms and a bathroom, four streets from the club. It was just far away enough so Selene didn't have to smell it.
They sat, slightly crowded, in the small kitchen-lounge. Selene heard the familiar sounds of silver weapons tinkling against things as they sat and smiled inwardly. She did miss a team sometimes.
"We just came from Russia," she began, leaning against the wall facing into the room where all the slayers had taken the sofas and the one chair. The leader had taken the chair, "nearly four years ago I was in a large coven, as a Death-dealer, our job was to hunt down the remaining lycans and end the war"
"What war?" asked the blonde
'It's a long story, but it ended because the Lycan-clan leader found the last descendant of our species common ancestor," she nodded to Michael, "Michael was the only one with the ability to become a hybrid of both, creating something stronger than all of us. To cut it short, revealing him made all the lies that were told were uncovered, and the twins sons of our ancestor, the first vampire and the first Lycan, were killed, and now the vampires and lycans are somewhere between choosing a truce or battling it out once and for good'
The blonde simply stared, looking both bored and incredulous
"You called yourself Death-dealers?" she asked
"I didn't choose the name" replied Selene in tones that could have frozen steel
"And is that your uniform?" she demanded
Selene had recently taken to dark trousers and t-shirts, and a smaller black jacket, but the belt had stayed and the jacket had pockets for useful things like bullet clips, her flask and so on.
"And you are?" she asked coldly
"Buffy" said the girl, and pointed at the other girls, "Jean, Anna and Sydney. We're slayers, just came from an Apocalypse in America, we're looking the next Hell mouth in Europe"
In fairness, the ridiculousness of the story on both sides balanced out. Humans that had demonic powers to kill demons of any shape and size you can imagine, and a couple of vampire hybrids that had functional souls and a mission of roughly the same magnitude.
"So… you're a hybrid?" asked Buffy to Michael, who had stayed in the doorway behind them
"Yeah, but I'm both Lycan and vampire, Selene is vampire and true immortal"
'You're…?' asked Buffy, frowning back at Selene
'I was a vampire for six centuries before accepting Alexander Corvinus' blood to kill his twin sons – Alexander was a true immortal, the ancestor of both our races'
"…Right" said Buffy
"So you came to kill the lycans?" asked Michael
'We came to see what we could find' said Buffy, though not as tersely as she spoke to Selene. Selene recognised in her expression that Michael was better in her eyes because he was American, tall and attractive.
Selene couldn't help rolling her eyes. She strode to the fridge and pulled out a strange metal tube which connected to a blood capsule using a thin drip-tube. She pressed the mechanised nozzle down into her flask, which looked like a standard steel whiskey flask, and waited for it to fill. Michael took his out of his pocket as Selene put hers down, she didn't even look to catch his which had been tossed across the room. The slayers couldn't help being a little impressed.
Buffy, on the other hand, was confused. It wasn't hard to see these… whatever they were, were nothing like what she had encountered before. She had seen Michael's eyes go black and Selene's go pale, almost white-blue. Her fangs were smaller than the vampires at home, her brow stayed the same, and they were definitely in possession of a soul. And the thing they were doing with the blood – she could see more blood capsules sitting on the shelf below, and the metal bottle-shaped thing appeared to make it more convenient to fill up containers. This was sophisticated. What happened to good old bust-'em-dust-'em? Selene had guns, for Pete's sake, she saw in the other room there were a small stack of bullet clips, more varying weapons, and even spare bullets sitting in a machine that looked like it might fill them with silver.
"So vampires are different where you come from?" asked Selene, still looking intently at Michael's miniature hip-flask that looked like it was designed for coffee on the go.
"Less about guns, more about bumpy faces and teeth"
Selene nodded
"We heard of them, we thought they were some kind of lesser strain of the Corvinus Curse"
Buffy was about to shoot back a scathing retort when Michael cut in
"So what's this about demons? There's more?"
Buffy gave her humourless smile at him, feeling, as ever, like she was a lead act in an endless freak-show.
"You can't imagine" she said
Selene turned round, and tossed Michael back his flask while keeping her eyes fixed on Buffy's. She regarded her thoughtfully.
"You said an apocalypse?"
'Well, one of, but yeah' she answered. Selene's eyes narrowed. Buffy realised whatever Selene was, she hadn't heard of the rest of the demon world.
"And you," said Selene, scanning her eyes over the other slayers, "averted it?"
"There's more of us" said Buffy, hinting. She noted Selene had a mug which she was sipping from, and Michael was crossing to get the other on the work-surface. She had to admit, it was less creepy than watching it being tapped from the source.
"Good to know" Selene answered, and exchanged a glance with Michael.
Buffy hadn't had a boyfriend in forever, and it prickled her that this one was with this brooding, English semi-goth vampire-thing woman. It hadn't helped Selene's equipment was flashier than hers – she had been really proud of her new silver stake which Giles had sent her for Christmas from England, he'd even taken impressions off old wooden stakes she had gripped too tightly so it would mould into her hand, using plated cast-iron. Anna looked subtly looked at her watch. Buffy looked at her own and realised the other slayers would be wondering where they were.
"Hey, we have to go" she said, and the slayers rose
"I had something to ask you" said Selene, who seemed, in the last second, to have decided something with Michael, as they had given each other a look that lasted a couple of seconds
"Which is?" asked Buffy, thinking to herself that the answer was no
"You're protecting the public, I'm trying to make a truce, and as soon as Razor's death is known to the lycans here, which is soon, the public won't be safe and it would jeopardise the entire mission"
Buffy hesitated. She wanted to go home and move everyone on to the next city and decide what to do about vampire-hybrids after she had called Giles, but she knew this wasn't going to happen. She needed to call Giles.
"Hotel near the fountain, in an hour" she said, and strode out followed by the slayers. It was weird not thinking of them as the 'potentials' anymore. It was nice not to have to do everything on her own, even if it was still saving the damn world.
The girls were buzzing as soon as they hit the street, discussing the idea of hybrids, Michael, souls and, to Buffy's disgust, the cool equipment.
Only Buffy saw Selene and Michael practically fly out of the window and take off over the rooftops back towards the club. Well, at least the jacket hadn't been bad
"So 1990s" she muttered
"… but it doesn't have to be magic, what if a virus can make you invincible?" argued Jean
Something else to ask Giles
"Well there have been stories,' said Giles, 'of vampires who weren't made by, erm… the way we're more familiar with, but as far as I know… it's said to be extremely unpleasant, literally rewriting the human DNA, very few survive the transformation"
"And that's the same with the Dycans?" asked Buffy, who was staring at a strange soup the other slayers had got from a local take-out restaurant. It looked like sausage was floating in it.
"Erm, Lycans,' corrected Giles absently, and she heard the thump of books with ancient bindings, "ah yes, we've only got vague references, this mentions a vampire Lord, one of three, who ruled a coven for a hundred years before going to sleep while one the other two takes a turn, surprisingly civilised of them… it does mention their ancestor, someone called Corvinus, but nothing about his sons… and despite having immortality and a thirst for blood, they have no demonic powers and appear to be much like you or I"
"Except for the blood part, did I mention the blood part?" Interrupted Buffy, "They had a fridge, and those blood packs you get in hospitals and they had a machine to fill coffee flasks with it!"
"Sounds very convenient, actually, quite a good way of going about it" said Giles, murmuring to himself
'Giles, it's gross!' she reminded
Jean came with a tub of ice-cream which Buffy gladly tucked into with her soup spoon and much enthusiasm, making a casual effort to push away the soup with her elbow.
"Buffy, you have accepted vampires with souls as allies before" said Giles with mild reprove
"Only when they…" began Buffy but Giles interrupted with an "Ah!"
"You know I could have heard that across the room" said Buffy reproachfully
"Diary from a watcher of the time of Corvinus, he says 'the slayer encountered vampires harder to kill than most of their kind, and did not display the usual behaviour, feeding on animals rather than on humans, claiming it was their laws to keep a discreet profile…' and it appears they weren't keen on conversation either"
"So they're not evil?" asked Buffy glumly
"No, sorry to tell you, they're not,I know how much you love to kill things, but perhaps if this Selene and Michael are more powerful still, they'd be useful if more Lycans are on the way"
"So I have to fight with them?" asked Buffy, pouting
"Yes, I'm afraid it looks like they'd be useful, especially since you started it"
Michael couldn't help studying Selene out of the corner of his eye. It was a regular habit of his to simply watch the way she moved or the way she sat still, like now. They were crouched on top of two roof-windows which stuck out of the main roof close together and swathed them both in shadow.
Michael was feeling in an odd position of knowing what Selene was capable of better than she did (although she did have a very good, more in-depth knowledge of the basic than he did) but still felt like a junior in the mission setting. He had a lot of patience with it, as, one, it was just a bit cool, he was still very young after all and clung to human ideas and values, and two, Selene had been a soldier from the day she was bitten up to now, she wasn't really a habit-losing sort of person.
He was lucky, he thought, to see things change for her as it had changed for him, they were adjusting to themselves being new creatures and somehow the extra space they'd allowed for themselves had allowed better room for each other. Selene had been much more open with him recently.
"I can sense their unease" she said
"You couldn't do that before?" he asked, who had thought this was normal
"No, you just knew it was there, like humans; you saw it rather than felt it"
That was a classic example; it didn't take a genius to guess Selene would never have spoken of it to anyone else.
"You're not happy about the slayer" he muttered, who knew enough by now not to use her name
"She's a human, and she knows about us, she can kill Lycans; as a Death dealer I would have got every soldier I could find and slaughtered all of them"
Michael pondered on that for a while
'You guys didn't make many allies?'
Selene smiled slightly
"Viktor wasn't keen on speaking to anyone we hadn't bitten first, Markus only thought about food and having as little to do with us as he could, and Amelia didn't think humans were stable enough to make good allies, so we weren't the making friends type"
"You never worked with any humans on missions?" he asked, a little incredulous
Selene's smile twitched very slightly wider and she looked at him
"Only one"
Michael leaned over using his enhanced balance, and kissed her, somehow sure that for the moment he could override the 'on the mission' atmosphere. He felt her hand grip lightly on his shoulder, and felt a little thrill as she accepted the break in the rules with returned warmth. Just then Michael's watch beeped, surprising them both, making Selene grab his watch and press the button faster than he could get to it, his hand having been on Selene's face.
They were off the roof so fast and heading towards the slayers' hotel that by the time anyone could have got to the window they would have already been well away.
Buffy noted they had waited politely on the roof for a few minutes before getting down on the fire escape to knock on the emergency exit door.
"I think it's alarmed" she called from her sofa
"It isn't now" said Selene, sounding a bit amused by all this
Buffy nodded to Sydney who opened the door, with a cross and a stake in one hand for good measure.
"Do those things work on your vampires?" asked Selene, eyeing them as she walked in
'Yeah,' said Buffy, getting up, "what works on you…? I mean your vampires?"
"Daylight" said Selene and half-smiling tossed her a gun, "the Lycans developed UV rounds, it's handier than the UV-beacons I suppose"
"Um… thanks" said Buffy, who wasn't a gun expert and knew that the grip was the bit you held it with and the trigger you pulled to make it kill things, but she had the best aim with a crossbow or a throwing axe.
"I can teach you how to use it" offered Selene and Michael grinned to himself. Selene was trying to be nice.
"Um, thanks, I'll probably figure it out on my own" said Buffy, trying to look casual as she put it down
The other slayers had taken casual positions round the room; Selene noted they all had an easy reach to a weapon.
"We could unarm if you like" said Michael, who was hovering again
"You are weapons," said Buffy, "what with the teeth, the super-strength and the weird eyes… they're just making sure" she said, giving Sydney a look because she had edged closer to her axe, "was the axe really necessary?"
Sydney smiled and raised an eyebrow
"We've been thinking" said Michael, "you should have killed us but you didn't, you saw what we were when you walked in but we haven't noticed you trying"
Buffy nodded, "we don't really kill the ones with souls"
Selene frowned slightly at that but then said "That can put us both unconscious" nodding at the gun. She noticed Buffy only glanced at the gun but didn't register it as an important fact.
"OK I'll just get to the point," Said Buffy, "we just came from an Apocalypse, and we need allies, we lost a lot of our friends and we need more, we always need more. So far, you're the most powerful demons- I mean, I don't know!' she amended at the couple's glare, 'But you're as powerful as we are, and the fact that you don't want to kill us is really as good as, well, people like you, are… to Slayers… hell, that even gets you on our Christmas card list"
"We don't have an address" said Selene, who was smiling
"Good, 'cause we don't really do cards said Buffy, grinning back
"Was möchten Sie von uns?" asked Anna, speaking in German again, always accidentally
"We actually want the same thing," answered Selene, "allies"
"I didn't really get the whole… story" said Sydney
"We used to be at war," said Selene, "vampires and Lycans have actually never been at peace – it began with the Corvinus twins; William, the first Lycan, had an appetite for destruction. His brother Markus kept trying to stop the spread of Lycans getting too far.
'Then several centuries, and several lies, later, the war had scaled into being near uncontrollable. Now it's over, the twins are dead, the Lycan Clan leader is dead, the Vampire Elders are all dead, we only have two races that are used to killing each other and no real leaders. It's made chaos, soon it could spill out and involve more humans than it does already, then the whole world will be at war… Michael and I are the only ones powerful enough to try and make some kind of truce, hopefully some kind of new treaty, but now we're on neither side which gives us two enemies who see us as a threat… we need a little more weight to have any chance of success"
The slayers nodded automatically; there was a silence as there was time to process it all.
"So, you wanna threaten the whole Vulcan-Vampire world that Slayers will come get them if they don't behave?" asked Buffy
"Something like that," said Selene, her eyes glinting, "but Michael and I scare them enough already, we just need allies for when humans might start getting hurt"
Buffy sighed. She was out of Sunnydale, and yet again was going to be responsible for protecting the world from another kind of Apocalypse. She wished she didn't need people with Selene and Michael's skills…
"So… you really didn't know about the Hellmouth, Slayers and demons?" asked Jean, who was absently toying with her dagger, lounged with her legs on another chair at the table
"No" said Michael, who looked sideways at Selene, who motionlessly agreed she didn't either.
Buffy noticed, and was impressed. The Slayers talked to each other like that when they were fighting, it was part of what made them so undefeated.
"Wow, you guys must've really been busy" said Jean, looking at the gun
"Speaking of which, Lycans won't be far away" said Selene
"We'll patrol tonight and keep look out for anything suspicious" said Buffy
"Lycans aren't very subtle" said Michael, grinning
"Yeah, I guessed, what with the motorbikes, bad clothes and the "this won't hurt" routine" said Buffy
'We'll be around' said Selene, and gave Buffy a card with Selene's number on it. It was a properly printed business card but it only had a number on it. Buffy raised an eyebrow slightly; what was with vampires and their weird thing about being slick. The slickness was just part of what made people want to kill them.
The two immortals left via the door they came and jumped neatly onto the roof opposite the building.
"Is it just me, or what Michael hot and Selene kinda creepy?" asked Jean, who was still lounging put had put the knife down
"Yeah," said Buffy, shutting the door, "And she needs a few shopping lessons"
There was a chorus of nods.
Note: I might have put the setting out of sync with dates the films and the last series of Buffy were made, but ah, the joys of artistic licence.