Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
Authors Note: I just wanted to state that this story is DH compliant. Basically, Snape did kill Dumbledore but the old man was a big faker. I also wanted to just FYI that I'm having the Hogwarts Final Battle taking place at the same time as Buffy and the gang are taking down the First. I'm doing this so that the Potentials that I have hiding at Hogwarts received their full powers during the battle.
Big thanks to my Beta, Melissa, without whom this story would still be sitting around doing nothing! As always reviews feed the author!
Chapter 2 - Fractured Spirit
"How do we know she won't go Slayer scary on us again," Harmony whined, hanging on tightly to a wincing Gunn's arm. Maeve shifted uncomfortably at the blonde vampire's words as everyone looked at her. She could tell they were all thinking the same thing, even though some seemed ashamed of it. Wesley had kept her wand before sitting her down on the couch she'd been keeping between herself and the Malfoy look-alike. The man had disappeared for a moment but had reappeared when all seemed calm again; standing in the alcove by the double doorway.
"Have her sing," he stated, Maeve jumped at the cool sound of his voice while everyone else just looked at him in confusion. He sighed, held his hand up to indicate that they wait, and walked through the wall. The door opened a few moments later and Maeve nearly leapt out of her skin when the ghost returned on the heels of a dark green demon. But she stayed in her seat when no one else seemed to be alarmed by his presence.
"Oh yeah! Have her sing for Lorne so he can read her," Harmony said, sitting herself down in one of the comfortable looking chairs, as though this solution had been oh so obvious to her. Lorne, his suit so garish it almost hurt her eyes, moved towards the nervous and somewhat hex happy Slayer. With the care one adopts with wild animals he knelt in front of her. She tensed when he touched her hand but she didn't pull away. Seeing she wasn't going to panic, he took both of her hands in a reassuring squeeze before he began speaking.
"Now, my little turtle dove, this is how it's going to work. You're going to sing me a little song, anything you want, until I tell you to stop. I'll use my mojo and read you to give us a sense of you aura, it'll give me a hint as to whether we can trust you not to attempt to kill the darling employees here at Wolfram and Hart. Just to make everyone feel better," he smiled with a wink, his face open and eyes kind.
Being so close to a creature considered "dark" by Ministry standards made the little hairs on the back of her neck stand up, but the kindness reflected in his red eyes was enough to allow her to nod in agreement, if not entirely understanding. Besides, the Ministry was wrong about so many things, not to mention their ideas on vampires made her either want to knock their heads against a wall, or laugh herself into hysterics. It was entirely possible, that these 'Dark Creatures' weren't really that dark after all. Lorne took the chair just opposite her, one of her hands still clasped firmly in his. "Alright, little bird, sing me a song,"
Maeve sat still, wanting to curl up into a ball and protect herself from these people. Instead, she closed her eyes and thought of the only song that expressed her feelings of late. The song was sung by a crazy haired American witch and, in the last year, had become an anthem of sorts to express her feelings.
"One night to you, lasted six weeks for me," her voice wasn't as raw as the original singer but it was on key, strong and had a pretty quality that Lorne wasn't used to. He could have read her with that one line but he was, for once, encouraging the singing and he wanted to know more about her. So he let her finish the song after he'd heard the first few notes. "Just a bitter little pill now, just to try and go to sleep. No more waking' up to innocence, say hello to hesitance to everyone I meet. Thanks to you, years ago, I guess I'll never know what loves means to me," she kept singing, and had been staring into the eyes of the demon before her when she felt him fall into her mind. The blonde effigy of the man who had tortured her for what seemed to be days was just visible out of the corner of her eye. She cringed as he moved to lean against the wall but kept singing. The words came swiftly from memory, flooding out as she felt the vague tingle of the seer reading her.
Lorne shifted his sight gently from her future into her past, something he rarely did but was still proficient at. He saw the happiness of her youth and felt a pang of jealousy at the love spread warmly through each family member. He watched her years at school, training hard at mastering witchcraft and learning to fight the evil in a forest beyond her school's grounds; her Watcher, a ragged, patch-worn man with graying brown hair, ever present in the shadows.
He saw the fall of darkness over her school, witches and slayer, their Watchers abandoned in the chased of masked cloaked figures and the First's Bringers. He saw her sadness as she, being the oldest girl, took charge and tried to get them to Rupert Giles but failing in her task when they were captured by cloaked Wizards she thought of as Death Eaters. Brief glimpses of the time spent with the Malfoy she feared and whom Spike reminded her of; the final battle with a dark wizard, and the fall of her Watcher, a stern looking man with a strange whirling eye. The demons and vampires beating back the students and the glorious overwhelming feeling of euphoria as the Slayer powers were released fully onto her and the other girls.
Lorne felt he needed more information on the man with Spike's features and shifted back towards the girl's memories of him. Following her line of thought from the moment she saw Spike, traveling further into her past. He watched it in brown sepia tones unfolding into her fears. Lorne felt her pain and wanted to shrink away from it but he stayed and followed it forward like a horror movie.
The woman was tied to a wooden pole, her robes and dress here gone, only a cotton shift remaining. Her hair was longer, sweat revealing the natural curl her current style hid, partially covering the bruises forming around her face. Other girls; some mere children, were in similar states but Maeve's was the worst. The room was dark, and Lorne thought that perhaps he could smell the moldy memory of the cold, stone cell. Maeve's lifted her head at the sound of the locks clicking and a voice saying an incantation to gain entrance.
A tall, angular man entered the room, ordering another cloaked man to watch the door. His face was hidden behind a silver, ornate mask, but wisps of white, blonde hair crept out of the hood he wore. Lorne watched helpless, as the man languidly strode over to Maeve, his wand out.
"Mr. Malfoy," she said, her voice cracked and popped with dryness wrought from dehydration and overuse. He crouched down beside her before lowering his hood. With a slight flick of his wand, the mask vanished in a swirl of charcoal grey smoke. Lorne started when the thin stream of candle light revealed a face not unlike that of Spike. The same sharp features, same icy blue eyes and the confident posture. Although in this man, it seemed more a quiet arrogance.
"Miss Flynn, we've been after you and your ilk for awhile now. You lead us on quite the merry chase. But you really should have stayed under Dumbledore's protection," when that goaded no response, he gripped her chin, forcing her to make eye contact with him. Maeve did something Lorne considered very foolish, she spat in Malfoy's face.
Judging by the satisfied smirk on her face though, he would assume she felt otherwise.
In Lorne's experience, this type of man usually retaliated in a physical attack. This one simply wiped the spit away, dropped her face and stood. With a smirk similar to one Spike had worn on occasion, he pointed his wand at Maeve and said lazily, "Crucio."
Though Lorne didn't recognise the word, its effect was painfully obvious once the jet of sickly yellow-brown light hit the witch. Maeve writhed in pain, her face reddening with the effort it took not to scream. Lorne admired her courage, but felt for this brave young girl. He held the spell for a full minute before releasing her. Crouching again, he tutted her as she regained her composure. He smiled when she faltered, breathing irregularly, but he waited until she looked up at him again before speaking.
"Now Maeve, I would have expected less stupidity from a Pureblooded Ravenclaw," he chuckled as she glanced at the still unconscious girls, "Don't worry about them, my dear, they won't be waking up anytime soon,"
Lorne watched in sick horror as the same spell was used repeatedly until her voice was gone and she began coughing up blood from her worn throat. From the purely magical, he moved on to other, more traditional forms torture, branding with hot irons, slicing her skin shallowly until she was weak from blood loss. The sick bastard took great care to stop the bleeding before she passed out. He wanted her fully conscious when he began removing the cotton shift from her thin shoulders. Suddenly his connection was broken. She stopped singing and took her hand from his.
He blinked rapidly against the suddenly bright light of the office. He looked at the witch; she looked aggrieved, and a little bit angry. It took him a moment to ascertain as to why. Maeve was a witch with a reasonable grasp on Occulumency. So she must have felt his intrusion into her mind, her past.
"Find what you were looking for?" she said with a tight voice. Lorne nodded, reaching over to grasp her hand again.
"Yes, little Slayer-Witch, I did," his voice held a soft sincerity that the present group had rarely heard, "I needed to understand your motives. To see what we needed to do to keep everyone safe and make you more comfortable," She nodded at his explanation, not that she liked it, but she understood the necessity.
"Well, is she safe?" Harmony asked, standing to move behind the dark haired vampire.
"Oh, she is in no way safe but we should be relatively safe from her," Lorne said, his red eyes never leaving her own soft brown ones.
"Well, then, whatever assistance we can offer, Miss Flynn, simply ask," Mr. Wyndam-Pryce stated. The others in the room echoed his statement and she nodded tersely, but first she had to direct her attention to the ensouled vampire formerly known as Angelus.
"Angelus, forgive me, I mean Angel; I would like to apologize for my earlier behavior and to let you know I will do my best to curb my Slayer instincts," she started awkwardly, her posture rigid. Angel moved away from Harmony, who promptly hid behind Gunn to offer Maeve his hand. She took it immediately. Any hesitation on her part would have been detrimental to any further collaboration; she clasped his hand firmly but without her full Slayer strength. It quite an odd feeling because his hands were so cold, but his eyes held the warmth she found lacking in his touch. If she had only taken the time earlier to see past the reputation of the vampire CEO before her, the fight could have been avoided and she wouldn't be rebuilding their trust now.
"Don't worry too much about it, we're kind of used to this sort of thing," he said with a smile, "Not to mention I've done it to more than one of our clients."
She returned his smile as she sat back down, and he moved to lean on his desk.
"I will need any and all data you've complied on, what's your name?" she turned to Spike, addressing him directly for the first time since she spat out the surname of her torturer. His blue eyes widened for a moment but his shock quickly faded as he smiled at the witch.
"I prefer Spike, but I was born William Octavius Malfoy. And as you've pointed out I am related to that git, Lucius Malfoy. He's me many times removed cousin or some such, the wanker," he remarked, his arms crossed and his jacket wrapped securely around him.
She looked at him, really looked at him to see the features of his face. There were features common to the Malfoy family line and there were those that were uniquely his. His eyes, though the same shape and color of Lucius', held a softness, a kindness in them that her enemy's had lacked. Where Lucius' were ice cold blue, William's were sky blue, sunny and warm.
"William," she said firmly, testing his name out before continuing, "As I was saying, I'll need everything you have on William, access to any library you have and I'll need the use of your Floo system," she directed that last request at Wesley. He nodded, turned to Harmony and directed her to have the Department of Magical Affairs set up a Floo connection in Maeve's office.
"Thank you," she said with a sigh. She didn't know where to go from here; the group just looked around uncomfortably as Harmony walked out of the room eyeballing Maeve the whole time as though the Slayer would lunge at her any second. Wesley took the initiative and walked over to her chair.
"Miss Flynn, if you'd like I could give you a tour of our establishment, show you your office, the library and our labs," he said, holding out his hand to her. With a grin she took his hand and allowed the former Watcher to haul her from her spot and took his elbow gratefully.
End Chapter 2
