Chapter 2: SunnyDC

Willow starts her first case, but things can't exactly stay simple for Wicca-Watcher gal.

The testosterone-sized FBI car pulled up at the crime scene and Brennan was the first out, gesturing for Willow to follow her. Excited at the prospect of beginning her first case, Willow bounded out joyfully. As she shut the door, she smiled, feeling the warm sunlight kissing her face and making her hair feel as if it were on fire… and then she stopped, paling as she looked at Angel-Booth who was yet to get out of the car. Telepathically – damn, using magic again, Rosenberg? Human life, remember! – she spoke to Angel.

"Angel, you're gonna fry!"

"Willow, I've been doing this for four years now. Remember the gem of Amara?"

"That you destroyed?"

"It had a friend."

And Angel-Booth stepped out of the car, his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face as the sunlight washed over him. Willow still cringed, he was supposed to be on fire, after all…

"Miss Rosenberg?" Brennan called.

"Coming, Dr. Brennan," she replied, shooting Angel a withering glare, before grabbing her kit-bag and following Dr. Brennan to the river. Brennan was crouching over a particularly ooky looking skeleton, scraping at it with a cotton bud and collecting samples. Willow had no objections to ooky – living on hellmouths all your life kind of got you used to the slimy and the stinky. She knelt next to Dr. Brennan removing some evidence bags from her kit and beginning to bag some loose scraps of clothing.

"What are your observations, Miss Rosenberg?"

Ooh, a test! Willow worked incredibly well under pressure. She cast her eyes over the skeleton, eyeing the important features and mentally noting them, so that she could reel off an impressive list of observations. "Victim is between twenty-four and twenty-eight, Caucasian female, very petite but well-muscled. She worked rigorously doing some kind of hard labour or fighting – perhaps martial arts?" Willow suggested. "She has stress indicators and calcium deposits in her radius that indicate a lot of fighting – most of these wounds are defensive."

"So she went down fighting?" Angel-Booth asked.

"Not exactly," Brennan commented, more closely examining the fractures evident on every bone.

"They're all remodelled," Willow said, "but there are hundreds…" She shook her head.

"It shouldn't be possible for someone of her age to have this many remodelled fractures," Brennan frowned. "Mathematically, there wasn't enough time. These have all been inflicted within the last five years."

"How long's she been out here?" Willow was so not used to hearing Angel talking like this…

"Decomp and insect activity say about two weeks."

"What's the cause of death?" The vampire-gone-FBI Agent asked.

"Blood loss," Willow said immediately. Brennan gave her an impressed smile. Angel patted Willow on the shoulder, grinning at her. Brennan didn't give smiles out easily.

"Let's get the body back to the Jeffersonian," Brennan said quietly, still examining the severely remodelled radius, "can't tell much more without cleaning the bones."

Not even a day. Not even one day. Willow had come to the Jeffersonian to escape the vampires, the demons and all the forces of darkness, yet here she was standing in front of a lab bench with the body of a girl who had obviously been killed by a vampire. There were two deep puncture wounds in the vertebrae of her neck – vamp teeth. She'd come here to face evil humans, but here she was, once again face-to-face with the victim of someone of the fangy-bumpy variety.

"Angel?" Willow drew up silently behind the vampire. They were alone in the lounge above the lab.

"You're doing great, Willow. Not that I ever doubted it… you're as smart as you were in high school." Willow blushed at the compliment, smiling at the man that was – or at least used to be – her friend.

"How do you do it?"

"Do what?" he asked.

"How do you keep your hellmouth-life so far separated from your human-life?"

"I don't let myself be a vampire when I'm here… I become Booth. I fight criminals, not demons. You just have to remember that you have two separate lives, and keep them that way."

Willow smirked, "I guess I kinda ruined that, huh?"

"Not at all," he smiled. "I have to say," he admitted, "I think you came at just the right time. I think I was getting too caught up in this life, this human world… I can't ever let myself forget who – what – I am."

"But, we live on a hellmouth. You must end up with some demon-kills down there in the lab, at least sometimes. How do you deal? Not let on that you know a human didn't do it?"

"What do you think my witchy friends at Angel Investigations are for?" he laughed. "Quick memory spell, send the body to the LA gang to sort out, it's like it never happened."

"It's just, Angel…" she looked down at the lab, all shiny in the sunset-light, "that body…"

"It's not a human kill?" he asked quietly.

"I really don't think so."

"Demon?"

"Vampire."

"Barbeque fork."

"What?" Willow laughed.

"A barbeque fork. She was stabbed with a barbeque fork."

Willow just gave him a confused look.

"I don't fork over - no pun intended - vampire kills to the LA gang – there are too many of them on a hellmouth. Instead, they always manage to come up with some non-supernatural explanation. I usually don't even have to fabricate anything."

"It's that easy to hide humans from the forces of darkness?"

"The forces of darkness hid from you for the first sixteen years of your life."

"It's so strange… they live on a hellmouth, with the apocalypses and the vampires and demons… and yet they have no idea."

"Brennan is the smartest woman I've ever met," Angel murmured, looking at her bent over the skeleton, "but she's so rational that she'd never believe me if I told her. She's happy not knowing, I'm not going to tell her."

"So we just solve the case, I pretend I don't know that a vampire killed her?"

"Pretty much. The vamp'll probably have been staked by one of the SITs before morning." He grinned at Willow.

"It's that easy to pretend our world doesn't exist?"

"It's that easy."

Willow opened the heavy wooden doors, sighing in relief as she looked at everyone lounging around in front of the fire. No apocalypse tonight. Thank God. She was exhausted.

"How was your first day, Red?" Faith called from her lioness-like position on the hearth.

"It was… special. I bumped into an old friend, actually."

"Ooh, who?" Buffy was lying with her head on Faith's butt, using it as a cushion.

"Angel."

"What?!" Buffy sat bolt upright. "I thought he was still in LA!"

Faith grumbled at the loss of her not-so-secret girlfriend, sitting up too. "Yeah, what's fang-boy doing in DC?"

"The same thing as me," Willow said with a smile. "He's trying to have a human life – at least by day. He's an FBI agent now, going by the name Seeley Booth."

"Wow." Faith collapsed back onto the ground, pulling the blonde slayer down with her.

"That's cool," Buffy said. "Seeley, though, seriously? Who picks that kind of name?"

"A guy born in the eighteenth century?" Faith offered.

"Good point…"

"So how was slayage?" Willow asked. "Did I miss anything?"

"Kennedy's trainees slayed the bad wallpaper. Crossbow training was fucking lethal," Faith grinned.

"Any disasters?"

"Eerily quiet," Giles said, emerging at the top of the staircase. The house they lived in was huge – enough room for an entire floor devoted to slayer training sessions. And another floor devoted to Giles' library, Willow's computers and their apothecary of magic supplies. It was better stocked than the magic box had ever been. The top floor was devoted to living space for the Scooby gang, the bottom floor dorms for the Watchers and Slayers in Training.

"Big evil's most likely a-brewing." Dawn came in, clutching a mug of coffee.

"Hellmouth normalness," Xander looked up from his comic, grinning at Willow.

Yep, hellmouth normalness… as per usual, Willow wasn't going to get to be normal-gal… nope. She was, once again, watcher-wicca-hellmouth-gal. In and out of work, now it seemed.

"Buffy?" Willow knocked on the slayer's door.

"Come in, Will." She waved her friend in, and they sat down together on Buffy's bed. "What's up?"

"Well…" she paused, not quite sure whether she wanted to tell Buffy now. "Say a girl likes another girl, but she's pretty sure that the other girl is straight, but she doesn't want to ask because that would be weird. The other girl already knows that the first girl is gay and obviously didn't have an issue with it, but now that first girl really just wants to know what the other girl thinks of her and…"

"Willow, I think I cracked your uber-advanced code."

"Right." She took a deep breath. "There's this girl at the Jeffersonian, Angela… she's beautiful. And she's smart. And she's INCREDIBLE with computers… but I've never made the first move with a girl… they always sort of just take the initiative. But I want to be initiative-girl now! How do I know?"

"Well, you've only known her for a day, Will. Maybe get to know her a little better? And knowing our Scooby-dating-collective track record, you might want to check she isn't a) evil, b) a demon or c) both. But who wouldn't fall for Willow?" The slayer grinned.

"You're the best friend ever, Buffy." She hugged her best friend and got up, turning to leave before looking back. "And Buff? We all know."

"Know what?"

"About you and Faith," she gave the slayer a shit-eating grin.

"Really?" Buffy seemed genuinely shocked.

"It's obvious in a glaring kind of way."

"Oh…" Buffy blushed. "I've liked her for… well, ever."

"Well, feel free to like in front of people. We think it's sweet."

"You've talked about it with the others?" The slayer blanched.

"Duh."

Buffy swatted at her friend, but the redhead just grinned, before closing the door on her friend.

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