Disclaimer: I do not own any of Whedon's creations: his characters, his world, his mythology, etc. I own only my characters.
Author's Note: Another short piece to flesh out character. The Slayer's own story arc. Or character shifts. Whatever.
Beginning (The Reluctant Hero)
A girl with long limp translucent blonde hair in green barrettes sat on the curb next to the middle school in the gathering twilight, deeply engrossed by a science fiction novel. She was a serious faced kid of about 13 or 14 years old, with indifferent clothes (a plain blue and purple sweater, some faded jeans, really old tennis shoes) and brilliant green eyes shaded, for the moment, by long translucent lashes. Her skin was a light olive tone that didn't look to have seen much sun, and her posture hunched and protective, like one who prefers to be left alone but often isn't. The sidewalk she was sitting on was laced with cracks, and was broken and bent upward around a large tree root that had invaded it from the foot of an overshadowing oak tree. The school behind her was in little better shape than the sidewalk, an old brick building with broken window casings and a terrible heating and cooling system, with a sticker in one of these windows saying prominently "Go Hawks!" and in smaller letters, "Turing Middle School." This was a side entrance, and had a small parking lot, on the edge of which the girl was sitting.
Another building, a large shed or storage building, butted up against the back of the school nearby, creating a sort of alley between it and the school, a path which only janitors, guiltily smoking teachers, and the occasional evil undead did not fear to tread, for it was dark and narrow and rather longer than it should be, given the length of the storage shed, though perhaps that was just the distance that fear lends to the imagination.
The vague menace of the alley was not what is on the girl's mind, however, though had it been she would have dismissed it nervously as one of those childish rumors and hype that go around the school—no one really ever died back there, it was probably some animal, or possibly nothing at all—and ghosts don't exist anyhow; no, what was on her mind was whether or not the child prodigy Ender would be taken away from his parents or not to be shipped off to the famous and very far away space station Battle School, to be trained for the fight against the Buggers: her book. Beneath that, however, she was wondering absently where her mother was; she was supposed to have picked her up hours ago, after her meeting. Her worry was beginning to invade her concentration on Ender's predicament.
Suddenly, from the alley, she heard a nervous laugh.
(That would be her Watcher being attacked. Her Watcher, a spacey British woman with silver-streaked black hair, had been coming to introduce herself and show her the ways of Slayage, when she was caught in a bit of a Situation--i.e. she was cornered by a vampire on the way. The young Slayer--for whom I have yet to find a decent name; Arden sounds nice but doesn't quite fit, but it will do for now--has to rescue her, thus plunging her immediately into the whole vampire thing, without the nice 'talking up to it' that her Watcher had planned. So she's a bit freaked out for a while. Well, both of them are, I suppose.)
Ten Years Later (The Hardened Warrior)
Arden entered the mage's apartment warily. She never knew for sure when some demon might rush at her from behind a pile of dusty old spellbooks as a result of one of that idiot's failed Summonings. describe more using wariness and disparaging observations on cleanliness
She peered cautiously behind a dusty curtain and her eyes fell upon a sleeping warlock, uncomfortably curled up among scattered books and talismans and black tapers long since gone out. She could tell it was him, and not some golem set there to catch her off her guard when the genuine article decided to show himself, because it had that small brown mole on his neck that he never included on any facsimiles, being too vain. It was strange, though, that his vanity chose to focus on that particular defect, the mole being so small and unnoticeable an imperfection compared to the ugliness that dealings with powerful, dark magic and assorted nasties (some worse than demons) gave to his otherwise beautiful face and form. But then, we often choose to ignore our larger, more fundamental problems in favor of those that are simpler, more diminutive, and easier to fix. That was almost certainly the case, however much she wished it were not so, that he really was, as he promised her so often, undergoing a profound reformation of spirit. She would only believe that when he failed to erase the mole from one of his lookalike golems, or stopped making the golems altogether, or some such.
(A lot has changed for the geeky little middle schooler who had to rescue her Watcher after school one day. She became a fierce, dedicated, intensely solitary fighter in high school, and very surprisingly, only through the most accidental of circumstances, she acquired a circle of friends and fellow fighters. Most of them, by the time of this last part, have left for college or jobs, leaving the Slayer to her calling, alone. One friend, who at one point became almost a lover and soon after a serious nemesis, getting a little too power-hungry and demon-friendly, is now a new age-y sort of hippie magic user, a bit of a slimy fellow, and neither friend nor foe. The Slayer doesn't trust him, but occasionally she goes to him for information. One suspects she begins to go to him for a sort of companionship as well, since he is the last remaining link to a time when she was surrounded by friends and the fight against the Forces of Darkness was much more straightforwardly difficult and arduous.)
Interim (That Creepy Goth Kid)
Sleepily, Arden raised her head, wincing at the crick in her neck and the ache in her arms where she had laid her head. She saw, with half shut eyes, books scattered and lying splayed on top of each other haphazardly all over the table, the open laptop on the desk showing scenes of the British countryside in its screensaver slideshow, and her Watcher, slumped back in the computer chair with her arms dangling, and snoring loudly every thirty seconds. She had even less endurance for these late night research sessions than had Arden, though she was, nominally, the one who was supposed to be motivating her Slayer to do the proper research on her enemies and her own abilities. In reality, it was most often Arden who would prod her Watcher for information, information only she could know, concerning her enemies, the vast dark underworld of demons and dark magic-users and the Forces of Darkness.
(This is set during the time of "Raccoon Eyes." Arden has become a Goth of sorts to disguise the fact that she's a Slayer: it explains the antisocial behavior, the trenchcoat she uses to carry around her emergency weapons, her frequent and illicit nightly wanderings, lack of motivation academically, the hostility she projects so as not to draw other people into her social circle--because that could endanger them-- etc. It all makes sense.)