VII.

The next morning, Faith went straight to Dawn's door and rang the bell. She'd thought about calling, but had no idea what she'd have said. She was wearing a navy blouse and khaki Dockers, what she thought of as her client interview suit. It was a little dressy for begging on your knees for forgiveness, but she didn't have much wardrobe that didn't feature black, or leather, or black leather. She needed to work on that.

She heard someone coming to the door, and it opened to reveal Dawn, dressed in a robe and wearing her bunny slippers. Her hair was still tousled, and she looked about fourteen years old, but beautiful. She frowned at Faith.

"What do you want?"

"Dawn, can I come in?"

"Depends. What do you want?"

Faith opened her hands, palms up. "To say I'm sorry, to try to explain. Mostly to say I'm sorry and see if we're still gonna be friends."

Faith waited. The silence stretched out a bit.

"Well," said Dawn, "I actually needed to talk to you anyway. Come on in."

They sat at the kitchen table. Dawn made herself some tea, and coffee for Faith. As Dawn put away the tea things, Faith noticed it was the same tea Robin made when his old wound was bothering him. It was something Willow had taught her, back in the Summers' house in Sunnydale.

"Your stomach bothering you, D? Wood drinks this stuff a lot."

"I didn't sleep very well last night. A little acid reflux."

"And I didn't help, did I?" Faith put her hand on Dawn's. "Listen, you know me, Dawn. I talk before I think. Not so much as before, but still, I didn't mean to hurt you. I just wasn't thinking."

"You know what hurt? Not that you and Xander had been together, I mean, I listened to him and Anya a lot more than I care to think about. I know there were women before me in his life. It hurt that there were still important things about him that could jump up and surprise me like that. You think you know a guy…"

"You do know him. I sure don't want to go into details, but Xander and I, he was trying to be a good guy, and be there for me, a long time ago. I wasn't ready to be helped, and I'm sure I screwed him up pretty good for his trouble. But he was a good guy, Dawn. Still is, and anybody can see how much he loves you. Boy has it wicked bad, hon."

"I know, I guess." Dawn sipped her tea and looked thoughtful. "There's something I've been thinking about, and I had decided I needed to call you but after last night I wasn't sure how."

"Well, I'm all ears, if you agree to put my major attack of foot-in-mouth disease behind us?"

"Sure. Okay, I want you to tell me what you and Buffy have in common, other than your amazingly individual fashion sense and the ability to kick demon ass."

"Aside from the slaying?" She sipped her coffee, frowning. "We both had our asses saved by Angel a time or two, both nearly had to kill him. Um, Watchers. The First. Dunno what else."

Dawn looked at her thoughtfully. "As far as I can tell from the Watcher diaries, as of next month, Buffy will be the oldest living slayer. Ever. You're what, just a few months behind?"

The young woman got up and poured more tea, and then pulled a notebook from her Ogdenville Community College school bag.

"Well, Buffy was called first, so I guess she has seniority." Faith decided not to mention her own jail time, or her time in a coma, not sure how they should count anyway.

"Yes, but she died and was gone a while before coming back. It's about a wash, near as I can tell. You ever wonder why she made it so long?"

Faith thought about her conversation last night with Wood. "Family. I think Spike said it once, like 'a slayer with family and friends, bloody hell!' I know that if it wasn't for her friends looking out for her, I might have killed her myself, back then."

Dawn grinned. "A lot of people hit the friends angle, but the Watcher diaries show a lot of slayers had friends. Robin's mom even had a lover when she was called. But in the end, it never mattered. I've been doing some research, and I have a theory."

"Well, lay it one me, Research Girl." Faith was really interested now, and was happy to put the previous night's incident behind them.

"How many brothers and sisters do you have, Faith?" She took a clean piece of paper and a pen and set them in front of her on the table.

"Just my lonesome, if you aren't counting you and Buffy and the new slayers."

Dawn wrote 'only child' on her paper, and put 'Faith Wood' under it. "Okay, let's name some more. Xander Harris. Willow Rosenberg. Robin Wood. Rupert Giles. You see where this is going?"

Faith looked at the list. "I got one. William the Bloody. Oh, and Wesley Windham-Pryce."

"Mmm hmm, and let's not forget..." She put Buffy's name down. "For most of her formative slaying career, you can't count me, can you? See the pattern?"

"It's pretty clear, I grant you. Still, what does that show? I mean lots of folks don't have a lot of kids, you know?" Faith was looking at the list and thinking. She could have added Fred Burkle to that list. "Oh, Cordy Chase."

Dawn nodded and added her to the list. "I forgot that one. We maybe could put Oz on here too. I think he had an older brother maybe, but none of us ever really knew for sure. Anyway, you said, 'a lot of folks don't have many kids.' Ever notice how many of us kids don't have many folks?"

She made a new column titled 'single parent' and put check marks next to Buffy, Faith, Robin, and after a moment, Spike. Then she made another column 'useless, cruel or missing parents' and put checks by Xander, Willow, Wesley, Cordy, and Oz.

"Whoops, forgot a special category." Dawn was deep into this now, and it was obvious she had given it a lot of thought. She wrote, "Magically created people" and wrote, "Dawn Summers, Anyanka Jenkins" on it, and checked the appropriate columns.

"Okay, so we got some screwed up family lives. What about it? I know you didn't do all this work just for kicks." Faith was looking at the list. She knew she could have added more, people she'd known, friends she'd seen fall.

"What makes ordinary people ordinary? Their whole lives, their experiences, their families, it's a whole package." Dawn got up and was pacing, her bunny slippers scuff scuffing across the tile floor. "The last time Buffy died, she didn't want to come back. What finally made her accept it at all was the idea that I was going to be here alone without her. She's slacked off a little in the sistering department since then I admit, but she did a pretty good job of saving the world after that realization. So, to some extent the world exists because she had family. It's not just the family we're born into, but the families we make."

"I'm with you, D. Family good. Rah-rah-rah for family. But where do you go from there?"

"Faith, don't you see? What's missing here? Generations. Our parents are almost all dead or gone. We have no children, and almost no brothers and sisters. We have no base, so every little apocalypse that comes along throws us. It seems like… like…" She looked for words.

"Like the end of the world?" Faith asked with a grin. "So I ask ya again, what do we do about it?"

Dawn grinned, and sat back down. She took a sip of her tea, and looked around as if suddenly worried they might be overheard. "Well," she said, "I'm not sure about you, but I'm starting by getting pregnant." She folder her hands over her still very flat stomach and beamed.

"You're… when are you planning on doing this, and when are you telling Xander?"

"Um, about three weeks ago, for the first part. I was sort of hoping you could help me with the second part. I wanted to try this theory out on you first."

Faith looked at Dawn, then at Dawn's belly, then back at her radiant grin. "I just ask one thing, Dawn. Don't tell him suddenly. I'd hate for him to die of shock before we get a look at the expression on his face. Oh, and better tell Buffy soon after, or she'll turn us both inside out for hiding it from her."

Faith gave Dawn a big hug, and was surprised at how happy she was for her friend. The theory might be nonsense, but it had a certain logic. Faith was woman enough to know there are times when happy baby-making has a strong appeal. She realized that's why Dawn was burning through the Ogdenville Community College catalog. She was trying to finish before her baby and her body gave her a deadline.

Faith drove home, so lost in thought she missed her exit and had to double back. She thought about Wood, and what sort of father he'd make. It was a weird thought, something they had never really discussed. She missed the parking garage entrance too, and finally gave up trying to concentrate and just parked on the street.

VIII.

Robin Wood waited in the conference room lounge of the Transit Authority. He'd already swept the area for anything suspicious. He had one of his students, Toni King, a dangerous redhead with almost as much experience with a sword as he had, working the crowd outside. Something still didn't seem right, so he'd stayed behind when Mayor Mitchell had gone into the conference room with his counterparts from North Haverbrook and Lago Vista.

They had some minor details to go over before they announced the extension of the monorail into Lago Vista. Wood rarely rode the little trains, since they mostly connected the mall in North Haverbrook with the campus in Ogdenville and some commercial parks in Brockway. Adding a Lago Vista line, with its bedroom communities, should make the system a lot more viable, or so went the logic.

Wood reviewed in his mind the report he'd received that morning from the sheriff's office. It seemed the person most likely to be responsible for the harassment of mayor Mitchell was the former mayor herself, Ms. Lena Beauxchance. She'd been driven from office in a bribery and corruption scandal, and had then jumped bail after being indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges. Her whereabouts were unknown.

One piece of information that Wood was privy to, and his sheriff's office contacts were not, was that Lena Beauxchance was a known figure in the supernatural underworld, having put hexes on opponents and critics for years. Nothing apocalyptic, just the sort of dime-store evil that had greased the wheels against the interest of good, honest people for years.

What Wood did not know, was that Beauxchance had decided to up the ante. She had been tipped off that Mitchell had protection, and had paid dearly for two items to tip the scales in her favor. First, she had a glamour cast, which rendered her unremarkable. It was a lot cheaper than invisibility, and less likely to be magically warded against. You could still see her, but it took amazing will and clarity of mind to actually notice her.

Second, she had purchased a blade, a thin triangular blade of obsidian that could pass through any metal detector, like those at the transit center entrances. It was sharp enough to be lethal, and she knew she could throw it accurately out to about twelve feet. Before she was that close to the new Mayor, she needed to eliminate his bodyguard. She walked, unnoticed, past the standard security and up to the conference room lounge.

Robin Wood stood, tranquil, peaceful, in the center of a room. His eyes were open, but he was looking inward, processing with his mind and not his eyes. He was standing that way, thinking about nothing, worried about nothing, when Death came for him.

A knife flew through the air, aimed for a spot just below his shoulder blade. It was slender and black and only the slightest exhale of breath from the woman who had thrown it marked its passage. Her eyes shone and a grin began to form as the blade hurtled through the air towards Wood.

With one motion, he bent one knee and reached towards the small of his back. This caused him to drop slightly and to pivot. As he drew a small wooden sword from a sheath in his jacket, he continued to duck and turn, whipping around as he spun into the ground.

The white silk handle of his hardwood blade made his dark hands look almost ebony, as they whipped his sword through the space his body had occupied moments before. With a single sharp exhalation, he drove his bent leg straight, snapping back to his full height as his blade connected with the knife precisely where he had been standing.

"KI!" came the sound, from his mouth, from his chest, from the muscles of his arms, the powerful flesh of his legs. His whole body moved, just as he had been trained so long ago. Just one "KI!" and there was a knife, now whistling back the way it had came, rotating slightly from the spin of his blocking blade.

With a sigh, the knife ended its whispering flight, protruding from the throat of the woman who had thrown it. It fixed her grin, not faltering even as she slowly collapsed. A knife, buried there just so, does not kill instantly. She had time to realize that he had killed her. Then she was gone.

Wood looked at the body of Lena Beauxchance. It was unremarkable, almost unnoticeable on the floor, surround by a small pool of blood. He recognized the effect, and almost chuckled to himself. "Stupid, stupid woman," he commented to her corpse. "I didn't notice you there. But I had plenty of time to notice a knife flying at my back. Should have stuck to politics."

He considered just tipping the body into a dumpster. While the glamour endured he might have gotten away with it, but he finally decided to call the sheriff. Of course, the way he told it, she had snuck up on him and tried to use her knife, somehow falling on it during the struggle. Better not call attention to the hardwood bokuto, a shorter, modified version of the practice sword used in kendo, which he carried beneath his jacket.

The sword was pointed, but not edged, and fire-hardened with a smooth finish and a cloth grip. In his hands, it was almost as deadly as a steel blade, and worked well on vampires too. And of course, it passed through metal detectors with ease, another reason to perhaps not mention his superior swordsmanship display to the sheriff. He glanced at Beauxchance's knife, and noted the flaked obsidian edge. He'd have to remember that idea, too.

By the time all the police reports and paperwork were done, and Mayor Mitchell safely on his way home, a town-car of guards discretely tailing his signature hybrid coupe, Wood was exhausted.

He wasn't certain, but it was better than even odds his old wound had opened during his fight at the transit center. He was anxious to get home and prepare the herbal remedies that best treated the wounds caused by the "ubervamps," the Turok-han. He got in his car and headed back to the dojo, already feeling the blood seeping into his shirt.

IX.

Faith lay on her bed, a little silken something covering her body, but leaving her arms and legs bare. She'd been waiting for a while for Wood to come home, and pondering what Dawn had told her. The more she thought about it, the more it made a certain kind of sense.

She'd called her husband on his cell, and all he'd told her was that he'd killed an attacker, and the police were taking statements. She knew it could take hours, and had made a call to the dojo's lawyer, a contact provided by the new Slayers' Council. She'd then proceeded to pace a groove in the floor, thinking about Wood.

He was a good man. Not perfect; he tended to idealize the whole slayer thing, probably because of his mom. He also drove himself too hard, and sometimes her as well. But the more she thought about it, the more she could see him as a father.

She did not have good luck with father figures, by blood or by association. She'd wondered a few times what would have happened in her life if she'd had Rupert Giles as her Watcher, the Great White Father of their little Sunnydale band. Not much would have been different, was her conclusion, because she hadn't been ready to listen.

Mayor Wilkins was still the closest thing to a father she'd ever had. As perverse as it was, she missed that still, sometimes. When the First had appeared to her, wearing his face, she'd known it was a lie. She'd known it was Evil. And she'd known that she wasn't the person who followed that Boss any more. Yet still, she'd wanted to hug him. She'd wanted to hear him say he approved of her.

"This is wicked screwed up," she said to herself. One thing was certain, beyond any argument. She wanted to talk to Wood about Dawn's theory, and see how he took the news that maybe being married, having children, making strong ties with friends like Xander and Dawn, maybe that was part of saving the world, too.

Besides, she'd heard on Oprah and whatever that sex trying to make a baby is the best sex there is. Add to that Wood having just killed someone, in a sword fight no less, and they should be breaking the freakin' furniture.

She heard Robin coming down the hall, heard him toss he keys in the bowl on the table, and the door to the bedroom slid open. Backlit by the hall lights, he was tall, striking, and just all-around manly. She forgot her carefully planned speech and just launched herself at him.

"Missed me today, girl?" he asked her, trying to push her back a bit and keep his footing.

"Mm hmmm," she moaned into him, spinning him around and backing him towards the bed with kisses, pulling at his belt.

"Hey there, little firecracker. Slow down." He almost never called her that because it made her go all mushy, and she usually punched him on the arm when he did it. His knees hit the edge of the bed and he went down, arms thrown out to the sides to catch him.

She stood over him, straddling his knees, and whipped his belt out of his pants so fast it cracked like a whip. She looked down at him, spread eagled on the bed except where she had trapped his powerful legs between her thighs.

"Yowza," she purred. "Momma like!"

"Faith... honey…" Wood was frowning at her, trying to sit up. "This isn't really the best time…" And with that, his eyes went unfocused and he started to slump back to the bed. His shirt came open, and Faith could see the pale silvery scars across his belly, and the rich black blood beading along them. She looked down at her silk negligee, and saw it smeared with his blood as well.

"Oh, crap!" She grabbed the phone off the table and flipped it open. Instead of 9-1-1, she buzzed the desk.

"Master Chen! Master Chen, I need you. It's Robin, he's bleeding again, bad." She flung the phone down, and lay next to Wood, taking his face in her hands. "What have you done, honey? What were you thinking?"

He had no response, and his breathing was irregular. She slapped his face lightly, and barked at him. "Hey! Wood! Snap out of it. Come back here right now. Don't you leave me, you glorious bastard! I need you. We all need you."

And then Master Chen was there, his dark eyes sweeping over Wood. He reached out to touch Wood's chest, the skin on his ancient hands so thin and fine it was like rice paper. He murmured something, and moved his other hand across Wood's face. Suddenly, there was an incense stick burning in his hand, and the smoke spiraled lazily around Wood's face.

Faith moved back, holding Wood's hand and feeling useless. Chen touched Robin on the chest again, a slight tap, and then Wood took a shuddering breath. Smoke was drawn into his nostrils, and his body shook all over, like he's stepped from a pool into the wind. His eyes blinked slowly, and he looked at Faith. He tried to speak, but no words came.

"Oh, Ricky," she sighed at him, worry scrunching her features despite her efforts to appear calm for him. "We have to take care of you, okay? Just relax."

"It's going to be okay," he whispered. His eyes closed. "You look great, Lucy." And then his breathing became more regular, more peaceful, and he stopped trembling. Faith looked to Master Chen, who sat contemplating Wood.

"Is he going to be okay? Tell me he is, Master Chen, please."

"Is beyond my ability to help, Mei Mei. I make him sleep, and he will rest. But his wounds are deep, and have fought the healing of a strong man for long time. He needs powerful magic, or powerful medicine, maybe both."

"But you can help him? You know someone who can help him, right?" She had never seen the ancient man, with his long white beard and his bushy brows, look so sad.

"I cannot fix, but I will see. Tonight I pray, and tomorrow, I ask my father if he know. I ask my grandfather. If there is a way, we find. Now, you clean him careful, with herbs I give him before. You sit with him, hold head in lap and tell him happy things. Tomorrow I ask my father, ask my grandfather, we find a way."

"Yes, Master Chen. Thank you."

"I go finish book now, and pray. You rest, Mei Mei, and talk to him."

He turned and slowly went back to his seat at the front desk. She was left, holding Wood's head, cradled in her lap.

From somewhere deep in her childhood, she pulled a memory of her mother, holding her that way when she was just four or five. It was mumps or measles or something that she should have had shots for, and she hadn't, and had been very sick. She smelled her mother's scent, the shampoo and the cheap laundry soap, for just a moment as she took the herb compress from the bedside table and began to carefully clean his wounds.

As the bleeding slowed, and her memory of her mother was pushed away by the smell of the herbs and the coppery tang smell of blood, she realized she was softly singing, the same song her mother had sung all those years ago in Southy.

"Some bright morning when this life is over, I'll fly away."

"To that home on God's celestial shore, I'll fly away."

"I'll fly away, O Glory, I'll fly away."

"When I die, Hallelujah, by and by, I'll fly away…"

Her tears fell, and her voice failed, and she whispered to him of life and love and never letting go, and she was still there gently rocking him when the morning came.