Family

The next day, Buffy was awoken promptly at seven o'clock. She then threw the pillow at her sister and tried to go back to sleep. Dawn woke her up again, this time using a coat rack from the living room. Buffy broke the coat rack with one sleepy kick, but rolled out of bed, finally waking her up. Groggily, Buffy pulled herself to her feet and looked at the broken coat rack.

"We don't have the money to pay for that," Buffy said.

"We're meeting our cousins and our aunt today," Dawn said. "They're the only family we have left that matters and I don't want to mess it up. Go put on something nice."

"Shower," mumbled the sleep-addled slayer.

"No, we're having breakfast with them at nine and you broke the alarm, refused to wake when I tried and only got up when you thought you were getting hit. Go get presentable, it's after eight," Dawn said, her hands on her hips in a show of temporary dominance. The effect was ended as Buffy hit her sister with the pillow from before. Then Buffy staggered over to the washroom to clean up.

A few oh-so-short minutes later (or so they seemed to Buffy), Dawn pulled the door open and dragged the showering Buffy, still not dried off. The Slayer escaped and ran back into the wash room grabbing a comb and her underwear. Dawn impatiently tapped her foot as Buffy combed her hair back straight and took care of her morning routine. For Dawn it was too slow, so the younger Summers grabbed a black dress and handed it to her older sister.

"Get dressed," Dawn commanded.

In the end, Buffy ended up looking more like a horror movie victim than her usual self. Her hair was a mess, her dress wasn't exactly fitted right and her eyes, still bearing the signs of lack of sleep made her look more dead than alive. Willow and Tara saw Buffy being dragged out of the room and had to suppress their laughter.

Luckily for Buffy, the restaurant was a couple blocks away, so she had plenty of time to comb and clean as much as one can when trudging from place to place in a city. By the time they arrived at the Café Milagro, it was nearly nine and Buffy considered herself to be nearly presentable.

A charming couple and their children ran Café Milagro. The mother was born and raised in France and moved to Costa Rica in her early twenties after falling in love with a young Costa Rican man who she later married. They opened this shop years ago and had started with local fare, but had gradually changed towards le petit déjeuner of her birth country. They focused on fresh made butter croissants, hard crusted baguettes, local hand made jams, French style chocolate as a morning drink, and fresh Costa Rican fruit. The end result was a perfect blend of French baking with Costa Rican ingredients. With this new move, they had changed the name to Café Milagro after their first daughter. This daughter, now ten, helped out around the shop before heading to school during the day. Afterwards she would return and help with the afternoon rush.

Sonya Hammond, formerly Murphy, but she had changed her name back after the divorce from her children's father, had discovered this café years ago when she would visit her father, the late John Hammond, on his few days off. She was quite a bit younger than her sister, Joyce, being the daughter of John Hammond's second wife, after Joyce's mother died in Kenya. The thirteen-year difference was starkly clear to most people who knew them, although Joyce had worn the years better than her sister. Sonya Hammond had used her full access to the Hammond fortune to…edit...herself, so to speak, with the finest plastic surgeons in the United States, Europe and Central America. It was one of the many reasons the marriage didn't work; Mr. Murphy was a jealous man.

Now, unlike many half-siblings, there was no bad blood between them, Joyce and Sonya had been very close, but the age difference between them had a drastic effect on the type of relationship they had. Joyce was more like an aunt than a sister. When Sonya was entering grade school, Joyce was entering college; when Sonya was entering high school, Joyce was getting married. Sonya would see Joyce during the summers and on school breaks or at special long weekends that John Hammond needed a family for public persona. But that was when the fights started. Sonya remembered those fight between her father and her sister well.

The first fights were about Joyce's choice of major. John Hammond believed anything but a business degree was a waste of time. The fact that Joyce was choosing Art History of all things drove the old man up the wall. Sonya could remember the voices echoing down the halls of the Hammond mansion, well, whichever one they were living in that month. Joyce would always say that she was getting a well-rounded education. She would cite the statistics of people who actually worked in their fields after college and it was always staggeringly low. Her father would always claim that they got useless degrees, so of course they didn't work in those fields. They would get so bad, but then they would just stop and those walls would suddenly be silent. It was like living in a tomb. And then, of course Joyce would do something like "accidentally" break a vase that her father had just bought and the fight would start up all over again.

That round of fights ended when Joyce graduated. The new round started when Joyce met Hank. Sonya was just the right age to be thinking about boys and Hank was quite a man when he was young. He also had an incredible capacity for assholery. Joyce never brought Hank over after that first visit, but would sometimes visit Sonya at times when Sonya wasn't at her parents' mansions. Sony had been the only family member invited to the wedding. After that, Joyce and Sonya would write, but the times between letters grew and grew until years slipped between them. Sonya had not even known Joyce had moved to Sunnydale after the divorce.

But now Joyce was dead.

That changed everything. Sonya's mother, after not getting her "fair share" in the divorce from John Hammond (she left with millions), was prompted written out of the will. Everything was going to Sonya and Joyce…Joyce was getting half of everything. In her heart, Sonya was overjoyed at the fact, although she had to pretend to be bitter for public opinion (it was expected of her, after all). This meant that John Hammond had not thrown out all hope. Sonya had hoped Joyce and their father could have mended fences when they got divorced, but John Hammond wouldn't even speak on it. Sonya wondered if her father had tried to contact Joyce and been refused.

But now John Hammond was dead.

They were both dead.

All that Sonya had of either of them were her children and Joyce's girls. She did not know what to expect. Would they look like Joyce or would they take after their father? Would they be a blend of both? What would they act like? Would they have Joyce's interests? Would they be only out for themselves like Hank? Would they want anything to do with the family business? Would they want anything to do with the family?

Now, Sonya waited for the answers as Tim and Lex devoured their breakfast. Tim and Lex: her two little children. Now that the divorce was finished, she had moved down to Costa Rica to stay with them. Funny how no one was willing to tell her ahead of time that she would not be able to leave because of something her father did. Something that her children knew of but refused to speak of. She wondered constantly what it could be.

She was glad they could continue their education down here. She had managed to hire the best tutors she could to keep their education continuing. Lex had made close friends with several children in the area and was well on her way to becoming fluent in the local Spanish dialect. She taught them baseball and they taught her soccer, or football as they called it here. They were all much faster after having hit a couple of home runs into the neighbor's upstairs windows. Tim was having a good time as well, although Spanish was not coming as easily to him as it did to Lex. He was excelling in his biology and computer science classes. In fact, he was delving into science deeper than she ever remembered him doing before. She guessed that was because scientists in paleontology, paleobotany, ecology and math were tutoring him. How they had met up, Sonya didn't know, and she was not entire sure she wanted to. She knew it had something to do with whatever happened on her father's island.

Sonya was embarrassed to admit that she was having a much harder time learning Spanish than either of her children. She never did have a gift for languages. Her embarrassing years of Latin and French were horrors she refused to recount even on penalty of death. Instead of learning the local language she had been absorbed into the intellectual scene, which was usually held in English since that was the lingua franca for the people who took part. She had to admit that most of it flew over her head, but it seemed that there was an important exchange of information about mathematics and how it relates to evolution and paleontology. She had ordered a few books so she could read up about it. She was about half way through Origin of Species and she had started asking questions about it. This had prompted several of the others in the group to start reading it for themselves. Come to find out, most of them had never read it in the first place. When she didn't understand some concepts, she had been loaded with books. Only a few, select pieces were written by the same people who suggested them. Alan Grant suggested John Gould as a place to start. She suddenly discovered that the formerly troublesome words like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Apatosaurus or even pachycephalosaurus were rolling off her tongue when before she would even know what they meant. She was discussing issues of species fitness and chaos theory, things she had never even heard about six months before. She found that she liked it.

But that was getting way off the topic of the morning. Sony Hammond, born of a British father and an American mother, mother herself of Tim and Lex Murphy, was waiting for her sister's only children.

When Dawn finally succeeded in dragging Buffy to Café Milagro, the elder Summers sister was finally fully awake and capable of self locomotion. They stepped into the packed café and suddenly realized they neither knew what their aunt looked like, nor did they have any way to contact her. They glanced around the place and noticed only a few tables were left. Soon though, a pretty woman walked up to them and spoke in accented Spanish.

Buffy, not knowing any Spanish, answered in French as it was as close as she was going to get. The woman smiled brilliantly and switched to the Parisian French of her birth. After a while Buffy turned to Dawn. "She says Madame Murphy is in the back and waiting for us. I think she means our aunt, although I think her name was Hammond."

"It is," Dawn said. "I heard she changed it after her divorce was finalized. Since when do you speak French?"

"Hey, Halloween had to give me more than the ability to sew an antimacassar in five minutes flat and knowing which fork is the salad fork," Buffy said with a shrug. "Xander wasn't the only one who kept something."

"An anti-what?" Dawn said. "I don't even know how to say that."

"It's one of those doily thingies on the backs of chairs," Buffy said as they made their way to the back of the café. "It's to keep hair oil from staining chairs."

"Oh, gross," gacked Dawn.

One of the few tables in the back was one with a pretty blond woman and two children. The woman smiled and stood up. Buffy's first thought was that she looked like Joyce and Susan Sarandon's love child, if that was even possible.

"I'm guessing you are Joyce's girls, right? Hi, I'm Sonya and these are Tim and Lex," She said, motioning to the two children beside her. Buffy shook Sonya's hand hesitantly.

"Uh, hi, I'm Buffy and this is Dawn," Buffy said. Not sure what else to say, she sat down. Dawn took the seat next to Buffy and Lex. "So, uh, you're Mom's sister?"

"Well, half-sister. Your mother is thirteen years older than me…er, was I guess," Sonya said. "I'm still not used to the fact that she's dead."

"Neither are we," Dawn said, falling back into her same level of depression she had been in before the trip. There was a moment of silence, but Buffy tried to fill it with false cheer.

"But at least we get to meet, that's good I suppose," she said. The Slayer gripped the table just a little too hard and pulled her hand away when she realized she was bending the metal of the table. Buffy glanced over and noticed that Lex was staring at the finger marks she put in the aluminum table. Nervously, Buffy tucked her hands behind her. The little girl was still staring at her. …Creepy…

"Yes, yes it is," Sonya said. "I saw you once when you were little, but I doubt you remember. You were only about two."

"Uh no, I don't remember," Buffy said. There was another long period of silence as they all looked at each other.

"…So…Dawn, how old are you?" Sonya asked.

"I'm 14 this year," the brunette said nervously. "I'm going to be a freshman in high school next year."

"That's great," Sonya said. She motioned to the boy. "Tim is twelve and Lex is eight."

"Hi," Tim said nervously.

"…sooooo…..What do you do for fun?" Buffy asked, not sure what to say.

"I play baseball and football, I mean, soccer," Lex said.

"Oh, that's cool. I used to be a cheerleader," Buffy said, wincing at the lameness of the statement. Dawn rolled her eyes.

"Buffy's into martial arts," Dawn said. Buffy shot her an alarmed look. "She's a real natural talent. And she goes to college at UC Sunnydale. I don't play any sports, but I do help out at our friends' shop."

"Oh? Did Joyce let you work?"

"No, it's more like I was there so often that I kept doing stuff," Dawn said.

"What kind of shop? Clothing?" Sonya asked. Buffy and Dawn shared a look. At first it was alarm then it changed to amusement.

"Actually it's a magic shop, although there are a few pieces of clothing," Dawn said. "Some friends of us run it. Giles came down with us. He's kind of like a surrogate father."

"Oh, magic," Sonya said, not sure what they meant by that, but sure that she was being tested. "So, like pulling rabbits out of hats? That sort of thing?"

Buffy shook her head. "Nope, eye of newt, wing of bat, that kind of magic shop."

"I didn't know Joyce was into that sort of crowd," the blond woman said a little confused. "So…are you um...witches?"

"No, but our friends are," Dawn said. "They came down with us, too."

"So, Buffy, what are you studying in school?" Sonya asked, changing the subject. Dawn wisely hid her smile by pretending to wipe her mouth.

"I well, I started thinking that I might go into psychology, the TA was nice, but the professor was a real killer. After dating said TA, I realized it was more the cute TA and less the subject I liked," Buffy rambled. "After breaking up with TA, now thinking that psychology might be okay again with a better professor."

"It sounds like you've been keeping up with the tradition of the Hammond family then, pick the worst possible person," Sonya said. She winced at the scowl that flashed briefly on Tim's face. Lex didn't seem to have caught the reference. Sonya turned back to her nieces. "Just be glad you didn't marry him. Hopefully your generation of the Hammond legacy can find the right person."

"Buffy's been messing up spectacularly on that front," Dawn said, ripping apart a croissant. At Buffy's scandalized outburst, Dawn just gave her a look. "Come on! Pike was named after a fish, Angel was anything but, and Riley was boring at the best of times and an addict at the worst. You could do a lot better."

"Pike wasn't bad," Buffy protested. Dawn made a fish face and waved her hands on her neck like little fins. Buffy laughed and gave her a little push. Dawn almost fell out of the chair. Lex started to giggle and Tim made the first noise since the Summers girls arrived. It was almost a laugh. Sonya let herself laugh for the first time since she had found out her sister was dead.

"So, a first love, a bad boy, and a wannabe bad boy," Sonya asked. "Speaking of poor spouse choices, how is Hank?" Dawn and Buffy gave her identical shrugs.

"Last we heard he was in Spain with his secretary," Buffy said. "He didn't even show up for Mom's funeral." Sonya snorted.

"Sounds like him," she commented derisively. "Hank never did anything that wasn't going to help him get what he wanted. Visiting you or going to a funeral wouldn't be on his itinerary unless it would help his career. He's always been that way. I'm surprised he put the energy into raising you both that he did."

"After the divorce, he didn't have any need for us anymore," Buffy said with a shrug. She took a sip of the breakfast chocolate and her eyes went wide. "This is GOOD."

"That's why I come here," Sonya said with a smile. Dawn just had to stare. Even though her face was a little too tight, she had that kind of plastic smile you saw on supermodels, there were times when Sonya would turn the right way and Dawn could see her mom in the woman. It wasn't every time, but here and there Joyce Summers seemed to be sitting across from her. It made her heart ache.

Buffy could sense that things were getting a little tense for her sister, so she tried to steer the conversation in a different direction. She turned to Tim and smile.

"So Tim," Buffy said, hoping that she wasn't too obvious about changing the subject. "What are you studying in school these days?"

Tim shrugged, but didn't say anything.

"Timothy," Sonya said in a chiding tone. "You never used to be this quiet." She turned back to her nieces and smiled apologetically. "Sorry, he used to talk about dinosaurs and computers for hours on end. Now he'll go through periods of just saying nothing. I just don't know what happened."

"That's alright," Dawn said with a shrug. She and Buffy noticed both kids flinch at the word "dinosaur" and both suspected they knew why. "So what are you studying?"

Tim just slurped his drink.

"Timothy Murphy! Do not slurp your drink in public!" his mother hissed. "Honestly, you've got plenty to talk about considering all the reading Ellie, Ian and Alan have given you. That doesn't even count those things you and Marty talk about. You must have something to say."

"Ellie? Was that Ellie Sattler?" Dawn asked. Tim nodded. "Oh, we met her last night. A guy from the American Embassy introduced us. She was pretty cool with all the paleontology and what not."

"It's not cool anymore," Tim muttered so quietly no one but Buffy and Lex heard him. Lex gave an almost imperceptible nod of agreement.

"What was that Tim?"

"Nothing Mom," he said quietly. Buffy, sensing that the tone of the conversation had changed, stood up.

"Sonya, it's so nice to meet you, but Dawn and I need to do some paperwork with the Embassy and some guy from InGen," she said warmly. "Why don't we meet back up for dinner?"

"That would be great," Sonya said, pulling Buffy into a hug. "It's so great to meet you both."

"Yeah, same here," Dawn said as she mussed up Lex's hair. The little blond girl grinned at the gesture.

"Where would you like to eat? It will be my treat." The Summers sisters looked at each other and shrugged.

"I don't know anything about this city," Buffy said honestly.

"Tell you what," Sonya said. "I'll pick the place and I'll leave a message with the hotel."

"Great! We'll be looking for it," Dawn said with a smile.

Dawn grinned as they walked out.

"What's got you in such a happy?" her sister asked.

"I like them, and," Dawn said, trailing off.

"spit it out squirt," Buffy said playfully.

"I'm not the youngest any more!" Dawn admitted with a widening grin.

"That's what you're happy about?" Buffy said with an incredulous look.

"Yup!"

"Well that's good. Because I like them too."