Chapter 7

Disclaimer: You can tell it's not mine. I'm not running around screaming like an idiot.

Warning: The following chapter deals with disturbing subject matter.

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Chapter 10

One and a Half Years After the Fall of Sunnydale

"So you're telling me, Mr. Harris, that my daughter is some kind of demon killing machine?"

Xander sat across from Mr. and Mrs. Sakowski in their living room. Charlie and Mary were your typical American couple. He was an insurance salesman and she sold houses. Xander didn't really know what to say to them. He thought he should have it down now. Some sort of pat speech to tell them that their daughter was a mystically empowered warrior Chosen to fight for Good and that he had had a part in that choosing. He'd done this enough over the past year and a half but he was always at a loss at how to start.

Each Slayer's home situation was different. Some didn't have parents at all. They were the easiest to deal with, no muss, no fuss. Some families took it as a blessing. In a third world country like Ethiopia or Laos, it was a miracle. Their child would be cared for, given a free education and a life outside of poverty. They could even, if they so chose, bring their family out as well once they had finished training. Possible death at a young age was no deterrent. In places like that you faced death daily and it made you rather callous to the fact.

Now that Xander had moved back to the States though, he ran into families that cared about such things more and more often. He should be happy to see loving parents. All too often when he was growing up he could forget they existed. His own parents were nothing to write home about, a drunk and abusive father and an uncaring mother. His best friends' parents hadn't been any better. Jessie's parents thought he was a geek and a loser and doted on his older brother, ignoring him. Willow's family just plain forgot about her sometimes, off on their academic tour of the world.

The only sign of normalcy he'd known during his teenage years were Buffy's mother Joyce, after Buffy had told her the truth, and Giles, Buffy's Watcher. The two had tried to provide some shred of stability in the Scoobies hectic teenage years, Joyce by simply mothering every one of them as much as she could and Giles by providing a stable male figure for them to look up to. The miasma that was Sunnydale had managed to break their little family apart bit by bit, however.

First Joyce's death, made somehow worse by the naturalness of it. If there had been an enemy to fight or blame they might have all felt better. Giles' disappearance back to England after Buffy's death had been the straw that broke the camel's back. Their happy times were over. Even after Buffy's return to life and Giles' subsequent return to Sunnydale things had never been the same for Xander. Anya's death at the final battle had only further ruined his dreams for a family. So he should be happy to see a Slayer being raised in a loving and supporting family. But the truth was it only made things harder and this situation was rather unusual. The Slayer in question was only 7 years old.

Xander took a sip of his coffee and then looked the man in the eyes. He could tell his eye patch discerned the man. He'd gotten used to the reaction. Then he started his story. "I'll try to explain it as best as I can, Mr. Sakowski…"

As he spoke he thought back on the situation. There had been some unusual times in the past year and a half, but nothing had been so disturbing as when the first newly Activated Slayer had died and they'd found out who had replaced her. The truth was they had no idea what was going to happen to the Slayer line when they'd chosen to activate all the Potentials at once. It had been a decision forced upon them and they really hadn't had the time, or truthfully the forethought, to consider the ramifications of their decision. Or, if any of them had, they'd shoved them to the side because of the desperation of the times.

When the girl had died, a victim of a train wreck of all things, Willow had felt the calling of another Slayer being Chosen. It had, at first, been a big relief to them. Her spell had activated all the possible Potentials that were available in the world at that time. There had been two possible scenarios that would play out after that. Either the Slayer line would fade out, the Activated Slayers dieing off and possibly resetting itself to its original parameters in the future, or the pool of Potentials would shift. To where and to what group it would shift, they had no idea.

The original pool that Potentials had been Chosen from had been girls between the ages of 12 and 18. All magick had a price and the spell used to create the Slayers had been particularly powerful. The thing that had been most valuable at the time that the Shadowmen had done the spell had been young girls of breeding age. They were the one thing that would ensure the continuation of the tribe. Willow's spell had been just as powerful, if not more so, and demanded its own price. The pool that Potentials were Chosen from were now girl children between the ages of 7 and 11.

People were living longer now and valued their formative years. Children were prized all over the world and were viewed as precious commodities. Innocence was the price that the spell chose to exact. The Scoobies had been horrified. It was one thing to send a teenager out to fight demons. They, at least, might have a chance. But to send a child was completely abhorrent. The one saving grace in the whole situation was that they weren't activated automatically like the previous Potentials. A Slayer had to die for them to be Chosen.

There were over a thousand Slayers worldwide though and the Scoobies had had to scramble to locate and protect them all, deaths were inevitable. Fewer and fewer Slayers were dying now thanks to the efforts of the newly reformed Council, but they still had a small core of little girls who were now charged with saving world and there would be a lot more in the future. It was something they where all having to learn to live with.

Mr. Sakowski dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his forehead after Xander finished his story. Mrs. Sakowski just looked shell shocked.

"Why should we believe you?" His voice was low and angry, it was a natural reaction.

"That's what I'm here for," Julia, the girl sitting next to Xander on the couch, said. She had been silent up till now, she usually was. A Slayer always accompanied Xander on his recruiting missions, both for proof and for backup. Xander had found she was particularly good at bonding with the families and getting them to trust her.

Calmly she reached into the bag at her feet and pulled out a common tire iron. She handed it over the coffee table to Mr. Sakowski. A little confused, he took it from her.

"Try to bend it."

"I can't bend a tire iron," he told her.

"I know. It's just to make sure we're not faking anything."

He nodded and slowly took the bar between his hands and tried to bend it. He was a rather big man, looked like he had played some football in high school, but he couldn't bend the bar.

"So it's real, so what?" He handed the bar back to Julia.

She proceeded to bend the bar in half before their disbelieving eyes. It was a common, if somewhat overdone trick, but it made a believer out of just about everybody. Besides, tire irons were cheap and you didn't get looked at too oddly for carrying them around.

"Later on tonight we can take you out to find a vampire if you want," Xander offered. Sometimes it took seeing a Slayer in action to convince people.

"You're certain our Samantha is one of these…Slayers?" Mrs. Sakowski spoke up for the first time since Xander had begun his story. She seemed to be coming out of her shock.

"See this," he pulled a small glass ball out of the bag, it was pulsing brightly, "It only gets like this when it's close to a newly Chosen Slayer." All of their eyes went upward, to where little Samantha was sleeping. "We've never been wrong before."

"Is Samantha having trouble sleeping lately, Mary? Has she been having a lot of nightmares?" Julia's voice was soft and kind so as not to startle the woman.

"Well, yes, she has been a little restless lately. I thought it was just growing pains."

"Ask her about it in the morning. Ask her if she'd been dreaming about monsters, if she's been dreaming about being lots of other girls in the past. Part of the Slayer package is prophetic dreams. Some girls get them more often then others, but we all get the past lives thing."

"Jesus," Mr. Sakowski got up and started pacing as his wife sat back on the love seat, her shaking hand at her mouth. "So say this is all true. What do you plan to do about it? What's gonna' happen to our little girl?!"

"She'll be provided for for the rest of her life." This, Xander had a preset speech for. "She'll be put in a class with other girls her age. Her entire education will be paid for by the Council, from start to finish. We encourage our girls to attend college after they finish at the Academy and we have connections at some of the oldest and finest universities in the world. We're a growing organization. She's going to have her pick of assignments and places to go."

"I thought you were training demon killers here?" Mr. Sakowski's voice was doubtful, but at least he was still listening.

"A Slayers job is to maintain the balance," Julia's slid smoothly into the silence, "We have to work in every layer of society to do so. Evil doesn't just roam around in the sewers at night. It can go all the way up to the top echelons of politics and business and so we have to be prepared to go there."

"So she could be a lawyer or even a doctor?" Mrs. Sakowski seemed to want to latch on to normality.

"Of course she could and she'll be helped along every step of the way."

"What happens if we don't send her with you?"

There it was. The one question that every parent asked and the one Xander hated the most. This was where they had to be completely honest because if they weren't, tragedy could strike.

"It'll start out with her getting restless," his voice was dead calm and his one eye seemed to pin the couple in place. "She'll start sneaking out at night and believe me, no matter how you watch her, she'll find a way. When you confront her about it she'll be defensive and moody and she may lash out involuntarily."

"She's strong now," Julia continued the story seamlessly. She was speaking from personal experience now. "She feels it all the way through her and it makes her hyper and she'll want to move all the time. If you pin her down she'll react on instinct and she may hurt somebody. She doesn't know how strong she really is and she can't control it."

"If she doesn't hurt someone and she doesn't get caught, she'll continue sneaking out," Xander picked the tale back up. Some things just shouldn't be brought up again. "She won't know what she's looking for exactly, but eventually she'll find it. If she's lucky it'll just be a baby vamp and maybe she'll slay it, but eventually she's going to run across something out there that's bigger and badder than she is. When that happens, she'll either get beaten up really badly or she'll get killed."

Mr. Sakowski had sat back down by the end of their speech, unable to say anything. It was obscene what they were telling him. His little baby was going to die? He wanted to tell them all to go to get the hell out of his house, but a part of him couldn't do it. What if they were right?

"Is my daughter some kind of monster now?" Mrs. Sakowski's voice was shaking.

"No!" Julia wanted to make this issue perfectly clear. Some Slayers had lost their whole families because of this sort of thing. "A Slayer is a hunter, there's no getting around that, but we aren't monsters. The instincts that Samantha has now are to help her hunt the monsters and make sure they can't hurt innocent people. If properly trained she'll be in control of them, not the other way around."

"Slayers are Champions, Mrs. Sakowski," Xander's voice was firm on this point, "they're heroes. It's our job at the Council to support them in their task as much as we possibly can and trust me, we take our job very seriously."

Charlie and Mary were silent for a moment, staring at each other and communicating in the way that only people who had been together for a long time could. Then they seemed to come to a decision.

"I'm not saying we're firm on anything yet, Mr. Harris," Mr. Sakowski warned in a low voice, "We have a lot more questions for you. Not to mention we have to talk this over with Samantha. But if we were to continue, what would be the next step?"

Xander sighed inaudibly, this had gone better than he had thought it would. He reached into the bag again and pulled out some papers.

"Here's the condensed version. Samantha will have to go off to a month long training session. It's something that all Slayers do at first. You're welcome to come to England, at our expense of course, to tour the school and see what it is we do there. You're lucky actually. Our new school in Cleveland will be finished soon and so she won't be to far away once classes start." He didn't go into the fact that the school was located there because of the Hellmouth, it was just too complicated. They had built it far enough away from the main sight that it wasn't affected by the miasma that Hellmouths released, but the training opportunities were to good to pass up.

"The 'baby groups' as we call them," Julia continued, "Are never let out on their own. They have to go patrol, it's a necessity for any Slayer, but it's in as a controlled environment as we can make it, one senior Slayer for every newbie." They had found that this was a good way to give some of the older slayers who were about to graduate a good taste of what leading squads was like without putting them in a dangerous situation. They were even graded on how well they interacted with their charge.

"Before all that happens though, we need to do some paperwork," Xander pushed the papers across the table toward them. Here came the fun part. "This is a standard non-disclosure agreement. You aren't allowed to tell anyone about this, friends or family. Some of the other family's know and you are welcome to discuss things with them, of course." They'd actually gotten a few potential Watchers from families of Slayers. It had solved a few problems all around.

"I believe Andrew's even started up a secure network you can chat on online," Julia interjected, "Some of the families have become very good friends."

"There's a little bit on the end though, that isn't so standard," he pointed to the last page where a series of runes formed a circle. "That's a binding spell. Now this is important, so pay attention. Once you've signed the contract, should you violate it, we'll know at once. Depending on the size of the infraction we'll be forced to take steps. This could include anything from a memory erasure to any number of legal actions."

They'd actually come up with this after one of the families had tried to go to the press. It was their answer to the problem of the world finding out about their secret. In the past the old Council had simply kidnapped girls away from their families and indoctrinated them. This left the families grieving but completely in the dark about the mystical world. The Scoobies knew they couldn't do that sort of thing. Andrew had actually been the one to come up with the contract solution. He'd been inspired after his run in with Wolfram and Hart.

"We're here to protect humanity," Xander continued, "But to be able to do that we have to remain a secret. We have to be able to maneuver behind the scenes." Charlie and Mary nodded uneasily. They'd just gotten their first glimpse into a world they were going to be pulled inexorably into, it was nerve wracking.

Xander felt he and Julia had been lucky today. Their recruitment had gone fairly well. Samantha was going to go off to the Academy and hopefully grow up to be a successful Slayer who saved a lot of people. This is what he did now. This was his way of taking care of the young women whose lives they'd interrupted. He didn't have superpowers and he was just a man, but now he could help. That's all he'd ever really wanted to do.

He gave them a trademark Xander grin as he finished off his spiel. "Besides, who's gonna' believe you if you told them about all this anyway?"

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Author's Note:

So here's the deal. This might be a controversial chapter for some of you out there. I was even a little disturbing for me to write. I mean little girls as Slayers? But I kept coming back to one question after the final episode of Buffy. What was going to happen to the Slayer line? They haven't, so far anyway, dealt with it much in the comic book (unless you count Fray which is still a huge ? in my book). Also, they kept saying over and over again in the show that magick has a price and for a spell the size of Willow's I figured the price had to be kinda big. This was the solution I came up with.

I chose Xander as the one to deal with this for several reasons. One, there were a lot of questions surrounding the recruitment of Slayers and how they dealt with families that needed answering. Two, I always thought he was one of the best teachers out of all the Scoobies. Xander always came across as a very approachable guy to me. Finally, I put him in charge of running the schools and dealing with family situations because he always seemed to want to protect everyone and I thought he'd do his utmost to keep all the kids safe.

The length of this chapter was a little bit longer than the others simply because there are so many questions that needed answering. I'd answer one and come up with a dozen more. I think I covered the basics of everything but if you come up with anymore just send them to me. If I can, I'll try to answer them in the future chapters.

You might notice as well that there are times that I capitalize Activated and Chosen. Activated is to refer to those Slayers brought into their powers by Willow's spell. Chosen refers to all Slayers before the spell (Buffy, Faith, etc.) and the new mini-Slayers, because they are Chosen by the PTB's.

I just can't seem to get in the mood to write an omake after that chapter so I'll have to save it for next time. Instead I'll just thank all the readers and reviewers as per usual. I'd also like to make a note to those that added me to their update list or favorite list. Even if you don't review, those notices give me a warm tingly feeling inside. Every little bit helps. Also, a lot of internet cookies to crazy4anime for taking the time to send me those reviews. They always make me smile.