Jocelyn had been taught to play the piano at the age of eight. When she was ten, she was making samplers embroidered with scripture. By the time she was thirteen she was an accomplished rider, and at sixteen she could balance a book on her head while dancing the Viennese waltz. When she made her debut at eighteen she and her pedigree, traceable to the Battle of Hastings, had three offers of marriage. But her father, who never bothered to hide his preference for his youngest, accepted that she was a hopeless romantic and politely declined. In the past century she had added variously under-handed methods of hand-to-hand combat and proficiency with a dagger to her resume, which, if one were to print it out, would list 'short sword' next to 'table settings.' Two-thousand years of blue blood, however, is difficult to suppress, and it was thus often that Jocelyn found herself a victim of her own breeding.

"It certainly is a clear night," Jocelyn remarked. "The moon is lovely."

"Yea, the moon is lovely alright," the Slayer replied, glancing sideways at the bounty hunter. She'd been making the same inane conversation for the past seven minutes, always in the same dry, polite tone. Buffy grit her teeth. She never thought she'd wish for the potentials. She caught Jocelyn shooting pointed glances at her. Clearly it was her turn to remark on the way the moonlight glinted off the tombstones.

"Look, I appreciate the effort, but this small talk isn't accomplishing anything," Buffy said, turning to face the other woman in exasperation. "In fact its ridiculous. Why can't we just agree that this is weird and try to get past it?" Jocelyn sighed.

"You know, its not often that I spend this much time with my clients," she grudgingly revealed. "I was hoping that if we stuck to the weather you wouldn't want to gab about relationships or share your innermost feelings."

"I don't make it a habit of sharing my deep dark secrets with strangers," Buffy retorted, annoyed. "Especially when I owe them money."

"Well after Anya cornered me to say that having the ability to disappear out of my corset must have made my love life easier, I wasn't taking any chances," Jocelyn muttered darkly. Buffy nodded sympathetically.

"That sounds like Anya," she agreed. They listened to the sound of crickets for a moment, then,

"Did it make it easier?" Jocelyn snorted.

"The first thing I did after I killed Damian was stop wearing dresses," she said. "I figured if I wasn't a member of polite society anymore, why dress like it?"

"Damian?" Buffy asked, arching an eyebrow. Jocelyn sighed.

"Lover gone bad." Buffy nodded sympathetically.

"I had to stab my boyfriend through the heart once."

"It's never easy," Jocelyn commented sagely.

"Got that right," Buffy agreed. She the natural pause pass, then asked the question that had been on her mind ever since Giles had shared what he'd found about the Phoenix.

"When you come back," she said quietly, "from dying, do you feel…?" She couldn't finish the sentence. She'd never thought she'd ever meet anyone who could relate to what she'd experienced the summer she'd defeated Glory, and now that she had, she couldn't even put her question into words.

"Hollow?" Jocelyn answered, turning slightly to face Buffy. The Slayer nodded, choking on the emotions welling up in her throat. "I only see it," the bounty hunter continued, looking at the ground and stabbing at it with her boot. "But I'm right there, hovering on the edge. The burning is bad, but the ripping-"

"Is the hardest," Buffy choked out. Jocelyn looked up at her, the pain in the girl's eyes penetrating her defenses.

"I'm not going to take him away, you know," she said softly, responding to the other woman's unexpected vulnerability. "It's obvious you have a connection." Buffy wasn't sure if she should be more shocked by how well Jocelyn had read her or the fact that she'd actually made a clear statement of intention.

"I don't love him," she admitted, trying to keep the tears that were clouding her vision from falling. "I mean I care about him," she continued, now the one staring at the ground. "But we have a complicated relationship." Jocelyn laughed softly.

"More complicated than ours?" Buffy allowed herself a small smile. She had a point.

"I'm not ready for him to not be here," she said in the same soft tone. "We've leaned on each other. He's always gotten me, been there and understood when even I didn't. When my friends were clueless, he was right on the money."

"He's always been like that," Jocelyn said, smiling genuinely at the memory. "Always seeing to the heart of everyone else's relationships but hopelessly biased when it came to his own." The silence that followed was made even more palpable by the intimacy of their conversation. They stood awkwardly next to each other, having come to a silent understanding and resolved not to continue the conversation. Buffy was about to comment on how nice the moss looked on a nearby headstone when she heard a yelp. She didn't bother to conceal her sigh of relief. Spike had chased the potentials their way at last.