Disclaimer: I don't own any of the iterations of Sherlock Holmes that exist in the world, but in particular no the BBC's Sherlock, nor do I own Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The first time Buffy saw Sherlock again after the rescue of the Mayimim children, he had been publically brought back to life, presumably by his creepy all-powerful brother, and had started consulting with Lestrade again. However, he'd refused to come out to this murder, so Greg had called her next. The dead woman was drowned in her bathtub, someone having held her down until she drowned. The death was hours old when Buffy got there. The struggle had been so loud someone had called 999, but the door had been locked with the chain on when they arrived, and there was no way out by the windows.
She'd been peering around, getting a bead on what the scene looked like when Sherlock arrived. "I thought you weren't coming," Greg said to the detective.
"That was before he heard you'd called Buffy," John had explained as Sherlock swept into the room with all of Spike's drama but with a totally British upper-crust attitude.
Sally Donovan's boyfriend, the one who was cheating on his wife, spoke up. Buffy still wondered what the other woman saw in him, but hers was not to judge. "Look at this," he gestured at the room filled with British paraphernalia. "She must have been ridiculously patriotic."
Buffy and Sherlock snorted and spoke simultaneously. "Clearly not, since she's American."
She looked at him, and he seemed to have a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth. "I suppose you noticed the handwriting on the notepad?" he inquired.
"No," Buffy said, wondering what distinguished American handwriting from British, unless it was just spelling things with the extra 'u' or something. "She put an extension cord into the bathroom."
Sherlock tilted his head. "And that signifies that she's American?"
"Your UK statutes making it illegal to have an outlet where it's convenient to a mirror," Buffy explained, still annoyed over the fact all these months later, "Means that Americans tend to find ways to get their electrical grooming stuff set up in the bathroom anyhow, usually with extension cords."
The dark-haired man lit up. "Intriguing," he said. "Americans tend to shape their letters differently than we in England."
"So, why would she have all these Union Jacks everywhere?" asked Anderson.
Buffy sighed. "She was one of those anglophile people," she said. "The ones who treat England as if the country were a celebrity. Like, the whole country. When they get something like a flag or a cookie tin with pictures of . . . of buses on 'em, they act like they just got ahold of Brad Pitt's socks."
John chuckled. "I met some when I was in Afghanistan," he added. "It's like they think an accent that can be labelled as 'English' is sexy." He tilted his head contemplatively, "I managed to land a reporter one time while doing the worst fake cockney accent you could imagine. Bill nearly killed himself laughing."
"And now that John's reminded me of that time my mother hit on my high school librarian during the drugged candy bar incident, let's get back to figuring out where the killer is," Buffy said. She pursed her lips a moment as she made her way to the closet in the middle of the wall. "The thing is, based on how much space is in here, and where the door is, this apartment is smaller than it should be."
Sherlock joined her. "You think the connecting door is through here?"
"What connecting door?" Greg asked.
Buffy spoke louder as she pushed into the closet. "This used to be a hotel, you can see where the sign used to be outside, and the shape of the room here, it really reminds me of a hotel shape. But it must have been a suite with a kitchenette, unlike the ones on the lower floors where they combined rooms together so that there was water in the bathroom and water for a kitchen where a bathroom used to be." She felt around a moment and there it was. "I don't know about the other apartments, but someone hid the door connecting the two suites rather than actually taking the door out instead. Maybe it was cheaper to do it this way, but," she poked the latch, sending the false side wall of the closet swinging in, and revealing the small, dusty space in front of a door into the next apartment. "Here we are," she said.
"Very competent," Sherlock said approvingly from behind her.
Buffy walked out of the closet to make room for the police and was about to respond when the killer came screaming out of that closet. He wasn't much of a threat to a slayer, though, and she lashed out casually, reflexively, a single hit sending him flying into the wall. "Some people," she said with a sigh. The police had him restrained in moments and carted him off.
Sherlock was eyeing her closely as he said, "There's an Indian place nearby, the owner owes me a favour. Would you join us for lunch?"
John looked at her expectantly, and Buffy thought a moment, internally checking whether she had anything that needed doing that day that she couldn't put off. "Sure," she said.
The dark-haired man was looking at her speculatively, but waited until they were all seated in the restaurant. There was a brief and spirited debate, which Buffy and Sherlock won, about what to order and the practice of sharing food out between them, "John, it's way more interesting to have a bunch of different things at a meal than to be stuck with just one dish."
"Not to mention it's more accurate to the traditional way of eating in India to do it so," Sherlock had added.
John had given in and as they waited for the food Sherlock asked his first question. "John has spoken to you of my mind palace, I am certain. I am equally certain, now that I have seen you twice, that you have a similar such thing yourself."
Of course he'd wanted to talk about that. Buffy had long since resigned herself to the flash of pain that thoughts tangential to Angel brought her. "Something like, yes. It's not a palace so much as . . . dance choreography overlaying a spiderweb, I suppose you could say. I've tended to be very people-focused in how I think about a lot of things, so it's about tracing the steps, I guess."
John looked confused, something Buffy didn't blame him for. When you didn't need that kind of thing, some parts of it were ridiculously and pointlessly esoteric to understand. Sherlock leaned forward, eagerly, "Tracing the steps? Do you mean you've attached specific items of information to particular people in memory?"
"Partly," Buffy allowed, "But I actually needed two levels. The spiderweb only dates to when I was sixteen. The dance-floor is . . . older."
He eyed her. "You were popular in school," he declared in vaguely accusatory tones. "Like Mycroft."
Buffy stared. "Mycroft? Red-headed weird guy with the perpetual smirk, Mycroft? Your brother Mycroft? When did he stop putting in the effort?"
"Around the same time he finally began spinning his web in the government," Sherlock replied dismissively.
"Oh," Buffy said, nodding. "Right. Different paradigm and they never do respect people who are actually personable."
"What?" John asked. "What do you mean?"
Sherlock smiled somewhat wryly. "At one time Mycroft bothered to impersonate the characteristics of those who are popular among the general population."
Buffy spoke up. "It was political practice. When you're in school you have to act one way to get people to do favours for you, cover for you if you want to skip class, whatever. But when you get into super-political stuff, and not running for office, but backroom bureaucracy, what people think of as personable and competent changes into something no sane person likes. People are still people, but how you act has to change a little. It's like a really extreme version of how you act differently with your friends, your boss or your parents."
"Oh," John said and applied himself to the naan. "Go on, then."
She shrugged. It wasn't something she was very proud of, but she refused to be genuinely embarrassed by the way she'd been at the time. "Once it stopped being cute that I could tell things about people, and when my dad really pushed me into the 'daddy's little princess' zone, I got bored," Buffy explained.
Sherlock looked surprisingly saddened. "You were under duress to avoid any sort of intellectual pursuit," he declared. John looked surprised for a moment, then winced as he was apparently able to follow the thought.
"Yup," Buffy replied. She easily slid into the character of who she'd learned to be growing up. "It's, like, totally not cool and boys don't like it when you tell them you can see them cheating on you." She relaxed back into a more adult state. "But I was also young enough to mistake the way my dad acted for loving me, just conditional on my being a daddy's girl. Mom was never that comfortable with me seeing through people either, although she never liked the way he kept telling me not to be school-smart."
The detective eyed her. "You acted in a way that John would certainly reprimand one for?" It was a prompt for details, rather than a genuine question.
She smiled wryly. "I ran the student body, manipulated everyone to be where I wanted them to be, to get better grades by getting everyone else to get teachers in better or worse moods - whatever would be more useful - propping certain boys up into the popular zone for me to date because I knew those were the ones who wouldn't cheat on me, arranging for friends around me that would let me do whatever I wanted, you know, the kinds of things you do when you play mastermind."
John looked shocked. "You?"
Buffy sighed. "I was bored and given what my parents wanted, perfect little Daddy's Girl, normal, blah, blah, blah, I did it just to have something to do, mentally. There was too much information coming in, I was seeing and hearing too much, and like I said, figuring things out about people isn't cute once you're old enough to know better."
"You were bored," Sherlock repeated. He sounded . . . weird. Like he was seeing something special. She didn't really know what to make of it. But there was something in how he was looking at her . . .
Still, the remark Buffy laugh a little. Sardonically. "I learned to spend a lot of time on pointless minutiae in order to keep myself occupied and to have something to do with all the information coming in." She looked at Sherlock and saw an understanding there that she hadn't seen since Angel.
Spike understood being a hunter, being more than what people wanted to see in you, understood about being physically strong and the high that came with death-dealing, something that only other hunters could understand, but Angel had understood something else. He'd understood the hunter part of her, but there'd been another part of her that he'd understood as well. She sharply pushed that memory away. This was not the time or place to get maudlin.
Sherlock's sharp eyes had clearly caught her moment, eyeing her with a sort of suspicion, but he let it lie. "Your rather pointed focus on fashion?" he asked.
"You have to admit, understanding how to fit yourself into any group in appearance is useful," Buffy said. "Learning the tricks of how to make yourself seem sophisticated, rich, poor, it's all very helpful in getting people to do what you want." She smiled at Sherlock, amused. "You do that with your snazzy suits." Then she leaned forward, in challenge. "And you don't like wearing them any more than I like to. You just learned to like looking good and how to use it, but you'll never like the way that clothes like that are ruined by using them the way you need to."
John looked from one to the other, then burst into laughter. "I think so too, I just never thought it was worth arguing with him about it."
Sherlock looked affronted, but there was a subtle tilt to his lips that said he was more amused than anything else.
Glancing between them, Buffy could see John reaching a realisation. "What changed?" he asked. "I mean, being the Slayer made that much of a difference?"
Buffy laughed again, in spite of the memories. "Well, at first it didn't. At first it was just a cool challenge. Could I stay popular and everything while learning how to be the Slayer and fighting vampires?" Her lips twisted regretfully. "Merrick never understood that I needed to entertain myself and that there actually wasn't all that much intellectual stimulation in learning hand-to-hand combat for a slayer."
"Your ability to pick up any weapon and just use it," John said, nodding. "I still can't believe you'd never used a Sig like mine."
"It comes with the package," Buffy said, shrugging. "I know it's impressive, but for a slayer it's like being born with blue eyes. It just happens and doesn't require any sort of effort, so it's not something to brag about. But to answer your question, the time that got eaten up by slaying, by patrolling, it meant I just wasn't able to keep on top of things the way I needed to. My boyfriend wouldn't have cheated on me if I'd been able to spend time with him, but I just didn't have the time. Once he cheated on me, it undercut everything I was doing. On top of that, my parents were fighting all the time, and they started to finally pay attention to my grades."
Sherlock nodded. "What was adequate before was no longer, and you had to make efforts to perform for your teachers."
"Speaking from experience?" Buffy asked, amused. "Let me guess, you did fine in things like science and math where you just had to show up and write down a few correct answers, but anything that required you to write a paper was a problem because you couldn't be bothered to do that."
John shook his head at both of them. "And here's me, putting in all the effort in the world to get good marks in school, all A stars, and the pair of you geniuses getting C marks because you both couldn't be bothered."
"Well, why put in the effort when you can get an average grade without trying?" Buffy asked him, amused. "But when you have to actually sit down and write an essay, well, that's still an hour or two hours out of your evening, however much time it takes to actually write the thing out. Before, I could read my textbooks in the car on the way home, when I was waiting for a date to pick me up at home, during free periods that the rest of my friends didn't have, whatever. I'd listen in class and between the two I'd know enough to pass. Being the slayer meant I started having to ditch extra classes, I was awake all night and didn't have the chance to make up sleep at any time because I had to keep on having a normal social life . . . well, it was less interesting to give up being popular, but something had to give, and my morals didn't let me give up on the other parts. Anyhow, I focused on picking up things about vampires, like how to tell when someone is a vampire when they're not all bumpy-faced."
"A laudable use of time," Sherlock said, looking very approving. Based on what John had said about Sherlock's preference to only keep information that was useful to him, he probably was genuinely approving.
John's cell ringing interrupted them. He looked at it, then made a face of distaste. "I have to go. There's an Anomovic demon who needs a doctor."
He said his goodbyes, and then was out of the restaurant, leaving Sherlock alone with Buffy. "Tell me about your web," Sherlock demanded. "How did you develop that?"
"Not as interesting as you'd think," Buffy countered. "John said your brother taught you how to build that mind palace of yours. A friend of mine taught me how to do it when he saw how much trouble I was having. I don't think I naturally would pick up as much as you," she explained, "But as a Slayer I have an amplified sense of smell and hearing, better eyesight. It means that there's more detail, but in order to get by I needed to react the way other people would, so I had to know what other people were seeing as well as what I was. It's . . . a lot."
That flash of understanding again. "So much detail, so much of it extraneous, and yet one cannot help but see the tales it tells," he said. "Who is this friend?" He took in her expression and his own fell. "I cannot meet him as he died. Not recently, however."
"Angel taught me how to build a web. What I'd needed before was mostly interactions with some facts tagged to the players, but once I needed to know everything about how to kill specific types of demons, faster recall of sewer maps, how to tell a vampire on sight without," she put on her best impression of a very perturbed Giles, "'Honing my senses'," the brief smile made her relax because it meant he probably wasn't going to be to horribly demanding in his questioning, "The previous form everything had taken wasn't practical."
Sherlock nodded in understanding. "So, this Angel, he had developed such a technique on his own? Impressive."
"He had to," Buffy said. "John once said that you used to use drugs to . . . to keep a lid on the information flow?" She turned it into a question. "At least, that was the impression he gave."
Leaning back, the detective said, "It is true, and I presume by your inquiry that your friend did something similar?"
"Imagine you're from a well-off, but not very wealthy family in Galway in the 1800s," Buffy said. "Few books and an anti-intellectual for a parent. His world was tiny, but it was overwhelming and boring at the same time."
His eyes snapped closed and he inhaled sharply. The notion looked too easy for him to imagine. "Too many pointless details, but nothing to distract or spread his interest," he said a moment later. His eyes were laser intense as he asked, "But John indicated vampires are 'monsters'." The air quotes were entirely implicit in his tone of voice, but she could almost see them dangling in the air in front of her.
"I've only met two who weren't," Buffy admitted, "And both involved some seriously major magical intervention that had given them both back their human souls." Before he said anything she added, "It makes a difference, trust me. Do you want to hear about Angel, or do you want to wander off to discuss the personality transplant that happens when people get turned?"
"I would presume the subjects are connected rather intimately," Sherlock said with a raised eyebrow.
She sighed. "They are in a way, but it doesn't have to do with his developing his spiderweb. He had centuries to develop a technique to deal with the overload, and that doesn't connect to the personality thing, because Liam needed it but didn't have it before he turned, Angelus needed it after the turning and Angel still needed it after he got his soul back."
"Understood," Sherlock said. "So, he taught you the technique?"
The memory didn't sting as much now as it did once. "He did. I was having trouble with school, just because I couldn't seem to slot the schoolwork into a convenient spot in my dance-floor and I didn't have a lot of time for studying because Sunnydale had too many monsters in it all the time for me to slide by the way I did in LA."
"I am sorry I could not meet him," the detective said.
"When he died," Buffy said, "It was heroic and all sorts of things people say to comfort you, but the fact is, I lost my soulmate." She looked up at him, and he had a slightly stricken look on his face. "Yeah, just about how you'd have felt if John died, only I was also romantically in love with him."
Suddenly he slouched in a fit of apparent pique. "Is this that ridiculous empathy John harps on about? The vague sensation of enduring another person's misfortune?"
"Yep," Buffy told him. "Kinda stinks, doesn't it?"
"This is distracting and useless," he grumbled. "Why would anyone endorse it?"
She rolled her eyes. "Because otherwise you turn out like Moriarty or your brother? Weird, unlikeable and with no morals because you don't care about other people?"
He pouted. It was adorable and she shouldn't be this attracted to him – who was she kidding? He was tall and hot and wore a pretty, fancy coat. Also, he knew how to dress. Buffy hastily reached for an internal distraction because John said Sherlock had declared himself married to his work and she wasn't going to go there. "So, Angel taught me to treat the organization like a spiderweb, with vibrations down the threads from information that I need. How's it work in your palace?"
Sherlock sat up and began cheerfully talking her ear off about the rooms in his mind palace, his idiosyncratic internal mental associations and discussing her mental dance-floor of interpersonal relationship predictors. He was enthusiastic and excited and she was in so much trouble.