Leo Valdez was of the opinion that, with very few exceptions, cars were better than people. As long as you took care of a car it would take care of you until the end of the road or the end of the world, whichever came first. He and his mom had a 1987 Dodge Ram 50 that still ran like new thanks to the work they'd done to it over the years. Leo had been working with cars since he was old enough to hold a wrench. The job he'd scored last year at Sunnydale's one and only auto shop was a godsend. He didn't have to awkwardly socialize after school, he got to spend time with cars, and they now had a second income to put toward the essentials. Choosing between electricity and running water was a thing of the past.
Leo wheeled himself out from under the car he was working on. "Hey, Beckendorf."
Charles Beckendorf—one of the exceptions—looked up from the engine he was elbows deep in. "Yeah?"
Leo wordlessly held up the piece of metal he'd finally extracted from the car's undercarriage. It was blackened and bent, but it was still clearly a knife. And not a kitchen knife, a medieval, knight-in-shining-armor knife.
Beckendorf raised an eyebrow. "Man, that's the third one this month. How did that even get there?"
"Beats me." Leo heaved himself off of the ground and went to put the knife with the rest of the collection of weird things they'd found in vehicles, which was officially the lost and found box. As usual, he eyed the taxidermied hippie squirrel wearing a tiny tie-dye dress warily. That thing freaked him out. His first week of work he swore he'd seen it move.
He rolled back under the car and studied the damage the knife had left behind. The brake line had been cut and the knife had somehow pinned together several parts into an amalgamated maze of metal. It was such a mess that he could barely tell what was what. How had that even happened? Fixing this was going to take a whole lot longer than he'd thought it would.
"Aw man," Beckendorf groaned.
Leo rolled back out from under the car. Beckendorf was staring into the open hood of the truck that he was working on with a mournful look on his face. "What is it?" Leo asked.
Beckendorf took has hands out of the truck and held up something that Leo was sure made him glad that he was wearing gloves.
"Aw man," Leo echoed. "That isn't going in the lost and found, is it?"
The floppy human arm that Beckendorf was holding was covered in something that looked like rust but was probably definitely blood. It was ragged at the elbow like it had been torn off or chewed on. Beckendorf looked at Leo, entirely unimpressed.
Leo sighed. "I'll go call the cops."
It was late when Leo got home. Mr. D, the owner of the auto shop where he worked, had been too hungover to deal with the cops, so they had to wait until his wife Ariadne arrived before anything got done. By the time the cops left it was long past time to close up the shop.
Leo walked up the crumbling front steps and unlocked the door. He didn't expect that his mom would be home yet, so he was surprised when he saw a light on in the back of the house.
"Mom?" he called. "You home?"
"In the kitchen, mijo," his mom called back. "There's someone here I want you to meet."
The only thing Leo got out of that sentence was that social services hadn't come by for a surprise inspection. He moved slowly, trying to eavesdrop on the people in the kitchen. Maybe he could at least figure out how many people there were. No luck, the kitchen was totally silent.
Esperanza Valdez was the first person her son saw when he entered the room. She had a smudge of grease on her jaw and strands of hair falling out of her ponytail. She looked beautiful. Leo turned his attention to the man sitting across the table from her. His hair was curly and what he had on his head was long enough to hide most of his ears. His ear lobes were covered by his impressive beard. He had calloused hands that dwarfed the mug he was cradling between them. His arms were bulging with muscles. In short, he looked like a blacksmith from the artwork for a fantasy game. The only things that ruined that image were his clothes (a regular old jeans and t-shirt combo with a motorcycle jacket hanging over his chair), his ears, which, when he pushed back his hair, looked more like they belonged to an elf, and his age. The man couldn't have been older than twenty-five, far from the grizzled old blacksmith that his look echoed.
The man looked at Leo. He had warm eyes. Very warm eyes. Fire-coloured eyes with no visible pupils.
Leo took a step back. "Uh, hi?"
"Hello, Leo," the man said. His voice was low, rumbling like a volcano that was about to erupt.
Leo looked at his mom. He raised an eyebrow. The question of "who the hell is this?" was fairly obvious.
"This is Heff," Esperanza said. She took a deep breath. "He's your father."
Leo blinked. "What?" Esperanza had never told him that his dad was dead, but that was what he usually assumed. Sometimes, when he was feeling unusually pessimistic, he thought that the guy was just a deadbeat. Either way, his dad was never supposed to be sitting in his house drinking hot cocoa.
Leo turned back to Heff, who was still looking at him with those alien eyes. Heff was also far too young to be Leo's dad. According to what his mom had told him, she had met his dad in their first year of college. That would put him at at least thirty-five if he was still alive, not barely twenty.
"You're not human, are you?" Leo asked.
Heff shook his head. "No, I am not."
Leo crossed his arms. "And you're really my dad?"
"Yes, I am."
"So why are you showing up now?" Heff started to speak but Leo cut him off. "Where were you when my mom couldn't find a job because no one would let her take a baby to work? Where were you when social services took me away from her because we didn't have anywhere to live? Where were you for all those years when they kept threatening to take me away again because we couldn't pay for electricity and running water? Where were you then?"
Leo was breathing hard. His eyes were playing tricks on him. It looked like there was a flame on the end of his nose, which felt appropriate but wasn't actually possible.
Esperanza gasped. Heff looked solemnly at Leo's nose.
Leo sighed. "My nose is actually on fire, isn't it?"
Heff nodded. "That is why I am here."
Leo gingerly patted out the fire on his nose and was only mildly surprised when he wasn't burned. So he wasn't totally human. Great. His life was going to suck if he kept randomly bursting into flame.
"I can't talk to you right now," Leo said. "Later, not now."
Neither Heff nor Esperanza made any sort of protest as he turned around and walked straight out the door.
Leo walked and walked and walked. As he walked, he thought. He didn't notice when the sun began to set. He didn't keep track of where he was going. It was a surprise when he looked up and saw that he was at the playground that he'd gone to when he was a kid. It was near one of the cemeteries, most things in Sunnydale were, and only a few blocks away from his house. For some reason he thought he'd walked further than that.
There was a girl sitting on one of the swings with her back to him. Her black hair fell in waves nearly to the ground. The chains of the swing had been twisted together and as Leo watched the girl took her feet off the ground and went spinning around and around. She laughed. It was a sound of pure delight. When she stopped spinning she was facing Leo. She looked around his age. She wore a diaphanous black dress that provided a stark contrast to her black combat boots and made her skin look even paler. She was Asian, which was an oddity in Sunnydale (Leo was certain that the number of non-white people in town could be counted on two hands).
The girl smiled at Leo across the playground. "Your head is on fire."
Leo lifted a hand to check and came away with a handful of flames. The girl kept smiling, though she did gesture towards a nearby drinking fountain.
"You're not human," the girl said after Leo had put the fire out.
Leo took a step back. The girl laughed musically.
"It's okay," she said. "I'm not either."
"Really?" Leo asked.
The girl nodded. "Do you want to sit with me?"
Leo hesitated for a second. "Yeah, sure." He went and sat down in the other swing.
The girl pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. Her eyes were dark too. They sparkled as they caught the light of the stars. "What's your name?"
"I'm Leo," Leo said. "What about you?"
The girl smiled.
The girl remained in the playground long after Leo had gone home. She watched the moon rise over the trees. It was a beautiful moon, full and bright. She searched in vain for the rabbit on its surface. She could never see the moon rabbit anymore. Her eyes were too sharp for soft edges to blend into each other.
When the moon was at its zenith she rose from the swing and began to walk. She walked and walked. Her hair and her dress whispered as she moved through the silent streets. Then the wind blew and it whispered such beastly and beautiful things. Abhorrent and angelic. She smiled and turned around. She had a destination now.
The door was unlocked. Of course it was, the one who lived behind it wasn't worried about anything that could be stopped by a locked door. The girl pushed it open and padded inside. The building was large but warm. The man she was here for was sitting on the couch in front of a fireplace with a book in his hand. He looked up as she got closer to him.
Quick as a wink, the girl swooped down and landed a kiss on his mouth. "Hello, Angelus."
Angel rested his forehead against her's. "What are you doing here, Shinko?" he asked softly.
The girl kissed him again. "I'm here to see you, silly." She drew back. "And that's not my name anymore. I've been Sapphire for at least fifty years. You really are out of the loop, aren't you?"
Sapphire perched on the arm of the couch nearest to Angel. She took the book he'd been reading out of his hands and perused it leisurely. It was poetry, French. She tossed it aside.
"Where are Nicola and Haydée?" Angel asked.
"Nico and Hazel are in Lyon." Sapphire swung her legs. "I ditched them with Nico's newest boy toy."
William Solace was a golden boy with a keen mind and a lust for adventure—just Nico's type. It hadn't taken much goading to get him to agree to come with them on a whirlwind European tour. Sapphire liked Will. She hoped that Nico wouldn't get bored of him after a few months like he had all the other boys. That was partially why she left. She didn't want to get attached to a new brother only for him not to become her brother at all. It had happened more than once before.
Sapphire's stomach growled. She hadn't had a meal since she'd arrived in Sunnydale the night before. "Do you have anyone to eat around here?" she asked Angel.
Angel looked off to one side. "Stay here." He disappeared into the next room and came back after a few minutes with a warm mug nearly brimming over with blood.
Sapphire accepted the blood and held it under her nose. She felt her face shift into its demonic form even as she grimaced. Beef blood. Ick. She drank it anyway. It would tide her over until she could get a real meal. There had to be humans in this town stupid enough to be out so long after sunset, it was a Hellmouth after all.
"You have to leave," Angel said the second she'd finished drinking the blood.
Sapphire's face shifted back into its human form and she licked blood off her upper lip. "But I just got here."
Angel's face was set in a serious expression. Sapphire pouted. "Aren't we friends, Angelus? Do you remember when I taught you how to play Pins? You said that you could appreciate how delicate it was."
Angel made a sound that could have been a groan, though Sapphire didn't see what he had to be unhappy about. Pins was a fun game that she was quite proud of herself for inventing. To play you took a pin—and in those days it was easy to find pins, ladies used them to hold their dresses together and in a pinch a hairpin or hatpin would do—and stuck it in the fleshy part of a human's shoulder. Then you bit whichever part of the body twitched in response. The winner was the one who had the most bite marks closest to the neck when the human expired. A good game could last for hours, days if you drank sparingly and had only two players.
"It's Angel now," Angel said. "Leave town, Sapphire. Go back to France."
Sapphire hopped off of the couch. "I don't want to and you can't make me. I'll see you around, Angel."
The library at Sunnydale High was rarely used for its intended purpose. When there was world saving to do there wasn't much room left for teenagers trying to take out books, not that any teenagers but the world saving ones ever went into the library in the first place.
The night after Sapphire had paid him a visit, Angel was walking around the library, taking books off the shelves and putting them back while he waited for the rest of the usual suspects to arrive. Sometimes he would find a book that was useful and he added it to the pile on the table where Giles was reading the first book that Angel had found.
Giles kept reading the same few pages over and over again. He looked up when Angel came to add another old tome to the pile. "Are you quite sure?"
Angel nodded.
Giles took off his glasses and began cleaning the lenses with a handkerchief.
Buffy, Willow, Xander and Oz arrived a few minutes later. Angel was standing behind the tower of books on the table. Giles was still cleaning his glasses.
"Oh god," Buffy said. "The world is ending, isn't it?"
"What makes you say that?" Giles asked.
Buffy crossed her arms. "You're polishing your glasses into a new prescription."
Giles put his glasses back on. "Yes, well. Angel has...news for us."
"Oh joyous day," Xander said. He sat down on the checkout counter. "How cryptic is it?"
Angel picked up a book from the middle of the stack he had made and opened it, turning the pages until he found the one with a black and white photograph of Sapphire next to a short paragraph. He turned the book around and pointed at the picture. "She's in town. If you see her, run."
"Not cryptic at all." Xander hopped off the counter and come closer to get a better look at the photo.
Willow held out her hands and Angel gave her the book. "Name: Shinko," Willow read. "Aliases: The Shadow Girl. Age: Unknown. Appearance: Japanese girl of sixteen to eighteen years. Range: Europe and Asia. Patterns: Unknown, may torture women with hat pins. Companions: Bianca, Nicola, Angelus, Haydée Zenaida."
Angel grimaced as everyone else in the room looked at him. "That's out of date. Bianca was killed in the 1870s."
"You know this girl?" Buffy demanded.
"Out of date?" Giles asked at nearly the same time. "How can it be out of date? That's the latest edition!"
Angel chose to answer Giles's questions first. "Half the vampires in there are dust. The other half have changed their names, habits, or both. Shinko goes by Sapphire now, and hat pins are out of style."
Giles looked scandalized. He began cleaning his glasses again.
"You know this girl?" Buffy repeated. "You were her 'companion'?" Her fingers made air quotes around the word.
Angel nodded slowly. "We travelled together for a few years near the end of the 1850s. She..." He hesitated. "She liked killing Watchers when I knew her. As far as I know she still does."
All eyes immediately turned to Giles. He looked remarkably unperturbed. It probably helped that that information was in the book he had been reading.
"So, Buffy is going to kill her." Willow looked at Buffy. "Right?"
"Duh," Buffy said.
"No," Angel and Giles said.
There was a brief stand-off that ended when Xander asked, "Why?"
Giles referenced the book in front of him. "When Bianca was killed in 1872 by the Slayer at the time, her siblings-that is Nicola, Shinko and Haydée-hunted down the Slayer and killed her and her Watcher, then went back and slaughtered everyone in the town where Bianca had been killed and burnt it to the ground."
"They killed the Watcher's family too," Angel added. "They know how to hold a grudge."
"So if we kill her then the other two will wipe Sunnydale off the map." Xander frowned. "Remind me why that's a bad thing?"
"We live in Sunnydale," Willow said.
Xander blinked. "Oh yeah. Let's not get the town destroyed."
"I'm trying to get her to leave," Angel said. "Until then, try to stay away from her."
When Angel got back to the mansion Sapphire was kneeling in the back garden heaping soil over the roots of flowers. Roses of all sorts, tiny violets and blooming moonflowers spiralled through the flower beds, crowding out any dead plants that may have still been there. It was unlikely that there were any dead plants left in the beds judging by the large pile of them over by the wall.
Angel sighed. "Hello, Sapphire."
Sapphire looked up at him. "You have a pretty garden, Angel. I hope you don't mind that I added to it."
Angel wanted to ask where she'd gotten the new flowers from, but he also knew that he didn't want to know. Plausible deniability; and the garden did look a lot nicer than it had with just overgrown vines, shaggy trees, and dead flowers. "Why violets?" he asked instead. "From what I remember you like roses and spider lilies."
Sapphire frowned. "You can't find spider lilies here."
Well, that was a completely logical answer. Not exactly what he would have expected from Sapphire, but he'd take it.
Sapphire stood up and tried to brush soil off her dress bust mostly succeeded in smearing it across the fabric in heavy streaks. "I smell Slayer blood. Did you get into a fight with her?"
"No, I didn't," Angel said carefully.
"Do you fight with her?"
Angel said nothing.
"Well, I guess that rumour's true too." Sapphire stepped closer and Angel saw that she had a drop of blood on the corner of her mouth. "You are not the hero, Angel. Heroes walk in the light. We belong to the darkness."
"I don't believe that," Angel said.
Sapphire reached out and cradled his cheek in her hand. "Prince of darkness," she crooned. "Child of night. You know I'm telling the truth. The Slayer will burn you to ashes."
Wind rustled the trees. Sapphire slipped into the shadows and was gone.
A/N: So...yeah. This was an idea that happened. Two more chapters of this and then we can get back to Sapphire kind of being terrified of everything, which is reasonable considering what I'm putting her through right now.
-Cynder2013