Heroes Part 5
They found nothing that night, and Brooklyn dropped her off at her hotel an hour before dawn. He explained he turned to stone at dawn; Buffy wasn't sure if he was serious or not.
Gives a whole new meaning to 'rock hard' now doesn't it? Spike cackled in her head.
"Shut up," she told the memory-Spike aloud. She picked up the hotel room's phone and called the airport. It had started to snow hard around four AM and she wasn't surprised to find out that the airports were shut down across the entire eastern seaboard. She would be here another day or two at least.
She made a call, collect, to Wolfram and Hart before she remembered that LA was three hours behind NYC. It was only five AM their time. She got a sleepy sounding receptionist -- not Harmony, thank the Higher Powers -- who transferred her to Angel's voice mail. She could be transferred directly to Angel's apartment if she wanted, but she didn't want to risk waking him for something that wasn't critical.
"Angel, this is Buffy. I've been delayed in NYC, I'll be there in a couple of days. Let you know when I can get there. Looking forward to seeing you."
She called the receptionist back, intending to ask for Wesley's voice mail too. Wesley deserved to be told about the loss of the books. He was most likely in the book and he certainly had plenty of enemies.
"Wolfram and Hart, where may I direct your call? -- Spike! Leave that copier alone! Don't think I don't know a priest who couldn't speed you over to the other side!"
Spike?
"Sorry," the receptionist said, to Buffy
"Spike?" Buffy said, aloud. Surely she'd misheard.
"... I mean it! I'll tell Angel!"
Yeah, she'd misheard. If Spike was alive -- well, undead -- he'd have found her by now. He was as reliable as a puppy that way. If he'd survived Sunnydale, the first thing he'd have done would have been to rejoin them. And even if he decided not to, the last place she'd find him would be working with Angel. They hated each other with a soul-deep passion.
The receptionist returned to the phone for the second time. "What is it about bored men and machines?" she asked, then said again, "Where can I direct your call?"
"Uh, Wesley's line, please."
* * * * *
She slept most of the day, much to her surprise. When she woke, it was still snowing fat white flakes that stuck to everything. The city was shut down; she looked out the hotel window and watched as a bulldozer cleared the road, one scoop at a time. How much snow had they gotten? Two feet?
Her luggage -- except for her lost carry on -- had proceeded to LAX without her, so she only had the clothes on her back to wear. She descended to the lobby of the hotel, and with a wince at the cost, bought clothing in the hotel's gift shop. She used her credit card -- she had not been joking about only having five bucks to her name. On the other hand, she didn't want to look like a bum in clothes she'd been wearing for three days straight. (She'd slept in the outfit on the flight from Heathrow.) But to her dismay, a pair of jeans, a t-shirt with a "New York City 2004" logo, and a sweat-shirt with a Giants logo cost nearly as much as the room, and the room had not been cheap.
And while the airline had coughed up the money to pay for the first night, she thought they might be unwilling to pay for the second night. They'd pay for connections missed due to the flight being diverted. They weren't likely to pay for weather related problems.
Damnit. She couldn't afford this.
By the time she'd eaten (also expensive) and returned to her room it was dark. She wasn't the slightest bit surprised to find that Brooklyn had let himself into her room. She'd left the window unlocked for his benefit; it wasn't like he could take the elevator up and knock on the door when he arrived.
However, she was surprised that he was sitting on the foot of her bed and signing an autograph for a hotel maid. The maid was giggling and grinning and very obviously flirting with Brooklyn, who was flirting back. When the maid saw Buffy, the girl gestured lamely at her housekeeping cart. "The bellman said he saw Brooklyn come in the window. I came up to see if he needed help."
Buffy's room had been done around noon; she vaguely remembered yanking a pillow over her head and telling the maid to g'way, she was sleeping!
"It's okay," Buffy said, reflecting that in most places, the sight of a winged monster flying through a window would cause panic in the whole building.
Someone else knocked on the door. "Police! Open up!"
The maid and Buffy jumped. Buffy decided that, yup, someone had panicked. Brooklyn rolled his eyes, and before Buffy could shoo him out the window, he padded on clawed feet to the door with his tail lashing. He peered through the eyehole, then pulled the door open and said, "Yes, Officer Morgan?"
The officer was a black man with graying hair and a frown on his face. The frown lessened slightly when he saw Brooklyn. "You were seen," he said, without preamble. His tone was chiding and annoyed.
Brooklyn shrugged, "Buffy knew I was coming. I figured entering the regular way would cause more of a fuss."
"Yeah." Morgan stepped through the doorway and shut it behind him. He sized Buffy up -- the maid had slipped silently around Brooklyn and the officer and beat a hasty retreat. "He's got your permission to be here?"
"Oh! Yeah, sure."
The officer left after he took Buffy's name; there was apparently no law against entering a hotel room through a window of the occupant of said hotel room had no objection. Brooklyn shut the door after the man and shook his head. "Sorry about that. Ten years here, and some people still panic when they see us."
"I'm impressed. You've got a good relationship with the cops," Buffy said.
Brooklyn nodded happy agreement. "With some of them, yes. Morgan's an old friend of Elisa's. There are a few policemen who I would not have talked to. Easy enough to jump back out the window if the guy's going to be a jerk. But I like to talk to them when I can, you know? If they know us as individuals, as people, they're more likely to trust us. It's hard to shoot one of us if we had coffee and donuts the night before."
He was right, Buffy supposed. And smart, to have figured that out. And brave, to trust that he wouldn't be betrayed by an assumed ally.
Brooklyn grinned and added, "It hasn't always been this way. We've had to work up it. When we first arrived, there were protests and riots by the Quarrymen. But we make a point of being, oh I dunno, not totally mysterious? We've got our enemies -- every single one of us has been shot at least once in the last ten years -- but those are fewer and fewer anymore."
He added, "Anyway, while we were sleeping, Elisa dug up a couple of likely contacts for us to go harass. Are you ready?"
Buffy nodded.
He scooped her up -- he was not that big, but there was amazing strength in his wiry body. Brooklyn hopped out through the window with one arm around her, then neatly swapped ends in mid air and caught the windowsill with his free hand. Her stomach was left somewhere far behind by that rapid move. "Shut the window," he directed, since he had one arm around her and one hand holding onto the sill. "Or you'll have a room full of snow when you get back. Hotel might bill you for that."
He had a point. She gritted her teeth, trusted that iron grip around her waist, and let go of his neck. It was seven stories straight down. Head spinning from the height, she reached up and pulled the window shut.
"I'm not going to drop you," Brooklyn said, sounding annoyed. "Relax."
"Easy for you to say," Buffy grumbled, "You've never fallen to your death before."
"You had a bad fall?" Brooklyn asked. He shoved away from the wall and his wings boomed open with a thunderous crack. They were flying. Buffy gritted her teeth and looked at Brooklyn's face from close range rather than looking down.
"I fell to my death. I mean, I really died. But they brought me back." Buffy explained.
"Dangerous to meddle in things like that," Brooklyn said, with a growl. "No offense, but things that are dead should stay dead."
"They needed me." Buffy sighed. "I mean, they really, really needed me in a sort of major way."
Without her, she reflected with a heavy sense of responsibility, would they have been able to stop the First? Being yanked from that warm and peaceful place had been worth it, but that didn't mean she didn't miss the comfort of Heaven.
"It's not that I fear dying again," she said, still securely gripping his neck. "Smacking the ground would hurt, but dying's not so bad. But my friends kinda need me still."
"Mm. That, I can understand," Brooklyn said. They were buffeted by a snowy, icy gust of wind; she gritted her teeth so she wouldn't squeak a scream of alarm when the wind flipped them nearly sideways. Her cheeks were numb and the wind made her eyes water and it felt like the tears were freezing to her skin.
"You warm enough?" he asked.
"No!" she said, through chattering teeth. "It doesn't snow in Sunnydale!"
"No, it doesn't, but you lived on a Hellmouth with far more assorted nasties than we would ever tolerate," Brooklyn snorted, surprising her. She remembered Elisa saying they'd done a background check on her. Apparently, that check had involved some non-traditional sources. "I'll take a New York winter over that many demons in one place, thank you."
"Oh, yes, we had plenty of nasties." Buffy said, too cheerfully.
"You had to destroy the town to get rid of the Hellmouth," Brooklyn said. He sounded more than a little horrified by that idea. "Gargoyles canna stop protecting their home anymore than we canna stop breathing," he said and sounded like he was quoting someone. His accent was thicker. It was definitely Scottish. Buffy decided she was amused by his accent; how many demons -- no, gargoyles, she corrected herself -- had identifiable Earth accents?
"If I ever had to destroy this place to save the world," he gestured loosely at the city, holding her in a one-armed grip that made her nearly strangle him in response, "I don't know ... I'd probably have to kill myself afterwards or something. We Gargoyles protect our homes to our last breath. It is who, and what, we are."
"And the city's your home and everything?" Buffy said, once she unclenched her teeth from a swallowed scream. The wind had switched directions and blown him sideways towards a radio antenna. Brooklyn didn't seem bothered by the gusting wind -- or the frigid temperatures -- nearly as much as she was. He was wearing a loincloth and nothing else, yet didn't even seem to have goosebumps.
"The city's our home," he confirmed. "We were born in Scotland ... but that was a thousand years ago, and the people then are dead and gone -- most of them, anyway -- and the way of life is lost. This is our home now. A new way of life. New friends. New family."
He grinned at her and looked at her over the top of his sunglasses and added, "And it's not all bad. You guys have indoor plumbing, fast food, and internet connections."
She had an incongruous vision of Brooklyn hunched over a keyboard. Then, on due reflection, she decided that maybe that wasn't improbable. Between his clear knowledge of modern life and his sunglasses, he seemed quite well adapted to the twenty-first century.
"Almost there," he said, as he stooped into a dive. The ground rushed up, she swallowed yet another howl of terror, and then she did squeak a bit when he boomed his wings open and swapped ends. He braked so quickly that it felt as if her lunch had kept going without her. Lightly, he landed on the street in front of a pawn shop.
She was so happy to have the ground beneath her feet that she could have kissed it. Or kissed him, for landing safely.
Spike giggled in her memories, but there was a growl of jealousy there, too. Even dead -- or deader -- she doubted he'd want to share her with anyone else.
If Brooklyn was attracted to her, however, he didn't seem to be showing it. She followed his winged back into the pawn shop. Most likely, he wasn't attracted to human women. He'd probably find her interest (and she refused to be interested!) perverted. He was friendly enough, but that seemed to be his basic personality. There was a wariness to him, a cautious edge, but once he figured out you weren't out to get him, he warmed up quickly enough. He reminded her a bit of Xander, she thought.
The pawn shop operator let out an angry oath when he saw Brooklyn. He pointed at the door, and added, "Can't you read?"
Brooklyn paused in mid stride, then backed up, comically exaggerating his movements. Buffy stepped out of his way, half expecting a fight. The owner sounded distinctly hostile.
The gargoyle stopped when he could see the front of the store. He tapped a placard in the window with one taloned finger; his claw made a sound like fingernails on slate when it touched the glass. The placard, taped to the window, was two-sided but there weren't any words. It was just a picture of hammer on a blue field.
Brooklyn lifted his eye ridge at the picture. "I can," he said slowly, "but you have apparently not learned anything more than pictograms."