Giles woke up slowly the next morning. He fairly wallowed in the knowledge that he didn't have to plan yet another useless trip to try to locate his wayward Slayer. Instead, all he had to do was wander downstairs to see her. And serve up another meal of broth and soda crackers. He remembered the look of complete betrayal on Annie's face when she realized she wasn't going to get to eat everything she could get her hands on. Her pout was far more devastating than Buffy's had ever been, and he was just grateful he wasn't the girl's father. Were he, she would have everything she wanted, just from that one look alone.
After a stretch that took up the better part of five minutes to complete, he finally left the bed. Both Buffy and Annie made it clear that while the bed was nice, they were more comfortable on the floor with a rug. Since neither would budge from the spot they staked out in front of the couch, he'd finally given in and taken possession of his bed again.
He pulled clothing out of his dresser, not wishing to wander around in a robe and pajamas any longer than necessary with two women in the house. 'What a pair they make,' he thought as he put on his bathrobe. He picked up his clothes and headed downstairs for a shower.
After he passed through the living room, Annie opened her eyes at the same time as her mother and said, "Think we can sneak some food before he comes back out?"
Buffy grinned at her daughter as they sat up and said, "Not a chance. He has eyes everywhere. He'll know." Sitting up, she continued, "Anyway, he's right. We need to go slow until we get back into the habit of eating regular meals again."
Annie sat up as well, but she was expending an inordinate amount of concentration on her fingernails. Buffy waited for her to speak, knowing her daughter had something on her mind. Eventually she said, "I really am sorry I wigged out last night."
Buffy caressed her cheek, marveling yet again at the softness of her daughter's skin, and said, "How many times do I have to tell you it's okay? I wasn't surprised, and neither was Uncle Rupert."
"Yeah, but I punched him — " she said, her face a misery.
"Yeah, and he should have known better than to get to you before I did. There was no damage, so you don't have to keep beating yourself up," she said, her voice brooking no further argument.
Annie shrugged, finally accepting her mother's judgement. She'd heard about Uncle Rupert her entire life, and the last thing she'd wanted to do was beat him up. But her mother was right. He probably should have known better.
"Mom?" She was still studying her fingernails.
"Yeah, sweetie?" Buffy took the time to run her fingers through Annie's hair, gently loosening the tangles. For the moment, she did nothing with the five smallish braids that fell to the right side of her daughter's head.
In a smallish voice, Annie asked, "Are you gonna talk to Grandma Joyce today?"
Buffy was thrown for a loop by the question. She hadn't really had the time or inclination to think about it before now, what with making sure the Hellmouth was sealed — 'And please let it be closed for good this time,' Buffy thought — talking to Giles and taking care of Annie. She looked at her now and said, "I'm not sure. The last time we saw each other, she was kind of kicking me out of the house when I was about as old as you are. I'll talk to Giles about it when he gets out of the shower."
Annie's eyes lit up at the mention of a shower, another thing she'd heard of while she'd been growing up. They'd never stayed in the towns they captured, so indoor plumbing was something of a novelty for her. She said, "So I can do that after he's done, right? And I can stay in there as long as I want?"
"As long as the hot water holds out, anyway. But I'd prefer you limit your first time to ten minutes or so. It's been a while since the last time I was all-over clean, and I don't want to wait any longer than I have to for my turn. Deal?"
"Deal. So do you think Grandma Joyce is gonna go pralitz when she finds out what happened?"
"Maybe one or two steps past pralitz and well into the territory of grimmon," Buffy said, dredging up the memory of her last conversation with her mother. "Either way, you're not meeting her until I'm sure she can behave herself."
"Are you gonna tell her about Daddy?" Annie hated to sound so uncertain, especially in front of her mother, but the last two days had done a number on her emotional equilibrium, and she was still trying to find her way in this new world where it was safe to sleep the night through and where food was available at any time.
Buffy gave her daughter a long look, wishing she could reassure her more, but knowing that the only thing that would help was time and getting past the first meeting. She sighed softly, wondering yet again if she should have been so honest with Annie about her relationship with her mother. 'Too late to change your mind now, Summers,' she thought. 'You made your choice, and this is the result.'
To Annie, she said, "Yes. I'll tell her about Daddy. And I'll tell her about your Grandpa Ian and Grandma Pella."
"Do you think Uncle Rupert will be able to find their phone number?"
"It shouldn't be too hard, unless it's unlisted. Too bad your Dad couldn't remember it," she said, her voice tight as she took one of Annie's braids to loosen it. Six years now, and she still missed him with a pain that was as fresh as the day he died.
"What are you doing?" Annie tried to twist her head away, but Buffy wouldn't let her. Playing with her daughter's hair soothed her in a way nothing else could. She was like her father in so many ways that Buffy felt he was still with her.
"If you're taking a shower, you need to take the braids out first," she said as she started on the second braid, pleased that Annie was too distracted to notice her mood.
Annie frowned and said, "But I can put them back in, right?"
"Sure. Right after your hair is clean," Buffy said, picking up the third braid on Annie's head. "I've been thinking maybe I should cut off my dreads," she added casually, testing the waters.
"No! You can't! Mom!" Annie's face was a study of unabashed horror.
"Calm down, child. Why so upset over my hair? It's not like it won't grow back." Buffy tried to keep her tone even, as if cutting off several feet of hair was no big deal.
Annie was almost in tears when she said, "But it's part of you! There are legends!"
Buffy tackled Annie's fourth braid — it had gotten a bit tangled along the way — and she said, "Those wouldn't happen to be the legends you started, would they?"
"It's just — yeah, okay, I started most of them. But they've taken on a life of their own now. Get rid of your hair, and the legends will die," Annie told her with all the passion a teenager was capable of.
Buffy finished with the fourth braid and started untwisting the fifth and final braid on her daughter's head. "Maybe they should die," she said, her voice somber. "We won the war, and we got out of Hell. Why worry about the legends?"
"The stories are part of the reason the war was won. Remember C'Hilk? They didn't even fight. As soon as they saw your hair, they surrendered."
Buffy sighed, running her hand through Annie's hair to look for tangles. "It's not like anyone in this world is gonna have a clue about my hair or its history. They won't even care."
Neither had noticed Giles when he returned. He watched Buffy and thought she suddenly looked a hundred years old when she said, "I'm tired, sweetie. I'm tired of being a legend, and I'm tired of dragging this hair around. It's time to let it go."
Annie reached up and touched the hair at her mother's temple and said, "It's been a part of you for so long. Guess I'm just afraid it's a Samson deal."
Buffy laughed at that and said, "I guarantee I'll be as strong as ever once it's cut off. Stronger, maybe, since I won't have to drag around the weight of my own reputation."
"And the stories?" Buffy sighed at Annie's persistence. For herself, she couldn't understand why they were so damned important. She'd had a job to do, and she did it. End of story, as far as she was concerned. Still —
"Write 'em down. Maybe you'll get on the bestseller list," Buffy said, grinning slightly. The grin was a small lie, but it was in a good cause. Anything to keep her daughter happy.
Still unaware of his presence, they both jumped slightly when Giles said, "I think it's a capital idea. And I'll be more than happy to provide the pens and paper."
Annie jumped up and ran to give him a hug — a considerably gentler welcome than he'd received the night before — and said, "If you think it's good, then I think it's good." She tried not to wince at the darkened lump on his jaw.
He returned her hug, a bit hesitantly. He hadn't been much for physical affection since his days as Ripper, and these days, he regarded hugs as very special things to be handed out sparingly. When he caught the amused expression on Buffy's face, he realized that hugs were about to become commonplace for him.
Buffy was still marveling over the fact that she hadn't noticed when he came back in the room. 'Maybe I really can get back to the way I was,' she thought, 'Especially if I can still trust him so completely.' She stood up and walked over to the pair, deciding at last to rescue Giles. She tapped on Annie's shoulder and said, "Ready for your first shower?"
As the two headed off to the bathroom, Giles went into the kitchen to fix breakfast for them. They had handled the broth well, but Buffy had said no to an egg just yet. He would keep them on broth for a bit longer, adding a cracker with each meal.
When Buffy returned to the kitchen, he said, "I'll call Joyce this morning and explain."
She made a face, but said, "No. It's not your problem. It's mine. I'll go over there and talk to her."
"It's not a matter of whose problem it is or isn't, Buffy," he said as he poured the broth into a pan. "It's a matter of warning her about what has happened. The two of you need to find your footing with each other, and it will be easier to do if you're not the one trying to convince her that you really are thirty-eight years old now."
"And you think you'll have a better time of it?" Buffy didn't bother hiding her skepticism.
"Not really, but she already hates me, so being the bearer of bad news won't affect our relationship any," he said as dispassionately as he could manage.
"She hates you? Nah. Can't see that. She might be royally pissed off at you, but I doubt she hates you," she said, trying to get around him so she could get a whiff of the broth.
He rebuffed her efforts and refused to let her near the stove. "She certainly gave a good impression of it the last time I stopped by the house."
"I think she's just pissed. And dammit, let me at the pan," she said, her frustration mounting.
"No. You'll just try to drink it all down." He was shaking with the effort not to laugh at her.
"Will not," she said in a sullen voice.
"Perhaps not, but it is amusing to watch you try to get near it," he said as he looked down at her, allowing a hint of laughter in his voice.
She gave up all pretense at a pout and told him, "I never realized what a sadistic bastard you really are."
In a bland voice, he responded, "Indeed. The stories I could tell. Get the bowls out, will you?"
She turned, hunting through the cabinets until she found them. When the broth was sufficiently heated, he ladled a serving for her and made a great show of giving her not two, but three crackers to eat with it. When he sat down at the table, he said, "We really do need to talk about what's happened."
"I know. But you're talking about more than twenty years of history. Even the summary is gonna take a while," she said, drinking her broth spoonful by careful spoonful.
"I know that. Why don't we start with how you ended up in a hell dimension?" The sight of her careful and deliberate eating was still painful for him.
"There was a girl. I can't remember her name, but we'd met in Sunnydale before we hooked up in L.A., and that was how she recognized me," Buffy said between spoonsful of her broth.
He raised his eyebrows and asked, "Did she go to school here?"
"I don't think so. I can't remember exactly. It was something to do with vampires, though," she said, frowning in her effort to remember.
"Why am I not surprised?"
She grinned at him and continued, "Anyway, she was trying to find her boyfriend and asked me to help. Funny. I can remember the why of it, but not her name. I doubt I'd even recognize her if I saw her on the street."
"That's hardly a wonder, Buffy. The why of your being stranded there would have made a greater impression on you than the who," he said. "What happened when you tried to find her boyfriend?"
"I found him, but he was an old man. A day earlier, he'd been in his early twenties, so it was pretty clear that there was some kind of mystical crap involved," she said, disgust coloring her words.
"I see your language skills have improved with the years," he said in a mild reproof.
"Be glad I haven't slipped into pidgin yet." She deliberately ignored his look of intense curiosity at her remark and said, "I did some backtracking — either to the food bank or the blood bank — one of the two — and found out where he'd been directed. The front was some kind of halfway house. They looked for healthy kids who wouldn't be missed. I barged in, fell down the rabbit hole and discovered that I was in Hell right along with Lily. Yay me! I remembered her name after all!"
He smiled at her enthusiasm before asking, "Slave trade, then?" He took off his glasses to polish them, even as he held her gaze.
"Something along those lines. Humans were captured to do menial work in the factories. They caught demons, too, for other stuff, but I didn't find that out until I'd been there for a while. Damn. I'm getting ahead of myself," she said. She frowned as she reviewed what she had already told him.
"It's alright. We can sort through it later," he said as he returned his glasses to his face.
"Yeah, but it's easier if I tell it linearly." She smirked a bit at his look of shock and said, "I know you never expected to hear that word come out of my mouth."
"Unfortunately, you're quite right. Would you like some tea? I think you could handle it," he said, standing to go into the kitchen.
"Sure. As long as you're making it anyway. Okay, so I'm in Hell, and it's pretty much Lily's fault, 'cause she made me start giving a damn again. They lined us all up, told us we were nothing, then started to make sure we knew we were nothing. They'd ask each person who they were. If they said they were anyone but 'nothing,' the kid got beaten up. Three points if you can guess what I said."
"'Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,' by chance?"
"Give the man his points. Brawling ensued with the expected chaos, and I was able to get the current crop back to the portal. Lily was the last to get out, and then the portal closed. Too bad I was stuck on the wrong side of it."
The kettle whistled. As he poured the water to make the tea, he said, "I imagine a great deal of mayhem followed when you realized you were trapped."
She was finished with her broth and crackers by that time, so she turned in her seat so she could watch him at work in the kitchen, using the pass-through as her window. "You've got a good imagination. I shouldn't have been able to take that factory down, but they'd gotten kind of lazy where humans were concerned. They didn't expect any of us to put up a fight of any kind, let alone the kind I can start. It helped that there were quite a few people down there who hadn't yet lost all hope. They were the ones who decided to torch the place. I was just gonna stop after killing the guards."
He looked at her and said, "I take it you decided to help destroy the factory?"
"There wasn't a lot of choice involved. I wanted to get back to L.A. — or at least someplace in this world —" She stopped, then, overcome with more emotion than she expected to feel. After a moment, she felt in control enough to say, "But the portal there was closed up tight, and the only way to get out and look for another one was to tear down the factory. You know — so they'd have something else to worry about than me."
"I'm so sorry, Buffy," he said, his eyes downcast as he finished setting the tea tray. All summer, he'd alternated between wanting to kill her for running and wanting to hold her if he could just have her back. Now that she'd returned after spending twenty-odd years in a hell dimension, he didn't know what to do. Nothing he could say would make this better, but he felt he had to try.
"I just —" He stopped short as he felt her arms come around him from behind to hug him. He had missed her sudden dash into the kitchen.
In a soft voice, she said, "Stop it. None of this is your fault. I'm the one who made most of the decisions that led to this point. And if you'll recall, I have one majorly huge reason not to regret a single one of those decisions."
In a tight voice, he said, "Annie."
"Yep," she agreed. Giving him one last squeeze before moving back to the table, she said, "And before Annie, there was her dad. I'll admit the civil war kind of sucked, but without it, we never would have gotten home."
She sat and watched him bring the tray to the table, waiting for him to rise to the bait. She wasn't disappointed.
"And you called me sadistic. This really isn't fair, you know. You keep dropping all these tantalizing tidbits of information about your life, then you don't follow up." He managed to keep a stern look on his face, but only just barely. He was still somewhat giddy from her return.
Buffy accepted the cup of tea he poured for her and said, "Relax, Watcher. You'll get the full history, but Annie's the bard. You're better off waiting for her."
"Waiting for who?" Annie stood just inside the living room, looking more than a little guilty.
"You," Buffy said. Then, judging correctly as to the cause of her daughter's shame, she added with a grin, "You hot-water thief."
Annie's answering grin showed her delight, even as she said, "I'm really sorry, Mom, but it felt so good. Can I have another one today?"
Giles answered, "Not until your mother's had a chance. I suppose this means you're part water sprite."
"No," Annie said, all serious. "They only ever want to kill humans. I can't imagine a sprite ever wanting to mate with one."
"I — it was — I wasn't serious," he said, his confusion making him stammer a bit more than usual.
"Oh. Sorry. I get a kind of literal sometimes," she said as she walked to the table. "Um...is there any food?"
"For me? Yes. For hot-water thieves? Don't think so," Buffy told her as she pulled Annie off balance make her sit on her lap. She met her daughter's brief scowl with a bland look and a raised eyebrow.
Rather than respond to her mother's unspoken challenge, she said, "I told you I was sorry. But there'll be more hot water later, right?" She directed the question to Giles, hoping he would give her a straight answer.
"Of course. But in the meantime, I don't think I'd want to cross your mother any more than I could possibly help. She's a bit mean when she thinks she's dirty," he said, daring Annie to join in teasing her mother.
She accepted the dare and told him in a confidential manner, "Tell me about it. I remember one time — the battle for Da-Ha'ar it was — she took out an entire regiment because they broke her bathtub."
"Hey! No fair picking on the dirty Slayer — especially with stories you made up. And I might add I'm still dirty through no fault of my own," Buffy said as she held Annie closer. "As punishment, you'll both have to suffer my ripeness."
"Suffer being the operative word, I take it?" Giles stood up, then, arching his back in a quick stretch. "I think now would be a good time for me to go out and get clothes for the two of you to wear. As fetching as you are in your leathers and my t-shirts, neither option is terribly suitable for going out and about in Sunnydale."
"I was kind of hoping you might still have some of my old workout stuff tucked away in a closet here," Buffy said as she looked up at him.
"Bloody — You're right. I do. I cleaned out your locker at school and never got around to taking your things to your mother. I think they're clean," he said, heading upstairs to retrieve the bag.
to be continued...
