When Buffy returned to Giles' home, it was with a heart not quite as burdened as she'd expected, but not quite as light as she'd hoped. Joyce had accepted her far sooner than Buffy's most optimistic predictions, but the woman had been so focused on recrimination that she never got to hear about her granddaughter. Perhaps they would be able to move beyond the blame stage the next night. For all that Buffy had tried to keep Annie from getting too excited about meeting Joyce, she really did want her mother and daughter to get to know one another. Joyce had been cheated of seeing her own daughter grow into womanhood, but maybe Annie could help make up for that, just a little.
It was with those thoughts swirling around in her mind that she opened the heavy oak door to the sounds of her daughter and her Watcher giggling. She plastered a grin on her face and hoped it would be enough to fool Giles into thinking everything was good. Annie would know it wasn't, but then, she had the benefit of being able to smell the truth of her mother's moods. Giles, with his piss-poor human nose would only be able to go by body language and voice. Buffy just hoped her ability to lie convincingly had improved over the years.
"Hey guys! What's the funny?" She stopped short as both turned to face her. Annie had a look of deep concern on her face, and Giles —
"Buffy, what's wrong? Didn't it go well?" His frown was deeper than Annie's.
'Damn. So much for being able to lie to him,' she thought as she tried to decide what to say. In the end, she gave up on the pretence and said, "It didn't totally suck. I'm going back tomorrow night for dinner."
"She's still alive?"
"Cute. You know perfectly well I have a rule against slaying family members. If I didn't, you would have been in the ground long ago." Buffy arched her back, grimacing as she felt her spine crack. She said, "I think I need another shower. Maybe soak some of the tension out."
Annie asked, "What did she say about me?"
Buffy's shoulders drooped when she answered, "We didn't get that far. I figured I was doing well just to get her to acknowledge I'm her daughter."
"Oh," Annie said, her chin dropping to her chest.
Buffy went over to where her daughter sat and knelt before her. She lifted Annie's chin so she could look her in the eyes and said, "We're meeting again tomorrow, sweetie. She invited me to dinner — which is a good thing — and I'll catch her up on the family history then."
"Really? I mean — good. Sure. Got —"
"Annie," Buffy said, interrupting her daughter's pending babblefest. "Things went better than I thought they would, but Grandma Joyce and I had a lot of ground to cover. It could have been worse — she could have refused to believe me. Let me get cleaned up and into something else to wear. We can talk while we eat, okay?"
Dinner had been difficult for the three of them, and they were all glad to leave the table for the sitting area. Buffy had done what she could to reassure her daughter, but the reality was that Joyce still didn't know about her granddaughter. She really didn't want Annie to feel like she was some deep dark secret, but her daughter was the impatient sort. She'd always wanted everything to happen right NOW, and anything that got in the way of that tended to make Annie feel as if she were going backward.
Finally, though, Annie said, "Did you at least have a nice visit?"
"I think I had more fun listening to T'Granc whine when I snapped off his wings, but all things considered, it could have been worse," Buffy said, watching her daughter's face carefully. She sounded okay about Joyce, but that was no guarantee of her true emotional state.
So intent was Buffy on Annie's reaction that she entirely missed Giles'. He'd gone perfectly still at the casual mention of torture, hoping it was a bad joke on Buffy's part. But Annie had accepted the statement at face value, and he was left with a horrifying image of his Slayer, of Buffy deliberately inflicting pain on someone for hours on end. His mind was replacing Angelus' face with Buffy's, and every time he tried to clear his mind, they just came back in new variations.
Annie was the one to notice his pallor. She half stood and said, "Uncle Rupert?"
Buffy turned to look at him and added, "Giles! What's wrong? Annie — get some water. I saw cups in the cupboard over the sink." She went over to sit next to him on the couch, putting her arm around him in an attempt to comfort him.
"Torture? You had to use torture? You couldn't have just killed the person?" He spoke barely above a whisper, his voice shaky. He unconsciously started rubbing his right hand, remembering the pain inflicted by Angelus. He could almost feel the dull throb of his left shoulder after it had been partially dislocated when Angelus, in a fit of rage, used his arm to throw him against a wall. Even now, three months after the fact, he still suffered aches and pains in various joints.
"A demon," she said, looking at him worriedly. She knew he'd been through hell himself, but he couldn't honestly feel sympathy or compassion for a demon. She continued, "T'Granc was a demon — one of the evil ones — he had information I needed, and the only way to get it was torture."
His eyes were on her, but he wasn't seeing her when he said, "Angelus wanted information. Hour after hour, he tortured me. Because I had information he needed. And that's what you did, isn't it?"
Annie was back with the water, and Buffy took the glass, holding it up to Giles' mouth and saying, "Drink this." It was a stupid thing to do, but she had no idea what to say to him. He was taking her actions far too personally, but at the same time, she could almost see why.
"Mom?" Her voice was tentative. She had no idea what was wrong with her mother's Watcher, but she knew it was fairly awful.
Without looking away from him, Buffy said, "Not now, Annie."
She stood there for a moment, undecided about what to do. His reaction made no sense to her — torture was a necessary evil — but the way he was acting seemed to make sense to her mother. After another moment, she went to the closet where they stored their packs and pulled out her short sword and its back sheath. Sunset would be coming soon, and Annie didn't want to be caught without a way to defend herself. She went to the desk and pulled out a sheet of paper to write a note for the two, then tacked it to the wall.
Annie glanced back once and saw her mother still comforting him. Without another word, she left the flat and closed the door behind her. Mom would yell at her when she got back for taking off like that, but she didn't think she had much of a choice. The moment had been too private for a witness.
It was past sunset, now, and Annie debated going back to Uncle Rupert's home. Her mother wouldn't be too pleased with her for going out on her own, but really, Sunnydale was pretty safe compared to everywhere else she'd been. Though her mother had warned her, she'd still been taken aback at how much wasted ground there was around each house. As far as she could tell, no one grew their own food, despite having land to call their own. It didn't matter to her that food was available for purchase, because one never knew when the food might disappear.
She'd walked a number of neighborhoods, her disapproval increasing with every block, before deciding at last to go the city center. The residents of Sunnydale had never known what it was to be in the middle of a war, and Annie realized it was stupid to get angry about that. She should be happy for their sake that they didn't know what it was to have an army roll through, but instead, she was passing the worst kind of —
Her train of thought was derailed when she heard a scuffle down one of the alleys, and she paused, considering her next move. It was late enough for vampires to be out and about, and she had her sword, but she was still very new to this world. She had no way of knowing if the vampire was working for a stronger demon, and if that were the case, she might bring a considerable amount of trouble down on her head. After another moment, a very human cry of pain decided her, and she poked her head around the corner of the building to see what was happening before barging in.
Two figures were struggling, but the lighting was confusing, and she couldn't tell if both were human or not. She pulled her sword out of the back sheath and crept nearer, keeping close to the building. A few feet away from them, her sense of smell told her that the taller one was human. The shorter, bulkier one was definitely demon.
As the two grappled, she cursed herself for being stupid enough to leave without a stake. Her mother had always spoken of using a stake when fighting vampires, but until that moment, it never occurred to her to wonder why, especially since decapitation was so much safer. Now, of course, seeing a vampire getting ready to feed, it made perfect sense. A stake could be aimed at the heart without injuring the victim of the attack. A sword, long or short, was useless in this situation, so she put it away again and looked around the alley.
It didn't take long to find what she needed — the people of Sunnydale were remarkably careless with their property — and she managed to snap off a piece of wood from something that looked like it might have been part of a crate once. The sharp crack did nothing to distract the vampire, so Annie found it remarkably easy to walk up from behind and stake it. Just before the creature turned to dust, she thought she heard it say, "What the —?"
The vampire dust had its usual effect on her, and she spent the next few minutes bent over, her hair hanging around her face, as her nose tried to clear itself of the irritant. Her eyes were watering badly, and for some reason, the man kept trying to shove a white cloth at her.
Finally, he said, "Here. To wipe your nose. I promise it's clean." Since he all but shoved it into her face, she accepted it and used it to clean up the after-effects of her sneezing fit.
When she was done, she looked up at him and offered the cloth back, saying, "Thanks."
She would have introduced herself, but he blurted out, "Buffy!?"
Giles accepted a glass of scotch from Buffy, and he forced himself not to lecture when he saw that she'd poured herself a glass as well. She had taken the chair while he remained on the couch, sipping his drink and still trying to come to terms with what she'd told him of her methods of interrogation. Granted, from what she had said, torture was standard practice in that dimension, but he was appalled that she had lowered herself to do the same thing. She was human — the Slayer, for god's sake — yet she spoke of torture as casually as she'd once spoken of musical groups and the latest fashions. Worse, Annie seemed to accept —
"Annie!" He looked around, panicked that he hadn't even thought of the girl since Buffy's revelation.
"Relax, Giles. She went out a while ago. She left a note," Buffy said. She was outwardly calm, but since finding her daughter's note over an hour ago, she'd been planning some fairly exotic punishments to express her displeasure. It wasn't that Annie couldn't take care of herself, because she could. She'd been taught by some of the best fighters in the pan-dimension. But she was very much afraid that Annie would run into people who might mistake her for her mother, and Buffy just wasn't up to dealing with that at the moment.
"It's too dangerous," he said, becoming agitated. "God only knows what she'll run into out there."
"She's got five demon kills to her name, and she's dusted her share of vampires," she answered, putting her drink down to join him on the couch again. She put her hand on his back and rubbed it in a slow, circular motion before continuing, "The only problem she'll have is if she forgets to hold her breath. She's allergic to vampire dust."
"She's what?" The statement was so absurd that he was shaken out of his dread for the girl.
She smiled wryly and said, "Stupid, isn't it? The daughter of the Slayer and a — wait — Annie told you about George, didn't she?"
"Braachen, yes," he answered absently. Her hand felt quite good on his back, and the rubbing soothed him considerably. It didn't make him forget what she'd told him, but somehow, it made her confession a bit more surreal. Surely hands as gentle as this couldn't possibly have broken bones or —
"Yep. And we'll need help locating his parents, by the way," she said, grateful to finally be getting off the topic of all's fair in Buffy's war, including torture. "They're in Ireland — his whole family is. None of them ever left. They'll want to know what happened to him. That he left a daughter behind."
Giles blinked as he took in what she said. It was perfectly natural that Buffy would want to get in touch with Annie's other grandparents, but it was apparent that she no longer wished to discuss her behavior during the war. 'Perhaps it's as well,' he thought to himself. 'I don't particularly care to discuss it any further myself. If nothing else, at least you've gotten over the notion that she hasn't changed since you last saw her.'
Out loud, he said, "Of course. I'll get in touch with the Council tomorrow. They should be able to help."
Grateful he was going along with her change of subject, she decided that now was as good a time as any to mention another request. He might not be happy about it, but it was important, and she figured she'd be able to talk him into it. "When you call, tell them to send Kendra's replacement here."
"What?" He looked at her — really looked at her — for the first time since she'd come back from her mother's house, and he saw the same weariness that had crossed her face that morning.
"I've been fighting for twenty-three years, Giles. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of never being able to rest, and I'm tired of having to fight for my life every single day," she said, surprising the hell out of herself. When she'd thought of what to tell him, of how to explain, she'd decided to just leave it at her being too old to be an active Slayer anymore. She hadn't expected to pour her heart out.
His voice quiet, he answered, "Of course. I hadn't even thought that far ahead yet, but you're right. Kendra's replacement should be sent here."
"What's her name?" Buffy left off rubbing his back and leaned to get her drink from the side table.
"I don't know. Council haven't seen fit to share that information with me," he said, sounding a bit irritated.
"They can tell you tomorrow when you call." And then she asked hesitantly, "What will you say about me?" The Watchers' Council had been one of her few worries about returning. The organization had a reputation that managed to be even worse than hers, and she wasn't entirely certain she was up to taking the group on if she had to. She didn't doubt they'd get nasty about Annie's background, but she had one or two pieces of information that should keep her daughter safe, and she wasn't above a little blackmail.
"The truth, more or less. They don't know you ran away — I kept that from them — but it shouldn't be any problem explaining how you ended up in Hell." He took a deep breath, thinking about Travers' reaction to the news. It wouldn't be good, and he would likely place the blame squarely on his shoulders, but he would survive.
"Good," she said. Buffy was about to mention the need for identification papers when the door crashed open, and Annie came running in, looking as if all the hounds of hell were at her heels. Just as she was ready to get something — anything — from Giles' weapons chest, someone else came in.
Buffy froze in place and whispered, "Xander."
to be continued...
