Chapter Eight
Over the next several months I settled into a routine of training, translation, and tension. Kennedy and I soon took over the bulk of time spent training the potentials. In the classic military tradition she tore down the young girls and I helped build them back up as fighters. Andrew called us "Sgt. Hartman and Obi Wan." We worked the Potentials up from general fitness to traditional Slayer techniques and then concentrated on decapitation moves after Buffy had her vision about the thousands of Turok-Han waiting for us.
We kept them busy and tired as much as we could so they wouldn't focus on being afraid all the time. That didn't prevent Chloe from killing herself, but it did seem to help most of the girls. Kennedy and I kept them so tired that the Potentials saw Buffy and Spike's specialized training sessions as a treat. Staking an ordinary vampire was much more fun than doing pushups.
In the evenings I often assisted Dawn, Willow, and Giles in translations of different materials. I knew several languages they weren't very strong in. I had always been blessed with a facility for learning and retaining languages and over two thousand years I had picked up many. I spent a lot of time teaching languages like Turkish and Greek to Dawn. She picked up languages faster than I did and had a real love for them. For me languages were tools to help get what I wanted, but they were more than that to Dawn. She had a real future with languages--assuming that she or anyone in Sunnydale lived to have a future in anything.
I also helped some of the Potentials with language barriers. Most of them had at least a working knowledge of English but Giles found a Chinese Potential named Chao-Ahn that didn't have any English. I was the only one in the house who knew her native Cantonese. Happily I was able to start translating for her before Giles started using his horrid flashcards showing bloody scenes of vampires and their victims. She was lactose intolerant and I had never liked ice cream that much, so she and I would get a doughnut while the other girls got ice cream on trips to the mall food court. We would talk about her home province, which I had visited once.
There were many sources of tension over those months. Some of that stress was financial. The girls ate as much as you would think a small army could and most of them hadn't been able to bring many clothes with them. Giles and Buffy helped with the extra expenses but it would take time to get full access to all the hidden accounts of the Watchers and her job was barely enough to take care of herself and Dawn. In the meantime I dipped into several of my accounts to furnish food and clothing for the Potentials. Over the last five centuries I had set up stable storehouses and bank holdings of artwork, crafts, smaller furniture, and books. If there looked to be trouble in a city or country where one storehouse was located, I would have the contents moved to a less troubled place and hire other people to watch it for me. After the contents had aged two or three hundred years, I would retrieve and sell off a cache and then invest the proceeds in very stable accounts. I always lost items to decay, theft, and vandalism, but the inflation of value from the surviving items more than made up for that. With a few exceptions, I had never lived extravagantly and I occasionally came into unexpected windfalls over the centuries, so I had a tidy fortune to live off.
Another source of tension was the kind of outrageous things that everyone assured me always happened in Sunnydale. This included the fear that Giles might actually be dead and that the First had taken his form. Happily this didn't turn out to be true, but it was a bit of a shock to see Xander, Anya, Dawn, and Andrew tackle Giles as the Watcher and I sat around the campfire in the deseret. Seeing Willow in a man's body and the pain Spike's misfiring chip caused him also caused their share of tension. It was a shock to see Xander trussed up over the seal in the high school basement. Fortunately his demon date-girl didn't do much damage since Robin Wood and I cut him down before a Turok-Han could rise out of the seal. But the "exchange student" demon from the shadow realm broke my leg before it ran off. Fortunately Spike was able to kill it and bring it back to the portal so we could get Buffy back. I was back on my feet and training Potentials in a couple of days.
Andrew caused his fair share of tension too, especially when he started carrying around a video camera. After several warnings, I finally had to physically threaten him to stop him from filming me. I couldn't afford to have my face on footage that following generations might see. Plastic surgery wouldn't work because of my healing powers, so I had to remain inconspicious throughout the ages. Despite his many annoyances, Andrew did amuse me sometimes, although I would never show it and he did start taking more responsibility for his actions after his tears shut down the seal.
Seeing Spike put on his "game face" and going berserk after being triggered in the basement caused all my old doubts about him to resurface despite recently fighting other vampires by his side in an alley. By the way Giles and Wood were talking as I left the basement, I knew they were going to do something. But I didn't say anything. The day after Wood provoked Spike into a fight, Buffy gathered everyone in her living room and played the "Early One Morning" song that was Spike's trigger. Spike wasn't affected by it, so there wouldn't be any more discussion about his reliability, but I wagered that doubts would still remain in most people's minds.
The next big ripple was the arrival of Faith, the other Slayer. I saw the less than warm reception she got in the house. After she talked to Spike, she had asked me, "So what's your story?"
"Just your average immortal mercenary fighting on the side of good for once."
"A man with a sketchy past who doesn't have first-hand knowledge about my sketchy past, I think I'm starting to like you," she had said.
I didn't get to talk much with Faith for awhile after our introduction, but I heard she got friendly with Spike. The next night the Potentials were winding down their caffeine buzz's from our trip to Starbucks when we got word that the new Potential in the hospital had regained consciousness and told her story. The plan to assault the vineyard that Buffy outlined for us smelled like a trap and gave me an unsettling feeling in my gut, but I didn't have any better ideas, so I went along with everyone else.
I felt a savage glee in my heart when the Bringers finally attacked. I buried my axe up to the hilt in one of their chests and then slit another one's throat with my gerber. Looking around, I saw that everyone else was doing well too. I was proud that our training was paying off. But that feeling curdled in my gut when Caleb appeared, taunted Buffy for a minute, and then knocked her halfway across the big storage room with his first punch. Then he asked, "So what else you got?" and Spike stepped up. Caleb traded a few blows with the vampire and sent him crashing into some wine barrels. I went for Caleb next and got a blocked knife thrust, punch to the face, disarm, and stabbing in the stomach with my own knife for my trouble. The next thing I knew Amanda was helping me out the door. We all were all beaten and bruised, but Rona had a broken arm, Xander had a gouged out eye, and Molly and Diane were dead. Later as I sat in the basement and healed, I thought that things looked about as bleak as they could get. I was wrong.