DISCLAIMER: Joss owns all of the canon characters. I own the kiddos.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: For some reason, this fic has been really hard for me to write lately. I've just been stuck. I've even written parts of the sequel, but for some reason…
Anyway, even though I know everyone loves them, you won't being seeing all the kiddos from here on out, at least not very much. You'll see the little Brookie, Claire, Noelle, Brandon, and Val, as well as Sunny and Kaya, but Drew and Geyton probably won't show up again until the last chapter. Sorry, but plot and pacing wise, it just has to be that way.
Also along those lines, this chapter will sort of jump all over the place because all of the loose ends are about to come together.
SMALL PACKAGES: Chapter Nine
Darla held the little girl tight in her arms, singing to her.
Cradled in Darla's arms, Sunny's body slowly relaxed and she snuggled against her white woman. It was getting harder and harder for Sunny to remember her other life, her Mommy, her Daddy, and the thing in the dark.
"Darla," Sunny said.
Darla looked at her. The child rarely said her name. "Why do they hurt me?"
Anger rose in Darla's throat, but she kept her outward expression calm except for the slight tightening of her lips. "I don't know, darling girl," Darla said.
Sunny accepted the answer in the way of small children. The awful, pulling feeling had been happening for what seemed like a long time now. Ever since Kaya had gone away. Kaya, who, before Darla, had been Sunny's only friend.
Darla cuddled the child. She'd never gotten to hold her own child this way, and in the end, she'd lost Connor completely, lost him to Jasmine, to vengeance. She'd been ready for hell when she'd lost that battle, and instead, she'd been given Sunny.
"Darla," Sunny said again.
"Hmmm?" Darla made a sound under her breath acknowledging the child's question.
Sunny screwed her delicate little face up in thought. "Are we dead?" she asked.
Darla continued rocking, as Sunny stared up at her. "Yes," she replied, "precious child, we are."
Sunny didn't say anything for a minute. "I thought so," she said finally. Sometimes, Sunny remembered dying. Here, in Darla's arms, she pushed the idea out of her mind. Darla would keep her safe. Kaya had said.
"They shouldn't be able to hurt me if I'm dead," Sunny said, her small voice high and clear and certain.
Darla swallowed the helpless fury she felt at the memory of the little girl's non-corporeal body contorted with pain.
"No," she said softly. "They shouldn't."
Brookie rubbed the corners of her eyes with her entire fist. How long had she been asleep? Where was she? Where was Daddy?
The two year old tried to roll over, but found herself bound to the seat with thick coils.
"Brookie doesn't like car seats," she said firmly. No one responded. She turned her head. "Claire-y?" she said, her little voice ringing out. "Daddy?" She paused, her bottom lip trembling a little. "Boingee?"
Brookie wiggled against the thick chain that held her in place. She sniffed. It hurt. Someone was mean-mean-mean to tie her up like that, and when she found out who it was, she was going to kick them. Where it hurt.
She let out a scream of frustration, the almost animal kind that kids could only manage when they were very young.
"Brookie?"
"Noelle?" Brookie sniffed.
"Yeah. It's me, Brookie. There aren't any weapons here, and Claire's still asleep, and I'm all tied up, too." Noelle sounded more than perturbed. "I think I may have to hurt someone," she said.
Brookie didn't respond.
"We may have to slay someone," Noelle continued, looking around and plotting the best course of action.
"Broken?" Brookie asked. "Play broken?"
"Oh yeah," Noelle replied. "As soon as Claire wakes up, we're going to play a lot of broken, and we might even play bleeding, too."
Brookie wrinkled her nose. Demon blood smelled a little bit like Play-Doh, but it tasted much, much worse.
Brookie wiggled her body back and forth. She'd long ago figured out how to get out of car seats without breaking them. You just had to wiggle your body just right and go all bendy with your legs…
Slowly, Brookie slid out of her chains, grinning devilishly. "Noellie and Claire-y," she called out. "Brookie coming."
Brookie tottled to the seat in front of her and saw Claire, still unconscious, slumped against the leather seat, chains holding her firmly in place. Brookie jumped up on her lap. "Claire," she whispered so loudly that she might as well not have been whispering at all. "Wake up, Claire." In a demonstration of sisterly love, Brookie shoved her sister impatiently, but Claire remained locked in a magic-induced sleep.
Brookie hopped off the seat and ran another row forward, where she saw Noelle struggling against her own chains, a mutinous expression on her innocent face.
"You know what?" she said to Brookie, her voice low and angry. "When the bad guy gets back here, I think we may have to play pain."
The plane started its decent into Los Angeles, and Brookie rubbed at her ears as they popped. How long had they been asleep for anyway? Brookie frowned. Without Claire awake, the plane was just too, too quiet.
Kate held her son close. Lindsey had assured her that he was just sleeping, that he would wake up, but he hadn't yet. She'd wanted to take him home. She'd been adamant about that. Her son wasn't going to be a pawn in whatever struggle Good and Evil had going.
That's why she hadn't wanted Brandon to go to Potential. Why she'd argued tirelessly against her ex-husband.
"Claire," the sleeping boy murmured.
From the pilot's seat, Lindsey glanced over his shoulder. "He's talking about her again," he said softly.
Kate sighed. Brandon's sleep talking was the only reason she was there at all, the only reason she hadn't taken him straight home.
They don't want him, Lindsey had told her when they'd found Brandon, unconscious on the runway. They want the girls.
Kate had been ready to argue, ready to run, to do anything to keep Brandon safe and away from whatever had taken him, and then, he'd spoken.
Claire. That's all he'd said since they'd found him, nearly five hours ago, and Kate knew in her heart that he would never have forgiven her if she'd taken him away before making sure that the girls were okay. She could have lived with that, but she knew her son, and she knew that, much worse, he never would have forgiven himself.
She'd carried that burden, that bitter self-anger. She didn't want that for Brandon. Not ever.
"How long until we land?" she asked. If Brandon wasn't awake to tell Lindsey what he knew before landing… Kate didn't want to think about it, or about what might happen to the three little girls. The expression on Lindsey's face, hard and anguished at the same time, was covered with a polite, emotionless mask.
Kate hugged her son, her own face tightened with anger and on the edge of collapsing with worry and relief.
She kissed his forehead.
"EWWWWWWWWWWWWW!" Brandon opened his eyes, bolted straight up, and contemptuously wiped the kiss off of his forehead with the back of his hand. "Mooooooom," he complained. "Kissing is for girls!"
Kate laughed, and with the laughter, she almost lost it altogether. Brandon was back, he was okay, and he was, more than anything else, still Brandon.
The little boy suddenly looked up at his mother, horrified. "Where's Claire?" he asked. "And Brookie and Noelle?" He paused. "Where are they?" Words started tumbling out of his mouth at warp speed. "I was supposed to protect them. That's what magic does. It protects people. They may be slayers and everything, but they're still little. Really little."
Kate didn't point out that Brandon was only about a month older than Claire. "Sweetie," she said, turning him to look at her. "The bad men still have them, but we're going to get them back."
When she saw the expression on his face, the anguish and the stubbornness, she knew she'd made the right decision, bringing him along. "We have to get them back," he said. "They magicked me. I didn't know they could do magic, and I was trying to make weapons so Noelle could play her stupid Broken game with the guards, well at least the guard who Brookie hadn't already Boing-ed real bad, and that guard, he just threw something on the ground and crushed it under his feet, and then…" Brandon trailed off.
Lindsey nodded and clicked the plane he'd chartered into auto-pilot. He walked back and sat down next to Kate and Brandon. "We're going to get them back," he told Brandon softly. "And the people who took them are going to be very, very sorry."
Brandon narrowed his eyes at the man who was Claire's Daddy. "You promise?" he asked. Lindsey nodded, and the little boy shrugged and quickly spoke again. "I mean, not that I like them or anything, because they're girls and I don't, but they're still little, so we should protect them, right?"
"Right." Lindsey said nothing else, as he returned to the pilot's seat. So there'd been a spell, as he had imagined, and they'd sent at least three guards to take the girls. If Brookie had hurt them, chances were that the guards were at least part demon.
What did Wolfram and Hart want with the small slayers?
Lindsey pressed the thought out of his mind and took solace in the fact that his girls were giving their captors hell.
Talot looked impatiently at his watch. The final sacrifices would be here within the hour.
"Sir?" the voice interrupted his thoughts and he turned a dangerous grin on its owner.
"Yes," he replied civilly, his eyes raking up and down the intern's body disinterestedly.
"I finished cleaning the chamber," she replied, willing him to let her do something else, something real. Making copies and cleaning up after sacrifices so wasn't what she'd signed on for. Didn't these people realize she went to Harvard? If that didn't say evil mastermind potential, she didn't know what did.
"Very good," he replied. Then he smiled and held up the tiny vial of blood. "Do you know what this is?" he asked.
"A talisman of some sort," she replied, ready to impress him with her knowledge. "Most likely of Corinthian, Butonic, or Kintroshian origins." She squinted at it. "Containing sacrificial blood." She paused and bit her bottom lip. The last part had been a guess, but hadn't she just finished cleaning up after a sacrifice? This new guy, whoever he was, was totally sacrifice happy.
"Very good," Talot replied, gesturing to a chair in front of him. "Sit down…" he trailed off and raised his eyebrows at the intern.
"Laura," the girl supplied him with her name as she took a seat.
"Let me tell you a story, Laura," Talot said, and the intern's heart began beating just a little bit faster. He was handsome, he was young, and whoever he was, he was powerful.
"There was once a boy who grew up with a very powerful father with no vision whatsoever," Talot said, and Laura's heart sank. His story was about his relationship with his father? Was intern another word for cheap therapy?
"And the father didn't realize that respecting boundaries meant limiting power," Talot continued. "The father didn't realize that, with the proper tools, no power, no realm was out of reach. So the boy grew up, moving along with his father as the father worked in this dimension or that dimension, and the boy learned that people thought that everywhere, death had power."
He sat back in his seat. "People die all the time," he said, his voice still low and charming. "And though we can enslave them with their consent…" Talot trailed off. Enslave was such a harsh word. "Though contracts can last post-mortem," he amended himself, "even necromancers cannot truly harness the power of the dead."
Laura leaned forward. Now this was getting interesting.
"Sure, they may use the dead for their purposes, but the powers that lie beyond life, ancient powers, bloodline powers, powers thought lost once a person's life is spent…" Talot grinned at her. "Those are the powers I seek," he said. Lifting the talisman into the sun, Talot smiled.
"It's a wonderful story, this tale of mine," he told her. "It all starts with a goddess from the boy's favorite dimension, a dimension where death itself is the true beginning of power, and the dead little girl who could bring the goddess to life."
Laura was practically salivating. Now this was what she called an internship.
"Sunny, do you remember how old you are?" Darla asked, wanting to change the subject.
"I remember," Sunny said in her solemn, funny manner. "I was this many." The child held up five fingers. "I remember," she said. "It was my birthday, only there weren't any candles, and it was dark, and then there was a man…"
Sunny shook her head. "I don't want to talk about this, please," she said politely, her little voice solid.
"What do you want to talk about, my baby?" Darla asked. The longer she held this child, the longer they stayed here together, the more she felt she had been given a second chance. Whoever she'd been born to, this child, this ghost-child, was hers now.
"Tell me a story," Sunny said, her voice small. "About a happy ever after."
"And," Xander finished with a flourish, trying to keep the children's attention, "they all lived happily ever after."
Val and Kaya stared at him, neither of them saying a word.
"Okay," Xander muttered, "not my best showing."
"Where did Miss Willow go?" Val asked. "And will someone please tell me who Tara was, if that's okay and everything." Val's voice was barely above a whisper, and as the sentence left her mouth, she blushed.
Xander stalled. "How about we have some graham crackers," he said, digging into the bag he'd brought along. The girls stared back at him wordlessly, Val still blushing and Kaya looking at him like she was about to pummel him.
That child was definitely Faith's.
"Tell ya what," Xander said. "How about we go see what's taking Miss Buffy and Miss Willow and Miss…er… Faith so long." It had been hours since the rest of the children had come home, and Buffy, Faith, and Willow had been locked up in Buffy's office the entire time, plotting.
Xander sighed and longed for the good old days of action without forethought. "What ever happened to spontaneity?" he said under his breath. "The good old I've got me a stake and a glaive, now let's go stop us some evil."
Spike's eyes darkened. "The whelp has a point. They're bloody attacking Kaya, and it's all we can do to keep ourselves from being pulled toward the great, sodding magnet of destruction and whatnot."
"I say we fight this evil," she said, her voice bright. "With the strength of our wits and the force of real, economical consequences and sexual deprivation."
"Or," Spike drawled, "the slayers can hurry it up, take Kaya and us to the source of the problem, and kill it."
"That would work, too," Anya admitted.
"Time to go," Kaya said.
Xander opened his mouth to reply, but he didn't get the chance. In the next minute, Kaya let out a bloodcurdling yell.
"BITCH HELL DAMN!" the child yelled.
Faith stuck her head into the room. "Kaya Joyce!"
"Time to go, Mommy," Kaya said sweetly, now that she'd managed to get her mother's attention. "Others say it's time to go."
Faith sighed. These days, Kaya was a force to be reckoned with. "Not just yet, baby," Faith said. Kaya opened her mouth to say something else, but Faith cut her off. "And trust me, little girl, you don't want me to come out there because you're saying what you shouldn't."
Kaya closed her mouth, stomped her foot, and glared mutinously at her mommy. Faith looked back at the child evenly. Kaya crossed her arms over her chest, and after one last warning look, Faith closed the door.
Damn, she loved that kid.
"Bugger this," Kaya said toward the door, just softly enough that she knew her mommy wouldn't be able to hear it.
"Natives are getting restless, B," Faith told Buffy. "You guys about done with that spell yet?"
Willow nodded. "I can transport the three of us, Kaya, Val, and Xander to L.A, where we'll meet up with Angel."
"If he ever gets my message," Buffy muttered. Stupid Harmony and her stupid voice mail.
"The spell will enclose the girls in a protective aura that will set off an alarm system if anything non-slayery and supernatural comes near them," Willow continued, setting the last elements into place. "And, at my command, it will teleport Val and Kaya to Anne's house and out of harm's way."
Faith nodded. She'd known all along that Kaya would have to go, that the two of them would have to face this, but she'd refused to go until Willow could promise that Kaya would be safe.
Willow's hands shook as she performed the final preparations.
Val was Tara. Tara was Val.
Even now that hours had passed, the chorus played over and over again in her head.
But what about my Tara? She wondered.
"Well, isn't this cozy?" Doyle asked Cordy. "You and me and the back seat of a car, Princess."
Cordy snorted. "In your ghost-dreams, Doyle," she replied. "We're in the backseat of Angel's car, and he and Dawn are right there."
"Too much stimulation for you, darlin?" Doyle asked, a wicked grin settling over his face. "I understand."
Cordy smacked him. Ghost Doyle just really needed to be smacked every once in a while.
Doyle tilted his head to the side and then placed his hand on top of Dawn's head. The visions would be too much for the wee one otherwise. The tantalizing possibilities with the equally tantalizing Ghost Cordy would have to wait.
The force of the vision threw Dawn's head back, and she let out a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a grunt.
A little girl with blonde hair, dead, light coming out of her body. Light being torn in a million different directions. More children. Dying. Bleeding.
Darkness with a name. Tyrai.
"Wolfram and Hart," Dawn gasped as she opened her eyes. "This sacrifice thingamajig is happening at Wolfram and Hart. Tonight."
Dawn ignored her headache. The vision thing kept on thinging, day after day. That's what it did.
"You okay?" Angel asked her.
"I'm fine," Dawn said. Angel continued looking at her. Dawn sighed. "I'm fine, okay?" she said, sounding for a minute again like she was fourteen, not twenty.
Angel searched her face to see if she was telling the truth.
"If you don't stop looking at me, I'll tell Suri that you give therapeutic massages three days a week out of your home," Dawn said. "And she'll never leave you alone after that."
Angel started driving. As far as threats went, it was a good one.
TBC…Kaya and company teleport to LA where they run into Dawn and Angel. The non-corporeal Doyle and Cordy meet up with Anya and Spike, Buffy finds out about Dawn's visions, Lindsey, Kate, and Brandon make their way to Wolfram and Hart, and the little slayers fight back.
Now I remember why I don't update this fic very often. It's a friggin lot of work. Anyway, I know we were a bit all over this chapter, but at the beginning of next chapter, all of the story lines will start converging, and then, hopefully, it will be easier for me to write and for you to read. If you have a heart or any redeeming qualities, please take the time to let me know that you're reading. This took forever to write, and it won't take you much time to let me know what you think.
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