Welcome to the--Well, A Hellmouth
On most Saturdays, Xander and Robin worked on the car.
The car started its life with the Watchers as an old, beat-up piece of junk. Xander bought it from an auto salvage yard for two hundred dollars, all he could really afford after he splurged on the most realistic prosthetic eye he could find. The owner delivered the car to the garage on a wrecker -- no tires, busted transmission, cracked engine block, torn fuel line, rusted interior, and many other bad things.
Originally, though -- and what attracted Xander to the car to begin with -- the car was a 1963 Pontiac GTO. He went to the yard to look for a rear bumper for Giles's car (he let Buffy take it to the store; she almost made it before she hit something), and the car's promise of beauty captured him. Fix it! his mind screamed.
Robin, a California transplant from New York City, was originally disdainful towards personal transportation. He felt public transportation was the way to go; take the subway to the stop closest your destination and walk the rest of the way. The mechanical dissection of the engine -- figuring out what does what, what goes where, as neither Xander nor anyone else in the house knew much about cars -- appealed to Robin's yearning for new knowledge and quickly overcame his reluctance to focus solely on his Slayers and The Mission.
Work on the car went slowly. Time was scarce -- they had to manage six young women between them, after all -- and they still had to learn what to fix before they fixed it. They worked well together, though, despite methods and philosophies that were pretty much polar opposites.
"I can't believe we finally found one," Robin said the morning after they met Katharine Beckford.
"We didn't so much find one as get found," Xander said.
"Doesn't matter," Robin said. He reached deep into the engine to check one of the lines; when he straightened back up, he grinned. "We got one. She's gonna be safe."
"Safe as you can be, at least, while in this gig."
"Safe from herself, I mean," Robin said.
Xander nodded and indicated the car. "We get all the lines? You ready to flush it all out?"
Robin nodded. They worked together silently for a few minutes.
"How's she doing?" Xander asked. "She sleep okay and all that?"
"Guess so," Robin said. "Hope so. She's getting the tour and introductions with Giles now. She didn't seem too freaked out."
"At least she'll get to meet the other girls. Better than it was for Buffy -- she'll get to see she's not alone, not a freak."
"Yeah," Robin said.
They worked silently again.
Katharine stayed the night in the spare bedroom at the house Giles, Robin, and Faith shared. Giles woke her up at ten-thirty to give her the "Welcome to the Hellmouth," speech.
"Well, actually, not 'the' Hellmouth," Giles said. "A Hellmouth, more accurately. The term 'hellmouth' is just jargon for a physical location where there is a weakening of the barrier between this world and any of the numerous hell dimensions--"
"It's pretty obvious from the etymology, Giles," Katharine said. Giles stopped and stared at her. She stared back. "What?"
Giles shook his head. "Sorry. It's just, well, in all the possible scenarios I imagined resulting from the spell we cast to open the Slayer line, I never dared to dream we would activate someone who wouldn't mangle the English language beyond recognition, much less someone who would actually know what etymology is."
Katharine grinned. She imagined an intellectual man stuck with only typical teenagers for conversation for years, and immediately knew the frustration Giles must feel. "I like languages, you know?" she said. "How they work, how they developed, how they sound."
"That--that's wonderful," Giles said. He smiled -- not a smile to charm her or to flirt with her, but rather a smile of genuine warmth and friendship. A smile which made her happy to be the cause of it. "Dead languages have always been one of my hobbies. How many languages do you speak?"
"Several." She grinned. "Aren't you supposed to be telling me stuff?"
"Oh, yes, right," Giles said. He removed his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief kept in his coat pocket. "Come this way."
He led her to his office, where he explained the origins of the Slayers, how she was first a Potential and now a Slayer. He glossed over some of the finer points of Faith's history when he explained how there came to be two Slayers.
"On May 20th of last year, Katharine, you would have felt something," he said slowly. "We're not sure what that something might have been; all the girls I have been able to-- converse with, they were fighting with the Turok-Hans at the time, they remember very little, almost nothing, of the moment. Do you remember? Can you tell me anything? Even the smallest details will help."
Katharine stared at him; through him, almost. She remembered. Vividly. Audrey was supposed to die; she didn't. "I remember," she said. Her voice was flat and hard. "I-- let me write it down. I have to think, I think better with a pen than I do my mouth."
Giles smiled and nodded. "Yes, that works well for me, I will be able to study it better, share the information with others easier."
He stood and held his arm out. "Shall we go meet your fellow Slayers?"
Katharine was determined to memorize everyone's name the first time around. One of the few things her father ever taught her -- before she hit puberty and the idea of a daughter with breasts scared him away -- was how to memorize the names of everyone you meet. Repeat the person's name while you look them in the eyes, he said. Memorize a distinctive trait, something easily recognized, and assign it to the name. Repeat the name sever times in the initial conversation, as many as possible without coming off like an idiot.
Janet was tall, easy to remember for her height. Rona reminded her of Lauren Hill. Kim was cool, almost cold, and very stand-offish. Vi wore the ugliest hat Katharine had ever seen, and seemed very solid emotionally. Helen was shy and seemed eager to be accepted, even though Katharine was the new girl. Chao-Ahn -- well, Chao-Ahn was easy to remember, and gave Katharine a chance to show off.
"This is Chao-Ahn," Giles said. "She is from Shanghai and spoke no English when she joined us. She is learning, though."
"Hello," Chao-Ahn said. She smiled shyly.
"Hello," Katharine said. "It's been about a year since I last practiced, so I apologize if my vocabulary is bad."
Chao-Ahn's face lit up. "You speak Chinese!" she said.
"You-- you speak Chinese?" Giles said.
"Yeah. I took one of those tests when I was a kid, points out aptitudes," Katharine explained. "Mine was with languages, so I just started learning stuff."
"Oh, thank god -- my Chinese is quite possibly the worst in the entire Western hemisphere."
Katharine smiled. "So, are you going to give me the gossip about all these people?" she asked Chao-Ahn.
"If you translate their stupid jokes," she replied.
Giles asked his two junior Slayers -- Helen and Chao-Ahn -- to stay with Katharine and get her into the Slayer routine. He pulled her aside before he returned to work to give her one last word.
"I want you to know that you do have a choice here," he said. "We do need information from you, that is true, but you do not have to become a Slayer like the girls here. Stay with us for a few days to make your decision, see what we do, how things go. Once you've told me about your Calling, you are free to go -- although I want you to know that we would love if you stayed."
Saturday was the Slayer day off, Helen told her once Giles left. They still patrolled that night, but training was minimal and studying was non-existent. The junior Slayers (all the Slayers under eighteen) lounged around in the living room to watch television, read, draw, paint their nails, or whatever struck their fancy.
"We train during the day with the senior Slayer in our group," Helen explained. "Chao-Ahn and I have been training with Giles for the past month, though, because Buffy -- that's our senior -- Buffy's been in Europe since late April."
"Training with Giles is better," Chao-Ahn said, "but Buffy more fun." She smiled.
"You can speak Chinese, Chao-Ahn," Katharine said.
"I know. I need to work on my English more, though."
"We do our studying with our Watcher," Helen said. "Giles is the best, he's so smart--"
Helen cut off at the commotion across the room. "What is your problem, are you stupid?" Janet snapped at Kim. The two stood close to each other in the middle of the room, but not nose-to-nose. The other Slayers seemed unsurprised at the outburst, and Katharine got the impression they argued regularly.
"It's not my fault you like to keep your head up your--"
"How can you say it's bad there are more of us?"
"Just look at how things are going--"
"Yeah, we got ten Slayers now, there's barely a peep in Cleveland--"
"Yeah, in Cleveland--"
"And no one's died in a year--"
"Maybe Slayers should be dying!"
Janet stared at her for a moment, her mouth wide open. "Are you insane?"
"Think about it," Kim said. "Slayer dies, new one gets called -- never in the same place. So you get Slayers all over the world, killing vampires and demons, every couple years a new place. Now, all we have is a safe Cleveland--"
"You're out of your mind!" Janet took a step closer. "You want to be all alone, no one to stand with you when you're out there?" Katharine felt Helen shudder next to her. "Or, what, you just wanna be the hero, the one to do it alone--"
Kim stepped up into Janet's space and shoved her back. Janet darted back forward, but Faith appeared almost from nowhere to step between them. "X-man's gonna be pissed off if he's gotta fix the window I toss one of you through if you don't back off," she said.
Janet put her hand on Faith's shoulder for a moment, then turned and moved to the sofa. Kim glared at Faith -- not her senior, but Janet's -- but she, too, backed down from the only Slayer currently on the continent to ever fight another Slayer in earnest.
Faith turned to Katharine and smiled. "What's up, Lite Beer?" she said. "Glad you're here. You're gonna dig it -- plenty of people to punch." Faith winked, then left the room.
"Lite Beer?" Helen repeated once Faith was gone.
"Yeah." Katharine rolled her eyes. "What is she, the queen of stupid nicknames?"
Helen laughed. "Trust me, you got off easy. She got Shanghai and Tibet mixed up, but even after Giles corrected her she still insists on calling Chao-Ahn the 'Shaolin Monk', or just Shaolin."
"What's she call you?"
Helen stared at her with wide eyes and shook her head. So Katharine repeated the question to Chao-Ahn.
"Helen is 'Tracy Lords'," Chao-Ahn said. Helen closed her eyes and turned bright red. "I don't recognize the words or know the story, though."
Katharine grinned. "I do. I'll explain later." She gently knocked her fist against Helen's knee. "I'm gonna go wander, I need to let some of this settle in. Be back in a bit."
Helen nodded. "Okay. I'll be here."
Katharine walked out into the garage with the intention of walking around the block, maybe, she wasn't sure. She just wanted to get away from the Slayers for a little bit. She stopped when she entered the garage and saw Xander and Robin with the car.
"Wow," she said. Robin and Xander looked up from under the hood and smiled. "That is one crappy car."
Xander and Robin looked at each other and laughed. "You should've seen it when we got it," Xander said.
"You like cars?" Robin asked.
"Nah, not really." Katharine walked over to stand in front of the engine, near Xander and Robin. "I had a crush on a gear head a few summers ago, though."
"We're certainly not gear heads," Xander said. "I'm actually a carpenter, in addition to being a Watcher -- I just like to put stuff together and fix things. I roped Robin here into helping me through vile trickery."
"Yes, you certainly come off as quite foul and deceitful, a worm of treacherous chicanery," Katharine said.
"Hey! Or, possibly -- thank you?"
Robin grabbed a rag and wiped his hands. "I'm going to go in and get a drink, make sure the girls haven't started a Whose-Ribs-Break-First contest or something."
Katharine raised an eyebrow. "They do that? Lemme guess -- Janet and Kim?"
"No, they're not that bad, but yes, those two are a bit competitive." He tossed the rag into a bin. "You two want anything?"
Katharine and Xander both declined. Robin left the garage. Xander and Katharine stood together for a moment and looked at the engine.
"You know anything about putting these things together?" Xander said. He immediately stuck his hand out and shook his head. "Already asked that. Sorry."
Katharine shrugged. "Not a big deal. I actually know a tiny bit -- acted all interested for Greg and all that, you know?"
Xander thought of all the times he listened to lectures on capital venture return and balloon loans and interest-bearing tax shelters. He smiled. "Yeah. I know how that goes."
"Audrey told me it was pointless, he wasn't going to notice me when he was working on the car. She was right. It didn't matter if I showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, ready to work with him, or four-inch heels and a little black dress. All he saw was the car."
"Who's Audrey?"
Katharine paused for a moment. "Twin sister."
"Identical?"
"Yeah."
"So did you meet at summer camp, decide to cut your hair and teach her how to impersonate you so you could get your parents back together again?"
Katharine rolled her eyes. "Why is it that whenever I mention I'm an identical twin, people bring up The Parent Trap? I mean, that was just one actress, not even real twins."
"Well, you're the wrong hair color and gender for the Weasley twins."
Katharine grinned for a moment; it quickly faded, though. She just felt too nervous, too concerned about the whole Slayer situation, to sustain it. "If I ask you a question, will you give me a straight answer, and not the whole party-line political crap Giles and Wood give?"
Xander leaned back against the car and fixed his eyes on her. "Depends on the question, I guess. I might not know the real answer."
"What? They don't bother to tell the youngest Watcher everything, keep you in the dark some?"
"No, that's not it at all," Xander said. "We-- lost a lot of resources last year. The Watcher's Council used to be near one hundred people, based in London. Now it's three, here in Cleveland. Information doesn't come easy in this business. Pretty much ever."
Katharine sighed. "Sorry. I--" She looked up at the ceiling, then looked Xander straight in the eyes. "How come I'm the first Slayer you've found since you cast that spell?"
Xander took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "Man," he said. "I should've known this was the question, huh?"
Katharine felt bad -- she didn't know why, but she suddenly understood that this was a question Xander asked himself often, something which he (and everyone else) felt a failing. "I--"
"No," he said. "You have a right to know. It's a legit question." He pursed his lips. "You ever hydroplane in your car, lose control for just a second?"
Katharine tensed. She refused to think about car wrecks, about Audrey, and concentrated on a moment a few weeks ago when she hit a puddle on the highway. "Sure."
"I lived my entire life in California," Xander said. "Not a lot of rain there. I'd never done that until I was here -- it rains so much here -- and I remember the way my heart just lurched and my entire body tensed up. It only lasted a second before the tires caught again, but man, I was freaked.
"That's how we all felt last year. Like how you feel when you first lose control of the car, except it lasted for the better part of eight months." He closed his eyes and shook his head for a moment. "We were losing. The town I grew up in, it was dying. People were leaving all the time. By the time the end was coming, it was like a ghost town. Nearly empty. We-- we had no idea what to do, who to trust, how to fight. Buffy had the idea to give the Potentials power... and we ran with it."
Katharine remembered Giles, earlier, when he told her that people died last year, failed to get out. He never said who, but she could tell someone close to Xander fell or got left behind.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
Xander shook his head. "So we get out, right? And -- surprise, things weren't how we thought they would be. I don't know why, Will doesn't know why, Giles and Buffy and Robin and whoever doesn't know why, but something different went down. And things here are pretty calm, for a Hellmouth, and..."
"It's easier to be reactive than pro-active?" Katharine said.
Xander grinned, a sad grin which made his eyes look sadder. "I've been in this gig since I was sixteen, I've never had time to be pro-active."
That night, Robin pushed Faith against the wall as she entered the bedroom and kissed her passionately. Faith kissed him back for a moment, then started laughing and turned away. "Hey, there, isn't this my line?"
Robin grinned. "A hot girl deserves to be taken every now and then, doesn't she?"
Later, in bed after things were done, Robin's legs bounced like a child's who couldn't sit still. Faith sat up and looked at him wryly, then his legs, and back to his face. "You know, as much as it should be the reason, I don't think my performance is what has you in such a good mood."
Robin smiled and sat up. "We found one, Faith! We finally found one." Faith could see the passion in his eyes, his face, as he spoke. "It's all gonna start coming together from here. She'll tell us how the spell hit, we'll be able to find others -- think of all the good we're going to be able to do, all the people we're going to be able to save when we get all these Slayers working with us!"
Faith smiled. Robin's enthusiasm and passion was infectious, but she worried sometimes about it being too much. "Just don't forget these girls are people, Robin, they're scared, and they're not necessarily going to see your bigger picture."
Robin chuckled. "You sound like Xander."
Faith's chin came up and her smile faded. "And, what, that's bad? He--"
Robin held up his hands. "No, no! There's nothing wrong with that. God, he'll never say it, but Xander cares just as much, or more, about the fight than anyone else. No one wants to do good and help people more than him. The only problem I have with Xander -- and, really, not a horrible problem -- is that he puts his Slayers' welfare ahead of the world."
"Oh, right, and it should be the opposite-- who needs individual Slayers when you have so many--"
"No! Faith, my mother was a Slayer, remember?" Robin shook his head. "Of course I think the Slayers are important as people. But so is everyone else. Both should be treated as equal, and decisions should be based solely on logic, not emotion.
"Xander cares about you and Janet and Rona so much, so personally. And we're in such a violent, deadly business." Robin paused, then chuckled quietly. "You know, if twelve months ago you would've told me that my two best friends here would be you and Xander Harris, I would've laughed. But it's true. I've gotten to know you two so well. And sometimes it's hard, because the chances really are good that one of us is gonna die sometime in the next five years. If not all of us."
Robin took a deep breath and continued in a softer voice. "And it's hard being a Watcher, because you know that one of your Slayers will die. Even with the greater numbers, it's inevitable. Or maybe I'll die, as a Watcher -- and I gotta be honest with you, Faith. I hope that's the case with Xander. I hate it, but I really hope he dies first, because I can't even imagine how much losing a Slayer is gonna devastate him."
Robin lied back on the bed, and after a moment Faith followed him down. She rested her head on his chest and quietly said, "What about you, Robin? How are you going to handle it?"
"I'll handle it," Robin said. "I'll be fine. I've been there before, remember? I lost the most important Slayer in my life when I was five."
Faith stared at the wall in the dark. "Oh," she said, and rolled over onto the pillow.