Seras stood in her room preparing for patrol. It had been nearly a month since she had that run in with that Persephone character, and since then nothing really notable had happened. She hadn't seen or heard anything from the supposed goddess, and the same had rung true for that Cattalano guy. She supposed it was because she had left Brooklyn to him and kept her patrolling to the other four boroughs.

Since then she had gotten better at her duties as a slayer. She was beginning to find it easier to kill the century old vamps as well as the occasional coven. Seras even found that she was beginning to enjoy it more. It really did work well as a stress reliever, killing things that deserved it. She was beginning to see why someone would take it up as a hobby.

Her arsenal had increased as well as her skill. Taking a page out of her acquaintance's book, she began to soak her sakes in both turpentine and holy water. She herself enjoy using the turpentine ones, but she required more practice when it came to throwing lit ones without singeing something on her person. Also, top of her two hip flasks filled with holy water, she carried the holy substance in glass vials that she could through from a distance. It worked for keeping some coven members occupied while she fought others.

Of course with the increase in weaponry came a change in wardrobe. Her boots became more functional, switching out her fashionable heeled Nine West boots for a pair of Doc Martens, the official ass-kicking boots. Her jeans we now made of thicker material, so as to avoid ripping easily and have to repair or replace them about five thousand times a month. A simple black, multi-pocketed trench coat covered up everything that wasn't kept inside the coat itself.

Also she had taken a liking to wearing t-shirts with a sense of humor: one that said "Bite Me", another from a blood drive that read "Got Blood?", and another from a band with the actual name of Slayer. Hey, if you couldn't keep yourself amused during the job what was the point? Besides, she might as well give the bastards one last laugh before she brutally killed them.

As she placed her mother's dagger in the scabbard hidden inside her boot, Seras heard her brother call her from the living room. She poked her head out of her bedroom and called out to him. "Yeah, what is it? I'm getting ready for patrol."

"Could you come out for a second?" was his only reply.

Seras stepped out of her bedroom, making sure that all her stakes were securely attached so that they wouldn't fall out. She looked up to see her brother standing in the living room with his arms crossed over his chest. She smiled at the look of exasperation on his face, probably from her t-shirt.

It read simply: Made You Look.

"Yeah, what is it?" She remarked with a loving smile.

"Do you know anybody by the name of Marco Cattalano?" He asked incredulously, looking off at the small entry hall that was out of her field of vision.

Seras stopped suddenly and gave her brother a look. "Marco who?"

Marco stepped out from around the corner and leaned against the wall, he grabbed at his heart. "Miss, you cut me to my very soul. And here I am thinking that we had made such a connection…"

Seras smiled, only to her brother's frown. "Exactly when did you meet this guy?" Her brother questioned, sizing Marco up with cold amber eyes.

Marco shrugged. "About a month ago….it involved a crypt and a hell god… or maybe a Hell demi-god, I could never quite get the proper theological term for it." A silence filled the room, which Marco quickly filled after a glance at her t-shirt. "Guess it did."

"Did what?" Seras asked a bit thrown off.

"You're shirt." He answered. "It made me look."

She gave a small laugh, which ended when she saw the look on her brother's face. He wasn't one to tell her who she could and could not talk to, but he excelled in making her feel ill at ease when he wanted to.

"Yes well, enough with the small talk, what do you want?"

Marco smiled and raised a brow. "Guess he got you're dad's English frankness."

"Excuse me?" Her brother's eyes flashed and the mirror next to Marco gave a horrifying crack.

Marco, slightly surprised, looked back at the mirror behind him. "Lemme guess: telekinetic witch?"

"You guessed right." Terrence growled. "Now what do you want?"

"I had been out in the cold cruel world that is Brooklyn, and I wondered if Seras wanted to come out and play. At the risk of you blowing a blow vessel in my brain, could I have a few words with your sister…preferably alone?"

Terrence looked Marco in the eye. The two kept gazed at each other for five seconds short of forever until Terrence finally broke it; seeming to have emerged from the ocean depth all too willing to breathe in the fresh air.

"There." Marco cocked his head and sighed. "You convinced I'm on your side now? Or will I need to pass a polygraph too?"

Her brother brought his hand to his brow and waved them off. "Be back by seven. I want you to get some sleep. You've been spending entirely too much time out there."

"I'm just honing my skills." Seras brushed off the comment with as much care as an airport luggage handler. She began to follow Marco out the door when he brother's hand shot out and grabbed her by the wrist. With a bit of a shock, Seras looked up at her brother who kept his head in his hand.

"You know exactly what I mean when I say that…Seras you have to remember there's a limit in what you do." He looked up and his younger sister, and startled her half to death. She had never seen his eyes filled with such graveness as she was seeing them now. "There's not much distance between what you do and what Marco does. His soul is a good one, but it's marred. That man out there carries a lot of rage in his heart and it eventually will be his downfall. Don't follow in his footsteps and make them your own."

Seras's eyes flashed with anger. She was becoming more annoyed by her brother's behavior than alarmed. "He does what he can to make this city a safer place for everyone, just like I'm doing. And if I have to find my downfall in something, I would hope that it would be while I was doing something as noble as a mission from God."

She pulled her arm out of her brother's grasp, startling him with her newfound strength. "And if I ever find you talking about another slayer like that-"

"He's not a slayer!" Terrence said trying to keep his voice down to a relatively soft tone.

"He's as much a slayer as I am, and if you haven't noticed, the organization and those rules you are so fond of following? Are the reason why our father is dead."

The two stood and stared each other down. Terrence too proud to admit that his sister was totally right, and Seras to enraged by her brother's arrogant, smug, prick-headed behavior to do anything else but stare dead at him; her self-control trying to force back her need to back slap some sense into her brother.

Marco leaned against the hallway wall, pretending to examine his fingernails—as if it would matter by the end of the night. Why did everyone assume his hearing was the same as everyone else's? His father could hear dog whistles at his age, and he wasn't that far off either.

What kind of pompous idiot was this brother of her's anyway? Marred soul indeed. Well, at least the sister had some common sense. But Marco supposed he could understand. He had an older sibling himself. Only difference was his sister wasn't as much of an assuming jerk as Terrence was.

Marco sighed, and was about to leave when he heard a loud slam of the door in front of him. He turned up his indifferent stare at the young slayer who stood before him; the door to her apartment hanging at an odd angle from the hinges.

"Your heart to hearts always go so well?" He asked, standing up straight.

"Must…kill…something…now…" She growled with the same intellect as a pre-historic Neanderthal. He face looked to have as much patience as well.

"As you wish."

From there, they took the elevator to the ground floor, left the building, and took the train to Brooklyn.

The two walked through a rather large, non-descript cemetery in the outskirts of Brooklyn and the no-middle-class-man's land of Long Island. They had been walking in silence, Seras not being able to say anything intelligible other than her desire to kill something…brutally.

"Feeling better?"Marco asked, examining the almost stone features of Seras's angered profile.

Seras didn't say a word. She continued to walk along, a primal determination in her step that mirrored that in her words.

"You know you're a great conversationalist, but I must stop you for a second and point out that you shouldn't get too angry atanything your brother says. Mainly because he's British."

Seras suddenly stopped, causing Marco to slam on the proverbial brakes and looked down at Seras's puzzled face. Although puzzled wasn't a good look for her, it was good to see that her face was pliable and not made of stone.

She stared a perplexed little stare which Marco promptly returned, until finally she uttered the question that was mulling about in her brain.

"You're Irish aren't you?" She accused more than asked.

"Guilty as charged. Is that a problem?"

It amazed Marco that she had to stand there and think about it before replying with a quick "No.", and start up her quick pace again.

"So glad you had to think about that." Marco muttered to himself, as he stared up again to quickly catch up his part limey companion for the evening.

Short after her British moment, Seras soon got her wish to kill something without regard for its or her soul: a group of nine vampires came out from behind a crypt and began to approach them.

"You twoz lost or sumtin?" Said one of the Gotti brothers turned vampire. "Cuz if youse knew any better you wuld- Wha da fuck?"

Seras held her mother's dagger in one hand and five vials of holy water in the other. Marco looked over at her and grinned. She leapt at them, slicing off one of their heads with one hand and hurling the holy water with another, throwing the vial down a vamp's throat. A spin kick slapped the second vamp's head off its body, and an underhanded stake throw took out a third.

She elbowed the last one in the eyes, driving him against a crypt. "Bu—bu—chu're just a kid."

Seras' left eye twitched, "You think I wanted this? You think I wanted this?...Having to learn responsibility through some age old tradition of robbing cradles to carry out God's mission instead of having it taught to me by my parents?" She rammed her dagger through the vamp's chest and into the stone crypt, pining him there. She grabbed his head in both hands and proceeded to bash his skull in against the mausoleum. "You think I want to be hunted my entire fucking life, you mutherfucking sonofabitch! You think a wanted this! DO YOU!"

Marco watched as Seras kept pounding the vamp's skull into the wall, and she only stopped when one particularly hard pull on her part had ripped the mushy remains of the vampire's skull off of his neck.

Marco was about to intercede when a whole bunch of freshly risen vampires literally popped out of their graves, having been so rudely awoken. Didn't Seras know that being a vampire meant they could sleep in?

Unfortunately for them, Seras was ready.

To save the very long details, imagine a graveyard. Any graveyard, really. Then imagine a straight path of destruction. A literal straight line where crypt doors were ripped off their hinges, then used to decapitate vampires; headstones had been used as projectile weapons; where crosses had been pull off of graves to be thrust into a vampire's chest, nailing him to the ground as she poured holy water into his open wound; trees felled so it could be used as a club; vampires still wailing in pain as they've all been impaled on the same gigantic cross, slowly disintegrating; large portions of fence ripped out to pin six or seven vampires to the cement.

Or, to make this a shorter tale, she started killing at 8p.m., EST. Marco had simply sat back on a headstone and sighed. "And people think I have deep-seeded emotional issues. I wonder how I report this to her brother: she ripped her shirt off to use as a restraint as she poked about twenty holes in the vamp's body, and pour holy water in all the wounds." He slipped a book from his back pocket, occasionally looking up to check on her progress.

Around 3 a.m., Marco was on his second book, and noted a distinct appearance by a familiar psychotic acquaintance: Persephone. He sighed, slipped in a bookmark, closed the book, and was ready to do battle with the demi-goddess. At that point, Seras hurled a gravestone at a vampire, and wound up decapitating two—the missile kept flying through the air, heading straight for Persephone. It put up her hands casually, with about five seconds to spare. Marco expected the stone to be crushed to dust, but it actually hit Persephone right in the chest, slamming her about two feet into the ground, to both there surprise. Before Marco could go over to her, she vanished.

Cattalano cocked his head. Fascinating. I must refer to Terrence to see exactly what Seras is…she's not just a Slayer.

At about five in the morning, Seras ran out of victims, until a power walker and her dog came out, passing the cemetery. Seras heard them and leapt for them, going after the yappy little Chihuahua.

Marco tackled her in mid-leap, knocking her out of the air, and pinning her on her stomach, his hands on her wrists. The power walker and her dog got away without ever having known they were about to be gutted.

"Don't, stake, the civilians," Marco told her. She tried to roll over and pound him into a bloody cocktail, but he managed to hold on through the use of several very creative wrestling holds, until, at the end, she merely lay crying…

Damn it, why did we have to come this far out? In her condition, I'm going to have to carry her back to Manhattan...

Still wary Seras might attack, he slowly let go of her. When she wound up curling into the fetal position instead of brutally attacking, he let out a deep sigh. "Come on, let's get you home shall we?" He gingerly lifted to her feet, buttoning up her trench coat before helping her out of the cemetery.

A half hour later, she growled. "Damn it, I look like an idiot."

Marco rolled his eyes. "Well, let's see, four weeks ago, you were a normal person…though I hesitate to say it, considering your prior wardrobe—though I thank you for wearing a sports bra—and since then, you've been recruited into an army of God, hunted down by vampires, needed to slaughter a legion of demons, and you're being stalked by a demi-goddess from the tenth circle of Hell." He shrugged. "You've had a busy month. You're entitled to a nervous breakdown."

She started to walk without his support, angrily pawing at her tears and closing herself by crossing her arms. He allowed her to commence with the self inflicted isolation, understanding that she didn't want to be talked to, but didn't want to be alone either. They walked to the New Lots station on three train, boarded the nearly empty and sat down. Marco had sat on the opposite side of the train car from Seras, intending to give her some personal space.

As Marco continued to read his book, he felt something on his left side. He looked up from the book to see Seras noiselessly seating herself next to him. Not questioning her, he went back to reading his book, until he experienced something very odd occurred.

Seras leaned over his arm, letting her breast rest on Marco's arm as she pressed her lips against his cheek. He wouldn't have been as startled if she hadn't next kissed him on the lips, and held for what seemed like an extraordinary amount of time. After pulling away, she rested her head on his shoulder and fell asleep almost immediately.

Marco didn't even put down his book. He merely stared blankly at the pages before him not being able to think for a while, until a single thought popped into his head:

Oh crud, she's into me. After seeing what a nervous break down looks like for her, I'm almost scared to tell her about Amanda.

He looked over at the sleeping slayer and finally took the time to examine her features in detail. Her face was relaxed in her state of deep sleep, her golden honey eyes hidden behind her closed eyelids and tangled mahogany colored lashes. Her brown red hair playfully swayed its ringlets to and fro about her face in time with the motions of the train.

He moved his eyes over her face and allowed them to fall on her lips, two pieces of pinkish red silk sitting on her naturally sun kissed skin. With her eyes hidden from view, her lips easily began her most becoming feature. She seemed too young to be a slayer, but he wasn't about to say she looked too innocent. After seeing what she was capable of, he "innocent" did not come to mind No matter how angelic she looked while she slept.

He returned to his reading, deciding to leave the explanations for another time; like when she asked him for such information or she was less psychotic. But definitely not now He'd leave that for another time, when he was able to tell how infatuated shewas with him.

If at all my aching ass. Marco sighed to himself. How do I always get stuck in situations like this? I mustbe asking for it in some strange way. Must be my karma, it attracts people like this.

The rest of the train ride went over without any major events. Marco read and Seras slept. When they reached 116th Street station, the seemingly closest station to her apartment, Marco put away his book, picked Seras up, and carried her to her apartment.

Upon arrival to the Blackwell abode, Terrence allowed Marco to carry Seras into her room and put her in bed. As Seras lay sleeping, they sat at the small dining room table sipping at over sized cups of coffee.

"Something happened tonight that you might want to know about." Marco said, taking a long draught of his coffee. He explained what had happened that night, afterward leaving Terrence to silently sit by himself at the coffee table, a heavy thought obviously burdening his mind.

Marco didn't bother to ask. He just wanted to get home and get some sleep.