2: VISITOR
"What is it?" Dawn asked her sister, who was packing things into her slaying bag. "Where are you going?"
Buffy tossed several more stakes into her bag. "LA."
Dawn looked skeptical. "For slayage?"
"It's Angel. He wants me to fly all the way to LA so he can tell me he's not evil."
Dawn lifted a crossbow from the bag. "I guess it's really break up, then," she joked. "Potentially a dusty one?"
Buffy snatched it back and tossed it in the bag. "We broke up a long time ago, Dawn." Dawn's sister was not in the mood for joking.
Dawn slipped her feet into a pair of her sister's shoes. "So you're gonna leave me here by myself?" She looked hopeful.
"Xander's coming to baby-sit you." Buffy stole her shoes back and put them on. She began quickly brushing her hair.
Dawn pouted. "I liked it better when Spike baby-sitted me, when you were dead."
There was a loud crash as Buffy dropped her hairbrush. She didn't say anything in response, only "Be good. I'll be back in three days." She left, and closed the door. Dawn shuffled to the stereo and turned it up loud.
Dawn sat on Buffy's bed, eating peanut buttered bread and reading Italian fashion magazines. The phone rang, and she set her plate on Buffy's pillow as she leaned over to pick up the receiver. "Buffy?...Hello, this is Dawn..." There was no sound for a few seconds, not even breathing. Then, click.
Dawn stared in confusion at the receiver. "They hung up," she said to herself.
Spike hung Harmony's phone back on the hook.
Harmony looked pouty. "So what'd she say?" the vampire secretary asked.
Spike started walking away. "Wrong number."
"That's funny," Harmony said brightly. "Angel used that number this morning."
Andrew sighed in pointed annoyance. "No, you fool. You foolish...Fool. Not all Klingons are evil."
The slayer-in-training rolled her brown eyes. "They're literary metaphors for vamps, what with the ugly faces and all –"
Andrew thought of his trip to LA, and remembered peroxide and leather. "Not all vam-PY-res are evil, young Slayer. You may have super-strength, but you have much yet to learn."
The door banged shut loudly. "GILES!"
Many Slayers rushed to the entryway. "Buffy!" they exclaimed excitedly.
Andrew studied the back of the cereal box. He was aware of how bad at keeping secrets he was, and he didn't want to let Spike down.
Buffy walked into the kitchen, depositing her bags on the counter and jumping up to sit on it. "Hey Andrew. Giles here?"
Andrew tried to study the Cheerios importantly. "He's on an outing...A shopping outing. After LA, he's decided I'm responsible enough to baby-sit Slayers of the vam-PY-res."
Buffy's face lit up with the glow of something suddenly remembered. "Oh, that's right. So how was your trip? Anything interesting I should know?"
Andrew studied harder. "Um, no...I didn't meet anyone...Anyone I didn't plan on meeting...And there isn't anything I can't tell you at all!" He laughed uneasily as he felt himself slipping out of the zone of credibility.
Buffy shot him a skeptical look, and then grinned, trying not to laugh. "Spill it, Andrew."
"I promised I – spill what? Nothing's spilling here...At least not in Mr. Giles's kitchen!"
Buffy hopped off the counter. "WHAT. HAPPENED."
Andrew thought again of Spike, and how the vampire hadn't wanted the news of his resurrection to reach Buffy via Andrew. "It's just..." he grasped for ideas. As he was doing so, he saw a penny and popped it in his mouth. Seconds later he spat it out. "Eeew. Yuck."
One corner of Buffy's mouth curved into an amused smile. "Did you just eat a penny?"
"Do they really taste like blood?" the watcher-in-training inquired.
"How would I..." Buffy began. But she remembered, years ago, when she asked a blonde vampire what blood tasted like.
"Metallic...like a penny. Doubt it would agree with you, luv," Spike had said.
"So whom did you meet?" she pressed, dreading his answer for fear that she was wrong.
"No one!" Andrew choked, a tangled mess of nerves. "Boy is Spike gonna kill me when he hears how close I came to..." he looked sheepishly at Buffy. "Oops."
Buffy had grabbed her bag and bolted out of the room in only a few short seconds, a decisive look on her face. At the thresh-hold she paused. "How long has he been back?"
"I dunno, a few months?"
"Interesting. Did he happen to mention to you how hard I'm gonna kill him!" Buffy shouted as she left the house.
"Well, Spike, old friend. Now I see why you didn't want to tell her." Andrew said to the Cheerio box.
Xander knocked on the door to the Summerses' Italian apartment. "Dawn?" He heard music inside, and a few crashes, and finally the door opened.
"Hey Xander," Dawn greeted.
Xander looked around the front room. "You gotta hand it to she who is the Slayer. Hiring Spartans to do her interior decorating...now that is the way to go. Cheap and aesthetically bare."
"Welcome to Planet Buffy," replied Dawn with a groan.
Xander procured a box. "I brought you a present," he added.
Dawn was intrigued. "Is it another wooden talking head?"
"Of course not," Xander said scornfully. "It's a clay sculpture. Of a foot. They sell them in the airport giftshops in Africa."
The door to Angel's office was opened roughly, and Spike walked in.
Angel stared at him. "I thought I said 'no visitors'. Where wasn't I clear enough?"
Spike began searching on Angel's desk for something. "No worry, mate. Just searching for that prophecy of yours. Want to see if it says anything about the Champion losing a crucial body part." Spike stuffed a small piece of folded address book paper in a pocket of his duster.
Angel snatched his papers back from Spike. "Get out of my office."
The door opened again, and Lorne's green head peeked through. "So sorry to interrupt. There's a lady waiting in the lobby, and she wants to see Angel."
Angel studied his fingernails. "Tell her she'll have to come back another day."
Lorne frowned. "You're really looking to raise your guard mortality rate," he commented. "This chica is strong. She knocked a guard out cold when he told her he wanted identification."
Spike vaulted over Angel's desk. "What did she look like?" he asked, clearly interested.
Lorne looked at Spike, then at Angel, and then back at Spike. "Not a happy bunch of grapes, are we?" he noticed the two vampires staring at him, waiting. He sighed. "Cute. Short. Blonde."
Angel quickly stood up. "I'll be right down," he said. Spike, who had been on his way out the door, watched Angel leave, feigning indifference. Angel, somehow, always managed to make him feel like he was a fledgling again.
"I told you, he said 'no visitors'."
Buffy kicked the desk, making a toe-sized hole in the wood. "So, Wolfram and Hart doesn't mind employing evil vampires, I take it."
Harmony shook her head. "We have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," she explained knowledgeably.
"Buffy!"
Blonde hair swished around. "Angel," she said cooly. Silence.
Buffy broke it. "Nice guards. Very effective," she told him, gesturing at the unconscious men on the ground.
Angel glanced around the lobby, worried. "We can talk in my office."
Buffy allowed Angel to lead her to his office, but did not allow him to do so physically, shaking off his arm when he tried. Inside the office, Angel fell back in his chair, and Buffy sat on his desk.
"Buffy, I –"
She interrupted. "Let me guess. You're not evil, you're only using Evil Incorporated to do your helping of the helpless in style?" Her emotionless voice was almost cold enough to turn Angel into a vampire icicle.
"Buffy, Wolfram and Hart has been great for Angel Investigations." Buffy picked up a pencil and played with it in her fingers, accidentally breaking it in half in the process. "With our new resources, we can do so much more to help, and we've acquired new business associates, several of whom are not evil..."
"I guess Knox wasn't one of those." Buffy put the two halves of pencil back in the pencil jar.
Angel looked at his fingernails. "So you heard about Fred."
Buffy was far from finished. "And while we're on the subject, have any of the 'new business associates' been...say, old rivals? Perhaps any mutual acquaintances of ours who have recently gone up in pillars of flames!"Angel started to deny it, but froze upon seeing Buffy's look of disgust.
"Just when, exactly, were you planning on telling me, Angel!" she demanded, and Angel noted that her voice had become far from emotionless - she even sounded hurt. "I could maybe have believed that your running this business has a touch of good in it. Maybe you really are helping people. But don't try telling me you're still a soldier of good. You want evil, try...Lying to me? How could you keep it from me, Angel!"
The vampire was on the verge of formulating a response when something large and bluish in color shattered his window.
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