Title: Two to the Rescue
Author: Gaeriel Mallory
Rating: G
Fandoms: Buffy and X-men the Movie
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, Inc. X-men is the property of Marvel, Bryan Singer, and a whole bunch of other people.
Continuity: After X2 for X-men and up to the series finale for Buffy. Story two in "The Hero Biz" series.

Scott woke up to frantic pounding on his door. Keeping his eyes carefully closed, he grasped for his glasses on the bedside table. Exchanging the blindfold he wore at night with his normal daywear, he slipped out from between the covers and padded barefoot over to the door. He opened it, blinking in surprise at the frantic Buffy on the other side.

Her hair tousled by sleep, she had her fist raised to knock on the door again. "I need to get to the city."

He blinked at her, trying to get his brain up to speed with his much-more-awake cousin. He took in the fact that aside from her hair, she was fully dressed, compared to just the sweat pants he had on. "New York City?"

She rolled her eyes but nodded. "One of the Slayers I contacted a few days ago went missing. Her parents just called my cell, wanting to see if I knew where she had gone."

"Maybe she took your advice and went to Cleveland?" He asked hopefully, even as he was reaching for a shirt laying across the back of a chair. God, but the place has turned into a mess since Jean— He pushed the thought away as he tugged the t-shirt over his head.

Buffy followed him into the room and sat down on the bed. "Maria seemed pretty level-headed and she adored her family. She didn't give me the impressions she was the type to run away from home." Turning towards the wall as Scott started to take off the pants he had gone to bed in, she continued. "I called Giles and he has the research team looking up anything that might need the blood of a Slayer within the next day or two. You'd be amazed how many spells or rites need that."

Fully dressed, he placed a hand on her shoulder and she looked at him. "Come on." He told her quietly. "We'll find her."

Before heading out, he grabbed his spare visor from the dresser and replaced his glasses with it. The glasses let him walk around with his eyes open, diffusing the lethal beams to harmlessness. The visor, on the other hand, allowed him to control the beams and use them if necessary. He hoped it wasn't.

He chose the Jaguar. Despite its flashiness and Buffy's comment about the "penis-mobile", it was fast and he was familiar with the car and knew just what it was capable of. He navigated the roads easily. "So do you want to tell me some more about what's going on here?"

Buffy frowned. "What do you mean? I told you everything I know."

"Does this sort of thing happen often? People getting kidnapped or going missing?"

"It's a dangerous job."

He glanced over at her; she was staring out the window. "That's not an answer, Buffy."

"What do you want me to say, Scott?" She finally looked at him and he saw a mixture of emotions cross her face – anger, grief, loneliness, and resolve. "You of all people should know what its like to put your life on the line. I watched people I love be put in danger or even killed because of what we do."

"You mentioned yesterday that you had died." He kept his eyes on the road, afraid to see her reaction to that simple statement.

"I did it to save Dawn," she said softly. "It came down to me or her; one of us had to die in order to save the world." She chuckled and he took one hand off the steering wheel to reach out and place it on her knee. Her fingers curled around his, holding on fiercely. "It was an easy choice to make," she commented. "Dying wasn't the hard part. It was coming back to life after being dead for three months."

"How did that happen, if you don't mind me asking?"

"My friends brought me back. They had only good intentions, but..." she trailed off and he stayed silent, letting her collect her thoughts. "I was happy," she whispered. "I was in heaven and being pulled back into the mortal world really screwed me up for awhile."

He swallowed past the lump in his throat and took a breath. "If you had the choice," he asked, "would you have come back?"

Her hand gripped his harder. "Honestly, Scott? No."

Scott merged onto the deserted highway and headed towards the city and tried not to think of the smiling redhead who was most likely in a better place.

Maria Cummings and her family lived in Manhattan, in a fairly well-off neighborhood. The doorman buzzed them up after Buffy showed him her ID. In the elevator, she turned towards Scott and said, "Let me do all the talking, okay?"

Maria's mother, Elaine Cummings, let them into the apartment, a split level that was much larger than normal for New York City. Leading the two of them into the living room, she sat down on the couch next to her husband, her hand automatically finding his. Buffy and Scott sat down on a loveseat positioned across the coffee table facing the couch.

Alan Cummings leaned forward and glared at Buffy. "Why would anyone take our daughter?"

Buffy responded, "When I spoke to you a few days ago, I explained just what a Slayer was. Even if Maria had ignored the calling, the calling would not have ignored her." She paused and took a breath. "Just because there are more Slayers in the world than there were a year ago, that doesn't mean that it's any less dangerous out there. For the Slayers themselves, it's actually more dangerous. Most of them are untrained and aren't ready for the things that might come after them just because they are Slayers."

"Why didn't you tell us this before?" he demanded.

Buffy sighed regretfully. "I tried, Mr. Cummings," she replied calmly, "but you refused to hear what I was saying."

Elaine Cumming's lips pursed. "She has such a bright future," she said firmly. "There was no way that we were going to let her get dragged into this...nonsense!" Turning to Scott, she told him, "She's only a junior but she's already been contacted by college recruiters from Duke, Yale, and Cornell. She could have gotten into any school in the country."

Despite his promise to stay silent, Buffy didn't interrupt when he started talking, his voice carefully neutral. She wondered absentmindedly if this was the teacher or the leader in him, or both. "I think need to evaluate just how much you value Maria's academic future over her life. This is not nonsense but very serious."

"I didn't want her to die," Elaine said softly. "That's why I refused to let her go with you in the first place. It's hard enough to live a normal life. What kind of life can she have fighting monsters? What will people say if they find out? They'll think she's a mutant."

Buffy glanced over at Scott before speaking. She had no clue what was going on inside her cousin's head but she was sure that he must have had conversations very similar to this one with his students and their families. "So what? No matter what people say about her, there will always be the truth: Maria has been given a gift, an incredible gift that she can use to help people. Yes, it's dangerous. And yes, people are more likely to make you feel like a freak than a hero. I learned this in my life and I accepted it. But Maria has something that I never had."

Looking the Cummings' in the eye, she continued. "She has others who are going through the exact same thing. She might be different to the rest of the world, but she has the best support system that she can ever have just with the other girls who were Called the same time she was. She has two older Slayers who can train her and give her advice and hopefully steer her away from the same mistakes that we made. She'll have a Watcher to back her up. But most of all, she has you guys." At their shocked looks, she smiled gently. "I thankfully had my mom. Except for a little bump after she found out, she was totally okay with it. Well, not quite okay because I was out there fighting god knows what every night, but it made me feel a lot better that she knew. And I honestly don't know if I could have survived this long without her."

The couple was silent, neither looking at Buffy or Scott. "Find her, please," Alan finally said. "We can discuss all of this after we know she's safe."

Reaching over the coffee table, Buffy laid a hand over their clasped ones. "We'll do our best," she promised. "And thank you for trusting me."

"So where do we start?" Scott glanced over at Buffy as soon as they were out of the apartment building.

Buffy pulled out her cell and turned it on. "Willow was going to call whenever she got the location spell sorted out. She was going to try and scry for Maria."

"From Cleveland?"

"She's actually in Brazil right now. She and Kennedy were planning on fighting some demons and hunting up some Slayers in between sunbathing."

Not knowing just how to respond to that, he stayed silent as Buffy checked her messages. She then dialed a series of numbers, putting the phone back up to her ear. "Dawn says hi, by the way," she told him distractedly.

Scott leaned against the car as Buffy talked to whoever was on the other end, most likely this Willow. She had given him the Cliff's Notes version of the last eight years of her life and what she had told him had made him want to lock her away somewhere safe and protect her. She was so young, even if she wasn't as young as he had remembered. Not for the first time, he regretted not keeping in touch. The last time, which was also the first time, he had seen Buffy was a year before her parents had gotten divorced. He had just graduated from college and the Professor had encouraged him to reconnect with the little family he had left.

He had resisted at first. There was a lot of residual resentment towards his Uncle Hank who never tried to fight to gain custody of either him or his brother Alex after the plane crash. Deep down, Scott blamed Hank Summers for him being separated from Alex, who he never found again despite the Professor's best efforts.

However, he found that while his uncle might not have wanted to claim him, his wife Joyce welcomed him into the family immediately. And he had been thrilled to find he had two cousins that he had nearly forgotten about. He smiled faintly at the memory of meeting Buffy that first time in her cheerleader uniform. Trying to impose that image with the reality before him, he failed. While there was a physical resemblance, the Buffy standing on the sidewalk talking on the phone was worlds away from the ditzy shallow girl he had first met years ago.

She flipped her phone closed and turned towards him, pulling him out of his thoughts. "Times Square," she told him. "Willow said that she was underground so that means we get to go sewer hunting."

"Do you do this often?" he inquired after she expertly pried open a storm drain a few blocks away from Times Square.

"More often than I would like." She gestured for him to climb down and followed, carefully replacing the cover after her. "Thankfully, I've gotten into the habit of wearing easily replaceable clothes on patrol. It's a lot easier on the wallet."

"I can imagine." Scott winched when something squished underneath his boot. "So which way?" He shown the flashlight he had found in the glove compartment down the tunnel, carefully not looking too closely at the sludge growing on the walls.

Buffy pointed in a seemingly arbitrary direction. "That way. My Spidey-sense is telling me there's a large group of demons down there."

Scott rolled his eyes as he followed his cousin into the sewers, eyes locked on the battleaxe strapped to her back. "Spidey-sense. I can feel the bad guys shaking with fear as you speak."

She looked over her shoulder and grinned. "You can't be serious all the time, Scott." She turned around again, her voice sobering. "Sometimes you have to joke and laugh or the fear and sadness will take over."

He kept silent, thinking over her words. What would Jean think of him laughing so soon after her death? To enjoy life without her? It seemed inconceivable. She was such a large part of his life for so long, he felt empty and disconnected from the rest of the world now that she was gone. "Does the pain ever go away?" He asked Buffy quietly.

She stopped walking. "No," she replied, still facing forward. "But it does stop hurting so much after awhile. And there are times when you forget it for a little bit. But even if it's hours, or days, or even a month, it comes back eventually. You learn to live with it."

"I don't know if I want to." The light from the flashlight wavered a bit as his hand trembled.

"You have to, Scott, if you ever want to get on with your life." She started walking again. "I knew Mom didn't want me grieving for her forever. I don't think Jean would have either." She stopped abruptly and unhooked the axe and swung it around her body, holding it in front of her defensively. "We're getting close," she told him quietly.

"Right." He transferred the flashlight to his left hand, bringing his other hand up to the side of his visor. It felt odd, not being the leader for once. Usually, he was the one in front, the position which had the most responsibility and the most danger. It stung him a little that his little cousin was in charge and he was the follower for once. Yet, he wasn't so foolish that he didn't know when to defer to someone else. She may be younger but she was the more knowledgeable one here.

They stumbled upon their lair with little warning. Scott observed in the back of his mind that they were covered in green fur and had huge beaks that looked very sharp. Red beams shot from his visor, knocking down the demons. Buffy charged into the utility room they had taken over, her arms swinging the axe with deadly accuracy.

As his cousin took care of the demons, Scott noticed an unconscious girl hanging from the ceiling, her wrists attached to some pipes by a long length of chain. He stood underneath her, cutting through the chain with his power and catching her as she fell. "I have her," he yelled to Buffy.

"Get her out of here," she called back, neatly severing the neck of one of the creatures attacking her. "I'll be right behind you."

With one hand on his visor, he cleared a path through the demons that had noticed he was about to escape with their prisoner. Hoisting Maria over his shoulder, he ran out of the room, ignoring the guilt he felt by leaving Buffy in there alone. He reached for the flashlight, which he had tucked into his back pocket, and used it to light his way down the tunnel. He had reached the ladder up to street level when Buffy caught back up with him.

"You look like hell," she observed as she took Maria from him.

Scott looked down, noticing the blood that spotted his shirt and covered one pant let. "Is it supposed to be purple?"

She shrugged and started up the ladder, easily balancing Maria's body on her shoulder. "Sometime it's green or black. And then there are demons that have slime for blood. Those are fun to wash out of your hair."

"I'm sure." He followed her up and tried not to think too much about just what demon would have slime running through its veins.

Maria regained consciousness in the car ride back to her home. Buffy was relieved that any awkward questions from the night clerk were avoided by having the younger Slayer enter the building under her own power. Scott and her looked sketchy enough as it was, covered in demon blood and sewer grime. Maria didn't look much better. Her clothes and skin were flecked with dried blood—both her own and her now-dead captors.

That didn't stop her mother from hugging her as soon as she stepped through the door, however. Maria winced and gently extracted herself from her mother. "I'm fine, Mom," she told her. "Though I think I might have bruised some ribs."

The Cummings' ushered the three of them inside. Buffy sat down in the chair they offered her, feeling out of place as Maria's parents thanked her and Scott. She pulled out a business card and handed it to Alan Cummings. She had given the family one like it a couple days prior but she figured that another one couldn't hurt. "This is the number of the Watchers headquarters in Cleveland," she told him. "Even if Maria doesn't become an active Slayer full time, she still needs to be trained to protect herself. Our Watcher-in-charge there, Robin Wood, is extremely competent and he can make sure that Maria gets what she needs."

Alan Cummings accepted the card reluctantly and nodded. "I'll give him a call tomorrow morning."

She looked over at Maria and her mother and smiled sadly. "It is completely possible to live a somewhat normal life, despite having these powers," she told him. "But they won't go away if you ignore them. We have a number of Slayers who are in college right now, or are holding down jobs. The days were a Slayer has to give up her life to dedicate herself to the fight are over."

He slipped the card into his pocket and looked her in the eye. "Thank you," he told her.

Scott moved in beside her and handed him another business card. "My organization is a little closer if you have any problems. We're a private school for gifted children—mutants—and we help them learn to control their powers. I know that Maria isn't a mutant but she's going through a lot of the same stuff that our kids go through."

"I'll—I'll keep that in mind." The second card followed the first into his pocket.

The sun was well above the horizon when Scott pulled the Jaguar back into the garage. They walked inside to the welcoming smell of breakfast. By mutual agreement, the two Summers headed towards the dining hall rather than their rooms. Their entrance was greeted by shocked stares.

"What the hell happened to you two?" Logan asked as he walked past, carrying a plated loaded down with eggs and sausage. He sniffed and grimaced. "It smells like you went crawling around in a septic tank."

"You wouldn't be too far off, Wolverine," Scott replied. He placed a hand on the small of Buffy's back and steered her towards the buffet line. "So," he remarked to Buffy as he handed her a plate. "That was some night. I must say that was a new experience for me."

She grinned at him. "Just stick with me, Scott, and I'll show you a world you never knew existed." Grabbing two slices of toast, she asked, "Do you like karaoke?"

He frowned. "Why?" he asked warily.

"You'll see," she answered breezily. "Hope you didn't have any plans for tonight because we're going back into the city."

"Should I be scared?"

"Most likely." She winked at him as she moved towards the teachers' table to sit down. Scott sighed and followed.

fin