Disclaimer: The characters or themes mentioned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel do not belong to me. I am making no profit from this project.
Summary: Buffy, a vampire with a grudge against the Council, is captured by the Initiative and finds herself dependent on her enemy: Spike the Vampire Slayer and his band of white-hats.
Pairing:Buffy and Spike
Rating:PG-13
Thanks: To justsue for being a great beta!
Chapter 4
London
March, 1995
Buffy had infiltrated the Watcher's Council Headquarters more times than she could count. It was simple at first, she could walk right in the front doors under the pretense of being a Slayer-in-Training and hide until everyone had gone home for the night, and then do her damage. It only took them a few years to catch on. Then every Council member knew her name and had memorized a sketch of her face. That was when Buffy had to start getting more inventive.
But the James Bond maneuvers had gotten old. Their security had become impossibly tight in the past decade. The Watcher's Council expected her to drop in on a wire or loop their security tapes, which had never actually worked for her. Buffy needed something new. That was why tonight, she was going back to the basics.
Buffy straightened her beige suede suit and walked purposefully into the front lobby.
"Marie!" A bespectacled middle-age man came towards her smiling pleasantly. "I didn't see you at lunch today, is everything alright?"
Buffy smiled back at the man, and so did the face of Marianne King. "Oh, you know how it is with the Department of Arcane Texts. One of the novices thinks he's suddenly deciphered the next Slayer Codex and I have to spend my lunch hour figuring out that he was looking at an upside-down engraving from the Rosetta Stone."
The man laughed good-naturedly. "Oh, Marie, I can't fathom how you put up with the people employed in your department. Peterson, you know, is all ways after me with his grand ideas about transferring the entirety of the demon archives onto a computer. And I always tell him--"
"Well, it's been nice chatting," Buffy said quickly, and made to walk around him.
"By the way," he said, stopping her, "I couldn't help but notice your necklace. Is it new?"
Buffy glanced nervously down at the jewels hanging around her neck. It was Freyja's Strand, a mystical treasure that allowed the wearer to take the form of anyone they met--or in Buffy's case, killed. Drusilla had played an obsession with the jewels back in the 40s and tried to convince Buffy to join her on a climb up a frozen mountain in Norway to steal them from an ice demon. Buffy wouldn't have thought of them again, except she found them last week in a thrift shop.
"This old thing?" she asked playfully, and the man blinked at her change in tone. "It's a family heirloom," Buffy amended in her best high society voice, and Marie's friend visibly relaxed. "We'll do lunch tomorrow," she said, and walked quickly away before he could call her back.
Buffy climbed the staircase up to the second floor and walked the length of the left wing. A few people smiled or nodded to her, but she paid them no mind. At the very end of the left wing, behind a set of formal mahogany doors, was the board room. There were many board rooms in the Council building—seventeen to be exact—but only one of them interested Buffy. The true Council of Watchers met there, the six men that decided the fate of young girls from all over the world.
The Watcher's Council began with six men, twelve centuries ago. Six men gathered to guide one girl with the strength and skill to slay vampires and the forces of darkness. They called her the Vampire Slayer and themselves her Watchers, and when she died the Watchers found another girl with the spirit of the Vampire Slayer, and when she died they found another. The Watchers did this until they themselves died, and then their sons took their place as Watchers.
Over the centuries the Watcher's Council expanded, becoming a band of men and women dedicated to banishing evil from this world. Guiding Slayers became only a part of their mission, and each Slayer was given only one Watcher to train and guide her. But there was still always the council of six, who oversaw everything in regards to the Slayer and her Watcher.
Quentin Travers was one of these men, and Buffy could feel hate, tangible and potent, rise within her at the sight of him. He came out of the board room, accompanied by two severe looking Watchers. Buffy recognized them after a moment; they were Council operatives, not unlike hitmen. These two were Weatherby and Kingston, which Buffy had the pleasure of giving the slip numerous times.
Buffy waited until she was sure Travers and his flunkies were far enough away that they wouldn't notice, and slipped into the board room. She crossed directly to the back wall and swept and hanging tapestry out of the way to reveal a hidden safe, right where Marianne King had said it would be. With a bit of i persuasion /i , Buffy could turn the most introverted person in to a talker. Buffy started to put in the combination, and then realized the safe was already open.
It was empty.
Whirling around and cursing, Buffy realized that someone else was the room.
"Ms. King," a young man said urgently, "what are you doing in here?" There was panic in his voice and the scent of his fear flavored the air. It was like licking the salt off a cracker.
"Where's the book?" Buffy demanded.
"It's safe, Ms. King, but you must come with me at once. The wards are going off, there is a vampire on the premises…they think it might be—"
"Tell me where the book is."
The young man opened his jacket to reveal a tome he was clutching protectively to his chest. In an instant, Buffy had ripped the book out of his grasp and knocked him out cold. She flipped through the pages and tore the last two pages of text out. Buffy stuffed what she came for into her chest pocket and dropped the book back on the young man's chest. She positioned her heeled foot over his windpipe, the shoe a nice beige leather to match Ms. King's suit. Buffy prepared to crush the young man's windpipe, but then stopped.
She looked at him for a moment. His hair was brown and fine, although slightly unruly. It framed a smooth, square face with a prominent chin. He looked a bit like Travers, she thought, and then realized that the young man was probably his son. He had a destiny, just like his father did, and tonight was probably his first test of faith—putting himself in harm's way so that his father could make a timely escape. One day, the young man would be just like his dad, but for now, he was still young and innocent.
There would be plenty of time to kill him later.
A/N: Freyja's Strand is from the book Spike and Dru: Pretty Maids all in a Rowby Christopher Golden.
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Sunnydale, 1999
Giles wasn't accustomed to going to bed before one in the morning. It was one of the unmentioned habits a new Watcher quickly learned. Granted, though no longer employed by the Watcher's Council, Giles still maintained many of the conventions he had adopted as Spike's Watcher; one of them being waiting up half the night for a Slayer who was as likely to return before midnight as he was to find a card game to crash until dawn. Spike might live in the dormitories now, but he was still supposed to call after patrol. He rarely did. All in all, Giles was starting to feel a wee bit unneeded.
Suffice to say, Giles was both surprised and quite concerned when he heard the frantic pounding on his front door shortly after midnight. He imagined it was Spike, badly injured or coming to describe a particularly nasty demon he had run into on patrol that would signal a coming apocalypse. He felt slightly guilty for hoping.
It wasn't Spike, and his realization of that triggered an initial feeling of disappointment. But on further inspection, Giles noticed that the sight that greeted him was far from mundane. Willow, leaning against the doorframe, was red in the face and looking distraught. Perspiration made her skin shine and there was a smudge of dirt across her left cheek. Behind her stood Xander, a young woman cradled to his chest, unconscious and looking badly beaten.
"Giles!" Willow said breathlessly, and immediately rushed into his flat and collapsed onto his sofa.
"Dear Lord, what's happened?" he exclaimed.
Xander was still standing outside the flat looking hesitant. "Well, what are you waiting for?" Giles asked him. "Bring her in here," he demanded, shoving everything off of his dining table--books, notepads, pencils, and a little digital clock--all fell to the floor.
Xander sighed, but conceded with an "All right," and laid the injured woman on the table.
Giles gave half his attention to Willow, who was looking at him as if she'd done something wrong, whilst she recounted how commandos had raided her dormitory. A stray name caught his full attention.
"Buffy?" he asked sharply. Willow stopped talking abruptly and glanced at the woman on the table. Giles looked at her too, the monster he had unwittingly just invited into his house.
"Bloody Hell!" he shouted, and scrambled to grab a crossbow lying on the kitchen counter. The crossbow was broken, that's why it was lying out in the first place, but that fact didn't seem so important in the face of his blind panic.
"Giles, wait!" Willow rose and came to stand next to the table.
"Willow seems to think she's harmless," Xander said, although once he had deposited the vampire on the table he had immediately retreated to the back of the living room.
" i Harmless/i " Giles intoned incredulously. Buffy had terrorized the Watcher's Council for the better part of the past century. She hunted Council members like game, stole resources from their headquarters, and had destroyed entire archives. She was a demon.
"What insanity possessed you to bring her into my home?" Giles demanded harshly. He was wary and confused. Willow was a smart girl and he'd always given her credence. She obviously had a story to tell that somehow concluded in her declaration that Buffy was harmless, but as of yet she hadn't made any sense.
"Giles, something's happened to her," Willow said, sounding a bit hurt by his outburst. "Look," she raised the vampire's head and showed them a small shaved patch the size of a quarter on the back of her skull. An incision had been made and then stitched up. "I think the commandos were after her, and I was just in the way," she said speculatively. "They must've captured her and put something in her brain, a behavioral modifier or something, because every time she tried to bite me she went all spazzy," Willow clarified.
"So these commandos are good guys," Xander said, "I mean, they're like demon catchers or something."
"Sure, good guys. Except for the part where I was running for my life from them," Willow snarked.
"But why did you bring her here?" Giles asked, referring to Buffy. He wasn't giving asylum to a vicious demon, whether her foes were theirs as well or not. By all rights, he should be staking her now. When had there been a better opportunity to take out the Council's greatest threat? If he let this window pass him by, would there ever be another one? But Willow had a point to make, and he had to hear her out before a decision was made.
"She saved my life, Giles. I couldn't just leave her like this," Willow explained. Giles sighed and massaged his temples. Trust the young redhead to want to bandage up a wounded tiger that would eat her if it could. "And yeah, so maybe she was trying to kill me right before that, but she's probably also got information about the commandos."
Deep down, he already knew he'd comply with Willow's wishes, but the Watcher in him couldn't let it go so easily. "Regardless of whether she saved you once or not, the fact remains that Buffy is a renowned serial killer, one that the Council would have eliminated immediately in this situation."
"That's what I said," Xander interjected, "but she was already trying to drag her down the sidewalk when I found them."
"Giles," Willow pleaded, and gave him the most pitiful look he'd ever seen, eyes wide and shining, teeth gently biting her lower lip. He took a deep breath and sighed again. Females.
"What would you have me do?" he asked her.
Willow brightened, "Well, I think we can spare a band-aid or two for a renowned serial killer."
It took much, much more than a band-aid or two. They turned her on her stomach to inspect her back, a mess of torn and bloody fabric. Giles had to cut open the back of her top, which was stiff with dried blood and in one place pinned down by a shard of imbedded glass. The landscape of Buffy's bare back was riddled with textures of sliced flesh. A few pieces of glass glistened underneath the flashlight Willow held.
There was also a bullet in her shoulder, but what attracted Giles' attention first was the faint, blinking red light he could see in her lower back. Giles dug a dart out of Buffy's back with a pair of tweezers. A small red bulb blinked intermittently at the top. They all stared at it for a moment.
"Tracer!" Xander exclaimed suddenly. "It's like a homing beacon! I bet they tagged her with it so they could regroup and track her later." He paused, and then said slowly, "which would lead them here."
"Get rid of it," Giles ordered, and the boy sprinted toward the bathroom.
An hour later Giles had pulled all the fragments of glass and the bullet out, and Willow had used up all of his butterfly bandages on Buffy's back. Giles retrieved one of his old polo shirts, the once bright white fabric now a dull gray, and dressed the vampire in it for modesty.
He had been concerned that Buffy might wake while they were patching her up, but she had remained blessedly unconscious. Now she was chained to the plumbing in his bathroom, and he had no idea what to do with her.
Giles needed to get in touch with Spike. Now.
