The first part of Dead Man's Party occurs with minimal changes (summed up in the initial narration), and this chapter continues into and alters Faith, Hope, and Trick.

Late August 1998

"Hello?" Andrew's voice answered, sleepily.

"Oh no! It's late there! I'm sorry, I forgot about time zones!" Buffy apologized, fetal position and making herself as small as possible on her bed, wrapped around her phone. The sound of Dingoes Ate My Baby playing their particular brand of rock music in her living room was making her raise her voice, even up in her bedroom.

"No, it's okay, Buffy," he said, quietly, waking up and realizing what was going on. "I told you to call me if you had a crisis. Let me just get into the other room so we don't wake Melinda or let her know your business." Buffy heard the sound of walking and a door shutting. "Okay. What's wrong?"

"They just… Willow, Xander, Cordelia, and Oz have been doing patrols. Snyder still won't let me go back to school, even though Coulson said he had to. Mom has a book club friend named Pat that thinks I'm a bad person. And we were supposed to have a quiet dinner just my mom and my friends but then mom invited Pat and my friends invited the whole school and they don't want to talk to me and I thought about leaving again… so I called you instead."

"You thought that everyone would be on pause without you, and they'd just pick back up when you got back, but instead you feel like they've moved on and you don't have a place anymore?" Andrew summarized.

"Maybe? Everyone says they're glad I'm back, but they seem to want me to be gone. Willow just ditched on a hangout yesterday!"

"Now I'm not your friends' therapist, but… my guess is projection. I worried this might happen. Teenagers aren't exactly known for mature responses to sudden changes. Have you apologized to them for leaving? Had a chance to explain what you went through? Made them understand that you weren't abandoning them, but trying to take care of yourself?"

"You think that's all it is? That they think that I don't care about them?" She asked, uncurling slightly. It always made more sense the way Andrew explained it. There was a distinctive beep. "Hold on. Someone is calling on the other line? I'll just be a second." She switched lines and said, "Hello?"

"Buffy!" Giles said, obviously excited he'd gotten through. "The mask in your mother's bedroom! The Nigerian one. It contains a demon. That reanimated the cat. You need to destroy it, preferably by smashing the eyes."

"Got it," she told her Watcher. The creepy mask in her mom's room and the zombie kitty had honestly been the least of Buffy's stressors the last few days. She moved quickly down the hall, took the ugly, fanged wooden mask off her mom's wall, and snapped it across her knee. It wailed and released a blast of red light. She walked back to her room and told Giles, "Did it. Screamed. Red light."

"The cat simply evaporated. Marvelous. Okay, I'm sorry I'm late to the dinner. I'll be there presently," Giles said.

"It turned into a whole party thing with Oz's band and like half the school. I don't think you'd like it unless you want to drink schnapps with mom and Pat," Buffy told him. "Listen? Giles. I'm sorry I left and didn't check in. You're my Watcher, and I should have. I know you went through a lot, too. Do you have someone to talk to? Do you maybe want to tell me about it?"

"I… that's very mature of you, Buffy. Thank you. I shan't burden you, but I appreciate the offer."

"Maybe a Watcher guy?" she suggested. "You got tortured. You can't just sit on that."

"I'll consider it. Enjoy the party," Giles said, hanging up.

Buffy switched back to the line with Andrew, "Sorry. Had to destroy a mask that raises the dead. I think it worked! I mean, talking to people: snapping the mask definitely worked. I apologized to Giles and it seemed to make him feel better. I'm going to try to talk to my friends and mom, okay?"

"Sounds good, Buffy," Andrew told her, not even mentioning the mask after all the other things she'd told him over the summer. "I'm glad you called. Don't be afraid to call if you need to. But, you know, I go to bed around 10, so that's 7 your time if you can swing it. We'll set up a daytime session in a few days."

"Right! Thanks! Get back to sleep. Tell everyone I said hi," she apologized again and hung up.

"Who… who were you talking to?" Willow asked, standing in Buffy's doorway.

"My therapist," Buffy acknowledged. "Will! I'm glad you came up. I didn't mean to abandon you! But I'm sorry! I should have called, at least."

"Because you left the party downstairs?" the redhead asked, a little confused.

Buffy stood up and crossed the room to grab her friend's hand. "No! Over the summer. I was going through so much stuff. But you were too! Do you want to talk about it?"

"Well… well yeah!" Willow realized this was the moment she'd been trying to confront Buffy about the last few days. "Because I'm having all sorts of… I'm dating, I'm having serious dating with a werewolf, and I'm studying witchcraft and killing vampires," she started crying, "and I didn't have anyone to talk to about all this scary life stuff. And you were my best friend!"

"Oh, Will!" Buffy wrapped her friend in a hug. "I'm so sorry." She was vaguely aware of her mother coming down the hall to check on her, seeing the two girls hugging and crying, and hovering, uncertain. "Mom?"

Fortified by schnapps and Pat's urgings, but a little nonplussed by interrupting a peer bonding moment, Joyce hesitated, "I mean, I don't want to interrupt… but… I think we need to talk, too."

"Yeah?" Buffy asked. She was a little more hesitant to apologize to her mother than her friends because, well, Joyce had kicked her out and still hadn't apologized for that explicitly. All the food, concern, and helping her get back into school was implicit… but not the same thing.

"Yeah you… you put me through the wringer, Buffy," she took a deep breath, steeling herself. "I mean it. And I've had schnapps." She asked the question that had been bugging her all summer. "Do you have any idea what it's been like? Thank God the government at least told me you were alive even though they wouldn't let me talk to you!"

It was hard to remain calm, a little of the hurt she'd tried to put away with Andrew's help surged up and Buffy couldn't help but demand, "But you told me! You're the one who said I should go. You said if I leave this house, don't come back. You found out who I really was, and you couldn't deal. Don't you remember?"

"Buffy, you didn't give me time," Joyce explained. "You just dumped this thing on me and you expected me to get it. Well, guess what? Mom's not perfect, okay? I handled it badly. But that doesn't give you the right to punish me by running away."

Arm still wrapped around Willow, Buffy had the strength to ask, "Punish you? Mom. You had me committed. Don't you remember that? I don't know how to make you deal. I can only do what you tell me." She took her own deep breath and insisted, expressing something she'd come to terms with in her sessions, "You're the grown-up."

Joyce rocked even more than if she'd been slapped. She'd forgotten. "We… we sent you to therapy, after you ran away the last time…"

Willow's eyes were wide with shock. Joyce had Buffy committed?

"I didn't run away the last time," Buffy explained. "I was hunting vampires in Vegas. With Pike," and wasn't she glad she had never seen that bad decision again? "And you didn't even notice until I got back. And then you locked me up until I pretended there were no such things as vampires. I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you so many times. I didn't want to dump it on you. But you wouldn't believe."

"I…" Joyce began, leaning against the hallway wall, remembering. "We had you committed. We did. I'm a terrible mother."

Buffy rushed over and hugged her, still not letting go of Willow. "No. You're a good mom. You just… have Sunnydale Syndrome. Will's mom has it too. So many parents just won't see what's going on right in front of them. We don't know why. The government's doing a study," she babbled.

"No… no, honey, you're right. I'm the grown-up. I should have believed you. I'm so sorry you didn't think you could trust me."

"I'm sorry too, mom. I should have figured out how to prove it to you, before it was the end of the world," Buffy sobbed out.

She was crying. Joyce was crying. Willow was crying. Jonathan Levinson, sneaking upstairs to try to find a second bathroom, realized he was way overstepping and cautiously padded back down the stairs.

After a few minutes, they finally finished and Buffy added, "Oh. Mom? I had to break your mask. It was a demon. It raised the dead."

"Of course it did," Joyce sighed. "I wonder if there's more schnapps…"

The rest of the week was better. Buffy and Willow made time to really talk. Joyce did too, though she still only wanted to hear so much and was having to be eased into the realities of Buffy's nights. Xander seemed to take his cue from the women in his life that things were okay, but Buffy felt like there might be a confrontation brewing there. Was he actually glad that she was back in between him and the forces of darkness, or did he resent her resuming her job as Slayer when he'd started to lean into his life as a demon hunter codenamed Nighthawk?

Buffy mentioned it in her scheduled call with Andrew later that week. "What does Xander normally do in your group?" Andrew asked.

"He helps! Well, mostly morale. He does his best. He's not really research-guy. And he's not really fight-guy. But he's brave! He killed the bug assassin guy. He gave me CPR when I died!"

"Did your Watcher wind up going on these patrols your friends did over the summer?" the psychologist drilled down.

"I don't think so? At least not the night I showed up. Giles likes his early bedtime," Buffy admitted. "I think he goes to bed earlier than you when there's not a crisis."

"And Xander was leading the vigilantes in your absence?"

"I guess so? Willow has a crush on him, so will kind of go with his ideas if she doesn't have a better one. And Oz is really laid back. And I guess Xander's dating Cordelia now. She'd probably try to be in charge if she was more interested. But, no, yeah, I guess by default Xander was the leader."

Andrew sighed, "And you mentioned that he had a crush on you before?"

"Yeah…" Buffy groaned. "Pretty sure that's why he always hated Angel." It was a testament to the success of the therapy that she didn't lose the thread of the conversation on mentioning Angel. "I think of him like my brother, but I don't know if he still feels that way."

"I remind you that I'm not Xander's therapist, and I can only give you an opinion based on your perspective," Andrew hedged, "but… I would expect a fair amount of sublimation and passive aggression from any teen boy in that situation."

"Oh! I know that one from chemistry! He's going to turn into a gas without becoming a liquid first?"

"You've remembered correctly for chemistry. For psychology, it's a similar kind of transformation. Think of it as taking hard feelings and trying to make them a productive gas without getting everyone wet? It's normally a good thing. I'd suppose he's taking his frustrations at you not returning his affections and of not being the dominant personality of the group and trying to work them off in a healthy fashion by doing what he can to help out. But then you went away and he got to be the dominant personality for once…"

"So now I'm back and he's just the guy that picks up the snacks again," Buffy agreed.

"Quite likely. He may not even be aware he's doing it. Rationally, he probably realizes that he'd much rather someone capable of facing the threats you face is doing it instead of him. But, emotionally, he's a 17-year-old young man who finally had a taste of being in charge of his peer group, and your return has taken that away. And, again, I don't know him, but based on things I've heard about Melinda's treatment at work… the fact that you're a woman is likely to be harder to stomach than if you were a man."

"What should I do?" Buffy asked. "Should I try to let him be in charge of more stuff?"

"If you honestly feel like you've been preventing him from living up to his potential? Maybe. Especially if he was doing a good job, you might consider treating him more like your lieutenant. But… you don't owe him a leadership role just because he's a man and is conditioned to want it. Did you notice you implied that you'd trust Cordelia as a leader more than him?"

"Cordy? Ugh, I mean…" Buffy started, then actually stopped to think for a second. "She's a lot like I was, before I became the Slayer. And she's been helping for over a year now, even though she thinks we're freaks. Maybe I should figure out how to give her more to do. Won't Xander hate that, though?"

"It's not your responsibility to handle your friend's insecurity. Again, Melinda is my main window into this, and... actually… why don't I just put her on?" Andrew realized.

A minute or so later, May was on the line, "Summers. Andrew says you have an insecure guy in your team and you're worried about putting his girlfriend above him in the hierarchy?"

"Hey, May! Pretty much."

"Do it anyway. I mostly work alone, and a lot of that had to do with having male agents undermining me when I was in charge. If you've got women you can count on, you'll get much less pushback from them. At least because you're a woman. If the guys can't buy in, figure out something for them to do where they're not going to cause you problems."

"Okay," Buffy nodded. That was one of the longest speeches May had given her, so she figured it was important. "If you're having problems with SHIELD guys, maybe you should work with Hartley more?" Buffy had liked the dark-haired woman who'd taught her some knife drills when she was passing through the SHIELD base.

"Maybe. We kind of both tend to want to be in char–" she got a rare self-deprecating laugh out of May. "No, you're right. I should. They have us playing their game when we don't want to work with other women in the organization either."

"Fight the patriarchy!"

"Speaking of Hartley, have you been working on your weapon drills?" May changed the subject.

"A little. There's only so much space in the house, and I don't know what the neighbors would think about me swinging knives around in the backyard. I usually use the school library, but I can't get in there because Snyder says I'm still expelled."

"I'll talk to Coulson. I'd say you could just homeschool, but if your support staff is at the school, you need to have access."

"Thanks May," Buffy told her. "The little troll doesn't want to listen to my mom. And maybe the school board?"

She could hear May's smirk over the phone, "Then we'll just have to find someone that he will listen to."

Buffy caught up to her friends as Xander and Oz were bodily carrying Willow down the school stairs and across the road. "Couldn't convince her that seniors get to leave campus for lunch?" Buffy asked Cordelia, who was amusedly watching the whole production.

Willow yelled back at her, "What if they changed the rule without telling? What if they're lying in wait to arrest me and... and throw me in detention and mar my unblemished record?"

"Why are you so late?" Cordelia asked.

"Makeup tests," Buffy shrugged. "The government can make the Snyde-man let me go to school, but they can't make him give me free credit for the finals I missed."

"Oh, right! You were with the FBI all summer!" Cordelia said. It wasn't that Buffy had been dishonest about SHIELD, it was that Cordelia only paid so much attention. "Were there any cute agents with guns? Do you have a guy that can fix my parking tickets?"

Up ahead, Willow had finally been carried far enough off campus without Snyder springing out of the bushes to punish her that she was getting her confidence back. "Hey, we're Seniors! Hey, I'm walkin' here!"

"Cute guys, yes. But, like, mostly too old. Like thirties," Buffy explained.

"So… way younger than your last boyfriend."

"Fair," Buffy admitted, again managing to avoid the surge of pain that came from thinking about Angel. "And probably not on the traffic tickets. For some reason, they don't have jurisdiction in Sunnydale unless it's, like, international bad guys. They only came in the first time because of the Order of Taraka."

"That's lame," Cordelia argued. "What good are they if they can't give us like, tanks and flamethrowers and stuff? And cute army men to help fight vampires!"

"Yeah," Buffy didn't actually disagree. The Watchers/SHIELD/Army pissing contest was a sore subject for her, too. "They at least gave me a bunch of extra training over the summer. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. Training."

"Training?" the brunette asked, suddenly realizing that this might be the longest conversation she'd ever had with Buffy without Xander there to interject. Up ahead, her boyfriend, Willow, and Oz were arguing over which restaurant to eat at from those near the school.

"I realized that I left you unprepared this summer. How would you feel about learning martial arts with me? Well, mostly with Giles; I don't know if I'm teacher-girl yet."

"Me!? Spend more time with you losers?" Cordelia scoffed, but there was an undercurrent of interest.

"Face it, Cordy. We're friends now," Buffy said, giving her an affectionate shoulder-bump that was only slightly forced. Be the big sister you wanted to see in the world. "And yeah, you. You're the cheerleader. You're the only other one in the group who's really athletic. A lot of it is basically the same as gymnastic drills, only you get to kick stuff."

"Huh. I'll think about it." Before the summer, she wouldn't have. But she was tired of being knocked on her butt by every newly-risen vampire in Sunnydale. She'd ruined so many outfits!

"Teriyaki's the winner," Xander announced, holding the door for the girls as they followed Willow and Oz into the small restaurant. "Genuine chicken. Or something that tastes like chicken!"

"Ew, gross, Xander!" Cordelia rolled her eyes.

A quick trip through the line for carry out and they were consuming Asian-fusion goodness at a small park right off of campus.

Willow suddenly announced, to Buffy, "Scott Hope at eleven o'clock." Confirming that Buffy was looking at the handsome senior, she explained, "He likes you. He wanted to ask you out last year, but you weren't ready then. But I think you're ready now, or at least in the state of pre-readiness to make conversation, or… or to do that thing with your mouth that boys like." Seeing the shocked look from her friend, Willow backpedaled, "Oh! I didn't mean the bad thing with your mouth. I meant that little half-smile thing that you…" She glared at Oz. "You're supposed to stop me when I do that."

Oz grinned and shook his head, "I like when you do that."

Scott split off from his friends and walked by, smiling and saying, "Hi, Buffy."

Buffy managed, "Hi," back before Scott continued on his way.

"I think that went very well," suggested Willow. "Don't you think that went very well?"

Cordelia nodded, "He didn't try to slit our throats or anything. That's progress."

"Hey, did you do that little half-smile thing?" Willow wondered.

Buffy sighed, "Look, I'm not trying to snare Scott Hope. I just want to get my life back, you know, do normal stuff."

Willow insisted, "Like date?"

"Well…" Buffy hedged.

"Oh, you wanna date." Xander laughed, "I saw that half-smile, you little slut."

Buffy curbed her first impulse to slug him one. Instead she just stared. How would Andrew suggest she deal with this? Was this more of the passive aggressive attempt to re-establish dominance, or did Xander just misjudge a joke? Cordelia was the one to break the silence. "Xander, God! That's not okay."

Three girls staring at him in solidarity and Oz raising an eyebrow and after a few seconds Xander admitted, "Sorry. Sorry. I didn't think that one through. Not funny."

"Forgiven," Buffy told him after a moment, since it seemed legitimate. "And, yeah, I guess I want to date. And shop and hang out and go to school and save the world from unspeakable demons. You know, I want to do girly stuff! But the dating thing… I don't know if I want to be secret-identity-girl with Scott. That didn't work out so well with my boyfriend freshman year, after I became the Slayer. Plus, my therapist wants me to be comfortable being single and make sure I'm over Angel before I seriously try to date again."

Willow pursed her lips but then nodded, accepting it. "I think my mom would say that's a good idea. I wish I could talk to her about, you know, stuff."

"Are we normalizing therapy?" Cordelia asked. "Because I haven't been to my therapist in months. We need to tell more therapists about monsters. I could really use someone to complain to!"

"And so SHIELD knows basically everything at this point?" Giles asked, finally having had a chance to do a debrief with Buffy about her summer that evening.

"Eh?" Buffy shrugged. "Andrew, my therapist, knows a lot. I think he's kinda not supposed to share unless he needs to stop me from hurting myself or other people, but since it's the government, I don't know? They already knew a lot, though. Way more than the Watchers Council said they would."

"I guess it was too much to assume that the world espionage organizations would 'stay in their own lane' as they say," her Watcher admitted. "But they've agreed to stay out of it?"

"More like they have to," she explained. "There's some kind of Army initiative in the area. I don't know if it's related to the Hellmouth, but I got the impression that the general in charge doesn't like other secret agent types in his backyard."

"Interesting. Perhaps the base from which you acquired the rocket launcher that was used to blow up the Judge? I supposed we should look into that eventually. But, for now, do you know what they expect of you?"

"I mean, I think they want me to be secret-agent-girl, or Captain America 2 or something. They were doing the whole more-flies-with-honey thing, trying to act like it wasn't a big deal."

Giles frowned, "And they understand that you have a unique mission and cannot be used to simply put down enemies of the state?"

"Relax, Giles. They were big on me needing to finish college first anyway. And if I live that long, that's pretty much a record, right? Plus, there are two Slayers now. I'm a bonus! If I live to graduate college and decide I want to go punch Nazis for SHIELD, I can retire and let the new girl go slay, right?"

With that many caveats laid out so eloquently Rupert Giles could only nod in agreement. He rather worried that this argument had been subtly coached, but if the United States government had a vested interest in keeping his Slayer alive for another five years… there were certainly many more immediate issues likely to appear before then. The one objection he could think of was, "I don't know that we've proven there will remain two Slayers going forward. Kendra could have been an accident. I haven't yet received confirmation that another was called upon her death…"

"Bet you a night off on it?"

"Giles owes me a night off!" Buffy explained to her friends a couple evenings later.

They'd gone to the Bronze, had a fun time hanging out, a bit of an awkward run in with Scott Hope (because Buffy was interested but, well, not), and followed a vampire to stop him eating a dark-haired girl that he'd lured off the dance floor. They'd quickly discovered that the girl was more than capable of handling the vampire on her own. Introducing herself as Faith, the new Slayer had borrowed a stake, finished off the vampire, and headed back inside with a simple, "Thanks, B! Couldn't have done it without you!"

A tray of muffins and an implausible story about a naked slaying in front of a bus full of South-Boston Baptists later, Buffy wasn't entirely sure what to make of the new girl. Honestly, if she didn't have her own advice to May about Hartley ringing in her ears, she'd probably still feel a little insecure. Instead, believing that not letting this girl go the way of Kendra was her chance to retire some day, Buffy was paying attention.

What little she'd figured out from Faith's stories suggested that her history had been much closer to Buffy's than to Kendra's: not prepared for years knowing she was a Potential, but instead suddenly called from her normal life. She'd obviously only been a Slayer for three months. Unless she'd been called much later than usual for Slayers, she was young and wearing makeup to appear older. Between the probably-exaggerated stories, the way-too-mature outfit, and the bigger-than-life-attitude, Buffy was pretty sure that there was something serious going on underneath the front Faith was putting on. Andrew would probably have a big psychology word for it.

Faith finished the tall tale with, "So I waste the vamps, and the preacher comes up, and he's hugging me like there's no tomorrow. When all of a sudden the cops pull up, and they arrested us both!" She dug into a muffin with satisfaction.

"Wow. They should film that story and show it every Christmas," Xander asserted, clearly already deeply crushing on the new Slayer.

Cordelia looked pissed. Buffy leaned over and quietly explained to the cheerleader, "She's only 15—16 at most—unless she got called super late." Suddenly, the Chase eye turned on Faith's wardrobe, Cordelia nodded. She could also tell when someone was putting on a front, if only on a sartorial level.

Faith, devouring the muffin in a somewhat salacious manner, opined, "God, I could eat a horse. Isn't it crazy how slayin' just always makes you hungry and horny?"

All eyes turned to Buffy, who rolled her eyes. "Thanks, Faith," she said sarcastically. "Xander's never going to be able to concentrate when either of us are fighting vampires again." Her gut reaction had been denial, of course. She really didn't want any of her friends thinking of her that way. But she wasn't interested in Faith immediately deciding she wasn't cool enough to listen to.

"I get it!" Cordelia announced. Probably what she got was how fake Faith's performance was, but what she said was, "Not the horny thing. Yuck! But the two Slayer thing. There was one, and then Buffy died for, like, two minutes, so then Kendra was called, and then when she died, Faith was called."

Willow wondered, "But why were you called here?"

"Well, I wasn't," Faith shrugged. "My Watcher went off to some retreat thing in England, and so I skipped out. I figured this was my chance to meet the infamous Buff and compare notes."

"At least this one's Watcher told her about me," Buffy said. Faith looked confused so she explained, "Kendra's Watcher didn't tell her I was alive and still in Sunnydale. She thought I was a vampire and tried to slay me."

Faith grinned, "Woah! That must have been intense. I gotta hear that story!"

Getting a sad look, realizing how big of a part of the story Angel was, Buffy started, "Well, there were three assassins after me, and we didn't know what they looked like. I'd already defeated one–"

"So what was the, uh, story about that alligator?" Xander completely steamrolled over Buffy's story as if any time Faith wasn't talking was just dead air. "You, uh, said something… before."

Buffy's half-eaten muffin connected precisely with Xander's forehead. "Seriously?" she asked him. Again, with Xander she couldn't tell if he was just totally oblivious or deliberately trying to take control of the group. Seeing that she had everyone's attention, and that Xander looked suitably chastened or at least afraid of getting hit with something weightier, she continued, "I'd already defeated one of the assassins. What we also didn't know at the time was that there were government agents and the new Slayer in town hunting the same assassins…"