Sorry about the long wait. I'm still having trouble getting back into this story. But if you are a fan of the show Psych, check out my new one shot crossover of Psych and Torchwood. Really it's more of a Torchwood cameo than a crossover... So if you watch Psych, read Torchwait for iiiiit...

Buffy went to work the next day feeling uneasy. She wasn't sure how Jack would act around her after she had unloaded everything on him the night before.

She walked in through the tourist office and saw Ianto finishing repairing the hole in the wall.

"I kind of liked the hole," she said.

"Not the image we want here," Ianto responded in his normal tone—or was it his sarcastic tone? She couldn't tell through the accent and his glaring at her.

"What kind of image do you want for your public entrance to your secret base?" She looked around at the drab walls cluttered with pictures and flyers.

"One that doesn't have a fist-shaped hole in the wall," he replied.

"Suit yourself," Buffy said with false cheeriness and then headed down into the Hub. She saw Owen and Tosh at their stations so she sat down in between them. "Anyone know what I'm supposed to do?"

"Jack hasn't told you?" Tosh asked.

"I think I'm supposed to help mostly with the field work… but El Presidente doesn't want me in the field until I start carrying a gun."

"I don't see what the problem is," Owen said. "How could you not have used one before? Why do you hate them so much?"

"I don't know," Buffy replied, thinking about when she was shot… dead. "They just seem so… gunny. I've used a rocket launcher before, and that was cool. But for the everyday stuff I like the hands on approach… in a holding a knife or stake kind of way. Anyways, what are you guys working on? Can I help?"

"I'm just running a few programs," Tosh said. Buffy recognised the tone: Tosh didn't think Buffy would be interested because no one else ever had been before.

"Like what?" Buffy asked. She might not understand it, but interest was worth more than understanding sometimes.

"Oh no, now you've done it," Owen grumbled. Tosh still looked hesitant and a bit ashamed. Luckily Jack yelled for Owen and some report he needed from the doctor. Owen left to see to that.

"You don't have to pretend to be interested," Tosh said to Buffy. "I know it's not something anyone really wants to hear about."

"I'm not pretending, and I do want to hear." Buffy saw that Tosh was still not sure. "Hey, I may not seem to be the best and the brightest, but I'm curious and interested in what you do. So, what do you do while you're here doing whatever it is you're doing?"

Tosh blinked, but then decided to go for it. "Well, I have a translation program that has collated every scrap of alien language we've got, and broken it down into binary threads to see if there is a common derivation." She paused and then looked away. "I know—you have no idea what I'm talking about."

"It's searching for 'Latin' in the all the French, Spanish, and Englishes of the universe. Only not with those specific languages because I'm using a metaphor."

"Yes, that's it exactly," Tosh said, a bit impressed. Buffy herself was a bit impressed. Back in high school she wouldn't have understood a word of what Tosh said. But after travelling with the Doctor, and then with UNIT, she found herself unusually smarter and knowledgeable with the big words and ideas. She tried not to show it most of the time; it was still wigging her out.

"So, have you found anything in common?"

"In some. I've been running the program for just over a year. We keep encountering more languages, so I don't know when I'll have an answer. Maybe never."

"Have you accessed the UNIT language databases?"

"Some," Tosh replied.

"Maybe I can help you get into a few more?" Buffy said conspiratorially.

HXHXHXHXHXHXHXHXHXHXH

While waiting for Owen to finish and give him the report he needed, Jack watched his team. Gwen was on the phone with Rhys while working at her computer. No doubt they were discussing wedding plans. He couldn't stop the grin that came with that thought. It was good that she was still holding on to her life; it couldn't be easy for her. Then there was Tosh and Buffy sitting close and laughing. It was so different to his daughter's tears yesterday.

His daughter.

For a man full of surprises, he didn't get many that often. But boy did he get one hell of a surprise with Buffy Summers. He knew he could have children; it was possibly the worst of the pains of immortality. Someone once said that a parent should never have to bury their child—he couldn't do anything but bury them in the end. An optimist might look at it from another angle, that his children would never have to go through the grief of seeing him die. But Alice had made it more than clear that it wasn't a comfort for her. She wanted nothing to do with him because it was too painful for her to age while he remained the same.

Buffy didn't know. Would she want to get to know him, if she knew the truth?

He'd need to know her better to answer that question. At the moment, as so painfully pointed out to him last night, he didn't know her at all. When she said she became the Slayer at only fifteen it knocked him a bit. Reading the date on a file was one thing, but hearing it from her was something else. He had read the UNIT file and had been impressed. Beyond impressed—it was a big part of why he just suddenly hired her. But he hadn't looked at what her life was like before that. There was no personnel record. So now he had to do some detecting/hacking to put together a picture of what she had to deal with in high school.

He wasn't surprised by the complaints of violence and fighting at Hemry High in LA in her school record. He was surprised that she was expelled when she burnt down the school's gym. Then she transferred to Sunnydale High.

He found a website dedicated to the odd occurrences in Sunnydale. It was a compendium of newspaper articles and publicly released police reports. It was all organised by year, so he looked at the years she was in high school.

There were multiple reports of death at the school: boy found in locker with neck wound, teacher found dead in closet, principal eaten by wild animals, suicide victim found hanging in computer lab, dancer found with heart cut out, boy-genius found with brain removed, several parents killed at Parent's Night, man found dead outside the library, computer teacher found in librarian's home with a broken neck, girl found dead inside the library with other injured victims… The list just kept going on and on.

But the list of strange occurrences not necessarily involving death was even longer: spontaneous cheerleader combustion, spiders coming out of textbooks, giant flies, gangs on PCP, blocked sewers resulting in thousands of snakes in the cafeteria, janitor shootiong a teacher (claimed he was possessed and never saw the gun before—it was never even found), swim team on steroids creating fish creatures, adults acting like teenagers, snow on Christmas, witch-hunt by a group called MOO, cafeteria lady attempting mass murder, principal eaten by the mayor-turned-giant-snake at the graduation, school blown up with snake inside. And that wasn't even the half of it.

He wondered just how stupid the police force there was. Jack had experience with the police in Cardiff turning a blind eye and handing it over to Torchwood, but nothing like the complete denial the Sunnydale force must have been suffering.

But all of this Buffy had to deal with. He wondered how she had handled it all by herself. Jack decided that he needed to contact Joyce and have a chat over the phone with her about their daughter. That's when he discovered that Joyce had died—only a couple months before Buffy's presumed death and disappearance.

The only thing that Jack could think was that he should have been there, and it was a painful thought.

HXHXHXHXHXHXHXHXHXHXH

Buffy expected to hear something that day from Jack, but he avoided her. It left her feeling awkward all day. The looks Owen kept sending her way didn't help any either. He picked up on her tension and Jack's conspicuous absence from the central Hub area, and looked as if he wanted to say something about it to one of them. Buffy didn't want him any more involved—this was just between her and Jack.

The day came and went. Reports about Beth and the invading aliens were written and filed away by Ianto, and then everyone went home. Buffy was restless and about to leave her flat on patrol when her cell phone rang.

"Summers," she said into it, but she couldn't keep the frustration out of her voice at being delayed.

"Something got your knickers in a twist, Slayer?"

"Just when I'm about to go out and slay evil things, one of them calls me so I can't leave."

"You'll get them right enough; waitin' makes 'em cocky and stupid."

"And that doesn't remind me of anyone," she mumbled sarcastically, knowing full well that he'd hear her. "What do you want, Spike?"

"Thought I'd see how this new group of yours is treating you."

"Fine," she said. "Great even."

"Great, huh? Then why are you so eager to go out and rough up some demons?"

Stupid vampire and his being so observant. "I don't really want to talk about it."

"Right, 'cause you can't be sharing your problems with the evil undead."

His bitterness made Buffy change her mind. She blurted out the question that had been nagging at the back of her mind since she left the room with the mind probe interrogation. "What was it like with the chip? How painful was it?"

Spike hesitated, probably puzzled by the question. "I'm not gonna lie to you, Buffy. It was the worst pain I'd ever felt, and I've felt pain. I learned how to be a vampire from the great git of a Prince of Painful Punishments and Torture. Best as I can describe it, it was like a white hot knife cutting through my brain. There was this one time… but you probably don't want to hear about that. But yeah, it was bloody painful. Literally with the nosebleeds and all."

There was silence as she took that in. "I'm so sorry, Spike."

"Here now, what's this? THE Buffy Summers—Slayer with not just a stick but a whole bloody javelin of righteousness stuck up her arse—is apologising to the big, bad vampire?" What started as joking sarcasm turned very serious. "What happened, luv?"

Buffy confessed the whole thing to him. From the moment she met Jack, to first entering Torchwood, to the crime scene and all the way to its conclusion with Beth's death, and then at last her breakdown in front of her father. It was so much easier to tell Spike all of it over the phone—it was so much easier to talk to him period. There wasn't the annoying smirk, or that gaze and head tilt that seemed to see right through her. She didn't have to remind herself that she was talking to an evil vampire that had killed two of her kind and tried to make her number three. It was just Buffy and an old friend she could confide in over the phone.

When she finished, there was nothing but silence.

"Say something," she said.

"What do you want me to say?" he asked.

"Anything, Spike. You always have something to say."

"Not this time. Buffy, I want to tell you to get out of there, come back home, come here, but this isn't home anymore for you. You have to suss out where that is for yourself. Wherever it is—if it's there with your dad or travelling the stars with that doctor of yours—as long as you're happy, then that's where you should be."

"But? I hear a 'but face' in there."

"But… I miss you, Buffy." There was a brief awkward pause, but he quickly ended it before she could say anything. "Anyways, I think you should stick it out with your dad. It's what you wanted, and you never back down from a fight. I know that better than I know anything."

"But if Torchwood is like the Initiative… I can't be a part of something like that again."

"And you won't. Maybe they aren't like that; maybe if they are you can change them. You changed me from a monster into something just a bit better."

Buffy shifted awkwardly. She could picture him doing that head tilt and staring thing, just like that moment on the stairs before going to rescue Dawn. He was saying just about the same thing again too.

"Yeah, well… you were never all that to begin with. I mean, gosh Spike, you were just pathetic."

"Hey! If I hadn't got that chip in my head…"

"Yeah, yeah, you can just keep saying that, but we both know it's not true."

"Do you know how many times I came so close? If it hadn't have been for that bloody organ keepin' me in that sodding chair, I would have succeeded where that enormous head of hair gel failed."

"Yeah right! I could have taken you even then."

"Really? What about that parent thing then that night at the school? I was breathing down… well, maybe not breathing… but I was right there and I was just about to have myself one good day, if not for that axe from your mo…" As caught up in the memory as he was, he trailed off suddenly. "I'm sorry, pet. I didn't mean to…"

"No, Spike. It's fine. Mom's been gone a long time. And it's good to remember all the good things about her—especially her whacking your sorry head."

"Yeah," he gave a slight chuckle. "She was one hell of a lady, your mum. Reminded me of my own a bit. And no matter who your dad is, you can be proud to be your mother's daughter."

"Thank you, Spike. I am, and I'll remember that."

The mood once again uncomfortably serious, Spike cleared his throat. "Better be lettin' you get in your spot of violence. G'night, Buffy."

"Goodbye, Spike. Thank you again for putting things in perspective for me."

"Thanks and an apology. You sure the world's not ending?"

"Not the right time of year yet," she replied. On that last laugh, they both hung up.