How To Kill Your Boyfriend In One Hard Lesson Chapter 2, an angel fanfic

Disclaimer: Don't own, etc., etc. Joss Whedon rules supreme and retains pretty much everything. Only written for personal enjoyment and because this plot bunny just wouldn't die, even after some serious staking…

Summary: Occurs after Brother, Unfortunately Mine. Rating 18 for sexual references. The sibling theme is not entirely played out …

HOW TO KILL YOUR (PSYCHO) BOYFRIEND IN ONE HARD LESSON

Chapter 2 – Slayer Sisters

"You've got my cell phone number, and Giles?" Buffy fussed. "Is it charged? Oh, I made some sandwiches –"

"Buffy!" Dawn cut off the flow. Plucking the cellophane wrapped food from her elder sister's hand she ignored the nearby Slayers and enveloped her big sister in a fierce hug. "Unclench. I'll kick that evil college paperwork into the middle of next week and be home by the weekend…do you think I'd miss the chance to see Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman when the entire Scooby Gang is going to be in situ. Stop channelling mom…try for Bart Simpson instead."

"Hah-hah." Buffy said, but gave over with the twittering, beaming as she still felt the warmth from Dawn's hug.

Waving Dawn off in the little roadster her sister could now operate all on her own after passing Driver's Ed…finally…Buffy gave a loud sniff and tried to get a grip.

"Come on, B." chided a voice behind her. "You survived enrolling at UC Sunnydale, I'm sure lil' sis will manage just fine."

"That's what worries me," Buffy pointed out. "College – my demon roommate, the Initiative, secret government experiments, frat boys…Okay, okay." Buffy shut up as Faith rolled her eyes.

Faith. Her Sister Slayer. Until Willow laid her whammy on the Scythe, she and Faith had been the only Slayers in the world, a kink caused in the endless line of solitary Chosen One following solitary Chosen One after Buffy Summers gave the rulebook the finger and became the first Slayer in history to, as Spike so aptly put it, have 'family and friends'.

The first time she'd died, Xander had revived her in less than a minute with CPR, the second time, Willow with the whammy again. But once a Slayer died, even if she was only dead for seconds, the next Slayer was Called…Faith – torturer, murderer, sociopath - and Champion.

Nowadays Buffy could see how Faith's eyes were a little less shadowed than they had been. In the kitchen a tall handsome black man, Robin Wood the ex-Principal of Sunnydale High and one of the few to survive outlasting that position, was cooking – Faith's lover, and a large part of the reason for those lessening of shadows; another considerable factor was that Faith now had a focus for her abilities other than just being the other Slayer. She was Buffy's PT Instructor, Drill Sergeant to the tenderfoots. She excelled in the role.

Buffy allowed Faith to draw her back inside the old, sprawling mansion the Scoobies had reclaimed as their own. Defeating the First Evil, losing Spike when her Champion closed the Hellmouth and losing Anya…that had been a pretty big bang in the scheme of things, but it was like the crescendo of a symphony – you couldn't sustain the peak forever, else it just became noise. This, however, this what was going on all around her redefined long haul.

Coming up with the brilliant notion of creating a new Slayer-user-friendly Watchers Council had been an off-the-cuff stopgap measure. It was something Buffy came up with to give the dozens of hyped up Slayers focus and purpose; something to deflect that restless light in Faith's eyes as the Dark Slayer's love for Robin Wood battled her fear of letting anyone get close to her because of how she'd been hurt in the past, and Buffy could see that Faith's patented flight over fight response was on the verge of winning unless she did something drastic.

However, It had taken Buffy less than an hour, and without any hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-lightening-bolt revelation from the Powers That Be, no less, to realise that her 'stopgap measure' would be her life's work. There were vampires and demons and evil nasties in a thousand places on this planet, but there had only ever been one Slayer, until now. A network of Slayers, criss-crossing the globe, fighting the good fight; they would still never be able save everyone, but their success rate would go through the stratosphere.

Completely changing the face of Slayerdom, however, required a lot of hard work and effort, and currently those closest to Buffy were scattered all over the place, hence the enormous anxiety-over-reaction to Dawn going to UC Sunnydale to register for the fall semester.

After initially settling in Rome whilst rounding up European Slayers, Buffy and Dawn had decided to return to Sunnydale, or rather what had been Sunnydale, and set up HQ in what little of the town – basically the old mansion, the airport and UC Sunnydale campus – remained. Eventually the others had drifted back too, though they often went abroad on research or Slayer-gathering trips since the "one slayer dies the next is called" rule held true; when one of the ex-Potential Slayers who'd survived that fateful battle against the First, Anis Willoughby, had been killed in a car crash en route back to Sunnydale, her hitherto mortal cousin, Andrea Findus, who had been visiting, had become a Slayer right in front of Kennedy and Rona's startled eyes.

Giles had taken Andrew Wells to England since the last surviving member of the Troika had decided to train as a Watcher, though Buffy suspected a not-entirely healthy attachment to tweed on the youth's part. Despite his supreme nerdiness, Andrew had a part to play. He was atoning for murdering his best friend, Jonathan Levinson, and opening the Hellmouth in the first place.

Also like Giles said, any new Watchers they could get, they had to take. The loss of the Watchers in Caleb's explosion aside, many of the Watchers came from ancient lineages of the same, and as such could be expected to adhere to the small remnant of the conservative, hidebound old Watchers Council that buzzed around the edges of the Scoobies like a fly you couldn't quite swat. Several of the family members and friends of the new Slayers had evinced an interest in such a role as well, and Dawn herself was considering the Watcher thing – she had the brains for the role, certainly, Buffy knew with pride.

Beyond that however, Dawn had told her sister, "'Look, I know you'd love me to be a teacher or something with a degree and job security and normality. But I can't do that – I'm not normal. I was an all-powerful energy being for billions of years. I can't do something like spend my life teaching a bunch of sixth graders a history of the world I know to be a crock when you guys are fighting the good fight and saving the world on weekends, even though I'd probably be safer. I'm part of the Scooby Gang, and even though I'm not a Slayer or anything, I have to be involved. Being a Watcher is a way I can contribute to what we do and still earn enough cash to support my deadbeat sister.'"

Willow was presently in South America on a higher plane of existence seeking more Intel from the PTBs if she could get it, her Slayer lover Kennedy waiting anxiously in the monastery for her return. After her "shadow puppet show" confrontation with the Shadow Men, before the Scoobies ultimate battle with the First Evil, Buffy had been left with the nagging feeling that she had missed something important in the subtext, easy enough to do considering how enraged she had been at the time with those self-important men who had callously chained a girl to the earth and, for want of a better term, committed an act of "mystical rape" by forcibly infusing demonic energy into her.

Quietly working away in the background as ever, it had been Xander who obligingly dropped what he was doing and hot-footed it to Africa following up a Shadow Men reference to those shamans who had infused the First Slayer with her power and created their line. Xander had met none other than Oz unexpectedly in Nairobi, and being forced to explain the loss of his eye, the pair had teamed up to go further into the Dark Continent.

Right now, as usual these days, Buffy tried not to think about Angel. When Andrew had brought back the mentally-ill Slayer Dana Parvati, he had been close-mouthed about Angel in LA, and Buffy still struggled with the notion that Angel, Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, Cordelia and the others of Angel's "team" she'd never met were now running Wolfram & Hart, the Biggest Bad on the Western Seaboard. While Andrew seemed convinced that Angel and his friends were still 'fighting the good fight', Buffy wasn't so sure, and that uncertainty frightened her. Angel; Riley; Spike. She'd loved them all in different ways, and lost them all in different ways, but Angel…something like that most people never even got once in a lifetime, never mind twice.

Buffy sighed to herself. Spike had been the only one who'd really understood, which somehow didn't amaze her as much as it seemed, from appearances, that it should. Despite that he had been her lover at the time, despite the fact that he was openly and unashamedly deeply in love with her, Spike had grasped her feelings for Angel and astonishingly had not seemed to hate it.

"'Look love, you and Angel…it's like the Star of Africa. The world's biggest diamond, that's part of the Queen's Crown Jewels back home? If you marry the woman of your dreams, the one who's got one hand around your heart and the other your soul, and then give her the Star of Africa for your first wedding anniversary, that's really great…but how do you top that? Love is joy…and sorrow. When it comes to love, most people only stumble across a way into Paradise on the fourth or fifth go – if they're lucky. That's your problem pet, with you and Angel. You hit the jackpot first go – with Angel, you got into Paradise first time, and trouble with that is, nothing that comes after can ever quite match up.'"

Buffy jumped as for a moment Spike's words were so real in her memory it was as if he were standing right there next to her, solid and…cold. Okay, enough with the wallowing…