Riley was back to his digs at Lowell House. Kicked to the curb. Keyed up. Like old times. He shot hoops through the basket on his door until he popped the inflatable ball between his hands.
A night of hard drinking was out of the question. The new residents of Lowell House were all freshman. None of His Guys remained. After the Fall of the House of Walsh and the subsequent renovation (twenty feet of solid cement down the elevator shaft), all of the Initiative crew had shipped out to testify in secret Senate subcommittee hearings, or for reassignment state-side. Graham, pack slung over his shoulder, had handed him a crumpled piece of note book paper with scrawled contact numbers on the inside. The others had simply saluted, or shaken hands warmly with him.
So maybe it wasn't like old times. Whatever old times actually were, as he hadn't the faintest idea about Buffy's nightly activities for the last three months. Not once did the bed creak to give away her leavings or returning to the bed. Fact was, she would have kept that reveal from him. But Giles had already been told, so the proverbial cat had already been thrown into the proverbial river, bag and all.
Might as well tell Riley, he thought bitterly, his growing unease at being Scooby sidekick in the Buffy Summers universe getting the better of him.
Riley paced the length of the room.
He didn't need to come to a conclusion. What he needed, what he hungered after was a plan. Throwing an old black-camo shirt over his head, he strapped a few stakes to his belt and shouldered a taser. The plan he settled on was some murky combination of stealthy approach and gunslinger-esque all-out vamp brawling once inside the Sunnydale castle.
Buffy wouldn't approve, he thought. Buffy doesn't want you to get yourself dead. But the adrenaline kept pumping fight-fight-fight impulses into his blood. He needed to kill something. Even if it was just the satisfaction of burning a pile of ash.
He wondered briefly how Dracula could have gotten so many films if he was so easy to kill.
"This isn't movies," Riley said. And the saying of it made him feel marginally more confident. But he was just a guy with a kick-ass girlfriend, saving the world piecemeal vampire patrol by vampire patrol.
It was time to start acting big.
He strapped two more stakes to his leg and bolted out the door. He felt like an action hero when he didn't face-plant into the sidewalk when he tripped over his laces on his first steps down the porch. Night was looking up already. Had Buffy been here, Riley was no doubt sure that he'd have broken his nose in the fall and earned another one of those pert, "Why Do You Try?" cheek-kisses.
"Enough talk. It's time for action man." Riley struck a small pose on the porch of Lowell House, then loped off across the wet grass of the SunnyD campus towards Destination: Dracula's Soon-to-Be Bordello of Smoldering Ash.