Chapter 7.
Giles and Willow spent the rest of the night researching magic and how to un-turn someone from a gargoyle back into a human. They also researched gargoyles to learn all they could about their new cousins and themselves as well. Xander also helped them since his broken arm meant he wasn't much use to Buffy and Amy, who were working on customizing their new clothing, and he really didn't have much else to do.
"Okay," Buffy announced as she and Amy brought over their new clothes. "Here are your new leather jackets and pants. They should be better at standing up to fighting and training than what we were wearing. Also, they're all black, so those of us who don't like their coloring can better hide that fact." She smirked at Xander before demonstrating how to put on the jackets.
Xander noticed something as Buffy put on her jacket. Something that he, as a teenaged male should have noticed long ago, but hadn't with all the strangeness going on. Buffy didn't have any breasts. Well, not like she'd had as a human. She wasn't wearing a bra so he could see her nipples through the fabric of her shirt but there was none of the soft plumpness behind it that he had so admired whenever he thought she, or any other girl, wasn't looking. He surreptitiously checked on Amy and Willow as well and found them similarly bereft. He sighed. A life without the sun and without boobies even though he lived in southern California. Fate was a cruel mistress it seemed. He turned his attention back to Buffy.
"Okay, as you can guess, there's no way to easily thread our wings through any sized hole in a jacket. It's much easier to just cut all the way through." she put the jacket on to show how three strips of leather now hung on either side of her folded wings and down her back between them. "And underneath the webbing-"
"It's called a membrane," Giles interrupted.
"Membrane. Whatever. Underneath it, two snaps keep it secure but allow for easy removal when you want without damaging the coat." She demonstrated how the snaps made the coats look like coats again. If you could ignore the elbow spikes coming out of the reinforced holes in the elbows.
"Xander, you'll get yours tomorrow, once your arm is healed," Amy said as she finished handing out clothes to everyone else.
"The biggest problem is that we've got these big, gaping holes in the coats where the membrane comes through and runs down our sides. You can hold them closed with your wings like this," Buffy demonstrated pulling her wings in tight to her sides, "but nothing's holding them closed when you're flying. I'll have to figure out how to fix that later. For now, I gave them a stiff seam so they wouldn't flap as much when we fly." Buffy shrugged. "The pants were a little easier. There's a button in the back over a hole for your tail. You can't see it but you can reach it to fasten it yourself easy enough." Buffy turned and pointed out the new hole around her tail and the button over it, holding her pants up. The pants similarly had holes in the knees for everyone's knee spikes. They also only came down to the false knee, where the foot/ankle bent forward and looked kind of like a backwards facing knee.
Buffy handed out the rest of the clothing. Giles took off his tweed jacket and replaced it with the new leather one. He did leave his undershirt on, though. No one noticed that he surreptitiously checked to make sure there weren't any holes on the inside of that shirt's left arm. Not that any of the children would likely care that he had a tattoo there from his youth. Or know what it meant.
Then, everyone but Xander got to try out their new clothing in a training session with Giles. Though he did watch, and imitated as much as he could without contact. Even so, his arm ached horribly. Finally, sunrise came with blissful sleep.
Xander woke the next evening feeling great. He took off the splint and moved his arm, then tested it by hitting his hand into his palm. No pain. He had to admit, healing a broken arm in a day was a pretty neat trick, and a nice pro to balance out the cons of stone sleep.
"I'm sorry, Xander. Is your arm better now?" Willow asked meekly.
Xander sighed. "Forget it. Just don't do it again."
Willow nodded enthusiastically and gave him a fangy smile. "Oh, I learned my lesson. Bears are food, not friends. Got it."
He opened up his arms and she rushed in for a Xander-hug. (Patent Pending) It was slightly different with their wings and their strength. You had to hug a gargoyle more up near the head and/or be careful of your strength. Wings are fragile and easy to damage.
After Xander dressed in his new leathers, they all took off and headed for Sunnydale.
Giles bought a paper out of a newspaper machine. He handed part of it to Willow. Xander got a peek at a headline about campers – nicknamed the Goldilockses – that claimed to have been attacked by three bears the night before. Willow blushed and folded it away. Nothing more was said about the incident, though. With that, the clan took to the air again to fly over to Buffy's house.
Joyce did a very good job of hiding her shock/fear at having five rather scary monsters on her porch, but quickly waved them all in without actually saying the words. It seemed as though Buffy and Giles' speeches/warnings to Joyce had taken hold pretty well. Xander noticed he had to duck just a little going through the doorway and still managed to catch his wings on the top of the door frame. He wondered just how tall all of them were now. Buffy was now as tall as her mother, which she hadn't been even close to a few weeks ago, the first and only time he'd seen Buffy side by side with her mother. And Buffy was currently barefoot while her mother was wearing low heels.
"Wow," Joyce broke the silence. "You all look very nice in your new outfits."
"Thank you," Giles answered. "Buffy picked them out and did much of the work in designing and modifying them to fit our new forms."
Buffy was torn between being mortified or proud at being praised in front of her mother and her friends like that. Blushing worked as a reaction either way, though it was hard to tell with her mottled green and brown coloring.
"Who's hungry?" Joyce asked, sparing her daughter any further embarrassment.
After the meal, the gargoyles prepared to launch themselves (very carefully) from the Summers' roof.
"I think I ought to take each of you out to train you 1-on-1 in the slaying of vampires and other demons," Giles announced. "Willow, why don't you come with me first? Buffy, as you have the most experience, you take point in your group." Then he and a nervous Willow took off from the chimney.
Willow flew slightly below and behind Giles, drafting off of him to save energy. "This is about the bear again, isn't it?" She had to repeat herself a bit louder again before he heard her. The fact that he was in front of her and the noise from the wind served to make it harder for him to hear her.
"Actually, no. You've learned your lesson from that already, I believe," Giles said, looking back. "I wanted you to come with me first because I wanted you children to learn proper slaying techniques from me before you learned the wrong techniques from Buffy, and I figured that you would be the best to start with, as Xander and Amy both have their own ideas already about how to fight. They would thus be harder for Buffy to corrupt."
"Corrupt?" Willow asked, her voice betraying the smirk he couldn't see.
Giles sighed. "Buffy is—was an interesting Slayer. And like all Slayers she took to martial arts training quite readily and developed her own system out of the many she was taught. Her system, however... how do I put this? It's too... showy. There are far more leaps and backflips and spins than a Slayer normally has. She's also rather inefficient. What I plan on showing you is: find a demon, slay the demon, and move on. Buffy tends to play with her victims overmuch."
"Oh. Okay," Willow replied, unsure of exactly what was about to happen, but trusting him to guide her.
There was no more talking as they flew through the silent night. Their eyes scanned back and forth over the ground below, their amazing night vision made it easy to see every detail on the ground. It also made it easy to spot vampires. The undead were easy to tell apart from the few living souls out that late. Giles spotted the vampire first and dove for him, with Willow right behind. Willow was reminded of the attack Xander used to save her from the bear when Giles silently plowed into the vampire, sending him sprawling. Giles landed where the vampire had been and Willow landed next to him.
"Now, normally, I would prefer to just dust him on the first attack. But that's your job," he said as he handed her a stake. "He's stunned for the moment, though I do suggest you hurry. And remember: if you stake his heart quickly, then he won't have a chance to hit you back."
It was Willow's turn to be stunned. A few nights of martial arts training and he just hands her a stake and tells her to aim for the heart? She was startled a bit as she realized the vampire was getting up and she had just missed her best chance to dust him. The vamp spotted her standing there with a stake and charged. Willow was reminded for the second time that night of the bear charging at her, but this time, there was no Xander coming to save her. She was on her own. Her eyes flared red as adrenaline flooded her body. Time seemed to slow down just a bit. She realized that the vampire, with its hand back for the attack, was leaving his chest rather unprotected. She plunged her stake forward, closed her eyes, and waited for the inevitable blow.
The blow never came.
"Perfect," Giles came out from behind a tree in front of Willow. Somehow he'd made his way behind the vampire without either of them noticing. "Other than losing your stake to the dusting, that was absolutely flawless, Willow," he announced, beaming.
She beamed back.
"Next time, if you want, you can pull your stake out during that half second before the vampire dusts so you can reuse it. Otherwise I have absolutely no other pointers to give you." He paused. "Don't take this the wrong way, and please don't tell Buffy. You might never be the fighter that Buffy or Xander are going to be. But I think you would have made an even better Slayer."
Willow swallowed and nodded at the compliment as they used a mausoleum as a launching pad for more hunting.
Xander swooped down at the latest vampire they'd found. It was his turn. He glided up behind the guy, plunged a stake in, and raised his wings as he went past the guy, his speed bringing him back up to rejoin Amy before the vamp crumpled into dust. They had carried Buffy back to her mother's house after her turn trying that move, because she'd forgotten about the delay in vamps dusting and hadn't raised her wing. She hadn't broken anything, but she was too sore for more patrolling and Joyce was more than happy enough to have extra mother/daughter time right now.
"We need longer stakes," Amy observed. "Like how knights would stab down from their horse at footmen with a big spear? We need something like that, except that our wings are our horse."
"I was actually thinking of air-to-ground missiles myself. But a lance might work too. Kind of bulky to be carrying, but it might be worth it."
"Yeah, a lance!" Amy nodded. That was the word she was looking for. "Would've been nice to have against that bear too."
"I think I needed the blunt force to knock him away from Willow," Xander countered. "But after that, yeah. Or if Willow had had one to begin with?" Then again, she probably wouldn't have been willing to use it at that time.
"When we get back to the forest, we should start work on some. Might be good for hunting too," Amy decided.
"Thank you, Mom. But really, I'm fine. Just too sore to want to go flying all over the place when there are four others who can do it for me. And I'll feel great when I wake up tomorrow night," Buffy insisted as she sipped her hot chocolate.
Joyce just gave her a tight smile. "I don't care if you're 15 or 80; human, slayer, gargoyle, or one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater. It's a mother's prerogative to worry. So I'm going to worry."
Buffy giggled at her mother's joke. "Xander's the purple one. And he has both eyes and four horns," she pointed out. "But you can worry less now. Cause gargoyle healing? Awesome. Last night Willow decided that some bear reminded her of Yogi. But it didn't like the comparison."
"Oh my gosh, it attacked Willow? And she looks fine today," Joyce was shocked.
"It never touched her, actually. Xander was there in a flash and knocked the thing away from her. Just like he did for me tonight. He got a broken arm for his trouble, though, which was healed when we woke up today- I mean night. He got the broken arm from playing with the bear last night, not from the vampire," Buffy explained her disjointed babble.
Joyce was nonplussed. "Let me get this straight: last night, Xander saved Willow from a bear attack and broke his arm doing so. And tonight, he saved you after you crashed into a vampire?"
"Mostly. I dusted the vamp I was after, he just wasn't dust when my wing tried to go through him. I just didn't know about the other vamp that was hiding behind a mausoleum. Xander dusted that one for me while I was getting the number of that train."
They were quiet for a bit while Joyce processed that information. She took a sip of her tea before speaking, "I'm closing the gallery."
"Mom. Please-"
Joyce held up her hand to stop any debate. "I'm selling off what inventory I have and breaking my lease. There's another gallery in town that's interested in hiring me. They close at sundown anyway, so I'll be home whenever you need me. And this isn't because you transformed. Or not just because you transformed. Opening a gallery is a lot of work. It takes a lot of investment. Of time, not just of capital. And if I had found out and believed that you were the Slayer right now, I would be doing the same thing. I need to be here for you right now much more than I need the promise that maybe someday I'll make more money than I can right now."
"Mom. Are you sure? The gallery was, like, your dream," Buffy reminded her.
"You are my dream. There is nothing more important in my life than you. I want you to know that, Buffy," Joyce said seriously.
Big, emotional hug time.
"Can I ask you another question?" Joyce asked, not letting go.
Buffy just nodded.
"How long do you think it will take Mr. Giles to find your... cure?" Joyce refused to ask whether she would ever be cured.
"Um, well... Giles seems pretty good at this research thing. He found out about the Harvest and the Master pretty quick. But I really haven't known him that long. Why?" Buffy had a feeling she wasn't going to like the answer.
"Sheila Rosenberg called today asking where Willow was. I had to tell her the truth that Willow had never slept over here. They're going to declare her missing tomorrow morning. Amy's already been declared missing. It will look... odd if I don't do the same for you. Are you okay with that?" Joyce tensed, waiting for the accusations.
Buffy let out a sigh of relief. "What? Yeah. Go for it, Mom. We all already discussed it as a clan and I figured you already had. Oh, and if you could... Xander would like you to remind his parents to declare him missing too. He doesn't trust them to remember on their own, I guess. I thought it was something serious. By the way, if you're asked, Giles would like you to say that you met him and don't think he's capable of anything 'nefarious'. His word, not mine. He's worried he's going to get blamed for the disappearances since we all disappeared together. Something about English people and the family name. Giles explained it, but I kinda tuned it out."
"I know the feeling," Joyce said dryly.
Buffy opened her mouth to retort, but could only giggle and fall into her mother's arms. It was true after all. Some things didn't change no matter what her form was. And snuggling with her mother still made her feel good.
A/N: "Bears are food, not friends." Why is it that in a cartoon with talking fish and hippie sea turtles, that the sharks who are trying not to eat other fish, bug me the most?
A/N2: Do not own Yogi the Bear or associated characters. I don't even own a pic-i-nic basket.