Author's Note: Hi guys! Some of you may have noticed that my word count is steadily creeping upwards as the Indefinitely-Open-Ended-Fic-A-Day has gone on (Day 74 today!). Back when I started out, I was putting out stories and chapters that averaged 1200 words, which was absolutely doable. This week, pretty much everything I've put out has topped three thousand words, including this four-thousand-word monster. That is my excuse for why I've been pushing stories out so late this week! And if you see me tossing out some shorter work next week, that's just me trying to save what scraps of sanity I have left. Hope you enjoy this Xanderiffic chapter!

…...

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, Xander had tried to go on a trip to see the world. After he'd graduated high school with a decent GPA (thanks to Willow), no money and no plans, he'd needed a place to start from. Getting off the Hellmouth for a summer had sounded like a pretty good idea. Of course, like all his plans, that one had failed as well; he'd spent the summer washing dishes in a strip club and never made it out of California. Now he had the whole world open to him, but all he wanted to do was stay on the Hellmouth, trying to fix up a home.

Finding the Hellmouth in their first hour in Cleveland had been surprising, almost funnily so. Buffy, who'd had just enough college literature to be dangerous, had complained for the rest of the day about dramatic irony and foreshadowing, but Xander was just glad this one wasn't under a school. They'd taken a break for lunch after surveying the location and talked about what they should do about it. Despite the general hellmouthiness of the place and the fact that it had been abandoned mid-rehab, the size of the place and its location on a growing edge of town gave it a hefty price tag that the Scoobies wouldn't be able to swing unless they were planning on actually living there. Since Donna, their resident mini, wouldn't even come out of the car long enough to look at the place, that seemed like a nonstarter even if it hadn't been the worst idea Xander had ever heard. For the moment, they'd just have to keep an eye on the place from a distance and hope nobody bought it up for demon luxury apartments or something like that.

After looking at five more locations in two days, they'd eventually settled on the one Xander liked best from the start: an old resort lodge of ten cabins and a main building on the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, bordering a small lake and surrounded by trees. Defensibility was a problem, one that Giles and Buffy spiritedly debated whenever the realtor was out of earshot, but that wasn't Xander's main concern. It was quiet out here, but not the deathly, unnatural quiet of the last days of Sunnydale. There were birds and animals, the sound of lake water lapping against the dilapidated little dock, the rustle of the wind in the trees. He could take a deep breath and actually feel it filling his lungs. The place needed a huge amount of work, some of the cabins were close to falling down and the main building hadn't been updated in half a century, but the work was doable and the price was right. He'd found Donna sitting on the porch of the main house, organizing the information from the roughly five thousand questions she'd asked the realtor. "What do you think about this place?" he'd asked. "Any bad vibes?"

She'd looked up at him and smiled shyly. He'd already gotten the idea that she wasn't used to people asking her opinion on things. "I think it's great, I think it would be a good place to put a school for Slayers. We wouldn't all have to live in the same building, or worry so much about practicing outdoors. And it's so beautiful here. Some of the girls who come here will be so scared already, and why do we have to put them any closer than this to the Hellmouth? But I don't know if we can fix everything that needs to be fixed."

He'd grinned at her. "Don't worry about that part. I know a guy." And so they'd bought the place lock, stock, and barrel with what they'd been able to free up of the Council's funds, with the agreement that the first thing they would look into was top of the line perimeter security, both mundane and magical. Buffy also wanted a slayer house in Cleveland proper, with some idea about rotating teams of girls staying and slaying, then coming back to base. It seemed like a fine idea once they were up and running, even if Xander suspected that the Los Angeles girl in Buffy was mostly wigged about living so far from civilization. There was enough livable cabin and lodge space already for the twenty-five members of their expanding coterie, so Giles and Buffy flew back to figure out the logistics of moving their whole operation halfway across the country, while Xander and Donna stayed to start the wheels turning on repairs and upgrades. Paying in cash had gotten them a very rapid closing and immediate possession, so the pair set up camp in bedrooms on the second floor of the main building and bought a lot of microwavable food.

Xander quickly decided that having a Slayer assistant was pretty much the most useful thing ever. Donna was tireless, following him around the lodge all day long, jumping onto roofs to check for damage, dragging broken furniture out of the cabins so he could inspect the floors and walls, and taking notes on everything they saw and everything he said. She was quiet through most of the first day, taking notes and taking orders, sort of like a really strong secretary. When they went into town for supper and supplies, he managed to nudge her into an argument on the proper toppings for pizza and found she could babble like Willow when pushed to it. (As a native Wisconsinite, Donna had very strong opinions about the necessity and beauty of the "extra cheese" topping, which Xander contended was a cop-out to let pizzamakers provide less of other topping.) She also ate two-thirds of the pizza, but Xander was used to that from Slayers. By the second day, Donna was complaining about having to carry Xander's toolbag around just because she was the stronger one. He figured that was a good sign she was getting comfortable.

Being able to lose himself in work was an incredible relief. Their stay at the Hyperion had let time hang heavy on his hands, which just led to thinking about things he wasn't ready to deal with. Even being around his best friends had hurt more than it helped, watching them mourning, or fighting, or snuggling with their surviving loved ones. Here at the lodge, their days were consumed with getting things repaired themselves or finding experts to fix things, or sourcing the massive supplies they would need to feed literally dozens of slayers. He'd wake early in the morning to get started and go all day, then collapse into his slightly musty bed at night, too tired to miss Anya, too tired to dream of her.

Donna was a good assistant but she was no apprentice; she was barely interested in the actual construction work except as it could be fit into her increasingly elaborate balance sheets and timetables. After four days, Xander gave in and bought a secondhand computer and a creaky old dot matrix printer just so other people would be able to read all the paperwork she was putting together. He taught her how to make up work orders and spec sheets, and in a surprisingly short amount of time they had an organized operation going. It was all time-consuming, and all required a lot of thought, and mostly that was very good.

The only hard time was when Donna would try and discuss budgets, and he'd see her blond hair and listen to her talking excitedly about amortization and equity, and suddenly he'd miss Anya more than he could possibly bear. When that happened, he usually needed to make an excuse to step outside for awhile and let the birdsong and the noise of the trees distract him. Donna probably thought he was crazy, or at least that he really hated talking about money, but she never asked him about it. She went off on her own sometimes as well, and he figured she had her own soothing places and her own painful memories to deal with. If he were a better mentor-Watcher type, he would've gone after her and tried to help her somehow, but it was all he could do to hold himself together these days.

In the dark days after his botched wedding, Xander had tried to convince himself that what he'd had with Anya wasn't real. She'd wanted him because romantic relationships were her most immediate experience of humanity and she wanted to be in one. He'd felt strongly tied to her because being wanted by anybody was rare and worth hanging onto, even somebody fundamentally incompatible. He'd loved having sex with her. She was giving, creative, inventive, and tireless. Who wouldn't love a woman like that? But he'd been embarrassed by her tactlessness and her bluntness, had cringed every time she'd plainly spoken a truth he would've hidden with obfuscating humor or not dared say at all. He'd known she thought he lacked ambition, he had been terrified and ashamed to introduce her to his family. They hadn't really fit at all, so it had been easier to tell himself that it wasn't love, it was codependence and convenience and habit. It wasn't until she'd turned back into a vengeance demon that he'd realized there had to be more between them than mutual lust and the fear of being alone. There had to be something more, or neither of them would've hurt so badly. It wasn't until after she was gone that he'd acknowledged that whatever else he felt, he really had loved her and had let her die not knowing that. Nights when he wasn't tired enough to sleep, he laid in the dark and wondered if demons with souls went to hell dimensions.

On the fifth day, work teams started coming in to get all the stuff done that they'd planned and budgeted. Xander was watching the plumbers installing an industrial washer and dryer in the main building when Donna found him. "I want to go the library," she told him.

"Put it on the list," he suggested, distracted by dread fascination at the lead plumber's sinking waistline. It seemed inevitable that he'd lose his pants entirely at any minute. "Maybe on Thursday when we get groceries."

"I want to go today," she insisted. "I've got something stuck in my head and I can't remember all of it. I need to look it up."

"We've got three crews in here," he pointed out. "I don't want to be the one to have to explain to Buffy why the phones don't work, or the laundry. And if the furnace guy ever shows up, we might not even freeze this winter."

"Ohio doesn't get that cold in the winter," Donna scoffed.

"Thank you, Nanook of the North, but I'm from California," Xander quipped back. "The idea of snow fills me with confusion and terror."

"All the crews will be done this afternoon, and the library is open till six," Donna pressed. "Or I could take the rental car."

"You don't get to drive the rental car," he reminded her. Getting himself put on the rental car agreement had involved an extremely painful rate hike for insurance purposes; getting a seventeen-year-old on the agreement had been out of the question.

"Come on!" she wheedled. "I can be trusted with a sword or a stake or, like, the entire budget and schedule for this entire renovation, but somehow I'm too young to drive a car?"

Xander smirked at her. "Sorry, kiddo. Having seen my share of Slayer driving, you're at least as likely to kill somebody with the car as with a sword." Of course, after that he'd wound up having to drive her to the library that afternoon, just to stop her sulking (and to keep her from calling Buffy and telling her what he'd said.)

He'd found some comic books and the latest issue of the woodworking magazine he liked, which kept him busy while she perused Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and books of poetry. While he was in the bathroom, she started an argument with the librarian about whether an invoice from the plumbers counted as proof of address, especially since she was a minor with no ID of her own. Somehow, he wasn't even entirely sure how, Xander ended up pulled into the argument, showed his ID with Sunnydale, California printed on it, and wound up the proud owner of a new Cuyahoga County Library card, which Donna used to check out a half-dozen books. On the way home, Xander asked why she didn't use her own driver's license, the one she'd been crowing so loudly about earlier.

"Because I'm a runaway," she told him simply. "My parents might find me if I start using my ID in a place I'm not leaving."

"You have parents?" he asked, a little dumbfounded by the idea.

"We weren't all raised by the Council, and not all our families got killed," she told him, a little sharply. "I don't like hiding from them, but I think it would probably cause a problem if they learned I was here and about everything we're doing."

"Yeah, you're not wrong," Xander mused. "I guess we better get something set up to deal with problems like that."

"You're gonna need a lawyer," she agreed.

On the sixth day, a company came with a load of gravel for the driveway, leaving Xander and Donna to shovel it into place. Despite her general disdain for manual labor, Donna burned off a lot of energy on the pile, bulldozing around with massive scoops of rock, then letting Xander smooth it out. She was on a strict no-slaying prohibition while they were in Cleveland with no backup, and the inactivity was obviously starting to grate. Saved a lot of money on the driveway, though. "We've got to be ready," she told him. "I've been telling the other Slayers where we are. They're going to find us."

"They all know where we are," Xander reminded her. "It's just a matter of getting the transportation sorted out and making sure everybody's going to have a place to sleep. Next week sometime."

"Nuh-uh," she replied with a secretive smile. "The other ones, the new ones. We're going to have to find a way to get some of them, they're too young, or too far away, or stuck where they are. But some of them are already on their way, and I told them not to bother going to California. They're coming."

"Okay, when you say it that way it sounds really creepy, you know that right?" Xander asked with a shaky laugh. She'd merely grinned at him and gone on spreading gravel. Sure enough, the first new Slayer arrived that night. Alicia from Altoona had stayed put when the Slayers had been assembling in California, but considered hitchhiking the two hundred miles to Cleveland much more doable. The hitchhiking was less of a concern to Xander, since who'd be able to kidnap even an untrained baby slayer if she didn't want to go, but the fact that she claimed thirteen and looked even younger was a real problem. Alicia assured him that her mom wouldn't care she was gone, but Xander was on the phone to Giles as soon as Donna took Alicia upstairs to one of the finished bedrooms.

Giles agreed that a lawyer or a team of lawyers would be an important acquisition for the new council, but he was more sanguine than Xander at the prospect of very young Slayers. "It's not at all unheard of," he informed Xander, his voice taking on the didactic tone that said Xander was about to learn something, whether he liked it or not. "A girl can become a Slayer anytime after the onset of puberty, which has been growing younger even as we as a society have begun to prolong childhood and adolescence. Historically it is rare for such a young Slayer to be called, but if she is the closest and best-qualified when a Slayer dies, even a young Potential will be activated. The youngest Slayer on record was called in Warsaw, Poland, in 1943, at ten years and seven months of age."

Xander's mouth was dry. "What happened to her?"

"The Council lost track of her almost immediately when her Watcher was killed," Giles replied, his voice solemn, "but only about seven weeks passed between her Calling and the next. Later records indicate she died at Treblinka. There were no more Slayers called anywhere in Europe until 1961."

"Right." Xander blew out a breath. "But Willow's spell activated every Potential who could be a Slayer, no matter how unlikely, which means we could be looking at a crowd of fourth-grader Slayers needing training. We've gotta get our act together, Giles."

"I certainly can't say that you're wrong about that," Giles agreed, "but we must move with deliberate haste. Having a secure base of operations is vital, elst we may just be assembling vulnerable girls in one place so they might be picked off more easily."

"Yeah, I hear you."

"Did Alicia say anything about how she found her way to you?" Giles asked.

"Yeah, but it was Slayer woo-woo, so I figured I'd toss it up the chain of command," Xander joked weakly. "She says Donna told her the address in a dream."

"Ah," Giles said, as if Xander'd told him that Donna mailed the girl a map.

"Ah?" Xander repeated. "This is actually a thing that is with the sense-making?"

"I'm afraid that we're operating largely on conjecture at this point when it comes to the evolving power of the Slayer," Giles told him. "When Buffy and Kendra both possessed the Slayer essence at the same time, we on the Council were left to rely on information gleaned from the legends of antiquity. Now that the Slayer essence has been split and multiplied in infinitely more directions, we're operating far outside the bounds of any established knowledge base. However, Buffy has reported that she and Faith have occasionally communicated information through shared dreams, an experience that Faith has corroborated. Faith also reports that she was immediately aware of Buffy's death and subsequent resurrection, despite being many miles away and imprisoned. It seems as though the Slayer essence is becoming stronger and more pronounced since the mass Calling, especially in certain of the girls who seem more sensitive. Given what we know, and the fact that Alicia makes the fifth Slayer to find her way to one of our groups based on dream instructions, I think it fair to say it is... 'a thing.'"

"Weird," was Xander's best analysis.

"Indeed," Giles agreed gravely. "How go the renovations?"

"Assuming you've all gotten used to a dilapidated hotel on the edge of being condemned, you should feel right at home," Xander quipped. "Nah, it's going great. Thirty new mattresses with frames being shipped in tomorrow, and we're gonna buy out the bedding department at Walmart. Any more interior decorating I'm leaving to the girls, since I need to protect what little testosterone I have left."

"Excellent. Faith and Robin are leaving overland with the bus and the girls whose identification has not yet been sorted tomorrow morning, and the rest of us will be flying to Cleveland in three days time."

"Great!" Xander said with real enthusiasm. "Getting the band back together. Good luck flying with that many teenagers."

"Indeed," Giles said, his tone much drier now. "And we are going to have some words about you poaching my research assistant and turning her into a construction foreman. I have a great deal of work to do, you know."

"You've still got Dawn and Willow," Xander pointed out blithely, "and you'll be glad for it when the bills start coming in. I'd have just thrown everything in a shoebox for later. It used to drive Anya-" He stuttered to a halt just from hearing her name aloud. "Anyway," he went on after a stilted moment, "you'll be surprised at how the place looks. Still a lot to do, but big progress."

"I'm certain of that," Giles assured him, his voice oddly gentle. "Keep in touch, and we'll see you beginning of next week." Xander had agreed and hung up, checking once more on the girls before he went to bed himself. They were both awake, talking and making a severe dent in the household Twinkie supplies, but at least looked bedded down for the night. He went on to his own room, pulled off his shoes and belt, and laid down. It took a long time to get to sleep.

The next day was Saturday, which meant no work crews, but a huge delivery of mattresses and bedframes to fill the empty cabins and replace the unpleasant antiques in the lodge. Alicia and Donna amused themselves by seeing who could run faster while carrying a mattress on her back. Donna had a significant height advantage that gave her an easy victory, but Alicia retaliated by climbing a tree and dropping onto the next mattress Donna carried, sending both of them tumbling to the ground along with the hapless furniture. Xander, who could carry approximately zero mattresses unassisted without risking an embarrassing fall, left them to it and stuck to assembling bedframes. When the carrying was done, the girls went and jumped in the lake, both of them obviously pleased to have made a new Slayer friend despite the significant age difference.

With a little bit of free alone time, Xander went for a walk along the water's edge, trusting the girls to take care of themselves. The lake was really more of a very large pond and may have once been groomed to perfection, but was now mostly overgrown with algae and choked with cattails around the edges. A little ways from the ring of cabins, he found the gazebo the realtor had told them about, one that marked the outskirts of the property and was "perfect for picnics!" if one did not mind spiders the size of golf balls. Andrew had immediately asked if it was a dread gazebo and then cackled at his own wit, but Xander didn't really care what esoteric things Andrew thought were funny these days.

Walking in, Xander realized immediately that Donna had been hanging around in here this week. The place was freshly swept out, spiders and all, and he could smell a whiff of the wood sealant he'd been using on the porch coming from the benches. The place needed some work, he noted, but nothing he couldn't do himself with a few supplies from the Home Depot. He noticed something tacked to one of the walls, a piece of yellow legal paper like what she'd been using for notes all week, this one carefully sealed inside a Ziploc bag to protect it from the weather. She'd written neatly on it, which must have taken forever.

" Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of death,

Into the mouth of hell.

Charging an army

While all the world wondered.

Then they rode back, but not,

Not the six hundred."

Xander read the words over twice, recognizing them vaguely as something he'd probably had to read once for an assignment in school, wondering what they meant for someone who'd descended into the mouth of hell and come back again. He looked across the water to where Donna and Alicia were playing. Maybe they needed a team of counselors to go along with that team of lawyers, but who would they get who could possibly understand? Buffy had certainly never gotten any comfort from modern psychology. Another problem to kick down the road, he guessed. The first thing they had to do was find all these girls and keep them alive.

…...

Author's Note: The quoted poem is a scrambled excerpt from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.