Author's Note: Hi everyone! I'm not actually very good at writing short chapters, but at least this one covers a lot of ground. I'm sure that counts for something! More and more West Wing characters creeping into the story now, though some of them are larval and quite hard to spot. I'm trying to cover larger chunks of time in each chapter now, stopping and lingering over interesting moments, because there's a lot of story left to cover. Hope you enjoy!

…...

Donna was just starting to get used to the quiet peace of the Lodge with only Alicia and Xander for company when suddenly the rest of the Scoobies and the minis arrived like a tidal wave, washing over the camp and changing it completely. That wasn't really such a bad thing. Peace had been nice, but she'd found herself spending a lot of time sitting in the gazebo and brooding, thinking about the friends who had died and missing her family. She needed people and activity to keep her busy and out of her own head, and now she had it in spades.

Overnight, the place was turned into an operation that resembled nothing so much as Slayer Summer Camp, two girls to a bedroom, four or six per cabin, with Scoobies in the main building. Buffy and Faith shared a two-bedroom cabin of their own, no roommates for either of them. After months of being crammed into the house on Revello Drive, then weeks of living in the musty hotel, it was nice to have the room to spread out. Donna and Steph ended up sharing a room again, Wisconsin poster and all, and she used her computer access to print out pictures of Bucky Badger, the Wisconsin state flag, and a cow. It wasn't home, but it was good.

Now that they had a home base set up, the Scoobies put their heads together and got down to a lot of planning. Donna, of course, was not privy to those meetings, but she typed up notes for Giles and chased down contractors, handymen, security experts, whoever was needed to get the work done. Learning to sound like a mature professional on the telephone was an easy skill to master, much simpler than the very complex martial arts moves that Buffy and Faith were trying to teach now in daily exercises. Sometimes Donna wondered if there had ever been Slayers who were also office managers or city planners or something. She liked exercise and actually slaying satisfied a deep need inside her heart and brain, but none of it was as interesting or fulfilling as helping to get the Lodge up and running.

Donna screwed up her courage and asked Giles about it one day while she was going over estimates for cabin repairs with him. Giles was always busy and he wore detached remoteness like a cloak over his shoulders, but he knew more about Slayers than anybody else here, maybe anybody else in the world right now. She waited until they were finished with the estimates, then dawdled for a minute while reorganizing the supply invoices. "Mr. Giles," she asked, "I was wondering, do all Slayers kill vampires? I mean, is that all they do, professionally?"

She could feel Giles studying her and ducked her head to avoid his gaze, busying herself with the paperwork. "All Slayers kill vampires and demons, as well as fighting the forces of evil and staving off apocalypse," he informed her. "It- ah, in the past it has been unusual for a Slayer to attain her majority and thus need to worry about supporting herself with a career-" Donna gave him a look that must have clearly conveyed her horror, judging by his immediate backpedal. "Of course, the rules are quite different now, thanks to the mass calling, and there will undoubtedly be new customs and ideas of normalcy for this generation of Slayers."

"I guess I was just wondering..." She brushed her hair back behind her ear. "When my Watcher was training me, he told me I'd probably never be a Slayer, but I could be a researcher for the Council, maybe even become a Watcher." If she kept her eyes on the papers and didn't look at him, she could finish talking. "I don't think I want to be a full-time vampire slayer," she admitted. "I don't like it the way some of the other girls do. Do you think it's possible that maybe a Slayer could do something else? Like, anything else?"

When she finally looked up, she saw that Giles was cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief, one of his typical nervous habits. "Well, yes, I suppose... yes," he repeated with more confidence. "Yes, that is absolutely possible. You'll always be a Slayer, but no one girl is The Slayer anymore. You'll all have more choices because of it."

"I want to finish school," Donna told him earnestly. "I want to go to college and learn... well, kind of everything. I'm not sure yet," she admitted with a little laugh, then hesitated. "I want to go home to Madison."

Giles steepled his fingers. "Well, we would certainly miss your skills here, but I can understand that desire. When your training is completed, we can explore setting up an outpost-"

"What if I just wanted to go home?" she pressed. "I don't know when I'm going to be done training, or when we'll be able to start posting Slayers away from Cleveland, but I miss my family!"

He gave her a severe look over his glasses. "Donna, have you ever faced a vampire alone, with no other Slayers nearby and no backup available?"

She frowned and rounded her shoulders. "Only with a team," she admitted, "but you wouldn't let me patrol by myself."

"Because I'd like to keep you alive long enough to explore that adult life you're planning for yourself!" he insisted. "You, all of you who were in Sunnydale, endured a dreadful crucible. Even so, you've been sheltered from the harshest realities of life as a Slayer. Most Slayers do not die because they faced a vampire who was smarter or stronger or more dangerous than all the others. They die from inattention, from carelessness, and from the fatigue of performing their duties by themselves night after night, month after month. If you return to Madison by yourself, you will attract the attention of evil forces," he continued inexorably.

"You have some training and a certain amount of innate skill, so I'm sure you'll be able to dispatch many of those threats. But there are far more of them than there are of you, and they are not respecters of ideas like uninvolved civilians. You will need to find ways to protect your family even as you put yourself constantly at risk. And you will have to prepare them for the reality that the average length of service for a lone Slayer with no Watcher is approximately five months, including some especially talented outliers."

Somehow the unemotional, didactic tone of the lecture just made it hit harder. Donna ducked her head and shuffled uselessly through the papers again. Giles seemed to relent a bit, his voice softening. "I realize that when you are seventeen, six months feels like an eternity, especially to be separated from home and family. I have no intention of holding you or any of the other girls here indefinitely. I have already begun contacting Watchers who survived The First's purge and will be bringing some here to speed the training process. Continue honing your skills, even when it seems dull, and perhaps we'll find a way to get you home by Christmas."

"Really?" she asked, looking up again.

"I can't make any promises," he reminded her, "but it seems like a reasonable timetable given our progress so far."

Donna worried a little about the caveat, but the idea of being home this Christmas was tantalizing, exciting enough to allow her to even overlook the million problems besides vampires she'd have to face while going home. "Thank you, Mr. Giles," she told him wholeheartedly. "I'll work really hard."

"I'm sure you will," he told her with a small smile. "And you might as well just call me Giles, Donna. After all these years, the Mister really does sound strange anymore."

Summer at the Lodge seemed to fly by, busy with a million things to do. Xander started organizing the girls into work teams to get the place in order faster and cheaper. Some girls helped with construction, some with maintenance, some with kitchen duties, some with research and administration. Donna was more than pleased to find herself at the de facto head of the small R&A work team because she could use all the computer software and nobody else wanted to do it. Even with Andrew coming in constantly to bug her about the kitchen supplies budget as though she had some kind of input, it was a good gig.

Steph was on the construction crew and developed a huge crush on Xander almost immediately, along with about a third of the other girls. "It's so sad what happened to his eye," she told Donna earnestly one day over laundry, "but his face has so much character. And he's so nice, even though he's had so much tragedy in his life..." Trailing off, she just sighed wistfully.

"I don't think he's looking at anybody our age," Donna pointed out, trying very hard not to openly mock her best friend. "Or anybody at all right now."

"You got to spend two weeks alone with him!" Steph pressed. "You guys must have talked. What's he like? What does he like?"

"He is nice," Donna replied, carefully matching up her socks and checking the inside collars of her shirts for her name. None of the refugees had anything after Sunnydale, so most of their wardrobes consisted of largely identical copies of whatever had been cheaply available at Walmart. She'd taken labels and laundry markers to her clothes just to keep track of them. "He likes the quiet, and he hates talking about money. I think he's really sad right now. Maybe everybody should just leave him be."

"Yeah, he is sad," Steph agreed. "He and Buffy are just sad all the time. Maybe they should get together, maybe it would make them, you know, feel better." Steph folded her laundry fast and sloppy, she was done with her entire pile already.

"I don't think it works that way," Donna offered dubiously. "Neither of them are like lonely-sad. He's sad because of Anya, and she's sad because of Spike. I don't think getting together would fix it."

"Yeah, but she was a demon and he was a vampire!" Steph pointed out, dropping her voice conspiratorially. "I mean, we're supposed to kill those things anyway! He was locked up in the basement and crazy half the time, and she kept yelling about how we were all gonna die like it didn't even matter to her! Maybe these guys just need to get over it!"

"Yeah, I know," Donna agreed with a little grimace. She could not understand the appeal of dating outside one's own species even a little bit. "But even if it doesn't make sense, it mattered to them. I think we should just leave them alone."

Steph sighed. "You're no fun."

"I suck," Donna concurred cheerfully, finishing the last of her clothes. "Andrew's making brownies today, want to go bug him till he gives us the bowl?"

"Yes, absolutely." Clothes hampers in hand, both girls took off at top Slayer speed, laughing.

More and more minis came trickling in, two or three a week, coming in on their own or being found and brought in by Giles and Robin. Willow tried to help Donna and some of the other heavy-dreaming minis to explore lucid dreaming and the possibility of directing their dreams to convey and receive more useful information. Donna typically had no trouble falling asleep during the meditation portions of these sessions, but most of her dreams were decidedly less than lucid. Considerable practice made it so she could recite directions in her dreams, to the point where the first time she encountered Miette from Lousiana and Rina from Long Island in person, her first response was to blurt the Lodge's address out one more time. That had been slightly mortifying, but everybody else just thought it was funny.

The dreams weren't the only weird supernatural thing going on that summer, though that was probably to be expected with so many supernaturally-enhanced people living in one place. They'd only been in residence a month when the first concerted attack by local vampires had come down. The vamps had plotted it out, waited until Buffy and her team were gone to the city for the night's patrol, then come down hard in the hopes of scattering and disorganizing the leaderless minis. Unfortunately for them, they hadn't realized Faith was still at the Lodge, or that the security systems were motion activated and more than able to detect vampires. The instant the alarms had gone off, girls were pulling weapons from under their pillows and spilling into the yard, organizing into fighting units just as they'd been trained. Giles and Andrew later estimated nearly forty vampires in the attack, an extraordinary example of vampires banding together against a threat, but they'd been no match at all for a score of angry mini-slayers, many of whom had cut their stakes on Turok-han. There was a short battle and a long celebration with lots of ice cream, and Donna and Steph both decided that slaying vampires did have its cool moments. Buffy and her gang returned hours early from patrol, with several of the minis saying they'd known something bad and exciting was happening at home and begged to turn around. They were graciously allowed to share in the ice cream.

Picking up on the emotions of other Slayers seemed to be happening more and more as the summer passed. Willow theorized it had to do with proximity, the various pieces of the Slayer spirit communicating with itself through the girls it had bonded with. Andrew had talked excitedly about Betazoids and telepathy until Kennedy threatened to throw him bodily into space, but it wasn't really like that. It wasn't even all emotions, mostly the strong and surprising ones. When Vi had stumbled upon a massive Chirago demon on patrol, everybody with her knew instantly to zero in on her position, and when Willow had surprised Kennedy on their six-month anniversary, a bunch of grinning minis had tiptoed around outside their room, hanging up congratulatory signs both cheerful and mocking. Cathy had been saved a lot of grief when her bunkmates felt her snapping her ankle in a nasty bike fall and went to find her, and when Robin told Buffy the story of a new Slayer he'd been too late to save from demonic sacrifice, the entire cadre of minis had wound up milling uneasily in the yard until Giles told them what had caused such angry grief.

Donna definitely thought the emotion thing was weird, but Willow theorized it would fade with distance and time, so maybe it wouldn't be a problem at all in Madison. As it was, it became easier to ignore with practice. By the time summer became fall, fourteen slayers had become thirty-five, and Giles had also dug up three retired Watchers and two trainees who'd been on holiday when the Council was destroyed. One cabin became the Watchers Cabin, two Watchers to a room, with the remaining one obligingly moving in with Alicia and the other littles as a sort of den mother. School became a pressing concern, but somehow Giles managed to grease the wheels of the local school system so they'd accept thirty new female students all from one address without asking too many questions. Sometimes Donna wondered if Giles used magic in his negotiations, but she didn't think he probably would. Money was usually good enough. In any case, she began her senior year of high school in Cleveland, much to the delight of Mrs. Morello, who'd been fretting.

By October, thirty-five Slayers had become almost fifty, and Donna and Steph now had two more roommates in their Wisconsin-themed room. Training was proceeding apace, and Donna could even step on the ground near the Hellmouth without wanting to throw up very much. She and Steph were both Senior Minis now because they'd been at Sunnydale, trusted to lead two or three other girls in patrols around the Lodge or when splitting up on group patrol in Cleveland. Donna was comfortable now with her ability to sense and slay a vampire without help, but she had to admit it was good to have company. On Halloween, everybody at the Lodge had a huge party with music and costumes and absolutely ridiculous amounts of candy. Andrew made enough amazing chocolate and caramel dipped apples to feed their small army, and there was cider and soda and punch for the minis and beer for the Scoobies and Watchers. The only rule, and this was hard and fast, was that there could be no evil costumes. Everybody had to dress as something good, or at least neutral. This had led, of course, to Xander telling what had to be a heavily embellished story of Buffy's first Halloween in Sunnydale, where she'd turned into a helpless noblewoman and almost been eaten by vampires before being saved by Army Guy Xander and Ghostly Punk Rock Willow. Buffy had laughed too, but she'd looked sadder than normal, and Donna wondered what the rest of the story was. But it was a great party.

Mid-November was colder than Donna would've expected for Ohio, something about the lake effect maybe, but there was already some snow on the ground. She was helping Andrew with the grocery circulars, checking for sales on things they could buy in bulk, when a sudden burst of startled elation erupted in her brain. She leapt up, ignoring Andrew's questions, and raced to the yard. Steph was standing by a newly-arrived car, engulfed in the arms of an older man who was rocking her back and forth. When she got closer, Donna could hear her sobbing "Daddy, daddy, daddy!" A half-dozen other curious Slayers popped up as well while Steph was composing herself.

"This is my dad!" she introduced him, beaming at everyone. "He's my Watcher too, but he adopted me when I was little. I thought... I couldn't find him after the Bringers came, but Giles and Robin tracked him down!" Steph bounced on her feet and hugged herself, grinning.

"Hi, Mr. Steph's Dad," Donna said politely, grinning at her friend's joy. "I'm Donna, Steph's roommate."

"Nice to meet you, Donna," he replied with a friendly smile, reaching out to shake her hand. "I'm Dan Gault. You can call me Dan, it's probably easier than 'Steph's Dad.' He made introductions with the other Slayers as well, then Dan had to go in for a Watchers' debriefing with Steph still keeping a firm grip on him and the rest of them dispersed.

That night, Donna slipped down to Steph's bunk (they were in bunk beds now, to free up more space) after their roommates were sleeping. "I'm so glad your dad is alive," she whispered.

Steph nodded vigorously, wiping at her eyes. "I was sure he was dead," she murmured back. "He had to run and get underground, they knew who he was and where he lived. He was trying to get to Sunnydale, but it was never safe, and then it was gone entirely. He thought I was dead too, until Giles tracked him down. Now we can go home!"

"You're going home?" Donna asked, surprised. "Back to Green Bay?"

"Or, you know, somewhere around there. Our house got destroyed," Steph confided. "We're going to have to figure out what to do next, where to stay, all of that. I love Slayer Camp," she admitted, "but I want to be in a real home with my dad again, even if I am out Slaying at nights."

Donna thought about that. "Would you guys consider maybe living in Madison?" she suggested. "I know somebody you could probably stay with while you got on your feet, and Giles won't let me move back without a Watcher and ideally some backup. We could have our own outpost."

Steph's eyes got wide. "I love that idea!" she yelped, a little too loudly for the quiet room. "Let's ask tomorrow. That would be so amazing, we'd be like Slayer sisters, taking care of a city together. I'm sure my dad will go for it."

In the end, it was a little bit more involved than that. Giles, Dan and the Scoobies all agreed that Madison was a decent place to set up a Slayer outpost. Though it had only average demonic and vampiric activity, its large school and hospital made it an inviting target, and the city also had proximity to most of the large cities in Illinois in Wisconsin. It was an eight hour drive from Cleveland, which could be managed in one day, and as it turned out, was almost equidistant in the west to New York in the east, where a Slayer outpost was also being planned for Kennedy, Rona and a few other Senior Minis who were ready to move out. Quarters at the Lodge were at risk of becoming cramped. The coming weeks of planning would be brutal, but Giles was certain, he announced with a glance Donna's way, that teams could be sent out before Christmas.

Planning was one of Donna's best things, but even she was taxed by the logistics of getting everything set up for the move to Madison. The Council would subsidize rent on a house and basic living expenses, plus Giles was hopeful about things like scholarships once he had access to all the Council's funds. There were utilities and plane tickets and all kinds of furnishings and weapons to acquire and account for. Even so, on Thanksgiving Day, Donna was confident enough to make a phone call she'd been hoping to make for six months, since the day their yellow school bus had rocketed out of Sunnydale. "Hi Mom, it's Donna. I want to come home."