Timeline: BtVS: S07ish & The Walking Dead: S02.
Disclaimer: Anything copyrighted belongs to its legal owners.
Author's Note: Written for Day 24 of the 2023 August Fic-A-Day.
A/N 2: Canon? What canon?
A/N 3: I've completely ignored AtS canon here, mainly because I haven't seen the show. Apologies.

"There was food back at the traffic snarl, you know. We didn't have to go hunting." Daryl looked sideways at her, but Buffy was trying to use her supernatural senses to see if she could get them to work as they were supposed to. It was something she had tried to do ever since the world as they had known it ended. It had mixed results.

If she could get her supernatural senses to detect the undead from a much further distance without having to rely on her enhanced hearing, it would be amazingly useful. It would also save lives as long as she got everyone to listen to her. As it was, she had to be within less than half a mile to be certain, but sometimes she could sense them as far away as four miles. It was frustrating.

By relying on her hearing she ended up hearing a lot more than she wanted, such as private conversations, people relieving themselves, or getting groin-y. Not something she wanted to have intimate knowledge about.

"Buffy!" It was low, but definitely annoyed. Daryl was a skilled hunter and she had asked him several times to teach her the finer points of it. She could track and kill her prey with almost any weapon, but honestly, she was lost on what to do with the animal afterward. Her normal prey usually went poof and cleaned itself up.

"I know, but we need something fresh, and it's better to save the canned food for later when we can't go hunting. Besides, you promised."

"The group need protection, most of them couldn't defend themself against an angry puppy. The biters just make them scream and do stupid things."

The sad truth was that it was true, and it really shouldn't have been. Not this far into the apocalypse. "I know, but Faith and Giles will protect them. Your brother is probably itching to kill something, too. Actually, Faith might be able to talk some sense into them. She has a lot less patience than I do and is more blunt, maybe they'll react better to that than my way. Faith is also an excellent fighter, and Giles can fight too. They'll be okay. Besides, if the walkers come we'll hear the group scream from miles away."

Daryl snorted in agreement but dropped the conversation and focussed on searching for tracks instead.

Carol, Ed, Amy, Dale, and Jacqui were more or less useless as fighters. Faith enjoyed the kill a little too much, probably. Something she might have in common with Merle. Dawn had gotten better as Buffy had consistently taught her how to fight as they had been traveling toward Atlanta. Angel had told her several times that Cordelia's ability to fight had improved since she had moved to Los Angeles, but she had yet to see it. Andrea was a little too desperate to prove herself, but at least she was willing to learn from anyone who would teach. Giles, of course, knew his way around medieval weaponry.

When they had some time, they would need to start teaching everyone how to fight and defend themselves, including how to use their environment to their advantage, to stop them from screaming anytime they saw a walker, and generally to keep the noise level down. If they chose to stay, because she was leaning toward them going their own way without these people. Most of them didn't want to face reality and depended on the few who could and were willing to both fight and feed them.

Case in point was Daryl; he was the group's main hunter, but he was disliked and distrusted by them, and generally left out of things. If he left their chances of starving to death would be so much higher. They just didn't think about the consequences of their actions.

They should be doing what she had asked Darul to do, teach them how to track, hunt, and field strip their prey. The last part was yucky, but it needed to be done.

"Besides," Buffy added after a while, "This way we can check and see if there are any herds in the area. If there are we can skeddaddle before they get too close."

The hunter beside her merely nodded, as he was preoccupied with a set of tracks he had been following for the last little while. Buffy had followed his visual cues and tried to see what he saw, and it wasn't as easy as she had hoped. On the bright side, she could hear the animal further up ahead.

Forty minutes later they were back at the gridlocked highway with a half-grown deer. As they hadn't seen any walkers they took a chance and made a firepit on the side of the road. Someone had found a delivery van full of unopened canisters of fresh water. Which was amazing and delicious.

"Did you find anything interesting in the cars, aside from the water?" Buffy looked curiously at the group.

"There was an assortment of canned food," her Watcher replied. "A few bottles of untouched water, a dozen or so first aid kits. Nothing groundbreaking, but still quite useful."

"First aid kits? Was there something useful in them?"

"Yes. A couple did not appear to have been opened at all, the rest ranged from a few plasters missing to only having a few usable items left." That was a lot more than she had expected, and she gave him a genuine smile. Despite everything, they had managed to cooperate. Now they only needed to get somewhere safe.

When she looked more closely around, she discovered that the cans were stacked neatly close to the RV. The first aid kits weren't there and had presumably been placed in the cars they intended to use when they left the car graveyard.

"I've been thinking," Buffy began, but was interrupted by both her sister and her sister Slayer saying 'uh oh', almost simultaneously. She gave them a look, but they just grinned innocently at her. It was a good sign of how well the evening had gone in hers and Daryl's absence.

"We need to be better prepared in case we get separated. My group each has a backpack with the essentials in them; weapons, water, food, medicine, survival stuff, and extra clothes. Everyone needs one, and you need to keep them on you at all times. I get that not everyone has a backpack and everything we need, so at the first opportunity we need to stop by a hunting goods store or somewhere else we can get this stuff."

Most of the others looked skeptically at her, and she had expected that, but a few of them nodded in agreement. As they ate, a discussion ensued about what needed to be in the backpacks, what could be useful but wasn't necessarily critical, and the tension in her shoulders loosened a little. Good, they were starting to actually understand. Some of them at least.