Through a Glass Darkly, 3/4
Here is Part 3 of my tenyearsofbuffy ficathon entry. Thanks to all for the comments and encouragement.
Special thanks go to the following for perceptive comments, helpful advice and general beta magic: rahirah, clavally, theblackmare, rainkatt, gillo, slaymesoftly, partri65 and antennapedia. All remaining mistakes are, of course, my own.
Spoilers/ Time period: End of Season 3 to Start of Season 5. This part follows on Part 2, in the summer a few weeks after Season 4.
Characters: Core Scoobies + Anya and Tara, with a special guest appearance by someone not quite dearly departed.
Rating: FRT
Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Buffyverse. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Strictly for entertainment, and no profit is being made. Please sue somebody else.
Distribution: If you're planning on asking me, I'm planning on saying "yes." Just let me know where it's going.
Word Count: 3,748
Through a Glass Darkly, part 3/4
Previous parts here:
Part 1/4
Part 2/4
Snyder watched as the Summers girl started out the door, up the steps from the courtyard to the street without turning to see whether he was following or not. He’d found in the past that he could sometimes be pulled along, without even trying to go through the motions of walking. But now, with his old form more solid than it had felt since he’d died, he found himself adopting old motions and mannerisms. He kept up easily, one hand thrust into his trouser pocket, just as he had once paced the school hallways, bent on catching a student cutting class-- Summers herself, as often as not.
He marveled at how much more clearly he could see, how he could almost feel the warmth of the summer night’s breeze against his cheek. Everything seemed new to him, and it was... invigorating. He chuckled a little as the irony struck him. Then he sobered as the contrast between his current state as a dead man and his former state as a living one also came crashing home.
He glanced up as the girl came to a halt just inside the gate of Restvale Cemetery. As she looked around, as if to take her bearings, he muttered his thought aloud. “God, I hate this place.”
He was rewarded by a puzzled look from his companion-- the first direct glance she’d cast his way since they’d left the librarian’s place. “Why?” she asked, as if curious in spite of herself.
Snyder grimaced, his lips thin; he hadn’t meant for her to hear. “The Petersen Crypt,” he said shortly. “All that overgrowth around it. I hate it when you cut through there. And you always do.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected her reaction to be. Defiance maybe. That was pretty typical, at least in his past experience. But she just said, quietly, “I can take care of myself.”
He stood there a long moment, as a deep sadness washed over him. It was worse now than all the other nights he’d been out here with her, unseen. It was sharper, somehow, like his vision, his other senses. He tried to glare at her, to grind out harsh words, but his voice sounded raspy to him as he shot back, “So I’ve seen.”
There was an odd expression on the girl’s face. Half perplexed, half suspicious. He drew himself up to his full height, barely two inches taller than she, and glowered at her, falling back on his old habit of intimidation. Her expression hardened, and now she did meet his gaze defiantly. Abruptly, she turned away. “C’mon,” she spat back over her shoulder.
She headed up the hill toward a freshly dug grave. Snyder followed more slowly. When she reached the hilltop, the girl found a convenient headstone nearby, a little squatter and wider than the rest, and perched herself on it, swinging her white sneaker-clad feet like a hyperactive ten year old, unable to be still. Snyder joined her, shaking his head reproachfully.
“No respect for the dead,” he murmured, with a quick glance up for her reaction. But if Summers heard him this time, she ignored him, digging in her bag and pulling out a sharpened piece of wood. He eyed her shrewdly for a moment, then asked softly, “Who are you? Really?”
She froze for a second, then turned and looked hard at him. “I’m the Slayer,” she said finally, simply.
He’d heard them use the word before. But now he understood with a blinding clarity, that it was more than just a nickname. And also.... “The Slayer,” he repeated slowly. “Only one. There aren’t any more like you?”
Something flickered through her eyes, but it was gone too quickly for him to read it. “Nope. I’m kinda it.” She hopped down off the stone and began pacing at the foot of the new grave, avoiding his gaze.
“And the Slayer kills....” He paused, forced himself to give voice to what he’d seen, unbelieving, almost every night since his own death. “Kills monsters.”
“Yep. That’s the job description. ‘One Girl in All the World’....” She shrugged. “You’ll have to get Giles to give you the whole speech-- he used to love that part. Me? I just work here.”
“Why?” he asked, truly trying to understand. “Why you?”
Summers gave a bitter chuckle. “That’s a really good question. One I’ve often asked myself.” She shrugged again. “Fate, I guess.”
He mulled this response over for a moment. “And you... you were doing this all the time you were a student in my school, weren’t you?”
Another chuckle. “Yeah. Guess you see now why I was such a troublemaker,” she said, with unmistakable resentment.
Snyder was surprised, just how it hurt to hear that bitter anger. He wanted to tell her that if only he’d known, he’d have done... something. But he knew it wasn’t true. This world, the one he’d been forced to watch, night after night, was one he could never have believed in, before. He tried to remember why that was, but the old thought patterns and rationalizations eluded him. Finally he mumbled, “I’m sorry. I wish I’d... known. I would have....” He trailed off. Even in his dead ears, the apology sounded pathetic. Weak.
“Would have what?” She looked at him, as if not sure what to make of something so uncharacteristic from him as an apology. He wasn’t sure himself. He struggled to put it into words, this feeling that had been growing on him as he’d watched her every night, trying to make sense of all he was seeing. Finally, he took refuge behind the cold formality of his classroom teaching days.
“My job was to prepare you kids for life,” he began stiffly. “To teach you the important things you’d need to be successful. Discipline. Hard work. Order.” He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have been spending all your time here, doing this.” He waved his hand vaguely at the stones around them. He glanced at Summers’ expression and faltered, finishing lamely, “Keeping you kids safe was-- should have been-- my job.”
The girl’s mouth twisted in a disbelieving grimace. “How dare you?” Her eyes flashed as she continued, gaining momentum with every word. “You were all, ‘everything’s your fault somehow’ and getting ‘tingle moments’ every time you thought of expelling me. And now because you’re dead, you want to be all-- nice? Who in the hell do you think you are?” She was so angry she was shaking. And that hurt, too. Because, from his very changed perspective, he could see that she had every right to feel that way. Another old habit, defensive self-righteousness, came to his aid.
“You know,” he snarled back nastily, “You kids were always so self absorbed, short sighted. Do you really think I liked being the way I was?”
“Um-- yeah,” Summers shot back, still seething. “I really think you did.”
He started to feel the old boil of rage himself, and it made him reckless. “I did the best I could with what I knew at the time,” he said, his voice rising. “One of the most naturally intelligent kids in my school, standardized test scores in the 98th, 99th percentile almost across the board, and what does she do? Hangs out with her misfit friends at all hours, cuts class to tend to her seemingly shallow, pointless social life, starts fights and trouble wherever she goes, gets truly dismal grades-- what was I supposed to do? Just stand by and let you throw your life away like that? And take my school down with you?”
Summers was eyeing him incredulously. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “You’re telling me you were being a bastard to me for my own good?”
Snyder closed his eyes for a moment. Familiar as it felt to vent his feelings on his old adversary, he realized now that he didn’t want to fight with this girl. After a moment, he turned away and said, almost as if to himself, “When I was in college, my advisor told me something about kids. He said, ‘You’ve got to understand, they’re just like us. We stick with our habits because they are comfortable, familiar. Easy.’”
Snyder glanced up at the girl, who was still glaring his direction. He fixed glittering dark eyes on hers, to emphasize the importance of his next words. “He told me that the only way people ever change their habits, replace their slovenly work ethics, tardiness, violence, with qualities that make them good citizens, is when something, or someone, motivates them to change those habits. He said, ‘Ray, your job is to make it so uncomfortable for them, they’ll do anything to change. They’ll hate you for it every day. But someday....’”
He was interrupted by a sound at their feet. The dirt covering the grave between them was starting to move as if something were digging its way out from below. Snyder backed away and watched in horrified fascination as a vampire pushed its way out of the earth, an unnatural, grotesque birthing he’d witnessed so many times since his own death, but never with such clarity.
He looked on helplessly as Summers traded blows with the creature, not staking it immediately, but almost using it to vent some of those violent tendencies which had always worried him. They seemed so much bigger than she, yet she always managed to come through these battles unscathed. Or, at least, alive. Just as he stretched out his hand with the vague notion of picking up a nearby branch or stone, the creature exploded in a cloud of dust. An almost physical relief washed through him.
She brushed the dust from her blouse and turned, heading for the Petersen Crypt and the tangle of undergrowth behind it. Snyder sighed and followed without a word.
***
Buffy’s thoughts were swirling with rage, confusion. She wanted so much to fall back on her own habits, to dismiss Snyder as she always had, as a sanctimonious prick who enjoyed petty cruelty for its own sake, and especially got off on making her life as difficult as possible. It really had never crossed her mind that he might have been trying, in his own misguided little way, to help her.
But, as she pushed her way through the undergrowth choking the path to the fence, she heard again in her mind his muttered, unguarded words about this very spot. “I hate it when you cut through there,” he’d said. “And you always do.”
If Buffy had learned nothing else in the past year, she’d finally started to understand that people were not always what they seemed. Actually, she realized, that lesson went a lot further back. But it wasn’t until now that she really got it, not in the abstract way of a bright kid who could read and understand something in theory, but in her gut, from painful experience and a little of that wisdom which was supposed to come with maturity.
She paused at the wrought iron fence, at the place where there was an unnatural, twisted gap between the bars. She had never seen the creature that had bent these bars thus, and honestly, she hoped she never did. She glanced back at the little man, watched as he bent to pick up a large stone, concentration etched across his features.
“How can you do that?” Buffy asked suddenly. Snyder started and the rock tumbled from his grasp. He looked up, then rose to close the distance between them, looking surprised to hear something almost civil from her after her harsh words.
“Um... practice, Summers,” he answered, a little sarcastically, as if imparting one of his old lessons. But then he glanced back at the rock, lying in the path where it had fallen, and shrugged ruefully. “It takes a lot of energy,” he explained, more matter of factly, “but if I concentrate hard enough, I can pick things up. Even move them short distances.”
“Things like phones?” she asked, amused in spite of herself. Snyder paused uncertainly a moment. Then, a faint smile flickered across his lips.
“Yeah. Really, I thought you were never going to figure it out. Telephone, hello! Someone’s trying to communicate with you,” he said, his laughter bubbling up through a voice heavy with a different kind of sarcasm.
It was not Snyder’s old pointed, mocking laughter-- it was genuine, a little self-deprecating, full of delight in the ridiculous for its own sake. It was so infectious that Buffy began to giggle a little, too. “Well, you know,” she said, still laughing, “Giles isn’t always the most observant of his own surroundings. Too busy watching out for me, I guess.” Her grin faded, and she felt again the stab of guilt, at how she’d neglected her Watcher, and their friendship, over the past year.
Snyder went silent and gave her that shrewd look again, the one that, in the past, had usually indicated he’d figured out something he could use against her. But there was only a little sadness in his voice as he said, “You always say it like it’s capitalized. Watcher. Like it’s a title. What’s that about? How did that librarian get mixed up in,” he gestured at the broken spot in the fence, the overgrown crypt behind them, “all of this?”
Buffy ducked through the bars and started down the well worn path to the little creek running through the wooded vacant lot, trying to think of how to explain it. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s a title. And a lot more. He was sent to be my Watcher. To train me, to teach me how to use all these powers I’ve got. And to help me fight whatever I go up against-- to know its weaknesses and how to defeat it.”
Snyder nodded thoughtfully, as if a number of events over the past few years were starting to make a lot more sense to him. They reached the bank of the creek, and Buffy crossed it easily. She turned back to see Snyder hesitating, then pushing himself forward, unwilling to be left behind. She looked down at the creek, which was not much more than a trickle.
“You ok?” she asked.
He reached her side, a little shakily. “Yeah. I don’t know. Something about crossing water gets me.” He paused, then grasped at the thread of their conversation. “So Giles knows about all this supernatural stuff, because it’s his profession.” He paused, still a little unsteady. Then, with a forced smile, “I always had a feeling he wasn’t cut out to be a high school librarian. Or, at least, that there was more to him than that.”
“Yeah,” Buffy agreed, still frowning at him in concern. “He also reads more languages than I can count, a bunch of them not even human. All those books you wanted to burn that time? The ones you couldn’t read?”
“The occult ones. Yeah, I remember.” He shook his head, smile fading. “That was a really weird night.”
Buffy nodded. “Yeah. That was magic-- it affected almost the whole town. Even my mom.” She peered at him intently. “What about you? Was that about keeping order, or did you really want to burn me and Willow and Amy at the stake like everybody else?”
He stopped in his tracks. “I-- uh, I don’t remember. But, I’m impervious to magic. They said so.” He kept saying it as if it were some kind of mantra, Buffy thought. She felt an odd tingle, the kind she got when on the edge of solving a puzzle.
“There was another weird night,” she said, pressing him, watching his reaction carefully. “That night you hung out with me and Willow and Oz. And later, Giles and my mom. At that factory. The one where they had all that candy.”
Snyder looked even more distressed now, as if, if he hadn’t been incorporeal, he might be about to pass out. “No,” he protested weakly. “They said....”
“Who said?” Buffy asked, urgently.
Snyder blinked, brow furrowed in thought. “The Mayor, and someone in his office. They interviewed me for this job personally. Asked me if I could keep order. Told me it was a very unruly school, a rough town. The last principal-- well, you know about that, don’t you?”
Buffy nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
Snyder continued, “So, they said that they needed someone impervious to magic. I didn’t believe in any of it, but if they wanted to chant gibberish at me, who was I to argue?”
“But you believe now, don’t you?” Buffy asked, almost sorry for him.
His answering laugh was hollow. “Oh yes. Yes, I do.”
They reached the stone wall surrounding Morningview Cemetery and Buffy led the way to the nearest gate, a door in the wall, the lock long since broken. Snyder looked around as they passed through the door, then nodded approvingly as Buffy closed the heavy wooden door behind them. As if trying to change the subject, he volunteered suddenly, “I was supposed to be buried here.” He nodded indicating the well-manicured green carpet over the row upon row of graves. “But I don’t suppose there was enough left of me to bury, was there?”
Buffy looked over at him, and she felt again a twinge of sympathy. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I could try to find out, if it would help....”
He shook his translucent head. “No. I don’t think it matters.”
Buffy remembered looking on in horror as Snyder had died, and she felt a rush of guilt. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes downcast. “I didn’t think you’d believe me, if I told you what the Mayor was planning. But maybe if I had....”
“If you had,” Snyder interrupted firmly, “I wouldn’t have believed you, and I might have barred you from the campus. You did the right thing, Summers.”
She shook her head, feeling again the old losses, the ones she hadn’t been able to save. Including the one standing here with her now. “A lot of people didn’t make it,” she admitted sadly.
“I know,” Snyder said quietly. “But if anybody failed them, it wasn’t you.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a couple of vampires strolling toward the front gate, and dinner on main street a couple of blocks away. Buffy watched as they stopped and stared at what probably appeared to them to be a middle aged man and a girl blocking their way. The taller one glanced over at his friend. “Did you place a delivery order?” he asked, with an unpleasant grin.
“Nah,” the stockier vampire replied. “Kinda nice, though. Father-daughter bonding on a beautiful moonlit night.” His face changed, yellow eyes and fangs glinting. “Almost hate to kill ‘em.”
Snyder traded a sidelong glance with Buffy, then stepped forward and assumed a reasonable impression of a fighting stance. “You’ll have to go through me first,” he said with grim bravado.
Buffy suppressed a grin. It was actually not a bad plan. She waited behind him as the taller one’s face also shifted and he rushed forward, stumbling as he met no resistance from the little man, only a numbing cold as he moved through the space where the man had appeared to be. He was dust before the confusion even registered in his undead brain.
Buffy turned and blocked a blow from the second one, noting automatically as she moved that Snyder was kneeling down, trying to pick up something hidden in the grass beside the path. Unlike earlier in the evening, this fight was all business: quick, economical movements. This guy was a little tougher than the fledgeling, and she wondered if maybe he was missing some of the reflexes that told his body it should fall unconscious when hit in the head a dozen too many times.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Snyder take careful aim, then clock her opponent upside the head with a hefty rock. She took advantage of the momentary stunned disorientation to reduce the creature to dust, wondering as she brushed herself off why she had a strange sense of deja vu. As she looked over at Snyder, another piece clicked. “You helped me last night, didn’t you? With that biker vamp.”
He looked a little embarrassed, ducked his head. “I might have,” he said gruffly.
She studied him a moment longer, then smiled tentatively. “Thanks.”
They stood there for another awkward moment. Snyder cleared his throat. “Summers, at graduation. The Mayor. Was that something somebody did to him, or... did he want to turn into that thing?”
She studied his face, respecting him suddenly in a way she never had before. It took courage to ask questions you didn’t want the answers to. As gently as she could, she replied, “He... he wanted to be like that. It was an Ascension. A human becomes pure demon, gains all the power that goes with the package.” She watched as he closed his eyes, his expression desolate. Betrayed. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head and opened his eyes. There was a familiar piercing anger in them, but it was for once not directed at her. “Not your fault, Summers,” he growled. “I’m the one who fell for his act. You know, he actually gave me a commendation, for ‘keeping an orderly school.’ Can you believe it? Shook my hand and everything. He even told me, the day before graduation, ‘Sunnydale owes you a debt.’ Looks like he paid me, all right.” He shook his head bitterly. “Me, and all those kids he killed. Damn.”
Something was tickling inside Buffy’s brain again. Another memory.... “Principal Snyder,” she said suddenly, urgently. “What did the mayor say to you, when he gave you that commendation?”
He glanced up from his self recriminations, startled. “I uh... something about how important keeping order was. Asked me about troublemakers.” His eyes narrowed. “Asked me about you. And the librarian.”
Buffy said, “We need to get back to Giles. I think I know what’s going on. Why you’re stuck here.”
Part 4/4
Special thanks go to the following for perceptive comments, helpful advice and general beta magic: rahirah, clavally, theblackmare, rainkatt, gillo, slaymesoftly, partri65 and antennapedia. All remaining mistakes are, of course, my own.
Spoilers/ Time period: End of Season 3 to Start of Season 5. This part follows on Part 2, in the summer a few weeks after Season 4.
Characters: Core Scoobies + Anya and Tara, with a special guest appearance by someone not quite dearly departed.
Rating: FRT
Disclaimer: I own nothing in the Buffyverse. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Strictly for entertainment, and no profit is being made. Please sue somebody else.
Distribution: If you're planning on asking me, I'm planning on saying "yes." Just let me know where it's going.
Word Count: 3,748
Through a Glass Darkly, part 3/4
Previous parts here:
Part 1/4
Part 2/4
Snyder watched as the Summers girl started out the door, up the steps from the courtyard to the street without turning to see whether he was following or not. He’d found in the past that he could sometimes be pulled along, without even trying to go through the motions of walking. But now, with his old form more solid than it had felt since he’d died, he found himself adopting old motions and mannerisms. He kept up easily, one hand thrust into his trouser pocket, just as he had once paced the school hallways, bent on catching a student cutting class-- Summers herself, as often as not.
He marveled at how much more clearly he could see, how he could almost feel the warmth of the summer night’s breeze against his cheek. Everything seemed new to him, and it was... invigorating. He chuckled a little as the irony struck him. Then he sobered as the contrast between his current state as a dead man and his former state as a living one also came crashing home.
He glanced up as the girl came to a halt just inside the gate of Restvale Cemetery. As she looked around, as if to take her bearings, he muttered his thought aloud. “God, I hate this place.”
He was rewarded by a puzzled look from his companion-- the first direct glance she’d cast his way since they’d left the librarian’s place. “Why?” she asked, as if curious in spite of herself.
Snyder grimaced, his lips thin; he hadn’t meant for her to hear. “The Petersen Crypt,” he said shortly. “All that overgrowth around it. I hate it when you cut through there. And you always do.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected her reaction to be. Defiance maybe. That was pretty typical, at least in his past experience. But she just said, quietly, “I can take care of myself.”
He stood there a long moment, as a deep sadness washed over him. It was worse now than all the other nights he’d been out here with her, unseen. It was sharper, somehow, like his vision, his other senses. He tried to glare at her, to grind out harsh words, but his voice sounded raspy to him as he shot back, “So I’ve seen.”
There was an odd expression on the girl’s face. Half perplexed, half suspicious. He drew himself up to his full height, barely two inches taller than she, and glowered at her, falling back on his old habit of intimidation. Her expression hardened, and now she did meet his gaze defiantly. Abruptly, she turned away. “C’mon,” she spat back over her shoulder.
She headed up the hill toward a freshly dug grave. Snyder followed more slowly. When she reached the hilltop, the girl found a convenient headstone nearby, a little squatter and wider than the rest, and perched herself on it, swinging her white sneaker-clad feet like a hyperactive ten year old, unable to be still. Snyder joined her, shaking his head reproachfully.
“No respect for the dead,” he murmured, with a quick glance up for her reaction. But if Summers heard him this time, she ignored him, digging in her bag and pulling out a sharpened piece of wood. He eyed her shrewdly for a moment, then asked softly, “Who are you? Really?”
She froze for a second, then turned and looked hard at him. “I’m the Slayer,” she said finally, simply.
He’d heard them use the word before. But now he understood with a blinding clarity, that it was more than just a nickname. And also.... “The Slayer,” he repeated slowly. “Only one. There aren’t any more like you?”
Something flickered through her eyes, but it was gone too quickly for him to read it. “Nope. I’m kinda it.” She hopped down off the stone and began pacing at the foot of the new grave, avoiding his gaze.
“And the Slayer kills....” He paused, forced himself to give voice to what he’d seen, unbelieving, almost every night since his own death. “Kills monsters.”
“Yep. That’s the job description. ‘One Girl in All the World’....” She shrugged. “You’ll have to get Giles to give you the whole speech-- he used to love that part. Me? I just work here.”
“Why?” he asked, truly trying to understand. “Why you?”
Summers gave a bitter chuckle. “That’s a really good question. One I’ve often asked myself.” She shrugged again. “Fate, I guess.”
He mulled this response over for a moment. “And you... you were doing this all the time you were a student in my school, weren’t you?”
Another chuckle. “Yeah. Guess you see now why I was such a troublemaker,” she said, with unmistakable resentment.
Snyder was surprised, just how it hurt to hear that bitter anger. He wanted to tell her that if only he’d known, he’d have done... something. But he knew it wasn’t true. This world, the one he’d been forced to watch, night after night, was one he could never have believed in, before. He tried to remember why that was, but the old thought patterns and rationalizations eluded him. Finally he mumbled, “I’m sorry. I wish I’d... known. I would have....” He trailed off. Even in his dead ears, the apology sounded pathetic. Weak.
“Would have what?” She looked at him, as if not sure what to make of something so uncharacteristic from him as an apology. He wasn’t sure himself. He struggled to put it into words, this feeling that had been growing on him as he’d watched her every night, trying to make sense of all he was seeing. Finally, he took refuge behind the cold formality of his classroom teaching days.
“My job was to prepare you kids for life,” he began stiffly. “To teach you the important things you’d need to be successful. Discipline. Hard work. Order.” He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have been spending all your time here, doing this.” He waved his hand vaguely at the stones around them. He glanced at Summers’ expression and faltered, finishing lamely, “Keeping you kids safe was-- should have been-- my job.”
The girl’s mouth twisted in a disbelieving grimace. “How dare you?” Her eyes flashed as she continued, gaining momentum with every word. “You were all, ‘everything’s your fault somehow’ and getting ‘tingle moments’ every time you thought of expelling me. And now because you’re dead, you want to be all-- nice? Who in the hell do you think you are?” She was so angry she was shaking. And that hurt, too. Because, from his very changed perspective, he could see that she had every right to feel that way. Another old habit, defensive self-righteousness, came to his aid.
“You know,” he snarled back nastily, “You kids were always so self absorbed, short sighted. Do you really think I liked being the way I was?”
“Um-- yeah,” Summers shot back, still seething. “I really think you did.”
He started to feel the old boil of rage himself, and it made him reckless. “I did the best I could with what I knew at the time,” he said, his voice rising. “One of the most naturally intelligent kids in my school, standardized test scores in the 98th, 99th percentile almost across the board, and what does she do? Hangs out with her misfit friends at all hours, cuts class to tend to her seemingly shallow, pointless social life, starts fights and trouble wherever she goes, gets truly dismal grades-- what was I supposed to do? Just stand by and let you throw your life away like that? And take my school down with you?”
Summers was eyeing him incredulously. “You have got to be kidding me,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “You’re telling me you were being a bastard to me for my own good?”
Snyder closed his eyes for a moment. Familiar as it felt to vent his feelings on his old adversary, he realized now that he didn’t want to fight with this girl. After a moment, he turned away and said, almost as if to himself, “When I was in college, my advisor told me something about kids. He said, ‘You’ve got to understand, they’re just like us. We stick with our habits because they are comfortable, familiar. Easy.’”
Snyder glanced up at the girl, who was still glaring his direction. He fixed glittering dark eyes on hers, to emphasize the importance of his next words. “He told me that the only way people ever change their habits, replace their slovenly work ethics, tardiness, violence, with qualities that make them good citizens, is when something, or someone, motivates them to change those habits. He said, ‘Ray, your job is to make it so uncomfortable for them, they’ll do anything to change. They’ll hate you for it every day. But someday....’”
He was interrupted by a sound at their feet. The dirt covering the grave between them was starting to move as if something were digging its way out from below. Snyder backed away and watched in horrified fascination as a vampire pushed its way out of the earth, an unnatural, grotesque birthing he’d witnessed so many times since his own death, but never with such clarity.
He looked on helplessly as Summers traded blows with the creature, not staking it immediately, but almost using it to vent some of those violent tendencies which had always worried him. They seemed so much bigger than she, yet she always managed to come through these battles unscathed. Or, at least, alive. Just as he stretched out his hand with the vague notion of picking up a nearby branch or stone, the creature exploded in a cloud of dust. An almost physical relief washed through him.
She brushed the dust from her blouse and turned, heading for the Petersen Crypt and the tangle of undergrowth behind it. Snyder sighed and followed without a word.
***
Buffy’s thoughts were swirling with rage, confusion. She wanted so much to fall back on her own habits, to dismiss Snyder as she always had, as a sanctimonious prick who enjoyed petty cruelty for its own sake, and especially got off on making her life as difficult as possible. It really had never crossed her mind that he might have been trying, in his own misguided little way, to help her.
But, as she pushed her way through the undergrowth choking the path to the fence, she heard again in her mind his muttered, unguarded words about this very spot. “I hate it when you cut through there,” he’d said. “And you always do.”
If Buffy had learned nothing else in the past year, she’d finally started to understand that people were not always what they seemed. Actually, she realized, that lesson went a lot further back. But it wasn’t until now that she really got it, not in the abstract way of a bright kid who could read and understand something in theory, but in her gut, from painful experience and a little of that wisdom which was supposed to come with maturity.
She paused at the wrought iron fence, at the place where there was an unnatural, twisted gap between the bars. She had never seen the creature that had bent these bars thus, and honestly, she hoped she never did. She glanced back at the little man, watched as he bent to pick up a large stone, concentration etched across his features.
“How can you do that?” Buffy asked suddenly. Snyder started and the rock tumbled from his grasp. He looked up, then rose to close the distance between them, looking surprised to hear something almost civil from her after her harsh words.
“Um... practice, Summers,” he answered, a little sarcastically, as if imparting one of his old lessons. But then he glanced back at the rock, lying in the path where it had fallen, and shrugged ruefully. “It takes a lot of energy,” he explained, more matter of factly, “but if I concentrate hard enough, I can pick things up. Even move them short distances.”
“Things like phones?” she asked, amused in spite of herself. Snyder paused uncertainly a moment. Then, a faint smile flickered across his lips.
“Yeah. Really, I thought you were never going to figure it out. Telephone, hello! Someone’s trying to communicate with you,” he said, his laughter bubbling up through a voice heavy with a different kind of sarcasm.
It was not Snyder’s old pointed, mocking laughter-- it was genuine, a little self-deprecating, full of delight in the ridiculous for its own sake. It was so infectious that Buffy began to giggle a little, too. “Well, you know,” she said, still laughing, “Giles isn’t always the most observant of his own surroundings. Too busy watching out for me, I guess.” Her grin faded, and she felt again the stab of guilt, at how she’d neglected her Watcher, and their friendship, over the past year.
Snyder went silent and gave her that shrewd look again, the one that, in the past, had usually indicated he’d figured out something he could use against her. But there was only a little sadness in his voice as he said, “You always say it like it’s capitalized. Watcher. Like it’s a title. What’s that about? How did that librarian get mixed up in,” he gestured at the broken spot in the fence, the overgrown crypt behind them, “all of this?”
Buffy ducked through the bars and started down the well worn path to the little creek running through the wooded vacant lot, trying to think of how to explain it. “Yeah,” she said finally. “It’s a title. And a lot more. He was sent to be my Watcher. To train me, to teach me how to use all these powers I’ve got. And to help me fight whatever I go up against-- to know its weaknesses and how to defeat it.”
Snyder nodded thoughtfully, as if a number of events over the past few years were starting to make a lot more sense to him. They reached the bank of the creek, and Buffy crossed it easily. She turned back to see Snyder hesitating, then pushing himself forward, unwilling to be left behind. She looked down at the creek, which was not much more than a trickle.
“You ok?” she asked.
He reached her side, a little shakily. “Yeah. I don’t know. Something about crossing water gets me.” He paused, then grasped at the thread of their conversation. “So Giles knows about all this supernatural stuff, because it’s his profession.” He paused, still a little unsteady. Then, with a forced smile, “I always had a feeling he wasn’t cut out to be a high school librarian. Or, at least, that there was more to him than that.”
“Yeah,” Buffy agreed, still frowning at him in concern. “He also reads more languages than I can count, a bunch of them not even human. All those books you wanted to burn that time? The ones you couldn’t read?”
“The occult ones. Yeah, I remember.” He shook his head, smile fading. “That was a really weird night.”
Buffy nodded. “Yeah. That was magic-- it affected almost the whole town. Even my mom.” She peered at him intently. “What about you? Was that about keeping order, or did you really want to burn me and Willow and Amy at the stake like everybody else?”
He stopped in his tracks. “I-- uh, I don’t remember. But, I’m impervious to magic. They said so.” He kept saying it as if it were some kind of mantra, Buffy thought. She felt an odd tingle, the kind she got when on the edge of solving a puzzle.
“There was another weird night,” she said, pressing him, watching his reaction carefully. “That night you hung out with me and Willow and Oz. And later, Giles and my mom. At that factory. The one where they had all that candy.”
Snyder looked even more distressed now, as if, if he hadn’t been incorporeal, he might be about to pass out. “No,” he protested weakly. “They said....”
“Who said?” Buffy asked, urgently.
Snyder blinked, brow furrowed in thought. “The Mayor, and someone in his office. They interviewed me for this job personally. Asked me if I could keep order. Told me it was a very unruly school, a rough town. The last principal-- well, you know about that, don’t you?”
Buffy nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
Snyder continued, “So, they said that they needed someone impervious to magic. I didn’t believe in any of it, but if they wanted to chant gibberish at me, who was I to argue?”
“But you believe now, don’t you?” Buffy asked, almost sorry for him.
His answering laugh was hollow. “Oh yes. Yes, I do.”
They reached the stone wall surrounding Morningview Cemetery and Buffy led the way to the nearest gate, a door in the wall, the lock long since broken. Snyder looked around as they passed through the door, then nodded approvingly as Buffy closed the heavy wooden door behind them. As if trying to change the subject, he volunteered suddenly, “I was supposed to be buried here.” He nodded indicating the well-manicured green carpet over the row upon row of graves. “But I don’t suppose there was enough left of me to bury, was there?”
Buffy looked over at him, and she felt again a twinge of sympathy. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I could try to find out, if it would help....”
He shook his translucent head. “No. I don’t think it matters.”
Buffy remembered looking on in horror as Snyder had died, and she felt a rush of guilt. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes downcast. “I didn’t think you’d believe me, if I told you what the Mayor was planning. But maybe if I had....”
“If you had,” Snyder interrupted firmly, “I wouldn’t have believed you, and I might have barred you from the campus. You did the right thing, Summers.”
She shook her head, feeling again the old losses, the ones she hadn’t been able to save. Including the one standing here with her now. “A lot of people didn’t make it,” she admitted sadly.
“I know,” Snyder said quietly. “But if anybody failed them, it wasn’t you.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a couple of vampires strolling toward the front gate, and dinner on main street a couple of blocks away. Buffy watched as they stopped and stared at what probably appeared to them to be a middle aged man and a girl blocking their way. The taller one glanced over at his friend. “Did you place a delivery order?” he asked, with an unpleasant grin.
“Nah,” the stockier vampire replied. “Kinda nice, though. Father-daughter bonding on a beautiful moonlit night.” His face changed, yellow eyes and fangs glinting. “Almost hate to kill ‘em.”
Snyder traded a sidelong glance with Buffy, then stepped forward and assumed a reasonable impression of a fighting stance. “You’ll have to go through me first,” he said with grim bravado.
Buffy suppressed a grin. It was actually not a bad plan. She waited behind him as the taller one’s face also shifted and he rushed forward, stumbling as he met no resistance from the little man, only a numbing cold as he moved through the space where the man had appeared to be. He was dust before the confusion even registered in his undead brain.
Buffy turned and blocked a blow from the second one, noting automatically as she moved that Snyder was kneeling down, trying to pick up something hidden in the grass beside the path. Unlike earlier in the evening, this fight was all business: quick, economical movements. This guy was a little tougher than the fledgeling, and she wondered if maybe he was missing some of the reflexes that told his body it should fall unconscious when hit in the head a dozen too many times.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Snyder take careful aim, then clock her opponent upside the head with a hefty rock. She took advantage of the momentary stunned disorientation to reduce the creature to dust, wondering as she brushed herself off why she had a strange sense of deja vu. As she looked over at Snyder, another piece clicked. “You helped me last night, didn’t you? With that biker vamp.”
He looked a little embarrassed, ducked his head. “I might have,” he said gruffly.
She studied him a moment longer, then smiled tentatively. “Thanks.”
They stood there for another awkward moment. Snyder cleared his throat. “Summers, at graduation. The Mayor. Was that something somebody did to him, or... did he want to turn into that thing?”
She studied his face, respecting him suddenly in a way she never had before. It took courage to ask questions you didn’t want the answers to. As gently as she could, she replied, “He... he wanted to be like that. It was an Ascension. A human becomes pure demon, gains all the power that goes with the package.” She watched as he closed his eyes, his expression desolate. Betrayed. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head and opened his eyes. There was a familiar piercing anger in them, but it was for once not directed at her. “Not your fault, Summers,” he growled. “I’m the one who fell for his act. You know, he actually gave me a commendation, for ‘keeping an orderly school.’ Can you believe it? Shook my hand and everything. He even told me, the day before graduation, ‘Sunnydale owes you a debt.’ Looks like he paid me, all right.” He shook his head bitterly. “Me, and all those kids he killed. Damn.”
Something was tickling inside Buffy’s brain again. Another memory.... “Principal Snyder,” she said suddenly, urgently. “What did the mayor say to you, when he gave you that commendation?”
He glanced up from his self recriminations, startled. “I uh... something about how important keeping order was. Asked me about troublemakers.” His eyes narrowed. “Asked me about you. And the librarian.”
Buffy said, “We need to get back to Giles. I think I know what’s going on. Why you’re stuck here.”
Part 4/4