Upsetting the Apple-cart 9/?
Eris watches them swagger back to the car, and grins, proud and fond. She'd only had to point out of the window, and say, “Him, there, bloke with the carry-case”, before they'd both leapt into action. A couple of decades of hard-boiled self-reliance mean that Ethan is never going to be an altruist - his reflexes don't work that way - but he is not exactly the hardened monster of depravity he thinks he is. He'd been scrambling out of that car after Xander, swearing about idiot children, before she'd even got her seatbelt undone.
He'd been prepared to sacrifice Buffy, to save himself, to save Rupert, she knows that - she also knows that Ethan has a better idea than most of what actually makes a Slayer, and that the resulting demonic cage-fight could have been epic. Dusting the vampire had worked out much easier, though, because that blade was going to do damage whoever it went into, and she's not sure they could ever have got past 'stabbing a human'. This time, she hasn't even had to find a knife. And, bless them, it's a good bonding experience.
Xander himself had apparently just been going for a blast of bug-spray to the eyeballs, which wouldn't do anyone any good, regardless of species, when the guy fell into a shower of gross right in front of them. Ethan promptly claims that his incendiary response was the result of finely honed magecraft, rather than instinctive panic. There was also a mutual agreement that the yelps of surprise uttered had not been girly shrieks, on either part.
“Screams of courage?” Eris offers, cheerfully.
“You're not the one with second-hand assassin all over your shoes.” Ethan grumbles.
“But the whole fwoosh thing was majorly cool.” Xander wiggles his fingers. “I definitely wanna learn that one.”
“Oh?” Eris looks from the eager grinning teen to the slightly shifty mage.
“I, er, may have given in to pressure to pass some knowledge along...”
“C'mon, Mr E, I'll make a great apprentice.”
“Mr E.” Ethan considers, nods. “I can live with that.” Frowns slightly. “Why exactly were you carrying around insect repellent, anyway?”
Xander mumbles something about 'biology' and 'date from hell', which leaves Ethan still confused and Eris smirking. They tip him out at the school, heading for the library and a late debriefing. Eris declines firmly to set foot in Buffy's 'territory' - “I rather like my larynx in the shape it is in, thank you” - and maintains that if Rupert wants any further information, he can come and ask for it nicely, in the morning.
“I meant it about the stockboy job.” She grins up at Xander as she gets into the front seat of the car. “We might end up paying you in pizza for the first week or so, but feel free to drop by.”
“And yes, we can get the other little project underway.” Ethan sighs, as those puppy eyes turn on him.
“Deal!” And Xander practically skips up the steps to the school. Ethan blinks, wonders what he's getting himself into. So does Eris.
“You're really going to teach Xander magic?” She grins at him. “And exactly how hard is Rupert going to punch you in the face for that?”
“That was a consideration, believe me. But...” Ethan shrugs. “I rather like the boy, and you told me that he's already wrecked a prophecy. My kind of person.”
“Yeah, he's a good kid, and he deserves better.”
All of Ethan's instincts flare up.
“Oh?” He says, warily.
“Let's just say that you've got more in common than just being chaos magnets.”
Ethan looks back at the Library, and something cold moves behind his eyes.
“Really.”
“Working on it.” She gives him a sad little smile. “Let's go home.”
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“So,” Giles looks around the table, “to sum up, we have a group of assassins upon Buffy's trail.”
Xander drops the ring onto the library table with a flourish.
“Eh, we're one down already.” he says, with a fair degree of nonchalance. He wonders if Giles is going to lay an egg with that amount of clucking. What with Buffy scolding, and Willow babbling, it takes a moment before he can explain himself, that he hadn't exactly meant to go leaping into things, it just sort of happened.
“You thought it would be a good idea to confront a killer?”
“Well, we only got as far as 'Hey, assassin guy' before he developed a bad case of maggot-face. I learnt some exciting new British swearwords. And then me and Ethan squished him...”
“Ethan?” Buffy snaps. “You were with him?” Her eyes narrow further. “Them?”
“Ms Nixon is the one who knew about the guy.” Xander says, a bit unwisely. “She pointed him out.”
Buffy, her face a mask of anger, pushes stiffly back from the table.
“I don't want you to have anything to do with them.” She spits. “Tell him, Giles.”
“Buffy...” Sigh, huff, clean glasses. “If Ms Nixon had not told us about this threat, the first we would have known about it would have been an all-out attack upon you.”
“How d'you know they aren't responsible for it?”
“Um, because we clobbered one of them, and have advance intel on the others?” Xander points out. “First thing Ms Nixon did when she remembered was to call Giles.”
“Remembered?” Willow looks confused. “But you said they weren't responsible...”
“She's got a load of memories from the future, or something, where the Halloween spell kinda backfired. She said Giles knows.”
“Er, yes.” It will do for now. “So far, I have had no reason to doubt the accuracy of her information.”
They all look at the innocuous little signet ring.
“She still killed Angel.” Buffy slumps angrily back into her chair. “I'm never gonna forgive her for that.”
“Since she's doing her best to keep you alive, that's kinda ungrateful, there, Buff.” But then, Buffy's idea of 'thanking' him had been to use him as a public stripper-pole, so...
“Regardless...” Giles recalls them, before the argument starts round again. “There are potentially two more assassins out there.”
“Why don't we just send your new friends after them, too?”
He takes a breath at Buffy's tone, but Xander steps in.
“One of them is a whole heap of one-eyed nasty who could pull a man's spine out with his bare hands, and the other is a fake cop-lady, but they are also nominally human, so we're gonna have to finesse past 'me slay now'. Plug-ugly is an up-close-and-personal kind of guy. It's the other that's a worry. She's planning to pull a gun on you in the middle of the Careers Fair.”
Everyone sobers. Slayers heal fast, but they are decidedly not bullet-proof. Buffy gets a weird look on her face.
“So that thing about me being suited for the Police is just to set me up?”
“It means we know where one of 'em is going to be.” They all exchange looks.
“Ambush.” comes the chorus.
“Ms Nixon put a whammy on the ring, says it will blip when the other rings get near it.”
“Proximity charm, using the Law of Contagion. Clever.”
“She says she mostly uses it for earrings and cufflinks.” Xander grins. “Handy if you misplace your keys, too, I guess.”
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Willow doesn't get angry, often. She's been taught to negotiate, to repress, appropriate behaviour, and she's always surprised when the tide rises. She's good at guilt, though.
Buffy had been going on about how nobody else understood what it was like to lose someone you loved like that, and something in Willow had snapped, very quietly. Because everyone gets the deal that she and Xander have been best friends forever, but they had been a trio long before they were a pair, and nobody ever mentions Jesse anymore, just another one of the lost. And yeah, she'd never had boy-girl feelings for Jesse, the goof, with his gigantic Cordy-crush - and watching Xander try to be twice as loud, twice as funny, to fill that void beside them that even Buffy cannot fill, hurts - but he'd been there, a decade of small everyday things to pile beside a scant year of stolen kisses and heart-wrenching drama. (And whilst part of her sighs in a dewy-eyed way about the romance of it all, a much more realistic part wonders if so much of the attraction hadn't been that star-crossed angsty secret thing, with the brooding and the cryptic.) And Willow feels like she's betraying her first real girl friend, by thinking these things, but she does.
Since Halloween, she's found herself touching things more. She's never had it as bad as Marci Ross, never sunk herself so far into the background that she vanished away, but she can't hide under a sheet forever. Being unable to touch the world, to have life pass by her and through her, had been a salutary shock. And all Buffy's clinging onto the might-have-beens of something that couldn't go anywhere, because Angel was breathless drama and longing glances, but he'd never be sharing ice-cream on a hot day, or Snoopy dances at Christmas, or ambling through the Mall with grandiose plans for a road-trip - Buffy had been given back her life once, but she doesn't seem to want to actually live it, for all her talk of 'normal'.
And - Buffy-without-Angel is a worrying thing, because, well, Xander. And there isn't any way Willow can talk to her about how someone managed to dust a vampire from a distance, considering, which would be really cool if anyone can do it, and she doesn't want to talk with Giles just yet, because he's obviously still a bit wigged out, and the same definitely goes for Ms Calender. The only other person around had been Cordelia, which is just a big no forever, so she really needs Xander about now. Pounces at him when he comes out through the library doors.
“Xander, what were you doing?”
“I, uh, eating take-out with Team Chaos?”
Willow's eyes are huge.
“But I thought we didn't like the creepy people...do we?”
“Hey, I got to beat up on Larry, so I think we're quits on the costume thing. And Ms Nixon whacked the demon, so that makes her good people.”
“She got Angel, too.”
“So she took out a demon wearing a creepy vampire overcoat. Kind of a two for one deal.” For a brief moment, Xander stops looking goofy, his face older, harder. “I'm not gonna cry about it, Wills. Ms Calender is still alive, and Eyghon won't be coming after Giles again.”
“I guess...” Drags her feet, and then the words burst out. “Buffy still blames me, too, because I came up with the idea of having it jump into Angel, what with him being a dead body and all...and, oh, that's kinda nasty when you think about it...”
“...Trust me, I've been trying not to for a long time...”
“...But he was supposed to win the fight and kill the other demon, only Ms Nixon stabbed him first.”
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Xander gives her a quick one-armed hug. “You couldn't know that she was gonna go all Slayer Lite, that's not your fault.”
Privately, he thinks that Ms Nixon had known exactly what she was doing. Hindsight, he's replayed the scene in his mind, and he remembers her intent face, tracking the moment the demon jumped. But he's still not seeing a problem - no more Deadboy, no more bodyjacking demon. Also, Mr E is gonna teach him some sorcery to go with the sword.
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Sunnydale PD are corrupt and useless, but they are quick enough to take down someone impersonating an officer, especially one about to take a loaded gun into a school. Most members of the public can be ignored when they phone in tip-offs, but Councilman Chase's daughter is not one of them.
There is one unexpected outcome from the takedown in the parking lot. Principal Snyder, scurrying forth to question the sudden influx of uniforms, panics, and as luck would have it, he jumps the wrong (right) way, and one of the assassin's bullets scores across his arm. From zero to hero, he finds himself praised as a courageous man putting himself between his students and harm.
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The Mayor waves the Chief of Police out of his office, but his mask of jovial bonhomie drops like a stone as soon as the door closes. He regards the ring sitting on his desk. He is not happy about assassins he hasn't hired in his town - the Slayer is useful for keeping the minor irritations under control, after all. It takes a lot of delicate negotiation to keep various elements at bay, pacts and wards and politicking, the military-industrial complex stalled at the edge of the town, other major players diverted. (There's a certain law firm would love to set up a branch office...) And now, someone isn't playing by the rules, which, gosh darn it, is just plain rude.
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Giles watches Buffy skate. She looks brighter, happier, this evening, the teenage girl that she should have been. But life is rarely fair, or kind. He sighs. He certainly isn't going to tell her that the rather surprising suggestion about this outing had come via Xander from Eris, has managed to sell it as a training exercise. Willow, bless her heart, lacks coordination, edging along the rinkside, ungainly but determined. Xander flails along like a giraffe on roller-skates, goofing around to make the girls laugh, which is enough to distract them from the fact that Giles has slipped out of the side door. Under his shirt, there is a sudden warmth against his chest, like a second heartbeat. The proximity charm on the ring is working well.
Just as Xander had described him - a big, ugly one-eyed heap of nasty. And all of Giles' misgivings fall away, in a wave of grim determination.
His loyalty is not to 'The Slayer', or to the Council. It is to Buffy. Giles has heard of fighting fair. He's not having any of it. So the first bolt from the crossbow simply takes the hulking man through the throat.
(Buffy lands from a triple axle, cocks her head.
“Did you hear something?”
“No.” says Willow, with perfect honesty, and sits down abruptly on the ice.)
He's slightly disturbed at how little remorse he feels, nothing but relief when he takes the ring off one meaty and rapidly cooling hand. The dark reality of Sunnydale is that disposing of the body is as simple as leaving it there.
His heart nearly stops when a pretty dark-skinned girl ghosts out of the shadows, but he registers the stake in her hand even as he brings the heavy crucifix up. (Effective as a cosh, in a pinch.)
“Miss...Kendra? I'm Rupert Giles, Watcher's Council.” And it almost feels like a lie.
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Later, too far the wrong side of midnight, Giles stares up at his bedroom ceiling, and wonders what his life is.
Introducing the Slayers had been somewhat akin to putting two strange cats in a room. There had been no claws or spitting, true, but the air had been charged with potential violence.
Kendra was settled on Jenny's pull-out couch, and tomorrow, they would have a full meeting to work out the what and why.
She was very young, younger than Buffy, for all her self-possession. Large-eyed and solemnly respectful, the Council's idea of a perfect Slayer, she obeyed orders, didn't question. After the contentious passages with Buffy, it should have been a relief. Somehow, it wasn't. The matter-of-fact report of her solo travel, method and reason, makes him want to break something. What really scares him, is that his first impulse is to call up Ethan. Whether for a fight, or a drink, or somewhere in between, he's not completely sure.
He killed a man tonight. And there was a terrible clarity in the act.
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Spike stands in the wreckage of the room, smashed tv screens flickering around him. He's gone on a rampage. The 'Three Strikes' package has failed, and the Order of Taraka have kept his deposit. And now, Dalton has just finished translating the manuscript. A bit difficult to cook up a cure when you are missing the main ingredient.
“Plan B. We find that mage. If he can power down the Slayer once, he can do it again.”
Drusilla can feel the twisted threads of time knotting themselves together again, but the shape they make looks very like a noose. Her sweet William will hang them both from the yardarm of his ambition. She whimpers quietly, and hugs Miss Edith.