“We crapped out again in Sweden,” said Gunn, frustrated. “Buffy’s people got there first.”
Angel was sitting behind the desk in his office. He had been looking in the direction of the windows along the side of the room with a rare smile on his face. Beyond was the bright and clear daytime landscape of Los Angeles.
“We’ll find some girls that the Scoobies haven’t quite managed to contact yet. It’s bound to happen soon enough. We’ll have our Slayers. So sit down. Relax.”
Gunn raised an eyebrow and smiled back at the vampire. “You’re in a good mood. Any particular reason why?”
“I’m planning on lunch with Nina soon, since you ask. So let’s try to get this meeting done quick.”
“So, you and werewolf girl, huh. How’s that going?”
“Carefully,” Angel answered tersely. “Where next after Sweden?”
Gunn reached over the desk and handed Angel a thin stack of files, “For now we’re still looking at these.”
The muffled noise of a heartbeat.
Hands, pushing wide leaves of flora and underbrush out of the way. Moving quickly through the jungle. An almost tumble. A hand, fingers splayed in the thick mud catching the fall. The sound of feet, scrambling in the moist earth.
The sound of breath. Breathless.
“Somebody help me!”
The noises of something following through the jungle. Loud. A branch breaking close by with a loud splintering crack.
“Somebody, please!”
A clumsy foot caught on a root. A tumble. A perspective on the world abruptly rolled into a brief chaos.
A girl laying on the ground. Scrambling for purchase. The mud beneath not giving her any.
A growl out of the darkness. A hulking human shape coming up out of the dark over her like a wraith.
A glimpse of a distended brow. Yellow eyes. Sharp white teeth.
The figure leaned down, tilting its head to the side. Fingers, fisting into the mud. She opened her mouth. A breathless moan came from her.
Dust settled down over her.
Her hand, held up. Her fingers wrapped around a sharpened piece of wood.
The girl trembled. Breathless.
A form standing in the further shadows. A slender shape like a person, but not moving like a person. Each tiny graceful motion full of ruthless vitality. “No help. Just the kill. We . . . are . . . alone.”
Lightning flashed in the distant sky, throwing everything into a brief stark contrast.
Dark eyes, hard and full of steel.
The shape in the shadow was simply gone the next moment.
Still laying on the ground, the girl reached up and touched her neck. Looked down at her hand. There was blood.
Hazel eyes came open. A girl, shoulder length brown hair mussed by sleep. Perfect, delicate complexion. A long, elegant frame entangled in crimson colored bed sheets. The naked length of a sculpted leg, the sheets bunched high up on the thigh. Soft, pale skin.
A loud noise in the room. Three sharp raps. The sound of someone knocking.
“Miss Stansfield, are you awake?”
A middle-aged woman with skin the color of mocha cautiously opened the bedroom door. The woman’s dark hair was clipped tight behind her head.
The girl in the bed groaned. Stretched languorously. The heel of her foot dug into the sheets. “Yes, Rosie. The creature stirs.”
Rosie entered the bedroom, smiling cheerily.
“Your mother told me to make certain you don’t sleep the day away.” She opened the heavy curtains over the windows. Bright sunlight fell across the bed. The younger girl held up a defensive hand and squinted at the brightness. “Come down quickly and I’ll make you some breakfast.”
Rosie left the room.
The girl on the bed sighed, “Right!”
She lithely rolled out of bed. Padded across the room holding the crimson bed sheet against her body.
A window in a sparse dirty room with a view of a small Spanish style villa in the near distance. The villa sat at the top of a rise. Small brick pillars stood at either side of the end of the driveway that wound down the fifty yards or so from the villa toward the road. The road in front of the villa, where it was visible, sloped down at the gentlest of inclines.
A man, leaning over the eyepiece of a telescope with a huge curved lens the size of a gallon bottle of milk. The large telescope was set on a tripod beside the window. Faint rainbow coronas were hinted at in the faint reflection of sunlight in the lens.
A girl, standing at the end of the villa’s driveway, raising her hands over her head in an elegant stretch. The bottom edge of her shirt lifted with the motion just enough to show the barest hint of her midriff. The girl finally started down the street at a brisk jog.
“She’s moving.”
A small man stood on a corner in the narrow streets. He leaned against a building and smoked a cigarette. The man exhaled a silent breath of smoke.
People walking past him in the narrow streets. Many of the people were dark or mocha skinned. More than a few of them were dressed in colorful clothes.
The girl suddenly appeared out of a side street and jogged past him, never giving the unassuming man a glance.
He reached up, lifted the collar of his khaki-colored shirt and spoke into it.
“I got her.”
He dropped his cigarette on the street and moved to follow her. He kept a distance back. The girl barely in view up ahead.
A few moments later he slapped at something on his neck and bit out a storm of silent curses.
“God-damn flies!”
A few fruits laying in a wicker basket. A few flies buzzing them. A hand brushed the flies away with a careless gesture and picked up one of them.
Two voices bickered unintelligibly.
An open air market.
Tables cover with wares and open booths lined up on either side of the narrow street. The air was thick with voices as vendors actively wheedled and negotiated. People, a faceless throng, moved from table to table, browsing.
The girl jogged around the corner into the market. She jogged slowly down the street, weaving carefully between the various passerby.
A little further down she turned between two of the booths and entered a very narrow ally.
A man abruptly stepped out from around the corner directly in front of her. She stopped about ten, twelve feet short of him.
The man wore a loose shirt. Dusty blue jeans. Scuffed and worn boots. The line of his chin was bristled and not recently shaved. He had dark brown hair. There was a dark patch over one eye. A pistol strapped in a holster at his hip.
The man’s gaze as he looked at her narrowed slightly with a question.
“Jane Stansfield?”
The small man in the khaki shirt looked around the market desperately. He turned in circles. People in the marketplace moved around him in a chaotic mass.
The girl wasn’t one of them.
His mouth thinned. Teeth clenched together.
“Shit!”
“Don’t worry, Jane,” Xander said, holding up his open hands at shoulder height in front of him. “I won’t hurt you.” A hint of a smile slowly slipped across Xander’s face, “Actually, I pretty much doubt I could. You could probably kick my ass in a second. Not that that thought isn’t strangely appealing, but . . . I just wanna talk.”
The girl, Jane, gifted Xander with an incredulous and bewildered expression.
“Who the hell are you? How do you know my name? And don’t you think approaching young girls in allies is just a wee bit creepy?”
“I’m a friend,” Xander said softly and kindly. “And I’m about to tell you the rest . . .”
“What do you mean ‘he lost her’?” a woman asked.
She was pacing back and forth in the dirty room. She had dark hair. Her lips were bright red. She wore a tight red sleeveless shirt that clung to her every curve. Her tight, red leather pants looked as if they were painted on. Long, black gloves extended up both her arms to just past her elbow.
She was speaking to a man at one side of the room. He sat in a cheap plastic and aluminum chair beside a window. He held an AR-15 assault rifle across his lap. A large telescope sat on a tripod between him and the window.
The man looked up at her and raised an eyebrow.
“I mean it just like it sounds.”
“Bite me, Ernie.” The woman grit her teeth and rolled her eyes. “Fucking amateur hour, ‘round here. Un-frickin’-believable. I should have just followed her myself.”
The man looked her up and down and raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah,” he said dryly, “you’re inconspicuous.”
She gave him a hard look, “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t understand. I’m a what?!”
The girl looked across the ally at Xander like he had a cat on his head.
“You’re a Slayer, Jane,” Xander repeated evenly. “I know you’ve heard the term before. In your dreams. In the places in your heart you keep isolated from the world. You have to have noticed . . . you’re not . . . you’re not like other people. There are things about you that make you different. The strength is only one of them. You go out running like this . . . what? . . . every day. You’ve got energy to burn. So you run a little bit further, a little bit harder. But . . . it’s never enough. There’s always so much further you can go. Am I right?”
Jane just shifted her feet and looked back at Xander silently.
“The truth is . . . that there are some things about you that frighten even yourself. You probably wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, every fear you ever wished you didn’t have crawling out at you in the dark. Wake up alone . . . no matter how many people you surround yourself with.”
She swallowed and then suddenly gave him a hard look. A look that went far deeper than her eyes. “Oh, what do you know about it!?”
“Only what I’ve seen,” responded Xander. “One of my best friends is a Slayer. The Slayer. She’s been on the wagon for the past eight years, in a crappy little has been town across the pond in California. A regular Batman prowling the night every night like a superhero, though maybe Power Girl or Wonder Woman is the better metaphor.” Xander couldn’t seem to help the faint smile, “Buffy always liked Power Girl, though Wonder Woman does have the virtue of the outfit.” Xander stopped a moment and shook his head. “Back to the point. I helped Buffy the best I could, given my distinct lack of any superhuman powers. She, on the other hand, could always lean on me and her other friends when it got too tough, though in my case not quite as often as I might have liked. That answer enough for you? You didn’t think I got this job just by virtue of my good looks, did you?”
Jane smirked. “Obviously not.”
“Hey!” Xander gave her a faux insulted look for a moment before he couldn’t even manage that. The faint smiled returned. “At least you’re getting all jokey with me. That’s a kind of progress, isn’t it? The reason I know these things is that for years I watched what it did to Buffy. And not all of it was of the good. Though, much as I love her, a lot of that was ‘cause of Buffy. She didn’t always handle it the best way she could’ve. I stood by her. I was the one who saw, so to speak. I’ve also talked to a lot of the other girls like you that I’ve found. So, yeah, I know quite a bit of what you’re probably feeling.”
Jane, quietly, “Somehow I doubt it.”
“I don’t know what it’s like to feel certain kinds of cramps either. Not exactly a virtue I was built with. Doesn’t mean there aren’t certain kinds of empathy . . . And I may have just gone too far. Just so you know I sometimes start to joke when it gets too tense. Sometimes it’s weird.”
“I noticed.” Jane shifted uncomfortably and gave him a few awkward looks. “I’m just curious. What happened to . . .?”
“My eye, you mean,” gesturing with one hand at the black patch one side of his face. “You probably don’t wanna know.”
“Our little girl is home.” The man sat in the cheap plastic chair and leaned over the eyepiece on the side of the telescope. The fingers of his left hand slowly adjusted the focus ring that encircled the eyepiece. “And she has guests.”
“What? Lemme see.” The younger man in the khaki shirt scrambled over to the telescope and leaned down over it as the other man stepped back.
He went over to a nearby small table and picked up something. It seemed to be a file. Inside were a stack of photos. He sorted through them quickly ‘til he seemed to find the one he was looking for.
He picked up a pair of binoculars and walked back to the window. He looked through them. The girl, a man, and slender red-head girl standing together on the lawn in front of the villa. The three of them were talking. He lowered the binoculars for a moment and looked over at the younger man.
“It’s him.”
“You sure, Ernie?” Leaning down a bit further and still staring harder into the eyepiece of the telescope. “It could just be someone that . . .”
“The eyepatch is pretty distinctive.”
“Fuck!”
The young man got up from the telescope and kicked at the angrily at the chair. The cheap plastic chair flipped into the nearby wall and landed on the floor.
The older man sighed, “Come on, Dave. Let’s start packing up the stuff. We’re done here. Time to go home.”
“You’ll never know what it’s like. You’ll never have to stop and wonder about your place in the world. People like you and my friend Vi here, you were born with a purpose. There’s meaning in the fact that you’re here. I imagine that probably frightens you. And it should. But in other ways it must be liberating. People like me struggle all their lives looking for one shred of the meaning to that life that you’ll find every day. You mean something. Isn’t that what everyone wants to hear?”
Jane looked back and forth between Xander and Vi. They stood on the lawn if front of her home. The other girl, Vi, was slender. Medium-length red hair. An eclectic outfit of strange mismatched styles that somehow came together. Vi stood beside Xander and watched Jane kindly.
“What do you want from me?”
“Only whatever you want to give,” Xander said gently. “You have a gift, Jane. The opportunity to really make a difference in this world. Not many people can say that so clearly. In some ways you’re lucky that way, but . . . with great power comes great responsibility. I know that's a little Uncle Ben, but it's true. What you want to do with that is the big question. We’ll do whatever is in our power to help. To start with we’ll probably give you a scholarship to a really good private school. We don’t have our own yet, but . . . we have others that we work with. And you can eventually decide for yourself how you can be of help.”
Jane swallowed. She looked at the two of them nervously, “Well, I . . . I don’t have much school left. I’ll be graduating this year.”
“That’s good.” Xander slowly nodded and smiled awkwardly. “If you decide not to come with us, and it is your choice, we’d still like to keep in touch with you. You know, just touch base every once in a while. Whatever happens will be up to you.”
Vi smiled at the other girl kindly, “No pressure, Jane.”
Jane hesitated. Opened and closed her mouth for a moment before any actual words came out. “Can I . . . Can I have time to think?”
“Yeah. Sure. We can, um . . . come back tomorrow.”
“No.” Jane held up a hand. “Not like that. Can I just have a few minutes? I think I already know what I want to do. It’s just wrapping my brain around it that’s the problem. I’m just . . . I just want a few quiet moments to sort this out.”
“Okay." Xander smiled. "We’ll be here. We won’t be going anywhere.”
“What do you mean we’re packing?” asked the woman. “I’m not exactly an employee of Wolfram & Hart like you two. I’m only doing this because someone met my price, and I lose a good size piece of what I was promised if I don’t bring home the girl. Not exactly what you could call an enticement to get on the plane empty handed. Say it with me now Com-miss-ion.”
Ernie sighed as he rolled up something and tucked it into a duffel bag. “I’m not exactly happy to be going home like this myself, Miss Raiden. But we do have our orders.”
She rolled her eyes. “Blah. Blah. Polysyllabic blah. You were saying?”
He chuckled. “Not exactly the most professional attitude there. I can’t believe you say you don’t play that well with others. Remarkable that. Never would have believed it.” He looked up as the younger soldier in the khaki shirt suddenly came through the door into the back room. “Dave, you got the scope all packed up yet?”
“Our girl just left the villa. Looked like she’s going for a walk.”
Ernie shrugged, “Kinda irrelevant at this point, don’t you think?!” He continued stuffing more things into the duffel bag.
Miss Raiden looked back and forth between the two men across the room from her. Her head tilted. An idea suddenly fell across her face.
“Let’s steal her.”
“What?!” The two soldiers looked at her sharply.
“We could grab her,” she argued. “Quick. Easy. Make the bitch the offer after we already have her. With the amount of money we’re talkin’ ‘bout the little girl is bound to take it. Come on, Ernie. We’ll be happy. Angel will be happy. The girl should certainly be happy. And we’ll all be out of here and long gone before Xander Harris and his Super friends even know anything went down.”
Author's note: I made a joke about cramps. What's wrong with me? Major apologies to anyone who actually read it.
The title of this chapter is from a line by Fred in the "Hole in the World" episode. I like that ep, but don't expect me to kill Fred anytime soon in this. Not gonna happen.
This is my first chapter that focuses largely on original characters. I hope they're cool enough to hold their own with the others. I kinda like Jane.
This chapter took a while to write. I hope you like it. At least you got a chapter out of it that's about twice as long as most of the others. I'll admit Xander isn't exactly my favorite character, but I hope I did him justice. My ability to write a character an get inside their head is usually determined by how much I associate myself with them, which means Spike is pretty easy, even when sometime I wish he wasn't. Buffy is easy. Andrew is so easy it frightens me. I understand these characters. I'm not sure how much I understand Xander.
On another completely unrelated note I watched some of the early S6 episodes recently. Does anyone know any reason for all of the shirts with numbers in those first few S6 eps. Dawn, Willow & Xander all have shirts with big numbers on them in the eps. It's just weird is all. BtVS was aways full of hidden depth and meaning. Does that mean anything? All I know is thinking about it makes my head hurt.