Chapter 1:  Trouble Again

3 years later

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Rome.

There was something so old and sad in the city’s soul, the way it dutifully endured horror and beauty alike.  For two thousand years it had withstood war and fire, survived chaos and treachery and tyranny galore, and still it refused to surrender its Rome-ness.  Unlike so many people she'd met during the course of of her short, weird romp through life, Rome had no other name and never would. She was always drawn back to it, for some unknown reason.  Even after the regrettable episode with the Immortal, she felt like she belonged there; zigzagging through the layered ruins of empires come and gone.

But mostly, in a very deep, inside-y place that she rarely acknowledged, Buffy Summers knew that her luck was finally running out, and that Rome – majestic, eternal Rome – would be a fitting place to die.

Again.

(Plus, the shopping was totally fab.)

She’d bought the villa in Lazio the previous Fall; a pretty perch high on the city's lush green fringe.  The Counsel footed the bill - yet another perk of the new Rupert Giles Express Sympathy Plan.  She didn’t feel totally cool with the whole allowance thing, so when the assignments started to roll in the previous Fall, Buffy was obedient in her ass-kickery. She even pretended not to notice how utterly lame they were: a rogue Fyarl demon here, a budding bloodsucker mafia there.  There were thousands of Slayers to carry her burden now.  This was all just polite busywork for her retirement, something to keep her in reasonably decent shape for the next apocalypse.

Or, apocalypses.

(Apocalypsi?)

The city felt empty as she strolled along the Via dell Gesu.  The windy night air seemed to have swept everything and everyone into the cluttered cafés that pockmarked the heart of the Old City.  She pulled her waistcoat tighter around her shoulders, hugged it to the silk blouse that clung magically to her small bare chest. The sensation was achingly wonderful; her heels clicking on pink stonework, alone in a city of secrets.

The Slayer had found a sort of peace in Rome, this second time around.  It had been over four years since Sunnydale bit the big one, and she'd come to terms with her strange life in ways she never imagined possible.  For one thing, the old Scooby spell had finally broken, and she finally realized this for the best.  She remembered watching in detached wonder as the old gang fragmented and was blown to the far corners of the world.  Ashes to ashes, and all that stuff.

Alexander Harris, shockingly, was the first to go.  In the beginning, he just tagged along in typically stoic, Xanderesque fashion. But soon after they set up shop at the Cleveland 'Mouth, it became clear that everybody’s favorite man-child was falling into a very deep and adult-ish downward spiral.  Construction was a tough racket to break into when all your previous projects are buried until ten thousand tons of demonic dirt, so he frequented the demon bars uptown instead, picking fistfights in between sips of what he called his ‘bubbly brain meds’.

Xander fought like a man possessed back then, trading on the fame that a half dozen near-holocausts had finally bought him.  She’d pulled his butt out of the fire constantly in those days – literally, once, when his butt was in a fire – but more and more it seemed like she was just stalling some inevitable deep freeze.  Something had finally broken inside him, and Buffy wasn’t going to dishonor her friend by pretending that she could fix it.  They were in the Hurt Business, after all.

Towards the end, only Willow ever seemed to crack his lobster-like shell, but it wasn’t nearly enough.  When the Council needed a trainer for the uber-deadly Ipswich ‘Mouth, he packed off with barely an aufwiedersehen-adieu. Buffy just assumed Mr. Strength had run off to die somewhere quickly and alone, like his vengeful bride-to-be.

And Buffy let him.  This was starting to become a familiar pattern, she realized, finally and too late.

When she arrived on the plaza, she made a sharp turn towards the Archivo, spying the porcelain features of The Goddess out of the corner of her eye.  The statue’s marble robes sung out in shocking white relief from the velvet sky, lit from beneath by a small garden of electric lamps.  The finely carved face was an unyielding stone; the jaw set for battle, the hooded eyes smoldering with blank violence and a terrible, terrifying wisdom.

Do you still smolder, baby?

Buffy shook a thought from her head.  Minerva wasn’t real.  Or, at least, she didn’t think so; maybe they just hadn’t met yet. But for some reason, the old statue did remind her of the Witch. Not the shrinking, sputtering Willow Rosenberg, but the pale thing that murdered a boy in the woods, the onyx-eyed monster who nearly destroyed the world.  Buffy knew the Witch had always been there, a cold and calculating machine reclining behind soft skin, waiting patiently for someone, somewhere to flip the switch.

Maybe Willow knew it too.  After Xander checked out, she seemed content to wallow in her sundry losses.  She started watching TV again, for one thing. “Dance, America, Dance!” and CNN Headline News became steady faves. The redhead would zone out for hours on end in front of the tube, delegating her Council duties to a threesome of catty young Wicca from Nevada whose names Buffy could never remember.

Every now and then, someone would gatecrash this Slackerfest, trying to snap Willow out of it with news of psychic tornadoes or zombie frogs or primordial seeing stones. Sometimes the Witch would muster a wan smile, or a vague pun.  Mostly, the response would be a nice and sweet and polite nothing.   The woman was somewhere else entirely, and lost there.  Boredom had done what fear and shame and loss and rehab couldn’t. Whatever magic was still inside her had curled up for a long night of sleep, and nothing Buffy or anyone else did would be enough to wake it.

The whole Kennedy deal fell apart, to the surprise of exactly no one. It was only “a bit of cold comfort to begin with,” Giles had sniffed, and post- Awakening it quickly became clear that Kennedy wanted nada to do with a washed up ex-Wiccan.  Instead, Little Miss Warrior Princess spent most of her time in Cleveland finding new and exciting ways to lie, embellishing and exploiting her role in the Battle of Sunnydale for whatever scraps of political clout could be had in a Legion of Secret Superwomen.

As a field general in Faith’s new Slayer Army, she’d earned a nose for trouble, too, leading recruits on one meat-grindingly dangerous mission after another to prove her war prowess. Her detail eventually became known as the Martyr's Brigade, boasting the highest Slayer mortality rate on three continents (four, if you counted 'Antarctica' as a continent, which Buffy always thought was a kind of silly thing to do).

When the murmurs about recklessness ballooned into howls of holy-crappiness, it was Faith who finally ordered the so-called "court martial."  Giles obliged it – even though, as he reminded them, they’d be making up the rules as they went along. Buffy remembered the way the brunette sneered her answer back at him: "So, what else is new?"

And throughout it all Kennedy was, well...  Kennedy.  Right to the bitter, Nixonian end.

She worked the whole ugly, defensive thing that had become her calling card over the years, flung accusations of cowardice and treason in every direction.  She zapped Buffy for her “barely there” leadership, nailed Faith for jealousy, busted Giles for megalomania.  But Kennedy saved her worst venom for the Witch, of course, branding her a “lesbo predator” with gross and thinly veiled insinuations about Dawn Summers.  It was all pretty much the opposite of fun, but fun went out the window with overalls and Doc Martens and baby doll dresses.  Fun was so 90’s.

In the end, it was Willow who cast the deciding vote, banishing her darling Ken Doll to a tiny outpost in the frigid, naked wastes of the Russian Steppes. Buffy recalled that neither woman had shed a tear that night as she was briskly packed off in a van, her fine suede luggage brimming over with dusky parkas and ziplocked K-rations.  In fact, Buffy couldn’t remember seeing Willow cry once since the day they sent Sunnydale crashing down to Hell. She looked too exhausted to feel much of anything, and it was possible there weren’t any tears left – for Tara, for Xander, for Kennedy or for anyone else.

And so, it was about a year after Xander The Great set sail to conquer England that the Witch trumped him with her own Houdini act, and simply vanished into oblivion.

Six panicked weeks passed before Willow bothered to send her first, glamorously brief email, outlining a pilgrimage to New Orleans and the shiny new life she’d built there.  She found work running a small internet café on the French Quarter, teaching bored teenagers to crack open government mainframes on the side. She’d tried to act nonchalant about it, claiming she just needed to “do something normal-ish” for a while.  Which, you know: fair enough.

For months afterward, she continued to write, but the notes grew increasing spare, eventually pared down to a few, breezy Hey-theres or the odd (like, really really odd) weblink.  Once she mailed Buffy a URL to an Oxford dissertation on “the Neurophysiology of Vampires”:

Scroll to page 47.  Big Bad would have had good larf.  Bloody hilarious!

- Will

Then came The Flood.

Pictures of carnage and ruin streamed through the TV like a looping horror movie.  Days and weeks passed without a word. Xander called then, momentarily snapped out of his own weary orbit.  He rented a mercenary coven down in Arkansas to search for her, and phoned in daily with fresh reports.  He’d even, against Buffy's wishes, written a letter to Wolfram & Hart, Angel’s endlessly disturbing side project with Hell.  These were all, ultimately, major flunkouts.  There was no sign that Willow Rosenberg had died in the disaster, but there was no sign of her life either.

Right around the time she disappeared, Buffy was invaded by a vivid dream of the Witch.  In it, the woman was standing at the center of the maelstrom, her coal snowman's eyes gleaming through the rusty spray, her arms held out threateningly against a bleached sky.  Had she fought the storm?  Or, had she, in some way, caused it?

Buffy confronted the Watcher with her suspicions, recalling the often supermodel-thin line between her nightmares and the reality of her nightmarish life.  Rupert Giles had remained aloof through it all, glowering down from the mahogany perch of his new study.  If he knew the beans, he wasn’t exactly falling all over himself to spill them.  “Patience,” was all he said, his voice a chilling instrument.  “All answers will come in time.”

Just not from him.  Secrets were his business now, his new Thing.

Giles:

He left too, soon after their little chit-chat and sharply, like a dagger raked up a naked spine. The new Council HQ in London was nearing completion, and he would “oversee the final stages, personally.”  Oooh. But in many ways he was never quite there with them anyway, had not been there for some time.

Since the Awakening, the man had ever more comfortably reclined into his new role as Big Shot Global Powerbroker Guy.  Gone forever was the sputtering, bookish old doof who confronted her in the Sunnydale High library, spreading out the large pages of “The Vampyre” like a children’s storybook.  In the run-up to their battle with the First, she had seen him reduced to a hunted old man, clutching handfuls of useless papers and Greyhound ticket stubs from Ottawa, Indianola, Trenton.

Now, everything had changed, yet again.  In the wake of the gang’s unlikely victory at the Sunndale 'Mouth, the remnants of the Watchers Council had rallied around the old Brit like a war banner.  He had gained the trust and respect of ancient societies and the loyalty of an army of demi-goddesses.   She saw the power trip seep through him like a virus.

Before long, the man she had yearned for as a father figure had vanished entirely. He had evolved into The Watcher: Keeper of Deadly Secrets, More Idea Than Man. Many of the youngsters had taken to calling him “G,” and it wasn’t long before the corny James Bond-y connotations of the nickname eventually melted into a strange sort of dread.

As the months and years passed he and Buffy spoke rarely, and then only in the hushed, narrow language of official Slayerly business. She recalled the day. so long ago now, when he'd given her the money for her Sunnydale spelunking trip.  Part of her was longing for that moment; a trademark polishing of the ol' spectacles that would betray his apprehension, if not something warmer and mushier. But the moment never arrived. She was halfway through the flight to LAX when she realized that he wasn’t even wearing them anymore. He’d traded them in for contact lenses.

Always a fashion thing, she mused, staring at the light that spilled from the mouth of the Pantheon like orange blood.  It was almost midnight, which supposedly meant she’d be getting in her weekly workout momentarily.  Darth Giles hath decreed it so, in this latest lame excuse for a “mission."

The assignments he sent her had long since turned cold and impersonal. As the Council grew in size and complexity, Giles had gone all technocrat on them. What had begun as detailed, handwritten letters had rather quickly dissolved into a terse, electronic shorthand, a sort of legalese for monster hunters. He eventually devised some convoluted system of spreadsheets and document templates to account for the various types and degrees of threats.  Currently, the Watcher’s Council communiqués resembled the sort of thing you’d expect to get from an insurance company, or the DMV. They had titles like “TR-D991,” and their tiny grid lines and checkboxes left little room for Buffy to write anything like a detailed report. Lately, she had taken to leaving vast portions of the things totally blank, or simply jotting down “It’s dead” somewhere in the cramped margins.

Privately, Buffy believed that Giles didn’t even type the things himself anymore. The writing style had changed, became a bit more compact than the windy Englishman was capable of. Stuff like “Target is 12’ tall, red w/ yellow stripes on butt“ and “Please describe tail (50 words or less).” It was like the old man had hired a few marketing interns out of Iowa State University to compose all his top secret-y occult missions these days.

Or chores. Or busywork, or whatever the heck it was supposed to be. They certainly didn’t seem very important; kill demon X, retrieve magic thingee Y,  rinse, repeat. She wondered whether she had just been out of the game too long, that maybe they'd simply lost faith in her powers over the years. Not that Buffy minded much. The gaps between jobs were pleasantly long, allowing her ample time for her newfound Brooding-and-Wandering hobby.

At night in the villa she would curl up in an empty bed, occasionally jacking into her laptop and trying to keep tabs on whatever and whomever she could. Xander still exchanged passive-aggressive emails with her from time to time, occasionally laced with empty threats to “hook up next Spring in Paris or something.”   Mostly, they tended to be gruff, military assessments of the Ipswich Hellmouth, peppered with little non-reports on the endless, seemingly hopeless search for a missing atom bomb named Willow Rosenberg:

The good news: she’s not dead. The bad news: she’s not dead.  No news period out of St. Louis in a month.

wtf am I paying them for?

- X

By far the most visible semi-Scooby was Andrew Wells, the spastic little murderer she'd once considered sacrificing for the cause.  Andrew currently held the world record for largest MySpace blog in existence.  It was also the only page that showed up when you typed in the keywords “ancient demonic forces” and “N’Sync fanfic.”  Buffy felt a weird, warm vibe whenever she visited his eye-bleedingly cute website.  It was so riddled with neon pink hearts and flashing Star Wars GIFs, she could almost hear the boy’s breathless patter as she skimmed his latest tales of monsters and superheroes

Buffy had tried to connect to his webcam once, but she was never very good with the hi-tech dealies.  Their conversation mainly consisted of a series of random stills punctuated by indecipherable squeaks of dialogue. The world had changed so much since high school. It was a remote, electronic thing now, a swirling lake of ones and zeros that just barely connected the dots between distant friends. She didn’t quite understand this new compulsion for communication. Some things, she’d learned, were better left unsaid.   Or, if so, then whispered, drunkenly and in the dead of night, preferably in a dim and cozy bedroom.

Because, when it was too bright – when the lines were too sharp and the signal was too clear – that's when they would all reappear.  Because some ghosts don't haunt you from the shadows.

Because some of them aren't even dead.

Still, she decided there was no use worrying about it.  The world didn't have one of those Supermanly rewind-buttons.  Time wasn’t going to go backwards, so neither was Buffy.  And when she needed to be reminded of the past, she always had Rome.

Changeless, ageless, eternal Rome.  City of marble and dust.

Minerva kept her stoic watch, and Buffy kept hers. It had been six weeks since her last mission, and she was surprised at how eager her body still was for the action.  For violence.

The folder had arrived that morning, Air Italia, in the same uber-bureaucratic manila envelope as the rest.  It was disappointingly lean this time: another generic search-and-destroy yawner about a frisky monster on the loose.  At least she didn’t have to “fetch” anything.

The only point of interest came towards the end, some anecdotal evidence that the Beastie Du Jour may have taken part in the murder of a Slayer last Fall, a certain Kelly Watson of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was a fresh-faced recruit, barely trained.  Apparently, they’d caught her patrolling alone one night on a wharf in Baltimore harbor.  The report spared her the messy details, but some curt language about a search for “the remainder of the body” gave her the feeling it wasn’t pretty. Death rarely was.

(except for his.)

Stop it.

(he could feel his soul it stings a little...)

Cut it out.

Just then, something flinched in a long shadow of the Pantheon, causing it to twist ever so slightly.  Buffy felt her eyes focus in on it, and a moment later a bulky shape broke free, and was shambling towards the threshold.  She didn’t need to study it for long.  Her rising blood told her all she needed to know.  The rest was automatic.

It was game time. Again.