Chapter 21: Watchfulness

Right.  How’d we get here?

Jumped the 6:12 to Hounslow. That was cock-up number one. Hounslow had always been more or less alien terrain, as far as he was concerned. The stench of those horrid chemical stovepipes had kept him and Dru at bay for the better part of a century. Besides which, there had always seemed to be something a bit off about the taste of a Hounslow man, a tart nip of lemon zest and quinine that you’d have to sort of choke down.

These days, Hounslow might as well have been a continent on the bloody moon. At each new turn, another appalling café, packed to gills with wankers, all of them jones-ing for their nightly Double Mochachino fix.

So, yeah, anyway, he got a bit turned around at first, stomping irritably from one corner to the next. Eventually, he got his bearings.  Button-hooked around Arthur till he spotted the bridge.  Then, he took a leisurely stroll up King Williams until the dowdy, old vein of Cannon Street popped into view. From there, he recalled it was a straight shot to Monument Station and the tube. But he opted to get fancy, instead.  See if he couldn’t shake his babysitter loose first.

So, he bore left instead, snug to King’s brawny brick shoulder.  Spike and Faith trudged together in an awkward formation that way, passing row upon row of the morbid little hatboxes that passed for family estates these days. He kept the casual bit up, lulling the girl into his sullen, rhythmic pace that he hoped seemed like resignation. Then, just as they breached the intersection on Swithin’s Lane, he made his play.

It was an ace one, he thought; quick feign left, a good, hard shove to the jubblies and the little cow goes airborne. Before her shapely bum could so much as slap a stone, Spike was already moving, bounding like a mongoose down the warren of black alleys that stitched together Oxford and Bond Courts. It was a giddy feeling: racing into the night like a mad thief, hearing the wind whistle through his pearly, pointy whites. Like the sound from an old gramophone, it transported him to a past that was terrible yet utterly, unbearably intoxicating.

Cock-up, number two. He’d only gotten about five blocks before he remembered he was still sober, still skint, and still wearing the equivalent of a tragic Halloween costume.

Truth was, the vampire missed his old things. He missed the wee silver Zippo, oiled and glossy, her orange flame gleaming suggestively along the dark, endless passageways of his undeath. He missed his damned coat. The original one, mind you, not the flimsy leather phantom that followed him back from oblivion. He longed for the sensation of throwing her on, his arms diving down her lengths like pale serpents. It was a gesture he’d had thirty long years to perfect, and, like everything bloody else these days, the habit died hard.

Cursing his stupidity, Spike stamped back in the direction of the girl, nose twitching wolfishly for her scent. But somewhere beneath the layers of oxide and muck and ancient grease, it was a different aroma that flickered up, the unmistakable scent of bergamot and grave mud. For a moment, his head turned to white fuzz, her anthem howling up at him from Hell.

Dru?

Sprinting back through the gloom, he found their shapes; five fledgling vamps, raking and keening at Faith like a pack of stray dogs. Their own kit was an abomination as well, a thumb in the eye and up the arse of fashionable villains everywhere. Football jerseys two sizes too big bloused ludicrously over pairs of saggy gray denim.  Logos seemed plastered over every visible inch, and the effect reminded him suddenly of one of those dreadful NASCAR rallies in the States.  It was enough to make a dandy old monster cringe.

Yet despite their recent vintage, the curse of Aurelius smoldered in them. There was a distinctive aura to his breed - the shining anarchism of the mad bomber tinged with the caprice of aristocrats. That recipe of merry violence had been handed down wholesale through the centuries, with each new trustee adding his or her own peculiar aromatic note. For Drusilla, it was more of an acoustic impression; a fiddle string plucked at the final knot of the spine and the crystalline chatter of a bell row in winter.

As he watched them hoot and holler from his place in the shadows, he slowly realized his error. These boys were far too worldly for his old lover’s taste. Dru had nothing but disdain for London's teeming masses, the hooligans and the housewives and the whores.  She could barely stand to eat them, let alone clog up the food chain with their kind.  Still, he could feel the madwoman’s ghost flitter through him, and the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

“’Oy! Lovely evenin’ we’s havin’, innit?” shouted a frisky little runt with a diamond-shaped hairdo.

“Out for a litt’ul stroll then, lovey?” hissed another, his yellow eyes measuring their meal. “Don’t s’pose we could interest you in a bite ‘nstead?”

Faith giggled at them. “Oh," she said.  "Oh man! You’re kiddin’ right?”

The vamps exchanged a puzzled glance. “What you mean, kiddin’?”

“That’s the best you could come up with?”  Faith cocked her neck, cruelly aping the murderous little midget. “Don’t s’pose we could interest you in a bite ‘nstead, eh? ‘Ello govner! Lovely evenin’ innit?”  She snorted haughtily.  It was such a raw and irritatingly American sound that even callous old Spike had to stifle a cry of wounded nationalism.

Go on, lads, he silently cheered. ’Least give the quim  a proper run for her money!

Black eye, broken nail.  Something.

The wee chap was the first to try, slithering out like viper. The girl played him off stage real easy, throwing an adorable little patty-cake of a block. The vamp swayed off-balance, stumbling a few degrees the wrong way. It was all over, then: Faith leaning through gravity, her stake tipped outwards like a gruesome bucktooth. A moment later, her prey vanished in a screaming cloud of sand. The others howled with laughter at the sight of it.

“Dekko ‘at!” screeched one, his beady eyes bright with malice. “Poor old Benji is lookin’ a bit fagged now, eh Jeffers?”

“Tosh, mate,” sung a tall, baggy-jeaned monster to his left. “E’s lookin’ a bit sweet fanny adams, you ask me! This minge is one of ‘em clever naysayers, I wager.” The adolescent monster loped to his mark a few yards out, grinning like a skull.

Faith tittered again, still monumentally unimpressed. “Oh snap!  Is that one of those cockney rhyming things? Naysayer-slayer?  How lame is that? ”

“It’s talkin’,” croaked the one calling itself Jeffers. “But it ain’t bleedin’ much. Let’s see how well it talks with the throat hangin’ out, wot?”

The fledglings danced in savagely, a hurricane of claws and fangs. Faith took the worst of it this time, eating a sequence of punches and kicks. The circle tightened reflexively around her, aroused by the sudden scent of blood. Spike jammed his helmet down.

“Now, now, lads,” he barked, tilting out from behind a corroded dumpster. Instinctively,he went to shove his hands in his pockets but, realizing he had none, he just waved them in mid-air like a nutter. “’S’no way to receive a guest to our fair shores."

The creatures stared for a long moment, transfixed, before bursting into peals of laughter.

“Wawhawhaw!” bellowed one. “Duh-duh-dekko, lads! It’s-it’s-it’s…”

“Batman!” squealed another, and set the pack roaring.

“Oh, very mature,” he growled. The creatures showed no signs of relenting. And, for what felt like the hundredth time that week, William the Bloody desperately wanted to hurt something.

Right.

There was a dark flicker-flash and then he was moving, William Pratt’s tired old bones hurling combinations like a champion prizefighter. Jeffer’s grin imploded with a sharp left hook. A swirl of colors charged in to take his place, and then a second young killer went airborne, flopping like a ragdoll into a pile of tin drums. Faith drew a long knife from her boot.  Beheaded the hapless bloke with a single slice.

The surviving vamps merely shrugged in defeat, and there was a sound of nylon scraping as they quit the battlefield. “Come back, wankers!”, he shouted after them. Faith pursed her lips, examining a broken red nail. “Bloody hell! Did you see that?“

“Vampires? Yeah, man. See ‘em all the time, unfortunately….”

“Yeah, well so much for British pride,” he mused, helping her up. “Churchill must be doing jackknifes down there, right about now.”

“Who?”

“Churchill,” he repeated, thoroughly aggravated. “You know. Winston bloody Chur... oh, bugger it.”

Spike and Faith stood still as statues in the darkness, breathing hard for no good reason at all. They stared at one another for about two seconds too long.  Somewhere, far off, a clocktower struck nine. The thought occurred to him that it was jolly old Big Ben, and a random quote popped into his head:

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even the past.

Miserably, he realized who coined it: another bloody Yank.

“Mind if I borrow twenty quid?” he said.

***

Heat. First, heat.

She touched a small rotary sensor, a soft orange glowed flaring to life at her fingertip as she dialed the temp to eighty five degrees farenheit. The room hummed to life, an array of digital appliances pinging each other hello. The Super Milk-Tracking fridge high-fived a self-cleaning oven. The Tivo frenchkissed the I-Pod.

…And the dish ran away with the spoon. Dawn fingerpunched a digital display, and an orchestral swell belched out of the speakers; Bach’s Coffee Cantata. The piece was composed as a light-hearted wedding accompaniment, and concerned a certain daughter’s addiction to that drink. Another quick stroke and the lights flared to full strength, revealing the room in shocking white detail. There was an almost clinical neatness about her new quarters, the bland civility of a bank office. That was her own fault, of course.

A sustained vibrato struck her belly like a swarm of butterflies as she drifted dreamily towards the bed. Flopping on the sheets, she stole a sly glance at the camera, bolted high on the south wall. There was another embedded in the widescreen, she knew, and a micro-lens peering out from the aluminum stem of a nightstand lamp. Everywhere, unblinking electronic eyes studied Dawn Summers, broadcasting every inch of her from in blazing 1080-P. She was always somebody's favorite show. Yep, they watched channel Dawn twenty-four seven, same as they had for years. That was her choice too; a life of Importance and Danger. The absurdity occurred to her, quite often in fact. Dawn was much smarter than anyone had ever imagined, and probably by a very, very wide margin. No matter how advanced or expensive the equipment, the eyes had little hope of capturing the real her. They only glimpsed the surface, blindly cataloging every fraud and forgery, quietly recording every lilly white lie and missing the really, really big lie. The Being Human Lie.

Easy mistake, she mused, studying her reflection in the dark mirror of the Sony. Her body was human, surely. Right down to the flimsiest little strand of DNA. The monks made certain of that much.

A viola carved violently through the measure, derailing that particular train of thought. She smiled playfully, plucked open the top button of her blouse, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. From a light fixture above the bed, the electric grind of a focal motor. It was yet another hidden camera, as wonderfully distant as a star.

She rarely considered the minds behind those eyes. Were they old or young, male or female? Human or… what-have-you? But when she did, she always liked to imagine whole roomfuls of them; men with crisp haircuts and uniforms, quietly studying those monks’ ingenious design. She tried to imagine them now, sitting in a squalid little room somewhere, tittering nervously as she seamed back the lapels of her blouse, swallowing hard as she fingered the tiny silver fastener at the center of her bra. There was a helplessness to watching, she knew; that seeing without touching, the guessing without the knowing.

It was getting harder to keep up the old masks, to hide herself in old habits. So, she tossed her head to one side, let a scoop of dark, dyed hair fall across one cheek, listlessly booted up the boob tube. As she thumbed through its seven hundred-odd channels, distorted faces loomed back at her from the screen. New TVs made everyone look much bigger than they were, monstrous even. Too much detail was visible in those smiling masks of theirs.

Click. A pair of dancers sugar-step across a stage full of miniature Roman columns.

Click. A woman in a bathrobe is harassed by a giant, decaying molar.

Click. A talking turtle sells car insurance.

Click. Dracula and Scooby-Doo ride a roller coaster at Disneyworld.

CLICK.

The images kept flickering past, and they barely registered any meaning on their own. But together they seemed to be telling the strange, sad story of all their lives. It almost made her cry.

Then, on the very next click, she saw something that did.

It was the face of a young woman, unknowable yet ruthlessly familiar. She was standing in a prism of gauzy yellow glow. The light dotted in the actress' large brown eyes, creating an illusion of a person on the constant verge of tears. This was Veronica Sewell, the sassy, beloved ingénue of ‘Passions.’ It had been ages since Dawn had last tuned in, and the years told on Veronica’s face. It wasn’t much – a subtle crease at the brow, a dimple slowly stiffening to a jagged line – but time was going to have its way with her. Not long from now, she would probably marry Rico. They’d settle down in a big fat dream house on Brandywine Hills, poop-out a brat or two. The writers would scramble like fighter jets then, changing the shape of Veronica’s life in a thousand imperceptible ways. Her usual plotlines about secret crushes and doomed love affairs would gradually morph into stories of financial skullduggery and broken friendships and cutesy-wootsy, baby-momma drama. If she’s really lucky, they’ll wind up putting her in a coma so she can co-star in some shitty made-for-TV movie.

And sex? Forget it. Sex gets traded in for a evil in-laws and a fuck-ton of suspicion.

"Oh, golly gee! I wonder who Rico’s cheating on me with this week?"

"I wonder why I'm not good enough, anymore…"

She could suddenly hear that train-of-thought chugging away again. Thankfully, there was a knock at the door.

Unthankfully, there was also a Xander at the door. He looked wiped out. Clumps of salt-and-pepper hair clung to his brow like octopus arms. Along with the eye patch, they made him seem hundreds of years old.

“Hey,” he chirped. “Mind if I have a heart attack?”

“Sure thing. Come on in.”

He pasted himself on her white sofa with an achy little hrrummmph. “Ooh, nice. Is that Tunisian brocade?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”  So irritating...

Xander reclined, weirdly catlike. His big rusty jaw dropped wide open, and Dawn braced herself for all those super-keen Words of Wisdom’ that were about to fall out.

“So,” he said again. “You’re crazy now, huh?”

“No.”

“Crazy-esque?”

“No!”

”…ish?”

“Xander!”

“Well, what is it then? I mean, is this, one of those rebellious phases I’ve been hearing so much about?” Dawn grunted and crossed her arms. He was trying to make her smile. At the library, he seemed to be the least weirded-out by all of it, and made about a dozen goony cracks about “measuring the curtains.”

“You know,” she said. “This whole Unflappable Sergeant Harris act is starting to wear thin. I remember a time when you… you we’re so totally...”

“…Flappable?”

And that tore it. She choked on a snotty little tear as he stood, gathered her in his arms. It was warm. In the background, Veronica was still speechifying about “destiny” to the dulcet tones of Bach’s wedding ditty.

“We can’t talk here,” she whispered. “They’re watching.”

***

“Oh no,” he groaned. “No, no, nonono.”

They lounged in Dawn’s “cleanroom” - an allegedly bug-free zone in the basement of the Brixby Hall. Mounds of obselete stereo gear lined the perimeter, packed against walls made of foam eggcrate and three-inch steel. It reminded him of a low rent recording studio he once raided in Chicago. A pair of Greater Goblins were embedding hypnotic messages in SAP broadcasts, so they could spawn an army of homicidal Mexican carpenters. No, seriously. They were.

Of course, Xander killed the heck outta those goblin jerks.

Which is what you’re supposed to do with demons, right? I mean, sure, that whole “peace, love and understanding” bit plays nice on the daytime talk shows, but this is a war. And, in war you just gotta kill every single badguy you meet. It’s a very old rule…

“Xander? Are you even listening to me?” Dawn had her arms folded again. She still looked about fifteen years old when she did that. He had to keep reminding himself that The Key was never fifteen years old. Not actually.

“Sorry,” he said, and he suddenly was, feeling weirdly ashamed. “What were you saying?”

“I said, what are we going to do about Sp…”

“Right! No! Why does everything always have to be about that bleach-y, skeevy freakshow?”

Dawn groaned. “I thought you were over all this stuff.”

“Oh? Which part? The 'boinking-my-soulmate-on-public-access-TV' thing  or the whole 'trying-to-murder-me-hundreds-of-times' thing?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Uh-huh, yeah. So was the Spanish Inquisition.”

She gave up. Old Frustrated Dawn probably would have thrown a pouty-party, stomped her little foot, slammed a door. This one breathed a long, low breath, drew a tiny circle on her thigh with a finger. Changed the subject. “Okay,” she whispered. “What do you want to talk about then?”

Xander blinked at her in amazement. “Me? Hmmm… oh, jeez, I don’t know. Hey, how ‘bout this weather we’re having, and OH WAIT! An army of superpowered-psychos on their way to kill us all to death! How’s that for a topic? Ooh, or maybe our dear old pal Willow, who’s lost in cyberspace or whatever? Or how about the fact that, less than an hour ago, the world’s oldest secret society of demon hunters ceased to exist because you woke up one morning and decided to pull the plug!”

She didn’t answer at first, intent on finishing the masterpiece on her lap. Then, “You think I made a mistake.”

“Yes!” Xander cried. “No. God!” He started rubbing his forehead. He hurt all over, and chunks of him felt like they were still up in that helicopter, flying in hard chop over unpronounceable European countrysides. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Honestly, I don’t think I believe in anything enough to care anymore.”

“And Kennedy?” asked a voice, startlingly direct.

He gazed up at her, astonished, finding the woman in the little girl. She wasn’t crying, wasn’t about to. The blue glow of her eyes and the frame of dark hair suited her completely now. It reminded Xander of an old painted saint. And also that hot Shakira chick, somehow. In any case, Key or no Key, she was a Summers for sure. There was steel under that skin.  “We’ll be fine,” he lied. “And, hey, even if we won’t, big sis is here, right? She’ll fix everything.”

“Yeah? What makes you so sure she even wants to?”

“She fixes stuff,” he explained. “I don’t think she can help it. It’s sort of her job, you know?” Dawn seemed to think about this for moment, then cracked a smile. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, I always kinda thought that was your job.”

***

They curled around the edge of another tidy hedgerow. The leaves glowed an unnatural shade of green under the street lamps in a way that reminded her eerily of Sunny-D U. Meanwhile, her guides continued to blather on about all their neat-o new crap. One of them was Lieutenant Ruddock; a tall, wiry Midwesterner wearing a “Korn” sweatshirt and a perpetual grin. Neither seemed to suit him too well. The other was Polly Doakes; one of the surviving members of the Cleveland crew, and, like Violet, a girl she barely remembered at all. It was a cynical move, she realized; Frank Grange’s crude attempt to lend an air of normalcy to the weird new order of the world. The pair gave her the grand tour of her new home, joking and gossiping the whole way like a couple of morning talk-show hosts. Trying to let her know they were all “one big happy family” now.

“… and over here we have a state-of-the-art R&D facility for experimental necromancy, cleverly disguised as a Student Book Center. And that thing that looks like the Women's Studies Department? Ectoplasmic Containment Unit.” He prickled with pride.

“Ecto-what-o?”

“Ghost Jail,” Polly chirped. “Lieutentant Nerdlinger over here likes to rattle off the big words. Thinks it makes him sound macho.”

Ruddock continued, unfazed. “Actually, it’s a little more than that, Poll. For instance, at the moment we're housing two pan-dimensional Fireworms, a time-bending Effrit demon and a physical manifestation of the emotion of 'Guilt.'”

“I see,” she lied.

“Not to mention your big Hell Demon buddy, too” Polly added cheerily. “Not that he’s a prisoner, or anything. I hear he’s snug as a bug in a rug in there.”

“'Melvin' is not my buddy.” They followed the winding path past a line of plain-looking dormitories, with Ruddock stopping here and there to extol yet another wonder of modern yada-yada. But when Buffy suddenly veered towards the front gates, their mood quickly changed. She heard them stop mid-banter, rustle quickly after her.

“Ms. Summers, Ms. Summers,” Ruddock stammered.

“Wait, Buffy!” shouted Polly. “What’s the dealy-yo?”

“Going for a walk," she replied, not breaking stride. "If that's a problem, then it's, uh... well, your problem.”

Her handlers were sputtering breathlessly when they caught up, probably fearing for their jobs. After all, losing the Original Flavor Vampire Slayer on her first night home wasn’t exactly something you wanted to put on the ol’ resume. Feeling merciful (and exhausted), she allowed them to coax her back up the long grassy drive. “Duty” was a strange thing that way. It was as though everyone who ever felt a sense of it shared a sort of secret, unspoken bond.

They bustled her to her private quarters, a small cottage tucked away at the far western edge of the campus. She left them at the front door, where they seemed content to drone on about all the Very Important Meetings they had to attend tomorrow.

Ah, to be young and annoying, she mused.

The house was nice, but not overly so. Its plush furnishings and modest kitchenette were a far cry from her juicy spread in Lazio.  But it also felt homier in some ways, more "lived-in." Buffy busied herself with the mundane, fleeting pleasures of life. She drew a hot bath in the loft's old-fashioned tin tub, and explored the rest of the space to the soundtrack of running water. For a few fretful minutes, she even searched for a bottle of wine, before finally thinking better of it. In a small oak cupboard above the sink, she found a box of strawberry pop-tarts, which she wasted absolutely no time in pillaging. She tried to imagine Dawn putting it there for her, as a sort of weird peace offering. But as she crunched away, she realized how improbable that image was. If anything, she'd ordered someone else to put it there. And in that light, the gesture seemed almost empty, even a parting jab. More than anyone in the world, Dawn knew how much of Buffy’s life was ruled by her impulses, her weaknesses.

Her addictions. She stared hard at the pastry.

And, we know how well that always works out, don’t we?

The bath was short. There was a bottle of bubbles behind the vanity mirror, but she forsook it for a brick of translucent yellow glycerin, which she rubbed obsessively over the place where the nurse’s needle had pierced her chest. Several times she peered down at her frame, wondering at the absence of scars on her 26-year old body. That didn’t seem right, somehow.

Once, she closed her eyes, and tried to remember what Buffy Summers was like at age seventeen. For her generation, seventeen was still a child’s age, a time reserved for excess, and foolishness.

(and fire...)

‘Duty’ wasn’t supposed to be part of the bargain. In some important ways, she’d grown up faster than almost anyone else in the world. It was Merrick Jamison-Smythe who asked her to partake of that particular cup. But it was Rupert Giles who taught her to savor it.

(firefirefirefi....)

Cut it out! she commanded. The voice snapped off, a dog coming to heel.

Afterwards, she wrapped herself in the big fluffy bathrobe hanging from the towel rack, then wandered into the house’s humble media room. Compared to the current era of 65’ hi-def plasma technology, the TV there was pretty teensy and clunky looking. On a plain white shelf nearby, an ancient VCR and a DVD player were stacked under a pair of gigantic, velvety brown 1970’s speakers. Once again, it seemed the whole world was conspiring to convince her she was old.

Despite the set’s advanced age, the stuff on the television was pretty much the same as usual. These days, it was hard to find a corner of the world that didn’t have five-hundred channels or so. The only difference in England was that three hundred of them were showing soccer games instead of basketball, and ninety percent of the rest were broadcasting what seemed to be some mediocre European version of MTV. She flicked through the latter in a daze, catching snippets of drum solos and clumps of gangsta rap. As if to mock her, Billy Idol made a brief cameo, writhing and sucking in his flawless cheeks atop a speeding limo. Click!

Somewhere around channel 412, she stumbled across one of those aerobics workouts, the sort of infomercial they show to sell you a useless training tape. She lingered for a dreamy minute, zoning out on an especially silly looking exercise that seemed to combine stepping backwards with grinning-like-a-dork. Buffy got so lost in the monotony of it, in fact, that she didn’t even notice the girl at first. She was hanging out near the back of the pack, a pale, red-headed waif struggling to keep up with her instructor’s insanely chipper commands: “And RIGHT... and LEFT... and BACK... and CHANGE.” At one point, the poor schlub twisted her ankle the wrong way, and almost fell flat on her butt. None of the other girls seemed to notice. They just kept grinding away, never skipping a beat. The whole thing struck Buffy as very…

Weird.

Right on cue, the TV cut to a closeup of the craziest thing she’d ever seen in her life.

Now, if Buffy Summers were to have taken a step back and examined this bold statement, it probably wouldn’t have turned out to be true. Seeing crazy things was part of the job, after all. In no particular order, she had borne witness to undead cowboys, satanic girl scouts, a horde of killer mimes, an android stepdad, prom-crashing hell hounds, a cat-resurrecting spirit mask, a giant snake with a master’s degree in urban planning, an ancient Incan skank-mummy, a headless Frankenstein, a love triangle between two witches and a werewolf, a love triangle between two Xanders and a vengeance demon, a nasty bout of fish-monster ‘roid rage, an organ-napping puppet, geeks with jetpacks, a gender-bending, brain-sucking hell god, a giant flaming hole in the fabric of time and space, and The Kingdom of Freakin’ Heaven.

And now this: a leg-warmered, leotarded Willow Rosenberg, jazzercising to Taylor Dayne’s 1988 smash dance hit, Tell it to My Heart.

Somehow, it managed to take the cake.