“Does your Dad have to be so…I don’t know….asking questions all the time?” Diane asked as she and Bianca walked to the ice cream parlour just before sunset a week before school started.
“He’s a father that way. Plus it’s almost sunset and also they just finished saving the world…again.” The blond teen tugged at her jean jacket tighter against the impending chill.
“Really? I didn’t know that the world was in danger…”
“Well, it’s not like they have an apocalypse reporter. I think the general public would panic if they knew that the world was in jeopardy every couple of months,” Bianca commented.
“I know I would,” Diane laughed nervously. “How is it that I never knew this about you for years? I mean we were in the same kindergarten.”
“I guess it means you’re special?” Bianca suggested.
“Well my mom always did say I was special,” Diane beamed. “I guess I didn’t really realise just what for.”
“Welcome to the wild world of weird,” Bianca sighed as she opened the door to the ice cream parlour, allowing Diane to enter ahead of her. “I wonder if they have that organic strawberry they had last month…”
Bianca was cut off as she ran into Diane who had stopped short in front of the door. Looking ahead of her friend, Bianca suddenly realised that maybe going to the ice cream parlour was not a good idea tonight.
The booth facing the door held Mark Ryan, possibly the cutest boy at Bianca’s high school. Every girl in school had a crush on him. This was why Diane had stopped dead in the doorway. Bianca pushed her forward a bit.
“Don’t spaz,” Bianca hissed.
“It’s Mark Ryan,” Diane whispered, “of course I’m going to spaz.”
“Just don’t be obvious about it.”
The girls tried to walk casually towards the counter and perused the ice cream flavours available today. Or at least that’s the action Bianca was trying to demonstrate. She was very much looking at the group of boys at Mark’s table who were whispering and looking at them. Bianca’s heart skipped a beat as the whispering stopped and Mark walked towards them.
The older teenager put his arm around Bianca’s shoulders without formality and turned her towards him.
“Graves, it’s been such a long time since I saw you last. What have you been doing this summer? You haven’t been to any parties.”
Bianca blushed. Mark Ryan was talking to her. HER. If she wasn’t so busy trying to think up something cool to say she was certain that she would have melted into a puddle of goo.
“I was forcibly persuaded to languish in summer school,” Bianca finally responded, earning an envious look from Diane.
“Nasty,” Mark responded. “Have you gotten over your emo phase? ‘Cause seriously, you could hang with the right crowd if you tried.”
“Are you the right crowd?” Bianca asked.
“Always have been,” Mark boasted.
“S..s…so M…mark? What did you do this summer?” Diane ventured to say.
Mark turned and looked at Diane for a moment, clearly uncertain who she was. Diane was not on Mark’s radar. “Partied, hung out, the usual.”
“You don’t skateboard anymore?” Diane asked. “It doesn’t look like you got a lot of sun…”
It was that comment that pulled Bianca out of her daze. Yes, Mark Ryan had his arm around her, but this pallor he was sporting was slightly suspicious.
“You always used to skateboard,” Bianca commented, ducking her head out from under Mark’s arm.
“I gave it up. Found better things to do,” Mark responded. “Better people to hang out with,” he said indicating with his head his friends sitting at the booth.
Bianca looked over the friends more carefully. They were all sunless and some of them were looking a little more hungry than she liked.
“You know, Diane, I don’t think I’m hungry for ice cream after all,” Bianca said, taking Diane’s hand and pulling her towards the door. “Let’s get doughnuts instead.”
Diane pulled back. “But I want ice cream. I want to stay.
“I want you to stay too,” Mark half purred.
Bianca dropped Diane’s hand and dug into her pockets bringing out a phone and a cross, things her parents never let her leave the house without. She hit her parents’ number and pressed the cross into Mark’s face before the boy could react.
“What are you doing?” Diane asked, only to have her question answered as smoke started to come off Mark’s face. “Vampire!” The ice cream parlour filled with the screams of Diane and the cashier behind the counter.
On the phone, Buffy answered and called Bianca’s name. It was too bad that by that time Bianca had been forced to drop the phone and try to fend off Mark.
Blocks away, Buffy was instantly in her SUV and speeding towards the ice cream parlour.
___________________________
Andrew looked at the scene before him and sighed. This particular ice cream parlour was where he had met his wife. Maggie was his Princess Leia to his Han Solo. They would never be able to come back here and recall happy memories. Vampire dust covered the floor and what parts of the floor it didn’t cover were spattered with blood. The poor cashier’s blood stained the freezers. These had been fledges, they hadn’t even learned to feed properly yet. The cashier’s body was behind the counter, and Andrew felt some remorse for her death, but it was the other body that was more of a concern for him.
Bianca’s friend, Diane lay there, in a puddle of her own blood, again because the fledge that fed from her did a poor job of it.
Andrew prided himself on being an experienced watcher now, over fifteen years on the job, but this brought a tear to his eye. Soon he’d let the detective in charge of this scene into the store. These two bodies needed to be put in quarantine.
He didn’t know what was worse for Bianca, the fact that she was attacked and now in the hospital from blood loss, or the fact that when she wakes up her parents will have to tell her that her friend is dead.
The door to the store opened and Maggie stepped in.
“Done here?” she asked, her hands on her hips, her badge and gun visible on her waist.
Andrew nodded to his wife, the detective. “They’ll rise again.”
Maggie nodded. “I’ll make sure that either Buffy or Spike get a visitation at the morgue then. You’ll tell Johnny that I’ll be working late tonight?”
“Of course. He knows his mom is an important detective,” Andrew responded with pride.
“I’m going to have to tell the family,” Maggie continued. “I hate that.”
__________________________________
Buffy paced.
She paced as doctors examined her daughter.
She paced as she waited for Spike to show up at the hospital.
She paced because she hadn’t been in time to save Diane.
Finally collapsing into a chair Buffy put her head into her hands and moaned. Yes, she’d lost friends before to vampires but it seemed such a long time ago that she’d lost anyone remotely connected to her family.
Faith and Robin were the last ones to go and that was fifteen years ago.
While it had seemed ridiculous to keep Bianca and Rowan locked up at home for the rest of their lives, Buffy seriously contemplated it there and then in that hospital waiting room. It was so unfair. This was the first friend Bianca had reached out to in such a long time. The Powers were really pissing her off.
And then there was the whole how to tell Bianca issue. By the time Buffy had arrived to dust the vampires, Bianca had already lost too much blood. There was no way the fourteen year old knew that Diane was dead.
Or turned. That would be even worse.
Memories of what happened with Jesse in her first couple of weeks at Sunnydale High flooded her brain. Maybe this was a discussion Bianca needed to have with Xander.
He was the only one that knew this kind of pain.
Buffy looked up to see Spike walking through the doors to the waiting room. In an instant, Buffy was up and in his arms.
“Andrew took his bleedin’ time getting back to the house,” Spike explained. “We need a better emergency sitter.”
Buffy nodded into his shoulder. “They’re cleaning her up. We’ll be taken to her room as soon as they get her there.”
It was Spike’s turn to nod. “What should we tell Diane’s parents?”
Buffy looked up at her husband with a torn look. She’d never had to deal with grieving parents before.
“I honestly don’t know.”
_____________________________________
Bianca woke up with the sensation that someone was petting her blond hair, and an intense pain in her neck.
Flashes of what had happened to her the night before startled her out of her sleepy state. There had been vampires and hitting and blood.
“Look who’s awake,” her mom said happily as Bianca opened her eyes.
“My neck hurts,” Bianca moaned.
“It tends to do that when you get bitten by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing,” Buffy explained. “They were fledglings. You had to have stitches to close it up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s not your fault. Consider it a right of passage. We all have our vampire bites. Auntie Willow, Uncle Xander, Me, I’m not sure about Andrew though…”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“I guess it doesn’t.”
“Where’s Da?” Bianca asked looking around her hospital room.
“It’s noon B,” Buffy explained, assuming it was the lack of blood that made her daughter forget that her father was confined to the house during the daylight hours. “He’s at home with Rowan.”
“Is Diane in the hospital too?”
Buffy knew that this question was coming, but still, she was unprepared. When Buffy didn’t answer right away, Bianca pulled herself up off the pillows of the hospital bed and sat up, facing her mother.
“I’m sorry Button,” Buffy whispered. “She was gone by the time I got there.”
“Gone?”
Buffy nodded, her own tears making an appearance to mirror her daughter’s.
“How can she be gone?”
Buffy sniffled and hugged her daughter, each of them mourning their loss.
______________________________
Once Bianca returned home she stayed in her room for days. Each time she passed the doorway to her eldest daughter’s room Buffy sighed. It was going to take time for Bianca to come to terms with Diane’s death. Both Spike and Buffy had tried talking to her, but clearly she wasn’t ready. As the days passed it looked like the Xander idea was getting better and better.
Her one excursion was Diane’s funeral. Appropriately the day was rainy. Buffy held Bianca’s hand through the entire service, and avoiding the eyes of Diane’s parents. The Slayer was certain that they were wondering why Bianca survived the ‘robbery’ and not Diane. Diane’s sister held a shaking umbrella over her mother as the coffin was lowered into the ground.
Only a handful of people knew that there was nothing but dust in that coffin. Skilful at entering funeral homes in the dead of night since the age of 16, Buffy dispatched Vampire!Diane before the teen even recognised her. It had taken the Slayer an hour of crying before she could go home again and face Bianca.
Bianca was to never know her friend had been vamped. At least she didn’t have that pain.
To Buffy though, this was the scene of her greatest failure. She couldn’t protect Bianca from everything. It was a harsh lesson. She could save the world, but she couldn’t mend her daughter’s heart.
They returned home in silence, and Bianca immediately went to her room, refusing food and even the offered hug from her baby sister looking to do something to cheer up her sister.
“I think I’m going to call Xander,” Buffy told Spike as she walked into the kitchen. “I don’t know anyone else that has dealt with this and not gone psycho.”
“Your pool of people with this experience is rather small, love,” Spike commented.
“He might be able to get her talking to us.”
“There’s a chance. There’s also a chance that she just needs time. You don’t’ have to fix everything all the time. There are some things you can’t fix, Slayer.”
“I didn’t get there in time and Diane died. I didn’t get to Jesse in time and he died.”
“And how did the wonder whelp deal with his loss?” Spike asked.
“He started hating vampires with a passion, even the ones that were good for me, and he became a Scooby.”
“Well I don’t think Bianca wants either of those things,” Spike offered, “I don’t want them for her either.”
Buffy nodded. “Agreed.”
_________________________
A few hours later, concerned that Bianca hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, Buffy took a plate of take out from Spike’s favourite chicken wings place up to Bianca’s room and knocked on the closed door.
“B, honey, I have some food for you. You’ve got to eat something today. Please.”
Buffy listened for a moment before pushing the door open slightly, to check what her ears were telling her. Eyes darting around the room, they confirmed what she sensed already. Bianca wasn’t in her room. Buffy stepped in, and putting the plate down, she found the note she knew would be there in the absence of her daughter.
I only want a normal life.
“SPIKE!”
______________________________________________
Tbc…
[Reviews - 24]
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | 
Chapter or Story
Has been viewed 1505 times
- Text Size +
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | Chapter or Story - Text Size +
Author's Chapter Notes:
Thanks to the great BTL for the betaing.
Disclaimer: Buffy, Spike and the Original Scoobies aren’t mine. All their kids...you bet.
Disclaimer: Buffy, Spike and the Original Scoobies aren’t mine. All their kids...you bet.