Chapter 17
After he made his phone call, Brother Luther begged the group to have patience until the next day. He told them he would return with a representative from the Powers, and that everything would be explained to them then. He was unable to give them any more information as his contact had been, at that time, unaware of all the facts himself. Assuring them all that their patience would be rewarded, he bid them all a good day.
Buffy watched the door that the little monk had gone through long after he had disappeared. She was so concentrated on sorting through her jumbled thoughts that she almost failed to recognise it when another memory change occurred. As she focused on the new memories, her eyes opened wide in horrified shock.
“Ewww,” she stated with great deliberation and amused disgust. Openly focusing her words at her mother, Buffy expanded on her less than pleased reaction. “The other Buffy thinks you and Giles are…um…sneaking around.”
Giles spluttered incoherently, Joyce blustered and blushed, and Buffy, Dawn, and Spike snickered.
Buffy’s comment managed to defuse the emotions that the monk’s visit had created. Each one of them visibly relaxed.
Looking speculatively at her sister, Dawn felt compelled to ask the question she’d wondered about since the monk had mentioned it. “Buffy, how did you strengthen the bond between us?”
“Oh…um…well, about that…” Buffy instinctively turned to her watcher in desperation. How the hell was she going to explain to her mom and her sister that she had basically linked them to a vampire without their knowledge or consent? This could seriously be of the bad.
Giles mentally rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, yes, that’s bloody typical, isn’t it? You get yourself into this mess, then I’m supposed to…Oh, I see what you're trying to do. Tying to deflect your mother’s wrath, are you? Well, not this time, my girl!’
“Buffy claimed Spike as belonging to the Summers family women. She was apparently unaware that a blood oath was not necessary, nor was she aware that the particular ritual she was performing was actually a ma….”
“Thank you, Giles!” Buffy jumped in to cut the watcher off, ‘jeez, can we say over-sharing?’
“You adopted a vampire?” Joyce lifted an eyebrow to emphasize her displeasure at her eldest.
Buffy found herself praying that the big eyed, innocent look still worked on her mother. “Actually, it’s more of a ‘we’ thing than a ‘me’ thing, mom.”
“Sooo, Spike is like my brother now?” Dawn couldn’t restrain her excitement.
Joyce held her hand up, effectively silencing both daughters. “Let me get this straight, please.” Turning to face Buffy, Joyce’s deceptively gentle voice sent warning alarms through the lot of them. “You performed a ritual that you had not bothered to research?”
“Uh…” Buffy was cut off before she could answer.
“Without knowing the risks involved?” Joyce was on a roll, working her way up to a full boil. Buffy’s half-hearted attempts to interject some sort of response were given the same amount of attention as her not speaking at all.
“Er…”
“Without knowing the consequences?” Joyce’s rapid fire questions followed one after the other.
“Um…”
“Without even knowing if it was the right ritual?” Joyce was holding nothing back, Buffy might be the slayer, but she was still Joyce’s daughter.
“Mooooom,” Buffy whined.
Joyce sighed in exasperation. “Even if you didn’t want to ask Rupert for some reason, why didn’t you ask Spike? Surely he knows all about the ritual?”
“Well it happened really fast. It’s not like I had time to tell Spike what I was going to do before I did it,” Buffy pouted.
“Buffy Anne Summers!” Joyce yelled. “Are you telling me that you didn’t even ask him for permission? You never asked him if he wanted this?” If Joyce were a teapot, her whistle would have just exploded.
“Of course he wanted this,” Buffy responded indignantly. Turning to the vampire in question, she slapped him on the arm and hissed, “Tell her, you bleached moron!”
Turning wounded eyes to Joyce, Spike asked her sadly, “Don’t you want me as part of the family, Mum?”
Joyce instantly drew the poor vampire into her embrace. With a wink at Dawn as he spotted her over her mother’s shoulder, she and Spike shared a conspiratorial little grin.
Noting Dawn’s smile, Buffy offered a disgruntled warning to Spike. “Yeah, well, lets see how much smiling you do when she grounds your ass.”
“She can do that?” Spike’s look of abject horror warmed Buffy all over.
~*~*~
The people standing around him looked at him as if he was crazy, but then how often do you see a short, smelly individual wearing a leisure suit and a fedora shaking his fist at the sky while yelling loudly, “What do you mean, ‘damage control’? I had it all set up!”
~*~*~
When Jenny arrived, there had been no need to hide. Spike recognised the scent of the gypsy he had met the night before. Jenny smiled as she greeted everyone until she came face to face with the older slayer for the first time, at which point her smile disappeared completely.
“This is going to cause a huge problem.” Collapsing heavily into the second armchair, Jenny looked around the room as if trying to grasp the magnitude of the situation as she saw it. Never in her wildest dreams had she expected anything like this. She felt like she’d just stepped into the imagination of Jules Verne. Quickly processing the little she knew, Jenny offered a suggestion. “I think you are going to have to bring in the others.”
Quelling their arguments with a quick wave of the hand, Jenny continued. “Willow has the mind of a scientist and she loves to research. Buffy will need to be told because there is no way that Willow will be able to keep a secret of this magnitude from her best friend, and really it is Buffy’s life that this involves.”
“And Xander?” Giles questioned dubiously. He couldn’t believe the lazy brunette would offer much in the way of help.
“Xander reads comic books and is into science fiction movies. He’s probably more knowledgeable about time travel and temporal paradoxes than the rest of us combined,” Jenny told them seriously.
~*~*~
Angel sang his slightly altered lyrics softly as he continued to draw images of the beautiful blond slayer.
“I remember my unlife, blood can be as cold as ice. A shadow of a man; no face in the mirror; crying in the night, the night goes into morning, just another day. Happy people pass my way. Looking in their eyes, I see my memories. I never realized you make me forget them, oh Buffy, well it’s time that you gave without taking, then I’ll keep you with me, oh Buffy, when you kiss me you make me start aching and I’ll have you someday, oh Buffy…”
~*~*~
Buffy, Willow, and Xander crept quietly into the library from the back entrance. They had come to the conclusion that the only way they could know for sure if there was anything between Giles and Buffy’s mom was to check it out for themselves.
The quiet singing from the main part of the library seemed to drift all around them, the acoustics of the room a perfect conduit for amplification. The melody was familiar, but the lyrics…
~*~*~
“Ewww!”
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Angels alterations to the lyrics of Barry Manilow’s Mandy are not meant as a slight to the original lyrics in anyway…and certainly not worth suing me over!