Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue

Welcome to Sunnydale

Los Angeles County, California – Early Summer of 1997

     An antique car rumbled down one of the quieter roads in LA County (as though such a thing existed) at an appreciable speed considering its great age. Even more impressive was it climbing the hills as it was headed away from Los Angeles itself. The Interstate simply wasn't an option for a car that couldn't even manage fifty miles an hour. It was quite a vintage model, a Ford Model T. Though the license plates were modern and labeled the car as being from Massachusetts.

The party of three within the car had driven quite the distance going by those. A radio was embedded in the car's slightly wide dashboard, both of which were a later addition. As were the speakers that sat in the thin doors that had a station local to the area delivering a weather report. Sunny, hot and miserable, as was common to the whole of the southern half of the United States and had been the weather report since Texas four days prior.

The driver of the car's name was Cornelius and he was a wizard. You could tell he was something magic for a simple reason, his car didn't have A/C, but he hadn't sweat a drop, despite his full white beard (which sort of matched his salt and pepper crown) and their being in the southwest. There was also the matter of his eyes, a bright violet that well, glowed.

He had been in an odd hurry to leave the a lot of the South, but especially Texas, muttering the entire time about dark clouds on the horizon of time and something about real insidious evil that couldn't be defeated easily from border to border. He probably should've avoided the place entirely, not that any of its neighbors had better futures, he'd muttered about most of the places they'd been since they left the Boston-Washington Corridor three weeks prior...

It took them a trying amount of time to actually climb the mountains into California as he insisted on the slower and in turn, harder roads. They all managed to marvel at the splendor of the Pacific as a hazy blue line on the distant horizon, it had been over a hundred years since the wizard had last seen it after all and it was the little things when one reached his age and the youngest in the vehicle hadn't seen it at all. Cornelius's complaints about dark futures didn't stop, per say, but they slowed a little bit.

The passenger across from Cornelius in the front of the car was a far younger looking man with rich red hair and gray eyes who was clean shaven. His name was Roland and one of his forearms dangled just outside his side of the car's window as thin trials of cigarette smoke curled up toward the sky, or at least they would have if they weren't violently ripped away from the slowly incinerating tiny stick of tobacco, paper and Gods alone knew what other foul chemicals.

Roland hadn't been paying much attention to his friend's mutterings until they were half way through New Mexico and only then because he noticed the complaints switched from portents of evil every few minutes to the far more mundane heat. It amused Roland, he'd known the wizard for a long, long time and remembered when the wizard was the cause of similar portents. Retirement did funny things to people.

     The final passenger was a young girl named Gale who sat in the back of the car half buried among a veritable sea of cardboard boxes that held as many things in them as could be imagined ranging from the magical (the teapot was a sound-alike for Frank Sinatra) to the thoroughly mundane (the books were often just books). There were many times the number of boxes that the car should've been able to logically house in addition to its human cargo. It was a wizard's car, after all. Gale was a little over five foot and most of the way through being fifteen years old, though she was by no means done growing yet.

Gale wore her own strawberry blonde hair long to the point it pooled around her waist. She'd just finished her first year of high school back east and though it looked like she were ahead in her education that was due to the peculiarities of her birthday which was a few more weeks away on the twenty-fifth of July, deep within the summer holidays.

On time but perpetually behind one of her old classmates once joked in a goodhearted manner. Unlike the two adults in the front of the car, Gale was fast asleep in pretty sharp contrast to their travel induced boredom. The horizon was only interesting for so long and the batteries to her GameBoy were in dire need of replacement.

Roland's only real action was to put what was left of his cigarette out against the palm of his hand with a sharp hiss, as the car didn't have an ashtray. It was a habit he had long meant to abandon and that was his last one. Whereas Cornelius kept his eyes darting around the outside world, ever looking for possible accidents waiting to happen. Be they mundane or otherwise.

     Eventually what remained of the day passed by without much notice as they rolled along. Though they stopped a final time to swap driving duties and refuel the car. Roland always held the view that the wizard didn't have to sleep and shouldn't have trusted him with his antique car, but made no further issue of it when the immortal shut his eyes. It was a few hours after that when a particularly gaudy sign greeted them as the trio reached the border of their final destination. 'Welcome to Sunnydale!' it proclaimed against a background of green and yellow stylized to look like a sunrise. The hills yielded some time ago and the squat, sprawling but small town sat in a valley. The redhead noticed that the sign didn't bother trying to guess at the town's population. Ominously declaring it to be in flux. He slowed the car to a crawl, even for it, to just… stare for a minute or so. It may as well have been a different world in terms of contrast.

While it was by no means 'rural', with LA just over the rise; it was certainly 'quaint' for lack of a better word. Like most towns that sat ringed by mountains, a dense fog pooled around the valley that Sunnydale sat in, broken up by the squat and mostly low standing buildings of the town. The tallest buildings were lost to the horizon and fog consumed the base of one of the town's water towers. Off in the distance he could barely make out the existence of a tall sea crane, which looked most out of place.

"Where the fuck is this, Sleepy Hollow?" He intended his comment to be spoken to the open air and little else. Gale hadn't looked up from her GameBoy since she woke up, the muted sounds of Pokemon Blue occasionally making its way to the front of the car as one of the boxes had helpfully offered a string of double A's.

As his initial shock wore off, the car rolled on. Occasionally if he listened harder he'd pick up the sound of music from the fragile ear phones that were perched on Gale's head, attached to a battered, blue Walkman. Roland had long since turned off the radio, until they figured out the frequencies for the state it simply wasn't worth the time as one could only listen to the weather and news so many times in his opinion.

"You've been to Sleepy Hollow, my friend. It was both smaller and quieter." Cornelius's voice was gruff as the older man shot up, awake and oddly alert for someone who had been sleeping deeply just as the car came to a stop outside a bland, thoroughly American townhouse that sat alone for a few yards in either direction. The wizard noted that it was an oddly specific shade of yellow in need of changing as he climbed out of the passenger side of his car and then opened the rear door on muscle memory.

     Not a single box moved more than an inch as Gale clambered her way out of the vehicle to stand next to the wizard, her brown eyes were bright with the vigor of life as she took in the house, looking a combination of underwhelmed and annoyed in equal parts. She'd vied for Los Angeles proper for hours in an impassioned speech, at least for a child.

Roland had won her over with vague promises of neigh constant weekend trips down to the sprawling metropolis. It wasn't that far away after all, only a couple hours. He'd be there most of the time himself anyway, working at a place his old boss back east had a friend at and put in a good word for him and his work ethic. Protestants got billed with the cliché, Roland lived the cliché. When he wasn't hunting monsters, anyway.

Cornelius reached into the vehicle and retrieved a couple of boxes, they ballooned rather imperceptibly as he did so to their normal size, well, some of them did anyway.

"You all foreign?" A woman of about five feet with mousy brown hair walked up to the driver's side of the car and stared Roland down with a curious eye.

Roland himself looked up from the car as he locked the antique's drive side door across to the woman in the middle of a blink. 

"No, I'm not." His accent wasn't too dissimilar to hers, Western American, the sort of generalized accent that most people thought that Americans overall sounded like due to Hollywood movies. It was practiced, but you'd have to have known him for years to know that. 

"and you are?" Cornelius spoke up from the opposite side of the car as he filled his hands with boxes. The wizard stopped his extraction long enough to hand a lighter one to Gale who had pocketed her toy and was standing by listlessly, best to make sure she put her own things away, in fairness.

"Susan Fitzgerald, I'm the head of the neighborhood HOA. I live at 1628." She introduced herself, almost preening at her title and pointed across the street to a specific shade of blue house with wide open windows, the lights were on and did a bit to illuminate the front yard, even.

"Gods preserve me." Cornelius caught himself before he said that part aloud, at least. "New England." He inflected an accent of RP English. "Salem, specifically. Small town to the north of Boston, you may have heard of it." He managed a ghost of a smile and held out a hand to shake.

Susan blinked, whatever she was expecting, she certainly wasn't expecting a British accent. She nodded and shook the wizard's hand before she turned her gaze to Roland who had crossed the car with several boxes of his own precariously stacked between his arms. He set them on the bottom step of the house's short three-step stairwell.

"What about you?" Susan was almost accusatory as she fed her curiosity but her tone remained friendly.

"Across the way. Came here for work down in Sunnyvale." Roland said with a shrug, as a life-long urbanite he'd never lived under a home owner's association and the horror stories of the tiny dictatorships were familiar to him thanks to a combination of his suburbanite colleagues back east and general paranoia of putting that much power in the hands of 'little' people. The greatest tyrants were often the most genial and polite of people.

"Balmer." Gale smiled sweetly at Susan as she turned her attention to the teenager; it was the sort of smile that you could tell that you were being insulted by its use. Gale's accent was quite 'Southern' in its sound. Not quite the incomprehensible jargon of the Deep South, but definitely a passable North Virginian drawl that was common to hear in the two states that formed the top of the South, though inflected with too much rotation on her "r" and a tendency to drag out certain vowel sounds as was common to where she was from.

"Where's that?" Susan's gaze turned into a glare at the teen as she stepped up on to the sidewalk near Cornelius who chuckled as he fished keys to the house out his pockets. He'd bought the house shortly before they'd road-tripped to it, the Realtor had neglected to mention HOAs, how kind of them… He'd have to curse their house with frogs or something.

"Baltimore," Roland cast Susan a withering sort of look that caused the woman to back up half a step. Astonishingly few people got to interact with his daughter in the negative and live, literally or metaphorically. Susan for her own sake recovered quickly but realized when she'd lost and a bubbly friendliness retook her tone.

"Well, welcome to Sunnydale. I'm sure you'll fit in just fine." bunch of weirdos, the mousy woman thought as she walked away. She'd inevitably corner the homeowner, she was pretty sure it was the older man, and go over the rules and bylaws and how the only landscaper allowed was the one owned by her nephew and the limited color selection available for outside of the houses.

After Susan left none of the three of them gave much thought to their Neo-feudal overlord as they unpacked the car. All in all there were about three hundred more boxes than the car should've been able to hold and it took them several hours to move them all with the two adults carrying on well into the evening after Roland shooed Gale off to a bed who shrugged and immediately pulled the small electronic toy out and resumed her quest for Pokemon mastery.

"I'm surprised there isn't a tower." Roland commented as the last boxes were set down which then organized themselves at a wave of Cornelius's hand, neatly piled by size and only half of them ballooned to their proper size.

"Stereotypes aside, I looked for one but those won't be in fashion for about twenty five more years, at least." Cornelius snapped his fingers and a few of the boxes opened, simultaneously the curtains shut themselves as a variety of items ranging from knickknacks to heavy leather-bound books flew from the cardboard and lined themselves up neatly along shelves ranging from the coat-rack just behind the door to a massive bookshelf that held many more books than seemed logical. Paradox? That was a video game company, right? Wait, no, they wouldn't exist for another few years.

"Tea?" The wizard offered as he directed a few more of the boxes to move into the kitchen otherwise unaided where they swiftly set themselves up. The stove and refrigerator were already there, standards, though looking at it he'd be replacing the gas trap with something electric as soon as possible. An antique kettle set itself on the stove and another flick turned the burner over to start the process of boiling water whilst the remainder of the pots and pans found cabinets they liked and settled into. Imagine that scene from The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin is packing, but in reverse. It was like that, the work of a practiced master of their Craft. 

Roland checked his watch, a cheap looking digital Timex. He set it to Pacific Standard when they crossed into Nevada. "Caffeine at midnight? Some of us are mortal." The teapot had started singing, literally.

Cornelius chuckled at the comment, which Roland amended, "some of us are mortal-ish. I decline, it's late, good night." The younger man exited the kitchen and walked up the stairs to find a bedroom as the wizard removed the pot from the stove looking amused… 

Here we go again, the wizard thought as he sipped at his tea. Perhaps they'd get further this time.

Chapter Text

The Other New Girl

Sunnydale, California – Early Autumnal Semester of 1997

So, this is it. Gale thought to herself from her seat within her uncle's newest car that sat stopped at the curbside of the voluminous campus she was doomed to enter daily for the next few years, to spend multiple hours a day within, surrounded by people who would probably come to hate her if they didn't already. Today was the day and a continent's length away from what used to be called 'home' that she started at a new school, in a new state and it was… public.

Gale honestly didn't think about the difference all that much. Especially considering how rare it was for someone in her income bracket to attend private schooling, secular or otherwise. From her own limited understanding, public schools tended to be a lot better in areas where people actually owned their houses. That wasn't really the case back east like it was here, where it was apparently the norm for people to not be flat broke. She only half-guessed that some places had survived the collapse of the industrial economy better than others.

As she sat there panicking quietly to herself, she remembered that she toured the campus with her father a few weeks before the school year started, albeit from the outside. The first thing she had noticed was that it was an absolutely sprawling in comparison to the smaller school she had previously attended. 

It had wrought iron gates on rickety rollers that squeaked when they slid into place with a clangor. The somewhat rusted things were painted a gaudy green and served as wards to keep the population in. A school, a prison? There wasn't much difference, she supposed.

Gale had learned pretty early on that adults were more interested in shaping you into what they thought were appropriate facsimiles of themselves than into anything you yourself wanted to be. The education was a nice side-effect and all, but the real point was to keep a bunch of hormonal teens in check and most especially to crank out factory workers and secretaries, at least by design. Just like elementary school was meant to start the process.

The gates she so lamented were around 'back', maybe along a side, she honestly forgot where exactly. Where she was now, this was the front door, where a grand stone and brick facade that welcomed its students stood. 'Sunnydale High School', it proudly proclaimed engraved in stucco, while below the letters hung a grand banner in Latin further proclaiming all welcome who sought to learn.

Because every school had to have a pretentious Latin motto that almost none of the student body could read… Provehite puellae honorae. That was her old one. She had committed it to memory rather quickly, something about the current language of magic was in itself, enchanting to her. The new motto would have to grow on her, it felt like too much of an invitation presently.

Gale adjusted the strap on her bag as she finally climbed out of her uncle's car. She was so glad he decided to not bring his antique, she would have never recovered from the social assassination of being related to the weirdo who drove around in cars older than her peer group's parents, never mind the students themselves.

"Don't catastrophize, it's your first day, it will be fine." Cornelius, who used a word that wouldn't be popularized for another couple decades, waved a hand at her as he turned the wheel of the metallic blue car to point the tires away from the curb, though it remained still. "Try and make a friend or two; oh and don't forget your charm. I'll be along to pick you up." She reached back into the car and palmed a necklace that he held up to her across the gear box. She didn’t believe him about picking her up, he had a poor perception of time. The trinket was a cloudy white crystal that hung on a string of round, wooden beads suspended around an elastic band, at least, she thought it was elastic. She slipped it over her head without a second thought becoming part of her chosen uniform. He pulled away shortly after, leaving her quite alone despite being surrounded by people.

Before Gale left the house that morning her father had tried to remind her that she didn't need to wear a uniform here; that she could've worn whatever she wanted. She nodded along as she brushed the dust from the pleated maroon skirt and adjusted her cream colored sweater vest under which was an equally maroon button-down, in turn she also wore a cream colored tie that you could only see the very top of.

The knee length socks were maroon too, but she folded them over so they didn’t reach her knees. It obviously wasn't fashionable in Gale's eyes, but that was the point where it was enforced. She personally thought it a horrid clash of colors that didn't really mesh well, but it was more important that it was one of the few things she owned that wasn't old or handed down, or both. The matching maroon blazer with the annoying crest of the school it was actually for hung in her new closet at home but she only wore that in the winter usually, not that southern California had proper winter as she understood it.

Whatever. She banished her uncle's weird fake accent (he ‘normally’ sounded vaguely Bostonian) from her mind for the time being and moved on by about three feet before she stopped dead among the sea of moving teenagers and parents headed into the doors of the school as her greatest enemy clawed at her fragile heart with an ironclad grip. Suddenly she was afraid. 

Neither word nor movement came easily and when her footfalls resumed it was slow going. One foot in front of the other, counting them softly in a numerical dirge. The bottom of the stairs arrived sooner than later and with a halting breath she stepped up on to the first of them. If she heard the snickers of her classmates, she missed them.

And why not laugh? A tomato covered in milk was walking up to their school. 

Despite the petty worry that etched itself into her mind, no one laughed as Gale walked through the doors a few seconds later into the throngs of students. In fact, no one really noticed her at all. A few faculty members nodded at her as she passed by but among her peers there was instead a buzz about a blonde girl who had just transferred from a school down in Los Angeles proper. Apparently that blonde had been thrown out for setting the school on fire and the rumor mills were already buzzing that she was going to the same to their fair school. Gale hadn't been in Sunnydale long enough to have an opinion on exotic Los Angeles blondes so she didn't partake in the rumors, instead she searched for the offices.

It took Gale fifteen minutes to find said offices labeled 'administration'. It was a long room with a galley style counter top that had a secretarial pool behind it and everything was either off-white or a ghastly shade of red that was nearly scarlet. 'Zero Period' was only forty-five minutes and she wasn't the first person there on the student side to arrive so Gale did the reasonable thing and sank into a chair and waited, though that wait wasn't very long.

Robert Flutie was already tired and it was only 9 AM. That was the sacrifice of the first days of the Semester. Get here at four and get all the ducks in a row. Some people think it's easy being the principal of a school, but no, it's not. It was very managerial, both in the negative and the positive aspects. Robert looked over the papers from the Archdiocese of Baltimore that had been faxed over again. Copies of the second permanent record he'd be looking at today.

He waved the first of his new transfer students out with an inspirational message that he thought she bought for the most part, or rather he hoped. You see, Principal Flutie believed in restorative and limited discipline and he thought it important to remember that teenagers were still barely children who had their whole lives ahead of them… and yes, he'd read the reports from Hemery, he knew exactly what it was Buffy Summers had killed when she burned down her school's gym.

It's why he didn't care and why he was a little amused when she corrected herself out of some fear of being discovered. Kids these days really did think the adults were stupid, he guessed. But the way that Flutie saw it was simple, if he was lucky she wouldn't have to burn the gym down here. He hadn't suffered any vampire weirdness of late and aside from a few tragic and unexplained deaths over the years… He shuddered at the thought, normal people didn't think like that.

Still, that was but one student. Robert pushed a button down on a black telephone with too many other buttons on it (the school didn't have that many departments) that sat on his desk, one of the cheaply made but expensively priced office models that people would forget what they looked like soon as they were replaced by cellular phones.

"Alice, you can send in miss Karling." That was a funny last name, Flutie thought, but who was he to judge considering his own...

They say that first impressions are everything. The first time that Buffy Summers saw Gale, the other girl didn't even know she existed, as she too busy looking at her own shoes to notice. The first time that Gale saw Buffy Summers however, it was like the heavens roared, the stars aligned and all the air in the room was suddenly too hot to breathe, but that did not happen until a bit later.

In the mean time, Gale was well in Buffy's wake by the time that she stood up out of her self-imposed doubtful stupor at the insistence of one of the secretaries behind the tall bench who ushered her into the principal's office. She didn't consider it a sentence of doom as she sat down in front of the cheaply made desk that looked like an IKEA product in an equally cheaply made chair that also looked like an IKEA product. She missed the handmade furniture of her previous school already.

"Good Morning." Robert led with a simple statement and Gale nodded her ascent that it was, for the moment at least, a good morning. "Welcome to Sunnydale High, Gale. It is my sincere hope that you enjoy your time with us these last three years of your grade school education. Now, before I let you go, we have a few minor things to discuss relating to your previous institution's warnings and recommendations that I certainly hope will not be a problem here." 

Gale felt one of her eyebrows going upward in imitation of something her uncle did whenever he was amused. Robert mistook this for an inquisitorial look and so he continued, "It says here that you threatened a teacher, would you like to explain that to me in your own words?" Robert kept his tone even and he did not speak with anger, he'd read the rest of her paperwork as well, reports from a councilor who was apparently also a nun and was disturbed by how thorough they had been. He had some idea of her previous school and home life. He made a mental note to sign her up for sessions with Stephen.

Gale blinked exactly once before she spoke very clearly without an ounce of sarcasm in her tone. "Well, sir, I told the good sister that if she touched me with that godforsaken yardstick that I would shove it where no man had ever been. However, sir, I only said that after she told me she intended to strike me with it." 

Robert blinked a couple times. He wasn't expecting that sort of straight-forward honesty. It wasn't that he thought teens were natural liars, in fact he thought they were very bad liars, as most people were; but it was always interesting in an odd way to hear someone hang themselves in regards to their own transgressions. Besides, it was the nineties! They didn't hit students anymore, it wasn't allowed and for good reason.

Principal Flutie also didn't expect Gale to sound so… well, foreign. As though she'd stepped out of a Civil War period piece. Maybe he was just used to Western American. It took him a few seconds to collect himself as a result.

"Well, Gale, we don't do that sort of thing here so I don't think we'll have any problems. Certainly if you have any problems with a teacher threatening you, you come here immediately and it will be sorted." He tore the report in half and tossed in the trash on top of the two haves of Ms. Summers' record before he scribbled something on a sheaf of blank paper and passed it to the girl. "You probably missed first period, this will cover you for second, once again, welcome to Sunnydale, Gale."

Gale decided she liked Robert. The poor girl.

Chapter Text

Conversations

Sunnydale, California – 1997

As the sun rose over Sunnydale for yet another day, to the incurious eye nothing had changed on Revello Drive since the arrival of its newest residents some weeks before. Some of them had come from within California, others from further away. The houses sat in the same pristine and unmarred rows of single family houses that were very same-y in nature. All of them of the same pallet of mute colors mandated by a petty council of seven people who thought they had supreme rule over everyone who lived between the two stop signs that formed the imaginary borders of the road established by their rules.

Naturally, Cornelius had painted his new house immediately outside of the boundaries of their covenant and paid no heed to their complaints. Miss Fitzgerald across the road was personable enough when she wasn’t in council meetings deciding things that had no bearing on people who did not sign their blood covenant, which he certainly had not done and thus she had no power over his household regardless of how the off-green sides walls now offended her eye sight and specifically her eye sight... As was carefully explained to her by a town official when she’d lodged her complaints down at city hall. Marvelously, nothing else had come of it yet.

The thunder of quickened footsteps caused him to raise his attention from where he was in the house’s family room; which the bookshelves and overstuffed furniture within had made themselves comfortable since the move in. There was a long sofa with an ottoman, two chairs, one rocked and the other did not which was stuffed and a coffee table made of genuine marble laden with fine literature and also a remote to a small television that sat on a smaller table made of peak a few feet away from it near the wall furthest from the windows which were richly curtained with velvet.

Gale appeared a few seconds later, hopping on one leg as she pulled a shoe on one-handed. Such was the way of the especially energetic sometimes, he supposed.

“Oh, good. Your father’s gone down to Los Angeles and won’t be back for several hours. We are going to have a talk.” Cornelius looked up from a book in Gale’s direction.

Gale stopped in her tracks, her head tilted to one side as though amused, “Are we now?”

"Yes, we are. Whether you listen or not is up to you, however, I feel it important to let you know what we're up against." Cornelius put the book he had been reading down and invited the teen into the room with a wave that said “listen” without using the word.

To her credit, Gale stepped into the room... and sat on the edge of the coffee table because she knew it annoyed him. If he wanted to pseudo-parent, he got to deal with the same things her parents did.

“I have an important job for you, my dear. As the school year has begun, I want you to do your best to endear yourself to the girl who lives across the road.” Cornelius pressed his hands together and stared at her, his violet eyes gleamed with an intelligent compassion underlain by a colder emotion that Gale couldn’t quite put her finger on. She counted him lucky that they were so blue they color shifted.

“Okay… why?” Gale hadn’t expected things to be carefree, she found they seldom were whenever her parents decided to up stakes and follow the mad wizard across from her on his wild adventures. Of course her mom probably didn’t know about her dad’s latest mad venture, which brought hilarious and somewhat dark thoughts to her mind. She could probably put some effort into that if she felt the need.

“Because being a chosen hero is a miserable and lonely experience visited upon people because the gods have an ill sense of humor.” Cornelius said very flatly with no room for argument. “But also, as another friendless new transfer you have an advantage of being an equally unknown quantity in which to invest. Besides, you sound foreign and therefor interesting.”

“That’s a weird way to put it, you know.” Gale's eyes widened and she glared at him for making fun of her accent. She idly toyed with the fringes of her perfectly combed hair afterwards as something else crept into her heart. The strands floated ethereally back into position, undisturbed. “and what do you want out of this?” Gale didn't mean for it to come out as an angry hiss but he started it.

“Nothing, yet. You also get access to this.” Cornelius held up a strip of black and silver plastic as he spoke, cultivating loyalty in an irreverent consumer simply meant giving access to the funds to acquire the new and shiny.

“Cool, bribery!” Gale snatched the charge card faster than a bolt of lightning and set her eyes to inspecting it, she was pleasantly surprised that it had her name on it; she also wondered how he got this passed her parents. “What’s the limit?” Keep it simple, yeah?

Cornelius chuckled and thought it all the better to integrate her in with the largely upper middle class town. “There is no limit, please spend wisely.” He doubted she would but the benefit of his very long life was indeed, vast wealth.

Gale squealed and punched the air in response. Ah, to be so energetic.

“Now, there are certain rules and I’m going to tell you a few things that are going to color your perception. I advise that you firmly remain yourself in the face of foresight.”

“Weird ass predestination.” Gale muttered in countenance.

“Predestination is a concept that affirms free will does not exist, that all things end in a preordained manner from which there is no escape. The word you’re looking for is precognition, which also is surely not correct. No, I have been made privy to certain things, they may, or may not happen and they may or may not happen in the same order that I have been made familiar with." He stopped for a second to breathe.

"I am trying to arm you so that you’re aware of what sort of pit of devilry, rather more literally than usual that I’m sending you into. Also, Gale, under no circumstances do you tell your father… Lest our goals be waylaid by his knight-errant nature.” Cornelius wasn’t a dramatic speaker when he didn’t want to be, it was not a speech, he kept his voice the sort of flat toned that was all about information and not showmanship.

Gale thought it funny, the order not to tell her dad. She’d absolutely tell him every word that Cornelius told her; and so he told her, in as explicit detail as he could manage with his own limited information, over which her horror and occasional amusement quietly grew at exactly what it was he expected her to survive in addition to the trials and tribulations or petty drama and examinations... Gale laughed to herself on the way of the room, a dark and mirthless sound. For such a wise man he was very foolish sometimes.

Sunnydale, California – 1997

It had been two days since that conversation. The last rays of the sun slipped below the horizon and darkness consumed the streets of Sunnydale with a ravenous hunger as the pecking order changed in an instant. As the mortal citizenry retired to their 'safe' homes and the night life gained new, and old, players. A constant undertone of paranoia and fear was palpable in the air, you could almost taste it. Which was funny, because the nightlife wasn't entirely lethal. No predator species deliberately rendered its prey extinct after all.

Cornelius sat on his porch sipping a coffee. The drink was warming but had no affect on him otherwise. It was always sunny in Sunnydale. He found this disconcerting. Also, the house hadn't come with a sun porch, but now it had one. Thus spake, thus it was. He supposed it would be of similar use for mechanical light, though those were few, with the illumination of the night left to homes and the moon.

"What breed do you reckon the locals are?" Roland's question preceded his arrival by a few seconds as he stepped out of the house holding a mug of likewise steaming liquid. The libations of the nocturnal. His question was certainly aggressive, but he would not have asked it about anyone living.

"Well," Cornelius sipped before he answered in full. "They certainly aren't homo sanguinaris. The Kindred are not so casual in their feeding habits. Not to mention they make these ones look like kittens. As comparisons go, they certainly dare not so casually create more without their king's permission as these lot do. Of course, I dare not speak so flippantly were these 'real' vampires. Whatever they are, we are dealing with I rather say 'lesser' in an order of magnitude."

"Thought the title was Prince." Roland practically spat the word out as he sank into a suspiciously new lawn chair. It glowed subtly.

"Yes, Princeps Noctirum, provided one agrees with that organization which so thoroughly misuses the tongue of my birth." Cornelius drained his cup as Gale bounced her way up the stairs apparently unphased by the new addition to their dwelling, knowing better not to look too closely.

Across the street, a door closed.

"You're late." Roland groused, to her credit Gale nodded apologetically as she walked passed him in silence. When he had learned what the wizard next to him had looped his daughter into, he was not amused. "I wonder if she's crestfallen yet..." His words fell softer and quiet.

"Hm? One day certainly isn't enough to break her spirit I hope. Rather cross she told you." Cornelius sighed, what an annoyance...

Roland's nose flared ever so slightly, a shadow of animosity long held before it subsided. "Annoyed? That's my daughter your schemes have endangered."

"Possibly endangered." Cornelius corrected, "I remind you that you invited her to come." As he spoke, a platter laden with small cakes phased into creation as though it had always been there.

Roland turned his head to actually face Cornelius, "Who exactly was I 'supposed' to leave her with? Her mother is on an expedition until the end of the year, which even happened because Gale agreed to it. We respect her opinion more than you do, it would seem." He was more indignant than he was hostile and stressed the 'we'.

"Perhaps." Cornelius nodded in response, acquiescing that much. He offered a cake, which Roland accepted.

A shuffling of noise from within the doorway preceded "If you don't respect me-" Gale's voice and her coming, "I won't do it." She closed with a tone of underlying annoyance as she stepped on to the porch lacking in her school bag and her blazer removed. She grabbed a cake unprompted and bit it in half in one go. "She's a very nice girl and I'm not a monster like you are." There was a barb in there, deliberate and targeted. She could be every bit as mean as he could with one millionth of the lifespan.

Cornelius sighed, "You are both correct, it was a volatile request and potentially dangerous beyond mere emotional trauma and should have been discussed. However, what's done is done," he changed the subject. "What did you learn today?"

"That there's a Nosferatu living under the church." Gale intoned plainly as she finished her nibble. Roland choked on his, sputtering as he did so while Cornelius's eyes sparked with something distant and viciously cold.

"What!?" Roland managed to sputter at last, though it had been no longer than a few seconds.

"There is at least one real vampire here." Gale repeated, as though that was her original sentence. "I overheard the librarian talking about it with our neighbor when I was in there doing my homework. Apparently no one ever goes in there. Weird, it's homely." What was weird here? The haunted occult library or the teen who liked it?

"You are very sure, Gale?" Cornelius's question came as he ruminated, fingers pressed together as he sank deeper into thought. "That he mentioned it by name?"

"Exact words are a little fuzzy, I don't speak British, but yeah, name dropped it and everything." Gale picked at her nails, it was a stress response. "Apparently he goes by the title of 'The Master'. I'd tell you more but the librarian stopped talking about the same time I looked up from my work and asked for a book. He jumped so high you'd think I hit him. I think he forgot I was there. Same for Buffy, that's her name by the way."

"Hm..." Cornelius slid further into thought still, falling silent. A 'real' vampire? That was different, and horrifying. If Miss Summers nailed one with a stake it would do little to nothing but pin it to the ground... At least as far as he knew. Sure, no mage worth his avatar was threatened by them but none the less he turned an eye skyward wondering just how many things he'd been told that were lies. He made a mental note to buy a good quality ax, just in case.

Roland let his comrade finish his own thoughts before he spoke, "Your school's librarian forgot there were students in his charge?" An odd change of topic, perhaps but he did care about the quality of her education, if the sixteen hour days in unforgiving work back east had been anything to go by to pay for it

"Yep." Another cake vanished alongside the single word answer.

"Even by our standards that's weird. Further still, the hell does a school librarian have to do with the occult." Roland switched the conversation back half way in his own way and it was rhetorical in regards to Gale's answering.

Gale shrugged and went back inside, her job done leaving the two adults to their own devices. It was a little passed seven and the night was young and she had no desire to be snacked on by any form of vampire. Unconsciously almost she gripped at her little charm and it thrummed with vulgar power at the thought.

A few minutes after Roland went in as well, and was very sure to mutter a few invocations of his own to various saints and his words echoed a mighty power not so dissimilar to magic.

Cornelius meanwhile stood up and went for a walk. Nothing bothered him, but then again there was little around to bother him. No vampire was interested in old meat, except perhaps the very desperate, no? Regardless they were in short supply. He reached the end of Revello Drive before he saw something in the corner of his eye and turned to meet whatever it was.

No one was there.

Yet, the hairs on the back of his neck stood to attention and every pore opened up as something deep inside his mind screamed at him to run. Instead, he snapped his fingers and summoned fire into a palm. The crackle of the flaming orb broke the relative silence of the night in his residential neighborhood and the orange glow illuminated at least as well as the electric lamps that were too few...

Somewhere, a dog barked. He sighed and dismissed the flame with a thought, as though it never were. Maybe this place was getting to him after all. Unbeknownst to him, the 'something' he had seen slunk silently back into the shadows, as what looked like a young lady in a uniform not so different from Gale's emerged at the other end of the street a few seconds later with her brow furrowed with a look of concern and darted away with the wizard none the wiser... and Darla wasn't the only person, vampire or otherwise, who saw that display.

From her bedroom window, Buffy Summers wondered just what in the hell that was in regard to the old man from across the street. She hadn't spoken to him, though he had dropped off a pie like someone out of an old movie when they'd first moved in. She had an unfortunate feeling that'd be necessary sooner rather than later. If only to see if he was another potential threat or a potential ally in the weirdness that had become her life lately. She leaned toward the first out of self-taught and hard learned survival instinct...

Neither mage nor Slayer saw one another again that night. Buffy wasn't particularly interested in chasing down someone whose name she didn't even know and Cornelius wasn't doing anything else bizarre as far as she knew. For his own part, fireball aside, what he had intended to be a bit of a patrol turned into a walk around the block before he felt his age, as the last few thousand years made him tire more quickly than his juniors.

Not to mention things that gnawed at the edges of his vision, ever hungry for reasons that man nor vampire could even imagine. Well, maybe some of them could, rumor had it they were mages once. Any mage worth their avatar indeed and perhaps he wasn't anymore.

The remainder of the evening went by silently for the neighbors of Buffy Summers, their houses kept safe by her extracurricular activities well into the single digits on the clock. The next morning, the sun rose and the pecking order changed again as those who dwelt in the night slept a sleep so deep as to be likened to death...

The house at sixteen thirty-two sat quiet come morning, Roland left early, Cornelius slept in. Gale bounced around the upper floor to the tune of a pop song that rang through that old faded blue Walkman. Whether she slept or not, who knew but a watching god, and those were in short supply too.

Gale was pulled out of her routine when she heard a knock at the door between tracks. Landing with the grace of a bipedal cat after taking the stairs two at a time on the way down she stood up, worked the nonexistent wrinkles out of her blazer and smoothed her hair as she wondered who it was because no one called at 6:45 AM. She opened it to see Buffy Summers, radiant and bathed in sunlight. Gale wanted to cry.

"Good morning!" Buffy had the brightest smile she'd ever seen and that urge to weep got stronger. "I was wondering, since we're neighbors and in the same year, would you like to go to school together? We can walk or I can beg my mom." There was something in that sweet musical tone that Gale missed, it wasn't mean per say, but it was searching, inquisitorial almost.

Gale swallowed. "Sure." She was certain that she stuttered, she didn't, but her voice was very soft. Gale fumbled her bag's strap as she pulled it from the coat rack, it landed with a thud before she managed to swing it over her shoulder. Why were things that were easy, hard? "Uh, I'm Gale, by the way, Gale Charles." The easiest way to anglicize her name, she found, was for whom it was named after.

"Buffy Summers, nice to meet you, Gale. Officially I mean, let's not count yesterday, yeah?"

Gale felt an existential pit of doom form in her stomach as she nodded. "Sure, fresh start. Nice to meet you, Buffy."

It was going to be a very long year.

Chapter Text

Fast Friends

Sunnydale, California – 1997

"So what brings you guys to Sunnydale?" Buffy's question pulled Gale out of a dissertation on the themes of a book she'd never read about a dragon and a magic ring.

Gale's temper flared with indignity for a second over it, "uh, work, I guess? My uncle's a wizard." It never occurred to her that wasn't a very normal sentence, much like how her fury never reached her eyes. "He convinces my dad into agreeing with his weird ideas all the time."

"What, like Merlin?" That Buffy wasn't as shocked as she thought amused Gale enough to put a small smile on her face.

"Like the Necromancer." Gale ran a finger over an errant thread in her blazer and it vanished. Maybe it had always been like that, she took very good care of her clothing after all.

"Who?"

"It's from a book." Gale sighed and muttered something about uncultured cheerleaders. "It's called The Hobbit if you want to read it."

"Oh! I know that one, that guy knew C.S. Lewis." Of course a pseudo-messianic heroine would like the lion. Of course.

Gale facepalmed, the word probably wouldn't exist itself for at least another ten years. "Yeah, he knew the lion guy," she emphasized and failed to notice how petty she sounded.

"Hey, now you can't say that cheerleaders are uncultured." Buffy's easy smile made her squirm not that Gale would ever admit that.

'How the​?' Gale didn't say anything, rather she nodded in silent agreement. Keep her thoughts to herself, that was a lesson she was glad she learned sooner rather than later.

"Oh," Gale plucked up the courage to speak after a few seconds of not quite awkward but not quite amicable silence. "My dad's a weirdo who likes to meet my friends. Are you okay with that?" If they were friends.

"Sure, you can come over tonight so he can flirt with my mom again."

"He did what?" The shrill tenor that entered Gale's voice could've been used to beat someone.

"Yeah..." Buffy tried not to think about it herself as she found it weird to think about.

"He's married." Gale practically hissed. A touchy subject perhaps, or a severe misunderstanding.

"So is my mom. Kinda. Where's yours by the way?" Buffy hadn't meant the question to offend her, though she'd figured out quickly that Gale was... neurotic. But what really got her attention the most was how every ounce of color drained from Gale's face...

"Hi, I'm Amy." A bright voice off to her left pulled Gale out of a daydream that was more interesting than health class.

"Er, I'm Gale." Gale held out a hand and marveled how warm Amy's was when they shook lightly. It wasn't fully natural, enhanced somehow. Gale's breath nearly caught when she finally turned her head. The girl across from her was... well, Gale shunted that thought from her mind, it wasn't proper.

"Not Gail?" The way Amy rolled the other pronunciation off her tongue bothered Gale on a deeper level than reached her face.

"Well, you see," Gale retreated inward and hid behind her voluminous hair. Her hands darted forward to gripped at a pencil over top her desk. "Dad wanted a boy." Gale kept her response measured and her voice as close to neutral as possible. The pencil didn't snap but it certainly bent.

"Oh, I'm sorry." Amy's apology shook something else in Gale and the pencil snapped.

"No, no... It's fine." Gale's voice fell an octave or two and she stared at the obliterated calligraphy tool instead of toward her classmate. "I know a magician." Gale fell silent after that as something tore at her heart, a gnawing feeling of helpless dread intermingled with an inflection of guilt and shame.

She really needed to shut up about that. Stupid masquerade and its stupid laws. That Amy didn't look at her like she was mad comforted her a tiny bit. "What about you?"

Amy paled rather like Gale's own had earlier that very morning, though lesser in intensity and she didn't notice it.

"My mom's a witch." Amy said very softly at last after a long pause. That she got it out at all impressed upon Gale as she understood that sort of fear. She also nodded along as Amy rambled off how great her mother was as well. She understood the mental gymnastics that called for affection too.

Toward the front of the room their teacher overlooked their whispered conversation, though he noticed when the pencil snapped. Doctor Gregory wrote down a note on a post-it before he carried on as though nothing had happened.

Class wound down a few minutes later, surprisingly mature on the subject matter of the importance of vaccinations. As the students disgorged from the lab, Stephen stopped Gale as she went to leave.

"Here, take this and go to that room. Some of us do care." He hadn't any idea what had upset her but a conversation could go a long way to being a small curative. "If you need help, say something." He practically vibrated with intelligent compassion.

Gale blinked at him as if to say; no, absolutely not; but she did as he suggested... ordered? Gale knew what mandatory reporting was and feared it enough to go. Good people paved the roadways to Hell in their intentions all the time...

A few minutes of wandering found her outside an office labeled 'Guidance Counselor'. "No..." That one word was so soft as to go unheard by anyone, thank all the gods. She had unpleasant memories of the last one and that one was a literal confessor.

Then the door opened before she could flee, sunlight from the large windows flooded the corridor where it mixed with the artificial. "Oh, hello. You are?" Stephen Platt had been stepping out for lunch but Gale shoved a post-it at him and remained stone silent. 'Okay, another one like that', he was sadly getting used to that. Which wasn't good to think about.

"Come in, but I do need you to tell me your name at least." He wasn't as warm-voiced as Doctor Gregory, but he wasn't unkind either.

"Gale." A forlorn look sat behind her eyes as she trudged into the room as her inner alarms screamed at her not to say a word.

"Well, Gale, I'm Mister Platt, have a seat." Somewhere in his notes sat a different missive from Principal Flutie to this end.

Twenty minutes elapsed in utter silence between Stephen Platt and his newest charge. Gale said nothing more than her name, her nose wrinkled every few seconds until he put a cigarette out, at which point she relaxed ever so slightly. Every other coaxing word and strategy he tried was met with a face as impassive as a stone wall.

"Gale, I can't help you if you won't talk to me." He did not implore, but it set something off inside the girl across from him.

"There's an assumption being made here teach- Gale started hotly, her alarms finally flatly ignored in favor of fury.

"I'm not a teacher." Stephen opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a very thick envelope of notes. "Nor was Miss Mary Sterling." He noted Flutie's note and read over it very quickly which suggested twice-weekly meetings. Stephen felt that perhaps thrice would be better if he could find somewhere to schedule it.

"-That I need help. Have you or Bob considered that I don't want help!?" Her voice got higher, and shriller as she spoke, "least of all from anyone who remembers that-" Gale paused and breathed. Her anger faltered as she did so, "-person of less than moral character... Her title was Sister." Something sat behind her words that the counselor caught, nor did he like what he heard...

"Ah." Stephen took up a pen and wrote something down, Gale leaned over the desk unbidden, "I am not damaged by religion!" That wasn't what the sentence said, what it said was a different and wholly worse assumption; but people have a way of seeing what they want to see.

Stephen scratched it out and a small smile formed on his face. "Good, so you can speak."

Gale sat back, a sullen look on her face as anger gave way to despair. "Yeah, I speak. Occasionally in three different languages." Why did she tell him that, why did she say anything at all?

"Impressive, which ones?" Stephen started writing again.

"I like my mom's the most. She's from Denmark but speaks Norsk." Gale's voice softened and dropped a few octaves. Luckily, or unluckily, the office was silent save for the scratch of the man opposite her's pen.

"And the other one? I assume the third of course is English." Stephen's pen paused momentarily before it started back up as he searched his mind to remember that was the proper name of Norwegian.

Gale nodded, "I speak Latin too."

"Has that been useful?" A note about the pride in her voice over that one was written down.

"Yep, sure has. Helps being able to read the bible twice removed from its primary language instead of twenty."

"So you read the bible in Latin?" Not many of the students were religious, or if they were they didn't show it in school.

"That's the proper way." Gale hissed, clearly annoyed by the question. Scratch. "I swear to God if you're slandering me-"

Stephen held up a hand to quiet her, surprisingly it even worked. "Gale, you may not believe this but I am not your enemy."

Gale clicked her tongue. "Tch, sure... The good sister said that one too." She didn't stick around to continue to indulge his curiosity further and cited a flimsy, yet not unreasonable excuse about food as she practically ran out of the room.

On that, Stephen Platt agreed, and as a final note wrote down aloof and insular, clearly introspective yet desperate to be heard. Gale would've screamed at him for that.

Gale made it to the cafeteria with ten minutes left in her break, short of breath and patience as she overthought every word she said in that godforsaken room.

"Do you mind a plus one?" Buffy's voice pulled her out of whatever doom spiral she'd entered.

"Hi." Gale smoothed her skirt's pleats worriedly, the simple act of talking to Buffy proved far more difficult than she had thought it would, more than anything she feared oversharing.

"Hi," Buffy echoed, "about this morning, I'm sorry for freaking you out." A hand was on top of Gale's before she could blink, when had hers even made it to the tabletop? The offending limb withdrew just as quickly.

"It's fine." It was decidedly not fine. "I'm..." Gale stopped short for a second, "it's complicated." No elaboration would come. A sandwich was retrieved from a bag and torn into in short order.

"Fair enough," Buffy waved another person over to the table, Gale looked up.

"I like your sweater," the words just spilled out before the new girl had even been introduced. Red hair almost as long as her own, a sense of style only a mother could love. Please don't have green eyes.

"Thanks! Hi, I'm Willow." Willow slid into one of the remaining chairs with the grace of someone who was easily overlooked and forgotten.

"Uh, Gale, I'm the other newbie." In addition to tripping over her words as fast as possible, Gale hadn't found a reason to bother Willow. They shared two classes in total and hadn't said a word to one another before that moment. Were it not for those experiences, Gale would've noticed her as a fellow academic overachiever.

The conversation that overtook the three was interrupted abruptly by the ring of the bell. "Hey, you should come with us to The Bronze tonight." The absolute beaming smile that Willow wore sold her on the terrible idea instantly.

Gale also noted that the invitation caused Buffy to twitch. "Sure, I have to like, tell people where I'll be, but sure."

It was also, she dreadfully noted, much easier to talk to Willow...

Chapter Text

The Red Drink

Sunnydale, California – 1997

"I don't know why you insist on this!" Gale called through her bedroom door, this was not a conversation she'd intended on having this or any other evening but some rituals were unavoidable. "I'm sixteen! Not six!"

On the other side of her door out in the hallway there was a shuffling sound. The linen closet was on the other side of the hall. "Because he's old fashioned." Cornelius closed the linen closet and moved down the hall without further comment.

Gale emerged from sixteen thirty-two at long last with a look best described as principle annoyance on her face as she marched across the street with a decided lack of spring in her step. She had never actually objected to this ritual before, but it irritated her today. It was hard to get to know someone if someone else was putting restrictions on your social interactions that were in direct conflict with the expectations of yet another person.

Besides! She really did want to make friends, even without her evil wizard sitting across the road with the Sword of Damocles held above her head...

Oh! Buffy's house had a real knocker, which was kind of funny for a door made out of frosted glass flanked by narrow windows. It was made of silver, neat! Once and done. The boom was short for what it was, the knocker was side-mounted to the door frame so as to not damage the centerpiece.

A muted 'coming' sounded off from in the house, Gale fidgeted with the hem of her dress, a powder blue thing that contrasted harshly against the pallor of her skin but complimented her eyes. At least in her opinion. She blamed the paleness on the Franco-Norse parentage.

The door opened to reveal a stairwell and a small girl who glowed. The immediate question to enter Gale's mind was why was she glowing? Behind Gale, Roland made a noise and averted his eyes as though he'd been struck by the sun itself. "Moooooooooom!" The cry of Dawn Summers proved to be largely unnecessary as her mother Joyce appeared not a second later. If Dawn was offended by Roland's weirdness, she said nothing.

A bow followed Joyce's appearance from Gale; one that was practiced over and over again. A short dip downward with her eyes averted to the floor. The Summers' matron's response was a laugh, "None of that now, welcome, come in. Buffy!" Joyce called the last part over her shoulder, "your friend's here!"

'Were they friends?' Echoed in Gale's mind once more as she stepped through the door with a friendly, if not sheepish smile. Oddly, she had no issue looking at Dawn, who was tall for her age, somewhere around ten or so at a guess.

The small gaggle of people drifted first into the living room, where three of the four of them stayed, after a few seconds of mandatory introductions that saw a ten year old stick her tongue out at Gale; Dawn escaped as quickly as possible. Though he'd never say it, Roland was glad when she was gone because he didn't have to keep staring at what was simultaneously the harshest and warmest light he'd ever seen... Whereas Gale was just glad she didn't have to explain anything to a little kid, as she had doubts about her ability to lie to her.

The next fifteen minutes were awkward. Buffy's entrance did catch Gale's breath in her throat. 'What a pretty girl.' She tamped down internally over and over again but that thought stuck, hard. It wasn't proper or correct or remotely okay but... well, she'd gotten used to carrying around that guilt.

It was about half way through that Joyce interrupted her dad in the middle of him saying something completely banal about time allotments. "Mister Karling with all due respect don't you think that's a little excessive?"

Gale looked at the floor as though it were the most interesting thing in the world and didn't say a word, or for that matter breathe, it caught in her throat and it stayed there for what felt like a long time.

"No, I don't." Roland wasn't mean by any means, he never hit her, or even shouted at her, he explained at length, but he had reasonable, to him anyway, though somewhat strict expectations.

"They're going to a social club, not a nunnery." Joyce was very flat, not blunt per say but very no-nonsense. "Besides," she cast an eye to Gale herself, who had turned blue. "Let her lighten up a little, it's a new place for her too, right?"

He made a noise that sounded a bit like an objection, at which point Gale's foot came down on his, the heel of her sensible (also blue) pumps on his toe.

Not a minute later, Roland left and Gale remembered how to breathe.

"Thank you." It came out softer than Gale intended but Joyce heard her.

"You'll be fine, you both will." That declaration was perhaps, misguided.

"So..." Buffy started as they walked out of sixteen thirty, toward Joyce's jeep while the aforementioned grabbed her keys from her bag. Dawn was in bed and the five minutes to drop them off wouldn't be that terrible. "That was something, does that have to happen with every friend you ever make, or just the girls?" There was a knowing sort of bend to that question that disquieted Gale quite a lot. She thought Buffy was pretty, certainly, she didn't want to marry her. Not that she could...

Gale blanched. "Uh, all of them. Except for Ken." She wasn't sure if that was a lie, as far back as she could remember she didn't really have any friends because no one had actually agreed to that for twelve years, it was old fashioned, invasive, annoying. Sure she had classmates but never really had more than a single friend...

"Oh? Boy?"

"Girl. Kendall Hart..." There was a dream in Gale's voice as she said that name, far away, safe.

The Bronze was loud in the way only spaces too small for too many people can be. The music hurt her ears. It was off-key karaoke sometimes and others it was a band she'd never heard of doing their best. Those were at least music. But Gale was a girl who listened to Michael Jackson like he still mattered so perhaps she wasn't the best of lyrical taste.

A mix of fruit juices and club soda the bartender had called a mocktail sat in front of her. It was bright pink and inviting. One of two of the boys in Buffy's friend group sat across from her, Willow was to her left and Buffy was up top with... the school librarian, okay, that was weird.

Gale promised not to count their first meeting and she meant it so she said nothing as Willow got up and wandered away leaving her with said boy. The other boy was on the dance floor, fluttering around the edges like a wallflower.

"I'm Xander, by the way." Alexander Harris was very much a guy. Dark hair in a bad cut and dark eyes. He moved and spoke in guarded ways that reminded Gale a little too much of herself so she really couldn't bear to look at him for very long and the darkest parts of her mind wondered why he wore baggy clothes that didn't quite fit him.

"Gale, sorry we missed one another somehow." She even managed a smile though she wasn't that sorry. Boys, even the ones she was related to, made her uncomfortable. Like they could see. But they were boorish and stupid instead which somehow made interacting with them even worse.

Xander stared at her for a second before he nodded and knocked back some more coke, at least she was pretty sure it was coke because it was in Willow's glass and his was empty. Unbeknownst to Gale, he sat three behind her in AP English, because he wasn't as stupid as people thought he was.

A minute or so later, Jesse gave up and reappeared at the table looking sullen. Cordelia had turned him down in that way only Cordelia could.

"It generally helps when you ask." Gale intoned over the rim of her drink.

"Yeah, suppose it does." Jesse agreed, "so, want to dance?" Take the shot, he figured.

"No, thank you. I'm not the sort of girl who's into public displays of affection." She was also a hypocrite.

"Right, private school kid, mono gender too I bet." Jesse didn't sound mean or even particularly sexist, just desperate.

Gale nodded and set her empty glass down. It had been less than an hour and she already disliked him a little. Gallantry unbidden wasn't chivalrous it was harassment. Was it? Was it really?

After a bit of back and forth, Gale stood up rather unexpectedly. "I'll be back." There was intent in her voice, drive even. Her eyes settled on something, someone, across the room, through the sea of people with a surety afforded to very few.

Xander followed her with his eyes at first but lost her in the crowd of writhing people and Jesse wandered off himself.

New city, well, town, really to hell with it, she thought, before the night was over she was going to kiss a girl and her dad would never need to know.

Poor Gale, thought a wandering god far above her. Hers was a horror story.

"Hi!"

Hallie Frances looked up from the red wine she'd been pretending to consume for the last three hours waiting for a mark dumb enough to show interest. The smartly dressed woman never expected her food of choice to actually show. She was passing through and mousy redheads were in short supply in this part of California.

Many a night went by where Hallie just went without... Cursing her bloodline's specificity after she spent hours vomiting the precious vitae of a blonde who dyed hers... From behind dark green eyes flickered an unnatural and pervasive hunger as she examined the girl, certainly not of 'legal' age, as the mortals defined it. Such things were meaningless to her kind, blood was blood was blood.

The vampire noticed how the girl bounced on her feet slightly, she was cute in that childish way. Hallie didn't generally drink teens, but she was so thirsty, it pulled and it pulled and it was maddening to go without. It had been weeks... the thrum of ancient kings sang out in her veins demanding the drink! It was hard to ignore... Impossible, in fact. Besides... a local half-breed had ended up with the only real redhead she'd seen in the whole town.

"Heya sweetheart." Hallie practically purred as she drew on what remained of her essence to call up ancient magic that worked its wonder swiftly without a hint of mercy. The girl's shoulders relaxed, her eyes dilated as her very will was subsumed... Hallie reveled in it as much as her stunted spirit begged a silent and uncaring god. Please be real...

For someone who didn't eat teenagers, Hallie ended up with an arm around Gale's shoulders and led her out of the bar a mere moment later. She wasn't much taller than Gale herself was. To the casual onlooker it appeared less like a predator and her prey and more like friends, or more. Which was exactly how she desired it to appear and to be fair to Gale, well...

Hallie could smell Gale's down right giddy want, which delighted her like no other. She was no degenerate, but god the thrill of the hunt was glorious when they gave themselves to you. Control... Control... She pushed back against the incessant howl of the inner beast, despite her desire to consume. A few hundred years ago she'd been normal, not too different... even.

Now, well, peasants knelt before their kings, as mortals would kneel before their gods. She wasn't a fledgling anymore, maybe this girl wanted immortality... The thought crossed her mind for but a second but it was snuffed out utterly by the drumbeat of drink... drink... drink...

"Easy honey, it'll be over before you know it." Hallie smiled at her, "Kneel." The single word overran any resistance left in Gale's pretty little head, if there was any to begin with.

Before Gale could blink, even as she tilted her head oh so willingly at Hallie's suggestion... An order that sent a vicious chill down her spine and a desire from the very bottom of her to simply obey. She couldn't have stopped herself if she wanted to, there simply wasn't a drive left in her, compelled to listen to till her last drop had been paid.

A strong small hand pulled Hallie off Gale rather abruptly and threw the vampire across the alleyway into a stack of pallets. The groan of wood yielding at the impact filled the air for a second or two as they they exploded. Yet, the blue blood was up before the mortal could blink. Unluckily for her; her intended victim wasn't the only person present.

"You know, it's not very nice to take advantage of naivety." Buffy directed a mirthless smile at Hallie, the remnant of a rod of pine in her other hand.

"Do you have any idea whom you are fucking with!?" The rage of a noblewoman built up and spilled out into crude peasantry. Hallie's scream was guttural, very nearly animal. How dare anyone interfere. Least of all a hunter.

"As a matter of fact," Buffy threw the halved pool cue at Hallie with the force and precision of bombs that didn't exist yet, "yes." The wooden shaft had the desired effect of nailing the vampire to the ground, not even able to do so much as flail about.

"A couple of you weirdos come through wherever I live it seems. You can't just be normal vampires, no, you have to be some special kind of horror." The contempt in Buffy's voice overflowed, it was a miracle there was no hatred in her words, just a tired resignation... So much for retirement...

Buffy pulled out a sharp looking miniature ax, its blade gleamed. "Long. Live. The. Queen." As though to emphasize the drop of each chopping blow... Buffy went through the grizzly work of decapitating a 'real' vampire with a superhuman strength all her own. A 'real' vampire, the very sort that Gale herself had reported one just a day prior from an overheard conversation. A pile of dust appeared where the vampire had been after a minute of thwacking. No second death was quite as final as that or sunlight.

As the power of the vampire's profane magic faded, Gale screamed, her will once again barely her own. Buffy was next to her before she could do much more though, eyes searching for bite marks pondering... "That was stupid, this place is dangerous, be more careful."

"I-I-" Gale started to babble before Buffy quieted her.

"It's okay. Your secret dies with me, I promise." The warmth in Buffy's voice barely reached Gale.

"I'm not a dyke." Gale finally muttered, voice soft and bitter in equally heavy parts. The words struck her like a hot iron down to the core of her very soul. It hurt to say it, a lie unlike her other lies, one that was dissonant to the song of her soul. Tears sprung in her eyes as though she'd been dealt a physical blow, though not just for that greatest of reasons alone. She felt like every happy thought was suddenly impossible, that the very idea of joy had been sucked from the world...

"I didn't say you were, you get it now, right? Why I didn't want you helping?" Buffy ran a hand through her perfectly styled hair that somehow stayed that way.

"You used me as bait!?" Gale's shrill cry was cut short, broken by a sob that wracked her, she really didn't have it in her right then... Few people survived a feeding by a vampire so utterly consumed by the thirst to begin with, it was the one exclusive club she hadn't wanted to be a part of, and she wasn't mad at Buffy, she was mad at herself... If only because this was going to be questioned. There was no way she could hide the less than dull horror that sat behind her eyes...

"No, actually. I was saving Willow from being eaten by a less than fifty, just over there." Buffy pointed down the way where the redhead was ducking back into the bar to collect their other friends, though Gale didn't follow her eyes. "Then I turn around and have to actually use this thing, because of you." Buffy stuffed the diminutive ax back in her bag with a huff.

A sharp intake of breath preceded a single word from Gale, "sorry," as though it meant something.

"You didn't do anything wrong, I get it. Seizing the moment..." Buffy's voice softened and she looped an arm around Gale's arm before she guided her back toward the Bronze, where the thrum of music sounded distracting and therefore welcome.

Buffy regretted giving that advice to her quiet friends, but neither of them would ever hear it from her. Because that was her job, to make sure it didn't happen in the first place. In that, she failed. Did she? Did she really?

Did Buffy get it? Gale doubted that severely... Just like the haunted part of her mind promised she'd never be happy again... It didn't occur to her in that exact moment, coming off the worst bad trip a non-user could imagine, that they lie. Indeed, all they do is lie.

"You need to leave her alone." Buffy's words were firm as she dropped Gale off at her door. The old man received her rather well with how Gale collapsed the moment she crossed the threshold, safety. "Keep her dad off of her, seriously." She paused for a second and regarded Cornelius carefully. "I think we both know what happened, yeah?" For all the brightness that Buffy kept in her voice, she didn't like the wizard at all.

Cornelius waved a hand and Gale's semi-conscious form started to float until she rested in midair next to him. "Yes, we do." He managed to hide the worry that buried itself in his eyes, barely. "No embrace, yes?"

"They don't call it that unless they're making more of them. But yeah, it didn't get the chance." Buffy stared at him for a few seconds, inscrutable.

"Good..." There was a tremor of distance in that old and tired voice as he held out the hand that wasn't levitating Gale. "It may not seem like it, right now, but I am a friend," he assured to break the encroaching awkward silence.

"I doubt that very much. Good night." Buffy walked away without another word.

Come Monday afternoon no one spoke a word of what had happened at the Bronze that past Friday. Gale sat pensive and non-responsive in the library after classes had ended. She wasn't super engaged throughout the day, either.

Unless 'broke down crying and babbling' counted as engagement. Much like how everyone knew that Buffy nearly staked Cordelia, Gale's hope of a social life died instantly when everyone figured out she was just as crazy, albeit in a different way.

To her saintlike credit, Buffy truly never said a single word about what Gale babbled about in her magically induced post-traumatic stupor. No one noticed the new jewelry that adorned Buffy's neckline either, a silver cross on a delicate chain.

So began the foundational meeting of the Sunnydale High Literature Club, a name suggested by Gale the preceding Tuesday no less, as a fiction to explain why half a dozen people hung around in the school library after hours. It also helped assuage any administrative worries about why their new as mint librarian was in a room alone a group primarily comprised of teen girls all by himself for hours.

Clockwise around a low oak table sat four teens above whom stood a harried looking Giles.

"The world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology it did not begin as a paradise."

"No, that's not right," but Gale wasn't exactly trying to be heard as his words pulled her from her stupor just a little.

"For untold eons, demons walked the earth. An extension of Hell. In time, they lost their purchase on this reality, and the way was made open for mortal creatures. For Man."

"No." Gale repeated, Giles looked in her direction that time, "That's wrong, what about Atlantis?"

"A fairy tale. Just like the garden. Today, all that remains of the old ones are certain magics, certain... creatures." How dare he speak British at her and tell her the most sacred things in her understanding of life were fake! Of course, he didn't say that, did he? A fairy tale was a horror story all its own.

"and vampires." Buffy emerged from Giles' office as she finished wrapping a bandage around her forearm, apparently she didn't heal that fast after all.

Gale clicked her tongue, fairy tale, yeah, right.

Xander stood up and paced, irritated. "Okay, this is where I have a problem, see, because we're talking about vampires. We're having a talk about vampires." He sounded incredulous, bothered.

Willow muttered about having to sit down, from a sitting position. It really had screwed with them all.

"So, vampires, are they demonic?" Xander looked to Giles, who nodded stiffly.

"The books tell us that the last demon to flee reality fed off of man. Mixed their blood."

"Wrong!" Gale shouted, shattering the tense peace of the library for only a second. "There was light, there was comfort, and then there was Caine." The name of the progenitor of vampire kind fell so softly that only Buffy heard it.

"What, like the bible?" Doubt hung off Buffy's question like a dew drop caught in a sunbeam.

Gale nodded, "the very same." Not one of them noticed that Jesse had just vanished.

Giles looked at her hard, searching for a moment before he moved on as though he hadn't been interrupted. "He was a human form possessed-nay, infected, by the demon's soul. He bit another, and another. So they walk the earth, killing some, mixing their blood with others to create more of their kind-" he followed Gale's eyes who said nothing, he guessed this didn't mismatch whatever bizarre fantasy lived in her head-"waiting for the animals, for man, to die out and for the old ones to return."

"The Antediluvians." Gale whispered, and when Giles nodded what little color had returned to her cheeks from her anger at his missteps fled. They really weren't in Kansas anymore.

"We do have... measures against the darkness." Giles also paced, more out of habit than irritation. "As long as there have been vampires, there's been The Slayer, one girl in all the world-"

"Oh, he loves doing this part." Buffy giggled, Giles frowned and sped up.

"All right; they hunt vampires. one Slayer dies, the next one is called. Buffy is the current Slayer." He stopped and stared at the three of them hard. "Do not tell anyone. I think that's all the vampire information you need. Class dismissed." He never got to say that, it brought a wry smile to his face.

"Just one more question, teach." Xander grabbed his bag as he spoke. "How do we kill them?"

"You don't. I do." Buffy was firm about that.

"What about Jesse-" Xander noticed, it seemed, even if no one else had.

"Is my responsibility. I'll get him back." An inflection of guilt that none of the teens picked up on, whilst Giles was polite enough to not say anything if he did.

"I-" Gale started, off to the side Willow teetered on the edge of falling over again.

"That isn't true." Xander spoke first, though.

"If you hadn't been there-" Willow interjected "they'd have taken us too." She looked toward Gale for support who nodded emphatically. "Does anyone mind if I... pass out?" Xander caught Willow before she landed and guided her back to her chair and Buffy rested a hand on her arm.

"Breathe, Wil."

"Breathe..." Willow repeated.

"I don't... have a nice way to say it." Gale started, "we'd all be dead without you, Buffy." The gravity of her statement hit them all harder than any one of them would admit. "You're kind of a hero." If nothing else, she was certainly her hero. Not that she'd ever say that to her willingly.

"Hero." Buffy stared at her, then to Willow, then to Xander, the word broke something inside her. That was not a good word. It fed a dangerous ego and tasted a bit like ash. "Huh."

"There was a big guy," Buffy turned her attention to her Watcher, "called himself Luke, him and his kept ranting about an offering for the myth under the town."

Giles' face remained a visage of unflappable wit... "Do you think it's a good idea to go down there now?"

"If they weren't just feeding then there's a chance Jesse is still alive. The longer we-, the longer I wait..."

He nodded to that much, it was true, however a vain and thin hope.

"This isn't a great question but should we call the police?" Willow asked, the others looked at her as though to say what.

"Do you think they would believe us?" Giles entertained her question.

"Uh, we don't have to say vampires? We could say it was... a bad man?" Willow seemed to realize the weakness of her argument as she said it and fell quiet.

"Even if they did believe us, they'd make things worse and only show up with guns." Buffy said a bit hotly.

"Do you have any idea where they took Jesse?" Giles felt a bit of hopelessness seep in.

"No. By the time I caught up with them they were just gone." Buffy flapped her arms a bit.

"They can fly!?" Xander yelped.

"Some can." Gale intoned.

Xander shrank into his chair. That wasn't the revelation he wanted to hear. "Oh."

Buffy scoffed, "they can drive."

"I didn't hear a car..." Willow sat up.

Giles scratched the back of his head, "let us take an enormous intuitive leap."

"You mean guess." Gale clicked her tongue. Giles had the decency to look sheepish.

"They went underground." Buffy checked her nails. "Vampires really jam on sewer systems. You can get anywhere in town without catching any rays. Didn't see any accesses, though."

"Well, there's the electrical tunnels that run all over the town." Xander offered.

"If we had a diagnostic of the tunnel system, it might indicate a meeting place. I suppose we could go to the building commission-"

"We so don't have time for that." Buffy huffed and stood up.

"Uh, guys? There may be another way." Willow made a vague motion toward the computer that sat on the intake counter across the room. "Does that thing get internet?" The question was rhetorical as Willow crossed the room and started typing.

A few seconds passed before a diagnostic blueprint sat on the screen as the others gathered around her. "This runs under the graveyard."

"Hm." Xander stared at the schematics with an examining eye, "I don't see any access points."

"The city plans are open to the public for viewing?" Giles's pointed question was directed at Willow who had the gall to look bashful.

"Uh, well, in a way? I sort of stumbled onto them when I accidentally... decrypted the city council's security systems?"

"Huh, someone's been naughty." Xander's eyes didn't leave the screen.

"By accident?" Gale asked, Willow nodded. "Cool." Gale didn't believe it was accidental at all.

"There's nothing here. This is useless!" Buffy's frustration once again overflowed. To be perfect and fly so close to the sun had a way of fraying at one's edges.

"I think you should ease up on yourself." Giles' said a touch softly.

"You're the one who told me I wasn't prepared enough! Understatement! I thought I was on top of it, and then that monster came out of nowhere---" Buffy stopped mid rant. "He didn't come out of nowhere. He came from behind me."

"You're certain?" Giles took his glasses off for a moment, cleaning a spec of dust from the lenses.

"Yeah. The other ones must have doubled back. God, I'm so mentally challenged!" Buffy's yell of frustration was self-evident.

"So, what's the plan? We saddle up, right?" Xander interrupted Buffy before she could continue to pity-party herself.

Buffy looked at him, her mouth drawn into a thin line. "There is no 'we'. Okay? I'm the Slayer, and you're not." None of them could read minds at that point or they would've heard, if not felt, the pang of loneliness in her words.

"Hey, screw that." Gale cut her off before Xander opened his mouth again. "You saved our lives, that means we're indebted to you, that means whether you like it or not you've got help. So let us help." There was a pleading in there that unsettled Buffy just a little bit.

"I knew you were gonna throw that in my face..." Xander managed to squeak out.

"You both need to understand this is deeply dangerous."

"Believe me, I get it." Gale said quietly, while the spirit was certainly there, there was a distance in her tone again.

"I'm inadequate. That's fine." Xander sighed, "I'm less than a man."

"Buffy. I'm not anxious to into dark places full of monsters, but I do want to help. I need to."

What a riot...

"They can help me." Giles threw a lifeline. "I've been researching this 'Harvest' affair. Seems to be some sort of preordained massacre. Rivers of blood. Hell come to Earth... Quite a charmless affair. I am fuzzy on the details however. It may be you can wrest some information from that dread machine." All four of them stared at him, befuddled.

"Uh, doc..?" Gale waved her hands around a bit, listless. "Translate?"

"That was a bit... British, wasn't it?"

They all nodded, "welcome to the new world." Buffy managed a ghost of a smile, it was short-lived.

"I want you." Giles pointed at Willow, "to go on the internet. You two, start reading." He pointed to a stack of antique volumes that sat on a book cart.

"Sure, I can do that." Xander felt a bit robotic saying it but didn't feel up to arguing either.

"Mhm." Gale had already picked up one particularly heavy looking one and popped it open. Her uncle was going to be so impressed when he learned that the school librarian had first editions of Cornelius Agrippa. He was a big fan.

"Right, I'm out of here. Please don't try to follow me. If Jesse's alive, I will bring him back." Buffy turned toward the door,

"Do I have to tell you to be careful?" There was something in the older man's voice, not want, not even really empathy, a professional desire to 'do well', perhaps.

Buffy turned her head back and looked at her Watcher for a long moment, eyes baleful. She really hadn't wanted to continue this perpetual struggle. But hey, you had to grow up sometime...

Once Buffy had gone, three of the remaining four people in the library got so engrossed in their project that they didn't notice when Xander followed after her like a lost puppy.

"Doc, this one's interesting." Gale broke the silence of the library after a good hour's worth of reading. Some part of her mind lamented the classes she was missing out on, nor did she look forward to explaining that either. But at least it was mundane.

"Oh?" Giles walked over to where Gale held up a book. Arcane volumes (some more literal than others) were scattered across tables and carts between the two of them as they skimmed their eyes over ancient letters that were often barely readable. Now, Gale counted herself as a good student and a voracious reader, but that didn't mean it was easy to discern faded letters from four centuries ago.

"For future reference, I am not a physician. Thank you, this is most helpful." Giles took the book and ran a finger down the page, reciting Latin as he did so.

"Library science comes with a doctorate, and that's not how you say that." Gale gave her best annoying smile.

"Oh? How would you pronounce it." If he was annoyed the librarian made no sign of such.

She did so, perfectly in fact, at least for the Clerical interpretation of Lingua Latina. She even said it without her accent. "I love the language of magic." As though that were an explanation in and of itself.

"Hrm... Right, this will do for now, both of you get to your classes." Giles produced notes from somewhere for both of them. "Wherever Xander got up to, let us hope he's equally alright."

Gale didn't take comp-sci, citing some esoteric dislike of machines. The only thing she knew about electronics beyond the television was 'Does this play music?' If the answer was no, it may as well have been in the inside of the human brain. She struggled through physical education instead, being somewhat of a wet noodle in human form naturally it was not a display of profound skill.

"Oh, hey, Gale." Willow caught sight of the quiet girl on her way out of comp-sci. "You headed back?" Willow's version of a yell was about the same octave as Gale's.

"Yep... Wouldn't miss it..." Gale hated hunting, but well, endear yourself rattled off in her head like an evil curse. Knowing her luck it probably was an evil curse.

Giles looked up from one of his volumes as the two girls reentered the library. "Buffy?"

"No, just us. Sorry." Gale muttered as a pit of gnawing dread formed in her stomach.

"Any word yet?" Willow handed Giles a stack of papers, full color prints of old newspaper stories, a few coroner's reports...

"Not as of yet." Giles glanced over the forms with a combination of fascination and revulsion. "Is there anything specific in here?" He held up one of the pages.

"No news is good news, right?" Gale picked up one of Giles' other books and started skimming through it again, trying to be useful.

"Well.. I'm sure they're great. Just great. Uh, I think maybe? I looked through the old papers around the time of that big earthquake back in '37 and for several months leading up to it there was a rash of murders."

"Great!" The look of abject horror on the girls faces caused Giles to blink, "Er, not in a good way. Go on."

"They sound like the kind of stuff you were looking for. Throats, blood." Willow put her hands behind her back so the other two couldn't see her fidget. "Months, and not even a clue."

Giles sighed resignedly. "It's all coming together. I rather wish it weren't..."

The library's doors opened drawing their attention where Buffy and Xander looked a bit... tired, haggard really.

"I take it you found Jesse?" Willow kept her tone surprisingly even.

"Yeah." Xander looked at the ground.

"and was he?" Wil didn't want to finish the sentence.

"Worse." Buffy collapsed in a chair with a huff. "I'm so sorry Willow, we were too late. And they were waiting for us."

"At least you two are okay."

Xander kicked a trash bin across the floor. "I don't like vampires. I'm gonna take a stand and say they're not good."

A flicker of a smile crept its way across Gale's face, "Yeah, they're kinda terrible."

"So, Giles, you got anything to make my day even worse?" Buffy's wane smile held not an ounce of joy in it.

"How about the end of the world?" Giles set the book he was reading down lightly.

"Knew I could count on you." The glum in Buffy's voice was self-evident.

"What we know," Giles stood up, "about sixty years ago a very old, very powerful vampire came to this shore and not just to feed." He gave Gale a preemptive withering stare to shut her up as her mouth opened to countermand him.

"Let me guess, he dropped by 'cause SunnyD's a mystical whoosit?" Buffy interrupted him instead.

"Yes. The Spanish settlers here called it Boca Del Infierno, roughly translated, Hellmouth. A sort of portal from our world to the next. This vampire hoped to open it."

"Mm... Bring the demons back."

"Y'all said the other day he was a Methuselah." Gale spoke up, bearing Giles' ire quite well. "That's like, a real vampire." Her voice was soft and full of terror.

"Yeah, yeah it is." Buffy sounded a bit hollow as she confirmed Gale's question. "One of the oldest of the real ones at this point." She really preferred her own version, they were plenty scary but not in and of themselves godlike beings.

"Sounds kinda world ending." Xander sounded just as distant.

"But!" Willow spoke up, "He blew it, or, I mean, there was an earthquake that swallowed half the town and him up with it. Or at least there were no more vampire-type killings after."

"Now, the good news is that opening dimensional portals is tricky business. Odds are he got himself stuck. Like a cork in a bottle." Giles' sounded almost excited. It was weird.

"This 'harvest' thing is meant to get him out, I take it?" Xander sighed, "great, just... great."

"It comes around once a century apparently. Heavenly bodies aligning sort of thing. In which a Master vampire can draw power from one of his childe-" Gale sank down into her chair thinking, oh no, he knew the words-"While they feed, gathering enough vitae to break free and open the portal. This minion is called The Vessel and they bear this symbol." Giles opened a book to a sketch of a three pointed star.

"So, I just dust the one sporting that look and no Harvest." Buffy managed to sound peppy, even.

"Simply put, yes. But it's rarely that simple isn't it? We've no idea where they'd gather that many people."

"Good point, any suggestions on where this little get together is being held?" Buffy glanced around the room, searching.

"Well, there are a number of possibilities-" Giles started before Xander held up a hand.

"They're going to the Bronze."

"Huh? It's Monday, it's not packed except on Friday." Willow sounded just a little unsure.

"Come on, tasty young morsels all over the place? Anyway, that's where Jesse's gonna be. Trust me."

"Then we need to be there. The sun will be down before long."

The last bell of the day aired as though to punctuate his point. Buffy stood up first, "I gotta make a stop, won't take long. Gale, come with me."

"Sure."

"What for?" Giles drew a petticoat over himself.

"Supplies."

As the two girls left campus Gale plucked up her courage to offer some form of poor advice, "I think I can help with that." Some part of her didn't want to after last Friday but Buffy needed help and that overpowered both her fear and common sense.

"I bet you can too ." There was an odd cheer in Buffy's tone that unsettled Gale more than she would admit.

Gale darted into sixteen thirty -two with the intent of grabbing something from her uncle's study without him noticing. She didn't even know the study existed before Sunday when she first came out of her post-Dominate stupor. If she thought about it, it probably didn't.

A minute later she was scanning through a plethora things that lined shelves that sat between heavy bookcases filled with ancient volumes that rivaled or even surpassed Giles'. She rifled through knickknacks, baubles and tiny jewels that glittered even without light on them. Little jars of glass and ceramic that held only god knew what. A charge of magic sat in the air and her hair stood on end in the field of static. There was even a plain gold ring, she ignored it though, she knew that was his wedding band.

Come on , something would be useful, right? He was like Gandalf, he kept that kind of stuff around for rainy days.

Unfortunately for Gale, he very much was not like Gandalf. But she did find something sitting on his desk, a thin rod, bone white in color that looked delicate and dangerous in equal measure. She grabbed it and turned into the waiting face of her dad.

Oh no.

"So..." Roland watched her movements, more self-assured than she usually was, that brought him a bit of quiet joy. "What do you think you're doing with that?" Now, he wasn't hostile, or even particularly forbidding, more amused.

"Uh..."

"You know what it is, right?" There was a smile in his voice.

Of course she didn't. "That's not a wand." He continued.

"Oh." There was a bit of disappointment in Gale's own voice.

"It's a musician's baton. Your uncle picked that up in seventy thirty, a gift from a man he'd helped out."

"Cool..." Gale slowly put it back on the desk, almost back where it was. "Uh, dad, there's gonna be a thing tonight." Better to beg forgiveness, right?

"That I kind of want to go to, and uhm, does uncle have anything that kills kindred easily?"

Roland tilted his head and looked at her carefully. "Yes, he has things that can kill rots. Check the bottom drawer. Is it worth to try and talk you out of it? "

Gale shook her head 'no' before she did so and out her hand came with another spindly looking rod, this one was made of hawthorn, though and not ivory. "How does it work?"

"I have no idea," Roland stepped into her personal space as he tied something heavy around her neck, an antique talisman of his own, pure silver and in the style of cross popular in the ninth century. "I got a call from the school today."

Gale's breath caught, "y-yes?"

"You missed classes today . Y ou, straight A student, missed classes?" He sounded more surprised than disappointed.

"I was helping the librarian with filing." Gale didn't like how easy it was to lie to him just then, she really didn't.

"Uh-uh. I wasn't born yesterday, why are you skipping?" Apparently he didn't either from the way his eyes narrowed for two tenths of a second.

"Because my friend asked for my help and I helped her. I've never had a friend before, please don't mess this up."

Roland blinked. "Did you just?" That had never happened before.

"Bye dad!" She pushed past him before he could further object. ..

"Here," Gale held the rod out to Buffy as they rounded the corner away from Revello Drive. "I don't know what it does, but like, a wizard made it, that counts for something."

Buffy stared at it for a second then tucked it into her jacket, best to not look gift horses in the mouth.

The exterior of the club sat against the backdrop of the industrial night like a black stone in a sea of dingy light. Every door was locked. The very feel of fear was palpable in the air.

"We're late." Giles sighed, defeated.

"I didn't realize I was going to be grounded!" Buffy hissed. It was just a minute anyway, a minute too long.

"Uh, can you break it down?" Xander motioned at the heavy iron door.

Buffy laughed, "Nah, not this thing. You guys try around back, I'll find my own way."

"Right, come on you three." Giles started to lead them away,

"Guys!" Buffy called out as she tossed her bag at them , " b e careful."

What followed was nothing short of a melee as the back door to the Bronze flew open as Buffy's coterie spilled in simultaneous to her well, beating the ever loving hell out of Luke. The few neophytes on guard duty fell with surprising speed considering that the only trained hunter among them was Giles and he was more an archivist than active participant ninety percent of the time.

From the stage Luke let out a bestial roar as he caught Buffy with a right hook that sent her and her stake flying.

"Hey, this way!" Xander called out to the panicked crowd, guiding people out the back. Of course, guiding was bit of a strong word considering it became a stampede almost immediately.

Xander's crowd wrangling skills developed rapidly though as Giles ducked out of the way to throw a haymaker with his pipe toward another vampire who caught the weapon with their face. Willow got caught in the tide of people until she was out the door and Gale got pushed up against a wall screaming. It hurt. A lot.

If Buffy weren't busy with the hardest fight she'd gotten out of a vampire in a long time she would've noticed the one headed for Xander's back as he directed people as the crowd thinned. Alas, she didn't.

Xander felt the hand close around his shoulder and screamed the most unmanly scream of his life so far as he was hauled backwards by the preternatural grip of yet another vampire. This one, however, he knew. "Jesse."

"Hey, buddy." The thing that wore his friend's face exuded a confidence that Jesse McNally never had.

They'd known one another for a long enough time that Xander knew from that alone, that wasn't his friend. Jesse was a bit of a gallant rake, sure, but he wasn't an utter bastard like the monster wearing his skin was. "Well, come on then, take your best shot." It didn't come out as confident as he wanted it to even as he levied his stake.

A look of annoyance crossed Jesse's face, demonic visage or not. "Okay, let's deal with this. Jesse was an excruciating loser who couldn't get a date with anyone in the sighted community! Look at me! I'm a new man!" His hand shot out and caught Xander by the front of his shirt as he shoved him against the wall. "What do you say, pal , how bout immortality?" At Xander's feet an unconscious Cordelia lay in a heap. When did that happen?

Xander levied his stake again. "How 'bout not?" He drove the point home with a step of courage he didn't know he had and just like that, Jesse was dust. It rattled Xander down to his bones. That was one of his best mates...

Toward the front of the chaos, Giles ran for the front door to ease the pressure of the crowd, there were far too many people in here for his liking but such things usually tended to be the case; what he was not expecting was a vampire to land on his shoulders with the force that drove him to his knees and then to his back before he could blink. The stake he'd been dusting neophytes with clattered away, his pipe long forgotten lodged in a different one.

"Stay down, hunter." Darla 's eyes flashed as she went for his throat, the thirst calling to her as much as it did her master far below. Giles drove his fist into her chest, decidedly ungentlemanly but he had no desire to be killed , it was a futile effort of course as it had little effect on her. She hit him back with the force enough to break his nose.

Which was about the time that Gale came back with the baseball bat from behind the bar counter. The resounding crack of the oak against the side of Darla's skull was almost satisfying. "Get away from my teacher, bitch!"

Gale didn't like that word. It wasn't a very nice word.

A crash of shattered glass drew attention to the front of the Bronze, where Buffy stood over the rapidly disintegrating form of Luke. "Moron. It's in about nine hours." At the fall of their defacto leader the remaining vampires fled, if only because of the look on Buffy's face as she scanned what remained of the crowd.

"I take it it's over." Giles sounded distant, dream like. That he'd survived that was still fresh in his mind; and this wasn't even that big of a fight...

Willow made her way back in almost skittish as she picked her way over the dust piles and bones. "Did we win?"

"Well," Buffy dusted her hands and tucked Gale's uncle's magic wand back into her jacket . It served as an excellent skewer for Luke. The remnant of her other one sat in splinters across the stage . "We averted the apocalypse. You gotta give us points for that."

"That was... terrifying." Gale sat on one of the few non-broken chairs with a downright catatonic look on her face.

"One thing's for sure. Nothing is ever going to be the same again." Xander's eyes were distant, hollow, and he'd cried, even if he didn't realize it. It wasn't every day you murder your bestie.

The sun rose over Sunnydale the next day and absolutely nothing had changed.

"What were you expecting?" Buffy leaned against the school's fountain, sun caught in her hair like an aura of gold. Gale really had to stop staring at her.

"I don't know, something! Obviously. The dead rose! We should've at least had an assembly." Xander was both incredulous and a bit of humor had injected itself into his voice again. Good for him.

"People have a tendency to rationalise what they can and forget what they can't." Giles didn't even look up from a book.

"It's called consensual reality, they protect themselves by agreeing with the consensus that vampires aren't real." Gale intoned.

"Believe you me, I've seen it happen in real time." Buffy popped a piece of gum into her mouth. "People are weird about the weird."

"Well, I'll certainly never forget it. None of it." Willow found her gaze locked on a rock.

"Good." Giles said grimly, "Next time you'll be prepared."

"Next time?" Xander was more than a bit uncertain. "We uh, won, no?"

"He's got a point, doc, we did win." Gale was tempted to press play on her Walkman but stuck it out.

"Yes, we won a battle." Giles was glad he didn't smoke, they would've driven him to it already. "We stopped the master from freeing himself and opening the mouth to Hell. Doesn't mean he'll stop trying. Indeed, I'd say the fun is just beginning."

"More vampires?" Willow questioned softly as the group stood and started walking.

"Not just vampires, I suspect the next creature we face may be something quite different. We sit at a centre of mystical convergence. We may in fact, stand between Earth and total destruction." The severity in Giles' voice made Gale press play on Thriller finally.

"Buffy, that isn't good, right?" Xander tightened his grip on his skateboard.

"Oh, I can hardly wait." Buffy smiled at him before she turned her attention to her friends. "Well, I gotta look on the bright side. Maybe I can still get kicked out of school."

"Hey, not a bad plan! A lot of schools aren't on Hellmouths."

"Oh, I know, maybe you could blow something up. They're really strict about that." Willow cheerfully advised.

"I was thinking of being a little more subtle, like an excessive lack of studying." Buffy laughed.

"Don't do that, I don't want to have double the homework, we live too close, your mom would beg me!"

Giles split off from the three as they headed into the school. An uneasy smile on his face. "The earth is doomed."

Chapter Text

Wicce

Sunnydale, California – 1997

For all of Cornelius's eccentricities, the wizard was not without a sense of small mercies. The interrogation, there really was nothing better to call it, began with a cup of steaming liquid chocolate and bits of very sweet fruits to counteract vestigial adrenaline as well as provide an artificial boost to Gale's energy levels. If not her morale.

He was even so kind as to physically prop her up in a padded chair as opposed to a hard one. Being nearly devoured was a trial he had expected for her, but he had been arrogant enough to assume it would've taken longer after meeting Miss Summers and not the day of, even if it wasn't 'the day of'.

Alas, did fair Icarus fly so close to the sun.

"Wake up." The command was not a normal saying of words, rather, power issued forth and compelled her eyes to open. They weren't as glassed over as he thought they'd be. Good.

"That makes two." Cornelius's headcount shook her attention to him alongside his spell's workings.

"Mhm." Gale's voice was smaller than usual, the shadow of a whisper and distant. "She was so..." and filled with a quiet longing made that itself at home inside her. Eternal misery morphed into a lovesick pining for something unattainable, gone forever even though it never was to begin with.

"Yes, they are. Until they aren't." Cornelius's words were not kind, though he was not expressly mean. A cruel experience sat in them, one cold and logical uttered into existence. A lesson learned, an encounter survived. "Do not tell your father." There was an order in there, magical and powerful. He didn't control minds, found it quite repulsive in fact, but he did plant suggestions. Semantics? Yes, of course.

Gale nodded in quiet agreement whether by magic or stark terror, no other living person would hear a word of it who didn't already know. Her grip on the fine china tea cup filled with confectionery tightened to the point of iron. The warmth provided a sense of grounding. The gentle sting a reminder that she was alive. "I hate vampires." Her voice remained soft and the house dare not amplify it as it normally did.

Cornelius chuckled sardonically and dropped a hand on her shoulder. The small gesture felt heavy and imperious instead of comforting. "Don't we all?" More thought than action dispelled whatever he'd done to her. Harmless overall.

Gale shuddered, she hated being touched. "I hope so."

However, some prey were fascinated by their predators.

Sunnydale, California – 1997

Wednesday. Two weeks later.

"All the cream spoiled in the cafeteria today." Gale didn't look up from the voluminous amount of homework she had spread across the kitchen table. Two copies of every subject. On the stove sat a pot bubbling. She could have accused it of being his cauldron, but that was upstairs in his study.

"Pardon?" Cornelius looked up from a book, it certainly felt like he always had a book but in this case it was something on collegiate mathematics. Gale was a good student, but she needed drill these days just to stay sharp. Public really did lack.

"Three hundred gallons of milk and cream spoiled in the cafeteria today at school. It was terrible." Gale repeated with a huff. "You want to know about weird stuff, that's weird, right?"

"Indeed..." Cornelius shut the maths book closed as the tone of the evening's conversation set, he waved a hand and extinguished the stove which allowed the cream of broccoli to settle. Silly girl and her vegetarianism.

"Oh, and a girl outright caught fire ex nihilo." Gale's pencil continued its trek across the pages, if she was disturbed it wasn't showing. "From nothing." She clarified in the common vernacular as though he didn't speak Latin fluently in ways she couldn't begin to imagine, "oh and someone struck Cordelia blind."

"Who? Was it blue?" Cornelius leaned forward and stared over her work, critiquing inwardly but saying nothing to its quality or lack-thereof.

"What?" Her pencil stopped as she looked up, "the popular girl." She waved him off her equations and snapped "they're fine!"

"The fire." Cornelius specified and pulled one of the worksheets over to his side of the table anyway. He could care less about random girls, even if they were 'popular'. There was a point to their meddling, even if he'd never tell Gale what it was.

"Let's not tell your father about this, either." He noted the name at the top was not her own, though it did not appear she'd written it at least.

"Does she pay you at least? That was popular about fifteen years ago." He knew she certainly didn't need the money, if only because she burned a hole in his pocket instead. 'Who knew cosmetics cost so much? When did they stop using lead?' 'Who chews that much gum?'

"No, she doesn't. I'm helping." Gale clicked her tongue in annoyance.

Cornelius's head tilted ever so slightly to the left, "Indeed." He would never accuse her of not being a good listener, he'd given her a job and she took to it like a sacred duty, even if this wasn't what he had in mind. "Anything else?"

"No, nothing else. Giles thinks-" She stopped mid sentence. He didn't need to know what her not-a-teacher thought. "Never mind."

"Noted." Cornelius held a hand out in front of her face and snapped his fingers.

A spark of nothing erupted into a flame that flickered a pale sickly blue. "Did it look like that?" The temperature around his fingers dropped considerably, it did not burn with heat.

"I. Don't. Know." Gale didn't blink at magic, she believe it in almost as strongly as she believed in god. She wanted to learn it, to master it with the same vigor she applied herself to everything in. The prick in front of her refused to teach her. Stupid rules. Not that the rules applied inside a chantry, even a small one.

Something in the back of Gale's mind ticked, though. "But since you think it's a witch, I think I know who it is."

"Oh?" There was a hint of dark minded amusement in Cornelius's voice, "pray tell, what know you of witchery?"

Gale stared at him incredulously, "the basics." Thanks to him no less, though he certainly didn't know it.

"There's this girl I share like half my classes with named Amy. When we met she mentioned her mom's a witch." and the way she said it reminded Gale of her own mom. "It runs in families, right, the static stuff?" Gale concentrated harder on her own homework at the thought.

Cornelius thought for a few seconds, searching his antique mind to remember the 'laws' of esoteric knowledge, such as they were. "It can, yes, though it is not at all common for mage bloodlines to exist."

"I said witch." Gale thought titles were important, she knew how words of power worked, after all. She absolutely did not.

"Witch, Warlock, Mage, it matters not, gendered and misapplied terms from the ignorant to describe Power and its users." Cornelius chuckled, amused. "There was a theory about echoes of power being passed down to progeny but the theory was never fully studied." He overlooked one of the equations and tutted.

"It's fine." Gale folded the sheets over and tucked them into her spiral, finished.

They were, which was the problem. Each equation was perfect. It was one thing for a class to have two academic try-hards, but three? And the third was barely ever in class? Cornelius didn't say anything, but Gale was going to get herself in trouble without any direction at all.

At least her handwriting was slightly off on the other pages. "If your classmate truly is a witch, did the bread also refuse to rise?"

"Schools don't bake it anymore." Gale intoned plainly as she put her school supplies away.

"and no equestrianism in suburban California, certainly." Cornelius agreed, the 'classic' signs of witchery according to small-minded and evil men. Blindness, cream that spoiled, bread that didn't rise, horses that sweat without running. Cornelius made a note to get a dog, they suffered from the same issue.

Distantly, the door of the house opened. It couldn't be forced so it had to be (for the moment) the other inhabitant. "What about witches?" Roland's question preceded the man himself as he entered the room looking a bit travel weary. "The traffic getting out of that godforsaken city I swear." A little more godforsaken than he thought, perhaps.

"I made the cheer squad!" Gale preened, changing the topic of conversation to something less uncomfortable and self-congratulatory. Seldom was she proud of herself. Very seldom.

"That's wonderful!" Roland beamed with a quiet pride. She'd made friends and had a new hobby, most importantly, a safer hobby. Never mind that in addition to it not being all that safe, he chose to ignore or encourage the other extracurriculars she got up to. Hunters were an odd bunch.

"But what do you know about cheerleading?" The question wasn't malicious but Gale's ego such as it was shrank anyway. As far as her dad knew, she was bookish and the opposite of athletic. Which was a touch unfair, Gale was spry and thin.

"Uh, maybe it was beginners' luck? Best foot forward, that's what you always say, right?" Doubt echoed in her. Maybe it was lucky, but she had done really well! Especially considering that the weirdos had kept trials going, with even more tomorrow. She'd made the cut while stressed and guessing, that was a skill, right? Besides, she kind of liked the garish purple and gold wrappings. She thought them boldly colorful.

The next morning, Cornelius caught Gale by the elbow before she could charge out of the house. "Take this with you." He held up a small glass jar filled with... salt. It was ashen black, as though it had been set alight and somehow didn't melt.

Gale stared at him. "I am not throwing salt at my friend." Whether Amy really was her friend or not was debatable, but she enjoyed her company when they were in the same spaces. It helped that Amy still talked to her after her social assassination.

Cornelius shrugged, "then die." The callousness wasn't new, you live to six thousand years and see if life is still precious beyond belief.

"I'm telling dad you said that." There was no threat there, it was a fact, she would.

"By all means." He dropped the vial of salt into the pocket of her blazer as she pushed passed.

Sunnydale High School

"Yesterday was weird. I've been slaying vampires for over a year now and I've seen some pretty cringe worthy stuff but nobody's hands ever got toasted." Buffy all but reached out and prodded Giles in a bid for his attention.

"No, I imagine not." Giles looked up from the front counter where a plethora of notes lay spread across the oaken surface.

"So, not vampires?" Buffy leaned over the counter looking for information only to find the library's filing system written in the 20th century equivalent of Sanskrit, which was to say it was written down still. In legitimately perfect calligraphy that approached being a work of art, not shorthand.

"No." Giles scooped up a few of the notes and tapped them into a neat pile that was quickly inserted into a folder.

"But it is weird, right? Not of the norm?" Buffy scanned Giles's collection of notes again increasingly aghast.

"Quite. Regarding the... cheering thing, may I appeal to your common sense or have I lost this fight already?" The rest of Giles' notes made their way into storage.

"I didn't make the team in the first round so I guess you're winning by attrition." Buffy huffed. "What do you think, some other kind of demon?"

"Spontaneous human combustion is scientifically unexplained, but, there have been reported cases for hundreds of years. Usually all that's left is a pile of ashes."

"Amber probably would've ended up as ash if it weren't for Buffy." Willow looked up from tying one of her shoes.

"So." Xander waved his arms a bit, "we have no idea what caused this? Comforting."

"Your sarcasm is unwarranted. Part of the thrill of living on a hell gate, one has a veritable cornucopia of all manner of devilry and ghouls to consider..." The abject horror on two of the three faces caused Giles to stop, "well, forgive me for finding the glass half full."

"What's the common denominator between cases?" Buffy leapt up on the counter.

Giles cringed. "Rage. In most cases the victims were terribly angry or otherwise deeply upset."

The door to the library opened drawing the attention of the four. "Hi, Gale." Willow greeted her fellow redhead first.

"Hey! Am I late? Sorry, apparently I have to watch other people's success." Gale shot a look of sympathy toward Buffy who shrugged, they were still filling out the team, a thin hope yet remained.

"Maybe Amber's like the human torch, only it hurts?" Xander offered to their previous conversation, "Hey," he waved.

"Amber? Oh, yeah, maybe!" Helpful, insightful even, 'liar' screamed Gale's inner voice, drowned and softer than it normally was. At her wrist the thin strand of wooden beads hummed with energy almost no one else could see, and was apparently doing very little for a shield and foci. The jar that lay forgotten in the pocket of her blazer literally vibrated, it wasn't meant as a grenade.

"Hey, you doing alright?" Buffy hadn't known Gale long, but aside from the apparent neurosis, she didn't yell unless her life was under threat. She barely held a conversational tone.

"Just fine." Gale's southern twang rang out with a clarity that was... unusual was a good way to put it, considering she usually hid it. Her tendency to lock up every other word whenever she spoke to her was missing, and she certainly did a much better job of restraining her wandering eyes. Buffy wasn't as vapid as she seemed sometimes... Vampire-bait aside, it was kind of easy to figure out that Gale wasn't completely normal... She even had that special kind of skill at repressing it most of the time.

Special skill indeed, staring at one's shoes distracted them from less honorable pursuits, after all.

"You're sure?" Buffy landed lightly.

"Yep!" Several octaves more excitable, too.

"Miss Karling, please do not yell, this is still a library." Giles was being ironic, right? With how much noise they got up to in the book-tomb.

Gale blinked and turned crimson in the same motion, "sorry." That was much more in tone with her usual behavior at least.

"If you're sure..." Buffy turned back to the rest of her friend group... her... support network, whether she wanted it or not. "I should get the skinny on Amber, see if she's had any colorful episodes before."

"Oh, good idea!" Willow was already moving as she returned to her regular coloration, "that means hacking into the school's system. I can do that." Indeed, she already was. Much easier given that she simply used Giles's credentials to do it entirely well, sketchily as opposed to brute forcing her way into the system they already had access to.

"I can ask around, see if anything weird's happened around her." Xander offered.

"Guys, I appreciate it but you don't have to get involved." Buffy didn't whine per say but...

"What do you mean? We're a team, aren't we?" Xander looked somewhat taken back.

"Yeah! Of course we are." Gale did in fact, shout the first word, though the rest of it fell to a conversational tone.

"Yeah, you're the Slayer, and we're like, the slayerettes." Willow added perkily from her position at the keys, her fingers moved like lightning.

Giles pinched the bridge of his nose. 'Teens.'

"I don't want you guys putting yourselves in... more danger." Buffy acquiesced to the simple fact it'd already happened, she didn't want a repeat.

"I laugh in the face of danger." Xander managed a bit of gallantry, "and then I hide until it goes away, but still." His humorless chuckle was not lost on any of them.

"Pffft, danger, wizard, remember?" Gale downright cheerily declared. Didn't she mention something about stopping doing that?

"Yeah,sure, but that doesn't mean you are." Buffy turned her attention back to Giles, "and what if it's not Amber's fault?"

Giles cleaned an invisible spec of dust from his spectacles. "Then we figure out who or what it is that decided to maim teen girls and respond accordingly."

Buffy nodded, that was reasonable.

"Hey, we got this, we've fought vampires, how much worse could it be?" Xander manged an actual laugh, "anything else'll be a walk in the park." If his actions matched his bravado, perhaps.

"I hope so..." Buffy sighed.

Sunnydale

"You're absolutely sure you're okay?" Buffy was not, in her own opinion, an insistent person, normally Gale would disagree, having learned the opposite quickly. Rare were the days they also walked home together, Buffy usually stayed behind in the library for whatever training regime Giles had planned.

"I'm fine.~" Gale insisted, sing-song, she was almost vibrating as she walked. Which of course, was about the time she collapsed.

Buffy caught her before she hit the ground, at least.

She also pounded on the door of Gale's house with enough force to buckle normal wood mere minutes later. It did not so much as warp. 'Weird house.'

The tall deeper redheaded elder and male-er version of Gale was not who she was expecting, but she held his daughter out from the awkward bridal carry to be received with a single word. "Help."

To Roland's credit, he was pretty confident in his upper body strength's ability to haul around his mini-me. "What happened?" It was not a question, it was an order. He was a jovial man most of the time, and Buffy was glad he took this seriously, she wasn't sure what she'd have thought if he were frivolous.

"I have no idea, weird things have been happening ever since cheer try outs started yesterday. Gale made it on in the first rounds." Buffy was pretty good at not panicking under pressure. Did this count as pressure? She wasn't sure.

Roland hummed as he bid Buffy follow him into the mini chantry. "Cornelius!" His bark reverberated off the walls of the house and echoed mightily, yet Roland did not yell, not truly. It made Buffy's ears ring.

By the time the wizard had appeared from gods knew where, Roland had laid Gale out in the family room on a sofa that didn't exist the last time Buffy had set foot there, and probably didn't prior to this very moment, she tried not to think about it.

"Oh, my. What happened this time?" There was a tone in the wizard's voice, amusement, bafflement even, whatever he was expecting, this wasn't it.

"Do you think this is funny?" Buffy rounded on the old man, a not so quiet fury behind her blue-greens.

Across the room, Roland had a handkerchief to Gale's forehead as he stared worriedly. He really wished he were a bit more of a healer at times like this. No, his special power was singing, as though that were useful right now. He took back the errant thoughts that cheerleading was any 'safer' than her normal after-school activities, too.

"No, Miss Summers, I do not." Cornelius had the gall to look offended. "I find excessively few things amusing and none of them happen to involve the astonishingly few people I care for being laid low." Cornelius did not speak with venom, but the anger left Buffy rapidly, she had a feeling he was being bluntly honest. "Yes, cursed. Bloody hedge magicians." He all but spat. "There is a wicce at work."

"Huh? I thought the word was Wiccan?" That was a hell of a time to be asking such a question but hey, curiosity bubbled up weirdly.

"Wiccan is male, if it turns out to be a man I'll certainly correct myself immediately, but it is not my experience that warlocks curse teen girls who are in the way of someone living vicariously through others." Somewhat more literally than usual... "Always respect your enemies, Miss Summers."

"But the religion?" Buffy wasn't even sure where she remembered that from.

"Was founded by a man. Hence, Wicca." If there was annoyance behind his eyes it didn't show like it did in his voice. "And not a particularly enlightened one either." Cornelius crossed the room passed her and looked over Gale with an appraising if not tired eye. "This is work is hurried, crude even, though it bears the mark of proper magick..." He hadn't expected that at all, though he hid it well.

"Huh?"

"Magic one o' one, I suppose. There is magic, and there is magick. This is a bit of the latter, this is no paltry blood curse, however much it looks like one. How did whoever did this get hold of something precious or personal from a girl so new to here?" He noted that Gale's thoroughly enchanted, and apparently useless, charm bracelet sat at home on her wrist undisturbed. It was of course, immovable save by her own will. It had stopped vibrating about the time she was carried into their chantry.

"No idea." Buffy wasn't with her every minute of the day and couldn't guess to how it had happened.

"Hmm..." Cornelius held out a hand and a long beam of gnarled wood materialized from no where. Breaking curses was easy enough for any proper mage in good standing with the Order.

Buffy was increasingly finding herself hating magic. How do you fight something that can create from nothing??

"I am not your enemy." The wizard reminded her as though he'd read her mind, knowing her luck, he probably did.

He started chanting in some language that Buffy could only guess at. She knew what Latin sounded like, thanks to Merrick and Giles, it wasn't that. No, the Latin chanting was Roland, soft and nearly immaterial, the kind of hasty prayers that people uttered for the dying...

Dramatically, or anticlimactically, Gale's eyes opened. "Huh? What? Dad?"

"Hey there," Roland's short greeting was succeeded by a hug.

"Ow, ow, get off!" Okay, she could yelp too, good to know.

"What was the language of magic before Latin?" Cornelius interrupted any further sentimentality with the most obtuse question imaginable.

"Sumerian." Gale answered on reflex.

"Good, welcome back. Next time, throw salt on your 'friend'." Cornelius sneered.

"What was it before that?" Buffy asked with a guess that she'd just heard Sumerian, 'neat!' Salt? What?

"No one remembers," Cornelius replied tiredly as he left the room leaning heavily on the staff he'd conjured. Alas did Icarus fly too close to the sun indeed.

"He's okay?" Buffy's question felt lacking, having seen the exhaustion on the old man.

"Oh, he'll be fine. It takes a lot to even slow him down." Roland sat back with a chuckle that was thin on joy. Stress and worry sat heavily in his features like the sculpted lines of a well made statue. "Knew you were one of the good ones, kid. Thanks," the air sat quiet for a second, "again."

"Sure.- Gale," Buffy's eyes flicked to her... friend? Yeah, sure, friend worked. Unrequited crush probably from the other side. Very unrequited. "Do you have any memory of today?"

"Some, yeah. Gets foggy after PE and trials, though. I think someone pulled my hair..." A hand went up and the quiet girl started frantically combing through her locks. Appearances were important too, right?

"Seems okay from here. I'm gonna jet if you're okay," Buffy didn't dislike Gale, but her house did creep her out.

"Sure, see you tomorrow?" The return of Gale's tiny voice did a lot to relieve Buffy.

"Provided we're still alive tomorrow, yeah." Macabre as that was, Buffy wasn't wrong and Gale knew it. "Hey, you." She pointed at Roland, "stop flirting with my mom, she's married." Kind of. Sort of. Not really at all.

Roland laughed, "believe me kid, your mom's got nothing to fear from me." First he'd heard of it, even, sure he'd bandied small-talk with Mrs. Summers but that wasn't the same thing as attraction.

Gale mumbled something as Buffy left. "Don't tell mom." Some part of Gale did want to tell her mother, if only because she longed to be told it would be okay. It wouldn't, but the lie would've been nice.

"Tell her what?" Roland smiled and ruffled her hair like she was four years old.

"Good." Gale stood up with the ungainliness of a very newborn doe. "Good," she repeated as she sank back down. "Help?" Blood curses took a lot out of people. Enlightened ones even more so.

Buffy entered her own home to the sight of boxes as far as the eye could see. Her mom stood over one with a crowbar in hand prying at it with vigor. "Hey, mom."

"Hi honey, how was school?" Joyce yanked downward and the lid popped off of one of the crates finally.

"A reverent joy... What is all this?" Buffy was good at keeping her cards close to her chest, especially after... she tried not to think about that either.

"It's for the gallery's upcoming tribal art display."

Buffy picked up one of the statues as a sour look crossed her face. 'I wonder who these were stolen from.' It was hard being the destined defender of the world and not picking up on how all the rituals, magic spells and artifacts of power belonged to someone else, and that usually meant someone brown. She sat the statue back down.

"We had more tryouts today." Buffy sighed and tried to catch her mother's attention properly.

"Great! How'd it go?" Joyce's real attention was on failing to open that crate.

"I washed." Buffy mumbled, disappointed more in her own rust than her mom's inattention.

Joyce turned around, crowbar relinquished as she crossed the small cluttered space and drew her eldest daughter into a hug. "I'm sorry."

Buffy blinked behind her shoulder but hugged her back. "What did I try out for, mom?"

"Uh..." Joyce hesitated for a second, "some activity? I have no idea, I'm so sorry."

"It's okay." Buffy squeezed lightly. "Your platitudes are good for all occasions."

They withdrew from one another and Joyce frowned. "I'm distracted. I've got all this inventory to go through, it's my gallery's first major show... It might not physically kill you to help me out? Your sister's a bit too small."

Buffy gave her mom a tired smile, "It was cheerleading tryouts, and sure," with ease the lid of the crate came off.

"Oh. good! I'm glad you're taking that up again, it can keep you out of trouble. Try again?"

Buffy stared, "I'm not in trouble, mom, and yeah, I will."

Joyce tutted, and gripped a statue. "No, not yet. I mean, you stopped cheerleading right before the trouble. So it's good you're going back." She looked down, then put it back. "Oh, dear."

"What?"

"A fertility statue, you don't need to see that, neither does Dawn, ugh." Joyce pulled a few other pieces out before she covered the crate back up.

"There's this girl in my class, Amy, trains with her mom hours every day. Like she's really into it or something." Buffy closed the fridge, quest for something edible forestalled.

"Sounds like her mom doesn't have a whole lot to do." Joyce replied distractedly as she left the room with a few pieces in either hand looking for somewhere to hide them from her sleeping younger.

"Oh!" Buffy put the lid back on the crate after a too curious look.

Thursday Morning

"I need everything on this list." Gale almost threw a legal pad at Cornelius over coffee, well, he had coffee, she wasn't allowed it.

"Gale, this looks like a grocery order." Cornelius scanned down the words quickly. "Mustard seed? What do you need mustard seed for?" He rose one of his eyebrows with the question.

"Er, what?" Gale hoisted her bag over her shoulder and prepped her Walkman in one go.

"Eye of newt is mustard seed..." This is why he hadn't started her beyond the basics. At least get the basics committed to memory first... He pinched his nose tiredly, the action reminded Gale of Giles a little bit.

"Oh." Gale felt very small as she adjusted the buckles on her shoes. She didn't dare look at him while her ears burned.

"Yes, oh." Cornelius sneered and waved a hand at the same time. A vial of salt, a different color this time, appeared in his hand. He held it aloft to her. "Take this with you as well."

"The last one didn't work." Gale held up the offensive jar of black salt.

"You're still alive, yes?"

Gale looked at her shoes again. "Thanks."

"Mm. Ungrateful child." He rose his mug and drank.

Gale's temper flared; "Ungrateful?" She looked up with a hiss in her voice. "I do everything you say! I listen! I'm practically a puppet! You said endear yourself to her and I did! I want that spot! You have no idea how much I want that spot! Buffy is the sun in my sky and I can't even look at her straight because of you and your stupid quest that almost got me killed!" The hand holding the blackened salt shot out and she tossed it at him with everything she had. The house was merciful and didn't amplify her voice.

"Ah." Which turned out to not be very much.

"No, you wanted me to curse my friend! You don't get to say 'ah' like it was nothing!" It did not occur to Gale that yesterday's 'misuse' of magic had not come from a friend.

A thread of ethereal light bloomed around the wizard, barely visible or even there. Yet not a single shard of glass nor a fleck of cursed salt touched him though the latter hit the floor with a violent hiss. "Ah, is a verbal component for shield spells." Cornelius dared sound defensive. Perhaps if she'd paid attention to the basics she'd know that.

"If only your deceptions were as refined as your spell work." Gale sighed and felt distinctly defeated and it wasn't even eight o'clock yet. She did pay attention and that was a lie.

"Houdini is evidence of the two going hand in hand." Cornelius once again went over her list and snapped his fingers. Various vials filled with her requests appeared in her bag, fresh and undisturbed.

Gale flipped him off over her shoulder as she marched out of the house. "Stupid wizard..."

"What about stupid wizards?"

Cornelius barely heard the neighbor girl, indeed the very subject of his 'quest' and wondered if this miserable place was having a more pronounced and quicker effect on Gale than he originally thought it would...

Sunnydale High School

A few hours later

Gale stretched awkwardly as her beginners' luck wore itself thin. The gym wasn't as full as it had been the day before and with only three spots remaining it was pretty much down to the last dozen or so people who milled about with anxiety not so dissimilar to her own.

The really athletic among them had done their piece, secured their spots. Amy looked none too pleased with her own success, though she'd had rather a sour look on her face this morning when they first piled in. As someone with a lot to prove herself, Gale felt sorry for her. Amy was good, really good even but no one should push themselves that hard... Pot, meet Kettle. Normal people don't do others work for them.

Then up stepped Buffy wrapped in the same purple and gold for the second time. Joy had a look on her face that made Gale wonder why Buffy was bothering, then she completed her section with the perfection of someone as preternaturally gifted as Buffy was a few people in addition to Joy applauded as the look vanished from the senior's features and her pen went flying across the page in front of her.

Amy's expression fell again and she began whispering something, soft but driven. Gale didn't have supernatural hearing, but she could have recognized the charge that filled the air if she weren't busy being star-struck. It was almost imperceptible, like electricity but more energetic, more... alive.

Then it vanished. A feeling more than a sound, a spell. 'What an able little witch' was something her uncle would've said. Gale missed it entirely.

Unfortunately for Buffy, she did too. Preternatural near superhuman hearing, a bit of the strength of Heracles and agility to match Hermes did not a god make, and magic or magick was a force equalizer the likes that both kindred and kine seldom understood until it hit them in the face with the full force of the fireballs that so many sorcerers had preferred long ago. These days it was more subtle. Most of the time.

Buffy however, did not catch fire as Amber had. Indeed, she was quite chipper as the tryouts finished up with Joy taking note of the most skillful of the hopefuls and passed those among the senior 'leadership' of the squad. Because while she was not a god, Buffy was a bit more than lucky. The initial impact of what would've killed someone like Gale, magical protections and all with no delay, barely slowed Buffy down.

At first.

The gym emptied not long afterwards, with those who'd done the most physical activity headed toward the showers. Gale sighed and looked at the tiled ground as she crossed the perimeter, change, get out, very simple. She was getting used to keeping her head down again.

"Hey, it's okay." A hand reached out and touched her, she almost screamed. "You're going to be fine." Buffy smiled at her and Gale thought she might die.

She managed a charmless "thanks", instead as Buffy bounced out of the room at top speed. 'Weird'.

A couple of lockers down Cordelia stepped into another girl's space, coiffed and perfected as always. "I have a dream." There was a hostility in her voice reserved for well basically everyone to be honest, one didn't get to the top of the social hierarchy by being nice.

Amy jumped back an inch or two and glared at Cordelia with a look that could've curdled milk but Cordy continued, unabated. "It's me on the cheer squad, adored by every varsity male as far as the eye can see..." and at least one girl.

"Look, Cordelia, I'm sor-"

Cordelia held up a hand, "silence when your queen is speaking." The tall girl's eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

Amy really was going to curse her now... "We have to achieve our dreams, Amy, or we wither and we di---"

"Are you always such an unrepentant bully?" Gale called from across the room. In rapid succession she stood up, crossed the short distance and inserted herself between Cordelia and Amy with a withering look of her own to match Cordelia's. She was shorter than Cordelia by a clear half a head and had to look up at her but it did little to change the dislike in her eyes which flashed with an anger oh so familiar to stereotypes.

Cordelia glared at Gale with a look in her own brown orbs that was best described as naked hatred. "How dare you speak to me out of turn you Texan hick."

"I'm not from Texas, moron." Gale didn't lose her accent, if she had a meaner bone in her body she'd have reached up and smacked her for the insult. If.

"Cordelia, I'm sorry for knocking into you, it wasn't on purpose." Amy interrupted from behind Gale with a touch of surprise in her voice. The metaphoric gears grinding away at why the girl in front of her was still breathing when she should've been dead.

Cordelia flicked her eyes back to Amy, "If your supreme klutziness took me out of the running the other day, you're going to wish you'd never been born." She flashed a smile, hollow and mirthless that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Have a nice day..." A hand shot out and slammed her open locker with a clangor that caused both the other girls to jump.

"Er, thanks." Amy said in Cordelia's wake.

"Any time." Gale exhaled a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. She wasn't used to being the heroic type. Nor did it quiet the dull roar of anxiety in her core.

It took a few hours for the effects of what happened in the gymnasium to catch up to Buffy. The waning hours of the school day when she stumbled suddenly and almost toppled over before Xander caught her by complete accident, stretching at exactly the right time when she was in mid-sentence about how great her friends were.

The quartet had milled about the quad along with the rest of the student body to see who'd made the final cut, bored seniors to hopeful freshmen scanning several pages of print-paper in search for their names. Toward the front of the crowd, unseen, Cordelia preened openly as she walked off in triumph, as did Amy, who made a note to more thoroughly murder Gale for making it as well. Poor Buffy was marked down as the first alternate along with a short list of others.

Gale wasn't fond of ironic reversals. She wasn't fond of being the knight in shining armour. It was a pedigree of bravery that she thought she lacked. The out queer teen in the nineties not being brave, okay kid, we believe you. Point being, never in her life did she expect to be half-carrying one of her friends through the halls of the school in a muted hurry alongside the other two as Buffy repeatedly flagged as they went along. Buffy passed out just before they entered the doors of the library itself and it took her, Xander and Willow to lift Buffy properly. That no one noticed, or more likely cared, was a miracle.

Why the library and not the nurse's office? Well, Gale was pretty sure that modern medicine couldn't do much about magic and if his library was anything to go by, Gale had a pretty strong suspicion that the good doctor was as awakened as her uncle was... But more importantly he could help with magic regardless. "Giles!"

"Miss Kar---" The man himself was standing behind the counter with a book in his hand as usual. He stopped mid pronunciation as they presented the flagging Buffy with a whine.

"What happened?" He was already moving to gather Buffy up as he asked. Giles wasn't a big man, reedy and read-y, but he managed to hold Buffy up without much in the way of strain. Buffy's eyes flickered open again, dazed and with confusion in them.

"I dunno, one minute she was fine and the next, well." Gale gestured helplessly.

"And you two? You've all been thick as thieves, surely one of you noticed something amiss." Giles was just as guilty of that but well, appeal to authority, even if they all casually disregarded it.

"Amiss?" Xander scratched the back of his head, he knew what the word meant but it was difficult to say much on what he didn't see.

Giles sighed, "wrong." He held up a hand before any of them could speak, however. "No, never mind. Help me lay her out on one of the tables for the moment."

"I'm not dead yet..." Buffy sounded far weaker than was normal for her.

"Which we will prevent entirely, at least this day." Giles managed to not choke as he consulted one of the books from the shelves that the student body certainly was not allowed to touch. He read quickly, skimming more than reading.

"Uh, doc? Please tell me you're a mage." Gale's question was both earnest and hurried. Buffy's head fell to the side, pallor coloring, or rather draining color, from her features as she slipped into unconsciousness again.

Giles nodded curtly and shooed her away before he began chanting in Latin, the much newer language of magic. Gale hung on to every word but her friends were not so luckily educated, and she interrupted only once.

"The god of witches isn't Diana..." Funny that she knew that, probably from some storybook she wasn't supposed to read.

Tacitly, Giles ignored her until he had finished his ritual, not missing a beat. A glow consumed Buffy's form, gentle in color but vibrant in intensity, the three teens looked away for a fraction of a second while Giles's gaze didn't so much as flicker, darting from his subject and his spellbook. 'Of course his foci was a spellbook', Gale thought, she'd have been amused by it any other time. Giles's book itself was a small thing, thick and wrapped in black leather, weathered from years of use.

When the light show ended and receded, Buffy had... stabilized was a good word, though inaccurate. A bit of color returned to her features and her eyes were open and semi-alert. Gale loved magic.

"I'm just saying, if you call down the wrong god you get a different result..."

"Gale." Giles looked up from his spellbook. "Yes, you are correct that Diana is not the god of witchcraft. What are Diana and her Greek counterpart, Artemis, the gods of?"

Gale fell into thought for a minute, going very quiet. Mythology was heresy after all.

"Protector of children..." Willow intoned softly rather than Gale, at last. One god or less, but other gods weren't excluded from existing.

"Good, well done. Top marks." Giles's sarcasm was more scathing than he would ever know. "Who did this?"

"Er, strictly speaking I was in the hall. Didn't see anything." Xander averted his eyes to look at a wall, less than enthused.

"I'm not sure, we don't exactly cover the occult in science. All I noticed was hopefuls being well, hopeful." Willow didn't try to sound snippy, her attention was on the stillness of her friend mostly. At least Buffy was still breathing, nice and even and almost normally.

"Well?" Giles all but reached out and poked Gale, who jumped out of her deep thinking with a sheepish look on her face.

"Sorry..."

To his credit, Giles didn't look all that disappointed. "Who did this? You know what mages are, along with other things I wish you didn't. You have some idea." His last statement wasn't a question.

"Uh..." Gale didn't necessarily want to say anything, it felt like treason. "There's a witch here."

"Yes, at least two, you're looking at a warlock." Giles frowned, he didn't like thinking about it very much. "Be specific."

"Er..." Gale muttered something about loyalty that he didn't catch. Mages were supposed to stick together, uphold the veil that kept sleepers sleeping. This was decidedly not that.

"Gale, they tried to kill your friend." There was a touch of softness in the librarian's voice that didn't appear often.

"and me..." Gale whispered that inaudibly to the rest of them...

"You might want to speak up." Xander helpfully advised, Gale shot a weak withering stare at him that bounced off.

"I..." 'don't know' wouldn't come out, no matter how much she wanted it to. "There's this girl I share social studies with, and biology, and PE too. I think it might be her." Gale was conversational but slow, like she didn't want to be misheard.

"Very helpful. Do you know her name, there are over four hundred students in this school."

Really? Sunnydale was supposed to be small...

"Amy." That felt like treason too. She'd just defended Amy for god's sake... but simple self-preservation had started to win.

"As in Amy Madison?" Willow asked gently and with a literal poke. Gale didn't jump but she certainly tensed. Somewhat surprisingly there weren't many girls with the name Amy at SHS and Amy Clearwater graduated last year bringing the count down to one.

"Yeah, that's her." Gale felt like crying, she even started. "I met her my first day, we kinda let it slip the weird in our lives. Hell," a look crossed her face that was downright aghast at the word that came out of her mouth. That certainly was a 'bad' word and the volume of tears increased. "I just fought Cordelia off from screwing with her at the end tryouts this morning..."

Willow chewed on her lip. "I know Amy, she wouldn't hurt a fly. We've been friends for years." Considerably less close for a while now but... "Her mom's a witch, though." Willow remembered things she wasn't supposed to see from years ago.

"Right. We haven't much time." Giles lifted Buffy bridal style, alas, her poor back. Alas, his poor back. "You two, odd as this is, get back to class. Tell them you were... something you think adults believe when we absolutely don't. Willow, come with me. I need directions."

Sunnydale High School

"The bracelet thing was creepy by the way." Gale intoned as she and Xander left the library a minute or two after the other three feeling particularly sullen as they did. "I didn't say anything yesterday because I figured Willow had it in hand but apparently she's just 'one of the guys' to you." Which Gale found funny, all of his friends were girls, who was one of what again?

"What makes you say that?" Talk for the sake of it, even if it was at his expense. Mostly, he was surprised she even knew about it. Sure, they hung out, but he didn't exactly tell anyone but Buffy... Well, also Willow, but Willow was his best friend, of course he told Willow. It didn't occur to him at all that the girls talked about things around one another.

"The way I see it, Xan, we're rivals. But beyond that, you're not dating her and you shouldn't act like you are." Gale kept her voice low, eyes roving for the occasional person knowing from experience how people would have thought less of her if they knew she was gay.

"True. Point in my favor though, I'm not a queer." Xander followed her with his eyes as her vision darted around for invisible students. He didn't see himself as cruel very often, but when he thought he had a point...

"You sure about that? Absolutely positively without a shadow of a doubt sure? And screw you, all it means is weird and I'm not weird." Gale's voice broke half way through and she almost punched him, but she didn't. That would've been beyond the pale in a plethora of bad things in one day, she broke down and cried again instead.

"No, I guess you're not. At least not for that." An uncomfortable silence filled the void as the two slumped against a wall in a less traveled part of the school, sniffles and all. There was no going back to class while they were worried about their friend and wanted paramour. "Here I rule, king of cretins, all lesser cretins bow before me..." Xander muttered to himself, whether he thought it right or not it felt very wrong to have said at all.

Sunnydale

"Where does Mrs. Madison live?" Giles's tiny hatchback really was miserably small. Willow pointed as they approached the right corners to turn but other than that she couldn't actually get a word in edge wise, being too preoccupied with making sure that Buffy was still with them in some manner or the other. For the moment at least she was awake, whatever weird that Giles had done seemed to have stuck.

"Sunnydale doesn't have a lot of town, Giles." Willow murmured as she flicked Buffy's hair out of her face, awake didn't mean mobile, not really.

"I'm not dead, Will." Buffy followed her with her eyes a little and wiggled a hand to prove the point further, and though she remained sickly looking, she was looking more hale than she had in the library.

"I'd really prefer if you didn't think like that, please." Willow sighed. "Right here, Giles." She pointed to a mid-last century Gothic house with a tower. Willow blinked and the tower was gone before she could question it. Even SunnyD had a Consensus.

"Stay here." Giles scooped Buffy out of the car with an oddly set determination in his features. Buffy, to her credit, managed to stand, even if she did have to lean on Giles rather heavily.

Giles was not looking forward to a mage's duel, least of all with his charge so obviously weakened... He'd done what he could but fighting off death curses was difficult at best. He wasn't an expert in life magics like Verbena were and he suspected that Gale's enigmatic ill educational patron wasn't either with the way the girl had been downright aghast at revealing her own thoughts.

A few seconds Giles knocked on the door of the Madison residence with the force of someone very much in a hurry. It shook on its hinges, imbued with some small amount of power that he'd left dormant for a very long time. Magic wasn't the wonder that some thought. It was, case in point, a horror.

"Giles, what happens next?" Buffy asked as she hung on to him for dear life, voice a tremor.

"Now, Buffy, you get to see a duel." Giles's own statement made him feel sick. It wasn't a boast. "Pray to God I win, as the only other method I know of is decapitation of the caster."

Understandably, Buffy cringed. "It'd be great if we didn't ghost Amy. She's only doing this out of fear."

"Or vanity..." Giles did not speak that thought aloud. There were entire schools of magic based around being vain. He shuddered at the thought, there was even a vampire lineage that specialised in being as beautiful as they were terrifying.

When the door opened a moment later, "What do you want? Is there something wrong?" Catherine Madison had a look in her eyes that was nothing short of blind terror. Much like how her mother was wearing her skin, Amy Madison did have power, and she could feel that the person in front of her radiated with much the same. What his tradition was, if any, she had no idea.

Giles' expression went through every stage of grief in about a tenth of a second before he settled on stony neutrality. "... Mrs. Madison, may we come in? We need to talk to you about your daughter."

"I'm not allowed-" The door inched toward closing before Giles slid a winged shoe in the frame.

"With all due respect, this is of paramount importance." If he were snappish, it probably had a lot to do with how Buffy flagged against him and nearly collapsed into him. Giles shifted his weight to accommodate her and pushed into the Madison house with a stare that sent Catherine flinching backwards.

If she was a witch, Giles was very confused. Like all mages, witches and pagans gave a damn. They fought back against the sort of thing he trained Buffy for. A few made things worse, sure, but even in that case...

"You'll have to come back later..."

Giles would've rounded on her if he weren't busy sitting Buffy on an ottoman. She teetered, nearly falling over, though she was not inactive and caught herself.

"Listen here, woman." With the misogynistic patronising tone that only a man of the British intelligentsia could manage, Giles turned to face Catherine with a particularly dark look in his eyes. "This girl here is very ill, and your daughter is up to something incredibly dangerous."

Buffy's eyes roved over the house while Giles argued... Knickknacks, normal dust collectors, a book shelf, a television with crappy daytime TV on that her mom was probably watching right then. Also a tray of brownies under the coffee table.

Giles was in the middle of a fervor when Buffy looked to Catherine, caught her terrified eyes and asked a simple, one word question.

"Amy?"

Giles deflated like a punctured balloon, possession was easy to solve.

Sunnydale High School

Forty-five minutes after he left, Giles carried Buffy through the halls of her school once again and muttered incoherently under his breath as he did so. Willow followed him carrying a book. From pretty much no where, Xander appeared. "Hey, uh, where we headed?" Classes let out half an hour before and the campus was mostly quiet in the interim between the now and that night's ball game. The Razorbacks were probably going to lose... Again. They sucked that much.

"Science lab three." Willow flipped through Giles' spell book with a voracious hunger to know. "Giles needs access to fire and some other things for his counter spell." Because she totally believed in magic before seeing it. Well, no, she didn't, but seeing was in large part believing! "Where's Gale?" 

"She said something about counter spells too and dashed off, I think to SL2." Xander rattled off as his eyes went wider than saucers when he saw Amy's mom bringing up the rear. "Is that a good idea?" He whispered as they walked.

Willow shrugged. "Good thing those are right next to each other in case anything goes wrong. Oh?" She looked back. "Yeah, it's easier to overcome possession when the victim and caster are in close proximity, apparently."

"I'm gonna ignore you just said that." Xander pushed the door to SL3 open for Giles and stood back while everyone piled in before he entered himself. Which was about the time his fight or flight instincts kicked in and someone hit him on the back of the head. Hard. That he didn't collapse was a miracle... "Ow! What the hell!?" He spun around to see... Amy.

"Oh." Thanks to his understatement and inability to duck quickly, Amy did nothing more physical to him. The fire extinguisher in her hands fell and instead she snapped her fingers. Xander fell to his knees gasping for air with a distinct inability to bring any in.

"Xander!" Willow dropped Giles' book, a hand she hadn't seen shot out and grabbed it and its owner was already chanting. Before Willow could make it to her friend she was shoved backwards violently by the air itself.

"Get out of my way." Amy's order rang with power that echoed in Willow's ears. Unnatural sounds rang in her ears and she felt queasy to say the least as she sank down winded.

As she stepped passed Willow, Amy threw a hand out as Giles chanted, some profane might in the invisible grip that she foisted upon him. A wall of light erupted between him and Amy not even a second later. Summoned from the depths of a dusty mind in regards to magic.

This was not a quiet battle. Indeed, were it not for the ball game in the gymnasium, it was entirely probable that the entire audience would've heard them. A few feet away through an adjoining door however, was a lot closer than the gym.

Gale looked up from her ongoing alchemical battle with her uncle's many vials as she mixed and prodded substances into other things via transmutation. Satisfied with the concoction that revealed itself a second later she poured it quickly from an inflamed beaker that was almost too hot to touch and into one of the vials from which her ingredients had come. Real magic, for the first time in her life, held in the palm of her hand. It felt good. She drove that thought from her mind however, the much more pressing issue in the next room over much more on her mind as she threw open the door that connected the rooms, very very glad that it was Giles's back she was looking to when she did.

Gale resisted the urge to throw bits of the malleus maleficarium at Amy, if only because it would've been hypocrisy; as she baseball pitched the vial at her just as Giles' chant reached a crescendo summoning down the wrath of a war god whose name she did know. Damn near everyone knew who Athena was, of course the librarian invoked the god of knowledge. On the table upon which Buffy lay her eyes opened, clearer and much more healthy than after the initial ritual done to her earlier that day.

Amy ducked, of course, and the vial smashed against the far wall harmlessly. When she came back up however, her eyes were her own again. Every ounce of hatred that had sat in them for the people gathered in the room had fled, replaced instead by a deep seated terror that Gale herself was all too familiar with.

Which was about the time that Catherine was back in her own vessel and to say she looked livid would be a disservice to the word. Giles threw his other arm up to separate himself from Catherine as she lurched toward him, quite literally airborne as she did so. The thin band of light didn't have time to form before she willed something heavy behind him to slam into his knees sending him downward. Catch a mage off guard and they were just as mortal as the rest of mankind.

Catherine turned from Giles and rounded on her daughter, towering and imperious. "You little bitch." That tone was familiar to two of the three teens in the room not named Amy. Gale winced. Duck and apologise played across her memory unbidden.

There was no wrath quite like... "Mom, please." That wrath. No sea wide enough nor mountain tall enough as the saying went. It was horrifying seeing the sentiment inverted. Amy scrambled backwards, stifled a scream and threw her hands over her face.

Something worse than hate boiled in Catherine's eyes as she stood over her progeny. Loathing was a good word, combined with vanity, the sort that sat next to vainglory among sins. Damn shame she believed in irony too, "Raise your hand to your mother? Who gave you birth!?"

"Hey bitch! Leave her alone!" Because Gale knew too well that sort of horror. In the next second she couldn't breathe.

"Hi there!" Buffy came up behind Catherine and clocked her, hard. "Guess what? I feel better!" Buffy's blow sent Catherine flying. Someone normal probably would've felt more than the whiplash that Catherine did as she rose from her tumble thrumming with power.

"She is mine, do you understand me? Mine!"  Well, that was an unhealthy possessiveness. Buffy let out what could charitably be called a laugh, though it was humorless. "Oh, grow up. It's your job to take care of her, not compete with her." 

Catherine sneered in response, "I look upon mine enemy and shall take from her, her very soul..." She did not scream. Real magic wasn't often bombastic. A field of light in every possible hue and even some impossible ones rose around her as her spell grew in power. Buffy's eyes widened as she charged at her, it wasn't a wide space, instead of going forward she got sent backward to topple over a desk. Gale, however paralyzed she was, did not recognized the name of whatever profane patron Catherine called down in her spell, nor did Giles for that matter. 

Buffy seemed to understand it was bad news, though, with the way she shot up like a rocket and knocked down a light fixture. The shower of sparks added a flare to Catherine's spell, certainly, but it had the added effect Buffy wanted it to as whatever shot out at her from the world's worst mom rebounded on to its caster... In the aftermath of the light show's fading, Catherine vanished, banished by her own hand. Hoisted by one's own petard indeed.

"Alright, sound off, who's not dead?" She called over the carnage. Giles clambered to his feet, battered but otherwise fine, nearer to the door, Xander, who was breathing normally once more, shot a thumb's up. Willow groaned, as did Gale, who looked exceptionally pale for a secondary target. 

"Just peachy..." Amy murmured, she knew enough about her mom's habits to know she'd never see her again. Some part of her was sad about that. The irrational part.

"I must say," Giles looked giddy, "that was... interesting." He chose the end word carefully and the few nods from their coterie seemed to agree it was. "I'm fairly certain the spells are reversed. Though that was the first time I've cast in more than twenty years so it's possible I got something wrong." There wasn't, of course.

Buffy scoffed. "You saved my life, you were practically a god." 

Giles had the good grace to look humble. "Well, I've no desire to be immodest, but I am satisfied with knocking the dust off."

"Doc, you're a fine mage. My uncle would say something like 'a rank amateur, but good effort', or something like that." Gale said as they exited the room in a gaggle. "Say, could you teach me?"

Giles thought about it for a moment, if nothing else it would net him an assistant. "Certainly."

Gale almost screeched with joy. Her uncle was never learning about that. Nor was her dad for that matter.

Sunnydale High School

Friday Afternoon

"So..." Gale caught Amy as she left the gym the next day, unceremoniously removed from the squad to be replaced by Buffy who, while apologetic, had been ecstatic. "Have we... actually met?"

Amy shot her an apologetic smile, "Sorry, not really." It had been a thing to explain that she'd spent the better part of the last four months at forty.

Gale looked legitimately crestfallen over that nugget of information but thrust out a hand awkwardly, "Gale Charles, at your service."Gale never Anglicized her name. Ever.

"If you don't object, I think we'd get along great." If only because that's a hell of a mutual bonding experience, child abuse.

Amy laughed when Gale took her hand in the most chivalric way possible. "Amy Madison, it's a pleasure to meet you."

Oddly, Gale's ever present anxiety was just gone. Good for her, thought a wandering god.