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Buffy walks into Sunnydale Memorial, a teenage girl in a hospital ripe with them, girls with stab wounds, bite marks, mysterious afflictions, claws ripping at their sides, girls this city keeps churning out in all their pretty, tragic, dead glory. The girl she’s looking for is in a room tucked away at the end of the hall, and no one notices as Buffy slips inside, slaps a hand over the comatose face and holds it tight until the body convulses, breathless, and the machines blare in warning. She slips out right before a nurse comes rushing in, and she waits.
When Faith wakes up, a new slayer has been called.
Kennedy only takes nine days to arrive in Sunnydale. The Council is all aflutter, a third slayer throwing their operation on its head in a way not even a second one could, but they can’t keep a girl like Kennedy hidden away, far from the action, silent and still. She has a watcher of her own, an old, white, British guy like the lot of them, who hums and tuts and shushes but barely says a word.
Buffy gets the spare mattress from storage at her mom’s house, sticks it between her and Willow’s bed in their shared dorm at UC Sunnydale. Giles makes the watcher tea.
Faith is gone one second, back the next. She was drugged, kidnapped, tortured, arrested, and somewhere in the middle, she found whatever passes for salvation in Angel’s side of Los Angeles. Not that she tells Buffy any of this. Instead, she shows up in the middle of a late-night fight in one of the grander Sunnydale graveyards, slays Buffy’s vamp from right under her, grins.
When Buffy grabs her by the throat and pushes her onto the nearest mausoleum, fire in her belly and ice in her eyes, all Faith says is: “Didn’t the old boytoy tell you, B? I’m all geared up and ready to repent.”
The rest of the gang feels sidelined, the Council throws a fit, and Giles withdraws further and further. There are more vampires than ever crashing through town, every dawn finding the three girls exhausted, the cemeteries littered with freshly dug graves, bits of information about prophecies, big bads and lurking evil scattered all throughout.
It’s when Riley shows her the Initiative that Buffy considers it: what if there were more of them?
She puts it to Kennedy late one night, munching on chips and waiting for a vamp to burst from the ground.
“You want us to go full Flatliners?,” Kennedy asks.
Buffy has never seen Flatliners, although she remembers Kiefer Sutherland from the poster, but she doesn’t even have to come up with a quip.
“Wicked,” Kennedy says, with a smirk, a quirked eyebrow.
They do it differently this time.
Willow’s too excited by the prospect of working on a magical-scientific hybrid project to ask Buffy too many questions about what the potion is for — not that she would have gotten answers either way.
Faith leads them into a lab in the science building, picking locks and breaking doorknobs with practiced ease, a swing to her hips belying her anxiousness.
Buffy’s too excited by the prospect of getting one more slayer, one more recruit, one more sister, to ask Faith why she knows her way around a college she doesn’t attend — not that she would have gotten answers either way.
In the lab, Kennedy drinks poison from a shot glass, convulses, throws up, faints, dies. For the briefest second, Buffy can swear she feels it, the slayer line moving, reaching towards something new. Faith holds Kennedy down as Buffy shoots potion into her veins, bringing her back with a start.
Kennedy’s too dazed by the experience to ask much of anything — not that there are answers to be had.
It takes a while longer to find Caridad. The Council doesn’t know what happened, aren’t looking for a new slayer, and she’s not like Kendra was, like Kennedy, bred into this life. Faith keeps her ear on the ground, Buffy eavesdrops on Giles and pays Spike for information, Kennedy makes mysterious calls to mysterious people. Finally, they find her: a too-strong girl a few states over, who killed her abusive boyfriend by breaking his neck, hitch-hiking to safety.
When it’s Caridad’s turn, she drains the shot glass with a defiant look in her eye, to distract from trembling hands.
They keep doing it.
Violet, who hesitates but wants to seem strong.
Amanda, who looks frail but does it without a hitch in her voice, her step, her gestures.
Chao-Ahn, who takes the longest to find and bring to Sunnydale, and who does it with resignation.
Rona, who refuses, then gives in, then chooses to leave and asks to be left alone.
Satsu, who—
That’s when things start really falling apart. World-wise. Apocalypse-wise. Consequence-wise.
The Council gives up on them, too outraged to accept them, too terrified to confront them. They hide in their marbled halls, behind their dusty books, curse the slayers til kingdom come, and no watcher comes to teach them, train them, put them through tests.
The Scoobies keep fighting the good fight, but they barely go to Buffy anymore, and she barely goes to them. She misses them, and the pain of it gnaws at her like a knife wound that won’t heal. But she can’t bear to be near them, to be anywhere that isn’t with her slayers, with these girls who are like her in an impossible way that she keeps finding ways to make possible.
Riley goes away, claiming she’s distant and withdrawn, and Buffy argues, but there’s no heat behind it. She slips into Faith’s bed now and then, into Satsu’s once, then twice, into Faith's, more permanently, or until their barbs become too pointed and their fists come into play, until Faith leaves for a few days, weeks, once even a month, and comes back with a mouthful of secrets and her swagger back. Once, and only once, Buffy presses against Spike in a damp crypt, feeling feverish and restless after a long night with not enough fight, and the memory of his cold hands, sharp teeth, hard body against her skin feels like falling apart, and she’s more scared to do it again than she has ever been to face certain death.
“The world wants balance,” Giles explains, his voice weary and rough, tripping over his accent like he hasn’t gotten much use out of it lately. “You, Buffy, have thrown it off-balance. You’ve created what the world sees as aberrations. It will stop at nothing to balance the scales.”
It sounds true, in the way everything Giles says sounds true, and Buffy bristles against it, this voice of authority that claims reality as limited, when she has found it to be limitless.
“I created balance,” she says. “There were monsters, and demons, and evil crawling all over this town, all over this world, and one single girl to stop them. The world wanted me lonely, and dead, and dying, but I don’t want to die, Giles. None of these girls wants to die. This way, my way, we keep them alive. We make them strong, we make them fight. We get a chance.”
Giles sighs. He pours himself a scotch, hesites, and pours Buffy one too. He takes off his glasses, cleans them on his shirt, puts them back on. He sighs again.
“I’m not saying it’s fair, Buffy,” he finally says. “But it’s how it was, and how it wants to be. I’m telling you: the world will eat itself up before it lets you run the show.”
Buffy leaves the scotch untouched.
The world continues to end.
More monsters, more demons, more evil. Blood rains, dead birds, premonitions. Bad omens all around, people fleeing every Hellmouth, air so heavy you could taste it, coppery on the back of your tongue, like getting electrocuted, like licking a penny. Slayer dreams so strong and real that all of them wake up at the same time, disoriented and certain they traveled in time.
Death, and death, and death, every day death in every inch of Sunnydale.
But they are slayers. They are killers. They have died and been reborn.
They continue to fight.