Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Buffy hoped the world would not end that day. She hoped the powers that be would give her a little bit of time to make the most of the dreadful situation she found herself in. But when you are facing a shower in a bed and breakfast that looks like it was plumbed in the nineteenth century, and you have been warned to expect a maximum of five minutes of hot water, it’s probably best to assume the worst.

“Mum!”

“Darling?”

“Mum.” It would have been rude to add ‘get in here now’. “Mum get in here now.”

“I could hear you just find from the bedroom sweetheart. What is it?

“Of course you could hear me from the bedroom. Our room is negative square feet. It’s a void in space and time. The shower is haunted and we shouldn’t have come here.” When she spoke out loud, she realised she sounded like a petulant child and this was the last day she wanted to sound like a petulant child. It was the day in her whole life when she had most wanted to sound grown up, capable and wildly intelligent, but it wasn’t happening. “Why are we here? We shouldn’t be here. No day that starts with this shower should be good. It’s a sign from the universe that we should have stayed home and hidden under our beds rather than making significant life decisions.”

“Buffy…”

“Did I mention the shower is haunted?” Buffy knew she had maybe three seconds left before her mum said something sensible and she had to calm down. But she didn’t want to calm down. She wanted to be right and she wanted to run away. She wanted to be warm and she wanted to be clever. It didn’t feel like a day where she was going to get either.

“It’s your first day at Oxford. It’s very understandable that you’d be nervous. I was nervous when I moved to university. But you are going to be fine. You know what happened to me my first day?”

“You met dad?”

“I didn’t meet your father til the second year when I was brave enough to start at the newspaper. I spent almost my whole first year hiding in my flat eating microwave meals and calling your grandmother three times a week. But this isn’t going to be like that for you because you’re my beautiful, shining, extroverted Buffy. I really think this is going to be a new start for you.”

Less of a new start than you think.

“I wouldn’t be leaving you here if I didn’t know you were going to be okay.”

“Do you really trust me in a haunted shower?”

“I really do. Hurry up and get clean sweetheart. We have to move your stuff in by ten or the porter chases us out of the city with knives, according to this form we were sent.”

“Thanks mum.”

When Joyce shut the door behind her, Buffy sank down on the floor to the side of the tub and wondered how she had aged a century in the last week. The last year of secondary school had been spent entirely clinging on to the idea she would move away and everything would be better. Applying to Oxford was more a way of imagining what a future would be like if she could have one than a real plan. She was almost late to submit her portfolio of essays because of a demon with what seemed like a thousand eyes. She actually was late to her admissions test because of a demon with no eyes. The application was a dream of an imaginary future where she was better, and she deserved chances, and anything in her life other than creeping around the cemeteries of her small seaside town could matter to anyone.

Her mum was so overjoyed when she got the letter but Buffy could barely make herself speak. At the time, she was worried about being away from Angel, which made her feel pretty stupid there on the bathroom floor. She had been thinking he would travel to her on weekends, lurking and waiting for her to come out of classes in the city’s many picturesque and ancient churchyards. If she had really believed that would happen, maybe she was far, far too stupid to be here. Without her intending it to, her head sank down into her hands and she wondered why any of this was worth doing at all.

On the cuff of Buffy’s yummy sushi pyjama top, a salmon roll with a creepy little grin looked up at her and she took a deep breath. She didn’t want to be weepy bathroom floor Buffy. She wanted to be go-get-em-girl power student Buffy. She didn’t spend all that money of Joyce’s on notebooks and silly little highlighters and rollerball pens to give up here, on the floor under some dreadful plumbing.

So she would pick herself up and remind herself of the four things she absolutely knew for sure:

Buffy was the vampire slayer, the one girl in all the world chosen to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.
Against all the odds, all her teachers’ and probably also Angel’s expectations, Buffy had got into the University of Oxford. She had even received a personal email, in multiple paragraphs, from her new personal tutor telling her how delighted he was to welcome her. His style was too verbose and a bit stilted but he seemed like a nice enough guy, this Professor Giles.
Oxford had forty nine cemeteries in the city, some of which contained famous and potentially demonic famous people.
And when she had used her mother’s janky dial up internet to post on a discussion board for new freshers and ask if anyone else was living on her staircase and wanted to say hi, she got exactly one response, from a sweet girl called Willow.

Chapter Text

Buffy and Joyce left the bed and breakfast about half an hour after the shower debacle. Breakfast was two slices of back bacon and a choice between slithery fried eggs or soft boiled, which gave Buffy an odd flashback to dipping soldiers made of toast into runny eggs as a child. She wondered if she made those eggs again now she would prefer to call them slayers. There could be a good quip in that if she workshopped it a little more. Maybe that was the secret to winning friends and influencing people at university - better egg-based slaying puns.

“Perhaps we should have paid for the chain hotel instead,” said Joyce as she stretched out a crick in her neck. The twin beds had been unnervingly close together. Buffy had ached and ached to throw the sash window open to let the cool October air hit her face, slip outside and see what was stalking the ancient streets, but her mum’s sleeping face warned her off it.

In the handful of years since Joyce had discovered the Great Slaying Secret, an uncomfortable but loving equilibrium had developed. The existence of vampires and demons was something they gestured at without using words. Will you be……. out tonight? Yes I think I will be……. out tonight. But only after you’ve looked at the comments on your coursework? But only after I’ve looked at the comments on my coursework, like a good little slayer. Except Buffy never said the last part. A lonely and tender part of her wondered if this was the city where she’d find someone to say the second half of the sentence to, of any sentence. Her mum loved her so much but there were so many things she might want to talk about, even just to joke about, that gagged themselves in her throat and sank back down. Angel had made a big show of wanting to hear things, but then every conversation got turned around to pain, and crying, just the sound of her crying and not the words she’d wanted or needed to say. The gap year she had spent there believing she could never really leave home and nothing could ever change had felt like an apathetic, grey kind of Hellmouth opening up between her ribcage and her heart. But anyway.

But anyway. Living in college had to be different, right? And the city had to be different. If anything, the dreaming spires would be good acrobatics practice.

After a little while trapped in the one-way system (note to self: the one-way system in central Oxford was definitely haunted) they came out at the front gates of St Drusilla’s. Three whole years of Buffy’s life gaped wide in front of her. Wondering what was going to happen to her in these next three years stretched deep, deep, deep into the sky. Realising that she was nineteen years old and she had no idea what was going to happen next felt like lying on your back under a starry sky and realising how far up the sky went, the perspective shift of the stars stopping being a dome above your head and turning into something that went on in every direction forever.

The college was square and dark, with a great gothic wooden door framed by towers with small rectangular windows tracing out four or five floors inside. A few windows were open with music and conversation drifting down slowly to the street. The walls were almost completely black, though a few crumbling places on the corners of the towers made it obvious that it had been made of the same sandstone as the surrounding buildings once. Maybe the whole place needed a heavy course of powerwashing, or maybe something black had risen out of the ground to swallow the whole place, from the ironwork on the doorframe to the saints that stood like sentinels in the alcoves looking down.

“Now you’re sure you checked for demons, sweetheart?”

“Mum! If you talk any louder there’ll be oil rig workers in Aberdeen listening to us talk about demons on my first day.”

Joyce paused with her head half out of the car. The leaves of a houseplant jammed in the passenger seat tickled her face. She lowered her voice and started talking in a loud stage whisper. “It just looks so….. Demonic.”

“Well it’s not. Demonic. I’ve researched this extensively, and I’m really, really sure there’s nothing here to worry about for you. Or for me. I think this whole place is probably like Halloween, you know, where it would be too obvious to be a demon here so they just don’t bother. And there weren’t any haunting stories about St Drusilla’s anywhere I could find. It’s too small and it doesn’t matter. The ghosts are probably all over at Christchurch or St John’s where there’s more budget. We can’t take up this parking space that long, anyway. Let’s just go in. You get the plant.”

***

Buffy’s room was on the top floor of a staircase that opened off one of the small back quads away from the street. It was so quiet there. It would have been easy to feel like you were a million miles from urban civilisation of the 1990s, trapped in some kind of time loop. Oh god, were they trapped in some kind of time loop? Buffy stood still for a moment and listened. Nope, that was an ambulance there in the distance. Not a time loop, just quiet.

It was an odd little room, high up under the sloping roof of a round tower. The room’s one window was in a far corner, and it was a big window with a firm, sturdy wooden windowsill. The bed huddled back away from the window in a dark corner. Joyce arranged cushions on the sill and suggested Buffy use it as a window seat reading nook. Buffy nodded and hugged her, then waited til she was gone to remove the cushions and check if the sill would support her weight getting out onto the roof. The world outside the window was a high, curved platform leading you out to a roof where more statues waited, looking down at the street together. A few of them had lights wired in underneath to illuminate them for the tourists taking photos of the college after dark. No chance of that giving her nightmares in the middle of the night. Looking down from the window you saw into the quad, a small open square with cloisters running around the outside and some flowerbeds ringing a tree in the centre. Off to the side, half hidden under one of the cloisters, a set of metal steps spiralled downwards.

Buffy was making her mind up about whether to put her books on the shelves or head out onto the roof and look for slippery stones in the daylight when she heard a knock at the door. She turned her head and wondered if that could possibly be a demon already, if she shouldn’t have lied so wildly to her mother about the level of supernatural threat present in 1990s Oxford. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, but what was she meant to say?

The knock came again, small and quiet and profoundly un-demonic. So Buffy opened the door.

The girl she saw was small, neat, a little fairy-ish, with feathery red hair and a thick argyle jumper. When their eyes met she smiled a wide toothy smile. “Buffy!” She said.

“Buffy is me,” she replied cautiously. Maybe Oxford’s demons did wear argyle jumpers and get up-to-the-minute 1990s bob haircuts. Everything was new here. Who knew. “And you are?”

“It’s Willow. We met on the discussion forum - staircase 16? This is room 30 so you must be Buffy. I’m just across the corridor in room 29. We’re neighbours so I’ve come over to be… neighbourly. I’m just right over there. I’m gonna be there all year so I thought I’d…” The sentence trailed off and Buffy realised her are you a demon here and are you here to eat me face might have been a bit off-putting. Great work Buffy. Very approachable.

“Willow! Hi! Sorry I’m totally out of it today.”

“That’s okay,” Willow just smiled and smiled. It wasn’t just the hair, Buffy decided suddenly, she must really be sunny somewhere deep down. “We’ve got all the time in the world. Do you want to come in for some tea or are you still unpacking?”

“Let’s do the tea. I don’t think I’m gonna get my room perfect today.”

Now Buffy had been just a tiny bit approachable, Willow’s nerves had burned off like mist and she was rushing to bundle Buffy into her room and start the business of being friends. Buffy felt a part of her exhaling. Maybe this was what Oxford was going to be like. Maybe this part of the day while the light lasted was going to be okay.

Willow’s room was a mirror image of Buffy’s, with a low dark bed at one end and a bright open area at the other end by the window. Willow had clearly been established here for a couple of days, with posters, cards and photos clipped carefully from newspapers pinned carefully around the room. It was the room of someone meticulous and careful, but also of someone with a rich and strange world trapped inside her. Woodcuts and pages scanned from medieval manuscripts met with black and white photos, book covers and sheets of equations on her walls, with tapestries and dreamy astrological designs carpeting the walls behind them.

“Do you like black tea? Herbal tea? Fruit tea? I have a lot of types of tea. Do you like coffee?”

“I like coffee.” It was hard for Buffy to take her eyes off the walls. Her boyband posters seemed less cool now (not that she had ever thought they were that cool to begin with) in comparison to this, which was what she imagined a real Oxford student’s room must look like.

“I don’t have coffee. Oh dear. I think I got a bit carried away with the teas and I didn’t… I haven’t actually been able to find…”

“Tea is good. Black tea. Any tea. With milk. This room is amazing, Willow.”

“You like it?”

“I love it. Some of these are a little spooky.”

“Do you like spooky? I’m a bit worried, looking at it now, about what it might say about me. I did a research project over the summer on the history of Oxford and demonology and I think I printed out way, way more stuff than my teachers actually wanted to read so I thought… I just found it all so interesting. I feel like there’s so much I haven’t got to the bottom of yet. So I just wanted to look at it all a bit more? But I’m not a weirdo or anything. I promise.”

“I’m sure,” Buffy said, and she was sure, “I’m sure you’re not.”

“I’m sure you’re not either. And here’s your tea!”

Buffy had had plans about going out onto the roof over her room, or going down into the cloisters to start mapping out where the passages and stairways went, or of getting all her stuff unpacked and exploring and learning where things were before Fresher’s Week got kicked off the following day. But she wound up spending the entire room in the warm purplish cocoon of Willow’s room, hearing about her childhood in a village in the Cotswolds near enough Oxford to see the towers on a clear day but too far away for a reliable bus service, and about her parents, who were professors someone more well-informed than Buffy might have heard of.

When Buffy said she was from the south coast Willow asked what it was like being from the sunniest part of the British Isles and Buffy said she didn’t know, because it never seemed very sunny to her. What she didn’t say was that she hadn’t seen much of it in the daylight since she was around fifteen. When Buffy said she was studying English, Willow said wow, and when Willow said she was studying Physics and Philosophy but she was also signing up for courses at the language centre in Japanese and German and wanted to keep going with her demonology research in her free time, Buffy said a big and slightly frightened wow. Because the dining hall wasn’t open yet before the start of term, they spent the fifth and sixth hours of their hangout eating crusty bread and cheeses that Willow’s parents had left with her when they dropped her off, and they stayed like that till later in the evening than Buffy had intended. Willow’s hobbies included computers and local history, and Buffy’s hobbies included nothing she was able to tell anyone ever.

In fact, Buffy stayed there so late that by the time she headed back across the corridor to her new, unknown, unlocked room, with the dark dark corners and the wide wide sash window, it was almost completely dark.

Chapter Text

Closing Willow’s door, Buffy felt happy for a moment and then, when she realised she was alone in the empty corridor, she felt like the stupidest slayer in the world. There was an argument for learning to relax and be a little more liberal with herself, but the first day in a new city was not the place to unclench those muscles. An ancient city where unspeakable evil waited in more places than she could probably guess at yet was the stupidest place for giving in to her desire to have friends, have a life, or have fifteen types of tea. The part of her that used to get home from patrolling in her small town and check her phone messages to see that no one had called was the part of her that was desperate to give in to Willow and cultivate a friend that might leave a message for her one day. Back in her small, shit seaside town there was just her mum hoping she was safe and Angel waiting for her to meet him in the dark. She had hoped to make friends in Oxford, but she should have had more self control than to waste the whole first day like this.

It was about five paces from Willow’s room to hers and her mind raced with thoughts of all the worst things she could see when she opened the door. The window could be wide open with big dirty footprints on the sill, or there could be someone lurking outside, or bats huddled in the eaves to infect her with vampirism or ebola, or vampire ebola. There could be a bloodbath or a corpse of something grisly left as a message of welcome to a new city. And above all, she knew that when she opened her door and saw something terrifying, she would know that she had been stupid to let her self-discipline go like that. How would Willow look at her when she realised living opposite Buffy was living opposite a massacre that never calmed down? She shouldn’t have tried to have a friend. She shouldn’t have tried to be a person. All the time Buffy spent alone in the last year, she had been working either on slaying or on her uni applications, because if she wasn’t working on something her stomach turned into a cold sea and she felt she would drown in it.

Then she opened the door and nothing happened.

Nothing in the new, small, strange-shaped little bedroom set off any of her slayer senses. Even the darkest parts of the shadows she could tell were undisturbed. The carpet bag of stakes and holy water was exactly where she left it under the bed, and every book on the shelf, and every fibre of every item in the wardrobe. For a second she stood there, with all that vigilance and nowhere to put it. If she had had something to beat herself up about, or a creature there to beat up, she would have known what to do, but instead she had to stand there with all her odd, new sort of safety.

Willow had said, “I’ll make us some tea in the morning before we go down to the breakfast for new students. Of course, there could be tea at the breakfast. There probably will be, now I think about it. But we could still walk over together. I could knock at your door, or you could knock at my door, and we won’t have to walk over on our own.”

And Buffy had said, “You have no idea how nervous I was about walking into the common room alone. Seriously, I had this nightmare all summer where I sit down and try to start a conversation and I don’t even realise my face has gone all bumpy and messed up.” That was a true statement, in more ways than Willow realised.

“Yeeshk,” Willow had replied, “I have one where I try to read my first philosophy essay out loud in the tutorial and then what comes out is just awful bad croaking opera singing. Like kabuki opera, but I don’t actually know anything about kabuki opera so it’s just culturally inaccurate and also I can’t sing. That’s a very genuine fear for me.”

“Have no fear. If I see you setting out like that, I promise to be there with the makeup wipes. It’s what friends are for.”

In her room on her own, going over everything she’d said and everything that might have gone wrong, Buffy found she needed something to check, so she went to the window. She confirmed it was exactly as she’d left it, not a millimeter shifted in the frame, the pressure distributed exactly the same. The double glazing was imperfect and a cold little draught danced around the side of the frame to touch her face. It was cold and normal. She didn’t smell anything dreadful coming.

If Buffy could be safe at St Drusilla’s, what was she going to do with her time? What if the college motto was really true? Salvus esse in armis, be safe in her arms. If St Drusilla was really going to be there for Buffy, she had no idea what she was going to do with her time. Her brain wasn’t set up to give up the weight of the world.

A light flicked on in one of the rooms opposite and the slight shock made Buffy flinch and draw her eyes up to it. Across the quad she saw a broad black wall. It was crosshatched with ivy that erupted into jasmine flowers that hadn’t faded yet for the autumn. She was looking into another top floor room, and that room was cluttered, literary and perfect. It looked like the doodly daydreams of what her life in this city would be like back when she had felt different and dreamed of escaping as a teen, as a preteen, as a child, always. The lamplight was warm and it illuminated a man who stepped into view. He shrugged off a brown leather blazer and rolled up his sleeves. His bookcases were packed to the gills with pamphlets and sheafs of paper packed into every inch of space above and around the books. His hair must have been very blond because it picked up all the facets of the light. There was something about the scene that demanded she pay attention, and the slayer senses that had been dead when she swept her room flickered to life in her chest. If she was compiling a heat map of the college, of where she needed to keep her eyes fixed, something whispered that she was meant to be looking over here.

He dumped a pile of books on a desk, took off his glasses to rub his eyes, stretched his lean body out like he had been cramped and curled up all day, and Buffy realised she was standing in her window staring into a man’s bedroom like a serial killer.

Why was she awful? Why was her reaction to everything awful? Why did she waste time doing nothing all day and then turn into a stalker as soon as a handsome man dared to take off his jacket in his own room a hundred feet away? But the same part of her brain that reminded her to look twice for signs of movement in a mausoleum told her she couldn’t look away yet. The man rifled through his bag and picked out papers to put in piles on the desk and on the shelves. It wasn’t just him, it was something behind or within him, behind and within him, that she had to mine for every detail. The cool air from the window draught settled into her tired lungs. She tried to read the scene in front of her, framed in jasmine and ivy and set against a backdrop of old books.

Then the man turned and met her eyes. Everything changed, the embarrassment flooded in, and she turned to fall heavily on the bed. Her mind was hot and racing, and she flashed back to her mum telling her she needed rest after long days and a lot of new things, to let her brain waves settle back to normal levels. Maybe when your senses are set to maximum sensitivity all the time it’s impossible to act sensibly around human students at a human university.

The most important thing was to be less crazy tomorrow. She would get up early to do a workout before going to the common room for the new students’ welcome breakfast. She would speak to Willow and be friendly but also lay careful groundwork in place for the strange noises she might hear, the hours Buffy would keep, the odd times of day she would come in and out. She would hit the library and pick up more advanced reading. She would be busy and productive, and if she saw the blond man, she would come up with something clever and perfect about why she had been frozen in her window watching him organize his bookshelves. Tomorrow would be a new day. Maybe she would tell him she had never seen an electric light before. Maybe she would be honest, and say she was overtired and emotional and had a strange brain moment she couldn’t explain.

Curling up on the bed in her clothes, Buffy briefly told herself she should go patrolling. If she chose one of the forty nine cemeteries a night, she would barely have time to meet them all before Christmas, to say nothing of the odd little nooks and crannies of college chapels where ashes of wardens and masters lurked under flagstones and behind statues. She knew that Percy Shelley’s heart was preserved under the memorial at Univ and she had no idea how many demons would be attracted to try and claim the heart of Percy Shelley. She would have to look into that. But her heart ached and her eyes were heavy, so she groped about on her bedside table and found a book instead of getting changed to head out into the cold. This was the book she had told herself she should read that night, dogeared on page five as a sign of the day getting away from her.

As Buffy read, she found her eyes closing. She was in danger of getting through less than one poem before the stress of the day brought her to sleep. The poem made her laugh grimly to herself, because it said that no life lives forever and dead men rise up never. There was a lot she could say about that but she didn’t think her commentary on it would get a mark she’d be proud of. The stress of the last few years, of being a slayer alone in a seaside town where the pressure never gave and no one ever listened quite how she needed, fizzed and popped in her brain, and she knew that something needed to change if she was going to keep body and soul together here for three years. She wanted a friend. She wanted to wake up the next and not feel like a failure. She wanted to reach the end of the poem, but she didn’t manage it before sleep took her and the book folded onto her chest. She just had time to read that even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.

One small strange thought turned in her head as she hovered between being asleep and awake. What would it be like if she was safe here? What would she become if St Drusilla’s was a place where she could be okay?

Chapter Text

Buffy read an article once that said the reason crying yourself to sleep works is that if you cry long enough, it releases hormones that relax you and make you able to drift off. She found that to be true, but she also found it led to your eyes being sticky and gross when you wake up in the morning. You get called to be a slayer at fifteen and you realise that there are many consequences to fighting vampires, one of which is that you hide in bed and ignore your skincare routine and find yourself crusty in the morning. But the light steamed in the windows where she had forgotten to close the curtains, and the day seemed good and nice even if her mouth did taste of unbrushed teeth.

“It’s the funniest thing,” Willow said when Buffy knocked on her door, at 8.45 as they agreed. She was wearing a midnight blue skirt, floor length, made of something heavy that made no sound as it moved, decorated with flowers and stars across a swirling night sky, and a lilac shirt with puff sleeves. Buffy was wearing a tank top with a smily face on it. “It’s really the funniest thing, after you left my room last night I got all ready for bed and then I just lay there and I cried and cried.”

“You did? Is something wrong?” Willow moved around the room picking up her ID, her wallet, a slim book and a fat book, and her printout of the college map and putting them into a tote bag that said ‘Bodleian libraries’ on it in capital letters. Her keys were collected on a crochet frog keyring the size of Buffy’s fist.

“Not exactly, or I don’t know. It just seemed so huge that term started today, and I started thinking oh my god, I’m going to be bad at everything, and if I sleep badly tonight that sets me off on the wrong foot for my whole degree and the rest of my life, and I’ll be bad at making conversation if I’m tired, and then before you know it I’ll be seventy and I won’t be able to retire because I never went places in my career and I failed to understand what my pension contributions would mean for my old age. Do you think that’s weird?”

“I think that’s the normalest thing in the whole world,” Buffy smiled. She had no idea that all she really needed to feel normal again was to be back in Willow’s presence, and to know that they had been crying about the same thing ten meters apart through the night, almost the same thing. “I went totally mad last night. I saw this dude out of the window, just a random dude in his own room and it was like my eyes stopped working, or my brain stopped working or something, I just stood and stared at him and he probably thinks I’m like an evil ghost or something. Then I just fell in bed and reevaluated my life for a few hours. I think you’re pretty much not allowed to leave home unless you get crazy on the first night.”

“I guess I feel like I’m meant to be good at this, you know? I’m on my own a bunch cause my parents are away so much. I’ve been going to conferences and stuff for a few years and I guess I thought I’d be good at it, you know. I thought I was good at all this but now I just feel small.”

“I guess we all feel small right now.” Buffy pushed the door of their staircase open and they were outside in the bright winter sun of an October morning at St Drusilla’s. The quad was gothic and beautiful. The sun picked out the veins of pale sandstone that could be seen through the black outside of the stone. The air under the cloisters was cool but there was a little warmth in the small centre of the square where the sun could reach through the leaves.

“I hope they never power wash this,” said Willow softly, like she didn’t know she was speaking out loud. I used to have a postcard of this quad up in my room when I was little. It was my favourite college cause of all the flowers on the cloister walls. I had a book by one of the old masters and I read it in the car to school.”

On the way back through to the main quad and the door to the common room, the patterns of light and dark from the cloister patterns played over their skin. Willow turned towards Buffy with an evil little grin and added “So this guy? Hot guy? Sexy handsome hot-type guy?”

“Not the point! Not the point!” Buffy laughed. “Oh my god I shouldn’t even have said.”

“Is it creepy if I ask you what room he was in? I don’t want to be creepy with someone I just met. But I want to support your love.”

Buffy’s laugh caught and carried in the wind and a few students coming out of different staircases turned and saw them.

“I’ll tell you but if you ever breathe a word of this to anybody I’ll have your head on a spike.”

They paused and dawdled by the turn into the passageway that led into the other quad. Buffy waited while a tall broad rugby-looking guy passed them and they were alone. “I’m very subtle,” Willow stage-whispered. “It was noted in my interview with the philosophy dons.”

“Up there,” Buffy pointed to the tower room where she saw the man, and Willow’s nose rumpled.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. That’s my room with the clock above it and there’s the room right opposite. I’m very good at seeing which things are opposite other things. I promise.” A note of panic entered Buffy’s voice. “Oh no, do you know him? Did he go to school with you? Does he smell of onions? Does he write dreadful poetry and follow you around reading it out? Does he have a shrine to Princess Diana in his bathroom?”

“No! No, nothing like that. I went to a girls’ school and I’m sure no one here smells of onions. But that’s the tower they’re fund-raising to remodel. It’s full of asbestos or moths or something. Look at the first floor rooms, they’re covered in dust sheets.”

Buffy squinted close and saw that Willow was right. The ivy on that staircase was shaggier and grew out over the door and windows, rather than being trimmed neatly back over Buffy and Willow’s windows. The panic started to surface and flow up Buffy’s brain stem again with the idea she had let go too much, said something strange or supernatural to Willow, or maybe even more catastrophically, something that would nip their two-day friendship in the bud. Buffy wanted so badly not to be crazy here, and she wanted to be a friend someone could make that would be safe, normal and nice. She also wanted the man to be real. She wanted to believe, even if she didn’t meet him or go there, that the small room with the warm lamplight was a real place like an oasis in the dark stone.

“That’s so weird, maybe I actually meant that tower.” She pointed in the opposite direction, “or maybe I was seeing things.”

“Or maybe it was a ghost,” said Willow as they ducked away from their quad into the passageway to the common room breakfast. “You get stories like that about St Dru’s.”

“You do?” Buffy kept her voice flat and even. “I didn’t see any of that on the web.”

“Not loads, but it was in the college history I read. I even thought I heard something in my room last night. It’s exciting, you know, like a hidden world.”

More students were streaming out of other staircase as they crossed the large main quad. Leaves were drifting in the quiet air. Buffy had read that bars roosted in these big old trees (regular bats, she checked photos) but now another slayer sense was picking up, finally finding something to latch onto. “What did you hear?”

“I don’t know really, it was quiet and I was tired and I might have just been being crazy, but it was like a kettle boiling, an old fashioned one that whistles on the hob. Then there was a kind of clinking I guess. Like a tea party.”

“I think someone lives downstairs from us I guess, maybe they’re even more of a tea fanatic than you.”

“Yeah I wondered that too. But then I was brushing my teeth and I heard a voice that was like it came from right behind me. I don’t even know why I’m saying this, I promised myself I wouldn’t make anyone listen to this.”

“What did you hear, Willow? It’s okay.”

“It was like it was right behind me. It was so real I checked there wasn’t anyone in the shower. It was like I heard a woman’s voice and it said ‘Miss Edith, pour a cup for Miss Rosenberg, she’s new.’ I guess maybe I’d cried so much I was kind of asleep or kind of dreaming. Can that happen?”

“Probably. I mean, crazy things have happened.” Buffy made a note to self that there would be no slacking and going on nights out for freshers week that night. There was the exploring she’d procrastinated yesterday, there was the cemetery tour to start, and there was the tower with the ivy and jasmine growing over the door, and the room that didn’t seem to exist. “Did it scare you? If anything like that happens again you should totally knock on my door. If I’m in I’ll always answer. I sleep very lightly. Did it scare you?”

“It sort of didn’t.” They were drawing closer to the common room entrance. They’d been walking slow to take their time but the clock was about to toll nine and there were only a few paces left to cover before the other freshers could hear every word they said in the gathering crowd. “I don’t know how to describe it. I was probably making it up anyway. But it felt kind. It really did, it felt kind.”

Chapter Text

If there was one thing Buffy was always good at, it was keeping her breath held tight, muscles clenched against the next bad thing that was surely about to happen. Later when she lay in bed alone and sorted through her memories of her great, important first week at Oxford, she found she remembered that conversation with Willow clearly and then everything that followed became watery and odd. Her first watcher, the watcher she tried not to think about anymore, had told her that as a slayer she should expect her resting heart rate to be significantly lower than other people’s because of her supernaturally excellent cardiovascular health. She often found the opposite - when she touched her fingers to the pulse in the side of her neck to try and centre herself, her heart was always, always racing. She counted sometimes and checked the rate against the poster in her personal, social and health education classroom, concluding that a heartbeat regularly going that fast was something to see a doctor about. When she exercised, it quieted down a bit. Perhaps the watchers with their heart monitors and her heart wasn’t calmer than other people’s, it was just able to live with a level of stress that others couldn’t survive.

At any rate, a conversation with a single person about a potential ghost situation was something she knew exactly how to manage. When Willow shrugged it off and said she found the voice she had heard kind, Buffy’s script went off the rails, and then they went into the crowded common room to look for a corner of a bench to sit on and hear about fire regulations, meningitis vaccines, fresher’s flu, the importance of exercise and the many resources they could draw on if the stress got too bad. Later Buffy could recall the words but the people around her were indistinct and watercolour, she felt she was swimming through something the whole time she listened, looking through and past the people around her for the bad thing she was supposed to be on guard against.

Willow’s eyes found her often, and when people shifted around between speakers she angled her body to protect her from the crowd Buffy’s brain only raced more. If Willow liked her and thought they were friends enough to come to her defense like this, how much harder would Buffy have to work to keep her safe from the undead? How awful would she feel when she failed to look after her?

How much would it remind her of her watcher and the pillar of flames on a grey morning on Brighton beach?

That night they both bowed out of going clubbing with the others. Buffy had wondered if letting go and dancing, working up a sweat til she had to press her hair off her face with her hands would empty her head out and fill her with something else, but when she heard the club was called Tomb she decided against it. The irony was too dreadful for words, and Willow seemed relieved when Buffy suggested they give it a miss.

A tall, beautiful brunette with hair slicked back in a perfect ponytail shouted in the college bar and told everyone with a wristband to follow her to the front gate to walk together. Buffy sorted through the soup of her memory of the morning to recall that this was Cordelia, the Junior Common Room president, and the bouncy blonde next to her was the vice president, Harmony. Cordelia was a third year law student who people seemed both admiring of and more than a little afraid of. Harmony did music and when you saw the way she smiled, you wondered if it made her cheeks hurt, what her face would look like if she relaxed a bit. But then Buffy wasn’t in a position to throw stones there.

Jesus Christ, Buffy kept thinking. These are all real Oxford students and she’s their queen. But Willow stayed with her the whole night and laughed til cider came out through her nose when Buffy told a few (sanitised) stories about life in her shitty little seaside town, and said ‘wow’ when she mentioned having had an (ex) boyfriend, the books she read on the beach with her torch. She didn’t say that it was a cradle-robbing creature of the night boyfriend, or that she read the books on the beach because she was waiting for creatures to rise out of the sand and trying to multitask, but it was nice to have someone to tell all the same.

The bar emptied as everyone followed Cordelia’s voice out to the front gate. The room was in a basement that might have been a wine cellar at one point, far too small to have that many people breathing in it and heating it up. Condensation was gathering on the ceiling and a pint had been spilled on the pool table. As the last stragglers were rounded up by Harmony, Buffy and Willow were left almost alone with the barman. An economist with a shrill voice had spilled something pink on him and he scrubbed at it ineffectually with a dirty dishtowel.

Buffy and Willow weren’t the only people left in the bar but the volume dropped to near zero.

“Yeeshk, that was a lot of people,” said Willow. She was a little giggly but not drunk, holding a bottle of incredibly sweet purple cider, drinking through a straw and bopping along to the music on the jukebox. She had taken her shirt off in the heat of the overcrowded bar and looked like a witchy kind of straight A it girl with her textured bob and her ability to make conversation with absolutely anyone on any academic topic. She could even get away with saying the sentence ‘when I was at MIT over the summer’ without sounding like a dickhead, which wasn’t something many people in that room could have managed.

“It was a lot. I thought I was going to turn into a demented hell-beast that just crawls around on the floor and repeats ‘where did you grow up? What A-levels did you do?’”

Willow giggled again. “We met some really cool people though. I talked to one guy who lives in a lighthouse. Well I guess he doesn’t really live in a lighthouse right now, because he lives here, but when he goes home for Christmas he’ll live in a lighthouse.”

“I didn’t meet a lighthouse guy but I did meet a windmill guy. Now I’m wondering if there’s a game of top trumps we’re meant to be playing here. I’d back lighthouse guy though so you win.”

“Windmill guy has a poignant Don Quixote melancholy about him through, but then lighthouse guy is just Virginia Woolf reflecting on time and causality. I don’t know how this fight is going to go now.”

Now everyone else had filed out, Buffy saw that the walls of the bar were painted with cartoonish sort of scenes that all seemed to refer to bits of college lore, things that had happened there over St Drusilla’s thousand or so years. The pictures might have started as graffiti but they had been made grand and official with some kind of varnish. The pictures commemorated professors people had really liked or really not liked, notable local drug dealers, the themes of beautiful college balls and the addresses of parties where people had been arrested. Around and between them you could see stickers, slogans and flyers for concerts and protests that took place ten, twenty or fifty years ago.

Willow got chatting to the bartender and Buffy was content to sit quietly and sift through the vast archive she was sitting in. Willow’s guffawing laughter and the man’s wisecracks echoed around the cave-like bar. She saw a flyer for a punk band called the Railroad Spikes, which had been pinned into the plaster. The image had been photocopied so many times on dreadful 80s computer equipment that it was impossible to see what the picture on the flyer had ever been of, but when she flipped it up with her hand to see what was on the wall beneath it her heart turned to steam and boiled up through her brain.

Even though she had only seen him from a distance, Buffy knew it was the man from the tower room opposite hers. It looked like it had been copied and enlarged from an ID photo - the art was good but he looked a little blank and bewildered. The hair was a darker shade of blond than she remembered but the whole face, particularly the cheekbones which were very memorable, were a perfect match. She had to shuffle a few postcards and flyers for tarot card readings out of the way underneath to get to the caption, which read ‘RIP William Pratt’.

Her fingers felt tingly and her mind was mixed up. The handful of strange things she’d noticed over the last day were a lot to sort through without a watcher (everything was a lot without a watcher) and she felt she needed a week of isolation to sift it and work out everything she’d seen. Under ‘RIP William Pratt’, she could see the tops of more words so she peeled off the top of a poster for a student production of Julius Caesar to read the rest of it. She hoped Willow and the barman wouldn’t notice her acting like this but she didn’t have it in her to wait to grab at the strings of the mystery. Underneath, it said in shaky unofficial marker pen handwriting, ‘a bloody awful poet but a good man’.

Chapter Text

Buffy’s brain was still ringing when they left the bar. Part of her wanted to make an excuse to race away and talk to someone about what she’d seen, but with no watcher to talk to, what would the point of leaving be? She thought about fire rising into the dawn on Brighton beach. She hadn’t even been inducted into the library yet, if she’d wanted to go and research on her own, and she didn’t trust herself to find much. Better to stay with Willow and be good at something, or as good as she could be at something. She could try and borrow Willow’s college history in the morning and comb the footnotes, but that evening wasn’t the time and she didn’t have lots of faith it would work.

“What’s that?” She said to Willow and the barman, realising she had zoned out completely.

The barman, Xander, got a pint glas, filled it with water and passed it to her.

“Would you rather,” Willow repeated, “start an independent bookshop with Shaggy or a vape shop with Velma?”

Buffy took a mouthful of water. “Well I think it really comes down to how complex the tax situation would be for each one. I wouldn’t want to feel I was leaving Velma to do all the work.”

“Mmmm,” said Willow, “That’s a good point. We must be fair and equitable to Velma.”

“Tobacco products,” said Xander, “Complex legislative situation.”

“Can Fred be my accountant?” Asked Buffy.

“What makes you think Fred’s an accountant?” Asked Willow.

“I think we should all assume Fred is an accountant until we hear otherwise.”

“Miss Buffy is judgemental of the orange ascot and that is a fair opinion.” Said Xander.

Buffy wrinkled her nose, “I think liking Fred makes a person quite untrustworthy. You can tell Daphne doesn’t really want him around.”

“That’s sacrilege! They are in love!” Said Willow.

The bar, already mostly empty, emptied further around them until it got up close to closing time and Xander started wiping down the counters. Willow was feeling about for her bag and Buffy thought it was a good time to ask about what she’d seen on the wall while no one was looking at her and they couldn’t investigate her facial expression too closely.

“What’s the story with these murals on the walls?”

“Oh they’re neat aren’t they?” Willow’s voice bubbled up from under the pile of coats that had eaten her bag. “It’s like a communal visual diary.”

“I think the oldest ones you can still see go back to the fifties but they were doing it before that.” Said Xander, “It used to be someone would just sit down with some paint whenever they were having feelings or something funny had happened but now I think you have to get the say so from the president.”

“Cordelia?”

“Yeah, and she’s a joy to talk to believe me. Her favourite people to be friends with are barmen who didn’t get into any universities. She’s crazy about us.”

“Ouch.”

“So there haven’t been any new bits of mural done in a couple of years but the old favourites are still up to enjoy. The professor who tried to get the bar closed is a classic, and the guy who got arrested for impersonating a priest.”

“Was that a sex thing?” Said Willow, all dressed and ready to go.

“I think it was more existential than that. The memorials are the oldest, I think, no one’s gonna paint over those.”

“From the fifties?”

“Could be way before, it wasn’t a big part of the bar training really.”

“Can we get a kebab?” Said Willow.

The street outside the college front gate was quiet, oddly. Half the city was in bed and half wasn’t on its way home yet, and St Drusilla’s wasn’t on one of the busiest streets. Willow and Xander kept talking but Buffy found she felt odd, guilty again about not going out to patrol the night before. Back home she had all her senses calibrated perfectly from a thousand patrols’ muscle memory. Now she felt like she was walking blindfolded, drunk less with the couple of drinks she’d had than with all the shadows in Oxford being deep, strange, and unmeasured. Buffy felt idiotic and unqualified, unable to even name where most of the dark doors led. On the way to the ATM, on the way to the kebab van, and on the way home, she tried to calibrate her senses to understand where she was like thumping the TV to clear the static. The uninvestigated spaces she had never patrolled crowded and menaced her. The amount of work it would take to feel she understood this space so she could relax anywhere except her little staircase with her little window under the eaves, felt too exhausting to manage at all. It was barely worth bothering with. It made you want to crawl home and keep patrolling the little town on the south coast where nothing, at this point, could possibly surprise her.

So it was almost a relief when she heard Willow and Xander squeal from a few metres in front of her. Buffy was squinting into a dark doorway, trying to work out where the bad feeling came from, when she heard,

“What is that?”

“What’s wrong with his face?”

She was already runnings ahead of them when she called back “I know what that is. Don’t worry.”

Chapter Text

Buffy found a little colour returned to Willow and Xander’s faces with the first cup of tea she made for them, and they were pretty much capable of having a conversation in sentences with the second cup.

“What kind of… What kind of tea is this?” Xander said to Willow, sat on the edge of her bed staring straight ahead like a suitor in a nineteenth century play.

“It’s strawberry and elderflower.”

“I like it.”

“My mum got it… for me. I could get you some for the bar. If you wanted to have tea at the bar.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with any of this.” Xander’s attention crashed back to Buffy. It had been like this all since they got back into college and Buffy bundled them all up to Willow’s room to talk and drink tea, except it had been mainly Buffy talking, and the other two drinking tea with big wide saucer eyes and shaky hands.

Buffy had turned Willow’s desk chair around to face the bed so she could sit and look at both of them, open body language, really putting into practice all the healthy communication skills around slaying she had developed in follow up conversations with her mother.

“What part would you like me to say again? I want you to feel you can ask anything you like. I have nowhere else to be tonight. I’m fully entirely here to help you be comfortable. Just hit me, whatever you need.”

Nobody said anything. A small dark part of Buffy’s brain wondered if she was allowed to be grateful this had happened, that it happened without her making the decision to open her world up to anyone. If this forced Willow and Xander to become friends with her, or at least to make knowing eye contact with her and understand what was going on when they saw her coming back into her staircase bruised and weepy in the small hours of the morning. At that moment, just someone to catch her eye and know what she wasn’t saying sounded like a kind of friendship she’d cut her arm off to have.

“If there’s one girl in all the world, shouldn’t you be in London?” Said Xander.

“Or somewhere more highly populated? Like Beijing? Or Atlanta for the air connections? You could probably get to a lot of cities in North and South America quickly from there.”

“I did have Goldsmiths as my insurance choice actually so, you know, I guess if I fail all my first year exams here I could end up defending south east London from the forces of darkness. But I don’t actually speak any Chinese or have access to, like, visas or knowing how to apply to uni in other countries. I’m actually amazed I managed to apply here or, well, anything. I’m rambling now.”

“I don’t understand,” said Xander. “You mean you had to fill in the whole application form and do the interview, like normal people?”

“There’s actually not a box on the form for being a vampire slayer unfortunately. And I don’t know if the skills transfer to English. So I’m kind of just normal, except for the times when I’m worse than normal.”

“Aren’t you meant to have some help with this?” Willow’s pale, elfin face didn’t look frightened anymore, or at least not frightened for herself. She looked sad. “What if you get hurt? What if you need a night off? What if the demons are… really big?”

In Buffy’s mind the pillar on Brighton beach ignited and this time she couldn’t make herself turn away from it to do something else, because she had to keep her even, comforting, calming face there for Willow and Xander. The pillar of fire reached all the way to the sky this time. She saw herself walking away up the beach, saw it from outside her body, her feet catching and sinking in the sand, and how she let herself into her house through the kitchen, and opened her binder, and memorised quotes from King Lear because she didn’t have anyone to call, or anything to believe, or any buttons to push to relieve the pressure. That was just before her exams, in what her mum kept calling the ‘final push’ for revision. There weren’t any contact numbers or mailing addresses for the Watcher’s Council, so she had assumed she would get on with her work and see when someone wanted to talk to her, to tell her what to do, to relieve the pressure. She only realised when Willow asked her what she did if she got hurt that she didn’t know.

“I guess I just try real real hard not to get hurt.” Buffy said brightly. She hoped the shock of sitting face to face with the world’s one and only vampire slayer would make that a more convincing argument to them than it was to her.

“So what do we do?” Said Xander.

“Do?”

“Yeah, what do we do?” Willow drained the last of her tea and set the cup down on her bedside table. She folded her hands in her lap and smiled a cautious, earnest smile. “If you don’t have any help, I’m sure we’re not anyone’s top choice and it would absolutely be better to have a medieval knight or…”

“... or Arnold Schwarzenegger…” Xander contributed.

“... but if you don’t have that then I’m confident we’re better than nothing. We have to be, so much better than nothing. So if you need stain removal, or breakfast, then maybe that’s what the powers that be wanted you to have and maybe we can help keep you safe.”

Buffy wasn’t strong enough to keep the tears from rising to her eyes. There wasn’t any place in her mind that had thought someone could hear what she had told them and want to make a clear, actual offer of friendship. Five minutes before, her greatest dream for these relationships was for them to make eye contact with her in a way that wasn’t disgusted or actively gossiping about what they knew she did with her time. For a slayer trapped in a new life she didn’t feel worthy of without a watcher, a physicist and a barman wanting to offer stain removal or breakfast was a gift from the universe she didn’t know how to handle.

She tried to say she couldn’t possibly let them help her with anything, and they insisted she could, and a fourth round of tea turned out to be necessary as the clock pressed on towards two o’clock in the morning. Because the world was a scarier place than either Willow or Xander had known, there wasn’t any question of Xander heading back out into the dark to go to his shitty rented room up the Cowley Road. So all three of them wound up huddled on the floor under blankets and tapestries, with the old victorian radiator clanging hot around them and strawberry stains settling into mugs with physics puns on them on the floor. It felt different from settling down with Angel’s cold hands or her mum’s anxious breathing in the other room. It felt like being near people, really being near people.

Xander fell asleep almost immediately, mouth wide and arms spread out over large parts of the floor. Buffy thought Willow was probably asleep, because her breathing was becoming light and feathery, when she spoke again.

“Buffy, do you think ghosts exist?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Do you think ghosts exist here?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“So when you saw that guy, the handsome guy, across the quad, do you think…?”

Buffy didn’t want to think. It had been a long and weird enough day that she hadn’t let her thoughts return to the little room in the other tower. Now it was nighttime again, she wondered if she could stand up, go to the window and see the man in his little tower room, or not see the man, just see the bookcases, or not see the bookcases, just see the light. Her heart and her adrenaline jumped when she imagined standing up, going to the window and seeing him. The fantasy didn’t run as far as speaking to him or even meeting his eyes. She just hoped that because it was nighttime, she might be able to see him exist again. She wondered if she was allowed to say she found his small, poetic room wonderfully safe, even though she had never been there. Maybe it was safest because she had never been there.

“I don’t know, Will. I really don’t know.”

“I think we should go find him. I think we should. I think I can… It’s nice of you to call me Will.” Willow’s voices faded away softer and quieter as she spoke, and when Buffy let the silence hang in the air for a second after she had spoken, she realised quickly that there was no point in replying because she was already gone.

Buffy lay quietly on the floor, with a witchy looking embroidered blanket with flowers and lightning bolts over her as a blanket. If the stress and surprise of the day had made Willow and Xander emotionally exhausted enough to crash into sleep almost immediately, it had robbed her of any desire to go to sleep at all. She was afraid of giving her brain the space to consider any of the things she had to consider now, and she didn’t want to try and work out how to wake up tomorrow and keep her new friends safe as her slayer support team.

So when it was just about time for dawn, when the first bits of grey light crept in over Willow’s windowsill, she got up and stretched out a cramp in her neck. She walked over to the window slowly, stepping over the limbs that spread all over the floor.

The little room across the quad was lit up like an island of soft light in the wall of ivy and jasmine. It was lit up like a gift just for her. The man was sat at a small desk just in the window, head down and working on something. His hair was bright pale blond and the light picked it up and made it shine. Buffy felt a keening, yearning excitement rise in her when she saw the little room again, the stacks of books, the leather blazer over an armchair, the armchair full of papers.

“You’re real,” she said to herself, low and quiet.

He didn’t look up straight away. He sat and worked, sat back to read what he had written, tapped his pen against the side of his face, and wrote again. Buffy watched for a few minutes, feeling her heart beating, feeling the clock on Willow’s wall click away the time, feeling the draught of cold air that came in through the cold morning window. When he looked up at her, it felt like she had been waiting for him. The sun was almost up over the far wall of the quad. It felt like boasting to admit to herself, but she thought he looked pleased to see her. It was hard to make out how his face looked through the distance, the shadows of the window and the half light, but it looked like he was moving his lips. It looked like he was saying “Buffy”.

Chapter Text

“My name is Professor Rupert Giles and I will be both your personal tutor and your tutor for the Anglo Saxon literature paper, so you will be seeing a lot of me over the next year. If you have any questions or problems, about early medieval literature or anything else, I hope you will feel able to come and see me in my office.”

Buffy was in a smallish meeting room that she remembered from her interview at St Drusilla’s. A large long oak table took up most of the room and the walls were lined with book cases. The books on the shelves had titles like ‘Senior Common Room Proceedings 1880’ and ‘Examination regulations 1977’. The windows at each end of the room were square, old and latticed with metal criss-crosses that cut the light into triangles.

A few days had passed since Buffy, Willow and Xander’s big impromptu traumatic sleepover, and the three of them had spent a lot of time together in those days. It was like a warm soft dream of being at university and having friends. Between library inductions and fire safety talks, she and Willow had walked down to Christchurch Meadow to trail their fingers in the cold water and talk about demonology. They waited for everyone to clear out of the bar to go clubbing so they could eat crisps and talk about nothing past the time the bar was meant to close. Buffy thought perhaps she should have returned to her list of forty nine cemeteries and got patrolling but really, did anyone need her to? Was there anyone giving her orders? What if her assignment from the universe was to protect two people in a small cosy basement bar? That could be a quest, right?

The eight students starting in English Language and Literature at St Drusilla’s were spaced out around the table, nervous, excited, apprehensive, note taking or doodling. At the start of the meeting everyone had gone round and said their name but those names were fading into the melty slayer background of Buffy’s brain, where to do list items and birthdays of distant cousins went to die. There was a tall, white broad boy called Larry Blaisdell, a black boy with hair cropped close to his head called Charles Gunn, and a small impish blonde girl with a supercilious private school smile called Veruca… Something. She has a forgettable surname. On the far side of the room, already sat there reading when Buffy and the others arrived, there was a girl whose name she had forgotten, but she sat quietly and small, shrinking back into the chair, and her hair parted in a zig zag up the middle of her head. The others, Buffy couldn’t remember a single thing about already.

Professor Giles kept talking.

“In your first term you will be taught partly by me and your twentieth-century literature paper will be taught by Dr Robin Wood, who I think some of you have already met if you came to the offer-holders’ open day. You’ll start looking at the victorians in the new year, with Associate Professor Wesley Wyndham-Price.”

Buffy wondered if she was imagining things when she heard a little bite in his voice when he said ‘associate professor’. Robin Wood, apparently, was allowed to have only a doctorate and be described in a perfectly respectful tone but Wesley got a dark little change of tone. Intriguing.

Professor Giles took his glasses off and wiped his eyes, as if the thought of Associate Professor Wyndham-Price had made him mildly unwell. He checked his watch.

“I won’t keep you all much longer as I’m sure it’s been a tiring week for all of us. You might be surprised to hear that senior faculty members also have to sit through all the talks about meningitis and vaccinations with you, if we have personal tutor responsibilities. No one has ever been able to tell me why. So I’m very happy to let you all go to your reading or your naptime, whatever you think best. I’ll just match you up into your tutorial partners for the first week and give you your reading list and your student contract on the way out.”

Professor Giles called the names of two students at a time to be handed a handful of papers, exchange a few quiet words. Buffy sank back into her chair, refused to learn any more names, and wondered what she would end up doing with her time tonight. She roll the big wheel of cemeteries and head out on her much-overdue first patrol, or she could see if Willow wanted to start on their readings for their first classes and essays together, with fifteen types of tea, a plate of snacks. Then when the stars were rising over St Drusilla’s ivy and jasmine walls she could head back across the hallway and see if William Pratt had his windows open, if he was looking out for her.

“Buffy?” The tall boy Larry was touching her lightly on the arm and she realised she had been miles away.

“Sorry?” said Buffy. She realisd the only three people left in the room were Larry, her and Professor Giles. The professor was holding out a sheaf of papers. She took them, muttered a thank you and an apology, and started rooting around for her satchel to get up and head home.

Larry was just heading over the threshold when Professor Giles spoke again, “Could I see you for just one minute, Buffy?”

“Absolutely, Professor. I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep last night, nerves and all, but I won’t be dozy at all when tutorials start. Or when I’m working on essays for tutorials. Or at all really, and I wasn’t tired, actually, I was just thinking. About literature.”

“Oh? No, not about the daydreaming, though I would encourage you to check in with Larry about the instructions for the essay. There was a book I wanted you to speak about. Just one moment.”

“Book?”

Professor Giles headed over to the bottom shelf of the far corner bookshelf, to move a box aside on the floor and take out a large book the size of Buffy’s whole torso.

“I assumed you’d be wanting to ask me about this,” he said with a sense of triumph, letting the book fall to the solid oak table with a loud and resounding whack. The cover of the book said VAMPYR.

The tower of flame on Brighton beach ignited with a great rush of hot air in Buffy’s mind, and it rose and rose to engulf the whole of the dawnish grey sky. Buffy stood stock still in front of Professor Giles for a moment as his expression clouded over, and then she started to sob.

***

An hour after that, someone knocked on the door and looked ashen at the possibility of having to throw the crying girl and the tweed-wearing man trying to comfort her out of the meeting room, but unfortunately there was a computer science introduction meeting due to start. Buffy was still not in a good state to be left to go back to her room, so Giles took her up to his office. His office was in the grand medieval front quad in one of the staircases that featured heavily in the college brochure. A slender, twining yew tree grew up around the door off the quad.

“And then no one in Brighton approached you?”

“Like the police?”

“Buffy, your watcher was incinerated, quite literally incinerated in front of you, in broad daylight on Brighton beach, at the start of the summer?”

“Not broad daylight,” said Buffy, crumpling a tissue in her hand and looking off out the window, finding the light with her face and keeping out of the shadows of the room, “It wasn’t really light yet.”

“Four months ago? Back before your exams? Your watcher has been dead for four months and I’ve been sitting in my kitchen in Jericho thinking I had all the time in the world to prepare for your arrival? This is a fuck up on a scale I can barely comprehend. Apologies, I shouldn’t swear in front of students. Four months is just… I can’t imagine now…”

“A year and four months, Professor Giles. I took a year between… I took a year.” Buffy sat grim and defeated in Professor Giles’ armchair. He had his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and he looked a little like a psychoanalyst and a little like a priest. She had thought that speaking to anyone about this would be impossible - she had not managed it with her mother or with Angel - but once she started speaking to someone whose job it was to understand she found the story pouring out of her like water. She felt like if she could just offer up all the messy shit she had been putting up with and failing to think through and work on, she could give it all to him and tell him to fix it while she finally, maybe, got on with other things. He rubbed his glasses.

His voice became dark and small. “They left you for almost a year and a half?”

Buffy just nodded. She was seized with a terrible fear that she had done something wrong and she was about to be scolded, but he stood up, came around to the side of the armchair and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this, Buffy, and I’ll make sure we get this right now, or as right as we can. I am your watcher and I’m responsible for you, and I intend to be responsible for you. I am sure there’s nothing I can do just now to help with any of the dreadful things you've had to go through alone, as a slayer and as a girl, but I will fix everything there is here to fix. I promise. I promise, Buffy.”

So Buffy turned to rest her head on the chest of her new watcher, and her new early medieval literature professor, and she realised after a few quiet moments that she wasn’t crying anymore, even though she had felt like she would never be able to stop crying again. She didn’t feel better yet, but she felt less dead and less gone than she had done. She felt like she had something to hold on to and she felt like she could breath, even if she was breathing through the waistcoat of someone she had never seen before today.

Across Giles, Willow and Xander, and the other person whose name she felt uncomfortable about even admitting to herself, Buffy realised how ready she had been to find things she could cling to, so she clung very hard.

***

“I think I’m going to head to Holywell Cemetery tonight,” Buffy said to Willow, when they stood at the back of the queue in the dining hall later that evening. “I think there could be beasties. I have a sense for beasties. I call it my beastie sense.”

“Are you sure you’re… okay?” Willow had only heard a brief summary of what had happened earlier in the day but it had been hard for Buffy to frame any of the key words she needed to share in a way that didn’t worry her. “If you wanted to take an evening to get yourself settled, more evenings, a lot of evenings, I think the mysteries can probably wait a bit longer. They’ve been waiting a while right?”

Buffy looked at the dining hall options and wondered how many times in her academic career she would make this choice. The options were chicken and rice, chicken and potatoes, or some kind of bean mix with a choice of rice or potatoes.

“I guess if I wait to be well then I don’t know how long I’ll be waiting. I’ve got work to do, you know? I’ve got to assume I’m here for a reason.”

“Can the reason not be that you’re here to do a degree though?”

“And I guess the curse of being a slayer is always having a lot of reasons.”

Willow went for chicken and rice and Buffy went for chicken and potatoes. They sidled towards the desserts where the choice was sponge cake with sauce or sponge cake with a different kind of sauce.

“So when are we heading out to the graveyard?” Willow said brightly and a little too loudly.

“Willow… You’re so gung ho for monsters after about three days of having a weird neighbour. I don’t know if I should be letting you help or referring you to some sort of support service.”

They paid for the food and slid into the benches of one of the dining hall’s long, dark wood tables arranged in rows under the great open vaulted ceiling. Willow let the silence hang in the air a moment and then smiled at Buffy. “Before I came here I wanted, I really wanted, to feel like I fit in with someone and I could take part in something, you know, with people.”

“You could try netball though? Before you go right to monster hunting.”

“Well I’m going to be going to the debating society, and I have some engagements in the diary with physics and some extra lecture series they’re looking for freshers to help organise, but I’ve never had the… I’ve never had the best time at fitting in organically with what my peers are doing. I kept thinking I’d feel comfortable with someone one day. And I feel comfortable with you. And besides, if I’m gonna find out the world is bigger, deeper, and stranger than I ever thought it was, then how could I be a good scientist, or a good philosopher, if I didn’t go and look at it?”

“We don’t know what we’ll find, Will. It could be dangerous. I can’t let you do this.”

“A lot of the best science is dangerous. And I figure, if we’re both people who want to find people to hang out with, and feel like our lives can change, and look at the mysteries of the universe, can’t we just give each other that and see how it goes?”

“I kind of think you’re amazing, Willow.”

“Mmm,” said Willow, looking down at her food, shifting it around with her fork. “This chicken is really average. And anyway, don’t we have a ghost to look into? How about we get a little patrolling in and make a plan to track down a hot blond ghost?”

Buffy’s stomach flipped over and she wondered how she had ever ended up in a situation so delicate, so strange, and so new. “That sounds like a good plan to me.”

Chapter Text

It’s amazing how quickly you find yourself settling into a rhythm, even when your life looks very different than you imagined, even when you never thought you would. Buffy and Willow went to Holywell Cemetery that night, and they studied together in the Philosophy faculty library the night after that, then Wolvercote Cemetery, then studying again. Buffy had a class on translating The Wanderer line by line as an introduction to Old English grammar and vocabulary, an essay on Beowulf and an essay on Robert Browning to work on. Parts of her life started to resemble the dreams she had had when she first held the paper prospectus for Oxford in her hands, flipped through, saw St Drusilla’s and thought it might feel like home. Life had been very different back then, when she had been working with Merrick on plans for meeting to discuss training across Oxford, London and Brighton, and when she had imagined meeting Angel at the station to walk about under the streetlights together. A lot of what she had imagined had become sad, silly and painful, but she had also imagined sitting here and doing work with people she hadn’t met yet, and here she was.

It had been a couple of weeks, it was a shaky thing that was not yet an equilibrium, and every day Buffy spent hours wondering when the other shoe would drop and every bit of happiness she had sort of imagined would turn out to never have been real. But her first tutorial came and went, and was mostly okay, and Larry was nice. After every meeting they had together with Professor Giles, Larry gave her a high five and had to run to make it to rugby practice, leaving her to stay in Giles’ room for the free hour he kept after her class. They were at an early stage of being watcher and slayer, still seeing how things were, and he spent longer asking her how she was than making training suggestions. He had made a map of graveyards and notable crypts, with colour-coded drawing pins marking the ones she had been to, and the things she had found. She met Dr Robin Wood and found him so cool it was disarming and a little unsettling, making biting little jokes about James Joyce’s personal letters that Buffy wasn’t well-read enough to understand. She met a loud, odd economics student called Anya, and liked her without understanding how anyone could spend more than twenty minutes with her.

And in the evenings when she was done at the library, or coming home from the bar, or padding back from Willow’s, she let her bag fall to the floor and opened her curtains to see the best thing she saw all the day, the calmest and warmest thing, the little room that shouldn’t be allowed to exist. William gave her a little wave when he saw her, and she wondered if he had been waiting, and she hoped he had been waiting.

“Have you seen anything odd in your patrols this week?” Said Giles at the start of the second week of term after handing her her reading list. “Anything to put on the map?”

He was becoming very passionate about his coloured drawing pins. He had more colours on order at a stationer’s on Turl Street.

“I killed a vampire with glasses shaped like hexagons. They were really cool, though I have no idea how they survived the whole crawling up out of the ground thing. I kind of wish I hadn’t smashed them.”

“Right. I’m afraid that’s still going to be a grey pin, though. I don’t have a colour for vampires with odd, er, fashion choices. Anything else?”

“No. Nothing else at all.”

***

“Let’s just go up there,” Willow said. Buffy was sitting on her bed watching a repeat of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly on Willow’s elderly square television. There was a screen down in the junior common room that would be better quality to watch absolutely anything on, but they enjoyed their private tower world more than the squishy leather sofas with unidentifiable stains.

“Go up where?” Said Buffy, shovelling popcorn into her mouth.

“Let’s go to the tower, let’s go up there and meet him. Or not meet him, if he’s a ghost and he’s not there. Let’s go up there and investigate?”

“I don’t… know if there’s anything to investigate. Probably just a weird thing I saw one time.”

“So why do I see you looking over at the window every forty five seconds? Are you really going to try and tell me you’ve only seen your hot ghost one time?”

“You’re too perceptive for someone who’s known me three weeks, Will.”

“Buffy, you’re at Oxford, in a beautiful tower room, with a beautiful man staring at you probably and writing poetry with your name in it from a beautiful tower room. And I’m at Oxford, and I have a best friend kinda, and I’m in a world that’s so much more exciting and gorgeous than I ever thought, and I want to investigate a hot ghost.”

“You haven’t seen him. You don’t even know if he’s hot.”

Willow pelted Buffy with popcorn from across the room. She missed wildly and only succeeded in filling her own bed with popcorn kernels she’d have to sleep among for days.

“You wouldn’t be all moon eyes out the window if he wasn’t beautiful. I’ve developed an elaborate picture in my mind of what he looks like and it’s wonderful. You need to introduce us so my fantasy can live, Buffy, please. Did you know my favourite movie is Ghost? Did you know I have a friend in Banbury who has a pottery wheel and I bet we could borrow-“

“I just don’t know if I want this guy to be a mystery to solve, Will. I’ve had a lot of mysteries and a lot of things I hoped were going to be amazing and romantic turn out to be creepy and frightening and…” It was hard to put into words how quiet and safe she felt staring across the quad at the guy who stared back and never said anything, never touched her, and never needed anything from her. “I like my daydreams, I guess. I don’t want him to turn out to be a zombie who eats brains and I have to behead him to save the world.”

Now Willow was talking about it, it was hard for Buffy to keep from looking at the sky to see how dark it was. She was glad, sometimes, that she could only see William Pratt’s room once it was dark outside and the warm lamp in the little room turned on. If she had access to it all day, she worried she would waste all the time she was meant to be working on watching him work, waiting for him to smile, telling herself stories where he was real, and imagining what his life must have been like in another time. The pull she felt for him was sweet and tight in the chest. It felt like the keening edge of something sharp or the soaring heights of pity as the music swells in a black and white movie where the lovers can’t be together. When they went down to see Xander in the St Drusilla’s College bar she always looked for the same chair and the same patch of wall. William Pratt wasn’t a man to her, he was a daydream, and he was her best daydream.

Buffy realised Willow wasn’t talking, she was just sat watching her, and she was smiling. “We have to look for him Buffy. You have to trust me. We need to do this. He could be your destiny or something.”

“That sounds terrifying.”

“He could be your best friend.”

“You’re my best friend.”

“Am I?” Willow had a great wide smile. If St Drusilla’s was a place where lonely girls could find each other on a haunted (mildly haunted) staircase and call each other best friends, after all this, in a bed full of popcorn, maybe Buffy could be a little bit braver.

“Let’s go get him.”

Chapter Text

Because Willow was a joint honours student, her schedule was more punishing than Buffy’s. Physics lectures were all compulsory, really compulsory rather than ‘essential’ for the English language and literature students. The degree was called Physics and Philosophy, but the physics faculty believed the physics was far more important, and the philosophers caused a tug of war in the opposite direction. If you combined that with the fact Willow was determined to maintain her commitments to every club and society she had picked a flyer up from in freshers’ week, you were left with a lot of busy days.

When Buffy told her she’d decided to try to meet William alone, she said it was because Willow was busy, but they’d found hours to spend together all the other days. Willow likely knew she was just looking for a reason and she let it go. Buffy felt tender and strange about the whole business, and the ghost of Angel lingered on her skin and in her lungs. Willow would have to wait to another time to wingman her with ghosts.

The next day, she had one class in the morning with Dr Wood, and she spent the whole ninety minutes tapping her pen on the spine of her book and wondering what William’s room would look like in the daylight, in the twilight, in the night time, to turn the light on and off herself, to run her fingers along the spines of all the books and weigh the handwritten papers in her hands.

She spent the afternoon in her bedroom, looking out at the tower room which sat empty in the daytime. It was hard to make out what was in there without the light on, but she thought she could see dustsheets over old furniture, perhaps a desk and perhaps a bookcase.

At five o’clock, she decided she would go at six. At five forty, she decided her stomach would turn to icy mush and descend to hell if she had to wait a second longer, so she put on her jacket and headed across the quad.

The shadows were long but the sun was still up when Buffy approached the door. The door was heavy, dark and locked, but it wasn’t too hard for the slayer to crack the old wood around the lock and push it open. It was dark inside and the air was heavy, as if it held all the exhaled air of all the people who had lived and studied here, and however many years of the staircase being closed off had prevented anything from clearing.

Some dead leaves from a previous autumn had blown in at some point and crunched on the floor. It meant walking slowly through the ground floor hallway and up to the stairs felt like straying into a fairy forest or returning to a graveyard. Buffy tried not to get distracted by the many disused teaching rooms, offices and student bedrooms she walked past, with doors hanging open, heavy on their hinges. The top floor was a mirror image of her and Willow’s staircase, with Buffy’s long low room off on one side and Willow’s square cosy one. Both rooms were abandoned, a few items of furniture covered in dust sheets and some left to take their chances with the moths. In the fireplace in the room that was a mirror of Willow’s, she strongly suspected the moths had built their stronghold.

Buffy didn’t know what she was expecting, but she felt stupid and unsettled, wandering around an abandoned set of rooms with no desire to give up or go home, holding on to the idea something good would happen when it got dark. It was embarrassing and painful to hope for things.

It felt like a long time sat in the dust on the floor of the hallway while the light decayed in the grimy window. She had been too anxious heading over here to bring a book so she just sat and watched the light change. She had no idea how she would admit to Willow that she had sat here for hours (and she knew she would sit here for hours) only for all her daydreams to be ridiculous and nothing to happen.

There was no flash or magical twinkling sound, but when she surfaced from her rumination and the dark space of the window was grey and empty, the hallway had changed. Where she had seen woodwormed doors hanging off their hinges, the door in the wall opposite was now shiny, polished, and closed. A brass plaque said ‘William Pratt’. She felt hollowed out and unsteady, with no idea at all what she could have to say to this person beyond “I’ve been waving through your window a few weeks now.”

So she hoped when she knocked on the door that he would answer it so quickly she wouldn’t have time to convince herself to run away, or she hoped he would never open it at all. She knocked.

And the door opened.

William Pratt was an artefact from another time, maybe fifty years ago. He looked a little bewildered, like he’d either just had a very long day or just woken up, hair very pale, very messy, eyes hooded and sleepy, cheekbones catching the last of the light. When he saw her, his confusion seemed to settle a little, and he looked a little wonder-struck, a little relieved. He said “Buffy?”

“William?” Buffy hadn’t planned further ahead than this.

“You came.” He looked like he’d been waiting for something for months, or years, or decades. He was sleepy and yearning. His room smelled like the only source of fresh air on this abandoned staircase.

“I came?”

“Come inside. I’ll try to explain… It’s hard, it’s very hard. I’ll try to explain.”

***

William Pratt’s room felt smaller than Buffy’s but when she went inside she found its bare bones were just like hers, only it had more furniture so it seemed smaller and cosier. She had the bare institutional plywood furniture of the late twentieth century university system, but William had bookcases upon bookcases, neat little occasional tables, rugs that looked like they had been imported from Turkey and Afghanistan butted up against and overlapping each other. The postcards he had propped and pinned on the walls suggested dreamy and distant otherworlds, John William Waterhouse’s Boreas staring sadly into the wind.

Inside the room, Buffy felt a warmth and a sense of safety that she couldn’t account for. The pillar of fire, she felt, would not find her here. Something strange and powerful kept it at bay, and in here the weight of the world mattered less like she had passed into a parallel dimension where people needed less from her, where just existing was enough. She felt lucky that William seemed to have so much he needed to say to her in a great long tumbling monologue, becuase if she had had to think of anything to say she might have cried, and she might have told him that he could never make her leave, because she was safe here as she had never been safe anywhere else in this world.

He took her inside and sat her down, started filling a copper kettle and stoking a fire in the little fireplace to make them tea. Everyone in this university wanted to bring Buffy tea.

“I died here, I suppose, many years ago.” He seemed like he needed to talk or he’d been practising a long time, but he had stage fright now he came to try and explain, and he couldn’t make himself look at her. “I had a fever and I just… I had so many strange dreams and I felt like St Drusilla appeared to me. They had the vicar coming in to sit with me but I always saw her stood behind him, and her voice was quieter than his but I could always hear her. She said she wasn’t going to let me go, and the demons weren’t going to get me. There are demons under the foundations of everything here… They cause the fevers or they cause the flux, and there’s not as many monks as there used to be…”

He fumbled the kettle and scalding water splashed onto the coals. Buffy stood to stop him and he waved her back, refilled the kettle and put it back on the flame. He kept his tea in a small wooden box with the college insignia carved in the top, the four quarters: knife, moon, tree and heart. William spoke again.

“The spirit of St Drusilla keeps everybody safe here. She keeps us in our rooms. You can sit down if you want, Buffy, I haven’t had a guest in… but I keep it all clean and I’ve got biscuits somewhere. She nourishes us in dreams and keeps the demons down. They say they aren’t sure if St Drusilla is a real person but how could she not be real? It’s her martyred blood in the earth that keeps the demons out. I tried to get a poem out of that, I tried for a year. I still might finish it but it needs another pair of eyes and I never… There’s never another pair of eyes. She keeps us safe but we can’t… get out… There’s times we’re here and times we’re not, I think is the best way to put it. I haven’t told this very well. You spend a long time planning how you’ll explain it and then you lose all your notes and…”

Above the neat, small single bed there was a cross on the wall. He glanced up at it on his way over to the whistling kettle.

Buffy felt like her heart was being dug out of her. She had nothing with her to take notes so she tried to remember, chanting details to herself in her head. She thought of demons beneath the college, clawing up towards her for a millennium. “She kept you here for fifty years?”

“She loved me. And she said you’d come.”

“So you’ve been…”

“Writing mainly. I read a lot. I can watch outside, though it never seems to get light.” A shiver seemed to go through William as if he realised he was being too odd, before the the tea was ready. He drew a chair over to hers and put the teapot and two cups on the windowsill, the windowsill that was a copy of hers, and sat down with an expression that was boyish, open, and nervous about what she’d say next. “So what do you study?”

“You’ve been waiting for the slayer for fifty years? William I’m… I thought I was working so hard and there was this whole, I’m so sorry I didn’t know. I’ll talk to my watcher tomorrow and we’ll get started -” Buffy felt herself start spiralling with the guilt and the pain of all the suffering she had been meant to be averting. The college was stranger and bigger than she’d known and her head filled with the amount of research she’d have to do, the amount of hours, the stairs into the basement, the demons, the voices. The to do list grew and bloomed in fractals.

“Buffy, I don’t want you to exorcise me. The dreams didn’t say you’d save me at all. They said you’d be able to see and talk to me. That’s all. I don’t need you to do anything. If I’ve made this sound stressful, any more stressful than it needed to be, I’m really sorry.” He turned suddenly as an idea entered his head. “I remember now, I have shortbread. Have some shortbread.”

“You’ve been waiting for the slayer to arrive and be able to see you, to chat?”

“Only if you’d like to. If you’d like to, you could have some shortbread and tell me what you study. If you’d like to.”

Buffy struggled to reset her mind from chosen one to person who made small talk. If she viewed William as a poignant ghost from another time trapped and waiting for her help, she felt exhausted, and if she saw him as a human, then there was a cute boy offering her biscuits. The duality was difficult. He sat forward in his chair, shirt buttoned up to his neck, keen and listening hard. Perhaps it was the effects of fifty years of loneliness, of no one other than the ghost of a medieval saint knowing you exist enough to make eye contact with you, but he looked at her like she was fascinating and full of light.

“I study English.” She smiled at the absurdity of the change in tone of their conversation. “I just started. I’m very new and probably not very good at it.”

“Are you starting with the Anglo Saxons? That’s where we started.”

“Yeah. They probably haven’t changed much.”

“Well if you need any help… I’d do a lot to bribe someone to bring me more books. And some more biscuits.”

Buffy looked at the shelves behind him and saw much-read, closely annotated books along the same lines as the things she’d been studying, squat Victorian novels, medieval romances, and Old English grammars.

“I can do that,” she said. “In fact it’ll probably be one of my easier slayer responsibilities. Unless you have any allergies. Do you have any allergies?”

“I don’t have any allergies. You can tell me about your life, if you’d like to.”

Buffy took a shortbread and found it fresh and homemade. It was dark outside now. She had been subsumed into the good small point of light she had been looking in. She felt she should ask more about St Drusilla and the demons, because there was always more to say about demons, but she was so tired and it was so easy to fall into the tea and the lamplight and let this be the evening nothing made her fight.

Chapter Text

If there was one thing slayers got good at quickly after being called, it was getting by on very little sleep. Buffy thought sometimes that the main reason she had got into Oxford was her ability to push through any level of stress and any level of exhaustion and keep walking, keep punching, or keep writing in exam conditions. So it surprised her when she got home from William Pratt’s room, a few minutes before dawn, and felt so dopey and sleepy it was like she had been marinated in camomile tea.

William had started by talking to her about the books he had read in his first term at St Drusilla’s, and the ideas for essays he had had but never got to write. He talked about his dreams, both the things he had wanted to do with his life back when he had had one, and the dreams he had now. It was a strange time to be young, arriving for your first year in 1975, after Bloody Sunday but before the Winter of Discontent, after the Beatles and before the Sex Pistols.

St Drusilla came to him in all his dreams every night, to start with, to remind him that every new student at her college was a formal member of her community and under her protection. That was what the matriculation oath meant to her, the patron saint of everyone who ate at her table in her hall, under her portrait, read her books, sat on her lawns. He felt like he loved her, to start with, and he felt grateful for a new sort of life, and a kind of immortality. He waited and waited for her to come to him, and his notebooks were full of the things he wished she’d say to him. Buffy strongly suspected there had been fantasies in those notebooks that he was skipping over.

He had been a ghost for a couple of years when he started to feel really dead. There were two things that happened to make him feel like a corpse. The first was Drusilla’s visits becoming rarer. It turned out her calling in life was not to spend all her days listening to him talk about poetry he’d been reading. It turned out there were many things for the patron saint of a college to do, and that Miss Edith could not be left to do all of it alone. The second was that punk arrived, finally, in Oxford. It had taken a while for it to crawl up from London on the train to the slow, old city where things were done the way they had always been done. William had heard the music, like nothing else he had ever heard before, drifting in from other students in other rooms, and he realised that he was dead, and he was old, and he would never go to those shows, and he would never be one of them, and he would never really be a young person who walked outside with plans to talk about and a future to see coming.

So he started to hate Drusilla, sometimes, for keeping him in a life that could never really be a life. The list of things he had never tried in his short, sheltered, bookish life started to seem very long indeed. He thought about his little room no one could reach, and the door he could not open, and the people he would never meet, and the fact that a living breathing active William would have had the option to dye his hair or be known by a stupid new nickname, and now he would never have that.

Buffy listened to him talk for hours, and then she talked for hours. The things she said in the little tower room that wasn’t real didn’t count in the real world. Talking to William was like talking into a knothole in a tree and letting the secrets stay there. She talked about being called to her destiny, and how odd that was when her only plan had been to be a nerdy blonde girl in a past-its-best seaside town. It had felt like enough work just to be trying to keep her grades high. Then she had to learn to fight. She met Angel and loved him so much it rewired every thought in her brain, obsessed to the point of tears for two years, two years that she never found the words to tell her mum about even when it was ripping her to pieces, and the evil still needed fighting, and the coursework still needed doing. When they killed Merrick on the beach she had decided she needed a gap year and she spent that gap year working in a rubbish bar, pretending to her mum that she had friends,

William Pratt was the perfect combination of real and not real, not real when she said things to him that it terrified her to say out loud, but real when he remembered he had a fruit cake wrapped in wax paper in a tin on the book shelf. Everything in his room was fresh and smelled good. The amount he existed was perfect.

So she got home tired, and she got home good. There was just enough time to shower and eat a cereal bar before heading to class with Giles. It felt like coming home after light rain in a warm climate.

Buffy was early to class and looking forward to her lunch with Willow later. After that, she would go to Giles in the afternoon, and she would talk about St Drusilla and what she had learned about demons. But for now, it was a bright clear day, and William Pratt had such a nice smile, and she was going to tell her new best friend about a handsome boy who wanted to talk to her and look at her with nice blue eyes. She’d take him snacks and library books later.

The quiet girl with zig-zag parted hair was waiting outside the room when Buffy arrived for her class. Buffy knew now that her name was Tara. Professor Giles and Dr Wood were compassionate and patient with her stammer, and slowly as the classes wore on she seemed more comfortable speaking in class. Something about the rhythm of Old English poetry seemed to appeal to her, the gentle rhythm hushing like the lap of the sea. When she read the texts they studied out loud, her face was calm and dreamy, completely absorbed in the language of another place. Buffy had seen her and Veruca holding hands, on walks around the city late at night, but as long as she saw them keep their distance from each other in the college, she didn’t say anything about it to Willow or anyone else.

“You’re early,” said Tara.

“I guess I was up for something different today. How are you doing?”

“I’m enjoying the essays, I am. I like being taught by Professor Giles. He’s organised for me to receive some funding to attend a conference in the Christmas holidays, on women in Norse literature.” Her stammer was quite pronounced when she spoke to Buffy one on one, looking her in the eyes. Buffy resisted the urge to try and finish her sentences for her, and in the short pauses in the conversation she enjoyed both the stillness of the college and the soft echoes of Tara’s quiet voice. If there was such a thing in the college as a patron saint of students who loved studying here, and felt safe, Buffy hoped St Drusilla would care for Tara too. Something told her, maybe her slayer senses and maybe her ability to recognise lonely girls, that Tara could do with being looked after.

Veruca was the next to arrive and while she didn’t say anything directly or quotably mean, Buffy felt a cold energy coming from her. Tara got stuck on a word and Veruca took the opportunity to change the subject, when Buffy thought she might have been about to share her news about Professor Giles and the conference. It felt more than a little uncomfortable, but Buffy was still searching for anything she could say when Larry and the others arrived, and the moment for saying something seemed to have passed. She found Tara’s eyes and smiled at her, but she wasn’t sure how much that helped with anything.

At the end of class, she dawdled putting away her books and Giles waited for the last other students to leave so they could be alone. Tara paused a moment at the door, but when Buffy didn’t follow she closed it gently behind her and headed out.

When the last footsteps echoed away, Giles said, “You’ve seen one of them, haven’t you?”

Chapter Text

Professor Rupert Giles came to Oxford when he was eighteen, and he achieved the dream many have but few achieve, of never leaving. He had shifted colleges a few times and had a research exchange, briefly, in Southern California, but he spent those months counting down the days til he could come home. When he got back to London Gatwick, sweaty and unhappy about the quality of airline food, a representative of the Watcher’s Council informed him it was time to take up a post at St Drusilla’s, and he had been here ever since.

Oxford was a wonderful place to situate the headquarters of the Watcher’s Council. The libraries, of course, were second to none in the world, and everyone was already half-ready to believe there were ghosts massing outside. What were the hundred portraits on the wall of every dining hall if not ghosts keeping their silence? Keeping their silence, for now? It was a good place to be an Anglo-Saxonist, too, partly as a cover and partly as a second love of his life.

The third love of his life was Jenny Calendar, first female lecturer on the Mathematics and Computation course when it started teaching in 1985, dead of fever in 1986. The office that had once been hers had an adjoining door with the office that was now Giles’. He was head over heels before he knew she was dead, and now he resisted all attempts to promote him. There was some talk a few years back of him applying to be Dean of Students, but being Dean of Students meant giving up the connecting door that led to a wall some of the time and to a cosy little office full of computer printouts the rest of the time, and that was far too precious to him.

His first few meetings with Buffy, he listened to her more than he talked. Oxford’s demonological ways of doing things had been running like clockwork for a while now. He could stall Professor Travers for a while to give her time to adjust, and he could tell Dr Wood she was taking some time settling in, because of something vague about a bad boyfriend, a stepfather who had left dramatically. He didn’t speak much in their meetings but he hoped she liked his office. He hoped it was a place she could imagine herself staying.

For the first term, from freshers week and printed out reading lists through to candlelit Christmas carols in the hall, it was Giles’ job this term to be someone she could speak to, someone she could listen to, and maybe even someone she could hand in essays about Deor and The Wife’s Lament to. And Professor Travers would have to be nice about it, or at least silent about it, after the bollocking Giles had given him about accidentally not noticing Merrick’s body was turning to mulch somewhere in the sand of the south coast for a full calendar year.

“I didn’t want to intrude on anything personal, or on something professional you hadn’t intended to share with me yet.” He cleaned his glasses, left lens then right lens, then held them up to the light, then left lens again. “Perhaps after all this time I know the signs, though.”

“You’ve met someone? Here?”

Giles smiled in a small little way that made him feel nineteen again. “Her name is, well, to you it’s Dr Calendar. She’s a quite brilliant mathematical mind. She’s very… lively. She’s very lively indeed.”

“So St Drusilla’s is just full of ghosts? Ghosts and a medieval saint who chains people to the stone And a whole layer of demons beneath the earth?” Buffy was doodling in her medieval literature notebook, doodles that became scratchy shadow taking over the whole page, hard enough to tear and warp the paper. “I came here to do something different, Giles, I came here to achieve my dream, because I do actually have dreams beyond beheading things in graveyards on school nights. I could barely keep it together back in Brighton and I knew there would be vampires, I’m not stupid, I knew there’d be-”

“Buffy-”

“Let me finish, Giles! I’m happy to slay vampires and I’m happy to put colour coded pins in the map of the million stupid cemeteries but I can’t fight an army of demons, I can’t take on a stupid thousand year old death saint who traps people in their bedrooms forever, I can’t do all of it, I can’t do the essays and the thousand demons and the hell, I can’t go to hell, I’ve spent too much of my life thinking about ending up and hell and…” Buffy didn’t intend to stop talking but she realised she was running out of words. There wasn’t enough air in the room to keep powering her speaking, though if she had been trying to summarise all the things on her list of obligations, she could have talked forever, or long enough to drag her down to hell.

Giles came round to her side of the wide dark table and sat in the chair next to her. He put his hand gently over hers, where she didn’t realise she had started gripping her pen like a gnarled claw. There was a moment of quiet.

“Did I even deserve to get in here, Giles?” Every breath felt like a collapsed lung. “Did you even read my essays or did you just need me to be here to save the world? Are the other students going to laugh at me when they realise I’m too dumb to stay her with them, I’m just the bodyguard?”

“Buffy…” There was so much he wanted to say to her that he had to take a few seconds to gather himself, shift his weight in his chair, and work out his words. “Buffy, the first thing to say is that I stepped out of the room when the rest of the St Drusilla’s literature faculty discussed your application. It is very clear in our regulations that any student we have a personal interest in isn’t someone whose application we should be discussing. Normally this is invoked for children, sometimes children of friends, of the faculty, but I didn’t give any details. I wasn’t involved in reading your application at all. Please don’t think for a moment that you aren’t good enough to be here in terms of academics. When Wesley and Robin discussed your essays neither of them had any idea who you were. It may interest you to know you were not even the only applicant I did that for this year. I have a niece who applied in the same cohort, and her application was rejected.”

When he tried to let her hand go, she kept hold of it, like a child holding their dad’s sleeve to keep from getting lost. Her breathing was ragged and strange, and it would have been impossible for her to speak if she had tried to. Giles kept his voice soft and low. It was a lullaby for her tired mind in the same voice he used to bring sagas and epics to life.

“I’m sure you can imagine the council was overjoyed when the university received your application. Your choice to apply here, however, was entirely your own. We didn’t try to transfer you to a secondary school in Oxford, and there’s no great advantage of keeping you handy for head office. For one thing, I think many of us might have liked to expense a few nights on the coast from time to time. If you chose St Drusilla’s, or St Drusilla’s chose you, I imagine it was because something here reached out and appealed to you between the lines of the prospectus. I think you probably recognised something here that would make it feel like home, in the same way you can sense a knife in the dark behind you or a shiver in the bushes. You planned to come here, work hard, and make a home, and you have done that entirely on your own merits, as a high-achieving young woman and a promising scholar, not as the slayer.”

Giles left a pause for Buffy to speak, if she wanted to, but she stayed quiet and overwhelmed.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for not explaining all of this to you immediately. I got the impression, and I think I was correct, that you didn’t need anything else on your plate at the moment. It is true that Oxford has some… unique challenges, but nobody was lying to you when they said St Drusilla’s could be a sanctuary for you. The ghosts do take a little getting used to, and certain things are done differently here, but St Drusilla has never done any harm here. In all the stories I’ve heard and all the records I’ve read, I’ve never heard of her being malicious. There are several anecdotes actually, often dismissed by scholars but recorded a good few times, where St Drusilla makes miraculous interventions to protect her students. When heretics were burned on the High Street, they said the smoke billowed as far as the door of St Drusilla’s and stopped, because fire couldn’t catch here. In the modern day, there are a few stories I’ve heard of students with ideas of taking their own lives finding that windows wouldn’t open in any room they tried. I would be lying if I said I truly understood St Drusilla or how her protection of these students and this land works, but her ghosts are created out of love, and I don’t think she poses any threat to you.”

Buffy’s wild gulping breaths were starting to slow. “I don’t know what to do with any of this, Professor Giles.”

His voice was so quiet and gentle, he sounded like a man soothing a cat as he carried it in from the rain. Buffy wondered if her dad had ever spoken to her like this, if it was a new experience for her or just something she hadn’t felt in her conscious memory. “I didn’t intend to share this with you so early, Buffy. I knew you would need time and I know your classes and homework are more than enough to keep a life busy. I had been hoping to take you down to the under level in January after you’d had Michaelmas Term to settle in. It was only when I found out you’d met one of our college ghosts that I thought you’d rather I explained than I didn’t.”

“How could you know I…?” Visions filled Buffy’s head of Giles scanning her brain or divining her thoughts using sheep intestines.

“Jenny’s office backs onto that quad and, well, she has a lot of free time for staring out of the window. She said you were speaking to the poet.”

“The poet?”

“Well the ghosts can spend as much time as they want staring into each others studies but they can’t knock on the door and introduce themselves. After Jenny started describing him to me this morning, I thought I’d give him a name for the notes based on his sitting and writing in the window.”

“His name’s William.”

“Ah, well I’ll be sure to put that in the notes,” said Giles. He chose his next words very carefully. “How did you find speaking to him?”

“It was lovely. I’m not sure how to describe it. It was lovely.”

“There’s something wonderfully safe about the ghost rooms, isn’t there?” Something sad came over Giles’ face. “Sometimes it makes you never want to leave. I’m constantly amazed by how, well, un-ghostly Jenny can be. I often think she’s more lifelike than I am.”

“What happens if you don’t leave, then? What if you’re in the room at dawn?”

Giles’ grimace told her he had spent time asking the same questions. “You only ever wake up in a derelict room.”

Chapter Text

St Sepulchre’s Cemetery was small and relatively recently established, barely a hundred and fifty years old when Buffy arrived in Oxford. So you’d be surprised how many vampires it had. Buffy certainly was. When she had dusted five and was wrestling a sixth to the ground in the shadow of a crucifix covered in dead leaves, she wondered how there could be that many in one evening in a graveyard where no one new had been buried since 1944 (she knew this, she checked on the cemetery’s informational placard).

The sixth vampire was burly, short but broad-backed. His cardiovascular health wasn’t great, and he wasn’t a great tactician, but trapped on the ground his dirty fingernails got in her hair and her face and he had a knack for never letting go. The slaying was scrappy and ragged, four or five attempts to stab him through the back where she couldn’t see, grunting and groping towards the heart. His face was forgettable but he had a disgusting beard that smelled like soil and rot. There were bits of earth in his cracked fingernails. Buffy knew she’d forget his face soon enough - vampires were inhuman enough that they started to blend together, didn’t quite register as a human face - but you didn’t forget the smell of grave.

She caught her breath and got back to the archway entrance to the graveyard, just in time for Willow to arrive. Willow looked her up and down and held out a takeaway coffee cup. “I got you a hot chocolate with orange oil in it. I’m sorry I arrived late. My mum was on the phone about… about something much less important than this, on reflection.”

Buffy took the cup and realised her hands were still covered with a mix of grave dirt and vampire dust. Maybe this was why slayers didn’t traditionally have friends, because it made you realise how disgusting you were. Merrick certainly hadn’t wanted her to have friends back in Brighton.

“You have no idea how grateful I am for this, Will. You have no idea.”

“So I’m really doing my part in the fight against evil?”

“You absolutely are.”

“I was really hoping to see you in action. I’ve still only seen the one vampire being actively slayed, and it was so dark and I had no idea what was happening. It wasn’t a proper fieldwork experience.”

Buffy leaned back against the shadowed side of the gateway. The hot chocolate was still wonderfully hot, meaning Willow must have speed-walked from the only coffee shop that would be open that late. Buffy took a sip, took another sip, and smiled. The adrenaline of the fight started to pass out of her and her muscles, slowly, started to relax. “I think it’s probably less worth watching than you think. Just imagine a really smelly guy, and then imagine me stabbing him with sticks.”

“I dunno, that sounds pretty badass to me.”

Xander jogged towards them smiling. “I’m late because I had to get the good mini pretzels. And also because someone was sick on me as I was opening the bar so I had to change. Bearing in mind the bar opened at 6pm that’s quite impressive actually. It made me feel like I’d achieved more than someone today. But I do still smell.”

“That makes two of us. What time is it?”

“Coming up on nine.”

“How is it still so early? I’ve been here several weeks already. The night does not still feel young. It feels positively old. I’m an old woman now.”

Xander opened the mini pretzels and held them out. “Aren’t we all?”

The three of them turned back towards the city centre and started back towards St Drusilla’s. It was amazing how many people they walked past, so close to the cemetery. It was still early. Tourists, students, residents, people going to and from their jobs, their dates, going in and out of restaurants and bars, were walking in twos and threes a few metres from St Sepulchre’s, and none of them had any idea what had just happened so close to them.

“I don’t know whether I feel more or less safe walking alone at night since I met you, Buffy,” said Willow as they walked.

“That’s very much the role I want to play in the world.”

“If we get back to my room by half past, we can watch Rear Window on ITV,” Willow said.

“Is that dirty?” Said Xander, mouth full of pretzels. “It sounds dirty.”

“You just think everything’s dirty since you met your economist,” Willow needled, causing him to grin through his pretzels.

“That’s only because I don’t understand a word of the economics.”

“No one understands economics, that’s the secret,” said Willow. “So do we want to do Rear Window or do we want to interrogate Xander about Anya until the bar has got quiet? I’m good with either.”

“I’m good to watch the movie,” said Buffy, stretching her arms out over her head to untangle her shoulder muscles. She caught Willow’s eye and tried to keep her face straight, “But I have to head off right after. I have somewhere I need to be later on.”

“Oh?” Xander said.

“I think it’s a slaying thing,” said Willow.

“Yeah,” said Buffy, “It’s a slaying thing.”

***

Buffy had told William to expect her around midnight, but she was antsy from eleven. She left Willow’s room early to go back to her room and get ready (for slaying or to make herself pretty, depending on who you asked), but she couldn’t possibly kill an hour getting ready. So she found herself sitting on the edge of her bed at twenty five past eleven in her pretty natural makeup with the floral perfume her mum gave her for Christmas, thinking about all the things that could go wrong and all the stupid things she could say. In the day she had been brainstorming a lot of questions about ghosts and St Drusilla, but now her stomach was full of bees and all she could think about was that she was going to see him again, and she hoped he’d think she was pretty.

For someone whose brain and body were never allowed a break from nerves and anxieties of a dozen different kinds, this was a new kind of fear and it twisted her up in different, hopeful ways. It wasn’t common for Buffy Summers to be able to imagine this many outcomes in a situation that were all good. When she looked into the future, there were so many possibilities for the night - sitting at the desk, in the armchair, or perched on the edge of the bed, drinking tea or hot cocoa, talking about books or telling the stories of their lives. All the versions of the night ahead of her were good enough to crowd out thoughts of the morning.

After pacing up and down her room several times, some star jumps and sit-ups to deal with her extra energy, a glass of water to calm her, redoing her hair, and three bathroom trips, Buffy decided to set off for William’s and just walk slowly. She had several things for him from the college library, coffee and cocoa powder, and some snacks, which she had arranged, rearranged and rearranged again in one tote bag then another tote bag, because she worried the first one was too pretentious. This one was from an independent bookshop in Brighton, which was also pretentious, but she didn’t think he would mind.

It turned out there was no way to make the walk down her staircase, across a small quad and into another door take fifteen minutes. Walking through the dead leaves that filled the ground floor of the staircase was disconcerting. There were enough of them to cover her shoes when she walked, blowing in a breeze she couldn’t find. The lamps were empty and the walls were scratched and marked. Most of the marks looked like they had been scrawled by builders, layers of designers wondering where doors might need sealing or bathrooms putting in.

She sat against the wall opposite William’s door, clenching and unclenching her hands, at eleven fifty two. It took a lot of control not to knock on the door early. She took the things she had in her bag out and moved them all around again. It was nice that all the conflict and worry in the universe came down, on that evening, to whether it would be nicer to watch him look at the books or the snacks first. She trusted him to like both. She trusted the conversation to stay easy. It was nice.

So she knocked early, because she felt like he might not mind, and because she wanted to feel safe and warm four minutes early.

He opened the door immediately, and she saw his messy pale hair and his starched stand-up collar. The kettle was whistling behind him and four rock cakes were set neatly on his desk. Two or three tall taper candles were lit and stood on saucers or side plates, on the desk, on the bedside table, on a stack of books. A smile spread over Buffy’s face like butter melting over pancakes or rain reaching exhausted land.

“Buffy…” said William. He had planned all the candles and the cakes but he hadn’t thought of what to say. Buffy imagined him sat on his bed, on the one indent in the perfectly steamed sheets, ready embarrassingly early, waiting for her. She held up her bag.

“I brought you some snacks too. I don’t actually know how you get food here. In my mind ghosts never need food.”

He stood back from the door and gestured for her to come inside. She sat on the armchair where she had sat before. This was partly because it was the space that felt like hers, and partly because she didn’t think the conversation would come as easy if she was on the bed, leaning back on her hands and taking in what his blankets felt like with her fingers, feeling for the warmth of where he had been sitting. William sat on the desk chair, turned around to face the room, fingers tapping on his thighs.

“Well I don’t know that I’m exactly a ghost, I suppose,” he said, “More a flesh and blood person in suspended animation.”

“So you’re flesh and blood? No ectoplasm and cold draughts?”

“Far as I can tell.”

A pause.

“The food is a mystery though,” he moved on, “Mostly I find replacements for things I finished in drawers and tins at the start of each night. It’s a bit samey but it gets the job done. I have my hot plate, just a small one. It works for one. You know, beans on toast, nothing exciting. There’s little things sometimes, a box of Christmas biscuits or a bottle of wine. When I dream of Dru sometimes, or when I see her - I don’t really know what to call it-”

“You see her?”

“Sometimes. She asks me if I need anything. Says her and Miss Edith can get whatever I need.”

“She sounds very loving.”

William shrugged. “She wants us to be safe, I think, all of us.”

Buffy knit her hands together in her lap. She liked the candles and, more than that, she liked that he had thought to like them. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you snacks then.”

“I don’t get a lot of variety here, love. Anything new for me to try is just, well, I’m very grateful for it.”

“I thought that might be the case.”

***

Oreos, it turned out, were hard to explain from a cold start.

“Like a custard cream?” William asked.

“No, the biscuit is chocolate. Also it’s round.”

“Like a bourbon?”

“No, the middle isn’t chocolate. Trust me.”

“I’m not saying I don’t trust you about it being a biscuit. I’m saying I don’t trust you about it being this important.”

“It’s very important. It also comes in birthday cake flavour.”

“How can that possibly work?”

“I don’t know if you can handle that knowledge right now.”

The demands of explaining how oreos work meant Buffy had to pull her chair right up close to the desk. The candles touched the air with warmth, and the light caught a small scar in one of William’s eyebrow. It looked like the skin was just raised enough for you to be able to feel it with the pad of your finger. Buffy had no idea why she was having thoughts like this about someone she’d spent a handful of hours with, someone who wasn’t really a person, and she felt silly and bad about her thoughts getting feverish and running away to odd places. She wanted so badly to feel good though, and she wanted so badly to like someone. She liked the fizzy feeling. The feeling of having a crush felt safe, even. If it was a crush she had, it wasn’t so bad or stupid to feel that way in the privacy of your brain. If you spent your day looking forward to a conversation with someone, maybe that was a little reward she could allow herself.

“Coffee?” He said, taking a package out of the bag.

“It’s really catching on with the young people now. I drink it more than tea, probably, though people keep making me tea. My best friend Willow makes me a lot of tea. But I was thinking about what you said about wanting to know what it would have been like if you’d been alive later on, or alive outside your college room later on. I think you’d have got into coffee.”

“Is that right?”

“Well you’d have graduated in 1960, but I’m sure you’d have done a doctorate, but you’d have been travelling for conferences and you’d have gone to all kinds of institutions and they always have coffee, bad coffee, but you’d have gone to little coffee houses with your notebooks. I can just really see you sitting there. Do you like tiny little pastries?”

“I’ve not had the opportunity to try.”

“Well I see you eating tiny little pastries.”

“You’ve got a whole life planned out for me then?” William leaned his head on his hand on the desk, close to her above the oreos. Buffy thought he was beautiful. There wasn’t another word for it. He was beautiful.

“I think you deserve another life,” said Buffy quietly, “I think about it a lot. Who we all might be if it weren’t for the vampires, the demons, the forces of darkness. I wonder who I’d be if I was another person in another time, if things were better, or if I was better.”

“I don’t know that I mind being here, like this.”

“But imagine if you just got to be a person, outside in the daylight, drinking coffee, sitting in bookshops.” The wonderful thing about candlelight was the way it danced and moved on his skin, gathering in shadows, picking up the colours in his eyes, sea-glass blue. Buffy spent a lot of her day imagining what it would be like if she was a person.

“My dream was always to go to Oxford and be there forever,” he said, with a small controlled smile, “And I don’t know if I’d have made all these friends I have, like you, if I wasn’t an exciting ghost boy. I wouldn’t even be here.”

“I don’t think that would need to be an obstacle at all. You could still be here, being a poetic genius, teaching your many amazing published books.”

“And then you’d arrive thirty seven years later?”

“Of course.”

“But I would have drunk so much red wine at so many college dinners, my nose would be bright red and I would have a toupee the wrong colour for my eyebrows.”

“Yes William,” said Buffy, very seriously, “That’s the dream.”

He smiled at her. Their whole conversation was just smiling and smiling, and the little yearning thing underneath, making Buffy feel fourteen, threatening to rip up all her calm and safety. When his eyes found hers, a light went off in her brain that said ‘don’t let yourself break this as well, don’t let yourself make this difficult’. So she went back to the tote bag to get his books.

“Are these library books?” He said.

“Yeah, but don’t worry about it. I can come back and pick them up when you’re done.”

He took out the small stack of books and started flipping through them. He looked boyish and happy, and she wondered how long it had been since he’d had new books to look through. “I don’t want to put you out, going back and forth picking things up for me.”

“It’s no trouble. I like coming up here. It’s nice. Choosing what books published in the last forty years you might like or if you’d want light roast or dark roast coffee feels like the kind of responsibility I can handle. So I could come back any time you like, really. I could come back tomorrow, or the day after. Any time you like.”

“Don’t think about it that way, Buffy. You’re the one with people to see and places to go. I’m the one who’ll always be here.”

Chapter Text

“There’s this dream I keep having,” said William. It had been several weeks, and there was an armchair that was Buffy’s armchair. When Buffy needed to read or work (and she often needed to read or work) William had arranged a little table close enough to her to easily read, but far enough away she could still sit curled up however she was most comfortable. There was a blanket that was her blanket, curled in on herself like an animal in a nest, and the blanket was rich brown shot through with gold and butterscotch. She arrived with books for her and books for him, new ones every couple of days, and they sat mostly in silence, mostly reading. It was a new normal, or a slice of a new normal, that they had composed together.

There had been no big conversations or big changes. Buffy’s little crush still sat inside her untouched, a tea light lit and hidden at the bottom of her hours in the tower room, her small and sweet good thing. She folded a note in half and put it in her book to keep her place. William lay sprawled back on the bed, staring at the ceiling in the sensual post-biscuit slump. “Is it a Drusilla dream? About, like, the future? Things to worry about? Demon things?”

“No, not at all. Quite the opposite, actually. I…”

“What?”

“I imagine sometimes that I started a punk band.” He kept his eyes trained on the ceiling, like he was confessing to a priest or waiting for the opinion of a psychoanalyst.

Buffy didn’t laugh. Whatever William may have accused her of later or however he may have interpreted the situation, Buffy knew then and knows still that she didn’t laugh. “A punk band?” she said in a measured, mature voice.

“I knew you’d laugh. I bloody knew you’d laugh.”

“I am not laughing! I’m expressing surprise. You said something surprising and I…. was surprised.”

“What’s surprising about it?” His accent wavered a little, in the direction of something more gruff, less polished. It was a voice Buffy could imagine him practising in the mirror.

“Hadn’t you been dead for twenty years by the time punk happened?”

“Never stopped Iggy Pop, did it?”

“How do you even know about punk? Did Drusilla pop in to play it to you and say ‘here’s a good career path you should consider if you’re ever not dead?’

“Alright! Alright!” He’s angry and laughing, sitting up on the bed with his shirt untucked. “You’re very flippant about my untimely death. For all you know, I’m very traumatised by it, thank you very much.” He looked around at the walls of his little room. Buffy made a note to herself that she ought to rile him up again, a little, as a joke, if it makes him laugh out loud and roll around on the bed. She worried sometimes he could read her crush in her body when she stared at him, the set of her jaw she couldn’t control when he turned his head and the light caught on his cheekbones. “As a matter of fact, this staircase was still occupied until the eighties, and I shared a wall with someone who had a good hi-fi and no inclination to be a good neighbour. Not that I ever complained. It sounded…”

He stood up and drifted over to the wall away from the window. There was a look of wonder on his face when he looked through the wall to what he used to imagine was on the other side, the music he’d have loved if he’d lived. His face was pensive and his voice was soft. He failed to put into words what it sounded like. Buffy looked around his room and tried to imagine spending forty years there with all your same books, your same starched shirts, pen and paper while the world develops outside.

“You don’t have a record player,” Buffy said softly.

“You’d have had to be a prince to afford one the last time I went shopping. The bloke next door was a wreckhead, obviously. They threw him out after the first year. I heard him telling his good for nothing friends about it. They were a bunch of losers, I guess. They gave each other stupid rock and roll nicknames and said they were gonna get famous. Never turned into anything, of course. These walls really are paper thin, actually. They never knew I was here, listening. One of them made his friends call him Spike. I thought, well you’re a waste of space, but what if I was Spike?”

Buffy sounded the word out, slowly so she could feel it round her mouth, “Spike.”

“See? It sounds good when a pretty girl says it.” He looked round at her and a spell seemed to be broken, the imaginary thing he saw in the blank wall to the empty, derelict room on the other side. He headed back to the bed and started rifling around the detritus that accumulated in a long late evening of sitting quietly curled around their work, scraps of paper and packets of sweet things.

Buffy laughed, taking more pleasure than she wanted to admit in indulging him. “I can call you Spike if you like.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s not the kind of name you can use with a straight face.”

“Spike.” Buffy imagined his hair bleached and slicked back. She imagined scrappy nail polish and a long black coat and some tight jeans. She imagined his voice, always low and rich, close to her ear saying much less poetic things. It was easy to imagine it, and easy to imagine him gentle underneath, his giggle and his medieval poetry, and her hands painting the bleach through his hair. It didn’t seem silly when she imagined it like that. It seemed a long way from silly. Not at all the sort of things you could say to someone, not even to Willow, not ever. She could imagine herself returning to the idea later, though. “Spike.”

“Well when you say it like that, anything sounds good, doesn’t it? How’s the essay coming?” He kept his gaze down and away from her, hands busy forming stacks of paper from the things he’d been scribbling.

“I think I’m nearly done. I actually think Professor Wood is gonna like this one, which is a feeling I think I could get used to. When I’m here, it’s like I’m Productive Girl. This one’s even actually two thousand words. Larry’s not gonna know what hit him.”

“That’s amazing, Buffy. Didn’t I tell you you could do it?”

“You did.”

“What’s this one on?”

“The Idylls of the King.”

“‘Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, wherefore, let thy voice rise like a fountain for me night and day.’” There was something he did with his voice when he read poetry, driving it lower and more secret, like he was saying something they ought both to be ashamed of.

“That’s the one. But you’re going to have to stop reciting poetry to me if you want to be a real punk, Spike. What have you been writing?”

“Nothing much.”

“Can I see?”

“I think it’ll be getting light soon, love. Maybe we should keep it for next time.”

Buffy looked over at the window and felt tired for the first time since she had arrived. “You might be right. I have to get a few hours of sleep and then type this up before six. Then it’s Turkish food in the JCR, which is a very big deal, I’m sure you understand. Unless you were dead before they started serving Turkish food. In which case it’s probably boring and forgettable and you shouldn’t worry you’re missing out on anything at all. I’ll see you tomorrow, or tonight. Later?”

William stood in the middle of the room like a statue of someone sad. “That’s barely ten hours from now. I think you’ve satisfied your slayer duties for a few nights, wouldn’t you say? You could try going and being alive for a bit.”

“It’s no problem. I like coming here. It makes me feel better, or energised, or calm, or just better.”

“What happened to you and Willow’s John-Wayne-a-thon?”

“I can John Wayne in the daytime.”

“You can’t John Wayne in the daytime. That’s not what John Wayne is for.” He moved slowly around the room, snuffing out candles by licking his fingers and touching them over the flame til it sizzled. “Consider me taken care of, slayer. I know you’ve got a lot of responsibility on you. This ghost is one you can tick off your list for now. I’ll be busy with Balzac for a good while. And if you leave me with the Idylls of the King, I can read along with your tutorial like a proper little fan.”

“I want to come back, William.”

“And I want you to come back. I haven’t had a friend in forty years. But don’t promise, and don’t come tomorrow. I’d hate to make John Wayne jealous.”

Buffy got her things together in her bag and set her battered, second hand penguin classic Idylls of the King down on his desk in the window.

“Can I read what you’ve been writing next time I come?” she said, and didn’t understand even in her own brain why her voice was a little shaky.

“I’ll have to see if it’s any good first.” William held the door open for her.

She hadn’t got over Angel, heart-rendingly and exhaustingly over sleepless ragged months, to become someone who got weepy about spending a few nights away from a boy. She was so much older than that now, and this boy wasn’t a boy, and he wasn’t a boyfriend. In a few minutes when the sun rose he wouldn’t be a person at all. Buffy thought as she made her way downstairs, with the dead leaves cracking and parting around her shoes like a strange tide, that maybe that was it. More than Willow, more than Giles, more than her mum, William had parts of the day when he didn’t get to be a person. He was a thing that was, at best, in midwinter, only a person slightly more than half the time. Buffy got to be a person when the graveyards didn’t need her more than her life did. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who would miss a boy already when she walked away from his room, but she felt she was allowed to miss the room where she got to be whole.

***

“Good night?” said Willow, bright and well-rested in her pyjamas, coming out of the bathroom with her washbag.

“It was lovely,” Buffy said.

“I can tell. You have googly eyes.”

“Not true. I have complicated mystical slayer emotions you could never comprehend.”

“Nope, you absolutely have googly eyes. There’s nothing mystical about it. I have to get to a lab and you have to go to bed, but I want to talk about this all dinner. I want to talk about nothing else all dinner. Absolutely nothing. Except I also asked Tara and Veruca to eat with us because I got talking to Tara at the bar last night and she said she wouldn’t really be able to eat with us unless Veruca came too. Is that okay? We don’t have to call him a ghost. We can use code names. We can say he’s a charming exchange student you met somewhere they wouldn’t know.”

“Willow, it’s fine. I want to eat with them. I’d like to have more friends who are alive.”

Willow smiled wide and slipped back into her room. “Amazing. I think it’s going to be really nice to eat with Tara, to eat with them. John Wayne after?”

“You bet.”

Willow started to close her door but Buffy thought of one more thing and propped it open so she could lean her head in.

“Hey Will, how difficult would it be to rig up a CD player in a derelict room with no power?”

Chapter Text

“Really, mum, it’s going great,” Buffy said. She twirled the cord of the one communal phone in the common room round her fingers and unwound it again. She had put off calling her mum to update her on her life in Oxford for a long time, and she didn’t honestly know why she did it. There had been such a long period of time where every conversation with Joyce involved Buffy either directly lying or just trying to put a positive spin on things. Really, she had tried very hard not to lie, but now she looked back on it she found her perspective was shifting, and the things she had insisted were fine seemed less fine. She hoped her mum would hear, hear clearly but without asking for any details or clarification, that Buffy really was telling the truth this time. When Buffy said she was happy in Oxford, she was nervous, but she was happy “Me and Willow have been hanging out a lot, and the other people doing English are nice. I wouldn’t say me and Larry are the bestest bestest friends but he likes to high five me, actually he really lives to high five me. Maybe it’s a rugby thing. I don’t actually know what his deal is. Professor Giles and Dr Wood are really supportive.”

When her mum asked the next question, Buffy coiled the wire around her hand tighter and tighter, because it was the one thing she didn’t have anything prepared for. Just this one time, she really didn’t want to lie.

“I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve met someone. Well, ‘met’ is a strong word. What do we really mean when we say we’ve ‘met’ people anyway? There’s a lot of grey areas in wondering who you’ve met, or if you’ve met anyone at all.”

The common room suddenly seemed very loud around her when she stopped to let Joyce reply. Every person in the college seemed to be within two metres of her and they were all leaning in to listen.

“He’s nice. He’s lovely. He’s not… really anything, he’s nothing to think about. Nothing’s happened. He’s nice.”

A pause again for her mum to talk.

“Yes Mum, I have lots of condoms. Got to go now someone else is waiting for the phone.”

***

“You brought snacks!” Willow said when she opened the door. Buffy was sitting on her bed, pillows propped up against the wall as a makeshift couch, and she craned her neck around to see the door. Willow’s duvet cover had dancing witches on tiny broomsticks, and the bedspreads she layered over the top seemed like they had been home-crocheted. Buffy could imagine Willow making them herself, in sessions of hours upon hours upon hours, in the Cotswolds mansion away from the world, listening to extra lectures or audio recordings of great philosophical texts. Willow had never actually said she lived in a mansion but you had to assume.

“I hope you like them,” Tara’s voice was slow and careful. It made Buffy wonder if she had been practising her lines in the hallway.

“I do! I will! I mean, we always like all snacks here.”

“I didn’t know if you liked salt or sweet popcorn so I bought both.” Tara took her jacket off and stood in the hallway holding it. “And I got chocolate buttons because I figured everyone with a soul likes chocolate buttons.”

Willow busied herself finding bowls, opening packets of popcorn and arranging things around the bed so they would have the best chance possible of staying upright.

“I like salt,” said Buffy, “Put the salt near me.”

“I can go both ways,” said Willow.

“Come join on the bed, There’s plenty of room. If you take, like, four pillows you can definitely make the wall not feel like fire on your spine. It takes a bit of mushing them around but you can do it.”

Tara crawled onto the bed and settled in next to Buffy. They had rented Halloween and Halloween 2, not out of a great love for horror movies, more because being young and having friends at university felt like a good time to watch slasher movies of days gone by on VHS. Everyone’s necks were stiff and hands were cramping after their long library days, and showering after a long day where you had got less done than you hoped and heading to someone’s room to eat junk and watch horror movies felt like the platonic ideal of being a student.

Buffy asked Willow if she needed a hand with anything and Willow said no, she just had one more thing to get from the kitchen and they would be all set.

“How did you find the essay for Dr Wood?” Tara said to Buffy.

“Surprisingly good, I think. I actually like Virginia Woolf. Or at least, I don't think anything can possibly be worse than my James Joyce essay.”

“I hope you don’t mind, I…” Tara trailed off and spend a few seconds putting her next words together. “I asked if it might be possible to switch the tutorial partners round for next week. I asked if maybe Larry and I could swap slots, and I could go in with you.”

“Sure? Sure, I mean. Whichever way round you like it. I’d love to go do modernism together. I thought you and Veruca were… getting on well. I thought you guys were working well together.”

“Professor Giles said he thought I was using her to hide behind in tutorials to get out of speaking. He suggested I… He suggested I think about anyone else I might like to work with to help me feel… more comfortable.” Tara’s voice was so soft it was almost a whisper and Buffy thought it had a nice, hushing sound.

“If Veruca makes it hard for you to speak up, maybe you guys shouldn’t… work together.”

“Maybe.”

“Et voila!” said Willow, letting herself back in with three

Buffy’s eyes flicked towards the window, and she knew that William would be reading the books she had left for him. She knew he’d be in his room now and the door would be there.

Sometimes it was easier to be a slayer in a magic room with a ghost than it was to be a slayer in the world with real, living people. When she was tired, when she felt she was getting everything wrong, when the world seemed very heavy and full of monsters, all she wanted was to vanish into a room that wasn’t real and escape from everything that frightened her. But when she managed a good day in the library, when she chased the vampires down in good form and managed to get the grave dirt out of her fingernails, and when she had soft, safe, nice plans with Willow, she wanted to be a person in the world. She thought maybe she could be good at it. She thought she was capable of some things, just some things.

Between William’s room and Willow’s, and occasionally in her own room, and Giles’, and the library, there were times when Buffy realised she was enjoying what she was doing, and she was looking forward to the rest of the day, and the tension she kept in her shoulders and her jaw had relaxed without her noticing. Sometimes she felt safe.

***

When Tara left to go back to her room in the front quad, a while after midnight, Willow and Buffy basked together in the pile of popcorn-y cushions and pillows and the glow of a low-key social event that had gone well.

“Tara is so nice,” said Buffy.

“She’s amazing,” said Willow, “I’m so glad she came. I wasn’t sure Veruca would want her to.”

“She and Veruca are…”

Willow nodded, barely perceptibly, not looking up at her. “And I’ve heard she can be a little jealous, maybe. I don’t know exactly. But a few of the girls from my prep school ended up at City of London Girls with her and I guess I heard… I don’t know what I heard. I just think Tara’s so lovely. Did you know she’s the first person from her school ever to get an interview at Oxford or Cambridge? She’s the most incredible thinker, she’s read everything, just absolutely everything, and she takes notes in the tiniest handwriting ever. She’s so original. I just want to sit next to her while she works and listen to her talk for a million years.”

“Jesus, Will, you’re making me kind of terrified to share tutes with her. I didn’t realise I’d agreed to swap Larry for one-woman-renaissance-girl.”

“Did she ask you about that?”

“Yeah, I said I’d be happy to do it. I don’t think Larry will mind at all. He gets on with everyone. Will Veruca mind?”

‘I really don’t know,” said Willow. There was a little bit of anguish creeping into her face. “I just really don’t know. I think if she’s the kind of person that just wants the best for Tara and wants her to be happy and confident and do as amazingly as she deserves and get credit for all her gorgeous ideas, then she’ll have to be fine with it all, right? I feel so protective of her.”

They slipped into silence for a minute, thinking about life, about Tara and Veruca, and about how when either of them moved or stood up, they would have to sort out washing up and remembering whose bedding was whose for when Buffy went back to her room to sleep. Willow seemed for a minute to be asleep, breathing low dreamy breaths Buffy was about to extricate herself and head silently back to her room when she spoke.

“Can you believe it’s nearly December?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“It’s like we’re not even new anymore. We’re real people who really live here. I can’t believe it’s nearly two months since I found out about vampires and ghosts and slayers and I’m about to have to just go home. I’m worried I’ll come back in January and find I dreamed all of it.”

“Wow,” said Buffy softly, “That’s a lot of thoughts to have at one in the morning.”

“Do you think you can write to William over the vacation, or something? Is there a way you can contact him?”

“I don't even know, Will.” The idea of going the whole winter vacation without seeing William, and without visiting the perfect little tower room, made her heart turn to dirt. The shock and nausea must have shown on her face because Willow said,

“This crush is really tearing you up, isn’t it?”

“Yes. No. Yes and no, I mean, it feels like a silly word to use about this situation. It’s not normal.”

“No, I suppose it’s not normal. But it doesn’t need to be normal, right?”

“I don’t know how you even start to say ‘look I know you’re a ghost I visit with library books every couple of days and you let me sit here and write my essays, but I’ve been thinking about what it would be like to touch you for two months and I was wondering if you’d like to go out with me’”

“I think that was a pretty good first draft.”

“Except for the fact it’s an insane crazy person thing. And if he says ‘I’m sorry I’m an immortal ghost and you’re only ever going to be a library go-between to me’ then I’ve made something very weird that was already pretty fucking surreal. If I can’t go there anymore then he can’t get his library books and I can’t…. I can’t go there. I can’t see him. I just can’t see him, I can’t even see him around in the JCR, I can’t wait to run into him, it just turns into nothing.”

Willow was quiet for long enough that Buffy thought her ghostly interpersonal drama might have sent her to sleep.

“I guess it depends which kind of nothing you prefer. If you spend all this time wanting to say something and always having to swallow it, and only ever having half of what you need, is that really any better?”

“Well when you put it like that everything is really depressing.”

“And you never have nothing, right? You have me, and John Wayne, and Xander and Tara, and Giles and the forces of darkness.”

“I was kind of hoping the forces of darkness were something I didn’t always have to have.” Buffy grumbled.

“And maybe he wants to kiss you back. Then you can tell me all about what it’s like to kiss a ghost. And you can do pottery, you have to do pottery. If you’ve fallen in love with a ghost it’s really essential to get into pottery.”

Buffy had never said the word love, out loud to Willow or in the darkness of her own brain. She had never said it. But her terrible mind bloomed into something beautiful when she thought of it, even after she had promised herself nothing like what happened with Angel would happen again, and she would be such an efficient slayer and such a perfect student that nothing supernatural would ever touch her like this again. Of course it was true. She couldn’t say for sure when it had become true, not the moment she saw him and not the moment she stepped into his room, but there had been a point over the six weeks she had been visiting him, when he had been reading to her or commenting on her translations or she had watched him write. She loved William because it was the thing that came easiest to her when she was happiest and when she was safest.

Whether she told him or not, she knew she’d never be able to tell herself this was just a crush again.

“I could get into pottery,” she said.

Chapter Text

“Do I have to go?” Buffy said to Giles, at nearly midnight on the last day of November.

“Do you have to go home over the vacation?” Giles was cleaning his glasses, sat at his large oak desk with the cold light coming in from the window above. “I suppose I would say it depends on your reasons.”

“I feel like I’ve spent six weeks starting to get used to something. I’m finally, I’m finally not tired. I’ve never really been not tired. I think I just want to be here.

In the pile of papers in her bag she had the first essay she had written yet at Oxford which clearly and definitely deserved a first class classification. It was an amazing thing to hold in your hands, evidence that the aching muscles and the hours spent had built something tangible.

“The college will feel very different during the holidays,” said Giles, “Many students who stay find themselves lonely. And of course your mother will be expecting you home.”

“I can talk to my mum. I know that’s a thing, obviously, it’s a proper whole thing and a big thing, very much a thing. I just want to be here Giles. I want to be the slayer, and I want to be a student, here in Oxford, at St Drusilla’s. I’m in love with here. I’m called to be here. I want to work and if I go home… I suppose if I go home I feel like my head will be full of bees again. I’m really tired of living with my head full of bees.”

“You’re in love with here?” Buffy could imagine the door through to Jenny Calendar’s study in Giles’ mind, where it always lived even in the daylight hours. If you were in love with someone who couldn’t exist in the day, did that mean you were in love with the space in the wall where you hoped the door would appear? Were you in love with the empty room where you waited for them to appear? Giles was in love with here too. He never went home for Christmas.

Buffy nodded.

“As a member of the senior common room, I can request on academic grounds for you to keep your room over the vacation. Cost will, of course, be an issue, but I can request for the accommodation fees to be waived by the chaplain and I would be surprised if she said no. If she did, I imagine the Watcher’s Council would be happy to make a contribution to keep the slayer in Oxford during the longest, darkest nights. I will be here through the holidays, so you will not be completely alone, but I should make it very clear that the college is a very different place out of term. Willow, I imagine, will not be here. You will not have the structure of classes and tutorials, and the dining hall will not be open. It is a good time to get work done, and a good time for patrolling I imagine, a good time to write. I hope you find the experience rewarding, but I should warn you, Buffy, it can be lonely.”

“I understand, Giles, I really do,” said Buffy, “You have no idea how lonely I am at home. If all my options are being lonely, I want to do it here.”

“In that case I will write your letter tomorrow morning and everything should be arranged within a few days. I hope you have a wonderful vacation.”

“Thank you, Giles. Thank you so much. I’ll report back from Rose Hill Cemetery tomorrow. Lots of moss. Lots of demons. Lots of un-death. And I’ll be so, so prepared for exams in January. I’ll be exam girl. I’ll blow all your other students clean out of the water.”

Buffy picked her bag up and started hustling to the door, airy and full of light. If she could stay here she could do anything. She was like a plant being turned towards the light. Giles went back to his desk to get essays, reading lists and photocopies of journal articles ready for his next student meeting.

“You blow everyone quite out of the water, Buffy, in more ways than I can count.”

“Right back at ya,” she said, already at the door, turning the door handle.

“Buffy?” said Giles, when she was already mostly gone.

“Yeah?”

“I think it’s a very admirable thing to want to stay in Oxford so you can read about the Anglo-Saxons and devote yourself to your slaying duties. I can absolutely imagine Brighton would be a hard place to return to just now. If you’re staying for him, though, you should tell him.”

Buffy couldn’t bring herself to pretend she wasn’t staying for him. For the work, the belonging, the slayer responsibilities, sure, and also for him.

Giles sat in silence for a moment, like a man who had just watered a plant waiting for the soil to drink its fill.

“For someone who can never leave, or never follow you, or never hope to keep you, it could be a very nice thing to hear. Or so I am told. I would never advise a promising young woman to chain herself to one location for a ‘cute boy’. I would probably not advise you to stay over Easter. But I want you here. I know I speak for many colleagues when I say we all want you to stay here, and on a personal level I want you to be happy and I am in no position to tell you only the living are worth loving.”

There was nothing for Buffy to say.

***

“Spike?”

“I told you not to call me that, love,” William got up from the desk with a smile on his face, collar done up to his neck, fingers stained with ink.

“But it suits you so perfectly.”

Buffy wondered how long St Drusilla had been telling William someone would come who would be able to see his lamplit window in the college wall. She wondered what it was like to be a ghost who had to wait to be visited and reminded that other people could share the same dimensions as you. The first few weeks she thought he was smiling when he saw her mainly because he had a visitor of any kind. Now she knew he smiled for her, her as a friend. The small, aching, sweet little hope in her chest woke up every time he smiled. His smile was boyish and clever. She loved him so much she wondered how she had ever pretended, to herself or anyone else, that she didn’t. She loved him because she had spent so long always wanting to run away, and he was the place she wanted to run to, and she loved him because she was getting better at feeling safe, and he was the place she wanted to stay.

And she had to tell him because it was getting harder and harder to put sentences together about anything else.

“Have you got an essay for me to read then?” He said, standing up from the text and shuffling some smudgy papers into a box with a lid that he closed and locked. “What’s that?”

“This,” said Buffy with immense and hard-earned pride, “is an extension cord.”

“Extension cord?”

“Yes, it’s a cord that’s longer than the other cords.”

“An electrical cord?”

“You have no idea. I spent a good half hour stringing this across from our staircase through the bushes so people wouldn’t see it. Willow doesn’t think it will explode, and you’d think she would know but, well, I guess you’re already dead and I’m a superhero so it would mainly be an issue for the architecture. Willow’s really good at science, though.”

I love you, she thought. I love you. The stars are rising over the college and the night is young and I love you. Your hair curls a little but it lies straight where you run your fingers through it and I love you. You have a single bed and I love you. I’d lie in it til morning and I’d wake up on the floor of a room full of leaves. I watch your fingers write, I watch them touch the scratches of my pen on the page and I love you, I love you because I am safe. She thought it so loudly it was hard to remember he was dead.

But she kept talking, because she hoped there would be a time but this was not the time.

“This is a power cable, and this is a CD player, and this, this,” she said with a flourish, “Is Patti Smith’s seminal 1975 album ‘Horses’. At least I’ve heard it’s seminal. It might be seminal. I’m not sure exactly what seminal means here, but it was the only punk album I could find to borrow and Tara said it was as punk as she could do for me.”

“Slayer,” said William, “Did you crawl around in the bushes instead of doing your work so you could play punk for me?”

“I like you calling me slayer.” She meant it. “I know how you wanted to be a young person, and not to have to think about death, and to listen to music like this. Or kind of like this. I have no idea at all if this is what your neighbours used to listen to, actually, maybe I haven’t thought this through at all. I kept thinking about what you said because I dream about being young too.”

So she plugged in the CD player and Patti Smith started singing Gloria. He was looking at her when she stood up from setting the music going, and it made her feel adored, and it made her feel alive. The room felt tight and timeless around them.

“I have no idea how to dance to this,” said William.

“Do you like it?”

“I like it.”

“I suppose we could stand still and nod our heads like sad dads. I’m not actually much of a dancer, you’ll be amazed to hear, I didn’t get invited to all that many parties in Brighton because I was always arriving at school covered in bits of-”

Buffy stopped talking abruptly when William reached out and took her hand to hold. They had touched before, passing things between them, taking umbrellas out of wet hands, but he had never held her. William was something between cool and warm, soft, light on her skin. His other hand hovered over the small of her back and he interrupted her to ask, “Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind.” He gathered her in a loose slow dance hold and Buffy was flooded with ten patrols’ worth of adrenaline. They swayed back and forth, standing a little stiff and leaving room for Jesus between them. “I don’t think this is how you dance to punk music though.”

“I don’t know what you expected me to be able to do with this, love. I died fifteen years before this song was a twinkle in anybody’s eye, and I wasn’t the best dancer before that.”

Patti said, “Then I go to this here party but oh, I just get bored until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing…” and she wasn’t wrong.

The music got faster and Buffy and William’s strange little slow dance got more and more desperately out of time and inappropriate to the song. When they tried to speed up with the song it became more and more apparent that they had no idea what they were doing so they slowed back down and accepted that they were always going to be out of time, all through that song and into the next one. Buffy hoped, hoped and hoped and hoped, that the ink staining his hands would transfer onto her skin and stay there forever.

“Did you dance like this a lot, back in the day?” Buffy said with her best casual voice.

“Cousins at weddings, one or two dances with the girls’ grammar school. Do I dance like a professional then?” He did not dance like a professional. “And you? You danced with the hot young things down at Brighton beach?”

“I think Brighton might be quite different now than you’d remember it.”

“And there was me thinking you came from a den of iniquity.” Without fully realising what she was doing, Buffy went in a little nearer, and their bodies settled closer. She felt William take a sharp breath in when her chest settled against his torso.

Patti said, “It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars cause when he looked up they started to slip,” and it started to seem that she was the one with the wrong tone, not the two of them, because they were perfect when they danced together, clumsy and out of time.

William said, “Are there any boys waiting for you at home?”

And Buffy said, “No. There was one, a man, but he turned out not to be nice, and he’s not waiting.” She paused and the low poetic angry voice of the music talked about something she didn’t care about from the floor. “And I’m not going home for a while.”

“So you can stay here and dance, poorly, with dead people?”

“I wanted to learn from my favourite punk.” Buffy realised William was so close now, it barely required any bravery at all to lean closer. Bravery entered her body at the points her skin touched his. It might have come from the fact she could feel his breath ragged and nervy and she let herself believe he felt as much dancing with her as she did, and he really might have been waiting just for her all this time. So she took her life in her hands and spoke, just in a whisper. “I think you’re the kind of person who’d ask me if I’d like to be kissed, and if you asked, I’d say yes.”

“Can I kiss you, Buffy?”

“Yes.”

He kissed like he’d been waiting in the dark for decades for her permission, and Buffy kissed him back like she had been waiting with him.

Chapter Text

Buffy and William kissed for hours and hours. At a certain point they stopped kissing to start talking, and at a certain point the rain started, grey English inevitable rain like how Californians imagine the whole country.

Buffy felt, finally, like the heroine of a novel about a teenage girl. His kisses were a little clumsy, finding the sides of her mouth and her cheeks. Everywhere his skin touched her felt like the soft print of beautiful handwriting. It was a whole new way to be the chosen one, chosen in better ways that mattered more, and it didn’t matter that the room was full of a vampire slayer and the ghost. She was so alive no death or undeath could ever touch her. It felt like all she could touch, feel and see was the soaring glory of being young.

In a thousand years of St Drusilla’s College, Buffy was sure no one had ever been as alive as she was. She had never been as happy. The noise that had filled her brain every day since she was called to her destiny, and the pillar of fire that reached to the sky, seemed to fall further away. The sensory landscape of William’s kisses, his room, Patti Smith’s low voice, the creaking of the floorboards, and the endless rain, were tattooed all over her and she hoped to God they would never fade.

William’s hands started on her upper arms, moved to her shoulders, briefly grazed the outside of her hips and waist, then drew back to stay on her shoulders, her neck, the sides of her cheeks and her jaw. There was a part of her that wanted him to touch more of her, and a part of her that wanted her senses to stay just this full, to have an experience that was just this new and no more. She loved the feeling of wanting him to go further but knowing he wouldn’t. After what had happened last time, the idea of going too far without thinking it through had less romantic appeal than it had before.

“Buffy…” He said, close into her neck, with her hair falling over his face. “Buffy, you’re so beautiful. You’re amazing, Buffy.”

The fire he had lit in the grate threw tall shadows across the walls. It made their bodies ten foot tall reflected on the walls and the dark of the windows. Everything was warm and soft until the lighting outside flashed, illuminating each drop of rain on the windows, the white of the teacups and the pages of the books, and the white skin of the scar on William’s eyebrow. Buffy had never read a book, never seen a film, never had a dream or a thought that looked like this.

Buffy remembered what she had said to Angel on Brighton beach under the pier lights. She had said, “When you kiss me, I want to die.” She pulled back from William’s lips and rested her forehead against his in the lightning light. Soon she would have to go back to her room soon because she didn’t want things to go further than they already had before speaking about it, and because she thought her heart might burst in her chest.

“William?” She said, small-voiced.

“Yes?”

“When you kiss me, I want to live forever.”

He smiled wide enough you almost forgot he was dead.

***

When Buffy left his room not long after, he tried to give her his umbrella. He said it had only been used a handful of times, back when he used to go outside, and it would surely be grateful for the chance to get out. Buffy said no, partly because she worried it would turn to dust or irreparable stop existing when the sun came up, and partly because she wanted to feel the rain. She said, “I’ll come back tomorrow,” and he said, “Come soon, but you don’t have to come tomorrow, Buffy. Remember.” She said, “I want to,” and he said, “I want that too.”

So she walked back across the quad in the rain and the night was stiller and quieter than any she had seen yet in Oxford. The temperature must have been close to freezing, still dropping, and the rain was blobby and fat, close to turning to sleet. Somewhere above the clouds there were stars and she felt so powerful that she could almost make them out through the grey and the reflected glow of the college lights. Maybe the reason she had never felt at home anywhere was because she was always waiting to be here. Maybe it could really be like this forever.

She let herself into her room quietly and coldly, considering having a shower but worrying it would wake Willow. Her little room seemed more wonderful to her than it ever had yet, her window seat with its cushions, the witchy throw blanket Willow had pressed into her hands, the stacks of books and the fact it was her whole job to sit here in the winter sunlight and read them.

Being in love with William made her fall in love with everything else harder and harder. She wanted to socialise with Willow, Xander, and Tara harder and deeper, somehow. She wanted to call her mum. She wanted to write ten thousand word essays for Giles and Dr Wood, read all the books in the universe, join three new clubs and go for a run. She wanted to sleep and eat well. She wanted to enjoy a long bath, a haircut, the weather in the morning whatever it looked like. Her clothes, her bedside lamp, and every page of every notebook felt like wonderful little tokens of time on earth that was profoundly and wildly worth having.

Loving William made her love everything. Buffy brushed her hair, pulled on her yummy sushi pyjamas, and took her jewellery off to leave on her desk. She made eye contact with herself in her mirror and saw how happy she was, so she smiled at the girl she saw.

It was only when things were this good and her mind was finally quiet that she realised how small her life had felt, all that time. Being a slayer brought your horizons down low and close to your body, always thinking about death, the things waiting behind the gravestone the next night, and how to get through the next day. Everything she had now, William and also the rest of it, also Willow, also Giles, also her books and her window seat, pushed the horizons of her world wider, gave her space to breathe and made her realise how wonderful breathing was.

When she climbed into bed, she thought it would surely take her a long time to get to sleep, but sleep came easy. Her body was ready to relax and let go.

And though she wasn’t expecting it, that night, at long last, she dreamed of St Drusilla.

Chapter Text

When Buffy fell asleep she saw St Drusilla straight away, and she knew who she was with perfect clarity. It seemed very clear that she had had this dream before, perhaps before she was called as a slayer, perhaps before she was born. She wondered if every night she’d ever thought she didn’t remember a dream she’d been seeing St Drusilla.

The body of St Drusilla was beautiful and odd, small but not frail, hidden in a simple, long gown. It might have been sackcloth worn soft by years of use. She had a shawl worn over her shoulders like a blanket against the wind, and her eyes were wide and clever.

“We’ve been hoping for a long time to have you for tea,” said Drusilla in a soft sing song voice. Buffy looked down at her silly pyjamas.

“I’d have worn something nice if I’d known.”

“I meet all my students when they’re asleep, so no one is ever dressed well, are they Miss Edith?” Buffy looked into the dark behind Drusilla but couldn’t make out who she was speaking to. “Unless someone falls asleep in their coat and tails on the quad. You’d be surprised how often that happens. They’re always too drunk to stand up so I lie down with them to stargaze.”

“Are they much good at stargazing?”

“Appalling. My students always work so hard they don’t look up enough. I show them the North Star and inspire them to roll on their sides so they won’t choke.”

Buffy found, all of a sudden, that she was holding a cup of tea in a bone china cup. The liquid smelled of berries and spice. Though she had been relaxing her opinions on dead people recently, she decided to set the cup down for a while before she drank.

“I don’t mean to be rude but are you a demon?” She asked.

“I’m a scholar.”

“Are you a witch?”

“A witch is a kind of scholar, if you look at it sideways. I’m an astronomer, a poet, an administrator and an amateur baker, but Miss Edith is the real talent in the kitchen.”

“How do you do all this? How does it work? Does the council know you-“

Drusilla laughed. The sound was like the highest notes on a Victorian piano, and she sounded very girlish and very powerful. “My council boys and girls are good at reading, but they wouldn’t get far without me giving them respite from the demons within my walls. The Watchers’ Council have had their annual conference here for nine hundred and eighty consecutive years, for reasons which include my demonological protection and my catering.”

“But how?”

“If you martyr a person who loves to live and loves learning enough, the ground doesn’t let go of that. Men in silly hats said my visions were heresy, but I’d already seen every student who would arrive here to continue what was built by me, rather than them. I love my scholars and I love my stars. I love the dreams I have of the children who need a quiet place to learn. I love to reach out to them and tell them to come home. And when I gather them here, I stop the nightmares at the gate and let the stars in over the branches of my gardens, the lowest wine cellar and the tallest tower.”

Drusilla stirred her tea. She held out a plate with blueberry scones on it, and the rim of the plate was decorated with soaring exploding stars. She kept talking, voice low and secret.

“I know how hard it was for you to work in your bedroom in Brighton. I know the sun and the seagulls came in the skylight early, and I know how late you had to stay up. I know how Willow struggled to make out the words through the loneliness, in a big empty house with money for pizza left on the table. I know Xander needed a steady job for him to save up. I know Tara needed to be listened to, and Cordelia needed to be listened to, and Charles Gunn needed to be listened to. It’s a terrible thing to be driven to distraction alone. It’s a terrible thing to be a mad heretic, knowing the future and knowing you are trapped in a past you can’t outlive. It puts me back together when I saw you all coming here.”

Buffy knew something suddenly. She might have seen it in the tea or the blueberry scone, or she might have just known it. “They burned you.”

Drusilla stirred and stirred her cup. “It worked on vampires so why wouldn’t it work on heretics? They didn’t make it law until four hundred years after I was gone. I might have been the first one to be burned, a fascinating kind of outlier. I have researched it extensively. And I know they burned a part of you as well. I’ve researched that too.”

“How do you know…”

“You don’t remember it, but the night after you watched Merrick die, and the night after Angel told you you’d ruined his soul, the first night you managed to sleep, you dreamed of a library with vaulted ceilings, and a soft breeze blowing down from the stars. I hoped it would be enough to call you home.”

“Home?”

“Edith and I kicked our feet with glee when you took the stereo up to his room. We know how long he had been waiting. And we liked the choice of album. Of course, shortly after that we knew to look away. I went back to my telescope and Edith knew she had scones to make.”

“Edith?”

“One of my first students. It’s a good Anglo Saxon name. There was no building here then, of course, nothing so elegant as this. But her voice was so beautiful when she sang. She can’t abide punk, unfortunately.”

Buffy took a sip of the tea and thought it tasted like the pillars of creation. Drusilla leaned in close, and the dream started to thin out a little. The sound of the rain began to bleed through.

“What do I do now?” Said Buffy, frantic, aware she had wasted so much time. “About the demons? What do I do?”

“I don’t need you to fight, Buffy,” said Drusilla as the dream faded. “This place is not yours to defend, but yours to enjoy. I need you to rest.”

Chapter Text

Buffy had two essays to hand in before term, on Seamus Heaney for Dr Wood and Christ and Satan for Giles. She wrote them quickly and enthusiastically in a little library alcove where the vaults and portraits of the library gathered close around her.

She thought about Drusilla often and William constantly. She tapped her pen on the worn edge of the desk. It was clear that Drusilla loved William, and had always loved him from before the day he arrived at the college til long after the day he died. It was clear she loved the stars. Drusilla loved too many things too much to have been allowed to live, by people who couldn’t see as far as her. Buffy supposed she loved Jenny Calendar too, the computer scientist gone beyond her time, someone Drusilla might have liked to know if they could have met eyes as equals and inhabited the same world.

The patrolling came easier when the slayer knew there was a place to really shelter. When she got home late, and she often got home late, at least she felt that her shift was really over, and she really wasn’t betraying anyone by falling asleep. Giles gave her a fat book of bus tickets to get to the cemeteries out in Headington and Botley, but she still ended up walking home at dawn more often than not. Sometimes Willow and Xander met her halfway.

William was waiting for Buffy every night, never angry when she didn’t come, never less than delighted when she did. He asked about Willow’s projects and their cowboy movies. He asked for stories about the bar and the dining hall where he had also eaten bland, underseasoned chicken.

On December 4, term ended for the Christmas vacation, and on December 5 in the soft dead hours between lunch and dinner, it started to snow.

“Buffy!” Willow called from outside her room, “Buffy! It’s snowing!”

Buffy threw the door open and saw Willow frantically working out which mitten was which in a mismatched pair. She had a long home-crocheted scarf decorated with frogs and shrimps wound ten or twenty times round her neck, and she was grinning. They clasped their hands together and ran down the echoing steps to the snow, and they were the first people to make footprints in it.

They might have been the only people in the world.

They tried to make snow angels and discovered that was cold, so they sat on one of the benches that had been built around the trunk of a tree.

“I never told you how grateful I am you’re staying for the vacation,” said Buffy, picking blobs of snow off her gloves. “Really Will, it means so much to me.”

“Oh, I’m not staying for you,” said Willow, “Wait, sorry, that came out wrong. Of course I’m staying for you. I just really didn’t want to go home. That makes it sound worse than it is. My home is, like, safe. Of course it’s safe. My parents love me so much. But we don’t celebrate Christmas, and we only celebrate Jewish holidays by calling to say it would have been nice to be together this year. I actually applied to stay in Oxford and work for Professor Walsh back in October. I’m gonna be a research assistant.”

“Who’s professor Walsh?”

“I hadn’t heard of her either, actually. She’s the chair of Psychology so she’s a super big deal, but St Dru’s doesn’t so psychology so I’m actually really surprised she picked someone from here. She must have had a gazillion applications. She’s a rockstar.”

“Will, that’s amazing!” Buffy grabbed Willow and held her close, scooting along the bench into a fresh patch of snow to reach her and feeling the cold soak through her trousers. “I can’t believe I didn’t even know you were doing that. I’ve been so wrapped up in everything, just so many things.”

“No, Buff, it’s okay. I only found out a few days before the end of term and the whole process was very hush-hush, like you wouldn’t believe how much they made us bend over to not even tell anyone we were interviewing. I had to miss a class and I couldn’t even tell them where I was, I just had to say I was sick.”

“That’s… creepy? It’s amazing but it’s also creepy. It’s a job within the university how can that possibly work?”

“Yeah, the interviews were very intense. I think she really likes me though. She was super curious about St Drusilla’s and what it’s like to study here. She put a note in my pigeonhole to say I’d got the job and I really couldn’t believe it - like I nearly screamed in the post room at about five in the morning. I bet she had a thousand applicants or something and I don’t even do psychology.”

“It’s because she knows you’re the most impressive woman in the whole wide world. The whole whole wide wide world and all the other dimensions full of monsters made of goo.”

Willow tried to stop herself smiling but she smiled all the same. Buffy wondered how much she had got to show pride in her (many) accomplishments before all this, in her echoing house with the money left on the table. They high fived in their cold and slushy mittens.

“My parents are really happy,” said Willow, still smiling but not as enthusiastically. “I called them yesterday and they’re really supportive. They’re paying for me to keep my room over the vacation and they also said they’re gonna send £500 for if we wanted to do anything. I think they thought of it as being for Hannukah stuff but I don’t know what they think I’m gonna do with £500 for it when we celebrated it maybe twice at home. But we could put it towards some nice meals and if you wanted to do candles and doughnuts, we could do candles and doughnuts. I don’t know really. It might be nice to do something.”

“Then we should absolutely do it. I’ll be honest with you, Will, I don’t know lots about this but if it’s food, candles and supporting you then I love food, candles and supporting you.”

“I think the thing I care about most is having people around.”

“That’s great, I’m people, and I’ve heard rumours of other people. Maybe we can see if Tara is around?”

“Do you think she would be?”

“I think she lives nearby. She’s been talking about having to get back to see her dad after tutes so I’m pretty sure she’s local. We can make some plans, do food, do candlelight…”

Buffy started considering the foods they could get and the activities they could do, talking a mile a minute to get through her thoughts, when Willow interrupted her all of a sudden.

“I think I’m in love with Tara.”

That shut Buffy up, stopping her in her tracks of explaining how much she’d like to try latkes. For a second she wondered if she had misheard or had a freak hallucination, but a moment of consideration looking at Willow’s face made it clear Buffy hadn’t heard wrong.

They made eye contact and Buffy waited to see if Willow would talk, and Willow waited to see if Buffy would talk. The snow was still falling lazily on both of them, catching at hair and the wet backs of their jacket collars.

Willow repeated, “I think I’m in love with Tara.”

Buffy said, “Tara’s amazing. I think it’s good to be in love with Tara. And… and I think it’s good to be able to tell me you’re in love with Tara. It’s all good, Willow. I’m not being awfully elegant here but… it’s all good. That’s all fine.”

“I haven’t told anyone about…”

“About Tara?”

“Anyone. I’ve never told anyone about this.”

It seemed obvious, suddenly, to Buffy that Willow would need to wait until they weren’t only alone in their rooms in college, but for the college to be almost entirely empty. After all the time they had been sitting out here, letting the cold settle deeper and deeper down inside their bodies, no one else had set foot in this quad at all. There were a million small, slow, quiet things that made Buffy realise how profoundly lonely Willow’s childhood had been. It was never the things she said about her upbringing or her parents, who sounded perfectly nice insofar as they were ever in the same postcode area as her, it was just how little she ever seemed to have anyone find her inner world worth engaging with. Maybe her being queer had never come up with anyone before because no one had ever thought about what was going on behind her eyes at all, provided it didn’t have an impact on homework or her ability to be punctual.
Willow said, “I think I knew I liked girls as early as I could think about liking anyone.”

“So it’s just girls?”

“I don’t know. I think so. There are boys that I… I like boys a non-zero amount. David Bowie and the guy who was the lead in all our school musicals. But I always imagined, insofar as I imagined anyone being with me at all, I always imagined… Not specific girls at school so much as a woman who would be out there one day. I always had a lot of work to do and there wasn’t anyone at my school that I… Maybe I just didn’t go to school with very interesting people. Then I met Tara and it was like, ‘You’ve been preparing for this, this is the moment’. It hadn’t really occurred to me that anyone could dislike it about me, actually. Homophobia always felt like a big word that was really far away because I couldn’t imagine myself saying or doing anything outside my brain. Then when I saw her I suddenly thought, you have to tell people, you have to do something about this, even if you never speak to her again you’re gonna have to tell people. Then suddenly I was telling you and I didn’t even have time to revise.”

“You’re doing fantastic, Will. First class. No feedback at all.”

“Does it make you think of me differently?” Willow’s face was pained and desperate, peeking out from under her big woollen hat.

“No, it just makes me know you better, and it’s a wonderful thing to know you better. I can’t remember if I already mentioned this, Will, but you know there was a girl I… knew, back in Brighton, right?”

“No?”

“You know I had a gap year where I was working?”

“Yeah, working at a food place with a stupid name…”

“Ugh, let’s not talk about it. The work was bad and the slaying was worse. Stuff had ended with Angel and things were going pretty dreadful for me. Dreadful is a bit of an understatement. Things were complete shit. I met Faith at work and it was just nice. It’s hard to describe. It was never formal and no one thought it was going to last a million years. But it was special. In its own way, it was really special. And now I’m in love with a ghost so I don’t think I was ever really going to be judgemental.”

“You make a very good point there.”

They sat in silence for a moment. This wasn’t how Buffy had expected this conversation to go when they came out here in the snow, but it was still snowing, and it was still good. The light was just starting to crawl down low close to the tops of the ivied buildings. By the time they worked out what to eat for dinner it would be almost full dark, and then whether she went up to William’s room or stayed with Willow in the land of the living, both futures seemed good.

“So what do you want to do, Will?”

“Do?”

“With Tara, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t want to put her in a difficult situation at all. With Veruca. I don’t want her to feel stressed out about anything she didn’t ask for.”

Buffy thought back to Tara and Veruca together in her classes, and Veruca barrelling on talking through Tara’s pauses to put her sentences together. “Maybe Tara would like to know what situations she has as options, though. You’re not kidnapping her and locking her up in a tower. Unless you want to do that in which case we’d have to have a different kind of conversation. You’re telling her something could be possible that she might not have thought about, if she wants it, and if she doesn’t want it, it goes away.”

Willow nodded. “I suppose that sounds okay. You seem so… You seem different the last few weeks, Buffy. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like you’ve drawn back a veil you were wearing.”

“I can’t put my finger on it either. I guess I just really like being here.”

“I really like it too. I am very cold though. I guess as the slayer you don’t get that cold.”

“Oh no, I’m fucking freezing. I haven’t been able to feel my arse since you came out.”

“I’m sorry about that, then.”

“It’s okay.”

Chapter Text

It turned out that Christmas at Oxford was a wonderful place to be and there was a lot to be learned there. The days ached out long and frosty, and the pretty coffee shops which had been too small and crowded to get a table in unless you got up before dawn to stake your claim were suddenly open and waiting for her whenever she chose to be there. Giles had written her a recommendation for a college grant to support her living costs, and the signed letter that arrived saying she had been awarded five hundred pounds was on St Drusilla’s College letterhead with the stars on the crest. It felt like a reward from the lady herself. With some careful budgeting, Buffy hoped she could make the funding stretch to cover staying at St Dru’s for both the Christmas and Easter breaks.

“I’m worried our daily Missing Bean trips are going to dent into that money pretty badly though, Buffy. I really don’t mind making coffee in my room for us. Or croissants. I don’t actually know how to make croissants and I think it’s really hard but we could get them from the shop,” said Willow. They were walking fast from the college to the coffee shop. The early morning mist was still rolling in from the river, gathering in neo-gothic window corners and spinning in wisps round the spires of the towers, and Buffy’s neck muscles hurt from slaying.

“Don’t ever say that to me, Willow. Having a table at the Missing Bean is better than having money. It powers not just my brain but also my soul. Why would you want to deprive my soul of this? It’s like preventing someone going to church.”

Buffy realised she was walking too fast for Willow - it was easy to get used to walking at whatever speed you needed in the seaside-town cold and she found herself forgetting a lot that other people needed to walk at reasonable paces.

“Well when you put it like that…” Willow wore a crocheted hat pulled low over her forehead to keep the chill out. It was impossible to say when she found time to make all these things. Buffy was tempted to guess she never slept… but then Buffy never slept, so did Willow never sleep twice? “I do have particular need of some apricot cake today.”

“Because Tara kept you up last night…”

“No, um, absolutely not. What did you hear?”

“I was out with the dead people.” Buffy smirked. “But you have confirmed that there was something to hear that I wasn’t hearing so now you have to tell me about it.”

“We were talking on the phone is all, is really all. I think Veruca’s taking some things quite bad. She’s been calling Tara all the time, she’s being really jealous. She keeps screaming at her that she knows she’s been with someone else, or she’s been with a man, or she never loved her.”

“That’s really awful, Will.”

“I think it’s getting better, a bit. I don’t think Tara’s had any calls since the day after she got back but she says she sleeps better when I call her beforehand.”

“Willow…” Buffy talked through her wide smile and her breath gathered and went white in the air. “Willow you’re so sweet I’m not even going to need that cake.”

“You always need cake.”

“You’re right, that was a lie. But you’re so sweet. Have you told her…?”

“Not really the time, I think.”

“You’re right, probably not the time. But there could be a time and I for one will be rooting for the time. I’ll be rooting for it with pom poms and glitter.”

“I just don’t want it to seem like I’m a friend who’s not really there for her, you know, or not really a real friend. If she never really liked me that way or I was just imagining… anything I might have imagined - then it really doesn’t matter and I wouldn’t want her to feel weird with me in any way at all. I’d just die if I made her feel weird. If I get to call her at all, that’s pretty much the best thing in the universe.”

They were turning the corner onto Turl Street and the lacquered black sign of the Missing Bean, the Holy Land, the sacred space where dreams and essays were made, was coming into view. If it was term time there would be a queue out the door right now. People would be sadly leaning against the walls of the Turl Street colleges with takeaway cups, silently seething and plotting their revenge against the people who had managed to get up earlier. But today the street was quiet and the city belonged just to them. The clouds were threatening snow and once they got inside with notebooks and pens and infinite coffee they would have no reason to go outside. They might even get the table in the window with the chess set and that would be a thing so good that no evil was ever allowed to exist again in the world.

“I don’t want to rush you, Will, and I’m sure you know exactly what timing and whatever would be best for you. But I do desperately want to hear about it.”

They turned and went inside, and the table in the window with the chess set was taken. The cafe had been open for all of eight minutes, and the small group of girls sat in the window seat were probably time travelling demons here from another reality.

Buffy sat heavily in another seat, by the other, less good window, and stretched her painful neck out, digging her fingers into the places the muscles were complaining. “Will, if we hadn’t stopped to have a heartwarming moment about your love life, we’d have that table.”

“Sometimes I feel like you must be lying about being the slayer if you can’t even manage to get the good table, ever, even once in your life.”

“Ugh, careful, I’ll slay you.”

“I’ll bring you coffee and cake then you can decide if you want to slay me.”

“Deal.”

That’s what all the days were like then. Buffy didn’t understand how anyone could dislike winter. Or rather, she had understood it once, when the wind coming in from the sea was awful and the long evenings did nothing but remind her of all the hours she didn’t have any plans to fill, but now the winter felt like magic. Every day the sun had got lower and smaller and the world got better and safer. Buffy loved every degree the temperature got lower. She loved the freezing rain, because she had people to hide from it with. She loved Christmas gathering in the clouds. She loved knowing her mum was coming to stay for a few glorious days at a fancy hotel over Christmas, and she loved that Tara would visit and they would go out on the town with Xander for cut-price cocktails, and she loved going to Giles’ office for tea. More than anything, she loved going up to William’s room at six o’clock, or five o’clock, or quarter past four, and the way he always looked at her with wonder whatever she described to him. Even on her most boring days, maybe especially on her most boring days, when all she had done was exist, William listened to her like he was hearing a benediction from the pope.

Maybe she saw him run to his little palm-size notebooks when she left the room, notebooks so small you could hide them in a fist and nobody would know you were writing anything at all. She didn’t go over to them on the desk and she didn’t open the covers, but she knew that there was poetry in there that was for her. Even if she never read it, it would be for her. It felt more special, in a way, that he could love her enough to create something he wasn’t proud enough of to show off. There was nothing flashy in writing for her and hoping it would make her unbutton her jeans. It was just something he felt without believing it deserved to be read, demanding to be written the way it demanded to be felt. It made Buffy smile, small and private in the coffee shop, to be so wonderful to someone that she made it impossible to avoid creation.

The inside of the Missing Bean, the small handful of people working or talking in hushed voices, was just warm enough to flush the insides of the windows with condensation. Outside a heavy sleet was starting, so hoods and umbrellas were going up on the handful of figures hurrying down to Broad Street.

“Coffee!” Said Willow.

“Mmm, coffee. Come and fix all my issues. Stop my neck hurting. Get these fangs out of my hip.”

“I don’t know that coffee will help with that but then I’m not a medic.” Willow slid into her seat and put down a tray with two large coffees, a slice of apricot cake, a brownie, and a cinnamon roll.

“I couldn’t choose between these so I thought we could just all eat all of them.”

“I like the way you think. I have so much Dickens to read today. This new professor I’m having next term only wants to teach the longest Victorian novels ever. I have to read about five hundred pages a day over Christmas if I want to get through just the ones he made compulsory, and that’s before we get onto the criticism. What are you working on today?”

“I’m reading a super cool book at the moment, actually. It’s about vegetarian alternatives to common spell ingredients. I thought maybe the slayer could use a little… I can’t actually think of a pun for this but I wanted to find a way to make my, you know, extracurriculars relevant to your slaying. There’s some really weird books in the St Dru’s library, if you go to the back of the lower floor where the filing system kind of stops working.”

“That’s kind of amazing, Will. I can’t believe you’d do that for me when you must have loads of degree work to get on with though.”

“I’m pretty much ahead on all that, I think. My physics professors actually told me to stop asking them for more work while they’re on holiday with their families so I think it’s pretty much this for now, and a little light Wittgenstein at bedtime.”

“You terrify me.”

“And the work for Professor Walsh, of course. That’s actually quite intense. She wants to come see me at college tomorrow, like super duper early, so I can let her into the library. I was in her office at Oriel for like ten hours straight the other day. I had to borrow a sandwich from a postdoc to keep from fainting.”

“That’s very weird… and probably not legal from an employment law standpoint?”

“I mean, the work is fascinating for sure I’m just never sure what’s going on.”

“That’s so weird.”

“But I don’t need to talk about it. I’m just trying to enjoy the cafe while I'm in it you know. And my frog book, well, my book about how to avoid damaging frogs.”

They went quiet, and Buffy dragged her enormous book out of her bag. The bookmark was still alarmingly close to the beginning of David Copperfield. She was enjoying it so far but she found herself calculating what percentage of the pages she still had to go more often than she’d like. She hoped the little boy in the graveyard found his way, though. Outside the sleet turned into snow, and Buffy smiled, because they had dug in so close to the darkest part of the winter.

Chapter Text

“So I was thinking we could bleach your hair,” said Buffy, first thing when she arrived in William’s room.

“What’s that, love?”

“I was completely failing to read David Copperfield earlier when the idea hit me,” she thrust a bag into his hands and tried not to think about how much of Giles’ study bursary money, money that could have funded a week of Missing Bean trips, had gone into this venture. She also didn’t think about the fact she had never dyed a strand of hair in her life, wasn’t even truly reliable at doing braids, and she was about to start a very ambitious project with some of the best and softest hair she knew. If she messed this up, she could fry his hair orange and turn him into a nightmare from an eighties movie about going to the prom.

But what was the slayer for if not to take bold and wild risks that risked either saving or dooming the world?

“It’s the best idea I’ve ever had. I went punk shopping for you.”

“Now I’m terrified.”

“I had a dream about you wearing a tight black t shirt with all this chipped nail polish and I… woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep for no reason at all, completely unrelated, probably something to do with birdsong. So I went shopping. I got you a couple of t shirts and an overshirt you can wear with them, it’s red cause I thought it would make your skin look… and some nail polish. It’s just cheap stuff but I figure Billy Idol wasn’t using top coat, you know. And the piece de resistance,” she brought the home bleach kit out of the bag with a flourish. “For your hair.”

When Buffy started smiling, she found it was hard to stop. When William (Spike) didn’t say anything back to her, she didn’t worry about the silence, she just stood. Something odd was happening.

What was it?

There was no tension anywhere in her body, and when she realised that she found it odd and foreign. The feeling would be unsettling if it weren’t so profoundly settling. She had received her calling as the slayer four years ago, her calling and all the things that came with it, her first pseudo-date with Angel, her dad leaving, the meetings after school with the head of English about how she wasn’t going to achieve her predicted grades. The pressure of all those things, the things Angel didn’t mean as much as the things he did, the studying she did when the got home from the graveyard as much as the graveyard she went to when she was done studying, all lived in her body. She had spent years picking up a new injury just when she was done healing from the old ones, feeling the repetitive strain of studying in the same tendons that controlled the ballpoint pens and the stake, never quite able to stretch out her neck or keep her eyes focused. It had been impossible to know how exhausting exhaustion was until she had something to compare it to.

Now she stood lightly on the ground, even though she was standing on old land full of ghosts, where monsters waited underneath, and the only part of her that hurt was the muscles in her cheeks, which lacked the stamina to smile any longer.

“I hate to draw this to your attention, Buffy, but I’m going to look like a dressed up baboon in all this. I’ve spent five decades living in a cupboard reading Tennyson and I don’t… whatever qualities a man needs to wear these clothes and not look like a gimp, I don’t have them.” The muscles in his jaw were clenched and it made him look a little more masculine than usual, made his cheekbones stand out in the rising moonlight.

If Buffy tried to describe all the ways she thought he could pull this off and look like the platonic ideal of alternative sensuality, she didn’t think they’d both manage to keep their clothes on long.

“Of course you can! You’re hip! You move with the times. You even learned the word gimp. Hang on, where did you learn that?” She dumped her bags on his bed and started sifting through them.

“The t shirts I got might be a little tight on you. Total accident. I hope that’s okay.”

“The only outcome I foresee here is you making me look so dreadful you never want to come back here unless I have a bag on my head.” He came close and put his hands on either side of her waist as she rummaged in bags. There was another pause that Buffy didn’t rush to fill. “It’s going to make you really happy if I do this with you, isn’t it?”

Buffy turned her head to press her cheek against his. “I really think it might.”

He sighed. “So let’s do it.”

“Amazing!” She cooed. “I have latex gloves right here for applying the bleach. And remember: the safe word is ‘chemical burns’.”

***

It never felt to Buffy that she was choosing not to tell William she loved him. It never felt that way because every time she saw him, she thought ‘oh wow I’m in love with him’ and it felt like a new realisation each time she thought it. She arrived at his room thinking maybe she’d imagined it before, or she’d been a stupid teenager the last time they’d hung out and she’d mistaken cheekbones and bright eyes for a real grown-up feeling. Then there was always something tiny that took hold of her absolutely, took her like a plague, and made her think the words again.

That day, it was the way William leaned back against the inside of her thighs after he eased himself onto the ground. She sat on the edge of his bed with her legs parted and he sat between them, facing away, arms propped on his knees and a towel still a little damp with shaving cream around his shoulders. The fact the towel was still damp meant he had just shaved before she arrived that day, like a real living man does when he gets ready to take a lady out to dinner, a lady with no particular destiny, a lady who had never killed anything.

The first time they tried to sit down, they realised it was not going to be possible to bleach his hair without making a terrible mess if he was wearing a collared shirt. Buffy pointed out the problem and his breath caught in his throat. He offered to pack the whole thing in, attempt it himself with a shaving mirror behind him since she’d paid for all the materials, the gloves and the tiny brush and comb. Buffy said she didn’t want to do that, and she thought he should take his shirt off.

William’s undershirt was pristine white, long sleeved and tight. A careful observer could see the outlines of his shoulder blades and the layers of muscle in his shoulders and upper arms, trace the pathways between them like distant constellations you couldn’t touch.

“If I read while you do this, will that make it harder? It won’t move my shoulders too much, or anything?”

Buffy said she didn’t know much about haircare as he thought she did, and he said that was a terrible thing to tell someone when you’re wielding powerful chemicals. And he was probably right.

“Why don’t you read to me, then, if you’re reading?” Buffy said, and she lowered her voice to a whisper because she was so close to him, speaking at conversation volume started to feel silly.

“Will it distract you? I don’t see how you can’t get bored of me reading the same poems over and over again.”

“I like it. I’ll tell you to stop if I can’t concentrate.”

With a small and insignificant handful of exceptions, this was the closest Buffy had ever been to another person. The two experiences felt very different. With Angel, she had felt acutely aware of her own body, and she had been obsessed with trying to work out how she would look back on what she was doing later, if she would regret doing it badly, if she would regret doing it at all. Now William’s neck and shoulders lay in front of her like a landscape to explore slowly, and she found her breathing shushed and shallow, time focusing into bubbles she could vanish into, and layers of complexity being stripped from the universe.

“You need to relax,” Buffy’s voice was so quiet she was barely making sound, with just a little more confidence than she felt. “You need to trust me.”

He turned to look up at her with wide, pale eyes, hands gripping his paperback tight, holding it just so, so the pages wouldn’t spill out.

“I trust you.”

And William started to talk. The reverence in his voice told Buffy she didn’t need to ask him if this moment meant as much to him as it did to her. She saw tightness in the muscles of his thighs and relaxation in his neck where she bent to touch him.

“Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see;
Let the dew-fall drench either side of me;
Clear apple-leaves are soft upon that moon;
Seen sidelong like a blossom in the tree;
And God, ah God, that day should be so soon.”

His voice was full of wonder and hush. She asked herself if it was wonder at her, at having her with him, or at the idea you could still change after all that time waiting stagnant. It was astonishing that a body could be taken apart and rebuilt better. He dreamed for twenty years of what he wanted to look like and Buffy sat with him while he did it. She loved him to the point of transformation.

Buffy combed pathways through his hair and portioned out the bleach on the little brush that came with the kit, and she thought about injured bodies remaking and reknitting themselves. She thought about the muscles she had torn and strained and the biological processes at work in her, making her be alive. His breath caught and restarted the line when she brushed her thumb up from his hairline to the rim of his head.

“Love, till dawn sunder night from day with fire
Dividing my delight and my desire,
The crescent life and love the plenilune,
Love me though dusk begin and dark retire;
Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.”

William’s voice drew quieter and slower because he understood as well as Buffy did that there was no background noise that mattered, anywhere in the world. His legs stretched out. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, shaped itself round the poem’s lines.

“What on earth is plenilune?” Buffy muttered, and found she was out of breath. It was a wonder she hadn’t noticed, because all the thought about just then was skin and breath. Perhaps she was so inside the action of it she hadn’t thought to label or understand what she was feeling. She lived more in the tips of her fingers than in her mind.

“It means,” he sounded like coming up for air from swimming in the sea, fingers tight on the book, “It just means full moon.”

“The crescent life and love the plenilune,”

The hair at the base of his neck was so fine and pale it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, she could only feel it with the gentle pads of her fingers. He was responsive to her hands, turning his head in answer to the lightest touch on the side of his neck. His shoulders stayed broad and straight, an artefact of a time when posture was better, and he seemed to breathe only to move his body to rise and meet her, or fall away when she was done touching him.

“Ah, my heart fails, my blood draws back; I know,
When life runs over, life is near to go;
And with the slain of love love’s ways are strewn,
And with their blood, if love will have it so;
Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.”

When his hair was nearly done, Buffy found herself sad. If they finished his hair, they would have to stand up, and the fragment of the universe she had existed in for twenty minutes would stop existing.

Angel had made her want to focus on her body, and Faith had made her forget it. The latter hadn’t been a bad thing, and fumbling around three Smirnoff Ices deep while giggling had been far from the worst evenings of that summer, more of which she cared to forget than not. She had never believed or anticipated that her body could be a place she would want to spend time, where she would want time to stretch out and go slowly so she could spend more of it.

When she reached the top front of his head, a part of her expected or hoped he would turn, pick her up and press her hard into the bed or the wall, but she loved that he sat still. His feet tensed and untensed on the floor, and his fingers shuffled on the spine of the book, and he was taught but he was still. He sat and waited to be touched when she chose, like she had asked him to.

If she had tried to say out loud that she had learned more about her body from twenty minutes watching the muscles in his neck move than in the rest of the years she had been alive, she worried he would laugh at her, so she said the only thing there was left to say.

“I’m in love with you, William.” She thought it would be hard to say but it was easy. It was so easy it demanded she keep going. “I’m so in love with you I don’t know what to do with it.”

“I’ve been in love with you for years, you know that.”

Both of them were looking at the window and the only place they touched was his shoulder and part of his starlit neck leant against her stained thigh.

“Years?”

“I suppose I’m very pretentious and very desperate. And I don’t get out much.”

“Years?”

“I didn’t just dream of you coming here to be with me, you know, Buffy. It wasn’t a pin-up to get me through the war situation. I kept dreaming of, I don’t know, all kinds of things. You eating grapes on the lawn, sitting by the stained glass in the library with the coloured light on your face, going to the terrible common room discos in costumes made of cardboard and the barman giving you free drinks that you spill down your front. Reading and doing your laundry. It’s embarrassing, now I say it. I kept looking for better ways of writing it down and I never… All that time you’d think the practice would have… I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you walk in the sunlight. I knew a woman was going to arrive who was going to walk across the quad in the sun and wherever she was going, I’d be in love with her. It’s because you’re so alive Buffy, and I’m grateful for all the dreams now no matter how much of a creep they make me sound, because it’s a blessing to see you walk in the sunlight. It’s like you glow. It’s like you’re…”

The silence took them over again and he finally touched her, holding one hand up for her to hold if she wanted to. Buffy took his hand and they both glowed.

Chapter Text

Buffy’s sense of self preservation woke her up in the first flush of warm grey before dawn. It was the same part of her that made her walk away from Angel, kept her walking away from bodies that melted into dust, and that woke her up before the nightmares got too awful to survive. She and William had slept in the bed together for the first time, pressed close together, and the metal of his belt buckle had formed the same imprint in the soft skin of both their stomachs. It was rare for Buffy to be awake this early (opposed to up this late). The quality of the grey was different for reasons she couldn’t explain. There wasn’t any shame in it. Asleep, with all the tension in his face smoothed out, William looked like something she didn’t have to feel bad about. The only thing to regret was leaving him here so that the sun could come up and he could stop existing.

At the edges of her mind, the borders of the room were starting to feel fuzzy. It might have been her slayer senses or it might have been a general sense of dread. Buffy had a great sense of self-preservation and a greater sense of when the moon rose and set. She barely needed to look at the sky anymore and she knew it was time to go. There had to be a process whereby William stopped existing in the mornings. Whether he blinked out of existence, faded slowly, or was more terribly swallowed up, Buffy knew she had to drag herself out of bed and not watch it when it happened. The look on Professor Giles’ face wouldn’t leave her alone, his face when he said that trying to stay only means you wake up alone in an empty room.

In the corner of her vision, where there had only been a well-swept empty corner before, she saw a couple of dead leaves gather and wait. William was so warm in the bed. He looked so completely alive. His eyes moved delicately under his eyelids and his breaths were slow, deep and warm. When Buffy exhaled it picked up the strands of his hair, pure white, like a new man she knew well. He didn’t look like he was fading out of existence, or dead or dying.

But being the slayer makes you good at bending your mind in terrible directions. If this was a room where she had been nothing but safe all these months, then leaving William alone in bed was terrible but waiting around for this to be the first time this place made her cry would be worse. She didn’t wake him because she hoped he was dreaming about them waking up together. In the dream, she hoped they went out for a walk before breakfast so his new hair could meet the sun, and people in the meadows would look at him and wonder who that punk-looking guy was. She hoped on that walk the cold sunlight would gather, pool and flow around the beautiful bone structure of his face in new ways that she hadn’t seen before in his window-light.

So she kissed him on the forehead, just softly enough not to wake up, just hard enough for him to seem real, and she left. Dawn was just breaking. By the time she got down to the ground floor of his staircase, his window was dark and he was already gone.

It was a slow walk across the quad and Buffy didn’t rush herself walking. The sadness wasn’t as bone-aching as some she had experienced - more of a manageable melancholy, almost pleasurable to feel, like something you could write a poem about. There was still a little warmth in the air when the sun picked up a strand of her hair and played with it. The certainty that William would exist again in the evening muffled the feeling. It was odd, sadness that could claim a part of you but not all.

Maybe everything was going to be okay.

Until she walked into her and Willow’s staircase and the first thing she heard was sobbing.

Speeding up, she took the stairs three at a time until she came out on the top floor where their rooms were. She was out of breath when she reached the top and saw Willow crumpled in her open doorway, sobbing so intensely that she might have been having a seizure.

Buffy’s eyes flicked to all the doors on their floor, the ceiling, the windows, shadows and electrical sources and places ancient ancestral magic leaked from. She didn’t see anything dangerous, and she didn’t know what was happening, but her body was already moving to the floor. Willow tried to reach out for a hug but the slayer was feeling for her pulse, brushing her hair away from her neck to find the bite marks, checking the pupils, feeling for if the soul was still there. Though she wanted to sound warm and reassuring, the voice that she found coming out of her was harsh and militaristic. It is hard to be warm when you associate adrenaline with fingers clawing at you out of the ground.

“What’s happened, Willow? Is there anyone in the building? Did Drusilla’s defences fail? Are you bleeding?” Willow just sobbed and sobbed. “Willow! What’s happening?”
Willow looked like she was about to break in two. When Buffy put her arms around her shoulders, she shook hard enough that all the slayer strength couldn’t hold her still.

“Please tell me something, Will. You’re scaring me.”

At last Willow spoke, just barely above a whisper. “She’s all on her own,” she said.

“What?”

“Tara. She’s all on her own.”

“For Christmas? No she’s not, she’s going to come here.”

Willow looked up at Buffy. “In the hospital Buffy. She’s on her own. She called me from her room, she locked the door because her father was… I had to call the police. I’ve never even called the police before. We had a session on primary school on how to do it and I couldn’t remember… By the time I got the address right he’d punctured her lung, Buffy. I was on the phone the whole time and the dispatcher said… oh my god.” Her voice trailed off and the great gulping breaths stole her and swallowed her words. She burrowed her head into the crook under Buffy’s arms.

The adrenaline that Buffy was full of didn’t have anywhere to go or flow away. She used one hand to hold Willow’s shoulders and one hand to check her watch. “So we’re going to the station? I don’t know where Tara lives but we can be in London by lunchtime and then we can get a train anywhere. Or we can take Xander’s car. There’s a lot of options here, Will.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t go. Maggie won’t let me.”

“Maggie?”

“Professor Walsh. She needs me to work. I asked her if we could… She really doesn’t like me crying.” Buffy looked down at WIllow’s hands and saw the cordless phone held in her hands like a claw, held so tight the planes where the plastic connected were starting to warp.

“Willow, what did she say?”

“She knows everyone in cosmology, Buffy, everyone everywhere. She said if I was stupid enough to abandon work I’d committed to age nineteen over a friend I’d known three months then I clearly don’t have a future in… She knows everyone, Buffy. She said if I really wanted to get a problem solved I’d stop crying like a stupid little girl. But I just couldn’t stop crying Buffy. I couldn’t even speak to her. I felt like I was going to die. She said…”

“What did she say?” Buffy heard her voice coming out cold, and she knew it was because the part of her that wanted to fight and kill things wasn’t getting quieter, it was getting louder. “What did she say to you, Willow?”

“She said she could tell I wanted to be a scientist and I’d done my best to work hard towards it, but I had to be careful of getting hysterical and burning my bridges at the first stage of my career. She said everyone would realise how weak and useless I was if I couldn’t even… if a friend has an accident and I abandon… I abandon… She’s all on her own Buffy and I’ll never be a physicist, I’m 19 and I’ll never have a job, and I’ll never forgive myself. I feel like my lungs are going to explode. I feel like I have to die to get away from feeling like this. I’m late for work…. And she’s all on her own.”

Pity rose up larger and brighter than anger in Buffy. Within and around the pity, the anger continued to burn. For a moment she didn’t think she could speak because she’d be too terrifying if she did, because she’d never hated a vampire like she hated Maggie Walsh. It wasn’t clear if Professor Walsh had known threatening Willow’s competence and ability to work was the most perfect way to flood her self-confidence and make her unravel as a person, or if she was so cruel and so used to demolishing frightened students that she didn’t even need to try. And Willow was paralysed in the middle of it, unable to comprehend a world where she couldn’t do enough homework to impress everyone. The amount Buffy loved Willow was bottomless and unfathomable, and she felt herself start to cry with her as she pressed her lips to Willow’s forehead.

“What hospital is she in, Will?”

“Who?”

“Tara, where is she?”

“It’s in Carlisle, Buffy. If I go I’ll lose my…”

“I’m gonna go. She won’t be on her own. I’ll get myself there, and I’ll sit in her room with her, and I’ll bring her back down here and we’ll buy an air mattress for her to sleep here with us while we get everything fixed. And when we’ve got her fixed and settled and everything’s okay, I’m gonna get a hammer and break every single one of Professor Walsh’s windows. You’re the best person alive in the whole wide world, Will. You’re the sweetest person there is, and you’re so much cleverer than Professor Walsh. You’re gonna leave her in the dust one day, I really promise, and Tara’s going to be okay. We can get all of it fixed. We can. We can fix everything.”

All of it was over so quickly that by the time Buffy got back to her own room to pack a bag and head for the train station, the dawn was still just visible in the sky. She got her wallet and bank cards so she could access her bursary money, a few pairs of clothes and the copy of David Copperfield she hoped she’d finally manage to read on the train. When she picked up a gym bag and started to empty it of her slayer gear to make space for her travel stuff, she left a couple of stakes and a knife at the bottom, just in case. She heard Willow cleaning herself up and getting ready for work, Willow who saw the world as a series of interconnecting and infinite homework assignments that one had to complete to be told you’d deserved to make it to the end of the day, still ready to work her hardest under the evil bitch monster of death. She thought about power and how proud someone must have to be to threaten teenagers over research assistant work done over a Christmas vacation.

As she hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and headed out to the train station, her eyes caught on the closed door to Willow’s bedroom and the empty window where William lived or didn’t live, and she thought about how three months beforehand she had never loved anyone like this, like either of these loves. She thought about Tara waiting and she broke into a run as she got closer to the train station. She wondered if Tara’s father or Professor Maggie Walsh had ever had to deal with a slayer before.

Chapter Text

The Cumberland Infirmary was a square red brick building, wide and flat like a fen that wouldn’t end. Buffy thought it would fit more with the literary character of the place if it looked like a mountain, but then it is hard to design a hospital to be like a mountain. There had been beautiful scenery on the train but it was hard to believe it now, not because the city was ugly but because the sky was so dark and low it seemed impossible to fit any hills and lakeside fells under it. You’d have to drag it up with your fingers if you wanted to fit any more landscape in.

All the way on the train, with her stack of penguin paperbacks and her complimentary stack of penguin biscuits, working on one much harder than the other, it hadn’t occurred to Buffy to wonder what she would say to Tara when she arrived. Hi Tara, we have watched several movies together. Hi Tara, I’m not in love with you but I was the one who could make the train. Hi Tara I kill vampires. Hi Tara I could kill your dad. Hi Tara, Willow loves you more than you could ever know. She flipped to the back of her notebook and tried to work out what she was going to say, numbered steps like an essay plan, but she never kept to essay plans and all her ideas turned into doodles of glowering skies. The clouds all had dark monstrous hearts, pierced and staked through with rain.

As she packed up her things to leave St Dru’s, there were only a few minutes to bang on Professor Giles’ door and hope he would be in. She spent six minutes in his office, and in that time he gave her two credit cards with his name on them, numbers still shiny from sitting unused in a desk, and a book for Tara to read if she wanted. He scribbled a note on the inside cover of it, and Buffy fingered the page absentmindedly as she carried it but she didn’t read it. He said he would go up to William’s room at sunset and Buffy said he didn’t have to, but he said he did have to. He made a cup of tea and she drank two sips of it. He didn’t tell her what to say in the hospital, though, and she didn’t ask. She was used to running towards things and hoping she would know what to do when she got there.

Then she got there and found that she couldn’t attack someone’s father not loving them. It was hard to drive a stake into something when there wasn’t a heart there to find.

When she went into Tara’s room, she found she didn’t have to say anything straight away, because Tara was asleep, a little bit restless, but she didn’t respond to the sound of the door closing or Buffy’s bag going thunk on the floor. She rolled over, away from the door to the rainy window, and it made Buffy wonder if she was turning away from her on purpose, assuming that anyone who came through the door had to be someone who would be hard to look at.

“It’s me, it’s Buffy,” She said stupidly, and then she thought to add, “Buffy Summers?” despite the fact you didn’t meet a lot of Buffies anywhere in the world, and probably less than average in Cumbria.

Tara shifted but didn’t look at her. She mumbled and Buffy went closer to listen, but it became quickly apparent that she wasn’t awake even a little bit.

“Another cup?” she murmured, “I could have another cup, with the stars around the…”

Tara trailed off into unintelligibility but Buffy squatted on the floor next to the bed and smiled so wide she was glad only the bedsheets could see her. They had all taken the same oath when they matriculated into the college, hadn’t they? Wherever they went in the world, and whatever they did, and if they dropped out or they failed their exams, being a part of St Drusilla’s was something that went deep and stayed put. The books in her bag with the college library stamps on the front page started to glow warmly in Buffy’s mind, and she was pleased that the flowers she had brought were purple. You cannot get wisteria in Carlisle florists round the corner from hospitals, but you can buy a colour to remind someone of them.

“No one’s ever gonna hurt you, Tara,” she said into the starched hospital bedsheets. “Willow sent me to tell you that nothing’s gonna get you.”

The word Willow made her eyelids flutter and open sleepily.

“Willow?” she said.

“I’m afraid not, but I do know where you can find her.”

“Buffy?” Now she had gone from a quarter awake to half awake, and she was as confused as she was dreamy. There was a fat cut over one of her eyes and the skin all around the socket was angry, shining, the skin around her face split and weeping.

“Hi there,” said Buffy. Looking into Tara’s face, she finally realised how injured she was, and her heart was breaking. She tried to sound warm and reassuring but it was hard to resist the twin urges to cry and to reach out and touch all the wounds, with a strange visceral fascination that made her want to get in the middle of the situation physically and use her muscles and sinews to knit it all up.

“What are you doing in Carlisle? Is Willow okay? Are you okay?”

“Everyone’s okay, Tara, and you’re going to be okay. Willow told me about everything and neither of us wanted you to be alone. I know it would have been better if it had been her here, and Willow wanted to be here so badly, I know she wanted so, so badly to be here and she’s so sorry, but we both love you and we’re going to get you home.”

Tara’s painful broken face crinkled and she started to cry. “I can’t go home, Buffy, I can’t go back there…”

“We’re going back to Oxford together. You’re coming with me and we’re going home home.”

“I can’t afford…”

“I’ve got Giles’ credit cards. We’ll get you a room or we’ll get you an air mattress, or we’ll get me an air mattress. I promise, Tara, I promise so so hard that I’m going to take care of everything, for both of you.”

“Buffy they’re my family.”

“Maybe we’ll see them at graduation.”

“They don’t want me to… They’re so angry, they’re angry with Willow, they’re angry with the girls from my school… They’re not gonna stop…” Tara’s anguished breathing overlook her and she hyperventilated out the last of her words with cuts reopening around her cheeks where her face crinkled. “What if I really don’t have a soul?”

“I’ve met a lot of people who didn’t have souls and they weren’t anything like you.”

“What if I’m really going to Hell? What if I keep fighting them but then it turns out I was really going to Hell all this time, and they know they’re right?”

Buffy felt herself melting into a puddle of desperately sad acid on the floor. She held Tara’s hand so tight she worried it would slay all her bones. It took a moment for her to speak because there was a Hellmouth grabbing up at her. She took Tara’s hand and stroked its back, feeling where the veins settled soft over the bones.

“Do you believe in Hell, Buffy?”

“I don’t know.” That didn’t seem like the right answer so Buffy gathered herself to attack again.
She found she was out of breath. She thought about all the claws, and fingers curled up into claws, she’d seen reaching up out of gaping holes in the earth. She thought about dust soaking back into the ground at dawn. She thought, for the first time in a long time, about a column of smoke on Brighton beach, and it hit her harder than it had for months, like the sensory details she’d been blocking out had found their way back to her all at once, the smell of meat mixing in with salt, the idea that Merrick could really be made of skin and the skin could burn, the idea that he and the vampires could burn up together into the same dust, and the police could never look for him, and the dust blew away into the sea. “I think Hell might be different for different people.”

“That’s a very literary answer.”

“Well I think I talked about Sartre in my admissions interview. I was very pretentious. Hell is other people.”

“Do you think that?”

“Not anymore. I’m pretty much a fan of other people.”

“I’m a fan of other people too, sometimes.” There was a lot held tight and silent in that ‘sometimes’. Tara looked down at her own hands and Buffy kept stroking them, and she thought Willow would say something better and more meaningful if she was here. Sitting in classes and watching a handful of movies together didn’t teach you a lot about what to say here.

Already embarrassed when she started to speak, Buffy let her voice drop to a whisper so that she wouldn’t sound so much like a character in a soap opera. Then when her words came out she found she did sound like a character from a soap opera. “I won’t let anyone hurt you, Tara. I’m gonna sit right here til you’re better enough to walk out of here, and I’m gonna use this credit card and, and whatever else I have to use, to get you back to Oxford. You’re gonna be safe as houses. You’re gonna be one of the people that I look after right, I promise.”

Before Tara could reply, footsteps sounded in the hall outside and her body crumpled in towards Buffy. It wasn’t the most optimal fighting conditions, a small hospital room, but the rain might cover up a bit of the sound of a struggle. If anything had to be done, Buffy knew she would need to do it fast. She wondered how many seconds it would take to smash a vase on someone’s head and get a very injured woman out of a first floor window. She wondered if the vase was real porcelain or plastic that wouldn’t do any damage. She guessed the only way to find out was to wield it with conviction and go for the chair as a backup.

Then she was looking up into the eyes of a nurse and wondering if she thought about violence too much.

“I’m afraid visiting hours are over now if you aren’t a close family member.”

“I’m her sister. I’m gonna stay here until she can come home.”

The nurse didn’t say anything to that but Buffy wondered if she saw a shadow of relief on her face. She said something about where the vending machines were and backed off down the hall.

When Tara turned back to Buffy there were still tears in her eyes.

“I just feel so awful, you having to come here. We never even have tutorials together. I had this idea I was going to get away without anyone at Oxford ever knowing anything, any of this. I didn’t want it to corrupt my new life. It feels silly to say it now. I really thought it was going to be… I thought I was going to be different.”

“Well I think Willow would be very angry if I brought you home different.”

“My dad’s a big guy, Buffy, I really think…”

“I really think that if anyone tries to stop me getting you back to St Dru’s in one piece, heads are gonna roll.”

“Really?”

“Really really. I’m the scariest man you’ve ever met. Also, I have a book for you.”

It took a long time for Tara to fall asleep that night, but when she did she was out for good. It made Buffy happy to know she was back in Drusilla’s arms where no one could hurt her, drinking tea full of stars with Miss Edith. Buffy propped herself up on the side of the hospital bed, holding Tara loosely, reading with one cramped arm, looking out at the window. This was how her mother had held her all the nights when she was younger when she’d told her in sprawling bawling tears what was wrong with her, and a few times later when she hadn’t explained anything at all. She didn’t know if it was a core skill slayers had to have to be able to hold someone like this, to pack Willow up and get her to work, to dye William’s hair and bring him clothes, but she hoped this was what it was meant to feel like. She had always felt like she carried the weight of the world. Sometimes, now, she found herself thinking about taking it all down off her shoulders and looking at what precious things she found herself holding.

Chapter Text

In his room in the daytime, in the time when he didn’t exist, William didn’t sleep but he did dream. Sometimes his dreams were the usual sort, finding he was wearing his underwear in the middle of a Gilbert and Sullivan show he hadn’t wanted to be in anyway. They might have just been echoes of dreams he’d had once before, like sound echoing in an empty cave, but he preferred to think there was a part of him that was really there.

Sometimes St Drusilla came to him in his dreams. Usually it was well-mannered, well-mannered and weird, asking if the insulation on his windows was good enough, asking about his well-being. That was less of a dream and more of a meeting. He woke up from those feeling vaguely comforted, but not feeling much.

Only very, very rarely did he remember what dreaming had used to be like. When Buffy was on the train, and Tara was in the hospital, and Willow was hunched over in a physics building stairwell trying to breathe, William spent that day dreaming. He saw the soil in all the quads gutter and churn, like there were great aching growing things underneath. He heard a heartbeat beeping on a machine, wheels turning on tracks, and footsteps passing above him. Somewhere in the college, someone was breathing feverishly. Something smelled like burning. There was something stirring the sky like tea.

Across the quad from his room there was a completely normal empty room, but there was also a gaping void. A squealing wind escaped from the empty room. It echoed out through the college, down into the earth, up into the sky. Something was missing and it wasn’t just William that felt it.

***

William had done a lot of pacing in his short life, his long not-life. At one time he had worried he’d leave grooves in the floor. Then he worried about it less. Then he worried about what it meant that he didn’t leave grooves in anything. There was no wear and tear from him living anywhere, because he wasn’t living anywhere. He opened the door sometimes and dry leaves blew in. Then he swept them out again. That was his whole impact on the world, shifting leaves back and forth. He had as much impact on the physical sphere as a medium-strong wind.

Buffy had been gone a week when the thought occurred to him that he might never see her again. He’d never been to Cumbria. He thought it might be a wonderful place to live, full of beautiful people, people worth dropping out of Oxford and committing to, the sort of spontaneous people who make you drop everything to stay there forever.

So William started running his hands through his hair, his blond hair.

He felt wrong, weak, sick, perhaps a little feverish, with her gone. He worried he was a bad, possessive person. Sometimes he sat at his desk looking down at his hand and worried it didn’t exist. He felt a yawning wrong thing somewhere over his breastbone. The pain wasn’t just in his chest, it was in the walls of his room. It was in the leaves. He put his hand to the wall and felt the plumbing moan, like it was able to miss her too. Like the whole college was lovesick, like everyone had pneumonia.

The fact Buffy had dyed his hair for him started to feel like a miracle. It was a real tangible truth that she’d ever been here and touched him. He scraped it back and back until it stopped flopping back over his eyes when he left it alone. He tried to read but all the poetry he’d ever liked was starting to look bloody awful. He just paced and paced, and checked in the mirror that his hair was still bleached, so he still knew her, so she’d still ever been here.

The first knock on the door was Giles and the second was -

“Willow?”

“That’s me. And you must be… You must be William. I figured you must be. Well I didn’t figure really. I’ve been able to see you for a long time. In a non-creepy way. But you know my name too so it’s not really creepy if we both know each other because we have a mutual friend. I’m being weird. I know I’m being weird. I’ve not been sleeping…”

William could only think of one reason for Willow to come up to a ghost’s room. He worried it would make his voice sound too angry (scary ghost) but the sounds he found himself making went too far the other way, because his heart was breaking already. “What happened to Buffy?”

“Has something happened?”

William gestured behind him at his room, which contained no computer, no phone, no fucking morse code fucking operator headset, not a single telegram, no carrier pigeons. “Well nothing’s happened here, has it?”

“Oh,” Willow’s eyes widened. “Well I heard she’d been held up. She phoned Professor Giles but she only had a minute, because a transaction needed to be authorised with the bank and she had to be really fast. I think Giles has had a lot on, really, because Larry’s got some kind of injury and I think Harmony’s been unwell…”

When he realised she wasn’t going to stop talking to cross the threshold he took her gently by one shoulder and brought her inside. There was a moment where he wasn’t sure where to put her. The options were to sit her on the bed (far too intimate) or at his desk chair, which would make it look like he was setting her reading to do. So they paused in the middle of the room and Willow kept talking.

“Apparently they were saying there were ‘suspicious transactions’, which I find judgemental for sure, but Buffy was keen to get going – I suppose there was some question of pressing charges but the main issue was sorting the trains…”

“Press charges? Which charges?”

“Giles was so anxious to get her home. He seemed very, I don’t know, gaunt. It took a long time for Tara’s knee to… William, I’ve been having the weirdest dreams. I might just be working too much. I don’t know. I meant to come up here a week ago but I kept losing track of… Sometimes I fall asleep and I’m just opening my eyes in the physics building and I don’t know how to get out. There’s always someone behind me when I go to the door and then I wake up in my room and there’s this movement over towards the… I wanted to come and see you but I never seem to… All the time I’m not working I feel so muddled and one time I really thought I saw all the worms in the ground moving at the same time, like one big hand, and they were reaching…”

William found he was already holding her head against his chest when she started to cry, though she never stopped talking. “I’ve been so worried, William, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, pet.”

“I keep thinking if Buffy was here… I don’t know, I keep thinking if Buffy was here the nightmares would go away. I just hurt all over.”

William was going to say, “You and me both,” when the door he’d forgotten to close opened again. He already knew it wasn’t Buffy, because the part of him that hummed when she came nearby was quiet. When he looked around there was nothing there to see, but Willow was looking too.

Drusilla’s voice was polite, but there was something slightly manic lurking underneath it. She told Willow to go to Giles’ office now, please.

Willow’s voice was very small when she said, “Did something happen to Tara?”, and William’s arms tightened around her.

The voice said Buffy and Tara were on a train, doing just fine. The physics faculty had exploded.

Chapter Text

There’s a quiet time at the end of term. Exam schools are quiet and the library is not empty but no longer feels fevered and sick. Buffy only realised after her exams finished that there were so many colours of sweet pea planted through the quads. They rushed in pink and purple currents along the ground next to her feet as she walked. The healthiest thing for Buffy was the college, and the healthiest thing for the college was Buffy. It felt immediate, obvious and true when you realised it.

It’s hard for one girl’s body to hold the weight of such a vast calling. Back in Brighton, the weight of being the slayer felt like trying to swim when you were also responsible for imagining the entire ocean underneath you. Now St Drusilla’s is that ocean, something ancient to draw on in fulfilling something ancient. And Buffy, with all her life to give, her beating heart, her energy, is the little bit of modernity that winds St Drusilla up like a clock. So Buffy becomes light, giggling, and clever. So the dead leaves dry up on the wind.

William didn’t tell Buffy at first when he started to dream of sunlight. In the daytime, slowly, he began to suspect that he existed. He realised the difference between dreaming as a person who didn’t exist and dreaming as a person who did, shifting in bed, instance of micro-waking, scratching your arm, rolling over. He dreamed of Drusilla coming to his room with the door left open, taking his arm, and leading him outside, and then all of a sudden his eyes opened. There was a noise in the quad that had woken him. It was Buffy laughing, head thrown back, hair in waves. Xander was chasing WIllow around with a croquet mallet. Tara tried to scrape yogurt off a library book.

It took a long time for him to say anything to her. He just sat and bleached his hair, played the records she brought him. Sometimes he lay awake and let the sun play on his skin. He wondered if it really felt warm or if he was imagining. He closed his eyes and saw if the feeling changed as the sun moved, if he really got warmer as it got on for noon. Then Buffy came up to meet him at sunset.

“William?” she said.

“Yes, Buffy,” he said from the hallway, a place he hadn’t been for so long he had almost forgotten it.

Rushing up the stairs towards him, Buffy noticed he was pale and exhausted, but he was outside. He was outside.

Maybe in the autumn she’ll take him down to the quad. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to do it, but the hope feels very warm. And as Buffy always reminds him, she’s very, very strong.

“Would that be enough, Buffy?” he said one time, keeping his voice so low it was almost like he didn’t want her to listen. “I don’t think I’ll ever make it out onto Broad Street. How long can you really spend chained up here with someone who can’t take you to a gig, go to the shops, Jesus, go anywhere?”

“Spike - “

“Come on, slayer, this is a serious conversation. Don’t use that silly name. Sometimes I feel like a corpse dragging you down into a grave when you’re so…” He picked up a wavy strand of her hair, glowing in the midday light.

“I like it so it’s not a silly name. Spike, there are two things I’m completely one hundred percent sure of in my life. One is that I want to be with you. I want to be with you more completely and permanently than I’ve ever wanted anything. But hey, I’m nineteen and who knows if I’ll change my mind. The other thing I’m sure of is that St Drusilla’s is the only place I ever want to live. If I’d never met you, or if I never talked to you again, I just want to be here forever. But you’ll have to bear with me because the first few years I’m a ghost I’ll probably find it hard to leave my room. So we’ll both need to learn morse code before I die. That’s what Giles and Jenny had planned, anyway, before he got moved into the office next door.”

“So you’re going to turn into a Giles?”

“Yes. I ordered several tweed jackets in catalogues only this morning. I’m working on getting more shortsighted.” She paused and nestled into him. “This summer he’s found some budget to pay me and Tara to do a bunch of the footnotes in his new book. It’s something to put on the masters applications, after all.”

After four exhausting weeks, Giles and Jenny powered through enough paperwork to register Tara formally as an estranged student with no contact with her family, qualifying her for more financial support and a room in a college house on Manor Road right through the vacations. Between Giles finding busywork for her in the English faculty and Xander doing wild nepotism to give her all the shifts on the bar she could handle, she found she could afford a lot of glow in the dark stars to put up over her and Willow’s bed in the house.

“I can’t believe you get a double bed,” Buffy grumbled when she went there to lift all the heavy boxes.

“You could have a room here in a second,” said Willow, “if you want to move out of the college.”

“Never,” said Buffy. Though she was a few streets away, though she couldn’t see it, the wisteria in St Drusilla’s bloomed a little brighter when she said it.