Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Buffy met Brie in homeroom, when the teacher was taking attendance. She’d been bracing herself for that moment when everyone turned to look at the new student, which had seemed to be happening a lot lately (small towns really did work differently than LA), but just after she’d said her name and the cursory hello, just as the roll call had moved towards all the T names, the girl sitting right behind Buffy tugged on her sleeve and said in a delighted whisper, “Your name is Buffy Summers?! That’s lovely!”

It was the accent that caught Buffy’s attention. British, and posh, like the kind of thing you’d hear on one of those hoity-toity period dramas Buffy’s mom liked so much. She turned around to see who the accent belonged to, and was met with a big, infectious smile. “We’ve the same initials, actually!!” the girl said, all kinds of rainbow-sparkle-glitter in a way that most girls left behind in middle school. “I’m Brie! B-R-I-E, incidentally, not B-R-E-E. I know, a bit cheesy of me,” and here she grinned as though delighted by her own cleverness, “but I do like knowing that it’s spelled correctly, even if only in people’s heads. Nickname, you see. So I suppose we don’t have the same initials, except we do, because most people don’t call me—”

“February,” said Buffy’s new homeroom teacher, whose name she’d already forgotten, “would you sit down?”

Brie’s pale cheeks went bright pink. “Sorry!!” she whispered, then waved again to Buffy. “But hi!!! I just really thought you should know how gorgeous your name is!”

“Your name is February?” Buffy whispered back, unable to resist the absurd allure of whatever the heck this girl was doing. Back at Hemery, a girl like Brie would have been eaten alive. Her outfit was eclectic without being fashionable, her smile was unguarded, and her chatter was completely charmless—but everything about her came from the heart, which Buffy liked. Hard to imagine someone like this screening her calls after a gym-burning incident. “That’s way prettier than Buffy. How’d you get a name like that?”

“February’s when my parents fell in love,” said Brie, in a tone of voice that suggested she very much enjoyed getting to tell people this for the first time.

Buffy felt a complicated twinge. She missed being excited about her parents like that. They had been happy, before it got complicated, and she’d always been kind of a sucker for seeing them happy together. “That’s really sweet,” she said honestly. “I’m pretty sure I was just named Buffy because—”

“Oh, no just about it!” said Brie immediately. “It’s no competition! I’m not really a B, but here you are, the genuine article!”

“So are you calling me a genuine B-word?” said Buffy, thinning her lips playfully.

Brie started giggling much too loudly. Buffy’s new homeroom teacher said very testily, “February. Am I going to have to see you after class again?”

“No, ma’am!” said Brie, pressing her hands to her mouth. Her eyes were still sparkling. Buffy kind of felt a little sparkly too, looking at her. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered in Buffy’s direction, “my most profound apologies, but I likely can’t continue this conversation, as I’ve no self-control and will talk your ear off. But I’m very glad you know your name is a lovely one, and I appreciate that you said something so nice about mine! Thank you!!” And with that, she turned back to her day planner, tongue between her teeth as she began to write.

This felt like the kind of friend that Buffy wanted to make. She considered her next move very carefully. Fishing a pencil out of her bag, she leaned across the top of Brie’s desk, then wrote in careful, precise, upside-down lettering: can I sit with you at lunch? :)

Brie looked up and beamed. She glanced furtively at their homeroom teacher, then scribbled her response: Yes Absolutely!!!

Brie wasn’t in most of Buffy’s classes, which was unfortunate. History with Cordelia left Buffy with something of a sour taste in her mouth. She had the distinct feeling that, had she already thrown her hat in with Brie where Cordelia could see it, they wouldn’t have had to go through that popular-girl pantomime where Buffy was granted conditional acceptance. Of course Buffy didn’t want to be weird, but she also didn’t really want to be mean, now that she knew how it felt to be on the other side of it. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do about Cordelia.

When lunch rolled around, just after a library incident that Buffy preferred not to think about, she found Brie sitting with Willow. This pretty much cemented her suspicions regarding Brie’s social position, but it didn’t change her plans. She raised a tentative hand, hoping that Cordelia’s sharp tongue hadn’t burned bridges with Willow, and Brie waved back so enthusiastically that she almost knocked Willow over. “Oh, Willow, oh, sorry!!!” she said anxiously, hastily putting Willow to rights. “But this is—”

“Buffy!” said Willow.

“Did you meet Buffy already?” said Brie. “She’s in my homeroom! She’s lovely.”

Buffy wasn’t super sure how Brie had gotten lovely from a two-second interaction, but she wasn’t complaining. It was sweet. “Hi, Brie!” she said. “And hi, Willow! I was actually hoping I could talk to you—”

“Oh, you might not wanna do that,” said Willow warily.

“How come?” said Buffy, even though she was pretty sure she knew why.

“You’re in with Cordelia, right?” said Willow. “You won’t be any more if you hang with us.”

“Don’t listen to her,” said Brie immediately. “Sit with us. Cordelia’s dreadful. Not to me, I don’t think she knows what to do with me, but she’s awful to Willow and Xander all the time. You don’t want a friend like that. I knew a group of girls just like her in private school—”

“Ooooh, in private school,” came a boy’s voice—the boy Buffy had met in the halls, Xander, who noticed her and subsequently went fire-engine red. “Uh, Buffy!” he said. “Hi!”

“Does everyone know me here?” said Buffy, amused.

“Not a big town,” said Willow helpfully. “You’re pretty big news.”

“Oh, I’m really not,” said Buffy immediately. Big news was the exact opposite of what she wanted to be.

“It was kinda like this when Brie moved here last year,” added another boy, one who Buffy didn’t know, as he sat down next to Xander. “Didn’t Cordy give you that interrogation about your rain boots?”

“I suppose,” said Brie, scrunching up her nose. “I stopped listening when she said I’d have to pass some sort of test to be her friend.”

“Speak of the devil!” said Xander, throwing up his hands. “Cordelia!”

Cordelia scanned the faces in front of her with clearly deliberate disinterest. “Not to interrupt your downward mobility,” she said, “but I just wanted to make sure you knew that gym class was canceled, on account of the extreme dead guy in the locker.”

At that point, other things took precedent.

Not that Buffy cared about vampires. Buffy was actually extremely done caring about vampires. Buffy was looking forward to a night at the club, fun, exciting, full of dancing and music and lots of other normal teenage stuff. She could so completely be a normal girl, if she wanted, which she did, so she would. End of sentence.

She was delighted to see that Brie and Willow were at the Bronze together, Brie happily slurping a ridiculous-looking drink while Willow nervously scanned the crowd. When her eyes landed on Buffy, she blinked a few times, smiled shyly, then steadied Brie’s glass before gently tapping her friend on the shoulder. Brie turned, saw Buffy, and very nearly upended her own drink; patiently, Willow steadied it. “Buffy!!!” Brie called, very loudly. “Hi, Buffy!! We’re over here, Buffy, hello!!”

Buffy really wanted to find out how those two had become friends. She had a feeling it was the most incredible story ever. “Hi, Brie!!” she said, skipping over. “And hi, Willow! You guys here with anybody else?”

“Willow’s waiting to see if Xander will show up,” said Brie conspiratorially.

“Brie!” said Willow, blushing fiercely.

“Oh,” said Buffy, smiling slightly, “are you and Xander—?”

“No, um, I mean, well, we used to,” said Willow nervously, “but then we—well, we broke up. For Barbie-related reasons. As in, he stole my Barbie.” Her blush was deepening. “We were five.”

“…Oh,” said Buffy, not sure what to do with that. “Um, how about you, Brie?”

Brie pulled a face. “Teenage boys are beneath me,” she said.

Willow looked a little amused. “Are there any other options?” she said.

“College boys,” Buffy suggested, then blushed a little herself. “I mean—I’ve heard.”

Brie shook her head. “My dad would go ballistic if I was seeing a college boy,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’ve no idea how many speeches I’ve had to sit through from him about how their brains aren’t fully developed, they’re prone to reckless and dangerous behavior, et cetera. He’s given me books on the subject.”

“Brie’s dad is the librarian!” Willow added brightly. “You know, Mr. Giles?”

Buffy’s brain did a full stop. “Your dad,” she said. “Your dad is—is Mr. Giles?”

Now she was looking at Brie differently. Everything about her had stopped making sense. It wasn’t like she went around meeting Watchers’ kids—Merrick had been sorta cagey about the topic of family, and he’d been the only Watcher she’d met before Mr. Giles—but it was hard for her to imagine Watchers’ kids as anything other than dry, boring copies of their dry, boring parents. Brie was British, which, in retrospect, should totally have been a tip-off, and she had hair the color of semisweet chocolate, which was maybe only a shade or two darker than Mr. Giles, but other than that, she didn’t look anything like him. She didn’t even carry herself like him. It was basically impossible to imagine Mr. Giles raising a daughter like this.

“Buffy?” said Willow.

“No, it’s all right!” said Brie, who looked extremely amused. “It does tend to surprise people. Dad’s a bit of a cryptid.”

“That’s definitely the word for it,” said Buffy under her breath.

“She takes after her mom,” said Willow, knocking Brie’s shoulder. Brie preened.

“Giles is married?!” said Buffy, realized that this sounded incredibly suspicious, and tried to modulate her expression. “Uh, I mean—”

Brie started laughing very hard and had to hide her face in her drink. “No, stop!” said Willow to Brie. “Stop! Your dad’s nice, he’s fun, he’s—”

“He’s DREADFUL,” Brie wheezed. “He doesn’t know how to talk to ANYONE!!”

Buffy felt irrationally betrayed. Her immediate connection to Brie, Brie’s interest in her—all of it was now pretty freaking suspicious. “Well,” she said, deciding to steer the conversation into relatively safer waters. “On the subject of boyfriends—”

“Oh, I don’t have any,” said Willow immediately. “Neither of us have any. We’re boyfriend kryptonite.”

Brie nodded very seriously. “My parents are a bit…much,” she said delicately, “and Willow’s a bit…um…”

“Terrified,” said Willow. “Of everything.”

“Well,” said Buffy. “My philosophy—do you want to hear my philosophy?” When Willow and Brie both nodded, she leaned forward. “Life is short.”

“Life is short?” Willow echoed.

“Yep,” Buffy agreed. “Too short to be worrying about being all shy in front of a boy, or upsetting your—” God, she had no idea how to process this. “Your, uh, dad. Seize the moment, because tomorrow, you might be dead.”

“Carpe diem!” said Brie brightly.

“…Okay!” said Buffy. “Well—”

“Oh, no,” said Willow abruptly. Her eyes were on a point somewhere above Buffy.

Buffy followed Willow’s gaze. Of all people, Giles was standing on the balcony, looking down at the students with an extremely uncomfortable expression. It didn’t look like he’d seen them yet, but it did look like he could if he chose to look.

“Oh, great,” said Brie through her teeth. “Willow, I need your sweater.”

“I need my sweater!” Willow objected. “It hides my arms!”

“Dad goes mental if I’m out after dark!” said Brie. “I told him I’d be at yours! If he sees me here, I’m going to be in so much trouble!!”

“Okay, well, maybe lying to your parents isn’t always the best idea ever?” Willow countered. “Maybe you should just, I don’t know, tell your dad where you’re going?”

“Buffy,” said Brie beseechingly. “Do you have anything I can hide behind?”

Eyes narrowed, Buffy considered this new development. “You know what?” she finally said. “I’ll go up there and distract him.”

“You’ll what?” said Willow.

“Oh, you’re a gem!!!” said Brie, throwing her arms somewhat dramatically around Buffy. Seriously, Buffy could not figure out how this was Giles’s kid. “Thank you so much! I’ll buy you a drink when you get back down, really!”

“…Okay!” said Buffy, awkwardly patting Brie on the back, and carefully untangled herself from—oh my god, Brie was wearing a tweed blazer. So there had definitely been some clues.

Giles turned towards Buffy when she approached him, and she found that she suddenly had no idea where to start. She’d usually open with something quippy and snippy, but there was really only one thought in her head, so she just opened her mouth and said it. “Brie Sykorova is your daughter?” she said. “You two don’t even have the same last name!”

“That—” Giles went all pink. “It’s, it’s a long story, and I’m not—that is—it’s hardly relevant to your duties as the Slayer!” he finished defensively.

“Oh, it’s not relevant?” said Buffy. “Your daughter’s been buttering me up all day and I’m expected to believe you haven’t set me up?”

Giles looked genuinely insulted, then genuinely pissed off. “February is not in any way involved in my calling,” he said. “I would never use my daughter as some sort of—of pawn to emotionally manipulate you, or anyone. I realize you don’t know me very well, but I’ll thank you not to assume the worst of me or of February based only on the fact that she is an outrageously friendly individual.”

Buffy wasn’t completely ready to put down her anger. “So why the hell didn’t she tell me she knows I’m the Slayer?”

“Because—” Giles’s eyes dropped. When he looked back up again, his expression was much more guarded. “Because she doesn’t know,” he said.

Something about that itched under Buffy’s skin. She didn’t know how to voice it, or why it bothered her, so she focused on clarification. “Brie doesn’t know,” she echoed. “What exactly doesn’t she know?”

“Any of it,” said Giles. “All of it. You—your Watcher must have told you the importance of secrecy regarding—”

“Well, yeah,” said Buffy, “but that’s your kid. You’ve been doing this whole Watcher thing without telling your family?”

Giles hesitated. He didn’t seem like he completely loved where this conversation was going. “My wife is aware,” he finally said.

“So how come she knows but Brie doesn’t?”

“It is a very complicated set of circumstances that I don’t much feel like explaining right now,” said Giles tightly. “Particularly when you’ve expressed multiple times that you’ve no interest in pursuing your calling.”

Now that was just playing dirty. “Would you tell me if I was a good little Slayer?” said Buffy, just as testily. “Or would you just get some guy to give me more cryptic warnings about the Harvest coming?”

Giles blinked a few times. “The what?”

“You know,” said Buffy. “The Harvest. That thing your friend was talking about.”

“My what?”

What was she talking about? Giles clearly didn’t have any friends. “He had this whole spiel about the mouth of hell opening up,” said Buffy testily. “I was not a fan.”

“That—this is the sort of thing that you need to be paying attention to,” Giles started, but Buffy was already turning away, scanning the crowd. Brie seemed to have tried to position herself strategically out of Giles’s view, but Buffy could still catch a glimpse of blue tweed elbow, and that loud, bubbly voice was nearly impossible to miss. God, that girl was not good at being subtle. “Look,” Giles persisted. “Listen. You should be able to spot a vampire among—”

And then Buffy did. Her stomach turned over. A tall guy in the ugliest shirt she’d ever seen was leaning in, twining a strand of Brie’s dark hair around one of his fingers.

In Buffy’s defense, she’d kinda figured that telling Giles would get him to 1) get off her case a little and 2) get him to realize that maybe telling his kid what was going on would be a good thing long-term, because then it would mean that she wouldn’t be doing things like flirting with vampires. What she wasn’t expecting was for Giles to see Brie, go white, and hurtle down the stairs, throwing himself bodily at the vampire to knock the guy sprawling.

Brie’s drink went flying, splattering her in the face. “Dad!!” she sputtered.

“Wow!” said Willow. “Um, hi, Mr. Giles! Is now maybe a good time to talk to you about this book my mom got me? It’s called Unhealthily Codependent Father-Daughter Relationships—”

Giles yanked the vampire to its feet, shaking with rage. “Get out,” he said.

“Hey, man—” the vampire started.

“Dad, you cannot possibly be serious,” said Brie through gritted teeth. “Would you at least consider not humiliating me in front of the entire student body?”

“February, I have told you many times that you aren’t to be out after dark,” said Giles flatly, still holding the vampire by the scruff of its neck. “Particularly with those of questionable morals and intentions.”

“And isn’t it terribly convenient for your sadistic tendencies that absolutely every boy I make small talk with seems to be of questionable morals and intentions?!” snapped Brie. “Do you realize how mortifying this is for me?”

“Brie,” said Buffy, suddenly feeling really awful.

The feeling was compounded when Brie turned towards Buffy and her face immediately softened. “It’s all right, Buffy!” she assured her. “I’m not mad at you. Dad is absolutely impossible and exorbitantly unfair when it comes to things like this.” This was very clearly directed at Giles. “I am going to go outside,” she added, “in the dark, where I will not have to suffer the utter indignity of my middle-aged father showing up to fight off boys for me as though this is—well—the Middle Ages. As he has clearly never left them.”

“February,” Giles started.

“You are awful,” said Brie, a wobble in her voice. She turned on her heel, tucking one hand into Willow’s and the other into Buffy’s. “I want nothing to do with you. Come on, girls, let’s go.”

Buffy wavered. It was kind of her responsibility to piece the whole vampire thing together, right? And it was hard to hold onto her anger at Giles when she knew exactly how something like this felt. How many times had Mom been mad at her over something she couldn’t possibly explain? Something she’d done that was justifiable, even noble, but that didn’t look that way to someone she loved so much?

Giles was looking at Brie with these sad, tired eyes. Buffy knew how that felt too.

“Buffy,” Brie stressed, tugging on Buffy’s hand. Buffy’s eyes locked with Giles’s, and he gave her this small nod.

“Sure,” said Buffy. “Okay.” She wrapped an arm around Brie’s shoulder, cuddling her close. “Rough night, huh?”

“Cordelia’s going to be talking about this for weeks,” said Brie miserably, letting Buffy guide her and Willow out of the Bronze. “And I really don’t care what she says, really, but—well, I don’t like when she’s horrible about Dad! He is awful, but he’s not—it’s not—oh, I don’t know,” she finished, burying her face in Buffy’s shoulder. “It’s just terrible!!”

“I’m sorry your dad’s all helicopter-y,” said Willow sympathetically. “I bet my parents have some self-help books we can read at home, though! Would that make you feel better?”

“…Probably,” said Brie, giving Willow a wobbly smile. “I’m sorry we left before we could see Xander.”

“Oh, Xander!” said Willow.

“Yeah,” said Brie, sniffling. “Xander.”

“No,” said Willow, straightening up, “Xander! Hi!”

“Hi, Willow!” said Xander. “Hi, Brie! Hi, Buffy the Vampire Slayer!”

“Buffy the what now?” said Buffy, tugging herself away from Brie.

“Oh, he’s talking nonsense all the time,” said Xander’s friend. “Hi, Buffy. I’m Jesse. And may I just say, you are extremely—”

“My dad’s inside,” said Brie flatly. “If you flirt with anyone tonight, I will set him upon you, Jesse, as I am not in the mood for even jokes.”

Jesse blinked. His face softened. “Aw, man, Brie,” he said. “Did Giles throw some guy through a wall again?”

“I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT,” said Brie. “WE ARE HAVING A GIRLS’ NIGHT NOW.”

“You want me to call Amy?” Willow offered.

“YES. CALL AMY.”

“Hey, we can make it a girls’ and guys’ night!” Xander suggested. “Or still call it a girls’ night, but me and Jesse wear wigs?”

Brie’s mouth twitched, as if without her permission. It was oddly Giles-y. “You were already heading into the party,” she hedged. “I’d hardly want to take away from that.”

“Nah,” said Jesse. “Nothing more important than—oh, shit, is that your mom’s car?”

“I want to die,” said Brie.

The driver’s side door of the tiny Volkswagen Beetle opened, and a surprisingly youngish lady stepped out who, sure enough, looked almost exactly like Brie. Now things made more sense. “Hey, hon,” called the lady who could only be Brie’s mom—and who, to Buffy’s surprise, did not have even the slightest trace of a British accent. “You want to bring your friends over here, get everyone off the street?”

“Mum,” said Brie, “you and Dad are fully ruining my lives.”

Brie’s mom took this in. “What’d he do?”

“He attacked a boy who was talking to me!” said Brie.

“…Oookay,” said Brie’s mom. “I will definitely talk to him about that one.”

“I don’t care,” said Brie. “I’m going over to Willow’s.”

“I can drive you—”

“I don’t want to be around either of you! You aren’t going to do anything that will get Dad to stop being absolutely deranged when I go out after dark, and you certainly aren’t going to just let me go out after dark, and—and I don’t want to be shouting like this in front of my friends, it is mortifying, and thoroughly your fault!” Brie finished angrily. “I’ve only met Buffy today, and this is the first impression I’m making!!”

“…Buffy?” repeated Brie’s mom, and turned her attention away from Brie, her eyes locking on Buffy’s.

Buffy abruptly remembered what Giles had said: my wife is aware. “Uh,” she said awkwardly. “Hi?”

Brie’s mom inclined her head. “Nice to meet you, Buffy,” she said, perfectly composed. “I’m Jenny Calendar.”

Ms. Calendar. Something occurred to Buffy. “So your last name is Calendar and you’ve got a daughter named February?”

“Yeah, you see why we gave her a different last name, right?” said Ms. Calendar, grinning a little. Buffy wasn’t entirely able to stop herself from grinning back.

“Well, fine, charm my friends to pieces, just don’t embarrass me,” said Brie grudgingly.

“Brie cheese, I am never gonna embarrass you even half as much as whatever the hell your dad just did,” said Ms. Calendar, “and I can say that with conviction. Buffy, you look after the kids, okay? I’m going to go collect my husband.”

“Yeah, Buffy, look after us kids!” Xander piped up, visibly amused.

Buffy, however, saw what Ms. Calendar had really just communicated. Just like she had with Giles, she gave Ms. Calendar a secret little nod.

Ms. Calendar gave her a smile—soft, appreciative—that made something long-neglected in Buffy feel cuddled and comforted. Then she turned back towards the Bronze, striding right past the bouncer without a moment’s hesitation.

As soon as her mother was gone, Brie said, “Right. Well, I have a learner’s permit, and Dad taught me to hotwire a car, so I hardly think there is any necessity for us to wait for my insufferable parents.”

“Your mom’s nice,” said Willow a little dreamily.

“Do not start,” said Brie. “Do not.”

“You know how to hotwire a car?” said Jesse.

Brie looked blankly up at him. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Giles knows how to hotwire a car?” said Buffy disbelievingly. She really could not figure that guy out.  

“Hey,” said Xander suddenly. “Is that girl okay?”

Buffy glanced in his direction and her mouth went dry. Another hulking vampire was tugging a girl down the street. “I’ll be right back,” she said briskly. She felt confident that they were okay by the car, and Giles and Ms. Calendar would likely be back anyway. The girl’s danger was immediate. Buffy had to take care of this one, and quick.

Stepping into the alley, she saw that the scene had changed. The girl turned, smiling prettily, teeth all sharp. “So we were right,” she said. “There’s been a heck of a lot of whispering about you, Slayer.”

“Does everyone know who I am?” said Buffy, exasperated. “Was there some kind of a memo sent out?”

“You’re not hard to spot,” said the girl, “if a body knows what they’re looking for.” She stepped forward, face shifting. Bones crunching. “And I sure do.”

Buffy was fast. The girl was faster. She lunged, not at Buffy, but past her, clearly aiming to throw her off balance. Buffy tried to focus on her, but she seemed like one of those types that played with their food before they ate it, which meant that the big guy was probably a safer bet. Stake in hand, she shifted her attention towards him. He was lumbering, graceless, much less of a long-term thinker—essentially, dust in the wind within seconds.

Now it was just Buffy and the girl. She smiled again, that horrendous parody of a schoolgirl smile. “You took my friend’s lunch,” she said. “That wasn’t very nice of you, was it?”

“If you’ve got a problem with me saving people, you’re probably going to have a long-term problem with me, full stop,” Buffy informed her, smiling right back.

“Long-term from your perspective,” said the girl. “But I’ve been alive a lot longer than you.” She lunged forward—

—and, unexpectedly, Xander walloped her directly across the face. “Hey!” he yelled. “You stay away from Buffy!”

“Oh, cute,” said the girl, grabbing Xander by the collar. “How about we call this an amuse-bouche?” With that, she sunk her teeth into his neck.

This was gonna smart. Buffy sent a silent apology to Xander, then rushed forward, grabbing the girl’s face to pull her bodily away from Xander. He stumbled back and into Willow, who tried to catch him, but they ended up in a heap on the sidewalk. “Stay away,” Buffy snarled.

The girl was laughing. “You are hilarious!” she giggled. “Some Slayer you are! Do you even know why we’re here? What we’re trying to do? One little snack is small potatoes in comparison to what we’re going to be doing come the Harvest.” She grinned. “I’m going to save the honor of fighting you for the Master,” she informed Buffy. “I think he’ll be very excited to drink a Slayer dry.”

“A what now?” said Willow uneasily.

Buffy sighed.

With a last little wave and a twirl of her pleated skirt, the vampire stepped back into the shadows.

Chapter Text

Buffy, Xander, and Willow arrived from the alleyway looking a bit shaken up. Brie felt a twinge of her usual instincts to barrage her friends with anxious, overly-fussy questions, but she was also more than a little miffed with them, as their absence had prevented her from leaving with the car before Mum and Dad got back. Dad looked like he wanted to start in on another lecture, but Mum was holding his elbow in the same way that one might hang on to the lead of a disobedient puppy, and Brie didn’t want to push her luck by drawing their attention to her. She already knew that she was going to be in trouble.

“So!” said Mum briskly. “Homeward bound?”

“Uh, Giles—” said Buffy.

Mum gave Buffy a look that Brie couldn’t decipher. “Buffy, I know you care a lot about your schoolwork,” she said, “but I’ve got to make sure we set appropriate boundaries here. When you’re hanging with our daughter after hours, we’re Brie’s parents, all right? Rupert’s job isn’t something you can ask him questions about at any hour of the day.”

“Jenny, I don’t think—” said Dad.

“No, I get it, Ms. Calendar,” said Buffy, “except this is kind of an emergency. See, there’s this…textbook?” For some reason, she glanced at Brie right then, in that same way she’d done before—as though seeing Brie as Mr. Giles’s daughter changed things between them somehow. “It might have some information about the Harvest. I just ran into a study buddy of mine in the alley—might have been a friend of that group you were trying to tell me about this morning—and she mentioned the Harvest in a way that made it sound like her crowd was involved, so—”

The Harvest? Brie mouthed in Willow’s direction. Willow didn’t meet her eyes.

“Ah,” said Dad tightly. “Quite. I’ll look into that for you, then.”

“You do that,” said Buffy.

Mum glanced between Dad and Buffy. Brie didn’t know what to make of any of this. It was, generally speaking, a relief that they both seemed to be focused on something that wasn’t her, but she couldn’t quite piece together why, and the not-knowing made her uneasy. “I’d still like to stay at Willow’s tonight,” she said, largely to test the waters.

Dad’s jaw tightened. “And I suppose you and Willow will spend the rest of the evening gallivanting through local cemeteries?”

“Rupert,” said Mum sharply.   

Brie felt the sting of that. “I’m hardly doing anything dangerous enough to warrant being locked up after hours like some sort of delinquent!” she burst out. “I get exemplary marks, I have sensible friends, I have more than demonstrated my responsibility, why won’t you let me just do things after dark?”

“I would hardly call lying to us both about your whereabouts demonstrating your responsibility,” said Dad, in that sharpened-steel tone of voice that meant she’d really upset him.

“What else am I supposed to do when you won’t let me go out even if I ask?”

“February, your mother and I ask next to nothing of you,” said Dad tersely. “We’ve made it abundantly clear that you are welcome to do anything and everything you would like. If you came home to tell me that you’d no interest in continuing school—”

“—you’d let me drop out immediately, which is nonsense,” snapped Brie. “You and I both know you don’t really mean that.”

“Everyone In The Car,” said Mum very loudly, clapping her hands together.

Brie and Dad startled apart, and Brie realized with a mortified rush that all of her friends were still standing there. She was fairly certain she’d had nightmares like this. “Dad probably brought his car,” she said. “I’d like to ride with him.”

“Yes, that seems a splendid idea,” said Dad through gritted teeth.

Mum gave Dad and Brie a Look. This one was not at all difficult to decipher. Clear as day, it said: do you think I’m fucking stupid? “The last time I let you guys ride in a car without me while you were both mad,” she said, “Brie tried to jump out onto the freeway.”

“I wasn’t going to!” Brie objected. “I was just making a point about—”

“Brie is coming with me,” said Mum. “Willow, Rupert can take you home. Do any of you kids need a ride?”

“I’ll go with Giles,” said Buffy immediately.

Brie felt her stomach sink. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Willow—she really, really did—but Buffy was lovely! Funny and sharp and, most crucially, she didn’t look at Brie as if Brie was some sort of museum oddity. It was very hard for her to find people who made her feel like that, and now this person likely didn’t want a thing to do with her.

As if she had some sort of sixth sense for it, Buffy’s hand snuck forward, reaching to tightly grip Brie’s in hers. “I figured you might want some time without all us kids,” she said under her breath, giving Brie a lopsided smile. “Parent stuff is always super mortifying. Been there.”

Brie had to resist the urge to burst into tears right then and there. “Thank you!!!” she said, mortified indeed. She was certain her voice was wobbly.

Jesse glanced shyly at Brie. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes I’m Fine!” said Brie. “Why don’t you go with—well, with Dad and the rest?”

“Ah, my car only has so many seats,” Dad started, at around the same time Xander cut in with, “Yeah, Jesse, maybe go home so we can—” and Willow piped up, “I’ve actually got some study questions for Giles too?”

Mum sent Dad a flat look. “I'll take care of Brie," she said. “You drop off Jesse, then see if you can answer Willow’s study questions.”

Before Brie could ask anything about exactly what sort of study questions Willow could have thought up in the last five minutes, Mum had bundled her into the passenger seat, buckling her in as though she were some sort of toddler. Brie wanted to snap something about how sick she was of being patronized, but then Mum brought her cool hand to Brie’s cheek, just for a moment, before pressing a kiss to her forehead.

God, Brie wished that sort of thing didn’t make her feel better. She watched Mum walk round to the other side of the car, waited for her to get in and shut the door, then said, “Dad is being categorically awful.”

“Brie,” said Mum, but there wasn’t very much bite to it.

“He is! And you are too, for that matter,” Brie added savagely, meaning it with all of her heart. “I meant everything I said to him, Mum, I do try to be responsible and levelheaded, and I don’t know why you two won’t just trust that I know what I’m doing!”

“We’ve talked about this before,” said Mum.

“Yes, and the conversations are ultimately absurdly unsatisfying. Saying it’s not safe outside isn’t enough of a reason to keep me under lock and key.”

“We’re not—” Mum sighed. “It isn’t safe to be out after dark, Brie. I know you don’t like that answer, and I can understand why you’re angry about hearing it so often, but it’s not something that your dad and I are willing to negotiate.”

“If you can understand why I’m angry about it, why can’t you understand that it’s a ridiculous rule?” Brie demanded. “You might even be worse than him, acting as though you’re on my side just because you get angry at me less than he does!”

Mum squeezed her eyes tightly shut, then opened them again, which probably wasn’t very safe, given that they’d already started driving.

“Do you realize you’ve killed any chance at a normal social life for me?” Brie pressed. “I can’t go to parties, can’t do anything where I might be out of doors at night, all because you and Dad are convinced that I’ll die on the spot if exposed to a single drop of moonlight! Am I some sort of supernatural construct that will dissolve into stardust under the night sky?”

“Kinda sounds like one of those high fantasy novels you love so much,” said Mum idly.

“Mum, you never get mad back,” Brie burst out, her voice breaking. “Do you know how frustrating that is for me?”

Mum’s eyes stayed on the road. “Your dad is in the middle of a cataclysmic freakout,” she said, still in that carefully level tone of voice. “Not just about this, but about a lot of other things. I am keeping my shit under wraps with you because I know for a fact he isn’t going to be able to do that right now.”

“And you’re just fine with him taking all of his extant anger out on me?”

“That is not—” Mum’s fingers tightened round the steering wheel. Brie felt a jolt of perverse satisfaction. “Baby, I know you don’t understand why we’re asking this,” she said, “but when you do—once we can tell you—”

“There is nothing that justifies the way you two treat me!” Brie all but sobbed. “I’m not a child, Mum! I might not be all grown up, but I’m certainly old enough to go out on my own after dark! Absolutely everyone my age is—is off doing things, and I can’t, I’m to just go home and sit around because Dad apparently has fits if he doesn’t know where I am for longer than two seconds!”

Mum stopped the car.

Brie wanted to shout more. She waited for Mum to say something else that she could shout at, but Mum didn’t, just lowered her face into her hands and didn’t move. “Well,” Brie said, still bubbling with excess rage, “this does seem counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Both of us being out after dark. Or is it allowed when it’s you?”

“They don’t make parenting books about this shit,” said Mum, half to herself, and then raised her eyes to Brie’s. “You can be mad at us,” she said, “all you want, for as long as you want. I can’t give you what I know you want, but I can give you this, at least. I love you so much—”

“You think you love me,” said Brie coolly.

“Let’s not start with that,” said Mum firmly. “I love you. I know that’s got to feel shitty to hear when you’re dealing with feeling like we lock you up because we love you, but that is not what’s happening here. You’re not going outside after dark because there are real, pressing, present dangers to your safety after dark, enough that there is absolutely no way we’re sending you out there unprepared.”

“The world isn’t a high fantasy novel, Mum,” said Brie sourly.

Mum gave Brie a sad little smile. She reached across the car and touched Brie’s cheek. “Gods above and below,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true.”

Dad was back by the time Mum and Brie pulled in. He of course did that thing he did every time he got to the Sunnydale house before them when it was dark, where he kissed Mum like he hadn’t seen her in twenty years, then pulled Brie into a brisk, tight hug. Brie stepped on his foot in such a way that it could pass for accidental, even though it wasn’t. “February,” he breathed, like he’d forgotten all about being mad at her. She hated him the most out of anyone.

“I’m going to my room, Dad,” said Brie. “Unless you’d like to tell me more about how I’m terrible and irresponsible?”

Dad gave Mum this look as though he’d expected Mum to straighten Brie out in the car, which made Brie feel a complicated mixture of resentful and triumphant. Even if Mum mostly took Dad’s side out loud, Mum’s heart was on Brie’s side, and knowing that took the sting out of moments like this. “If this is how you intend to behave for the rest of the night, then yes, do go to your room,” he said. “I can hardly see our conversation getting us anywhere productive.”

“When does it ever?” said Brie.

“February—”

“Yeah, Brie, why don’t you skedaddle?” said Mum, tucking an arm round Dad’s waist. Dad turned his face towards her, shoulders dropping, like he was the one who needed comforting.

Sometimes Brie constructed elaborate fantasies in her head where Mum left Dad and told her what, if anything, was so incredibly fucking dangerous about being outside after dark, and then she and Mum moved again, not to England, but to Los Angeles, where Brie would visit the ocean and the rest of Mum’s mysterious family. She knew all of Dad’s family already, and his friends; none of them were very nice about her or about Mum, which always made her feel sick to death with rage. She didn’t look Romani, only was by half, but she was Romani enough that all of the sensible English girls knew to whisper about Dad slumming it with Mum. Hard for Brie to ever take Dad’s side when Dad came from people like that.

She watched Dad and Mum fold together and felt so angry at them both. The world would be better, she thought, if Dad just wasn’t fucking here, imposing his stupid colonialist iron will upon Brie and Mum and making things twelve times more complicated than they needed to be. Mum didn’t say it, but Brie knew, she just knew that Mum didn’t think Dad was being reasonable with all this inside-after-dark nonsense, and he’d only gotten worse since they moved. Sooner or later, she was certain they’d reach a breaking point.

Willow picked up the phone within seconds. “February!” she said. Then, “Uh, I mean, Brie!”

Which was essentially confirmation that Dad had said something about Brie to Willow. Outside of authority figures who didn’t know any better, Dad was the only person who called Brie February, and she resented it. She loved the story behind the name because Mum had picked it, but she wasn’t a February. Nothing about her looked like February. Her dark hair was outrageously curly in a way she hadn’t gotten from Mum or Dad, more bouncy than wintry, and she dressed in bright, clashing patterns so that the English girls never forgot she wasn't one of theirs. She was all warmth, not a single icicle to her. Hearing February from Willow stung more than it ought to.

“Willow,” said Brie, closing her fingers round the receiver. She wasn’t sure whether Dad would come in to take it away from her, but one never knew. Maybe today was the day that he arbitrarily decided it was too dangerous to have phone calls after dark. “How was Dad on the ride home?”

“What?” said Willow. “Oh! He was, um, he was normal! Well, I mean, not normal in the sense that—um, normally he’s kinda mad, you know, when you and him get into a fight. That kind of normal. That’s the kind of normal he was.”

Something about Willow’s frenetic energy gave Brie pause. “Did he say anything to you that he hasn’t to me?”

“Oh My Gosh It’s Eleven PM?” said Willow. “Oh Wow, I Think I Hear My Mom Calling Me I’m Not Supposed To Be On The Line BYE BRIE!!!”

Brie was left with the dial tone and a strong sense that Willow had, in fact, heard something. Part of her did want to investigate further, but most of her—perhaps all of her—didn’t want to find out that there might be something reasonable behind what Dad was doing, because the way he handled her very reasonable frustrations about it remained categorically unreasonable and also unfair. She had no interest in discovering anything that might inspire sympathy. She was furious at him.

There was a knock on the door. “I’ve probably been killed by some opportunistic night-stalking murderer!” Brie called.

A long, heavy sigh. Then Dad said, “February. Can we talk?”

“No,” said Brie. Her throat felt thick with tears.

“You must know, I—” A pause. “Your mother and I discussed the situation further,” said Dad. “She is of the mind that it isn’t fair for me to be as angry with you as I am when she and I have information that you do not, and have made an informed decision to not share this information with you.”

“You are an Oxford-educated man,” Brie shot back. “You’re perfectly capable of coming to that conclusion without needing Mum to hold your hand through all of it.”

“I—” Now Dad’s exhalation sounded more frustrated than anything. “I am trying to apologize.”

“I don’t accept your apology. I hope you get yourself horribly injured by whatever night-crawling thing it is that you’re so hell-bent on making sure doesn’t get me.”

Dad was quiet for a very long time. Then, very tiredly, he said, “In the event that something does happen to me, February, I want you to know that you are the most important person in the entire world to me. Nothing and no one matters to me more than your safety, and as angry as you are with me, I will always prefer you angry and alive than placated and dead.”

The way he spoke made Brie furious. It felt almost as though he was trying to comfort her, the words soaked in the patronizing assumption that she might need them one day when he was gone. Well, fuck him for thinking what he was doing was justifiable, and fuck him extra for thinking she’d sympathize someday. “Oh?” Brie called. “Well, maybe I’d rather be placated and dead, Dad. Think about that for a change.”

Another long sigh. Something more unsteady than usual about it. In perfect Romani, Dad said, “I love you, Brie. Get some rest.”

Brie mumbled curse after curse under her breath long after his footsteps had subsided.

Giles descended the stairs, heavy with his calling, and all but collapsed onto the sofa next to Jenny. She looked just as worn as he felt. “I half want to call my father,” he said. “I really do have a better sense of the sort of thing he must have been dealing with, when I was this age.”

“She’s not summoning demons,” Jenny pointed out.

“Yes,” said Giles, “because we don’t let her out of the house.”

Jenny exhaled through her teeth. “The minute we tell her,” she said, “we have to tell her everything. Every part. You yourself said that it would be better to wait until after—” Her jaw clenched and she didn’t finish the sentence.

“After the situation with Buffy is less nebulous,” said Giles tiredly, which, of course, was the Watcher’s way of saying once it becomes clear how long she will live. And of course it wasn’t an exact science, nothing was, but there were some Slayers who survived through luck and some through skill. If Buffy proved herself to be the former, their time in Sunnydale would likely be over, and disclosing the truth of February’s lineage could easily be postponed until she was eighteen. If Buffy proved to be skilled enough to necessitate a long-term stay in Sunnydale—

Giles didn’t know what to think. All he could really think about was February, so small, nestled in Jenny’s arms and chattering away about monsters and magic she didn’t believe in. His greatest treasure was hardening into an angry, hurting little thing before his eyes, and he had no idea how to stop it.

“You tell me, okay?” said Jenny. “When you feel like it’s the right time to tell her, you tell me. This stuff with Buffy, that’s your turf. I’ve already told you that I think she’s ready for my half of this.”

It felt impossible to imagine February ready to take on the mantle of Watcher. She still wasn’t as old as he had been when he’d faced the Lorophage demon, and he certainly hadn’t been old enough for that at the time. “It’s at least two years before she’s a legal adult,” Giles said, thanking all available deities for the easy excuse that this provided. “In the event that this situation with Buffy is—clarified, we can discuss it further then.”

Silence from Jenny. Then: “She’s almost exactly the same age as Brie, Rupert.”

Giles didn’t want to think about that for very long. The concept of a Slayer had changed shape since the birth of his daughter. Most Watchers didn’t seem to struggle with the notion; he himself wasn’t sure how to feel about it, and tried to avoid dwelling upon it. “I am working perpetually to protect February,” he said, which was enough of the truth to sound almost like a response to Jenny’s statement. He hoped she would let it lie.

Jenny settled into his side, brushing a hand against his cheek. He felt the cool metal of her wedding ring and closed his eyes, bringing back the memory of that absurd courthouse farce and the bewildering joy afterwards. February, three at the time, had been eating flower petals straight from the basket, and had cried through most of the photos when Aunt Vin had taken the basket away.

They had been happy in England, and he missed it there. Everything felt on a knife’s edge here, February included.

“I don’t know how my father did it,” said Giles, barely a whisper.

“Well,” said Jenny. “My father didn’t. So you’re ahead in at least that respect, right?”

Giles pressed his face into her hand. She’d hold him, he knew.

The next day was remarkably uneventful. Buffy, Willow, and Xander were nowhere to be seen at lunch, which Brie didn’t mind too much, because she still hadn’t figured out exactly how she wanted to approach them. Willow had seen a handful of arguments between Brie and Dad before, as had Xander; it was par for the course, with them. Brie had been there last year when Xander’s dad had hit him across the face, and she would have told Mum and Dad about it, only Xander had made her promise she wouldn’t and she wasn’t all that certain she trusted Dad to handle it very well anyway.

He never seemed to know what to do with her friends. She’d had girls over back home, here and there, and Mum had always been a delight, playful and charismatic without ever hovering long enough for it to feel weird. Dad was either conspicuously absent when friends were over or clearly attempting to make himself scarce, which Brie had thought wonderfully silly when she was in primary school, but now she just found it upsetting. She’d have liked for him to care at least a little about the people she cared about.

Of course, telling Willow something that Brie didn’t know was taking caring about to a whole new level. That, too, was consistent with Dad’s nonsense. He never did things by halves.

“Oh, look, it’s Baby Calendar!” jeered Cordelia. “So, tell me, did you get that skirt from a rag bag, or did you make it out of a rag bag?”

Brie turned to stare blankly at Cordelia. The notion of her fashion sense mattering even slightly on a day like this one felt ridiculous. “Is your life so small that you care about everything that everyone wears?” she said, not biting, just curious. “That certainly wouldn’t leave very much time to spend on your own ensemble. Which I suppose makes sense.” She glanced up and down Cordelia’s own outfit. “If you’d ever like any fashion tips, Cordelia, I’d be happy to help,” she added, entirely because she knew it would upset Cordelia greatly, and tacked on a winning smile that she’d modeled after Mum’s.

Cordelia colored. Harmony said, “Whatever, freak,” as though this was in any way a cutting rebuttal, and tucked her arm into Cordelia’s as the group moved along.

“Wow,” said Buffy. “I have never seen anyone respond to a fashion don’t accusation like that. You small-town girls really do it different, huh?”

“Oh—hello!” said Brie, feeling a rush of nervous relief as she turned to face Buffy. “I’m really sorry about yesterday, I-I don’t think I had the opportunity to—”

“Seriously,” said Buffy gently, “don’t worry about it. My parents got divorced pretty recently, and they used to fight in front of my friends about me. Family stuff can be just the weirdest.” She reached out, squeezing Brie’s shoulder. “It actually kinda seemed like you were having the worst night ever.”

Brie flushed. “It was…eminently humiliating.”

“Are you gonna be able to go out again?”

“Technically, I wasn’t able to go out in the first place,” said Brie tiredly. “I doubt anything about that has changed.”

“Well,” said Buffy. She wavered, oddly uncertain, and for just a moment, her eyes darted towards the library. She nodded, as if to herself, then said, “If you ever wanna learn how to sneak out, I could totally teach you a few tips and tricks.”

“Really?” said Brie.

“Really,” Buffy confirmed.

Brie gave Buffy a lopsided smile. It could be nice, having a bad influence.

Chapter Text

Compartmentalizing was an essential part of being a Slayer. There were the people who knew and the people who didn't. The people who knew: Xander, Willow, Giles, Jesse, Jenny—who was apparently fine with Jenny if they weren't in class, what with her being their friend’s mom and all. The people who didn't: Buffy's mom, obviously, but also most of the girls at school who Buffy would have hung out with once upon a time, and pretty much any person who lived the kind of life that Buffy had been all set up to inhabit. 

Up until Brie, the dividing line between those two groups had felt absolute. It was easy to look at Willow and Xander and Jesse and know them as people that Cheerleader Buffy would never have spoken to, and Giles and Jenny, being adults, were pretty obviously not her usual social circle. Buffy-as-she-was-now wasn't (couldn't be) Buffy-as-she-was-then, which meant that the people who didn't know felt relatively impossible to talk to anyway.

Brie, however, was impossible to avoid. Not so much when Buffy was with Giles (she did not want to touch whatever was going on between Brie and Giles with a ten-foot pole), but definitely when Buffy was with Willow, or with Jenny, or sometimes even with Xander and Jesse. It took Buffy a few days to realize that this wasn't actually a regular occurrence. Brie, it seemed, had friends all over the school, but for some reason or another, she'd taken enough of a shine to Buffy to just be around all the time.

This brought new complications. Not only did Brie sometimes just show up with some other random girl who they definitely could not discuss weird monster shenanigans in front of, it was now never an option to discuss weird monster shenanigans at lunch, because Brie was always there, chattering away until your ears bled. All of this was made exponentially worse by the fact that Brie, while completely oblivious to the situation she was putting them in, was possibly the sweetest person that Buffy had ever met. Stonewalling her wasn't on the table either.

"Amy's been a bit weird as of late," Brie was saying, brow furrowed with contemplative worry. "I've never known her to be so fervent about cheerleading. Has she been like this in the past?"

"Well, no-o, but—you know her mom," said Willow, which was one of those vaguely-implied-history sort of things that always made Buffy's chest twinge a little. Brie had only been here for about a year, but that was still longer than Buffy. It was hard to be newer than the new girl. "Maybe Mrs. Madison’s coming down harder on her with tryouts on the horizon." She blew out a breath. "Must be nice."

Brie glanced sidelong at Willow and didn't press the subject. "Are you thinking of tryouts, Buffy?"

See, that. That was the kind of statement that Buffy had no idea how to answer. The response on the tip of Buffy's tongue was well, golly gee, Brie, I'd love to try out for cheerleading, but your dad called it a death cult and says I'm not allowed to do anything but slay vampires forever! "Probably," she said, a private, spiteful part of her hoping that Brie might mention this to Giles and stress him out just a little more. "You?"

Brie considered the question. "You know, I've never really thought about it?" she finally said. "We didn't have anything like that in private school." ("Ooooh, in private school!" Xander and Jesse chorused. This, Buffy had learned, was a regular occurrence.) "It does sound awfully fun. Would it conflict with band?"

"You play?" said Buffy.

"Badly," said Brie. "But yes. Marcie's trying to get me to learn the flute."

Marcie. That was the name of that other random girl. Buffy was about to say something—she wasn't sure what—when Willow, with a sneakily pointed look in Buffy's direction, said, "You know, Brie, I think you'd make a really amazing cheerleader! Don't you think so, Buffy?"

Buffy felt the sentiment behind Willow's sentence, and understood with a jolt what Willow was trying to do. It took her a moment to respond. "…Yeah!" she said, and gave Willow a lopsided smile, touched beyond the telling of it.

She hadn't realized that Willow had noticed how astronomically sucky this situation was for her—and, even if Willow had noticed, she'd automatically assumed that Willow would still sympathize more with the friend she'd known longer. And obviously there weren't sides, it wasn't like that, but for some reason Giles thought that Brie was worth protecting and Buffy wasn't. For a good reason, sure, a well-documented reason, a reason steeped in centuries of history and fatherly affection and The Way Things Were Done, but...

It stung to think about. That by some weird trick of birth, some sixteen-year-old girls got to be babied to death while other sixteen-year-old girls got to just, well, die. 

"Do you think I would?" Brie asked shyly.

It felt mean, being mad at Brie for something that wasn't even within her control, especially when nothing about Buffy's situation was in her control either. It felt even worse when Buffy now knew Brie well enough to know that Brie would be fundamentally horrified by what was being done to Buffy, and that Brie was on Giles's side pretty much never. But Buffy also knew what it was like when someone you loved was pretty much never on your side, entirely because they didn't know what you were doing and who you were, which made it hard not to sympathize with Giles, too, sometimes. It was a big mess. 

“I don’t know,” said Buffy. “What do you want to do?”

Brie, apparently, wanted to cheerlead. It was pretty clear to Buffy that Brie was not actually built for cheerleading, though she could understand why someone not familiar with the sport might think otherwise. Cheerleading was more about gymnastics than enthusiasm, and Brie was more about enthusiasm than gymnastics; she was uncoordinated on a level that made Xander look graceful. This was the kind of girl that Buffy would have laughed out of tryouts a year ago, and part of her almost wanted to stop Brie from trying out now, just because it felt a little mean to let her when there was no way she'd be on the squad in the first place.

Thing was, though, Brie didn't seem aware of her whole doomed-to-fail deal, and didn't seem even half as overly invested in securing a place on the squad as, say, Amy Madison, or even Buffy. She just seemed happy to have the opportunity to spend more time with Buffy, if that was even possible at this point. "This is much more aerated than the band room!" she informed that other girl, the one whose name just would not stay in Buffy's head. 

"Yeah, I think that's counterbalanced by the overwhelming stench of sweaty gym socks," said the girl, wrinkling her nose. "You sure you wanna turn into a total Cordelia?"

"Buffy's a cheerleader, and she's all right," said Brie with particular finality.

The girl gave Buffy a dubious and slightly jealous look that Buffy recognized. This was the kind of look that girls usually gave other girls over boyfriends, which made Buffy wonder—and then she put it aside. Female friendships could get weirdly intense sometimes. "Are you all right?" the girl said.

"Doing okay today," said Buffy, giving the girl her best and least threatening smile. "How about you?"

"…Hmm," said the girl, and went back to fiddling with her sleeves.

"I'll not leave you for Cordelia, Marcie, if that's what you're worried about," said Brie matter-of-factly, which did make the girl—Marcie, shit, Marcie, Buffy really was going to remember it this time—perk up significantly. "I just think it would be nice to diversify my options!"

Marcie didn't look completely comforted by this, but she did look marginally more cheerful—though that wasn't saying very much. "Just try not to metamorphose into some vapid social climber overnight," she said, giving Buffy yet another sideways look that suggested she thought Buffy wasn't too far from that, for wanting to cheerlead.

Buffy was starting to think she didn't like Marcie all that much. 

“Oh, Amy!!” said Brie delightedly, throwing her arms around a new arrival to their small crowd. The girl in question looked somewhat uncomfortable with Brie’s abundant affection, but also like she was trying to look like she was cool with it, which pinged something in the back of Buffy’s head. She wasn’t sure what just yet. “I haven’t seen you in ages!! I tried to call you the other night, but you didn’t pick up—”

“Well, you know my mom,” said Amy, squirming delicately away from Brie. “No phones after eight PM.”

“That is a rubbish rule and your mother is a rubbish person,” said Brie without missing a beat. “Anyone who doesn’t allow you your snack foods of choice should be outlawed.”

Amy smiled somewhat tensely and didn’t respond. Buffy felt a twinge of sympathy. She couldn’t imagine how she’d feel if anyone started shit-talking her dad, even if she did feel incredibly complicated feelings about him. “Moms are complicated,” she said, smiling gently at Amy, and hoping that this would come off as ambiguous enough not to sound like she was trying to one-up Brie. God, she used to be better at this.

“My mom’s pretty simple, I think,” said Amy. Her smile was icy and strained, her eyes strangely cold. Were all of Brie’s non-Willow friends just slightly uncanny, or was it something to do with that Hellmouth thing Giles had been talking about? “She’s set a high bar, but if I work hard enough, I’m sure I can live up to her legacy.”

Willow and Brie exchanged a slightly concerned look. “Amy, are you okay?” said Willow. “You seem a little…”

“Fizzy,” said Brie. “Around the edges.”

“Okay,” said Willow, mouth twitching, “now you seem a little.”

Brie waved a dismissive hand and didn’t elaborate.

“Amber Grove?” called one of the senior girls, and one of those girls skipped forward: a girl who Buffy could tell would make the squad, just by looking. She carried herself with that perfect blend of poise and pride, she moved through her perfectly choreographed routine with the kind of precise movements that only came from hours and hours of practice…it almost reminded Buffy of slaying. Maybe that was part of why she wanted to get back into it again.

“Oh, wow,” said Brie, who didn’t look half as bothered by Amber Grove’s prowess as any self-respecting future cheerleader should. Girls clawed each other to death for a spot on the squad; that was how it had always worked back at Hemery—yet Brie was just watching, and smiling. “She’s really talented!”

“She trained with Benson,” said Amy, half wistful. “He’s the best coach money can buy.”

“They have cheerleading coaches?” said Buffy and Brie in unison—Buffy unnerved, Brie skeptical.

“Oh, yeah,” said Amy. “You don’t? I train with my mom—three hours in the morning, three at night.”

“…Goodness,” said Brie, and blinked a few times. “You Americans really do things differently.”

“Hey, I don’t have a cheerleading coach,” Buffy countered. “Maternal or otherwise. This is just as new to me as it is to you.”

“Were you a cheerleader at your old school, then?” said Brie with great interest.

Buffy was opening her mouth to answer when Willow said, abruptly, “That girl’s on fire!”

“Oh, please,” said Cordelia from somewhere nearby. “She’s not that good.”

But then Buffy smelled the smoke. Apparently things couldn’t stay reasonably normal for any longer than about five minutes.

Conveniently, Brie was more than happy to walk Amber to the nurse’s office. Of course, because some cosmic force seemed to have it out for Buffy, Giles, who must have found out about the whole thing through the grapevine, all but sprinted up to her in the hall and opened with, “What the hell happened to my daughter?” which Buffy did not appreciate. Was it suddenly her responsibility to babysit Brie specifically? They were the same age.

“Rupert, please behave like a human person,” said Jenny, gripping Giles’s elbow and towing him back. Buffy loved Jenny with every fiber of her being. “Buffy, is everything okay?”

“Brie’s fine,” said Buffy testily. “She wanted to take Amber to the nurse’s office.”

Giles smiled, all gooey. He wasn’t saying it, but Buffy could see the pride in his eyes, and it suddenly made her feel like kicking something. She’d saved someone, just like he was always telling her she needed to do, and his attention was on his kid? The guy could not shut up about how important it was that she focus primarily on her sacred calling, but she hadn’t had a single conversation with him that didn’t somehow involve how worried he was about raising his precious princess on a Hellmouth. At this point, she actually missed Merrick.

“Briefing?” said Jenny, already starting to steer Giles towards the library.

“Briefing,” Buffy agreed. Willow, Xander, and Jesse weren’t far behind.

Jenny gave Buffy a small smile and a thumbs-up.

Not for the first time, Buffy found herself wishing that Jenny was her Watcher. Jenny did seem to care about things that weren’t Brie or Giles, which put her worlds ahead of Buffy’s other Watcher option. She liked that Jenny didn’t make her feel like an inconvenience, and communicated this with a little thumbs-up right back.

The briefing itself was pretty short. There weren’t a lot of long ways to say “a girl caught on fire.” Giles started in on spontaneous human combustion, but Jenny held up a hand and said, “Sounds a little like witchcraft,” which made him give her a reproachful look that clearly communicated he’d been wanting to theorize a little more for a captive audience. Willow offered to search the Net for combustion and witchcraft, Giles said he’d use his office computer for combustion and Willow could look into witchcraft, and so on, and so forth. Pretty much the standard Sunnydale fare.

Buffy wasn’t all the way paying attention. Some small, petty part of her felt like maybe she shouldn’t have to. If Giles cared about Brie so much, enough that it eclipsed even that all-important Watcher calling, how could it possibly be fair for him to ask her to give up things she loved for the sake of the greater good? Sure, cheerleading wasn’t exactly the same thing as having a daughter, but Giles didn’t even process when Buffy did do the kind of stuff he was asking her to do. She didn’t completely see the point in trying when she was faced with that.

“Amber’s all right!!” said Brie in homeroom the next day, as though Buffy hadn’t been talking endlessly with Giles and the rest about exactly that. “A bit shaken up, some burns, but nothing serious. Are pyrotechnics generally part of American cheerleading, or was she just overly ambitious?”

“Hmm,” said Buffy, seriously considering the question. “Maybe both? But we don’t go setting fires in enclosed spaces, like, all the time.”

“Saving it for holidays and weekends,” Brie agreed sagely. “Makes sense.” She bit her lip, clearly considering something, then said shyly, “Um, I was thinking about inviting you and the rest over for a sleepover this weekend, if you aren’t busy? It’s been a while since—well—everyone in America has been really lovely, and—”

“Me and the rest?” Buffy repeated. She was already beginning to see a problem with this—not just now, but long-term.

“Yes, if you aren’t busy!” Brie had gone a little pink. “You, me, Willow, Marcie, Nancy, Amy—though, um, Amy I asked already, or tried to. She’s been a bit off lately.”

That had been bugging Buffy, actually. “You said fizzy,” she said.

“Hm?”

“When we were all with Amy. You said she was fizzy around the edges.”

“Well, yes,” said Brie. “I have…um, I think it might be synesthesia? Or something similar? Some people get a bit glowy here and there.”

That definitely did not sound like synesthesia. Buffy felt like she should start some kind of list for Giles titled Reasons Why Not Telling Brie About Magic Was A Bad Idea. “Glowy,” she repeated, trying to make it sound like she was just a casual teenager asking casual teenage questions, and not at all like a Vampire Slayer looking for useful information. “But Amy’s fizzy? That’s different, right?”

“She, um…” Brie furrowed her brow. “It’s hard to describe. Not everything’s changed, it’s mostly as it should be, but…do you know how it feels when you drink soda water too fast? That’s how Amy looks.” She smiled nervously. “I must sound ridiculous.”

“No!” said Buffy hastily. “No, that’s—” Almost definitely important. Amy had felt weird at that first set of tryouts. “I get it,” she said instead. “Sometimes you just get a feeling about someone.”

“Yes!” said Brie, looking enormously relieved. “And it’s not a bad feeling, to be clear—or, that is, it’s not—well, it’s not a good feeling exactly, but Amy’s a really lovely person! She was one of the first friends I made last year, actually, after Marcie, so it isn’t—” She exhaled, still smiling, but she looked a little unsettled.

Brie had the same feelings around Amy that Buffy did—like something was wrong, but she couldn’t put her finger on what. Buffy felt a twist of sympathy. It had to be weird, not having the explanation for why your friend’s energy suddenly didn’t feel entirely right, and knowing that they wouldn’t tell you if you asked.

“How do I get?” she asked. “Glowy?”

Brie smiled slightly and shook her head. “You’re bubbly,” she said.

Buffy grinned without really thinking about it.

As soon as the lunch bell rang, Buffy slipped out of geometry class and into the library, still not completely sure which piece of news she wanted to bring to Giles first. Her instincts said that opening with why the hell have you not told your kid about magic wouldn’t go super well, so she decided to start with the softer toss. “Giles?” she called, poking her head into the mostly-deserted library. “Brie invited me to OH MY GOD.”

Giles pulled away from Jenny and straightened up. Jenny, at least, had the good sense to look a little mortified; Giles mostly just looked like he’d been hit with a frying pan. “Um,” he said. “Buffy!”

Seriously? The absolute nerve of him, insinuating that she wasn’t treating her calling with the gravity it deserved! “If you guys are done,” said Buffy, “I think you should both probably know that Brie invited me to a sleepover this weekend. And while we don’t have anything super serious on the agenda right now, at least as far as I know, if there’s another Harvest-level situation on a day that Brie’s scheduled a sleepover—”

“I see your point,” said Giles grimly.

“No, I don’t think you do,” said Buffy. She plucked up her courage, then said, “I think someone needs to tell Brie what’s going on.”

Giles looked blankly at her, like he thought maybe he’d misheard her, or like he was giving her the chance to say ha ha, just kidding! When neither of those things happened, he said, “Buffy, I appreciate your compassion for February’s situation, but—”

“But nothing,” said Buffy. “She and I got the same weird vibes from Amy at cheerleading tryouts. And she was telling me about how she can see some kind of glow around people—”

“February has always had an overactive imagination,” said Giles, but it was a little too fast, a little too forceful. He was trying to brush her off. “And for that matter, Amy has been avoiding her for some time. To attribute her hurt feelings over her friend’s changing interests to some sort of—of supernatural instinct—”

“Giles, this is serious!” Buffy pressed. “She’s not just your daughter, she’s my friend! That’s got her twice as close to the action—”

“Yes, well, thank you for your concern,” said Giles. His eyes were narrowed. “With that in mind, I see no reason for you to continue your friendship with February if, as you say, your proximity to her places her in greater danger.”

Buffy stared incredulously at him. “Brie’s right,” she said coolly. “You don’t know how to talk to anyone.”

She saw that land with Giles—some special little Brie-shaped chink in his armor, one that she would definitely be filing away as an exploitable weakness—but it didn’t feel like enough. How dare he? Merrick had discouraged her from spending time with her friends, sure, but he’d never talked about it like he’d have the power to stop it—more like her friends were part of a life she wasn’t in, and trying to keep them wouldn’t help, which he’d been right about in the end.

But these were people Buffy had met after she’d changed. They did feel like friends to her. And Brie—well, Brie was the first friend Buffy had made. “I’m not gonna stop being friends with her just because you don’t want to tell her anything,” said Buffy coolly.

“It’s not—I don’t—” Giles exhaled through his teeth. “It’s family business,” he finally said.

“Okay, well, you clearly are not good at being a family entrepreneur,” Buffy shot back.

“Hey!” said Jenny loudly, startling Buffy and Giles, who had both very much forgotten that she was still there. “I have had to mediate enough fights between Rupert and a teenage girl in the last week, and I am not sitting through another one. Rupert, take a walk.”

“Jenny—” said Giles, going a frankly hilarious shade of pink.

“Take. A. Walk.” Jenny jerked her thumb towards the library doors.

Buffy expected Giles to push back. He didn’t. He didn’t look happy about it, but he left, hands in his pockets and jaw clenched.

“Buffy,” said Jenny, and sighed. She looked really, really sad. “Nobody’s asking you to stop being friends with Brie.”

“Your husband literally just did that.”

“Yeah, well, he lost his library privileges and I might make him sleep on the couch.” Jenny gave Buffy a crooked smile that Buffy didn’t return. When she saw the look in Buffy’s eyes, that sad expression returned to her face. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

“What, that Giles sucks?”

“No,” said Jenny. “You shouldn’t be in this position. You have no idea how it feels to—” She swallowed. “You are the exact same age as my baby,” she said. “You two get along like a house on fire. The fact that anyone’s letting you fight monsters feels objectively ridiculous. I understand that it’s what has to happen, but I don’t like it, and I want—I want you really aware of the fact that I don’t like it. And if there is anything I can do to make this easier on you, I am there, okay?”

Buffy opened her mouth, fully prepared to say something angry and snappy, like she had with Giles and Merrick, but all of a sudden she was thinking about her mom, and how her mom would never, never, ever let any of this happen to her if she knew it was happening, how her mom would try and fight every vampire for Buffy and almost definitely get herself killed in the process. And Jenny was a mom—not her mom, but somebody’s mom—which meant she got it, really got it, how awful it was that Buffy was doing this.

Her face crumpled. Her words were gone.

“Oh, Buffy,” said Jenny, her voice catching in that way that it did when you were talking to a hurt little kid, all heartbroken sympathy. How long had it been since anybody older than Buffy had said that it sucked, her going through this? How long had it been since—since someone had hugged her, hard, like a mom even if not like the right mom, the one Buffy wanted in the know?

Jenny’s hands were cool and soft and her arms were strong enough that, even though Buffy had to hold her Slayer strength back, it still felt like Jenny could hold her up.

When Giles did come back, Jenny said without missing a beat, “Buffy and Brie are staying friends, Rupert,” and Giles just kind of nodded and sat down heavily in one of the chairs. He looked weighed down by something Buffy really didn’t understand, and so did Jenny, so she figured she might have overstayed her welcome just a little. She got up and walked outside.

Brie was standing by a row of lockers, looking inches away from biting someone. She sparkled when she saw Buffy, but it was like how hot flames sparkled—dangerous, and a little angry. “Buffy!” she said. “Hello! I’m to wait until mum and dad are done doing whatever it is they’re always doing!”

Why was it so ridiculously complicated to be friends with someone who was so nice? Buffy managed a weak smile. “I’m really looking forward to that sleepover,” she said.

Brie seemed just as relieved as Buffy at the excuse to talk about something else. “Me too!” she said excitedly. “I read that it’s generally the in thing to watch romantic comedies when you’re with your friends at an American slumber party, but I found this absolutely marvelous stop-motion animation film—Parisian, but it’s got subtitles, and I feel that it may set a new precedent in slumber party trends. Do you know, I haven’t had a slumber party in ages? It didn’t even occur to me until recently! I tend to spend time with Willow and Marcie and Nancy all separately, and Amy’s been round less and less, but spending time with you and Willow and Marcie on occasion made me realize, gosh, I do have enough friends to properly invite over, and we even have a guest room that’s never in use!”

She was so chattery. It was nice. Buffy leaned against the lockers and rested her head against Brie’s shoulder.

“Buffy,” said Brie, her voice softening, “are you all right?”

“We’re just a couple of normal girls, huh?” said Buffy. “Sleepovers and chick flicks and complicated inter-friend emotional politics. All we need now are some boys to crush on and we’ll have hit just about every cliché on your American Teenager Checklist.”

“You joke,” said Brie, “but I do have a checklist.”

“I’ll bet you do,” said Buffy, and smiled. It was nice, this whole almost-normal thing.

Chapter Text

Brie’s room was a state. She’d been living there for a year, and half of everything was somehow still in boxes, which was acceptable in front of Willow and Marcie but hardly reasonable in front of Buffy. Willow and Marcie had known her when she’d first moved in, when it was still relatively socially appropriate to say “oh, sorry about the boxes” and smile sheepishly, and by this point in the friendship it was abundantly clear that they still liked her at any amount of unpacked boxes—but Buffy had only met her very recently, and knew that she’d been living here for a year, and this meant that it wasn’t impossible that she might come over and see the boxes and go gosh, Brie, you certainly aren’t very organized!

Which, well, Brie wasn’t, but she at least wanted her room to look as though she could be, instead of having multicolored bras strewn across the half-full dresser and a plethora of stuffed animals on the floor. (That one she felt a bit bad about. They deserved a nicer home.) She spent much of Friday evening darting around the house at top speed, trying to ensure that everything looked at least reasonably normal—a tall order, when your dad collected freaky artifacts that looked as though they could have been taken from a haunted house.

“Brie cheese,” said Mum, who had already settled onto the sofa with a strange antique book from Dad’s office, “you know most of these girls have been here before, right?”

“This is a slumber party,” said Brie. “This is an entirely different context! They won’t be in my room the whole time, they’ll be—we’ll be out and about and around all of Dad’s garbage!”

“Be nice to the antiques,” said Mum, considered, and added with a small smirk, “Dad included.”

They both giggled. Brie felt that satisfied curl of flame inside her. She knew Mum loved Dad, but Mum still would make fun of him, and that made Brie feel like there was hope vis-à-vis Mum leaving Dad, someday. Small steps. She’d work up to it. “Dad’s not here,” she persisted, “and he’s not going to be here, if the hours he’s keeping lately have been any indication.”

Mum hesitated.

“What?” said Brie.

“Honey, you know Dad’s going to be here tonight, right?” said Mum.

Brie rolled her eyes. “Oh, well,” she said. “It’s not as though he’s actually going to engage with any of my friends. Him being here, him not being here, not too much of a difference, is there?”

Now Mum didn’t look half so happy. Brie never quite knew where the line was. So it was fine to say Dad’s ridiculous little crystal balls and fanged statues were garbage, but saying Dad himself was garbage, that wasn’t allowed? “Are you going to be okay if he does try and say hi?” she said.

“You and I both know he doesn’t care even slightly about me,” said Brie coolly.

Mum bit her lip and looked at Brie with that sympathetic expression that meant she was thinking about—well, things that Brie was not thinking about, not even slightly, and refused to entertain for even a second. “I know that you really want to have the kind of independence that a lot of kids have at your age,” she started.

This sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a feelings conversation. That, or possibly a you know you can’t go outside for reasons we won’t explain conversation, neither of which remotely appealed to Brie. “My room is a state,” she said briskly. “I need to go put up some more posters.”

“You finally unpacking?” said Mum, standing up with Brie and smiling at her in an I-refuse-to-take-the-hint sort of way. “I can help you break down some of the boxes, if you want.”

“I’m fine,” said Brie.

“Yeah, you seem fine,” said Mum, reaching out to tug gently at one of Brie’s curls.

Brie’s chest hurt. “I like it here,” she said. “Better than England. I’d like to be able to do things with my friends. Willow and Buffy are out all hours and nothing terrible ever happens to them, and—I-I’m lucky, really, to have found people who don’t mind that I’ve still got a five-year-old’s curfew, but you—you know how it was back in England. Girls started minding.”

“As I remember,” said Mum, “the issue was a lot less with the curfew.”

Now, Mum was talking about how most of those girls were from wealthy English families on both sides, not just one, and Brie knew that, but she didn’t feel that Mum was entirely accurate. She came from the Gileses and the Fairweathers, both names that were more than enough to shelter her from disdain if she’d just been a bit less Brie about it. While being a Romani girl with a Romani mum hadn’t helped, a Romani girl with a wealthy British father could have been seen as something gorgeously exotic if Brie had known or cared to present herself as such. Instead, she’d taken pride in her difference, chattered incessantly about how lucky, how happy she was to have Mum, never once let anyone forget who she was and where she came from, and the other girls had done their very, very best to bruise her ego because of it.

And of course none of that existed here, none of it, which meant that Brie could make friends like it was nothing, even though it was everything. She felt certain that something would happen to shatter her tranquility, and this slumber party felt as though it would be the perfect opportunity for them to all see how very Brie she was.

“No,” she said tightly, “the issue was that I don’t fit, not anywhere that I am. But the curfew didn’t help, Mum.”

Mum had that look in her eyes that Brie knew so, so well. She tilted her head forward and took Brie’s face in her hands, pressing their foreheads together. In Romani, she said, “February Mirjana, someday I will burn down this world and give you a new one,” which she always said when they both knew the world hadn’t been very fair to them. And the thing was, it always made Brie feel better, always, because she knew Mum meant it.

Buffy arrived first, with her mum close behind, and the look of mortification on Buffy’s face made Brie feel such a profound and relieved sense of kinship. “Hi,” said Buffy, glancing sideways up at her mum, “I hope this isn’t too much, or anything, but my mom kinda wanted to meet your mom, make sure I—well, make sure she knows where I’m going to be tonight?”

So apparently it wasn’t only Brie’s parents that were overly protective. This made Brie feel suddenly optimistic about her own curfew-breaking prospects; if Buffy really could do it, certainly she could teach Brie a thing or two. “Not a problem!” she said, and bowed to Buffy’s mum without really thinking through what she was doing. She decided to commit to the absurdity of it halfway through. “Ms. Summers, yeah? I’m Brie. Mum’s in the kitchen.”

“Mum is actually rounding the corner,” said Mum cheerfully.

To the surprise of both Brie and Buffy, Buffy’s mum suddenly stopped looking nervously tense. “Oh my goodness, Jenny?” she said. “What are the odds?”

“Joyce?” said Mum, and her mouth trembled a little, her eyes moving from Buffy to her mum and back again. Buffy looked down and away.

Brie didn’t know what to make of any of that. “Do you two know each other?” she said tentatively.

“Jenny’s come into the gallery more than a few times,” said Buffy’s mum, who was now wearing a big, cheerful smile. “And I believe you brought your husband, once, though I don’t think I’ve actually met your daughter officially before, which means—but Buffy, you said your friend’s name was Brie?”

“Brie, short for February,” said Buffy, who looked somewhat relieved in the same way that Brie felt. It would put a damper on the friendship if Buffy’s mum deemed Brie’s family inappropriate company, or vice versa. “Have you guys met?”

Brie was opening her mouth to say that she didn’t think so when Buffy’s mum said, “Oh, no, but—well, Rupert talked so much about her that it’s hard not to be endeared already! Do you know how many pictures of you your dad just carries around? There was that one of you all dressed up in a leather jacket—”

“THANKS, YES, I’LL SHOW BUFFY THE HOUSE NOW,” said Brie very loudly, grabbing Buffy’s hand before she had to hear more about how much Dad loved her and how, apparently, that made her immediately trustworthy without even a second of consideration necessary. “IF THAT’S ALL RIGHT WITH YOU?”

Buffy’s mum looked a bit confused. Mum said, sotto voce, “Things are a little tense between Brie and her dad at the moment,” which felt very much like Mum was minimizing the issue, but at least Buffy’s mum seemed to understand things better. “Buffy!” Mum added smoothly. “Everything going okay with Amy?”

“Amy?” Brie repeated.

“Oh, yeah!” said Buffy, turning pink. “I’m sorry, Brie, I—it must have slipped my mind, I actually ended up having the chance to ask Amy whether she wanted to come to your party, and she said she’s, uh, gotten over her whole cheerleading-for-mom thing,” this with a bizarrely intense look towards Mum, “and I guess that me, uh, checking in with Amy must have—um, somehow reached your mom? Somehow?”

Well, stranger things had happened, and Buffy did seem to like Mum an awful lot, as most people with good sense often did. Mostly Brie just felt all-over fizzy about the fact that Amy did want to come, after all, and that Amy was done with whatever parental nightmare she’d been working through. “That’s lovely!” she said breathlessly. “Oh, that’s wonderful! Oh, and that means we’ll have more than enough people to really necessitate ordering in! Can we have pizza, Mum? You said you weren’t sure, given the timing, but can—”

“You know what,” said Mum, “how about I call your dad at school, see if he can pick you guys up a pizza on his way home?”

That was the sort of thing that Dad did for Brie when she had friends over, and whenever she asked, to boot. Brie wanted to say something particularly terrible about Dad, mostly to make herself feel better, but she didn’t really feel as though it was wise to do this in front of Buffy’s mum. “…Sounds lovely,” she said grudgingly.

“Great,” said Mum. “Why don’t you show Buffy the house? Joyce and I can catch up.”

Brie obliged. There wasn’t too much house to show, by her estimation, but Buffy seemed quite impressed. This possibly meant that Brie’s experience growing up in Dad’s country home might be something alien here, which made her feel all sorts of mixed up—back home, the girls she’d gone to school with had all been Someone Of Consequence, with homes and ponies and dresses and all those other lovely things.

The girls here didn’t live in houses like that, nor did Brie, anymore, which was part of why staying in this house felt so claustrophobic. She belonged outside after dark, lying in the grass in fields that still counted as home, because they belonged to Dad. None of that felt like a communicable feeling, though, so she settled for showing Buffy the rooms that now felt a bit bigger with someone to be delighted by how big they were.

Buffy stopped in the hall. Her eyes had landed on a picture that Brie had run past too many times to think very much about. “Is that…you and Giles?” she said.

Brie’s heart tightened. She didn’t say anything, just stared at the photo and wished it wasn’t there, then wished Buffy didn’t care very much about it. Buffy, however, was staring too. “…Yes,” said Brie, hoping that her saying something would mean that Buffy would lose interest.

Buffy didn’t. “You’re, what, twelve?” she said softly. “In that picture?”

“I don’t know,” said Brie, turning away. “Probably. We can go up to my room now, if you like.”

But Buffy wasn’t moving, just looking, eyes lingering on how tightly little Brie had wrapped her arms round her dad’s neck. Brie didn’t have to keep looking at the photo to remember the rest of it: Dad holding her even though she was much too big to be held by now, both of them all muddy from a particularly fruitful adventure in the woods. She’d actually scraped her knee quite badly, which was much of why he was carrying her, but he’d gotten her to laugh enough that she’d forgotten about it by the time Mum had taken the photo. If you looked, which was very deliberately what Brie wasn’t doing, you would be able to see where Dad had ripped the sleeve off his shirt to wrap it expertly round Brie’s knee.

“You guys were close,” said Buffy, barely a whisper. “When you were—”

“I really, really don’t want to talk about this,” said Brie, and hurried up the stairs.

It was fine, after that. By the time Buffy caught up to Brie, she’d gotten the message, and only gave Brie a small, apologetic smile before saying something nice about Brie’s quilt. And that was an easy thing to talk about, because it had belonged to Mum’s puri daj, who Brie had never met—and when Brie said the words puri daj, Buffy only smiled curiously and asked what she meant, nothing horrible to say about girls who should be brought up speaking the right language.

Nancy came not long after Buffy, which necessitated another round of introductions. Buffy still seemed a bit jittery—par for the course whenever she and Brie weren’t alone, which made Brie wonder if perhaps it would be better to just invite Buffy over by herself next time. She wasn’t entirely clear what had caused Buffy to leave Los Angeles—she didn’t take gossip seriously, and the things she’d heard had seemed almost maliciously outlandish—but it did seem to have impacted Buffy significantly, and Brie wanted to make it easier, if she could.

Amy arrived next. Without a word to the rest, she moved forward and hugged Brie very tightly. “I’m so sorry, cheesy,” she said earnestly. “I’ve been going through this whole thing with my mom, but—um, Dad’s getting custody now, which is great, and I missed you! And we could totally have you over for brownies and Dawson’s Creek next week! And—”

“Oh, love, you don’t need to overcompensate!” said Brie, a mixture of touched and concerned. “Believe me, I understand completely. Parents bring out a whole other side of you.”

Buffy and Amy exchanged a wry look. Brie smiled curiously at them, but they provided no explanation, which—was good, wasn’t it? Buffy and Amy having in-jokes? That meant that they were friends, which was good, and she refused to be nervous about any potential ulterior motives. No reason to worry.

Willow and Marcie arrived at around the same time, which was a crisis only narrowly averted by Brie meeting them both at the door. Marcie really didn’t like most people who weren’t Brie, but Brie had no intention of not inviting her to a slumber party, and Marcie would always come if Brie asked, which created a very baffling situation where Marcie spent most of her time glowering at the other girls. She’d softened to Amy as of late, though, which seemed to bode well long-term, and she didn’t look as upset about Willow’s general existence as she had when they’d first been introduced—though, to be fair, she and Willow apparently had multiple classes together, none of which Willow had remembered. Not exactly the best starting point.

It was a nice group of girls, and, for some reason, they were all looking with expectant affection towards Brie, which gave her a cheerfully dizzy sort of stage fright that she was determined to fight her way through. “Thank you,” she began, “all of you, for coming. I really appreciate it. We’ll have pizza in a bit, but—um—” She laughed nervously. “I’m so sorry. This is my first slumber party! I’ve no idea how this sort of thing works.”

Willow, Marcie, and Amy all shared vaguely anxious looks, as though they were worried someone might ask them how a slumber party worked.   

“No worries!” said Buffy, and scooted forward on her half-unrolled sleeping bag, bumping Brie’s shoulder companionably. “I’ve been to a bunch of slumber parties back in LA. I can totally give everyone a crash course.” She glanced tentatively at Brie. “I mean, obviously only if you’re okay with it. I’d never wanna bogart your moment.”

“No, that’d be great,” said Brie, extremely relieved.

Buffy bit her lip and smiled at Brie with a sort of affection that Brie sometimes received from Mum and Dad. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe I’m stating the obvious here, but the things you do with eyeshadow are, like, ridiculous. You need to show us how it’s done.”

So Brie did everyone’s makeup. It was fun, because she loved colors, and matching their colors with the odd little haze that hung around them all felt wonderfully special. She started with Marcie, that soft, warm, golden-sparkle glow that you would miss if you weren’t looking closely enough, but halfway through, Marcie said, “No, Brie, can you make it basically impossible to miss?” which led Brie to give her shooting-star makeup that gave her this intense luminescence. All the other girls swooned theatrically and fussed over how pretty Marcie looked, which opened Marcie’s face up in a way that made Brie feel all warm inside.

Marcie had been Brie’s first friend, before Willow and Nancy and Buffy and Amy. She loved all of them differently, obviously, but Marcie was lonely in a way that Brie remembered, and had used it to make herself smaller instead of bigger. It was perhaps why they fit together so well: Marcie loved Brie’s sparkle, and Brie wanted to find a way to make Marcie sparkle too. Makeup, she realized, was a starting point. And she wouldn’t have learned that without Buffy.

“Can you do me next?” asked Willow, shy and hopeful, and Brie gave Willow the black spiderweb cracks that she could see in Willow’s royal purple. It would have been too easy to make Willow a queen; Brie wanted to give Willow something she wasn’t expecting, something almost scary, just to see what Willow would make of it.

“Wow,” said Amy. “That is not the look I’d have expected.”

“Brie has a particular artistic vision,” said Marcie loftily.

Willow looked a little overwhelmed. “I don’t know,” she mumbled, chewing on a fingernail between now-black lips. “It’s kinda…goth?”

“Well, we can start again!” said Brie, not taking it to heart. The colors she saw were only what she saw, after all. What mattered more than that was what people said. “What would you like?”

“Um,” said Willow. “Green?”

Brie gave Willow something vaguely faerie-esque, which Willow seemed to like well enough. She gave Nancy bright pops of color, and Nancy said with a bit of exasperation, “Look, I like your makeup on you, but can you go for something a little more current with me?” and so she adjusted to give Nancy something a bit more in line with some of the girls on after-school specials. Amy she wanted to give playful eldritch swirls, but when she reached for the glitter, Amy said immediately, “Hey, actually, I’d like mine like Nancy’s,” unusually tense for a reason that—Brie wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she felt it—had something or other to do with Amy’s mum.

She was bracing herself for Buffy’s correction when she got there, but Buffy just smiled at her, soft and open, and said, “Give me something…I don’t know. Bubbly.”

Brie’s cheeks heated up and she smiled. This was that thing she couldn’t explain, the little connecting line between her and Buffy—that Buffy wanted to be what Brie could see in her, and that Brie wanted much the same thing. She brought out powder blues and gentle whites and began to paint silly little bubbles, not just limited to where they’d look pretty, but all over Buffy’s face.

“See, at this point,” Buffy said, trying with great effort to keep her voice free of giggling, “this is just face paint.”

“Hush, you,” said Brie. “Makeup is what I make it up to be.”

“You think that’s why they call it makeup?” asked Willow with interest. She kept on examining herself in the mirror with shy appreciation, which made Brie glad that she’d changed course at Willow’s request. The most important thing was to make people feel glad that they’d asked for her help.

“No, I think it’s called makeup ‘cause it makes you up,” said Marcie, who was also examining herself in the mirror. “Like, upward mobility? Socially?”

“Is everything about social climbing with you?” said Nancy, glancing sidelong at Marcie.

“Be nice,” said Brie. “If you two start fighting, I’ll muck up Buffy’s bubbles.”

“So is this a look you’re gonna rock at some point?” Buffy asked seriously. “Full face paint of bubble activity?”

“Hardly,” said Brie. “In the event that I’m painting my entire face, it will only be fully and completely clown makeup.” She grabbed Buffy’s shoulder as she felt the other girl twitch under the makeup brush. “Do not laugh!!”

“You make it really hard!!” Buffy giggled.

“Wait, wait, Brie, you gotta do clown makeup on yourself now when you’re done with Buffy,” said Amy eagerly. “But, like, sexy clown. Not silly clown.”

“Yeah, we’d never wanna make fun of Brie the clown,” said Buffy very seriously, then doubled over.

“Oh my god,” said Brie. “Stop!! You’re going to wreck your face!” But she was starting to laugh too. “What is a sexy clown, Amy?”

“Picture this,” said Amy, shifting forward onto her knees. “Pinstriped rainbow pants, suspenders, no shirt. Nothing sexier.”

“See, that only works for guys,” said Nancy, who was beginning to look reluctantly amused. “Girls in suspenders—”

“Girls in suspenders are lovely,” said Brie. “Do not blaspheme or I shall bubble up your face in retaliation. Amy, that’s a wonderful description, but hardly useful for my future makeup efforts.”

“I could make you a sexy clown,” Buffy suggested, but she was mostly on the floor, and mostly giggling, so really, it was only a guess at what she’d managed between wheezes.

“You shall not,” said Brie. “If the makeup brush is in your hand, you’re to trust your own instincts and not listen to me for even a second.”

“Is that why you gave me a goth face?” said Willow, sounding horrified and amused at the same time. “Do you think I’ve got a goth face, Brie?”

Brie had no interest in spoiling this wonderfully giggly moment by admitting to the odd little colors that flickered in and out of her vision. “You are a bit broody,” she teased. “All you need’s some epic poetry and a balcony to stand dramatically upon, and you’d be the perfect Gothic heroine.”

“No, we’re saying Goth, not Gothic,” said Willow immediately. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there a difference?” asked Buffy curiously.

“Oh my gosh,” said Willow. “Buffy. We have to talk about this.”

“EVERYONE STOP DISTRACTING ME!!!” shouted Brie, pulling Buffy dramatically up to her. This was a mistake. She must have pulled a bit too hard, because Buffy, limp and giggly, fell against her shoulder, knocking Brie directly into Amy’s lap.

“Whoa,” Amy quipped. “Buy me a drink first, why don’t you?”

“You talking to me or to her?” asked Buffy without missing a beat.

Another round of giggling started up. Brie tucked her face into Buffy’s hair, trying her best to muffle her own laughter, and Buffy said, not at all seriously, “Get off me, sexy clown in training,” which sent Brie into absolute hysterics. She pushed Buffy off and away, and Buffy pushed her back, and they were just starting to playfully tussle when Willow said, “Oh! Um! Mr. Giles!!”

Brie froze. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. She had hoped that Dad wouldn’t be around for any of this, and him coming to check up on them felt so absurd that, for a moment, she thought that some sort of terrible apocalyptic event might have taken place. But when she looked up, Dad wasn’t actually looking at her—instead, for some reason, he was looking at Buffy, who still had all the bubbles painted gorgeously across her face.

“…Girls,” he said.

In what was clearly an attempt to diffuse the extremely strange tension, Willow said, “Do you like Buffy’s makeup? Brie did it!”

“Brie…” Dad shook his head a bit, and swallowed very hard. His eyes moved from Buffy’s bubbled face to the small stuffed pig sitting at the foot of her sleeping bag. “Yes. Yes, it’s, it’s good that you girls are all…that you’re all here. All here. I only—there’s, the, the pizza. I’ve brought it. Though I suppose it’s not yet, um, dinner, but when you, if you. Yes.” He took a few steps back, shutting the door behind him.

There was a long silence. Then Nancy said, “Wow, Brie, your dad really is weird.”

Brie wanted to say that she didn’t want to talk about it, but that wasn’t as easy to say in a group. “Don’t let him spoil our fun!” she said instead, smiling as brightly as if it had been painted on. “I still haven’t done, um, my makeup—”

“I’ll do it,” said Buffy. She had an oddly intense look on her face.

“Oh, I-I can—”

“No,” said Buffy. “I wanna do it. I’ve got an idea.”

Buffy painted a thousand tiny little multicolored freckles across Brie’s nose, then brought in the sweeping eyeliner and the hot pink lipstick. It was a daring look—almost too bright to look at—and not even half as silly as the way that Brie had been planning to do up her own face.

“You are really pretty,” she said, soft and firm. And for once, Brie actually felt it.

Dad was gone by the time they all traipsed down the stairs for pizza. Mum was grading papers, which piqued Willow’s attention, and Mum said with wry amusement, “You’ll find out on Monday, Willow, okay? Don’t stress about it,” then migrated to Dad’s office so that there wouldn’t be pizza grease on someone else’s homework. They traded stories, which were less gossip and more about the fun things they’d been doing and the books they’d been reading and such, and they watched television, first what was on, then the stop-motion film that Brie had really been wanting to show everyone. Marcie liked it—Brie had expected this—and so did Nancy, which Brie hadn’t expected, but Buffy, Amy, and Willow seemed more baffled than anything. Affectionately baffled, though, which was the sort of reaction Brie always hoped to inspire in friends.

Brie only saw Dad once that night. She was last up the stairs, herding everyone up because they were going to have a pillow fight (Willow’s hopeful suggestion), and she happened to glance towards Dad’s office on the way. He was sitting in his chair, nursing a glass, with a mostly-empty bottle of something alcoholic on the desk next to him. He was turned mostly towards the window, so he didn’t see her, but she lingered for just a moment.

Mum was sitting on the desk. Quietly, but still audibly from Brie’s vantage point, she said, “She’s only sixteen. You signed up for that.”

Dad said something that Brie didn’t catch.

“Yeah?” said Mum. “Well, then, maybe you need to be less of a dick to her sometimes. You’re not doing yourself any favors.”

Brie felt that curl of hot, satisfied flame again and followed her friends up the stairs. Small steps.

Chapter Text

The thing was, it didn't feel like play-acting. Brie made it feel easy to step back into being a girl, and not just being a girl, but being a better girl than Buffy had been before. Buffy knew all the ins and outs of what it meant to be a popular teenager, how slumber parties were supposed to go, how to make things just that little bit more fun, because she'd led her crew around in LA and they'd always been happy to see her when she rounded the corner. But she also knew, now, that it was important to pay attention to the people who didn't know things, and that while showing off how much more you knew could be satisfying, it wasn't half as wonderful as showing them how to do things too. 

Brie was a fabulous makeup artist. If it had been Buffy's party—if Buffy had Brie's level of talent—she would have known this about herself, known how to subtly present it as a Fun Activity, placing herself as hostess in an irreplaceable position that would make the night memorable. At Buffy's parties, they'd put on fashion shows, pulling together all the amazing outfits in Buffy's closet so that everyone could see how fashion-forward Buffy was. It always left the girls envious, which was what Buffy had wanted at the time.

But Brie left her mark on you. Left you all smudgy and sparkly at the end of the night. And it didn't escape Buffy's notice that Brie had spent more time on her face than on anyone else's at the party. 

They all had to take the makeup off before bed, of course. Brie left hers on. “It won't smudge,” she said with conviction, and Buffy felt a kind of magic in the air about it, as though just Brie saying it was enough to make her rainbow freckles decide they'd stay on after all. Willow and Amy seemed to notice too; she saw them exchange a look, but Buffy was pretty sure Giles had given Amy the same don't-tell-Brie-or-I-end-your-life speech that he'd given them all in the car, before the Harvest that wasn't. 

Buffy left her makeup on too. She didn't mind if it smudged, and pillowcases could be washed later. She liked the bubbles. They weren't exactly the kind of cutesy-glam that she'd have gone for before becoming the Slayer, but they didn't feel as dangerous as a Slayer needed to be. Bubbles were magical and delicate and free. Buffy liked that Brie looked at her and saw that.

It was weirdly cute, seeing everyone in pajamas. The sleepovers in LA had seen all the girls in couture designer loungewear, but Amy was wearing an extremely dorky pajama set with little monkeys printed all over it, and Nancy just had a T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts. Willow's pajamas weren't a surprise to Buffy, thanks to all those fake-but-also-kinda-real sleepovers she'd been on lately, where she went patrolling and climbed up into Willow's bedroom, after, so that Mom wouldn't realize she was out at horrible hours. Brie's pajamas…also weren't, actually, because they sort of looked like something that Giles would think teenagers wore to bed, and they were also way too warm for Southern California. But, of course, because she was Brie, she didn't look bothered by this at all. 

Buffy's own pajamas were, of course, adorable. Brie didn't hesitate to tell her this immediately. “You look so sweet!” she informed Buffy, her whole heart behind the words, her hands gripping Buffy's elbows as if determined to impart the veracity of her statement through touch. “And these are so soft! Oh, wow, you're always wearing just the loveliest things, Buffy, I feel as though we should take notes from you!”

This really was not like any slumber party Buffy had ever been to. Usually, the hostess was more about backhanded compliments than anything, and never suggested that someone else should be in charge. Maybe Brie had a thing or two to teach her. “I do my laundry,” said Buffy, and smiled crookedly, sitting down on the foot of Brie's bed. “So. We're all pajama'd up. What's next?”

“Um,” said Brie.

“Deep, dark, revealing secrets?” suggested Marcie, rolling her eyes. God, Buffy had completely forgotten she was there.

“Do you think?” said Brie, turning tentatively towards Marcie.

It was very clear from Marcie's expression that she'd been tossing out a sarcastic dig at the entire girly concept of sleepovers, and hadn't expected to be taken seriously. It was also very clear—to Buffy, if not to Brie—that Marcie would do just about anything for Brie, and that hurting Brie's feelings was, in Marcie's book, essentially a war crime. “I mean,” Marcie fumbled, “uh, we, I s—I said it, so I guess I must have meant it, right?”

“Well, yes, and I'd hate to turn down an idea, but I feel that's the sort of thing that comes organically,” Brie hedged. “It's hard to just open with a deep, dark, revealing secret.”

Buffy's own secret was sitting heavy on her chest. She'd so wanted to put it aside for the night.

“What about the secret of Sunnydale?”

Buffy froze. So did Amy and Willow. Brie and Marcie just turned innocently curious eyes towards Nancy, because obviously they didn't know why this was not something they should be talking about in this house. “The secret of Sunnydale?” Brie echoed.

“Well, yeah,” said Nancy, who looked surprised. Made sense. A person had to be living under a rock to not notice Sunnydale's weird factor—or under lock and key. “You guys know what I'm talking about, right?”

“Nope,” said Buffy immediately.

“No idea,” Willow agreed.

Amy shrunk into her sleeping bag and didn't say anything.

“I'd be happy to listen!” Brie encouraged.

Of fucking course she would. “You know what?” said Buffy. “Here's a secret for you guys: I really did burn down that gym.”

She mostly said it just to steer Nancy away from the Sunnydale stuff, but the second after she said it, she realized what she'd done. She wasn't going to be able to tell Brie that there were vampires in that gym—she couldn't. And Brie had been pretty clear about not believing the gossip around Buffy, which had probably-to-definitely informed her friendliness with Buffy, which meant that now that she did know Buffy to be some kind of crazed arsonist, she'd—

“Oh,” said Brie. There was a small, thoughtful furrow to her brow. “Well, why?”

“…Why?” Buffy repeated.

“Yes,” said Brie. “Usually there's a reason for a thing like that. You've been nothing but nice to all of us,” here she glanced pointedly around the rest of the room, and Buffy was surprised and touched to see that everyone was nodding, “and I've not seen you burn down anything recently, so it stands to reason that this may have been a special set of circumstances.”

She sounded so much like Giles that it made Buffy feel almost uneasy. But, like, nice Giles. Giles if he was in possession of a human soul. “…It's kinda complicated,” Buffy said awkwardly.

Brie swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “Things often are.”

Buffy had braced herself for more questions, and found herself surprised and a little unnerved by the fact that Brie wasn't pushing. And she could tell it wasn't because Brie wasn't interested, because Brie was literally always interested in everyone—there was an unusual restraint to Brie that Buffy hadn't seen before. Something less bouncy and carefree. She wanted to ask, but she couldn't think of a way to do it, so she said instead, “There was…a guy. In the gym. And he was hurting people. Was—was going to hurt a bunch of people. And I couldn't think of any other way to stop him than—” God, that sounded so fucking stupid. So fucking insane. “I know,” she said, her voice catching, “I could have called the police, or run away, or, or done something that wasn't that, but—”

“No, you couldn't have,” said Willow, soft and firm, scooting across the sleeping bags to gently nudge her shoulder against one of Buffy's dangling legs. “It's hard to make a rational decision when you're scared. I know I got myself into a situation with a pretty scary—” She halfway glanced at Amy, then blushed. “Uh, guy? A while back? And all I could do was just Willow-babble at her. I mean. At him. Because he was a guy. Which I guess probably isn't the same thing as major-scale property damage, but—”

“One time I hit my mom,” said Amy.

This was not the kind of sleepover talk that Buffy had ever experienced. Maybe it really was the weirdness of Sunnydale, permeating everything, even though not everyone here was in the know. “You did what,” she said, even though she really shouldn't have been surprised.

“I'm not, um. Recommending it?” Amy fiddled with her sleeves, only halfway looking at the rest of them. “And it wasn't really—like it wasn't on purpose or anything, it was more like—we were fighting—”

“She was yelling at you,” corrected Willow, sounding more than a little pissed off on Amy's behalf. “It's not a fight if you're not fighting back.”

“Well, whatever happened,” said Amy awkwardly, “she was—she got all up in my space, and I put my hands up, and I kinda—because she was so close to me, I ended up hitting her in the face a little. And that's when—” She stopped the sentence, glancing at Brie in such a way that made it clear what she would have said, then said carefully, “And that's when stuff with my mom started getting really bad.”

“Yes, see, that's actually an even better example than Buffy's of extenuating circumstances,” said Brie tightly. “If your mum's making you afraid for your safety, I think it's perfectly reasonable to attempt to defend yourself.”

“Seconded,” said Marcie, and not in the usual Brie's-always-right kind of way, either. She was looking at Amy with real sympathy. It looked a little weird on Marcie. “My parents are dorks, but they've never done anything like that.”

“My parents mostly just ignore me,” said Willow, quietly enough that it was clear she was half-hoping people might not hear her. “Which is a different problem, I guess.”

Brie met Buffy's eyes. Somehow, bizarrely, Brie's expression exactly matched what Buffy felt: please for the love of God do not ask me about my parents. “Yeah, well, some parents ignore, some parents smother, all parents remain cosmically clueless,” said Buffy as casually as she could. “Pretty much the lay of the land, right?”

Brie bit her lip. “My mum's all right,” she said softly.

“Your mom is amazing,” said Buffy. “Don't even hold back.”

Brie laughed. The cloud over her face dissipated. “Well, we're talking about terrible parents, not lovely ones!” she said. “I'd hate to draw further attention to the unfortunate situations of others by talking all about how wonderful I have it.”

“Hear, hear,” Nancy agreed. “My dad kicks ass.”

“My dad actually does also kick some ass,” Amy agreed. “He's been way smother-y ever since he got me out of there, but I don't actually mind it too much. It's nice to feel protected.”

Willow let out a wistful sigh. “It is nice,” she said. “Or it would be. I don't know.”

“Aww, Willow, you are totally protect-able,” said Buffy, trying to wrap that extra second meaning into the sentence: I've got all the powers you need to stay safe. “If your parents can't do it, I've got your back.”

“Having a professional arsonist on your side can really only help,” Brie agreed, with such earnest conviction that Buffy couldn't hold back a laugh. “Is something funny?” Brie asked, looking genuinely confused.

“You might be the only person on the planet who heard about that story and thought it was a good reason to be friends with me,” said Buffy, still giggling.

“Well, I like you,” said Brie. “I'll use anything you tell me to justify it. And that goes for all of you,” she added, swinging away from a tangled-up Buffy to face the room at large. “Anything you tell me, I'll still like you. I'm certain.”

Oh, wow, Buffy wanted that to be true. So much.

“I was the one who put that dead fish in Cordelia's locker,” said Marcie, straight-faced.

A stunned silence. Then Willow said breathlessly, “Will you marry me?” and the entire room exploded into delighted, scandalized laughter.

It made Buffy feel even more tangled up, all of a sudden, because suddenly she was imagining other girls, other sleepovers in LA, ones she hadn't been at, where people probably would have been laughing at her misfortune in the same way. A deserved way. She knew these girls, and she knew that Cordelia had been heinous to them, and she knew why. She would have done the same. She'd never do it now. 

Buffy woke up in the middle of the night a little thirsty. Waking up in the middle of a slumber party, a room that wasn't hers, a whole bunch of girls she knew, was such an overwhelmingly normal experience that she almost wanted to cry with the relief of it—just a normal Friday night, and her awake in the middle of it not because something needed killing, but because she needed a glass of water. And now she had to go through that normal, ridiculous slumber party ordeal of trying to figure out whether to wake someone up or just brave it alone downstairs, except—

Except, actually, Brie was awake. She was sitting on her bed, fiddling with the end of one of her pigtail braids, looking off into the distance with no hint of that bright sparkle Buffy had gotten so used to. She looked tense and sad.

“Brie?” Buffy whispered.

Brie turned. Her expression softened into something much more recognizably Brie-ish. Maybe everyone was a little different after midnight. “Buffy,” she said, a soft little exhalation. “Can't sleep?”

“Little thirsty,” said Buffy. “If that's—”

“Come on,” said Brie, shifting carefully off of the edge of her bed.

They stepped over all the different bodies on the floor, which was something that Buffy had never found morbid and strange until now, after a year of stepping over real-life bodies as she fought. But these bodies were fine; she could hear them breathing. Willow had cuddled up to Amy in her sleep. Marcie hadn't taken off all of the glitter, and some of it was smudged on her pillow; her hand kept coming up to try and rub the stuff off as she slept. 

They walked past a closed door that Buffy could only assume was Giles and Jenny's room. Suddenly Giles was someone's dad at a sleepover, tucked away in bed with Brie’s mom while Buffy traversed his house with his daughter. In a world where things were fair, where things made sense, Giles would be that guy Buffy didn't know and only saw sometimes. He'd show up for the field trips that Jenny couldn't make, chaperone a dance or two, maybe come to graduation with a big bouquet of flowers for Brie. Buffy would know Brie for years and only talk to Giles once, maybe twice, never enough for things to stop being awkward between them, but it would be a comfortable awkwardness, because that was the way things were supposed to be. You were best friends with your best friend's dad next to never.

Did Buffy want Brie to be her best friend? 

She shied away from the thought. Focused instead on the fact that in a world where things were fair, she probably wouldn't have been a good enough person to realize the worth of people like Brie and Willow, Amy and Nancy, hell, maybe even Marcie, a little. She wouldn't have any of this without the blood on her hands and her impending early death. She didn't know how to feel about that.

Buffy walked past the pictures on the wall again. With normal-girl eyes, they'd be impossible to see in the half-light, but Buffy's eyes weren't normal, and they were walking slowly so as to not wake people up, which meant she had the time to get a better look. A few pictures of Brie dressed up onstage in elaborate costume. More than one picture of Brie with a guitar. One picture of Giles with a guitar, and wasn't that a weird thing to see? Jenny was standing next to him, college-age, wearing a too-big leather jacket and giving the camera a smile that looked way less controlled, way less hesitant. More like Brie.

Brie tugged on Buffy's elbow. “Snooping again?” she said, and it wasn't as easy or as friendly a statement as usual, though it was clear she was trying to make it sound like it was.

Buffy exhaled. “Sorry,” she said, and meant it.

Brie hesitated. Then she said, “I know it might seem nice, having a dad who's really, really present, but—”

“What?” said Buffy. “No. It's just weird to see him looking like a human in all of these.”

Brie looked so thrown that Buffy almost wanted to apologize. Her mouth puckered in the middle, a hand flew up to cover it, and Buffy realized with a belated rush of relief what was happening. “Don't,” said Brie, a strangled giggle in her voice. “You know how I am; I'll wake up the whole house if you set me off!”

“Angle yourself towards your dad's room,” said Buffy, straight-faced. “Get him first.”

“Buf-fy!” gasped Brie, outraged and amused at the same time, and tugged her into the kitchen.

With the light on and the doors closed, they fell into a fit of delighted giggles. This part of sleepovers was one that Buffy would always love. There was something so special about sharing a midnight with someone, in their house after hours, a world comprised of only this kitchen and Brie's fuzzy slippers. “Water?” Brie inquired. “Juice? Tea? Coffee?”

“It's two in the morning,” said Buffy. “I'm not caffeinating under these conditions.”

Brie pulled out a pitcher of water, one of those unnecessarily fancy little things garnished with lemon slices and some green stuff inside, and poured two glasses before turning back to the fridge. “Snack?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Got any cheese?” said Buffy. “Or would that be cannibalism?”

“Cannibal—oh. Ha ha.” Brie rolled her eyes, mouth twitching. It was so weird every time Buffy saw pieces of Giles on her face. “I'll thank you to remember that my given name is February, which makes me a month, not a cheese.”

“February Calendar,” Buffy said. “It is very, very clear why your mom didn't give you her last name.”

As she was setting down the adorable little cheese platter in front of Buffy, Brie's hands went stiff for just a second. She stared down at the cheese as if contemplating something, then said, “No, um. No. Mum gave me her last name.”

“Sykorova?” Buffy repeated.

“It's—complicated,” said Brie. 

“Who trades Sykorova in for Calendar?” said Buffy skeptically. “Sykorova sounds like an actual last name. Calendar is what you come up with if you're in an office supply store and you're out of options.”

Brie swallowed. She looked carefully up at Buffy. “You know I'm Romani,” she said. “Don't you?”

This sounded vaguely familiar to Buffy, but it didn't seem like enough to make Brie's shoulders all tense. “I…think you mentioned,” she said, uncertain what this was leading to.

Brie studied Buffy. It was more than weird. Buffy was used to Brie bouncing around like a hyper puppy, not holding herself with pained rigidity. Whatever it was that she was looking for in Buffy's face, she seemed to find it, because she said, “It doesn't matter in America, really, or at least not the same way that it did back h—back in England, but in England, if you're Roma, it's a problem. To quite a lot of people, actually. To the point where it's actually very unusual for me to go to school and not have girls going out of their way to make my life miserable, which makes me, um,” her voice caught, “quite grateful, really, for how exorbitantly kind everyone has been to me here. So I may come off as somewhat effusive, but it's really just because I'm very excited to be at a place where people don't trip me down stairs and send me to hospital and things, and you seem least likely to do things like that, out of everyone, and I appreciate it, and it's very nice of you to say that Sykorova is a better last name than Calendar and I appreciate that too.”

“Oh, wow, Brie,” said Buffy. Suddenly she felt like pond scum. “That's…I'm not that nice.”

“No, but you are,” said Brie, all wobbly. “You really, really are, Buffy, because I've met girls like you. You know how to make people feel comfortable, and sometimes, most times, girls who know how to make people feel comfortable only know it so that then they can make people feel miserable right after for a laugh. You've always made me feel like you're happy to get to know me, and I just wanted you to know that that, um, that really means a lot to me—”

“I was a heinous bully in LA,” said Buffy, cutting Brie off so that she didn't have to hear more words she didn't deserve. “Like Cordelia but worse. The only reason I'm not doing messed-up stuff to you and to Willow right now is because—” 

She almost hadn't wanted to tell Brie about the vampire-slayage before. She did now. More than anything, she wanted Brie to meet her with those big Bambi eyes and love her even after the whole ugly vampire mess came out. And she was opening her mouth to try and string together some sort of coherent sentence when Brie said, still all unsteady, “But it doesn't really matter, though, does it? I've not seen a single thing to suggest that the Buffy Summers I know takes any pleasure in being systemically unkind to other people. And I'm not—I'm not asking for any sort of explanation as to what made you change, because some things hurt to talk about. I know that very well. Whatever it was that changed you, it had to have—have really hurt.”

Buffy tried to imagine being bullied so badly, for so long, that any scrap of garden-variety kindness had you throwing yourself wholeheartedly into rainbow hearts and sunshine around other people. It made her want to fly across the pond and ritually eviscerate a stuck-up British girl or seven. “So we're just mutually deciding to not talk about it?” she said.

Brie swallowed. “Maybe I'll tell you later,” she said.

“Later,” Buffy echoed, and reached across the kitchen table, brushing her fingers against Brie's. “Later sounds good.”

Chapter Text

Of course Brie hadn't told Buffy everything. There was no way to start the story without it all getting morbid and miserable within seconds, and as much as she liked Buffy, she didn't know her nearly well enough to talk about what had happened after her stay in the hospital. It would sound demented to say that the headmaster had despised her, that the teachers favored the girls who were the right sort, that Dad had wanted to pull his weight and sink the school into the ground in such a way that had made both Brie and Mum angry and hurt. Just moving through a single day in Dad's world left a good Romani girl with a thousand paper cuts, to the extent that Brie's expulsion felt like next to nothing by the time they'd gotten there. His outrage always felt ridiculous.

He wasn't outraged lately, though. There had been a marked change in Dad since the slumber party. He hadn't apologized, which irked Brie, but it hadn't escaped her notice that he no longer asked when she was coming home, or interrogated her when she arrived a few minutes late. Experimentally, she stayed fifteen minutes late after school, just to see what would happen upon her arrival home, but instead of yelling at her, Dad just sprung up, white-faced, and hugged her so tightly she felt the ache of it for hours afterwards, which made her feel so indescribably horrible that she wasn't sure if she could ever do it again. 

Mum was noticeably evasive about what was going on with Dad. “Maybe he had a brain transplant,” she said, which was one of Mum's ways of avoiding talking about things: she would say something that Brie thought funny, that Brie also agreed with a bit, but that also clearly did not answer Brie's actual question. More questions only got Mum to tell Brie, gently but firmly, that Dad would tell Brie when he was ready to tell Brie, which was a much more comfortably familiar refrain, and, strangely, made Brie feel a bit better about the whole thing.

She didn't know how to talk to Dad anymore. It had been easy, once. Dad had been the one to pick her up from school when she was small, almost always, because Mum was still working her way through uni, and Brie had never been embarrassed to fly down the path and into his arms. Dad had been the one to teach her how to play guitar. Maybe that was why, when he'd been so suddenly angry at her for daring to ask why she never seemed to be old enough to go outside after dark, her returning anger at him had been so fucking absolute that she'd felt the need to burn every scrap of love out of herself. 

But he just looked so scared. All the time. And now that he wasn't yelling, she could see it in his eyes, his hands, the way he held himself, which, she thought, was perhaps why he'd been yelling so much in the first place. Because now it was easy enough to notice that Brie's unyielding dad was terrified of something in the dark—easier still to piece together that he was terrified it would get her.

Brie didn't know how to talk about this with anyone. How could she? What would she even say? She knew that Dad was afraid of something, but she didn't know what it was. It was easy to dismiss him offhand as overprotective and ridiculous before, when he was going out of his way to lock her up for her own good, but now he wasn't, and the change made her feel awful, which somehow sort of made her feel angrier. Could this be some new strategy to try and get her to stay inside more? Martyring himself to show how much he loved her—that he would let her do things he believed to be life-threatening simply because the alternative made her miserable?

Except Brie knew Dad. That was the wrench in the system: Brie knew Dad, and she knew Dad wasn't nearly manipulative enough to pull off a long con to this extent. All of Dad's anger up until this point had been outbursts—impatient, panicked things that always seemed to end with exhausted apologies. He didn't like yelling at her. She knew that too. 

She hadn't thought about Dad like this in months. Some of it might have been motivated by the fact that she could recognize her dad in this man, the person she loved as much as Mum, maybe more, and that was a person she missed. Wanted back. Dad was noble and good, cuddly and soft, laughed so hard at Brie's jokes that he doubled over, to the point where she'd thought herself at least twelve times funnier than she actually was for years. Dad was the only one who had ever been able to sing her to sleep, and he'd been doing so even when Brie was thirteen, fourteen, right up until they'd started fighting all the time. Dad braided her hair and told her she was beautiful and it mattered most when he said it, because he was from that world that didn't want Brie, didn't like her, and he'd chosen her and Mum even though it meant getting looked at differently. 

When Brie was seven, the girls at school had started saying that she wasn't Dad's. It was one of those rumors that only got started because the parents were saying it too, but Brie hadn't realized this at the time—had only known the hurt confusion of all the school whispering about how Brie's mum had seen an easy mark and taken advantage of a good man with a baby that wasn't his. She'd come home with her chest tight, already convinced that she wasn't what Dad deserved, and Dad had seen her face, sat her down at the kitchen table, and brought out a dangerously fragile photo album. Dad's mum had the same riotously curly hair as Brie. The same smile, even. Just seeing those pictures had been enough to settle Brie's chest in warm relief.

Dad solved problems like that. So neatly and quietly that, by the end of it, you'd half forgotten that they were problems in the first place, because he'd magicked them into a good memory and kissed the top of your head. It was almost impossible to slot those memories of him in with the memories of him now, pale and wan and yelling at Brie, telling her she was disrespectful and inconsiderate and irresponsible. None of those words were words that Brie felt she deserved.

It was with this in mind that Brie stayed late. Not even for the reasons that she would have before whatever shift had occurred; she didn’t have any intentions of staying out late at a party or with friends. She just knew that Dad would be out doing whatever he did after hours, and she didn’t know how to talk to him, but maybe if she was with him, it would be all right.

She checked the library first. Dad was in the middle of a slightly tense conversation with—well, quite a few people, actually. She didn’t have time to scan the room, though, because as soon as Dad saw her, he went white, looking just as terrified as he did when she came home late. He didn’t say anything, just pivoted, all but stalking across the room to grab her wrist and tow her outside. “February, what did you hear?” he demanded roughly.

This was too much for Brie. She wanted to be angry, but she just couldn’t! Even a half-week of someone in her house who was recognizably Dad-shaped was more than enough to rekindle that soft, heartbroken hope, and a return to their new normal hurt. Tears welling up in her eyes, she hugged her elbows, then said in a wobbly tone of voice, “I just wanted to spend time with you!”

She hadn’t meant for it to hurt Dad, but she thought that on some level she knew that it might, because the version of Dad she knew and loved would feel her words like a knife to the chest. He no longer looked so unapproachably angry, but now he looked impossibly wounded, and somehow that was terrible too. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” she said, all but sobbing. “It’s developmentally appropriate for me to want some degree of independence, I think, and yet you’re acting as though I’m about to run into traffic the second you take your eyes off of me! And I’ve said all of this a thousand times, I know you don’t care about any of it—”

“Don’t you ever think I don’t care, Brie,” said Dad.

Brie wanted to be angry at him. She missed being angry at him. “All I want is to know what’s going on,” she pressed. “That’s not too much to ask, I-I don’t think, isn’t it?”

Dad took this in and sort of nodded to himself. “Right,” he said. “Well, we’re short on time, and there’s no room to explain. You’ll come in the car with the rest of us.”

“The—rest of us?” said Brie in a small voice.

“You’re right that my approach isn’t working,” said Dad. “I think it’s more than time to bend our rules a bit.”

This left Brie in the car with Buffy, Willow, and Xander, all of them unusually jittery, none of them willing to make conversation. She tried to say hello to them, but Xander said, “Not now, Brie,” in an uncharacteristically terse tone of voice that didn’t quite seem like the Xander Harris Brie had grown reluctantly fond of during her time in Sunnydale. (Willow did have terrible taste in high school boys, but it seemed as though there weren’t very many to pick from, and at least Xander had the capacity to be a decent person on occasion.) She tried to ask them what was going on, but in lieu of an answer, Willow said anxiously, “Giles, you said—” and Dad said, “I know what I said. February is riding with us to Ms. French’s house.”

Natalie French. That was the substitute filling in for that poor Biology teacher who had been killed. Brie hesitated, then turned to Buffy. “What is going on?” she asked quietly.

Buffy’s jaw set. Her eyes moved from Brie to Dad and back again. Then she said, “Your dad is a piece of shit.”

“Buffy—” said Dad.

“This is not the way to handle this, Giles,” said Buffy. “I don’t know what the hell your plan is, but this is actively insane. I honestly hope that Jenny kills you when she finds out about this.”

“Yes, thank you, I’ll be sure to take all of my parenting notes from a sixteen-year-old,” Dad shot back, which was also particularly eerie. Dad was nice to girls. Dad didn’t have much patience for boys, usually, but neither did Brie, so she never thought it out of the ordinary. But Dad was nice to girls, and Buffy had never been anything but cordial to Brie’s parents, yet Buffy and Dad were sniping at each other as if this was some sort of long-term argument they’d been having.

It made Brie feel strangely warm inside. She liked the idea of Buffy arguing with Dad on her behalf. Unsure how to communicate this to Buffy, she settled for tucking her index finger under the sleeve of Buffy’s denim jacket.

Buffy sort of smiled. She tugged her wrist away from Brie and took Brie’s hand, really-truly, lacing their fingers tightly together. “I gotcha, little-b,” she said. Then, to Dad, “Giles, you’re gonna drop Brie off at home.”

“Buffy—”

“I don’t care what your plan is,” said Buffy. “It’s a stupid plan and it’s going to get Brie killed. You don’t do stuff like this. You’re the one who’s always telling me I need to keep my head in the game—”

“Buffy,” said Dad, somewhere between fury and terror.

“Do you want me to tell her?” said Buffy. “Because if you don’t drive Brie home, I am going to tell her. I don’t care what you have to say about it, I don’t care if you’re angry with me, whatever you’re about to do is not how she finds out. You can’t do it like this.”

Brie felt as though she should be scared, angry, something, but she wasn’t. She’d never felt so protected before.

“I’m not telling her a damned thing,” said Dad tightly. “She is going to sit in the car while we run our errands, we are going to resolve this issue, and when we are done, I will answer any and every question that February wants to ask me. She will not be accompanying us, but she will be with us; it’s well past sunset, we do not have time to drive her home, and we all know her mother is currently occupied.”

Buffy went strangely pink and said, “I didn’t keep the jacket! Jenny’s giving it back! I don’t see why you’re acting like it’s my fault that Angel—”

“ANY MORE QUESTIONS?” said Dad very loudly. “NO? GOOD. I SHALL TURN ON THE RADIO.” And then he did, blisteringly loud, and Brie had to fight down the urge to kill him herself.

As soon as they’d parked in front of a sweet little home, Dad sent Buffy on ahead. “You’re the—it’s your responsibility to handle this,” he said tightly. “I’ll talk to February about—well—I’ll talk to her. All right?”

Buffy wavered. She squeezed Brie’s hand. “It’s gonna be okay,” she said softly, then let go, hurrying down the front walk.

Willow and Xander didn’t wait for instruction. As soon as Buffy was out of the car, they were close behind. Brie couldn’t blame them. She almost wished she could be out there, too; whatever they were doing had to be better than whatever Dad was about to put her through.

Dad turned to Brie. “February,” he said, “would you come and sit in the front of the car with me?”

Brie swallowed. “I like it back here,” she said.

“That—” Dad sighed, but he didn’t push the matter. He didn’t say anything at all, in fact—he just kept on looking at her.

“I don’t want us to be fighting anymore,” said Brie. Her chest hurt. “I don’t know what I did wrong. I-I’m sorry. But I can’t just—just stay inside forever, just because you want that.”

Dad let out a ragged breath, eyes wet. “February Mirjana Sykorova,” he said. “Do you know why we did not give you my last name?”

“Because Mum’s is better,” said Brie without missing a beat.

Dad swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, but—that’s not the entire reason.”

He always started with odd, seemingly directionless asides, but they always went somewhere. Brie would have dug her heels in usually, but it was dark enough out that the shadows in the car prickled at her skin. She wanted to return to the way things had been before Dad was looking at her like that. “You said you’d answer any question,” said Brie.

“Yes, I did,” said Dad.

“Why can’t I go outside at night?” said Brie.

Dad didn’t answer. Brie almost thought he wouldn’t. Then he said, “February, I would like to make something very clear to you. When I answer this question, the rest of your life will unfold in front of you, and your mother and I will no longer have any ability to hold off the many, many people who have believed for your entire childhood that they should have a say in the way that we raise you. Jenny and I promised multiple parties that we would not tell you anything, not one piece of information, in exchange for their allowing us to raise you outside of the forces that shaped our own childhoods. You have never met my father, nor have you met Jenny’s uncle; when I answer your question, you will likely have to properly meet them both. The world will take a different shape, your mother and I will not be able to protect you as we have—and, in fact, you will understand precisely how unsafe you are, right now, in this town.”

Brie wanted to be the type of girl who wouldn’t be scared when she heard a thing like that. Wasn’t that the sort of thing that brave little princesses would respond to with a scoff and a toss of their hair? She reached for that sharp fire inside her, waiting for anger to return, but all she could see was how deadly fucking serious Dad’s eyes were.

“I will answer your question,” said Dad, “but first I need you to understand that this is not a choice that you can take back. There are expectations that will fall upon your shoulders within seconds. Your mother and I love you—love you more than anything,” his voice broke, “and the thought of you bearing this burden is…” He seemed nearly unable to continue. “Your mother is of the mind that you need to know,” he said. “I trust her judgment. But I cannot in good conscience answer your question without first attempting to impart upon you what it will change.”

Brie tried so valiantly to keep looking at him. She very nearly couldn’t. “Is this you trying to get out of answering?” she said, all wobbly.

“Yes,” Dad breathed, not even a moment of hesitation. “I don’t want to tell you this, Brie. I will not obfuscate that even slightly.”

“And what will my life look like—” Brie bunched up her skirt in a fist, “—when I know?”

“I will not be able to protect you,” said Dad.

“But I’ll go outside?”

Dad exhaled. “I don’t think you’ll want to,” he said.

Brie would have been angry. Should have been angry. But something in the pit of her stomach told her that Dad was telling the absolute truth. She could see colors around him, a bright, sprawling, agonized rainbow, with broken-off spiderwebs of black flaring up like a war wound every time she opened her mouth. “Why did you not name me Giles?” she asked.

Dad leaned into the backseat of the car. Brie flinched away from his hand when he reached to touch her face. She saw hurt unfurl in his eyes, and she felt like the world’s worst monster, but—she didn’t know him, not really, not when every other day seemed to bring a different Dad to her doorstep, and she didn’t want to trust that he’d be gentle tomorrow and find herself wrong about that. “Your mother is the strongest woman I have ever known,” he said, barely a whisper. “She threw destiny off her shoulders without a moment’s hesitation. She forged her own path, refusing to allow others to dictate what she becomes. I have made a thousand compromises to ensure that I can provide for my wife and child; your mother has not once compromised in her determined rejection of what her family demanded she become. I told her this when we gave you the name Sykorova, and I will tell you this now: I have always wanted you to carry that legacy with you.”

“And what legacy would I be carrying?” said Brie unsteadily. “If I knew all the things you aren’t telling me?”

Dad’s jaw tightened and he looked down.

“You said every question,” said Brie, all but begging. “You promised.”

“February, there is no simple answer to that,” said Dad. “Nothing I can tell you without telling you everything.”

“So my only options are nothing or everything?” Brie felt a brief, ghostly spark of anger. “How is that fair?”

“It isn’t,” said Dad. “But your mum and I were given everything before we were old enough to so much as string sentences together, and it fucked us up quite royally—”

“I can see that,” said Brie archly.

Dad looked up at Brie with a harsh, silencing stare. “Know that we want what’s best for you,” he said. “Know that it is near impossible to ascertain what that is, under the circumstances. You will understand if you ask me again to tell you why you can’t go outside at night, but with that understanding will come all the rest. I’ve answered your questions; please answer mine. Do you wish to know?”

Brie opened her mouth. The answer was simple.

“February,” said Dad. “Do you wish to know?”

Brie’s mouth was open. The word was on her tongue, a golden key, one that might let her love Dad again and make the world make sense and, and—

“Dad,” she said. “One more question.”

“Yes, love, anything,” Dad whispered.

“When I learn this,” said Brie. “Do I get to be—normal? Really? Do I get to, to have friends, and go out with them, and be the sort of girl that people don’t trip down the stairs just t-to make a point? Because if it’s not—if it’s just some new way for me to not be right, I don’t want it. I don’t. I don’t want it if I lose what I have here.”

“Oh, Christ, Brie,” Dad whispered, and tears flew to his eyes. He turned away from her, burying his face in his hands, and began to really, honestly cry.

So Brie had her answer. Which meant she knew what she would have to say.  

Dad didn’t even try to hide that he was crying when everyone piled back into the car, now with a particularly miserable Jesse in tow. He didn’t say anything to Buffy, never mind that she looked all sorts of roughed up, so Brie turned to her and started picking little leaves and sticks out of her hair.

“We learned about this kinda thing in biology class,” said Buffy conversationally. Her eyes moved to Dad’s in the rearview mirror. “How’d that talk go?”

Dad didn’t answer. Brie said, “He didn’t tell me anything.”

Buffy glanced at Brie uncertainly. “You don’t sound upset.”

“I decided that I didn’t want to know,” said Brie.

Something tightened strangely in Buffy’s face. “Well, okay then,” she said. “Fine and dandy. Pretty great that he gave you that choice.”

“…Buffy?” said Brie.

“Could you maybe get your hands out of my hair?” said Buffy. “I don’t really feel like being groomed tonight.” Shifting away from Brie’s careful fingers, she turned towards the car window, tangles of messy hair hiding her face in those awful sundown shadows.

Mum met them at the door. Dad stumbled unsteadily forward, and without preamble, Mum said, “Did you—”

“No,” said Dad. “No. Jenny, not—not without you. If she’d asked—but she didn’t, she doesn’t want to know, so I don’t think we should tell her.”

“Rupert,” said Mum. A lot was communicated in those two syllables.

“I’m going to bed,” said Dad, and moved past Mum, walking all heavy and lurching like Frankenstein’s monster.

Mum watched him go with her hands on her hips, then turned to Brie. “You don’t want to know?” she said.

“I don’t want to know,” said Brie.

“Not everybody gets that choice,” said Mum, almost sharply but not quite.

“Yes, and there are starving orphans in Africa, and some horrid atrocity going on somewhere or other creating loads of people less fortunate than me,” said Brie a little testily. “You’ve spent my entire life refusing to let me know anything, Mum, I don’t see why you’d be upset that I don’t want to know things anymore.”

She didn’t wait for Mum’s answer, just stalked past. She couldn’t stop thinking about Buffy’s shadowed face. Was she supposed to want to know? Was it important to Buffy that she know? Well, Buffy hadn’t been there to hear what Dad had said, about how whatever it was that Dad was keeping from her would change her very fucking carbon makeup or something, make her even stranger than she already was. Buffy had been someone once, Buffy could and would be someone again, Buffy honestly already was someone loved and wonderful and perfect, but Brie was only just now becoming someone that people loved, and she couldn’t risk that. She couldn’t.

Chapter Text

Buffy didn’t pick up the phone for anyone for two days, just because she felt like it could be Brie, which meant that her phone ended up ringing itself almost off the hook and Mom made some little quip about how unusual it was for her to not jump at the chance to chat with her friends. Mom fielded a few calls while she was there, and she said that there were two from Willow, one from Amy, but somehow none from Brie, or at least none that Mom got, which made Buffy feel…

She didn’t know how she felt. She would have made that same choice in a second, if that choice had been afforded to her, so it felt weird to even think about being mad at Brie, but it also felt weird being buddy-buddy with the worst kind of rich girl. The rich girls in LA had been terrible, but they’d somehow been more tolerable than this, where Brie pretended to be a downtrodden weirdo but got to go home to her big house and close her eyes while her dad killed the monsters. And then thinking about Brie like that, when Buffy now knew Brie well enough to know that the world as it was could very well change her into something Buffy wouldn’t know half so well how to reach, felt so fucking uncharitable that Buffy ended up looping back to being mad at herself all over again.

But there had been some kind of a change, because Brie wasn’t calling Buffy, which made Buffy think that maybe Brie had gotten mad when she hadn’t expressed immediate, glowing support for Brie’s super-duper plan that seemed mostly comprised of “sticking her pretty little head in the sand like a sartorially challenged ostrich.” And if that was the case, then good fucking riddance, because Buffy didn’t see why the hell she had to pretend to think that Brie’s plan was a good idea in the first place.

“Brie’s been a little, um,” said Willow on Thursday, glanced sideways to make sure no one else was around, and then breathed, “weird? Ever since the car.”

“Brie’s always been a little, um, weird,” said Buffy flatly. “No big changes there.”

Willow gave Buffy a look that was surprised, hurt, a little disapproving. Buffy didn’t fucking care. If Brie wanted things to be normal, well, Normal Buffy wasn’t someone that Brie would like. Maybe a big old helping of normal would put her head on straight.

Except Brie kept on not talking to Buffy. Actually, Brie was going out of her way to avoid Buffy. Owen Thurman chatted Buffy up in the library, and it just felt like amorphous weirdness in her peripheral vision, not the total win for feminism that was scooping up a guy Cordelia was after, because Brie was going out of her way to avoid Buffy. Where the hell did Brie get off, acting like she was the wronged party just because—well—if she’d heard Buffy calling her weird, that would probably inspire this kind of avoidance, but if she hadn’t, which Buffy knew she hadn’t, because she hadn’t been there, she was just doing it because she knew Buffy was mad at her, which was deserved. And Buffy had been really gracious for months about how much better Brie had it than her, all because she thought that Brie didn’t know, but now Brie was making idiot-girl choices not to know.

The dating stuff all felt hollow lately—not only because of the whole Angel fiasco, but also because dating belonged to Girl Buffy, and Buffy didn’t want to be that girl anymore. She had wanted it back before, but now she saw how it looked when you grabbed for it, how stupid it made you look in the face of monsters and demons, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what it had to look like to Giles when she talked about cheerleading and boys like they were things she wanted back. Did he look at her and see Brie? No, of course not, never ever, but he’d been nicer to her lately, way more permissive, ever since the sleepover, and that had been around the time she’d stopped talking his ear off about how unfair he was being to her.

It was really fucked up to be on better terms with Giles than with Brie. It made Buffy feel like something in the world had gone irrevocably screwy. She hadn’t realized how much she wanted Brie around until Brie wasn’t around, and suddenly the absence was loud, terrible, uncomfortable. She loved Willow, but if she’d had any choice in the matter—

Well, that was the rub. Brie was Choice Girl. Buffy was Destiny Girl. No sense in letting herself forget that now. “It’s not a big deal,” she said firmly.

“It’s totally a big deal,” Willow pressed.

“It’s not,” said Buffy, “and I’m not interested.”

“Not int—” Willow looked first scandalized, then reproving, then concerned. “Buffy,” she said, “it’s Owen Thurman. And he likes you.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve probably got vampires to slay, right?” said Buffy. “What’s the point in pretending I get to be a normal girl? Who the hell wants to pretend, anyway? Pretending is what you do when you can’t cope with the way things are, and if I pretend, I’m probably going to get half this town killed through sheer irresponsibility. Must be really nice to be able to pretend and to not even know that you have options that other people don’t have and to just twirl around in floaty bubblegum dresses singing songs about love and fairyland. Must be great. Watch her hold her own against a vampire, see how she does—”

Willow grabbed Buffy’s arm, hard enough to stop Buffy in her tracks. “Okay, I know you’re mad at Brie, but you need to find a solution,” she said. “And it needs to be a solution that’s not just trying to turn yourself into some kind of angry Slayer murder robot, because I really miss my friend.”

“Well, turns out I can’t be your friend and the Slayer at the same time!!” said Buffy somewhat hysterically. “Maybe you should go hang out with Brie if you need a friend!! She’s great at being a friend to people who don’t get up to weird murder activities after hours!”

“Buffy—”

“You’re not helping,” said Buffy, “and you’re not going to help. What solution is there, Will? Brie’s—” Her chest caught when she thought about Brie, Brie with her big, silly smile and her gentle hands, Brie who had decided that she didn’t want to know. How could someone so sweet do something so selfish? “Brie doesn’t want a thing to do with me,” she finally said. “And I just have to be okay with that like she didn’t spend months acting as though I was the most important person on the entire planet.”

“To be fair,” said Willow carefully, “Brie does do that with pretty much everyone.”

“No, you—” Buffy drew in a frustrated breath through her teeth. You don’t understand, she wanted to say, but saying that would mean playing the only card she held: Brie’s half-a-secret, and her promise of more later. She knew on some intrinsic level that the non-bouncy midnight Brie was a realer Brie, a special Brie, someone that only Buffy had actually gotten to meet, but she had no way to prove that to anyone without betraying Brie’s trust. No world where she ever did that, no matter how angry she was.

“She’s important to me,” she said.

Willow gave Buffy this sad little smile, like she understood, even though she really, really didn’t. “I get that,” she said. “But she made a choice not to find out, and—and you still have me, you know.”

Buffy knew with the practiced ease of a thousand and one best friendships what she was supposed to do here. Now was the moment where she was supposed to dive forward and assure Willow that she was more than worth it, that she was maybe even better than having Brie there, that Buffy would never stop being grateful for the nobility of good, reliable, vampire-fighting Willow. But, god, she was so fucking tired of pretending she could be even half of a girl anymore. Maybe Brie was doing enough pretending for both of them. “I’m not a good friend to have, Willow,” she said. “I don’t want to put you through being mine.”

Willow let out a soft, frustrated breath and squeezed Buffy’s arm, then let go, stepping past her. She weaved effortlessly through the crowded hallway. With normal-girl eyes, it would be impossible to track her movements long after she’d vanished from view.

Buffy ate lunch in the bathroom. That was what social outcasts did, right? She did it by halves, though: she didn’t hide in a toilet stall, just sat down under the sinks with her sandwich and refused to think about how gross every aspect of this was. She wanted people to see her doing this, have them think wow, look at that freak Buffy with no friends, so that it would get back to Cordelia, the rest of the school would find her unforgivably weird and loserish, and she would be something well beneath the notice of girls like Brie and Amy and Marcie. They wouldn’t want to hang out with her anymore, if she did this right, and she wouldn’t have to pretend she had options. She could just subsume herself into her slaying and die early and hopefully ruin Brie’s life a little in the process.

The thought of Brie having to deal with her death sent a surprised shock of pain through Buffy that she hated more than any of the other feelings she’d been having recently. She gritted her teeth and turned her attention back to her lunch tray.

“—don’t know what she’s on about, honestly,” came Brie’s voice from the other side of the door, and before Buffy had time to do anything, Brie and Marcie were in the bathrooms too. By some cosmic miracle, Brie didn’t look down, but Marcie did—and Buffy had never been more grateful for Marcie’s whole thing about Brie until now, because Marcie stepped neatly in front of the sinks, blocking Buffy from Brie’s view. “How can I be expected to make rational, reasonable decisions without all of the information?”

“Uh huh,” said Marcie loyally.

“They don’t tell me a single thing my whole life,” Brie was continuing furiously, “they tell me I’m too young to know things when I tell them I’m more than mature enough to be trusted, and then, as soon as I tell them I’d like to stay in the dark, actually, suddenly I’m behaving remarkably childishly?”

“They’re the worst,” Marcie agreed.

Brie sniffled, wiping her eyes, and shifted to lean over the sink. Her stompy combat boots were inches away from upending Buffy’s lunch tray. “Mum’s mad at me,” she said, her voice breaking. “Mum never gets mad at me. And never this mad.”

“Do you wanna ditch band and just hang out off campus?” Marcie suggested.

“No, I…maybe,” said Brie absently. “I don’t know.”

“You know your parents are completely nutbars,” said Marcie conversationally. “Like, sure, Sunnydale’s a little weird, but it’s not weird enough to justify the way they treat you. More than likely whatever dumb reason they have for treating you like this is gonna be really disappointing when you find it out.”

Brie didn’t answer. The toes of her combat boots were still pointed right towards Buffy.

“And, I mean, c’mon,” said Marcie. “What happens when you do find out? Pretty much all you’re gonna discover is that your dad’s got some major issues, your mom’s enabling him, and now you’ve got some half-baked explanation that doesn’t make up for any of the other shit. At least right now you get to pretend that there actually is some good reason for them doing all of this. So personally, I think you were completely right to just—”

“MARCIE!” said Brie, so loud and sharp that for a second Buffy really did hear Giles in her.

Marcie flinched back. Buffy mostly couldn’t see her, but she saw the half-step towards the door, and heard the quaver in Marcie’s voice when she said, “Brie? I—”

“No, it’s…no,” said Brie, a bit more level. “I’m sorry. It’s just all starting to get to me a bit.”

“Yeah, god, of course,” said Marcie. “Obviously. It…I’m sorry too. I just don’t like seeing you like this.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not. You’ve been crying.” Marcie stepped forward again. “Pretty much all the time.”

Brie swallowed. “Could you, um, give me a minute?” she said.

A long second. “…Sure,” said Marcie finally, miserably. She left the bathroom slowly, like she kept on hoping that Brie would change her mind before she was all the way gone, but Buffy knew Brie wouldn’t.

Brie knelt down on the floor, clearly planning to do the same under-the-sink thing that Buffy was doing. Her eyes widened when she saw Buffy, but she didn’t say anything, just squeezed in next to her and dipped a finger into Buffy’s container of mystery meat.

“That’s disgusting,” said Buffy flatly.

“It’s not as though you’re eating it,” said Brie, licking her finger. “And I haven’t had lunch; I left mine at home.”

Buffy exhaled through her teeth. “So you’re done avoiding me?”

Brie’s mouth trembled. “I sort of hoped we wouldn’t have to talk about that,” she said. “At least not right now.”

“Yeah, well, not having to talk about things until later does seem to be your specialty,” said Buffy coolly.

It seemed to be a Herculean effort on Brie’s part, keeping her smile on her face. “I don’t understand why you’re angry with me,” she said.

“Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?”

“I—um, no,” said Brie.

“Because you seem to be fine hanging with Marcie,” said Buffy, not sure why this mattered or why she was mad about it.

Clearly it mattered to Brie, too, though, because she looked somewhat ashamed. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “Marcie, she…she’ll just say yes to everything, no matter what it is, and I didn’t want—well, when you and I talk, it’s a conversation, it’s not just you telling me how wonderful and perfect I am, and I didn’t—really—want to talk about whatever it is my parents aren’t telling me.”

“No one’s saying we have to talk about that,” said Buffy, determined to find some outlet for her directionless anger. “You ditched me.”

“You didn’t seem exactly happy with my choice—”

“Well, yeah, because you’ve been talking basically the entire time we’ve known each other about how much you want to know what your dad’s deal is, and now suddenly you’re all actually, no, I love living the life of Emily Dickinson,” said Buffy testily. “What gives?”

“Um, technically,” said Brie awkwardly, “Emily Dickinson didn’t have the most terrible life. She wrote loads of letters to her—to her best friend.”

This last sentence was delivered with a furtive look towards Buffy, which only served to annoy her more. “Get a freaking pager,” she said. “We’re not living in the 1600s.”

“Emily Dickinson was from the 19th century,” Brie corrected.

“So not my point. You’re abandoning your principles.”

“I—” Brie swallowed. “I’m not you,” she said. “All right? You know how to—to do things, be things, and I don’t know anything. All that nonsense Marcie has to say about my dad—I know she thinks she’s right, but she’s not. Whatever he and my mum want from me, it’s more than I can give.”

That caught Buffy’s attention. “Hold on,” she said. “What did Giles tell you?”

Brie’s face tightened and she didn’t answer.

“Brie,” Buffy prompted, very gently. “I can’t help if I don’t know what I’m helping with.”

Brie chewed on her lip, training her eyes on a point just over Buffy’s shoulder.

“What’s so scary about talking about it?” When this got her nowhere, Buffy let out a giant sigh. “Okay,” she said. “Do I have to go first? Because I can go first.”

“It’s fine,” said Brie.

“Yeah, sure,” said Buffy doubtfully. Closing her eyes, she reached for something, anything, that she could tell Brie. “Um,” she said. “On the subject of your family, did your mom tell you that she chewed out an older guy for hitting on me?”

“She what?” said Brie, an astonished laugh in her voice.

Buffy had to open her eyes to see Brie’s face, and the return of that familiar Brie sparkle brought her a rush of relief. “Oh, it was this whole thing,” she said. “Apparently he’s, uh,” (there was no normal way to frame this, but she would sure as hell try) “your mom and him have some kind of history? Or something? And so she saw him at the Bronze, and she recognized his jacket when I was wearing it the next day—”

“That’s where you got the leather jacket?” gasped Brie, scandalized and delighted all in one. “From my mum’s mystery ex?”

“Okay, yikes,” said Buffy, skin crawling at the very notion. “He is so not your mom’s ex.”

Brie sent Buffy a wicked look and said, “Why else would she be so upset about him going after you?”

This conversation had taken a truly unfortunate turn. “Please trust me when I say this guy definitely does not have romantic history with your mom,” Buffy persisted. “That was not the vibe I got when they were talking. I think maybe he did something sleazy with one of her cousins or something?”

“Salacious,” purred Brie.

“You are an actual degenerate,” said Buffy disbelievingly. “And you are missing the point of this story. I was completely mortified. He seemed like a totally nice guy, and then, bam, your mom’s reading me a literal printout of all the things he’s done wrong in his entire life, just to make sure I don’t get myself mixed up in something seriously messy.”

“Oh, God, they’re turning their attention to other teenagers now,” said Brie, pulling a face. “Next you’ll tell me my father took you aside to tell you all the different ways your life will be much, much worse if you don’t just trust him to know what he’s doing.”

“Hold on,” said Buffy. “Is that what he did?”

Brie blinked a few times and went a little pink.

“Oh my god,” said Buffy. “Oh my god, of course he did. Why is he like that?”

“Buffy, really, it’s fine,” said Brie tightly.

“Where does he get off?” Buffy demanded. “How is it his decision what you do and don’t know?”

“Well, it’s—he’s my dad!” Brie managed. “And he really was upset—”

“I’ll bet he was,” said Buffy, infuriated. “And you said your mom’s mad at you?”

“Well, y-yes,” said Brie, “but that’s because he’s offered to tell me, um, a few more times, and I’ve not let him, and I—I don’t see why I should have to know, if they apparently have it all under control.” Her voice sharpened a bit at the end. “And he said it would—would change me, knowing, and I don’t want—to change.” She swallowed. “I want to stay like this.”

There it was again: that quiet flash of anger in the pit of Buffy’s stomach. But it was quieter now, knowing that Giles had at least been some part of getting Brie to change her mind, and—and it was hard to stay mad at Brie, anyway, when you were in front of her. All that obsessive parental protection had given Brie a Disney-princess sweetness that, okay, yeah, maybe Buffy didn’t want shattered to bits. It was hard to imagine Brie handling the supernatural any better than Buffy had. In point of fact, Brie might handle it worse.

“I get that,” said Buffy, because she did, and because it wasn’t fair. “But whatever they’re not telling you, you know you’re gonna learn it at some point, right?”

“Yes, I do, but I want—” Brie swallowed and stopped talking.

“Brie,” said Buffy, frustrated.

Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, Brie said very fast, “It was bad in England, horrible, and it’s not here, and I don’t know how to feel about that! Girls were terrible there and they’re all so lovely here, even Cordelia does me the decency of only a terrible little aside here and there, and I can’t ever imagine her s-setting—” Her sentence caught in the middle and didn’t finish. “All those things they did back home, she’d do none of that, and she’s possibly the worst girl I’ve met here! And you,” her eyes flew open, big and wet, “you’re the best—the most—you’re brilliant,” she finished emphatically, “and by some miracle, you seem to like me very much, a-and if I change, if whatever they’re not telling me makes me someone different, we won’t be friends anymore!”

“Oh my god, you dummy,” said Buffy, somewhere between frustration and affection, and pulled Brie into a tight hug, sending the lunch tray flying.

Brie hugged her back. God, this girl was a clingy hugger. “I just don’t want to go back to not having friends!” she all but sobbed. “It really—it wasn’t—I didn’t like it!”

Buffy pressed her face into Brie’s hair. She was pretty sure they were both splattered with mystery meat. “Look,” she whispered, “if I hadn’t gone through that whole gym thing, we wouldn’t be friends. You know that, right? I’d probably still be in LA, and even if I was here, I’d be hanging with Cordelia and we would never have even known each other. Sometimes change means you get to be…” She swallowed. “I don’t know. A different you.”

Brie didn’t answer. Didn’t even raise her head.

“And for that matter,” Buffy added, “you weren’t having half this big a freakout about any of it until Giles started talking about how you were going to end up some new you at the end of it. This is totally on him.”

“I…” Brie sighed, soft and wet. “No. Um, no. That’s very generous, Buffy, blaming him, but he—he has offered, and I’ve said no. It’s my fault.”

It can’t be your fault, Buffy thought, because if it’s your fault, there’s a non-zero chance that I stay mad at you forever. She didn’t say that, though.

Willow smiled, big and bright, when Brie and Buffy reappeared from the bathroom, both of them still covered in most of Buffy’s lunch. Marcie looked more than a little put out. Certain that pretending not to notice would upset Marcie more than anything, Buffy gave Marcie her most winningly vapid dumb-blonde-cheerleader smile. (So she was a little petty. She was entitled to be petty every so often; she was the freaking Slayer, for God’s sake.) “So, hey, we made up,” she said brightly, sitting down between Xander and Amy. “Looks like the friend group is no longer divided!”

“Were you two fighting?” said Jesse blankly. “Did I miss that?”

“What were you guys fighting about, anyway?” inquired Amy curiously.

Buffy, who had only half an idea about what the answer to that was, was just about to stumble through some completely nonsensical explanation when Brie said, “Um, Buffy thinks I need to stick to my principles rather than letting my parents influence my feelings about choices that should be mine to make, a-and I wasn’t really ready to think through the implications of that. So the whole affair was my fault and I am sorry,” she finished, turning to Buffy with a soft, apologetic smile, “and I will do better next time.”

Wow. That actually sounded like a logical reason for them to be having an argument. Completely off base, but definitely coherent enough to fly with those at the table who weren’t in the know. “…It’s okay,” said Buffy, more than just a little bit conflicted.

“It isn’t,” said Brie. “I’ll do better.”

“Can you do better at the Bronze tonight?” Willow inquired. “Buffy has a boy-shaped situation!”

“Buffy has a what?” said Brie, eyes alight.

“Yeah, Buffy, a what?” Xander echoed.

“Oh,” said Buffy, “well, I—”

“With Owen Thurman,” said Willow in a delighted whisper.

“…Oh!” said Brie, and went a little pink. “Owen! That’s, that’s really lovely, Buffy, c-congratulations!”

Synapses fired in Buffy’s brain. “Wait,” she said. “He likes Emily Dickinson. You like Emily Dickinson.”

“We’ve, um, had a conversation or two between classes,” said Brie, who was now very pink.

“Brie, do you like Owen?” said Buffy, enthralled. “He’d love you! You’re a total book geek, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.”

Marcie was now sending Buffy a death glare to end all death glares. Brie had started nervously twirling her hair. “I wouldn’t want to step on your toes,” she started shyly, “a-and I’m not allowed out after hours, anyway—”

“Not allowed out after hours is so Owen’s type,” said Buffy immediately. “And you are not even slightly stepping on my toes, because he’s not my type. Not exactly.”

“Really?” said Willow. “But Owen’s everybody’s type!”

Except the thought of sitting through another agonizing conversation with another person she liked and couldn’t tell anything important sounded like actual hell to Buffy, when she was getting more than enough of that from Brie on a daily basis. Setting Brie up with Owen felt like a great idea. Owen was a refreshingly normal boy, geeky and broody in a way that clearly appealed to Brie, and even when she did learn about all the stuff that went bump in the night, Brie was going to get to be a normal girl. Match made in heaven. “Not really in the dating mood these days,” said Buffy, which was true enough.

“Huh,” said Xander, shoulders dropping. “Really?”

“And to be clear,” Buffy added, “he didn’t officially ask me out. He just kind of pointedly insinuated that he might be at the Bronze tonight. So if you were there, and he was there—”

“You know I can’t be there,” said Brie, all droopy.

“Ask your dad,” said Buffy immediately. “Tell him I’ll come with you, if that helps. Probably don’t tell him about the boy stuff; better to start slow.”

“Buffy…”

“Or I can sneak you out! You’d totally have fun if you—”

“Buffy,” said Brie, gentle and firm. “It’s very nice, but it’s not…that is, I doubt Mum would be happy about it, even if Dad didn’t mind. I think you’re right that I should resolve my, my family business.” She smiled, slightly wobbly. “Sooner rather than later.”

Chapter Text

Even the aunts had only kind things to say about Brie’s cursive. It wasn’t neat by any means, but there was a sweetly artistic whimsy to it, and it was worlds better than her artless, messy print. If Brie had the patience for it, she’d write in only cursive all the time. It felt too magical for her to have at her fingertips always, though, so she saved it for special occasions, ones that mattered: fancy invitations, thank-you notes, decorative letters. Essays. Not always—just the first draft.

She wrote in cursive during English. The words looked nicer like that. Hi, Dad! she started, then scribbled it out, because that was a fine start to a letter, but a terrible one to a question. What did she even want to ask, anyway?

Hello, Dad. No, that was the same thing with a synonym. Salutations, she wrote, not to use it, just to make fun of herself, then scratched the whole first line away.

Dad.

Just those three letters, that one word, carried so much weight with Brie. Dad called his own dad father; Brie had heard him on the phone, here and there, and just the thought of calling Dad that had always made her heart ache. He’d been Daddy for a lot longer than he probably should have—long past the point when the other girls had grown out of it—and she’d taken off the little-girl adoration of the second syllable not long after their move to Sunnydale. Should she use Daddy, here, again, or would it sound too transparently manipulative? Best to stay consistent.

Brie tapped her pen against the paper. Turned the period into a comma. Dad, can we talk? No. Dad, I’d like to talk to you. Better. You said that you’re willing to tell me why I can’t go outside, and I’d like to know. Simple. Please don’t try to talk me out of it this time. Accusatory. She had let him, after all. She scratched out the last sentence and tried again.

I know it’s scary, but I’d like to know. Redundant. I know it’s scary, but I want to know. Not much better. I know it’s scary, but I think it’s important that I be brave. Closer. Brie chewed on her lip. I know it’s scary, but growing up means being brave. Somehow an impossibly childish statement, at least in her mind. I know it’s scary, but I’m old enough to handle the truth.

Was she? Brie didn’t know. She had felt so sure of herself right up until she’d seen Dad crying in the car. Buffy had seemed thoroughly outraged on Brie’s behalf, infuriated that Dad pressed her into making a decision, but Dad wasn’t like that. When he pressed, you knew. He hadn’t been able to hold back whatever it was that he’d been feeling in that moment.

She wondered what would scare Dad to the point of tears. The secret of Sunnydale, Nancy had said, and that felt like it could be important, because Dad had never been like this back in England. He’d been a bit weird about making sure Brie wore a cross every day, even to bed, but all the girls at Brie’s primary school had worn crosses, and most of the women that Dad worked with, so it hadn’t been that bad. By the time secondary school started up, Brie had asked Dad if she could stop wearing the cross, maybe, having no particular attachment to organized religion, and Dad had asked if it would be all right for her to wear one of Mum’s old necklaces instead, which had been so wonderful to Brie (to be trusted with a necklace of Mum’s, one that hummed with colors even brighter than the ones around other people!) that she’d acquiesced immediately.

Compromise. That was how it had been, before. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t like that now.

I miss you, Brie wrote on the paper, and then scribbled and scribbled and scribbled until the paper had torn, wet through with ink.

Dad wasn’t in when Brie got home. Mum was. Usually she greeted Brie at the door and asked her about her day, but today, she just glanced up, gave Brie a tight, tired smile, and went back to reading her paper. Which was, in all ways, worse than Dad’s anger, and more than enough to make tears spill over and down Brie’s cheeks.

Mum set down her paper and sighed. She patted the spot on the sofa next to her.

Brie lurched forward and all but tumbled into Mum. She was opening her mouth to sob out a plethora of nonsensical apologies when Mum said, “Honey, look, I…I think you’re right.”

“I’m what,” said Brie in a small voice.

Mum reached up and touched Brie’s face. “I’ve been letting your dad run the show for way too long,” she said. “You ask me anything right now and I’ll tell you.”

Brie stared at her. “But Dad—”

“Do you really want to live in the dark forever?” said Mum gently. “Or is this just the only way you know how to push back?”

Brie didn’t like that question and didn’t want to answer it. “I want him to tell me,” she said instead.

“I don’t know if he’s gonna,” said Mum.

“Why do you stay with him?” Mum’s eyes widened, and Brie almost wanted to snatch the question back, but also, maybe, she didn’t. “They’re awful to you,” she said. “All of them. They’ve always been. We went to all those parties when I was little, a-and they’d always talk to you as though you were my age, not your age, and the aunts said all those things about how me getting expelled was a foregone conclusion considering where I came from, and I’ve not even met Granddad because he said worse things before I was even born! And—”

“Baby,” said Mum, her voice breaking. She stroked Brie’s wet cheek with her thumb.

“He just lets them,” said Brie. She was starting to cry. “And then he does this, and I—”

“He didn’t know how bad it was,” said Mum, “and that’s not on him. That’s on me.”

“No,” said Brie, her voice catching. “Mum, it’s not your fault that Dad’s friends are a bunch of racist wankers.”

Mum let her hands drop. She looked so bone-deep ashamed. So heartbroken. “There are a lot of idiotic things your dad has done, Brie,” she said, “but I can’t let him take the fall for this one just because he’s the one you’re mad at right now.” She swallowed. “It would have made it a hell of a lot harder for your dad to move up the ranks if he knew how I was being treated,” she said. “You know how he gets. I’m pretty sure he’d have just snapped and started stabbing people right in the middle of one of those fancy galas. Probably even with the right fork,” she cracked, saw that Brie wasn’t smiling, and sighed. “I didn’t want him to know,” she said. “And I didn’t…I knew it would kill him to know how his coworkers looked at you.”

Brie stared at Mum. She almost couldn’t get the words out. “Christine and Antonia set my music on fire,” she said, “because you decided Dad wasn’t to know about how people looked at me?”

Mum’s eyes flashed lightning. “Do not turn that into this,” she said sharply. “You spent years hiding how bad it was at school from me and from your dad. You were in the hospital and you told us it was an accident, and we believed you. The only reason we found out at all was because you retaliated, and your father and I are both smart enough to know that you would never do something like that to girls who hadn’t done something just as horrible to you.”

“Well, where do you think I learned not to tell people things?” Brie sobbed out. “You told me don’t say a word to Dad when they called you the worst things at the gala, you acted as though it was fine—”

Mum flinched back. Tears were spilling down her cheeks. In that perfect, level voice, she whispered, “Baby, I am so sorry.”

“That doesn’t fix it!” Brie was crying so, so hard. “I don’t even have you anymore!”

“Brie—Brie,” Mum tried, reaching for her, but Brie was already stumbling off the sofa, sprinting out the door. Close enough to sunset for them to worry—well, good, she hoped they worried themselves fucking sick. She couldn’t be anywhere close to here.

Buffy wasn’t at the Bronze. Owen, however, was, with Cordelia Chase making hungry little eyes at him. Brie, who needed a pick-me-up, sat down with a macchiato and watched Cordelia tug impatiently at a clearly uninterested Owen, pulling out all sorts of overly obvious tricks to try and get his attention. It did make her feel at least a little bit better to know that someone else was having a difficult time.

Owen’s eyes were continually scanning the crowd. Once or twice, they landed on Brie, and she hastily looked away. It was the third time that did it, though; she wasn’t fast enough, and their eyes met. He smiled curiously, as if trying to place her, and crossed the room to greet her, completely leaving Cordelia behind. “You’re Buffy’s friend, right?” he said without preamble.

Brie smiled a bit wryly. It was sweet of Buffy to try and match-make, if a bit bafflingly misguided. Owen was clearly a one-girl sort of gentleman. “I am,” she said. “Actually, um, I’m in a bit of a crisis, so if she does arrive, you wouldn’t mind giving us a bit of space so that I can talk to her? I know you’re interested, and I-I won’t stand in your way.” That sounded absurd. She revised it. “That is to say, I won’t take up her time too long! She’s just, well, she’s very helpful with these sorts of things! Once I’m done with her, she’s all yours.”

Somehow that sounded even worse. Today was not her day for words.                                           

“Yeah, you do look a little,” Owen gestured vaguely and sympathetically, “around the eyes.” He sat down next to her. “You wanna talk about it? I’m no Buffy, but—”

“Oh, please,” scoffed Cordelia. “You’ll be here all night if you ask Brie how she’s doing.”

Normally, Brie wouldn’t care very much about what Cordelia had to say about anything. Today, however, she was just a little bit too angry to react in a healthy fashion. Calling upon all of her convoluted emotions, she burst into deliberately violent sobs, hiding her face somewhat dramatically in her hands.

“Ooooh,” said Cordelia, in a suddenly very different tone of voice. Then, shocking Brie, she said, “Owen, get out of here.”

“What?” said Owen.

“What?” said Brie, raising her head.

“Girl talk,” said Cordelia. “Scram.”

Owen didn’t seem to know what to do with this. Brie could relate. She had been watching Cordelia focus obsessively on Owen for the last fifteen minutes. “Um,” he said, “okay,” and wandered vaguely back over to the other side of the room, glancing over at the both of them more than once.

“Okay,” said Cordelia, in a short, pissed whisper. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I know for a fact those tears are either fake or about something else, because I’ve said way worse than that to you and you have never acted this freak-like about it. And you are ruining my chance with Owen as long as you’re in whatever weird funk you’re in, because he’s exactly the kind of sensitive, dreamy guy who wants to help poor little crying girls that dress like a thrift store threw up on them, which means that I have to pretend to solve this so that he sees how unexpectedly nice I am.”

Brie stared incredulously at Cordelia.

“It’s, like, my only currency at this point,” said Cordelia through gritted teeth. “I mean, you saw us! Nothing’s working!”

“Well, yes,” said Brie, wiping clumsily at her eyes. Oh, god, her makeup must be a wreck. “He’s interested in Buffy.”

“He’s interested in Buffy because he doesn’t realize she’s a loser,” said Cordelia.

Brie looked Cordelia dead in the eye. “You’re a loser,” she said flatly. “You care more about what other people think of you than about being a good person. You came over here to make yourself look better, not to help me. You don’t have a single friend who wouldn’t throw you under the bus to be exactly where you are right now. Buffy Summers is a thousand times prettier, kinder, and better than you are, and you know it, and that’s why you are desperately scrambling to have anything that she has. More people will end up liking her than you after high school, Cordelia Chase. I think you know that.”

Cordelia looked as though Brie had hit her in the face. Brie felt flame at her fingertips. Maybe Cordelia wouldn’t set her music on fire, but she wouldn’t stop it from happening. That mattered. “Go spend your time with Owen,” she said. “Tell him you nursed me back to health. You know it won’t do a thing to change his mind. You’re less than nothing to anyone with half a brain.” She leaned in and hugged Cordelia, tightly, making sure to angle it so that Owen could see. “Got what you wanted, didn’t you?” she whispered. “And I certainly don’t matter enough for my words to mean anything to you.”

“Brie?” said Buffy.

For a horrifying moment, Brie was certain that Buffy had heard her. But when she turned, Buffy’s face was only open and curious, a little amused, as though the joke was on Brie and Cordelia for hugging like that. “Buffy,” she said, a relieved exhalation. “I was just helping Cordelia win Owen over!”

“You were what?” said Buffy. She didn’t sound mad, just deeply confused.

“She needs all the help she can get,” said Brie brightly.

“You are a fucking psycho,” said Cordelia, eyes wet, and shoved Brie backwards. She got up, walking fast and at almost a run, until she was all but sprinting out of the Bronze.

“Psychological warfare,” said Buffy, grinning a little, and sat down next to Brie. “Impressive.”

“Oh,” said Brie, heart pounding, “did you—hear—?”

Buffy shook her head. “Don’t need to,” she said. “Pretty sure Cordelia’s picture is in the dictionary under overreacting.”

Brie exhaled and let her head fall against Buffy’s shoulder. “It’s been a difficult day,” she said in a small voice.

“Did you talk to your mom?” asked Buffy, almost too casually.

Brie went stiff. She didn’t want to think about that. “It’s been a difficult day,” she repeated.

“Okay,” said Buffy, “well—”

“Uh, Buffy!” said Owen, hurrying up. “Is Brie okay? She said something about having a tough time, and I just wondered—I mean, I just wanted—”

“Aww,” said Buffy, smiling hopefully in a way that was, unfortunately for Owen, extremely pretty. “You’re checking in on her?”

“…Yeah,” said Owen, giving Buffy a sheepish grin back.

Brie could not stick around for this. “Buffy,” she said, “Owen was just telling me about how much he likes you and thinks you’re lovely, and I think that, as the very first friend you made in Sunnydale, you should heed my sage advice and spare him a dance or two at the Bronze.”

Buffy sent Brie an I-know-what-you’re-trying-to-do look. Brie seriously doubted that Buffy did. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think Brie’s the one who could use a little dancing. Right, Owen?”

“Yeah, you guys can dance first!” said Owen immediately. “I don’t mind!”

Brie tried not to laugh. Buffy smiled with some frustration and tugged Brie onto the dance floor, almost exactly as the song began to slow. “Great,” she said. “You realize this would have been an amazing slow song for you and Owen, right?”

“Owen is very clearly exclusively interested in you,” said Brie patiently, winding her arms round Buffy’s neck.

“Well, yes, but that’s because he doesn’t realize how great you guys would be together!” Buffy pressed. “You’re both big with the books, you both know things about Emily Dickinson—”

“Buffy, there was an Emily Dickinson unit last year,” said Brie, amused.

“I just think you two would be cute together,” said Buffy awkwardly.

“Do you not like him?” asked Brie curiously. “Because if you need someone to, I don’t know, distract him, you could just tell me that and I would try.” She smiled shyly. “It’s very flattering that you think I could, incidentally. More than flattering enough for me to justify trying.”

“You’re not some piece of meat that I’m trying to dangle in front of Owen!” said Buffy, visibly horrified.

“It’s very hard to see what I am, if not that,” said Brie, mostly just to gently needle Buffy a bit.

Buffy scoffed. “Look,” she said, “as much as the girls give you grief about the way you dress, it’s actually a total asset. Most of the guys at school at least know who you are ‘cause of all the bright colors, which is more than Willow and Marcie have going on, and you’re loud enough to be impossible to miss.”

“You are describing a police siren,” said Brie, straight-faced. 

“Shut up and take me seriously. If you’re not interested in Owen because you think you don’t have a chance with him—”

“How is it relevant whether I’m interested in Owen? He’s interested in you. Are you interested in him?”

“I don’t know!” said Buffy. “I’ve got other things on my mind!”

“Like what?” said Brie.

“Like…” said Buffy, then bit her lip. Swallowed hard. “You didn’t tell me how that conversation with your mom went.”

Something occurred to Brie. “How’d you know that I talked to my mum?” she asked, frowning. “I’ve been telling you all about how dreadful Dad’s been, and how he offered to tell me things.”

Buffy fumbled. “Um,” she said, then, “well,” then, “lucky guess?”

“Oddly lucky,” said Brie, smiling uncertainly. Buffy’s soft bubbly blue had a strange, rotten tinge today. “Are you all right?”

Buffy exhaled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not usually.”

Brie sniffled. “Me either,” she said.

“Do your parents know you’re out?”

Ah, hell. “Can we go somewhere that isn’t here?” said Brie. “I think there’s something I want to tell you.”

They tucked themselves up on the catwalk. It was nice, being up that high. You had to tuck your face close to say things, and to hear things, and there weren’t that many people up there today, anyway, with the band actually being good and all.

“I didn’t tell you,” said Brie, “but I got expelled too.”

She was almost glad their faces were too close to see each other. Buffy’s fingers curled lightly around her elbow.

“The girls that tripped me down the stairs,” said Brie, “they, um, didn’t stop at that. I think they were a bit scared, because they weren’t expecting to actually put me in hospital, and not for so long, so it stopped for about a year, but then—well, Dad and I went to go see Rocky Horror, and I've always known how to play guitar, but that show made me want to do a bit more with it. I, I spent most of my lunch break singing, and writing songs, and things. In this—” Her voice caught. “In this perfect little notebook.”

Oh, it still hurt to think about that notebook. She’d gotten it as a birthday present from Mum and Dad when she was four years old, and had spent the next decade refusing to use it for anything, so determined was she to find a purpose worthy of something so beautiful. It had had her initials engraved on the front, and an explosion of butterflies and flowers. She remembered how good it had felt to see those colors and realize that Mum and Dad understood the way she saw the world.

“And there were so many songs,” Brie whispered. “I used to write one a day. I don’t think they were very good, probably, but I didn’t, um, need them to be? I’d sing them for Dad.” That part hurt too. “Dad really loves music.”

“I didn’t see your guitar out during the slumber party,” said Buffy, a tremble in her voice, like she saw where this story was going and didn’t want it to get there.

“Yes,” said Brie. “I don’t play anymore.”

“Brie,” Buffy whispered, her voice breaking.

“No, I-I don’t play anymore,” said Brie. “It’s ridiculous. I wasn’t good at it, and I don’t have any of my songs.”

“You didn’t write them down anywhere else?”

“I didn’t think I needed to,” Brie whispered. “The notebook was—was with me all the time. I never let go of it.”

Buffy swallowed. “Can you sing me a little of one?”

Brie wanted to say no. She sort of couldn’t, though. No one outside of Dad had ever asked for that before. “Um,” she whispered, and leaned in as close to Buffy’s ear as she could, barely breathing it.

Sunshine girl from fairy days,

What’s it gonna take for you to go away?

I’m a rotting, withered thing,

No space for a girl who wants the world to sing.

You’d be better without me,

You’d be better alone.

You’d be better without me,

You’d be doing better on your own—

Buffy pulled back and said, a disbelieving laugh in her voice, “Did you sing that one to Giles?”

“Oh my God, no, not that one!” said Brie, an unsteady giggle escaping at the very thought. “He’d have gone mental!”

“Yeah, I think he would!” said Buffy. She looked—Brie didn’t have words for how she looked. How she was looking. “That’s a good song,” she said loyally. “I like that song.”

“It’s the only one I still remember,” said Brie.

Buffy tucked an arm round Brie’s shoulders. They watched the people below. “How’d the rest go?” she said.

Brie focused in on Owen below them, Cordelia nowhere to be seen. Reached for guilt she couldn’t find. “The girls set my notebook on fire,” she said. She felt Buffy’s arm tighten around her shoulder, hard enough to actually hurt. She liked that hurt. It meant that Buffy, in anger, had forgotten how to be careful. “It’s fine,” she said lightly. “Happy ending.”

“Happy ending?” Buffy repeated, words crackling with anger.

“Yes,” said Brie. “You see—well, I don’t know if you do much art, Buffy, and it’s fine if you don’t, but either way, I’ll explain it, and I hope you’ll forgive me if you know this already and this ends up being redundant. But when you make something, sometimes it’s as though it’s you on those pages. I don’t know if Christine and Antonia knew that they were setting me on fire a bit, but I figured, um, an eye for an eye felt a bit appropriate, and extremely deserved, as it would impart upon them the severity of what they’d done.”

Buffy didn’t ask why Brie hadn’t gone to the teachers. Possibly this was why Brie was telling her the whole story—far past anything she’d admitted to Mum and Dad.

“I set my sweater on fire,” said Brie, “and my stockings, both in a waste-paper basket, and I locked Christine and Antonia in a classroom so they couldn’t get out.”

Buffy drew in a sharp breath.

“Not for very long,” said Brie. Her heart was pounding. “Twenty seconds. Thirty. I don’t know. I wanted them to think I’d just leave them like that. I wanted them to realize that after everything they did to me, there was a chance that they might die from the smoke, with nothing to put that fire out and all the windows closed. And I haven’t told Mum and Dad that, because—it doesn’t matter, really, and I never, never would have, but I wanted—I wanted them to think that it could happen. They spent ten years pushing me down stairs and telling me I was nothing and destroying every single thing that could have made school something lovely. I knew that they didn’t know me well enough to know that I’d never kill them.”

Buffy’s arm tightened around Brie again.

“As you can imagine,” said Brie, “I got in quite a lot of trouble.”

“Yeah,” said Buffy. “Yeah. God.”

“And whatever you were like,” said Brie, “I don’t think you were ever the sort of girl who would just stand by if someone set someone else’s notebook on fire.”

Buffy didn’t say anything. Brie didn’t mind. She knew Buffy thought she was a Christine-and-Antonia, but Brie knew she wasn’t, and that was what mattered. “You keep surprising me,” she finally said.

“I’m sorry I’m not…” Brie trailed off. “Nice,” she finally said.

“Yeah, well,” said Buffy. “Me either.”

They stayed curled together like that for quite a while. Brie kept looking for Cordelia in the crowd, but she was nowhere to be found. “All that to say,” she said, “I found out today that my mum spent quite a lot of time hiding the way that people treat her, and me, so that Dad wouldn’t get upset and jeopardize his job security. So we really—didn’t get to the conversation that needed to happen. Though I did try.”

She waited for Buffy to get angry again. Instead, unsteadily, Buffy said, “Must be a hell of a job your dad has, if your mom’s trying that hard to make sure he keeps it.”

But she sounded like she was about to cry, which seemed a perfectly acceptable response to the situation. Brie pressed her cheek into Buffy’s shoulder and counted the piercings in her ear: one, two, three.

Chapter Text

Buffy took Brie home with her. Brie curled up on Buffy's bed without hesitation, and without a single offer to take the floor. Buffy was struck by how Willow would probably have offered to take the floor, and Amy, and probably even Marcie, but Brie just went straight for the bed like she already owned the place. On another girl, Buffy might have found that kind of thing annoying. It was hard to ever stay annoyed with Brie, though. 

Buffy sat down on the bed next to her. “How's it going?” she asked quietly. If it were Willow, she might reach out and touch Brie's hair, but for some reason she didn't know exactly how to do that right now. 

Brie just sniffled and hugged Mr. Gordo. 

“You know, you shared something kinda big with me,” said Buffy. “Is it okay if I share something kinda big with you?”

She knew Brie wouldn't want to say no to her if the question was phrased like that, and she was right. Brie set down Mr. Gordo and sat up on her elbows, then all the way, all soft dark eyes and faerie prettiness. Buffy felt an unusual spark of anger that Brie didn't seem to know she could have Owen, if she wanted. “Yes, all right,” said Brie, still a little soggy.

Buffy took Brie's hands in hers. Brie always painted her nails with funny faces, like they were all little people. “I'm a Vampire Slayer,” she said. Simple as that.

She waited for Brie to freak. Brie didn't. “Oh,” she said, and then sort of smiled. “Is that why you're so special?”

Buffy's heart was pounding. Slayer-senses said Brie's was too. She felt like the moment demanded something, but she didn't know what, so she settled for lacing their fingers together and staring at Brie's funny-faces next to her own perfect manicure. “You got any questions?” she said, unable to keep the wobble out of her voice. "Cause now's usually the time when people start freaking out."

“Well,” said Brie, “Nancy said the secret of Sunnydale, and it would explain why Mum and Dad have been going utterly insane trying to keep me inside, and acting as though knowing's going to change my entire life, as they are stupidly melodramatic like that. And you're…I don't know, sort of magic, just generally, in a way that most people aren't, so it would make sense for you to be all wrapped up in something like this. Vampire Slayer.” She said it wistfully. For the first time, it almost sounded cool. "It does fit your, your indescribable mystique.”

“Didn't you say I was bubbly?”

“Bubbles have mystique! You know everything about everything, boys fall in love with you, Cordelia Chase is jealous of you—”

“Brie, I love you, but you're living on some kind of alternate planet if you think Cordelia's jealous of me.”

“Well, she only started chasing after Owen when she saw he liked you,” Brie pointed out. “And she seems to have some sort of pathological need to show off how lovely and intelligent she is in front of you. Besides which, you know Xander and Jesse are both mad about you, don't you?”

“Jesse has a crush on you,” said Buffy tiredly.

“Jesse has a crush on Cordelia,” Brie corrected.

“Yeah, that stopped a few weeks ago. You seriously haven't noticed that he's been carrying your books all the time?”

Brie blinked a few times, then said uncomfortably, “Well, that could mean a lot of things, and I don't care to interrogate all of them at this juncture!”

One thing at a time, Buffy decided. “You're not freaking out?”

Brie shook her head, smiling slightly. “I think you're awfully noble,” she confessed. “Choosing to go out a-and fight monsters every night? That's wonderful.”

Buffy's stomach did a flip-flop. She realized that without the second half of this story, the Giles half, the whole thing actually did sound like she'd picked up the mantle of Vampire Slayer without hesitation. She wanted to be the kind of person who felt bad about not telling Brie the whole truth, but the thought of telling Brie she was a freaked-out faker who hated every second of her calling felt awful when Brie was looking at her like she was some kind of bona fide hero. 

Besides which—and this was an actual reason, not just Buffy justifying her decisions—telling Brie about Giles right now was a blow Brie couldn't take. A blow Buffy didn't want to deliver, either. Telling Brie this much could be excused away. Brie was Buffy's friend, and friends didn't let friends wander around in the dark. Telling Brie that her dad was a Watcher—Buffy wasn't prepared for the thorny mess of that conversation, and didn't feel like it was hers to have, anyway. She had no interest in taking away from all of the yelling and immediate emotional processing that Brie was going to do when she found out, and wanted it directed directly at Giles. Full force. He deserved it.

“I don't know if I'm that great,” Buffy said evasively.

“Shut up, you're wondrous.” Brie nudged her knees against Buffy's, and Buffy felt the point of contact acutely, bizarrely. “I'm really not the type for heroics myself, so—it's all right, isn't it, if I don't join you on your, um, your killing missions? I'd happily help with any research if you like.”

Something quiet and ugly turned over in Buffy's stomach. Definitely Giles's kid, she thought. “I don't think anybody really wants to do it,” she said, which was close enough to an answer for Brie, or at least she hoped it was.

She'd forgotten that she hadn't called Giles until her mom woke them up at 4 AM, slamming Buffy's bedroom door open and looking almost as pissed as she had after the gym-burning incident. When her eyes landed on Brie, who had flinched awake and curled into Buffy's shoulder, her jaw tightened and she said into the phone, “Yes, Rupert, she's here. I am so sorry. I'll—what? Oh, you are welcome to talk to Buffy,” then thrust the phone in Buffy's direction.

Brie looked full-on bewildered. Buffy took the phone. Without waiting for a response, and without caring who was listening, she said, “You know what, if you're going to treat your kid like she's some kind of breakable porcelain doll, then throw her at the wall as hard as you can every time she so much as tries to ask you a question about anything, I think one night of thinking she might be dead should set your head on a little straighter. You are a terrible dad. You are the worst dad I've ever met. And your wife is a two-faced bitch for putting Brie through all that stuff when she was little, all for your job, which we both know is just about wrecking the lives of more teenage girls who didn't ask for you to be anywhere near them. I don't care what you have to say to me, I don't care how much trouble I get in for saying this to you, Brie deserves better and you know it.” And then, just because she felt like it, she wound up and threw the phone at the wall, full Slayer strength, watching it punch a hole clean through frame and molding and probably a wall in Mom's bedroom, too.

“Buffy!” gasped Brie.

Mom was staring incredulously at her, anger giving way to something else.

“Mom, I am not going to apologize,” said Buffy. “Brie has been going through so much. I know you like her parents, I'm sure you guys have great coffee dates or whatever, and if you want to ground me forever, fine, but they've been awful to Brie. And—”

“Buffy,” said Mom unsteadily. "Did Mr. Giles…do something to you?"

Oh, for the love of God. “No!” said Buffy, affronted and frustrated all at the same time. “God, is it so hard to believe that I care about my friends?”

“I…” Mom didn't seem to know what to say. She sat down hard on the edge of the bed. “Brie,” she said. “What's going on?”

Brie burst into tears. This could really only help their case. Mom had a soft spot for emotionally vulnerable teenage girls, and Buffy wasn't always all that great at being one of those. 

“Oh, honey,” said Mom gently, sitting down next to Brie and tucking an arm around her shoulder. Brie surprised Mom and Buffy both by flinching away. Mom took this in stride, though, moving back and saying, “Can someone fill me in at least a little?”

Buffy swallowed. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you Brie was here,” she said. “I get why her parents would freak. I just…they got into a really, really bad fight, and I was worried that if I told you, you'd try and get them involved, and the way Brie's been right now, I think that might make things a lot worse for her.”

“Why would you think,” Mom started.

“I don't know,” said Buffy, all wobbly. “Don't parents side with other parents?”

Mom considered this. Then she said, “Not always, and not in times of crisis. But I will say this: Mr. Giles is someone who we all know worries a lot about Brie's safety. I've honestly never heard him that scared before. Maybe I couldn't have stopped him from coming over here, but I sure could have locked the door if Brie didn't want to see him, and he and Jenny wouldn't have had to spend the whole night worried about whether Brie was alive or dead.” She exhaled. “I'm not exactly mad at you, Buffy, because I can see why this happened, but I need you to be more conscientious about the way that your actions might impact other people.”

Buffy wanted to be angry—she did think about all of that stuff, so much—but she was just really, really tired. “Okay,” she said. “Well, he knows now. Sorry about the wall,” she added belatedly.

“Oh, it's fine,” said Mom. “If the house can't handle a teenage girl throwing a phone around, I'm pretty sure that's a structural issue.” She kissed Buffy's temple. “We are going to talk about some consequences,” she said, “but maybe in the morning. How about you girls get some sleep?”

Buffy managed a nod.

Brie was still crying even after Mom left the room. When Buffy turned to her, she raised her head, then said, barely coherently, “You said all that to my dad!”

“Yeah, I,” Buffy winced. “I know I might have been way out of line, I just—”

“No, I like that you don't like him!” Brie wailed. “He's always being terrible and you're the only one who cares enough to—to yell at him about it! Mum always says I should just—she—mum,” she sobbed out, as if remembering all over again how much Jenny actually sucked too, in this, and then went back to just crying, generally.

Buffy hugged Brie close. They stayed like that until it was light out.

School the next day was weird. Brie wasn't exactly an outfit repeater, which meant that from the get-go, all of their friends knew something was wrong. Jenny came in later than Giles, and she looked like she'd been crying. Neither Jenny nor Giles tried to say anything to Brie, and when Buffy came into the library, Giles flinched like he'd been hit and didn't say a word to her about patrol.

“Training today, Giles?” said Buffy, anger making her calm.

Giles swallowed very hard. He looked up at Buffy with that expression he'd gotten at the slumber party. No, he looked up at Buffy with fear, affection, concern, shame, the exact same way he always looked at—

Buffy turned around. Brie wasn't there. She turned back around and saw that Giles had gone into his office, already shutting the blinds.

“You said something about the Anointed Whoever,” she called. So what if he was upset? He deserved to be upset forever, maybe. Longer than that. “We gonna go and look into that?”

“No,” said Giles from inside the office. His voice was cracked. “I'll do it myself. Don't concern yourself with your training any longer, Buffy.”

Buffy stared at the office. “You're not serious,” she said, not quite to him. Maybe just for her.

“I am so sorry,” said Giles, still inside the office. “I'm in no condition to—” He didn't finish his sentence. “I am so sorry. Go spend time with your friends. I'm no arbiter of your time or your life.”

This was almost definitely not good for the fate of the world at large. You should be able to handle one teenage girl yelling at you, Buffy thought, but then again, maybe he wasn't. He'd been spending the entire time she'd known him flipping out and shutting down every time Brie yelled at him, after all. Maybe two teenage girls were his breaking point. “I'm the Vampire Slayer,” she reminded him, digging the words in.

Giles didn't answer. There were lots of clattering sounds coming from the office, like he was trying to be loud to cover something else up.

Buffy turned and left. If she wasn't the Slayer today, she knew who she could be.

More disturbing than anything that day was the fact that when Brie realized they were skipping class, she didn't have a freak-out of any kind. She was unusually quiet today in a way that made Buffy mad at maybe the entire world, but especially Giles and Jenny, who couldn't seem to get their shit together long enough to stop messing Brie up. Usually she'd push down the anger—it didn't help to be mad at her Watcher or her Watcher's wife—but she wasn't the Slayer today, had been given permission to not be the Slayer today, and Brie's good friend Buffy was, to put it mildly, a complicated person.

They reached Brie's house relatively quickly. Giles had picked a place close enough to the school that walking to it wasn't too hard, and Brie pulled out her adorable little set of house keys and let them in with shaky hands. She still wasn't really saying anything.

“You're cool with this?” said Buffy.

Brie nodded. Flatly, she said, “They're not going to tell me, I don't think. I'd much rather find out myself, and Dad's one to document.”

Buffy knew that there was a non-zero chance that they would find something in Giles's papers that would indicate her own identity as the Slayer. She didn't care. She trusted Brie. She found it impossible to imagine a world where Brie wouldn't understand what it was like to have Giles get you to keep your mouth shut about something that mattered. He'd stopped Brie from asking the questions; he'd stopped Buffy from giving the answers. Pretty straightforwardly his fault, and Brie had never been very inclined to blame Buffy about anything anyway. 

God. Understatement of the damn century. Brie went out of her way to not blame Buffy for things. Brie heard that Buffy had been a mean girl arsonist and said that she wasn't either of those things now, so it didn't matter. And, well, Buffy was the Slayer now, which Brie knew, and Buffy was telling Brie everything she could and figuring out a way to get her to the things that she couldn't, and—and—

Buffy looked sideways at Brie and felt so much impossible everything in her chest that she didn't know what to even say about it. She stepped into Giles and Jenny's house once Brie had the door open.

The house felt different in a non-sleepover capacity. Emptier. It was a little more cluttered, with Jenny's papers all over the dining room table and a big pile of books in the living room. Buffy moved towards that office she'd seen Giles in, the one with locked cabinets, but the door was locked. Oh well. She was about to twist down real hard, break the knob, when Brie said, “No, Buffy, it's locked, hold on,” and stepped past Buffy, turning the knob to open the door.

Buffy stared at her. “If it's locked,” she said slowly, “how'd you manage that?”

“Doors like me,” said Brie, giving Buffy the ghostly approximation of one of her goofy smiles.

Huh. Well, weirder things had happened, and Buffy was probably one of them. She followed Brie into Giles's office. 

The place was meticulously organized. Lots and lots of locked cabinets with books behind glass. Brie pressed her fingers against the frosted panes and stared intensely at the books for a moment, then turned to Giles's desk. “I could have done this a long time ago,” she said distantly. “It really isn't very hard to do. I know where they keep everything that matters.”

Buffy's chest hurt. “Is any of it in that desk?”

Brie opened the top drawer. It was cluttered, but in a Giles-y way, where even all the clutter seemed to have its place. There was an old Polaroid of Jenny and Brie right on top, the very first thing anyone would see when they opened the desk: Jenny, her hair shoulder-length with white blossoms woven in, wearing a satin-y white dress and holding Brie on her hip. Her smile was big and shy. Brie had a flower petal stuck to her cheek and was chewing on another one.

Brie picked up the photograph and ripped it. It looked like she'd tried to rip it down the middle, but what actually happened was a neat decapitation of baby Brie, the piece of the print with the head and the flowers fluttering to the floor. She crumpled the rest of the photograph up and placed it delicately in the middle of Giles's desk.

So Brie got the memo. This was not a stealth mission, nor did Buffy want it to be. This was a long-overdue set of consequences for people who deserved them. She watched as Brie opened the second, larger drawer.

Files. Files, files, and more files, all meticulously labeled in a language Buffy didn't know. Brie's brow furrowed as she flipped through files indiscriminately, jaw tight. Whatever she was finding clearly wasn't helping answer any questions. Maybe Giles didn't do his work at home. “This is useless,” she finally burst out. “This is—it's just Dad, Buffy. It's just—” She scrubbed at her eyes, fists clenched. “I've not found anything that helps!”

“Is there anywhere else you can think of that he might put stuff?” Buffy suggested tentatively. Suddenly their stealth mission felt a hell of a lot more stupid and teenage than she wanted it to. “Like, not his office? Do you guys maybe have a basement, or—”

“The attic,” said Brie.

She was off like a shot. Buffy followed at a run.

The attic had a ladder that Brie pulled down, and it was way dustier and mustier than anything needed to be, considering that Giles and Jenny had only moved in a year ago. Brie turned on the light and Buffy found herself in one of the creepiest rooms she'd ever seen.

“I don't come up here,” said Brie, “at least, not often.”

“That makes sense,” said Buffy uneasily. Most of the stuff looked artifact-y in nature, probably magical if her Slayer sense was any indication. Some of it was books. There was a beat-up old computer in the corner that blinked on and off despite not being plugged in. “Do you know what we're looking for?”

Brie closed her eyes. So did Buffy, after a moment. She was getting used to the magic that permeated the room, made it hot and sticky and weird in a way that, for some reason, made it feel like she and Brie should be holding hands. She focused on that feeling and tried to trace it to the source, but everything in the damn room was magic. Maybe this part was up to Brie. 

“Buffy,” said Brie. Buffy opened her eyes and saw that Brie was looking at the computer. “That's not plugged in.”

“Oh,” said Buffy. “Doesn't it always do that?”

“No,” said Brie. She moved over to the computer and knelt down in front of it, raising a hand to pet it like it was a small cat. "Hello!" she said.

The computer chirped a few times. Brie laughed.

“Okay,” said Buffy uneasily. “Do you usually do that?”

The computer's display lit up in a whirl of polka dots and confetti. Brie laughed again, eyes a little glazed, and Buffy wondered if the concentrated-artifact-weirdness was having some kind of impact on them both. Maybe it was smart of Brie to not come up here too often. “Yes, hello darling,” said Brie, almost a song, “hello hello hello, would you tell me more about your friends, please, or perhaps the things that you know? You're just about my sister, aren't you? We've the same mum, I expect! Same sort of feeling around you and me.”

The computer chirped again. Somewhere in the attic, a printer started to whir.

“Oh, wicked,” said Brie emphatically, eyes clearing. She leaned down and kissed the computer on the monitor's slope, leaving a little lipstick print. “Thank you, sweetheart!”

Buffy followed the sound of the printer. It hadn't been going for very long. She didn't look at what was on the first set of printed sheets, just brought them over to Brie, who took them without really looking at them and gave the computer another little kiss for good measure. “What do they say?” Buffy asked, then nervously amended, “um, if you feel like telling me, of course, because you don't have t—”

“Shut up,” said Brie, very affectionately, and pressed a kiss to Buffy's cheek. Buffy felt it like a brand. “Let's look.”

(TRANSL. FROM THE OLD TONGUES)

PROPHECY 713 

SO IT IS WRITTEN THAT EYGHON'S MARKED SHALL LIE WITH A ROMANI GIRL

AND FROM THIS UNION SHALL BE BORN A CHILD NAMED FOR LOVE AND FOR OLD BLOOD

DAUGHTER OF EYGHON'S MARKED OWES PIETY

DAUGHTER OF THE MURDERED IS OWED VENGEANCE

FEBRUARY'S WILL UPON THE WORLD SHALL SHAPE IT ANEW

THE POWERS THAT FEBRUARY SERVES WILL ALWAYS TRIUMPH

NO FORCE WILL BE GREATER, NO AUTHORITY MORE ABSOLUTE THAN SHE

PIOUS, VENGEFUL DAUGHTER WILL RESTORE THE WORLD'S NATURAL ORDER

Buffy’s blood ran cold; she felt lightheaded and sick. She couldn’t do this.

“I don't understand,” said Brie, that uncomfortable laugh in her voice that Buffy recognized, knew right down through to her bones, because she'd sounded like that a year ago when Merrick had told her she was the Slayer. 

“Good,” said Buffy tightly. “Don't.”

“Buffy—”

"No," said Buffy. Suddenly she understood with horrible clarity why Giles and Jenny had been scrambling to hide Brie away. "Your parents were right on the money. Whatever this is, this is not something you want."

“Buffy,” said Brie, her voice catching, “you were the one who told me to look—”

“Yeah, well, I was wrong,” said Buffy. "You don't want this.”

“I am more than tired of people I love telling me what I want!” Brie snapped, tears springing to her eyes. “What do you know that I don't? It's a piece of paper with a handful of nonsensical fairy-tale words and my name right in the middle, it's not some bloody Horseman of the Apocalypse! When do I get to make a choice for myself?”

Buffy's heart was pounding. “You don't,” she said. “You never do.”

Brie was starting to really cry. She drew the paper close to her chest, crumpling it tightly against her like a hug. Buffy yanked it forward and out of her hands, ripping it once, twice, shredding it to pieces with furious, tearful violence. “You don't want this!!” she shouted. “You don't, you don't want this! You don't get friends, you don't get a life, you don't get anything you want the minute you ask what's so special about you and your parents know that! They know that as soon as you know, you're not going to be a person anymore, you're going to be a-a line in some old book, and they don't want that for you! No one wants that for you, Brie, you're a person! You’re a—”

And suddenly she was seeing another little girl in front of her eyes, a little girl with parents who loved each other and a Dorothy Hamill haircut and a guaranteed spot on the varsity cheer squad in a year or three. A little girl who had sucked sometimes, but been nice other times, and yeah, maybe she hadn’t had the chance to learn how to be a good person, but that didn’t mean she would never have learned, even if it might have taken her longer to do it. She hadn’t set anyone’s music on fire, not once, and she’d tried in class even if it wasn’t always her top priority, and she’d been a person, a person with a whole life ahead of her instead of three years at best, a person who hadn’t asked for this and wasn’t any good at it.

“You’re a person,” Buffy sobbed. “You’re a person. You’re—”

Brie let the scraps of paper flutter down between them and hugged Buffy, so, so tight, like she knew what was wrong, even though Buffy knew she didn’t. Except maybe, impossibly, she could feel enough of it to figure out the important parts. Brie could unlock any door with just a touch, after all.

Chapter Text

Mum and Dad found them like that in the attic, all dusty, Buffy crying so hard she couldn't even talk and Brie with her face buried in Buffy's hair. Brie was too tired and sad to remember how to be scared, or ashamed, or angry, or anything that she'd been feeling, usually, about her parents, so she just stayed tucked against Buffy until she felt a hand in her hair. She looked up and saw Mum, eyes shining. “Baby, let's talk,” she said.

Brie didn't let go of Buffy. She saw no point in listening to either of her parents anymore. 

“All of us,” said Mum.

Buffy looked up. She was still crying. Dad knelt down in front of her. “We're overdue for a conversation,” he said. “You're right about many things. I'd like to talk to you about some of them.”

That was strange, wasn't it? Not just the notion that Dad owed Buffy some sort of conversation, but the fact that their colors were overlapping, bleeding, a strange convergence that Brie hadn't seen before. For an uncomfortable moment, she wondered if it was romantic, but colors didn't seem to work like that with partnered hearts. Dad's green storm seas had Mum's neon-electric woven through like a last-minute mending; Mum's colors saw Dad's settled round them like a blanket. Colors remained their own distinct entities, usually.

Dad's and Buffy's weren't doing that right now. Didn't do that ever, now that Brie was thinking about it. 

“What do you want to talk about?” said Brie, on the knife's edge of crying herself.

Mum sat down next to Dad. She looked at Brie, wet-eyed and intense. “I didn't know about you when I was pregnant,” she said. “You know this story. The doctors said you must have been a cryptic pregnancy, but—I don't know. I don't know. There was always something unusual about you. Good unusual.” She almost smiled, her mouth trembling with the effort of it. 

“Don't,” said Buffy. “Don't tell her this.”

“I'm so sorry,” said Mum. Her smile was fluttering like a leaf in the wind. “I am so, so sorry, baby, but you have to know.”

Brie was beyond the point of asking questions. Perhaps Buffy's fear was infectious. She listened. Waited.

“I should have been in college,” said Mum, “when your dad and I met.” She smiled, closer to a real smile than before. “I should have been in college,” she said again. “I was dicking around. I was angry about my life, and I didn't want to live up to my full potential, or do anything I was supposed to do. Rupert was ten years older than me. Felt like a terrible choice. There are a lot of parts of this story I don't want you to emulate, Brie.

“We met at a nightclub and fell in love. It wasn't exactly immediate, or easy—we named you February, but we met in, god, July?” She laughed softly. “So it took a while. He was in England, but he'd been in New York for a half-second, looking into some—some stuff for his job,” a strange, sidelong look towards Buffy, here, “and I'd been living there with my uncle through high school. We slept together, he realized I'd been lying about my age, he freaked out and fled the country—”

“Are all parts of this story necessary, Jenny?” Dad cut in.

“And he wrote me letters,” said Mum. She turned towards one of the boxes behind Brie, pulling it forward, opening it up. Brie took the first letter off the top.

Janna,

I will ask you a third time to please refrain from responding to my messages as though there are any implicit romantic communications twined within. Though I am deeply, truly flattered by your interest, I find myself with a myriad of concerns regarding—

“Yeah, you don't have to read that,” said Mum. “I mean, you can, but it's just an itemized, cited list of all the different issues we'd face if we ever so much as dared to insinuate we felt things for each other. I'm pretty sure there's at least ten more double-sided pages in that box. And that's just that letter.”

Brie's heart felt all fluttery in a way she couldn't explain. Mum and Dad had never told her any of this before, and she'd always wanted to know.

“So we kept writing,” said Mum. “Most of your dad's letters were just him going here's why we definitely can't be together, researched methodically for your perusal, coupled with thoughts on whatever he's reading and/or whatever long, broody walk he took by the beach. I was flirtatious at first, but it transitioned into a real friendship over time, enough that,” she swallowed, “after I had you, I told him without hesitation, because there was enough reasonable doubt about who the dad could be that I figured he wouldn't feel pressured to step in.”

That Brie hadn't known. She wasn't sure she'd wanted to know that. She'd heard people say things like that before about Mum, but Mum herself had never said anything to indicate that they could be true things. Voice trembling, she asked, “Does that mean—”

“Baby, no,” said Mum emphatically. “We've had it tested every way that it can be. You're a Giles by blood and birthright.”

“And even if you weren't,” said Dad, quiet but intense, “it wouldn't matter.”

Mum's mouth trembled. "Yeah, that's not exactly true," she said. Leaning behind Brie, she placed her hand atop the computer that had called Brie over. “Maja, baby, would you print out that prophecy for me?”

“We saw it,” said Buffy. 

Brie had half forgotten Buffy was there. She wasn't sure why Buffy was still there. She felt that this was the sort of conversation that happened when friends weren't in the room, usually, but at the same time it felt better to not be alone against the united front of her parents, so she wasn't entirely certain how to feel about the whole thing. “We saw it,” she echoed. “Some nonsense about—”

“Not nonsense,” said Dad heavily.

Mum closed her eyes tightly shut. Twin tears trickled down. She opened her eyes again and said in a high, thin voice, “The Watchers' Council—you know Dad's job, Brie—they caught wind of the fact that your dad was in contact with a Romani girl who'd named her daughter February Mirjana. And of course I didn't know shit about any prophecy; I was twenty-one, freaking out, and I'd just had a little girl out of nowhere, so I gave her a name that made sense to me. Mirjana for your great-great-great aunt who was killed, and February for—for the month I realized I was in love with your dad.”

Unsteadily, Brie said, “You always said it was for the month you and Dad fell in love.”

Mum smiled, still all wobbly. “Easier to explain,” she said. “And it's not like your dad wasn't in love with me then, too.”

“I was doing my best to behave decently about it,” said Dad, pink around the ears. “You were quite young.”

Mum made a production of rolling her eyes. “Anyway,” she said. “The Council found out, and they insisted I come to England. My uncle found out and flipped out on me for being irresponsible, so I took the opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge. Rupert found out and—um—” She actually did smile. “Came to the airport with flowers.”

Dad sort of smiled too, like he was thinking about that moment all over again. His eyes landed on Brie and his smile looked like it might break in half. “The moment I saw you,” he said, “I understood the true weight of my life's calling.”

“Bullshit,” said Buffy.

Dad flinched. Brie turned, confused.

“If you understood,” said Buffy, eyes on Dad like he was the only person in the room, “really understood—how can you be her dad and be my Watcher at the same time? How does that work, huh? How do you justify that to yourself? What makes her any different than me?”

“I d—” said Dad, in that terrified tone of voice that meant there really wasn't a sentence there.

“Your Watcher,” said Brie. Something was tugging at her. “Like the Watchers' Council. Like Dad's real job.”

Buffy froze as if caught out. Brie reached immediately to place a firm hand on her shoulder. She knew who'd been keeping the secrets here, and whatever they were, it wasn't Buffy who had chosen not to tell her. 

Dad looked at Brie's hand on Buffy's shoulder. He swallowed. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Why?” said Brie. She felt eerily calm, now that everything she wanted to know was on offer, really. “What do you need to be sorry for, Dad?”

Mum leaned forward and took Brie's free hand in hers. She pressed it to her heart, like she'd done when Brie was really little. “Magic is real,” she said. 

Brie stared blankly at her. 

Mum seemed a bit surprised by Brie's reaction. “Demons,” she continued, clearly testing the waters, “vampires, ghouls—”

“Well, I know about vampires,” said Brie bemusedly. She had no interest in sharing Buffy's identity as the Vampire Slayer, though, particularly with how difficult it had clearly been for Buffy to tell her, so she said instead, “This town is categorically strange. And magic, that's…” She chewed on her lip, uncertain how to phrase what she'd always known intuitively. “That's just the world, isn't it?” she finally said. "There's colors and strangeness and you tug on the world the right way to make a, a door open, or a song sound a bit better. You just have to know how to pay attention. I don't see why you'd think I wouldn't know that.”

She wasn't angry, though. Mum had said magic is real in the sort of way she said things like just try a taste of the salad, Brie, or let's see how we feel after five minutes before we talk about going home : ascertaining how much resistance she would have to work her way through before reaching her actual goal. And Mum did look a little relieved, if also a little confused, which supported her theory that this wasn't actually the capital-s Secret she and Dad had been dancing around. “Colors?” Mum repeated.

“February can see auras,” said Dad, then winced.

Mum turned very slowly to look at Dad with a terrifyingly cloying smile. “After everything you put me through about secrets in this family last year,” she said, “you neglected to mention to me that Brie sees auras?”

Dad coughed a few times, then said, “Well! It was only a-a hypothesis based on something Buffy said—”

“You said I was way off base!” snapped Buffy.

Brie swiveled. “Buffy,” she said. “What's a Watcher? You said Dad's yours. What does that mean?”

Buffy flinched and drew inward. Dad looked down.

“Rupert,” said Mum, compassionately unyielding.

Dad looked back up at Brie. “A Watcher is the person meant to support the Vampire Slayer in her calling,” he said. “His job is to ensure that she is prepared to fight vampires, to research any enemies she may face, and to—”

Brie hit him in the face.

She was a creature of instinct, really, first and foremost. Perhaps those instincts had caught up to the implications of what Dad was saying before her thoughts had. She knew Dad, knew how he treated her, knew how he must have treated Buffy, to get Buffy to keep this from her. She'd spent all this time begging Dad for answers and he'd gone so far as to ensure Buffy couldn't tell her a damn thing. Buffy had begged her in turn to find out what Dad wasn't telling her, over and over. Buffy had wanted to tell Brie. No one had ever wanted to do that. Dad had wanted to not do that so badly that he'd stopped Buffy from making her own choices. Brie was so angry that the room was changing shape.

“Brie!” gasped Mum.

The room was changing shape. The world was changing shape. Brie felt new things, old things, all things behind her eyes and at her fingertips. She slipped through the dust particles and out, away, between.

“Total freak behavior,” Cordelia was saying on the phone. “She is so not invited to Harmony's birthday party. I know, but I'm basically in charge of the guest list for that, you know how Harmony is—”

Phone static hummed. Brie moved along.

“Man, I don't know,” Jesse was saying, sprawled back on his bed, head dangling off the edge as he watched Xander play video games. “I mean, I just look at her and I wanna protect her or something, you know? She doesn't know anything about the kind of monsters we're facing down every day. She's just so sweet.”

Brie felt soft smiles at them both. She liked seeing them in their element.

“You just wanna be a big hero,” said Xander, a laugh in his voice.

“This from the guy who hasn't lost his hard-on for Buffy since day fucking one of her being here?” said Jesse.

Xander's onscreen character ran off a cliff and died. “Jesse, you suck!” he said emphatically. “Why don't you just—”

Out, away, between. This time Brie wasn't drifting so much as she was pulled.

Hello, little girl, said someone far away, someone Brie knew/didn't know/needed to know. Quite a lot of power under your skin. 

Brie didn't want to talk. 

Well then, said that someone. You'll be in my neck of the woods this summer, won't you? Come find me. You'll know how when it's time. And the pull on her let go and threw her, laughing, towards—

“You,” said Angel, all tall and terrified, flinching back like he knew her. “No. No. Get out of my head. Get out of m—”

“—Brie!” said Amy, and grabbed her arm, pulling her into a half-unpacked bedroom with only some of Amy's posters up. The mattress didn't even have any sheets on it. “What were you doing?”

Brie blinked a few times. She felt as though she'd come up from under the water.

“What was that?” Amy asked, sounding genuinely unnerved. “I've seen my mom do stuff, but nothing like—like that! Magic isn’t supposed to let you do that!”

Brie raised a hand to her head. “I'm not sure,” she said. “It wasn't—I got very angry, and then-- something happened. I'm not sure what.”

“Okay,” said Amy, nodding mostly to herself. “Okay. Well. Makes sense. Magic sometimes responds to strong emotions. Maybe you got swept up in the tides.” She squeezed Brie's hands. “You've got me, though, cheesy,” she said warmly. “I know the ropes. I gotcha.”

Brie stared blankly up at Amy. She felt heavy, lethargic, all of the thoughts in her head jumbled out of order. She was opening her mouth to say something that seemed as though it wanted to be thank you when Dad said, tight and far-away, “I don't think we'll have any of that,” and something closed around her wrist, pulling her back through the between-spaces.

Mum looked more rattled than Brie had ever seen her. So did Buffy. Dad didn't look like that at all. He was crackling with the same kind of unearthly strangeness that Brie had allowed to pull her away from whatever this was. He let go of her hand, jaw tight and angry, and said, “February, you are not to ever do that again. Do you understand me?”

“Oh, great, let's start another thing to have a fight about,” said Mum exhaustedly. 

“Jenny,” barked Dad, which was so disturbingly unprecedented that even Brie forgot how to be angry. Dad didn't snap at Mum like that. Ever. When he turned back to Brie, his eyes were half-wrongness, and the colors around him were shot through with an angry black lightning. “I don’t care what you know or don’t know,” he said. “What you did just now is unacceptable. Do it again and there will be consequences.”

Brie stared up at him—this man she didn’t know. She felt it in her bones: the futility of arguing back. The exhaustion of it. He wasn’t listening. He’d decided for Buffy—for her—and he’d muddied the waters between them one too many times. 

“All right,” she said.

Quick as a flash, that anger left Dad, replaced with a kind of fear, a kind of horror. His eyes were locked on her, now, like he was looking for something, and he seemed to be having some trouble finding it. The color was draining from his face.

“Dad, what do you want me to do?” Brie asked, perfectly even. “It’s not getting us anywhere when I…don’t do it. So just tell me. What do you want me to do?”

Dad turned around and left the attic.

Brie watched him disappear down the ladder, feeling curiously empty. Mum said, “Brie cheese—”

“Let’s not,” said Brie. “Just tell me.”

Mum let out this shaky breath and said, “Okay. So. The prophecy.”

SO IT IS WRITTEN THAT EYGHON’S MARKED WILL LIE WITH A ROMANI GIRL

“We’re not gonna get into what your dad got up to in college,” Mum said, “but let’s just say he’s got good reason to be twitchy whenever people start doing magic without knowing what they’re doing.”

“I wasn’t—”

“I know, baby. But the kind of training your dad went through really fucked him up, and with a gift like yours…” Mum trailed off. “Your dad’s a Watcher, like we said. He’s someone who comes from generations of old and powerful magic. And on my side of the family, you’ve got all sorts of strong and powerful witches. There’s a hurricane in you. You’re going to need to learn how to harness it, and your dad doesn’t know how to teach you. Or who can.”

“Do you?”

“Maybe. I…” Mum sighed. “Let’s just keep going with this.”

AND FROM THIS UNION SHALL BE BORN A CHILD NAMED FOR LOVE AND OLD BLOOD

“Love,” said Mum. “February. Old blood. Mirjana Sykorova. We fought the Council tooth and nail about it, we said it had to be about someone else, but they said even if it wasn’t—”

DAUGHTER OF EYGHON’S MARKED OWES PIETY

“They kept on pointing to that line. Saying it was them who you were supposed to be paying back, for how—” Mum’s voice caught. “Baby, they treated us like shit, but that never meant they treated your dad right, it just meant they treated him better than us. I never told you that because—”

“Mum,” said Brie, her own voice breaking.

“Because you love him so much,” said Mum. “Because you needed him to be your shield. But they don’t give a shit about any of us. And the only reason I would ever put up with any of it was because they—they have the power to take you away.” She swallowed. “Or they would have.”

DAUGHTER OF THE MURDERED IS OWED VENGEANCE

“Except,” said Mum. A knife-sharp smile flitted across her face. “Our family—yours and mine—we’ve got a history of biting back. My Uncle Enyos flew all the way out to England to go toe-to-toe with the Council for us. For you. He said they couldn’t lay claim to a child of the Kalderash without her mother’s permission, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to give it—not at twenty-one, and not now. If they’d taken you from my arms, we’d be entitled to more than a little bit of vengeance.”

All those eyes on Brie at Council parties—all those disdainful little asides about how disappointing she was, how poorly she reflected on her father—they were all cast in a sickening new light.

“I’m nothing special,” she said dizzily. “Some—some old words on a page don’t make me special, or important, I—”

Buffy made a noise like a wounded animal and pressed her face into her hands.

“My baby,” said Mum, all shaky. “I am so sorry.”

FEBRUARY’S WILL UPON THE WORLD SHALL SHAPE IT ANEW

Mum didn’t say anything. She sort of didn’t have to. In a world where magic was real, that was the sort of prophetic sentence that would change lives. If what Brie wanted could shape the world, well—

“The Council wanted me,” she realized aloud. “To make the world—what they want. Whatever that might look like.”

Mum looked at her with wet brown eyes.

“And your uncle—”

“A long, long time ago,” said Mum, “a vampire killed your great-great-great aunt Mirjana. My family’s grieved her ever since. My uncle wants to carry on that mission—enshrine that vampire’s suffering as a permanent and perpetual fact. A power like yours—whatever it is—”

THE POWERS THAT FEBRUARY SERVES WILL ALWAYS TRIUMPH

“You’re an automatic win,” said Mum. “Or at least that’s how the Council saw it. With you on their side, they’d stay in power. With you on my uncle’s side, the Sykorova family’s legacy would never die. And—” She wrung her hands. “And I was twenty-one, and I just wanted—I wanted you to grow up without this fucking bullshit to contend with. Your dad grew up a chess piece in a stupid cosmic battle and—and so did I. We didn’t want that for our baby.”

NO FORCE WILL BE GREATER, NO POWER MORE ABSOLUTE THAN SHE

“But the Powers that Be didn’t care about what we want.”

PIOUS, VENGEFUL DAUGHTER WILL RESTORE THE WORLD’S NATURAL ORDER

“I don’t know if we did it right,” said Mum. “What I know is that we tried. Both of us. Maybe it would have been easier if—if you’d grown up knowing. I don’t know. But we managed to talk the Council—and my uncle—into letting you grow up as a normal girl would. Impartial. Letting you have the opportunity to choose between them—”

“I don’t want anything to do with either of them,” said Brie immediately.

“Baby, I know. We don’t want you to. But they’re going to take you anyway.”

“That’s how they work,” said Buffy raggedly.

Brie couldn’t look at Buffy. Couldn’t think about any of this. Wanted to return to that strange in-between place, where she was everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing. Didn’t it matter, what she wanted? Wasn’t that what the whole absurd prophecy had said?

Come find me, the voice had said. You’ll know how when it’s time.

They’d been asking her to choose her whole life. Hadn’t she already made her choice? To not fit— wasn’t that a choice? Why did some lines on a paper define her in such stark and unyielding terms?

“What I want,” she said. “What I will. What if I willed this whole fucking system into nothing, Mum? What if that’s what I want done?”

And Mum smiled at her again, that knife-sharp smile, proud and angry and dangerous.

“Then I’d say we raised you right.”

Dad was downstairs in his office. Brie stepped inside. Leaned against the doorframe.

“I’m done fighting, Daddy,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”

Dad looked up at her like—well, she supposed he had been hit in the face. By her. 

“I never wanted you to look at me like I looked at my father,” he said hoarsely. “Never. And I am so…tired, of…of not knowing how to keep you safe.”

“You do just fine.” Her chest ached. “I didn’t know. I…”

“I didn’t want you to.”

She was glad to, though. Right now, at least. Knowing meant she could cross the room and lean down, tucking herself into Dad’s side. “I’m done fighting,” she repeated. “I don’t want this either. It’s stupid, and I don’t want it.”

“It is stupid, isn’t it,” Dad breathed, hugging her close. “Destiny is never done with us. I’m only sorry I passed it down to you.”

It’s a piece of you, though, she wanted to say, and didn’t know how to say it. She wasn’t quite sure he’d understand it, anyway.

Mum knocked on the doorframe. Brie looked up to see that she was watching them with this sad, relieved expression on her face.

“I’m going to take Buffy home.”

“Oh,” said Brie, “Buffy—”

“Don’t worry about that right now,” said Dad immediately.

“No, she’s not—she should stay here,” said Brie. “She needs to stay here. Does her mum know? Who’s keeping an eye on her? She was—she seemed—”

She didn’t know how to think about Buffy. She felt…too much to categorize, really. Everything was a miserably jumbled-up mess, but…well, if she wasn’t looking after Buffy, who was? She somehow didn’t think that Dad had been doing the best job of it.

Mum and Dad exchanged a look that Brie couldn’t quite decode. Dad opened his mouth to say something, but Mum interrupted. “I’ll handle that,” she said—very clearly to both of them. “We won’t take her home, baby, I’ll—I’ll talk to her.”

“Jenny,” Dad started.

“What’s one more fucking conversation you can’t fucking have?” said Mum, smiling very sharply at Dad. “What’s one more girl’s life on the line, right? You lose your shit day in, day out, and I talk the kids through, that’s what we’re doing, right? You manhandle my baby in front of me and then you go and cry in your office while I have to have the hard talk with a volatile teenager, again? Be the peacemaker, again? Do you have any fucking idea how difficult it’s been for me, these last few months, trying to keep you two from killing each other? Brie is sixteen. You, Rupert, are not.”

Dad looked stricken. Brie, who had been praying for some iteration of exactly this conversation for months, really hadn’t expected to feel quite so ill when it actually happened. 

“She’s sixteen,” said Mum. “Both of them are. We don’t get to pick and choose which one we treat like a little kid and which one we treat like a fucking prophesized weapon of doom. I’m done. I’m done.”

She turned on her heel and left.

Brie couldn’t look at Dad. His arm around her felt like the only thing keeping the rest of the world at bay. 

“Your mother,” said Dad, very hoarsely, “is absolutely always right.”