Archive of Our Own

The key scrapes against the lock when she lets herself into the apartment; she has to jiggle it three, four times to get it to catch. She really needs to get that fixed. Jenny thinks very hard about that, about the specific feeling of the key scraping in the lock, as she toes off her shoes and creeps into the living room, as she drops her bag on the couch, as she shrugs off her sweater and lets it fall onto the floor. She tries very hard not to think about anything else.

She should have taken an extra five minutes in the car. She should have done some breathing exercises or something, or maybe stopped at a bar and bought herself a shot. She walks into the bedroom like this, Rupert’s gonna know right away how —

“Jenny?”

A light switches on. Jenny blinks.

“Yeah,” she manages, and then she can’t really think of anything to say after that.

“Jenny, are you quite alright?”

He’s closer now, close enough to see her face, to see how she’s —

“Did Stella get to bed okay?” Jenny asks, scrubbing a hand under her eyes, not caring what it does to her makeup. She’s going to wash it all off anyway, as soon as she works up the energy to make it to the bathroom.

“What?” Rupert blinks at her, and Jenny blinks back, and for a drawn out handful of seconds they’re both just standing there, blinking, like a couple of jackasses. “Right. Yes,” he says, finally, as his brain catches up to what she asked. “She left a stack of her drawings on the dresser, she wanted me to show them to you.”

Something warm cracks over her, then, the horrible chill finally starting to thaw. Jenny shivers.

Rupert frowns.

“Did you eat?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Jenny says vaguely. She can’t actually remember if she did or not; it doesn’t seem particularly important right now. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

“Alright,” Rupert says after a long pause, but she’s already past him by then, leaving him standing there alone.

In the shower she tries very hard to think about nothing, and when that doesn’t work she forces herself to focus on the most ordinary topics she can dig up: the scrape of the key in the lock. The living room curtains that need to be replaced. The emergency contact form Stella brought home from school, currently lying unsigned on her kitchen counter.

The man in her house who isn’t on the lease.

That last one mostly does the trick, eclipsing all the other petty problems she had to try so desperately to keep on her mind. By the time she switches off the water and reaches for a towel she almost feels like a normal human being.

The man in question is waiting for her when she comes out of the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands clasped between his knees. He looks at her when the door opens; it’s obvious he’s been waiting.

“Hi,” Jenny says softly. “Sorry about that.”

“Perfectly fine.”

It really isn’t, but Jenny isn’t gonna be the one to point that out.

She would have, before, but it’s so strange between them now. Like they’re getting to know each other all over again, only the first time she got to know him she did it by picking fights with him for no reason and then getting as close to sexually harassing him in the workplace as she thought she could get away with. Now it feels fragile in a way it never did back in Sunnydale: back then he could have cracked him over the head with a hammer, probably, and he still would have come back to finish whatever inane argument she’d started that day.

If she cracked him over the head with a hammer right now he’d probably just die.

“Weird day,” she offers as a half-assed explanation. “The shower helped.”

“I’m glad,” Rupert says, and there’s a split-second of them staring at each other, waiting for a cue that never comes, before Jenny decides she’s had it and steps closer to stand between his legs, one hand coming to rest on his shoulder. He blinks up at her, startled the way he is every time she initiates anything. She’s letting him sleep in her bed, but somehow it’s always a surprise that she wants to touch him.

“Jenny,” he says quietly. She doesn’t say anything at all.

I saw a dead body today.

The thought rises up like a shock, threatening to choke her, fingers digging into the meat of his shoulder as she stares down at his face. He’s so much older than she remembered him.

One of his hands has come to settle on her waist; the other reaches up to clasp the hand at his shoulder, carefully loosening her grip. Heart pounding, she leans forward and presses her lips to his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth. His grip on her waist tightens.

Jenny jerks back, twists her hand free of his grip to tug at his shirt, suddenly impatient, missing when she never saw him in anything but button-downs and sweaters. “Help me, would you?” she mutters; her mouth twists in a smirk as his awkward attempt to fumble himself out of his shirt ends up knocking his glasses askew. She untangles her fingers from the fabric of his shirt to take them off for him, stretching over to set them safely on the bedside table.

He lets her finish tugging his shirt over his head and then he lets her push him backwards onto the bed and then he lets her crawl on top of him, tugging the towel she’d secured around her body after her shower free in the process.

“Jenny,” he murmurs one last time, just as she’s leaning down to kiss him, but she shakes her head and doesn’t let him finish.

It’ll ruin it if they speak.

In the morning she wakes to find her face squashed against the mattress and her pillow long gone — the floor, she suspects, but she doesn’t particularly want to open her eyes and find out. She can hear voices and the occasional clang for the kitchen; Rupert must be making breakfast. Jenny’s surprised Stella didn’t come running in to scream her good morning greeting like she usually does, before she realizes Rupert probably told her to let her mother sleep.

For some reason that’s enough to get Jenny out of bed, smothering a yawn in her elbow as she tugs her robe off the hook on the back of the bedroom door. She’s still squinting against the light when she makes her way towards the kitchen. Rupert’s standing to the side of the stove, just as she expected, mixing something in a bowl: omelettes, probably, judging by the open carton of eggs.

He’s got Stella sitting on the counter next to him, which he definitely should not be letting her do, but she doesn’t seem particularly interested in getting any closer to the stove, at least, drumming her heels against the cabinets and holding a bowl of cut mushrooms securely against her chest.

“Daddy’s making breakfast,” she informs Jenny as soon as she notices her presence, a self-satisfied expression on her face. “I’m helping.”

“I see that,” Jenny says, reaching into her bowl to steal a piece of mushroom, popping it into her mouth raw. Stella’s mouth twists in disgust; Jenny grins. “What’s the coffee situation like, hm? You help with that, too?”

“He doesn’t like coffee,” Stella informs her. “I asked. But he said I can do the toast later.”

“Well, it’s good that you asked,” Jenny says, moving to Rupert’s other side to get a pot started. He shoots her a sideways glance while she measures out the grinds, a look on his face that says he wants to ask her what happened yesterday, but doesn’t know how to bring it up. “Did you and your dad make any plans for today?” she says loudly instead of acknowledging any of that, craning her neck a little so Stella knows she’s talking to her.

“Uh-huh,” Stella answers, offering up the bowl when Rupert needs the mushrooms. There’s a very serious look on her face, like she’s worried she isn’t going to do it right.

“Thank you, Stella,” Rupert says quietly, in the exact same tone of voice he’d use for an adult.

Well. An adult he was in the habit of being nice to, which definitely isn’t all of them. It certainly wasn’t Jenny, for a not-insignificant period of time.

“Daddy’s gonna take me to school,” Stella informs her, watching interestedly as the mushrooms sizzle in the pan. “He said you probably weren’t gonna wake up in time for breakfast, but then you did!”

“I did,” Jenny agrees, stabbing the start button on the coffee machine and wandering back over to where Stella’s still sitting. Rupert must have let her dress herself: she’s wearing two different socks. “How’d you get up here, huh?” she asks quietly, grabbing one foot — the one in pink and yellow polka dots — to tickle the bottom of it. Stella shrieks and tries to squirm away. Rupert glances over from where he’s scraping the cooked mushrooms back into the bowl, a small smile on his face.

“I jumped,” Stella says, finally, which is a clear lie; she laughs as Jenny tugs her to the edge and helps her jump back down to her feet. She’s tall for her age, all long skinny limbs, already too big to be carried. She’ll be taller than Jenny by middle school, probably. When Jenny thinks that far into the future she finds it hard to breathe.

“Come on,” she says, smiling down at Stella as she herds her towards the bedroom. “Let your dad worry about the toast, hm? I gotta fix your hair before we eat.”

She hugs Stella in the doorway for longer than usual when it’s time for her to leave for school, holding her daughter’s living, breathing body close for as long as she can before Stella squirms and pulls away, taking her father’s hand instead.

Rupert glances back at Jenny as he walks Stella to the car, a puzzled expression on his face, but Jenny doesn’t do anything but smile, offering one last wave as he buckles Stella into the backseat.

“Drive safe!” she calls, just as Rupert closes the driver’s side door behind himself. In the window she sees him raise a hand in acknowledgment, then turn to say something to Stella, who immediately twists and gives a farewell wave of her own. There’s a weird tugging feeling in Jenny’s stomach as she watches them disappear down their quiet street.

Probably she just needs to finish her coffee, she tells herself, locking the door behind her and turning towards the empty house.

Except when she gets back into the kitchen she finds she’s lost the appetite for it; she leaves the mug on the counter and wanders back into the bedroom instead, shrugging off her robe and letting it fall to the floor as she crawls right back into bed.

Just a few minutes, she tells herself, picking up the pillow from the floor and fishing the sheet up from where she kicked it down in her sleep. Just a few more minutes, then she’ll get up for real.

Really.

“ —ny? Jenny, I picked you up a — oh.”

“What,” Jenny mumbles from under the quilt, batting at the fabric until she can free her face enough to squint in Rupert’s direction.

He’s standing in the doorway with a paper takeout in his hand, obviously having expected to find her a little more … upright.

Fair enough, Jenny thinks as she yawns, half-heartedly covering her mouth as she struggles to push herself up against the pillows.

“Hey,” she says blearily, once she’s finally settled.

“I got you a coffee,” Rupert finishes his sentence from earlier, holding the cup up as though for inspection. Jenny, much more interested in drinking it as quickly as possible, holds out her hands until he comes close enough to pass it over.

“Are you feeling alright?”

He waits until she’s taken a few sips to ask, at least, perching himself gingerly at the very edge of the bed in the meantime.

The old Jenny would have told him to come closer, would have tried to distract him; this Jenny takes another sip of coffee and shrugs, saying nothing. He got her order right, thankfully, although that probably be more impressive if she didn’t take her coffee black.

Still. It’s nice that he remembered.

“Jenny,” Rupert says after a few more sips, a look on his face like something’s just occurred to him. She watches dispassionately as he stammers a little, searching for the words, vaguely curious as to what he’s getting at but mostly just tired. “Jenny, you aren’t — it’s just. Last time I saw you this exhausted in the mornings, you were — you know.”

“No I don’t,” Jenny says automatically, only then the pieces click together and she knows exactly what he’s getting at, actually. She laughs, a short, sharp bark. “Jesus. No. I’m on birth control, that’s not — no.”

“You were last time, too,” Rupert points out uncomfortably. “At least, I was under the impression — That is, you’d told me you were — ”

“Yeah, don’t even bother trying to finish that sentence,” Jenny cuts him off. She scrubs at her face, feeling more exhausted than ever. “I was a flake back then, I missed a dose like once a week. I learned that lesson, I promise. I’d — I’d know.”

“Right,” Rupert agrees, and then he doesn’t seem to know what he should say after that. The thing is, he doesn’t look as relieved as she’d expect. She doesn’t really know how to describe the look on his face at all, actually. She’d like to think she used to know him better than this, but the truth is she never really did. She never got the chance. “So then why…?”

He gestures towards her blanket cocoon, visibly struggling for a polite way to ask her why the hell she can’t get out of bed.

“What time is it?” she asks, instead of offering an explanation she doesn’t really have.

Well, no. That’s a lie. She has one, she just doesn’t want to say it. She doesn’t even really want to acknowledge it, because then she’d be thinking about —

“It’s eleven,” Rupert says, thankfully interrupting that train of thought. Jenny blinks at him in shock: that can’t be right.

“Stella’s school is seven minutes away,” she says blankly. “What were you…?”

“I had to run some errands,” Rupert explains. “My order arrived at the bookstore, and then I wanted to pick up some groceries, and I thought it would be easier, you know, seeing as I already had the car — ”

“Right,” Jenny agrees faintly. Stella’s school ends at two-thirty; there’s no way she’s going to get everything done by then. “I’m so sorry,” she says reluctantly, taking another long sip of her drink before she sets it down next to the bed and shoos Rupert off so she can stand up. He hovers close to her like he’s scared she’s going to topple right back down, which is honestly a lot more likely than she wants to admit. “Is there any way you can pick her up, too? I know you’re afraid of the carpool lane, but I swear it’s not that bad if you just park at the playground and walk.”

“I’m not afraid of the carpool lane,” Rupert protests, but the look on his face says otherwise.

“Everyone is, it’s fine,” Jenny says, waving a dismissive hand. She jerks open the topmost dresser drawer, the one that always sticks, and fishes out a new pair of underwear and a bra, then moves towards the closet. “It was so much better when her friend’s mom was picking her up, but then Kelly started taking ballet lessons on the other side of town and she couldn’t do it anymore and that was a whole thing.”

The whole thing was that Stella also wanted to take ballet lessons, but Jenny couldn’t afford them. She’d tried to be as kind as she could, explaining that if Stella still wanted it in six months she’d consider it, but Stella had been so upset she’d barely spoken to Jenny for a week. Jenny hadn’t realized a six-year-old could hold a grudge for so long. She hadn’t realized how badly it could hurt.

But Rupert doesn’t need to hear about any of that right now.

“Ah.”

She doesn’t think he’s indifferent to the banal minutiae of Stella’s life, exactly; she’s willing to give him more credit than that. It’s more that he never seems to know quite how to respond, which she guesses makes sense. The problems of a six-year-old girl aren’t really his area of expertise.

“Anyway,” Jenny continues, poking her head back out of the closet. Rupert blinks at her, a little dazed, before he pulls it together and nods for her to continue; it takes her a few more seconds to realize it’s because while she managed to get the underwear and bra on, plus a pair of jeans, she stalled out while trying to find a shirt. “Do you mind? I swear I wouldn’t ask you, but I didn’t exactly plan on spending the whole morning unconscious. I thought I’d have like two more hours.”

“Of course I don’t mind.”

“I promise I’ll — oh.” Jenny stops, surprised; she’d been gearing up to make a deal. She wasn’t expecting him to agree right away. She wonders, idly, if that makes her a bad person. Rupert’s Stella’s father; is it really such a stretch that he’d agree to help even more than he already is?

God. That’s a road she doesn’t want to go down right now.

“Thanks,” she says, with a smile she wishes was just a little less awkward. “That’s really — I appreciate it.”

“It’s no trouble,” Rupert says, and he sounds like he honestly means it. His forehead furrows, though, like there’s something more he wants to say; he opens his mouth only to flounder and fall silent.

“Right,” Jenny says briskly. “Great. I’m gonna go send about twenty-seven emails, and then maybe we can talk about what to do for dinner.”

“Yes,” Rupert agrees. “Although first you may want to, ah. You know.”

He gestures at his own chest, cheeks flushed, and Jenny remembers, belatedly, that she never did find that shirt.

“Maybe I thought I’d do you a favour,” she says with a grin, but she turns back to the closet anyway, grabbing a blouse at random and shrugging it on. “You ever think of that?”

“I didn’t, no,” Rupert admits. He’s really red, now, Jenny observes with delight. Since he got back he’s harder to fluster, mostly; she feels like she’s won something every time she manages.

“Sucks,” she says breezily, standing on her tip-toes to press a kiss to his cheek. “I prefer a guy with a good imagination.”

“I’ll work on that as I prepare lunch, shall I,” Rupert says, voice dry, the corner of his mouth quirking up. Jenny grins back, delighted that he’s playing along.

“See that you do.”

Jenny’s ‘work’ is pretty nebulous: most of it pretty much amounts to magical virus protection, the online equivalent of selling herbs and crystals. The pay isn’t great — or consistent — but last year she started teaching basic computer classes three times a week at the local community college, and between that and the cheques Rupert was sending for Stella, she’s been doing okay.

Now that he’s here she has no idea what’ll happen. It all feels so tenuous: one wrong conversation between them, one phone call that Buffy’s died or Willow’s starting another apocalypse or Xander’s — god, Jenny doesn’t even know; what is Xander up to these days? — and it’ll just be Jenny and Stella. Exactly the way they were before, only this time they’ll both know what’s missing.

Rupert said he wouldn’t leave again, obviously; Jenny made him promise when he moved his stuff in. For Stella, she’d insisted, knowing full well it was for herself, too. But what’s he supposed to do about an apocalypse? It’s not like he’s the one scheduling that shit. Jenny’s hands start to shake, a little, when she lets herself think about it, so mostly she just doesn’t.

She really does have to get this work done.

A sandwich gets set down next to her; she eats it. The plate disappears. The door opens and closes as Rupert leaves the house, and then again when he comes back from wherever it is he went. Another cup of coffee appears at her elbow. The door opens and closes again. He’s gone for longer, this time; picking up Stella, she imagines. Maybe going for a walk. They both seemed to enjoy that, the last time they went.

Jenny picks up the pace, knowing she’s going to have to set everything aside as soon as they’re home, but what should be a thirty minute walk, max, stretches out past an hour; she’s finished for real by the time she finally hears the door open.

“Mommy we got dinner!”

She grins at the sound of Stella screaming from the front hallway, followed immediately by Rupert’s ineffectual shushing, and pushes herself to a stand.

“You did, huh?”

“Daddy said he doesn’t like Chinese but Mexican is okay so we got tacos,” Stella breathes out in a rush. “Well I got tacos and Daddy got a salad and you got a quesadilla because I remembered that you liked quesadillas last time. Also I got extra guacamole because I want to be strong like the avocado baby.”

Rupert stands behind her, watching her give the speech with a kind of bemused fondness on his face; she stumbles a little on quesadilla but rallies impressively, holding a brown paper bag up for Jenny with a grin.

“Wow,” Jenny says, grinning back just as wide. “A quesadilla, huh?”

“I told her we could make them at home, but she insisted it wouldn’t be the same,” Rupert informs her, as he struggles to take off his shoes without spilling what looks to be two full bags of groceries, plus the rest of the takeout order. Jenny moves forward to take the takeout and one of the bags, barely hesitating before stretching up to give him a kiss, just as she had before he left.

Rupert pauses, forgetting about his shoes for a moment as he looks down at her, the beginnings of a goofy little smile on his face. The moment stretches out, just the two of them and their eyes on each other, until a clatter from the kitchen startles them both.

“Shit,” Jenny mutters, with an awkward laugh. “That’s her trying to get down the plates, I should — ”

She gives him one last kiss before she hurries out to help Stella, praying she gets there before the kid actually breaks something. She feels Rupert’s eyes on her the whole time.

Stella keeps up a steady chatter through dinner, tearing her way through her first taco in her typically graceless fashion. By the time she’s finished there’s a perfect halo of shredded lettuce around her plate; Rupert has a mildly terrified expression on his face.

“Thanks for picking up dinner,” she says, nudging his foot under the table. He startles, then smiles at her, a lot warmer than she expects.

“Of course,” he says softly, and then, teasing, “you’ll be handling the cleanup, of course.”

He nods towards Stella’s taco mess. Jenny grins and shrugs; she’s survived far worse. At least this time Stella’s eating the guacamole with a spoon, not her hands.

“You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Stella has her bath after dinner, which she can mostly handle unattended as long as she doesn’t lock the door, and Jenny cleans up the kitchen while Rupert wanders into the living room, poking around and mindlessly straightening. He does that a lot, she’s noticed. It annoys her, some days, to have him touching all her stuff; other times she’s glad for the help.

“What is this?”

Rupert’s voice has raised, sharp at the edges, a tone she hasn’t heard from him in years. Not since Sunnydale.

“What’s — ”

Jenny’s question dies in her throat as she finishes drying her hands, walking out of the kitchen to find him standing with her open purse in front of him, a notebook that doesn’t belong to him in his hand.

“Don’t touch that,” she snaps, but it’s too late. He’s seen everything, she presumes, or at least enough to get a pretty good idea of what she was out so late looking into last night. “Were you going through my bag? I can’t believe you would — ”

“It was open,” Rupert interrupts her coolly. There’s that confidence to his voice, the strength he only picks up when he thinks someone’s in danger. Jenny really, really does not want to hear it right now. “Anyone could have seen it, Jenny. Stella could have picked it up.”

A very particular anger is rising up inside her; it’s a feeling she only gets when she knows someone else is right, and the self-recrimination only ever ends up making her even more pissed off. Not her most attractive trait, probably, but she can’t always help it.

“Well, she didn’t pick it up, you did,” she snaps back, self-aware enough to realize that’s a horrible comeback, but not enough to stop herself from actually saying it. “And I didn’t ask you to — ”

“I don’t care if you asked or not!” Rupert says, raising his voice for the first time. “This kind of magic is fatal, Jenny, and more than that it’s, it’s bloody, it’s — ”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I don’t know what you know! You — you’ve never really said what it is, what it is you do for work, specifically, but I was under the impression that it was sort of — I don’t know — email magic, or something of the sort, not — not this.”

Jenny takes in a sharp breath, a desperate gulp of air, trying to calm herself down enough to answer without screaming. She can’t scream at him because Stella’s in the next room. She can’t scream at him because she won’t be able to take it back. You can’t scream at him because he doesn’t actually deserve it, a horrible voice of reason pipes up from somewhere in her brain. She squashes it down as viciously as she can.

“It wasn’t for work,” she bites out, finally, and she was so worried about screaming when she should have been worried about this: the way her voice betrays her and wobbles, then cracks. Rupert blinks, obviously surprised, his anger wavering in the face of sudden concern.

The doorbell rings, startling both of them, shattering the moment neatly in two.

“I’ll get it,” Jenny says quickly, before Rupert can offer. She clears her throat to make sure her voice will hold, trying to pull herself together. “Would you just — just go tuck Stella into bed. We can talk about this later.”

She is going to do absolutely everything in her power to avoid talking about this later, and from the look on Rupert’s face he’s well aware, but she turns to stomp down the hall before he can try and stop her. She has no idea who might be coming by this late, but she hopes it’s someone looking for a long conversation. If it’s Mrs. Whitehall complaining about Stella’s toys in the backyard again they’re really going to get into it.

She jerks the door open with more force than necessary, mouth opening to tell Mrs. Whitehall that it’s private property, actually, and also none of her fucking business, only to find —

“Oh,” Jenny says faintly.

It isn’t Mrs. Whitehall standing there at all.

In her memories Buffy’s larger than life, staring down life and death and vampires, an energy around her much bigger than you’d think such a tiny body could contain.

In person Buffy’s older than Jenny remembers, obviously, and thinner. Rupert never said anything about how skinny she’d gotten. All sharp edges — pointed shoulders, bony wrists. Her mouth is a sharp red slash in her face. She has a haunted, shellshocked look in her eyes that Jenny imagines one sees quite often at the veterans’ hospital.

Buffy used to wear pink, Jenny thinks vaguely. She used to tie her hair in ponytails on the top of her head and carry around tubes of that sticky lip gloss all the pretty girls were obsessed with, applying a second and third coat as it wore off through the night. When Jenny left Willow was still using cherry Chapstick; that’s probably changed, too.

“Shit, sorry,” Jenny says, abruptly realizing she’s just been staring at Buffy’s face for what’s gotta be going on a full minute now. It feels surreal, like maybe she lost her head so badly in that fight with Rupert that now she’s started to hallucinate. “Do you want — um. Rupert?”

Buffy shakes her head and then pauses, frowning, and doesn’t offer anything more about what it is that she does want. Jenny, for her part, has no idea; Buffy can’t possibly be here to talk to her. Jenny’s been absent from her life since Buffy was a teenager, and they didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.

“Do you want to come in?” Jenny asks carefully. Buffy hesitates, then nods, following Jenny silently to the living room. The couch seems even uglier than usual, suddenly.

“Rupert will be out soon,” she says, nodding towards Stella’s closed bedroom door. “He’s just, um. Tucking Stella in. It shouldn’t be much longer.”

He’s probably taking his sweet time in there, actually, and Jenny can’t exactly blame him but she can be irrationally annoyed about it, because the longer he barricades himself in there, the longer she’s stuck out here, trying to manage a situation she couldn’t even begin to know how to understand.

“Um,” Buffy says, finally, still kind of just staring around the room. “I guess I can just — ”

She flails one arm out towards the couch, but doesn’t actually move to sit on it. Jenny’s usually better at handling things like this, at breaking the tension and making people feel comfortable, but right now she’s still flushed from the fight, panic still buzzing at the back of her brain, and she can’t even think of the words to string together a coherent sentence.

“Do you need any — water? Or something to drink?”

Buffy shakes her head.

“Okay,” Jenny says faintly, and walks forward slowly perch herself at the edge of the couch, gesturing for Buffy to sit next to her. That’s enough to get Buffy moving, finally, sitting with her hands braced on her knees, like she might need to spring up at any moment.

“Did you come from — you know what, I’m sorry,” Jenny says helplessly. “I don’t actually know where it is you ended up after, after Sunnydale — um.”

“Caved in?” Buffy offers, and Jenny winces.

“Yeah, that.”

Buffy shrugs one sharp shoulder.

“It was kind of up in the air for a while,” she says evasively. “Me and Dawn — do you remember Dawn? My sister?” — Buffy pauses, a weirdly intense expression on her face as she waits for Jenny to nod her agreement, before she continues — “We kind of traveled for a bit, ‘cause I’d basically been stuck in Sunnydale for, like, five years, but then Dawn had to go back to school and Faith needed help in Cleveland, so.”

Jenny definitely doesn’t remember knowing a Faith — even Dawn’s name is barely familiar — but she nods anyway.

“And how’s, um. How’s Cleveland?”

“It’s fine.” Buffy shrugs again. “Lots of vamps. Keeps me busy.”

Jenny thinks of the girl who used to barge into the school library, talking loudly about dating boys and fighting with her mom and forgetting her homework. The woman in front of her is nearly unrecognizable; Jenny finds she has no idea what to say to her.

The creak of Stella’s bedroom door interrupts her before she’s managed to think of anything, both women turning their heads toward it in unison.

“Sorry to take so long,” Rupert says, voice a low murmur as he closes the door quietly behind him. He sounds bizarrely normal, considering the atmosphere between them before he went in there. “There was an issue with the bear and a pair of shoes that quite urgently needed to be resolved, I’m sure you can — ”

He falls silent when he takes in Buffy’s presence, the way she’s hovering near the couch, too afraid to sit. He comes to an awkward stop at the entrance to the living room, a shocked look on his face.

“Oh,” he says faintly. “Hello, Buffy.”

The smile Buffy offers him is significantly cooler than the greeting she’d given Jenny, which surprises her. It makes her sadder than she would have expected; she hadn’t realized she cared.

“Hi,” Buffy says, that sharp mouth twisting into a shape that is, very technically speaking, a smile. Her shoulders are so tense Jenny aches just looking at her.

“Buffy came in from Cleveland — sorry, I didn’t ask, did you fly in?”

“What?” Buffy blinks, tears her gaze away from where she’s been staring at Rupert. “Um. Yeah. I took a taxi straight from the airport.”

It’s Jenny’s turn to pause, nonplussed. She assumed Buffy had dropped her luggage off at a hotel, that maybe she was here for work, or to see friends, and that seeing Rupert was a last stop before she headed home. Not — the only thing she’s carrying is one of those useless tiny purses, Jenny realizes with alarm. She didn’t even pack a change of clothes.

“That’s, ah — is there some sort of emergency? That is, do you need me to — ”

Jenny’s whole body goes rigid as Rupert’s meaning sinks in. She hadn’t even — how had she not considered that? Of course Buffy wouldn’t just show up here randomly, of course there’s something bigger going on.

If Buffy asks Rupert for help he’ll leave again, Jenny feels sure of it. Why wouldn’t he? He found a notebook full of black magic in her purse and she picked a huge stupid fight about it even though he was right and now he’s going to wash his hands of all of it and leave, and Jenny wants to be the type of woman who’d be fine with it but she feels kind of like her chest is caving in, actually —

Buffy shakes her head.

“No, it’s not — everything’s fine!” She pastes a bright smile on her face, almost frighteningly fake. “Just a personal visit, that’s all!”

“Oh.”

The look Rupert gives her at the words personal visit reminds Jenny of nothing so much as a startled deer; she’d find it funny, maybe, if the situation weren’t so dire. “No, that’s, um, that’s lovely, that’s — was this spurred on by, by anything in particular?”

God, it’s like having a front row seat to a traffic accident. Jenny’d try and help him, maybe, if she weren’t still trying to recover her own composure.

Buffy’s smile wavers, just the slightest bit; she sets her shoulders and tosses her hair back, then gives up and trades the smile for a more neutral expression. Just as fake, Jenny expects; it’s almost painful to watch.

“I can’t just want to see you?”

Probably Buffy means it to come out differently, Jenny thinks, but her voice wavers, making the words sound plaintive and childish. Buffy clamps her mouth shut as she hears herself, obviously horrified, and for the first time Jenny notices the bandage on the inside of her arm, as though she’s given blood recently, or — or from an IV, more likely.

“Did something happen?” Jenny asks, because someone has to intervene, and it’s obviously not going to be Rupert. “I know you said it wasn’t an emergency, I just noticed — ”

She gestures to the crook of her own elbow, then to Buffy; Buffy looks down at it, frowns when she sees what Jenny means, and immediately tears it off, crumpling it in her fist.

“No,” she says, and then, still frowning. “I mean, yes, but, you know. It wasn’t a big deal, or anything. I only had to stay one night.”

“Stay where? The hospital?”

Rupert’s finally recovered enough to speak.

“Um,” Buffy says, glancing at him, then away. “Yeah. It was just a stupid mistake, no big deal.”

“While you were, ah, patrolling?”

Buffy flinches. Jenny wishes that she were almost literally anywhere else, and if she can’t have that, she wishes Rupert were at least sitting next to her, so she could grab his knee and discreetly signal for him to stop.

“I told you, it was stupid. I just wasn’t paying enough attention.”

Jenny glances between them, from Rupert’s vaguely shellshocked concern to Buffy’s defensive posture and then back again, her existing sense of dread intensifying by the second.

“Ah, well,” he flounders, still looking lost. “I’m sure you’ll — I’m sure you’ll be more careful in the — Buffy, you’re sure there’s nothing wrong? It’s — it’s quite a long flight, from Cleveland to Seattle, and I’m simply — I’m not sure what’s going on, that’s all.”

“I’m gonna get us all water,” Jenny announces loudly into the silence that follows that stammering interrogation, ignoring the desperate look Rupert sends her as she moves to the kitchen. The kitchen doesn’t actually have a door that closes, so she can still hear everything they’re saying as she opens the cabinet to take out three glasses. It feels like she should be making tea, something to calm them all down, but she can’t handle the look she knows Rupert’ll give her when she inevitably fucks it up, so. Water it is. She tries to open the refrigerator very quietly.

— can always call me, you know —

— can I? Can I really —

If there’s something going on, you can tell me, and —

— and, what? You’d listen, and then what?

— not fair, I’ve always fulfilled my responsibilities to —

Jenny winces, but forces herself to hold still, three full glasses of water on the counter in front of her.

— so that’s all I ever was to you, then? A responsibility?

Buffy’s crying, or maybe trying not to cry; these horrible, high pitched wheezing sounds coming out of her as she struggles to breathe normally. Jenny can’t listen to it anymore.

“Okay,” she says loudly, coming out with only the glass of water she’d poured for Buffy, leaving the other two in the kitchen. If Rupert’s thirsty he can go get it himself. “That’s enough for tonight, I think.”

She knows none of it’s really her business — she gave that up when she left Sunnydale. It is, however, happening in her living room, which means she couldn’t keep herself separate from it even if she tried. Besides which, she’s not a monster, and she’s pretty sure Buffy’s halfway to a panic attack on her couch right now. So.

She thinks about Buffy in that library, god — seven years ago, now? Six? Jaw set with determination, walking to her own death. Maybe I’ll take him with me. Jenny just let her go, then.

She sits next to Buffy on the couch and hands her the water, holding her hands around the cup until she’s sure she’s not going to drop it.

“Drink that,” she instructs quietly. “We can talk more tomorrow, okay? Let’s all just get some rest.”

Buffy doesn’t really acknowledge her, but she does drink the water. Behind her, Rupert shuffles uncomfortably; Jenny looks resolutely forward.

“You’re going to sleep here, right?”

Buffy’s mouth twists apologetically when Jenny asks, discomfort practically radiating off of her.

“I can take the couch — ” she starts, but Jenny’s already shaking her head, reaching for the glass to set it on the coffee table.

“Rupert will take the couch,” she says firmly, steadfastly ignoring the injured look he gives her from where he’s migrated towards the kitchen entryway. “You’ll take our room, I’ll fix it up for you. I can go in with Stella. She has a regular sized bed, we can both fit.”

“No, I can’t — ”

“You can,” Jenny interrupts brusquely. “Rupert, can you get the spare sheets from the linen closet and make up the bed?”

She jerks her head meaningfully towards their bedroom, hoping he gets the message to give the two of them some privacy, staring him down until he sighs and reluctantly obeys.

“You really didn’t bring anything else with you?” Jenny asks, once Rupert’s left them alone. “A bag, or…?”

Buffy shakes her head. The day finally seems to be catching up with her: she sways a little on her feet, then rights herself immediately with an embarrassed grimace. There’s a bruise on her collarbone, Jenny notices, already nearly healed. She wonders if there are more, hidden in places she can’t see.

“I’ll lend you some pyjamas,” she says quietly. “Bathroom’s down the hall, I’ll come meet you there.”

It’s incalculably strange, caring for the young woman who once pinned Jenny to her own desk by the throat. Jenny mostly tries not to think about her time in Sunnydale; most of the time it feels like another life. Like it happened to a completely different person. Now Jenny’s handing her an oversized t-shirt and her most comfortable pyjama pants and pointing her to the towel closet, digging out a spare toothbrush from the cabinet under the sink so she can give her that, too.

“Do you need anything else?”

A stupid question, probably; Buffy stares at her dully, like she didn’t even hear what Jenny said. She must be exhausted, Jenny thinks, or else — something deeper, maybe. She was going to leave Buffy to it, but something makes her linger in the hallway, waiting until she’s out of the bathroom to lead her into the bedroom. Rupert’s still in there, smoothing down the quilt as though it isn’t going to be pulled back immediately. When he looks up and sees Buffy standing there in Jenny’s pyjamas his face softens, expression suddenly indescribably sad.

“Get some rest,” he says quietly, giving her shoulder a comforting squeeze before quietly leaving the two of them alone.

He went to get Buffy’s water from the living room: it’s been placed carefully on a coaster by the bed. Jenny doesn’t know why the sight of it nearly brings her to tears.

“Sleep as late as you want, alright?” she tells Buffy softly, moving through the bedroom one more time to check that the windows are all closed. “We’ll be quiet in the morning.”

Jenny wishes Buffy one last goodnight from the doorway, but Buffy seems to have exhausted all her words: she just curls up under the quilt, silent. By the time Jenny switches the light off, all she can see is her hair.

“She didn’t say anything more about why she’s here?” Jenny asks quietly in the living room, perched on the couch next to where Rupert’s stretched himself out. Now that she’s too tired to be mad at him, she feels a pang of sympathy for the state his neck will be in tomorrow morning; she rubs a hand along his arm in a futile apology.

Rupert shakes his head.

“You heard it all from the kitchen,” he says, a faintly abashed expression on his face. Jenny can’t tell what part’s upsetting him more: that Buffy said those things to him, or that Jenny heard her say them.

“Have you ever seen her like this before?”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Jenny fumbles for the right word, not wanting to imply something that isn’t there. “Just — it was like she couldn’t even hear me, in the bedroom. I don’t think it was just exhaustion. Do you know if she’s ever talked to anybody?”

“I don’t — ”

“Like a therapist, Rupert,” Jenny clarifies, exasperated. “Someone who could help her.”

“I don’t think she’d tell me if she had,” Rupert admits.

Jenny breathes out a sigh of reluctant agreement: he’s probably right. She isn’t sure Buffy would tell anyone at all, honestly; it seems like the kind of thing that would embarrass her.

God. What a mess.

“I’m sorry for earlier,” Rupert murmurs suddenly, so unexpected that Jenny nearly slides off the couch in shock. “For raising my voice. I wish I hadn’t done that.”

“We were fighting,” Jenny points out warily. “Remember?”

Rupert shakes his head.

“I don’t — I don’t like to think of myself that way,” he says. “I don’t want to person who raises their voice in anger, not with my — my — ”

Jenny doesn’t need him to finish that sentence.

She does need to be closer to him, though, suddenly; she nudges at his hip until he gets what she means and shifts over towards the back of the couch. There’s still not really enough room for her, but if she lies mostly on top of him, his arm around her back keeping her in place, she can mostly fit.

“I overreacted, too,” she confesses quietly, finding it’s easier when he can’t see her face. “I was upset.”

“I could, ah. I could tell.”

It isn’t a question, exactly, but there’s a hesitant openness to his tone that invites an explanation.

“You were right about my job,” she starts slowly. “It is mostly email magic, as you put it. This wasn’t for work.”

Jenny presses her face into his shirt and just breathes there for a few seconds, trying not to remember. Rupert’s arm tightens around her back.

“One of Stella’s friends, her mom asked — it was her niece, she went missing last week,” Jenny continues. “They found some strange — ” her voice starts to wobble; she stops to take a deep breath. “ — her mom found the notebook in her room and she didn’t know what it was, and they know what I do for a living, thought maybe I’d know. She asked if I’d look into it for her.”

“Jenny,” is all Rupert says, voice low and warning, but she hears his question just fine. Why didn’t you tell me? Even if he’d really asked, she couldn’t answer. She doesn’t know how.

“I swear, I wasn’t trying — I was just going to one of the tarot places downtown to ask about the symbols, I didn’t think I’d find the — ”

The body, Jenny can’t quite make herself say.

“Jenny,” Rupert says again, this time with significantly more concern.

“It was her mom’s boyfriend,” she tells Rupert, raising her voice a little, because she needs to get it out before he says something nice to her. “He strangled her first, then dumped the — the body. All those spells, and he didn’t even use any of them. I guess he wanted to do it with his own hands.”

Rupert inhales sharply. For a long time he says nothing, hand smoothing a slow circle on her back.

“And this — it’s been taken care of, I trust? The, ah. Boyfriend.”

“PD picked him up,” Jenny says, with a funny little laugh. “I didn’t even need — it wasn’t actually anything to do with spells, or the occult, or anything. I didn’t even need to be there.”

“You wanted to help,” Rupert says quietly.

“Shut up,” Jenny snaps, voice wet. She’s been trying so hard not to think about it. “Shut up.”

“Alright.”

“I have to go check on Stella.”

“Alright.”

But she lets him hold her a few minutes longer anyway.

The door creaks when Jenny opens it to creep into Stella’s room, squinting and making her way to the bed in dim light cast by the nightlight in the corner.

“Mommy?”

Jenny shushes her daughter, smoothing her hair back from her face before nudging her sleep-heavy body over to make room. Stella smells like L’Oreal kids shampoo, and the strawberry bubble bath she insists on using even though it always makes her skin itch. It’s too warm for her long nightgown but she wanted to wear it to bed anyway, so proud of the present her father brought back from England for her. If Rupert leaves her in the lurch Jenny’s going to hunt him down and kill him herself.

“Go back to sleep, baby,” Jenny says quietly, even as Stella rolls over, blinking groggily at her.

“You missed a really good story,” Stella informs her, voice slurred with sleep. “The bear got a new pair of shoes.”

“Your dad mentioned something like that,” Jenny tells her, smiling softly, one hand still stroking her hair. She’s so big already, demanding so much room to grow. Jenny won’t be able to do things like this for much longer. Her hand is shaking, she notices dimly. “You’ll have to tell me all about it in the morning.”

“Okay.” Stella sniffs, groggy and sweet. “Love you.”

“Love you always,” Jenny whispers back. She presses a kiss to Stella’s cheek, a little too hard, then strokes the same spot with one trembling thumb. “All the way to the moon.”

She wakes up confused, her brain struggling to put together why she’s got her face smashed into patterned pink polyester instead of her own dark plum cotton sheets. For a few long minutes she just lies there, letting her eyes drift closed again, before she hears the sound of Stella’s chatter from outside and realizes what that means.

“Shit,” Jenny mutters, pushing herself upright with a groan. She’s already swung her feet over the edge of the bed when she hears the low murmur of Rupert’s voice.

It’s his problem, she decides, slowing down her rushed movements. He can explain to Stella why there’s a total stranger in her parents’ bed. Hopefully before Stella runs in there and surprises its occupant.

Buffy’s got, like, crazy good senses, right? She’d probably wake up first. Probably.

Jenny stretches slowly and makes the bed herself, for once — take that, Rupert — before she ambles towards the closet to find something to wear. It feels kinda weird to greet Buffy in her pyjamas, even after the episode last night.

“Um, are you allowed to have those, uh — crayons? With breakfast?” Jenny hears Buffy ask from the kitchen, and she smiles softly to herself. She pulls a t-shirt over her head, wincing at the mess it makes of her hair. She gives up after a few seconds of finger combing and reaches for a clip instead, twisting it up and off her neck.

“Mom says it’s okay,” Stella answers in the other room, not sounding at all bothered. “As long as I eat all my cereal. It’s ‘cause I have to draw my pictures before I forget.”

“Okay,” Buffy says, bemused. “I think your — um. Dad. Is making pancakes, though?”

“Yeah,” Stella agrees happily. “Can you hand me the yellow? Please?”

Jenny moves silently towards the kitchen entryway, smiling in amusement at the scene she discovers. Buffy’s sitting next to Stella with a faintly shellshocked expression on her face, clutching her mug of coffee like a lifeline as she uses her free hand to pass Stella the requested crayon. Rupert’s next to the stove, working on pancakes; Jenny can see the tension in his spine from here.

“Good morning,” she says, amusement melting into genuine joy as Stella looks up with a grin.

“I’m drawing the bear’s shoes!” she announces, completely oblivious to the weird energy in the room. Jenny laughs, coming around behind the table so she can hug her daughter over the top of the chair, swaying her back and forth as she peers at the drawing in front of them.

“Good details,” she comments, giving Stella one last squeeze before she stands up and rounds the table to the stove. “Did you leave any coffee for me?” she asks Rupert, hovering close enough that their elbows brush. He glances over her, tension in his shoulders momentarily loosening.

“Well, I certainly didn’t drink it,” he says quietly, an expression on his face that’s working towards a smile. “As for Buffy, I couldn’t say.”

“I left … some!” Buffy defends herself half-heartedly, clearly still a little dazed by the scene she’s found herself in the middle of.

“Feeling really appreciated around here,” Jenny says, voice dry, standing on her toes to give Rupert a cheerful peck on the cheek before opening the cabinet to dig out a mug. It’s the bright purple and pink one Stella picked out when Jenny took her to Miami last year. Honestly, she’s surprised Buffy didn’t use it: it’s an eyesore, but it seems much more her style than Jenny’s. She turns over her shoulder to check which one Buffy did pick, huffing out a surprised laugh when she sees that Buffy has, for some reason, chosen Garfield.

Jenny pours the last of the coffee into her mug and then leaves the carafe in the sink; Rupert reaches over, one hand still mixing the pancake batter, to run the water and soak it, making very pointed eye contact as he does so. Jenny rolls her eyes good-naturedly, not bothering to dignify his action with a response, before she eases herself into the chair across from Stella.

“It’s Saturday,” Jenny comments, knowing full well everyone in the room is already aware. “What are we gonna do today, huh?”

She directs the question at Stella, but she knows Rupert understands she’s asking him, too: the slightly panicked look he shoots her over his shoulder confirms it.

“I wanna eat tacos again,” Stella says, still determinedly coloring the bear’s fur.

“Probably we can make that happen,” Jenny says easily. “Your dad said he knew how to make them, right?”

Rupert shoots her another look; Jenny grins up at him, feigning obliviousness.

“Maybe you and I could hang out,” she continues, stretching her leg under the table until she can nudge Stella’s socked foot with her own. “I’m not naming names, but someone’s room needs to be cleaned.”

Stella looks up with an indignant scowl. Next to her, Buffy smothers her laugh with a sip from her Garfield mug.

“How about,” Jenny says slowly, as though the thought is only just now occurring to her, “you and I tackle the junk yard — ” she pauses, laughing, at Stella’s indignant Hey! “ — while your dad and Buffy spend some time together, huh? They haven’t seen each other in a while. And then we can all meet back together for dinner, and you can help your dad make tacos.”

Stella frowns, but nods her agreement. She’s switched out the brown crayon for blue — the sky, Jenny thinks. When she was younger she always coloured the trees blue, too; Jenny was worried she was colour blind, maybe, took her in for vision tests and everything, only to find out it was all because she liked blue better than green.

Parenting’s like that, she’s realized. Fumbling her way through false alarms, preparing for a thousand imagined emergencies, only to be blindsided by problems she never would have expected.

Rupert and Buffy stay out all day.

Cleaning Stella’s room takes less than an hour, so they read together for a while until Stella starts getting restless, at which point Jenny decides on a walk to the little grocery store at the end of the street. She lets Stella carry the eggs on the way home, hoping the focus will help calm her down a little bit, and then she makes them fried egg sandwiches for lunch. Rupert isn’t home to make comments about sugar intake, so she lets Stella get as heavy-handed with the ketchup as she likes. Jenny’s stopped buying her fruit juice; probably it all evens out.

After lunch she really does have to get some work done; she sets Stella up with her colouring and bets her she can’t finish ten pictures before Jenny’s done working. She can, of course, but the challenge keeps her occupied enough that Jenny can get in a solid thirty minutes without interruptions.

She hears the key in the front door just as she’s starting to wonder about dinner. She fumbles to save her work and power down her computer, listening to the sound of Stella greeting them from the other room.

“Hey,” she says, padding out in her socked feet, only to stop short at the sight of the two of them. Rupert’s on one end of the couch, obviously in pain, clutching a bag of frozen corn to his side; Buffy’s perched on the opposite end with a guilty expression that pretty much tells Jenny everything she needs to know. “What the — ” she cuts that sentence off, reminding herself that whatever she says, Stella will inevitably repeat it in front of all her friends at playgroup. “What happened?” she settles on, feeling blindly for Stella behind her.

“We were doing some, ah — training, you know,” Rupert says. “For old time’s sake.”

“For old time’s sake,” Jenny repeats. She can hear her own blood pounding in her ears, for some reason, a low and steady roar. “You just — what? Let her beat the — ”

She remembers Stella’s presence again, turning abruptly to her daughter, ignoring Rupert completely for the time being.

“Why don’t you go play in your room before dinner?” she says, aiming for casual and definitely missing by a mile. On the bright side, Stella’s obviously freaked out by her tone: she doesn’t even try and argue, just nods reluctantly and starts to creep towards her door, turning one last time towards the living room before she closes herself in her bedroom.

And that’s something else Jenny’s going to have to deal with, yet another conversation she really, really doesn’t want to have.

“What the hell is wrong with you,” she hisses as soon as the door’s shut, striding forward to grab the frozen corn out of Rupert’s hand, sitting angrily on the couch next to him and holding it there herself. He didn’t even bother with a towel; it’s so cold that it burns her hand.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Buffy tries; when Jenny whirls her head to glare at her she puts her hands up immediately, eyes widening at the expression on Jenny’s face. Jenny’s never gotten angry with Buffy before, she realizes distantly, and even when she used to fight with Rupert in front of the kids, it was — it was all bullshit, mostly. Computers in the library, creases in the spines of Rupert’s favourite books. Stuff that didn’t matter at all, in the long run. Buffy’s probably never seen her like this.

“Buffy didn’t do anything wrong,” Rupert insists, placing his hand over Jenny’s where she’s still clutching the bag of corn. “We weren’t arguing — at least, not seriously — we were simply, ah. Reliving the old days, as it were.”

Jenny thinks about asking him where, exactly, they picked to ‘relive the old days,’ only to realize there’s no answer she wants to hear. She keeps her mouth shut.

“We saw your friend — who is it? Amber? The one who hates me. I believe she makes candles?”

“All my friends hate you,” Jenny says absently, although she does actually know exactly who Rupert means.

“She was looking at me even more, ah — venomously, than usual, if I’m not mistaken. I wasn’t really sure why.”

Jenny pauses, thinking about it, and then it sinks in and she groans, imagining the phone call she’ll be getting from Amber about how she saw Stella’s dad out and about with a much younger blonde.

“Okay, that’s — thanks for the heads up, I guess.” Jenny presses a hand to her forehead and takes a deep breath, trying to calm down, and remembering in the process that Rupert was going to make dinner and working herself up all over again.

“I’ll take Stella and go pick up takeout,” she offers; Rupert grimaces in apology and nods, looking genuinely contrite. “It’s — I’m sorry for swearing,” she offers hesitantly, thinking of Rupert’s apology from the night before. She pats the bag of corn and then withdraws her hand. “Leave this on for five more minutes, okay?”

When she meets Buffy’s eyes as she collects her purse Buffy’s just staring at her, looking shocked enough that Jenny’s honestly kind of offended. What, she can’t be the bigger person? Just this once?

But she is the bigger person, at least until she loses her temper again, so she offers Buffy a conciliatory smile.

“Pizza or Greek?”

The good thing about having a six-year-old in the house is that any awkward silences are, without fail, inevitably — and brutally — smashed to smithereens by a constant stream of inane chatter.

Which is to say that dinner goes fine. Jenny honestly can’t tell if Rupert and Buffy actually discussed anything, or if they just beat the shit out of each other in silence — the more likely option — but it doesn’t really matter, because the only topics that come up at the table are what Stella had for lunch, the pictures Stella drew after lunch, and an extended story about either someone Stella knows from school or a dream she had last week, or possibly both. Jenny gets a little lost in the middle.

It helps that Buffy chose Greek: Rupert likes feta cheese and Stella likes cucumbers and pita bread and Jenny likes yogurt and stuffed grape leaves and Buffy, apparently, really likes lamb, so long as no one reminds her where it came from while they’re eating.

If Buffy smiles a little too brightly, and if Rupert exclaims a little too loudly at Stella’s incomprehensible storytelling, and if Jenny holds Stella a little too tightly when the meal’s over — well. It could be much worse.

Jenny sends Stella out with Rupert and a hushed warning to be careful with her dad, and then it’s just her and Buffy on cleanup duty.

“Thanks again for dinner,” Buffy says, shooting Jenny an awkward smile. “I know it’s like, mega-weird that I’m here. I should have called first. Or like, not come at all, probably.”

“It’s fine,” Jenny says, choosing her words with care. “You’re always welcome here.”

Buffy makes a little scoffing sound of disbelief, scrubbing way too aggressively at a spot of grease on the table.

“I mean that,” Jenny says, turning off the sink to make sure Buffy hears her. “Buffy. I know the situation is — well. It’s awkward, and there’s a lot of history, and I’m sure you blame me for at least part of it. But you’re always welcome here either way.”

“I’m sure you blame me,” Buffy says, and Jenny doesn’t recognize the expression on her face at all. The longer she looks, the more foreign it seems.

“There’s nothing to blame you for,” she says, finally.

“I think I might have fractured one of Giles’ ribs.”

Jenny lets out a slow breath, her eyes fluttering closed.

“Okay, yeah, I wish you hadn’t done that,” she agrees. “But I don’t — if I’m blaming anyone in that situation, it’s Rupert.”

“Yeah, but — ”

Jenny doesn’t let her finish.

“Buffy, I’m going to say this, and I mean it in the nicest way possible, okay?”

Buffy nods slowly, looking unsure.

“A lot of things are about you, but not everything,” Jenny says bluntly. “Whatever you guys were doing, Rupert’s a grown man, and I trust that he made his own choices. And when I left Sunnydale, I can assure you that I wasn’t thinking about you at all.”

“Okay, but I was being a total b-word back then,” Buffy insists. She doesn’t look like she believes Jenny at all. “Maybe you could have stayed, if I hadn’t broken you guys up, or whatever — ”

Jenny breathes out a humourless laugh, shaking her head.

“We were adults, Buffy,” she says. “We broke ourselves up. I lied to him and he was angry about it; that had nothing to do with you. And I left Sunnydale because I didn’t want Stella to grow up like I did, and that had nothing to do with you, either.”

Buffy frowns.

“What do you mean, grow up like you did?”

Her shell of defensiveness has cracked, slightly; she’s leaning forward, curious, like she genuinely wants to know. Jenny shrugs, suddenly uncomfortable, turning to lean back against the sink. She’s better at sharing her feelings than she was five years ago, sure, but that doesn’t mean she’s thrilled about unloading her personal history onto a former student.

“Just, you know. Too much responsibility, not enough affection,” Jenny says, purposely vague. She waves one hand in an awkward, aborted gesture, like she’s trying to physically clear the words from the air. “We don’t need to get into it right now. Or ever.”

“Okay,” Buffy says, dragging the second syllable out, valley girl accent somehow still familiar even though Jenny hasn’t heard it in years. She screws her face up, like she’s getting ready to do something she thinks is really going to hurt, and adds, “you’re doing a good job, though. With, um. With Stella.”

“Wow,” Jenny says dryly. “That took a lot out of you, huh.”

Buffy stiffens, ready to take offence, then gets a better look at Jenny’s expression and relaxes.

“Okay, excuse me for being a little wigged,” she protests, rolling her eyes. “Giles dropped the secret baby bomb on me and then just bounced, do you have any idea how that made me — ”

She cuts herself off, pressing her lips together tightly, but it’s too late. Jenny’s eyes narrow.

“When did Rupert tell you?”

Maybe it’s weird that Jenny doesn’t already know; judging by the look on Buffy’s face, she definitely thinks so. The truth is that Buffy’s always been an awkward subject between them, but Jenny can’t think of a way to say it that won’t hurt.

“Last year,” Buffy says. “When I, um. Came back. He came to Sunnydale to see me — I guess you probably remember. He told me that was why he had to leave, that he had to come and be with you guys.”

Jenny’s stomach feels sour.

Rupert showed up on her doorstep when Buffy died the second time, ostensibly for good, red-eyed and miserable and stinking of whiskey. Jenny probably would have slapped him, if Stella hadn’t been loitering around her knees, wide-eyed, seeing everything.

She didn’t slap him, but she didn’t let him in, either, made him find a hotel and then, despite her private assurances to herself about keeping him separate from her life, left Stella with one of her friends from playgroup while she drove up to check in on him every day, pressing cool washcloths to his face and flushing vomit down the toilet and forcing him to choke down dry Saltines. Jenny doesn’t like to remember it.

He’d barely sobered up when he heard the news that Buffy was alive again, and the raw relief on his face had scared her. She’d known, looking at him, that if he went to Sunnydale and found something had gone wrong — that he’d misunderstood, somehow; that Buffy wasn’t really there, that it was all some horrible trick — it would kill him. Not right away, maybe. But if he slid back into the bottle she wasn’t going to fish him out, this time.

So when Jenny said goodbye to him, she really thought it was goodbye for good. She’d lose him because Buffy was alive or she’d lose him because Buffy was dead, but either way he wouldn’t be coming back.

Only he had come back, somehow, and in one piece, eyes and voice clear as he told her that Buffy was alright, that she didn’t need him anymore, that they were all settled, and that he needed to see his daughter, please, it was quite urgent.

He’d sounded desperate, by the time he got to that last part, and Jenny had figured he’d fought with Buffy, that maybe she’d kicked him out of Sunnydale, and maybe Jenny should have asked him for details, but it turned out she wasn’t strong enough for that. She wanted his honesty less than she wanted him to stay, as it turned out, and it didn’t make her feel particularly good about herself, but there it was.

“So, what? You were just — waiting up here for him? This whole time? That was your deal?”

Jenny barks out a laugh. Their deal? They didn’t have any such thing. Rupert sent a cheque every month, without fail, just as he’d promised in her car. He sent her his sterling silver baby spoon, and all his childhood photo albums, but he never once promised her any more than that. She never once asked him to. That first goodbye hadn’t been much more optimistic than the second.

“Waiting for — is that what he told you?”

“He barely told me anything!” Buffy snaps, but when Jenny flinches back at the anger in her voice she goes still, eyes widening in horror. Jenny holds herself still, heart rising to her throat, as she realizes what she’s done.

“I’m sorry,” she tries, very carefully, trying to relax her body as obviously as she can. “I’m sorry, I was just — ”

“No, I know,” Buffy says, taking a step backward, almost to the kitchen entrance. “The last time I saw you I was choking you out. I get it.”

“I trust you,” Jenny tells her, urging her to believe it. “I wouldn’t have invited you in if I didn’t, Buffy, it was just — it was just a physical response. That’s all.”

“Sure,” Buffy agrees, but she doesn’t sound at all like she believes it.

“Shit,” Jenny mutters.

She wishes she had a beer or something; hell, she wishes she had a cigarette. Or better yet, a joint. She hasn’t smoked in years. Not since before Stella.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Buffy says miserably. “I know he’s your — whatever.”

Jenny raises her eyebrows in amusement, as much at the vagueness of Buffy’s description as her expression of distaste.

“He’s my whatever, yes,” she agrees. He’s the father of her child. He’s her — roommate, she guesses, although it feels beyond bizarre to think of him like that. Boyfriend implies boy, which he definitely is not; partner makes her feel like they’re in a cop movie. “But you can say what you need to say.”

Buffy doesn’t.

“Are you guys gonna, like. Get married?” she asks instead, sounding genuinely curious, underneath the squeamishness. It’s funny that she hasn’t grown out of that, Jenny thinks. High school was years ago, now.

“Um,” Jenny says intelligently. “We haven’t really — discussed. That.”

God. She’s as bad as Rupert.

“Wow,” Buffy drawls. “I’m having, like, major flashbacks to high school all of a sudden. I really thought you guys would have figured it out by now.”

“Here’s a secret about adulthood,” Jenny says, with a humourless smile. “Some people go their whole lives and never figure it out.”

“So, it’s a no on the whole marriage thing, then.”

“It’s not,” Jenny blurts out, then winces.

There are so many things they still haven’t discussed. Rent, bank accounts. That stupid emergency contact form, which she still hasn’t managed to ask him about. Jenny deposited every cheque he ever sent in a separate account and only withdrew from it for Stella-related emergencies, tracking every withdrawal to the penny in a painfully well-maintained spreadsheet. She’d offered to show it to Rupert soon after he showed up, sure he’d want to check it, only for him to brush her off immediately with a distracted I’m sure that won’t be necessary. It had offended her for about thirty seconds, until she realized it was, in his strange and obtuse way, a display of absolute trust. He cared, generally speaking, that Stella was provided for, but he trusted Jenny’s judgment enough that he didn’t need to see the details.

Which is all a roundabout way of admitting that she’s thought about it, more and more over the past few weeks, and not just because This is my husband, Rupert, would be a much less awkward way to introduce him to people than This is Rupert, Stella’s dad. He wouldn’t be a bad husband, she doesn’t think. He cooks breakfast and dinner without complaint, and he’s good about putting the toilet seat down. Jenny thinks she could maybe promise the whole til-death-do–us-part thing, as long as she was sure he could promise it back.

Buffy’s eyebrows are raised nearly to her hairline, judgment clear as anything her face.

“Shut up,” Jenny says, rubbing at her eyebrow with one hand, right where a headache’s just starting to form. Is this how Rupert always felt, back then? She swears she used to think shit like this was funny.

“Rupert tells Stella those stories every night, you know,” she says, after a long pause between them. Her hand drops to the counter, fingers tapping anxiously against the tile. “For all his faults — I never had anyone who’d do something like that for me. Every story my uncle ever told me was about violence. Monsters and demons. Vampires. All the horrible things they do to little girls at night.”

Buffy’s expression twists into something complicated. There’s sympathy in there, Jenny’s pretty sure, lurking underneath the anger and the guilt. Buffy’s heard plenty of stories about monsters, most of them from the very same man telling Stella about a little girl and her bear.

“I couldn’t live in the world my uncle told me about,” Jenny continues very carefully, eyes on Buffy’s face the whole time. “Maybe that made me naïve, but I had to believe that it could be different. Otherwise what was the point?”

She watches, heart clenching, as a single tear makes its way down Buffy’s cheek.

“He was right about the monsters, and all the death.” Jenny forces herself to keep talking, even as the words burn her throat. “You know that even better than me. Better than anyone, probably. But I was right, too. There is more to the world than just death.”

Buffy nods, her whole face crumpling. Jenny wishes she was standing a little closer. She doesn’t know what she’d even do: she’s never hugged Buffy before, as far as she can remember. It would probably be weird.

They stand like that for a long time, just kind of looking at each other, until a soft cough breaks the silence. Buffy turns to find Rupert hovering awkwardly behind her, a familiar expression of discomfort on his face. When Rupert sees her tears his face falls.

Jenny catches his attention, raising her eyebrows in silent question.

“Stella was hoping she could say good night,” he says quietly. “To, ah. To both of you.”

Buffy twitches sharply at that, obviously surprised.

“I’ll come,” she says, before he can ask why she’s crying. “You guys go, I’ll um. I’ll be right there.”

She directs that last part at Jenny, offering her a tremulous smile. Jenny hesitates, then reaches out to squeeze the other woman’s shoulder, feeling the sharp jut of bone under her palm.

“Maybe you could tell Stella’s story tonight,” she blurts out, shocking Buffy as much as herself. She swallows the urge to take it back, offering her a smile instead. “I bet you have a lot of good ones.” She hesitates, and then leans closer, fighting the urge to tuck Buffy’s hair back behind her ears, the way she’d do for Stella. “Sometimes it’s easier, you know? If you’re doing it for someone else.”

Buffy nods, sharp and jerky; her eyes are very bright. Jenny gives her shoulder one last squeeze before letting her go.

She goes in to say good night to Stella, kissing her forehead and her cheek and even the shell of her ear, ignoring the way Stella giggles and squirms, trying to wiggle free. Her sweet girl. She’d do anything to keep her safe, anything.

But she knows that’s not always how the world works.

Buffy slips into the room, and the two of them slip out.

“Will she be alright, do you think?” Rupert asks, voice low, once they’re in the relative privacy of the hallway. Jenny closes the door behind her and looks up at him and for a moment that’s all she does: just bites her tongue, for once, and looks. Trying to see it all through his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Jenny answers truthfully. “I guess it depends what you mean by ‘alright.’”

Rupert’s mouth pinches together: that obviously isn’t what he wanted to hear.

“I thought she’d told you to go,” Jenny says quietly, looking up at him, the shadows cast on his face by the dim light from the living room. “I didn’t know you left her there.”

Rupert swallows hard, looks away.

“I wasn’t what she needed,” he says, which is such a blatant lie Jenny kind of doesn’t know where to start. “I couldn’t — I couldn’t be what she needed,” he tries, then. “I couldn’t stay there because I needed to be here.”

There it is, Jenny thinks. That’s closer to the truth. Maybe the whole truth, at least as far as Rupert can understand it himself. She closes her eyes, swaying a little on her feet. She doesn’t know how he could have left Buffy behind; she doesn’t know how he could have left Stella alone. There was a better way, probably. Jenny doesn’t know what it possibly could have been.

“She did need you,” Jenny says quietly. “Maybe she won’t ever tell you, but she did need you.”

“That’s — how could you possibly know that?”

Jenny laughs, mean, but just as quiet.

“Rupert,” she says, hating how bitter her voice comes out. “Of course I know.”

It’s so obvious; she doesn’t know he can’t see it. But he’s only looking at her, helpless, one hand warm on her elbow to keep her steady. He’s been so steady. It scares Jenny so badly that she might start to rely on him.

“I know because I needed you here,” she says, hearing herself speak as though from across the room. “None of my friends understood why why I let you back in, you know that? And then you left again for Willow, and again when Sunnydale was in danger, and I knew why you did it but I couldn’t tell them, so I just said it was for Stella, that it was because you’re Stella’s father, and that might have been true but it wasn’t the real reason. You know that wasn’t the real reason, don’t you?”

She must sound completely unhinged, Jenny thinks. Rupert looks like she just hit him in the face.

“Jenny,” he says, in this horrible, pained voice.

“You knew, right?” she asks him — demands, really. She can’t remember the last time she felt out of control like this, not even when they were fighting last night. “You had to know how much I needed you.”

“Jenny,” he repeats helplessly.

Maybe he really didn’t.

“I tried so hard to be better than this,” Jenny tries to explain, aware that she’s not really clarifying anything but unable, somehow, to force herself to say the real truth outright. “I tried so hard to make it so I could always do everything by myself, but I just — ”

“You’re alright,” Rupert says quietly, and at first she can’t figure out why he says it like that, but then he’s closer to her, all of a sudden, his hand reaching for hers and bringing it to his own chest. “There,” he says. “Can you feel that?”

No, she can’t feel that. She can’t feel anything except her own heart, swollen and over-large, beating so fast she thinks she might die.

“Jenny.”

“We’re the same,” she whispers, finally. “Can’t you see that? All of us are the same.”

“Who, Jenny? All of who?”

But Jenny can’t answer, shaking her head frantically, fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt, thinking of Buffy, abandoned in Sunnydale, of herself as a teenager, angry and alone. Always alone, until she learned how to laugh through it. She thinks, unwillingly, of that little girl dead in the alley, all the life choked right out of her.

The girl’s mom — Linda, Jenny reminds herself; her name was Linda — had been so worried about her daughter, growing up without a real father. She’d been so relieved she finally found someone.

“Giles?”

At the sound of Buffy’s voice Jenny startles so badly she nearly falls over, her hand dropping to Rupert’s forearm to steady herself as she tries to force her breathing back to normal. He glances down at her, concerned; Jenny tries to pretend she doesn’t notice.

“Is everything — okay?”

Buffy sounds hesitant, like she can tell she’s interrupting something.

“Yes, of course,” Rupert says hurriedly. “Is — how was Stella?”

“She was fine,” Buffy says. The light is too dim to really make out her face properly, but Jenny thinks she sounds almost — hopeful. “She said I tell really good monster stories.”

“Not too good, I hope,” Rupert says, recovered enough to regain some of his wit. “I’m the one she’ll wake up first with her nightmares.”

“Nah.” Buffy shrugs. “I didn’t tell her anything really scary. Just the fun parts.”

Just the fun parts. Strange to think of it like that, but Jenny guesses she’s right. It was fun, sometimes, in between all the screaming, and the mortal danger. Joking in the library, teasing the kids.

She missed it when she left.

“You know, I’d kinda missed this,” Buffy comments, leaning back against Stella’s closed door, so prescient that for a horrifying second Jenny thinks maybe she accidentally said that last part out loud.

“Missed what?” she asks, a little embarrassed and a lot unsteady, wishing her voice would come out a little more casual. She’s still holding Rupert’s arm for support.

“You guys fighting in front of me,” Buffy answers, which is — still humiliating, actually, just in a different way. But she’s smiling, small, like she really does mean it, so Jenny doesn’t try to explain that they weren’t, in fact, fighting, and that any raised voices Buffy might have heard were just because Jenny was having what she thinks might have been an anxiety attack, right here in the middle of the hallway, but she can’t know for sure because she’s never experienced anything like that before in her life. Her breath comes a little short just thinking about it; Buffy doesn’t need to know about that. “Makes me feel young again.”

“Yeah, well, tough luck, kid,” Jenny says, forcing a wry smile. “We all have to grow up eventually.”

Beside her Rupert rearranges them so he’s got an arm around her waist, tugging at her until she gives in and leans into his side.

“Good night, you two,” Buffy says quietly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

The obvious plan is for Jenny to sleep in Stella’s bed again, but she trails out to the living room after she’s changed into her pyjamas, following Rupert to the stupid old couch. They should really just buy a pull-out, Jenny thinks with a sigh, only every time she starts to seriously consider it she remembers her vague plan to move out of here in the next year or so, and how much easier that’ll be if they can just throw out the old couch in the move and have the new one sent directly to the new place, and then she forgets about it entirely for another few months.

Until now, when Rupert’s staring down his second consecutive night of ergonomical torture.

Just like she did the night before, Jenny perches on the edge of the couch until Rupert makes room for her, curling up on his chest — gingerly, this time, mindful of the bruise on his side — and waiting for him to talk first. She’s done trying to explain herself, she thinks. She’s getting tired of the sound of her own voice.

“I have no intention of leaving,” Rupert says seriously. “I would have said something, earlier. I didn’t know you needed to hear it.”

“You can’t make that promise,” Jenny protests. “Not when — look at Buffy, just showing up here. Anything could happen.”

“I can,” Rupert counters. “I am. With Buffy, it’s — we’ll figure it out. But I’m not leaving. I don’t want to leave.”

Jenny chokes on a sound that’s horrifyingly close to a sob, pressing her face into the material of his shirt to stifle it. He flinches, just slightly, but then he sweeps her hair out of the way so he can cup the back of her neck, not letting her pull away. His thumb rubs a slow back-and-forth pattern, right at her nape.

“When — when you first found out about Stella,” Rupert starts, hesitant. “I didn’t — it didn’t sound as though you wanted me here. I couldn’t promise anything then anyway, obviously. But I wasn’t sure you’d want me to, and I didn’t want to impose.”

“I did,” Jenny whispers, eyes shut tight. “I couldn’t admit it, but. I did want it. More than anything.”

“Jenny,” Rupert murmurs, sounding about as heartbroken as she feels.

“It’s fine,” she says, her words made less than convincing by the sniff that follows them, graceless and ugly. “It’s not like we could have done it any differently.”

“Maybe not,” Rupert agrees, and for a long time, there doesn’t seem to be anything more for either of them to say, until —

“I’ve been thinking,” he says carefully. “That is, ah. I was wondering if — for Stella, but also for, for you. It might make more sense, you see, if things between us were made a little more, ah. Official.”

Jenny pauses, letting that sink in.

“Rupert,” she says, laughing a little in disbelief. “Are you — are you asking me to marry you right now?”

“Well,” Rupert starts, and then stutters to a stop. “If that’s — I mean. If you’re amenable to the idea, then. Well. Yes, I suppose I am.”

“You didn’t even give me a ring,” Jenny laughs again, the sound coming out a lot more hysterical than she’d like.

“I did,” he says quietly. “That is — you did keep it? I see you wearing the watch sometimes, you must still — ”

“You can’t be serious — of course I kept it, how could you think — Rupert. It’s been six years. More than six years.”

“Yes,” he agrees.

Jenny props herself up just far enough to look at him, finding nothing but quiet sincerity in his expression.

“Unless you’d rather something new,” he says, after a moment. “In which case — ”

“No,” Jenny interrupts. She can feel her heart pounding in her throat, unsteady and overly loud. She isn’t sure how much more excitement it can take. “No, that’s — I don’t want a different one. But that’s — we don’t even know if it fits — ”

Rupert’s shifting her off of him before she’s even really aware of what he’s doing, padding quietly into the bedroom as Jenny lies there on the couch, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the low murmur of his apology to Buffy for disturbing her, Jenny presumes, followed by what she hopes is not an explanation of what he’s doing in there, but knowing Rupert, he’s spilling everything without even meaning to do it.

“It’s alright if it isn’t your style,” he says, back in the living room, after helping her upright so the two of them can sit side-by-side on the couch. Jenny’s hand shakes a little when she reaches for it — all those years, and she’s never once tried it on. She could lie, say she hadn’t wanted to be presumptuous, but the truth is that she was just too afraid.

She’s afraid now, too, only that doesn’t seem like such a good excuse anymore.

“I think your mother had bigger hands than me,” she says, inspecting the way it wiggles, loose, on her ring finger.

“She was a very tall woman,” Rupert agrees.

Jenny laughs, too loud, clamping a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound.

“We’ll get it resized,” Rupert assures her, and this time Jenny’s laugh is closer to a sob. “It’ll be a perfect fit.”

In the morning she wakes up on the rug, having rolled off of Rupert completely in her sleep, to find Buffy and Stella blinking down at her with twin looks of bemused concern as above her, Rupert snores merrily on.

Jenny makes a promise to herself to look into the pull-out couch for real, hobbling to her closet to find clothes for Buffy to borrow; Buffy, obviously embarrassed at the inconvenience, promises to make everyone breakfast, which takes the form of her pouring them all bowls of cereal, exclaiming loudly about the lack of orange juice in the refrigerator the entire time. Jenny would be a lot more grateful about it if she’d quit raising her eyebrows significantly every time she catches sight of the ring on Jenny’s left thumb.

She grits her teeth and pretends not to notice, thanking Buffy for the bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, the purchase of which was secured following a bitter battle with Rupert in the grocery store a week prior. The short term win unfortunately required a significant cession of territory; they’ve been eating frozen yogurt instead of ice cream ever since. Still committed to acting like the bigger person, Jenny graciously offers Buffy a refill on her coffee, laughing when it’s accepted with a frankly alarming degree of enthusiasm.

Stella, for her part, colours three pictures of a blonde woman fighting a series of amorphous multicoloured blobs, and then she gets distracted asking questions about Buffy’s French braids, a line of interrogation which leads to Buffy offering to give Stella braids of her own, waving both Jenny and Rupert off when they try to intervene on her behalf.

“It’s fine!” she chirps, reaching for the hairbrush Jenny fetched her from the bedroom. “I used to do this for Dawn all the time, I’m really good at it.”

“Yeah, I can do ponytails and barrettes, and that’s pretty much it,” Jenny confesses, pulling one foot up on the chair as she watches Buffy work.

“My mom taught me,” Buffy says absently. “She was really good at stuff like this.”

“Little girls’ hairstyles weren’t really high on my uncle’s priority list, I guess,” Jenny says, but she’s smiling, charmed by the look of total concentration on Buffy’s face, and by Stella doing her best to hold herself still.

“I could teach you, if you want,” Buffy says, almost like an afterthought, most of her focus still on Stella’s braids.

“Sure,” Jenny says, smiling as she takes a sip of her coffee. She hesitates, posing her next question as carefully as she can. “You think you’re gonna stick around for a little while, then?”

“What? Oh, no — I’m gonna book my flight home soon, I swear,” Buffy promises, the words slightly muffled by the hair elastic she’s holding between her teeth. “Today, even. I know I’m being such a flake about it, I’m sorry.”

“Nonsense,” Rupert says from where he’s been hovering by the sink, having cleaned up the dishes from breakfast and now visibly at a loss for what to do next. “Jenny and I will buy the ticket. You just let us know the date.”

His eyes dart to Jenny’s after he says it, checking; she rolls her eyes, but nods her approval.

“Oh my god, no, I can’t do that,” Buffy says immediately. “I just showed up here totally empty-handed, I can’t ask you for that. I’ll pay for it myself, I promise.”

“You aren’t asking,” Jenny points out, but Buffy shakes her head again. “It’s no trouble.”

“Ms. Calendar, I’m literally wearing your underwear right now. That’s huge trouble.”

Rupert coughs and looks away, cheeks turning an uncomfortable pink.

“Okay, first of all, if you’re wearing my underwear I think it’s okay to call me by my first name,” Jenny says, laughing. “And second of all, we want to, okay? You’re not putting anybody out. And we’re not letting you take a taxi to the airport, either.”

“Why are you wearing Mommy’s underwear?” Stella interrupts before Buffy can protest again, craning her head back to peer up at her with interest.

“Because she forgot hers at home, honey,” Jenny says around another laugh. Buffy grimaces, but her lips start curving up at Stella’s serious nod.

“I’ll just, ah — living room,” Rupert says, edging around the table to make his escape.

“You do that,” Jenny says, waving him off. Her right hand’s occupied with her coffee mug, so she has to use her left; Rupert catches it mid-gesture, bringing it up to give the base of her thumb a quick kiss.

Jenny clears her throat, flustered, and looks up to find Buffy gaping at her with an expression caught somewhere between horror and glee.

Stella, at least, seems unbothered, scratching absentmindedly at one socked foot. Jenny takes another sip of her now-lukewarm coffee, comfortable silence settling between the three of them.

“So I guess your mom wasn’t around when you were younger?”

Buffy’s almost done the second braid, focusing intently; Jenny’s pretty sure it doesn’t actually require the level of attention she’s giving it.

“My parents died young,” she answers, the simplest explanation she can give. “That’s why uncle took me in.”

Buffy’s eyes flit up to hers. Jenny can’t really read the expression on her face; it’s not pity, exactly. An apology, maybe.

“It’s funny,” Buffy says, tying off the braid with a neat, efficient snap. “When something bad happens to you, it’s like — no one could ever understand it, you know? No one could ever feel as you do, in that moment. But bad things happen to people all the time.”

“They do,” Jenny agrees, not totally sure what point Buffy’s trying to make.

“I don’t know why I said that,” Buffy says, then, which answers that question. “But I’m really happy for you guys,” she adds, nodding towards Jenny’s hand, and the way she smiles, it seems real enough. “That’s not a bad thing. Not even close.”

“You’re not a bad thing either,” Jenny says quietly. Stella launches herself from her chair, careening forward for a sloppy hug; Jenny reaches for her automatically, pulls her in close. She meets Buffy’s eyes over her daughter’s newly-braided head. “And we meant it, before. Stay as long as you want.”