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Buffy The Vampire Slayer
“In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.”
Buffy Summers had been repeating that mantra to herself since she was fifteen years old, when she’d been told that she, and only she, could save the world.
She didn’t say it as often anymore.
Dying had a way of changing your perspective. Dying twice, going to heaven, and then being dragged back to life changed it even more.
The world still needed a Slayer. Vampires still crawled out of graves. Demons still lurked in the dark.
But Buffy had a life, too.
Against all odds, Spike had gotten his soul back. Even more surprisingly, he’d lived. Aged. Settled into pretending he was a perfectly normal thirty-something-year-old man instead of a one-hundred-and-forty-seven-year-old former vampire.
So they did the logical thing.
They got married.
They forged paperwork for William Pratt that wouldn’t raise too many questions.
And they built a life.
Buffy Anne Summers became Buffy Anne Pratt-Summers, and somewhere along the way, they created something neither of them had ever expected.
A child.
Buffy had never imagined herself as a mother.
She’d been a daughter. A sister. A Slayer. A wife.
Motherhood had never been part of the plan.
And yet it suited her.
A whirlwind of blonde curls tore through their house, inheriting Buffy’s golden hair and Spike’s curls. She filled every room she entered and every empty place Buffy hadn’t known still existed inside her.
Buffy was already an anomaly.
No Slayer had ever lived this long. No Slayer had ever been allowed a real life, let alone a happy one.
Which was why, when Giles appeared on her doorstep one rainy afternoon carrying an ancient book and wearing an expression of carefully concealed dread, Buffy knew this wasn’t a social visit.
He didn’t ask to sit down.
He didn’t make tea.
He simply looked at her and said, “I believe we’ve encountered something unprecedented.”
Then he told her that her two-year-old daughter was the next Slayer.
Buffy stared at him.
Then she laughed.
Then she realized he wasn’t joking.
Upstairs, her little girl was asleep in a princess bed, wearing a pair of glittery fairy wings she’d refused to take off for three days.
That child.
That tiny, sticky-fingered little girl.
The next generation of vampire slayer.
Buffy couldn’t accept it.
She couldn’t.
Because she was still here.
Still patrolling.
Still fighting the battles that destiny claimed belonged to her daughter.
So she said nothing.
Years passed.
The monsters remained in the dark, but the truth never stayed buried.
Buffy never hid what she was. Not really.
There were whispered conversations with Spike after midnight. Weapons hidden in closets. Strange injuries with stranger explanations.
Their daughter grew up knowing that her parents had secrets.
She simply didn’t know she was one of them.
Until she turned sixteen.
Three weeks after her birthday, a member of the Watchers’ Council arrived at their front door.
And this time, they didn’t speak to Buffy.
They spoke directly to her daughter.
Now Buffy stood alone in the kitchen, staring at the cookbook her mother had bought years ago.
She’d never learned to cook.
The book sat open on the counter anyway, because it gave her something to look at besides the clock.
Or the door.
She heard it open.
Then close.
“How was school?” she asked.