Disclaimer: Buffy, Spike and the Original Scoobies aren’t mine. All their kids...you bet.

Author’s note: BTL, my beta, wonderful beyond the telling of it.
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Chapter 5: Little Witch

As per Buffy’s insistence, and convinced that she was fostering a friendship that would help Bianca as she missed Nikki, Diane was invited over for dinner within the week. Bianca spent the days leading up to the encounter prepping both her family and Diane.

“You can’t have any blood in the fridge. Da can’t vamp out. Rowan can’t do anything weird. Andrew can’t come over,” Bianca ranted to her mother. “And you have to take the prophecy off the fridge.”

Buffy looked at her daughter with sympathetic eyes. “I’ll put the blood in the training room fridge. Your father won’t vamp out. I can’t guarantee anything about Rowan though. And the prophecy stays on the fridge, it’s been there since before you were born. It survived the fridge replacement after the Fyarl demon got into the house when you were three,” she said decidedly firm.

“It’s weird!”

“Yes, we are weird, Bianca. I know you want the normal, but honey, it’s not going to happen with us. Your father is a vampire. Your mother is a slayer. Your sister….well we don’t know what she is yet.”

“She’s a witch Mom. Accept it and move on.”

“There’s no proof of that, B.”

“How else can you explain how the walls in her room suddenly changed from pink to yellow? You know she doesn’t like pink.”

“You make the sense. But Willow…”

“Aunty Willow isn’t here. She doesn’t see the weird. Or maybe she does. She’s a little oblivious you know.”

Buffy nodded. “I don’t want Rowan to be a witch,” the Slayer admitted. “It means she’ll have to go away to school, learn to control the power.”

“There isn’t a witch preschool is there?” Bianca asked hopefully.

“That’s harsh. No matter what you say, I know you love your little sister. You’ll be sad when you can’t see her everyday.”

“Like you and Aunt Dawn?”

“Exactly.”

“Fine, I’ll be tolerant of Rowan’s strangeness,” Bianca conceded. “I don’t want Diane to think I’m completely weird.”

“I hope you are the most normal of us all,” Buffy noted.

“Oh that’s great Mom, remind me that I have that to look forward to in October.”

“You can have a party if you want? For your birthday? I’ll tell Willow to hold off on the spell until afterwards.”

“Nice present.”

Prepping Diane took a different vein. Bianca thought she was being subtle. She wasn’t.

“So, what embarrasses you, family wise?” Bianca asked as they walked home from summer school one day.

Diane shrugged. “Um, my mom can’t drive? She’s always getting my dad and my older sister to drive her places. It’s not all that embarrassing though. What embarrasses you about your family?”

“How about everything? They are so not normal.”

“Maybe your parents should buy a house away from the cemetery? Maybe it’s dead vibes from all the corpses that are making your family weird?”

“You have no idea how right you are.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that we’ll move. The Graves will be in that house until it gets sucked into hell.”

“That’s a vivid mental image. I just figured the whole planet would turn into some sort of desert and the human race would all retreat into caves.”

“Nope, it’s sucked into hell for us. You cannot ask my parents about anything religious or hell or the afterlife, ‘kay?”

Diane raised an eyebrow to that.

“They are strange. It’s best if you don’t lead them down that path.”
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At the actual event, Bianca thought her family was on their best behaviour. It was all polite and normal. Buffy asked about school and Spike asked about any boys in their math class who were cute.

Bianca blushed, but she enjoyed the normality. Normal non-vampire fathers asked about boys. Normal non-vampire fathers didn’t usually follow up on the threat to kill any boys who treated them badly.

Rowan was actually a normal four year old too. More or less. Bianca noticed that the little girl’s dress changed from green to yellow and then to blue as they ate, but it didn’t appear that Diane noticed.

“Why’d you choose to live across from a cemetery?” Diane asked between the main course and the dessert.

Inwardly, Bianca groaned.

Buffy chuckled, but left it to her husband to respond to this question.

“The price was right. Quiet street. Right, pet?” Spike offered, feeling a little more than usually put on the spot. He wasn’t the one that chose the house. And he knew exactly why Buffy had chosen the house. It made vampire slaying easier when you lived right across the street from a cemetery.

“I just fell in love with it when I saw it,” Buffy explained.

“You don’t mind all the dead people?”

Spike snorted.

“Of course not,” Buffy answered. “They have as much right as the next person to live someplace nice.”

“It’s got to be creepy at Halloween,” Diane continued.

“Not usually,” Spike said, “though there are the occasional drunken teenagers that decide they are being smart by hanging out in the cemetery.”

“Da scares them away though,” piped up Rowan. “Lots of people think Da is scary.”

“Why?” Diane asked.

“He has a scary face,” Rowan answered.

Somewhere in the house there was a pop sound and an angry female voice with a British accent started yelling from upstairs.

Buffy knew exactly who it was too. She excused herself from the table and bolted upstairs, leaving Spike and Bianca to deal with the explanation.

Up on the first floor landing, TJ and Willow were yelling.

“She’s terrible! I’m not going to stay there anymore. I’m normal! I have lots of normal friends. I don’t care if she thinks that being a witch is abnormal or a misguided attempt to gain closeness with my mother who is still clearly rebelling from the structured life she tried to give you. I want to go home. I want to be able to hang out with my friends. Hecate invited me over to her house. Lily invited me over to her house. Why can’t I go visit them instead of my grandmother the psychologist?”

“TJ!” Buffy hissed. “Shh! Bianca has a friend over for dinner.”

“Great, Mom, you’ve messed up Bianca’s visit. How come you had to apparate here?”

“It’s called teleportation, TJ, and I didn’t know Bianca had a friend over,” Willow defended herself. “We’ll have to go down and excuse ourselves. It was completely rude of us to intrude.”

“I don’t mind the intrusion,” Buffy noted, “just that this is an important night for Bianca. This is the first time she’s ever allowed a friend to come over and meet her family.”

“It isn’t a boy type friend is it?” Willow asked with curiosity.

“No,” Buffy laughed. “But come down for some dessert. I’m sure we can salvage the situation somehow. Also, I really need you to look at Rowan for a minute.”

Willow nodded, even as TJ was bounding down the stairs.

“My mother is a menace,” Willow breathed watching her daughter go down the stairs. “Or maybe it’s TJ. We hardly ever see her anymore, she’s away at school, but when she comes home it’s like she’d rather be at school still.”

“As I recall Willow, you spent a lot of time at school avoiding your parents,” Buffy reminded her friend.

“I guess. But I’m a witch! Wouldn’t the similarities make for some bonding opportunities?” Willow complained.

“Why didn’t you mentioned this when you were here?” Buffy asked.

“Because TJ promised to not to mention school for the time that she was here, she likes it here. I think knowing the Slayer gives her some brownie points at school. Apparently one of her best friends’ father is some big deal.”

“You’re a big deal, Willow,” Buffy soothed her friend’s feelings.

“Apparently not big enough to impress TJ any more.”

Buffy gave her friend a hug. “It’ll get better. I made cheesecake for dessert.”

Down stairs, TJ was explaining the ways she hated her grandmother to Bianca and Diane.

“You are so glad you’ve never met Sheila Rosenberg,” TJ finished, and sunk into a vacant chair, just as Buffy and Willow entered the room.

“Something I am glad of every day, pet,” Spike responded. “Are we having dessert or not?”

“Cheesecake!” Rowan announced gleefully clapping her hands.

“I’ll get the cheesecake,” Buffy said immediately, walking towards the kitchen, afraid that if she didn’t go and get the cake quickly, somehow the cake would move into the dining room of its own volition.

“How’s summer school?” TJ asked her cousin. “I’d love to be at school during the summer.”

“Why?” Diane asked. “It’s hot and we have to do stuff we’ve already done. Boring.”

“My school’s not boring,” TJ noted with a twinkle in her eye.

“I can’t imagine a school that isn’t boring. You’ve got to have something about your school that you don’t like?” Diane continued.

“History isn’t that exciting. But it’s funny to watch the professor.”

“Why?”

“Uh…he’s just unusual,” TJ explained.

Bianca was eternally thankful for TJ’s reluctance to talk that openly about her school. Bianca had heard some strange things about TJ’s witch school.

Buffy came out with the cheesecake and started serving up slices, each slice dripped with a generous helping of cherry topping on it. Except the piece she handed Spike. Bianca balked at the slice of cheesecake that her mother handed her father. There was blood on the cake. She looked wide eyed at her mother, imploring her to stop.

Buffy just rolled her eyes. This was far from hard to explain, and there was no way that Diane was going to realise that it was actually blood.

“I don’t like cherries!” Rowan pouted.

“Rowan, just eat your cheesecake, please,” Buffy asked the four year old. “You liked cherries yesterday.”

“I don’t like them today!”

“Well you aren’t getting anything else. Either eat this or don’t eat. This is dessert.”

“I want blueberry!”

“Rowan, you don’t need to yell. You aren’t getting blueberry. If you continue you will be removed from the table.”

Rowan crossed her arms and frowned at the cheesecake in front of her, which suddenly had the topping turned into blueberry.

“Holy crap!” Diane shouted, pointing at the cheese cake. “How did you do that?”

Bianca groaned.

Buffy moved to pick up the four year old and remove her from the table.

“I’m taking it that this is what you wanted to talk about me with?” Willow side whispered.

“Oh yeah,” Buffy noted, picking up the little girl and taking her upstairs.

“How’d she do that?” Diane asked again.

“She’s a witch!” TJ announced proudly. “Does that mean she can come to school with me?”

“She’s not going to school in England!” Spike protested.

“But if she’s a witch she should go to a school that will teach her what she needs to know,” TJ responded.

“TJ, it’s up to Buffy and Spike where they send Rowan for school,” Willow added. “Eat your cheesecake.”
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“Rowan,” Buffy started, sitting on Rowan’s bed, in the now yellow room. “You can’t do that kind of thing in front of Bianca’s friends.”

“Why?”

“Because Bianca’s friends aren’t used to you turning things different colours or flavours. It’s not exactly normal.”

“And Bianca wants to be normal?”

“She does.”

“Normal’s boring, Mommy.”

“Not always.”
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When Diane left, Bianca was certain that her friend would never want to talk to her again. A little sister that turned cherry cheesecake into blueberry cheesecake and a cousin that spouted the virtues of being a witch would have been enough to drive anyone normal away.

“If she’s a true friend, she’ll be back,” Buffy noted as she closed the front door of the house. “Remember, Uncle Xander and Aunt Willow were normal kids. I was the one that was a freak.”

“But Aunt Willow turned out to be a witch,” Bianca countered.

“And Uncle Xander is still a normal guy. He’s just familiar with the freaky.”

“And he married a Key.”

“I chalk that up to…yeah, I got nothing there.”

“So by your reasoning, Diane will either, never see me again, or will turn out to really want to be a Scooby?”

“Or she just might want to be your friend.”

“Whatever.” Bianca stalked up the stairs, passing Willow on her way down.

“Diagnosis?” Buffy asked her friend, referring to her youngest. “Please tell me that it can be cured.”

“Nope. It’s a hopeless case.”

“Wonderful. She’s supposed to go to kindergarten in September. How is she supposed to go to kindergarten?”

“I suggest a dampening spell on the house and on her school. Until she’s old enough to learn to control her emotions, and her impulses, she’s going to be a danger to everyone she’s with.”

“Did you have to do this with TJ?” the Slayer asked.

Willow nodded. “She told me last summer when she came home from school that most witches get home schooled until the age of eleven. But then they have parents who can undo the damage they do.”

“I don’t really have the ability to control her. I’m not you. Maybe home schooling would be better.”

“No, lets give the kindergarten thing a year at least. You never know, she might have a really good time interacting with other kids. If it’s a really big problem we can discuss options then.”

“What about your problems?” Buffy asked, referring to TJ.

“I’m going to send her to Giles. Oz and Danny are still at my mother’s house, and I’m not going to push this anymore. I know I shouldn’t give up. But really, if I can’t stand my mother, how can I expect my daughter, who has lived in a tolerant house her whole life, to deal with intolerance on such a concentrated scale?”

“Anya will be sympathetic to TJ.”

“Anya thinks that Kristina is a witch too.”

“TJ will love that.”

“Yeah, she really will.”
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Tbc…