Previously, on And I Do Still (love you):  Max has made it clear he isn’t afraid to remain in Sunnydale, and that he has perfect confidence in Buffy, Spike, and Winston’s ability to keep both the town and the world safe. Robin has tried to create problems for Spike with Max, but to no avail. Time has passed with no startling events for a week or so….

 

 

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

When a bewildered-looking girl entered the Magic Box and tentatively asked to talk to Giles, Buffy sighed and shook her head.

 

“It’s starting again, isn’t it?”

 

“Sounds like it, pet,” Spike said, his hearing having allowed him to hear the brief conversation.

 

Giles walked the girl over to the table and introduced her.

 

“Buffy, this is Roxanne. Her watcher sent her to me because they’d had two run-ins with Bringers, and when he called the Council for advice, they told him to bring her here.”

 

Buffy gave her the warmest smile she could come up with while mentally cursing the Council of Watchers for being less than helpful, but expecting her to keep the potentials safe.

 

“Hi, Roxanne. It’s nice to meet you. Did your watcher come with you?”

 

Roxanne shook her head. “Everybody calls me Rocky,” she said. “And no. He just dropped me off and went back to make it look like I was still around.”

 

“Good thinking, I guess. But I wouldn’t count on it being helpful. Hiding out over the hellmouth probably isn’t the safest place to be.” Buffy forced another smile. “But, here you are, so let’s see if we can figure out the best place for you to stay..”

 

It turned out Rocky’s belongings were in two large suitcases just inside the door, and she sat down on them to wait to be told what to do.

 

Buffy and Giles walked back to the office where they couldn’t be heard.

 

“I can’t ask Lois to take in another girl,” Buffy sighed. “I guess it’s time to start looking for more room.”

 

“What about your building? That’s probably the safest place in Sunnydale.”

 

“It is. But I can’t ask Max to give up his privacy and move a bunch of teenaged girls in with me. I’m pretty sure he’d lose his mind….”

 

Giles nodded and grimaced. “Indeed. Understandably so.”

 

“Hey! You only had to deal with me!”

 

Giles just looked at her until she blushed.

 

“Okay. But just because these other girls are potential slayers, doesn’t mean they’d be just like me.”

 

Giles sighed and shook his head. “If they were, the First would run away and hide in the center of the earth for the foreseeable future,” he said, giving her an affectionate smile.  “I wouldn’t have traded you for any other slayer on earth, believe me.”

 

“Oh.” Buffy felt a bit nonplussed. “Well… Thanks, I think.”  She shook herself. “So, anyway, we need to think about this some more. In my time, I had Willow and Xander and…. and other people helping me, but I was still responsible. I don’t know how I can do that if they aren’t living with me. They’re going to need a house mother of some sort.”

 

“Buffy, you’re speaking as if you know for sure that these girls are going to keep coming here—”

 

“Did or did not the Council send this one? Do you think they’d do that if they didn’t think there will be more?”

 

“Excellent point,” he sighed. “All right, I will be giving it some thought and I’ll discuss it with Winston.”

 

“I’m going to go talk to the Guardian. Maybe she’ll have some ideas….”

 

He frowned. “Is that wise? Are you sure she is what she says she is?”

 

Buffy’s brow wrinkled briefly as she gave it serious thought, then she nodded and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I do. She’s very different from the one I met in my time, but I get that same vibe from her.”

 

XXX

 

Instead of just dropping by the shop again and taking a chance that Sara would be busy, Buffy went online and found the phone number, using it to call and ask for Sara. The Guardian came to the phone immediately.

 

“Buffy! I didn’t expect to hear from you again so soon. Is everything all right?”

 

“I think we need to talk,” Buffy said. “I need to know what you know, and you need to know what… what I know.”

 

“All right. That sounds reasonable. I’m closing the shop at six this evening. Why don’t you drop by then and we can have a chat.”  She paused. “Will your husband be with you?”

 

Buffy thought for a second, then said, “Not if you don’t want him to be. This is just Slayer­—Guardian stuff I want to talk about.”

 

“Then we should probably keep it between the Slayer and the Guardian, shouldn’t we?”

 

“I guess so. I’ll see you later, then.”

 

“Till then,” Sara replied.

 

XXX

 

Spike was surprisingly willing to agree that Buffy should go by herself to talk to the Guardian. When she gave him a suspicious look, he laughed.

 

“Not steppin’ out on you, love. Winnie and I are going to look around at some possible places to stash the potentials, and see how many Bringers we can scare up and eliminate. Might check out the hellmouth again, too. Just to be on the safe side.”

 

“Oh, okay then. But be careful!”

 

He rolled his eyes. “If I didn’t know you were sayin’ that because you love me, I might be offended. On Winnie’s behalf, if not my own.”

 

“Neither one of you might be looking out for Robin… or any other human.”

 

“Right you are, love. I didn’t mean to mock you. It’s a right treat to know you worry about me.”

 

“I always worried about you,” she mumbled. “I just didn’t think I should let you know about it.”

 

“Always? We’re going to talk about that when you get home.”

 

“No we aren’t,” she said briskly as she picked up her scythe. “See you later.”

 

XXX

 

Buffy arrived at the bridal shop just as Sara was putting the “closed” sign in the door. She smiled and held the door open until Buffy was in, then closed and locked it.  When Buffy raised her eyebrows, Sara said, “We don’t want to be disturbed, do we? And I leave through a back door.”

 

She led the way past the dressing rooms, down a small hallway, and into a room that seemed to be half office and half comfy living area. She gestured for Buffy to sit on one of the overstuffed chairs, and walked to a tiny kitchen area to make tea.

 

Buffy gazed around, noting the very business-like looking desk and file cabinets on one side of the room, and the elegant and comfortable furniture on the other. Even the walls were different, on one side painted a very plain cream color with nothing but a few sketches of bridal gowns and a business license hanging there; and on the other side, a cream-colored wall paper with a very subtle floral pattern to it, and a couple of lovely watercolors.  A few houseplants with their own grow lights to make up for the lack of windows, completed the abrupt change from office to living room.

 

Buffy smiled her thanks for the mug of tea Sara placed on the table beside her, and set her scythe down at her feet. As she sipped the delicious tea, she watch Sara fold herself into the other chair and curl up with her own mug. They exchanged warm smiles and sipped in silence for several minutes before Sara finally said, “So, what is it we need to talk about?”

 

Buffy sighed and set her mug down. “Let’s start with me telling you how and why Spike and I got here; and when we came from, ‘k?”

 

Sara nodded and continued sipping. She was silent the entire time as Buffy explained the world they’d left, and why they were sent back. She raised a groomed eyebrow from time to time, but didn’t comment or register any surprise until Buffy talked about her resurrection.

 

“I think I’d like to meet this witch,” she said, interrupting without apology.

 

“Um, actually, you already have,” Buffy said. “Do you remember the redhead who came with my sister to get a bridesmaid dress?”

 

“Well that explains a lot,” Sara said without going into detail. “Now I really want to meet her. Again.”

 

“She wants to meet you too–now that she knows what you are. It’s okay that I told her, isn’t it? In our time… well, I guess I didn’t really have a chance to find out if the Guardian wanted to be a secret…”

 

Sara sighed. “I’m not sure. But if she already knows, then she knows, so…. Just go on with your story while I think about it.”

 

Buffy hesitated a few seconds, wondering if she should tell Sara that the entire group knew about her, then decided not and continued her tale. She talked about how unhappy she’d been, and made sure that Sara understood how important Spike had been to her recovery from the resurrection. She glossed over the end of the year, saying simply that Spike had gone to get his soul for her.

 

“Well, that makes him rather unique,” Sara said, with a trace of admiration. “I assumed you wouldn’t have married someone evil, but to seek out a soul….”

 

“Spike’s not like any other vampire, anywhere,” Buffy said, not trying to hide her pride.

 

“So I see.  Not like that other one….”

 

“The less said about him, the better,” Buffy growled. “I’ll tell you why some other time. Let me finish up with our last year in our time, so you’ll understand what we’re dealing with now.”

 

She went on, hitting the low points and then the even lower lows, of the following year and the gradual deepening of her concern as more and more potentials arrived and she struggled to keep them safe. When she got to the point where she had Willow use the scythe to do the spell, Sara actually gasped.

 

“Oh my god… you…all of them?”

 

“Yep. Every single one that hadn’t aged out of the window.” 

 

“Who took charge of them?”

 

Buffy raised her hand and waved it back and forth, then dropped it into her lap.

 

“We had to do it,” she said. “There was an army of Turok-Hans trying to come out of the hellmouth, and I only had one scythe.”

 

“So, your little army of slayers beat them back?”

 

Buffy shook her head. “It helped, but we were still losing. There just weren’t enough of us here in Sunnydale, and many of the girls weren’t even trained except for the little bit we could manage in the backyard.” She sighed. “And Turok-Hans are harder to kill than the average vamp. The girls just weren’t ready for that, even once they got their slayer powers.”

 

“But here you are, so you obviously survived. I presume this is where your amazing mate comes in?”

 

“He did. I already told you that last time we were here. He wore an amulet that was meant to be worn by a champion, and it used his soul to kill the Turok-Hans, and in the process, bring Sunnydale down around his head.”

 

Sara blinked. “Sunnydale? The town, not just the high school to close the hellmouth?”

 

Buffy snorted, and continued, “In our time, Sunnydale doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just a big crater filling up with water.”  She sighed. “I was in England with Giles, trying to put together a Slayers and Watchers Council to replace the one lost when Caleb blew up the Council building.” At Sara’s gasp, Buffy laughed. “Yeah. The First wasn’t just trying to take out all the slayers, he went after the Council too. And Caleb killed the last Guardian. So Spike, me, and all the potentials who we activated were what was left. And Giles and the Scoobies. I didn’t mean to forget them. While we were all down in the hellmouth, the others were fighting off Bringers in the high school so they couldn’t attack us from the rear.” Buffy’s expression darkened. “They didn’t all make it out.”

 

“What have you managed to change so far?” Sara’s expression was sympathetic, but she didn’t ask who had died.

 

“Well, the biggie is that I didn’t have to die and be resurrected—” She grinned at Sara’s wide eyes. “That was the main reason we were sent back here. To make sure I either didn’t have to jump, or that I stayed dead. Dying and coming back to life months later upset the balance of Good and Evil. At least, that was thinking when we got sent back here. 

 

“Keeping me alive helped, but it didn’t stop the First as…emphatically… as everybody hoped it would.  But, thanks to you, I’ve already got my scythe, and I’ve already used it to send Caleb and the Turok-Han that was guarding it back to hell. The First is still trying to come up here anyway, though, and we don’t know how many human minions it has. Giles tried to warn the Council, but he wasn’t talking to anybody important, so we don’t know how seriously they’re taking the danger. And Winston is talking to the Coven about himself and us, so they can say they talked to a seer or something. We’ll see. Maybe they can keep all those important records and books safe.”

 

“And the people who work in the building?” Sara asked with a slightly disapproving raised eyebrow.

 

“And them,” Buffy agreed with an embarrassed shrug. “I didn’t mean they weren’t important… it’s just that in my time, they’re gone, you know? And we’ve been working our butts off since we got out of the collapsing hellmouth to make a new Council that includes slayers. But then, if things really are totally different…” She shook her head.  “Spike and me… we know we’ll be okay now. I mean we’ll still be us. We weren’t sure about that when we first came back. If we changed everything that made us fall in love, would we still—but we aren’t worried about that anymore.”

 

“I imagine not,” Sara said with a wry smile and a glance at Buffy’s neck.

 

Buffy laughed softly. “Yeah. Anya thought of that, and she bugged Spike about so much I thought he was going to bite her.”

 

Sara joined her in laughing briefly. “So, in addition to pushing this First Evil back where it belongs, you are worried about the world you’re creating and where you will fit into it.” 

 

Buffy nodded at her. “Pretty much. I mean, shutting down the First is the mission, but we’re all a little worried about what we’ve done to the world we came from and where we’re going to fit in there.”

 

“All?”

 

“Yeah, Winston too. You haven’t met him, I guess. He was sent back to help us, so something we did or didn’t do when we first got here changed things enough that the Coven was a bigger part of the Council than it was in our time. And they thought we would need him.”

 

“And do you?”

 

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah. You have no idea…”

 

“So, I gather the question becomes, with the addition of such a strong magical presence on your side, do you still need or want to activate all the potentials in the world?”

 

Buffy frowned. “When you say it that way, it sounds like such a really bad idea….”

 

“It’s certainly one that hasn’t occurred to anyone before, I’m quite sure.” Sara looked thoughtful. “I can understand the advantage of having more than one active slayer at a time. I think there’s something to be said for that…. but an entire world full of untrained girls with super powers that they have no idea how to control or why they have them….”

 

“Yeah. Not as much fun as you might think,” Buffy said dryly.  “On the other hand, being the one girl in all the world was getting a little old. If it wasn’t for the headaches involved in trying to find them all and get them all trained….” She heaved another sigh. “Well, let’s just say I’m not anxiously waiting to go back to being Buffy the-head-slayer-school mistress-head trainer-whatever else Giles comes up with for me to do.”

 

“That is a good bit of responsibility.”

 

Buffy rolled her eyes. “Ya think?”  She shook her head. “Faith helps in my time. I guess since I’m not there right now, she’s the boss. But mostly she was sitting on the small hellmouth in Cleveland and training the girls we sent there. It took a little bit of the pressure off, but we really needed to get a school set up near London with dorms and stuff.”

 

“In your time, did Faith not abandon her calling then as she did here?” Sara’s expression said she already had an opinion of the other Slayer.

 

“She did. But stuff happened to her after she woke up from the coma and went to LA. I’m not sure what, but she ended up having a change of heart and going to jail. Wesley broke her out for us when I told him we needed her, so she was here to help me with the potentials and their training. She’s turned into a really good head slayer. I think the girls like her better than they do me.” Buffy shrugged. “She’s the fun one, I’m the bossy one.”

 

“Will she be here this time?”

 

Buffy shrugged again. “No idea. We haven’t kept track of her since she left Sunnydale. I guess I need to ask Wesley if they’ve seen her. Maybe she’ll show up, maybe she won’t.”

 

Sara stood up and carried her mug to the small sink. She smiled at Buffy when she did the same.

 

“I know you came here looking for advice, and I intend to offer it. But I really need to have a good long think about all the ramifications of activating all the potential slayers in the world, as well as what it would mean to be a Guardian to so many slayers.”  She gave Buffy a warm smile as they walked to the back door and out into the alley behind the shop.

 

Buffy couldn’t stop herself from taking a quick glance up and down the alley, and then at Sara’s car.

 

“Is it safe?” Sara asked with some amusement.

 

Buffy flushed. “Force of habit,” she said. “I’m sure you’d be perfectly safe without me.”

 

“I‘m sure I would be,” Sara said with a small laugh. “But you would have no way of knowing that, so I appreciate your concern. It’s what makes you such a good slayer. Always worrying about other people.”

 

Buffy blushed again and coughed. “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Anyway, if you have any questions, or want to talk some more, let me know. And please think about what I’ve told you and give me your opinion about it.”  She paused. “That’s assuming, of course, that I have choice. If things get really bad….” She shook her head. “In the meantime, I need to figure out where I’m going to put all these girls that are obviously going to keep arriving.”

 

“Understood. I’ll let you have my thoughts on it when I’ve sorted them out for myself.”  She got into her car, and with a wave, drove away leaving Buffy staring after the tail lights.