(Takes place in the aftermath of S6.8 ‘Tabula Rasa’)
I ask again. “Who turned me?” I twist his arm further round. It is making a tearing sound.
“I told you I don’t know,” he sobs. “Please. Just stake me. I can’t tell you anything. Please don’t hurt me any more.”
I should not be doing this. Torture is wrong. I am frightened and hurt and angry but this is still wrong. I drive the stake home and withdraw it quickly so that it does not turn to dust with him, as my first stake did seven vampires ago.
I fall to my knees and cry. No tears come from my eyes because I am a horrible inhuman monster.
“Violet!”
It is Joan’s voice.
“Oi! Vi! What’s wrong, love?”
Randy.
They are approaching. I scramble to my feet and back away from them. “Don’t come near me. Please.”
“Violet, what’s wrong?” Randy asks again. “Where’ve you been? We’ve been worrying ourselves sick.”
“We found where we live,” Joan tells me, “but Umap sent us straight out to search for you again. Come home.”
“Home?” I scream at her. “How can I come home like this? Please, please, just go away and leave me.”
“Like this? So, you are a vampire, then?” Joan says softly. “Violet, we still love you. I guessed you might be when I found your room at home. You live in the basement. There’s blood in our refrigerator.”
“You know? I still live with you?”
“Yeah, and, guess what, pet, I’m a vampire too,” Randy reveals.
“We’re both vampires?”
“Bloody right.” Randy grins. “That wasn’t meant to be a pun, love. Found out when we got jumped by some vamps – some other vamps, I suppose – and I went all bumpy faced. But I’m definitely a good guy. Maybe Dad or the witch girl found some way of restoring my soul. Yours too, I presume. We’re a matched pair.” He yelps. “Oi, Joan, what’d you do that for?” He rubs his shin.
“Sorry,” Joan says sweetly. “My foot must have slipped.” She holds her arms out to me. “Come home, Violet.”
I step into her arms and we hug. “Love you, Joan,” I tell her.
“Love you too, Violet,” she replies. “Let’s go home.”
We walk homewards together, hand in hand; that is, I hold one of Randy’s hands, Joan holds the other, and we walk with him in between us. We talk about what they found out after I left.
We live at 1630 Revello Drive. Not just Joan and Umap and I, but Tara and Willow live there too. Xander also has gone there for now as we still don’t know where he lives. Rupert and Anya stayed at the magic shop. They said they were going to research a way to get our memories back but Joan and Randy think that actually Rupert is going to fuck her until steam comes out of her ears. I am sure they are right.
We seem indeed to be superheroes. They did a little sparring in the dojo after I ran out of the magic shop and found out that Randy and Joan have super strength and speed. Randy’s is because he is a vampire, like mine is, although they didn’t realize that at the time, and they don’t know where Joan’s comes from. Xander suggested she might have been bitten by a radioactive spider but she cannot climb sheer walls or shoot out silk webs. Xander’s own superpower is strange. Randy felt a terrible pain in his head when he hit Xander, worse than the pain Xander felt, but he didn’t feel any pain when he hit Joan and nobody else felt any pain when they hit Xander. Except Xander. It puzzled everybody and pretty much brought a halt to the sparring session, because Xander was getting fed up of everybody hitting him, but now Randy and Joan think that Xander can reflect any pain a vampire causes him back on the vampire only worse. I agree. It would be a good superpower for a vampire hunter. They didn’t find out if any of the others had superpowers besides Willow being a witch but they probably have. I suggest that Rupert is our leader, our Professor Xavier, and Randy and Joan agree.
The vampires that attacked Randy and Joan called her ‘Slayer’. It appears that I was right about it being vampires that she slays. Randy and I are vampires but still part of the team. He can eat pizza and I can’t, which puzzles us all, but perhaps he has been a vampire longer than me and learned how to do things that I can’t do yet. It doesn’t fill him up properly, and he drank some of the blood that they found in our refrigerator. They haven’t found out where he or his father lives yet.
Joan and I change from holding Randy’s hands to linking arms with him, and then to walking with our arms around his waist. It feels natural and right. We smile at each other, and he puts his hands on our asses and gives them a squeeze. I feel very happy. I think I am an incredibly lucky girl, even though I have been bitten by a vampire and turned into an undead creature of the night who does not have a pulse and cannot eat pizza.
And then my vision dims and I stagger. I recover my balance and walk on but it happens again and I can’t recover my balance. My legs are not working properly. Randy holds me up and looks at Joan with alarm.
“I feel so weak,” I say as they fuss over me. “Whaatt iiis happennnniiinggg …”
Everything goes black.
I woke up on my own bed. My charger was connected to my power socket. Buffy was sitting on my chair looking at me. “Vi? You okay now?” She looked unhappy. There were lines in her face that hadn’t been there while she was Joan.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Buffy. I just ran out of charge. I must have been operating below the red line for at least an hour. I had no idea what I needed. You brought me home and charged me up?”
“Well, we hadn’t any idea what you needed either, not at first,” Spike put in. He’d been playing with my PlayStation; he was never good at waiting patiently. “We thought it was some kind of vampire thing. We just put you on the bed at first, dug out the charger later after the spell broke.” He put the controller down and came to sit at the end of my bed. “You got all your memories back, then, pet? Got your back-up discs here if you need them.”
“No thank you, Spike. I’ve got all the memories back. Right up to the point where Giles was showing us the fake ID papers he’d got you, and he’d persuaded you to put on that suit he’d found for you in the thrift store. And I remember everything that happened during the Randy and Joan Show.” I checked my charge meter. Ninety-one per cent. “What are you two doing down here? Not that I’m not glad to have you here, ‘cause I am, but I didn’t really need to be watched over.”
“Well, partly we were worried that you might not get your memories back, we thought maybe the spell might have wiped the data permanently,” Buffy told me. “But mainly we’re just hiding out.”
“Hiding out?” I asked, puzzled, and then I thought about some of the things that had been happening while we didn’t have our memories and what the ramifications might be.
“It’s a bloody war zone up there,” Spike said, confirming my suspicions. “Never would have thought Glinda could get that angry.”
“Yeah, well, I never would have thought Willow would do anything like that,” Buffy put in. “She’s out of control. I’m just waiting for her to annex the Sudetenland or appoint her horse a Senator, except that she doesn’t have a horse.” Spike raised a quizzical eyebrow at her. “Hey, didn’t entirely sleep through College,” she sniffed. “I do know stuff. A whole bunch of stuff.”
“So it was Willow?” I’d guessed as much.
“Bloody right,” Spike confirmed. He and Buffy sat on the end of the bed and told me what they’d managed to get out of Willow. Apparently she’d had a fight with Tara, hadn’t liked Tara being mad at her, and got over it by making Tara forget that the fight had ever happened. That had backfired on her when Tara found out what she’d done and got twice as mad. So she’d decided to make Tara forget that she’d found out, and then thought she might as well make a few other changes while she was at it.
Buffy was unhappy because she’d been dragged out of Heaven? Easy fix. Just wipe the memories away. I was being a better friend to Buffy than Willow was, taking a place that was rightfully hers? So fix me by wiping my memories too, which she’d thought would make me the chirpy and stupid BuffyBot again. Giles and Spike would have gone ballistic over that, Buffy and Dawn wouldn’t have been exactly thrilled either, so everyone would have to forget that I’d become self-aware. Of course it had run out of control and done far more than she’d expected.
“I feel like punching her,” Buffy admitted, “which is another reason why I’m hiding out down here. But mainly to keep out of the way. See, not just Tara who’s mad.”
I turned my hearing up a little. “Xander. Giles. Anya. Oh crap. Giles did boink Anya until steam came out of her ears, right?”
Spike smirked, but then turned serious. “Good description, innit? Yeah. He did. Guilt and recriminations flying every bloody which way. The crap really hit the sodding fan.”
“It’s all my fault,” I wailed, realization hitting me.
“Don’t be daft. Not your bloody fault, you weren’t even there,” Spike assured me, looking at me as if he thought I was crazy.
Buffy looked at me sharply. “How come you think that, Vi?”
“The flashes,” I told her. “The bits from the original BuffyBot programming. There were a couple of bits I got which I didn’t pass on. Anya, ex demon, dates Xander. Xander, dates Anya. I thought it must be obsolete data, because Giles and Anya looked so right together, so I didn’t say it. If only I had.”
“Yeah, if only,” Buffy agreed. She gave me a frown and a hard stare. She was angry with me. Then she grinned. “They did look right together, though. I can’t blame you. I’d have thought the same.”
“They did, at that,” Spike agreed, “and they looked bloody happy about it.” He sighed. “Was pretty happy myself, y’know. Rupes being my dad, being accepted by everybody. Felt a damn sight better than being stuck on the outside.”
“We won’t let that happen again,” Buffy promised him. “You’re a Scooby. Official. They’ll just have to deal.”
Spike glowed. That’s the only way to describe it. I was happy for him, but it hurt. Seeing him so happy because of some words of acceptance from Buffy; I could never make him that happy. And then he surprised me.
“What about Vi?” he asked, taking my hand. “She’s a Scooby too, right?”
“Of course,” Buffy said, sounding surprised. “She’s my sister. Well, okay, not really, but kinda used to getting new sisters added to my life. Vi’s a Scooby; they can deal with, or walk. It’s my way, my way or the highway.”
“You listening to Limp Bizkit these days?” Spike grinned.
“Umap is, and I can’t turn my hearing down,” Buffy replied defensively.
“You called Dawn Umap,” I giggled. I was happy. I wondered if I was glowing too.
“The Bit’s got herself a new name,” Spike said. “She likes it, y’know. Bloody weird, teenage girls.” He shook his head and smirked.
“She at school?” I asked.
“Yep. Only too glad to get out of the line of fire. It all blew up when everybody was getting up this morning. Willow stood on something she’d used for the spell, instant memory city, and the fighting started straight off. Made a change from bickering over who’s going to be first in the bathroom. Only not in a good way.” Buffy stuck out her lower lip. “I suppose I can’t keep being all avoidy girl down here for ever. Are you fully charged up yet?”
“Ninety-four per cent,” I reported. “Good enough for Government work.” I pulled free the charging cable and replaced the cover over my power socket.
Buffy suddenly giggled. “Like, what were you thinking, deciding that you were a vampire? Jump to conclusions much?”
“The conclusion was right there to be jumped to,” I explained. “Not making it with the pizza eating, I checked for a pulse and I didn’t have one, there were all the stakes and things – what was I supposed to think? I never guessed I might be a robot. I didn’t feel like a robot.”
“You never did, did you? I mean, the first thing you ever said to me was ‘I don’t think I’m a robot’.”
“‘Say, look at you’,” I quoted. “‘You look just like me. We’re very pretty’. Then, ‘oh, I don’t think I’m a robot’.”
“You remember exactly? Yeah, guess you do. Digital memory, total recall, right?”
“Not so total. I have to compress things down a lot to make sure I can fit everything on my disc space, it gets lossy sometimes. But that’s important to me. The first time I met you.”
Buffy smiled and her eyes got a little teary. She gave my hand a little squeeze, and then released me and stood up. “Guess we’d better go on up there,” she said reluctantly.
“Yeah, I suppose I’m going to have to make my little confession,” I said equally reluctantly. “Time to face the music.”
“There may be trouble ahead,” Spike said, with a tilt of his head and a raised eyebrow.
“But while there’s moonlight, and music, and love and romance,” I continued.
“Let’s face the music and dance,” Buffy and Spike completed the quote together.
Despite all that had happened, despite that we knew what lay ahead wasn’t going to be pretty, we were all laughing as we went up the stairs.
At least nobody was actually shouting when we got into the living room. Giles and Anya were sitting on the couch, although at opposite ends. Willow was sitting on an armchair. Xander was standing leaning against the wall. There was no sign of Tara. Willow looked as if she had been crying. Anya was crying, sobbing into a handkerchief. Giles looked as if he wanted to be comforting her but didn’t dare.
So I did.
That got me out of the firing line for a little while as the arguing kicked into top gear; but not for long.
Tara was packing to move out. Buffy flipped at that, said that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t done anything wrong, plus Willow’s parents lived five minutes’ walk away whereas Tara’s family lived five months’ walk away, that being if you didn’t get stuck in the Donner Pass over the winter and have to survive by eating mountain goats and your companions, so if one of the girls was going to leave it damn well wasn’t going to be Tara. Willow wanted to know if that meant Buffy was throwing her out; Buffy tried to wriggle out of it but when Willow pushed her came down as a ‘yes’. “I just can’t trust you any more, Willow,” she said sadly. This didn’t go down well with Willow, nor with Xander, who got angry with Buffy about it.
That was one fight.
Simultaneously there was the one between Xander and Spike. Buffy and Spike had pretty much forgotten that Spike’s chip hadn’t gone off when he hit Buffy during sparring, and it hadn’t seemed all that important to me either when they mentioned it to me, but Xander hadn’t forgotten and he wanted Spike to be staked because he was a danger. He was pretty much alone on that point; only Willow backed him and that was probably just because she was after his support in the ‘Willow is a nut-job with major control issues’ fight.
The major big fight was the Giles/Anya/Xander one, into which I soon got dragged once I made my confession. Giles had boinked Anya. Several times. Probably in lots of different ways, and I would have liked to see sketches. Xander was totally freaked out by that anyway. Worse, he was convinced that they’d done it after the spell had been broken, ‘cause he’d charged off to the Magic Box and was sure that they’d only just finished when he got there. I guess they’d been in the middle of doing it when the spell broke and just carried on. Spike put in a comment of “I’ve started so I’ll finish,” which made Giles laugh right in the middle of all the fighting and misery, and which I think came from some British TV show I hadn’t seen. This made Xander mad at Spike again and the ‘Spike is dangerous and must be staked’ fight became part of the ‘Giles boinked Anya’ fight.
Everything got very confused. At one point Spike and Tara were in a heated argument over which was best between ‘Charmed’ and ‘Passions’, seemingly with as much fervor as the argument between Buffy and Xander over forgiveness for Willow which was raging at the same time.
But at last things sorted themselves out. Tara was going to keep on living with us. Anya was leaving Xander. Willow was going to stay with Xander until she could find somewhere else. Giles and Anya were going to see if they could make something of the relationship in which they had unexpectedly found themselves.
Once Xander had gone, and they could relax a little, they looked right together again. The age difference didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. After all, Anya was way more than a thousand years old. There was warmth and affection between them as well as passion, and Anya drew strength and comfort from Giles as she pulled herself together. They were now prepared to admit to having been feeling a growing mutual attraction for months, which both had suppressed because of her involvement with Xander, but now it was out in the open they were going to run with it.
“Two people in the workplace. Feelings develop,” Spike commented. Buffy looked at him strangely when he said that, I couldn’t read her expression, and she took his hand and gave it a brief squeeze. I saw Giles frown at that, but then he gave a funny little half smile and shook his head slightly. I think he was resigning himself to the possibility of a relationship between Buffy and Spike and deciding not to interfere.
So where would that leave me? I didn’t know. Whatever happened I wasn’t going to fight it. I’d done enough damage already. I’d driven a wedge between four people who had stood together and supported each other against untold dangers for more than five years. It seemed as if my creation and my evolving self-awareness had brought nothing but trouble and unhappiness to the people my programming had told me to love, help, and protect.
Xander, who hadn’t really cared about me one way or the other, and Willow, who had actively hated me, were gone. I suppose that was something of a victory for me. Yet the rift between Buffy and her closest friends was hurting her, and I knew that I could only be a poor substitute for them. Giles and Anya looked as if they might have a chance of happiness together, but Anya was obviously torn by conflicting feelings, and it might all go horribly wrong anyway. Spike was showing signs of genuinely caring for me now, but he was also growing closer to Buffy, and I knew that he would always put her first.
The battle’s done, and I kind of won, but there was no way I could sound any kind of victory cheer. It was a battle I hadn’t started, and had never meant to fight, and everybody had got hurt in the process, including me.
Where do we go from here?