Chapter Text
This story begins with two little girls. Like most little girls, they were weird. They made up their own languages and civilizations on the playground. They skipped rope and used horrifying rhymes to keep time. They tried calling lightning down on their foes. They played Power Girl and civilian, with Power Girl needing to rescue the civilian from some truly gruesome potential deaths. They pretended they were witches and cursed the Puritans who wanted them hanged. They played “light as a feather, stiff as a board” and chanted for Bloody Mary in mirrors.
In all, normal things for girls between the ages of eight and thirteen.
Unlike other girls, though, one night during a slumber party, they summoned a demon.
Maybe this story actually begins about nine years later, with a man named Ethan Rayne. Ethan Rayne was a chaos mage, and one Buffy Summers—Slayer, bleach blonde, and perpetual foiler of plans—had just prevented him from sowing chaos in the town currently the abode of his ex, Rupert Giles.
Again.
Ethan was one to take his lumps whether they be literal or metaphorical ones—chaos, being what it was, tended to go his way only about fifty percent of the time, and he had discovered he had a rather sturdy skull. This, however, was the second time she had interfered with him. Third, technically, except he was willing to let the one time with Eyghon go, seeing as how he got out of it with only some self-inflicted acid wounds.
He, unlike some self-righteous blondes he could name who were quick to punch people over any little thing, was generous like that.
But this time she had gone too far. His band candy plan had been perfect, bringing out the Ripper he knew and loved. It wasn’t bad enough that she had interfered and put an end to his work; her mother had also been the one to take advantage of Ripper, rather than his industrious self, busy at the factory at the time. He’d even wore a shirt in a color Ripper had fancied and with the sleeves rolled up to show off his wrists and forearms—Ripper had a fondness for wrists; he had always enjoyed putting Ethan in handcuffs—and all he had to show for his work were some bruises from a super-powered teenager.
He hoped Ripper and the mother were now too uncomfortable to even look each other in the eye after what they’d done. It would serve them right for ruining his plan like that.
If Ethan ever wanted another crack at Ripper and a pair of handcuffs, he knew he had to do something that would put a stop to the Slayer’s meddling ways. But there were rules. He couldn’t do anything to touch the Slayer directly; the gods he served and whose power he channeled were not interested in pain and agony of the physical sort. Their magic couldn’t be used for assassinations or beat downs. This had been attractive to him after his youthful discretions with Eyghon, but right now, desperate either for a shag or for someone else to play the buffoon, Ethan could see the downsides of chaos centered on causing mischief rather than chaos bent toward destruction. More annoyingly, his magic couldn’t single out the active Slayer; his gods strictly avoided the Power’s playthings. He hadn’t even been able to use magic to convince her to buy the Halloween dress, just his own salesman charm. Charm which he had in spades, but his magical impotence when it came to a California teenybopper still galled.
He couldn’t hurt her. He couldn’t even stop her from becoming the Slayer, moving to Sunnydale, or having Ripper as her Watcher. Waiting until she was no longer the Slayer was useless to him.
Ethan paced, his mind racing as he looked at his limited options in every which way. He couldn’t touch her now. He couldn’t touch her in the future. But—Ethan paused in his pacing as an idea started to click together—he could interfere with her before she became the Slayer. There was no guarantee this would solve his immediate problem of getting her out of the way so he could have a weekend fling with someone that actually knew what they were doing, but it might do something. It might even change her entire fate . . .
In the questionable motel outside of Sunnydale where he had gone to lick his wounds after his latest scheme had gone awry, Ethan assembled the tools and magic he would need. He scryed through her past, learning about his meddlesome foe and searching for a moment he could slip in. A moment that could change everything.
Ethan’s grin was sharp when he noticed it, two little girls rummaging through a box labeled “Free Kid’s Books, Take and Read!!!” while adults stood around talking at some kind of horrid suburban yard sale. His grin was even sharper when he slipped a book, title slightly modified to draw attention to it, into the box: A Beginner’s Smart Girl’s Guide to Summoning Demons.
His grin was sharpest when one girl, the girl who wasn’t Buffy, loudly announced, “We found a book,” before flashing it briefly in the direction of some adults and quickly stuffing it in Buffy’s backpack, disturbing a plush pig in the process.
In the magic that hummed in his fingertips as the world, beginning in his hotel room and rippling out away from it, shifted to the left by one degree, Ethan could tell that for one Buffy Summers, everything was about to change.
Or maybe this story actually begins with vampire dust in an alley. The Slayer looked up at the sardonic clapping coming not from her friends behind her but from somewhere in the alley in front of her.
“Nice work, luv.” The man who stepped out of the alley’s darkness complimented her in a way that made it feel like it wasn’t a compliment. Not really. It was more a lazy assessment as he eyed her up and down. He was in black—pants, boots, T-shirt, leather duster—relieved by bright blue eyes, hints of a red button down between the layers of his T-shirt and duster, and bleached hair. And, the Slayer noted, the black was also relieved by something colorful wrapped around his wrist, something that she never would have noticed if his sleeves hadn’t slipped down his forearms while he clapped at her.
“Who are you?” she asked, curious as to how he would respond.
He smirked at her. “You’ll find out on Saturday.”
“What happens Saturday?”
The grin faded. His face projected his seriousness, even as his eyes danced with personal enjoyment at the moment. “I kill you.” He then faded into the alleyway, gone almost as quickly as he had arrived.
Once she could no longer feel the tinglies of vampire on her neck, the Slayer grinned, something sharp and delighted and a bit wicked. “I don’t think so, Spike,” Buffy whispered, before hurriedly soothing her panicked friends with rote words.
She totally had this vampire in the bag, but she needed to call Celia, and like now, because while Spike wasn’t going to kill her, Aunt Arlene totally would if she called her cousin after midnight on a school night again.