How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Rating: NC-17

Disclaimer: Joss Whedon et al own everyone in this story except Lexie, Gab and Tara, because those three are mine all mine.

Distribution: The Mystic Muse http://mysticmuse.net

If you want it, please ask me first.

Spoilers: None

Feedback: Please!

Pairing: Willow/Buffy

This summer was probably the best vacation I've ever had. Before I start talking about it, though, I have to give you some background information so that you won't be totally lost. My writing teacher says background information is essential to the writing of a composition, so here goes. My mother wasn't born in this world. My mother is from a different world, actually a different universe, where they have vampires and demons and werewolves and things. But the vampires and demons aren't all they have. They also have the Slayer.

The Slayer is a very special person. My whole life, all of my mom's stories have had the Slayer in them as the hero. Or, rather, I should say the heroine, because the Slayer is always a girl. My mom says the Slayer is the only girl in the world who can stop the evil. Giles says it better, though. He says "The Slayer is the one girl in all the world with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires and stop the spread of their evil." But that's not completely true because of two things. First of all, she doesn't just hunt vampires. She kills demons, too, and other nasty things. And second, right now, there's more than one Slayer.

I don't want to get off-topic in talking about the second Slayer because my writing teacher says that it's best not to let details distract you when writing a composition, and writing about the second Slayer can become very distracting. So I'll be short. Buffy drowned when she was in high school, and she was dead for a couple of seconds, before Xander saved her life with CPR. But when a Slayer dies, the next Slayer is called, and whatever does the calling didn't notice that Buffy came back. So Kendra was called as the next Slayer, but a vampire killed her. When Kendra died, then the next Slayer was called. That's Faith. I won't tell you any of the stories they told me about Faith. They're very disturbing. So that's all I'm going to say about the second Slayer, because she hasn't got anything to do with my summer vacation. She's in jail in L.A., so I didn't even get to meet her.

Some more background information that you need before I go on with my vacation is about the people I met and lived with. Buffy is the Slayer, and she was also my mom's best friend for years and years, before my mom came to this world. I'm named after her. My mom's other best friend since they were little kids is Xander. Xander is awesome—he's so funny and he's way cute. I'm also named for Xander—it's where my middle name comes from. Buffy has a little sister named Dawn, who's sixteen and was really nice to me, but she seems a little spoiled. I didn't like that, because spoiled people usually want everything their way, and you don't get to do much of the stuff that you want to do, because you have to do what they want to do or they pitch a fit.

Buffy also has a Watcher. A Watcher is the person whose job it is to find the Slayer, train her, and help her fight the demons. He (or she) is very valuable to the Slayer because they usually know a whole lot about demon lore, and they also have books to look up whatever they don't know. That way, the Slayer can find out the best way to kill whatever demon she has to fight. Buffy's Watcher is Giles. Actually, Giles is kind of retired from being a Watcher. He runs a magic shop now.

Anya is Xander's girlfriend. She used to be a vengeance demon, and she granted wishes to women who had been hurt by men. But she doesn't do that any more, and nobody would really tell me why, although when I asked Buffy, she just looked over at Xander with a grin and asked him if he'd heard from Cordelia recently. I don't know who Cordelia is, but Xander just kind of glared at Buffy. Anya works at the Magic Box with Giles. Those are all the people who are really important to this story. Oh, except for Spike.

Spike is a vampire. Now, normally this could not happen, you know, Spike being all buddy-buddy with Slayer And Co., because, well, you know, Slayer, vampire, doesn't mix. But a couple years ago these military guys captured Spike and put a chip in his head where he can't hurt people any more. He can still fight demons, but he can't hurt people. So now he fights on the side of good, even though he doesn't like it much.

Okay. So, at the beginning of the summer I had some problems at home and I decided to run away. Not smart, I know, but I was really mad and it was all I could think of to do. So I decided, since I've heard so many stories about mom's friends from Sunnydale, I'll just go there. This is not as easy as it sounds. I had to do a spell to open an interdimensional portal, but I also had to put a glamour on myself because I thought they wouldn't let me stay if they knew I was only twelve, and I wanted to look older. I had met Buffy once before, when I was a little kid, and I sent the portal looking for a spot in her time stream that was not very long after she had come looking for my mom. I cut it kind of close, though—I got there the day after she came back from visiting our world!

Well, I should have known that my mom would catch me. She's a very powerful witch and she knew as soon as she got home what I had done, because of the vibrations in the house. So she came after me, but she talked a lot with Buffy and they decided to let me stay for the summer. I was so excited. I never got to do anything like that before.

Living in Sunnydale was awesome. It was actually kind of boring at first, because nothing much really happened. Buffy was working, teaching self-defense classes at a karate dojo, so I hung out with Dawn most of the time. We hung out with some of her friends, but we also spent a lot of time at the Magic Box.

I liked being at the Magic Box the best. It was a lot like a library, only warmer and friendlier. You don't have to be all quiet in there, and of course all the books are about magic so you can learn so many things, and there's cool artifacts to study and mess with, and of course there's Giles and Anya. Anya's kind of funny because she used to be a demon, so she doesn't really know how to act like a human, and she says weird things sometimes. But she's very nice. And Giles was always willing to teach me about demons, let me read his books about Slayers, and he even let me look at some of the old Watchers' Diaries that were written by Watchers hundreds of years ago. He started teaching me some languages, too. I can speak a little bit of German, French, and Latin now. I like French the best. He also started teaching me a little bit of one of the demon dialects. Those are very hard! But I think he liked teaching me. He says I have the makings of a very fine Watcher and I should really think about maybe becoming one when I get older.

The beginning of the summer was pretty boring, like I said, because the only things to do were hang out with Dawn or go to the Magic Box. But then it got very exciting, because there were some new demons in town and I got to help with the Scooby stuff. Oh—maybe I should explain about the Scoobies. That's the name that Buffy and Xander and Giles and Anya and my mom all have, the Scooby Gang, because they solve mysteries and they fight bad guys, like in the Scooby-Doo cartoon. And when they were in high school they used to make jokes about how the villains on Scooby-Doo always say "I could've gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids!" And they became the Scooby Gang because they were the meddling kids. So it kind of stuck. But that's off the topic again.

These demons came to town. Now, Sunnydale is located right over a Hellmouth, so a lot of nasty things tend to show up there, but these guys really took it. They were like vampires, because they drank the blood of their victim, but they also were rather fond of snacking on the rest of the anatomy as well. So Buffy went out looking for them. And she didn't come back.

Now, every Slayer has an expiration date. As a Slayer, you know that it's only a matter of time before you come up against something that's stronger than you, and you're gonna bite it in the line of duty eventually. But Buffy has lasted longer and been more effective than any other Slayer in history, plus she has a lot of friends who are rather fond of her, so when she didn't show back up by the time the sun came up the next day we all panicked and went out scouring the town looking for her. I had to pair up with Spike, who is very cool despite being a vampire. He told me all kinds of interesting stories about places he's gone and people he's eaten over the years. He's almost 150 years old. He was right in the middle of telling me about a Slayer he killed during the Boxer Rebellion in China when we found Buffy.

She was lying on her back, her eyes closed, and she almost looked like she was sleeping. But her chest wasn't moving, and we of course immediately were afraid she was dead. But I put my ear up to her nose, like they taught us in CPR class at the YMCA, and I could tell she was just barely breathing a little bit. But man, she was bruised up and banged up beyond belief. Whatever it was that she ran into, it wasn't any spring picnic. So Spike picked her up and I called Giles on the cell phone and told him we'd found her and we were on our way to Sunnydale General.

Giles got in touch with the rest of the Scoobies and they met us in the Emergency Room just as the doctors were taking Buffy in for surgery. She had a couple of broken ribs and they were afraid she had a punctured lung, but there was also evidence of internal bleeding and possibly a ruptured something-or-other. So all we could do was sit around and stare at each other and worry. Dawn was crying a little bit, and I can understand that. Their mom died a couple years ago, and their dad doesn't really care about them very much, so Buffy is really all the blood kin that Dawn has. So I went over and hugged her and told her blonde jokes until she laughed and felt a little better, and then I told her all the stuff that Giles has told me about a Slayer's healing powers.

A Slayer has really awesome regenerative healing powers. She has to. She's out fighting demons every night, she's gonna take her knocks. She needs to be better way fast so she can get out there again the next night and fight demons again. Ergo, as Giles would say, super-healing. She's really like a superhero, like Batman or something, only way better because she's also really funny.

So I told Dawn all the stuff Giles had told me, which she already knew anyway, but it helped make her feel better, because she remembered that as long as a Slayer is breathing, she can come back from anything. That other Slayer, Faith, she even came back from serious brain damage and a coma that Buffy put her in. Long story. Buffy had to do it. But anyway, so Dawn felt better, and we waited together for the doctors to come back. When they did, they were very positive, and they even let us go in and see her for a couple of minutes.

It turned out that she did in fact have three broken ribs, which the doctors put back together while they had her open, and she did have some internal bleeding from a ruptured something that I can't really remember because there were so many other things going on. She was also very banged up. But the doctors sewed her back together and then her healing abilities took over. In fact, while we were standing there, she came around long enough to give Giles a very limited description of the demons before she passed out again.

Xander asked if we were going to hit the books and Giles said yes, but Dawn wanted to stay with Buffy so I went with them back to the Magic Box to help research instead. And man, was that ever interesting! I got to dig through some books that I hadn't seen before, and they had descriptions of all kinds of crazy things in them that were actually kind of scary, if you stop and think about them too much. It was Anya who finally found what we were looking for.

It was called a skinner demon. The reason for that is because a guy named Skinner was the first person to see one and live to write the description down. But Skinner was connected with the Watchers' Council, so he got in touch with the Slayer of the time, which was back in 1024 a.d., and she came to help him fight it. Well, it killed her and turned her into a demon snack. It also killed the next two Slayers, who came after it first thing. I think that was a Watcher's Council record—they went through three Slayers in the space of like a month and a half. Oops.

But the fourth Slayer who came after it, a girl named Elisabeth Vancleave, was a little smarter about things than her three predecessors. The first three girls who showed up just went into battle armed with a few trusty weapons and got munched on. Elisabeth went where the monster's lair was and watched it from a distance, watching what it did and also watching what it didn't do. But she didn't have any luck. After watching the thing for a week, she still didn't have a clue. So Elisabeth called in some help. She had a friend since childhood, Lisetta Francione, who was a powerful witch. So Elisabeth sent for her friend Lisetta, who came immediately to help.

This was the first time I really realized how rare it is for a Slayer to have friends, because I went into the Watchers' Diaries and pulled out the diaries of Jakob Wallen, who was Elisabeth's Watcher, and he went on for like a page and a half about how much he disapproved of Elisabeth's continued relationship with Lisetta after being called. But Elisabeth was obstinate and refused to cut all ties. Apparently most Slayers work in complete isolation. They don't have friends or family or anything except their Watcher. There have been a few who had maybe one or two acquaintances, but Slayers with very close ties like what Elisabeth had with Lisetta are extremely rare. And, of course, there's never been a Slayer before Buffy who had a Scooby Gang.

So, anyway, Lisetta came and she went with Elisabeth to check out the monster, and she started examining it from a magical angle, and she discovered that the thing has magically enhanced strength and defense and things, almost like a monster out of Dungeons and Dragons with a plus-one hundred defense or whatever. So Lisetta went about figuring out how to use her own magic to enhance the Slayer until she was stronger than the demon. And she did it. And it worked. Jakob Wallen recorded the method faithfully in his diary, so that any future Slayer who encountered a skinner demon would be able to use the information.

But I was looking over the spell and it was incredibly complicated. It involved the witch or mage taking their own magical strength and putting it inside the Slayer, becoming one with the Slayer, and adding that magical strength to the Slayer's own superpowers. And it could only be done by an incredibly powerful witch or mage. Which Giles was not.

But I was.

At first they were all very against the idea of me doing the spell, especially Buffy after she got out of the hospital and we were able to debrief her on everything we'd learned. They were extremely against the idea because I was so young—just about to turn thirteen—and because if anything happened to me, my mom would kill them. But I had to stand firm. I knew I could do it—this was complicated, but the interdimensional portal was more complicated than this, especially with having to aim it and everything. I was the only way this could work. Giles didn't have the power in himself. I did.

It took me three days and another corpse to convince them that not only did it have to be me, but it had to be now. Finally, reluctantly, they agreed, and we gathered together to do the spell. We did it in the back room at the Magic Box, which is Buffy's training room and also the largest space we could find. I drew a circle on the floor with sea salt and Buffy and I stood inside of it with everyone else outside. In a small brazier on the floor I set several different herbs on fire. Then I called the quarters and invoked the Goddess just like my mom taught me to do whenever I did a spell. Buffy and I clasped hands, and I recited the incantation.

It was the weirdest feeling. I felt myself come out of my body and go into hers—I actually felt it. It was so weird. Then I was seeing out of her eyes, and I watched my body just drop to the floor. Dawn gasped, and I—we?—turned and looked at her. I heard myself speak, and it was my voice coming out of Buffy's mouth, telling them that it was okay and I was all right.

Then Buffy took over. We could talk to each other without having to speak out loud and she asked me what we were supposed to do next. I told her to let me open the circle and then she had to get us to the demon's lair. So she stepped back—that's the best way I can describe it—and I stepped forward. I opened the circle and then closed it behind me, knowing that we were going to need it to finish the ritual. But as I was stepping back again to let Buffy take over, she caught a stray thought from the back of my mind and got really, really angry with me.

You see, I didn't tell them everything about the spell, If I had, they never would have done it, and we had to do it because it was the only way. When Elisabeth and Lisetta did it, something went wrong—horribly wrong—and Lisetta couldn't get back into her body. She stayed trapped in Elisabeth's. This wasn't a problem for the first year, but after a while, two co-dwelling personalities will start to blend together. When this happens, the passive personality will be absorbed into the dominant. So the passive personality kind of dies, but not exactly. It's more like they become just a facet of the main personality. This is what happens when people who have multiple personalities get cured.

But when there is more than one dominant personality, as there was with the Slayer and the Witch, both of whom were very headstrong and stubborn, there is a sort of battle for dominance. If this battle can't be won, eventually they both go insane. That's what happened with Elisabeth and Lisetta. They went slowly insane over a period of a few months and ended up committing suicide. So I guess it was kind of understandable that Buffy would get a little upset with me for not sharing that piece of info. It took me probably ten minutes of convincing for her to stop yelling at me and go after the stupid demon, ten minutes in which we stood stock still in the middle of the doorway with our eyes closed, not responding to anyone because we were too focused on what was going on inside our shared head.

When I finally got her calmed down enough to see that there was nothing to do but go on and kill the demon and worry about it when we got back, she told Giles and the others that we'd explain later, and we took off for the demon's lair.

She ran. I let her run because I don't run very fast, but she's the Slayer so she can really move. When we were very close, she stopped and told me to get ready to work my mojo. The monster was living, believe it or not, in a Dumpster behind Willy's Alibi Room, which is a demon bar. The irony has yet to fail to amuse me.

I came forward then and said the spell that imbued her with my magical strength, which manifested in her Slayer body as intense physical power like she had never experienced before. Concentrating on holding the spell, I slipped backward and let her take over. She called the demon out, and then things got ugly.

To this day I don't know very many details of the fight. I wasn't looking. I was concentrating too hard on working the magic and making sure that she stayed strong. And then it was over. As suddenly as we had begun, I felt her stop moving, and I looked up to see the corpse of the skinner demon lying on the pavement. And man, was it ugly! I did a quick chant and incinerated the body, and we slowly took our exhausted selves back to the Magic Box.

I opened the circle back up and we stepped back inside it, and I looked down at my body. I almost didn't want to go back into it, after being inside a Slayer and feeling the strength, the pure, raw power surging through me the way it did through her. It was exhilarating! But it was also hers, not mine. Mine was the power of the magic, and I knew that. So I explained to her what she needed to do for her part of the ritual, and then we closed our eyes and faced one another inside our shared mind, clasping "hands" and reciting the last part of the spell together.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor, looking up at Buffy, who was grinning and hauling me to my feet. I released the quarters and took down the circle, and we triumphantly told the gang how well it had worked. And then we went home, because we both needed sleep in the worst way.

The next day was my thirteenth birthday. Mom came to visit for the day, to bring me my present, and to see everyone. I thought she was going to pass out when Buffy and I told her our story, but then she got all red in the face and hugged me and told me she was proud of me. Then she went home again.

The rest of the summer was kind of anticlimactic. Hanging out with Dawn and her friends, studying with Giles at the Magic Box, and even working out with Buffy, who agreed to teach me her fighting style; none of this even compared to being inside Buffy's body, helping her fight that demon. Nothing could possibly compare to it. And the last month of vacation kind of dragged along.

Then it was the end of August and it was time to go home, but Buffy told me to go ahead and leave whatever I wanted to leave, because that way, when I came back, it would still be there. So I hugged everyone and then I opened the portal home and I came back.

My sister is gone. Thank goodness. She and I don't get along at all, and she's gone away to college so she won't be around to make me miserable this year. It's just me and my mom and Gab. It's very boring here compared to Sunnydale, because there's not even any vampires here. But I do have several books of demon lore that Giles lent me to study, and my mom got me some French and Latin textbooks from a used bookstore so I can keep working on my language studies, and I get to go back and visit for a week at the end of the quarter if my grades are high enough. So I'm very excited about that.

And now that this composition is done, I'm going to write another one about how boring my summer was at my grandmother's house, because there's no way I could ever turn in this essay, even though Mom's been reading it and says it's the best piece of writing I've ever produced.

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