River Tam

River's head tilts slowly.

"Not worried," she says softly, and distantly.

Her eyes are fixed on something just beyond Brianna; the focus shifts now, just slightly, so that her gaze holds the other woman's instead.

"Bring her in. Tea and dumplings for the little lost doll. Lock out the world and say it's for her good. We'll teach you how to think."

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-- and at that Brianna looks downright alarmed. And suspicious.

"Who's been trying to do that?"

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"Isn't what you think."

River's voice is obscurely gentle; she's smiling again, small and sweet and savage.

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"What have they been telling you?"

Brianna's dealt a few times with the zhirelin who've been coopted by the Council. The self-styled Slayers. Fanatics, to a woman.

This one, though, this one ...

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"You are."

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The thought's clear in Brianna's eyes, even to one who only sees the surface: something here is not right. Something here is very not right.

"You're not making any sense," she says, and it's a little sharp, but mostly uneasy.

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River is silent for the space of a few slow breaths, watching the other woman.

Her eye contact lingers too long, unwavering; it may be disconcerting.

Softly, unblinking: "Why are you here?"

There's a weight to the words. As though the answer will decide a great deal, or as if the question has more layers than the immediately apparent.

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Brianna watches her carefully for several seconds.

"I know what you are," she says finally. "What we both are. Women like us. That's why I was watching for you. Vampires are drawn to zhirelin, nobody knows why."

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"No."

River's voice is very soft. Her smile is back, and again it has that incongruous, lethal sweetness.

"Not like you."

One step forward. Another. The crossbow's bolt rests easily in her hand: not dangling, not gripped. Just held with a thoughtless, natural ease, as if it were no kind of weapon at all.

(As if she hadn't just yanked it from one vampire's corpse-dust to kill another.)

Very deliberately: "I shoot with my mind."

"I kill. With my heart."

Her head tilts fractionally. Gently, implacably: "Where is your heart, Slayer?"

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Spike never could resist a good entrance line.

"Little to the left," he says, appearing in the mouth of the alley himself. There's a stake hanging slack and casual between the fingers of his left hand, like a pool cue. He needs the right to hold the cigarette.

"Good to see you again, pet," he says, speaking right past the other, to the Dru-girl. Meaning, alive.

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Oh, it's you, says the brief flicker of River's expression, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

Without especial rancor either, though, and her eyes don't budge from Brianna's face.

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And if anything else was needed to convince her -- the other zhirel's use of the word Slayer, and the appearance of one of their vampires --

"You're with the Council."

She backs away a step, crouching in a swift motion to pick up the crossbow, setting her back to the alley wall where she can see both of them.

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"Why does everyone keep bloody saying that?"

Honestly, you rip your heart out and lay it at the feet of one Slayer, and people just assume you're a lapdog for her employer-of-record ever after. Not like he'd ever been on the Wolfram & Hart payroll either. Or the Order of Aureliwhatchamacallit. He's not much of a joiner.

Spike drops his cigarette and crushes it out with his boot, even though there was one more drag in it, easy. That brasses him off too. But he's in a mood to crush something, and the soul doesn't fancy the throats of little blonde girls these days, even ones with their heads up their tight little arses.

"I'm not with anyone." Except Angel, maybe, on a good day, and that's no one's bleeding business.

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Overlapping him, with the same distant calm as before: "I'm not with anyone."

Spike gets a quick, startled flick of a glance, before her eyes cut sharply back to Brianna.

River's a small girl, slim and short. But she stands straight, and right now there's an aura around her of something almost regal: an aura not just of confidence, but of something like authority.

"Not his. Not yours."

"I stand for the White. Rose and Beam and Tower. Khef and ka, watch and warrant."

With a soft certainty that's half a challenge: "I know who I am."

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"Lovely. Mind sharing with the rest of us?"

The back of Spike's head, the bit that's spent entirely too much time round Giles and Wesley and Andrew, is automatically noting the nonsense words -- Keff, Cah? -- in case they turn out to be the kind that have three foot tusks and agendas of their own. The White Rose sounds vaguely familiar, like something out of a Yeats poem. Or else even hamburger joints are hiring Slayers nowadays.

Spike shivers, almost imperceptibly, at the mention of a tower. Last time he met one of those, he wasn't fast enough.

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Brianna's staring at her, as though trying to get through to her by sheer intensity of gaze.

"You don't have to believe what they've told you," she says, low and fierce. "You don't have to let them control you."

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"I mind."

And then, to Brianna, matching her fierce anger with an eerie unruffled calm, she says, "That's the point."

And suddenly she's smiling, almost laughing silently -- as if it's a joke, as if any minute now Brianna might catch onto the punchline. "What I said."

The laughter's gone. "I shoot. With my mind."

"And they do not own me."

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She's mental, Spike reminds himself. We knew that. But it sounds like sense, the weird sort of internal-rhyme sense that Dru used to make in the grip of a serious case of the visions. Spike would bet his last kitten that this madness, too, has more than a dash of method in, if he could just get hold of the right place to stand.

All right, and he wants her to be more than just broken. He likes her. She's got her own share of authority issues, by the sound of it, not to mention a wicked kick.

"Good for you, pet," he says.

He glances at the other one, belatedly realizing she's made no attempt to stake him. It makes a pleasant change, but what kind of Slayer ignores a vampire? By the sound of it, she's not been called off by the Council, either. "What are you on about, anyway?"

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She's insane. Not just wrongheaded, not just deluded, but actually insane.

Brianna's concentrating right now on remembering what the other zhirel is saying, to tell Emma. There are key words there, she can tell, key phrases that might make sense in context. Might provide a lead to where this one came from, what she believes she is.

This isn't something she's prepared to take the initiative on. This is something that should be brought to the boss. An insane zhirel, god; that wasn't in the brochure.

"Never mind."

She steps back, and back again, towards the mouth of the alley. "My mistake."

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Spike steps back to let her pass. (The wary, half-dancing step of a duelist staying out of reach of a weapon -- or a matador staying out of range of the bull.)

He looks at the crazy bint uncertainly. It's all he was waiting for, the Stepford Slayer to take herself off without dragging the new girl off to a deprogrammer or an exorcist. But it doesn't feel right just to walk away.

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"So's that," River says to the zhirel's back. Softly; too softly to hear, perhaps.

Perhaps not. Slayer senses.

(Pick a word. It doesn't always mean what you think.)

Her head turns slightly; it's a moment more before her eyes follow, and meet Spike's. She's poised, wary: not like she was, not trembling on the edge of violence, but uncertain and waiting and watchful.

Improvised stakes protrude from a pocket of her long brown duster, and her pale fingers curl loosely around the smooth wood of the quarrel.

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Spike hasn't a clue what to say now. She's crazy and armed, and she's already refused to give her name -- fuck knows what she'll do if he mentions something really controversial, like the weather or the Yankees.

What the hell. In for a penny, in for an apocalypse. "You gonna be alright out here alone?"

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Silence.

And then, low, "Long as I have to."

She hasn't relaxed at all; the words are a flat statement.

Still, it's an answer of sorts, which (whether Spike heard all the conversation or not) is more than Brianna got.

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"Yeah, well. You don't have to. Is what I'm saying."

It comes out flat in return. This girl isn't Buffy or Angel, this is actual new sodding information to her, and she doesn't deserve Spike's urge to smack himself in the forehead just because he is so bloody tired of heroes stalking off into the night to deal with it, whatever it is, alone.

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