River Tam

"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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sunnydalealum

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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sunnydalealum

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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River is silent, studying him.

Or studying something, anyway; her focus isn't quite normal, all of the time, but she never looks away.

"Face the dark," she says softly, and perhaps to herself.

Then, "Don't I?" It treads the hazy boundary between rhetorical and genuine question.

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Spike opens his mouth -- not that he has the slightest idea what's about to come out of it. He's not half as ticked as he pretends to be when he's interrupted by the pocket of his black leather coat playing a snatch of "Sugar in the Sacrament."

The cell phone's out, open, at his ear without him ever actually looking at it, in one automatic motion, like drawing a switchblade.

"Spike," he says into it, one eye on the girl to see if she'll bolt.

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Spike? Angel's not picking up his phone again. Is he with you?

*Andrew's voice over the phone sounds only mildly put out, not worried. Not urgent.*

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"Sorry, mate. Haven't see him since sunset. Try Gunn."

Angel's probably drycleaned his sodding phone again.

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It's just that I'm at Lyle's and he's got a sale going, and I wanted to pick up some new spring-clips and maybe this really cool repeating crossbow, and I wanted to see if he'd okay it as a business expense --

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River's not bolting.

Wearing a look of slightly extravagant patience, when she's not watching the shadows warily, but not bolting yet.

(Listening, though, maybe.)

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Since she doesn't seem to be running away, Spike risks taking his eyes off her long enough to roll them. Weapons are all right in the right hands -- his -- but fuck if he can understand the geek passion for new and more complicated gadgets.

"Not now, Andrew. I still don't have Angel in my back pocket, and I've got company."

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Company?

*A note of curiosity.*

Anybody I know?

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River's currently scrutinizing a rotted rug, an anonymous no-color under dust and grime and dim yellow streetlights.

It's interesting, apparently.

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He never got her name. He can't very well say "another crazy Slayer" with her pockets full of stakes, and anyway this one's not like Dana -- he doesn't want the Council coming to collect her. And lord knows how much longer he can count on the pixies keeping her amused. He'll have to sort out something to report if he wants help looking up her bout of speaking in tongues, but -- "Not now, Andrew."

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*There's a pause.*

You've never watched a single action movie ever in your life, have you.

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