Chinese Whispers.

The Slayer is dead, long live the Slayer

They teach you at the very beginning in the Academy, that the Slayer is the priority. A matter of course, since she is the Chosen One (for the moment). Your task is to be everything she needs. Everything and anything (the possibilities are endless, the borders undefined).

They teach you also that the Chosen One is one of many, expendable, a verse in the song, a whisper in the wind, dust.

What does that make you?

*

Faith is eighteen. The last one didn't live that long, if that matters (it doesn't).

She appears on his doorstep in the middle of the night, one bag, two pairs of leather pants, three tops, six stakes. He approves, if anyone asks him (no one does).

After two hours, he's quite sure of three things: a)he will have to hide the alcohol and cigarettes (the weed is already hidden, some habits die hard), b)somebody was really fucked in the head to give her that name (and she has the audacity to laugh at his, really), and c)she will be the death of him (he predicts a heart attack, but it might just as well be a dagger to his heart in the middle of the night).

To be quite fair, he is almost certain he will kill her at some point.

(he is only mistaken about one of the above).

*

The Master is slowly regaining control over Sunnydale, after the losses he suffered in the factory. Recruitment was never a trouble for vampires (Larry is one of his new minions. Giles wonders if he should care more about this).

Their first plan of killing him tumbles like a house of cards (he huffed and puffed and killed six people. Only six, less than Giles expected even in the case they did succeed).

That is the night Faith comes to him for the first time. She fucks like she fights, rough and careless and losing herself in it. Her bruised thighs will be fine in the morning, his shoulders and his back won't.

*

The schools in Sunnydale won't open after the summer. Too few students. For Giles, it means only the necessity of getting his book from one location to the other. No one ever visited the library anyway.

No one but Oz, Larry, and Nancy.

Giles has a list of the people he had killed. It's well into the double digits now.

*

Faith is twenty one when she dies (it's a euphemism. Sounds better than the truth, whish is the point with most euphemisms).

If there is an afterlife (Giles doubts it), she must be beyond pissed because she didn't get to the age when she could legally buy alcohol (not that it ever stopped her).

It's funny that this is what he's thinking about when he scatters her ashes on the seashore (sentimental to the very end. Not his own end, of course, that would be overdoing it).

*

The next one is fifteen, and apparently has some potential. Giles doesn't give a damn.

Chances she gets sent to him are... nonexistent (assuming the Council has an ounce of sense).

One of the Master's former lieutenants is taking over the town. Giles is designing another plan, bound to be a failure.

Next verse, same as the first.

Echo. Slowly fading.