Prompt 560 - Fealty - Giles as the Big Bad - Dragon's Phoenix - BtVS

[dragonyphoenix]

Author: Dragon's Phoenix
Fandom: BtVS
Prompt: 560 - Fealty
Word Count: 981

 

Kris bowed and waited for sensei Brian's answering bow before stepping off the mat. The austerity of the dojo felt like home but the aching muscles – after only a 45 minute session – was unexpected. Her Watcher had been in his early sixties when she'd … retired, but it'd been a spry sixty. Watchers didn't let themselves go, he'd told her time and again, and neither could Slayers. Still, as fit as he'd been, he'd never trained her as hard as sensei Brian just had.

With a shake of her head, Kris grabbed her purse, surreptitiously pulling out a cross, and opened the door. After the bright intensity of the dojo, Sunnydale's night, even with streetlights, almost blinded her. Pausing in the doorway to give her eyes a moment to adjust, Kris resisted the impulse to turn and run back into the spurious safety of the well-lit rooms. The street, she could see it now that her eyes had adjusted, seemed less dark than foreboding. The storefronts, harkening back a generation in design but in a pristine, freshly painted manner that suggested nostalgia more than history, were as brightly lit as the dojo, leaving the street seeming all the darker. That woman, wearing what had to be a reproduction of some sort of historical military jacket, pale blue with red piping on the sleeves, was she sporting a retro look or had she been alive when the original had been worn? The couple walking hand-in-hand, were the out on a date, on a Monday, or a pair of vampires on the prowl?

Reluctantly Kris turned her steps toward home, wishing she'd driven. She'd told herself the walk was a warm-up before her fighting class, but she'd hoped she might get a chance to slay a vampire. Kris' grip on her cross tightened as a gang of young men, seemingly high-schoolers by age, stampeded past her, rollicking like a herd of wild ponies, taking more than their share of the sidewalk. Her breath froze in her chest until one, a lad she knew from the high-school, gave her a nod. She'd seem him just that afternoon. She breathed a sigh of relief, certain he was human. If he'd been Turned, he wouldn't have risen yet. For the moment, she was safe. She continued on, clenching the cross so tightly that she didn't have to look to know her knuckles had whitened.

Climbing the stairs to her apartment was, if anything, worse than the rest of the walk. The bushes, too close to the walkway, could be hiding all kinds of enemies. She'd have no warning if one leaped out at her.

Once inside her apartment, with the door shut firmly between her and the dangers of the night, Kris fell onto the plain, tan tile. She'd come to Sunnydale, against all advice, to fulfill her duty. All her life she'd been trained to fight demons. She'd thought herself fierce, a warrior. Kris' thoughts turned to her walk home and to the terror she'd felt. There was a Power that chose whom to pass the strengths of a Slayer on to. Perhaps that Power had sensed her weakness, her cowardice.

Had her Watcher known? He couldn't have. He wouldn't have wasted his time training her if he'd known of her cowardice. She'd been taken when she was four and handed over to a gruff old man, or so he'd seemed at the time. William Whittington Price had, at first, terrified her. Unwittingly she'd later learned. His second Potential had died only a month or two before. Kris had eventually realized he'd donned his aloofness like armor, so he wouldn't come to care for her. She'd started calling him Billy Goat Gruff, only in her head, until one day she'd spoken the nickname aloud. After that it had been Mr. Price when spoken aloud although she'd come, with time, to think of him as William in the privacy of her own thoughts.

When she'd been eleven, long after William had retired for the evening, after she'd heard his snores trailing down the long hallway from his bedroom, Kris had sworn fealty to the Council in a ritual she'd devised herself after reading a history, an book unauthorized by her Watcher and thus all the more fascinating, on feudal bonds. It had been a childish whim, she could see that now, based on a half-decade's training in obedience. She'd had stars in her eyes, seeing herself as their champion, as the greatest Slayer who'd ever lived.

Ah, yes, lived. That was the rub. She'd read the histories, knew Slayers died young, but still had thought that she, even if Called, would live. Kris pulled herself up from the floor, trembling not with fear but with exhaustion. If one short sparring session had weakened her to such a degree, how could she ever expect to survive a fight with a demon?

Leaning against the wall, she thought back to her Watcher's final lecture. “You haven't been Called. Your duty is done. Don't go looking for the demons. You won't survive.” When she'd asked what else she could do with her life, he'd spoken just one word: live.

She dragged her aching muscles toward the bath, past the dining table and hutch full of china she only broke out for company, past the barstool and high counter she ate her solitary meals at, and past the comfortable chair where she spent her nights reviewing demonic lore. She'd been soaking in the hot tub long enough for her muscles to unknot before she thought back to William's final advice – live – and wondered if that word had come for a place of love. Would her life redeem his failure with the second girl or had he, as she hoped, come to finally care for her once he knew she wouldn't be confronting death night after night?