The Man in the Monster

A/N: I’m bowled over by the response that Chapter 1 got, and a big thank you to all of the lovely people who read/reviewed it.

I promise it won’t be so long between updates in future, had to finish exams first and I wanted to get more of the planning done for this before I started posting in earnest. Hope you enjoy!


1135, ICWS Headquarters, London, England

There’s only one thing that Buffy hates more than the spinning feeling of being magically transported through space, and that’s the feeling when your taxi driver overshoots the landing spot. Bloody wonderful day for a swim, she thinks wryly as she opens her eyes underwater and struggles to her feet. Beside her, Willow does the same, though somewhat more gracefully given her lack of fresh battle wounds.

For a moment it’s like old times as both women laugh and wring the water from their clothes, their eyes meeting for the first time in months without hesitation, and without the undercurrent of anger and pain that normally buzzes between them.

“Sorry, um… sorry! I was thinking about having a hot bath after we’re done meeting Giles… I guess I thought a little too hard about the water. And obviously not enough about the hot. ”

Willow looks sheepish, and touches Buffy’s ruined clothes hesitantly; sending steam rising. It warms them both briefly as they climb from the fountain. They stand frozen in the foyer, close yet worlds apart, and both are lost for words.

The sudden and unexpected truce melts away as the steam settles, leaving them both cold and wanting. Buffy sighs – the Coalition counsellors would have a field day if they could pin either of them down long enough to force the black bitterness out of them – and pulls her jacket tighter around her as an excuse to avert her eyes.

Buffy feels the pain flare in her knee as they climb the stairs to where Giles is surely waiting with restrained impatience, and longs for the days when such injuries barely even stung.

The sentiment applies to more than just last night’s wounds.

It is nearing lunchtime in London, and the hallways of ICWS are abuzz with the chatter of employees making plans for lunch, interspersed with other more serious topics. Slayer hearing is underrated as a gossip-gathering tool, Buffy thinks briefly as snippets float in the air around her.

“Jack recommended a cafe near St Margaret’s, the Caesar dressing is to die for… hang about; I’m getting a call… ”

“Would you say the slime was more greenish or yellow in colour, madam?”

“Boss, Ruby and I are going out for falafel before our meeting with the Mayor: Johnson wants a full update on the predicted vampire uprising in Kent and I’m not talking prophecy on an empty stomach…”

“Viscous like molasses, or thin like olive oil?” Buffy can’t tell whether they’re talking about the dressing or the slime, and that’s a whole new level of “ick”.

“Yo, B!” Unmistakeably Faith’s voice, softened slightly by time and responsibility, but still throaty and rich like molasses (after what she’s just heard, Buffy will have to come up with a better comparison because – ewww).

Faith looks her up and down from the corner of her eye as they walk toward Giles’ office. “I’d say you looked good, but I’d be lying. What big and nasty did you and the Slay-ettes piss off last night?”

“Just me and my undead friends... I decided to take a leaf out of your book and give the girls some time to unwind,” Buffy answers, but really she means they remind me too much of someone else young and giggly and gone, and I wanted to be un-reminded for awhile. Whether Faith hears it in her voice or senses it from her too-stiff shoulders, Buffy isn’t sure, but thankfully her sister Slayer doesn’t press the issue when once she might have.

A lot can change in a few short years.

Just ahead, Willow disappears through the heavy double doors , and Faith quirks an eyebrow in the direction of the witch. “You and Red have a nice flight?”

Thankfully, Buffy is saved from having to answer that (where to begin?) by Giles’ appearance in the doorway. The years have treated him well, and as Director of ICWS he is in his element, though it does mean that Buffy hardly sees him anymore. His obvious air of impatience gives way to restrained concern as he too stares and blinks.

“What?” she quips, “Do I have something on my face?” The bruises have already blossomed and begun to fade, and will be gone by morning. All the staring, however, is starting to grate. “Watcher-mine, why the early morning summons? Places to be, Slayers to train.”

He is not her Watcher anymore – not officially – just as she is not the girl who once fled at the first sight of him, but the affectionate nickname has stuck regardless. It reminds them both of how far they have come.

“Buffy, Faith, do come inside – Xander is waiting to speak with you both.” He says her name like a proud and chastising father, and as Buffy breezes past him (taking great care not to limp and fooling nobody) his hand rests briefly on her shoulder in a silent show of support.

All pretences of lightness and levity are gone as Buffy stops dead in front of the video screen, almost bowling Faith over as her knee gives just a little. She shifts her weight and feels Giles’s eyes on her back.

“Buff… Faith… we have a major problem here.” Xander says, and despite the poor quality of the picture and the frantic activity in the background, Buffy can hear the exhaustion shrouding his voice as clearly as if he were standing right next to her.

He closes his remaining eye for a minute before explaining, and next to her she feels Faith’s muscles begin to vibrate with tightly coiled anger.

They were warned – thanks to a seer from the Magical Department – of a minor influx of inter-dimensional activity in the Horn of Africa. Xander was sent (along with two Slayers, a member of the Magic Department and Leanne Cummings, a senior Watcher) to the region to monitor and report back on the situation, but not to engage until they had more information on what was suspected to be a terrorist training camp. Inside which, naturally, someone was opening dimensional portals and bringing through things that were not exactly your garden variety of demons.

“Terrorists and demons working together, and quite likely with a butt-load of financial assistance from someone wealthy, powerful and pretty well-versed in ‘Demons 101’. I’m gonna take a stab and say that whoever it is doesn’t intend to use them to rescue kittens from trees.” Xander turns for an instant and mutters something to someone unseen in the background, then continues with a sigh.

“Basically, we’re in over our heads here, Buff. Gaeun got close enough two nights ago to see into what we think is their main assembly room, and she reports seeing at least twenty armed men – human and vamp – and a cornucopia of beasties, some of which aren’t even in the database. And they’re still coming through. So there’s that problem.”

They are all silent for a moment, waiting for the inevitable. Xander rubs a scarred hand over his face as someone starts sobbing softly in the background. When he speaks again, it isn’t so much a voice as air forcing its way through tortured cords.

“And… Kelly was captured last night at 2330, caught too close to the perimeter by what we think was a Grachen, judging by the tracks and slice of tail she managed to remove before she was taken. Clementine” – the witch on the mission – “thinks she’s somewhere inside the building, and still alive, but not for long.”

Just like that, everything – aches and pains, regret and re-opened wounds and the bitterness of remembering how things used to be before – vanishes beneath the weight of the here and now, and Wood was right when he said the mission was what mattered.

“Willow, ‘port back to the Mayfair house and alert Magdelena’s team, and tell them it’s an S&D op – Caitlin will know what to bring for me. Giles – we’ll need transport as soon as you can arrange it, and the M.D might need to be on standby to pull us out.”

All those present in the room let her words – orders, really – rush over them like a tide, because they know by now that this is how she works these days, especially when a Slayer is in danger. The days of long speeches are gone, and there is nobody who misses them, least of all Buffy herself.

Sometimes she misses the ease of it all, the way they made the research and the planning… not fun, but at least lighter. Now there are too many tensions, too many agendas to fulfil and new problems to face.

“Should you be active on this one, with your knee busted like that?” Faith says quietly, and she’s about the only one in the room who would dare ask the question, though she doesn’t really expect an answer. She gets it.

Once, the reply would have been “Who else is there to do it?”, but the rules have changed and she’s not the ‘one girl’ any more. Buffy watched Kelly grow from a scared young girl into a powerful woman and if this is going to be as bad as her gut feeling tells her, she’ll be damned if she’s sending someone else to fight in her place. The knee will hold.

“Right. Well, as fun as it is to listen to teacher-types talk about the best way to demonstrate jujitsu techniques, this sounds more like my kind of party, and you didn’t even invite me! I’m hurt, B.”

“You always invite yourself anyway, F,” Buffy shoots back, but she smiles as she says it.

Faith jumps neatly over Giles’s desk (“Why walk when you can fly?” she said to him the first time, and he’s learnt to ignore her disregard for expensive furniture now) and retrieves the first aid kit, tossing it to Buffy casually. “Might as well get cleaned up before the girls get back. You’ll freak them all out before we even get out of the country.”

“What’s the point? We’re just going to get all dirty again.”

“Oh, I hope so baby,” Wink. “Nobody messes with our own. Nasty demon-conjuring bastards won’t know what hit ‘em.”

Faith smirks, and Buffy isn’t fooled by the act for a second but lets it go. They all have their ways of gearing up for battle, and it’s better than hiding in a corner and thinking about all the things that could go wrong.


1900, Eritrea, Horn of Africa

A world away, a heavy bolt slides back with a crash, and the door opens and lets in stale air and the sharp scent of tobacco. Heavily booted feet approach carefully as she fights to keep her breathing steady, feigning sleep. Sometimes they leave her alone, sometimes they don’t. She’s somewhere past the point of caring.

The door slams and she’s sure that for a minute she can hear sobbing, screaming, pleading. It comes in with the air that fights its way into the fetid little room, and after the last six days she’s not sure anymore what is fantasy or reality.

“I can hear your heartbeat racing, little one. No sense in pretending.”

His hands are impossibly cool on her sweaty face, and his breath smells like soil and blood, but she bleeds so often now that all she smells is copper, so who’s to know really? Marble hands smooth what remains of her dark curls from her neck, and fingers seek her pulse and lie flat and cold against her skin, testing the reserves of her strength.

She wishes she had the strength to do something more than lie down and let this... thing... touch her, but all her energy goes into keeping her heart beating (though really, what’s the point?) and she has none to spare.

Teeth sink into throat like a hot knife into butter, and she loses her battle to stay still, her breath faltering and catching as fire burns through her body, the agony of literally having the life force sucked right out of her.

Even the most thorough and expansive Mossad training could not prepare her for this, although she knows of his kind through legends and the warning stories told to little Israeli children about the monsters that lurk under your bed after dark.

Ziva has seen many monsters, but they always turned out to be merely humans committing monstrous acts. The way he touched her hair so gently, it was almost like the monster allowing himself a moment to be human. Man-in-monster versus monster-in-man, and her head spins with the comparison.

The monster groans, and rips the clothing from her body, and bites down with pointed teeth on tender flesh. The world fades into static and this time the screams she hears in her head are her own.


In Chapter 3: Buffy gets a little more than she bargained for when they invade the camp, and we have a look at the latest from the squad room – including a very interesting ZNN news bulletin. (Sorry for the lack of NCIS in this chapter!)

Thanks for reading – I’d love to hear your thoughts. :)