Chapter Text
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Rosenberg Residence, 1996
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They had sent her to a camp, this summer, and in that camp she had found a small support group of people who'd taken to studying.....certain things...and had learned a very strange secret about the world. It was older and bigger than people knew and she had power, enormous potential power. Not enough to keep her or any of them from getting here but what had been awakened could no longer be suppressed, and would not be. Her parents had yelled at her before she was sent and after it. If it had been a phase, or a political thing in college, that would have been one thing but it wasn't that. It wasn't that at all and the magic she had within her could and did coil within her like a snake, fangs bared and wanting to rage at the world that had put her in this situation. Her fingers trembled slightly as she finished packing things. The laptop.....she would take it with her, even if it would likely spend time off. She knew enough of the hidden truths to have holy water and spells that could let her transmute the water in water bottles into that. They had practiced fire-spells there and she could set vampires on fire, if some of them were foolish enough to do it.
She knew there were monsters in the shadows, not human ones who spoke with cold and unpleasant gazes and told you that you were never worthy of being their child, that a good Jewish girl had children and did not let darker forces gain a posthumous victory. Way to play the low blow there, dad. A murmuring and then so much of her stuff could and did shrink in what one of the more Dungeons and Dragons obsessed people in Camp Freedom! had sardonically called a Bag of Holding spell. She nodded, and put it on her back and marveled that it felt about as heavy as it would in school. It was the early hours of June, she looked at the scarring on her arms, testaments to what had happened there in the efforts to make a 'real' woman out of her, and she nodded. And so she'd stepped out.
"Where do you think you're going?"
She looked her mother in the eyes, fair and square.
"Away from here."
"I won't let you-"
And then for a moment Willow let herself murmur and incantation and there was a ball of flame hovering in her hand, and her parents were staring at her then.
"You don't have the power to stop me. You made it plain I'm not your daughter, not in any way you want. Very well. You won't have to put up with me. Good bye, mom, dad."
The fireball vanished and she stepped out into the night.
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Living on the streets that summer was its own challenge, in that last few spans of months before Buffy Anne Summers entered her life. It was in that first week that she met a man in a long coat with a very high forehead, or at least he'd seemed like a man until he'd become one of the bumpy-faced things. She'd called him her Guardian Angel and he'd accepted that with a wry grin and had told her that he did go by Angel, or Angelus, sometimes. He was not always there. More...intermittently, and he helped her against the bigger forces of darkness while learning to duck beneath the holy fire fireball that would and did consume the rest in its path.
The fights against the bumpy-faced horrors were the cathartic bits. Things she could control. If she showered it was in shelters. And then one of the times, during Angel's absence (when unknown to her he had taken a car and had gone to surveil a newly-called Slayer in Los Angeles and had found himself deeply drawn to her with an obsession that would only deepen in time) she had woken up to a shade of the most nightmarish part of life in that camp. A man's hand, and it had moved from her ass to her hip and then had started to dip from it and he had smiled, then.
His right hand glimmered with red light and he had placed it against her chest and the exhilarating rush of powerful magic was there, and she had turned to look at him with eyes just as dark and called up lightning with Abracadabra and had placed that hand against his face. The smell of burning human flesh was there and the man ran off howling like a damned soul, as she had glared and made herself take her cardboard box shelter and move well away from it and had quietly managed to pilfer branches from a rowan tree and red thread to place around her box for a set of protective charms.
And in all that time she hadn't seen Xander or Jesse, and in truth she hadn't wanted to. The absolute worst day for that was when she was warming herself by a fire on one of the cooler nights and had found herself startled to hear-
"Rosenberg?"
She had looked up to see none other than Cordelia Chase.
"Oh my God."
She had flinched then, and taken a deep breath.
Bracing herself for whatever Cordelia-ism would follow only to see Cordelia just give her a strangely empathetic look and walk away. The confusion had lingered then. And it would worsen when she'd managed to use an Internet cafe to register for school and get all of that done as she had needed to.
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1630 Revello Drive, August 1996
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New town, new life. Buffy Summers knew that much. It was.....a strange place. The references to reminders to lock doors and that it was a local custom not to allow people in houses without invitations was very real and it left unpleasant associations for her that she didn't really want to face, nor to question, not in any specific way at that point in time. She had had a dream, a dark and a brooding one. Monsters, with swollen faces and gleaming golden eyes and savage smiles, the undead horrors that it was her chosen destiny to fight. Well, on paper. In practice Buffy Anne Summers was done with that life and she would remain so. That was what lingered behind perky happy responses to her mom, behind driving up to Sunnydale High. She didn't quite register either the man who'd crashed in on his skateboard, nor the girl in leather with hair that had started to take on very brilliantly red highlights, a tiger-strip of red within dark brown who'd squeaked in shock at her hug from Xander. And in all this, the beginning of things she hadn't quite expected.
The threats of Principal Flutie were.....charming, but irrelevant when you faced real monsters and knew you were meant, at least on paper, to be to them what the tiger is to the antelope. She had heard with her Slayer hearing both statements that the school brainiac was there and a mixture of strange relief and even a kind of awe, an awkwardness around her that was starkly revealed when she found herself meeting her. That was when she'd blinked, she'd vaguely seen the girl in leather with tiger stripes and yet there she was, drinking, and Cordelia Chase had walked up to her.
"Biker chic, eh Rosenberg?"
The girl gave her a stolid glare that was almost tangible and Cordelia blinked when Buffy had tried to step between them, as Cordelia had turned to glare at Buffy.
"What is your childhood trauma?"
Teeth were bared in a snarl and the girl just walked off.
"Yeah," Cordelia was distracted, "first rule of this place. Know your losers and potential school shooters." Rosenberg paused then and flipped her off, producing some mild gasps and getting a surprised and almost vaguely approving eyebrow raise from Cordelia.
It was at lunchtime when she found the girl in the leather and open-fingered gloves getting another fierce hug from her friend and squeaking a bit and in those moments the hard-bitten persona she put up cracked and she seemed very, very human and different. It was a set of layers that more than most Buffy Anne Summers understood and it intrigued her. That the librarian was a Watcher was one of those damned things you couldn't quite help.
And so fate hinged, in more than one way, when she'd gone up to Willow Rosenberg and introduced herself. The briefly more vulnerable self disappeared as behind a fortress, a much harder stare replacing it.
"Yes?"
"Hi, I'm Buffy. Buffy Summers. I hear you're the person to ask for homework help around her."
"Usually." Her guard was up, and that much surprised her but a careful look drew some hostility from her, especially with the jeans that had some tears in them getting lingering looks. That introduction was followed by the shorter man, Xander, as she'd learned his name was when he'd tried to mooch in on her, inviting Willow to the Bronze, which she'd tilted her head at for a long time and then had accepted with a nod.
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Buffy Summers was....full of contradictions. Stylish, very much a Cordelia Chase knockoff except that she was a dirty blonde, and yet she'd taken the news of the killing with more interest than Willow might have expected. She'd lived an entire summer on the streets, she knew the monsters were real and that her fire-spell in that nifty old Avestan took care of them. Shifted damned near every other demon or kind of demon she'd come across, and it brought....healing...to humans. Sometimes that had gone well. Once it really, really hadn't. She fidgeted slightly and looked at her mocha. Xander had paid, quietly, and the gratefulness for that stung. And yet Buffy had gone up to her and talked and there was an extra sting that curdled in her.
The assumption that she'd want to be interested in men, even if they were. A part of her wanted to shoot some lightning at that, the way the lightning had coursed through her, the way the whips had hit her. She just smiled and stammered a bit, that much genuine. and flinched slightly. And then Buffy had gone elsewhere and a man had gone up to her after all. He wore archaic clothing and his skin was cool, and that was when it hit her. The literal monsters were here, and Xander and Jesse had no idea, and they were heading off with some blonde monster that looked all too clearly like one of them when you knew what to look for. And so she'd smiled charmingly and let herself be led off by a vampire that had smiled when he'd turned to try to pin her against an alley.
"You're not so scary."
She'd grinned at him, for a moment.
"I'm your worst-"
Azar.
A brilliant flash of flame erupted and then there was a sound of falling sand and a dust pile, and she'd groaned at the sight of Xander and Jesse being led onward and missed entirely the astonished Buffy Summers dropping a stake at just what she'd seen.
"Dammit, Xander. This is why I don't like men anymore."
She'd followed him into the cemetery and had let herself be herded with them into the room, taking a few deep breaths. And lo, inevitably, came the lumpen face and golden eyes and the boys were screaming and then she'd raised her hands as the monster had huffed in amusement only to shout the word, this time.
AZAR!
A flash of holy flame and then there was a sudden rolling wave of falling sand-like substances, and Jesse McNally and Xander Harris had turned to her like she was Carrie White.
"What. The. Hell. Was. That."
"Not Hell, not really. Heaven. Or Heaven-like. That it works shows a lot of assumptions about religions aren't true, not really-" and then another of the vampires, the biggest and most hulking of the lot had drawn Buffy into a fight until he'd realized that his compatriots were dusted and he'd been very confused until he'd realized what his own senses told him. The great reservoir of mystical power wasn't the Slayer, who took advantage of his distraction to give him a solid boot in the balls and he'd limped off.
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You say the rumors then, are not rumors?
He'd nodded.
"That is why, my lord, I was the only one that returned. The Torch is not a Slayer. It's a witch. Damned powerful one, too."
The Master had paused, then.
That would explain the absence of the signs.
And so had gone in motion the plan for the Harvest.
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As the vampires plotted, Willow had gone with Xander and Jesse to meet Rupert Giles, the Watcher. He had been prepared for an elaborate thing and she let him start off with the rather pompous-sounding overture until she'd cleared her throat.
"I've..." she paused and he was looking at her and there was silence. "I've been living on the streets for the summer since my parents kicked me out. The bumpy face people, they go poof-"
"Because they are demons. Demons in the form of men."
Willow's cheeks puffed out as she exhaled. "Oh good, I'm not a serial killer then."
"Well...no." He'd wiped his glasses and then the full weight of those words registered-"The streets. For a month."
"That's what I said, yeah."
"Here."
"Yes."
She made a point to note the bright sunlight in the library. "No going poof, so....I'm human."
Xander had cleared his own throat then. "She said some magic word and she summoned a really weird fireball."
Giles had done a double-take then. "A witch."
"Uh....kinda. Yeah. Yeah. The reason I left home I...." a haunted look crossed her face. "There were other people in that camp who uh......they learned about magic. We had our own little coven. The Island of Misfit Toys." There was a bittersweet smile crossing her face at the memory. "They told me about holy water, which I can do with water bottles now. I can't really pronounce Latin well but I can do a bit better with Avestan, so..."
The silence that lingered was much longer and there was greater awkwardness.
"You're coming home with me."
For a moment it seemed like Jesse would challenge that but in the end he'd shrugged and had accepted it, and thus for the first time in months she was in a room with a bed, she had showered in a place that was a lot more sanitary than the local shelters where she stopped in for showers and food and had kipped out when she could. The bed was too soft so she slept on the floor that first week.
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The first year of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's adventures on the Sunnydale Hellmouth unfolded in the shadows of that. Willow had spent an entire summer homeless and had started the school year that way. Joyce.....was not Sheila or Ira. She had found that out after that first night when she'd been able to skip school for a day and had found her sitting at a table and gesturing for her to sit down.
"What kind of camp?"
That had thrown her for a loop, and she'd cleared her throat.
"The kind where they try to cure the gay."
Joyce had inhaled sharply and Willow had closed her eyes, preparing to duck a blow, only to hear her getting up and then getting a hug and for a moment she'd broken down, all the emotions crashing into her at once. And Joyce had let her. After it, when she'd wiped her eyes and her nose and had been given that moment, Joyce took a deep breath.
"Your parents may have cared, but I don't."
She'd blinked at that.
"You, you-"
"That's right. I don't. I would be as strict with any girl you wanted to bring home as I would with a boy for Buffy, because it's my house and we do have rules." She had blinked at that and then nodded. "Parents shouldn't do that to their kids," and for a moment Willow had broken down again and had hugged her. Joyce Summers had held her and at the time Willow had taken that completely at face value. And then, with that same day skipped Joyce had taken her shopping and for the first time since early May of this year she'd had actual clothes, her own supplies of....things...and not having to deal with shelters. Or with aggressive people or things worse than people.
It was a luxury she wasn't entirely sure she'd deserved or earned until Joyce had held her, and hugged her. And over time some of the hard-bitten elements faded but rather less than she might have thought. Around Xander and Jesse and Buffy and Joyce and ultimately Amy, she was able to relax more. That was the first thing they'd dealt with after the Harvest, Amy's evil mom had literally stolen her body and tried to outmaneuver all of that for goddamn cheerleading and wasn't that a kick in the teeth? Willow had helped to save her friend, using a mirror trick she'd used against the evil man in the sleeveless shirt who'd woken her up with hands in bad places and had poured evil magic into her only to have the second blast hit him and solve his existence for her.
The trick worked astonishingly well and now she had all of her friends back. But once you knew about the monsters it was not possible to ignore them, and once you'd become adept at killing them or they killed you it was even harder to let Buff go out on her own.
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The Slayer had worked alone, so Merrick told her, before Lothos had killed him and she'd had to set fire to the old school gym to get rid of his minions after she'd dusted him. That had been the death of Pike, and.....she'd paused, as she watched Will casually raising her hand and speaking that word and the fires dissolved another vamp. Slayers worked alone, but she didn't have to. Xander went out with a stake and did his best. Will......with a big gun like that at her side she could survive and she would survive and Will got it, she understood exactly what the prices of facing all this were.
She could face vampires, witches, demons hunting animate dummies.
A summer on the streets had left her thinner and gaunter but regular meals and living with her meant her face filled out again and that was.....astounding in its own way. And the more regularly she used magic on patrols the more the hair she had went from tiger stripes to solid bright red, and the more they found themselves connecting.
She had taken Will in because as a Slayer she couldn't let someone keep living on vampire-haunted streets. She had found that when the mask she'd put on to survive vanished that Will was a surprisingly adorable and geeky babbler who'd set up a whole tech room and who was very active in helping her with her course-work. With that help and the two of them keeping similar hours and Will constantly cajoling her and promising her that she wasn't dumb, not a bit, nor someone who was required to think with her fist....she was producing her best grades in her entire life.
It was an odd dissonance no less than with her. To those who didn't know she was the Slayer she was a juvenile delinquent with a bad temper and a violent streak and yet stylish and affordable clothes that made her quite the fashionista. Will had replaced what she'd referred to quietly as 'overalls and beanies' with her duster, that she'd acquired via what she referred to as 'the five finger discount', with jeans, her own rather more everyday boots, and a variety of quirky T-shirts.
She kept the gloves, however, and had taken to pulling her hair into a ponytail. That much was....stable. And then one fine day when they were working on history homework and Will was doing her best to explain to her the relevance of the 1938 crisis, a topic about which as a Jewish person she was more than usually vehement about, the doorbell had rung.
"I'll get it."
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And so that was how Buffy Summers met Sheila Rosenberg. The scenes that followed were.....tense. Will had stared at her and had then removed the duster and had shown her the welts on her arms and had glared, as her left hand tapped the one on her right forearm.
"That's my answer, mom. No. I survived the streets. You put me in that place because I looked at girls, that's what you think of me."
"I am your mother-"
"Only biologically."
Those words brought her up short, as she breathed heavily, and then Will had laughed, disbelievingly.
"Wait, don't tell me. Someone saw me in that summer on the streets."
"Yes," Sheila growled. "He went over to speak to us. He's........unusual. He would remind me of a drug dealer-"
And then Will had curled up on her knees, breathing heavily as Sheila had trailed off, and had registered that language and Buffy had had both the awed disbelief and satisfaction of seeing a corpse grey look you almost never saw on a living person and not even really on the vampires.
"Oh."
And so quietly, Will hadn't been quite adopted but something had changed then. At that point Buffy was in blissful ignorance of what things meant with that look.
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And then came the week Xander had had the hyena incident. It had left Jesse bemused and then angry, and he had tried to provoke Will only to find out the hard way that after some of her training sessions with Giles that provoking Will was actually an extremely bad idea, now. Enough that it had jolted him away. And that was when Xander had tried to rape her and very unfortunately for him had done so when Will had followed her and had seen him.
For the first time Buffy realized how deadly that magic of Will's could be in the hands of someone with far less ethics about it when she had gone into a deadly calm, lifted Xander off of her, and that had given her the chance to collect herself and knock Xander out with a punch as they left. Will's anger was a smoldering thing and that was when she'd put two and two together with the statements about the 'drug dealer' and had gotten four.
They had held each other for a moment, whispering words of support, and she had fed the demon summoner to the hyena pack and that had seemingly and satisfactorily been that.
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And from there, the dummy-demon hunter, and the Moloch incident. The demon had pretended to be a girl, in that case, calling herself Melissa, only to reveal that it had hidden behind a mask and proving itself monstrous. The holy flame thing that Will could do had un-distressed the damsel and between that, and the introduction in all of their lives of one Janna Kalderash, aka Jenny Calendar, they had managed to outmaneuver a trainwreck.
It hurt Will, more than a bit, that one of her first efforts to seemingly be with a girl and to let herself explore that part of herself had cratered so solidly. And over all of this was the shadow of the Master and the prophecy that she would find. Will had been there when she'd discovered it and had understood its implications and had then stepped out to give Buff and her Watcher the moment of dealing with things.
Buffy had thought herself unwilling to face it, at first. Then had come the Earthquake, and Will, by then someone she'd already thought of as sister in all but blood, had vanished.....only to have a vampire from the Master's group show up. His face was lumpen and swollen and he had grinned.
We have your witch. She is alive, and unharmed, for now. Refuse to face him, and he will mail you her body, bit by bit.
And with that she had gone down to face the beast, Xander and Angel at her side. She wasn't entirely sure what to make of Angel, not really. There was a romantic element that had grown there, epic and doomed and dramatic and tragic all in one. The Slayer and the Vampire, each in perfect unity.
And there were other elements that actually bothered Will more than a bit but none of the rest of them, while Jenny Calendar kept looking at Angel like she expected him to grow multiple heads and try to kill them all. She knew he was a vampire, she knew he had a soul, that he was seeking some strange idea of redemption.
That had hung over elements of his cryptic hi-byes with advice....and it would be here in the darkness that she would learn that he was willing to fight, at last, after so long of hiding and brooding on his past.
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The Master's lair was beneath that church. The blood-pool smelled awful, and Will was there, bound and gagged, a cut dripping down her forehead. There were two pools of dust and there he was, Batface himself.
That one's given us as much trouble as you have, you know. None of the prophecies accounted for her, or so I thought, but then I've found a few that might. And yet....
He had spread his arms.
Prophecies are unreliable things, are they not?
"I certainly hope so."
That was where she'd taken her stake and had gone to face him and then that power of his had rippled out and she stayed her hand, and was as one dead. All the way until he'd gone up to her and his eyes had glowed red and then he'd bitten down on her neck. Willow's scream through her gag was there, and he had tossed her aside and had drawn his arms up, exulting in his triumph.
You can set her loose, now. Nothing can stop me-
Absalom looked reluctant.
You sure about that, boss?
The Master had paused and snarled.
Do as I command or I shall dust you.
The knife flashed and the Witch's hands were freed, the grave shroud in her mouth removed and as the Master began to call upon the power of the Hellmouth, the witch had turned toward him and his minions, and had raised her hands. For a moment her eyes seemed to turn dark as night.
Azar.
The word echoed in a low and reverberating tone, the magic and the power of the Hellmouth vastly amplifying her own and the Master had had enough sense to immediately hit the dust beneath the fireball's range of effects and every single vampire in his proximity disintegrated, in that moment. The darkness in those eyes lingered and as he rose to his feet, he realized the witch was doing this with no understanding and in that, there was at least a chance.
Mighty. What a thing you might be, if I were to turn you.
"What would that mean for me? Leather and red ruffles? Gross. No thank you. Only thing your kind is good for-" and that was when his thrall went into being and he had seen her slacken, laughing coldly as he'd stepped forward.
"Hey, ugly."
He'd turned, staring at the Slayer, clothes stained but alive.
You're dead.
She had smiled at that and as he'd withdrawn his attention from her, Willow had gasped like a drowning woman.
"I may be dead, but I'm still pretty. Let's try for round two, fruit punch lips."
The Master had snarled at that and for a moment they had seemingly been easily matched and then she'd caught one of his punches, headbutted him, smashed his head into the ground face first multiple times, and had picked him up. The Master had stared in mute horror when she'd hurled him down and had only the time to murmur Oh fu-before he'd crumbled into a set of solid bones.
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Buffy would spend the summer with her dad, one of the last times that she would do so. And Willow......spent it living at 1630 Revello. Staying in the guest room, which was now her own room and which was becoming a bit of a mirror of the space she'd had in the Rosenberg house. Parts of herself hadn't been literally burned away with the electroshock, the beatings, the whips, or the most extreme methods, the reasons she had been so glad to burn half of Rack's face until he looked like a character from one of Xander's comics.
The things that haunted her most were the electroshock and that and the memories that the guards had done this to all the girls in that camp, what it meant, what it meant that places like that existed.....and that her biological family had done this to her hurt. Hurt terribly, and that was why when she'd done her decision, after talking about it with Buffy, Joyce had been first surprised, and then delighted.
She wouldn't be formally adopted, her parents, who barely deserved the name, would not unbend that far, but it would be Willow Summers, after the woman who'd let her exist and be herself, not the name that had hurt her. And after all the statements from her parents and what those guards had done to her with the unpleasant risk of intentionally gambling on giving them that, to boot......
She was glad it was the quietest summer of their entire experience. The Hellmouth opening and shutting had seemingly put all the demons on vacation. She could sleep in a bed, get used to hanging around with Xander and Jesse from a different house as if things were normal. Spend time with Amy and Michael in their own coven, before Amy's growing draw to the darkest magic all too akin to Rack's began to draw that rift between them.
And then there were the other nightmares. All that power, all that magic, and her best friend had died because she'd been too weak to be there for her when it counted. She would never, ever do that again. But.....she had also remembered the feeling of that dark magic, she had seen what the evil magic had done with and to Amy. She had seen the almost euphoric pleasure it gave her.
It was tempting, admittedly. Like cheap drugs if drugs made reality what you said it was, and for only as long as you said it. Dark magic would let her lash out at a world that had hurt her for the seeming crime of her existence and when that was done the world would be there, and with it the hurt. It would have to be careful. Great power, indulged grandly, but only to protect. It was that or be sent back to that place, or have her best friend die and be thrown off of where she was like trash into a puddle by a monster that had started to gloat to her about his deeds.
And with that she went to one of the first magic books she'd gotten from the Magic Box with the allowance Joyce gave her. A beginning text, yes. More beginning, she'd learn, than some of her spells but the bits about meditation, about focusing on a proper source, these things would keep her from that path. She was as sure of it as she was sure of her own name.