By the Light of the Moon

a BtVS/Sailor Moon (and others) crossover AU

by Setcheti

 

 

Disclaimer: Don’t own any of them, not trying to - all fun and no money and all that jazz.

 

Author’s Note:  I really like Sailor Moon – all of them, manga, anime, and TV.  I especially like writing Sailor Moon crossovers, and this happens to be the first one I’ve done that’s ever actually made it online.  The Usagi in this story is the one from the live-action TV show, and this plot is very much AU to the TV show’s storyline. I’ve also taken liberties with the BtVS timeline, and Giles is not a very nice person in this story.

 

The end of sophomore year at Sunnydale High was a good time for the small group of students who usually hung out in the school library.  They’d beaten a prophecy, Buffy was still alive, and the Master was dust!  And Giles had reluctantly admitted that it would take the local vampires a while to get reorganized, so everyone was eagerly making plans for the summer.  Buffy had been grounded – again – for sneaking out, but she’d expected that and it had only been for a week anyway.  Giles had attempted to scold Xander for ‘running off half-cocked’ the night of the Harvest, but the fact that he still had his Slayer had made the Watcher’s protests against foolish actions fall rather flat.  And Angel had left town for a little while because some of the remaining vampires in the area had been trying to hunt him down for his part in the Master’s destruction.

 

No one had considered that there might be repercussions beyond that.  Willow went traveling with her parents, Xander did odd jobs around town, Buffy went to L.A. for a while and Giles took a short trip back to England.  And once everyone started to come back it was almost time for school to start again, and time to start researching and planning patrols with an eye to keeping Sunnydale’s demon population under control.

 

Buffy came back from L.A. later than expected, barely a week before school was supposed to start, in fact.  She went looking for Angel before going to see her Watcher or her friends, found him under less-than-acceptable circumstances, and then took her displeasure out on everyone she encountered after that.  Xander got the worst of it, much to his surprise – he hadn’t expected any thanks for saving Buffy’s life, but he never would have imagined that she’d make a public show of her contempt for him, either.  Willow had called him later that night to make excuses for Buffy, and Xander had gone to bed more disappointed than mad.  Buffy trying to make tall, dark and fangy jealous he could understand, but Willow defending her using him to do it had hurt.  He resolved to stay away from them both for the rest of the weekend, deciding he wanted a little time to himself before school started anyway.

 

The next time Willow called and he reluctantly answered, wondering if she had more excuses or was now mad at him for ‘being avoidy’, she instead told him tearfully that Buffy was leaving Sunnydale.  For Japan.  On Monday morning.

 

The emergency meeting in the library that Sunday afternoon had a shocked Giles, a frantic Willow and a stunned Xander , but no Buffy as her mother wouldn’t let her out of the house.  No one had thought about Joyce Summers’ possible reaction to everything that had gone on during the past year; even Buffy had thought being grounded and lectured was going to be the worst of it.  No one had expected that Mrs. Summers would take drastic measures to put a stop to what she saw as her daughter heading down the same delinquent path that she’d been on in L.A.  She’d even kept her plans from Xander, who had mowed her lawn all summer long and had talked with her a lot.  No, Mrs. Summers had planned well and secretly and acted fast.  Buffy was packed and on a plane almost before she had a chance to say goodbye to anyone, off to be a foreign exchange student in Japan.  And a week later, a Japanese exchange student would be arriving to take her place.

 

Which was exactly the problem, of course.  You might be able to substitute one high school student for another…but you can’t replace the Slayer.

 

 

Sunnydale’s first contingent of exchange students arrived at the airport a week later as promised, and Xander went with Mrs. Summers to pick up the one that would be coming home with her.  Xander had even made a small sign with the girl’s name on it, which he held up higher than his friend’s mother could so it would be seen above the heads of the other students and parents.  “They should have sent us a picture,” he complained, scanning the crowded airport for someone he’d never seen and didn’t know.  “We’ll never spot Usagi in all this.”

 

“I am Usagi!”  The voice was feminine, high, and excited, and Xander looked down to find a short, slender Japanese girl with long black ponytails and wide brown eyes beaming up at him.  “I am here to meet Joyce Summers.”

 

Xander lowered his sign and Mrs. Summers smiled at the girl.  “I’m Joyce Summers, and this is Xander Harris, a friend of my daughter’s.  We’re glad to have you here, Usagi.  Shall we go look for your luggage?”

 

“I have already seen it,” Usagi told her with a bow.  “I will be right back!”

 

She darted back into the crowd, and Xander handed his sign to Joyce with a grin.  “Stay here, Mrs. Summers, I’ll go help her.  There’s no sense in all of us getting lost.”

 

He disappeared in the girl’s wake almost as quickly as the girl had, and in less than ten minutes the two of them reappeared, Usagi hauling along a suitcase and Xander carrying her trunk.  The sight of the trunk made Joyce hide a smile; it was pink and liberally decorated with prancing unicorns and glittery hearts.  Xander saw the smile and grinned back at her.  “Hey, at least it was easy to find,” he quipped.  “So are we ready to get out of here?”

 

“Let’s go home,” Joyce agreed.

 

 

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  Xander and Usagi got along like a house on fire – multicolored psychedelic fire, that was.  They both loved junk food and hated school.  They both talked a mile a minute and often said the wrong thing at the wrong time.  They both ate enough for two or three people and fell asleep at the drop of a hat.  And they both bounced.  A lot.

 

An awful lot.  Luckily for both of them, Mrs. Summers thought it was cute.

 

Willow and Giles didn’t; they thought Xander needed to spend less time playing with his new friend and more time focusing on vampires and demons.  Although the absence of the Slayer had seen to decreasing the number of vampires and etcetera around Sunnydale, deadly creatures of the night still roamed the streets.  Xander knew this, because he and Willow and Giles were still going out to the cemeteries at night to chase the newly-risen dead.  Unlike Willow and Giles, however, Xander was not willing to put his new friend in danger by letting Joyce stay ignorant of what was going on in Sunnydale.

 

Giles was furious, Willow aghast.  Xander blew them both off and went straight to Joyce Summers to tell her what he and his friends – and her daughter - had been doing nights.  “It wasn’t Buffy’s fault, she tried to stay out of trouble,” he told her.  “But these gangs, they passed the word, and some of them came looking for Buffy the first night she went to the Bronze.  They weren’t going to leave her alone, just like they weren’t leaving a lot of other kids alone.  So all of us started being on the lookout, trying to keep the other kids from getting hurt, and eventually it turned into kind of a night patrol thing.  I know it’s dangerous, but we do a lot of good.  And it’s not like the gangs will leave us alone even if we stop, so we’re protecting ourselves too.  This way all of us always have someone to watch our backs.”

 

Mrs. Summers was furious, aghast…and proud.  She agreed to keep Usagi in at night unless Xander said it was all right to go out and went with her, and she hugged him until he was pretty sure he had bruises.  Not to mention, she agreed to mind every detail of the ‘gang signs’ Xander told her about, including not verbally inviting anybody into the house.

 

Xander went home feeling smug, and shared that feeling with Willow and Giles the next day.  He told them how Joyce had accepted what he’d told her, and expressed his opinion that they should have come up with a cover story much sooner – like maybe before Buffy had been exiled to Japan and left Sunnydale without its Slayer. 

 

Giles informed him coldly that the Council made their rules for a reason, that his idea was full of holes and would only cause more trouble in the long run, and that he could deal with the inevitable results of his idiocy by himself.  And then he’d thrown Xander out of the library and sent a note around to his teachers informing them that the boy wasn’t allowed to have any more library passes because he’d been ‘abusing the privilege.’  Willow, not wanting to lose her own library privileges, sided with Giles and made a point of giving Xander a look of sad-eyed disappointment and when possible a mild scold for ‘not listening’ and ‘not being sorry’ every time she saw him.

 

Xander started ignoring her, much to her shock.  Because he wasn’t sorry, not one little bit.  He knew that weaving a web of lies like he’d done could come back to bite him in the ass, possibly even to bite all of them in the ass, but he just couldn’t agree with Willow and Giles that letting the people who were ignorantly on the fringe of what was going on get hurt was acceptable because a bunch of weird old men in England had said so hundreds of years ago. Especially since those were the same old men who’d said the Slayer had to fight alone and die young.

 

However, now that he was severed from the library and the Watcher, Xander realized that he had a problem:  he couldn’t not go out and fight the darkness, but he was officially cut off from all of the resources he’d been using to do it.  He needed to find new resources, and he needed to find them fast.  So after a little bit of consideration, he went to the Sunnydale Public Library to see if they had anything he could use.

 

Surprisingly – or maybe not surprisingly, considering that it was the Sunnydale library – they did.  Not the same collection of rare and fragile tomes that Giles kept at the school, but plenty of other demon-related references and a handful of open-access computers where he could get on the ‘Net and find whatever was missing from the books.  He also followed up on a number of other ideas he’d had, like setting stake-traps on the graves of the newly killed or using his old super-soaker to douse wandering vamps with garlic water prior to staking them.  Not wanting to run into Giles, he made sure to only patrol the more distant, older cemeteries, the ones the older man was unlikely to pick for Slayer-less patrols. And after a serendipitous discovery that some vamps carried money, Xander told his mother that he’d gotten a part-time job washing dishes for an Italian restaurant, thereby explaining his late hours, extra cash, and occasional aroma of eau de garlic in a way that she not only accepted but also wasn’t likely to object to.

 

Xander had never told any of his friends about his mother, not even Willow.  He knew his mother loved him, but he’d had to accept from a very young age that she wasn’t always capable of showing it, the same way she hadn’t always been able to take care of him.  Not that his father had been much better; until the plant cutbacks a few years before that had cut Tony Harris’s paycheck in half, Xander’s father had been a gruff, lumbering figure in a security guard’s uniform who Xander had only seen for more than a few minutes at a time on the weekends.  Now, however, his father was a bitter, angry, overweight man who was at home far too much and lashed out at everyone around him.  Especially his son, whose ‘interference’ in matters around the house and concerning his mother Tony deeply resented.  And Xander had found out the hard way that resentment fueled by alcohol could get real ugly real fast.   

 

Especially once his father, citing lack of insurance, had forced Xander’s mother to stop taking her medication and had instead started pushing liquor on her in its place.  Xander had started staying out of the house as much as possible after that, feeling like he was abandoning his mother but knowing there was nothing he could do.

 

Except kill vampires, that was.

 

The one bright spot in Xander’s life over the months following his banishment from the Watcher’s circle was Usagi.  The bouncy little Japanese exchange student was always happy to see him, and Xander found himself spending a lot of his non-vampire, non-research time doing homework with her, taking her to the mall, or escorting her to the Bronze.  Which also kept him in regular contact with Joyce as well, giving him the chance to do little things for her like keeping her yard mowed and making small repairs around the house.

 

He still couldn’t understand how Giles could feel no responsibility at all towards the mother of his Slayer – how the Watcher could simply ignore the fact that Joyce could be a very inviting target now that said Slayer wasn’t around to keep the vamps off by her mere presence in the house.  Giles didn’t even set any patrols around Joyce’s neighborhood!  Xander, however, made a run through the area every night.  He couldn’t protect his own mother…but he would do the best he could for Joyce Summers instead.

 

 

Things were going very well for Xander, so of course that meant that sooner rather than later the law of averages was going to catch up with him.  Xander had known this, had in his own way accepted the fact that some night he probably just wasn’t going to make it back home…but having gotten used to going out for the dangerous demon-fighting stuff all by himself meant it had never crossed his mind that he might not be alone when his luck finally ran out.

 

And as luck would have it – bad luck, that was – he was walking Usagi home from the Bronze when it happened.  They were cutting through a corner of one of Sunnydale’s many cemeteries, a relatively open and well-lit corner where Xander knew there hadn’t been anyone buried in quite a while, when Usagi gasped and he saw that a vampire in full game-face had appeared some little distance ahead of them.

 

Followed by two more.  And then too many more, oozing out of the shadows.  Too many for him to kill.

 

Not too many for him to hold off for a little while, though.  Long enough for Usagi to make a run for it, long enough for her to get away.  “You need to run, Usagi-chan,” he told her in a quiet, firm voice as he pushed her behind him, pulling one of the stakes he was never without out of the lining of his jacket.  “You need to run to the nearest safe place where other people are as fast as you can, all right?”

 

Her feet rustled in the dead leaves that littered the ground.  “What about you?”

 

Xander didn’t quite laugh, eyes never leaving the approaching vampires.  “I’m going to be distracting them.  And if I show up at the house later tonight, call Willow and do not under any circumstances ask me to come in.  But I’ll do my best not to show up, I promise.”

 

She hesitated, then squeezed his arm and was gone.  The sound of her running footsteps fading back out of the park made him smile, and then he darted forward with his stake and one vampire disintegrated in a very surprised cloud of dust.  One down, six to go.

 

The next vampire was a little more wary, but he was young and thought his opponent would fall for his feint.  Xander didn’t, and more dust floated down to hit the grass…but the other five vampires moved into position then, advancing slowly but steadily.  Xander started to back up,  never taking his eyes off of them, trying to watch them all at once.  He thought he heard a shout from somewhere behind him and hoped with everything he had that it wasn’t Usagi running into more vampires.  He and his remaining five were already at the checkmate point; he was backed into a corner with them closing in on him, fangs bared, yellow eyes glowing with hunger and hate.  They were – and he thanked God for it – going to rip him apart in a few minutes.  He found a weird sort of consolation in the fact that Joyce would know he’d gone down fighting, protecting someone.  “Not so worthless after all, am I, Dad?” he whispered under his breath.  And then the first vampire lunged, and the final round began.

 

Or at least, Xander thought it was the final round, especially after he lost his stake and the vamps just started generally kicking the crap out of him while letting him know exactly what they thought of him for having killed so many others of their kind over the past few months.  He had apparently dispatched enough vamps that the others had decided he was more threat than nuisance, which was a definite ego boost even if he wasn’t going to get to enjoy it for very long.  Or at least, he thought it wasn’t going to be for very long…and then a high voice called out something right before a beam of pink light sliced through the darkness and disintegrated one of the vamps.

 

Xander and the remaining vamps all froze.  A girl in red boots and a white minidress was standing on top of a nearby tombstone, her long blonde hair streaming down from two red-jeweled topknots.  She had a sort of scepter-looking thing in one gloved hand, and she didn’t look happy.  “Let him go!” she demanded.

 

The vampire currently holding Xander up in the air by the front of his shirt leered at her.  “Sure thing, doll,” he said, and tossed the young man away as though he weighed nothing at all.  “We can play with him any old time, but you,” he licked his lips, “oh baby, something like you doesn’t come around every night, you are worthy of my full attention.  Why don’t you come down here and we can…get to know each other better, hmm?”

 

The girl’s expression didn’t change, but she did leap lightly off of the tombstone…which placed her right in the center of a ring of vampires.  Xander struggled to get back up from where he’d been thrown and couldn’t quite do it; his head was spinning, and blackness was crowding in around the edges of his vision.  But the girl…he couldn’t let the girl die.  “Run…run away,” he whispered.  “Save yourself…”

 

The girl heard him, and her scowl deepened.  She pointed her scepter at the still-leering leader of the vampire pack.  “I know your kind,” she said coldly.  “Monsters, demons.  And I will fight you wherever I go.”

 

“You can fight me all you want, doll.”  The lead vamp was still leering.  “You want to tell me your name before we get started…or should I just make one up for you?”

 

She smiled at him, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “I am Sailor Moon,” she told him, almost confidingly, and then the scepter, which up to that point had looked a lot like a little girl’s overly-elaborate princess toy, flared into radiant life.  “Moon Crystal Whip!”

 

Xander had the satisfaction of seeing the lead vampire’s head separated from its owner’s shoulders by a twist of laser-bright pink and white light, but even before the resultant explosion of dust could settle the darkness that had been edging in on him contracted so suddenly that he didn’t even realize it had happened.

 

The girl who called herself Sailor Moon, however, did realize it – and it didn’t make her any happier.  The light-whip cracked in her hand, cutting down two more vampires, and then a spinning kick knocked over the one that had been sneaking up behind her while another flash of the whip took out a vampire on her right; the whip’s backlash dusted the kick’s victim almost before he’d hit the ground.  The whip retracted back into the scepter, and she hurried through the drifting dust to the side of the young man who had tried to save her knowing it would cost him his life. Carefully, gently, she shook his shoulder.  “Xander!” she called.  “Xander!”

 

Xander groaned, and his brown eyes slowly blinked their way back open.  He focused on the girl leaning over him, eyes widening in recognition.  “Usagi?”

 

Her eyes widened too.  She was still transformed, how had he…  “You…you know me?”

 

“Yeah, of course I do.”  He let her help him sit up, looking around at the dust blowing on the night breeze.  “You got them all, wow.”

 

She shrugged.  “They were monsters, but not like…what I am used to.  These were easy to kill.”

 

To her surprise, he smiled.  “You don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that.”  He regained his feet and leaned heavily against the nearest tombstone, trying to will his head to stop spinning and his legs to stop shaking.  “I want to hear all about it, but right now we’ve got to get you home before Mrs. Summers gets worried – although that outfit might worry her more.  Can you…”  The scepter vanished with a bright flash that made him wince, and then Usagi was standing there looking exactly as she had when they’d left the Bronze.  Xander smiled.  “Cool.  We are so going to talk about this later.  But for now…”  he straightened away from his granite support and let her slide under his arm to replace it, “let’s get going before more vamps show up.”

 

“Vamps?”

 

“Vampires,” he explained as they slowly made their way out of the cemetery.  “Evil bloodsucking demonic fiends that only come out at night.  They hunt people, eat people, and they have the worst pick-up lines in the world…”

 

 

Usagi was helping Xander limp his way across the Summers’ front lawn when two more vampires bled out of the night shadows, leering.  “Ah, the sweet smell of fresh blood,” one of them said, smacking his lips.  “Makes my mouth water.”

 

“You can be our late supper,” the other vampire informed Xander, waving a hand in Usagi’s direction.  “We’ll save her for a midnight snack.”

 

“Eating late at night makes you fat,” Xander told him, straightening away from his support and pulling the stake he’d reclaimed at the cemetery out of his shirt.  “And since you’re already ugly and stupid…”

 

Both vampires snarled and shifted into gameface, and the one closest to Xander laughed.  “Nice stick, bloodbag.  Too bad you’re not fast enough to do anything with it.”

 

He darted forward, a blur of motion, and grabbed Xander’s wrist in a crushing grip, freezing the stake in place and driving the young man to his knees.  The vampire was still laughing when the toothpick in Xander’s other hand stabbed him in the heart, and his expression of complete surprise exploded into dust.

 

Xander regained his feet, choking on the swirling dust, and switched the stake to his right hand.  “Next!” he called out hoarsely to the remaining vampire.

 

The vampire growled, started to spring forward…and then stumbled instead, off-balance, when Usagi hit him from behind with a rake.  The vampire whirled on her, then spun back around to backhand Xander as he was rushing up behind him.  “Ladies first,” he scolded the young man sprawled in the grass…and then grunted when Usagi plunged the business end of the rake into his stomach.  “Not nice, bitch,” the vampire spat, blood trickling out of his mouth.  He yanked the rake out, tossed it aside and stalked toward the girl.  “I am so gonna enjoy eating you.”

 

And then he stumbled again, and looked down in surprise to see the point of a stake protruding from his chest.  “Son of a…”

 

Dust flew.  “Don’t swear in front of Usagi,” Xander rasped, and dropped back down in the grass, coughing.  “Damn rude vamps.  Are you okay?”

 

“I am fine.  Are you…?” 

 

“I’ll be okay.”  Her arm slid around his waist and Xander slumped against her with a sigh.  His whole body felt like one solid bruise, all he wanted to do was lay down somewhere and sleep for a week…and then he felt Usagi tense and his head shot up.

 

There, on the front porch of the house, stood Joyce Summers.  And Xander could tell from the look on her pale, shocked face that she’d seen the whole thing.

 

Joyce sank down on the steps, and with Usagi’s help Xander staggered back to his feet and cautiously approached her.  He stopped at the bottom step.  “Mrs. Summers, I can explain…” he began.

 

“They were vampires.”  Her voice was flat, and she wasn’t looking at him.  “Like the ones in L.A.”

 

“Um…yeah.”  One of his knees buckled, and he sank down on the step, looking up at her.  “You…you knew about the vampires?  In L.A.?”

 

“No.  No.”  She shook her head.  “We didn’t.  We…I wasn’t sure what to do, what to think.  And Hank didn’t want to deal with it, so he had Buffy committed.”  Her head came up then, but she wasn’t looking at him.  “We locked her up, in a mental institution.  And there really were vampires, weren’t there?”

 

“There are, yeah.”  Xander felt like someone had punched him in the gut – and not just because he had, in fact, been punched in the gut more than once that night.  Buffy’s dad had had her committed.  He pushed the sick feeling that gave him aside.  “Mrs. Summers…how could you have known?  Most people…most people don’t believe in vampires, or demons, or magic.  And…and they’d freak out if they found out it was all real, so nobody who does know is supposed to say anything.  Not that anybody is going to believe someone who says that stuff is real anyway.”  No response.  He tried again.  “And it’s not all your fault.  There’s the Watcher’s Council, they’re supposed to look out for the girls like Buffy, to take care of them.  And they didn’t, they let that happen, they didn’t get her another Watcher until she showed up here.”

 

That got her to look at him.  “Another…”

 

“Buffy had a Watcher, in L.A.,” he told her, also pushing aside the idea of how much more trouble this conversation was going to get him into.  “The vampires killed that one, she won’t talk about him.  And then when she got here…well, Giles was her new Watcher.  She tried to tell him no, that she wasn’t going to do it any more…but the vamps started coming after her the first night she went out, and she just didn’t have a choice.  Remember, I told you about it, before?”

 

She blinked.  “You said…you told me they were gangs.”

 

Xander fought the urge to look away from the accusation.  “Yeah, I did.  And I still got in trouble with Giles for even saying what I did, but I had to tell you something!  I was afraid the vamps would come here once they realized that Buffy was gone, and you didn’t even know how to protect yourself from them.  And I couldn’t have lived with myself if something had happened to you or Usagi when I could have stopped it.”  His voice broke on a cough compounded of emotion and vampire dust.  “Not after…I mean, I just couldn’t have.” 

 

That was what made Joyce really look at him, actually see him…and suddenly reality flooded back in.  Usagi and Xander had just killed two vampires in her front yard.  Had there been more vampires before that?  Xander’s clothes were ripped, his face was bruised and bloody, and every time he moved he winced.  And Usagi, disheveled but not visibly hurt, was hovering beside him with wide, frightened eyes.  Buffy was safe in Japan…but there were still two children here who needed her, so she would have to finish having her nice little guilt-fueled breakdown some other time.  She locked eyes with Xander.  “Do you need to go to the emergency room?”

 

He looked startled, but quickly shook his head, wincing as he did so.  “Uh, no, I’m okay.”  He flinched and looked away when she turned her best don’t-lie-to-me glare on him.  “Really, Mrs. Summers, it’s okay.  I’m just a little banged up, don’t worry about it.”  The glare hadn’t shifted when he dared to glance back up, and he flinched again.  “Okay, more than a little.  But I’ve had worse, so I know I don’t need the emergency room.”

 

Joyce could tell he was telling her the truth, and if she didn’t like the truth he was telling her…well, she realized that was hardly his fault.  She stood up.  “Usagi, please help me get Xander into the house so we can make sure he’s all right.  And then I want the two of you to tell me exactly what went on tonight.”

 

Xander looked at Usagi with worry in his eyes, but his friend shook her head.  “No,” she said, helping him get back to his feet.  “I will tell the truth too, just like you did.”  She made a face.  “I wish…that I could have told my mother.  But that would not have been possible.”  She smiled at his questioning look.  “My mother cannot keep a secret to save her life.”

 

Even Joyce had to smile at that.

 

 

It was a long night at the Summers house.  Joyce held herself firmly in check throughout the story the two teenagers had to tell her, not wanting to frighten either of them with an uncontrolled reaction that might be misunderstood.  So she listened and kept her questions to a minimum as they described the night’s vampire encounters to her, and was rewarded by getting to watch Usagi transform into what she called a Sailor Senchi in an ethereal swirl of power and light.  It was not difficult for her to believe that the magical ‘Sailor Moon’ would find vampires easy to put an end to, or even that the girl would be contemplating doing so on a regular basis.  She was a superhero; that was what superheroes did.

 

The fact that Xander had been doing it too – and that he was very obviously planning to keep right on doing it – sorely tested Joyce’s resolve to say little and react less.  Xander had started fighting this fight to help her daughter, another superhero apparently, and he had kept on doing it after Buffy was gone simply because he knew that it needed to be done.  He knew that every night he didn’t patrol, didn’t fight…someone else might die.

 

But Xander wasn’t a superhero; he hadn’t even been trained to fight.  And if Usagi hadn’t turned out to be a superhero, tonight’s fight would have been his last.  As it was, he was covered in bruises and cuts and was a little more pale than a mother’s knowing eye thought he should be.  He’d turned even paler when she’d mentioned calling his parents, and been visibly relieved when she’d chosen not to push and insisted that he stay where he was for the night.  She and Usagi had fussed over him and bedded him down on the couch, and then Joyce had fussed over Usagi a little more before tucking her into her own bed, whispering how proud she knew the girl’s mother would be.

 

Joyce went down to the kitchen after that and made herself a cup of coffee.  Xander was restless at first, but when she went in to check on him her gentle touch made him flinch away with a whimper, although he didn’t wake up.  So she moved into the darkened living room to finish her coffee, watching him sleep, wondering about more than just vampires.

 

 

This story has not been completed.