A Man of Africa

by Setcheti

 

 

Disclaimer:  Don’t own the Buffy characters, they belong to Joss Whedon/Mutant Enemy.

 

After the fall of Sunnydale…the world went on pretty much the way it always had.  Traffic was bad during rush hour.  Stores had sales.  Stupid television shows continued to be made.  People lived, died, and fell in love.  Another Hellmouth started to form.

 

Except that this time, there were Slayers everywhere.  Never again, thanks to Willow’s not-so-well-thought-out spell, would there be a single Chosen One fighting the forces of darkness.  Now there were hundreds of them, maybe even thousands, scattered all over the planet.  And the process, it had been determined by what was left of the Watcher’s Council, would continue pretty much forever; now that Pandora’s box had been opened, it could never be closed again.

 

Which meant that there were young girls, all over the world, waking up one morning with superpowers and not knowing how they got them.  And the surviving remnants of the Council didn’t know what to do about it, except for sitting around bitching about how ‘bloody Rupert’ had gotten them into this mess so he could damn well get them back out.

 

Rupert Giles didn’t give them a chance to take that offer back.  He gathered up his Chosen One and her friends and a few stray slayers they’d picked up along the way, and he took them all to London.  They marched straight into what remained of Council Headquarters where he proceeded to prove just how much Ripper there was left in him.  The Council never stood a chance.

 

They rebuilt the Headquarters – that was Xander – and restored the Council Library – that was Willow – and trained some English slayers.  That should have been Buffy, and she certainly thought it was, but it ended up being Xander and Giles who actually trained the slayers while Buffy just…went through the motions, sparred with them, and got more and more sullen.  The new young slayers were faster than she was, and they had more energy.  The more they trained, the harder it was for her to beat them, and the more frustrated with them she got.

 

Giles called a halt when Buffy started observing, rather loudly and publicly, that she didn’t think letting a crippled human train slayers was good for anyone except the vampires.  She hadn’t said it in front of Xander, but she also didn’t appear to care if he heard it and that more than anything convinced Giles that Buffy had to go.  Somewhere.  Anywhere.  He spoke to the new Council, one member at a time, and then had them summon Buffy as a whole and send her on vacation.  They filled her ears with gratitude for all her sacrifices, for all her hard work, and then told her they were sending her to Italy for a ‘well deserved vacation’, unquote.  She hesitated, the Council mentioned that they would, of course, be increasing her monthly stipend for the duration of her trip…and the Slayer was on a plane almost before they’d finished talking.

 

Xander got on a plane going the opposite direction a few weeks later, much to Giles’ and Dawn’s and the new young slayers’ dismay.  Word had come through that there were slayers in Africa, and that some of them were being killed as witches or worse.  Someone had to go, and Xander had insisted that he was the only person currently available who could be spared.  Giles heard ‘expendable’ and cursed Buffy roundly, but he drove the younger man to the airport himself and spent the trip making sure Xander knew that the Slayer’s opinion was definitely not shared by the himself and the rest of the Council.

 

He was surprised and relieved to find that Xander knew that…and more than upset to be told that Willow had sided with Buffy.  Giles cursed them both all the way back to the Council, where he promptly sent the Red Witch back to Devon.  And that evening Dawn told him Buffy had called and said she had a new boyfriend…who was immortal.

 

Giles went back to his rooms and drank half a bottle of brandy that night, and then the next morning he got up and tasked the Council with finding more people to train as Watchers since their best one had just left for Africa. 

 

 

A few years passed.  Buffy came back from her extended Italian vacation, sans immortal boyfriend, and embarked on a quest to prove she was still the best Slayer the Council had.  Giles had by that time stacked the Council with people who had at least a modicum of common sense, so they allowed her to think she was proving it while making sure to reassure the other slayers and their Watchers that she wouldn’t be allowed to stay very long in any one place.   That became slightly more complicated when Willow started insisting on tagging along, which eventually caused the Council as a body to insist that the capital-S Slayer and her friend the Red Witch both stay at Council Headquarters in London on a permanent basis.  It cost the Council a hefty amount in the form of a ‘Euro shopping allowance’ to make the order stick, but the improvement in morale everywhere except London was generally agreed upon to be more than worth it. 

 

During all of these goings on, Xander had stayed in the Dark Continent and continued gathering Slayers.  Some he took out of Africa, escorting them to the Council and seeing them safely placed before heading back.  Others he simply put on a plane, knowing a waiting Watcher would be at the other end of the flight to welcome them to their new home, and then he walked back into the jungle alone.

 

But there were others he didn’t report and never sent anywhere, girls whose tribes realized the gift of the Slayer and stood ready to support and defend their Chosen One under any circumstances.  Xander trained those girls himself, trained their people…and then walked away again, off to find more girls who weren’t so lucky and decide how best to help them.

 

He went back to ‘civilization’ less and less often as the years passed.  And he gradually ‘found’ fewer and fewer Slayers in Africa.  What trust he’d had in the Council, in the new order of Watchers, even in his former friends, had evaporated a little more with each trip back, with each loaded question, with each accusation or criticism or cutting insult.  Africa had become his home, he understood her, he’d learned her ways and played by her rules; the awkward, unsure boy he’d once been had been replaced by a strong, confident man.  A man of few words, well chosen, and silences as deep as the velvet night sky.  A man of earned friends and respected enemies, walking with a measured tread on paths he carved himself through the devouring jungles.  A man of Africa.

 

Buffy and Willow couldn’t see it, didn’t want to.  They took exception to his methods, especially when it came to his gaining custody of some of his girls by marrying them.  It was the safest, most expedient way to extract some of the newly awakened from slayer-hostile tribal families; sometimes it was the only way to keep the girl alive, in fact.  Giles knew this, knew it wasn’t about sex, and simply passed on it as a relatively unimportant detail.  Buffy and Willow, however, insisted that such situations were not caused by different cultural standards and beliefs, but by Xander’s inability to ‘not make a mess out of things.’  Buffy had gone so far as to formally request of the Council on several occasions that a ‘real’ Watcher be sent to Africa as it was obviously more than Xander was able to handle.

 

The Council kept turning her down.  Some of them had been to Africa, none of them wanted to go back – or at least, none of them wanted to go further than the familiar,  civilized streets of Johannesburg or Cape Town.  Lions did not prowl in modern cities, deadly snakes and spitting spiders rarely ventured into comfortable hotels and gracious rooming houses.  And African vampires stuck to the jungle, prowling in the eternal twilight that filled the living green space beneath the thick, verdant canopy.  They were vicious, almost animalistic, and unlike their more civilized brethren were not able to pass for human and did not try.  Xander had filled pages upon pages with his observations of them, with accounts from villagers and tribesmen, with sketches of hook-handed monsters in ragged clothing, or even none at all, their bulging pale eyes glowing with red fire and their translucent-appearing skin a sickly ashen yellow like old wet parchment.  Those observations and sketches kept Giles up at night and made the rest of the Council even more adamant that none of them wanted to relieve the current African Watcher of his duties.  Even moreso than the animals and the insects, none of them wanted to confront an African vampire.

 

Xander, by his own accounts, had killed four of them – three with help from his slayers-in-training, one on his own.  Buffy and Willow said he must have gotten lucky.  Giles was not so sure.  Xander’s slayers were more stable than many of the ones trained by other Watchers, or even by more experienced, older slayers.  They were obedient, they were respectful, but if they thought you were wrong they either corrected you politely or quietly did what they felt was right without making an issue of it.  Xander’s slayers were future leaders, future mentors…they were a vision of the future that the Council and Giles personally had sorely needed to see, faced every day as they were with resentment, bitterness and death.

 

Xander’s slayers had hope.  He had given them that.  Giles only wished sometimes that the younger man had kept some of it for himself.  Perhaps, he often thought, Xander would find his hope in Africa.  Or perhaps he already had, and refused to bring it out of the Dark Continent with him for fear the girls or the Council would take it from him.  And Giles thought that was a very likely possibility, as he’d long since given up waiting for Buffy, or even for Willow, to grow up and become half the women he’d known they could be – or even a tenth of the man he knew Xander had become. 

 

 

Communication between Africa and the rest of the world was, even in the digital age, a slow and often chancy process.  Xander was rarely near a computer, or in range for a cell phone.  He wrote his reports in a waterproof notebook, and got them to the river and the nearest ferryboat mail drop by whatever means he could.  Months might go by before the Council heard from him, especially if the weather had been bad.  Or if the politics had been worse, either way.  So a silence of three months during the rainy season amid a period of localized unrest went unremarked upon by the Watcher’s Council.

 

At six months, the absence of a current report from the Congo was noted, and someone mentioned in a meeting – for the fortieth or fiftieth time – that they really did need to find a more effective method for maintaining communication with that area.  The idea was, as usual, tabled with the understanding that they would discuss it with Watcher Harris when next he came back.

 

The idea that Xander might not be coming back didn’t come up until the ninth month of silence gave birth to a group of four African slayers who showed up at headquarters demanding to be sent back home.  They gave no explanation save that they were needed.  And they would not take no for an answer.

 

The Council didn’t like that.  They weren’t in the business of keeping girls against their will, slayers or not, but they also weren’t in the business of sending valuable soldiers in the war against evil back to the families who’d tried to kill them – especially without a reason.  So they mollified the girls by sending them off to get their paperwork checked and their shot records updated, and then they set to trying to figure out what was going on.

 

They hit a dead end.  No demons had contacted them, no Hell-gods were hanging around, and the Powers That Be were not involved.  No one had had any visions, and no prophecies were coming due.  The four girls were from different parts of Africa, they lived in different cities, and prior to now they hadn’t known each other.  It would have been easier, someone commented half a day later, if Watcher Harris had been there to talk to them, since these were ‘his’ slayers.  Which prompted a flurry of digging into records, and revealed that the four girls were, in fact, literally as well as figuratively his – in Africa, they were his wives.  And no one had heard from him for almost a year.

 

The girls were called back in.  No, they hadn’t heard from Xander and no, they didn’t know his whereabouts either.  They stared at Buffy with cold eyes when she accused them of lying for him, and looked away from her in disgust when she tried to ‘explain’ to them why it had been wrong and perverted of him to marry them and that they shouldn’t protect him.  It was when Giles ordered her to shut up and sit down that the four African slayers exchanged a look amongst themselves and then the oldest stepped forward to address the Council.

 

Xander had not called them – Africa had.  A war was coming, and they were needed back home.  They were going back home, whether the Council agreed with it or not.      

 

The Council agreed.  Or rather, Giles did, on one condition; he was going with them, to look for Xander.  The girls exchanged yet another look and agreed, respectfully.  Watcher Giles would be most welcome, and they would be pleased to keep him safe as he searched for their husband.  That set Buffy off again.  Her rant was long, loud, and arrogant enough to make even the more jaded Council members cringe.  Giles saw something change in the eyes of the African slayers as they watched her, saw silent contempt become something darker when the Council ended the Slayer’s tirade by approving her demand to be sent to Africa with them.  Giles protested and was overruled; the group in London, like everyone else, had gotten their fill of Buffy.

 

Giles privately believed that their ‘solution’ was likely to cause more problems than it solved, but he had no choice but to accept it.  He apologized to the African slayers, and was told again that they would be pleased to keep him safe.  And after that, he was afraid.  

 

Because their eyes were still dark, and they hadn’t said a thing about Buffy.

 

 

The flight to Johannesburg was bad enough, but their arrival was a nightmare.  Many conversations with Xander had given Giles an idea of what to expect and the African slayers had been to the city before, but Buffy had all too obviously expected something like a cross between her European vacation and an Indiana Jones movie.  The reality of Johannesburg was neither, a mix of modern influence, old colonial affluence and shantytown poverty.  They stayed the night in a Watcher-friendly rooming house which Buffy pronounced ‘shabby without the chic’, and whose owner knew Xander well; Joseph was able to inform them that the younger man had last been seen in Kowata, a medium-sized village two days up the river, perhaps a week away on foot.

 

They had to explain several times to Buffy that ‘up the river’ was a joke, which made her flounce off to bed and left Giles, the girls and their host free to have a more civilized and serious conversation.  Joseph, too, had heard the voice of his country…and he was worried.  “War is coming,” he told Giles.  “Africa has awakened and called her soldiers home.  We will fight the darkness, and we will win.”

 

But later, Giles overheard him tell the slayers, “You know what you must do, and there is no time for retribution even if it is just.  Keep your promise, yes, but to Kowata and no farther.”   

 

Giles went to bed disturbed, and dreamt of the jungle.

 

 

The next morning, Joseph drove them out of the city in a battered Land Rover and dropped them off at a spot where farmland and jungle were battling each other for dominance.  He bid each of the African slayers a very respectful goodbye, shook Giles’ hand warmly, and completely ignored Buffy.  Who spent the next twenty minutes complaining about the rooming house and its owner, and then steadily on thereafter about everything and everyone else.

 

They stopped for a rest after four hours of steady walking, and not an easy walk even though they were on what for the area was a fairly well-traveled trail.  Giles knew the girls had insisted on the stop for his sake and was grateful; he was in good shape for a man his age…but only if that man was living in London and his idea of exercise was strolling ‘round the park after a large meal.  He ignored Buffy’s snide remarks to the girls that she wasn’t tired and that maybe they’d had it too easy in whatever postings they’d been assigned in the States.

 

The girls ignored her too, and refused to start back on the trail for an hour.  They spent a good part of that hour telling Giles about the trail, about the jungle, and about the different parts of Africa they’d come from.  Once they started walking again, they took turns telling him about waking up as a slayer, and about Xander finding them and bringing them away from those who would have killed them.  Giles noticed that they did not seem concerned about their missing savior, nor did they talk about finding him.

 

And when they stopped to make camp for the night, they ignored Buffy’s renewed attempt to tell them the ‘truth’ about Xander Harris.  In fact, like Joseph, none of the girls spoke to her at all.  They took turns keeping watch throughout the night, and near dawn the eldest again told Giles that they would see him safely to Kowata.  Breakfast came out of the packs Joseph had provided, and then they were walking down the trail again and not listening to Buffy complaining about going on foot when the trail would ‘obviously’ take a jeep.

 

The African slayers ditched them thirty minutes later, disappearing into the jungle and not coming back.  They hadn’t left entirely, though; markers appeared when the trail grew faint or branched off, and in places which would be good for taking a short break.  When it was time to stop for the night, Giles’ tent would appear in a clearing with a small fire burning before it and perhaps fresh meat on a spit or a small pile of fruit on a piece of bark.  The girls kept it up until the Kowata village had been reached about two hours before sunset of the fourth day, and then even their invisible protective presence vanished for good.

 

It had been almost a year since the army had swept through, and the people of Kowata had rebuilt what they could and ignored what they couldn’t.  A youngish man greeted Giles with honest deference when he and Buffy entered the village, had obviously been expecting them, and led them to a thatch-roofed building where several older men were waiting.  Xander had been near when the army had come, the old men told him, using the younger man as their translator.  He had helped many to safety in the jungle, he and the warriors who had been with him, but he had gone after several rogue soldiers and had never come back.  They waited until Buffy had been taken off by several women before producing a well-wrapped waterproof notebook.  One of the warriors had brought it to them right after the wet season, months after the army, they said.  They had been asked to keep it safe, and give it only to a man who came looking, not to any woman.

 

Xander had known Giles would come looking, then, but hadn’t wanted to be found if anyone else did.  Which was good on the one hand, since it meant he had been alive after the army’s depredations in the area…but on another hand was very, very bad, to Giles’ mind, as it meant the younger man had effectively cut all ties with the Council and the rest of the world.  The most important question to be answered, of course, was why.

 

Giles lay awake in a hut that night, reading the notebook by the light of a battered old lamp and growing more and more frustrated.  There was nothing entered in the rambling report, not even the faintest hint, that the young man who had written it had been planning or even simply contemplating his own disappearance – which was rather a clue itself, in Giles’ mind, that said disappearance had not been premeditated.  Even the final message, written in Xander’s familiar scrawl, simply said, “If this notebook is found, please deliver intact to Rupert Giles c/o IWC, London, England to receive substantial reward,” followed by a few blank lines and then, “Goodbye G-man.  I can’t say it’s been great knowing you, because our lives have pretty much sucked a lot of the time since we first met, but know that I think of you as a great person to know.  With Respect, X. Harris.”

 

The head of the Watcher’s Council inferred several things from this.  Xander had been well enough to pen his goodbye with care for its legibility, and to think out what he was going to say before writing it down.  Meaning he hadn’t been in particularly dire straits at the time he’d written his final message, which was a good thing to Giles’ mind.  But why leave a goodbye, and carefully guarded to prevent it reaching the wrong person at that, if he wasn’t in dire straits?  Why cut all ties and disappear into the jungle just before Africa began calling her children home for war…

 

Asked and answered, Giles realized, and a chill traveled down his spine.  He put out his light and tried to get comfortable enough to sleep in the hammock he’d spread his bedroll over, but he ended up lying there staring into the velvet darkness that was only slightly rimmed with silver moonlight.  He knew without a doubt that Africa had called Xander just as she had called Joseph and the four African slayers.  Which meant that Africa had claimed Xander as one of her own.  

 

Which meant that Xander had indeed found his hope in Africa, and it had kept him there.

 

 

Giles delayed a few days in Kowata, speaking with the old men about a good many things and making up his mind while he was doing it. It would have been easy, even expected, for him to trek back to the outskirts of Johannesburg, return to Joseph’s, and from there arrange a return flight to London. Xander’s notebook was packed snuggly into his bag, and it did truly need to be filed into the Council archives with all the others. Not to mention that Rupert Giles was not getting any younger, and was definitely not in the tip-top condition necessary for traipsing around in the world’s largest jungle looking for one man who quite possibly didn’t want to be found. There were also the African vampires to consider, as he only had one slayer with him for protection. The fact that the slayer happened to be Buffy, who had lost a good deal of her fighting edge and had spent their entire sojourn in Kowata sulking, was also a strong argument, in Giles’ mind, for heading back to Johannesburg without delay.

Except…he had come here to find Xander, known respectfully as Watcher Harris by the Council. He had the notebook, yes – which he hadn’t told Buffy about, nor did he plan to – and although it did need to be taken back to the Council for proper archiving, there was nothing in it that made its immediate return a priority. Trekking through the jungle would be arduous, Giles had no doubts about that, but thanks to his extended discussions with the old men of the village and his knowledge of Xander’s reports, he did have some idea of what direction he might search in and what landmarks he could look for to keep on course. Not to mention that probably the best retraining for a sulky capital-S slayer who had gone soft might be to slog through the jungle and keep her Watcher alive until he was ready to give up his search and go home.

The two of them set out the next morning, heading in a vaguely northwesterly direction away from Kowata in the wake of a small group of armed men who were attempting to track down a predator which had been feeding off the village’s meager herds. Or so they said, anyway; Giles suspected that the ‘predator,’ when found, would turn out to be a very saleable carcass, but he also didn’t believe that the possible black-market dealings of his temporary guides were any of his business. In this part of Africa, one did what one had to in order to survive.

Up to and including threatening to stick one’s Slayer’s mouth shut with duct tape unless she kept her opinionated, ill-informed ranting to herself. The hunting men they were following hadn’t cared for the sound of her voice any more than Giles had, and Buffy’s sulking silence in the days following his threat had earned him a new measure of respect in their eyes. It also bought Giles a spot in their nightly circle around the fire, and during the all-male give-and-take of information that went on there he learned more things that he needed to know for his quest.

Because these men had encountered Xander and his warrior-wives on multiple occasions. They knew what direction he’d come from, what direction he’d left in, and what he’d mentioned seeing along the trail both ways. The hunters thought it possible that Xander’s base of operations was located in a deep valley many days travel from Kowata. It was the only place, they said, that he could have come from. Supposedly there was a city there, ancient and long since devoured by the jungle. It was there, somewhere beneath the shadow of three sister mountains, that Giles might find the one he sought.

Giles and Buffy parted company with the hunters the next day, heading further to the north and west. Four days and two African vampires later they saw the three sister mountains for the first time, and two days after that they found an entrance to the valley and descended into a deep, dark sea of devouring green. Giles only hoped that it wouldn’t devour them before they could find some trace of Xander.

Their first day in the valley, they found a trail that led further in and followed it cautiously. And the first clue that they were on the right trail was the fact that from that point onwards they encountered no vampires at all – Giles knew from Xander’s reports that African vampires normally prowled around well-traveled trails the way American vampires haunted the alleys behind popular nightclubs. And as the next few days went by, Buffy became progressively more uneasily territorial, which was a sure sign that more slayers were somewhere in the area.

Giles thought they had probably been walking around the perimeter of the place they had come to find for about half a day before they actually realized anything was there. It was a heavy little breeze that revealed the secret to him, brushing listlessly at some creeping vines and thereby revealing carved yellowish stone that on closer examination became one of two overgrown pillars flanking an equally overgrown cobbled road. What could be seen of the road didn’t seem to lead anywhere except into another sea of devouring green and Buffy very adamantly didn’t want to leave the trail to follow it…but somehow, Giles just knew. He picked his way along the old road, his Slayer trailing unhappily along in his wake, and in ten minutes he was standing looking down at the remains of a stone city.

Following the increasingly clear if narrow road – probably it had been more of a footpath, in fact – Giles made for the largest and most intact structure he could see, a two-storied building whose arched windows were curtained with clinging vines. He saw birds, and monkeys, but at first nothing else…and then something white and brown moved behind a short wall and he realized he was seeing a penned goat. Closer still, and some of the green jungle sameness revealed itself as well-kept gardens. The lower doors were mostly clear of vines, square stone mouths into blackness with heavily carved lintels and posts marking the building as having once been a temple or palace. The stone-flagged walks around the base of the building were clear of grass and vines, something that would have been impossible if there hadn’t been people living there. But there were no people in sight.

Giles hesitated a moment outside of the building, in front of the largest entrance, and then stepped in, blinking against the change from bright to dim. As his eyes adjusted, he saw vines, and hanging, dangling ropes, and monkeys. A dais with a stone chair on it – the structure had been a palace, then. Bright colored birds flashing in and out of high-set windows, thick stone steps leading up and away in one corner…

And then a flash that wasn’t bird or monkey, and four girls who had swung in on the ropes and dropped, battle-ready, to the floor in front of him. Buffy behind him made a surprised noise and started to move forward, but he held out an arm to stop her. “No,” he said, and inclined his head to the girls. “You are slayers, correct?”

“Yes,” one girl answered him, straightening; the other three remained on their guard. “You are Rupert Giles, correct?”

He smiled. They were definitely in the right place. “Yes, I am.”

There was another blur of motion, larger than the others had been, and someone else swung into the room and dropped to the tiled floor, knees flexing to take the impact although he kept one hand hooked in the rope. Fatigue pants with plenty of pockets, a worn sleeveless t-shirt…a black eyepatch. Xander Harris smiled at the openmouthed head of the International Watcher’s Council. “Hey, G-man. Welcome to the jungle.”

 

 

This story was last updated on 7/16/11.
It has not yet been completed.