Things Unseen

By Gidgetgirl

Chapter Seven

Lilah Morgan sat uncomfortably in the last place in the world she belonged. She felt the uneasy eyes staring at her, even as the wheels rolled beneath the van.

They were in a mini-van. It was more than could be born. Lilah stared out the window, feeling the ever more familiar emptiness in her stomach. Why had she come to the one group of people she despised most for help? She pushed the thought out of her mind and concentrated on ignoring the wriggling little girl sitting beside her.

Since it was dark, Angel was driving, and Cordelia had unceremoniously claimed the shot gun seat. Lilah was squished in between Hopie and the window, Lorne and Connor to Hopie’s other side. Fred and Gunn, Lindsey and Faith were crammed into the back seat, whispering.

Lilah thought the affection was nauseating. Hopie stared intently at Lilah, a frown creasing her little brow.

“What are you staring at?” Lilah asked, shooting daggers at the little girl with her eyes.

“You tell me,” Hopie responded. Connor and Angel smiled identical smiles at Hopie’s retort. The little Shanshu learned fast.

“Oh, that was original. I’m wounded, deeply wounded,” Lilah said, sarcasm dripping out of her voice.

Hopie gave Lilah’s shin a little sideways kick.

“I am original. There’s only one of me. There’s lots of you, and that’s why you want him back, cause you think he makes you special but he doesn’t like living in your tummy cause the emptiness hurts and I can tie my shoes all by myself.” Hopie demonstrated, her tongue darting out between her lips in concentration.

Lilah glared at the little girl, blatantly unimpressed with her shoe tying skills.

“Lilah,” Angel called from the front seat, “you do realize that you’re arguing with a four year old child, don’t you?” He couldn’t keep the almost laughter out of his voice. She may have been the injured party this time, but Lilah Morgan was always Lilah.

“That thing is not a child,” Lilah muttered.

“Am so,” Hopie responded before anyone else could say anything in her defense.

“Are not,” Lilah muttered.

Hopie batted her eyes at the older woman. “Would you like to meet Claude?” she asked sweetly.

“Who’s Claude?” Lilah asked.

Lindsey snorted from the back seat, stroking Faith’s back gently, trying to sooth the angry slayer.

“Maybe,” Hopie said thoughtfully, “when we get to the Heckmouth, you can meet Claude and Bob at the same time. Wow. Claude and Bob haven’t met. This could be fun.” Everyone in the car pictured Hopie playing with two flame throwers simultaneously. Cordelia grimaced slightly.

“Heckmouth?” Lilah asked, not really knowing why she was picking a fight with the little Shanshu when she was dependent on the Fang Gang for help. “Don’t you mean Hel…”

Cordy cut Lilah off. “Say that word around my daughter, and I’ll tear out your tongue,” she called cheerfully from the front seat.

“Silly Momma,” Hopie said, casting a sideways glance at Lilah. She couldn’t help but look at the woman. She had never felt anything or anyone so empty before in her life.

“Silly Momma,” Gunn echoed from the back seat, relishing Cordy’s threat as if he hadn’t received a similar, albeit more civil, threat earlier that day.

Faith relaxed a bit, leaning into Lindsey’s body and resting her head on his shoulders. She thought back to the dream and remembered why crypticism and interpretation of aforementioned crypticism were not her forte. Lindsey brought a hand up to gently stroke her hair. She could feel his heart beat.

Angel started whistling from the front seat. Hopie hummed along, and Lorne, on the other side of Connor, lifted an eyebrow in wonder. Interesting, he thought. Very interesting.

Angel couldn’t help himself, and the lyrics just came out of his mouth, “Rubber ducky, you’re the one…”

Lilah’s mouth dropped open.

“New song, Daddy,” Hopie insisted.

Angel thought for a moment. Sticking with the same motif, he began singing the Sesame Street theme song.

“Sunny days, sweeping the clouds away…”

Lilah felt the urge to curse, but settled for looking haughty instead.

Back at the Summers house, Anni scurried to her room before any of the adults had a chance to say something. Luckily, they had all been somewhat distracted by a phone call Buffy had received from Angel.

When Anni opened the door, Dawn’s left eyebrow arched gently. “Got caught, didn’t you?” she asked, matter of factly.

Anni nodded glumly for a moment before smiling. “But he looked so cute, and he said I was cool and held my hand until Spike threatened to chop his off, and we shared a soda.”

Dawn giggled. “You’re turning into Hopie,” she accused, referring to the run on sentence. Anni sighed, flopping down on her bed.

“Luckily the slayer dream thing confused them,” she said.

“What slayer dream?” Dawn asked. Anni explained.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Totally unfair,” she said. “I sneak out and get caught, I get in trouble. You sneak out and get caught, and you use a slayer dream to distract everyone and end up getting off scott free.”

Both girls jumped a little when they heard Buffy’s voice from the doorway. “I wouldn’t say exactly scott free,” Buffy said wryly from the doorway, hiding the smile that wanted to creep onto her face at the way the two girls were around each other. “Wes wants to see you downstairs,” Buffy informed Anni, “and Dawn and I need to talk a bit about the implications of being an accessory to a crime.”

“Correction,” Dawn grumbled in Anni’s general direction, “you sneak out and I get in trouble.”

Anni batted her eyes at Buffy, a trick she had picked up from the little Shanshu. “It wasn’t Dawn’s fault…” she started to explain. Buffy rolled her eyes, but her half smile told the younger girl all she needed to know. Dawn wouldn’t be punished for helping her out.

Dragging her heels just a bit, Anni headed downstairs to face the music.

Kendall and Maddy tiptoed through the corridors, somewhat energized by the dream they’d just shared with the other Potentials. Maddy impatiently pushed a strand of dirty blonde hair out of her face, trying to get a better look at the hallway they were walking down.

“This is bloody exciting,” Maddy said, relishing the word bloody.

“This is bloody stupid,” Kendall replied, resisting the urge to tousle Maddy’s somewhat tangled tresses.

“We have to investigate,” Maddy said importantly, emphasizing the last word. Kendall couldn’t help but smile at just how much Maddy sounded like an eleven year old child.

“Well, brat,” she said finally, gesturing to a heavy door in front of them. “Investigate away.” Maddy bit her bottom lip and threw open the door. Both girls felt their mouths drop open at what they saw.

Demons contained in plexiglass cells were attached to all kinds of machines, and the room fairly buzzed with the noises the computers made as they recorded observations. Maddy, despite Kendall’s protest, walked up to one of the clear cages and put her hand on the glass.

‘It doesn’t seem right,” she said, eyeing the demon. She’d never seen one before, but something about the entire situation struck her as unfair and unnatural.

The sound of footsteps coming toward the room had Kendall pulling a frozen Maddy underneath the nearest desk. Together, the two girls crouched under the desk, each able to feel the other’s pounding heart.

The sound of Travers’ voice made Kendall automatically clench her jaw. Bloody hell, she hated him.

Neither girl recognized the other voice. “I’ll report your results to my superiors, sir,” the man’s voice said.

“Thank you, Agent,” Travers responded a bit sarcastically. “I’m sure the Initiative will be pleased with our progress.” The pseudo-snarl in Travers; pronunciation of the word Initiative was not lost on the soldier.

“Our operation is not the Initiative, sir,” the Agent responded. “Under code 6054873, the Initiative was disbanded and our organization was started.” The girls could practically hear Travers’ dismissive shrug.

In a different part of the facility, Chance, Colette, Nic, and Joss were still discussing the dream they had all shared.

“Both slayers were shorter than I expected,” Colette ventured, her voice still shaky.

Chance beamed. She was very short for her age.

“Size versus speed and strength,” Joss responded. “We’re talking about two very different things here.”

Nicolaa remained surprisingly quiet. “For one of us to be the slayer,” she said after a moment, “one of them would have to die. Buffy or Faith.” Before they had been faceless; now things weren’t so simple.

The girls sat in silence for a moment. “That’s what I felt,” Nic continued. “We were all there, something holding us together, but Buffy and Faith were different. As long as they’re alive…” she trailed off.

“Well, the girl in the air was kind of glowy too,” Chance commented, shrugging.

“What girl?” the others asked at once.

“The one floating in the air, her head thrown back and her hair flying behind her head. She was talking to the little girl and looking at the man and woman and the baby.” The others stared at the tiny Potential.

“Chance,” Nic said seriously. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

When Anni saw Wes, she gulped. He looked a level passed furious. A muscle in his neck was practically twitching, and Anni, for the first time in her life, was afraid of her brother.

“Wes,” she said softly. He turned to look at her.

“Annabella,” he regarded her, completely in control. She gulped again. Annabella: never a good sign.

“I’m sorry I snuck out,” she said, stuffing her hands in her pockets. “I didn’t think you’d understand about Jordy.”

“Understand?” Wes said, his mind truly elsewhere. “What’s there to understand? You snuck out of the house to rendevouz with a teenage werewolf who also happens to be a walking hormone time bomb. I don’t know whether to be more afraid that he’ll eat you or that he’ll try something.”

Anni blushed a deep scarlet. There was a reason, she remembered, that she didn’t speak with Wes about this type of thing. “I can take care of myself,” she replied, a little fire coming into her voice. “Either way.”

Wes ran his left hand roughly through his hair. This was too much. First it was just taking care of Anni. Then it was boys. Then, finding out that he was, that he might be a father. That his maybe child had been magically kidnapped. Most of all, it was that he had no control over any of it. Lilah had taken the control from him. From that matter, in her own teenage sneak-out-the-trellis way, so had Anni. Neither of them trusted him.

“I have bigger problems to mess with,” Wes said, more cruelly than he meant to. “So, I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version of this lecture: danger is bad, sneaking out leads to danger, and therefore, sneaking out, in addition to being generally dishonest, is also bad.” Anni bristled at the tone he was using with her. He’d never spoken to her like this, like she was somehow worth less than other people. She pushed the thought out of her mind. “It was thoughtless, stupid, and damn irritating,” Wes concluded, his mind flashing again to Lilah.

“It was selfish,” he said, not really thinking about Anni and failing to notice the stricken look on her face as he began to yell. “I should have known about yout. What was I thinking?”

Anni turned and fled the room, tears gathering in her eyes.

Wes, cursing himself for letting the situation with Lilah get the better of him, turned to follow her, but was distracted when the doorbell rang. And rang. And rang again.

Ten seconds and twelve rings later, he answered the door, to see Hopie happily poking the doorbell, trying out different rhythms. Angel was tapping his foot to the rhythm.

“Was that the Sesame Street theme song?” Willow asked, coming into the room.

“Yup yup,” Hopie replied happily. “See, somebody likes it,” she said, looking pointedly at Lilah. Wes met the woman’s eyes. She stared back, unabashed.

The rest of the group came into the house.

“Is Aunt Anya here anywhere?” Hopie asked. “Leo Bunny is in the car and he says he misses her.”

“She’ll be here later,” Willow promised, making a mental not to steer clear of any ex-vengeance demon vs. bunny battles that could feasibly occur. Hopie smiled and then tugged on Cordelia’s shirt. Cordy bent down to listen to the little girl’s whisper. Seconds later, Hopie was skipping toward the car to get Claude. As she had explained to her Momma, Hopie was afraid the flame thrower might get lonely.

Upstairs, Anni had locked herself in the bathroom. I should have known about you. What was I thinking? Wes’ words ran through her head. She sat in the bathtub, fully dressed, reluctant tears slipping slowly off her face.

 

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