BUFFY 2029 A.D.: A Breakfast Interlude
by Miles
Willow points at the v-opening of the front of her leather coat, starting at her waist and drawing her finger upward to her neck. Seemingly by magic—merely by passing her fingertip over it—she closes the opening without ever touching the material.

She catches Dawn grinning at her and says, “Do I amuse you, Dawny?” Dawn grins more broadly. Willow is the only person who still calls her by her childhood nickname. Even Buffy never calls her “Dawny” anymore, though Dawn wouldn’t mind a bit if her older sister did.

“I’m just reminded of something I once read,” says Dawn. “It went something like, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.”

“Arthur C. Clarke,” says Willow. She pauses, wrinkling her brow thoughtfully as she puts on a beige wool beret and adjusts it to a jaunty angle. Then she adds, “if I’m not mistaken.”

Though her red hair is streaked with gray—which she refuses to color—Willow is still slim and vibrant. As she wraps a matching beige scarf around her neck, she says, “You know, you too could have some clothes with remote-zippers in them. They aren’t very expensive nowadays.”

“No thanks,” says Dawn. “When it comes to trying new-fangled gizmos, you’ve always been younger than I am. I still use buttons.”

“Dawn, we simply have to drag you into the twenty-first century,” Willow says laughingly. She makes a mental note of Dawn’s approaching birthday and decides to buy Dawn that gown—the one Dawn was admiring in the window of the Christian Dior shop in the lobby of the hotel. Dawn didn’t seem to notice that it had a couple of remote zippers in it, as well as a miniature cell phone embedded in one of the shoulder straps.
Willow has her own cell phone in the collar of her leather coat, and she activates it now.

“Hey, Xander,” she coos, “whatcha doin’?”

“Lying on the bed in the bedroom of my hotel suite, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for your call, Will,” comes the reply. “I’m raring to take a look at that old bridge.”


“No breakfast first?” asks Willow with a little surprise and maternal disapproval. “Not even a cup of coffee in the five-star restaurant downstairs?”

“Aw, you seen one five-star dining room, you’ve seen ‘em all,” says Xander. “Besides, I already took an early morning walk. Had a cup of coffee along the way. Say, did you know that a lot of street vendors in Geneva actually speak English?”

“And here I’ve been struggling to use my high school French,” Willow exclaims in mock astonishment.

Xander laughs. They both knew that Willow’s French is so fluent that, last year, she read papers in both French and English before the International Archeological Society of which she is a board member.

“Well, I have an ulterior motive for trying to get you into the dining room,” says Willow.

“Does it have anything to do with food being the way to a man’s heart?” he asks.

“No,” says Willow sternly. “It has to do with a special surprise for you there, and I don’t want to have to spoil it just to get you to go down there. I am invested in seeing the look on your face.”

“Does this have anything to do with the fact that Buffy is here?”

“Blast it, Xander! The least you could do is go along and pretend to be surprised.” She makes a sour face, but then glances at Dawn; her expression turns into a mirthful smile.

“Uh, uh,” demurs Xander. “I’d never be able to put anything over on you, Will. Not with your unfair advantage of being able to read minds.”

“You’re darn tootin’, Mister,” Willow shoots back.

* * *

Waiting for her sister and friends in the dining room, Buffy stirs her yin zhen (white tea) with the cover of the zhong. During extensive travel in Asia, she acquired a fondness for yin zhen, and is pleased to find that the best hotel in Geneva caters to such exotic tastes.

Buffy wears a conservative, navy blue suit and matching high heels. Her blouse is snow white and her tiny earrings sparkle gold. Unlike Willow, she has taken to dying her hair a lustrous blonde, and, since the train, it has been neatly coifed. Her hair is her only vanity: she actually goes lighter on the make up now than when she was young. Nevertheless, she is aware that every man in the room—and not a few women—have given her a good looking over. Buffy misses little if anything that is happening around her but filters out most of it as unimportant. What weighs on her mind at the moment is the intuition—based largely on last night’s dream—no, nightmare—that her day job has somehow become intertwined with her super-hero job. The trouble is that neither her dream nor her intuition are telling her how they intersect.

“Hey, Buff!” calls Xander.

Buffy looks surprised for a moment and seems about to leap up and throw her arms around Xander’s neck; then she looks at Willow’s face and scowls at Xander. “So you told her you already knew I’m here? We could’ve staged a very touching reunion just for Willow’s benefit.”

“No, you see, that’s just it,” complains Xander. “I’m surrounded by women who can read minds. I can’t put things over on anybody here.”

“That’s true,” says Buffy thoughtfully. She rises and gives Xander a long hug.

After Willow and Dawn get their hugs, the gang pulls up chairs around the table. A waiter promptly arrives and takes their orders.

“Do you have chocolate chip and hotdog pancakes,” Buffy asks the waiter in a confidential tone. His eyes widen in something approaching controlled horror as he processes what Buffy is saying. “’Cause I seem to recall that my kid sister, here, loves them.”

Dawn rolls her eyes, then turns to the waiter. “Don’t pay any attention to her. She is teasing me, not you.” Turning back to Buffy she adds, “Besides, I never liked that combination, it was chocolate chip and marshmallow pancakes I craved.”

“And no one ever figured out why you ate them more than once considering what happened the first time,” says Willow.

“Don’t ask,” Xander advises the waiter. “It wasn’t pretty.”

“Honestly,” says Dawn, “Sometimes you’d think I'm still twelve instead of a middle-aged woman.”

Buffy and Willow groan in unison. Xander’s brow drops so far that his glasses—the pair with one corrective lens and one that is merely plain glass over his bionic eye—fall off, slide down his menu, and land in his lap.

“What?” asks Dawn defensively.

Willow puts her hand on Dawn’s and leans forward. “Dawn, dear, if you’re middle-aged, what does that make us?”

“About ready for the dinosaur burial grounds,” mutters Xander to no one in particular.

“Speak for yourself,” says Buffy. “I’ve never felt better.”

“I am speaking for myself,” says Xander. “And may I say, you look better than ever. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Flattery is always appreciated.” Buffy smiles at him.

Buffy is just finishing her yin zhen and Willow only orders a cup of black tea. While Xander and Dawn each order more substantial breakfasts, Buffy takes stock of this—the only real family she has. Dawn is as delicate and exotic-looking as ever. The youngest of them, she still looks to be in her twenties. She is wearing a form-fitting green dress with sheer stockings and high heels, her adolescent wish to look grown up fulfilled—almost. Buffy regrets not spending more time with Dawn, but is inexpressively—or at least unexpressedly—proud of her. Dawn is a renowned professor of ancient languages, perhaps most famous for deciphering Harappan—a language of the Indus River Valley that no one had been able to read for almost five thousand years until Dawn made it the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation.

Xander does look older, Buffy thinks. His hair is thinning and gray; he is a bit heavy, but is also powerfully built. He has an impressive tan, too, from supervising construction projects all around the world. Although he recently became president of Reliable Erections International, Inc., he still dresses like the project manager who joined the company a quarter century ago. He is wearing what Buffy knows is his favorite shirt: a faded but unmistakably red-brown-and-white-checked lumberjack number that has imbedded electronics: his phone and some surveying instruments. Before he sat down, she noticed that the pants he is wearing, though once an elegant gray, are now a bit shiny in spots. Xander’s one acknowledgement of his surroundings is the dark blue tie cinching his collar (which is missing its top button). It occurs to Buffy that this might be the same tie he wore at his second wedding in 2009.

Still, Buffy thinks, Xander looks distinguished—even sexy. She wouldn’t say so, of course, though it’s silly to think he might get the wrong idea after all this time. They have been friends for thirty-three years, through high school and three of Xander’s weddings, two of which actually involved him saying “I do”—to unequivocal humans. But then there were the divorces. The best thing to come out of it all was Xander’s gorgeous, redheaded daughter. (Xander seems destined to be surrounded by redheads.)

Buffy keeps her feelings to herself, but her reticence isn’t a policy that applies only to her sister and Xander. She accepted long ago that she harbors at least a frisson of attraction toward Willow, but there is no point in changing anything about her relationships with any of them. Dawn, Xander, and Willow are her only family, and she fears doing anything to screw that up. Besides, as always, keeping her friends at some distance, Buffy tells herself, is safer for them.

She recalls the last thing that Giles told her. (What a vacuum there has been in her life since then.) He was right when he said that she would become more self-reliant in years to come. But is this what he really meant? Being alone? Feeling that it is better to spend her physical passion on men who can take care of themselves as well as she takes care of herself? (Riley was more right about that than she was willing to admit at the time.) The trouble is, it is getting difficult to find men who fit the bill. The ones that belong in her league physically are often empty spiritually.

All of these thoughts occur to Buffy in an instant. She looks up to see Willow looking back at her, undoubtedly trying to read her mind. Willow has not been able to read Buffy’s thoughts consistently ever since a Tibetan lama taught the Slayer how to conceal them.

“Deep thoughts?” asks Willow. “You have no idea how unnerving it is not to be able to read someone’s mind.”

“Oh, yes I do,” answers Buffy sweetly. She then allows Willow to see her memory of the time that she tried and failed to read Angel’s mind.

“Ancient history,” says Willow. “You don’t know how keenly frustrated I am right now.”

“What are you two talking about?” asks Dawn. “Are you having another mind reading contest?”

“Caught read-handed, so to speak,” says Xander holding his fork in midair for emphasis, but no one gets his pun, based as it is on visual text.

“How’s Toni?” Buffy asks Xander, by way of changing the subject.

Xander looks up form his eggs Florentine. “Sassy as ever,” he says with a mouthful and pauses to swallow before continuing. “She’s riding the horse I bought her and growing her red hair fashionably long, long, long—you know how they do today. Her mother is exasperated, but I think its kinda neat, flowing behind her as she gallops over the meadows.”

He goes back to attacking his eggs. Buffy notes that substituting this dish for eggs Benedict is unusual for Xander and probably means that he’s trying to eat healthier, maybe even lose weight. Good for you, she thinks, though she does not believe the diet will be successful.

“I heard that,” says Willow. “You never know. It might work.”

“What might work?” asks Xander.

“Never mind,” replies Buffy glaring at Willow and mentally suggesting that she hold her tongue.

“Are you thinking about work?” asks Xander.

“How uncanny, Xander,” says Buffy. “That’s exactly it.”

“Well what work brings you to Geneva—or is it a secret?”

“No secret,” says Buffy. “Not if you’ve read the papers. You’re talking to the new P.R. consultant for Credit Suisse.”

“What have they done now?” asks Dawn.

“This time, more sinned against than sinning,” says Buffy. “And I’m not just saying that because I work for them. I’m one of the weapons in their arsenal against a hostile acquisition by KRU Global Bank.”

“I’ve heard of them,” says Xander. “Their nickname is Hostile Takeovers R Us. Isn’t that outfit run by a pair of Indonesian brothers?”

“Sri Lankans, actually,” says Buffy. “Otherwise, no one knows much about them. Very mysterious guys. Only a few people have ever seen them—and most of them aren’t alive to tell about it.”

“Oh, oh,” says Willow. “If this turns out to be a job for the Scooby gang, I hope you won’t hesitate to call.”

“I’ll definitely keep you guys in mind, just in case.”

“Why are you meeting in Geneva?” asks Dawn. “Isn’t Credit Suisse headquartered in Zurich?”

“Yes,” says Buffy, “but since KRU is in Geneva, they want to focus my efforts here. Now, tell me what brings the three of you together—or is that a secret?”

“Will, you want to field that?” asks Xander as he chases the last morsel on his plate.

“The Rhone River, divides Geneva into a new city on the left bank and an old one on the right,” says Willow.

“Can’t miss it,” observes Buffy. “The river, the bridges, the lake—they’re among the most beautiful aspects of the city.”

“Right,” says Willow. “The river and lake, of course, have almost always been here, but the oldest bridges were built in Roman times. The newer causeways are, in recent years, crossable by magneto-train, but we are interested in the very oldest bridge. They have done a heroic engineering job of diverting the river under the bridge—I mean under the river bed itself.”

“I’m salivating to get a close look at that,” says Xander leaning back from his thoroughly cleaned plate.

“And what they've exposed under the river bed is an ancient site with potentially earthshaking archeological implications.”

“Willow could be exaggerating, of course,” says Dawn.

“You saw the plates, Dawn,” snaps Willow. “Have you ever seen anything like those inscriptions?”

“No,” Dawn allows, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to turn out to be earth shattering. It might turn out to be very ho-hum.”

“Well, I doubt it,” says Willow.

“Ladies, ladies,” says Xander. “We’ll find out soon enough. In fact, it’s been great to see you, Buff, but the three of us should probably get going. We’ll all be here for several days. If we can tear ourselves away from our duties, maybe we can get together again.” He raises his eyebrows hopefully, looking from companion to companion.

“It’s a promise,” says Buffy.

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