Perfect: Twenty-four years
by slayerfest
Eight years later


Will stepped off the plane will all his luggage. Giles was going to send the rest of his stuff through eventually. He said he’d be by with most of it in a week or two.

He’d been waiting for this moment for eleven years. Since he was seven, when he asked Giles to train him as Watcher, he’d been waiting for this moment.

He was in Cleveland, home of the fantastic new Watcher’s council.

Well, it wasn’t so new anymore. Giles kept calling it new, but that was because he knew the council when it was in England. Poor Giles. Seventy-one and still going strong; age was still treating him spectacularly. But he’d gotten very British in his later years, and it had gotten to the point where he said “in my day” every few minutes.

Will had heard endless stories endless times about Sunnydale and Buffy and everyone else. He was most fascinated by his father. By the time Will was nine, Giles first noticed that he was a spitting image of Xander, and it had gotten to the point where, when just waking up, Giles would call him Xander without realizing it.

Every time he saw Willow or Dawn, they commented on how much he looked like Xander, too. He loved talking to Willow; every time they met, she had a new story about what Xander did when he was Will’s age. On all accounts, Will had always wanted to be a Watcher version of his father.

And Giles had trained him well. He had everything he ever needed to be a Watcher—except the mandatory three years of formal instruction from the council. So here he was, in Cleveland, home of his birth and his mother.

Aha, another fun moment to look forward to, he thought to himself. Buffy. The infamous Buffy. I love my mum and the things she did, really, but I doubt it would have killed her to come and visit like she promised.

He rented a car, first thing. He would buy one once he was settled in. He rented a hotel room for a couple of nights so he could find himself an apartment, close to both the Watcher’s Council and the University. He would take Watcher’s lessons by day, and train to be a teacher by night.

Once he’d settled and taken a nap in his room, he decided to go see his mother, despite that she hadn’t come to see him in Britain ever. She’d sent a lovely present every birthday accompanied by a card that said she was sorry she couldn’t make it, but whether she knew it or not, she seemed to be channeling her deadbeat dad.

He went to the address and memories came rushing back. He remembered running around in the yard with his dad; he remembered helping his mum plant daffodils around the house. They were her favourite, and they were still there.

Slowly he walked up to the door and knocked on it lightly. The door opened shortly and there stood a shortish woman, her blonde but graying hair tied into a bun on the top of her head. She wore a t-shirt and capris, and she still looked very slim and very in shape.

She also looked shocked. She stared at Will for a second, and finally he figured out that she couldn’t tell if it was Xander or not, so he put on a lop-sided grin and waited.

“Oh…kay…” she said slowly. “Either the most recent love of my life has been mysteriously pieced together and brought back to his eighteen-year-old form, or my lovely boy has come to see me despite my not coming to see him.”

Will grinned. She was exactly as he remembered, and as Dawn, Willow and Giles had told. “Hullo, mum,” he said in his thick British accent. A tear rolled slowly down her face and she hugged him carefully, not over-tightly as she did to most people but with the gentle care of a mother.

“Oh, God, Will. It’s so great to see you. Come in and let me apologize profusely for the multiple things I’ve done wrong as a mother,” she said guiltily. Will stepped in, hands in his pockets, and looked around the house. A strong wave of nostalgia hit him and he just stood in the front hall, waiting for the memories to pass. “Please, sit down. Can I get you anything? All the time I spent with Giles as a kid I learned how to make some pretty good British-style tea,” she offered.

Will nodded slowly. “Yeah. Thanks.”

She hurried into the kitchen and he reflected on how much she didn’t look forty-seven. Maybe it was being a Slayer, or maybe it was the active life both she and Giles had led, but everyone he knew looked absolutely fantastic. Well, Willow was artificially providing her young form by practicing so much natural magick with the coven, but he wouldn’t include her in that scope.

He sat down on what he remembered to be his favourite sofa. The furniture hadn’t been changed much; apparently the home-invasions didn’t come as often as he’d been told they came in Sunnydale.

Buffy trundled back in. “Here you go. Sugar? Cream?”

Will shook his head. “I’m fine, thanks. Sit down,” he told her. She did.

“So how are you?” she asked before he had a chance to say anything.

“I’m peachy,” he responded, grinning. “I’m here for the mandatory three years of council training and then I’m a Watcher, and I’m taking night classes at the University to learn to teach, in case the Watching doesn’t work out. I hear the Slayers are dying off,” he said untactfully.

“Will! That’s fantastic. I’m so proud.”

“Yeah. It’s good work. I enjoy it.”

“Any girls come with you?”

Will laughed. “Nothing to write home about. Er, obviously,” he said. Buffy watched him talk. He looked exactly like Xander and spoke almost exactly like Giles. “How’s the Slaying?”

She smiled. “Fine. We haven’t had anything big since the ascension…”

Will frowned. “That’s strange for a Hellmouth, isn’t it?”

Buffy nodded and grinned at her son. “It really is. In Sunnydale, something exciting and new was jumping out every three weeks or so; there didn’t tend to be a fifteen-year pause. Even now, twenty-four years after Sunnydale collapsed, there’s something spouting out of there once in a while. I took a vacation to have a look, and it’s incredible. The same demon I met when I was sixteen is older and bigger and sticks a tentacle out every once in a while to say hello. Then Watchers and bored Slayers and just your regular old demon fighters cut it off, and it retreats until next time.”

Will laughed. “You’d have thought it would have closed for business, wouldn’t you?”

Buffy blinked hard and forced herself to understand that this was not Xander sitting in front of her. “Well, we certainly thought so. I think it was even said, those exact words, as we were standing over it.”

A small silence fell. Fifteen years of not seeing each other and they had five minutes’ worth of conversation. Eventually Buffy looked up, teary-eyed. “I’m so glad to see you, Will. I didn’t think you’d ever come.”

Will shrugged. “It was touch-and-go for a while, but I decided I needed to see you.” He bit his tongue to prevent himself from adding ‘even if you didn’t need to see me’.

Buffy nodded. “Do you have a place to stay?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a motel room.”

“Do you have a place to live?”

“No, I was planning on starting the search as soon as I left here. Which,” he said, standing and looking at his watch, “I really should be doing now…”

“Stay here,” she pleaded. “Live here.”

Will tried to keep his calm. “Why?”

“Because I have the space and need the company, and you’re going to two schools and will barely have the use for an apartment, let alone the lack of money.”

Will stared at his mother. On the one hand, he just wanted to tell her to go to hell and walk out the door, but most of him wanted to accept. She was a lonely Slayer who obviously hadn’t seen much of anyone in the past fifteen years, and she did have a point.

“I’ll… think about it. Give me time,” he told her. “Thank you for the tea.” And he walked out the door.

He moved in two days later.

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