The Undead Have Few Friends: Part 1
by Theodore J Miller
Disclaimer: The characters in this story belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, WB, FOX, etc., except for any references which belong to other appropriate copyright holders.
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Buffy Summers is looking at the dresses in her closet, and down below the front doorbell rings. "Buffy, your date's here!" her mother calls up to her. Trying to look her best loses out to keeping her mother from doing too much talking to her date; Buffy quickly chooses a dress, puts it on and goes downstairs.
Her fears are realized; her mother IS talking to her date. "Angel! We'd better get going," Buffy tells him.
"What's your rush?" Buffy's mother asks. "Let's talk for a while. A mother should get to know the young man her daughter is dating."
Behind her mother's back, Buffy mouths an emphatic "No!" to Angel. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Summers, we really should be going. My family will be waiting for us," Angel apologizes. "Some other time, perhaps?"
"I'll be looking forward to it," Buffy's mother replies. As Angel and Buffy start to leave, Buffy's mother adds "And Buffy, don't be too late getting home."
"Right, not too late, got it, Mom, see you later, bye now," Buffy says, while hustling Angel out the door.
Outside, Angel asks Buffy, "Buffy, you still haven't told her about me, have you?"
"I had enough trouble explaining the age difference," Buffy says. "Let's wait a little longer before bringing up the V-word."
"Buffy, my being a vampire is not something that's going to change. It's who I am. You can't keep it secret from your mother forever," Angel answers.
"Not forever, just a bit longer. Let her get used to us dating before we explain it's a mixed relationship."
"Well, if you insist," Angel agrees reluctantly.
The two quickly find themselves at another house in Sunnydale. Angel rings the bell, and a girl Buffy's age answers the door. "Angel! Buffy! Come in!" she says, then calls upstairs "Dad! Angel and Buffy are here!" She then turns to Buffy. "Buffy, I'm really mad at you," the girl says with mock anger.
"Darla, what did I do?," Buffy asks.
"Ever since you started dating my big brother, we never get to see him anymore," Darla answers. "Even after he got his own place, he'd still come here for dinner a lot, but now he goes out with you instead."
"Well, I'm here now, Sis, and with Buffy," Angel answers her. "So there's no reason for anyone to complain."
"Except for Uncle Luke," Darla says. "He still wants you to find a vamp girl. I've heard him talking to Dad about it."
"Darla, you shouldn't eavesdrop on them," Angel chides her.
"The way they talk, I can't help it," Darla answers him.
"Luke and I do get unnecessarily belligerent at times," a new arrival coming down the stairs interjects. "You must be Buffy. I'm Angel's father. Why don't you call me 'Master'; everyone else does," he says in a friendly tone.
"Hello, Master," Buffy replies. "It's very nice to meet you."
"But getting back to my belligerent brother-in-law," the Master says, then raises his voice, "Luke! Come in here, we have company!"
Luke enters from another room, and Buffy gives a little gasp at his appearance. Unlike Angel, Darla, and the Master, Luke has on his vampire face, rather than his human one.
"Luke, didn't I tell you to be polite to our guest? Change your face," the Master tells him. Luke reluctantly changes to human face, as the Master continues, "Luke is not always as... assimilated as he could be."
"Assimilated? Didn't do my sister any good. The Slayer still killed her," Luke responds.
"Uncle Luke, you always go on about Mom's death that way," Angel interjects. "But the police never established that there even is..."
"Police?" Luke interrupts. "Police don't care when one of our kind is killed. They wish ALL of us would get staked."
"What about Detective Knight?" the Master asks mildly.
"One token vamp in the police? Means nothing," Luke answers harshly.
"Dad, Uncle Luke, no more arguing about Mom, PLEASE," Darla asks, tears starting to form in her eyes.
"Now we've upset Darla," the Master says. "Luke, just leave it for now. Besides, we have a guest."
"A guest? Just 'cause Angel is seeing a ..." Luke starts to say, but the Master interrupts him, "I said 'leave it', Luke."
"Come on, everyone, let's have dinner," the Master continues. They all move into the dining room, where the table contains a large tureen, several bowls, and a styrofoam McDonald's container. The Master says to Buffy, "Buffy, I know that our usual diet wouldn't... suit you, so I picked up hamburgers for you, if that's okay."
"Yeah, sure that's great," Buffy answers. She sits down by the styrofoam container, while the others take bowls and begin ladling blood into them from the tureen. But before Buffy can begin eating, things around her start fading out.
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Buffy opened her eyes. She was in her bedroom, and the clock said 3:00 AM. Shaking her head, she said, "Ooh, WEIRD dream. The Addams Family Afterschool Special." She turned over and tried to get back to sleep, muttering "I dream about a date with Angel, and he's taking me home to meet his family. I've GOT to get my mind INTO the gutter."
In the morning, the memory of the strange dream was still very clear, and Buffy kept thinking about it. "Mom, hypothetically, what would you think about my dating a vampire, if he came from a nice family of vampires?" Buffy said to the mirror, followed by "No, I don't want to have THAT conversation with my Mom." Buffy decided to emulate her dream-self, and not mention the v-word to her mother.
At school, though, Willow noticed Buffy's preoccupation. "Buffy, is something wrong?" Willow asked.
"No, not really wrong, at least not a 'threat to life and limb and possibly civilization as we know it' kind of wrong. It's just, I don't know if it means something, but I had this mondo bizarre dream last night."
"Slayer dreams, vampires, that kind of dream?" Willow asked.
"No, well yes, or sort of, actually. What happened was, I was on a date with Angel..."
Xander, walking up to join the two girls, heard this last bit. "Whoa! You, Angel, date, when, where, how?" he asked incoherently.
"You can start using verbs again, Xander, it wasn't a date date, or a real date, or an anything at all date. I just had this weird dream in which I was on a date with Angel," Buffy told him.
"Oh, a dream, that's okay, that's ... wait a minute, weird? How exactly do weird and date go together in a dream? We're not talking nudity and adult content, are we?" Xander asked.
"No, nothing like that," Buffy answered, adding under her breath "not for lack of trying." "The weird thing in the dream was that Angel took me home to meet his family."
"Would that be his 'dead for 200 years, because he killed them all and drank their blood' family?" Xander asked.
"No, this was Luke as his uncle, Darla as his sister, and the Master as his father," Buffy replied.
"What, no mommy vampire?" Xander asked sarcastically.
"Actually, they said the mother had been killed by the Slayer," Buffy replied.
"That could be a psychologically significant detail, right?" Willow asked.
"Maybe," Buffy answered. "They WERE arguing and making a big deal about it in the dream. You know, intense family drama stuff."
"But with vampires," Xander said.
"Right," Buffy agreed. "It was like getting the whole Monday lineup on the WB all at once."
"So what IS the point of the mother vampire having been killed by the Slayer?" Xander asked.
"I don't know," Buffy said exasperatedly. "It feels like it SHOULD mean something, but what?"
"Maybe you're worried about your mother, and what effect your being the Slayer will have on her," Willow suggested.
"Or maybe it's warning you that you have to go out and slay the queen of the vampires," Xander offered.
"WHAT queen of the vampires?" Buffy asked.
"You know, evil but sexy, slinky black dress, really low- cut, that sort of thing," Xander said.
"Xander, I think that would be from one of your dreams," Willow said.
"No, well maybe once, Elvira was on TV, but never mind that, just forget I said anything," Xander said.
"Gladly," Buffy said, "And getting back to MY dream?"
"The dream could mean that you're tired of fighting vampires, and wish you could just get along with them," Willow suggested.
"Maybe it's a warning that Angel is still a vampire, and will lead you into a den of other vampires," Xander tried.
"Or it could be telling you that you CAN be with Angel, that you can do normal stuff with him, even though he is a vampire," Willow then offered up.
"No, it couldn't be telling her that," Xander said to Willow, then continued to Buffy "It probably means that what you really need is a normal guy who has a real family that you can get together with. Oh, by the way, isn't it about time you came to my house for dinner? My Mom would love to have you. She'll cook something really special."
"Uh, Xander," Willow said, "remember that time a few years ago when your Mom tried to cook dinner, and her tuna casserole sort of, you know, exploded?"
"It didn't explode, it just, well, expanded a bit," Xander said. "And every really good cook has a little shrapnel now and then."
"Forgetting Xander's Mom's contributions to the field of edible weaponry, what do we have so far? The dream could be telling me that I'm worried about my mother, or that I should be with Angel, or that I SHOULDN'T be with Angel, or that I don't want to slay vampires any more, or that I should go slay Elvira, Mistress of the Dark," Buffy summed up, giving Xander a pained glance during this last bit. "Or to put it briefly, we have NO idea what the dream means."
"None whatsoever," Willow agreed. "Are you going to talk to Giles about it?"
"Might as well," Buffy said. "I'm sure he'll have a dozen contradictory theories we haven't even thought of."
But Giles wasn't much help. "A Slayer's dreams about vampires can be prophetic, but normally they're literal, accurate glimpses of future events, even if jumbled together, not the kind of figurative, symbolic dream that this one would appear to be. And for anything in this dream to literally come true would be rather implausible."
"Me and Angel have dinner with Luke, Darla, and the Master? Yeah, that part's gonna happen," Buffy said sarcastically. "Just after Cordelia wins the Nobel Peace Prize for her work helping the less fortunate."
"I'll check today and see what information I have on the subject of dreams; there may be something relevant, although right now I'd say that this was just an ordinary dream, albeit a peculiar one."
"It just, I don't know, FEELS like it was more than that." Buffy shook her head. "The little alarm bells are going off, like I'm being warned about something that's going to happen, or some kind of danger, or something I should be doing something about."
"If I discover anything applicable, I'll let you know. And you should let me know if you have any other dreams like this, Buffy; a series of related dreams would potentially be significant."
"Fine, if tonight I go to visit Angel's grandpa Dracula, you'll be the first to know," Buffy said, covering her unease with sarcasm. "Or maybe we'll all go on a family outing to the beach; we'll pack the SPF 3000 sunblock, and a thermos of cold, refreshing blood."
"Quite," said Giles. "Now, setting aside dream vampires in favor of training to fight real ones, let's get to work."
During her training session with Giles, and during classes that day, Buffy's mind kept returning to the bizarre dream. In the evening she went out looking for vampires or other Hellmouth-related threats, hoping to locate a cause for her uneasiness, but Sunnydale was unusually quiet; the vampires seemed to be taking a night off, and nothing new was on the streets.
So Buffy returned home, went to bed, and that night she dreamed again.
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Buffy and Angel are standing in her living room, facing her mother. "Mom, there's something I, something we have to tell you. I've been dating Angel for a while now, and, well, you should know that, um,..." Buffy trails off.
"What is it, Buffy?" her mother asks, then an expression of alarm crosses her face. "Buffy, you're not pregnant, are you?"
"No, of course not, nothing like that. It's just, well, I have to tell you that, that Angel..." Buffy takes a deep breath, then in a rush says, "Angel is a vampire, and I don't care that he is, and I want to keep seeing him, and..."
Joyce Summers' alarmed expression changes to one of relief. "Oh, that. I thought you were going to tell me something bad. Of course Angel is a vampire; I knew that already."
"You knew he was a vampire?!" Buffy asks incredulously.
"Buffy, do you think I'm totally oblivious to what goes on in your life? What kind of mother would that make me?" Joyce asks. "Your friend Darla is Angel's sister, I talked to their father Master at a parents' event at your school, they seem like a nice family."
"So you're not upset that I'm dating a vampire?" Buffy asks.
"To be honest, it did take a bit of getting used to," Joyce says, then adds an apologetic "Sorry" to Angel. "Mothers do worry when their child brings home someone who's, well, different. But I'm not prejudiced; just because someone's different doesn't make them a bad person. And I can see how you feel about Angel."
"There, Buffy, you see," Angel says. "You were so worried about this, and it turned out to be nothing."
"I've got a meeting I have to go to tonight, but one day soon I'd like the three of us to sit down and talk for a while," Joyce says. "Now that everything's out in the open.... Everything is out in the open, isn't it, Buffy?"
It seems to Buffy that there is something else she hasn't told her mother, something that also involves vampires, but she can't think what it is, and decides it wasn't anything important. "No," she says, "I think that's it in the 'big secret' category."
"Good, so as I was saying, now that everything's out in the open, I do want to get to know Angel, and hear how things are going with you two. If that's okay with you, Buffy?" Joyce asks.
"Sure, Mom, I want you to tell you about it," Buffy says. "Mom, I'm, I'm glad I can share what's happening in my life with you, and, and I love you," she adds, giving her mother a quick hug, then pulls away, embarrassed.
Joyce smiles at her daughter and says, "Okay, you two run along now, and we'll talk later."
Buffy and Angel leave, and eventually arrive outside an ice cream parlor, with a sign saying "Count Chocula's" above the door.
"I don't think I've ever been in here before," Buffy says.
"The owner of the chain is a vampire, so it's one of the few chains that serves vampires. Legally, of course, restaurants can't refuse to serve us, that would be discrimination, but no law says they have to serve anything suited to our ... unique requirements." Angel says. "It's only places like this that have both ordinary and vampire menus."
Inside, Buffy sees what Angel means; there are two menu boards, one listing ordinary flavors of ice cream, and the other mostly flavors she's never heard of. "What's Purple Cow?" she asks.
"Frozen cow blood with grape flavoring," Angel explains.
"And Funky Chicken is..."
"A sort of spicy frozen chicken blood."
"And for a vampire, that's yummy?"
"When blood's all you can eat, you have to do what you can to make it interesting. Though some of the more traditional vampires don't like this kind of thing," Angel says, gesturing at the menu board. "They say we should have our blood plain, the way nature intended."
"And you?" Buffy asks.
"Personally, I think that kind of diet is why vampires got a bad reputation in the old days. Eating the same thing at every meal, with no change? That would drive anyone to violence, out of sheer boredom."
"And should I worry that being with me all the time will also drive you to violence out of sheer boredom?" Buffy asks archly.
"Buffy, being with you is many things, but it's never boring."
"I think I'll assume that's a compliment, and just say thanks. Now, what are we going to eat here of a non-boring nature?" Buffy asks.
Angel gets a Chocolate Moose, and Buffy gets a Chunky Monkey ice cream, after a brief delay to clarify that she does NOT want the version that gets its chunkiness from clotting factor.
The two sit down and start eating, but are interrupted when one of the other customers points to the television set in one corner of the ice cream parlor, and says with disgust, "They're showing that, that Nazi again."
Buffy looks at the TV; the figure on screen, who seems familiar to her, is saying, "Vampires hunt and kill; that's what they do. All of them are vicious, violent animals. A vampire isn't a person at all; at the core, it's a demon."
This speech provokes boos and hisses from the other customers in the ice cream parlor.
The picture then changes to a woman, who says, "That was from a speech earlier this year by Rupert Giles, the local head of the extremist anti-vampire organization known as the Watchers. Mr. Giles has denied any connection between his organization and the so-called Slayer murders of vampires in and around Sunnydale, California. These murders are supposed to resemble the work of the Slayer, a mythical superhuman being whose purpose is to kill vampires."
"Change the channel!" someone yells, and the ice cream parlor clerk switches over to Seinfeld, on which Jerry is saying "People will think I'm a vampire! Not that there's anything wrong with that."
"I don't understand people like that Giles," Angel says to Buffy. "We just want to fit in and live our own lives. Are we really so different?" He gestures down at the dish of frozen blood in front of him. "Is this so much worse than eating the meat of an animal? But to someone like him, this makes us bloodthirsty creatures, monsters to be slaughtered. And if people hate us so much..." He pauses.
"Go on, Angel," Buffy says gently.
"Some vampires, like Uncle Luke, think that there's a secret conspiracy to wipe out vampires, that an actual superhuman Slayer has been deliberately created by some covert organization. And when I hear people like that Giles, I can't help but think that Uncle Luke could be right, that people do hate us so much, think we're such monsters, that they'd create their own monster in order to destroy us."
"Angel, do you really think something like that exists?"
"I don't know , Buffy. All I know is that my mother never hurt anyone, but someone killed her, just because of what she was."
Buffy tries to comfort him, but things around her start to fade out.
* * *
Buffy opened her eyes to her darkened bedroom, muttering, "Angel?".
"Oh, right, another of those dreams," she said. "This is getting too twisted, not to mention how pathetic it is that even in my dreams I can't do more than go out for ice cream. Something's going on here; I know it. I've GOT to talk to Giles." She glanced at the clock, and said resignedly "Okay, I'll talk to him in the morning. I guess I can't call him at 3:00 AM to tell him he's a vampire-hating Nazi bigot in my dreams."
Unable to get back to sleep, Buffy went into the kitchen; possibly as a result of the dream, she felt like having some ice cream. Her mother heard Buffy moving around, and came into the kitchen sleepily, asking, "Buffy? Is anything wrong?"
"Uh, no, nothing, I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, so I thought I'd get some ice cream," Buffy answered.
"At three in the morning? Oh, never mind, who can be a mother this early," Joyce said resignedly. Glancing in Buffy's bowl, Joyce asked, "Vanilla? Wasn't there any Chunky Monkey left?"
Buffy gave a brief grimace. "I, uh, didn't feel like having it. Something called 'monkey' suddenly didn't seem appetizing."
"Huh? No, don't explain now, let's leave it until 8:00, when I'll be awake to understand it." Joyce started to leave, then turned back to Buffy. "Buffy, if there is something bothering you, well, I know that I haven't always been as good at, well, mothering as I could be, but I hope you know that you can come to me with whatever it is, and I'll at least TRY to understand it."
"I, um, I know that, Mom," Buffy said, and she looked down and starting eating again. Joyce paused for a moment, looking at her daughter, then said "Good night, Buffy" and left.
Too softly to be heard, Buffy continued "I know that, Mom, but there's so much I just can't tell you." And remembering her mother in the dream saying, "Of course Angel is a vampire; I knew that already," Buffy gave a sigh, and a single tear dropped into her dish.
At school the next morning, Buffy got together with Giles, Willow, and Xander in the library. "Last night the sequel was on. 'Bizarro Dream 2: This time it's personal' " Buffy said to them.
"Personal? How personal?" Xander asked suspiciously.
"Well, Giles might take it personally," Buffy answered. Turning to Giles, she continued, "In the dream, you were on TV, and they called you, let's see, 'local head of the extremist anti-vampire organization known as the Watchers'. And you were saying these really hateful things about vampires. Well, actually, they're the same things you normally say about vampires: they're really demons, they're violent and vicious, all that stuff. But somehow, in the dream it seemed like, I don't know, bigotry or something. Oh, and someone called you a Nazi."
"That is rather... disturbing, that I'd be portrayed in your dream that way," Giles said.
"They did say that you denied any connection to the Slayer murders of vampires, if that makes you feel better," Buffy replied.
"Not a great deal better, no. If this was an ordinary dream, psychologically-based, then it would seem to imply a certain ambivalence on your part toward my role as your Watcher," Giles observed.
"Yeah, extremist Nazi bigot is a little bit unappreciative," Xander interjected sarcastically.
"It's NOT an ordinary dream," Buffy insisted. "I just KNOW it. There's something going on, something's going to happen. Maybe they're, you know, signs, omens, ..."
"Pup tents of doom," Xander suggested.
"Pup tents of doom," Buffy repeated, then "Huh?"
"I think that's portents of doom," Willow corrected.
"Right, those," Buffy agreed. "You were looking this stuff up, Giles; what did you find?"
"I have some possibilities, but you should describe the rest of the dream first, so I can tell if any of them seem relevant," Giles said.
"Okay, but don't tell me it's psychological, 'cause it isn't," Buffy said. "Let's see, the first bit was, I was telling my Mom that Angel was a vampire, and she said that she already knew that, and that it was okay with her for me to date a vampire."
"All right, now that's just sick," Xander interrupted. "Mothers can't go telling you it's okay to date vampires; that's totally against the rules of the Mothers' Union, and don't they have to take an oath, and there's the, um, the secret initiation ceremony, and..." The other three were looking at Xander strangely. "Well, forgive me if I believe in the sanctity of motherhood," Xander said snappishly.
"ANYway," Buffy said firmly, "then in the dream Angel and I went on another date. And NO, nothing happened, we just went out to this vampire ice cream place," she added, looking at Xander.
"Vampires eat ice cream?" Willow asked.
"No, actually they eat, well, never mind what they eat, it's kind of yucky, particularly the Chunky Monkey flavor, but that bit doesn't matter," Buffy said exasperatedly. "It was just, there was Angel and me, in this ice cream place, and there was a television, and Giles was on it, and he was saying nasty anti-vampire stuff, yadda yadda yadda, and Angel told me this conspiracy thing like on X-Files, and then I woke up. So what kind of strange mystic Hellmouth stuff is this, Giles, 'cause that's what it is, not anything psychological or, or ANYTHING."
"Well, setting aside the interpretation of being able to date Angel and share the truth with your mother as wish fulfillment, I did find a number of possibilities. Some cultures considered dreams as messages from the gods or spirits; those dreams were often considered symbolic or metaphorical, to be interpreted by priests or shamans."
"I don't see any priests and shamans in here," Buffy said to Giles, "so I guess it's your job. How do you interpret these dreams symbolically?"
"That's the problem," Giles replied. "This kind of interpretation is very culturally-dependent; for example, in ancient Greece, dreams of sex were often interpreted as prophecies about money."
"So I guess I'm not getting any money soon, either," Buffy said, while Xander muttered something about becoming incredibly wealthy.
"Um, quite," Giles said. "But some other culture would interpret the same dream quite differently. If your dreams are that type of message, we'd need to know what sort of entity is sending them in order to interpret them properly. Do you recall anything appearing in the dreams which might indicate that?"
"For example?"
"Artifacts or symbols relating to a specific culture. Ancient Greek statuary, for example, or perhaps repeated appearances of owls, symbolic of Athena. Many cultures had idiosyncratic masks: the Aztecs, the various North American or African tribes, etc. Ancient Egypt might be indicated by human/animal hybrids such as the Sphinx or the animal-headed forms of the gods, and of course there's the distinguishing characteristics of the Australian aborigine Dreamtime, such as..."
Buffy interrupted Giles' list. "Since I'm one of the few people in this room who WASN'T curator of the British Museum, I couldn't RECOGNIZE most of that stuff, but I don't remember anything like that in the dreams. Unless Chunky Monkey ice cream is a cultural artifact?"
"The Chinese monkey gods, perhaps? No, probably not. So the 'divine message' theory would seem to be a dead end; if the dreams ARE such a message, there's no cultural context to establish their meaning."
"So what else have you got?" Buffy asked.
"Sometime dreams are considered to be glimpses of other worlds, other realities. Coleridge might have seen such a world in the dream which inspired his poem 'Kubla Khan'."
"Is that anything like 'The Wrath of Khan'?" Xander asked.
"No, 'Kubla Khan'," Willow corrected him. "You know, 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree...' We read it in English class last year."
"Oh, English class," Xander said, "no wonder I didn't remember it. Stuff you read for English class goes into the 'until the final exam' part of the brain, then gets erased to make room for new stuff."
"Yes, well, apart from the literary accomplishments of the modern American adolescent," Giles continued, "sometimes the worlds glimpsed in dreams are considered to be realities in which your life, or history, or nature are different, in which the same things might exist but act in different ways."
"That could be my dreams, but then why would they feel urgent?" Buffy asked. "It would be sort of nice to know that somewhere, in some world, I do get together with Angel, but what would I have to do about it? What COULD I do about it?"
"That's the problem with that theory," Giles answered. "In terms of actual actions to be taken, it's also a dead end."
"Do you have any theories that AREN'T dead ends, where we can actually DO something?" Buffy asked, annoyance coming through in her voice.
"I AM just trying to be thorough, covering all the possibilities my research turned up," Giles retorted. "However, if you want a more active possibility, the third theory involves the use of dreams as an attack.
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