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Part 10
Buffy stared out into the unnatural darkness of Hell’s night, using her time on watch to sort through the events of her life, trying to understand the strange weave of fate and destiny and friendships that was her existence. She knew it was futile, that she would never really figure out exactly what her particular place in the universe was, but she also knew she would always try.It was only human to want to know if there was some hidden meaning to it all, some higher purpose to existence and consciousness. It was something she’d pondered many times through the long, lonely nights of her life, and in the end there was only one answer that would have truly terrified her if it were true: what if there was no meaning? What if it was all just the accumulated randomness of a mindless and uncaring universe? What if the reason she couldn’t find her answers was that there were none?
She felt the enigmatic presence of the Dark Hunter come toward her from the Crossover Zone encampment, and she pulled herself from her thoughts.
“How does the leg feel?” asked Hunter, sitting down beside her on the crest of the ridge.
“Much better, thanks to those stitches you put in.”
“You spend as much time around battlefields as I do, you get pretty good at field medicine,” said Hunter. “Just keep it clean and the antibiotics I gave you should keep it from getting infected. In the not-so-good-old-days, it was sepsis that was the real battlefield killer, not arrows or swords.”
“You’ve seen a lot of fighting, haven’t you?”
Hunter nodded, looking off into the night. “Yeah, my fair share.”
“Why haven’t I ever heard of you before?” asked Buffy.
Hunter shrugged. “It’s a long story. In a nutshell, the Elder Powers were not very pleased with my involvement in the First Apocalypse. Their periodic exercises in Armageddon are supposed be test of mankind. After their defeat, they made it quite clear to all concerned that the involvement of a nonhuman entity violated whatever set of bizarre rules they work from. The Metaphysical Council of Gaul was convened, at which time I agreed to allow the Slayer to move into the forefront of the Eternal War. I guess you could say I got to bat cleanup for whatever the Slayer and other Defenders couldn’t get around to. So, I spent the next thousand years or so keeping a low profile, pitching in where I could but not taking any sort of leadership role in the battle between good and evil. I’ve done a lot of damage to the bad guys, but usually they never know what hit them, and if they do, they don’t live long enough to tell anyone about it.”
“But here you are, fighting the Second Apocalypse, and it doesn’t get much higher profile than this,” said Buffy.
“Best laid plans, huh? You were supposed to lead the vanguard of that fight, but when you didn’t come back after the first round with Lillith Prophet, there wasn’t anyone left who could give mankind a fighting chance. There are no Thousand Defenders anymore, no one left to take up arms against this sea of troubles. And with the Slayer missing and possibly dead … well, I couldn’t stay neutral. It’s not in my nature. The Elder Powers complain a lot, but I know for a fact they’ll tolerate me. They have before, on other worlds. They know that I alone can’t win mankind’s battles for it. It ultimately always comes down to people like you, the Thousand Defenders, or Giles or Willow: good people willing to make great sacrifices to save their world.”
“I’m not sure I ever really thought of myself as ‘good people’,” said Buffy wryly.
Hunter smiled, the infrequency of the expression making it all the more special. “The best never do.”
When Buffy finally decided that her silence in the face of that statement was getting awkward, she said, “So, explain this whole Dark Hunter thing to me.”
“Hmm. A tall order. I’m not sure I understand it all myself. There are a lot of things even I don’t know about the Hunter entity.”
“Seems like a strange relationship.”
“It’s different, I’ll say that much. And it’s not for everyone. Fortunately, it was my choice to become the Dark Hunter. I wasn’t forced into the role by destiny, as the Slayers are. The entity within me never compels anyone to join with it and assume the mantle of Dark Hunter.”
“So, you wanted to be a Dark Hunter?”
“Not at first. I didn’t just wake up one day and say ‘Gee, I’d really like to fight cosmic evil for the rest of my life.’ But the Hunter doesn’t choose its hosts based on their zeal for the job. I don’t think I’ll ever really know what it saw in me. I was eighteen years old and I’d bottomed out on booze and pills, and I blamed everyone and everything for it except Elisa McKenna. Then one day I realized that I couldn’t get any lower and still be alive, and the Hunter offered me a way out of the grave I’d dug for myself. So Elisa McKenna became Elisa Hunter, and now here I am.”
Buffy frowned slightly. “I don’t know. Sounds to me like it took advantage of a vulnerable young woman.”
“Perhaps. But I would have died in a gutter a long time ago, would have departed the world without contributing anything of value to it, if I hadn’t become the Dark Hunter. I know I’ve gotten as much from the relationship as the Hunter itself has.”
Buffy’s gaze drifted over to the sleeping form of Giles as she thought about that. Then suddenly, she asked, “Why don’t you like Giles? You’re not mean to him or anything, but I can see the coldness and tension there.”
Hunter sighed and followed Buffy’s gaze to the Watcher. “He’s okay. Better than okay, really. It’s not Giles the man I have problems with, it’s Giles the Watcher. The Watchers are only human, and I’ve seen them time after time lead their Slayers to death in the name of false prophecies or through misguided intentions or even because of good old-fashioned ego. You take an innocent girl, fourteen, fifteen years old, what does she know? She doesn’t know whether she’s really fighting the good fight or just being used as a tool in someone else’s vision of the future. The smart ones like you can figure it out, eventually, but not all Slayers are smart or wise or live long enough, and too often they die in foolish quests concocted by foolish men. And it’s hard for me to separate Giles from an organization I’ve grown to distrust and resent.”
“He knows you feel this way?”
“Oh, yes. He knows. You may have noticed that blunt honesty is not something I have a lot of trouble with. And he’s told me why he doesn’t much care for me, too.”
“Why?”
Elisa looked rather sad as she returned her gaze to Buffy. “I know you’ve had to make some difficult choices as the Slayer. There have been times where every choice was a bad one and you’ve had to make do with the least terrible.”
Buffy’s eyes shifted to Angel for a moment, then back to the Hunter. “Yes. Too many.”
“And you’ve been a Slayer for what, fifteen years or so? Now imagine for a moment that you’ve been the Slayer for four thousand years, fought in some of the biggest battles between good and evil in the history of the world. It’s inevitable that in all that time, you’d find yourself having to pick among some very terrible choices. Such as, do you sacrifice ten thousand lives to save ten million? Do you have the right to even make such a decision? Do you have a right not to, and let ten million die to spare you from a difficult moral choice? I’ve had to make those sorts of decisions. They aren’t easy to live with. It’s very difficult to acknowledge that sometimes, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you fight, innocent people will die. Giles only sees the vast destruction I have sometimes been party to, he can’t look into my heart and know the pain it has caused me. I don’t blame him, though.”
“It’s nice to talk to someone who understands from experience. It’s not physical fights that do the real damage. It’s the battles we fight inside that really cost us. And those injuries take a lot longer to heal,” said Buffy.
Elisa rubbed her shoulder and smiled mischievously. “Wait a few years, the body will catch up to the soul, believe me.”
“You don’t look any older than I am.”
“Just a year, actually. But I’m not the Slayer, I don’t have your knack for recovering from physical punishment. This is a tough business. It takes its toll. The Hunter and I both know it won’t last forever. Sooner or later, it’ll be time for us to go our separate ways before somebody forces the issue the hard way. At last count, I’ve had twelve miscellaneous breaks and fractures, collapsed the same lung twice, had a lacerated kidney, had a bullet miss my heart by an eighth of an inch, and been run straight through with a rapier. Some mornings, I just plain hurt. Time to retire to a little place somewhere nice where I can just be Elisa McKenna again for awhile. I think I’d really like that.”
“At least you can get out. Apparently, I’m stuck with the job title of Slayer for life, and last I checked, nobody ever bothered to set up a Slayer pension plan. I’ve been lucky so far, but Slayer constitution or no, eventually I’ll lose one step too many and then someone will get lucky. But hey, at least I don’t have to worry about whether Social Security is going to be there for me,” said Buffy.
“I might be able to give you an edge, if you want it. I can’t guarantee you’ll live to a ripe old age, but you might get a few more years out of the deal,” said Elisa.
“Yeah?”
“Become the Dark Hunter, Buffy. Take over for me. With your abilities and the Hunter’s combined, there’s not much on Earth or in Hell that would be able to beat you.”
“But I wouldn’t be me anymore. I’d be … it,” said Buffy.
The Hunter shook her head. “No, you’d still be you. I’m still Elisa. I’m everything she ever was. But I also have the accumulated experience, skills and wisdom of dozens of former Dark Hunters, and I have the sort of abilities that only the Hunter entity can provide on top of that. Those things don’t make me any less who I am, it just gives Elisa so very much more. I’ve never regretted the choice I made, Buffy. I don’t think you would, either.”
“I appreciate the offer, Elisa. Really, I’m flattered. But I have enough trouble coming to terms with who Buffy Summers is by herself. Put anybody else in my head and I’m liable to end up back in the nuthouse.”
Elisa nodded. “Well, all I can do is ask. Just promise me you’ll think about it?”
“Sure,” said Buffy, but she knew the answer already. If it meant living a shorter life, at least it would be her life and hers alone.
“Buffy?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you ever tell them what you were really doing those eight years after you left Sunnydale?” asked Elisa.
“How would you know anything about that?”
“My intelligence network is much better than the Watchers’. Why did you let everyone think you abandoned the responsibilities of Slayer?”
Buffy frowned and looked distantly at the sleeping forms of her friends. She suddenly felt terribly alone and haunted by the cold, dark ghost of an old sorrow. “Because I needed to see if there was anything to my life beyond endless killing and death, and I could only do that on my own. I couldn’t bear to lose any more of the people I loved. After the final battle in Sunndydale, I lost my way inside. Mom’s death killed something in me, something I don’t think I’ll ever get back. I tried so hard to leave it all behind, to just run away from the Slayer and the pain. But the problem with being who I am is that the bad things have a way of finding you whether you seek them out or not. So I drifted, and fought when I had to, and tried to put my life back together.”
Elisa nodded and put a reassuring arm around the Slayer. “I thought as much. If it means anything to you, I think you did some good things out there on your own. Somebody has to fight those small fights, the ones that matter to individuals rather than worlds. I’m glad it was you.”
When Buffy felt some control return to her voice, she said, “Thanks. Whatever good they did, at least they were my battles, not someone else’s. Maybe that makes sense to you.”
“Very much.”
“It still didn’t keep the inner demons away. They all caught up with me in the end, nearly drove me into someplace I would never have been able to come back from if it weren’t for Lillith Prophet. Of all the enemies I ever fought, it turned out the most dangerous of them was myself. I guess there’s supposed to be some cute symbolism or cosmic irony there. Whatever, it still sucked.”
“That’s a pretty good summary of this business in general, I think.”
Buffy managed a weak smile. “Well, I’m tired, and it’s your watch, Elisa. Good night.”
“You’re all right, Slayer,” said Elisa.