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Point of Focus
by Aadler
Copyright May 1999
Part I
– December 1998 –
From the parking lot she could hear the first bell, and she hurried to the front entrance, clutching her books and brushing her hair from her eyes. For once she would actually make it on time; she had gotten barely three hours’ sleep, but that was all she needed these days, and everything was ready for her first class with minutes to spare. Her step quickened, and then checked as a thin, biting voice broke into her thoughts. “Running late again, Summers?”
She halted with a sigh, waiting as he stepped out in front of her. “Can I help you with something, Principal Snyder?”
“This is becoming a commonplace sight in the morning,” he replied, acid satisfaction radiating from him. With his close-set eyes and small, twitching mouth he looked more than ever like a rat — a bald rat — and not for the first time she wondered if there was something in the atmosphere of the Hellmouth that was progressively liberating the inner Snyder. “This daily performance of yours is hardly what this school needs,” he was continuing. “We need punctuality, we need reliability and planning and discipline …”
It took effort, but she managed not to yawn in his face. There it was: seven hours of night patrol, two ferocious bouts of hand to hand combat and five stakings — God, what it took to get that dust out of her hair! — didn’t tire her as much as twenty seconds of Ratboy’s pontificating. “I’ll give that a lot of thought, Principal Snyder. May I go now?”
He flushed at the honeyed politeness of her tone, but before he could spit out a reply another voice sounded behind her. “Excuse me, might … might I have a moment of your time?”
She felt the familiar slow fury suffuse through her; yes, it helped keep things in perspective, to be reminded that there was indeed one person in this school she loathed more than Snyder. She turned to face him, and as usual his eyes slid away from hers. “Yes, Mr. Giles?” she said, even more politely, and he flinched at the chilled steel behind her words.
“I just … I had hoped we might meet after classes to discuss … to go over your reading lists for this term.” He blinked helplessly, looking to Snyder as if to an ally. “Reading lists,” he repeated faintly.
Even from Giles that sounded idiotic, but she knew what he wanted. More training, or a warning about this week’s doomsday threat, or perhaps another carefully phrased lecture about her responsibilities. Well, she’d be there — why miss a chance to make him squirm? — but there was no point in saying so just yet. “I’ll see what this afternoon looks like,” she told him, and strode quickly away without farewell to either man. Behind her she could hear Snyder spluttering, but her thoughts were already elsewhere.
The halls were almost empty now as students rushed to their first class, the final bell only seconds away by this time, but even so several of them — the males — paused to watch her pass. In a photograph she never would have attracted attention (she had a nice face, a decent body, no complaints but no fireworks either), but the living reality was a different matter: she moved with the casual vitality of a strolling panther, and adolescent eyes followed her with wonder and yearning.
One of the oglers was elbowed roughly by his companion, a beefy ginger-haired young man in a football jersey, who warned, “Whoa, throttle back there, stud. You don’t even want to think about Summers.”
The first boy laughed. “Come on, Larry, like you never do?” He grinned back at his friend. “Hey, she can’t kill me for dreaming.”
Larry looked after the retreating figure and shook his head slowly. “You might not want to bet on that,” he murmured.
As she had feared, the bell shrilled while she was still a dozen steps from the classroom door. She slowed, considering her approach. It wouldn’t do now to rush in, that kind of entrance would get her the wrong type of attention, and her situation was already tricky enough without that. Control was the key, never let them see that you were rattled. She composed herself and pushed open the door, and the normal morning chatter subsided as several dozen heads swiveled to watch her come in. She nodded to them, moving with easy, calculated assurance, and said firmly, “Good morning, class.”
About half of them answered in a soft chorus (most respectful, some slightly mocking, but none openly derisive), “Good morning, Mrs. Summers.” She acknowledged them with a smile as she went to the big desk facing them at the front of the room, and settled in to begin the school day.
It was a full eight hours before she saw Giles again; he even took his lunch in the library, rather than in the teacher’s lounge where she ate, and she didn’t know if this had always been his practice or if he had retreated to a safe haven when she joined the faculty, nor did she care enough to ask any of the other teachers. She had changed from the tailored suit to a pair of cargo pants and a sleeveless pink sweatshirt that had been baggy on her daughter but fit her rather snugly, and as she entered the library she saw his face stiffen at the sight of the familiar garment. Good, another prick in that piece of rotten leather he called a conscience. His voice, when he spoke, was vague but steady. “I didn’t know if you would come.”
“I had to stay with one of my students for detention,” she replied. Larry, of course; at least twice a week the hulking football player did or said something that elicited from her a frosty command to remain after class, ostensibly to help her sort the supplies and clean the studio, and neither of them acknowledged that it had become a deliberate routine. He was her favorite student, and she never showed it, just as he stubbornly hid the eager hunger with which he devoured the lessons he affected to despise. He painted in jagged swaths of color, great slashing streaks of raw emotion, all the while jeering to his teammates that art was for wusses but it was an easier grade than geometry, and in another life she would have sacrificed almost anything to nurture the promise she saw in him.
But no, she reminded herself once again. Teaching wasn’t an end to her now, but a means. To stay close to the center of Hellmouth activity. To protect, when she could, some of the children who had walked these halls with her daughter. To learn, and train, and ready herself for the day when Buffy’s killer would return for the showdown that had to come.
And to pursue the only pleasure that remained for her in this world: the steady, relentless torment of Rupert Giles.
“Very well,” he sighed. “I assume you will, as usual, set your own programme?”
For three quarters of an hour she went through her self-appointed practice as he watched her without speaking. She fired a hundred straight punches into the makiwara in a period of twenty seconds, and the post didn’t splinter. She launched kicks and elbow strikes into the heavy bag from every angle, leaping and rolling and spinning, then did it again, and a third time, and a fourth, and the bag never burst. On the wooden dummy she went through forms for wing chun, jeet kune do, choy li fut, pa kua, shifting smoothly and tirelessly through the odd-angled protruding limbs, and when she was done the structure stood without damage.
In her first scheduled training here, she had exploded through all the equipment, reveling in the destruction, shredding and smashing in a moving swirl of carnage. Stupid, and childish, and pointless, and unspeakably satisfying. When her rampage was ended, Giles had looked over the wreckage with wounded eyes and said only, “Yes, well, then. Right.” Now the very faultlessness of her behavior was a continuing reproach to him, for he had seen what she could do and what she wanted to do, and knew full well where it would be directed if she ever let her passion have its sway.
She worked with the staff, the Filipino escrima sticks, the Okinawan tonfa, the wooden training sword of the samurai, and finally with the sharpened stakes that fit her hand so sweetly: striking with the point, the butt end, feigning parries with the hardened length of the shaft, driving them by main strength into selected targets and hurling them across the room to transfix others. This was her weakest area, throwing with accuracy, and she settled herself into serious concentration, where before she had only been demonstrating to Giles that he no longer had anything to teach her.
Just as she had put seven in a row into various targets without a miss — her best performance to date, it was finally coming together — something struck her shoulder and caromed away. The impact was negligible, but she started at its unexpectedness, and the eighth stake clattered away into the shelves. As she whirled to glare at Giles (it had to be him), he drew back and snapped another tennis ball at her with a fluent sidearm motion, and only instinct and paranormal speed allowed her to deflect it inches from her face. “What the hell is this?” she demanded, panting.
With that maddening primness of speech, he said, “You will not always have the luxury of addressing your targets without distraction, Joyce. You move beautifully, but there is also the matter of reacting to multiple attackers. I know —” he held up a hand to forestall her, “— you have already faced that challenge in the parks and graveyards, and emerged victorious. Surely, then, a bit of added verisimilitude in your practice is all to the good?”
She would not demean herself by arguing with him when he was right. “Fine,” she said stonily, stuffing back the snarl that wanted to get out. “Fire away.”
She slapped aside the next two balls with contemptuous ease; the third she sent rocketing back to glance off a corner of his forehead, knocking his glasses askew. He said nothing, but donned a catcher’s mask and began throwing again, and she attuned herself to his presence and got back to work with the stakes. Spin, sight, throw; crouch, sight, throw; somersault, sight, throw; strike, strike, cartwheel, sight, throw; and at every instant she had to be ready to dodge or deflect one of the tennis balls, or even to continue without hesitation through the throw while he stood poised to launch another one at her. She felt her awareness expand, she was moving in a maze of perfectly balanced forces, and every shift in the balance brought an automatic response in her own readiness.
Giles let out a long breath and stepped back, removing the mask. “Yes, very good,” he said. “That one, I believe, is worth repeating in the future. I will confess,” he continued, looking about at the dozens of yellow-green balls that now littered the library, “that I had not expected you to adjust quite so quickly. That was … excellent.”
She nodded, hating his praise, hating that he had after all shown her something new. “So do I get a passing grade this week?” she asked, and for once the edge in her voice just sounded … well, catty. Damn him!
Giles, in his turn, studied her uneasily. It had been a superb performance, but still … the thing was, it was so bloody difficult to avoid comparisons. When he had first met Buffy Summers, she had struck him as superficial, undisciplined, lacking in seriousness and respect. Quintessentially American, one might say. Then he had watched her fight, seen her through scores of battles in fact, and had come to appreciate that flippancy was the way the girl maintained her equilibrium, that the seeming lack of discipline was in fact an eclectic flexibility, and that respect … respect was his once he had earned it.
Her mother was almost precisely the opposite. In training she did whatever he asked of her, mocking him with the perfection of her skill. She was every bit as dedicated as her daughter had been (more so, and that troubled him for he knew its source only too well), but never hid that determination behind wisecracks or sardonic turns of phrase. She could reproduce with uncanny exactness the tactics and techniques of as many martial arts as he could name …
But she made little use of them, that was the problem. Again the comparison presented itself. Seen in battle, Buffy had been like a force of nature, animal instinct coupled with trained reflex and directed by that quality of will which was uniquely her own. Joyce in practice was a flawless machine; but Joyce in combat was simply rage made flesh, driving to her target like a crossbow bolt, smashing through any opposition and heedless of what damage she might herself sustain in the process. It made her a terrible enemy, and demons of centuries’ vintage had fallen before her simply through being unprepared for the savage totality of her onslaught. But it wasn’t healthy …
“You have all the tools,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “You work hard, no one can question your commitment, and your technique is impeccable. But you lack a, a focal point, one might say.” He shook his head in frustration, seeking some way of phrasing it that would make sense to her. “Surely in your teaching you have occasionally encountered those with too much talent? It comes so easily to them, and they never have to reach into themselves, to find that central focus …”
“I have a focus,” she interrupted him.
It was nothing in her voice that startled him, but an absence; the fury that drove this woman was never far from the surface, and the effort she expended in hiding it from her students and coworkers made it all the more likely to manifest itself in her private dealings with him. This time, there was nothing. Her voice was empty, and when he looked to her, her expression was empty. “I beg your pardon?”
“You said I lack focus. I don’t. When I fight, my mind is always in the same place. When I slam the stake into a vampire’s chest, the same thought goes through my head. The same words, every time.” She laughed softly, a sound like cartilage tearing. “A mantra, though I don’t think a Buddhist would approve; a point of focus. The same words, every time. Do you want to know what they are? Do you want me to tell you?”
For once he met her eyes, and shuddered away from what he saw there. “Thank you, no,” he said, the words barely audible. “I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.”
He stood silently as she caught up the gym bag which, he knew, held her regular clothes and the books she would be taking home with her. He was still staring at the door through which she had left, long after the echoes of her steps had faded from the hall outside.
* * *
She had only a whisper of warning, and hurled herself blindly back without knowing why. Her instant surrender to instinct carried her clear of the main sweep of the battle-axe, but as she arced backward the broad blade cut through the lower segment of the bulky jacket and bit into her hip, scoring along the bone. Adrenaline surge subsumed the vicious jolt of pain, and her hands found the grassy carpet of the park lawn and guided her through a gymnastic walkover to bring her back to her feet. Even as she came upright she was launching herself forward in a leaping kick, the foot of her wounded leg driving like a spear point to the massive chest of her assailant, just below the heart.
Before the blow had landed she already knew it wouldn’t be enough, for in the split-second of reaction she had recognized her adversary. The demon warrior Lagos, whom she had thought killed weeks ago in the collapse of the Von Hauptmann crypt during the brutal three-way struggle for the Glove of Myhnegon; that he had survived was merely further testament to his eldritch vitality. She landed from the rebound of the first attack, and immediately went for the monster’s knees, smashing at them with stamping kicks that could have shattered teak. Another swing of the axe, easily avoided, and she darted inside his reach to piston a palm-heel thrust into the snoutlike nose, to strike with rigid knuckles at the throat beneath the tusked mouth, then whirled and slashed outward with bladed hands against the biceps of the arm that wielded the axe. The weapon sagged momentarily as the knotted muscles numbed beneath the double strike, and she wrenched it away in a twisting circle that brought it above her head, her arms tensing to bring it down in the killing stroke …
She froze as a black wave of horror swept through her, and in that same moment the great hands closed on the axe handle and on her shoulder, calluses like crocodile armor biting into her flesh. Her paralysis vanished at his touch, and she released the axe and threw herself in the opposite direction. She had neither the strength nor the time to break the demon’s grip directly, but she swung her entire body up and around his arm as if around a trapeze bar, using leverage and momentum and all her weight to twist out of his grasp. She landed in front of him with her right arm around his neck and her back to him, and powered forward in the koshi guruma, the hip wheel of judo, spinning the huge body around and over her.
For an instant Lagos hung poised in the air, inches above her, and in that moment she thought with icy clarity, It won’t bring back my daughter. Then, as he fell toward the ground, she yanked backward with the arm encircling the shaggy head, the palm of her other hand locked beneath the jaw. The creature’s neck snapped under the opposing forces with a deep soggy crack!, and she let the deanimated body flop to the earth.
She stepped back and looked around for other enemies, but there were none. A good thing, because really determined opposition could cause her serious problems just now; there was no such thing as a routine night patrol, but this one had proven more debilitating than most. She got the corpse tucked into a dense patch of bushes, hoping she or Giles could return to dispose of it before it was found by picnickers or oversexed teenagers, and started slowly back to where she had left her jeep. The pain was returning now, and Joyce found herself moving sluggishly. Already she could tell she would need help; she healed quickly, the blood had ceased to well from the wound as her enhanced metabolism began the process of damage repair, but this one was deep and ugly, and infection from demon accoutrements was far from unlikely. Settling into the driver’s seat was like having the left side of her lower body clamped into an iron maiden, but fortunately the uninjured right leg was the one needed to work the accelerator and brake pedals. She started the engine and pulled out with scrupulous care, then began the drive downtown.
Buffy, she knew, would have gone to Giles for the tending of injuries (not to her mother, no, never that), but this was a course she was unwilling to follow except under the direst of circumstances. Joyce had developed an alternative that would have horrified Giles — and she yearned to tell him, for precisely that reason, forbearing only because it would have cost her a precious advantage — but it was a tricky matter necessitating certain precautions. These added an extra quarter of an hour to the length of her trek, so that by the time she reached the unlit back door she was almost to the limits of her strength.
A tiny toggle switch was set unobtrusively in the jamb above the door, well out of ordinary view; she flipped it on and back, twice, then leaned against the wall, hoping nothing would delay the response from within. Half a minute later there was a single sharp rap from the other side, and Joyce let her fingers dance across the surface of the door in a quick, broken rhythm, an impromptu code that only two people knew. In a moment the door swung open and Willy hurried her inside, shooting an anxious furtive glance down the alley before closing the door again.
“Criminy, Joyce, what are you tryin’ to do to me?” His tone was aggrieved, his eyes darting in search of hidden observers. “It’s bad enough you come around in the daytime, but if any of my third shift clientele ever saw you here … Every time that little light blinks, I like to have a heart attack, wonderin’ if somebody found the switch and is movin’ in on my blind side.”
“You should install a peephole,” she said distantly.
“Oh, yeah, sure.” He shook his head. “Sorry, doll, some of the folks in this neighborhood, you don’t want ’em to catch your eye, even through a one-way lens.” He stopped abruptly, turning to her. “Your car — you didn’t …?”
“It’s parked six blocks away,” she said with immense effort. “With a false license plate and a HONK IF YOU LOVE SATAN sign in the back window for camouflage.” Then nerve and will were no longer enough to carry her, and she stumbled forward into blackness.
When she awoke on the folding cot in the dingy recesses of his private office, there was a fresh dressing on the hip wound, with an itching that told her healing was well along and a dull ache that almost surely meant a shot of morphine. She looked around for the weasel-faced bar owner, knowing he would be there, and found him watching her from a padded deck chair, its back set under the knob of the office door. “How long?” she asked him.
“Little over five hours,” he told her. He held up the Sunnydale High letter jacket she had been wearing, a great rent running down one side clear to the ribbed bottom. “Lemme guess: varsity wrestling, right?”
She smiled despite herself; he was almost the only person who could make her do that these days, one of the reasons she continued to come here periodically. “I was trolling for bloodsuckers,” she explained, and indicated her hair, which had been pulled back in two loose braids. “They’ve been avoiding me lately, so I tried to look like a softer target. I was going for the cheerleader type, but I didn’t want to overdo it.”
“You might wanna change bait,” he offered. “Don’t many vampires use meat cleavers, so I figure you reeled in somethin’ else.” She made no move to offer explanation, and he nodded as if having expected that. “I gave you a tetanus booster just for grins — you’re up on your rabies, right? thought so — and a solid hit of tetracycline, plus a couple cee-cees of Demerol to take the edge off. Would’a’ made it more, but I know you don’t like to hang around long.”
“Other obligations,” she agreed. “Let’s see, I have some khaki slacks stored in that lower drawer, don’t I?”
“And a couple blouses that would go with ’em; I’d say the light blue one.” He made a vague, uneasy gesture toward a black plastic garbage bag that lay beside the cot. “Those hiking shorts you had on, they’re pretty much totaled.”
She had already noticed she was still wearing her briefs, though they had been cut (and bled through) just as badly as the shorts. Poor Willy, it surely mortified him to know she was aware of how much he would have had to bare her in order to dress the wound. “Better them than the leg,” she acknowledged. “I’ll change and move on. Thanks for the patch job.”
He waved it away. “Hey, drop in anytime. I mean, it’s not like I wanna keep on livin’ or anything.”
The sun was clearing the horizon as she found her vehicle, removed the misleading sign from the back window, and drove off. On the way she had checked several times to be sure she wasn’t being followed, for Willy’s protection rather than from any fear that he might betray her. Only a fool would trust him: hustler, fence, informant, collaborator with dark forces. Joyce trusted him, and whenever she sought his help he gave her whatever she needed, with whining complaints and doglike worship.
She would never return that devotion, and not just because of what he was. Her heart was a sealed gate, admitting no sentiment or affection, and would remain so for the foreseeable future. Three times since her daughter’s death she had allowed herself to care for someone — for Ethan Rayne, for Gwendolyn Post, and for shy, lethal Kendra — but two of them had betrayed her and all three were dead, and she would not again make herself so vulnerable. Someday, if she survived, she would leave Sunnydale and build a new existence for herself, and perhaps then she would relax her defenses. Not before.
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, and the metal groaned beneath the force of her grip. There could be no thought of leaving until certain matters of business had been properly completed. Not until all her daughter’s living schoolmates had graduated and moved out into larger lives. Not until Rupert Giles was insane, dead by his own hand, or an alcoholic wreck. And not until William the Bloody — also known as The Frost-Haired Devil, also known as Razor Jack, also and most recently known as Spike — had ceased to walk the earth.
The awful paralysis in the park had taken her completely by surprise, but though she had not foreseen it there was nothing mystifying about the event. It would not happen again (she had been warned now), would not in fact have occurred at all if she had known that the trap was lurking in wait within her. But standing as she had once stood, holding a weapon so sickeningly similar to the one she had once held …
She no longer dreamed, at least not any dreams she could remember, but the scene had played through her waking mind at least once a day for more than a year now. She kept returning to it, picking at it: not from obsession in the strict definitional sense, but from a bone-deep inability to admit that she couldn’t find anything she might have done differently, that might have changed the results of that dreadful night. Again she called it back, still searching for whatever tiny detail it might have been that had remade her world so terribly and irrevocably.
Fix the picture. Study the picture. Start the action …
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