Another Girl

Disclaimer: I own nothing. I'm just playing.

A/N: Beta-ed now. Thank you Anneliese.

A/NLunar: No update this week, due to writer's block and a cold. Sorry folks, but I don't want to rush this.



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Another Girl

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Seeley had been turning the thought over and over in his mind since he’d first seen Amy in that bed, pale and young and wanting nothing more than to live. The thought became a plan sometime during the hunt for the ones responsible for her disease. After she cried in Angela’s arms after a virtual visit to the Louvre, he knew that couldn’t let her die.

A young girl, fighting a destiny she couldn’t escape, headed straight for death and wanting nothing more than to be normal, fall in love and visit Paris. The pattern was familiar and while this girl had no idea what went bump in the night and her death would not be violent and bloody…he’d walked out on a girl like this once. He wasn’t going to do it again. Last time his failure to fight had ended in yelling, grief, accusations and death. Too early and too painful. Amy deserved better.

Buffy deserved better, a small voice in his mind informed him acidly.

The voice, he had to admit, was right. With one last look at Amy curled up against Angela and her family standing around the two girls watching with tears in their own eyes, he walked out the door quietly. He had barely taken five steps down the hallway when he heard the door to Amy’s room open with a soft woosh that he associated with hospitals ever since his years in Sunnydale and L.A. and countless nights spent in the emergency room, waiting for someone to patch his friends back up. Now he needed someone who was willing to use…unorthodox methods to patch this teenaged girl back up. He needed someone who would understand what drove him to save this girl and right this wrong. He needed the only person still around who could look into his eyes and know every thought in his head, even if nothing would ever come from it.

The door closed and he didn’t have to turn around to know that Bones was the one who’d followed him. Her curiosity reminded him of Willow sometimes, only….tougher. A mixture of Willow and Cordelia, probably, not that he ever would have told either woman that. They would have staked his undead ass.

Ignoring his partner, he pulled a slim cell phone out of his pant pocket and dialled a number he knew by heart although he had never written it down. He lifted the phone to his ear and had to wait exactly three rings until someone answered.

“Yes?” A female voice queried, wide awake, despite the late hour.

He let the voice wash over him for a second as he leaned against the nearest wall, running a hand over his face. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Temperance mirroring his position further down the hall, watching him passively.

“Hi Buffy, this is A…Seeley. Sorry for calling so late.”

There was a dry chuckle at the other and of the line and for a moment the vampire-turned- FBI-agent wondered when the teenaged girl he remembered, the girl Amy reminded him off, had grown so old. “You know perfectly well it’s too early for me to be asleep.”

He grinned at the off-white wall opposite him, marvelling, as he did every time they talked now, that they were the way they were. There was no lingering resentment anymore, no hatred born from hurt feelings, no romance. Buffy was probably the easiest person to talk to that he knew. Whether that was because of or in spite of the way they had both changed so drastically, he didn’t know.

“Yeah. I do.”

Bones had given up all pretence of not being interested now and watched him with open curiosity.

Buffy snorted into his ear, “Why are you calling, Seeley?”

She always stressed the name, reminding him of what she thought of it. His grin faded slowly from his face as he eyed the other occupant of the hallway wearily before deciding, what the hell. He’d made a decision to interfere and this time he was going to pull through.

“Well, you see, there’s this girl. Her name is Amy, she’s fifteen and she’s dying…”

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