NOTE: This chapter is rated FR15

What the doormouse said

Disclaimer: See part 1. No changes.
Pairing: Still None.
Author's notes:
[1] Hopefully the last of the background exposition.
[2] Constructive feedback on this part wanted. Of course.

--- --- ---

Joyce stared intently at her reflection in the hotel mirror, looking in vain for any physical signs of the turmoil of the past few months. Being held captive by Heinrich, unable to return to Sunnydale while her daughters were in danger, hadn't been physically demanding, though she imagined her hair would have turned grey from the stress if she hadn't been immortal.

But she still thought that Buffy's death should have left some visible mark on her face, something to match what she felt inside. She desperately needed something tangible to tell the world that there was something missing from her heart, that her Buffy was gone, but it was yet one more thing her immortality denied her. And she couldn't hide from the world until the ache lessened. It wasn't an option. She still had one daughter left, someone to take care of.

Shaking her head at the direction her thoughts were taking, Joyce wandered out of the bathroom, collapsing on the bed and staring up at the ceiling. In her first life she could have at least given Buffy the honor she deserved as a warrior of her house. It wouldn't have been enough but it would have been something. But now, in this time and place, she wasn't sure what she could do. To the Council Buffy was just another in a long line of forgettable sacrifices, but she wouldn't forget.

Sighing, she covered her face with a pillow and thought about the previous weeks. Since coming to Seacover she'd done quite a bit to lay the groundwork for the next few years. She'd managed to find a good location for her gallery. A failed dance studio in an old brick hotel, she'd already begun to mold it into what she wanted. If it worked out, Connor had agreed to purchase the entire building.

The gallery was far enough from Duncan MacLeod's dojo to be safe from the headhunters that tended to be attracted to him, but in a safe area of the city. Not too commercial, with just enough bohemian character to attract the kinds of customers she preferred. With nearby public transportation, Dawn would be able to get there in the afternoons after school.

She'd just started searching for a house big enough for herself and Dawn, within walking distance of the private school she planned to enroll Dawn in for the Fall. There had been several houses that she felt would meet their needs, though she wouldn't narrow it down to a single house until Dawn arrived and was able to give her input.

She'd also begun the process of moving a few of her pre-Hank possessions up from storage in LA. She wasn't sure when she would be ready to deal with going through Buffy's personal effects but it wouldn't be any time soon. Until then, anything from the Sunnydale house that Dawn hadn't wanted had joined her other things in storage.

Even with everything else she'd needed to do to get the gallery up and running, Joyce hadn't been able to take her mind completely off of Dawn's possible reaction to her non-death. She couldn't wait to hold her in her arms again but at the same time she was dreading their up-coming reunion.

There were so many ways it could go badly, having to explain who and what she really was to her adopted, monk-borne daughter. Connor hadn't been much help. Although he'd been supportive, and had gone along with her plans, he'd made it clear that he thought it was not the best idea she'd ever had.

But she hadn't expected him to see it her way. She'd raised plenty of other people's children in the past, but they'd never truly belonged to her like Buffy had and Dawn did. From the moment she'd held Buffy as a baby she'd felt a connection that had never dissipated.

And while she knew that most of her memories of raising Dawn weren't real she took them for the gift they truly were. Those monks may not have had the most coherent or intelligent plan to protect their Key but they had given her something precious in exchange, memories of giving birth to and raising a daughter she should never have had.

Removing the pillow from her eyes and hugging it tightly, she once more stared up at the ceiling and tried to think of things to say in her own defense. Although she had a good reason, she wasn't sure her absence in the weeks before Buffy's death was something Dawn would forgive. The rest of it didn't bother her.

She suspected Dawn would take the idea of immortality better than she had when she'd found out about Buffy being a mystical warrior destined to fight vampires until her death, but she couldn't be sure. They'd never really discussed Buffy's destiny. The inevitable conclusion had been too painful to contemplate.

True, Joyce had been hearing stories about vampires and other strange creatures for centuries, but they'd never seemed that common. She'd never encountered them directly and had come to think of them as tales for the gullible. To find out that her Buffy, the one bright light in her life after centuries of loneliness, endangered herself nightly to fight them had come as a nasty shock. She hadn't taken it very well, to say the least, when Buffy refused to stay home where she would hopefully be safe from those things. Even Connor had reacted better when she'd told him.

One of the things she regretted was that she'd never been able to explain to Buffy why she'd been so angry. Why her reaction had been so out of proportion to the event. It had taken her that entire summer to accept that she couldn't control this aspect of Buffy's life like she'd controlled her own. The skills she'd developed over the centuries to survive and hide from other immortals, to live a quiet life, had no place in Buffy's brutal 'evil fighting' world.

It had taken time but with Connor's help Joyce had eventually put together what they thought was a much more accurate picture of what a slayer was than what Rupert Giles and his Council of Watchers thought she should know.

From what they'd discovered, a slayer was the blunt instrument of the gods. Her role was to confront evil directly, not to hide from it. It wasn't about order or any sort of balance. By the time a slayer showed up things were usually so bad that only the survival of the creatures the gods blessed mattered. The cost inevitably being the slayer herself.

She hadn't accepted this at first. Joyce knew she wasn't the perfect mother but she'd invested so much hope and love into that small girl that the thought of seeing her life extinguished through a quirk of fate had filled her with despair. She'd spent the following year trying to pray to a god she'd given up on long ago, looking for some sign, a loop-hole, some way to save Buffy from her destiny. But it had never appeared. She hadn't even been given the chance to try and protect her at the end. She strongly suspected that the gods had intentionally arranged things to take her out of the picture while Buffy fulfilled her destiny.

Pushing the pillow away, Joyce got back up and looked deeply into the mirror in her room, trying to see, like she had every morning since then, if the knowledge about how the world really worked was visible in her face.

All she had left of Buffy now was Dawn and she had no plans to lose her also. No matter what, even if the price was to lose her own anonymity. Something she'd held onto desperately ever since her first death, the result of running afoul of dynastic politics that had thrown her first husband into the arms of another and had taken away the children she'd raised for him. Unable to understand what had happened to her after rising from her deathbed, she'd spent decades in seclusion in different convents and abbeys, in prayer to her god in search of an answer to her continued existence.

Answers that came only when one of the abbeys she'd hidden herself in had been sacked by Vikings and she'd been carried off with the other nuns. In some ways slavery had been an enlightening experience for her. The decades she'd spent, until escaping, in bondage to an immortal priestess of Freya, a former shield-maiden, had given her the knowledge and basic skills to defend herself against other immortals. True, she'd been a slave, but her mistress had taken the time to explain in her brutal way the realities of being immortal.

But she'd never gained a taste for the Game, the deadly struggle between immortals. Taking the life of another in exchange for their power had never appealed to her. She'd found herself returning again and again, over the centuries that followed, to the seclusion of the holy orders when the stress of watching those around her, the mortals she'd befriended, grow old and die became too much. She sometimes thought it had been a big mistake on the part of God to make her immortal. Whatever the reason, she believed it would have been better spent on someone else.

Joyce made another face at the mirror, undisturbed by the morbid turn her thoughts were taking. She would look like she was in her late twenties for the rest of her life. A well worn late twenties, thanks to the harshness of her first life, but still young. She'd never really worried abut her looks in the past. Her few lovers over the years had always appreciated them. Now that she'd outed herself to a Watcher, would she need to be more careful about her appearance so she wouldn't offend the sensibilities of her own watcher? If it would ensure Dawn's survival it was well worth it.

Knowing that she was being watched would certainly be a new experience. She'd been hiding in plain sight for the last few centuries. Not that she'd known she was hiding from anyone other than other immortals. Until meeting Hank she'd been completely unaware that there were people who chronicled the lives of immortals like herself. If Hank hadn't fallen in love with her and sought her out, would they have ever found her? From what she'd learned from him it was inevitable that she would have attracted the Society's attention at some point.

Being a friend of Connor MacLeod, someone watching him would have noticed her eventually. Why they hadn't already was a mystery. Or she would have been unable to avoid fighting some immortal who was already being watched. Marrying Hank, mistake though it probably was, and later living in Sunnydale, had only given her a brief moment of additional freedom from them.

Noticing the darkening sky through her hotel room window, Joyce came to a decision. If she was going to have a voyeuristic watcher, she thought to herself, as she grabbed her jacket and sword, she wanted some control over the process. It would have to be someone she could trust around her daughter and Connor when he visited. And without bringing Hank into it.

He'd been very clear from the beginning of their relationship that the Society took a very dim view of any sort of personal contact between their watchers and immortals and, although he wasn't someone who would ever have been assigned an immortal to watch, she had no plans to endanger his position in the Society by breaking their agreement, especially since he hadn't stood in the way of her plans for Dawn to join her in Seacover.

Taking one last look at her clothes in her mirror, Joyce decided they would have to do. While the expensive business-like outfit didn't completely project the image she was looking for it was a definite change from the middle class, soccer mom appearance she'd become adept at projecting over the last few years. Seacover wasn't a small town like Sunnydale. To attract a much more upscale clientele she needed to dress like they would, in expensively tailored clothes.

For the first time in years she felt truly in control of her destiny. Stepping out of her room, she headed towards the lobby. There was just enough time to stop at Joe's before meeting Connor and Dawn at the gallery.

--- --- ---

Playing quietly to himself, Joe paid only cursory attention to his audience. It had been a quiet day. With MacLeod out of the country the usual insanity that followed closely in his wake was absent. He'd spent the previous day reading the slim chronicles of Alix de Poitiers, and the morning searching for any additional information about her in Society records, trying to confirm the blonde woman's claim to being an immortal last reported alive over half a millennium ago,

Out of the corner of one eye Joe saw both Amanda and Adam subtly stiffen. Glancing around to see what had attracted their attention, he saw the door to the bar opening. Their tension didn't decrease when the blonde haired woman entered the bar.

Watching her take a seat at the bar, he couldn't imagine, if that was who she really was, how she'd managed to disappear for so long. There was nothing remotely plain about her, she was a striking woman.

Putting down his guitar, Joe slowly made his way behind the bar and over to her. "What can I get you?" he asked gruffly.

She gave him a slight smile. "A glass of white wine."

"Anything else?" He asked several minutes later, placing the glass in front of her.

"If you could pass along a message to your Society for me I would appreciate it." she said, her voice just barely audible above the background noise.

"My Society?" Joe asked, giving her an innocent look, hoping she wasn't yet another immortal who knew about the Society of Watchers.

"There's no need to play games." she told him firmly, before taking a sip from her glass. "We both know who I mean."

"Yes." He nodded slightly, hiding a grimace, wondering how he was going to keep this a secret.

"I'm opening an art gallery in Seacover. I expect to be here for a number of years." She said. "If your Society insists on someone watching me, it will be with my supervision. Or not at all."

It was the way her eyes seemed to pierce him that impressed upon him that she might actually be who she claimed to be. "I can't make any promises." He told her. In fact, he'd be lucky if they didn't laugh him out of the room when he brought it up. But he didn't think telling her that would be useful. "What did you have in mind?"

"I'll need help at the gallery. An assistant." She paused to take another sip from her glass. "I have no objections to filling that position with one of your watchers. If you have someone who understands art." She held up a hand to prevent him from speaking. "And if they meet with my approval."

He sighed. "I'll pass that on."

"I'm also not interested in any immortal games." She told him, waving in the direction of the table Amanda and Adam were sitting at. "I will defend myself and my family but I have no time for such nonsense."

"They aren't a threat but I'll let them know." Joe said.

"Thank you." She took one last sip from her glass before slipping from her stool. She handed him a small card. "I don't have a phone in my gallery yet. Job candidates can reach me through that number."

He watched her stroll out of his bar with the confident stride of someone in total control of their life. As soon as the door closed behind her he was headed towards an obviously curious Adam and Amanda.

"Do either of you recognize her?" Joe asked them, carefully slipping into an empty chair at their table.

"No." Adam said. "Who is she?"

"Possibly." Amanda said reluctantly, "though, if it was her, the last time I saw her she wasn't quite so..." She shrugged, her vague answer drawing confused looks from the two men.

"She claims to be Alix de Poitiers." Joe told them.

"Claims?" Amanda asked.

"We have no record of her after the reign of Elizabeth the First. Her watcher died and by the time another one was found who wouldn't attract attention, she'd disappeared." Joe said, frowning. "There are no existing pictures of her."

"How hard is it to find a watcher for a woman like that?" Amanda asked, her meaning clear.

"According to her chronicle, she always preferred living on Holy Ground. As a nun." Joe said. "Inserting a watcher into that kind of life isn't easy."

Adam raised an eyebrow but said nothing, instead taking a long drink from the beer in front of him.

"What brings her here?" Amanda asked. "There aren't any convents near here that are open to women like that."

"She's opening a gallery in Seacover," Joe told them. "and she's looking for an assistant."

"Why here?" Adam asked, languidly drinking from his bottle.

"No idea. But she left this card." He tossed it out onto the table.

Picking it up, Amanda looked at it for a moment before laughing and passing it over to Adam. He looked at it, puzzled.

"You don't recognize that number?" she asked them.

"No." Joe admitted. Adam just shrugged.

"It seems another MacLeod has taken an interest in Seacover." Amanda told them with a slight smirk. "That's Connor Macleod's answering service."

"I wonder if Mac knows." Joe mused. This would definitely give him further avenues of research into her life, he thought.

"Does it matter?" Adam murmured. "Her sister was a queen. She ran off with a Duke. If she's still alive she can obviously take care of herself. She won't put up with his Boy Scout attitude."

"I thought you didn't recognize her?" Joe asked, puzzled.

"The name was familiar. Darius might have mentioned her once. Or I might have read her chronicle purely by accident." Adam said, shrugging and finishing his beer.

"I wonder what she'll pay?" Amanda mused. "Working in a gallery could be useful."

"She's looking for a watcher." Joe told them.

"Why?" Amanda asked, surprised.

"She wants to know who her watcher is?" Joe suggested.

"Clever. Picking your own watcher." Adam said, nodding. "Almost as good as becoming one. Why didn't I think of that?"

"Because it isn't as exciting." Amanda said, winking at Joe.

"It doesn't allow you to keep anyone else from looking for you." Joe added, shaking his head.

"And it doesn't give you all of that gossip about other immortals that you like so much." Amanda said with a laugh. Joe groaned at the comment, waiting for the inevitable explosion.

--- --- ---

Joyce smiled to herself as she drove back to her hotel. Giving the Society of Watchers access to her household, while risky, wasn't really a grand gesture. She'd outgrown those almost a thousand years ago. But she couldn't imagine them not taking her up on her offer. If they were reluctant she had a few connections she'd developed after marrying Hank that might prove useful.

If her plan succeeded, her goal of keeping Dawn safe long enough for her to grow up would have a better chance of success.

--- --- ---

Connor gently ushered Dawn into the gallery. She didn't have much to compare it with. The only one in LA she'd been allowed into had been the one her mother had worked in. It had seemed cold and unfriendly. All chrome and glass to impress its rich clientele and intimidate the unworthy. She'd been too young to be taken to any others while they'd lived in LA.

The one her mother had started in Sunnydale had been very different. It had been welcoming and friendly. A small, warmly lit place that felt more like someone's home than a place of business. It had had character, or so Tara had claimed. It had been a place where patrons could sit and chat with each other and examine the art over long periods. They were never pressured to buy but it had been very successful. She distinctly remembered her mother being much happier in the Sunnydale gallery.

This one reminded her of the gallery in Sunnydale. Most of the displays were covered up or empty and the lights were dim but she could easily imagine her mother waiting here to greet her after school. It had the right smells and a certain 'Mom-ness' to it that she recognized. And the suddenness of that recognition hurt. She tried to suppress her feelings but they were still raw from Buffy's death.

Taking a ragged breath, she turned to escape, slipping out from under Connor's grasp and back out into the street. She didn't go very far. Stopping at the mouth of an alley next to the gallery, Dawn leaned back against the wall.

The brick was rough against her back as she slid against it to the ground. She really thought she'd gotten past this. It was embarrassing in too many ways. Any second now Connor would join her and make it official - she was still a kid - only kids cried when their mother had died months ago. Or ran away from things that reminded them of her.

"Dawnie?" a familiar soft voice asked. Dawn resisted the urge to look up, knowing she was imagining things but wishing for just a moment that it really was her mother. Rubbing her eyes with her sleeve, she continued to stare at the ground.

"You're not really here." she mumbled, only sure of one thing - the feel of the brick tearing into her back where her shirt had ridden up.

"Yes I am." a voice she'd thought she would never hear again insisted. "See?" a hand gently pulled her face up until she was looking into her mother's eyes for the first time in months.

"Mom?" She said hopefully, after staring into her face for what seemed like forever.

"Yes?" It was the sadness in her voice and her eyes as she spoke that made Dawn believe that it was really her.

--- --- ---

"I'm sorry. I couldn't stop her. It was all my fault." Dawn said, bursting into tears as Joyce pulled her daughter into her arms. "I didn't know until it was too late." she sobbed.

"Didn't know what?" Joyce asked, looking up at Connor where he stood in the doorway, hovering protectively while pretending to not be listening.

He just shrugged, saying silently 'She wouldn't explain.'

"Buffy," Dawn whispered hoarsely, "she wanted to die. She missed you so much."

"She wouldn't have left you like that unless there was a very good reason." Joyce protested.

"She found a reason and I couldn't stop her." Dawn said.

"Oh baby," Joyce hugged her even more tightly, "it wasn't your fault."

"She was supposed to stay with me." Dawn protested. "But I wasn't good enough for that."

"Never think that." Joyce told her, pulling Dawn to her feet. Nodding to Connor, she guided her back into the gallery. "Let me fix you some cocoa."

"With large marshmallows?" Dawn asked in a small voice.

"With large marshmallows." Joyce agreed.

--- --- ---

"How?" Dawn asked, closely watching her over her cup. The familiarity of the cocoa had gone a long way to calming her down. "We buried you."

"Yes. You did." Joyce agreed. "But I wasn't permanently dead."

"How can you be not permanently dead?" Dawn asked. "Even vampires are really dead. And you aren't a vampire. Unless there are vampires who aren't allergic to sunlight."

"No. I'm not a vampire." Joyce said. She held out a hand. "Check for yourself."

"They did an autopsy." Dawn said, even as she fumbled with her mother's wrist, trying to remember how to check for a pulse. "You're warm."

"It's hard to explain." Joyce told her, pulling back her arm and taking a sip of cocoa. Dawn could see her hands shaking slightly.

"Are you human?" She asked nervously. "And what does that make me?"

"I'm as human as you. Or Buffy." she said.

"Umm..." Dawn stared at her for a moment, struggling to put her thoughts into a coherent sentence. "Buffy had a mystical destiny that came with superhero extras. Those monks said I didn't start out like this." She gestured vaguely at herself.

"Yes." Joyce nodded. "You are both human. You just have something magical in your make-up."

"So there's something magical about you that let you get better when we thought you were dead?" Dawn asked.

"Yes. Exactly." She said, giving Dawn one of her, surely patented, 'Mom' smiles that warmed Dawn from the inside out. "It takes a lot to really kill people like myself. It might take a while but we usually get better."

"So you're sort of immortal?" Dawn said, throwing out the only word she could think of to describe her mother's apparent condition. "Without the evil vampire side effects?" She turned her head at the snort of amusement from Connor from his position at the front of the gallery where he'd gone to give them some semblance of privacy.

"Yes." She said. "Though there are a few rules that make it less desirable a condition than you might think."

"Like what?" Dawn asked. She couldn't imagine what would be so horrible about not dying.

"Before I explain, you need to promise me that you won't tell anyone." Joyce said. "Most people react badly when they find out there are immortals."

"They don't ignore it like they do demons and vampires?" Dawn asked.

"No." Joyce said. "I'm not sure why."

"People want to believe in immortality. They want it to be possible." Connor interjected.

Looking at him, Dawn could sense a story behind his answer. "Okay. I promise."

"Good." Joyce said. "The first thing to understand is that immortals are born that way, not made. We think."

"Huh?" Dawn mumbled.

"All immortals are foundlings." Joyce told her.

"So Grandma and Grandpa aren't really your parents?" Dawn asked.

"No."

"So they found you on their doorstep?" Dawn asked. "In a basket?"

"No." Joyce said. "I'm much older than they are."

"Oh." When she didn't explain, Dawn looked at her expectantly. "What does that mean?" She finally asked.

"There is no medicine or magic that will turn someone into an immortal. You either have the potential to be one or you don't."

"Potential? So you could 'not' become an immortal?" Dawn asked, confused. She intercepted a look between her mother and Connor. "How do you become one, if you have this potential thing?"

"You die. Violently." Connor said, walking closer. "A potential immortal who dies a peaceful first death never becomes immortal."

"How did you..." Dawn asked Joyce.

"Most first immortal deaths aren't pretty. There are no flowers, no marching band." Connor told her. "And your family isn't happy to see you when you come back to life."

Her mother stared over her head as if looking far away. "Unlike Connor, who died a noble death in battle, I was just in the way." she murmured. "And that is all I'm willing to say." she added.

"What else?" Dawn asked, hoping to distract her from what seemed to be a painful subject, something she'd learned from watching Tara after Buffy's death.

"Immortals can't have children." Joyce said, still staring into the distance.

"Buffy wasn't really your daughter either?" Dawn said, staring at her mother in surprise.

"She certainly was my daughter, just as you are." Joyce said, once more looking her directly in the face. "It takes more than giving birth to make someone your daughter."

"She isn't one of your kind of immortals? Is she?" Dawn asked. "She isn't going to wake up and have to dig herself out of her grave..." she stopped at the horrifying thought.

"No. She wasn't. I rescued her when her real parents were murdered." Joyce said.

"What about Dad?" Dawn asked. "Does he know?"

"Yes."

"So he really isn't going to want me?" Dawn frowned, gulping down a mouthful of hot cocoa, not wanting to feel sad but unable to avoid it. She didn't think she'd ever met him but she had memories.

"No." Joyce reached over and gave her a hug. "He knows you aren't really his daughter. But just in case there was ever a question, he sent me legal papers giving me sole guardianship. So you are mine," she squeezed Dawn even tighter, "until you grow up."

"Why didn't you come back sooner?" Dawn asked. "Buffy would have still been alive."

Joyce grimaced. "An old enemy... kidnapped me."

"Why?" Dawn asked. Buffy's enemies had always tried to kill her. The idea, that her mother had enemies who didn't, seemed strange.

"It is possible for an immortal to take the power of another immortal, what is called their quickening, by killing them." Joyce said with a grimace. "It's usually done in ritual combat. Some believe that eventually there will be only one immortal left with the power of all of us. They call it the Game."

"It is unavoidable." Connor said, taking Joyce's mug and finishing her cocoa. "No matter how hard you try to avoid it, eventually someone will challenge you."

"It's nonsense." Joyce said, shaking her head.

"How did you get away?" Dawn stared at them, wondering about their apparent closeness and sensing an old argument.

"Connor found out and rescued me." Joyce drew a shuddering breath. "It was a close call. Heinrich thought he'd found another way to extract the quickening from an immortal without having to defeat them in combat, but it was still fatal. Five more minutes and I would really have been dead."

"Thank you." Dawn said, standing up to give him a hug.

"I did it for me." He protested, his face red. "Do you know how lonely a long life is if you don't have trustworthy friends?"

"No. Thanks anyway." Dawn said, giving him another hug. "Can we go eat now?"

"No more questions?" Joyce asked.

"Maybe later." Dawn said. "After desert. Something with lots of frosting."

"You don't think you've had enough sugar for one day?" her mother asked.

"Never!" Dawn said, grinning. "Teenager here."

--- --- ---
TBC