Chapter Text
Sunnydale Island is a shadowy crag, full of boulders and cavelets and places to hide. Buffy noticed this right away as the barge carried her across Lake Hellmouth this morning. Now, at deep midnight, she's rethinking her assessment. Sunnydale Island is an exceptionally difficult place to sneak about.
She picks her way down the boulders that line the castle walls, listening for the rattle of footsteps along the gravel beach below. Someone’s tracking her, and they’re not very good at it. Buffy rolls her eyes. She’s got an island to explore, so whoever it is will just have to try and keep up with her.
She and the other Slayer candidates have only gotten the sanctioned tour so far – castle, training grounds, all within the sturdy stone walls of the fortress. Skills testing has kept them too busy for anything else. It makes Buffy itch. It isn’t her way to stay inside the lines. Anywhere she travels, the first thing she does is sneak out at night and patrol. Not for anything in particular. She barely knows what she’s looking for; she just doesn’t feel able to rest in a new place until she’s managed to sneak away and observe it herself: the alleys, woods, and canals where in daytime, Buffy is told she must never go.
“Patrolling,” her mother’d scoffed when she caught Buffy sneaking back in the window of her aunt’s cottage during their last visit. “It’s nearly time for the dawn bell to ring! The only folk out at this time of night aren’t patrolling, they’re prowling.” That was the last time Buffy’d been caught. But it wasn’t her final patrol. She merely got better at staying unseen and unheard. A difficult task for a girl as unnaturally strong as her, who’s forever slamming doors she meant to gently close.
Joyce Summers thought her daughter’d stopped her nighttime investigations after that, but Buffy had only gotten better at it. On their journey to Sunnydale Island, Buffy slipped out of every inn to patrol at night. No easy task when you’re sharing a narrow rented bed with your mother, but that was all the Summers women could afford. Joyce’d seen her all the way to the shore of Lake Hellmouth, pressing tears from her eyes as Buffy boarded the barge toward Sunnydale. The whole time, she’d been none the wiser.
Buffy swallows down a little lump of guilt, thinking of that. Joyce barely scraped together enough coin for the trip. She doesn’t like deceiving her mother when she’d gone so far to see her off. But that kind of thing doesn’t keep her up at night. The itch of not knowing what lay in the shadows? That does.
She’s right to be suspicious, Buffy reflects. She’s found a nook in the cliff that separates the boulders from the beach, and there is a tall, square shadow waiting for her on the gravel. The owner of the shadow, whoever they are, isn’t even trying to hide.
Her first night patrolling on Sunnydale Island, and someone is following her.