Disclaimer and Notes: Mutant Enemy owns them, but occasionally, they come through looking for a refuge. Who am I to turn them away? :-) This takes place after the episode where Angel and Riley meet.
A Mother's Eyes
By Raine Wynd
When I look at her, all I want to do is wrap my arms around her and tell her everything is going to be all right, that the monsters under the bed are just imaginary things and that she's a big girl now, but I can't. I never could really, not even when she was little. Somehow, she'd known there were things I'd never dreamed of, things I thought belonged to bad horror movies and fiction. Of course, she'd grown out of that belief...or so we both had thought. Then she found out that she was the Slayer. In time, so did I.
If I knew it would make any difference, I would rail against God and whomever would listen that it shouldn't be my daughter, that my daughter was the last girl that should've been destined to fight vampires. She'd been every mother's dream: popular, a cheerleader, a bright student... and then someone else's daughter died. That's the part I have a hard time accepting: that someone else's daughter had to die in order for mine to know her destiny. Some part of me thinks that if that hadn't happened, we would still be living in L.A., and she would've never met Angel. I tell myself that's only dreaming, because Angel's in L.A. now, and who's to say they wouldn't have met anyway? The way those two are, it's worse than Romeo and Juliet, because Buffy's supposed to kill vampires, and Angel is a vampire.
Oh, I know Angel's cursed, that he has a soul, but I remember all too vividly what happened when he didn't. A mother might forgive, but she never forgets, especially those who hurt her family. Even if he wasn't made to be evil, he's hurting her now just by the fact that he came back to town.
I wanted to hold her now, tell her all the pretty half-truths that mothers are supposed to tell. How could I, when she knew things I would never know, had died and come back and been through more hell than anyone twice her age I knew? In my eyes, she was still my little girl, damn it, my baby. Standing in the doorway of her room, I could see she was hurting and heartbroken and I didn't have the words to tell her that she'd get over it, because we both knew she'd never get over it, not really. Not when he'd been her first love, and there was nothing in the world I could say except that maybe... maybe in time it would hurt less.
Something told me that it wasn't what she wanted to hear, and not for the first time since she'd become the Slayer, I felt like I'd somehow failed her as a mother. Looking at her, I think she knew exactly how I felt.
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10.1.00, 6.24.01 Raine Wynd