Heroes

L Mouse

Note: This is set sometime after the series finale of Buffy but Buffy still thinks Spike is not only dead, he's dead and gone. This is a crossover with Disney's Gargoyles, but has a few other cameos as well.

* * * * *

Buffy stood alone on the curb at Newark. Somewhere close, a jet engine roared in a rising crescendo. She hugged herself, then realized that looked vulnerable. She lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and craned her neck to see if the hotel shuttle was coming. And she tried to look confident.

She was alone. This should be a familiar state for her -- she'd fought vampires and assorted nasties of varying degrees of bad, from minor to Big Bad, by herself, for the better part of a decade.

But ... well, she was all by herself. In a strange city, New York, with the rest of the Scoobies still in Europe and Angel in LA, and nothing but half the world between them -- a continent on one side, an ocean on the other, and not a friend between here and there. And Spike, well, she would have liked nothing better than to have had Spike by her side for this little detour, but Spike was dead.

She swallowed.

She realized she was hunching her shoulders and hugging her carry on to her chest. She put the bag down and stood up straight and defied anyone to notice she was all alone.

Damn the airline, anyway.

She was supposed to change planes at Newark, but some idiot had run with scissors in Newark. Normally, this would only be a problem for the idiot with the scissors, but said moron had run through the checkpoint with a pair of scissors in one hand. Buffy was led to believe that the level of chaos this had caused had been formidable.

She wouldn't know. Her international flight had been diverted to La Guardia. One harrowing and hours-long taxi ride later, she'd reached Newark just in time to miss her plane to Minneapolis where she was to catch a flight to LAX. Not, theoretically, that big of a problem, except that all subsequent flights were full out of Newark. And a snowstorm was now descending on Minneapolis, and the airline attendants had mentioned cancelled flights being a high probability for tomorrow -- and then maybe the next day if the blizzard moved east and socked New York.

To say that she was annoyed was a significant understatement.

Buffy picked her carry on back up and hugged it to her chest. It was heavy, for a normal human, but the Slayer found it to be little burden. It held texts that Giles wanted Angel to have. They were texts so important and so dangerous that Wesley had agreed to put them in safe keeping. He had the resources for it; the Watcher's Council was utterly destroyed. Normally, she would have just burned books like these, and good riddance, but these were enchanted. They wouldn't burn, not even in a blast furnace. She'd tried.

"Damnit," a woman said, beside Buffy. She shifted restlessly and added a fouler phrase in a voice that held just a hint of a Scotts accent. After a moment, she muttered, "It's going to be dark soon."

Buffy sighed agreement, and glanced sideways at the woman. She was not tall, but had fiery red hair and green eyes that glittered with barely contained anger. The woman was well dressed and looked professional -- a lawyer or administrator of some sort. Maybe a government flunky. Bored with standing still, Buffy tried for small talk: "Where were you headed?"

"I live here," the woman snapped. "I was trying to get to LAX; I've got business there."

"Yeah, I've got friends there." Buffy said. She added, "This is exasperating."

"My lawyers want me to see them in person," the woman growled. "Something about a change in management, and screening their clients for evil now. Pah."

Buffy gave the woman another sharp, sideways look, and reflected that the word "evil" was becoming more and more prevalent in popular culture. But she knew what true evil was. This woman had no idea. She said idly, "Well, I guess I'm going to take advantage of this and see the city. Never been to New York."

Those green eyes fixed on her. There was something in them that startled Buffy -- something ageless and angry. The woman said shortly, "Tourists." She made it sound like a curse word.

Buffy found herself protesting, "Only for the day!"

The woman squinted at the setting sun. Then she scowled, picked her bags up, and marched back into the building. Buffy watched her go, then decided with a mental shrug that the lady had been decidedly odd, and turned her attention back to the road. There! A van with her hotel's logo on it approached. Buffy grabbed her bags and flagged it down as the last rays of the setting sun faded from the tops of the surrounding buildings.

As she was stepping up into the shuttle, a snarl sounded from a rooftop behind her. She turned, startled, and saw a creature with wings launch into the air from the top of a nearby parking garage. The creature glided across the road, caught a thermal, and spiraled higher.

The shuttle driver also saw it. He squinted through his windshield at the creature and then commented idly, "Gargoyle."

Buffy claimed a seat and asked, "Gargoyle?"

The driver hit the gas and shot out into traffic in a move that made Buffy cringe and the other passengers on the shuttle wince as well. Drivers in this city seemed to have gone to the "Bumper Car" school of driving. At least traffic didn't usually move fast enough to be dangerous ...

The driver said, "Yes, Gargoyle. They've been around for about a decade. Some people say they're evil."

That was the second time someone had used the "e" word in front of Buffy that day. She fought down the urge to define 'Evil' for the man: Evil was Glory. Evil was the First. Evil was the IRS. Anything else she wasn't impressed by. She, instead, said, "Really? You'd think someone would do something about them."

The man shrugged and said, "But they're not, really, you know."

"Not evil?" Well, that was a relief. She didn't particularly want to be "someone" to have to do something about them.

A woman behind Buffy said, "There's a lot of strange things in this city. Gargoyles are on the side of the light. One of them rescued my daughter from a mugger once."

There were four other people in the car; they chorused agreement that gargoyles were good guys. Buffy listened with interest. She was not the slightest bit surprised that New York had a resident species of demon but she was curious about a demon species that had earned such unanimous praise.

"They live up there," the driver pointed at the tallest skyscraper on the horizon. "The Aerie Building. That's Castle Wyvern up there. The gargoyles claim that they were cursed, you see, to sleep in stone until Wyvern rose above the clouds. The curse was broken when the owner of the building bought the castle and moved it to the top of the skyscraper."

"Magic," one of the other passengers said, skeptically. "I say they're just genetically engineered freaks. Humans with wings."

"Could a human put claw marks in solid concrete?" The driver argued. "The building I live in has gargoyle tracks from the ground all the way up to the roof where one of them climbed to the roof. The building manager was furious, he wanted to send the bill for repairs to Xanatos," for Buffy's benefit he explained, "Xanatos owns the castle -- but w convinced the manager that the tracks are lucky. Truthfully, I don't think they are lucky at all, but they're neat!"

Nobody argued the point.

Buffy craned her neck, looking out the window, studying the distant building. She thought she saw a shadowy winged finger aloft above it.