Belonging
by DreamsofSpike


39. Going to War

Giles was unexpectedly awakened the next morning by a loud, insistent knocking on the closed door to the den. He frowned in irritation at being pulled from a much-needed rest as he glanced up at the little travel alarm clock he had set on the end table by the head of the fold-out bed.

It was only 7:30.

Another round of forceful knocking drew him, muttering under his breath in irritation, from the warm comfort of the bed. He had kept reasonably early hours for most of his life; but he had spent the previous day in a flurry of hectic activity, after a thirteen hour drive from Arizona, and as he had no set plans for this day, he had intended to sleep in for a change.

Someone obviously had other plans.

"Coming, I'm coming!" he sighed in weary exasperation as he stumbled sleepily toward the door, aware that his hair was disheveled and his pajamas were rumpled, but thinking resentfully that the sight of him first thing in the morning, pre-grooming, was the least that was deserved by anyone who would be so inconsiderate as to wake him so early.

He opened the door much more forcefully than was necessary, a disapproving look of annoyance on his face for the as-yet unknown person who had the nerve to awaken him at this unearthly hour on a Saturday morning.

Buffy.

He should not have been surprised at her nerve, but he *was* surprised to find her in full-on Slayer mode, smiling at him expectantly, but with a decisive, no-nonsense look in her eyes – and not the slightest hint of apology for waking him so rudely.

"Time to get up, Giles," she said brightly, in a tone that left no room for argument. "No time to waste on sleeping. We have an evil organization to take down."

He stared at her blankly for a moment, surprised by her words. After their conversation the day before, she had seemed quite supportive of his goals, but she had not seemed nearly as fired up about it and eager as she appeared to be now.

"Buffy," he said in a voice of weary patience, still a bit raspy with sleep. "I rather think that's been the point of my efforts – for the past *several years* now. We're going to 'take the evil organization down' as you say...but could we possibly do it sometime *after* 9:00 this morning?"

Finally, there was a bit of sympathy in the girl's sparkling green eyes, but it did not hide the intensity of determination that was there as well. "I'm not talking about legislation and law, Giles, or public awareness. Don't get me wrong," she hurriedly added, her voice genuinely sincere. "That stuff's very important. But I'm talking about taking action. *My* kind of action."

Her words were met with nothing more than an incredulous look from her sleepy Watcher, who was not quite to the point of wakefulness that made coherent thought possible yet.

She paused, her eyes suddenly downcast for a moment, and when she met his eyes again, he was stunned to see them shining with tears, an unmistakable look of regret on her face. "I know that – that what you've been doing to stop them is – is everything that you could. And that – if I had been here, instead of – with Riley, maybe we could have taken them down a long time ago. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry that I let..."

Her eyes went involuntarily to the vampire sleeping in the big, comfortable recliner in the corner of the room, and she stopped suddenly, her eyes down again as she fought to keep her composure. Finally she looked back up to meet his eyes again bravely. "But I'm ready to take them on now. I'm ready to do whatever it takes to stop Riley and his organization. We need a plan of action...and we need it now."

There was a righteous fury, a determination, in her eyes that he recognized...and it never boded well for those who were the object of that fury.

A slow smile spread across his face, his exhaustion forgotten. His Slayer was back in action. He nodded slowly, running a hand absently through his hair as a thoughtful look came over his face. "All right," he agreed softly. "Give me a few minutes to get dressed."

Buffy nodded in satisfaction. "You can take a little longer than that if you need to. I'm gonna go call Xander and Anya. I'm sure it'll take them a little while to get here. But we need to get everybody together for a good, old-fashioned Scoobie meeting." She paused for a moment, a smile that was both nostalgic and anticipatory rising on her lips as she thought of the many times in the past they had had such meetings, and the success she was determined that they would have this time.

"Riley and his organization are going down."


A little over an hour later, the dining room table was surrounded by all of the members of the original Scoobie gang -- except Willow and Tara who were in the kitchen -- with the addition of a few new friends. Everyone was chatting easily, though there seemed to be a bit of a heaviness in the atmosphere; everyone knew that Buffy had to have something very important to discuss to have called an early morning meeting like this.

The Slayer was not exactly a morning person.

Buffy sat at the head of the table; she was the one who had called this meeting, and she would lead it. Spike sat in the chair to her right, still not willing to be separated from her any more than was necessary, watching her closely, wondering what it was that she had on her mind.

The night before, she had just insisted that she was all right, and had not been terribly talkative for the rest of the night. She had just led him up the stairs to the guest room and put them both right to bed, holding him close to her as he drifted off to sleep again. He had been able to feel the difference in her embrace, knew that something was troubling her, but she had not said a word about it to him, and he did not yet have the courage to press the matter.

Now, it seemed that he was about to find out anyway.

Tara walked in from the kitchen with a couple of platters of home-made cookies -- and Buffy wondered when she had possibly found the time to bake them.

*Perfect Tara strikes again,* she thought wryly, but this time without the resentment she had felt before. Tara's reliable perfection was ceasing to be a source of irritation, and becoming something that actually made her feel affectionate toward the soft-spoken blonde witch.

Willow followed her girlfriend with a pitcher of milk in one hand and a coffeepot in the other -- because what were homemade cookies without milk, and it *was* still fairly early for a Saturday morning; caffeine would definitely be of the good.

Once everyone was present and accounted for, Buffy stood up to call the meeting to order, and the soft murmur of conversation around the table gradually quieted.

"Okay," she began in a soft, uncharacteristically humble voice. "First of all..." She looked down at the table for a moment before looking back up, honestly meeting the eyes of each person as she spoke. "I want to tell each and every one of you that I am truly and deeply sorry. For staying with Riley, for choosing him over the people who truly cared about me -- for allowing him to do the thing's he's done -- to build this -- *empire* -- and not doing anything to stop him."

Her eyes came to rest on Julian's as she finished, not really deliberately, but she saw a flash of painful understanding in his deep dark eyes before he looked down at the table, uncomfortable. He had obviously just realized that someone must have told her at least part of what he had been through. It was not a secret among them; Giles had long ago received Julian's permission to use his story in any way that might help their cause.

And telling the Slayer, enraging her sense of justice and compassion -- that was sure to prove very helpful indeed.

Still, it was embarrassing to him to think that this virtual stranger to him knew any details at all of the ordeal he had been through, and still more disconcerting to him to see the compassion in her eyes.

He had not yet completely let go of the mindset that had been driven into him, that told him that he deserved nothing more than the abuse he received; that he was a dirty, foul creature, with no right to privacy or secrecy anyway, so what did it matter if she knew? What was more troublesome to him than the fact that she knew his secret was the fact that she actually cared.

"I've made a lot of really bad mistakes," Buffy went on, her voice firm and decisive. "But now...I've been doing a lot of thinking over the past few days...and i want to make up for them. I want to stop Riley and his people. *Now.* I *will* stop them, one way or another."

She glanced first at Giles, then at Tara and the rest of her friends, as she went on, "With no disrespect whatsoever to all of you who've been working so hard to change things -- we can't wait months -- years -- however long it's gonna take to see that change."

She paused for a moment to allow her words to sink in, searching the eyes of her Watcher and her friends, seeing with relief that they agreed with her words. "We have to find another way to stop them, as fast as possible." She was quiet, looking around at the faces of her friends and waiting for their response.

There was silence for a long moment before Giles was finally the first to speak. "I – I agree with you, Buffy. If there is a faster way of stopping the slave trade – I would be in full support of it. But – are you quite sure there *is* a faster way?"

"That's why we're here," Buffy said. "I *know* there is. There has to be. And I wanna find it."

"What we've been focusing on lately," Tara spoke up slowly, meeting Buffy's eyes with rising interest in her own, and Buffy could see that she was starting to warm to what she was saying. "is getting the word out to people of just how cruel their practices are – how dangerous this whole thing really is. I just know that if people really *knew* just what goes on in those places, Riley would be out of business like that!" She snapped her fingers.

"The problem is," Anya added, nodding. "All we've got to prove it is the word of a couple of vampires – and no offensiveness intended from the ex-demon here," she reminded them in a matter-of-fact voice, "but it's not exactly like vampires have a lot of credibility these days."

"Not like we ever did," Spike pointed out quietly with a little huff of mild derision, and Buffy was pleasantly surprised that he had entered the conversation at all.

"That's right," Xander added with a nod. "And Riley is very careful to keep everything hush hush. That's why they go to such great lengths to be sure that even the slaves themselves don't ever tell anyone about what they do to them. He doesn't want what he's *really* doing behind the closed doors of the training facilities to ever get out to the public...because he knows that it would destroy him."

She nodded slowly, thinking. "What we need then," she said, her eyes widening with the beginnings of an idea, "is hard and fast evidence. Proof positive that no one can deny."

"Like...official records? Videotapes?" Willow suggested, her green eyes lighting up at the mention of something that just might fall into her field of expertise.

Buffy nodded, meeting her eyes with rising excitement. "Is there any way you can try and hack into their computer systems?"

"I can try," Willow agreed, practically bouncing in her seat, a smile spreading across her face. "It might take a while but I should be able to do it."

"Riley is an evil, conniving bastard," Anya pointed out, a frown on her face as she shook her head in warning. "But unfortunately he's not stupid. I highly doubt that he's going to have any kind of records where there's any possibility of anybody getting to them. It wouldn't surprise me if he doesn't keep any records at all that say anything about the really bad stuff."

Buffy sighed, realizing that she was probably right. "Oh, well," she shrugged, going on in a firm voice, "Can't hurt to try."

Willow nodded her assent, that she would begin right away on her part of their barely developing plan.

"Next step – some kind of video or audio recorded evidence..." Buffy mused.

"Not likely," Spike interjected, looking at the table. He looked up, self-conscious, when the room grew silent, to see every eye in the room on him. "Well, it's not likely the man's gonna leave anything like that just lying around, is it?" he pointed out, a bit defensively, glancing around the room until his eyes met Buffy's, uncertainty clear in his gaze. He added in a softer, hesitant voice, "I'm not trying to be negative..."

"No, you're right," Buffy encouraged him, just glad that he was growing confident enough to participate at all, and especially to express disagreement with a human.

Taking her cue, wanting to support Spike's positive step, no matter how small, Giles nodded his agreement. "Yes. I seriously doubt that Riley would have anything of that sort. Too easy to get out to the public, in the hands of a dismissed employee, for example...he just wouldn't allow that sort of evidence to exist. Very good point, Spike."

"Then we might just have to *make* it exist," Buffy spoke emphatically, looking around the room at them all to gauge their reactions to her suggestion. "Just how secure are these training facilities?" she directed the question to any of the vampires in the room.

"V-very secure," Julian replied, his voice hushed and tentative, his eyes downcast. "It's next to impossible to get out."

"What about getting in?" she pressed gently. "Did you ever notice how the soldiers would enter the center? What sort of access codes or whatever they might have had?"

He shook his head, still not looking at her, and Mara did the same, though she had no trouble meeting Buffy's eyes as she indicated that she did not know, either. When the Slayer looked at Aaron, he just shrugged carelessly.

"I never was in the place – and never tried to get in," he said with a dark little laugh. "So – I really wouldn't have a clue."

Buffy was a bit surprised to hear that, and made a mental note to ask Giles about it later. *Well, *that* explains a lot,* she thought, beginning to understand why he was so much more confident than the others.

"Well," she said aloud. "Somehow -- we need to find out." To the questioning looks that met her words, she smiled slyly. "I think it's about time we pay Riley's training center a little visit."