Lives Lived and Lives Lost

Life #35: vampire slayers, part 1

Life # 35: That time Harry and Tom were vampire slayers

Sunnydale, California, 1997.

Harry woke up with Xander hovering over her after she’d just drowned in a puddle. Well, after the Master had her for a midnight snack, that was.

For a few long moments, Harry stared up at nothing, horribly disoriented and filled with grief. In their previous life, number 34, Harry, male and Tom, female, had been openly opposing the cultural revolution in 1970s China where they’d been born, trying to get others to see that Mao’s goal of purging all traditional and capitalist elements from Chinese society was harmful and not in China’s best interest. They’d paid for that with their lives after a brief stint in prison as traitors to the communist nation. The grief Harry felt came from their two small children she’d now lost. But she knew her parents would look after them, so that was a small comfort. A very small comfort.

“Buffy?” Xander asked, and it snapped Harry back to the here and now.

Right. She was a vampire slayer and there was a vampire that needed slaying.

Work first, existential crisis later.

As Harry got to her feet, Angel had the audacity to call her weak.

“No,” Harry said, ignoring the lightness in her head. “No, I feel strong.” And she did. She had 34 lifetimes worth of memories now, plus she was a slayer. Not to mention the magic she could feel all around her. This world had lots and lots of magic and Harry was determined to learn to control it. “I feel different,” Harry added, just to signal that there might be something different about her, so her friends wouldn’t freak out when inevitably she’d act in new and exciting ways around them now that she remembered all her previous lives. “Let’s go.”

Kill vampire first, then worry about what happened to Tom.

Ugh. Harry hated having her memories back before she met her soulmate. This was now the second time that had happened. The first time being life # 21, when a sudden soy allergy had sent Harry into full-blown anaphylactic shock and cardiac arrest and when she woke up in the hospital days later she had all her memories but no soulmate, and she’d freaked out about it for the years it took to finally run into Tom. A few lives after that, Tom had gotten his memories back early after he’d accidentally electrocuted himself as a young teen while helping his dad remodel the garage, causing his heart to stop until his panicked father had gotten it going again with CPR. It had taken Tom five years until he finally met Harry that time, so Harry knew she might be in for a bit of a wait.

But at least now she was quite sure that this was just a normal part of their endless reincarnation deal. When one of them died prematurely and was resuscitated, it always led to getting their memories back before their soulmate did, plain and simple.

Harry took care of the Master, pulling up Occlumency shields to protect herself against the Master’s mental powers of persuasion, and dumping him down from the roof into the library onto a convenient piece of wood.

Afterwards, as they all headed to the Bronze to celebrate their victory, Angel sidled up to her and Harry had to repress a few shivers.

What the fuck even?

What the fuck was a two-hundred year old guy doing pretty much stalking a sixteen-year-old girl?