Seeking Vengeance

 Chapter 4 - Flooded

I remember the day the basement got flooded. I guess it'd be a memorable day in anyone's life, in a wish-we-didn't-have-the-memory sort of way. It wasn't long after she came back. She'd been living, well, sort of normally. She still wasn't herself, and the rest of us were kinda concerned about that. She would go off somewhere, I mean, she'd be in the room with you, but you just knew she wasn't there. It seemed creepy considering we thought she'd been in hell. Why would she want to go back there? Unless she was missing the pain in some way. And that was something I really didn't want to consider.

When she and Dawn weren't around, we'd talk - the rest of us. The ones who brought her back. We'd try to remember how Angel was when he came back. Of course, we didn't know he was back until he was more or less back to normal. We wanted to guess how long it'd be before she'd be 'our Buffy' again.

Anyway, that was the day she had to face another problem. She was out of money. She needed to do work on the house, and the money was gone. Pretty much everything her mom had put aside for her and Dawn's futures had been eaten up by the hospital bills.

It was another thing for her to deal with, and she just didn't have the skills to do it. Of course, she was going to try. She had this idea of going to the bank and asking them for a loan. I didn't know, of course, or I'd have told her. I mean, they were never going to give her a loan while her earnings were precisely zero.

So, she went to the bank, and sat through the interview, with someone telling her exactly how she was never going to get a loan. Then some demon turned up to rob the bank, and she had to become the Slayer again. She didn’t actually stop the bank from being robbed, though, so she couldn't even claim any sort of reward.

It was about that time that Anya started nagging at me to tell them that we were engaged. I'd held off, the general depression that filled our lives while Buffy was gone making it impossible to share the news. Now that she was back, Anya couldn't understand why I didn't just blurt out the information. She couldn't see why I didn't just announce it in the aftermath of the visit by Tito to check out the pipework. Or just after she'd been turned down for a loan. Or while we were researching the latest villain. She couldn't see that until Buffy was really back, our news just wasn't important.

It was while we were researching the demon that robbed the bank that Giles came back. Buffy came closer to being herself in those few seconds than we'd seen before, and I was relieved. She'd always needed Giles, and having him back was bound to be the missing piece of the puzzle.

Of course, we didn't know then that the demon responsible for the bank robbery was actually working for some humans. Humans who were going to make things as difficult as they could for Buffy, just when she could least cope with anything.