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Fresh from her first mission and unaccustomed to budgeting, Buffy buys a Crystal Ball. The name is some myth from the back end of the Earth-that-was and the tech is--glitchy would be polite. In two years it'll be perfected and everywhere and in three, desperately gauche, but for now she loves it. She sets it on her single table that's desk and dining and shelf altogether while she gets cleaned up. It chimes and sings in a low voice and the smooth glass dome shimmers and mists and throws waves of soft colors around the tiny, bare room.
Finished, it chirps after a while, and gives a shuddering rush of string-plucked notes to catch her attention before saying it again. Finished finished done ready, talk to me, ready to talk, touch me to talk to AN! EE! ONE! in the galaxy!
She finishes squeezing out her wet hair, piles it on top of her head and wraps it in a bright scarf, brushes some shimmering powders across her cheeks and lips and browbone and sits in front of it.
Thumb pleaaaaase index pleaaaase, it says, and when she touches the glass it sparks a tiny fireworks animation. Yay pop bang yay bang! and then the ball swirls with mist and then--
There's a Companion on her screen. Buffy jerks her hand back.
"Wèi?" the woman in the glass ball says.
"Um, hi," Buffy says.
"Oh," she says, and smiles. "It does work." As if nothing could make her happier.
"Wow," Buffy says. "I really didn't dress for a Companion."
The woman--thick dark hair, smiling red mouth, a soft, high-class Sihnon accent--tilts her head. "I'm not a Companion," she says.
"When's your graduation, then, next week?" Buffy says, and crows with laughter at the irritated flick of the woman's shawl. "I knew it."
Do you wish to continue this conversation, the Crystal Ball asked, in purple scrolling characters across the woman's face. Buffy touches I wish and flicks the popup away.
"That looks very strange from this side," the woman says. "My name is Inara."
"Buffy," she says.
"You seem like you know companions, Buffy," Inara says. She's looking at her face, the escaped strand of yellow hair, the tiny slice of tiny room that will be visible around Buffy's shoulders, trying to decide if Buffy's family is rich or if Buffy used to be a Little Sister herself.
"I know you're probably not allowed to have a Crystal Ball," Buffy says. "We couldn't have anything that broadcast out."
"Well," the woman said. "--I graduate in a week." She fusses with her shawl a bit more, drawing it up over bare shoulders.
There's a little silence, then--Inara is young enough she doesn't have the hang of steering a conversation without ever stumbling, and Buffy is gently touching the space in her head where her own Graduation Day squats, sizzling and dramatic. It's tender, still, but even looking at this lacquer-haired perfect smiling Little Sister, it doesn't hurt any more.
"I'll keep your secret," Buffy says.
"How did you know?" Inara asks.
"The shawl," Buffy says. "The posture, the instrument behind you, your lips--not that I was looking at your lips, except a normal amount, just--your lip color. It's. Distinctive."
Inara pulls a curl, lets it bounce back. "I'll have to remember that."
A bell chimes, soft and pleasant despite the way it makes both women jump half out of their skins.
"I have to go--" Inara says, at the same time Buffy says, "Go, go, hide me, can I talk to you again--"
Inara's face disappears in a swirl of mist.
Oh no it's over. Was it fun? Talk to someone else? The Crystal Ball asks. Talk to AN! EE! ONE! in the galaxy?
"Kuài shuì ba," Buffy says, and the Crystal Ball subsides to a silent, flickery light show. She watches the colors chase each other around the glass for a few seconds until the energy under her skin builds up too much to leave room for introspection, and she's jolting up from the chair, blinking, and setting off for the door. She's got to meet Willow in half an hour. She can make it on foot if she jogs.
And that's how she meets Inara, for the first time.
A week later she's sleeping when the Crystal wakes up.
Hi hi hey! It trills, and lights up violent green. Buffy hits the floor next to her bed and comes up with a knife as long as her forearm. The Crystal strobes happily. Someone wants to talk! Someone wants to talk? Do you?
"Who?" she croaks at it.
A grey ripple chases across the green, and with it a recorded voice. "Inara Serra," it says. "Inara Serra. In--"
"Accept," Buffy says hastily. "Wait, no--"
Too late. Inara pops into view. Buffy hides the knife behind her back.
"Oh," Inara says. Where she is is bright, almost medic bay white lighting. Her hair is falling out of what looks like it was a very architectural updo. A gold hairstick strut is dangling by a single curl, tapping her cheek occasionally. "I don't know your time zone. I'm so sorry." She blinks. "I don't even know your planet."
"It's fine, I was just--reading," Buffy says. "In the dark. With my... pet knife. How was the party?" She crosses to her small kitchen, leaves the knife on the counter, flicks the lights up. She hesitates before stepping back into the line of sight, but--this isn't a date. This isn't anything. This is just a strange woman she's given access to her video feed because she still has a Coreworlder addiction to stupid shiny tech and no sense of appropriate safety. Right.
She steps back into view. A smile slots into place on Inara's face. The hairstick wobbles. "How intimate," she says.
"Wore it just for you," Buffy says. She sits down at the table where the Crystal has been sparkling and warbling at her all week. "It" is a faded blue synthetic top advertising delicious realsalt realbeef realness realcafe.
"I'm a Companion now," Inara says. "My own room. My own connection."
"So I guess I don't get to be your dirty little secret anymore," Buffy says.
"I'm sorry if that takes some of the thrill out of it," Inara says, in that impeccable genteel never-left-the-light-of-the-white-sun voice, and Buffy can't help giggling.
"So I'm a companion," Inara says. "But what are you?"
"I'm..." Inara's a stranger and it makes her want to be honest. She steps on the urge. "I do security," she says. "I bodyguard and act as a champion in duels." That's honest enough.
Inara seems to notice the dangling hairstick finally, and she wraps her fingers around it and draws it out of her ink-dark hair, sets it aside. The whole edifice tilts a little farther. "When I was a child they told us the first companions were to comfort warriors," she says.
Buffy tucks a strand of yellow hair behind her ear, feeling a helpless little curl of envy. On Sihnon she'd teetered back and forth across the edge of interestingly exotic and plain odd looking while she'd tussled with puberty. In the wider galaxy she usually feels pretty. Inara is as far beyond pretty as Buffy is beyond Sihnon.
"Told us that too," Buffy says. Now the adrenaline of sudden waking has drained away, tiredness curls its hands around her again. Whatever she'd been dreaming of wouldn't have been as nice as this, she thinks, as Inara starts to dismantle her hair, stick by pin by spray of flowers by light-up clip flashing good luck messages. She sets this last piece far away from the rest. "Not a fan?"
"A gift from my first patron," Inara says. "I suppose I'm meant to keep it."
"Bad time?" Buffy says. "Not that that's... any of my... I'm sorry, I really was asleep. Though I don't want to go back to sleep. Please stick around."
"Oh, they were fine, just... tacky," Inara says. "I'm sorry for waking you, I just." She bites her lip. Her hair is loose now, standing in a mass around her head, stiff, with odd shapes crimped into the curls where different ornaments had been pinned. "I got this because I don't know anyone who isn't a Companion or a client. I'm sorry for waking you. Tell me your time code, I'll program it in--"
"No," Buffy says. "I move around a lot with my job, it wouldn't be worth it to keep changing it--" Because somehow between the gold hairpin and light-up chrysanthemums she's decided that the Crystal is coming along with her, every place they let her bring a bag.
"Still," Inara says. "Security. You need to be sharp."
"I can turn down calls, you know," Buffy says, like she has any intention of doing that. "Come on. Stick around. Tell me the gossip. Bitch about your clients."
"I'd never." The edge of her mouth twitches like a smile is pulling at it, though.
"I'll bitch about mine, too," Buffy says.
"What makes a client bad?"
"When they don't listen," Buffy says. "If you've got a bunch of money you get out of the habit of doing what you're told, even if it'll keep someone from ventilating your head..."
It goes like this. It goes easily, mostly. They both know about the vices of the rich, and the tape and wires that prop up beautiful things, about swords, about being set apart, about control that cannot ever waver. Inara tells Buffy about art and new fashions and training up new Companions and getting what you want without violence; Buffy tells her about rim-worlds and new foods and the stupidest insults to honor she's ever fought over, a low mark that keeps pushing ever lower.
She hadn't lied about her time zone, but Inara has an uncanny ability to contact her at night anyway. A swirl of light across the ceiling or through her bag wakes her from deep sleep, after a month or so. She grows used to Inara in the dark, at the end of the day, in a two person alcove made by the light thrown off the Crystal.
"You're the only person I ever talked to through this thing, you know," Buffy says one day, sleepy enough to not care how exposing that statement might be. She's lying on her side on her bed, the Crystal on her nightstand showing Inara struggling happily with a bowl of soup. It's ridiculously endearing. Companions don't eat messy or smelly foods. The slippery fish paste dumplings are by way of being a secret vice.
"You're the only one I've ever spoken to twice," Inara says. "The algorithm is meant to be random, but--" A dumpling slides to freedom, splashing broth on her chest. Her nose wrinkles, but no curse words escape.
"But?"
"But nudist cultures are somewhat overrepresented," Inara says. Buffy laughs, face half turned into her pillow.
"Glad to spare your delicate nerves," she says.
"I think my delicate nerves could stand it," Inara says, lightly, and the words rake through Buffy's torso like claws of fire. She is suddenly very awake.
"I'll remember that next time you call and I'm in the shower," Buffy says, and holds her voice to that same lightness.
"I'll look forward to it," Inara says. Then: "Tā māde!"
"What are those made of, ball bearings?" Buffy says. Inara's words hang in her mind like a plucked string reverberating.
Inara sighs. "I've been teaching the music lessons for three days. I can barely close my hands."
"What's his name still sick?"
The tight moment fades away. It stays in Buffy's head like a raw patch of skin.
A Companion wouldn't flirt unintentionally. But that doesn't mean they'll always flirt seriously. If she meant nothing by it--if Buffy pushes and loses this small secret thing that's all hers and has nothing to do with waking up one morning from a dream of blood with a dead woman's strength settling into her bones--
That's not an option. She won't push.
But if it ever does chime while she's in the shower--
*
It doesn't. It chimes when she's really, really high.
She is topless, but it's incidental. Her shoulder had been shattered into so many pieces the scan looked like a star-map, and it's been No Shirt Sabbathday for four days. Maybe five? She's really, really high. She tells the Crystal yes out of habit, and then says, "Ohhhhhh nooooo."
Inara doesn't look surprised, but she does suddenly look all Companion-y, all "tell me about your fascinating tariff reform"-y, all "let me quote something about plum bossoms that obliquely reassures you about your poorly hidden fetish"-y.
"I swear this isn't a, a move," Buffy says. Her head is on the table, so she's looking sort of up Inara's nostrils. "I got shot."
On "shot" Inara blinks a few times, and moves her eyes from Buffy's chest smashed against the tabletop to the excitingly intricate device octopusing all over her shoulder and neck, holding all the healing bits of bone together. "What?"
"Shot. And... stepped on a little. Maybe a little chewed. Like. Towards the end. Might have been chewing."
"What happened? Are you okay?"
"Yeah yeah," Buffy says. "I heal quick. And they give me the really strong stuff, you know, because of the thing... that... you can't... know about."
She can't see Inara's hands, but her red-lace shawl is moving and crimping like she's wringing it in her fingers.
"Really," Buffy says. "Super fine. Don't worry. I'm really strong. I could lift you up. But I have to stay sitting down now. But I could lift you up."
Inara licks her lips. "And--" She pauses. "And the other guys?"
"Super dead," Buffy says delightedly. "I was so cool. I had to kill the last one with my leg."
"Should you be alone?"
"You're with me," Buffy says. "Willow left... Giles left. Xander is banned. Tara can't talk when I have my shirt off. I'm glad you can. I worried."
"About me and your--chest?"
"That it would be weird. Oh, no." Buffy writhes against the table.
"What? What is it? Are you in pain?"
"Itches," Buffy huffs, and promptly falls asleep.
She wakes up later with a vicious crick in her neck, drool on her cheek, and a dim yellow light in one eye. She lifts her head, and--the Crystal is still on. Inara's there, in the same clothes, and her face is pinched with strain.
"I tried shouting, but no one heard me," Inara says. "And I don't know where you are, I had to just--sit here, and watch you breathe, and hope you didn't stop--I cancelled on a client--"
"Oh, crap," Buffy says. She peels her tacky cheek off the table and sits up, scrubbing at her mouth with her functional hand. The painkiller's clouds have pulled back. There's a throb throughout one whole side of her body, but nothing that pulls her mind apart anymore. "Inara. I'm so sorry. I didn't--" Women like me don't die in our sleep, she can't say. Women like me die screaming. "I'm safe."
"You got chewed on."
"That's what I do," Buffy says. "That's always going to be what I do."
Inara is white around her eyes. Inara has probably not been caught on the back foot often in her life.
"This isn't how I wanted to get my shirt off for you," Buffy says, one of those statements that will be a joke or not depending on how Inara reacts.
Inara doesn't react.
"It's really fine," Buffy tries again. "I'll have this off in two days. Please stop looking like that."
"I have to go to bed," Inara says, and Buffy's stomach drops down a gravity well. Inara's hand flashes up to swipe the Crystal to sleep, and hesitates in the air. "Next time--next time you want to seduce me, just pretend your climate control broke, ba?"
"Right. Gotcha. Yes. Boiling summer here," Buffy says. "Absolutely--"
The Crystal switches off. Buffy rests her much-wired arm on the table and stares into space for a long, long time.
Their next conversation is several days later. Buffy's dressed, and the casts are off. Inara's very determined to be bright and carefree and not to let any pauses into the conversation whatsoever. Buffy's tentative "looking good today" becomes a whole opera on this season's unfortunate pastels, which Inara does not think suit her, and the hopelessness of the Little Sisters in training, and the new shipment of--something or other--by this time Buffy's bored, which she's never associated with Inara, but she's on sick leave and it's dull and both her hands work now, so. So.
"About last week," she says loudly, over Inara's chatter. Inara stills. "Listen, I--it's going to happen again, you know? This is my life. If it's too much--"
"No," Inara says quickly. "But--Buffy, it doesn't have to be your life."
Buffy says nothing.
"You could quit."
"I really, really can't," Buffy says. "You don't know what you're saying, but--trust me when I say I can't."
"Do you want to?" Inara says, across the galaxy, wrapped in a red lace shawl so fine you could draw it through a child's ring. A thin curl of incense smoke drifts across her cheek. Her nails are short and gold-tipped. A different universe, in almost every way, but touching hers through this cheap bit of fell-off-a-freighter tat. Abruptly she wants every bit of Inara that she's willing to give.
"Right now what I want is to switch off my climate control program," Buffy says. "Where I am, what I am--I have a good life but I'm here because of need, if I can want anything then I want--"
Inara pulls a bright pin out of the shawl, and it drops down her shoulder, and then down the other, and then farther down, and there's nothing underneath but her.
"I always keep it warm in my rooms," Inara says. "Maybe you should try it."
The conflict, if it was conflict, is tabled.
*
Detente lasts a year. It lasts until Buffy says, "I've been called to Sihnon."
"Called?" Inara says, carefully, and carefully still.
"I work in security," Buffy says. "But sometimes--I also--I work for things other than money."
Inara's fine eyebrows arch. "Volunteer security work?"
"Sort of," Buffy says. "Listen, I--I want to meet you. But if I meet you then you have to know something that you can't ever go back on, and you might not want to know it."
Inara's silent for a moment. "You're with the Independents," she says.
"What? No," Buffy says, and is startled into laughter. "No. I mean I don't think all their ideas are wrong but--no. Oh wow. You thought I was involved with the Browncoats? This whole time? You little rebel."
"Taller than you," Inara says.
"Not a chance." That's flirting, that ends up with the Crystal by the bed and some anti-fogging spray, that isn't what needs to happen right now. Buffy clears her throat.
"What is it, then? What's this great secret?"
Buffy licks her lips. She stands up out of her chair to pace around. She tugs at her hair. For all her imagining, she's never come up with a good plan. Finally she yanks a knife she doesn't like out of a cabinet.
"Look," she says, sitting down in front of the Crystal. "Look. There's a lot of ways to fake this but you know me. You know when I lie, right? So look."
And she carefully takes hold of the flat of the blade and bends the knife in half, until the tip jabs into the handle.
"You're enhanced," Inara says, a thin overlay of relief in her voice. "That's not illegal anymore, Buffy."
"I was sort of born this way," Buffy says. "Actually. Uh. What do you know about the Migration? From Earth-that-was. About why we left."
"The Overuse theory has the most support, I think," Inara says. "And the Comet theory has a certain romance. But no one really knows."
"I know," Buffy says.
"No one knows." Inara fusses with lighting a new incense cone. Her movements are sharp. "It's been a thousand years, and there hasn't been so much as a new artifact found since--"
"We were being eaten," Buffy says.
"Buffy," Inara says.
"We left because we were being eaten," Buffy says. "Inara, I know where Reavers come from. They come from Earth. And I was made to kill them."
"I think you need to start from the beginning," Inara says.
So she does. She takes bits of Giles's speech from that long ago Graduation to patch up her own nervousness and spotty eloquence, because Inara is not going to be satisfied with just the bones of this story, this secret stuck in the throat of history. The holes in reality that let the apocalypse in. The bloody tide that swept across Earth, and the remnant of it that stuck to humanity's fleeing feet, the death-powered girl who died under a yellow sun and the new one born under the white. The creatures who were finally clawing themselves out into the space between stars. The ancient order of Watchers slowly coalescing around her on a base she lives on, but isn't allowed to know the coordinates to.
When she finishes Inara is silent for a long time. Her incense has long since burned itself out, and the distant ringing of temple bells gone silent for the night.
"I do know when you're lying," she says, eventually. "I know you believe this. I don't know if you're crazy."
"I might be crazy," Buffy says. "But I'm not wrong."
"Why are you telling me all this?"
"I want to meet you," Buffy says. "But I want to meet you as me. All of me. And--" and this is the sting in the tail. She continues, with heavy reluctance. "And because you have to know that if you meet me, it won't be safe for you."
"Reavers have never come this far inside," Inara says. She's gone from you're crazy to logistics, which is sort of encouraging, but--
"I've been called to Sihnon," Buffy says. "I haven't been hired. Someone in the government rang our bell and we're running towards you. Even if whatever I find isn't Reavers, it's not going to be Sabbathday dim sum."
They sit in silence, lightyears away from each other.
"If you don't want to see me," Buffy says to her hands, "I understand."
"I don't understand any of this," Inara says, a note of unaccustomed peevishness in her voice. Buffy stays quiet and doesn't look at her. There are different kinds of warrior and different kinds of brave and abruptly Buffy doesn't have this kind of courage. Can't bear to see distance grow in the dark eyes that have somehow become the thing she sees every night, whether the Crystal chimes or not.
"I don't understand any of this," Inara says, again. "You'll come explain to me in person. At the temple."
Buffy's head jerks up. It isn't as though she ever thought Inara wasn't steel inside, but to spend that courage on Buffy, on a dream lover in a burbling, chatty piece of glass--she'd been viciously selfish to even ask.
"There are plenty of guards here," Inara says. "This is the safest place in the system. You'll stay here. We'll talk face to face."
"Are you sure?"
"Of course I'm sure," Inara says. "Besides--" She takes a deep breath, and twitches her shoulders back. "That ship of yours has awful climate control."
Buffy's smile feels like it has been yanked up from deep inside her, a hook dragged up through every fear and doubt and insecurity, snapped through every thread and left her full of a foolish giddiness she hasn't felt in a long, long time.
"I'll see you in three days," Buffy says.
Inara nods, and swipes the connection closed. Buffy grins at her own ridiculous, distorted face in the glass, filled now with a dancing green glow.
Is it over is it over? Talk to someone else? Talk to AN! EE! ONE! in the galaxy? Talk to someone else?
"No one else," she tells it. "No one else. Kuài shuì ba."
The Crystal subsides, and Buffy goes to bed to scream happily into her pillow. She'll meet Inara. She'll smell her perfumes and her silks and her hair and her skin, and she'll keep her safe, she swears it to Whoever's listening.
The whole galaxy, and Inara.