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The mayor’s office has been majorly made-over to match the rest of city hall and now it looks like the inside of a tower of Eggo waffles. Honeycomb walls, honeycomb floors, honeycomb throne on top of a honeycomb lump that used to be the desk, and on top of the throne sits the Queen of the Apisir demons.
According to Giles’s research, Apisir demons are actually pretty human-friendly, at least as far as demons go. They’re supposed to shun society, keep to themselves in the woods, and just focus all their demony leisure time on being one with nature.
But, well. Nature. Vacuum. And there’s a giant, monster-snake-sized vacuum in the middle of their city government as of two weeks ago thanks to Sunnydale High’s graduating class of 1999.
Buffy puts a hand on her hip and surveys the room. “So, this is what all the buzz is about.”
The joke gets the grand prize of zero laughs, but that’s probably from the language barrier. The Apisir? Not so large with the English. Or the any spoken language for that matter, not that she was looking to take that technically passing C+ in French for a field test.
The response she gets is a lot of agitated gyrating from the queen as she glances around the room with her buggy compound eyes at the half-dozen sheepish-looking handmaidens.
“I’m sorry,” says Buffy. “I really meant to pick up Interpretive Dance but it never fit into my schedule.”
Lucky for them both, they have a mutual shared language in extreme violence.
The queen sets aside the jar of jam she was eating out of with her hands like a mutant cartoon bear, shrugs off her big royal cloak to flex her hilariously undersized wings, and lunges at Buffy.
The plan is pretty simple. Take out the queen, all the other Apisir in the hive will immediately fall into line, especially once Willow and Giles’ smoke spell goes all
Wizard of Oz
poppies on their fuzzy yellow foes. Giles just apparently forgot to mention that the queen is twice the size of the drones patrolling around the grounds outside. She’s gotta be an easy eight-feet tall even without those–frankly stunning–heels, and hippy but in a way that works for her.
For all the study halls and late evenings training in the library for the last two-and-a-half years, Giles really dropped the ball on preparing her for the best way to defend against an attack from someone whose sword is pretty much part of their butt. But Buffy took out a few minions in the alley on her way in to clear some workspace for the spellslinging Scoobies and she knows from some experience that was very nearly of the personal variety that disarming an Apisir is the quickest way to Slay. She’s just got to get the queen to sink her stinger into something and then—
bam
. Easy, hands-free disemboweling.
She dodges the first strike, sidestepping around the queen and hopping up onto what used to be a decent accent chair. With the extra height, she has a clear shot to throw an uppercut into the queen’s jaw, but her timing is off or the busy bee buzzy vibrating throws her and she only connects with a mandible that cracks off and gooey, clear blood the consistency of corn syrup pours out.
With Buffy just ever so slightly out of stinging range, the queen retaliates with her own hands. She claws and scratches with four fists and catches Buffy over the chest and neck. A long tear rips open over her clavicle, burning and welling blood instantly.
Buffy leaps, spins, and flips away.
Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Stay in range, bait the stinger. It’s scarier than the fuzzy little paw hands but she’s so not here to get cat scratched to death.
Buffy draws the queen back toward the far wall of the office and then lunges, punching with a full Slayer power punch into the queen’s thorax thingy or some part of her with a buggy anatomical name she knew for one afternoon in Sophomore year. Some of the yellow carapace cracks open under her knuckles and the queen makes a choking sound and elbows Buffy in the top of the head so hard that her ears ring and she stumbles off balance, which gives her demony foe the opening she wanted.
The queen plunges her stinger into Buffy’s thigh.
It
hurts.
This isn’t some little sewing needle coming out of her majesty’s royal derrière. It’s a full on rapier that’s sharpened way beyond regulation. Buffy sees white and bites into her tongue when her teeth clack shut over her cry of pain. Blood fills her mouth and runs down her leg and she really for real does try to focus on the good of it all, that the queen has only until Buffy pulls away to live and then she’ll be done and she can go back to her summer break. She clenches her fists and focuses every last decibel of Slayer strength into staying standing while she waits for the inevitable
slorp
of the queen’s insides falling out from the hole she’s about to tear into herself and she hopes really, really hard that the ancient mystical mojo whoever that thought One Girl in All the World was the best response to the hordes of Hell also thought to cover bee allergies in their superpower starter kit.
Because, boy, talk about embarrassing ways to lose your Chosen One.
Honestly, Buffy wouldn’t have One Girl’d it if she’d really had a choice in the matter. But with Angel and Cordy gone gone, Xander on the road Kerouacing it off on his own—oh, boy, she’s glad these thoughts are only in her head—and Giles and Willow taking shelter next to the dumpsters to prep the smoke spell, her backup options are harshly limited. Oz is great for a snarky quip and a laconic perspective but without the rest of the Gang to back them up, she feels better off going it solo than risking his life.
She’s regretting that a little bit now, when it sure would be nice for a monosyllabic werewolf to shove this overgrown honeybee off of her. Her nerves scream and her knee turns fully jellified, wobbling and threatening to buckle under her. Blood pours down her leg and finishes the hit job on her poor wedge sandal. She is learning new depths and heights and all measurements in all kinds of dimensions of stickiness. It’s been a very educational foiling of ambiguously bureaucratic evil plans.
But not educational enough, apparently, because the queen kicks Buffy’s leg out from under her when she tries to rise back up and the stinger just slips neatly and oh so painfully out of her thigh without harming the queen even one little bit.
The queen looks completely unflustered, in fact. Not a single flus in sight for this lady. Just calm anger as she kicks Buffy in the kidneys, drops her down to all fours, and stabs her stinger sharply down into her back.
Buffy gasps and gags as the stinger slips in between two of her ribs. The rush of pain leaves her dizzy and makes the room, in all its lumpy, waxy glory, tilt and spin like a sticky carnival ride.
Buffy kicks, her brain going all sludgy and goopy on the inside. She is beyond fighting smart, she’s fighting desperate. She’s fighting like terrified-out-of-her-boots fifteen-year-old Buffy in her borrowed Hemrey High letter jacket and fluffy Marabou feather purse the first time Merrick sent her out on patrol completely on her own.
The queen still has the advantage though and she pushes down harder, tearing into more of Buffy’s insides. Buffy loses the fight against her instincts and drops onto her chest trying to escape.
Half a dozen fuzzy black legs surround her and the incessant energy grid hum that’s taken over city hall doubles and triples and turns into a whole buzzing chorus. She shouldn’t have wasted her buzz pun so early on; that was a complete beginner mistake.
The queen lies down on top of Buffy and the handmaidens join her. Seven very tall bee ladies begin to spoon her on the office floor and as she’s buried, Buffy thinks this vibrating mass of demon women is probably something Xander’s had a very specific erotic dream about that she never, ever wants to hear in detail.
It’s warm down here, and sticky, and her stab wounds are varied and painful. Buffy squirms but it doesn’t really get her anywhere and her limbs are solidly pinned under the round, fuzzy bodies.
“This really doesn’t seem fair, does it?” she asks them. She has to gasp to breathe against the weight crushing her into a Buffy pancake and flattening her lungs and other organs. “I mean, if you all really want, we could take turns. You try to cuddle me, I try to punch you to death. But I’m only here for the queen, honest. We can keep this one-on-one.”
The Apisir demons don’t let up and the warmth is actually kind of soothing, really. Like being tucked into bed really tightly as a little kid, if the bed was a stack of waffles and the blankets were alive and humming at her.
The pain is sort of letting up a little, or it’s getting smothered would maybe be the more traditional way to think of things, but when has Buffy ever been one for the tradition anyway? She’s a new Slayer for a new era, she’s doing things her way, and right now, her way is being loved to death by a… eight-tet of four-armed yellow demon ladies.
What’s the double of a quarter?
Quintet is one of them. What number is quin? Seven? Seven. Quin. Sequin.
That’s a whole thing, if you speak Latin you speak a whole bunch of languages and she doesn’t speak or read Latin but she’s around it a lot.
She smells smoke.
The vibrations get a little slower around her and her head gets a little clearer and her lungs get a little more burny and she knows she was actually present for the whole smoke spell conversation study party last night but it’s like English class, really. You gotta learn to tune in for the relevant parts and her relevant part was the part that went: “Buffy will locate the queen and open the window so the summoned smoke can induce a state of stupor until—Willow, are there honestly no more jellies in the box?”
And, you know what, it might not be her place but she’s gonna award herself an A+ on the first half. The queen is very thoroughly located. She’s gold star sticker and ten points of extra credit located. The second part, she was going to ask for an extension on, really, she just ran out of time and she’s got so much other work to catch up on and there’s really the whole extra outstanding circumstance of getting stabbed through the gut that just knocked her plans out of whack but she was definitely going to get to it next.
Smoke is something Buffy is familiar with. She has a lot of extracurricular experience with burning buildings full of monsters, so she can confidently say that this smoke is not of the normal smoke. The smoke pours in like water, like Aunt Arlene overstuffing a turkey, like one of those real powderpuff cats climbing into a box. It moves like it’s a real actual living thing that really
wants
to be in the building with all of them. She’s already feeling Froot Loopy enough but the smoke makes her dizzier. Her eyes burn and water.
The demonic dogpile gets heavier and limper on top of her as Buffy coughs and hacks and tries to wring her lungs out like wet laundry. She squirms but even when they aren’t actively trying to microwave her insides, they’re still seven very tall demon ladies with a whole lot of junk in the trunk who are falling asleep on top of her and the floor is still sticky with sweet, sweet bee barf. She doesn’t get very far.
One of the handmaidens rolls away, scoops a fistful of honey from the floor, and sleepily stuffs it into her own mouth.
A second handmaiden follows.
The rest get lazier and more lump-like on top of Buffy and most of them also take a snack break to refuel after all of their hard work with the smothering.
The queen is still shuddering on top of Buffy, still smooshing her into the floor, but even her majesty can’t refuse the siren call of getting in on the big big taste by taking a big big bite. Buffy can’t pull away but when the queen leans her head over Buffy’s shoulder, Buffy raises her arm. The puncture in her side rips further, honey seeps into the wound. Her stab wounds burn, her chest burns on the inside and outside, her eyes burn, her shoulder is
not
excited about her new act as a circus contortionist, but she pushes through, like she always does.
She’s the one girl, alone, and she fits her elbow around the queen’s big fluffy neck and flexes with every last speck of strength she’s got.
The queen’s neck snaps. She goes limp and collapses. One of her antenna jabs Buffy in the eye like her eyes weren’t already watering enough but she’s still. She’s slayed.
When the smoke eases up five minutes later, Buffy’s still trapped but the bleeding has slowed, Slayer healing kicking in or maybe the honey’s just really good for sealing wounds. Her eyes are still watering and the world is smeary like wet toilet paper. She hasn’t had a decent breath of air in way too long and she isn’t touching a single delicious smoky barbecue meal for the rest of the summer if she can help it, maybe the rest of the year.
No honey either. Her post-Slayage nonfat yogurts are a strictly honey-free affair from now on and, really, Giles never has to know she wasn’t much of a tea person before all this anyway.
At least all of her horrible coughing leads the rest of the gang right to her though.
“Buffy!” Willow runs in, Giles quick behind her, and they haul her out from the dead queen and the Sleeping Beauty handmaidens while Oz hurries and yanks all the windows open.
She’s gone all Sea Legs Buffy on them and her legs don’t remember how to be her legs, exactly, so they have to help her over to the windowsill with Willow’s arm around her middle. She sits partway out the window, gulping in air and hacks and coughs and tries to catch her breath while Willow inspects her for any sign of imminent death.
The stabby holes in her body hurt but don’t seem to have hit anything vital, and the bleeding has mostly stopped from the wounds in her side and over her chest.
The other Apisir demons have no comment to make about the regicide, through contemporary dance means or otherwise, and just lie around continuing to slurp up honey by the handful without blinking at the second set of intruders.
The sprinklers finally go off, so now she’s sticky and asphyxiating and wet, just to mix things up a little.
Giles leans out the other window to wipe off his glasses and looks at the goopy mess of the office. “They didn’t waste much time in taking over this space, did they?”
“I kinda like it,” says Oz. He stands with his hands in his pockets and nods and lets the water pour over him unbothered. “It’s modern. But organic.”
Willow sacrifices her thin cardigan to the cause of tying off Buffy’s leg.
When Buffy can breathe well enough to speak, she says, “So what’s the deal? I thought bees only sting once. I was sorta banking on the whole ‘only one gaping stab wound per customer’ rule.” That’s too many words in a row and she starts coughing again hard enough that Willow has to slap her on the back.
“Well, not the queen though, Buffy,” says Willow. Her slapping turns into gentle little circles. She’s being nice about it but she’s also kind of Willow about it and she’s probably disappointed Buffy didn’t ask to borrow her notes ahead of the exam and just let herself get the D-. “Queens have smooth stingers, so they slide right back out. The drones have barbs, that’s why they get stuck.”
Buffy looks at her through watery eyes and wishes she had copied those notes after all. Or that she hadn’t paid attention at all and not gotten her hopes up on the whole one-and-done dealy. She’s not sure she would have done much better without knowing the fake rule that her opponent wasn’t going to follow in the first place, but she’s pretty sure this would have all gone better if her bio teacher hadn’t gotten killed halfway through the entomology unit.
She slides her arm around Willow’s shoulder and the One Girl in All the World and Her Three Friends Also in the World limp for the stairs. Their feet stick in the mess on the floor and they have to circle around the queen’s large and thankfully late body to get to the door and Buffy gives her one last look before they head out into the hall and then turns away.
“You know, one of these days we should really fight a demon themed after a class I did good in,” says Buffy. “Like gym. Or lunch.”