Caveman Tactics
Rhiannon was in a good mood.

She jogged downstairs and left her apartment building at a trot, blowing past the only other tenant (the software engineer) at the mailboxes. All he caught was the smell of cinnamon incense, the sight of her ponytail, dyed auburn, and the back of her outfit, a navy tank top and tight-fitting jeans. Her earbuds blasted an old Skinny Puppy track. Its distortion and crunching riffs made a strange accompaniment to the afternoon. She took public transport across a few neighborhoods and hopped off near Connor's place. On her way up the road, she kept her eyes on the blades of crab grass sprouting in the sidewalk cracks. She almost missed him. He was about a block ahead of her, heading in the other direction. She picked up the pace to catch up.

"Boo." Rhiannon knocked her shoulder into his. She wound up the white wires of her digital music player.

He'd been looking up at the sky, watching the way the clouds scudded across the blue expanse as he walked, realizing that he could still tell what time it was just by tracking the position of the fiery orb. Even for city living, some skills never lost their usefulness. Connor adjusted his cheap sunglasses, then took a staggering step to the left when his shoulder was purposely bumped.

"Ow! What?" The soles of his tennis shoes slapped against the concrete as he regained the sidewalk, and he rubbed his shoulder while arching an eyebrow at Rhiannon. He'd been on his way to the grocery store to pick up a few staples, and he watched the thin wire of the portable music player disappear before adding, "You know, most people just say hello."

Rhiannon said, "We're not most people. I thought monster-speak would be fitting. And by the way, you're clumsy, annnnd nice to see you, too." The electronic device fit into the front pocket of her jeans. She swung her arms, snapping her fingers and slapping her fist into a palm. A week ago, knocking Connor off his feet would've required a running start, so apologetic wasn't what she readily felt. The breeze blew strands of hair into her face. "Can I come?" Unsure where he headed, Rhiannon didn't know if her presence interrupted, but she planned to walk the distance to wherever.

"Yeah, sure. I was just on the way to the store. We need some sodas and stuff. I'm trying to keep up with my end of the grocery shopping so Francess doesn't have to go out every week."

Connor was walking again, and it was almost as if it took his brain a minute to catch up to him, his thoughts having scattered with the jostling his friend had given him. The street had gone quiet with the brief lull in traffic, and he listened to the noises his sneakers were making, rubber on concrete, as he covered the distance with slow strides. Slap, slap, slap...

It gradually caught up with him, though, and the Destroyer turned to look at the brunette, his eyebrow arching again, and after a second he reached out and poked her closest shoulder with his index finger. Stress testing again.

Rhiannon's eyebrow mirrored his. "What, now we're poking?" She reached out and poked him back, harder. Sometimes their physical communication reminded her of cave people. "Very scientific. Most people just ask." The look on her face gave it away, though. A little bit of fire behind brown eyes. "Yes. I could kick your ass, right now. Or we could wait for the grocery store, if you're into witnesses." A smile drew up the corners of her mouth. After she got her abilities back, it crossed Rhiannon's mind to send an email or text, but for whatever reason, she decided to make her re-entrance into the super-group in person.

The strangest thing happened to Connor's expression, and he took the sunglasses off to look Rhiannon over without the dark lenses shielding his eyes. She looked the same, her compact frame clad in her usual unofficial uniform, but he saw it, saw it as clearly as if a neon sign blazed above her head. For one second, he looked young and happy, the way someone might look if they'd just seen their first sunrise. Later, he would be grateful for the city truck that blew its horn as the driver within was cut off by an SUV. Otherwise, he might have done something to embarrass the both of them, like hug her.

"You and what army?" His voice was gruff, and he put the shades back on before hooking one thumb into a belt loop. But his bones felt like they might melt from relief. If realizing that she could no longer feel his Otherness had shaken Rhiannon, not being able to sense hers had rattled the Destroyer to the soles of his worn-out shoes. "You're welcome to try, but maybe not at the store. Cops have real trouble to go after, y'know."

He edged over in her direction, bumped her shoulder with his. 'Welcome back' and 'I'm glad' at once, no matter the silence of it. "There's an ice cream place in the grocery store, a Ben 'N Jerry's. Would you like one scoop or two?"

His expression made Rhiannon's smile widen.

"Pssh, two," she answered, as if it were an insane question. "Strawberry." In the absence of burning a cigarette, Rhiannon put her hands in her back pockets. They walked along in the quiet, she with elbows lightly swaying, and then she cut her eyes at Connor. Unable to resist. "Me and an army of little, plastic soldiers. One-pose." If she thought it true, Rhiannon never would've joked about it. Most times, they came out at a draw, for lack of wanting to sit in an ER waiting room, two busted-up and sheepish friends.

"By the way, thank you for not caring that I didn't call for back-up." Rhiannon lifted her shoulders. "I had my reasons." Part of it protectiveness, part of it pride.

"Right, because I'm able to talk you into anything ever," Connor said with an eyeroll. "Not that I wouldn't have shown up if you had asked. I hope I don't have to tell you that." The coins in his pocket made a clinking noise as he tugged at the belt loop his thumbed was latched onto. "I thought I had him collared when I went out looking for him with Faith, but it turned out to be some stupid college kids."

The two of them had reached the edge of the store's parking lot, and he watched idly as a rattletrap Buick passed by, the tailpipe emitting bluish smoke. "That can't be good."

Her eyebrows pulled together in reaction to the smog. "Honestly, I'm glad you didn't." Rhiannon waited for the car and its pollution to pass before stepping onto the blacktop. "Kinda needed to work it out with Jenny and Melinda." Reaching overhead, she tightened her ponytail. "So--" She mentally rewound her oncoming sentence. How to word it without sticking her boot in her mouth? "You and Faith. How okay is that?" Arms flexing behind her back, she scrutinized the pavement instead of his profile. Last she knew, they couldn't be in a room together, then they were out hunting bad guys. Somewhere, she missed the segue.

He shrugged, following after the Slayer past the carts lined up outside on the sidewalk. "It's...we're not all the way back yet. I called her because it made sense, because whatever might be wrong with her otherwise she knows what she's doing when it comes to a possible fight. There's still a lot of things I think she doesn't get, but she knows what she did was wrong and why I was mad. I guess that's all I can reasonably ask for."

Not that it didn't irk, Faith's insistence on going all Pavlov's dog every time his father's name was mentioned, and the companion piece to that, which was refusing to acknowledge the vampire's flaws, but Connor had long since realized Angel threw a long shadow. If he was going to be friends with her again, he'd just have to learn to live with it. Just like she would have to learn to live with him not being overly amused by it. Such was the way of the world. "What happened when you found him? Other than the obvious."

"Uh," Rhiannon raised her shoulders. "We broke in. Jenny and Melinda held off his... sideshow freaks while I threatened to blow his kneecaps off. It didn't take him long to talk." She tilted her head to the side and walked beneath the awning of the supermarket. Its shade, and the air conditioning coming from the automatic doors, brought the temperature down. "The funny thing was, he was more worried I'd put a bullet in an aquarium full of his creatures than he was about being shot." The Slayer scratched the nape of her neck and sidestepped a woman, whose cart contained a kid and a million boxes of cereal. "We broke all the jars holding the... you know, mojo. Then we tranq'd him and left the others in a cage. I went through Whistler to find somebody to take him and the collection off our hands. The police weren't gonna cut it."

Inside the grocery store, elevator music played beneath the sound of electronic check-out beeps. "Melinda's..." She arched an eyebrow. "Interesting."

"Yeah, she comes off a little prickly at first," Connor replied, picking up one of the green plastic baskets where they were stacked. It bumped his hip as it dangled from his left hand, and he added, "We hung out a little bit at some college party, then I ran into her again at UIC. That was how I figured out she'd been attacked too."

The ice cream place was in the front of the store, and he passed by on his way to the soda section. Not needing to buy perishables meant he could do the shopping, then sit down for a few minutes afterwards. "I kinda thought you'd end up killing him," he told Rhiannon in a low voice, pulling the shades off to tuck them into the neck of his shirt. "Kinda glad you didn't. Guy like that, he deserves to live and be miserable without being able to steal from people. He wouldn't be worth the guilt either."

Rhiannon crossed her arms and walked alongside him. "Yeah, I thought I'd have to do the deed, too. I was ready. I wouldn't have felt bad if it happened out of necessity. But that's a slippery slope. Last time I went down it, I busted my ass." A person couldn't take lives without consequences. Even if the police didn't catch them, their consciences would, or the driving urge to keep doing it. In a weird way, it was easier to throw caution aside and kill anything that got in the way, at least in the moment. Easier was bad.


She picked up a hand-written sign about fruit prices and set it back down. "What it comes down to is, I'm not an impulsive idiot anymore. Yay for personal growth."

"Yeah, I remember that. More often than not, the easiest thing is also the worst thing. Wherever he is now, I can guarantee he wishes you'd done him the favor." Connor picked up a net bag of oranges and put them into the basket, then made his way through the rest of the produce section. "So what's next?" he asked the Slayer, because there was always something 'next' or something 'else'. Rhiannon was right, they weren't most people. "Maybe we could do some patrolling soon, just to see what's moving around out there. Give the bloodsuckers something to worry about."

"Sounds like fun," she said. "Whenever you're free." Rhiannon rubbed her lips together and looked around the produce section. The grocery store was one of her least favorite places. It ranked up there with laundromat and post office. "I went out and staked a vampire when I first got back. Small fry. I'm in the mood to take on something sweat-worthy. I could get in a lot worse trouble with you there." An annoyed look cinched her eyebrows. "Speaking of trouble, do you know that Deanna, Katherine, and Grace are in Chicago? Shit."

Rhiannon put her back to a refrigerator. "Deanna actually left an autopsied corpse in my stairwell a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, the landlord found it first. No bite marks, so nobody she picked off herself. The police said the body was snatched out of a morgue, a car accident victim. I guess she wanted to freak me out because I beat up Victoria. Mostly it gave the landlord piss stains."

"Grace I've been hearing about. She took offense at Avery's existence and started stomping on him every chance she got before putting Faith in the hospital. I actually thought at first that Deanna was behind what happened to you. I don't know much about Katherine other than this thing with Kris. The three of them sound like they could be dangerous if they ever decide to band together and take over the world. I'm not sure why it is, but I think female vamps are more lethal than the guys."

He scratched the back of his neck, reflecting that he needed to get a haircut now that summer was on them. The two of them had meandered into the canned goods aisle, and he looked at soups and baked beans before selecting a few of the cylinders. "You have to come to my birthday party," he said after a minute. "I'm gonna be thirty, I think it'd be okay to celebrate. Francess mentioned wanting to meet some of my friends, I think that'd be cool. I don't knew when it'll be, but it'll be soon and I'd like to have you there."

"Female vamps are vindictive," she said, picking up a can of broccoli cheese soup and reading the label. "The men get distracted with comparing their undead dicks to cold steel. Because every girl loves humping a flag pole." Rhiannon replaced the can and smiled at him. "Let me get this straight... you're having a party? And you're thirty?" She pinched his ribcage. "God, you're old. And suddenly social. Wouldn't miss it for the end of the world."

"Shut up," Connor said in a genial voice, smacking Rhiannon's hand away. "I figure the worst has already happened anyway. I can either get on with whatever happens next or I can crawl back into a hole and sulk. I like it out in the world better, there's more air to breathe."

He had resigned himself to the idea that 'whatever happens next' did not include Jessica, who maybe had never really liked him to start with. A single question, even if it was just to ask what his childhood was like, might have turned his opinion around, but she was too busy being afraid of him. Punishing him for something he hadn't done. He wasn't enjoying the nostalgia of the latter. "So yeah, you can meet Francess again. And Clemence. It'll be fun."


"Wait... I don't remember meeting Francess a first time." If she had, Rhiannon had blanked on it. She didn't often forget names or faces, but it was entirely possible she flaked on this one. She bounced on the outsides of her boots and scanned the canned goods. "Are either of them super-powered?" She pulled a coupon out of the automatic dispenser, simply because it spit the glossy rectangle at her. "Not like it's mandatory," she said, reading the fine print. "Just trying to prepare myself for possible antennae." She smiled and tucked the coupon in Connor's grocery basket. It was for tampons.

"Clemence is an empath or something," the Destroyer answered, having missed the addition of the coupon to his basket. "I don't know about Francess, you'd have to ask her yourself. And I thought you met her during the whole high school thing. I know I'm not so old my memory's going bad. What's your excuse?"

The soda aisle was next, and Connor weighed the merits of Coke versus Mountain Dew before putting a six-pack of the red and white cans into the basket. "I was kinda concerned with that guy running around that Clemence might get caught, but I haven't heard anything from her so I guess she's okay. Probably just wrapped up with the end of the school year."

"Yeah." Rhiannon frowned. "I wouldn't call being aware of someone's presence in an alter-verse, 1980s high school 'meeting them'," she said dryly. "In that reality, I sold drugs to Katherine and voted for Elfleda for prom queen. That was not me. " For the sake of entertainment, she read the generic brands of sodas. Mountain Mist. Doctor Thunder. "Anyway, we broke all the jars. If Berg had hers, she's got it back now. Ask her if a firefly drifted into her apartment and flew down her throat."


She backed down the aisle, watching Connor instead of where she walked. "How do you not know if your roommate's super-powered? You said she dates a vampire, right? Avery?"

"Avery's not exactly any vampire," Connor said. "If she was bringing Katherine or Grace around, I'd be thinking she'd need whatever powers she could get. Not to mention a possible visit to a shrink. But Avery's not dangerous, I don't think."

He bumped into an arranged display of cans, knocked one of them off, caught it absently and replaced it before moving on. "It's not exactly something that's come up in conversation, though."

Rhiannon stopped at the end cap, where a display of spaghetti sauce was stacked precariously high. A breeze from the meat section chilled her neck. "Not what I meant." She put her hands in her pockets. "Avery seemed okay. I just thought if she dates a vampire and lives with a demon hunter... That's a pretty high tolerance." Gesturing at his small basket of groceries, "So what else do you need? I'm freezing." The brunette raised herself onto tiptoes.

"Um..bread. Then I'm finished." He'd neglected to wear a jacket because of the warm day outside, but the air coming from the freezer section ahead was cold. "I'll go ahead and get that, you can head up towards checkout if you want."

Connor found and snagged two loaves of bread, one white and one wheat, then made his way back to the front of the store. The do-it-yourself lanes were full, so he unloaded his basket onto the conveyor belt. The now-crumpled coupon landed on the black rubber surface and he looked at it before giving Rhiannon a 'cut it out' look. He snatched it up before anyone else saw, wadded it up and threw it into the wastebasket at the cashier's station.

She snickered under her breath and perused the magazine selection. The National Inquirer had a cover story about Michael Jackson. A small box in the corner offered the inside scoop on a vampire celebrity. Same old, same old. Once the cashier began to scan Connor's items, Rhiannon meandered to the end of the lane and started putting things in a bag. "What've you got in mind for your party?" she asked. "I'm guessing it's at your place." The plastic crinkled as she pulled another off the rack.

"Yeah, it's big enough that we can have some people over. Maybe we can get some Chinese takeout or something. We don't have a game system, but you can bring your X Box if you want. I have no idea what kind of host I'll be, but with people I know around it shouldn't be too bad." Connor dug out his wallet and paid for the groceries, dropped the change into his pocket along with the rolled-up receipt. Once they were walking away from the register towards the ice cream stand he said, "Hard to believe it's been so long since I've been here. In this dimension, I mean. Sometimes it feels a lot like I just got here."

"Not to me." Rhiannon allowed the bag she carried to twist around her fingers. "I can't remember not knowing you." It was an exaggeration, of course, but she felt as if Connor and she had been friends more than four or five years. The life she led before Nevada faded into the backdrop, just an under-painting that barely mattered. Whistler was the only connection left, and he gave her the ticket out of Michigan. "So this birthday thing. That an anniversary of an actual birth or you getting out of Quar'toth?" Her own birthdays slipped by, willfully ignored by Rhiannon. It was just a date on her driver's license.

She leaned her knee against the ice cream stand. Her fingertip turned purplish-blue, so she let the bag unwind.

"Either. Both at once, maybe. It feels like everything's new, y'know? Not just us, but the whole world. I used to think that it'd be the end of everything if others knew the truth about what's out there, but i'ts not, it's just different. I don't feel so self-protective anymore, like I'm going to turtle any second. Makes breathing easier."

He was dissatisfied with the explanation, but eloquence was not one of his strong suits. There were tiny tables in the Ben N Jerry's, and he set his bags down next to one of the chairs. "Two scoops, strawberry, right?" he asked, indicating the menu behind the counter. "Cup or cone?"

"I think one's good," she said, changing her mind, now they were out of the heat. "Definitely on a cone." Rhiannon set the third bag on a tabletop, but didn't sit down. If they could walk and eat ice cream at once, she preferred that to hanging out in the grocery store. A cone only took one hand. While waiting for Connor, she got out her cell phone and checked her text messages. She drafted one to Juliet, a simple, 'Are we speaking?' and reflected on it before hitting send. If they weren't on good terms, she might as well know about it. Periodically, Rhiannon had to remind herself that Juliet was a hormonal teenager who hadn't been in their crew for that long. In other words, it didn't take much to ruffle the younger Slayer's feathers. Once she'd been in the game for a while, she'd figure out that grudges should be saved for actual wrongdoing. Like, say, going on a homicidal binge. Given certain circumstances, even that was forgivable.

"Juliet's a handful," she said. "She's all about the duty, which is great, and she works hard, but..." Rhiannon rubbed her temple with the heel of her hand. "Her brain still interprets things in black and white."

They were the only people waiting to be served, and Connor bought a double fudge cone for himself along with Rhiannon's selection. "Kind of makes sense if she's freshly Called," he said to the Slayer, handing her the frosty treat before snagging the bags again. "Would another perspective help her? Not that you can't handle it, but if she's an absolutist maybe she could use someone else's point of view. If you want me to, I could have a casual word with her." This was new too, offering to step in with advice, but with Rhiannon it felt okay. What Juliet would think of him was anyone's guess, but he was willing to chance it.

"Mm. Maybe. So far, it's just that she gets pissed over little things. Then again, so did I, until I crossed the line myself. Once you've had to apologize for a massive fuck-up, you get lenient on other people. Ironically?" Rhiannon wrapped a napkin around the cone and picked up the bag again. As they exited through the quiet doors, she said, "It's her opinion of me that freaks me out the most. She doesn't know the half of it. I get this feeling she wouldn't respect me if she had more details. I tell her as little as possible."

Outside, the afternoon soon hurt her eyes. Rhiannon squinted. After a bit of maneuvering, and she put on her sunglasses. "Not because I don't want to. Maybe I'm selling her short." She rescued a drop of strawberry ice cream before it hit her thumb.

The idea that someone could disrespect Rhiannon had Connor frowning, and he covered his eyes with his shades before sampling his ice cream. "Well, if you decide it's necessary, just let me know. We were all that young once, and I like to feel like I'm helping."

The day was hot and bright, and he could feel the heat coming off the parking lot through the soles of his shoes. He hoped his ice cream didn't melt before he got to finish it. "It's good to have you back, Rhiannon."

She smiled and licked a dribble of pink ice cream off her lip. "I didn't move. I just hit like a wuss." The brunette watched the wiggling lines of radiation hovering over the asphalt. Her tongue traced a circle around the cone. "Actually, no," she countered, "I wasn't completely helpless. I fought Victoria and didn't get my throat ripped out... I didn't see you much, though. Was I avoiding you or were you avoiding me?"

"I don't think it was so much avoiding," Connor said, minding a thin streak of fudge as it tried to wander past the edge of the cone. "I've been trying to get my head on right again, figured you had your own personal stuff happening. It's hard for me not to clutch at what's familiar in a crisis. I didn't want to put too much on your plate, I guess."

He was a little self-conscious saying it, but he hadn't wanted to use the brunette as a crutch while she was dealing with her own situation. Now that things were back to normal for both of them (whatever normal even meant anymore) he felt better about...better about everything, really. "I hope you don't think I was doing it on purpose."


"No. I doubt I'd let you get away with it." She stepped on a concrete marker in front of a parking space. Bright, yellow paint covered it. Rhiannon slow-motion walked off the other side. "The clutching or the intentional avoiding. This is really good," she added, holding up her cone. It was years since she ate one. Small chunks of strawberry jutted out from the smooth ice cream. "Definitely worth going in the grocery store. I try to con Purity into doing that for me, except if I don't give her a list, we end up with nothing but stir fry and noodles. By the way, it's her X-Box. I'll see if she minds."

Back on the sidewalk, she kept close to the buildings, where there was shade. "So patrol. You want to pick a night or play it by ear? I'll be out, anyway, with Juliet if she answers my text."

"I'm sure I'll catch up with you some night," the Destroyer said easily. "Now that they're building stuff in Lincoln Park, I think I'm waiting for the next set of creepy-crawlies to announce themselves. Shouldn't take long."

He wondered again about Juliet, then pushed the subject aside. Summer was here, it was a beautiful day, and he'd be fighting by his best friend's side soon enough. Life was good.