Successor (BTVS)

[X] KILL

Buffy saw red, and her own voice was screaming inside her mind.

The shockwave from her rapid motion exploded water out from the fountain, but even the raucous noise only gave Kathy time to barely raise her eyes. Her anger tempted her to swing right for her head, but she had to make sure Harm was safe. The elbow would do better for that, right there!

It barely offered resistance as the hammer slammed into it, buckling instantly as the whole arm shattered and was swept to the side. Buffy used the remaining angular momentum to spin her body into a flying tackle, crashing into Kathy and knocking her clear of her victim. She distantly heard the water splashing all over the courtyard as she dropped out of superspeed, and a moment later she landed on her off hand and pivoted herself into an axe kick at her target.

Kathy just barely had time to get her remaining useful arm in front of her head; the bone splintered as it took the blow and Buffy quickly recovered into a crouch. She took the barest instant to glance back at Harmony, confirming she was well short of the amount of damage it took to actually re-kill a vampire. That was good. She could put her full attention to the problem that was Kathy.

She should've been listening more carefully all this time. The voice had had the perfect solution for her back in the car; obviously Kathy needed to die, but somehow Buffy just hadn't heard it. It was hard to understand why; maybe she just hadn't been paying close enough attention? Whatever the reason, at least she was correcting her earlier mistake.

Kathy backed out of reach as she made a couple exploratory swings with the hammer, and despite the gruesome damage to her arm, Buffy could tell she was still in fighting form. The actual damage she'd sustained in the fight with Harmony was already healing, even though the ruins of the human-looking outerlayer weren't. She was probably even tougher than the Mok'tagar she'd fought days earlier, if less skilled.

"Alright, alright, fine!" Kathy said annoyedly. "I guess that was enough. I still think you should get rid of her, but if you really want to keep her around I guess you're the boss. You still have to break up with her though, it's just way too gross!"

"Oh, it wasn't nearly enough," Buffy said. Buffy could guess she was stalling for time, waiting for her regeneration to work, and she wasn't going to give it to her. She rushed forward, but Kathy managed to get back another couple feet, behind the cover of an arch near the courtyard's edge. Buffy's hammer swing obliterated it, sending shards of stone everywhere, but the obstruction blunted the blow enough that Kathy was able to stay on her feet when she was hit. Then Kathy was inside Buffy's effective reach, pounding on her with one good arm and trying to claw at her with one that was only half-healed.

Buffy shrugged off the attacks and kneed her in the gut. It didn't produce much of a reaction, but it gave her space to spin her hammer around and get her in the back of the neck with the shaft. She kept it going in a circle, levering her out of the way and then aiming for her bad shoulder again when the business end came back around. Kathy managed to sort of catch it before it hit, but Buffy just kept powering through and Kathy lost the strength contest, losing her footing and tumbling to the ground.

Buffy was about to press her advantage, but she was momentarily distracted by Xander rushing over to Harmony! The leap to her defense was almost instinctive, before she realized he was just dragging her off to the side, away from the fight. She turned back to swipe down at Kathy on the ground, but given the extra time to recover she managed to roll out of the way. The bloodstained tiles where she'd been lying shattered into pieces under the hammer.

"You really need to improve your self control." Kathy was scrambling back and away, still on the ground. "All this property damage is going to be expensive! And what are you really achieving?"

Buffy managed to finally hit her again and mashed her foot into a pulpy mess. Kathy winced, but kept retreating in spite of it, back to the fountain, losing most of her sneaker, all of the fake skin, and even what looked like some parts of the actual demon foot on the way. Buffy wasn't having any more of it though, and instead of going through the slower process of picking the hammer up again, just continued the swinging motion and launched herself over it.

And then she was on top of Kathy, and her fists were getting thoroughly acquainted with her face. Watching Harmony fight without being able to help had been very stressful, and it felt nice to just hit Kathy, again and again. She tried to push and kick her way out, but Buffy got a firm grip with one hand and anchored herself in the fountain's now-compromised foundations. She wasn't going to be budged. Just as Kathy had been too strong for Harmony to escape, Buffy was too strong for Kathy; it was appropriate justice. The demon had been blasé about pain from her injuries before, but she was clearly hurting for real now.

It wasn't long before the remnants of the human mask were gone, and not too many punches after that even the veiny Mok'tagar face didn't look much like it had when she started. Kathy had stopped struggling a while ago, but her jaw was moving now. Maybe she finally had an apology?

"I'm going to-" she hacked out a cough, and bones could be heard breaking and rehealing, "I'll tell daddy..."
KILL
No, of course not. For all her talk about learning, she just couldn't seem to learn herself. Buffy's right hand reached for her hammer and found it, taking a reverse grip just below the head.

Anya was talking, far away, "Buffy, as annoying as she is, she might have a point. Maybe we should slow down, and consider the political ramifications of-"

Buffy drove the topspike of the hammer through Kathy's eye socket, with enough force that the weapon's head crushed her skull when it met her face and the point dug all the way through her to the dirt underneath the broken courtyard tile.

"Or we could not. That's also a valid choice," Anya finished.

"Harmony." Buffy abandoned the grisly corpse and raced over to her girlfriend. She was still unconscious, but had Xander's bloody shirt wrapped around her neck now. Her friends were positioned around her, but all of them had shifted most of their attention to the fight that had just ended.

Buffy was still worried. "Is she gonna be OK?" Angel had been in pretty bad shape a few times and recovered, but he was over two hundred years old. Fledglings were usually more fragile.

"I admit it's not exactly my area of expertise, but I don't believe there's been permanent damage," Giles said. "Stories of vampires being crippled are few and far between, without some curse or poison being involved."

"Most of the blood was Kathy's," Oz said. "Or well, it used to be, until about a minute ago." It had seemed like an enormous amount of bleeding for a vampire, so that made sense. Maybe it wasn't all digested yet, or something. Still, she looked so ragged. Buffy couldn't help but run her finger over her face, looking for some sign of (un)life, even though she knew it was futile. Angel had barely ever twitched when he was asleep, much less beaten unconscious. She settled for carefully moving her head into her lap.

"So I'm guessing the whole Harmony thing is still a thing?" Xander said. Buffy would've been more annoyed, but he had jumped in to save her. Xander wouldn't be Xander if he wasn't insufferable about whoever she was dating.

"I kept telling you on the way over, it's been a thing for over a month!" Anya was complaining, but was also clearly distracted by shirtless Xander. "And not even your currently seductive state is going to win you this argument!"

"I know it's weird," Buffy tried to remember what she'd been thinking when Harmony first invaded her room. Suspecting it was all some crazy spell wasn't that ridiculous, from their perspective. "It just really fits, you know? And it's not like she's bad, she's never even killed anybody."

"Yeah, yeah," Xander sighed. "If I didn't mostly trust her she wouldn't still be on the Watch. Just, look out for yourself, OK?" Anya seemed satisfied enough with this concession to start leaning up against him.

"So with the fitting, and the girls, do you like, like girls?" Willow mumbled. Buffy raised an eyebrow. "Before, I mean. Were you afraid to tell me, umm, because-"

"No!" Buffy said. "This was new. Very new. And I was maybe a little afraid? But I was never perving on you or anything. Harmony is just kind of, well, unique."

"Well, that's a relief. Not that it would've been bad, or anything. To be unique. Like Harmony, or Angel." Willow's forehead wrinkled a little after saying that, and she got conspicuously quiet.

"Well, if all this melodrama is settled for now, we have something of a situation to deal with," Giles said. All of their gazes drifted over the smashed up courtyard filled with bloody mess and Kathy's dead body in the middle of it.

"I'm not saying Kathy didn't earn it, but isn't that Tap-to-talk guy with his army of regenerating demons going to be kind of pissed at us?" Xander said.

"To say nothing of my homeowners' association," Giles quipped.

"You harbored his fugitive daughter when she ran away from home, then embarrassed his soldiers and trapped him politically to keep her. After that, not only is she dead inside three days, you're the one that killed her," Anya summarized. "Blood feuds have been started for less."

"It needed to happen. She was trying to kill Harmony, and she had a grudge," Buffy said, justifying her actions to herself. The voice in her head had been extremely convincing, but it was maybe better not to say that part out loud. "Can I just fight Tapparich to settle it, with that ritual combat idea from before?"

Anya shook her head. "When he finds out about this, his hands will be much less tied than they were before. Pretty much completely bondage-free, really. He wouldn't lose any face by refusing single combat, and he might come at us with his whole army instead."

"How big is his army?" Buffy asked.

"It could be about a hundred Mok'tagar?" Anya guessed. "Maybe two hundred on the outside?"

Buffy winced. They'd had enough trouble with ten earlier.

"I'm gonna have to scare up some of those nets," Xander said.

"Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way," Willow said. "What if he doesn't find out?"

"I don't think we can salvage the Kathy skin," Oz said.

"Impersonating Kathy would be pretty hard," Willow conceded. "But she could just go missing. People go missing in Sunnydale all the time."

"I hardly think an angry father will accept that," Giles said.

"Well, he might still be angry that we lost her, but it'd be a lot better than this!" Willow gestured at Kathy's corpse, the hammer's spike still impaled through the head and sticking up from the ground.

"It could work," Anya said. "But if he found out anyway, it could also backfire, and ruin our reputation for honest dealing."

"Does interdimensional civilization care about things like that?" Xander asked.

"The old ways passed down from ancient times technically don't stigmatize perfidy or betrayal, but most people aren't as devout as they say they are," Anya frowned. "It'd be pretty bad. Gossip spreads fast."

Buffy was still pretty tempted, but then realized a problem. "Could he just figure it out with some kind of magic? He was pretty magical."

"The Hellmouth is hard on that kind of information gathering, and I could muddy the waters some more myself," Willow said. "As long as nobody tells he won't be able to prove anything."

"People at the Watch House saw her leave with us tonight, and they knew where we were going," Xander said.

"So?" Willow asked. "Kathy came, we talked, she went home. She's a big scary demon girl, she walks alone at night, doesn't she?"

"Andrew saw me break her arm earlier," Buffy said. "My dad too."

"They're both trustworthy, aren't they?" Willow said. "We could just make sure they keep quiet."

"Surely that chain of reasoning has never gone wrong before," Giles said.

"Andrew might've already told someone," Oz said. "Or maybe lots of someones."

"It's just a little detail," Willow said. "It isn't like, real evidence or anything."

"There's all this too," Xander indicated the damage to the courtyard. "It's gonna be hard to hide that something happened here, if someone comes looking."

"It's not like we have to fix it ourselves though," Anya said. "We have money."

It was the kind of thing Cynthia would definitely know how to handle, now that Buffy thought about it, but that would mean telling her too, at the least. It was all a huge tangle. "I'm sorry I put us in this position guys. Well, not so much the killing her part. But I could've just not hired her in the first place."

Giles sighed, "You've had extraordinary successes recruiting all summer, even with certain exemplary individuals among us now that many would've never given a chance. Some errors in judgement are inevitable."

It was comforting to hear, but it didn't mean that she didn't have to deal with the fallout. The question was how.

Vote: Voting for this one will be by PLAN. Make an overall plan for how to handle Kathy's death, including who to tell what truths, half-truths, or lies, what to do about the evidence, and/or how to handle the diplomatic and military repercussions if you decide against a cover-up. As I'm going to show in the example, the plan's name should be the main vote with stunts comprising the elements of the plan; please don't try to add stunts to someone else's plan that don't agree with the general thrust of the plan already in place.

Example:
[] Drusilla's Plan
-[] Claim Kathy was just Tapparich's imaginary friend all along.
-[] Have Andrew spread this propaganda to anyone who will listen.
-[] Try to get rid of all evidence Kathy was ever in Sunnydale to begin with, bringing everyone in the city government in on the conspiracy.