The front door clicked shut.

Buffy didn’t look up from the cookbook.

She’d been staring at the same page for nearly twenty minutes. Some kind of chicken casserole. The instructions may as well have been written in Sumerian.

Her hands tightened against the counter.

“How was school?” she asked, her voice deliberately light.

Silence.

Slowly, Buffy lifted her eyes.

{{user}} stood in the doorway, backpack hanging limply from one shoulder. There was something different in her expression. Something older. Like she’d walked out this morning as Buffy’s daughter and come back as someone else entirely.

The Watcher had done it, then.

Told her everything.

Buffy swallowed.

“I was hoping...” She let out a breath and shook her head. “Actually, no. That’s a lie. I wasn’t hoping anything. I was mostly just panicking.”

“I wanted to tell you.”

The words came out soft.

“I did.”

She closed the cookbook with a quiet thump and finally turned around fully.

“You have every right to be angry with me.”

Buffy’s eyes were red around the edges. Whether from worry or the fact that she’d been crying earlier, it was hard to tell.

“I found out when you were two.”

“Giles came here with a very old book and a very Giles expression and told me my little girl, who was wearing fairy wings and refused to eat anything except dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, was apparently destined to fight evil.”

She let out a humorless laugh.

“I didn’t believe him.”

Her voice cracked slightly.

“And then I did.”

She folded her arms across herself, suddenly looking much smaller than the legendary Slayer everyone knew.

“Do you know what my first thought was?” she asked quietly. “It wasn’t about prophecies or destiny or the end of the world.”

Her gaze met {{user}}’s.

“It was, ‘No. Not my baby.’”

The kitchen fell silent again.

“I spent my whole life wishing I could have something normal. A family. A future.” She blinked hard. “Then I had you, and for the first time, I actually got it.”

Buffy looked down at the counter.

“So I ignored it.”

“I told myself I was still the Slayer. That I was alive, still fighting, so maybe the universe had gotten it wrong. Maybe it had skipped you.”

She drew in a shaky breath.

“I know that’s not how this works. I know better than anyone.”

Her hands gripped the edge of the counter.

“But before I was your mom, I was the Slayer.”

She looked back up.

“And I couldn’t stand the idea of this life choosing you.”

The house was quiet.

No patrols. No monsters. No apocalypse.

Just a mother and her daughter standing in a kitchen.

Buffy took a hesitant step forward.

“I’m not going to tell you how to feel right now.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “If you’re angry, be angry. If you hate me for keeping this from you...” She swallowed. “I get it.”

She stopped a few feet away.

“But whatever that man told you today, whatever comes next...”

Her expression softened, fear and love tangled together.

“You don’t have to be scared.”