Author: Dyane Windshadow

Timeline: Just after 'As You Were', Season 6

Rating: PG

Disclaimer: Joss's toys, my playground. I don't own the characters, I just play with them.

Summary: Riley's POV of events in As You Were

A/N: So many things in As You Were just didn't ring true - so I made up my own explanation.

Collateral Damage

It hadn't worked out the way he'd wanted it to. But at least part of his mission - his *unofficial* mission - had been accomplished.

As he and Sam rose into the helicopter, Riley Finn smiled inwardly as he remembered the damage he *had* managed to cause. All in the name of protecting humanity.

*****

Agent Finn hadn't really needed the Slayer's help with the Suvolte demon. After all, he and his wife had tracked it this far without her help. But when the Suvolte headed for Sunnydale, the military man had decided that a bit of payback was in order.

Payback - for the guilt he'd felt over leaving Buffy, when it was HER fault in the first place. Her fault, for not loving him the way he had loved her. Her fault for driving him to get suck jobs from vampires, in an effort to see what it was that SHE saw in them. Her fault for not letting him into her life enough, for not letting him protect her, the way he'd thought that men were meant to protect women. Until he'd met Sam.

Her fault - and Spike's, for finding out and telling her, showing her what Riley was doing, where he was going in the middle of the night.

Spike's fault for being there instead of him when she'd battled the Queller in her own home. And especially Spike's fault, for loving the woman that Riley Finn loved, and for staying when he himself had left.

Spike's fault, for being with her when she had died, when he himself had known nothing about it for months afterward.

*****

Riley had deliberately 'forgotten' to tell Buffy that he was married.

He'd *wanted* her to think that he'd come back for her - had been setting her up for the fall when she found out about Sam. Too bad that his wife had gotten there so soon - he'd been sure that the petite blond was about to proclaim that she still had feelings for him. As soon as she had, of course, the tall Iowan had planned to 'let her down gently' - by letting Buffy know that he was already happily married, to a woman who meant everything to him. He'd planned to twist that knife as much as possible. Ah well - most battle plans never survived the first engagement with the enemy.

As for his other 'enemy' - Riley had had plans for the bleached blond vampire that didn't include either Buffy or Sam. Unfortunately, finding and destroying the Suvolte's nest had come first. He and his partner, his wife, had paired up after the Slayer had left Sam on her own, and taken care of that chore. However, to Agent Finn's great delight, during his questioning around town while looking for the Suvolte's nest, he'd found out that Spike was 'egg-sitting' for a different type of

demon. For cash, of course. It gave Riley the excuse he'd been looking for.

He could, of course, have simply dusted the vampire, just for being a vampire. But even before he'd left, he could tell that Buffy had feelings for the peroxide blond demon. Why else was the vampire still walking around, after all the problems he'd caused? Especially after almost causing Riley's death when Spike had kidnapped that Initiative doctor. Buffy had sworn she'd kill the annoying vamp then - but she hadn't. And Riley hadn't missed the fact that when Buffy had been

protesting that she hadn't been dating him for his 'super powers', it had been Spike's name that popped out as an alternative choice.

Clearly, there had been more between the two than the petite young woman had been willing to admit.

Armed with an excuse that even the Slayer would have to accept, Finn had stormed into Spike's crypt - only to stop dead in his tracks when he saw the two blond heads lying together on the sarcophagus. He would have killed the vampire for that alone, if he'd known what was going on. He couldn't just dust the man-shaped demon with her watching, but he could and would discredit the bloodsucker as much as possible. With any luck, maybe he could get Buffy to dust her lover FOR him - now *that* would be priceless!

So the black-clad commando threw his false accusations first, that Spike was The Doctor and was hiding the Suvolte eggs. Riley knew the accusations were false, but they set the stage for the true portion of his diatribe - that Spike was hiding eggs in his crypt. The blond Slayer was thinking about as well as the average stereotypical blond, or she would have realized that the vampire would never have risked having Suvolte demon eggs in his crypt - not when she and Dawn were regular

visitors there. Even if he hadn't had any concern for their lives, his own un-life would have been forfeit when the flesh-eaters had hatched.

Fortunately for Riley, his former lover's death and rebirth had left her totally unlike the confident, clear-headed-in-a- crisis woman he'd left behind. She had immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion when they found the eggs in the lower cavern. Riley had breathed a silent sign of relief when he'd seen that the eggs were covered in the same greenish-yellow ichor that was representative of the Suvolte demon that Buffy had killed. Of course, the odds had been in his favor on that one - the majority of the egg-bearing demons had 'blood' of that color. When the eggs had hatched, he'd kept her attention elsewhere by tossing his gun to her. It had distracted her nicely from the fact that the hatchlings didn't look anything like the 3-month-old 'adult' Suvolte demon had. Of course, if she had questioned him about it, he would have 'explained' that the hatchlings underwent a metamorphosis into the other form - but that hadn't been necessary after all.

And since Buffy herself had blown up the lower cavern and hopefully, most if not all of the beetle-looking demon hatchlings, there was little chance that she would ever realize that the former Initiative agent had lied to her. Riley hadn't gotten to kill Spike, even though he'd offered to do so to Buffy before he left Sunnydale. But apparently her feelings for the blond demon were such that she would protect him from harm even when she thought the vampire was scheming behind her back.

Their relationship, though, whatever it had been, would never be the same. The big commando had made sure of that, at least.

Added to that was the extra 'pleasure' of demonstrating just how right he and Sam were for each other. Just another bit of pain to add to the load that Buffy was already carrying; just another bit of payback for the pain that she had put *him* through.

*****

As the helicopter swept him and his wife away from Sunnydale, Agent Riley Finn smirked at the thought of the 'collateral damage' he'd managed on this mission. The Slayer should have known better, should have remembered - he'd been a psych major before he was a Black Ops agent. The combination of the two could be deadly.

END

Dyane Windshadow 7/10/02