2 - Buffyverse SB (Part 12)
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cliffc999
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Jonathan POV:
For Amy and I being in an acknowledged relationship was mostly like our previous not being in one except that we were allowing ourselves to feel a lot less guilty about it. Also there was more hugging and kissing allowed. Neither of us felt any particular need to rush ahead beyond that right now. We were both sixteen - physically and emotionally - even if I was also basically reincarnated twice, and while this school was full of people our age who'd already skipped straight to the ending they weren't exactly what you'd call the best examples to follow. So we didn't.
Besides, I had my stuff that I was trying to recover from and Amy had hers, and I had a particularly vivid memory from my original life about an old master sergeant lecturing us in-between Basic and AIT. His lecture had been about how the classic mistake for idiot youngsters our age was to mistake the girl you were currently dating for the great romance of the ages simply because you hadn't allowed for the fact that emotions of all kinds were often magnified hugely under prolonged stress or while decompressing from same. And even Teenaged Angst had some limits, apparently. Or else I'd finally begun the 'growing out of it' process it had mentioned. Or maybe it was just that since my "Benefactor" had skipped the 'out-processing' after my last jump and I'd imported into this one as a Drop-In a good portion of my ingrained habits and attitudes were still culturally Europan, i.e., heavily Victorian influenced. Or multiple choice.
Slaying-wise, we had ourselves a near miss on Halloween. Principal Flutie had volunteered us high school students as escorts for the younger kids to go trick-and-treating, so we all had to get costumes. And fortuitously, a new costume shop had opened up to catch that particular overflow. Having decided that decking ourselves out Europan style would not be a great idea Amy and I decided to go to the shop instead and dress in something more normal for American teenagers. Our first idea to go as Han Solo and Princess Leia was bounced when we found out that Xander and Buffy had already thought of that first, so we rolled with the Star Wars theme by going as Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade. Amy even had part of the hair color for it, being a reddish-blonde.
However, when the proprietor of the shop introduced himself as 'Ethan Rayne'... well, my memory turned up mention of "Ethan Rayne's Halloween spell" in the Notes section of the jump-doc. A quick request to Amy to check our costumes for spells turned up a positive result, and a quick phone call to Giles about that had him basically flip out as soon as he heard the name of the guy who'd sold us the costumes. Apparently him and Ethan Rayne had some sort of history and he knew of Ethan's past as a Chaos Mage and generally malevolent person. Giles and him had a confrontation that resulted in him closing the shop and leaving town, and between that and some cleansing rituals that our four practitioners did on his Janus idol our Halloween remained blissfully magic-free.
So yet again I realized that I was being an idiot, in that I'd had a potentially available source of foreknowledge available the entire time and had neglected it in favor of focusing on the immediate problems and teenaged drama. Yeah, I am never voluntarily taking a mind-affecting Drawback remotely like this ever. Not even if it offers way more CP than a measly 100. They are so very limiting, and so very very insidious.
Still, I did have an eidetic memory - even if I had to actually make an effort to recall things before I remembered that I could remember them, if that makes any sense - and I had carefully read the entire jump-doc, so I was still able to transcribe it. And thus some dedicated work with paper and pencil produced a list of several things mentioned in it to keep an eye out for, some of which were more than a bit alarming in hindsight:
The highest priority item on the list was Angel's soul curse and it's possibly finite nature. Since he entirely knew about the Jumpchain I could bring up anything on this list with him without having to explain how I knew it. We got out that little soul orb that Giles had enchanted once, had Amy re-empower it, and put that sucker in a piece of jewelry to wear at all times. I really was not looking forward to what we'd have to do - what I'd have to do - if he ever lost it, but the Baron had already taught me this lesson long ago and Teenaged Angst or not I wasn't going to back off from it now. And we certainly couldn't haul Angel's soul back from the afterlife to curse him again if he lost it - it had been an act of the blackest magic and done for the worst form of hate and revenge in the first place, that's why it was called a goddamn curse!
But the best outcome would of course be to keep him from losing it in the first place, as Angel had already long since made the decision that cursed or not he would not actively seek out death as a release. If he hadn't chosen to bear his curse then he could have just picked any given morning to go watch one last sunrise. So simply off the 'random observation' that his soul curse hadn't come with any guarantees of eternal permanence or immunity from being dispelled it might be a good idea to look into exactly what its limitations and weaknesses might be, the nature and history of Angelus' cursing at the hands of the Kalderash Roma clan became the new research project for our resident occult scholars. It almost made me want to go out and drain a Mohra demon right now except that those things were virtually impossible to find.. Besides, Angel was still having a long serious case of the thinking it over after finding out that becoming human again was now theoretically possible, and I was respecting his right to make his own life choices at his own pace. If he wanted to talk about it, I'd be here.
The apparent revelation that Mayor Wilkins was actually some kind of long-running master villain explained several of the anomalies I'd learned about Sunnydale and why my off-and-on researches into them had produced almost no results; I'd been looking in the wrong place (outside of Sunnydale) for the wrong thing (government involvement above the local level). We still had no idea what he was building towards or why, except that involved 'Ascension' and setting up the town as some kind of demon feeding grounds, but given how deeply wired Mayor Wilkins had to be into the everything around here if the jump-doc's hints were true then we knew we'd have to investigate this very slowly and subtly anyway. At least we'd have some time; 100 years from the founding of Sunnydale would spring semester of our senior year and we were just heading into junior year.
Upon finding out exactly what we were researching re: Angel's soul curse and it's possibly expiring Ms. Calendar was alarmed enough to confess that she was actually Janna Kalderash, a Romany who her clan had inserted into Sunnydale as an agent-in-place to keep tabs on Angel and report on his behavior. Which in hindsight explained several of the weirder conversations she'd had with me. I'd certainly have twigged to it sooner except that she'd been so amateur at trying to pump me for information that I'd written her off as just being morbidly curious on her own hook instead of being anybody's agent. Clearly I'd spent a little too much time dealing with Smoke Knights and other such players.
At any rate, despite Giles wigging out a bit at hearing that it turned out to be a stroke of luck for us that we had her available; she'd already sent a query back to the Kalderash clan elders asking for all available details on the spell used to curse Angel in the first place. Her alibi (which we'd helped compose) of 'I want to be able to determine if prolonged Hellmouth exposure might have any effect on it' was accepted as a valid reason to provide her with an exact copy of the spell formula, and we expected it to be arriving soon.
Preliminary researches into something called 'The Key' turned up only a few scattered mentions of it as a precious artifact allegedly guarded by a mysterious group of monks called the Order of Dagon somewhere in Eastern Europe. However, what very fragmentary info existed always described as some type of disembodied mystic force or mysterious object, not a person. As for 'Dawn', Buffy of course was an only child as far as anyone knew. However, given one of the reasons her parents had gotten divorced was because Hank Summers had cheated on her mother it was entirely possible for Buffy to have a half-sibling that she - or Mrs. Summers, for that matter - had absolutely no idea existed. So there wasn't much we could do there except keep an eye out for anybody remotely fitting the description who might show up later.
Giles' inquiry to the Watchers' Council regarding possible effects of Buffy's temporary cessation of vital signs got results - the next Slayer, who was indeed named Kendra Young, had been called the night Buffy had fulfilled the prophecy of the Pergamum Codex by temporarily dying at the Master's hands. She was a native of Jamaica and currently undergoing field missions under the supervision of her Watcher, Samuel Zabuto. The name 'Faith Lehane' also turned up as a potential Slayer - apparently the Council's divinations as to who the next Slayer would be were at least occasionally able to turn up probable candidates in advance of their being Called, and whenever possible they were offered training and supervision even prior to or if they weren't Called - who had just recently begun training under the supervision of Watcher Diana Dormer in Boston. With absolutely no indications available as to what might possibly kill Kendra or when it would to Call Faith as the Slayer after her, and with Kendra already being a highly talented and conscientious Slayer underneath the supervision of someone Giles unhesitatingly recommended as one of the best Field Watchers out there, there wasn't much we could do there to warn her that wasn't already being done.
As for everything else on the list, anything that Angel or Amy or I had a good rationalization for bringing as something we could have possibly heard about or thought up ourselves for innocuous reasons was brought to the attention of the group. However, even with two instances to show me that my "Benefactor" would not intervene if I told people of the Jumpchain I still wanted to keep that knowledge as closely held as possible. If nothing else, knowledge of the existence of beings like my "Benefactor" and the ways they could play with peoples' lives was a great way to cause an existential crisis in almost anyone, and the rest of the Scooby Gang had enough reasons to have one of those as is. So the remainder of the line items on our list, the ones we couldn't rationalize to the others about knowing about, we just resolved to keep a very wary eye out for ourselves. And it's not as if we didn't all have a lot of demands on our potential research time already what with the day-to-day Slaying duties and our ongoing educations as demon hunters, witches, and so forth.
And that was especially true after what happened when a part of Buffy's past came back to haunt her.
Xander POV:
So, I had a girlfriend now. The girl I'd been drooling over, if in a perfectly tasteful way, ever since the moment I fell off my skateboard like a complete idiot at my very first glance of her. Before I'd known the slightest thing about how brave she was, or how hard she worked to protect other people, or how much or what kind of stuff was going on in her life. Yeah, kinda shallow of me.
But my point was, I was now going steady with someone who was important to me for reasons far more than 'a hot girl is paying attention to me' and so I was busy choking all over the place because for the first time I had something legitimately important to screw up on an interpersonal level. And my two best guy friends, past and present, were kinda useless in this regard for advice. Jonathan was the smartest guy I knew for pretty much anything else but Amy could entirely testify that he needed months of angst and a big ol' kick in the butt to actually begin to get anywhere on the romance front, not that they didn't seem perfectly fine now, and Jesse was... not a guy you went to for advice about girls. And I certainly couldn't talk to Willow about this, that would just be rubbing salt right in the open wound even if her and her new boyfriend seemed happy enough so far.
Which is why I was having perhaps the single most awkwardly painful conversation of my life right now and wondering just how desperate was desperate that I'd thought this was a good idea for even a second.
"Look, I'm just saying that I have absolutely no idea what she sees in you! So how am I supposed to tell you how to keep making sure she's seeing it? I am being impossibly forebearing in not deliberately sabotaging you two so that she could salvage what popularity she could hope to retain!" Cordelia said.
"You will be publicly canonized as Saint Cordelia the Sarcastic any day now, I entirely agree!" I replied lightly. "I just wish..." I continued more sobertly. "That I knew what I was doing right, so I could not stop doing it."
"You saved her life, what more does she want?" Cordelia eye-rolled. "And-" she stopped and blinked, having spotted Buffy talking to this tall, incredibly handsome boy who I'd never seen before and grinning ear to ear like she'd just received the most wonderful present in the world.
"I see him." I said glumly. "Are you sure the nightmare demon didn't get out again?"
"What, did you think you were the first boy she ever dated in her life? With her looks?" Cordelia stared at me incredulously. "That is clearly a 'Oh wow, what's my ex doing here at my new school?' facial expression. So get over there and remind her that you still exist!"
"Cover me, I'm goin' in." I agreed firmly and walked on over while Cordelia waited exactly two whole nanoseconds before deciding that she didn't actually care what happened and leaving. "Hey Buff!" I said cheerfully, stopping just short of hugging distance and waiting for a signal. "Who's your friend?"
"Xander!" she said, smiling at me. Well, at least I still rated a smile- "Billy, this is my boyfriend Xander Harris. Xander, this is Billy Fordham. I went to school with him for seven years in LA."
He stuck out his hand for the manly handshake. I manly restrained myself to only crushing him a little. Weird, for a guy as tall and broad-shouldered as he was he had a pretty weak grip. "Wow." he said, rubbing his fingers after I let go of him. "What sport do you play?"
"Still deciding exactly what to try out for." I replied smoothly. "But I like to stay in shape."
"Xander, the closest Ford and I got to dating was him being my fifth-grade crush." Buffy said knowingly to me. "So ix-nay on the ompetition-cay."
"Competition?" I put on my best oblivious face, to receive Buffy's long-suffering pout in return before she broke and gave me a lopsided grin again. "Sorry." I apologized.
"Look, I need to show Ford where the admissions office is so he can transfer in." Buffy said. "See you in class?"
"Sure!" I agreed, and we both headed off towards our respective destinations. It wasn't until a couple periods later that I had a chance to talk freely, although not with Buffy.
"What do you call it when you are absolutely unable to trust the person you should entirely trust?" I asked Jonathan.
"Paranoia." he replied matter-of-factly.
"And when it's your girlfriend and it's about other boys?" I continued.
"Jealousy." Amy chimed in. "And really, Xander, you know Buffy isn't like that."
"I know that but this Ford guy still has me panicking like crazy. I mean, seven years of going to school with Buffy. That's like what me and Willow had." I angsted.
"It's also what you and I had and yet here we are, completely not dating each other." Amy joked.
"For that matter, Willow's dating Oz so empirical evidence suggests that Buffy's not likely to switch back to this guy just because of shared history." Jonathan followed her lead.
"Both perfectly logical points, but I still can't shake this horrible nightmare that Buffy's going to wake up one day and go 'Wow, I could be doing so much better!' Especially seeing as how literally ninety-nine percent of the student body agrees with that premise and just ask Cordelia if you don't believe me."
"If Buffy cared about what ninety-nine percent of the student body thought she wouldn't be Buffy." Amy said, and then only continued more soberly after a thoughtful pause. "Xander... have you ever considered talking to the school counselor?"
"About what?" I asked defensively.
She looked at Jonathan for reassurance, and he nodded once to her and gave her a comforting squeeze around her shoulders before she turned back to me. "You know a little bit about what my mom did to me, and I don't mean the magic." she began. "Trying to cut me off from anybody but her, always making me feel worthless, having unreasonable expectations-" she stopped, and visibly forced herself to start again. "It's called emotional abuse."
"I just remembered that I forgot-" I began, and hurriedly started to get to my feet when Amy's next words cut me off.
"I didn't want to go either."
"You're seeing the social worker?" I said to Amy incredulously as I stood there. "But you always seemed so-"
"She didn't tell me she was going until a couple of weeks ago." Jonathan said, giving her another comforting hug. "And I entirely understand why. Therapy is a very private thing, and there's this whole irrational social stigma about admitting you need it. As if having suffered trauma was a character weakness, which it's not." he finished angrily. "I'd be going myself except I can't mention anything about my past to a psychologist without getting certified, anymore than Buffy can talk about Slayer stuff."
"Ms. Calendar originally recommended that I go when she saw how much I was carrying emotionally into my witch apprenticeship. So I've been seeing the counselor since last spring." Amy nodded. "My point is, I think that your mom and dad didn't do you any favors either- I've gone to school with you as long as Willow has, remember? So if you went, it might help you deal with the anxiety."
"Anxiety? What do I have to be anxious about?" I babbled, and that would entirely have worked if I wasn't receiving matching stares of disbelief from two of the smarter and more mature friends I had. "Not buyin' it, huh?" I joked weakly, sitting back down.
"Look, it's okay not to be okay. As long as you're not wallowing." Amy said kindly.
"You saw me when I wallowed." Jonathan admitted embarassedly. "And look at all the great stuff it didn't do for me!"
"You're using resolve voice again." I groused. "That is so completely not fair."
"Fair fights are-" Jonathan began.
"We know." Amy and I said in amused unison.
Buffy POV:
It was nice to spend a normal day with a normal person who didn't know anything about Slaying or vampires or anything. The Scooby Gang were the best friends I ever had, or the best boyfriend I'd ever had in one particular case, but that still didn't mean I didn't have the occasional regrets over having been Called in the first place. So even if it was just for a tiny little while, being able to talk about old acquaintances and old times with Ford was like a vacation to the land of Before Slaying.
Which is why I was just a little crabby when I entered the library to find my friends minus Willow already running a background check on Ford like a punch of paranoid CIA people.
"Seriously?" I ranted. "Oh come on, Xander! This is too much!"
"It was my idea." Jonathan said. "Xander was the one telling me I was being paranoid."
"You are being paranoid." I insisted. "Ford is not some crazy demon cultist or whatever! He's normal boy from normaltown! I bet your background check has turned up absolutely nothing!"
"That's precisely the problem." Giles said in his serious voice, making me turn to him in surprise. "You escorted him to the admissions office this morning, correct?"
"I did." I said firmly. "So-"
"So when I checked the records room in the middle of this afternoon, I should have found at least the beginnings of his school file instead of the complete and total absence of any documentation." Giles continued.
"Buffy, my 'randomly Southern California' magic teacher turned out to be a gypsy and working for the gypsy clan that originally cursed Angel." Amy pointed out. "Which was a perfectly harmless and okay secret agenda to be having, yes, but she could have been like the demon-summoning frat boys and we'd never have known because we never looked."
"So after that I said to myself, 'Why not look a little more next time?'" Jonathan continued.
"And I can confirm for the professional snoops here." Cordelia said. "I've been hitting the grapevine since lunch and nobody saw your friend Billy in any senior homeroom or classes anywhere today. Apparently he only came on-campus to talk to you. So much for 'new transfer student.'" she air-quoted.
"Maybe he was just scouting out the campus ahead of time!" I said to them desperately. "Maybe he actually wants to be admitted tomorrow... in the admissions office... that he asked me to take him to and pretended to go in..." I trailed off weakly and slumped into my chair, banging my head on the table in frustration. "Urrrggggh! Does the Slayer thing have to take every single thing in my life and weird it up?"
"To be fair, we have no knowledge of anything supernatural going on with him so far." Xander reassured me. "We just know that he's a lying liar who tells lies."
"I told him you and I were going to the Bronze later tonight, and he said he'd meet me there." I said, my forehead still on the table. "Now I'm starting to wonder if I should pack extra stakes."
"And here I was just thinking 'You know, I haven't been to the Bronze in a while'." Jonathan said readily.
"It's a date." Amy agreed with him.
"It already was." Xander followed on hammily.
"You guys are the best." I said, looking up at them. "Even when I'm desperately praying you're all paranoid and wrong."
"And that was the story of the ninth-grade beauty contest." Ford finished, my face practically blushing in infra-red. I started to weakly laugh all 'ha-ha! See, I can take a joke!' styles, only to notice that everybody else at the table was kinda staring at Ford.
"Wow, deliberately dredging up a massively embarassing story to toss it in her new friend's faces. That's not funny." Jonathan said flatly.
"It was a little mean." Amy backed him up.
"You actually had a crush on this guy once?" Xander said, giving him the stink-eye.
"Well excuse me for not being all part of your small-town Bible study group." Ford shot back at them. "It takes a sophisticated point of view to be able to laugh at yourself!"
"Un bon mot ne prouve rien." Jonathan smiled back at him, and Ford's face fell flat at... okay, I had no idea what Jonathan had just said but clearly Ford had.
"Laugh at yourself? But I haven't heard you say anything funny about you yet." Xander said with the sort of smile that's really just showing your teeth. "So tell me something funny about you."
"Look, I don't have to-"
"Let's not match dishonesty with dishonesty," Jonathan said suddenly. "So we'll be straight with you. Your story of transferring in? We know it's BS."
"You don't know anything." Ford said defensively.
"Cordelia hit the gossip network for us." Xander said. "You aren't actually in senior year, not even as a transfer student. You weren't in any homeroom today or any classes."
"And what would this Cordelia girl know?" Ford shot back dismissively. "Who is she, anyway?"
"Now I know you haven't actually joined our student body." I sighed disappointedly. "There's no way anybody misses Queen C around here, any more than they could have missed Tegan Matthews back at Hemery." Ford startled at the mention of our old high school's resident social sovereign, the rich popular girl even I'd had to show proper deference to despite having been Freshman Princess and being well on track to becoming queen myself after she graduated, as he realized just how deeply he'd ruined his own cover story with his reaction.
"Ford." Amy said, falling naturally into good cop to everybody else's bad cop. "You're one of Buffy's old friends and she clearly values you a lot. You don't need to lie and sneak up on us. Whatever you want her to help you with, we can help you with too. Just ask."
"It's none of your business." Ford said angrily. "Only Buffy's."
"Okay." I said, waving everyone else down. "So we'll talk about it alone."
"You sure?" Xander asked me.
"He's clearly not going to say squat as long as anybody else is here." I said. "So the most civilized way we can do this is...?" I shrugged.
Jonathan polled everybody else with a glance, then all three of them stood up and headed across the Bronze to where they could see but not hear us.
"Okay, Ford." I said as soon as they were out of earshot. "Make with the un-mystery."
"I know you're the Slayer." he began.
I almost replied "So do they." but at the last minute shifted to saying "How'd you find that out?"
"I found out just before you left Hemery. After all the weirdness, and the fire in the gym-" he began.
"Okay." I said, actually kinda relieved that we didn't have that secret between us any longer. "So, why does that bring you up here?"
"Do you remember Nicole?" he asked me.
"Yeah." I said sadly. "She died in the gym attack... oh no." I said with realization.
Ford nodded. "I saw her just last week. She was... sort of staking out my house." he said nervously.
"Damn it!" I swore. "I am sick and tired of putting stakes in people I went to high school with!" I sighed. "Look, this town is vampire infested central. I have to work late like five nights a week just to handle the overflow. I don't know when I'll be able to get back down to LA-"
"I'm pretty sure she'll have followed me up here." Ford said. "She was sort of crushing on me right before she died, even if I don't think she told you, and I think that might-"
"Freshly turned vamps can obsess on things they were obsessing on right before they died." I agreed with him.
"And I can't fight a vampire on my own." Ford begged me. "I need your help!"
"Okay." I said. "Tonight I'll walk you home, and tomorrow we'll meet at the Espresso Pump - in the afternoon, in broad daylight - and work out a plan. Okay?"
"Absolutely." he said, smiling at me in relief. "And I'm sorry about the whole 'transfer student' thing but..." he shrugged. "I didn't want anybody else in your new school to find out you were the Slayer from me, so I had to think of a way to approach you."
"And you did." I said, feeling like the biggest phony in the world.
Because I was. I'd left Hemery High over six months ago, and if Nicole had been turned on that night - which she'd had to have been if she'd been turned at all, because I saw her get bit that night - then there's no way she'd have waited this long before making a move on Ford. Unless there was some unique level of obsession like Spike going on, the whole 'working out your unfulfilled urges from life' thing was a fledgling phase they got over pretty fast. She'd have either moved on him already or stopped caring, plus the fact that he obviously hadn't been afraid of walking to the Bronze alone after dark tonight. And, of course, the whole 'transfer student' lie was ridiculous; if he wanted to talk to me without involving anyone from my new school all he had to do was go to my house. My mom knew him, we were in the phone book, and if he knew where I'd moved to and what school I went to then getting as far as my home address would be simple.
No, I'd long since learned enough about to think about and evaluate what I was being told to spot the obvious holes in stories. So as much as I didn't want to believe it, Ford was clearly up to something sneaky as hell. Which is why as I left the Bronze with him I made sure to wink at Xander, Jonathan, and Amy behind his back so they'd know to follow me, and counted on the fact they'd do it subtly enough that he wouldn't notice they were there. Because this was almost certainly some kind of trap, and we had to find out what kind before it caught anyone else.
Life had been so much simpler before I made friends with former teenaged secret agent people or fought vampires.
Author's Note: Amy's actress is a redhead. Her character on the show is blonde. I split the difference with strawberry blonde.
Jenny's gypsy reveal? Totally different, because Jonathan already gave the group a precedent for 'So, you were actually a secret agent. But you're still on our side'. Also, her fessing up as a response to 'Angel may possibly be a threat/under threat in the future' is a much better time to do it than to speak up only after disaster has struck.
And yes, we blew right past Halloween with no magic. Psych! But really, it's mentioned right there in the jump-doc along with Ethan's name, and the instant you mention that name to Giles of course he's going to know what's going on. In fact, Jonathan has finally been prompted by that to go through the entire jump-doc again and itemize as many foreshadowing clues as possible.
So here we now we are in the middle of episode 2x07, "Lie to Me", but without Spike. As well as Ford being knocked notably off balance by this timeline's notably more professional and slightly more suspicious Scooby Gang. You can almost visibly see the moment where he has to abandon his original plan and start desperately spinning... and badly.
"Un bon mot ne prouve rien" is French for "A witty saying proves nothing", which is a quote from Voltaire. Jonathan was entirely going 'Pretend to be big-city sophisticated on me, jerkwad? I am actually Old European nobility, I can out-class anybody in this town.' Not that I speak a word of French, but poster 'ContemplativeWyrm' on SB did and was willing to correct my usage after I let Google Translate do the first attempt.
As canon was vastly unhelpful in giving me the name of Hemery High's resident Cordelia equivalent I just made it up. Nicole is a canon casualty of the final battle of the original BtvS movie, although highly obscure.
Lastly, the story about the old master sergeant is semi-autobiographical - that's exactly the advice an old chief petty officer gave my Navy boot camp class right after we'd graduated and as we were entering 'A' school, and I've never regretted following it.
For Amy and I being in an acknowledged relationship was mostly like our previous not being in one except that we were allowing ourselves to feel a lot less guilty about it. Also there was more hugging and kissing allowed. Neither of us felt any particular need to rush ahead beyond that right now. We were both sixteen - physically and emotionally - even if I was also basically reincarnated twice, and while this school was full of people our age who'd already skipped straight to the ending they weren't exactly what you'd call the best examples to follow. So we didn't.
Besides, I had my stuff that I was trying to recover from and Amy had hers, and I had a particularly vivid memory from my original life about an old master sergeant lecturing us in-between Basic and AIT. His lecture had been about how the classic mistake for idiot youngsters our age was to mistake the girl you were currently dating for the great romance of the ages simply because you hadn't allowed for the fact that emotions of all kinds were often magnified hugely under prolonged stress or while decompressing from same. And even Teenaged Angst had some limits, apparently. Or else I'd finally begun the 'growing out of it' process it had mentioned. Or maybe it was just that since my "Benefactor" had skipped the 'out-processing' after my last jump and I'd imported into this one as a Drop-In a good portion of my ingrained habits and attitudes were still culturally Europan, i.e., heavily Victorian influenced. Or multiple choice.
Slaying-wise, we had ourselves a near miss on Halloween. Principal Flutie had volunteered us high school students as escorts for the younger kids to go trick-and-treating, so we all had to get costumes. And fortuitously, a new costume shop had opened up to catch that particular overflow. Having decided that decking ourselves out Europan style would not be a great idea Amy and I decided to go to the shop instead and dress in something more normal for American teenagers. Our first idea to go as Han Solo and Princess Leia was bounced when we found out that Xander and Buffy had already thought of that first, so we rolled with the Star Wars theme by going as Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade. Amy even had part of the hair color for it, being a reddish-blonde.
However, when the proprietor of the shop introduced himself as 'Ethan Rayne'... well, my memory turned up mention of "Ethan Rayne's Halloween spell" in the Notes section of the jump-doc. A quick request to Amy to check our costumes for spells turned up a positive result, and a quick phone call to Giles about that had him basically flip out as soon as he heard the name of the guy who'd sold us the costumes. Apparently him and Ethan Rayne had some sort of history and he knew of Ethan's past as a Chaos Mage and generally malevolent person. Giles and him had a confrontation that resulted in him closing the shop and leaving town, and between that and some cleansing rituals that our four practitioners did on his Janus idol our Halloween remained blissfully magic-free.
So yet again I realized that I was being an idiot, in that I'd had a potentially available source of foreknowledge available the entire time and had neglected it in favor of focusing on the immediate problems and teenaged drama. Yeah, I am never voluntarily taking a mind-affecting Drawback remotely like this ever. Not even if it offers way more CP than a measly 100. They are so very limiting, and so very very insidious.
Still, I did have an eidetic memory - even if I had to actually make an effort to recall things before I remembered that I could remember them, if that makes any sense - and I had carefully read the entire jump-doc, so I was still able to transcribe it. And thus some dedicated work with paper and pencil produced a list of several things mentioned in it to keep an eye out for, some of which were more than a bit alarming in hindsight:
- A mention of 'the Mayor' becoming an 'Old One' if something called 'the Ascension' happened on cue. Further mentions involved 'runnng a small city for a century without anyone noticing' in the plots and plans perk in the Dark line, and a picture of Mayor Wilkins underneath the perk for 'Big Bad'.
- A mention that at least one significant prophecy applied both to Buffy - which we'd already seen at least one of - and Angel, which was a definite surprise.
- A picture of Angel in game face underneath the 'lost your soul' Drawback. Not good.
- Two pictures of Willow looking all powerful, scary, and evil. One of them was next to a Drawback for 'magic addiction'. Also not good.
- The existence of something called 'Wolfram & Hart', an evil law firm mixed up with the supernatural.
- A species of demon called the 'Mohra' whose blood could apparently turn a souled vampire back into a human being. Um... okay.
- The existence of powerful named demons called 'The Judge', 'Lucronis', or 'Acathla'.
- The revelation of a still-extant if 'depowered' Old One named 'Illyria'.
- A mention of someone named 'Jonathan' as an example of a minor spellcaster on the 100cp tier. Since I'm certain this document was not referring to me, especially since I hadn't spent even 100cp on spellcasting, then presumably it was the other Jonathan in the tabletop roleplaying club.
- Some kid about my age I didn't remotely recognize underneath the 'Physically Empowered' entry and several mentions of what he could possibly be, ranging from 'impossible human child born of two vampires' to 'government genetic engineering project'.
- A picture of Buffy standing back-to-back with a young black woman I didn't recognize underneath the 'Slayer' entry. The Drawbacks section contained a photo of a third young woman who was apparently a Slayer, as well as names for her and the other young woman - 'Kendra Young' and 'Faith Lehane'. No idea which was which.
- Bundled with that was a mention that temporarily dying but being revived would pass on the Slayer powers to the next host while allowing the revived Slayer to retain hers. Which definitely had a certain meaning given what had happened with the Master.
- Several magical items mentioned under the 'MacGuffin' entry, such as a Glove of Myhnegon, a Gem of Amara, a Cup of Perpetual Torment, a Blessed Sword, or a Scythe of Vocah.
- A mention of a demon hunting organization called 'the Initiative'.
- A picture in the Companions section of Angel leading a team of people most of whom I didn't recognize... except for an older-looking Harmony, which was absurd, and Spike, which was mind blowingly impossible. Just how much divergence had I caused from the original timeline?
- A very puzzling entry underneath 'The Real Key' Drawback of Buffy having a younger sibling named Dawn - who I'd never heard of - who was apparently some kind of 'Key' who could open portals between dimensions, that a being named 'Glorificus' was seeking.
The highest priority item on the list was Angel's soul curse and it's possibly finite nature. Since he entirely knew about the Jumpchain I could bring up anything on this list with him without having to explain how I knew it. We got out that little soul orb that Giles had enchanted once, had Amy re-empower it, and put that sucker in a piece of jewelry to wear at all times. I really was not looking forward to what we'd have to do - what I'd have to do - if he ever lost it, but the Baron had already taught me this lesson long ago and Teenaged Angst or not I wasn't going to back off from it now. And we certainly couldn't haul Angel's soul back from the afterlife to curse him again if he lost it - it had been an act of the blackest magic and done for the worst form of hate and revenge in the first place, that's why it was called a goddamn curse!
But the best outcome would of course be to keep him from losing it in the first place, as Angel had already long since made the decision that cursed or not he would not actively seek out death as a release. If he hadn't chosen to bear his curse then he could have just picked any given morning to go watch one last sunrise. So simply off the 'random observation' that his soul curse hadn't come with any guarantees of eternal permanence or immunity from being dispelled it might be a good idea to look into exactly what its limitations and weaknesses might be, the nature and history of Angelus' cursing at the hands of the Kalderash Roma clan became the new research project for our resident occult scholars. It almost made me want to go out and drain a Mohra demon right now except that those things were virtually impossible to find.. Besides, Angel was still having a long serious case of the thinking it over after finding out that becoming human again was now theoretically possible, and I was respecting his right to make his own life choices at his own pace. If he wanted to talk about it, I'd be here.
The apparent revelation that Mayor Wilkins was actually some kind of long-running master villain explained several of the anomalies I'd learned about Sunnydale and why my off-and-on researches into them had produced almost no results; I'd been looking in the wrong place (outside of Sunnydale) for the wrong thing (government involvement above the local level). We still had no idea what he was building towards or why, except that involved 'Ascension' and setting up the town as some kind of demon feeding grounds, but given how deeply wired Mayor Wilkins had to be into the everything around here if the jump-doc's hints were true then we knew we'd have to investigate this very slowly and subtly anyway. At least we'd have some time; 100 years from the founding of Sunnydale would spring semester of our senior year and we were just heading into junior year.
Upon finding out exactly what we were researching re: Angel's soul curse and it's possibly expiring Ms. Calendar was alarmed enough to confess that she was actually Janna Kalderash, a Romany who her clan had inserted into Sunnydale as an agent-in-place to keep tabs on Angel and report on his behavior. Which in hindsight explained several of the weirder conversations she'd had with me. I'd certainly have twigged to it sooner except that she'd been so amateur at trying to pump me for information that I'd written her off as just being morbidly curious on her own hook instead of being anybody's agent. Clearly I'd spent a little too much time dealing with Smoke Knights and other such players.
At any rate, despite Giles wigging out a bit at hearing that it turned out to be a stroke of luck for us that we had her available; she'd already sent a query back to the Kalderash clan elders asking for all available details on the spell used to curse Angel in the first place. Her alibi (which we'd helped compose) of 'I want to be able to determine if prolonged Hellmouth exposure might have any effect on it' was accepted as a valid reason to provide her with an exact copy of the spell formula, and we expected it to be arriving soon.
Preliminary researches into something called 'The Key' turned up only a few scattered mentions of it as a precious artifact allegedly guarded by a mysterious group of monks called the Order of Dagon somewhere in Eastern Europe. However, what very fragmentary info existed always described as some type of disembodied mystic force or mysterious object, not a person. As for 'Dawn', Buffy of course was an only child as far as anyone knew. However, given one of the reasons her parents had gotten divorced was because Hank Summers had cheated on her mother it was entirely possible for Buffy to have a half-sibling that she - or Mrs. Summers, for that matter - had absolutely no idea existed. So there wasn't much we could do there except keep an eye out for anybody remotely fitting the description who might show up later.
Giles' inquiry to the Watchers' Council regarding possible effects of Buffy's temporary cessation of vital signs got results - the next Slayer, who was indeed named Kendra Young, had been called the night Buffy had fulfilled the prophecy of the Pergamum Codex by temporarily dying at the Master's hands. She was a native of Jamaica and currently undergoing field missions under the supervision of her Watcher, Samuel Zabuto. The name 'Faith Lehane' also turned up as a potential Slayer - apparently the Council's divinations as to who the next Slayer would be were at least occasionally able to turn up probable candidates in advance of their being Called, and whenever possible they were offered training and supervision even prior to or if they weren't Called - who had just recently begun training under the supervision of Watcher Diana Dormer in Boston. With absolutely no indications available as to what might possibly kill Kendra or when it would to Call Faith as the Slayer after her, and with Kendra already being a highly talented and conscientious Slayer underneath the supervision of someone Giles unhesitatingly recommended as one of the best Field Watchers out there, there wasn't much we could do there to warn her that wasn't already being done.
As for everything else on the list, anything that Angel or Amy or I had a good rationalization for bringing as something we could have possibly heard about or thought up ourselves for innocuous reasons was brought to the attention of the group. However, even with two instances to show me that my "Benefactor" would not intervene if I told people of the Jumpchain I still wanted to keep that knowledge as closely held as possible. If nothing else, knowledge of the existence of beings like my "Benefactor" and the ways they could play with peoples' lives was a great way to cause an existential crisis in almost anyone, and the rest of the Scooby Gang had enough reasons to have one of those as is. So the remainder of the line items on our list, the ones we couldn't rationalize to the others about knowing about, we just resolved to keep a very wary eye out for ourselves. And it's not as if we didn't all have a lot of demands on our potential research time already what with the day-to-day Slaying duties and our ongoing educations as demon hunters, witches, and so forth.
And that was especially true after what happened when a part of Buffy's past came back to haunt her.
* * * * *
Xander POV:
So, I had a girlfriend now. The girl I'd been drooling over, if in a perfectly tasteful way, ever since the moment I fell off my skateboard like a complete idiot at my very first glance of her. Before I'd known the slightest thing about how brave she was, or how hard she worked to protect other people, or how much or what kind of stuff was going on in her life. Yeah, kinda shallow of me.
But my point was, I was now going steady with someone who was important to me for reasons far more than 'a hot girl is paying attention to me' and so I was busy choking all over the place because for the first time I had something legitimately important to screw up on an interpersonal level. And my two best guy friends, past and present, were kinda useless in this regard for advice. Jonathan was the smartest guy I knew for pretty much anything else but Amy could entirely testify that he needed months of angst and a big ol' kick in the butt to actually begin to get anywhere on the romance front, not that they didn't seem perfectly fine now, and Jesse was... not a guy you went to for advice about girls. And I certainly couldn't talk to Willow about this, that would just be rubbing salt right in the open wound even if her and her new boyfriend seemed happy enough so far.
Which is why I was having perhaps the single most awkwardly painful conversation of my life right now and wondering just how desperate was desperate that I'd thought this was a good idea for even a second.
"Look, I'm just saying that I have absolutely no idea what she sees in you! So how am I supposed to tell you how to keep making sure she's seeing it? I am being impossibly forebearing in not deliberately sabotaging you two so that she could salvage what popularity she could hope to retain!" Cordelia said.
"You will be publicly canonized as Saint Cordelia the Sarcastic any day now, I entirely agree!" I replied lightly. "I just wish..." I continued more sobertly. "That I knew what I was doing right, so I could not stop doing it."
"You saved her life, what more does she want?" Cordelia eye-rolled. "And-" she stopped and blinked, having spotted Buffy talking to this tall, incredibly handsome boy who I'd never seen before and grinning ear to ear like she'd just received the most wonderful present in the world.
"I see him." I said glumly. "Are you sure the nightmare demon didn't get out again?"
"What, did you think you were the first boy she ever dated in her life? With her looks?" Cordelia stared at me incredulously. "That is clearly a 'Oh wow, what's my ex doing here at my new school?' facial expression. So get over there and remind her that you still exist!"
"Cover me, I'm goin' in." I agreed firmly and walked on over while Cordelia waited exactly two whole nanoseconds before deciding that she didn't actually care what happened and leaving. "Hey Buff!" I said cheerfully, stopping just short of hugging distance and waiting for a signal. "Who's your friend?"
"Xander!" she said, smiling at me. Well, at least I still rated a smile- "Billy, this is my boyfriend Xander Harris. Xander, this is Billy Fordham. I went to school with him for seven years in LA."
He stuck out his hand for the manly handshake. I manly restrained myself to only crushing him a little. Weird, for a guy as tall and broad-shouldered as he was he had a pretty weak grip. "Wow." he said, rubbing his fingers after I let go of him. "What sport do you play?"
"Still deciding exactly what to try out for." I replied smoothly. "But I like to stay in shape."
"Xander, the closest Ford and I got to dating was him being my fifth-grade crush." Buffy said knowingly to me. "So ix-nay on the ompetition-cay."
"Competition?" I put on my best oblivious face, to receive Buffy's long-suffering pout in return before she broke and gave me a lopsided grin again. "Sorry." I apologized.
"Look, I need to show Ford where the admissions office is so he can transfer in." Buffy said. "See you in class?"
"Sure!" I agreed, and we both headed off towards our respective destinations. It wasn't until a couple periods later that I had a chance to talk freely, although not with Buffy.
"What do you call it when you are absolutely unable to trust the person you should entirely trust?" I asked Jonathan.
"Paranoia." he replied matter-of-factly.
"And when it's your girlfriend and it's about other boys?" I continued.
"Jealousy." Amy chimed in. "And really, Xander, you know Buffy isn't like that."
"I know that but this Ford guy still has me panicking like crazy. I mean, seven years of going to school with Buffy. That's like what me and Willow had." I angsted.
"It's also what you and I had and yet here we are, completely not dating each other." Amy joked.
"For that matter, Willow's dating Oz so empirical evidence suggests that Buffy's not likely to switch back to this guy just because of shared history." Jonathan followed her lead.
"Both perfectly logical points, but I still can't shake this horrible nightmare that Buffy's going to wake up one day and go 'Wow, I could be doing so much better!' Especially seeing as how literally ninety-nine percent of the student body agrees with that premise and just ask Cordelia if you don't believe me."
"If Buffy cared about what ninety-nine percent of the student body thought she wouldn't be Buffy." Amy said, and then only continued more soberly after a thoughtful pause. "Xander... have you ever considered talking to the school counselor?"
"About what?" I asked defensively.
She looked at Jonathan for reassurance, and he nodded once to her and gave her a comforting squeeze around her shoulders before she turned back to me. "You know a little bit about what my mom did to me, and I don't mean the magic." she began. "Trying to cut me off from anybody but her, always making me feel worthless, having unreasonable expectations-" she stopped, and visibly forced herself to start again. "It's called emotional abuse."
"I just remembered that I forgot-" I began, and hurriedly started to get to my feet when Amy's next words cut me off.
"I didn't want to go either."
"You're seeing the social worker?" I said to Amy incredulously as I stood there. "But you always seemed so-"
"She didn't tell me she was going until a couple of weeks ago." Jonathan said, giving her another comforting hug. "And I entirely understand why. Therapy is a very private thing, and there's this whole irrational social stigma about admitting you need it. As if having suffered trauma was a character weakness, which it's not." he finished angrily. "I'd be going myself except I can't mention anything about my past to a psychologist without getting certified, anymore than Buffy can talk about Slayer stuff."
"Ms. Calendar originally recommended that I go when she saw how much I was carrying emotionally into my witch apprenticeship. So I've been seeing the counselor since last spring." Amy nodded. "My point is, I think that your mom and dad didn't do you any favors either- I've gone to school with you as long as Willow has, remember? So if you went, it might help you deal with the anxiety."
"Anxiety? What do I have to be anxious about?" I babbled, and that would entirely have worked if I wasn't receiving matching stares of disbelief from two of the smarter and more mature friends I had. "Not buyin' it, huh?" I joked weakly, sitting back down.
"Look, it's okay not to be okay. As long as you're not wallowing." Amy said kindly.
"You saw me when I wallowed." Jonathan admitted embarassedly. "And look at all the great stuff it didn't do for me!"
"You're using resolve voice again." I groused. "That is so completely not fair."
"Fair fights are-" Jonathan began.
"We know." Amy and I said in amused unison.
* * * * *
Buffy POV:
It was nice to spend a normal day with a normal person who didn't know anything about Slaying or vampires or anything. The Scooby Gang were the best friends I ever had, or the best boyfriend I'd ever had in one particular case, but that still didn't mean I didn't have the occasional regrets over having been Called in the first place. So even if it was just for a tiny little while, being able to talk about old acquaintances and old times with Ford was like a vacation to the land of Before Slaying.
Which is why I was just a little crabby when I entered the library to find my friends minus Willow already running a background check on Ford like a punch of paranoid CIA people.
"Seriously?" I ranted. "Oh come on, Xander! This is too much!"
"It was my idea." Jonathan said. "Xander was the one telling me I was being paranoid."
"You are being paranoid." I insisted. "Ford is not some crazy demon cultist or whatever! He's normal boy from normaltown! I bet your background check has turned up absolutely nothing!"
"That's precisely the problem." Giles said in his serious voice, making me turn to him in surprise. "You escorted him to the admissions office this morning, correct?"
"I did." I said firmly. "So-"
"So when I checked the records room in the middle of this afternoon, I should have found at least the beginnings of his school file instead of the complete and total absence of any documentation." Giles continued.
"Buffy, my 'randomly Southern California' magic teacher turned out to be a gypsy and working for the gypsy clan that originally cursed Angel." Amy pointed out. "Which was a perfectly harmless and okay secret agenda to be having, yes, but she could have been like the demon-summoning frat boys and we'd never have known because we never looked."
"So after that I said to myself, 'Why not look a little more next time?'" Jonathan continued.
"And I can confirm for the professional snoops here." Cordelia said. "I've been hitting the grapevine since lunch and nobody saw your friend Billy in any senior homeroom or classes anywhere today. Apparently he only came on-campus to talk to you. So much for 'new transfer student.'" she air-quoted.
"Maybe he was just scouting out the campus ahead of time!" I said to them desperately. "Maybe he actually wants to be admitted tomorrow... in the admissions office... that he asked me to take him to and pretended to go in..." I trailed off weakly and slumped into my chair, banging my head on the table in frustration. "Urrrggggh! Does the Slayer thing have to take every single thing in my life and weird it up?"
"To be fair, we have no knowledge of anything supernatural going on with him so far." Xander reassured me. "We just know that he's a lying liar who tells lies."
"I told him you and I were going to the Bronze later tonight, and he said he'd meet me there." I said, my forehead still on the table. "Now I'm starting to wonder if I should pack extra stakes."
"And here I was just thinking 'You know, I haven't been to the Bronze in a while'." Jonathan said readily.
"It's a date." Amy agreed with him.
"It already was." Xander followed on hammily.
"You guys are the best." I said, looking up at them. "Even when I'm desperately praying you're all paranoid and wrong."
* * * * *
"And that was the story of the ninth-grade beauty contest." Ford finished, my face practically blushing in infra-red. I started to weakly laugh all 'ha-ha! See, I can take a joke!' styles, only to notice that everybody else at the table was kinda staring at Ford.
"Wow, deliberately dredging up a massively embarassing story to toss it in her new friend's faces. That's not funny." Jonathan said flatly.
"It was a little mean." Amy backed him up.
"You actually had a crush on this guy once?" Xander said, giving him the stink-eye.
"Well excuse me for not being all part of your small-town Bible study group." Ford shot back at them. "It takes a sophisticated point of view to be able to laugh at yourself!"
"Un bon mot ne prouve rien." Jonathan smiled back at him, and Ford's face fell flat at... okay, I had no idea what Jonathan had just said but clearly Ford had.
"Laugh at yourself? But I haven't heard you say anything funny about you yet." Xander said with the sort of smile that's really just showing your teeth. "So tell me something funny about you."
"Look, I don't have to-"
"Let's not match dishonesty with dishonesty," Jonathan said suddenly. "So we'll be straight with you. Your story of transferring in? We know it's BS."
"You don't know anything." Ford said defensively.
"Cordelia hit the gossip network for us." Xander said. "You aren't actually in senior year, not even as a transfer student. You weren't in any homeroom today or any classes."
"And what would this Cordelia girl know?" Ford shot back dismissively. "Who is she, anyway?"
"Now I know you haven't actually joined our student body." I sighed disappointedly. "There's no way anybody misses Queen C around here, any more than they could have missed Tegan Matthews back at Hemery." Ford startled at the mention of our old high school's resident social sovereign, the rich popular girl even I'd had to show proper deference to despite having been Freshman Princess and being well on track to becoming queen myself after she graduated, as he realized just how deeply he'd ruined his own cover story with his reaction.
"Ford." Amy said, falling naturally into good cop to everybody else's bad cop. "You're one of Buffy's old friends and she clearly values you a lot. You don't need to lie and sneak up on us. Whatever you want her to help you with, we can help you with too. Just ask."
"It's none of your business." Ford said angrily. "Only Buffy's."
"Okay." I said, waving everyone else down. "So we'll talk about it alone."
"You sure?" Xander asked me.
"He's clearly not going to say squat as long as anybody else is here." I said. "So the most civilized way we can do this is...?" I shrugged.
Jonathan polled everybody else with a glance, then all three of them stood up and headed across the Bronze to where they could see but not hear us.
"Okay, Ford." I said as soon as they were out of earshot. "Make with the un-mystery."
"I know you're the Slayer." he began.
I almost replied "So do they." but at the last minute shifted to saying "How'd you find that out?"
"I found out just before you left Hemery. After all the weirdness, and the fire in the gym-" he began.
"Okay." I said, actually kinda relieved that we didn't have that secret between us any longer. "So, why does that bring you up here?"
"Do you remember Nicole?" he asked me.
"Yeah." I said sadly. "She died in the gym attack... oh no." I said with realization.
Ford nodded. "I saw her just last week. She was... sort of staking out my house." he said nervously.
"Damn it!" I swore. "I am sick and tired of putting stakes in people I went to high school with!" I sighed. "Look, this town is vampire infested central. I have to work late like five nights a week just to handle the overflow. I don't know when I'll be able to get back down to LA-"
"I'm pretty sure she'll have followed me up here." Ford said. "She was sort of crushing on me right before she died, even if I don't think she told you, and I think that might-"
"Freshly turned vamps can obsess on things they were obsessing on right before they died." I agreed with him.
"And I can't fight a vampire on my own." Ford begged me. "I need your help!"
"Okay." I said. "Tonight I'll walk you home, and tomorrow we'll meet at the Espresso Pump - in the afternoon, in broad daylight - and work out a plan. Okay?"
"Absolutely." he said, smiling at me in relief. "And I'm sorry about the whole 'transfer student' thing but..." he shrugged. "I didn't want anybody else in your new school to find out you were the Slayer from me, so I had to think of a way to approach you."
"And you did." I said, feeling like the biggest phony in the world.
Because I was. I'd left Hemery High over six months ago, and if Nicole had been turned on that night - which she'd had to have been if she'd been turned at all, because I saw her get bit that night - then there's no way she'd have waited this long before making a move on Ford. Unless there was some unique level of obsession like Spike going on, the whole 'working out your unfulfilled urges from life' thing was a fledgling phase they got over pretty fast. She'd have either moved on him already or stopped caring, plus the fact that he obviously hadn't been afraid of walking to the Bronze alone after dark tonight. And, of course, the whole 'transfer student' lie was ridiculous; if he wanted to talk to me without involving anyone from my new school all he had to do was go to my house. My mom knew him, we were in the phone book, and if he knew where I'd moved to and what school I went to then getting as far as my home address would be simple.
No, I'd long since learned enough about to think about and evaluate what I was being told to spot the obvious holes in stories. So as much as I didn't want to believe it, Ford was clearly up to something sneaky as hell. Which is why as I left the Bronze with him I made sure to wink at Xander, Jonathan, and Amy behind his back so they'd know to follow me, and counted on the fact they'd do it subtly enough that he wouldn't notice they were there. Because this was almost certainly some kind of trap, and we had to find out what kind before it caught anyone else.
Life had been so much simpler before I made friends with former teenaged secret agent people or fought vampires.
* * * * *
Author's Note: Amy's actress is a redhead. Her character on the show is blonde. I split the difference with strawberry blonde.
Jenny's gypsy reveal? Totally different, because Jonathan already gave the group a precedent for 'So, you were actually a secret agent. But you're still on our side'. Also, her fessing up as a response to 'Angel may possibly be a threat/under threat in the future' is a much better time to do it than to speak up only after disaster has struck.
And yes, we blew right past Halloween with no magic. Psych! But really, it's mentioned right there in the jump-doc along with Ethan's name, and the instant you mention that name to Giles of course he's going to know what's going on. In fact, Jonathan has finally been prompted by that to go through the entire jump-doc again and itemize as many foreshadowing clues as possible.
So here we now we are in the middle of episode 2x07, "Lie to Me", but without Spike. As well as Ford being knocked notably off balance by this timeline's notably more professional and slightly more suspicious Scooby Gang. You can almost visibly see the moment where he has to abandon his original plan and start desperately spinning... and badly.
"Un bon mot ne prouve rien" is French for "A witty saying proves nothing", which is a quote from Voltaire. Jonathan was entirely going 'Pretend to be big-city sophisticated on me, jerkwad? I am actually Old European nobility, I can out-class anybody in this town.' Not that I speak a word of French, but poster 'ContemplativeWyrm' on SB did and was willing to correct my usage after I let Google Translate do the first attempt.
As canon was vastly unhelpful in giving me the name of Hemery High's resident Cordelia equivalent I just made it up. Nicole is a canon casualty of the final battle of the original BtvS movie, although highly obscure.
Lastly, the story about the old master sergeant is semi-autobiographical - that's exactly the advice an old chief petty officer gave my Navy boot camp class right after we'd graduated and as we were entering 'A' school, and I've never regretted following it.
