We Happy Few: Impossibilities
by Sibling
The first thing Rachel saw when she woke up was Rupert Giles' face peering worriedly into her own.

Ye gods and little fishes! she thought. How am I supposed to explain all this to him? All she said was, "Ah . . . I'm sorry. I really don't know why I fainted like that."

"I do," Faith said. Although Rachel couldn't see her from where she was, she could hear the girl's annoying little smirk. "You'd better just spit it out, lady -- you gotta do it sooner or later."

"Spit what out?" Buffy asked suspiciously.

Rachel sat up slowly, and set her shoulders. "I know what we need to save the world. It's not twenty-eight doxies, it's," she grimaced, "fourteen paradoxes."

Giles' brow furrowed, then he began to mumble the phrase "fourteen paradoxes" to himself over and over, finally imitating a lower-class English accent, which made it sound like "fourteen pair o' doxes." Then he swore sufurously.

Buffy didn't seem any happier. "You mean we spent the past month chasing down a prophecy that was mispronounced?"

Spike gave a half-smirk. "Why do you think I always admired Dru? As she proved with that little trap she set for you, luv, she was far from stupid, no matter how daft she was. Angelus was the one who always spilled his guts like a bad movie villain when he had you in his power," he said with a roll of his eyes toward the former vampire. "But Dru always had one more game to play, one extra hidden ploy, and I wouldn't be surprised if she knew she was gonna die, and fed us that line just to get a little revenge on us for killin' her."

"Or maybe she was just really, really insane and didn't know what a paradox was?" commented Willow with an upraised eyebrow.

"Well, um . . . yeah, that too," Spike said with a frown and a shrug.

"Enough, you guys," Dawn said. Then she turned back to Rachel. "So just what are these fourteen paradoxes?"

"Not 'what,' Dawn. 'Who.' Fourteen beings whose very lives are contradictory, whose relationships defy explanation." She paused. "Such as a vampire and a Slayer in love."

Buffy and Spike glanced at each other. They shrugged. "Another prophecy. Great. Wonderful," Buffy commented dryly. Then she blinked, and look at Faith. "Wait. You said to Rachel, 'Look around and count heads.'" She looked around the room.

Rachel waited while she counted, and nodded when Buffy's eyes opened wide. "That's right, Buffy. You, Spike, Xander, Anya, Willow, Tara, Angel, Cordelia, Fred, Gunn, Dawn, Giles, and me. Take out Faith -- I don't suppose she can be counted because of what she is --" She waited for Faith's nod, then went on, "and Lorne, and add Connor, whom we've already guessed has to be here, and you've got fourteen."

"Now hold on, Blue Eyes, what do you mean by 'take away Lorne?'" Lorne asked. "Don't get me wrong, I'm in no hurry to join the Grand Parade of Champions -- the pay is lousy, and there isn't much of a retirement plan -- but I'm a little hurt that I'm being written off so quickly. After all, I'm a bit of a paradox myself: for most Pyleans, music is like bubonic plague, but it's my stock in trade."

Rachel blinked at that, and made a note to ask him about that later, even as she was saying, "Because there's another requirement for being one of the fourteen." She sighed. Here goes. "You have to be married to another one of the fourteen."

The silence that followed was deafening.

* * *

"Muh . . . Muh . . . Married?" squeaked Dawn after a long, long moment of silence. "But . . . " She looked around the room, counting off couples in her head. If she assumed that Giles was supposed to be with Rachel -- it was kinda cute, and the alternative was a million times too icky to even think about -- that left her with . . . "No! No! I am not gonna marry some boy that I haven't even met, and . . . and be Angel's daughter-in-law!"

"I'm with Dawnie on that," Buffy said angrily. "She's sixteen years old. She's supposed to be going to school, dating, and Slaying." Dawn snorted loudly at that, but her sister didn't seem to notice. "She's not supposed to be walking down the aisle!"

Rachel shrugged, and looked helplessly at Faith. The former Slayer made a face. "It's like this, B: things ain't goin' the way they were supposed to. I was supposed to be the second Slayer in all this, not little D. And . . . " She glanced at Giles, who had been giving Rachel a wide-eyed stare the whole time. "There's someone else who was supposed to be here."

Giles' expression turned from shock to fury in the blink of an eye. "You can't mean . . . If you think for one moment that anyone could take Jenny's place-"

"No!" Faith shouted. "Listen . . . I never met Jenny Calender when she was alive, but the Powers showed me who she was . . . what she meant to you . . . and what she was supposed to do."

She sighed, walked up to Giles, and gave him a sad look. "Giles . . . old Watcher of mine . . . you weren't supposed to be alone. I couldn't do anything about Jenny dying, that happened before my time. But I looked all over the world, and I found someone who could do what she couldn't: help you save the world . . . and make you happy again."

Giles and Rachel stared at each other. Rachel murmured, "Then all those clients who suddenly cancelled on me-"

"I, ah, persuaded them to cancel on you, so you'd have to take this job," Faith said smugly. "And that was a helluva lotta work, lemme tell ya. I wanted to be helpin' out here in SunnyD weeks ago, but I had to make sure you'd be here, or it'd all be for squat."

"But . . . " Giles protested weakly. "Faith, how could you be the Neverborn Slayer?"

She snorted. "You thought of that one back in England when you first read the prophecy. I wasn't 'born,' I was removed by emergency C-section." Then her expression changed, and the Scoobies of old felt the urge to back away as the Dark Slayer showed her face for just a moment. "The scar got infected, never healed properly. One more reason my mom always hated me."

Then she shook herself, and the spectre of the past vanished. "Anyway, that's it. You've got seven couples here -- or you will, once Connor gets back. And all of 'em are crazy, impossible matches between wildly different people, but they'll work out, because . . . because you're each others' reward."

"Reward?" That question came from all of them, but came the loudest from Dawn, Giles, and Rachel.

"Yeah, reward. You've fought the good fight, done what you're supposed to do, and if you win this one, you all get the happy ending. Not peace and quiet, exactly -- most of you'd go bananas in a week if you didn't have somethin' to do -- but no more end-of-the-world crap for as long as you live."

* * *

Faith's pronouncement left them all rather stunned. Several minutes went by, and no one said a word.

Finally, Giles cleared his throat, and said, "Since . . . ah, since I don't think any of us will be able to, um, concentrate on research for a while . . . maybe it would be best if we went home, rested for a while. As long as . . . " He glanced hesitantly at Rachel. "Do we have time for that? When will we have to fight this, er, final battle?"

She answered without looking at him. "The next full moon. Two weeks."

He chuckled. "That's more warning than we usually get for something like this. All right, then, Lorne, you can stay with Angel and the others-"

"No, I don't think so," the demon interrupted. "Angel and Cordy haven't even started their relationship yet, and Fred and Gunn's is so new it squeaks when they move too quickly. I think they need some time to themselves."

The various permutations were discussed for a while, until finally Faith put her fingers into her mouth and whistled loudly. "Okay, that's enough! Giles, you are gonna marry Rachel, so you two might as well get to know each other. You go with her to Xander's, lock yourselves in the guest room, and have it out. I don't care if you yell at each other, talk each other's ears off, or screw each other's brains out, but work it out!"

Leaving the two adults blushing fiercely, she turned to Lorne. "You go stay with B, Red, and that gang. They'll have room with Giles gone, and you can shoot the breeze with Little D while she waits for her Loverboy to show up."

"I've got another errand to run, but I'll be back here by noon tomorrow to help out with Connor. See ya!" Then she turned abruptly, and walked out the door, slamming it so hard the bell almost fell off.

* * *

There was another long, silent pause after Faith left, but finally everyone started filing out, and it never occurred to anyone to try to change the plans the Guardian had already laid out for them.

The Slayers, the witches, Spike, and Lorne were silent all the way to Buffy's house. The two couples went off to their rooms, leaving Dawn and Lorne sitting in the living room. Finally, Dawn found herself asking, "I know you usually only see stuff if people are singing, but . . . do you know why Faith was in such a rush to leave? I mean, she said she had something to do, but . . . " She shrugged. "She always was a lousy liar."

Lorne gave her a sad little smile. "Didn't you hear what she said? She was one of the original fourteen, like this Jenny she was talking about . . . which means she was supposed to be in love with one of the people in that room, and get the happy ending she told you all about. Instead, she's stuck being an observer." He shook his head, and sighed sympathetically. "I'm surprised she stuck around as long as she did."

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