This journal can exclusively reveal that the rights to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER are owned by Josh Wheedon and Mutant Enemy. When asked to comment President Bush said: "Who? Whoever he is he's doing a damn fine job!"
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The room exploded at that with most of the blast being centred on the younger Watcher. His older counterpart glared at Xander and growled: “Oh, thank you very much, Xander!”
”Hey, I know you: you woulda danced around it for most of the evening.”
The younger Giles was beside himself. (Heh!)
”Do you mean to tell me… All this time… While we were…. That she….”
”Oh shut up man! For God’s sake, get over it!”
Everybody swivelled to watch Giles argue with himself.
”What? What? How can you expect me to…”
”I expect you to forgive her because I did. I did it too late but I still forgave her. I expect you to forgive her because I’m going to have to go back to a world where there is no Jenny Calendar and never, ever will be again and, do you know, I’m finding it rather hard to keep this meeting civilised and gentlemanly and if you don’t sit down and shut up I will find myself in the position of having to punch myself in the head and as you’re younger and fitter than me you’ll probably get the better of any fight and I’ve had a bit of a day already. So be a good chap.”
The younger Giles sat down and opened and closed his mouth for a bit and then they both fell into a burst of glasses polishing, with occasional glances over at Ms Calendar.
She in turn had retreated almost into a ball at the emotional outburst.
“I… I died?”
“Yep,” said the older Xander, sitting himself beside her. “Angelus somehow got wind of the fact that you were working on reproducing the ritual that could give him his soul back. Broke your neck and left your body at Giles’ place.”
”Surrounded b..by rosepetals. The bastard. The only good thing was that he didn’t have time to drain and turn you, which would have been his preferred method of torturing me.”
“So, Ms Calendar, mebbe you can tell me. Bug or feature? The clause in the curse? Was it deliberate or a mistake?”
”I…. I’ve never been sure. The tribal elders…”
The older Giles snorted. “You mean your Uncle Janos!”
”Well, yes. Uncle Janos has always told me that it was the way of ensuring that the punishment never turned to a reward. But… Well, it never seemed to make sense to me. To deliberately risk letting Angelus loose on the world again… Look, Rupert I’m sorry that…”
The tweed-suited Giles avoided looking at her and focussed his attention on the notes he was taking.
”We can discuss this later, Ms Calendar. There is a lot we have to cover. If I might ask, how did Angel’s soul come to be restored?”
The older Willow raised her hand. “That would be me. First big working I did. Which unfortunately I managed to trigger after Angelus had used Acathla to open the Hell portal but before Buffy used the sword of whatshisname to seal it up again with Angel inside. And I agree with Ms Calendar. The specifications of the spell don’t seem to include any clause to purposefully cause Angelus’ return. It seems more of a side effect. What I found when I searched your records were hurriedly written notes on the ritual by the person who cast it first….”
”My great-great-grandmother. She was one of the tribe’s most powerful witches.”
”Uh huh. And there was the big warning on the end about the flaw in the spell. I really wanted to ask you a whole lot of questions about it but… Well, I couldn’t.”
”I don’t honestly know much more. The notebooks were all we had. She died before she could make proper records. One of Angelus’ associates killed her the next night. William the Bloody.”
”Oh, Spike! Right.”
“You know Spike?” Angel’s puzzled but slightly worried question caused every single one of the older Scoobies to look at the older Buffy. Who blushed bright red and looked over to Giles to rescue her.
”Umm, yes. Spike and Drusilla turned up in Sunnydale over the course of the next year…. We’ll come back to them. I… I should mention that I corresponded with Angel over the matter of your Uncle Janos, Jenny. His memories of what happened when Angelus killed your Uncle seem to imply that Janos was planning to use his knowledge of the ‘true happiness’ effect to blackmail some sort of information either out of me or out of Angel. It was unclear mostly because Angelus wasn’t interested and killed him before he could explain. Perhaps you might have a word with him, hmm?”
Ms Calendar nodded and continued looking over at the younger Giles.
“But that means….” Everyone looked over at the younger Buffy. “That means… Angel and me…. We can never…”
“No, never.” The older Buffy knelt by her other self. “He came back to me. From the hell I’d had to send him to. I think only real love could have done that. He spent an uncountable span of time there: maybe hundreds of years passed for him in a few months for us. But he came back and found me and I helped put him back together…. And we still loved each other. Still do. But we couldn’t risk…. Just before graduation, Mom had a word with him. Told him what we should have seen for ourselves but we were too wrapped up in our own angst to see. That we were making each other miserable… That I had growing up to do… Angel… Well, in my time he lives in LA, runs a detective agency. We see each other from time to time.”
”But… But… Never?!!”
Angel answered her despairing wail. ”No, never. Not if it means letting Angelus loose. She’s… You’re…. Right. I can feel him inside me now. Laughing his head off to know that there’s a chance he can get free. Knowing that I’ll never have the… Never know…”
The two of them looked at each other, tears in their eyes. They looked away when the older Buffy spoke.
”Actually, there is a way.”
”What?”
”There’s a way for Angel to become human again. It’s been tried once and worked.”
”What? Buffy, what are you talking about?” The older Giles was as puzzled as anyone.
“This is something I never told you. Never had cause to. Part of it you know about. The Shansu prophecy.”
”Well, yes. I got a letter from Wesley….”
”See, there’s this prophecy…”
”Not another prophecy! I am so sick of prophecies!”
”You’ll like this one,” Buffy told her younger self. “It’s on a scroll called… Giles, help me out.”
”The Prophecies of Aberjian.”
”Yeah, right. Currently in the vaults of the world’s most evil law firm, Wolfram and Hart, the LA Office. Angel stole it from them. He was taking something else from the vaults and this scroll sort of called out to him. Which isn’t too surprising because a lot of it’s about him. About the Vampire With A Soul. It gave details, annoyingly vague and ambiguous details about the evils the V with an S gets to fight. A really long and impressive list. And then at the end it says that, as a reward, he will get to ‘shansu’.”
”Which appears to mean,” explained Giles, “regain life, become a real breathing mortal human again. But Buffy what did you mean about…”
”Well, you all remember that I went to see Angel. When I came back.”
”Back?”
”From the dead. The second time. Yeah, yeah, all right. Settle down! We’ll get to that, we’ll get to that…. See, I was… in a pretty bad shape but I knew who I wanted to see. Wanted to see more than anyone in the world. We met in a motel room halfway between Sunnydale and LA. And we had our first really big, slamdunk fight!”
”That bad?”
”That bad, Xander.”
”You never went into details… You told us not to ask.”
”Well, part of it was I was still torn up inside but most of it was his attitude!” Angel in the here and now looked as if he was torn between feeling affronted at being criticised for something he had yet to do and wanting to apologise to Buffy for hurting her. Sensibly, he kept quiet. “He wasn’t so much pleased to see me as puzzled. And annoyed. He said…. He said he’d felt miserable and betrayed when I’d died and now he just felt ridiculous. And then he told me… He told me that he’d given up his chance to be human for me and then I’d gone and died on him anyway and the great Irish idiot seemed to blame me for getting myself killed!”
”Buffy, slow down. You’re skipping details…”
”Right yeah. I went to visit him the first year he was in LA. While I was in the office with him he was a bit jumpy as if he were expecting something. And then a demon came in through the window. We fought it. It got trashed. No biggie. But when we met at the motel he told me that was the second time he’d lived through that fight. The first time some of the demon’s blood got into a cut he’d taken and got mixed up with his. It was a… whatyoumaycallum…. A Mothra demon.”
”You mean ‘Mohra’, presumably?” one of the Gileses sniffed.
“If they’re the ones with healing, regenerative blood yeah. Apparently it can even raise the dead, if the dead in question happen to be a vampire with a soul. Shortly after the fight he started breathing again. Heart started beating. And we had a day together.” She smiled. “It must have been quite a day. But part way through it we went out patrolling together. And he got creamed. Discovered what Xander knows all too well: your average human being is very vulnerable to demons and monsters. So, he went to speak to the Oracles under the Post Office. They’re sort of the local agents for the Powers in LA. Asked them what would happen to me if I didn’t have my trusty Vampire boyfriend to help out. And they told him I would die. So he pestered them to turn back time for him to just before the fight so that only he would remember…”
”Well, of course. Well, yes I’d have to…I couldn’t bear it if you were to die….”
”Oh, you’re an idiot now as well! Of course, I’m going to die! I’m a mortal! And I’m a Slayer, damnit! How long do any of us last? You gave up a chance for us to be together, even for just a few days, a few months, a few years, as breathing, living man and woman because I’m going to die! I… I... Well, back in the motel I started to throw things. Dawnie, you remember how Mom’s voice got when she and Dad were fighting, just before they went for the divorce?”
”Do I ever! Sort of screechy! You managed to screech?”
”So high only dogs and vampires could hear me. And so, there you are, you’ve got a promise of becoming mortal again and a method…”
“If you can find a Mohra demon. They’re quite rare….”
”Thank you, Giles. So there’s hope, OK? There’s no guarantee, but there’s hope. Always hope.”
There was silence then for little while as Angel and white-dress Buffy first looked at each other and then wrapped themselves in each other’s arms and just sobbed. The moment was broken by an enquiring mind that had just managed to process what she was hearing.
“Hold it! Wait a goddamn minute!”
Buffy stopped watching her younger self jealously and looked over at the questioner.
“Yes, Cordy?”
”Are you telling me… Are you saying…. Angel’s a Vampire?”
The older Scoobies blinked and looked at each other.
”Oh, that’s right… She doesn’t know yet…”
”When was it she finally got a clue?”
”Can’t remember… Yeah, that’s right Cordy. Angel’s a Vampire. Used to be a really Big Big Bad called Angelus and then got cursed to get his soul back. OK? On the same page as everyone else now?”
”And you slept with him?” Faith snickered at that.
Buffy rolled her eyes and let her glance flicker over to Willow, touching her mind.
Do you wanna tell her what you figured out when you were in LA? About her and Angel?
Nah. Save it for later, maybe.
“Yeah, Cordy. I slept with him. Once. And maybe a couple of times more that got erased from history.”
”You slept with a corpse?!!!”
”How did we manage not to throttle her? Willow, Xander, remind me why she was allowed to live to graduate.”
”She had her good points.”
”Well, thank you very much, Mr Twenty-First Century Lumberjack! I think I’ve heard enough! This…. This is all too much! I’m out of here! I’m for the Bronze and actually having a good time! With living people!”
”Wait, Cordy, no! There is stuff here you need to know.”
”Such as? And just how did you get so careless as to loose an eye?”
”I’ll get to that…. But the most important thing you need to know… Look, sit down. You want to be sitting down for this.”
Suspiciously, the Queen of Sunnydale High sat.
”Well, I’m sitting.”
”Cordy, your dad…”
”Oh! Daddy’s not going to die is he? Does some monster get him?”
”Sorta. The monster’s called the Internal Revenue Service.”
”What?”
”See, your daddy, one of the reason’s he’s such a rich daddy and can give you all kinds of nice stuff…. Well, is that he’s been forgetting to tell the government about most of the money he’s been earning. Just before graduation.… They caught up with him. No jail time: he still had enough hidden away to pay for really good lawyers. But the house went, all the credit cards and goodies went. His cars, your car…. The whole lifestyle. Your mom went into a decline and back to her Mother. You went off to LA to try to make a career as an actress and ended up working as Angel’s secretary.”
”A secretary? Me! I….”
”Well, more a sort of general research assistant and polisher of the weapons. Angel got the weirder sort of cases and you being all familiar with living in close proximity to demons…”
”I…don’t believe it…. I don’t wanna believe it… Actually, y’know. I do kinda believe it. It would explain some things I’ve noticed… Oh, daddy, daddy, you moron!”
She stalked to the middle of the room seething with rage. She stopped by the Master’s skeleton and tried to pick up the mace Buffy had been smashing it to pieces with, nearly putting her back out in the process. The younger Xander stepped over to the weapons cage and got out a more manageable weapon.
“Here, try this. Start on some of the smaller pieces.”
”Thanks, Harris. I…. Right.”
As she started to pulverise the bones, the older Xander beckoned the younger over to him.
”If you folks don’t mind, we’ll go and get some pizza. Got some stuff I wanna say. Private stuff.”
Willow watched as her oldest friend wandered out of the room, times two. She glanced to where her younger self was watching the pair of them and resolved that she too had stuff she wanted to say to the young, shy and innocent nerd princess that was best done in private. Later for that. For now she turned back to the rest of the room where discussion had turned to the events of the near future.
The younger Giles underlined something he had been writing and then looked up.
“This… Spike comes to Sunnydale, you say?”
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