"Watson, I have it!"
"Well, put a poultice on it and see me in the morning..."
"No, Watson! I have proof positive that BUFFY is owned by Mutant Enemy and not by our client!"
"You astound me, Holmes!
**************
Arms full of cardboard boxes of pizza, with bags of garlic bread balanced on top the two Xanders strolled along the hall towards the library.
”Hang on a second,” said the elder putting his burden down on the top of the soda machine. “Let’s just go over what you’ve got before we go back in.” He fumbled in his pocket for change.
”Uhh, OK.” The younger Xander put down his boxes and reached into his pocket for a paper napkin on the back of which he had been taking notes.
“What I’ve got is:
1) Willow is a girl.
2) Smart chicks are sexy.
3) I am a demon chick magnet.
4) I am not a Zeppo, no matter what Cordy says. And make sure Jack O’Toole stays dead! (See Giles for how.)
5) I am not my dad, no matter what some dude who claims to be me from the future says… Uhhh…”
“I know, I know,” said the one-eyed Xander, retrieving a Dr Pepper, “but you’re just going to have to trust me on that one.”
“I just can’t help seeing an internal contradiction there, that’s all. Ummm,
6) Never, ever do magic or ask other people do it for me.
7) Don’t go anywhere near Southern preachers with a bad attitude.
8) Go directly to construction work. Do not try to become a bartender.
9) Coach Marin wants to turn me into a fish.
Is that it?”
“I’m sure there’s something I’ve missed, but maybe it will come back to me later.”
At that moment a burst of shouting came up the corridor to them from the direction of the library.
“Oh, crap!”
“You can’t leave them alone for five minutes….”
Grabbing the pizza boxes and muttering about boneheaded idiots who can’t keep their emotions under control the two Xanders hurried towards the furore.
In the middle of the room the two Giles were standing head to head and yelling out their lungs at each other. Around the room, two Slayers, two Willows, Cordelia and Ms Calendar were watching with a mixture of impatience, pain, disappointment and awe. The two returnees barrelled right down the middle.
“All right! All right break it up!”
”Pizza! We got pizza! Who wants pizza!”
The argument continued though until one-eyed Xander walked directly between the two of them and shouted “All right, ‘Ripper’! That’s ENOUGH!”
The two Giles turned on him and he shoved a pizza box at each of them, hard enough to push them both back a step.
“Okay, everybody’s got pizza? Where’s Deadboy? And Faith?”
The older Willow answered. “Angel took off. Faith went after.”
”Huh. And I went and got garlic bread especially for him.”
”Xander!”
”Hey, they’ll have to put up with cold pizza. Their loss. Now, what is all this shouting about? ‘Cause they can probably hear you in the Bronze. Hmm, come on fess up!”
Cordelia swallowed her mouthful of pizza and said, “Things started getting heated when future Giles got all Gerry Springer and confessed to having been a bad little magician when he was a kid. And then there was all this stuff about some guy called Ethan… Personally, I don’t know why Giles didn’t whack him while he had the chance.”
“For the same reason,” said the older Willow, “that you… well, the other you, couldn’t bring herself to stake Harmony when she got vamped.”
”Harmony? All fangs and sucking? Sheeh! I could have done without knowing that… I mean it’s going to be a little hard going shopping for shoes with her with that image in my mind.”
The elder Buffy paused and swallowed a mouthful of pizza (with extra hot pepperoni and olives) “Then we got onto the Crucamentem. Giles… Uhh, their Giles didn’t believe our Giles when he told him about the whole Council-being-a-bunch-of-idiot-control-freaks bit.”
”No! I do not! This… This arouses my worst suspicions about this whole…. You are trying to make my superiors sound like a pack of hidebound, incompetent fools…. And you are accusing me of… of betraying my Slayer over a meaningless ritual….”
”That’s not… That’s not how they sell it. Not how they convince you…” The older Giles stood there, with a pizza box in his hands looking more than slightly ridiculous. “I… We… No, I damnit! I took an oath of obedience and duty. They told me it was an important test, to ensure the Slayer was ready. And it’s not totally meaningless. It has a meaning. Just not the one they tell you about.”
”Giles?” The older Buffy sounded puzzled. “What’s this? Are you defending them?”
”No, not exactly. Thing is… I came across something at Watcher’s HQ when I was looking for material on the First Evil. It seems there was a purpose behind the Crucamentem, apart from… Tradition.”
The younger Buffy put down her pizza (ham and pineapple: the Slayer’s tastes had changed over the years) and demanded ”What possible purpose could there be in making me helpless and seeing if I could still take down a vampire?”
”It’s… They say it’s a test of the Slayer. But it’s not. It’s a test of the Watcher. And it isn’t nearly as old a tradition as they claim. It only goes back as far as the fourteenth Century.”
”Is that all?”
“That is nothing in the millennia of the Council’s history, Xander, no matter how impressive it may seem to an American. You see, Buffy, in about 1340 there was a Slayer who fell in love with and married her Watcher. They abandoned their duty for each other. Had children. A boy and a girl. It… It didn’t end well. The boy was turned when he was just an infant and became a master vampire. The mother had to die to stop him. Ever since then, the Council has been afraid of what might happen if a Watcher and a Slayer grew too close. If a Watcher, instead of preparing the Slayer for battle, tries to protect her from it. They held the Crucamentem to test me, you see, to see if I had grown too fond of you. If I had forgotten that my… my duty was to let you go to your death, if that was what was required. And to their mind, I failed.”
The older Buffy took a deep breath. “Oh. But that’s….”
And was interrupted by her younger self: “That’s ridiculous! You’ve already passed that test! You let me go tonight! Because I had to!”
”I… I know. Perhaps I did not emphasise that enough in my report…”
”Nah! You’re wrong, Giles. Whatever you did, it wasn’t going to be good enough. By then, you’d allowed me to go and face down Angelus and dozens of others. They just wanted you out of the way and their own guy in place. Control freaks. And look what it got them.”
The younger Giles blinked at Buffy’s furious contempt for the Council. “And w… what did it get them?”
”A big, big boom, G-Man,” said Xander. “They’d put up lots of mystical wards and pentagrams and Lord knows what around the London HQ. But the followers of the First Evil decided to try something less subtle. As in several tons of C4. Or was it Semtex? The news reports weren’t clear.”
“Oh. Oh dear.”
The elder Buffy went over to her Giles and took the box of pizza from his hands and opened it. As she poked around inside, rescuing a couple of slices for herself and… herself, she said: “You didn’t tell me any of this before. About the Crucamentem, I mean.”
”Yes, well. I thought it could probably wait until we’d finished saving the world. Or failed to. And that is my Chicken Feast!”
”Don’t be greedy.”
“If you ask me,” said the older Willow, as she shared her vegetarian pizza with Ms Calendar, “it was mostly Quentin Travers. There’s a man with issues about who’s in control. Not as psychotic about it as Ted or Snyder and a lot smoother. But he made the Council over in his own image and kept a lot of people around him that were happy to be satellites. Look at Wesley: it took being fired from the Council to make him into anything like the Watcher he was meant to be.”
”Wesley?”
”Wesley Wyndham-Price,” said Xander. “The guy they sent to replace Giles when he got fired. You think Giles can be a stuffed shirt?” Both Giles gave a ‘hey!’ at that, “Wait till you see Wesley…”
”There’s a senior Watcher called Wyndham-Price….” Said the younger Giles.
”His son and heir,” explained the elder, “Head boy at the Academy. All the best training and preparation the Council could give him. And about as much use as a chocolate tea-pot when it came to fighting evil in the real world.”
”He got much better after he moved to LA and started to work for Angel Investigations,” said Willow. “Though I think he went through some dark times. Got shot at least once and had a falling out with Angel for a while. He really impressed me when I was in LA last.”
“Humph,” said the younger Giles, clearly still unhappy with what he’d been told. “And what do you suggest we do when the Council tells me I’m to run this… Crucamentem? Tell them to go fly a kite?”
”Lord, no! That would just give them the excuse they were looking for….”
”It’s what I did when they came crawling round trying to take over the fight against Glory!”
”Yes, but by then you were officially an adult. They had a lot more leverage when you were still at school and I was a member of the school staff. It’s very easy to destroy a teacher’s reputation forever….”
”You mean they’d say you were….”
”Hanging around with you in a manner liable to raise suspicions? Oh, yes. I think they would…”
”So what do I do?”
”That’s easy,” said the older Willow. “Xander, do you want that garlic bread? All you’ve got to do is fake it.”
”Ummm?”
”You tell them that you’ve been injecting Buffy with the drug and that she’s helpless. She acts helpless but comes up with some brilliant stroke such as….”
”Such as conning the vampire into taking his medication with a Holy Water chaser…” Buffy offered.
“Medication?” Cordelia was puzzled. “Do walking corpses need pills?”
”Trust me,” said Willow, “this one was tried and worked. And with luck you won’t even lose the two Watchers who got turned and Mrs Summers won’t get kidnapped and everyone will be impressed by Buffy’s ingenuity and your obedience to orders.”
“Humph,” said the younger Giles. And then said it again. “Well, I suppose that I… Shall think about that. Let’s move on. We have still not got past even the halfway mark, if my notes are correct. What after the Acathla affair?”
”Our last year at Sunnydale High and the last year of Sunnydale High. Oh, yeah,” said Xander. “This old place had to go. And for a very good reason. Which is all tied up with the reason this town is here and the why and wherefore of the people who run it. Or rather person. And here comes the one who can tell you most about him.”
The doors to the library opened again and Angel and Faith came in.
“We brought donuts,” said Faith waving a bag. “And who exactly am I supposed to be an expert on?”
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