Fic: I Play My Part (You Play Your Game) PG-13 8/12
Before midnight! Yay!
Okay, I need to do these things earlier in the day. We'll see how well that works.
Part 1 is here
“So,” Lucy said. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and she was glaring at Xander. “You used me.”
“Yeah,” Xander said. He kicked at a stone on the floor of the barn. “We did. I’m sorry.”
“What does my father have to do with any of this?”
“He’s working with Luthor,” Xander said. “We know enough to know that he doesn’t want to be, but at the moment he doesn’t have any choice. We’re hoping to provide him with evidence he can use to discredit Luthor, and get his people away. But the soldiers who attacked Dawn yesterday, the ones who came into her home, injured and subdued her bodyguards and kidnapped her, they worked for your father, and for Lex Luthor.”
“How long have you known?”
“About your dad? A little under two years,” he said. “Riley informed us of what was going on, and we started to feel hits from them a month after that. They were trying to abduct Slayers, trying to experiment on them. Dissect them. Kill them. Lucky for us, they had underestimated just how good our Slayers are. Gave us time to adapt, and stay out of the way a bit more when we needed to.”
“And Prague,” Lucy said. “How much of that was real?”
“Almost none of it,” Xander said. “Although your boyfriend was actually a drug dealer. The rest of it - the murder, the kidnapping, me being arrested. All of it was orchestrated and planned. We had surveillance teams and technical teams making sure everything went smoothly.”
“And what about us, Xander? Was everything a lie?”
Xander shook his head. “Lucy,” he said, “every single day that I have known you, I have lied to you about one thing or another. But I never once lied about my feelings for you.”
“How can I believe that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Xander said. “I guess I don’t really expect you to. We used you for information, for opportunity, to get to your sister, your cousin, and your father. We lied to you, and we held things back. And you should know that I’d do it again if I had to. This is too important.”
“Oh, this is too important?” she asked angrily. “All these girls are too important, more than me, the woman you claim to love.”
“Yeah,” Xander said. “More important than you, more important than me, more important than Dawn or Buffy or Willow or Giles. You think I’m happy with this? You think I didn’t beat myself up over it? We had to do this, Lucy. We had no choice.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why, exactly, is this so important to you?”
Xander deflated a little. “Because it’s our fault.”
“Bullshit,” Lucy said. “You didn’t ask Lex to come after them.”
“But we made them what they are,” he said. “It was our need, our decision that made these girls Slayers. That made them targets. If not for us, they would have lived out their lives without being exposed to all of these dangers. We are responsible for what happens to them.”
Xander shook his head. “We tried contacting your dad through legitimate channels. We tried bribing people. We tried going through side avenues, and all sorts of other things. For a year we tried. All of it got us nothing. So we looked for another option.”
“And you found me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t think you could trust me enough. After what you’ve shown me, after what we’ve been through with these girls, after everything we’ve done, you didn’t think you could trust me with this,” she said.
“We couldn’t take the chance.”
Lucy turned away from him, walked over and fiddled with something on the tractor.
“Lucy,” he said. He walked up behind her and slid his hands onto her arms. “I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”
“Who made the decision?” she asked. “Who was it who said that I couldn’t be trusted?”
Xander shrugged. “In the end, what it comes down to is that I did. Because no matter what the others said, no matter if they were unanimous in not trusting you, or if they were split down the middle, I could have told you anyway. And I didn’t. This one is on me.”
She shrugged his hands off of her shoulders. “You should go inside,” she said.
“Can you…” he started. “Where are we?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But you being here right now is making me so angry I could scream. So go.”
Xander stepped back from her. He paused, started to say something, then thought better of it and headed back to the house.
* * * * *
“Clark,” Buffy said. “Do you have a minute?”
Xander had come back inside looking decidedly depressed, and was in no mood to be cheered, either. Lois had gone out to the barn to console her sister, and Chloe and Oliver were doing something on Chloe’s computer that Buffy didn’t really understand.
That left her and Clark. And she definitely needed to talk to him.
“Um, sure, I guess,” he said.
“Out front?” she asked.
Clark shrugged and led her out the front door onto the porch. “Can I ask you a question?” he asked, once they were alone.
“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering… how did Xander and Oliver meet? It doesn’t seem like they’d run in the same circles.”
Buffy smiled. “That depends on which circles you’re talking about.”
“Lex?” Clark asked.
“The tie that binds,” Buffy said. “Soon after we’d been attacked that first time, Riley found out who was after us. Xander was in Denmark staking out one of Lex’s facilities that we thought might be involved in his experiments. All of a sudden, part of it goes up in flames. Big explosion.”
“That sounds like Ollie.”
Buffy nodded. “Xander sees a guy in a green mask - very suspicious - limping out of the building. Guy falls down unconscious and instead of, like most normal people, ignoring him and fleeing the scene, he gets out of his car, grabs the guy and tosses him into the back of his car. Drives him to his hotel.”
“Finds out who he’s got when he takes off the mask.”
“Oh, lord no,” Buffy said. “And don’t let Xander hear you suggest that. He’s far too much of a comic book nerd to do something like that. But about an hour later, Xander’s hotel door explodes open and a young kid in red and a… well, a cyborg, burst into Xander’s room, ready to beat him up.”
“Okay.”
“Well, by this time, Xander has set Ollie at ease, and Ollie had taken outed himself. Anyway, some of the heat from the explosion had kind of melted Ollie’s suit onto his back. So the guys burst in, and see Ollie on the bed, and Xander’s behind him with a knife, peeling strips of leather off his back. And Ollie’s screaming in pain, and bleeding.”
“Oh, no,” Clark said.
Buffy smiled at his earnestness.
“So there’s a fight. This is actually why Xander has bodyguards now.”
“Those two girls in the museum!” Clark said.
“I don’t know about a museum, but if you saw two girls following him, that was probably them.”
“Was he okay after the fight?” Clark asked.
“Xander was fine. Apparently Ollie is really good at throwing things, not just with a bow and arrow. So about ten minutes later, instead of peeling leather off of Ollie’s back, Xander’s picking glass shards out of the little guy’s forehead from the ashtray Ollie hit him with, and Ollie was patching up the robot-guy, and the police bust in and arrest all of them.”
“Oh man.”
“Right. Anyway, there’s a lot more stuff, and Ollie had to basically call in a lot of favors to keep it from being an international incident. So they bonded.”
“Wow,” Clark said. “That’s kind of crazy.”
“This is our life.”
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” Clark asked.
Buffy smiled. “Okay, well you seem like a really nice guy,” she said. “With all of Lucy’s opinions on people, she really didn’t have a bad thing to say about you, with the possible exception of your wardrobe. But you seem like a good guy. So I really hope you won’t take this the wrong way.”
“Take what?” he asked.
She punched him in the stomach.
“Ow, God!” she said, walking around the porch waving her hand up and down in pain. “Jesus, I didn’t think it would hurt that much. I think I dislocated a finger!”
“Uh, I can explain,” he said. “I have this condition where -”
Buffy waved him off. She took a deep breath and yanked her finger back into its socket with an audible pop that made Clark wince.
“Man, I haven’t had to do that in years,” she said, still waving her hand around.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “Just not used to that. Wow. Okay. I don’t know if you remember what Riley said on the phone, but he called us the Council of Watchers.”
“I remember,” Clark said.
“Back when there was only one Slayer, instead of a lot of us - and I’m not going into that right now, by the way, it’s just too long a story - there was a whole council full of wealthy people, mostly men, mostly white. They trained the Slayer to save the world, and kept a journal of everything that happened while they did it.
“But field watchers weren’t the only ones who kept journals. So did our researchers and librarians, archaeologists and religious historians.”
“Okay,” Clark said. “I’m not sure what -”
“I’m getting there,” Buffy said. “So anyway, when my friends and I took over this little endeavor six years ago, the biggest resource we had - because we had very little at that time - was these journals, so we spent a lot of long, boring hours poring over them.
“We ran across an entry in one of the journals, speaking of a prophecy of a being from another planet, a being of immense power. One who could change the world. The prophecy referred to this being as The Traveler.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Clark asked.
Buffy smiled. “You’re good at that. Okay, so we did a lot of checking, and this was the only reference to this Traveler that we found. Until about four weeks ago, when our advance team came here to Smallville -”
“You’ve had people here for a month?” Clark asked.
“We’re very good at what we do,” Buffy said. “And part of that is because we have learned to be very thorough. In any event, when looking through the history of this town, one of our team members came across a single mention of a group called Veritas. More digging turned up four members of this group: Lionel Luthor, Virgil Swann, Robert Queen and Edward Teague.
“And the reason that is important, Clark, is that the watcher whose journal we found this prophecy in was named Desmond Teague,” she said. “Edward’s brother.”
“What was the point of telling me all this?” Clark asked.
Buffy hopped up on the porch railing, letting her feet swing in the gaps. “Look, you’re obviously not going to admit to anything, and that’s cool. After our people found out about Veritas, we thought we might run into this Traveler while we were here in Smallville. It kind of clicked for me when Mel said there was a huge source of power that was disrupting her. I know Mel pretty well, and she has a definite tendency towards the understatement.
“So I guess the point of all this was to let you know that we know. And… that we’re going to be watching.”
Clark crossed his arms. “If I am this Traveler,” he said, “which, I’m not admitting, but just hypothetically.”
“Of course.”
“If I have this power to change the world… if I wanted to do something, how would you go about stopping me?”
Buffy looked at him for a second and then laughed. “You see?” she said. “This is why I generally leave the talky parts to Willow and Giles. I always mess it up.” She shook her head. “The prophecy said you would usher in a new era of hope for humanity. That you would be a symbol known the world around to stand for truth and justice. That you would be this planet’s greatest defender, and battle evil in all its forms.
“We don’t want to stop you, Clark,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes. “We want to do everything we can to help.”
The two of them looked out over the fields. Off in the distance, a small light was shining well above the corn, and it was getting closer.
“That’ll be General Lane,” Buffy said. “Guess it’s time to get this show started.”
----------
End Chapter 8
Continue to Chapter 9
Okay, I need to do these things earlier in the day. We'll see how well that works.
Part 1 is here
“So,” Lucy said. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and she was glaring at Xander. “You used me.”
“Yeah,” Xander said. He kicked at a stone on the floor of the barn. “We did. I’m sorry.”
“What does my father have to do with any of this?”
“He’s working with Luthor,” Xander said. “We know enough to know that he doesn’t want to be, but at the moment he doesn’t have any choice. We’re hoping to provide him with evidence he can use to discredit Luthor, and get his people away. But the soldiers who attacked Dawn yesterday, the ones who came into her home, injured and subdued her bodyguards and kidnapped her, they worked for your father, and for Lex Luthor.”
“How long have you known?”
“About your dad? A little under two years,” he said. “Riley informed us of what was going on, and we started to feel hits from them a month after that. They were trying to abduct Slayers, trying to experiment on them. Dissect them. Kill them. Lucky for us, they had underestimated just how good our Slayers are. Gave us time to adapt, and stay out of the way a bit more when we needed to.”
“And Prague,” Lucy said. “How much of that was real?”
“Almost none of it,” Xander said. “Although your boyfriend was actually a drug dealer. The rest of it - the murder, the kidnapping, me being arrested. All of it was orchestrated and planned. We had surveillance teams and technical teams making sure everything went smoothly.”
“And what about us, Xander? Was everything a lie?”
Xander shook his head. “Lucy,” he said, “every single day that I have known you, I have lied to you about one thing or another. But I never once lied about my feelings for you.”
“How can I believe that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Xander said. “I guess I don’t really expect you to. We used you for information, for opportunity, to get to your sister, your cousin, and your father. We lied to you, and we held things back. And you should know that I’d do it again if I had to. This is too important.”
“Oh, this is too important?” she asked angrily. “All these girls are too important, more than me, the woman you claim to love.”
“Yeah,” Xander said. “More important than you, more important than me, more important than Dawn or Buffy or Willow or Giles. You think I’m happy with this? You think I didn’t beat myself up over it? We had to do this, Lucy. We had no choice.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why, exactly, is this so important to you?”
Xander deflated a little. “Because it’s our fault.”
“Bullshit,” Lucy said. “You didn’t ask Lex to come after them.”
“But we made them what they are,” he said. “It was our need, our decision that made these girls Slayers. That made them targets. If not for us, they would have lived out their lives without being exposed to all of these dangers. We are responsible for what happens to them.”
Xander shook his head. “We tried contacting your dad through legitimate channels. We tried bribing people. We tried going through side avenues, and all sorts of other things. For a year we tried. All of it got us nothing. So we looked for another option.”
“And you found me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t think you could trust me enough. After what you’ve shown me, after what we’ve been through with these girls, after everything we’ve done, you didn’t think you could trust me with this,” she said.
“We couldn’t take the chance.”
Lucy turned away from him, walked over and fiddled with something on the tractor.
“Lucy,” he said. He walked up behind her and slid his hands onto her arms. “I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”
“Who made the decision?” she asked. “Who was it who said that I couldn’t be trusted?”
Xander shrugged. “In the end, what it comes down to is that I did. Because no matter what the others said, no matter if they were unanimous in not trusting you, or if they were split down the middle, I could have told you anyway. And I didn’t. This one is on me.”
She shrugged his hands off of her shoulders. “You should go inside,” she said.
“Can you…” he started. “Where are we?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But you being here right now is making me so angry I could scream. So go.”
Xander stepped back from her. He paused, started to say something, then thought better of it and headed back to the house.
* * * * *
“Clark,” Buffy said. “Do you have a minute?”
Xander had come back inside looking decidedly depressed, and was in no mood to be cheered, either. Lois had gone out to the barn to console her sister, and Chloe and Oliver were doing something on Chloe’s computer that Buffy didn’t really understand.
That left her and Clark. And she definitely needed to talk to him.
“Um, sure, I guess,” he said.
“Out front?” she asked.
Clark shrugged and led her out the front door onto the porch. “Can I ask you a question?” he asked, once they were alone.
“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering… how did Xander and Oliver meet? It doesn’t seem like they’d run in the same circles.”
Buffy smiled. “That depends on which circles you’re talking about.”
“Lex?” Clark asked.
“The tie that binds,” Buffy said. “Soon after we’d been attacked that first time, Riley found out who was after us. Xander was in Denmark staking out one of Lex’s facilities that we thought might be involved in his experiments. All of a sudden, part of it goes up in flames. Big explosion.”
“That sounds like Ollie.”
Buffy nodded. “Xander sees a guy in a green mask - very suspicious - limping out of the building. Guy falls down unconscious and instead of, like most normal people, ignoring him and fleeing the scene, he gets out of his car, grabs the guy and tosses him into the back of his car. Drives him to his hotel.”
“Finds out who he’s got when he takes off the mask.”
“Oh, lord no,” Buffy said. “And don’t let Xander hear you suggest that. He’s far too much of a comic book nerd to do something like that. But about an hour later, Xander’s hotel door explodes open and a young kid in red and a… well, a cyborg, burst into Xander’s room, ready to beat him up.”
“Okay.”
“Well, by this time, Xander has set Ollie at ease, and Ollie had taken outed himself. Anyway, some of the heat from the explosion had kind of melted Ollie’s suit onto his back. So the guys burst in, and see Ollie on the bed, and Xander’s behind him with a knife, peeling strips of leather off his back. And Ollie’s screaming in pain, and bleeding.”
“Oh, no,” Clark said.
Buffy smiled at his earnestness.
“So there’s a fight. This is actually why Xander has bodyguards now.”
“Those two girls in the museum!” Clark said.
“I don’t know about a museum, but if you saw two girls following him, that was probably them.”
“Was he okay after the fight?” Clark asked.
“Xander was fine. Apparently Ollie is really good at throwing things, not just with a bow and arrow. So about ten minutes later, instead of peeling leather off of Ollie’s back, Xander’s picking glass shards out of the little guy’s forehead from the ashtray Ollie hit him with, and Ollie was patching up the robot-guy, and the police bust in and arrest all of them.”
“Oh man.”
“Right. Anyway, there’s a lot more stuff, and Ollie had to basically call in a lot of favors to keep it from being an international incident. So they bonded.”
“Wow,” Clark said. “That’s kind of crazy.”
“This is our life.”
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” Clark asked.
Buffy smiled. “Okay, well you seem like a really nice guy,” she said. “With all of Lucy’s opinions on people, she really didn’t have a bad thing to say about you, with the possible exception of your wardrobe. But you seem like a good guy. So I really hope you won’t take this the wrong way.”
“Take what?” he asked.
She punched him in the stomach.
“Ow, God!” she said, walking around the porch waving her hand up and down in pain. “Jesus, I didn’t think it would hurt that much. I think I dislocated a finger!”
“Uh, I can explain,” he said. “I have this condition where -”
Buffy waved him off. She took a deep breath and yanked her finger back into its socket with an audible pop that made Clark wince.
“Man, I haven’t had to do that in years,” she said, still waving her hand around.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she said. “Just not used to that. Wow. Okay. I don’t know if you remember what Riley said on the phone, but he called us the Council of Watchers.”
“I remember,” Clark said.
“Back when there was only one Slayer, instead of a lot of us - and I’m not going into that right now, by the way, it’s just too long a story - there was a whole council full of wealthy people, mostly men, mostly white. They trained the Slayer to save the world, and kept a journal of everything that happened while they did it.
“But field watchers weren’t the only ones who kept journals. So did our researchers and librarians, archaeologists and religious historians.”
“Okay,” Clark said. “I’m not sure what -”
“I’m getting there,” Buffy said. “So anyway, when my friends and I took over this little endeavor six years ago, the biggest resource we had - because we had very little at that time - was these journals, so we spent a lot of long, boring hours poring over them.
“We ran across an entry in one of the journals, speaking of a prophecy of a being from another planet, a being of immense power. One who could change the world. The prophecy referred to this being as The Traveler.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Clark asked.
Buffy smiled. “You’re good at that. Okay, so we did a lot of checking, and this was the only reference to this Traveler that we found. Until about four weeks ago, when our advance team came here to Smallville -”
“You’ve had people here for a month?” Clark asked.
“We’re very good at what we do,” Buffy said. “And part of that is because we have learned to be very thorough. In any event, when looking through the history of this town, one of our team members came across a single mention of a group called Veritas. More digging turned up four members of this group: Lionel Luthor, Virgil Swann, Robert Queen and Edward Teague.
“And the reason that is important, Clark, is that the watcher whose journal we found this prophecy in was named Desmond Teague,” she said. “Edward’s brother.”
“What was the point of telling me all this?” Clark asked.
Buffy hopped up on the porch railing, letting her feet swing in the gaps. “Look, you’re obviously not going to admit to anything, and that’s cool. After our people found out about Veritas, we thought we might run into this Traveler while we were here in Smallville. It kind of clicked for me when Mel said there was a huge source of power that was disrupting her. I know Mel pretty well, and she has a definite tendency towards the understatement.
“So I guess the point of all this was to let you know that we know. And… that we’re going to be watching.”
Clark crossed his arms. “If I am this Traveler,” he said, “which, I’m not admitting, but just hypothetically.”
“Of course.”
“If I have this power to change the world… if I wanted to do something, how would you go about stopping me?”
Buffy looked at him for a second and then laughed. “You see?” she said. “This is why I generally leave the talky parts to Willow and Giles. I always mess it up.” She shook her head. “The prophecy said you would usher in a new era of hope for humanity. That you would be a symbol known the world around to stand for truth and justice. That you would be this planet’s greatest defender, and battle evil in all its forms.
“We don’t want to stop you, Clark,” she said, looking him straight in the eyes. “We want to do everything we can to help.”
The two of them looked out over the fields. Off in the distance, a small light was shining well above the corn, and it was getting closer.
“That’ll be General Lane,” Buffy said. “Guess it’s time to get this show started.”
----------
End Chapter 8
Continue to Chapter 9