Fic: The Great Random Xander Story - Iteration One (15/?)
Yes, once again this story is probably NSFW, although I don't think there's anything too graphic going on. Once again it's more talking about stuff than actually doing stuff.
I asked all of you out there to submit to me a bunch of ideas for things that could happen or become true for Xander. Then I used a random number generator and the AXIS (Alternate Xander Idea Selector - thanks, learnedhand_dj) to choose three random consecutive episodes and three random ideas, and I wrote a story based on those ideas.
Authors: please feel not only free, but actively encouraged to attempt your own Great Random Xander Story, using the AXIS listed above. I can tell you from personal experience, it's actually kind of fun and a very interesting writing exercise. Writing a story where you know at least two more major changes are coming but you don't know what they are going to be or when they will occur is pretty wacky. Try it out, and be sure to share your results with the rest of us!
This is the first attempt at that story, but will not be the last, so keep submitting your ideas. (We're up to about 150, I believe. New goal is 200!) First chapter and author notes can be found here
On with the story:
The Secret Diary of Dawn Summers
Do Not Read - THIS MEANS YOU!
Nobody knows who I am. Not the real me. It’s like, nobody even cares to find out. I mean, does anyone ever ask me what I want to do with my life? Or what my opinion is on stuff? Or what restaurant to order in from?
NO!!!
No one understands. No one has a sister who’s a slayer. Mom’s all “Oh Buffy’s doing so well in school” but that’s just because her stupid slayer powers make her smart or something. I don’t really know how it works, I just know she used to be normal and now she talks about science and math and other boring stuff all the time. Mom thinks it’s soooo amazing, so she lets Buffy get away with anything.
I mean she’s only nineteen, and Mom let her move into Xander’s house. They’re probably even having sex! And please, did she have to go after Xander? He was this total genius super cool guy: sooo not her type, and what does she do as soon as Angel breaks up with her? Swoops in and snatches up Xander.
I see them kissing all the time. It’s so gross. What does he even see in her? Oooh, big deal, she’s the slayer. So’s Faith, and Faith’s way better at being the slayer than Buffy is. She killed like a thousand demons all by herself. Buffy never did that. All she does is kill vampires. Big deal! They’re killed by wood! Oh no, a splinter! I’m dead now! So lame.
Faith’s the cool one. She’s the only one of my sister’s friends who’s never allowed to babysit with me -- as if I need one in the first place, god! But if I had to be watched by someone, it would be so cool if it was Faith. I bet she’d let me do all kinds of cool stuff. We could go to a party and meet boys.
Faith is totally cool.
I guess most of my sister’s friends are okay. Willow’s nice, but I hate talking to her. She’s got some weird curse thingy where you have to tell her the total truth all the time. I once told her I had a...dream...about Xander. And he was right there! So embarrassing. I thought I was going to die.
Buffy says if I feel like talking to Willow I should whisper stuff to her in public, but that never works for me. I always forget and I just start blurting stuff out. I usually try to be elsewhere when Willow’s around.
Jonathan’s nice too, but he’s a total dork. He’s short and really quiet, but he once showed me how to break into the school’s grades database, so that was kind of cool. He says someday he’ll show me how to do an illusion spell so it looks like I’m a demon, but Buffy got in his face and made him promise not to.
God, she’s such a pain sometimes. What’s some dumb illusion spell going to do that’s so bad? It’s just for fun. Sometimes I think Buffy was put on this planet just to keep anything interesting from ever happening to me.
Like today at Xander’s lab -- Xander has this totally awesome lab he built himself. He’s like the smartest person on the planet, for real. From the outside his house just looks like this small little place, but then inside it’s huge and has all these rooms. He said he’s going to let me try out this virtual reality thing he’s working on soon.
Anyway, today at the lab I was just sitting around minding my own business like usual. Buffy’s always afraid I’m going to break something, but whatever. It’s not like she even knows what half of the stuff in the lab actually does. Xander’s the real genius, not her.
All I did was pick up this little glowing ball thingy, and suddenly Buffy’s all “Dawn! I told you not to touch anything! You reversed the blah blah blah” or something like that. Then she looked at Xander with that stupid moron look she gives him all the time and put the ball in a weird container.
She does that a lot, by the way. Not the container thing. The stupid moron look. It’s like whenever Xander’s around she just stares at him like the biggest idiot on the planet. Okay, we get it, he’s your boyfriend. Does she have to make such a big deal out of it all the time?
I think she does it on purpose just to rub it in my face that she got him and I didn’t. She knew I liked Xander, and he liked me back. Xander always treats me like a real person. Sometimes when he looks at me it’s like he doesn’t just see Buffy’s little sister. He sees a woman.
But it’s too late. Buffy’s got her claws in him, and I’ve seen him give her the stupid moron look a bunch of times too. She’s got him totally wrapped around her finger. It’s so sad. He deserves to be with someone who would really love him, not just be with him because he’s the second choice.
I mean three years ago it was all Angel all the time, and now suddenly Buffy’s pretending she’s in love with Xander. Does anyone actually believe her? I sure don’t. There’s just no way she actually appreciates him, just like she doesn’t appreciate me.
She thinks I’m just her little sister. Well she’d better get ready, because she’s about to be in for a big surprise. I am NOT little Dawnie anymore!
Joyce Summers sighed as she got out of the car. This was really so foolish. It was just a brief dizzy spell, that was all.
“Buffy, I really don’t see what Xander can do that the hospital can’t. I understand he’s a very intelligent boy, but--”
“I told you, he’s not just intelligent,” Buffy said as she urged Joyce up the walkway leading to the small, unassuming home. “He’s the smartest person on the planet.”
Joyce tried not to roll her eyes at her obviously-in-love daughter. Yes, Xander was definitely a very smart young man; perhaps the smartest person she had ever met, but that didn’t make him the smartest person in the world.
Buffy sighed as she keyed in a combination beside the door, then pulled it open. She gestured for her mother to enter, so Joyce stepped inside.
It was not the first time she had been in Xander (and Buffy’s) house, but she did not visit there often. It was small and somewhat cramped, and she preferred to have Buffy and Xander over for dinner at her house than to visit them at Xander’s. Part of that was because Joyce was not yet fully comfortable with the idea of her eldest daughter living with a boy.
She knew of course that Buffy was much more responsible than many girls her age, but it still bothered her. She wasn’t even twenty years old yet, and she was living full-time with another boy the same age? It seemed so rushed.
And yet she had never seen Buffy happier. Sometimes during dinner she would catch Buffy gazing dreamily at Xander, and Joyce would feel a pang of envy at just how strongly Buffy obviously cared for him. She missed feeling that in her own life. One, long ago, she had felt that way about Hank.
“Here, this way,” Buffy said, leading them over to a door by the stairs. It was the entrance to the basement. Joyce followed Buffy down the stairs, but nearly fell over as she reached the bottom.
It was huge. It was far too large. A door in the back was opened onto a hallway that seemed to stretch out for hundreds of yards. The room was spacious, white, and filled with glowing lights and neon displays. Joyce’s mouth dropped open.
“Buffy,” she breathed. “What is all of this?”
“This is Xander’s lab,” Buffy said. She grabbed a pair of what looked like black-tinted welding goggles from over the back of a chair, and slipped them onto her head. Then she grabbed a labcoat from a hook and slipped into it. It fit her perfectly. Stitching just over the heart read: Buffy Summers, Lab Assistant/Slayer.
To Joyce’s astonishment, Buffy then reached up into thin air. Glowing diagrams appeared before her fingertips, and she manipulated them easily, sliding shapes and lines from one spot to another. A glowing red light blinked.
“Xander?” Buffy said into thin air. “My mom’s here.” There was no reply, but Buffy nodded. “He’s on his way.”
One of the doors down the long hallway opened, and Xander poked his head out. He was dressed similarly to Buffy in a labcoat and with those strange black goggles on his forehead. His hair was unkempt and it looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days, but he smiled broadly as he came out into the main lab.
“Mrs. Summers,” he said brightly. Joyce tried not to feel too flustered as he gave Buffy a quick kiss on the cheek. She was an adult, and they were a serious couple. It was to be expected. “Glad you came by. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, thank you, Xander. It was really just a minor fainting spell or something. The doctors did some scans but I checked out just fine.”
“They give you an MRI?”
Joyce nodded. “Yes, and a C/T scan.”
To her surprise, Xander rolled his eyes. “Jeez. What is this, the dark ages? I mean, really. Magnetic resonance imaging? We might as well stick leeches on your brain. Well, let’s get you onto the medi-bed. I’ll call up a cloud-swarm and get a real scan going.”
“I already pre-loaded the system,” Buffy said. Her fingers were flying over the neon lights in the air. There was a soft hiss of air, and what looked like thick gray steam billowed out from a vent. Joyce frowned at it.
Xander grinned at Buffy. “Right. Should have known. Okay, Mrs. Summers, you want to hop up on this bed over here?”
“Now wait just a second,” Joyce said as she looked from Xander to Buffy to the cloud of steam. “W-what is that?”
“It’s a cranial-cloud-swarm,” Buffy said. “It’s like a billion tiny atomic frequency receptacles suspended in a nanomolecular crystalline network. They surround your body and provide us with accurate atomic vibrational data of your body. If there’s something wrong, we’ll see it.”
Joyce blinked at her eldest daughter. She knew that she was doing much better in school lately, and had heard Buffy talking about the strangest, most complicated things, but this was too much.
“Buffy, what are you talking about?”
“Please, Mom? Just get on the bed. It won’t hurt, I promise. It actually feels pretty nice.”
“You’ve been in this cloud-thing before?”
Buffy nodded. “Sure. Lots of times. It’s how Xander learned about my body and how he can make me stronger and better and stuff.”
Better. “Smarter?”
A soft flush of red rose up Buffy’s neck and into her cheeks. “Um, n-not really. That’s, um, something different.”
“It’s her Slayer brain,” Xander said. “She’s reacting to a perpetual outside stimulus of increased mental activity, and her own mental capacity is increasing in order to keep up.”
“Outside stimulus?” Joyce asked as Buffy continued to blush. Just what was going on here?
“It’s a Slayer thing,” Xander said for her. “There was this demon, she got kind of splashed with some blood. Don’t worry, it’s safe.”
“A-and that’s why you’ve been getting smarter, Buffy?”
Buffy shrugged. “Yeah. Kind of.”
“Oh. I-I didn’t realize that was possible.”
It was always so hard to believe that her little girl was some sort of superhero. Even seeing Buffy bench press impossible weights or jump ten or fifteen feet into the air didn’t really register with her. She guessed that if Buffy could become stronger and faster, then she could easily become smarter as well.
Which was a good thing, after all. Buffy had never been an unintelligent girl. She’d always done well on standardized testing, but she had hardly ever applied herself. Joyce now knew that much of that was Buffy being distracted by her duties as a Slayer, but in the last year or so it seemed that Buffy had managed to juggle her responsibilities much more easily. Joyce had thought it was because Faith was there to help her, but now she wasn’t so sure. Was it really because Buffy was just getting smarter?
“Mom?” Buffy said, breaking Joyce out of her thoughts. “The bed?”
“What? Oh. Yes. Um, okay.” Feeling rather anxious, she stepped over to the strange bed with the glowing strips of light running along the side. The material of the mattress was unfamiliar to her, but when she sat down on it, it felt wonderful soft and yet somehow firm at the same time. Without really thinking, she spread out on it and rested her head back. Oh. It was heavenly. It felt as if she were floating, weightless and without a single point of pressure along her entire body. Her eyes slid closed.
“Extending bio-electric monitor field,” Buffy said. Curious, she opened her eyes just in time to see a shimmering orange field of light sluice down around her entire body, conforming to her form and pressing up against her clothing. She felt suddenly claustrophobic.
“B-buffy?”
“Relax, Mom. It won’t hurt. Just lie back.”
Joyce swallowed nervously, then closed her eyes again. Mmm. It felt so nice. If she had a bed like this, she thought she might never get out of it. Her breathing came slowly and evenly. She could hear Buffy making quiet announcements every so often. Curiously, Xander never said a word. Was Buffy the one in charge of all of this? Was she really that smart?
She recalled Buffy talking about the curvature of space-time one night over dinner, or about how she had been working on her own solution for Fermat’s last theorem, or even how she had fixed Joyce’s DVD player in just a few minutes. It seemed obvious now that Buffy was changing. It worried her a little, but it also made her feel somewhat giddy. Any advantage Buffy could get was one that Joyce was very happy about.
She smiled to herself as something warm and soothing flowed over her. Buffy was a genius. She would change the world! Her little girl could be a doctor or a scientist, not just a Slayer.
Joyce woke up some time later, unaware that she had fallen asleep in the first place. Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked sleepily at the face floating over her.
“Mom? Can you hear me?”
“Buffy? What happened?”
“You fell asleep,” Buffy said in a soothing tone. She put a hand on Joyce’s shoulder. “No, don’t get up yet. Wake up a little first. You might feel a little dizzy.”
“What? Why?”
Buffy gave her a serious look. “We found something. I-it was a brain tumor.”
Joyce tried to sit up, but Buffy’s strong hand kept her down. “What?”
“The doctors wouldn’t have found it,” Buffy said. “Not until it was bigger, anyway. And by then the risk of removing it would be...” There were tears in her eyes, but she swallowed past a lump in her throat and looked meaningfully down at Joyce. “Well, it doesn’t matter. We got rid of it.”
Joyce blinked at her. “You did?”
“Well, Xander did. You might kind of dizzy for a day or two. He had to implode the tumor into null-space, but he filled the void with this neuron-paste stuff. You need to tell me if you start seeing floaty light thingies, okay?”
“W-why? What does that mean?”
“It means you might be exhibiting the ability to see Dawnitrons,” Xander said. Joyce looked to her side to see him standing over her.
“Dawn? What?”
“They’re these fundamental superparticles I found last year,” he said. “They don’t precisely exist in our spacetime, but I think human beings have an innate ability to sense them. Your tumor was right where the brain function for it would be, if it exists. So if you start seeing them, you should tell me, cause then I might be able to figure out the exact mechanism behind seeing them and program them into my Froggles. Being able to accurately track Dawnitrons would be pretty nice. Anything got all reality-shifty and I’d know it right away. Right now I have to keep eight different sensor programs running just to detect reality shifts, and even then I missed like six of them.”
“R-reality shifts? What?”
“It happens sometimes,” Buffy said off-handedly. “The universe isn’t actually constant, it kind of morphs and folds. And that’s not even counting magic.”
“Oh,” Joyce said. This was very strange. Buffy removed her hand from Joyce’s shoulder, and allowed her to sit slowly up. “I really had a tumor?”
“Yeah,” Buffy said. “But it’s gone. We should probably scan you again next week just to be sure there’s no damage, but the neuron-paste should keep things running smoothly. You probably won’t need to sleep as much for a few years, and it’s possible your memory might get a little sharper.”
“Really? Buffy, this is all just so...”
“Amazing, right?” She grinned at Xander, who gave her a shy grin in return. “He just came up with the neuron-paste last night, too.”
“And you put it in my brain?” Joyce said, a pang of fear rising within her. “Buffy, was this really a good idea?”
“It’ll be fine, Mom. We mapped out your whole brain. Right now you’ve got the healthiest one in the whole world. That paste will keep your brain squeaky clean for years, maybe decades.”
Joyce touched the side of her head. She didn’t feel any-- no, that wasn’t true. The dizziness she’d been feeling lately, that sense of being disconnected from reality, that was gone. She felt clear-headed and alert for the first time in months. The general fatigue she had been feeling was gone. Could any of this be real? Could Buffy and Xander really do these things?
Well why not? Her daughter was a superhero, after all. Magic was real. She had seen it firsthand. Why couldn’t this be real too?
Joyce reached her hands out for Buffy and pulled her into a hug. “I don’t know what to think about any of this,” she admitted. “But thank you, Buffy.”
Xander grimaced as Buffy led him down the street by the hand. Why couldn’t he just stay at home? He was still processing the data on the energy field that weird ball thing was putting out. It was doing things to Dawnitrons that he had never seen before, and it was opening up a whole new avenue of research.
“Because it’s some old magic ball thing, and that means magic research, not science research,” Buffy said as dragged him towards the shop. “And besides, I have a training session with Giles and it’s easier to come to him now that he’s working all the time.
“But I hate magic research,” Xander whined petulantly. “Nothing ever makes sense.”
“It makes sense to Willow,” Buffy pointed out. “And Giles. And Jonathan. And Tara!”
“Yeah, well they’re cheating somehow.”
“You’re just being stubborn,” Buffy said as she stopped in front of the door to the Magic Box. There were several people inside. Giles had purchased the store a few weeks ago after the owner was killed in a demon attack. Since then, he had managed to maintain a fairly thriving business. Part of that was because he was more than happy to let Willow and Tara try out his merchandise, and allowing Willow to spend a lot of time there meant Faith had an excuse to spend time there as well, and with Faith nearby, demon attacks were quite low. The one demon that had tried -- they had later identified his smoking corpse as a Toth demon -- was easily dealt with by Faith’s chain-blade and explosive rounds.
Buffy opened the door and gently shoved Xander inside. He stumbled inside with only mild annoyance, but he calmed down a moment later when Buffy’s fingers entwined with his and she leaned up against him. God, she was diabolical. She had gotten extremely good at manipulating his mood. He would almost be upset by how easily she played him if she wasn’t so good at keeping him from being upset.
“Flatterer,” Buffy whispered up at him as they went to the back of the store. Sure enough, Willow and Tara were sitting at a table. They were also, Xander realized, sitting very close to one another. And was it his imagination, or had Willow blushed a little when they came in?
“Oh. Hi, guys,” Willow said, offering them a quick smile.
“Hi,” Tara said as well.
“Hey,” Xander said. He swallowed nervously, tried to hold back, and then resigned himself to the inevitable. “I just thought about having sex with you and Tara, Willow.”
Tara blushed, but Willow hardly seemed fazed by his admission. He couldn’t quite remember the last time she’d seemed at all embarrassed by someone’s enforced truthfulness. He guessed she had just gotten used to it.
“That’s okay, Xander,” she said.
“I just thought about him having sex with you too, and it’s turning me on and making me think about this girl Xander and I picked up a few weeks ago,” Buffy admitted. Then she sighed and took a seat at the table, slumping her shoulders slightly. Changing the subject, she said, “Um, so did you guys find anything out about that ball?”
“Yeah,” Willow said, ignoring Buffy’s admission. “It’s called a Dagon sphere. Or maybe the Dagon sphere, I’m not sure.”
“It’s very old, a-and very powerful,” Tara added. “I-it’s used to ward off very powerful evil.”
Xander sat down next to Buffy. Her hand went to his thigh almost at once, hidden beneath the table.
Oh, great. It was going to be one of those teasing days. In response to this thought, her hand slid up his thigh a little higher, and began to gently rub back and forth. Didn’t she know that Willow was there? She wasn’t just going to get caught, she was going to flat out tell Willow what she was doing.
“Oops,” Buffy whispered, then quickly took her hand from his thigh. “Um, so this day-glo thing, any idea what evil we’re supposed to use it on, or is it like a catch-all kind of thing?”
“I don’t know,” Willow said. “Giles knows more than I do, he’s the one who found most of this stuff.”
“Oh,” Buffy said. She leaned her head back towards the main part of the store. “Giles! Giles!”
A somewhat flustered and obviously annoyed Giles poked his head around the corner. “What is it, Buffy? I’m with a customer.”
“Dagon sphere? Bad for evil, or bad for specific evil?”
“Specific evil,” he said. “But before you ask, no, I’ve not yet determined which specific evil. There is only some reference to That Which Must Not Be Named.”
Buffy started to giggle softly to herself, and everyone turned to look at Xander. He sighed. She always ruined his jokes by laughing at them before he said them.
“Uh, it was something about Harry Potter,” he said sheepishly. “Anyway, whatever that thing is, it’s putting off a crazy weird energy field. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re talking redefinition of the fundamental structure of reality stuff, here. Are we sure it’s magic?”
“It’s definitely magic,” Giles said. He glanced back at his customer, then sighed and joined the others around the table. “I suppose that doesn’t preclude it from having a measurable scientific impact as well.”
“There is a distinct lack of precluding going on,” Xander agreed while Buffy snickered to herself ahead of time. He gave her an annoyed -- albeit loving -- glare. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he started getting ideas. Her tongue went back in her mouth, but moistened her lips on the way back in. He swallowed hard.
“Buffy, perhaps you and Faith should return to the factory where you found the sphere,” Giles suggested. “Take a closer look around. If indeed the sphere puts out an energy field, perhaps Xander can adjust your M-Specs to track similar sources of power?”
“Oh, I can do that myself,” Buffy said. “But yeah, sure. We’ll check it out tonight. If there’s big no-namey evil coming, I want to know about it, especially since my next Cruciamentum treatment’s coming up. What do you want to bet Voldemort shows up right when I’m at my weakest?”
“Not very much at all,” Giles said. He gave Buffy a serious look. “Are you certain you wish to do another treatment so soon? You’re still showing ever increasing improvements since the first treatment. Perhaps it would be best to wait until you seem to level off.”
“I think it would be good to do one more for now,” Buffy said. “Xander has some ideas for biological augmentation, but they’re contingent on my buffy-wave generation increasing by at least another fifteen percent. He thinks I can get that with one more treatment. After that, we’ll see where I am after the augmentations. It might just be overkill after that.”
“I see.”
“It’s going to take a month or two to start working on augmentations anyway,” Buffy said as Xander’s mind thought vaguely of this fact. “In the meantime, we’re working on stuff for you guys.”
“Stuff?” Willow asked. “What kind of stuff?”
“Oh, weapons and augmentations and stuff like that for regular human beings. In case something happens where we all need to fight. We’re doing some really cool stuff with nanites. It’s just in the testing phase right now, but it’s working out so far.”
Xander’s eyes widened. No! Don’t bring up the testing!
Sure enough, Willow leaned forward and asked the seemingly innocent question, “Oh, what are you testing?”
Buffy stared at her for a moment, then blurted out, “Xander’s penis.” She blushed furiously and added, “H-he wanted to test and see if he could simulate tissue growth and cellular generation, so I convinced him to do it on his penis. It’s, um, it’s bigger now. And Xander’s been thinking about what I would look like with bigger breasts, so we might do that too.”
Willow just rolled her eyes. “That is what you guys would do.”
“W-we did other stuff,” Buffy insisted. “It wasn’t all sex. We increased metabolic regeneration across the board and induced cellular power distribution as a result of quantum catalyzation of endothermic protein sub-fusion, and strengthened his bone structure with a Cordamite weave of inverted proto-faiths suspended in a bio-mimetic willino field. But really, I’m more interested in the sex stuff. It really excites me.”
“I know,” Willow said. “And it’s okay.”
“We have to cure that stupid curse,” Buffy said for what was surely the ten-thousandth time.
“Yes, well, in the meantime, we will all do what we’ve gotten so good at doing, and that’s pretend that portions of this conversation never took place,” Giles said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my customers.”
Buffy groaned and leaned her head onto Xander’s shoulder. He put his arm around her and hugged her to him.
“It’s really okay, guys,” Willow said softly. “Nobody’s being judgey. Right, Tara?”
“U-um, right.” Tara whispered, but her face was beet red.
“We knew you’d find out when we did it,” Xander said with a sigh. Buffy nodded against him. “We were just too turned on by everything to stop, and Buffy already had me design some sexual augmentations for her when it’s her turn, she wants to have a super sensitive a--”
“Tara and I are dating!” Willow suddenly blurted out.
Buffy’s head rose. Xander stared at Willow. What?
What?
WHAT?
“I already told Faith, Giles, and Jonathan,” Willow said in a low voice. “I-I’ve wanted to tell you guys for a while, b-but...well every time I talk to either of you you’re always going on about whatever sex thing you’ve done recently, a-and I never really get a chance to get a word in edgewise. So, um, yeah. We’re dating.”
Xander looked from Willow to Tara. Dating. His best friend and this beautiful girl? Dating? Kissing? Having sex?
“Oh my God,” Buffy breathed. He had heard that before. That was excited-Buffy voice. “That’s so sexy.”
“I don’t understand,” Xander said finally. He frowned at her. “You’re bisexual?”
It was shocking, but it wasn’t entirely impossible. After all, Buffy was a very obvious bisexual these days, and he had thought she was totally heterosexual for years. Were all of his friends bi?
Buffy whimpered and her hand went to his thigh.
“Um, n-no,” Willow said, eyes lowering. “I’m a lesbian.”
“B-but Oz?”
“Taught me something about myself,” Willow said. “I love Oz, but...he wasn’t meant for me. That’s not the life I was supposed to have. It took me a long time to realize it, but now I understand what I want, and that’s...Women. Tara.”
“I’m really hoping this means I can talk you into having sex with me,” Buffy said, rubbing Xander’s thigh. “And with Xander.”
“I’m with Tara,” Willow said firmly. “And I don’t think it would, um, be a good idea. Even if I wasn’t.”
“Are you sure?” Xander asked. “I mean, about being a lesbian?”
“I’m sure.”
“You just don’t seem like a lesbian.”
Willow puffed up a little. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I, uh, I don’t know. I just never thought of you as a lesbian. It’s weird.”
“It’s not weird, it’s just who I am,” Willow said, eyes narrowing at him.
“Okay, I’m sorry, I-I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just shocked, that’s all. If this makes you happy, then that’s great. Tara’s awesome. Buffy and I have pretended to have sex with her a bunch of times.” He winced at that, then glanced to Tara, who was still quite red in the face.
Willow took a deep breath and then sighed. “Look, I know this is going to be strange for you guys, but I just thought you should know.”
“I’m a little upset that you didn’t tell me before anyone else,” Buffy admitted. “And I’m upset that you decided to become a lesbian with another girl when I’ve been telling you for months how much I like you. But I understand too that would be weird, and I’m happy for you Willow, really. Also, Xander’s starting to realize that you and Tara might be having sex and that’s getting him really hard and I kind of want to wrap this conversation up and go suck his cock or have sex with him or maybe both.”
Willow rolled her eyes. “Okay, maybe you guys should go get it out of your system. But we’ll talk later?”
“Definitely. I’ll come by after patrol, if you want. I’m fantasizing about us having sex now that I know you’re into girls, but I know that won’t happen. We’ll just talk.”
“Thanks, Buffy,” Willow said, and Xander once again marveled at how she seemed to take the strangest admissions from people in stride. It was as if she hardly even noticed them anymore.
“You’re amazing, Will,” Xander said, utterly truthfully. Then he added, “We’ll talk too, but right now I really need to have sex with Buffy while we think about you and Tara.”
“I really want to do that,” Buffy said, nodding vigorously. Xander knew she was just as embarrassed as he was as they got up. “Um, I-I’ll see you later, Willow.”
Buffy took Xander by the hand and quickly led him into the back room.
“I made such an idiot of myself,” Buffy said as she and Faith wandered around the outskirts of the factory. “Here she is telling me this big life changing decision, and all I can tell her is that I want to seduce her?”
“It’s not your fault,” Faith said, even as part of her was running a full sensor sweep of the area. “You know what I said when she told me?”
“No. What?”
“I said I wondered if she’d eaten Tara’s pussy yet. Cause I did. It was the first thing that popped into my head, so I said it. Trust me, B, she doesn’t even care anymore. People tell her the filthiest stuff in the world all day long. We don’t even compare.”
“But I should have been in supportive friend mode, not creepy stalker mode. I just couldn’t get it out of my head, and neither could Xander. She’s a lesbian. It’s so...”
“Hot?”
Buffy shuddered. “Yeah.” She took a deep breath and then sighed. It had taken her some time, but she was getting used to the reality that her friends all knew about her sexual proclivities. Realizing she could easily classify herself as a bisexual was something she would have preferred to experiment with in private, but as was so often the case with her life, she didn’t do anything normal. Her sexual evolution had occurred right there in front of all of her friends, and she’d either been caught or blurted out the truth so often that she hardly even tried to keep it a secret anymore.
Still, she felt a mild sense of embarrassment whenever she admitted something to Faith, like how she found girls attractive, or how she really liked the idea of watching Xander with other girls. Whether those thoughts were naturally her own or she’d stolen them from Xander’s mind, she didn’t really care.
Some of it was surely from Xander. Before reading his mind, she had always considered herself very possessive. It was just that Xander so often fantasized about having sex, and those fantasies were so amazing. The nebulous, abstract feelings of lust that came with such fantasies could really get to Buffy, especially if she were close enough to actually feel Xander’s physical sensations.
Buffy bit her lip gently as she thought back to the last time she and Xander had picked up a girl at the Bronze. Watching Xander have sex with the pretty brown-haired girl was hot enough, but actually feeling him have sex with her was incredible. She always loved the double-sensations she felt whenever she had sex with Xander: she felt him having sex with her, and she felt herself having sex with him. But when Xander was with another girl, all she felt was his side of it. She knew what it felt like to enter that tight passage and feel it pressing down around her hardness. It was intoxicating.
She wasn’t really looking forward to talking with Willow after patrol. Her mind had been a whirlwind of sexual thoughts ever since that afternoon, and she knew she was going to pour her heart out to Willow the moment she saw her. She’d gotten better about accepting that Willow would know all her darkest secrets, but she really hated it when she told Willow about her specific attraction to her. It just made things uncomfortable.
Sometimes she wished Xander had dated Willow at some point, just to get rid of all that unresolved sexual tension he still had for her. Sometimes Xander thought about Willow the way he thought about Buffy. It should probably have made her jealous, but instead it just got her excited. It made her love Willow even more.
“Never thought I’d be the straightest girl in the room with you and Willow around,” Faith said as they continued to stroll around the outskirts of the factory.
“Me neither,” Buffy said. She glanced at Faith out of the corner of one eye, and tried not to think about what she looked like naked. If she didn’t love Xander’s mind so much, she might be just a little annoyed at how he’d obviously contaminated her brain with his stupid male lust.
When they arrived at the fence surrounding the factory, Buffy paused in front of it. “So,” she said, looking at Faith. “Are you like, okay with it?”
Faith glanced up to the top of the fence. “Okay with what?”
Buffy crouched down low, then sprang up and launched herself upwards. She just cleared the barbed wire at the top of the fence and then landed on the other side. “About Willow and Tara.”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay with it?” Faith asked, then sprang upwards herself. Unlike Buffy, she cleared the barbed wire easily, and landed in complete silence. “Tara’s cool.”
Buffy shrugged as they made their way towards the factory entrance. “I just mean, well, you know, you and Willow are really close, and I know that can be weird. Like when I started dating Xander I kind of tuned everything else out for a while.”
“Oh yeah, cause you just ignore the dude constantly these days,” Faith said, rolling her eyes. Buffy punched her lightly in the shoulder, and Faith laughed. “But nah, it’s cool. I see Will all the time. She helps me with my homework and she’s been teaching me these meditation things that I think might help with my synch rates.”
“Like you need help,” Buffy said. “You’re going to max out the current systems soon.”
“Yeah, I know.” Faith smiled broadly. “Gonna get some better upgrades when that happens. I want my processor sped up some. I want to be able to download info way faster.”
Buffy cocked her head to one side and looked at Faith sideways. “What’s it feel like?”
“Downloading?”
“Yeah. I can’t imagine it.”
“It was freaky at first. It’s like I’m thinking, but I’m thinking way too fast. I dunno how to explain it. My brain’s part computer, so it all just kind of fits together, and as my rates go up the info just goes through easier.”
“Hmm,” Buffy said. “I wonder if that’s like Xander. I mean I hear his thoughts, but I don’t just hear his actual thought-thoughts. I hear his feelings and his weird abstracty ideas and his imagination and all this other stuff, and it’s so much bigger and faster than anything in my own head. At first I couldn’t even come close to keeping up with it all. It’s still totally overwhelming when he really starts thinking about something, but I can follow a lot more of it nowadays.”
“I wonder how fast he thinks. You think he’s faster than me?”
“I don’t know,” Buffy said, and then reached up to pull herself up to one of the windows on the factory wall. She peered inside, then dropped back down. “He thinks really, really fast.”
“I’ve got a fourteen gigaquad per second data processor,” Faith pointed out.
“Yeah, and he came up with the idea for it in like three seconds,” Buffy countered.
Faith chuckled. “All right, all right. I get it. He’s your boy, you gotta stick up for him.”
Buffy huffed slightly, albeit good-naturedly. “Darn right. Anyway, it looks empty in there.”
Faith nodded, her eye glowing slightly. “Yeah, seems clear. Want to take a closer look?”
“Yeah.”
After ejecting her M-Specs from her watch, Buffy slipped them on over her head. She engaged night-vision mode as she and Faith made their way inside. They’d only gone a few steps before Faith paused.
“Hang on,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Bio-rhythms. I’m reading at least one human. There’s something else too. You seeing that blob?”
Buffy turned to look in the direction Faith was looking, and then cycled her M-Specs. Sure enough, one of the spectrums showed a strange amorphous blob, as well as the bio-rhythms of a human being. “What the heck is that?”
“No idea. Want to find out?”
“Yeah,” Buffy said. She unclipped her plasma-blade while Faith reconfigured her arm into chain-blade mode. They quickly made their way through the factory until they found a doorway that appeared to have been blasted open.
In the center of the room was a man. He was beaten and bloody, and was tied to a chair. Buffy raced over to him and knelt down beside him. “Hey, you’re the one who planted the Dagon sphere, right? We found it. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here.”
“B,” Faith said. Buffy looked up to find Faith watching her back. She followed her gaze and found an attractive woman in a red dress standing behind them. Buffy’s eyes lingered on her breasts for a moment before she swallowed. Hot as she was, Buffy could feel the power -- and the evil -- pouring off of her.
“Must run,” the man on the chair groaned.
“No, don’t run,” the woman said. Her painted red lips curled into a mocking smile, and she sauntered closer to Buffy and Faith. “I haven’t had a chance to beat you to death yet.”
“Try it, bitch,” Faith snarled, and launched herself forward. Her chain-blade began to roar as it fired up, and she slashed it down at the woman. The woman raised her forearm and caught the blade on the meat of her arm. The chain locked, squealed, and then snapped off, flying across the room. The woman’s arm was completely unharmed.
“What did you call me?” the woman demanded, seemingly aghast. She scowled at Faith and then backhanded her hard across the face. Faith was sent careening backwards to crash into the concrete wall on the opposite side of the room. Huge cracks spider-webbed out from the impact, and Faith slid down onto the floor.
“Faith!” Buffy cried. She ignited her blade and slashed at the woman, but as with Faith, her blow was easily deflected. The woman’s hand gripped her around the throat, and Buffy choked as she was lifted off of her feet.
“What is this?” the woman asked, snatching the blade from Buffy’s fingers. As it was designed to do, it shut itself down the moment Buffy was no longer holding it. The woman frowned, turning the plasma-blade handle over and over in one hand while she held the struggling Buffy by the throat in the other. Buffy kicked and clawed at the woman, but her blows seemed to have no effect. “Did I break it? How do you turn it back on?”
Buffy gagged and sputtered, causing the woman look up at her. Rolling her eyes, she threw Buffy down with a contemptuous sneer. Gasping for air, Buffy clutched at her neck and looked up at the woman. Then she sprang at the woman, landing a solid haymaker across her jaw. The woman staggered backwards and clutched at her jaw.
“Hey! You hit me! You can’t just go around...” Buffy followed up with a sharp kick to the woman’s stomach. She doubled over, but continued to complain. “...Hitting people! What were you...” Buffy hit her with a powerful uppercut. “Born in a barn? Fine! Be that way!”
Buffy tried to swing a heavy kick into the woman’s side, but her leg was caught, and a moment later stars exploded in front of her face. When she could think again, she was lying against the wall and her head was pounding. The woman grinned down at her before she grabbed her by the throat once more.
“I just noticed something,” the woman said, holding Buffy over her head. “You have superpowers! That’s so cool. Can you--”
KABOOM
Buffy and the woman were knocked backwards. Buffy groaned and rolled over as concrete dust rained down on her. When she looked up, she saw the woman standing dazedly in the center of the room. Her red dress was completely shredded, and it was only a fine layer of soot that hid her nakedness. Her eyes were wide and she looked absolutely livid.
“You...” she said in a shaking voice before turning to face Faith, who was down on one knee on the other side of the room with her arm-cannon aimed directly at the woman. “You ruined my dress!”
Faith’s only response was to fire another heavy explosive into the woman’s chest. Buffy winced as another powerful explosion shook the factory, but when the dust settled, the woman was still standing, although she seemed at least slightly dazed.
“I’ll kill you!” the woman screeched. “I’ll kill all of--”
KABOOM
Faith fired again, and this time the factory could not take the stress. A large crack spread across the floor and directly towards one of the main support beams. Buffy looked to Faith, who looked back at her for a split second. Then Buffy raced across the room and grabbed the man from the chair. The factory began to crumble all around them as Buffy leaped out of the nearest window, with Faith only a half-second behind.
Three stories up, Buffy twisted in mid-air so that she landed back-first so as to cushion the man in her arms. She grunted with pain as she hit the ground hard, but got up to her feet right away, hauling the man with her. When she looked back up to the factory, it had already begun to implode.
“That’s not gonna stop her for long,” Faith said. Her right eye was twitching slightly.
“I know,” Buffy said with a grown. “We have to get out of here. Come on!”
She dragged the man -- the monk, she realized -- along with her as they went, but after a moment, he gasped and dropped to his knees. “Stop, please!”
“No,” Buffy said, picking him back up. “We have to keep going.”
“M-my journey’s done, I think,” the monk gasped as Buffy continued to drag him along.
“Don’t get all metaphory on me. We’re getting out of here.”
“You have to-- The Key. You must protect the Key.”
“Yeah, whatever, guy. We’ll all protect the key,” Faith said. “Let’s just do it after we get out of here.”
“Many more will die if you don’t keep it safe,” the monk whispered.
Buffy found herself pausing in mid-step. “What? How? What is it?”
“The Key is energy. It is a portal. It opens the door.”
“The Dagon sphere?” Buffy asked.
“No. For centuries it had no form at all. My brethen, its only keepers. Then the abomination found us--”
“Lady in red back there?” Faith asked.
The monk nodded. “Glorificus, the Beast. We had to hide the Key; gave it form, molded it flesh. Made it human and sent it...to you.”
He gave Buffy a meaningful look.
“What? Sent it to me? I-I don’t have any Key.”
“Your sister,” the monk said in a strained voice. “She is the Key. We gave her life.”
Buffy stared at him. “What? No you didn’t. She’s my sister!”
He shook his head. “No. She is the Key. We knew you would protect her, so we made her part of your family. We built her past, your memories, out of the most divine of magics.”
“D-Dawn’s not real?” She couldn’t wrap her mind around that. It was impossible. He was lying. He had to be. “You’re making this up.”
“No. She is human now, but was not always. She does not know her true nature. She is innocent in this. You must keep her safe, or we are all doomed.”
“Dawn’s not my sister?” Buffy whispered in absolute shock.
“She does not know that,” the monk said. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth one last time. A soft chuff of air left his lungs, and he slumped forward, dead.
Buffy stared down at him, and then looked up at Faith. “What just happened?”
Faith stared back at her. “I have no idea.”
They were a kind of inverted Dawnitron, only with a negative spin and an ancillary vibrational frequency out of tune with reality. Such a thing really shouldn’t be possible, but there it was, staring him in the face.
Or rather, starting Faith in the face. It was her visual data he was looking at. He was examining the information she’d collected on the crazy demon lady thing that was apparently called Glorificus. The strange energy that Faith had seen around her body operating on the Anti-Willow phase spectrum was fascinating, particularly because he could see at a glance the way this new energy field would interact with the Dawnitrons coming off of the Dagon sphere. The particle interactions would cause a negation effect within the sub-field and could, he theorized, severely weaken this Glorificus.
From what he could tell, this Glorificus was somehow tapping into energies not of this universe. In their universe of origin, those energies would be incredibly powerful, perhaps even psuedo-omnipotent, but in their own universe, they were drastically reduced. He calculated that she must be using close to 99.99999% of it just to keep herself from being crushed by the weight of spacetime closing in around her. It was one of the most incredible things he’d ever seen.
Xander looked around the quiet lab. Faith was lying in the medi-bed, her chest rising and falling softly as she ran a full systems diagnostic following her most recent repairs. Her eye had been slightly damaged in the fight with Glorificus, but he had been able to repair it fairly easily. He was thinking about upgrading her self-repair systems in the next few weeks. Her bio-mimetic tissue and skin regenerated quite well, but her bionic components usually required actual physical repairs to be done by him or Buffy. Perhaps his new nanite designs could be modified to perform routine repairs like these.
While Faith slept -- well, technically her mind was busy accessing his computer system’s database so she could do her Philosophy homework -- Buffy was in the back spending some time in the protein tank. Xander was not at all happy with how badly she’d been hurt. Slayer or not, jumping from the third story and using herself as a cushion was a bad idea. She’d cracked three ribs and had some mild damage to her liver. It would have healed on its own, but luckily with the tank she would be feeling better in just a few hours.
His job was to make sure that Glorificus never managed to finish the job. That was especially true if what Buffy said was right, and Dawn had somehow been transformed into some kind of mystical key thing. He wasn’t sure he believed that Dawn wasn’t actually real -- he would need more evidence of that before he believed it -- but he could believe she’d somehow been imbued with some magical force. That was par for the course when you live in Sunnydale.
And there was no way he was going to let Glorificus or anything else hurt Dawn. He’d always liked Buffy’s little sister. She was smart, funny, and just one of the coolest kids he’d ever met. Buffy didn’t always get along with her, although their sibling rivalry had cooled somewhat since Buffy had started reading his mind. Maybe seeing her little sister through his eyes had given her a new perspective on things.
He was definitely going to have to get Dawn into the swarm-cloud though. He wanted to get new reading on her. If he was right, then this Key thing might be related to the extrauniversal nature of Glorificus, and it might give him more data to work with. As it was, he was fairly certain he could rig together a Dawnitron particle beam cannon and set it to the same output level as the Dagon sphere. If that thing really could hurt Glorificus, then the beam cannon should concentrate that into something even more devastating. If his hyper-calculus was correct -- and really, when had it ever not been correct? -- then with the proper application of quantum disruption and particle nucleation, he could weaken the structural cohesion of Glorificus’ energy field and collapse it. The resulting implosion would almost certainly erase her from existence.
That would be nice. After all, she’d hurt Buffy. She deserved a good universe-negation.
Xander puttered around the lab for a while as he worked on building the cannon. The initial design took him a few hours, but once he built a working prototype he could render it into Faith’s internal MCD and program her for a new arm configuration. For Buffy, he’d design a smaller version she could carry around with her. He thought about maybe giving one to Dawn, but wasn’t sure her mom would be too happy with him giving her a particle beam cannon. Dawnitrons weren’t particularly dangerous to human beings, but if the frequency was turned up high enough it was possible for it to do some damage to the sixth-dimensional localized time-sense. That would be bad.
Okay, so he wouldn’t give one to Dawn. If they were lucky, Dawn would never have to find out that she was now some kind of magical key thingy.
Xander was in the middle of using his cold-welder to bond the Heisenberg-Modifier to the subatomic pattern buffer when his mind drifted to Willow. Willow was a lesbian. Wow. He had really not seen that one coming.
Then again, he never imagined he would ever have Buffy Summers encouraging him to “do it harder” while he was having sex with some random girl they had picked up at the Bronze, so he supposed he was really bad at imagining what people were like, sexually speaking.
Willow and Tara. That was definitely out of left field. Sure, they’s spent a lot of time together in the last few months, but he just had no idea that Willow would ever feel that way about girls. It was hot.
Xander paused and looked up. Oops. Buffy was in the tank room, and that was well within her range. He was probably making her a little crazy right now. She was trapped in there until she was healed, and here he was getting turned on while thinking about Willow and Tara. They might be making out right now. Willow might be in Tara’s bed, and they could be kissing and groping and sliding against each other. Tara had really nice breasts. Maybe Willow was licking them. Maybe.
He grinned. It served her right for trying to tease him that afternoon in the Magic Box. Besides, she was the one who wanted him to use his new augmentations on himself. Could he help it if being bigger and better down there meant he was thinking about sex even more than usual? This was all because of her, after all.
She was going to kill him for thinking all of this while she was stuck in the protein tank. But hey, he had to get his teasing in where he could. Buffy had the distinct advantage of being able to read his mind and knowing just how to tweak him, but he had gotten to know her intimately in the last year, and he knew that she must be squirming.
Yes, she would kill him, but oh what a way to die.
Something beeped. Willow groaned and slowly opened her eyes. It took her a moment to remember where she was, but when she did, she smiled. She was in bed. With Tara. She could feel her breathing softly beside her, and she could smell her hair just beneath her face. Tara had one arm around her, and Willow had both of her arms around Tara. A girl. Her girl.
It had taken a long time for her to recognize her feelings for Tara, let alone admit to herself that she could have feelings for a girl in the first place. But once she had, it was as if something had snapped into place in her mind. Of course this was what she wanted. How could she have ever denied it? Being here with Tara was the--
Something beeped again. Tara whined softly, and Willow frowned. Whatever that was, it was ruining her nice, peaceful morning. All she wanted to do was lie there with Tara and remember the wonderful evening they’d had together. She could still recall the absolute joy she’d felt when Tara looked her in the eye and told her she loved her. The truth was never so glorious.
Beep.
Willow groaned and finally realized what was beeping. It was her watch, and it wasn’t on her wrist. It was on the nightstand beside Tara’s bed. Careful not to move too quickly for fear of waking the lovely young woman beside her, Willow carefully reached out and picked up the watch. Someone was trying to contact her. She set the volume low and hit the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Willow? Oh, good. I wasn’t sure I was doing this correctly.
“Giles?”
“Yes. I, um, I tried to call, but of course none of you answer your phones anymore, so I was forced to use this...device.”
Willow smiled. She was pretty sure there was an “infernal contraption” trying to get out of Giles there.
“Is everything okay?” Willow asked. “Is this like an emergency thing?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I just thought perhaps you would want to know straight away.”
“Know what?”
“I was recently in contact with the Council over this Glorificus business. They provided me with a number of texts, but their head researcher had something else for me as well. We’ve found it, Willow. We’ve found the spell to summon and bind Anyanka.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. No more truth-telling? No more being constantly told how pretty, small, or sexy her breasts were? No more knowing every sordid detail of Buffy’s impossibly kinky sex life? No more late-night sessions of talking with Faith and working through her problems? No more Xander, Giles, and Jonathan pointing out to her every time they were looking at her ass? No more Tara telling her she loved her?
A strange sense of panic mixed with an equal sense of hope. “We can break the curse?”
“I think so. It should be a simple matter of summoning Anyanka and destroying her power source. I think we’ll want Buffy and Faith there, of course, just in case things get out of hand, but everything seems to be in order. You’ll have your life back, Willow.”
It seemed impossible. For almost a year now, she’d lived with the absolute truth. It had changed her, and it had changed her profoundly. It had made her recognize some scary truths about herself, but it had also made her recognize some very nice truths as well. One of those truths murmured softly in her arms.
“When can we do it?” Willow asked.
“Tonight, if you’d like.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Giles.”
“Of course, Willow. We’ll meet at the store at say six o’clock?”
“Okay. T-that would be good.”
“Very well, then. I shall see you then. Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
There was a brief rustling sound, and then a softly muttered curse. “How do you turn this blasted thing o--click.”
Willow carefully set down the watch. This was it. No more truth. It was really going to happen. It was what she had wanted for months.
So why did she feel such a sense of dread?
Continued in Installment 16 only it's not finished yet, so check back soon.
I asked all of you out there to submit to me a bunch of ideas for things that could happen or become true for Xander. Then I used a random number generator and the AXIS (Alternate Xander Idea Selector - thanks, learnedhand_dj) to choose three random consecutive episodes and three random ideas, and I wrote a story based on those ideas.
Authors: please feel not only free, but actively encouraged to attempt your own Great Random Xander Story, using the AXIS listed above. I can tell you from personal experience, it's actually kind of fun and a very interesting writing exercise. Writing a story where you know at least two more major changes are coming but you don't know what they are going to be or when they will occur is pretty wacky. Try it out, and be sure to share your results with the rest of us!
This is the first attempt at that story, but will not be the last, so keep submitting your ideas. (We're up to about 150, I believe. New goal is 200!) First chapter and author notes can be found here
On with the story:
The Secret Diary of Dawn Summers
Do Not Read - THIS MEANS YOU!
Nobody knows who I am. Not the real me. It’s like, nobody even cares to find out. I mean, does anyone ever ask me what I want to do with my life? Or what my opinion is on stuff? Or what restaurant to order in from?
NO!!!
No one understands. No one has a sister who’s a slayer. Mom’s all “Oh Buffy’s doing so well in school” but that’s just because her stupid slayer powers make her smart or something. I don’t really know how it works, I just know she used to be normal and now she talks about science and math and other boring stuff all the time. Mom thinks it’s soooo amazing, so she lets Buffy get away with anything.
I mean she’s only nineteen, and Mom let her move into Xander’s house. They’re probably even having sex! And please, did she have to go after Xander? He was this total genius super cool guy: sooo not her type, and what does she do as soon as Angel breaks up with her? Swoops in and snatches up Xander.
I see them kissing all the time. It’s so gross. What does he even see in her? Oooh, big deal, she’s the slayer. So’s Faith, and Faith’s way better at being the slayer than Buffy is. She killed like a thousand demons all by herself. Buffy never did that. All she does is kill vampires. Big deal! They’re killed by wood! Oh no, a splinter! I’m dead now! So lame.
Faith’s the cool one. She’s the only one of my sister’s friends who’s never allowed to babysit with me -- as if I need one in the first place, god! But if I had to be watched by someone, it would be so cool if it was Faith. I bet she’d let me do all kinds of cool stuff. We could go to a party and meet boys.
Faith is totally cool.
I guess most of my sister’s friends are okay. Willow’s nice, but I hate talking to her. She’s got some weird curse thingy where you have to tell her the total truth all the time. I once told her I had a...dream...about Xander. And he was right there! So embarrassing. I thought I was going to die.
Buffy says if I feel like talking to Willow I should whisper stuff to her in public, but that never works for me. I always forget and I just start blurting stuff out. I usually try to be elsewhere when Willow’s around.
Jonathan’s nice too, but he’s a total dork. He’s short and really quiet, but he once showed me how to break into the school’s grades database, so that was kind of cool. He says someday he’ll show me how to do an illusion spell so it looks like I’m a demon, but Buffy got in his face and made him promise not to.
God, she’s such a pain sometimes. What’s some dumb illusion spell going to do that’s so bad? It’s just for fun. Sometimes I think Buffy was put on this planet just to keep anything interesting from ever happening to me.
Like today at Xander’s lab -- Xander has this totally awesome lab he built himself. He’s like the smartest person on the planet, for real. From the outside his house just looks like this small little place, but then inside it’s huge and has all these rooms. He said he’s going to let me try out this virtual reality thing he’s working on soon.
Anyway, today at the lab I was just sitting around minding my own business like usual. Buffy’s always afraid I’m going to break something, but whatever. It’s not like she even knows what half of the stuff in the lab actually does. Xander’s the real genius, not her.
All I did was pick up this little glowing ball thingy, and suddenly Buffy’s all “Dawn! I told you not to touch anything! You reversed the blah blah blah” or something like that. Then she looked at Xander with that stupid moron look she gives him all the time and put the ball in a weird container.
She does that a lot, by the way. Not the container thing. The stupid moron look. It’s like whenever Xander’s around she just stares at him like the biggest idiot on the planet. Okay, we get it, he’s your boyfriend. Does she have to make such a big deal out of it all the time?
I think she does it on purpose just to rub it in my face that she got him and I didn’t. She knew I liked Xander, and he liked me back. Xander always treats me like a real person. Sometimes when he looks at me it’s like he doesn’t just see Buffy’s little sister. He sees a woman.
But it’s too late. Buffy’s got her claws in him, and I’ve seen him give her the stupid moron look a bunch of times too. She’s got him totally wrapped around her finger. It’s so sad. He deserves to be with someone who would really love him, not just be with him because he’s the second choice.
I mean three years ago it was all Angel all the time, and now suddenly Buffy’s pretending she’s in love with Xander. Does anyone actually believe her? I sure don’t. There’s just no way she actually appreciates him, just like she doesn’t appreciate me.
She thinks I’m just her little sister. Well she’d better get ready, because she’s about to be in for a big surprise. I am NOT little Dawnie anymore!
Joyce Summers sighed as she got out of the car. This was really so foolish. It was just a brief dizzy spell, that was all.
“Buffy, I really don’t see what Xander can do that the hospital can’t. I understand he’s a very intelligent boy, but--”
“I told you, he’s not just intelligent,” Buffy said as she urged Joyce up the walkway leading to the small, unassuming home. “He’s the smartest person on the planet.”
Joyce tried not to roll her eyes at her obviously-in-love daughter. Yes, Xander was definitely a very smart young man; perhaps the smartest person she had ever met, but that didn’t make him the smartest person in the world.
Buffy sighed as she keyed in a combination beside the door, then pulled it open. She gestured for her mother to enter, so Joyce stepped inside.
It was not the first time she had been in Xander (and Buffy’s) house, but she did not visit there often. It was small and somewhat cramped, and she preferred to have Buffy and Xander over for dinner at her house than to visit them at Xander’s. Part of that was because Joyce was not yet fully comfortable with the idea of her eldest daughter living with a boy.
She knew of course that Buffy was much more responsible than many girls her age, but it still bothered her. She wasn’t even twenty years old yet, and she was living full-time with another boy the same age? It seemed so rushed.
And yet she had never seen Buffy happier. Sometimes during dinner she would catch Buffy gazing dreamily at Xander, and Joyce would feel a pang of envy at just how strongly Buffy obviously cared for him. She missed feeling that in her own life. One, long ago, she had felt that way about Hank.
“Here, this way,” Buffy said, leading them over to a door by the stairs. It was the entrance to the basement. Joyce followed Buffy down the stairs, but nearly fell over as she reached the bottom.
It was huge. It was far too large. A door in the back was opened onto a hallway that seemed to stretch out for hundreds of yards. The room was spacious, white, and filled with glowing lights and neon displays. Joyce’s mouth dropped open.
“Buffy,” she breathed. “What is all of this?”
“This is Xander’s lab,” Buffy said. She grabbed a pair of what looked like black-tinted welding goggles from over the back of a chair, and slipped them onto her head. Then she grabbed a labcoat from a hook and slipped into it. It fit her perfectly. Stitching just over the heart read: Buffy Summers, Lab Assistant/Slayer.
To Joyce’s astonishment, Buffy then reached up into thin air. Glowing diagrams appeared before her fingertips, and she manipulated them easily, sliding shapes and lines from one spot to another. A glowing red light blinked.
“Xander?” Buffy said into thin air. “My mom’s here.” There was no reply, but Buffy nodded. “He’s on his way.”
One of the doors down the long hallway opened, and Xander poked his head out. He was dressed similarly to Buffy in a labcoat and with those strange black goggles on his forehead. His hair was unkempt and it looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days, but he smiled broadly as he came out into the main lab.
“Mrs. Summers,” he said brightly. Joyce tried not to feel too flustered as he gave Buffy a quick kiss on the cheek. She was an adult, and they were a serious couple. It was to be expected. “Glad you came by. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, thank you, Xander. It was really just a minor fainting spell or something. The doctors did some scans but I checked out just fine.”
“They give you an MRI?”
Joyce nodded. “Yes, and a C/T scan.”
To her surprise, Xander rolled his eyes. “Jeez. What is this, the dark ages? I mean, really. Magnetic resonance imaging? We might as well stick leeches on your brain. Well, let’s get you onto the medi-bed. I’ll call up a cloud-swarm and get a real scan going.”
“I already pre-loaded the system,” Buffy said. Her fingers were flying over the neon lights in the air. There was a soft hiss of air, and what looked like thick gray steam billowed out from a vent. Joyce frowned at it.
Xander grinned at Buffy. “Right. Should have known. Okay, Mrs. Summers, you want to hop up on this bed over here?”
“Now wait just a second,” Joyce said as she looked from Xander to Buffy to the cloud of steam. “W-what is that?”
“It’s a cranial-cloud-swarm,” Buffy said. “It’s like a billion tiny atomic frequency receptacles suspended in a nanomolecular crystalline network. They surround your body and provide us with accurate atomic vibrational data of your body. If there’s something wrong, we’ll see it.”
Joyce blinked at her eldest daughter. She knew that she was doing much better in school lately, and had heard Buffy talking about the strangest, most complicated things, but this was too much.
“Buffy, what are you talking about?”
“Please, Mom? Just get on the bed. It won’t hurt, I promise. It actually feels pretty nice.”
“You’ve been in this cloud-thing before?”
Buffy nodded. “Sure. Lots of times. It’s how Xander learned about my body and how he can make me stronger and better and stuff.”
Better. “Smarter?”
A soft flush of red rose up Buffy’s neck and into her cheeks. “Um, n-not really. That’s, um, something different.”
“It’s her Slayer brain,” Xander said. “She’s reacting to a perpetual outside stimulus of increased mental activity, and her own mental capacity is increasing in order to keep up.”
“Outside stimulus?” Joyce asked as Buffy continued to blush. Just what was going on here?
“It’s a Slayer thing,” Xander said for her. “There was this demon, she got kind of splashed with some blood. Don’t worry, it’s safe.”
“A-and that’s why you’ve been getting smarter, Buffy?”
Buffy shrugged. “Yeah. Kind of.”
“Oh. I-I didn’t realize that was possible.”
It was always so hard to believe that her little girl was some sort of superhero. Even seeing Buffy bench press impossible weights or jump ten or fifteen feet into the air didn’t really register with her. She guessed that if Buffy could become stronger and faster, then she could easily become smarter as well.
Which was a good thing, after all. Buffy had never been an unintelligent girl. She’d always done well on standardized testing, but she had hardly ever applied herself. Joyce now knew that much of that was Buffy being distracted by her duties as a Slayer, but in the last year or so it seemed that Buffy had managed to juggle her responsibilities much more easily. Joyce had thought it was because Faith was there to help her, but now she wasn’t so sure. Was it really because Buffy was just getting smarter?
“Mom?” Buffy said, breaking Joyce out of her thoughts. “The bed?”
“What? Oh. Yes. Um, okay.” Feeling rather anxious, she stepped over to the strange bed with the glowing strips of light running along the side. The material of the mattress was unfamiliar to her, but when she sat down on it, it felt wonderful soft and yet somehow firm at the same time. Without really thinking, she spread out on it and rested her head back. Oh. It was heavenly. It felt as if she were floating, weightless and without a single point of pressure along her entire body. Her eyes slid closed.
“Extending bio-electric monitor field,” Buffy said. Curious, she opened her eyes just in time to see a shimmering orange field of light sluice down around her entire body, conforming to her form and pressing up against her clothing. She felt suddenly claustrophobic.
“B-buffy?”
“Relax, Mom. It won’t hurt. Just lie back.”
Joyce swallowed nervously, then closed her eyes again. Mmm. It felt so nice. If she had a bed like this, she thought she might never get out of it. Her breathing came slowly and evenly. She could hear Buffy making quiet announcements every so often. Curiously, Xander never said a word. Was Buffy the one in charge of all of this? Was she really that smart?
She recalled Buffy talking about the curvature of space-time one night over dinner, or about how she had been working on her own solution for Fermat’s last theorem, or even how she had fixed Joyce’s DVD player in just a few minutes. It seemed obvious now that Buffy was changing. It worried her a little, but it also made her feel somewhat giddy. Any advantage Buffy could get was one that Joyce was very happy about.
She smiled to herself as something warm and soothing flowed over her. Buffy was a genius. She would change the world! Her little girl could be a doctor or a scientist, not just a Slayer.
Joyce woke up some time later, unaware that she had fallen asleep in the first place. Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked sleepily at the face floating over her.
“Mom? Can you hear me?”
“Buffy? What happened?”
“You fell asleep,” Buffy said in a soothing tone. She put a hand on Joyce’s shoulder. “No, don’t get up yet. Wake up a little first. You might feel a little dizzy.”
“What? Why?”
Buffy gave her a serious look. “We found something. I-it was a brain tumor.”
Joyce tried to sit up, but Buffy’s strong hand kept her down. “What?”
“The doctors wouldn’t have found it,” Buffy said. “Not until it was bigger, anyway. And by then the risk of removing it would be...” There were tears in her eyes, but she swallowed past a lump in her throat and looked meaningfully down at Joyce. “Well, it doesn’t matter. We got rid of it.”
Joyce blinked at her. “You did?”
“Well, Xander did. You might kind of dizzy for a day or two. He had to implode the tumor into null-space, but he filled the void with this neuron-paste stuff. You need to tell me if you start seeing floaty light thingies, okay?”
“W-why? What does that mean?”
“It means you might be exhibiting the ability to see Dawnitrons,” Xander said. Joyce looked to her side to see him standing over her.
“Dawn? What?”
“They’re these fundamental superparticles I found last year,” he said. “They don’t precisely exist in our spacetime, but I think human beings have an innate ability to sense them. Your tumor was right where the brain function for it would be, if it exists. So if you start seeing them, you should tell me, cause then I might be able to figure out the exact mechanism behind seeing them and program them into my Froggles. Being able to accurately track Dawnitrons would be pretty nice. Anything got all reality-shifty and I’d know it right away. Right now I have to keep eight different sensor programs running just to detect reality shifts, and even then I missed like six of them.”
“R-reality shifts? What?”
“It happens sometimes,” Buffy said off-handedly. “The universe isn’t actually constant, it kind of morphs and folds. And that’s not even counting magic.”
“Oh,” Joyce said. This was very strange. Buffy removed her hand from Joyce’s shoulder, and allowed her to sit slowly up. “I really had a tumor?”
“Yeah,” Buffy said. “But it’s gone. We should probably scan you again next week just to be sure there’s no damage, but the neuron-paste should keep things running smoothly. You probably won’t need to sleep as much for a few years, and it’s possible your memory might get a little sharper.”
“Really? Buffy, this is all just so...”
“Amazing, right?” She grinned at Xander, who gave her a shy grin in return. “He just came up with the neuron-paste last night, too.”
“And you put it in my brain?” Joyce said, a pang of fear rising within her. “Buffy, was this really a good idea?”
“It’ll be fine, Mom. We mapped out your whole brain. Right now you’ve got the healthiest one in the whole world. That paste will keep your brain squeaky clean for years, maybe decades.”
Joyce touched the side of her head. She didn’t feel any-- no, that wasn’t true. The dizziness she’d been feeling lately, that sense of being disconnected from reality, that was gone. She felt clear-headed and alert for the first time in months. The general fatigue she had been feeling was gone. Could any of this be real? Could Buffy and Xander really do these things?
Well why not? Her daughter was a superhero, after all. Magic was real. She had seen it firsthand. Why couldn’t this be real too?
Joyce reached her hands out for Buffy and pulled her into a hug. “I don’t know what to think about any of this,” she admitted. “But thank you, Buffy.”
Xander grimaced as Buffy led him down the street by the hand. Why couldn’t he just stay at home? He was still processing the data on the energy field that weird ball thing was putting out. It was doing things to Dawnitrons that he had never seen before, and it was opening up a whole new avenue of research.
“Because it’s some old magic ball thing, and that means magic research, not science research,” Buffy said as dragged him towards the shop. “And besides, I have a training session with Giles and it’s easier to come to him now that he’s working all the time.
“But I hate magic research,” Xander whined petulantly. “Nothing ever makes sense.”
“It makes sense to Willow,” Buffy pointed out. “And Giles. And Jonathan. And Tara!”
“Yeah, well they’re cheating somehow.”
“You’re just being stubborn,” Buffy said as she stopped in front of the door to the Magic Box. There were several people inside. Giles had purchased the store a few weeks ago after the owner was killed in a demon attack. Since then, he had managed to maintain a fairly thriving business. Part of that was because he was more than happy to let Willow and Tara try out his merchandise, and allowing Willow to spend a lot of time there meant Faith had an excuse to spend time there as well, and with Faith nearby, demon attacks were quite low. The one demon that had tried -- they had later identified his smoking corpse as a Toth demon -- was easily dealt with by Faith’s chain-blade and explosive rounds.
Buffy opened the door and gently shoved Xander inside. He stumbled inside with only mild annoyance, but he calmed down a moment later when Buffy’s fingers entwined with his and she leaned up against him. God, she was diabolical. She had gotten extremely good at manipulating his mood. He would almost be upset by how easily she played him if she wasn’t so good at keeping him from being upset.
“Flatterer,” Buffy whispered up at him as they went to the back of the store. Sure enough, Willow and Tara were sitting at a table. They were also, Xander realized, sitting very close to one another. And was it his imagination, or had Willow blushed a little when they came in?
“Oh. Hi, guys,” Willow said, offering them a quick smile.
“Hi,” Tara said as well.
“Hey,” Xander said. He swallowed nervously, tried to hold back, and then resigned himself to the inevitable. “I just thought about having sex with you and Tara, Willow.”
Tara blushed, but Willow hardly seemed fazed by his admission. He couldn’t quite remember the last time she’d seemed at all embarrassed by someone’s enforced truthfulness. He guessed she had just gotten used to it.
“That’s okay, Xander,” she said.
“I just thought about him having sex with you too, and it’s turning me on and making me think about this girl Xander and I picked up a few weeks ago,” Buffy admitted. Then she sighed and took a seat at the table, slumping her shoulders slightly. Changing the subject, she said, “Um, so did you guys find anything out about that ball?”
“Yeah,” Willow said, ignoring Buffy’s admission. “It’s called a Dagon sphere. Or maybe the Dagon sphere, I’m not sure.”
“It’s very old, a-and very powerful,” Tara added. “I-it’s used to ward off very powerful evil.”
Xander sat down next to Buffy. Her hand went to his thigh almost at once, hidden beneath the table.
Oh, great. It was going to be one of those teasing days. In response to this thought, her hand slid up his thigh a little higher, and began to gently rub back and forth. Didn’t she know that Willow was there? She wasn’t just going to get caught, she was going to flat out tell Willow what she was doing.
“Oops,” Buffy whispered, then quickly took her hand from his thigh. “Um, so this day-glo thing, any idea what evil we’re supposed to use it on, or is it like a catch-all kind of thing?”
“I don’t know,” Willow said. “Giles knows more than I do, he’s the one who found most of this stuff.”
“Oh,” Buffy said. She leaned her head back towards the main part of the store. “Giles! Giles!”
A somewhat flustered and obviously annoyed Giles poked his head around the corner. “What is it, Buffy? I’m with a customer.”
“Dagon sphere? Bad for evil, or bad for specific evil?”
“Specific evil,” he said. “But before you ask, no, I’ve not yet determined which specific evil. There is only some reference to That Which Must Not Be Named.”
Buffy started to giggle softly to herself, and everyone turned to look at Xander. He sighed. She always ruined his jokes by laughing at them before he said them.
“Uh, it was something about Harry Potter,” he said sheepishly. “Anyway, whatever that thing is, it’s putting off a crazy weird energy field. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re talking redefinition of the fundamental structure of reality stuff, here. Are we sure it’s magic?”
“It’s definitely magic,” Giles said. He glanced back at his customer, then sighed and joined the others around the table. “I suppose that doesn’t preclude it from having a measurable scientific impact as well.”
“There is a distinct lack of precluding going on,” Xander agreed while Buffy snickered to herself ahead of time. He gave her an annoyed -- albeit loving -- glare. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he started getting ideas. Her tongue went back in her mouth, but moistened her lips on the way back in. He swallowed hard.
“Buffy, perhaps you and Faith should return to the factory where you found the sphere,” Giles suggested. “Take a closer look around. If indeed the sphere puts out an energy field, perhaps Xander can adjust your M-Specs to track similar sources of power?”
“Oh, I can do that myself,” Buffy said. “But yeah, sure. We’ll check it out tonight. If there’s big no-namey evil coming, I want to know about it, especially since my next Cruciamentum treatment’s coming up. What do you want to bet Voldemort shows up right when I’m at my weakest?”
“Not very much at all,” Giles said. He gave Buffy a serious look. “Are you certain you wish to do another treatment so soon? You’re still showing ever increasing improvements since the first treatment. Perhaps it would be best to wait until you seem to level off.”
“I think it would be good to do one more for now,” Buffy said. “Xander has some ideas for biological augmentation, but they’re contingent on my buffy-wave generation increasing by at least another fifteen percent. He thinks I can get that with one more treatment. After that, we’ll see where I am after the augmentations. It might just be overkill after that.”
“I see.”
“It’s going to take a month or two to start working on augmentations anyway,” Buffy said as Xander’s mind thought vaguely of this fact. “In the meantime, we’re working on stuff for you guys.”
“Stuff?” Willow asked. “What kind of stuff?”
“Oh, weapons and augmentations and stuff like that for regular human beings. In case something happens where we all need to fight. We’re doing some really cool stuff with nanites. It’s just in the testing phase right now, but it’s working out so far.”
Xander’s eyes widened. No! Don’t bring up the testing!
Sure enough, Willow leaned forward and asked the seemingly innocent question, “Oh, what are you testing?”
Buffy stared at her for a moment, then blurted out, “Xander’s penis.” She blushed furiously and added, “H-he wanted to test and see if he could simulate tissue growth and cellular generation, so I convinced him to do it on his penis. It’s, um, it’s bigger now. And Xander’s been thinking about what I would look like with bigger breasts, so we might do that too.”
Willow just rolled her eyes. “That is what you guys would do.”
“W-we did other stuff,” Buffy insisted. “It wasn’t all sex. We increased metabolic regeneration across the board and induced cellular power distribution as a result of quantum catalyzation of endothermic protein sub-fusion, and strengthened his bone structure with a Cordamite weave of inverted proto-faiths suspended in a bio-mimetic willino field. But really, I’m more interested in the sex stuff. It really excites me.”
“I know,” Willow said. “And it’s okay.”
“We have to cure that stupid curse,” Buffy said for what was surely the ten-thousandth time.
“Yes, well, in the meantime, we will all do what we’ve gotten so good at doing, and that’s pretend that portions of this conversation never took place,” Giles said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my customers.”
Buffy groaned and leaned her head onto Xander’s shoulder. He put his arm around her and hugged her to him.
“It’s really okay, guys,” Willow said softly. “Nobody’s being judgey. Right, Tara?”
“U-um, right.” Tara whispered, but her face was beet red.
“We knew you’d find out when we did it,” Xander said with a sigh. Buffy nodded against him. “We were just too turned on by everything to stop, and Buffy already had me design some sexual augmentations for her when it’s her turn, she wants to have a super sensitive a--”
“Tara and I are dating!” Willow suddenly blurted out.
Buffy’s head rose. Xander stared at Willow. What?
What?
WHAT?
“I already told Faith, Giles, and Jonathan,” Willow said in a low voice. “I-I’ve wanted to tell you guys for a while, b-but...well every time I talk to either of you you’re always going on about whatever sex thing you’ve done recently, a-and I never really get a chance to get a word in edgewise. So, um, yeah. We’re dating.”
Xander looked from Willow to Tara. Dating. His best friend and this beautiful girl? Dating? Kissing? Having sex?
“Oh my God,” Buffy breathed. He had heard that before. That was excited-Buffy voice. “That’s so sexy.”
“I don’t understand,” Xander said finally. He frowned at her. “You’re bisexual?”
It was shocking, but it wasn’t entirely impossible. After all, Buffy was a very obvious bisexual these days, and he had thought she was totally heterosexual for years. Were all of his friends bi?
Buffy whimpered and her hand went to his thigh.
“Um, n-no,” Willow said, eyes lowering. “I’m a lesbian.”
“B-but Oz?”
“Taught me something about myself,” Willow said. “I love Oz, but...he wasn’t meant for me. That’s not the life I was supposed to have. It took me a long time to realize it, but now I understand what I want, and that’s...Women. Tara.”
“I’m really hoping this means I can talk you into having sex with me,” Buffy said, rubbing Xander’s thigh. “And with Xander.”
“I’m with Tara,” Willow said firmly. “And I don’t think it would, um, be a good idea. Even if I wasn’t.”
“Are you sure?” Xander asked. “I mean, about being a lesbian?”
“I’m sure.”
“You just don’t seem like a lesbian.”
Willow puffed up a little. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I, uh, I don’t know. I just never thought of you as a lesbian. It’s weird.”
“It’s not weird, it’s just who I am,” Willow said, eyes narrowing at him.
“Okay, I’m sorry, I-I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just shocked, that’s all. If this makes you happy, then that’s great. Tara’s awesome. Buffy and I have pretended to have sex with her a bunch of times.” He winced at that, then glanced to Tara, who was still quite red in the face.
Willow took a deep breath and then sighed. “Look, I know this is going to be strange for you guys, but I just thought you should know.”
“I’m a little upset that you didn’t tell me before anyone else,” Buffy admitted. “And I’m upset that you decided to become a lesbian with another girl when I’ve been telling you for months how much I like you. But I understand too that would be weird, and I’m happy for you Willow, really. Also, Xander’s starting to realize that you and Tara might be having sex and that’s getting him really hard and I kind of want to wrap this conversation up and go suck his cock or have sex with him or maybe both.”
Willow rolled her eyes. “Okay, maybe you guys should go get it out of your system. But we’ll talk later?”
“Definitely. I’ll come by after patrol, if you want. I’m fantasizing about us having sex now that I know you’re into girls, but I know that won’t happen. We’ll just talk.”
“Thanks, Buffy,” Willow said, and Xander once again marveled at how she seemed to take the strangest admissions from people in stride. It was as if she hardly even noticed them anymore.
“You’re amazing, Will,” Xander said, utterly truthfully. Then he added, “We’ll talk too, but right now I really need to have sex with Buffy while we think about you and Tara.”
“I really want to do that,” Buffy said, nodding vigorously. Xander knew she was just as embarrassed as he was as they got up. “Um, I-I’ll see you later, Willow.”
Buffy took Xander by the hand and quickly led him into the back room.
“I made such an idiot of myself,” Buffy said as she and Faith wandered around the outskirts of the factory. “Here she is telling me this big life changing decision, and all I can tell her is that I want to seduce her?”
“It’s not your fault,” Faith said, even as part of her was running a full sensor sweep of the area. “You know what I said when she told me?”
“No. What?”
“I said I wondered if she’d eaten Tara’s pussy yet. Cause I did. It was the first thing that popped into my head, so I said it. Trust me, B, she doesn’t even care anymore. People tell her the filthiest stuff in the world all day long. We don’t even compare.”
“But I should have been in supportive friend mode, not creepy stalker mode. I just couldn’t get it out of my head, and neither could Xander. She’s a lesbian. It’s so...”
“Hot?”
Buffy shuddered. “Yeah.” She took a deep breath and then sighed. It had taken her some time, but she was getting used to the reality that her friends all knew about her sexual proclivities. Realizing she could easily classify herself as a bisexual was something she would have preferred to experiment with in private, but as was so often the case with her life, she didn’t do anything normal. Her sexual evolution had occurred right there in front of all of her friends, and she’d either been caught or blurted out the truth so often that she hardly even tried to keep it a secret anymore.
Still, she felt a mild sense of embarrassment whenever she admitted something to Faith, like how she found girls attractive, or how she really liked the idea of watching Xander with other girls. Whether those thoughts were naturally her own or she’d stolen them from Xander’s mind, she didn’t really care.
Some of it was surely from Xander. Before reading his mind, she had always considered herself very possessive. It was just that Xander so often fantasized about having sex, and those fantasies were so amazing. The nebulous, abstract feelings of lust that came with such fantasies could really get to Buffy, especially if she were close enough to actually feel Xander’s physical sensations.
Buffy bit her lip gently as she thought back to the last time she and Xander had picked up a girl at the Bronze. Watching Xander have sex with the pretty brown-haired girl was hot enough, but actually feeling him have sex with her was incredible. She always loved the double-sensations she felt whenever she had sex with Xander: she felt him having sex with her, and she felt herself having sex with him. But when Xander was with another girl, all she felt was his side of it. She knew what it felt like to enter that tight passage and feel it pressing down around her hardness. It was intoxicating.
She wasn’t really looking forward to talking with Willow after patrol. Her mind had been a whirlwind of sexual thoughts ever since that afternoon, and she knew she was going to pour her heart out to Willow the moment she saw her. She’d gotten better about accepting that Willow would know all her darkest secrets, but she really hated it when she told Willow about her specific attraction to her. It just made things uncomfortable.
Sometimes she wished Xander had dated Willow at some point, just to get rid of all that unresolved sexual tension he still had for her. Sometimes Xander thought about Willow the way he thought about Buffy. It should probably have made her jealous, but instead it just got her excited. It made her love Willow even more.
“Never thought I’d be the straightest girl in the room with you and Willow around,” Faith said as they continued to stroll around the outskirts of the factory.
“Me neither,” Buffy said. She glanced at Faith out of the corner of one eye, and tried not to think about what she looked like naked. If she didn’t love Xander’s mind so much, she might be just a little annoyed at how he’d obviously contaminated her brain with his stupid male lust.
When they arrived at the fence surrounding the factory, Buffy paused in front of it. “So,” she said, looking at Faith. “Are you like, okay with it?”
Faith glanced up to the top of the fence. “Okay with what?”
Buffy crouched down low, then sprang up and launched herself upwards. She just cleared the barbed wire at the top of the fence and then landed on the other side. “About Willow and Tara.”
“Why wouldn’t I be okay with it?” Faith asked, then sprang upwards herself. Unlike Buffy, she cleared the barbed wire easily, and landed in complete silence. “Tara’s cool.”
Buffy shrugged as they made their way towards the factory entrance. “I just mean, well, you know, you and Willow are really close, and I know that can be weird. Like when I started dating Xander I kind of tuned everything else out for a while.”
“Oh yeah, cause you just ignore the dude constantly these days,” Faith said, rolling her eyes. Buffy punched her lightly in the shoulder, and Faith laughed. “But nah, it’s cool. I see Will all the time. She helps me with my homework and she’s been teaching me these meditation things that I think might help with my synch rates.”
“Like you need help,” Buffy said. “You’re going to max out the current systems soon.”
“Yeah, I know.” Faith smiled broadly. “Gonna get some better upgrades when that happens. I want my processor sped up some. I want to be able to download info way faster.”
Buffy cocked her head to one side and looked at Faith sideways. “What’s it feel like?”
“Downloading?”
“Yeah. I can’t imagine it.”
“It was freaky at first. It’s like I’m thinking, but I’m thinking way too fast. I dunno how to explain it. My brain’s part computer, so it all just kind of fits together, and as my rates go up the info just goes through easier.”
“Hmm,” Buffy said. “I wonder if that’s like Xander. I mean I hear his thoughts, but I don’t just hear his actual thought-thoughts. I hear his feelings and his weird abstracty ideas and his imagination and all this other stuff, and it’s so much bigger and faster than anything in my own head. At first I couldn’t even come close to keeping up with it all. It’s still totally overwhelming when he really starts thinking about something, but I can follow a lot more of it nowadays.”
“I wonder how fast he thinks. You think he’s faster than me?”
“I don’t know,” Buffy said, and then reached up to pull herself up to one of the windows on the factory wall. She peered inside, then dropped back down. “He thinks really, really fast.”
“I’ve got a fourteen gigaquad per second data processor,” Faith pointed out.
“Yeah, and he came up with the idea for it in like three seconds,” Buffy countered.
Faith chuckled. “All right, all right. I get it. He’s your boy, you gotta stick up for him.”
Buffy huffed slightly, albeit good-naturedly. “Darn right. Anyway, it looks empty in there.”
Faith nodded, her eye glowing slightly. “Yeah, seems clear. Want to take a closer look?”
“Yeah.”
After ejecting her M-Specs from her watch, Buffy slipped them on over her head. She engaged night-vision mode as she and Faith made their way inside. They’d only gone a few steps before Faith paused.
“Hang on,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Bio-rhythms. I’m reading at least one human. There’s something else too. You seeing that blob?”
Buffy turned to look in the direction Faith was looking, and then cycled her M-Specs. Sure enough, one of the spectrums showed a strange amorphous blob, as well as the bio-rhythms of a human being. “What the heck is that?”
“No idea. Want to find out?”
“Yeah,” Buffy said. She unclipped her plasma-blade while Faith reconfigured her arm into chain-blade mode. They quickly made their way through the factory until they found a doorway that appeared to have been blasted open.
In the center of the room was a man. He was beaten and bloody, and was tied to a chair. Buffy raced over to him and knelt down beside him. “Hey, you’re the one who planted the Dagon sphere, right? We found it. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here.”
“B,” Faith said. Buffy looked up to find Faith watching her back. She followed her gaze and found an attractive woman in a red dress standing behind them. Buffy’s eyes lingered on her breasts for a moment before she swallowed. Hot as she was, Buffy could feel the power -- and the evil -- pouring off of her.
“Must run,” the man on the chair groaned.
“No, don’t run,” the woman said. Her painted red lips curled into a mocking smile, and she sauntered closer to Buffy and Faith. “I haven’t had a chance to beat you to death yet.”
“Try it, bitch,” Faith snarled, and launched herself forward. Her chain-blade began to roar as it fired up, and she slashed it down at the woman. The woman raised her forearm and caught the blade on the meat of her arm. The chain locked, squealed, and then snapped off, flying across the room. The woman’s arm was completely unharmed.
“What did you call me?” the woman demanded, seemingly aghast. She scowled at Faith and then backhanded her hard across the face. Faith was sent careening backwards to crash into the concrete wall on the opposite side of the room. Huge cracks spider-webbed out from the impact, and Faith slid down onto the floor.
“Faith!” Buffy cried. She ignited her blade and slashed at the woman, but as with Faith, her blow was easily deflected. The woman’s hand gripped her around the throat, and Buffy choked as she was lifted off of her feet.
“What is this?” the woman asked, snatching the blade from Buffy’s fingers. As it was designed to do, it shut itself down the moment Buffy was no longer holding it. The woman frowned, turning the plasma-blade handle over and over in one hand while she held the struggling Buffy by the throat in the other. Buffy kicked and clawed at the woman, but her blows seemed to have no effect. “Did I break it? How do you turn it back on?”
Buffy gagged and sputtered, causing the woman look up at her. Rolling her eyes, she threw Buffy down with a contemptuous sneer. Gasping for air, Buffy clutched at her neck and looked up at the woman. Then she sprang at the woman, landing a solid haymaker across her jaw. The woman staggered backwards and clutched at her jaw.
“Hey! You hit me! You can’t just go around...” Buffy followed up with a sharp kick to the woman’s stomach. She doubled over, but continued to complain. “...Hitting people! What were you...” Buffy hit her with a powerful uppercut. “Born in a barn? Fine! Be that way!”
Buffy tried to swing a heavy kick into the woman’s side, but her leg was caught, and a moment later stars exploded in front of her face. When she could think again, she was lying against the wall and her head was pounding. The woman grinned down at her before she grabbed her by the throat once more.
“I just noticed something,” the woman said, holding Buffy over her head. “You have superpowers! That’s so cool. Can you--”
KABOOM
Buffy and the woman were knocked backwards. Buffy groaned and rolled over as concrete dust rained down on her. When she looked up, she saw the woman standing dazedly in the center of the room. Her red dress was completely shredded, and it was only a fine layer of soot that hid her nakedness. Her eyes were wide and she looked absolutely livid.
“You...” she said in a shaking voice before turning to face Faith, who was down on one knee on the other side of the room with her arm-cannon aimed directly at the woman. “You ruined my dress!”
Faith’s only response was to fire another heavy explosive into the woman’s chest. Buffy winced as another powerful explosion shook the factory, but when the dust settled, the woman was still standing, although she seemed at least slightly dazed.
“I’ll kill you!” the woman screeched. “I’ll kill all of--”
KABOOM
Faith fired again, and this time the factory could not take the stress. A large crack spread across the floor and directly towards one of the main support beams. Buffy looked to Faith, who looked back at her for a split second. Then Buffy raced across the room and grabbed the man from the chair. The factory began to crumble all around them as Buffy leaped out of the nearest window, with Faith only a half-second behind.
Three stories up, Buffy twisted in mid-air so that she landed back-first so as to cushion the man in her arms. She grunted with pain as she hit the ground hard, but got up to her feet right away, hauling the man with her. When she looked back up to the factory, it had already begun to implode.
“That’s not gonna stop her for long,” Faith said. Her right eye was twitching slightly.
“I know,” Buffy said with a grown. “We have to get out of here. Come on!”
She dragged the man -- the monk, she realized -- along with her as they went, but after a moment, he gasped and dropped to his knees. “Stop, please!”
“No,” Buffy said, picking him back up. “We have to keep going.”
“M-my journey’s done, I think,” the monk gasped as Buffy continued to drag him along.
“Don’t get all metaphory on me. We’re getting out of here.”
“You have to-- The Key. You must protect the Key.”
“Yeah, whatever, guy. We’ll all protect the key,” Faith said. “Let’s just do it after we get out of here.”
“Many more will die if you don’t keep it safe,” the monk whispered.
Buffy found herself pausing in mid-step. “What? How? What is it?”
“The Key is energy. It is a portal. It opens the door.”
“The Dagon sphere?” Buffy asked.
“No. For centuries it had no form at all. My brethen, its only keepers. Then the abomination found us--”
“Lady in red back there?” Faith asked.
The monk nodded. “Glorificus, the Beast. We had to hide the Key; gave it form, molded it flesh. Made it human and sent it...to you.”
He gave Buffy a meaningful look.
“What? Sent it to me? I-I don’t have any Key.”
“Your sister,” the monk said in a strained voice. “She is the Key. We gave her life.”
Buffy stared at him. “What? No you didn’t. She’s my sister!”
He shook his head. “No. She is the Key. We knew you would protect her, so we made her part of your family. We built her past, your memories, out of the most divine of magics.”
“D-Dawn’s not real?” She couldn’t wrap her mind around that. It was impossible. He was lying. He had to be. “You’re making this up.”
“No. She is human now, but was not always. She does not know her true nature. She is innocent in this. You must keep her safe, or we are all doomed.”
“Dawn’s not my sister?” Buffy whispered in absolute shock.
“She does not know that,” the monk said. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth one last time. A soft chuff of air left his lungs, and he slumped forward, dead.
Buffy stared down at him, and then looked up at Faith. “What just happened?”
Faith stared back at her. “I have no idea.”
They were a kind of inverted Dawnitron, only with a negative spin and an ancillary vibrational frequency out of tune with reality. Such a thing really shouldn’t be possible, but there it was, staring him in the face.
Or rather, starting Faith in the face. It was her visual data he was looking at. He was examining the information she’d collected on the crazy demon lady thing that was apparently called Glorificus. The strange energy that Faith had seen around her body operating on the Anti-Willow phase spectrum was fascinating, particularly because he could see at a glance the way this new energy field would interact with the Dawnitrons coming off of the Dagon sphere. The particle interactions would cause a negation effect within the sub-field and could, he theorized, severely weaken this Glorificus.
From what he could tell, this Glorificus was somehow tapping into energies not of this universe. In their universe of origin, those energies would be incredibly powerful, perhaps even psuedo-omnipotent, but in their own universe, they were drastically reduced. He calculated that she must be using close to 99.99999% of it just to keep herself from being crushed by the weight of spacetime closing in around her. It was one of the most incredible things he’d ever seen.
Xander looked around the quiet lab. Faith was lying in the medi-bed, her chest rising and falling softly as she ran a full systems diagnostic following her most recent repairs. Her eye had been slightly damaged in the fight with Glorificus, but he had been able to repair it fairly easily. He was thinking about upgrading her self-repair systems in the next few weeks. Her bio-mimetic tissue and skin regenerated quite well, but her bionic components usually required actual physical repairs to be done by him or Buffy. Perhaps his new nanite designs could be modified to perform routine repairs like these.
While Faith slept -- well, technically her mind was busy accessing his computer system’s database so she could do her Philosophy homework -- Buffy was in the back spending some time in the protein tank. Xander was not at all happy with how badly she’d been hurt. Slayer or not, jumping from the third story and using herself as a cushion was a bad idea. She’d cracked three ribs and had some mild damage to her liver. It would have healed on its own, but luckily with the tank she would be feeling better in just a few hours.
His job was to make sure that Glorificus never managed to finish the job. That was especially true if what Buffy said was right, and Dawn had somehow been transformed into some kind of mystical key thing. He wasn’t sure he believed that Dawn wasn’t actually real -- he would need more evidence of that before he believed it -- but he could believe she’d somehow been imbued with some magical force. That was par for the course when you live in Sunnydale.
And there was no way he was going to let Glorificus or anything else hurt Dawn. He’d always liked Buffy’s little sister. She was smart, funny, and just one of the coolest kids he’d ever met. Buffy didn’t always get along with her, although their sibling rivalry had cooled somewhat since Buffy had started reading his mind. Maybe seeing her little sister through his eyes had given her a new perspective on things.
He was definitely going to have to get Dawn into the swarm-cloud though. He wanted to get new reading on her. If he was right, then this Key thing might be related to the extrauniversal nature of Glorificus, and it might give him more data to work with. As it was, he was fairly certain he could rig together a Dawnitron particle beam cannon and set it to the same output level as the Dagon sphere. If that thing really could hurt Glorificus, then the beam cannon should concentrate that into something even more devastating. If his hyper-calculus was correct -- and really, when had it ever not been correct? -- then with the proper application of quantum disruption and particle nucleation, he could weaken the structural cohesion of Glorificus’ energy field and collapse it. The resulting implosion would almost certainly erase her from existence.
That would be nice. After all, she’d hurt Buffy. She deserved a good universe-negation.
Xander puttered around the lab for a while as he worked on building the cannon. The initial design took him a few hours, but once he built a working prototype he could render it into Faith’s internal MCD and program her for a new arm configuration. For Buffy, he’d design a smaller version she could carry around with her. He thought about maybe giving one to Dawn, but wasn’t sure her mom would be too happy with him giving her a particle beam cannon. Dawnitrons weren’t particularly dangerous to human beings, but if the frequency was turned up high enough it was possible for it to do some damage to the sixth-dimensional localized time-sense. That would be bad.
Okay, so he wouldn’t give one to Dawn. If they were lucky, Dawn would never have to find out that she was now some kind of magical key thingy.
Xander was in the middle of using his cold-welder to bond the Heisenberg-Modifier to the subatomic pattern buffer when his mind drifted to Willow. Willow was a lesbian. Wow. He had really not seen that one coming.
Then again, he never imagined he would ever have Buffy Summers encouraging him to “do it harder” while he was having sex with some random girl they had picked up at the Bronze, so he supposed he was really bad at imagining what people were like, sexually speaking.
Willow and Tara. That was definitely out of left field. Sure, they’s spent a lot of time together in the last few months, but he just had no idea that Willow would ever feel that way about girls. It was hot.
Xander paused and looked up. Oops. Buffy was in the tank room, and that was well within her range. He was probably making her a little crazy right now. She was trapped in there until she was healed, and here he was getting turned on while thinking about Willow and Tara. They might be making out right now. Willow might be in Tara’s bed, and they could be kissing and groping and sliding against each other. Tara had really nice breasts. Maybe Willow was licking them. Maybe.
He grinned. It served her right for trying to tease him that afternoon in the Magic Box. Besides, she was the one who wanted him to use his new augmentations on himself. Could he help it if being bigger and better down there meant he was thinking about sex even more than usual? This was all because of her, after all.
She was going to kill him for thinking all of this while she was stuck in the protein tank. But hey, he had to get his teasing in where he could. Buffy had the distinct advantage of being able to read his mind and knowing just how to tweak him, but he had gotten to know her intimately in the last year, and he knew that she must be squirming.
Yes, she would kill him, but oh what a way to die.
Something beeped. Willow groaned and slowly opened her eyes. It took her a moment to remember where she was, but when she did, she smiled. She was in bed. With Tara. She could feel her breathing softly beside her, and she could smell her hair just beneath her face. Tara had one arm around her, and Willow had both of her arms around Tara. A girl. Her girl.
It had taken a long time for her to recognize her feelings for Tara, let alone admit to herself that she could have feelings for a girl in the first place. But once she had, it was as if something had snapped into place in her mind. Of course this was what she wanted. How could she have ever denied it? Being here with Tara was the--
Something beeped again. Tara whined softly, and Willow frowned. Whatever that was, it was ruining her nice, peaceful morning. All she wanted to do was lie there with Tara and remember the wonderful evening they’d had together. She could still recall the absolute joy she’d felt when Tara looked her in the eye and told her she loved her. The truth was never so glorious.
Beep.
Willow groaned and finally realized what was beeping. It was her watch, and it wasn’t on her wrist. It was on the nightstand beside Tara’s bed. Careful not to move too quickly for fear of waking the lovely young woman beside her, Willow carefully reached out and picked up the watch. Someone was trying to contact her. She set the volume low and hit the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Willow? Oh, good. I wasn’t sure I was doing this correctly.
“Giles?”
“Yes. I, um, I tried to call, but of course none of you answer your phones anymore, so I was forced to use this...device.”
Willow smiled. She was pretty sure there was an “infernal contraption” trying to get out of Giles there.
“Is everything okay?” Willow asked. “Is this like an emergency thing?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I just thought perhaps you would want to know straight away.”
“Know what?”
“I was recently in contact with the Council over this Glorificus business. They provided me with a number of texts, but their head researcher had something else for me as well. We’ve found it, Willow. We’ve found the spell to summon and bind Anyanka.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. No more truth-telling? No more being constantly told how pretty, small, or sexy her breasts were? No more knowing every sordid detail of Buffy’s impossibly kinky sex life? No more late-night sessions of talking with Faith and working through her problems? No more Xander, Giles, and Jonathan pointing out to her every time they were looking at her ass? No more Tara telling her she loved her?
A strange sense of panic mixed with an equal sense of hope. “We can break the curse?”
“I think so. It should be a simple matter of summoning Anyanka and destroying her power source. I think we’ll want Buffy and Faith there, of course, just in case things get out of hand, but everything seems to be in order. You’ll have your life back, Willow.”
It seemed impossible. For almost a year now, she’d lived with the absolute truth. It had changed her, and it had changed her profoundly. It had made her recognize some scary truths about herself, but it had also made her recognize some very nice truths as well. One of those truths murmured softly in her arms.
“When can we do it?” Willow asked.
“Tonight, if you’d like.”
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Giles.”
“Of course, Willow. We’ll meet at the store at say six o’clock?”
“Okay. T-that would be good.”
“Very well, then. I shall see you then. Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
There was a brief rustling sound, and then a softly muttered curse. “How do you turn this blasted thing o--click.”
Willow carefully set down the watch. This was it. No more truth. It was really going to happen. It was what she had wanted for months.
So why did she feel such a sense of dread?
Continued in Installment 16 only it's not finished yet, so check back soon.