fic: Between Seacrest and Revello | IV. Sophomore Slump (6/7), Part Two | Buffy/Veronica Mars
series title: Between Seacrest and Revello (a crossover)
story title: IV. Sophomore Slump
chapter: six of seven (lj-enforced part 2)
pairing: buffy/veronica mars
setting: season five, post-"the body" and beyond (BtVS), post-series (VM)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: joss, fox, darkhorse. BtVS is theirs. rob, warner bros. VM is theirs. I profit not at all. I write just for my own, personal enjoyment.
________________________________________________________________________________
“Hell she get so far?” Faith asked Willow, jogging after the green whatchathing. “Are we catchin’ up?”
They just turned off Main.
“I-I think so.” Willow’s attempt at confidence sounded rather unconfident. “Yeah.”
If they could afford to stop, Faith would have. Dead in her tracks.
“Whaddaya mean, *‘think so’*? If it’s just headin’ home to the Hundred Acre Wood, how were you gonna...?” She shook her head. “Picked the wrong time to go big league if you can’t play, Willow.”
It was too late now. But who was she kidding? “We both did.”
“Tara’s who was working on it. She wanted to help the people that Glory made...like she is,” frowned the redhead, sadly. “But she told me she didn’t have enough power to do it herself, and that it’d only work for one person at time, ‘cause you have to map out their essences individually, and...and you read Pooh?“
Faith ignored the question, and winked. “You mapped her essence?”
Willow flushed, but ignored the innuendo just as the slayer had ignored her question.
“Right,” Faith thought that fair enough, “she thought you had the mojo to pull it off.”
Willow couldn’t fathom it. “But, *so* don’t. I mean, the last spell I did before Tinkerbell, was after I put Angel’s soul back. In high school! And I just closed my bedroom door...or it coulda been windy.”
The brunette’s brows rose. “You put Hair Gel back in the box? *Cold*? And you dunno why Glinda thinks you got juice?” She nearly felt a chill at this impressive fact, but moved past it. “Tell ya what I don’t get. Hardly know her, and you’re riskin’ this.”
“I’m a good guy! It’s what we do. Save people. However we can,” reacted Willow kind of defensively. “Tara’s a good guy, too. A really nice, ‘good guy’ girl, who likes m...who-who we like. Everybody’s we.” Beat. “I hafta try. Riskiness be damned.”
“Speaking of *damn*...way her set fills out those dresses?” Faith made her patented grunting noise. “People say I like it tight.”
She may have been MIA a while, but her sixth sense for horniness couldn’t be beat. Following her suggestive comment, the hacker slowed, but didn’t say anything.
The slayer assumed her humor was taken wrong again. “Hey, I’m jus--“
“No, Faith, look.”
Willow pointed at the sky ahead them. Not far in the distance, they could see the top of what had to be a large tower.
“Xander said they were finally building another Starbucks there...but a few months ago, somebody bought out their lease. It’s been totally abandoned since. Or it’s supposed to be.”
Faith focused like a laser. “Wanna guess what made *that joint* step down?”
Willow’s eyes grew large with realization. “Why didn’t you let him and Anya come? There’re probably gonna be minions everywhere. We’re two people, and, uh, not everywhere.”
“Why we’re goin’ in stealth,” Faith said, walking again, still fast, but more cautiously as they knew where Tara was headed now. “Scope the layout, get your honey, get Dawn. No way there’s anybody else standin’ guard...she’s wherever the bitch is. You do your thing, then till she’s out, I do mine.
“Buffy wakes up? She’s gonna see her fam still kickin’. Won’t fuck that up.” She almost convinced herself there. “Five by five?”
“Uh huh,” said Willow, feeling her anger toward the slayer begin to drain.
She hadn’t meant to hurt them, had she?
Just as the redhead thought that, Faith pulled her down behind a bench on the sidewalk. “Ow.”
Faith had, because of what she saw on the other side of the street. That dude from the hospital running and looking paranoid--Dawn in tow. “Lucky day.”
Willow gasped, and then became perplexed. “But how did he...?”
The Bostonian watched as he turned down an alleyway, trying to figure why Dawn didn’t seem altogether happy about being with the guy. She also finally saw Tara up ahead, who’d cowered as he passed, and presently was trying to grab at the green whatchathing.
“Better grab her. Doc’s gotta squeeze us in.”
________
Keith stepped out onto the front porch to make a call. Inside, Xander was pissed about being left behind, and Anya didn’t quite get it, because if they were here they couldn’t die. But while they worried about the world-ending if Dawn bled at the wrong time, something Keith couldn’t wrap his head around (he could be a parent to her, help with homework, but that?), he was unable to stop worrying about Neptune.
He’d asked Faith how it was. Her answer?
{“Devil’s playground, Mr. M.”}
She didn’t just mean at night, either.
He knew why it was so bad. In his bones, he knew. There were only two reasons his town could be described worse than one with a Hellmouth--Vinnie Van Lowe and Liam Fitzpatrick. Made his blood boil. Neptune had been nothing but unkind to the Marses in general, but it was still where he felt most at home. He’d left it in those men’s hands and it had gotten...
“Hey, Leo, it’s Keith Mars.” He got his former deputy’s voicemail. “Listen, when you get this, give me a buzz? There’s just something I’d like to...run by you. About this guy I’m tracking. Thanks.” He ended the call, and took a deep breath.
Never knew who might be listening.
Then he walked back into the house, again having missed apparently a lot, because entering the living room, he heard and saw a very mobile Buffy speaking to the couple.
“...then we’re hitting the Magic Box first. Not like it isn’t probably on the way. This is Sunnydale--everywhere’s on the way. Anya, you’re sure you know...?”
“Yeah. It glows at random and inconvenient times,” complained the once-demon. “Temporary blindness in a basement filled with extremely fragile, high cost items--”
“Great,” Buffy cut her off, and then noticed Keith there. “Xander can you, um, start your car? Be right there.”
“C’mon, Ahn,” Xander said, and both of them left by the front door.
He didn’t look so pissed anymore.
“How you feeling?” Keith asked with a small smile as his daughter’s girlfriend came over to him.
“Won’t be doing the ‘catatonic’ thing again,” she assured him.
For many reasons. One started with an “L.”
He glanced back toward the stairs expectantly then, and she knew who he was waiting to see.
“Veronica’s not up there. Looks like she stole my brilliant idea and used the window.”
As with whenever Veronica went off on her own to do something dangerous, he felt that first rush of anger, and then felt his stomach drop as the fear and protectiveness took over.
He closed his eyes, and opened them again. “She can’t have any idea what she’s getting into.”
“Veronica’s the adaptable type,” Buffy gently disagreed. “Think she knows *exactly* what she’s getting into. Which relaxes. Most of the time.”
Now was the exception. Her first stop after getting off that bed, was Veronica’s laptop left purposely un-passworded. She saw all the spy-cam footage of Glory’s loft. How the god fed on her victims, and just who that human vessel was the general had talked about at the gas station.
Veronica had known. Just not what to do about it.
When the recorded truth was watched, the truth of what Glory wanted to keep unknown, the magick whammy was overridden. Veronica must’ve loved that a camera could see through even mystically-deceiving lies. And she’d left a sticky-note on Mr. Gordo’s nose:
^Ask Dad to do his voodoo^
“Where is she?” He asked.
“I’m not gonna say don’t come. The Slayer might, but I’m Buffy, and she has no right to tell her girlfriend’s dad to not be one. But I’m asking--stay here.”
She could tell his knee-jerk reaction was going to be, “Not a chance,” but she put a hand on his arm, silently also asking him to wait.
“Xander told me Faith’s plan. Mine’s just as non-guaranteed. We don’t know what we’re walking into, but then again, we sorta do. Isn’t our first, maybe-apocalypse.”
“But it’s mine,” conceded Keith.
“You’re cop-skilled. You know people; you know predicting them...even when they’re trying to be Un. You also have dad skills, the best ever. ‘Cept, if they kick in at the wrong time...
“Mix in Glory, who to an nth infinity degree, is so far from a person--“
“I get the point.” He spared her from having to continue.
He was a variable they couldn’t afford. Everyone else knew how to keep their cool in these situations. With Veronica there, he couldn’t make that promise. And he didn’t want to endanger their chances because all he’d be able to see would be his daughter.
But Buffy couldn’t stop continuing. “Plus, if something happened to you, and Veronica...”
“You always watched out for her. Still do,” he told her gratefully, hands on her shoulders, trust in his eyes. “I won’t make you promise anything, just...keep it up.”
She hugged the man. That trust meant everything. “She’s walking back through that door, Mr. Mars. Everybody is. Haven’t worked all the details, but my friends, and my sister, are living through this.”
And the Slayer, that loner, solitary part of her and Faith, was going to help, whether it liked it or not. She was Buffy, goddamn it, and...oh yeah. Voodoo.
“Oh, uh,” Her hug reached its natural endpoint, “Veronica has her cell turned off, and we need to find her. Then we find the rest of the gang. You know how to, right?”
She remembered that day at Hearst. He’d showed up out of the blue looking for Weevil, and Veronica’s cell had been off then, too. It just served as a constant reminder to her girlfriend, that Keith would always be one step ahead.
He nodded, staring down at her, solemnly. “If I show you, this is a secret you must swear to protect at all costs. Until you’re of a very old age, and are so senile, that even if it did happen to *accidentally* spill out, no one would believe it.
“But most importantly, Veronica never knows. It’s the only card I have left to hold over her. The only thing I can still brag about. Don’t take that away from me, Buffy.”
No, no, no, no. He wasn’t putting her in this position.
“Me, hide something? From *Veronica*?” She swallowed. “Have you *met* her?”
________
“I didn’t ask for any of this!” Ben insisted to Willow--who’d run in with Tara by the hand--and Faith, now that they’d caught up to him and Dawn in the one-way alley. “I just wanted a normal life.”
“Yeah, got it tough, ‘Casey,’” Faith said in sarcastic response. Like he knew *anything* about a shitty life? “See how it could suck, few years out, sittin’ on all that green. Me, I like red.”
Her eyes moved from the doctor-in-training to the teenager. “Back off the kid. Slow.”
“Fine,” he said, releasing Dawn’s arm and holding his up. “Take her away from here. Fast as you can. I barely got us out; Glory could come back any second.”
Dawn ran to her friends and hugged the slayer like a vice, crying. “Faith! Oh my god! You’re here!”
“She doesn’t have to come back,” said Veronica to the young doctor, surprising everybody present. “You must’ve thought about it.”
The girls turned around to see her walking deeper into the alley, looking all the way past them, directly at Ben. If this were any other situation, she would’ve made a crack about him being cross-dressed in a ceremonial gown. This wasn’t any other situation.
“Veronica?” Willow had no idea where she’d come from.
But the detective walked directly past them too, until only a few feet separated her and her mark. An alarm went off for Faith, but the slayer didn’t quite know what it was warning her about, so she just shut up and watched.
“What’re you talking...?” Ben trailed off.
It didn’t take long for the “What’s next?” tension to ratchet up to, “Holy f...!” tension. Supplied by the gun Veronica pulled from her bag.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “Sorry destiny came knocking when a Dodge Dart was probably rocking, making your entire life *blow* from the Big Bang on. Nobody so pretty deserves that. Or this.”
Her hands didn’t shake as she pointed her father’s spare that she’d freed from the master bedroom’s safe, at the young, almost M.D.
“But you need to die.”
story title: IV. Sophomore Slump
chapter: six of seven (lj-enforced part 2)
pairing: buffy/veronica mars
setting: season five, post-"the body" and beyond (BtVS), post-series (VM)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: joss, fox, darkhorse. BtVS is theirs. rob, warner bros. VM is theirs. I profit not at all. I write just for my own, personal enjoyment.
________________________________________________________________________________
“Hell she get so far?” Faith asked Willow, jogging after the green whatchathing. “Are we catchin’ up?”
They just turned off Main.
“I-I think so.” Willow’s attempt at confidence sounded rather unconfident. “Yeah.”
If they could afford to stop, Faith would have. Dead in her tracks.
“Whaddaya mean, *‘think so’*? If it’s just headin’ home to the Hundred Acre Wood, how were you gonna...?” She shook her head. “Picked the wrong time to go big league if you can’t play, Willow.”
It was too late now. But who was she kidding? “We both did.”
“Tara’s who was working on it. She wanted to help the people that Glory made...like she is,” frowned the redhead, sadly. “But she told me she didn’t have enough power to do it herself, and that it’d only work for one person at time, ‘cause you have to map out their essences individually, and...and you read Pooh?“
Faith ignored the question, and winked. “You mapped her essence?”
Willow flushed, but ignored the innuendo just as the slayer had ignored her question.
“Right,” Faith thought that fair enough, “she thought you had the mojo to pull it off.”
Willow couldn’t fathom it. “But, *so* don’t. I mean, the last spell I did before Tinkerbell, was after I put Angel’s soul back. In high school! And I just closed my bedroom door...or it coulda been windy.”
The brunette’s brows rose. “You put Hair Gel back in the box? *Cold*? And you dunno why Glinda thinks you got juice?” She nearly felt a chill at this impressive fact, but moved past it. “Tell ya what I don’t get. Hardly know her, and you’re riskin’ this.”
“I’m a good guy! It’s what we do. Save people. However we can,” reacted Willow kind of defensively. “Tara’s a good guy, too. A really nice, ‘good guy’ girl, who likes m...who-who we like. Everybody’s we.” Beat. “I hafta try. Riskiness be damned.”
“Speaking of *damn*...way her set fills out those dresses?” Faith made her patented grunting noise. “People say I like it tight.”
She may have been MIA a while, but her sixth sense for horniness couldn’t be beat. Following her suggestive comment, the hacker slowed, but didn’t say anything.
The slayer assumed her humor was taken wrong again. “Hey, I’m jus--“
“No, Faith, look.”
Willow pointed at the sky ahead them. Not far in the distance, they could see the top of what had to be a large tower.
“Xander said they were finally building another Starbucks there...but a few months ago, somebody bought out their lease. It’s been totally abandoned since. Or it’s supposed to be.”
Faith focused like a laser. “Wanna guess what made *that joint* step down?”
Willow’s eyes grew large with realization. “Why didn’t you let him and Anya come? There’re probably gonna be minions everywhere. We’re two people, and, uh, not everywhere.”
“Why we’re goin’ in stealth,” Faith said, walking again, still fast, but more cautiously as they knew where Tara was headed now. “Scope the layout, get your honey, get Dawn. No way there’s anybody else standin’ guard...she’s wherever the bitch is. You do your thing, then till she’s out, I do mine.
“Buffy wakes up? She’s gonna see her fam still kickin’. Won’t fuck that up.” She almost convinced herself there. “Five by five?”
“Uh huh,” said Willow, feeling her anger toward the slayer begin to drain.
She hadn’t meant to hurt them, had she?
Just as the redhead thought that, Faith pulled her down behind a bench on the sidewalk. “Ow.”
Faith had, because of what she saw on the other side of the street. That dude from the hospital running and looking paranoid--Dawn in tow. “Lucky day.”
Willow gasped, and then became perplexed. “But how did he...?”
The Bostonian watched as he turned down an alleyway, trying to figure why Dawn didn’t seem altogether happy about being with the guy. She also finally saw Tara up ahead, who’d cowered as he passed, and presently was trying to grab at the green whatchathing.
“Better grab her. Doc’s gotta squeeze us in.”
________
Keith stepped out onto the front porch to make a call. Inside, Xander was pissed about being left behind, and Anya didn’t quite get it, because if they were here they couldn’t die. But while they worried about the world-ending if Dawn bled at the wrong time, something Keith couldn’t wrap his head around (he could be a parent to her, help with homework, but that?), he was unable to stop worrying about Neptune.
He’d asked Faith how it was. Her answer?
{“Devil’s playground, Mr. M.”}
She didn’t just mean at night, either.
He knew why it was so bad. In his bones, he knew. There were only two reasons his town could be described worse than one with a Hellmouth--Vinnie Van Lowe and Liam Fitzpatrick. Made his blood boil. Neptune had been nothing but unkind to the Marses in general, but it was still where he felt most at home. He’d left it in those men’s hands and it had gotten...
“Hey, Leo, it’s Keith Mars.” He got his former deputy’s voicemail. “Listen, when you get this, give me a buzz? There’s just something I’d like to...run by you. About this guy I’m tracking. Thanks.” He ended the call, and took a deep breath.
Never knew who might be listening.
Then he walked back into the house, again having missed apparently a lot, because entering the living room, he heard and saw a very mobile Buffy speaking to the couple.
“...then we’re hitting the Magic Box first. Not like it isn’t probably on the way. This is Sunnydale--everywhere’s on the way. Anya, you’re sure you know...?”
“Yeah. It glows at random and inconvenient times,” complained the once-demon. “Temporary blindness in a basement filled with extremely fragile, high cost items--”
“Great,” Buffy cut her off, and then noticed Keith there. “Xander can you, um, start your car? Be right there.”
“C’mon, Ahn,” Xander said, and both of them left by the front door.
He didn’t look so pissed anymore.
“How you feeling?” Keith asked with a small smile as his daughter’s girlfriend came over to him.
“Won’t be doing the ‘catatonic’ thing again,” she assured him.
For many reasons. One started with an “L.”
He glanced back toward the stairs expectantly then, and she knew who he was waiting to see.
“Veronica’s not up there. Looks like she stole my brilliant idea and used the window.”
As with whenever Veronica went off on her own to do something dangerous, he felt that first rush of anger, and then felt his stomach drop as the fear and protectiveness took over.
He closed his eyes, and opened them again. “She can’t have any idea what she’s getting into.”
“Veronica’s the adaptable type,” Buffy gently disagreed. “Think she knows *exactly* what she’s getting into. Which relaxes. Most of the time.”
Now was the exception. Her first stop after getting off that bed, was Veronica’s laptop left purposely un-passworded. She saw all the spy-cam footage of Glory’s loft. How the god fed on her victims, and just who that human vessel was the general had talked about at the gas station.
Veronica had known. Just not what to do about it.
When the recorded truth was watched, the truth of what Glory wanted to keep unknown, the magick whammy was overridden. Veronica must’ve loved that a camera could see through even mystically-deceiving lies. And she’d left a sticky-note on Mr. Gordo’s nose:
^Ask Dad to do his voodoo^
“Where is she?” He asked.
“I’m not gonna say don’t come. The Slayer might, but I’m Buffy, and she has no right to tell her girlfriend’s dad to not be one. But I’m asking--stay here.”
She could tell his knee-jerk reaction was going to be, “Not a chance,” but she put a hand on his arm, silently also asking him to wait.
“Xander told me Faith’s plan. Mine’s just as non-guaranteed. We don’t know what we’re walking into, but then again, we sorta do. Isn’t our first, maybe-apocalypse.”
“But it’s mine,” conceded Keith.
“You’re cop-skilled. You know people; you know predicting them...even when they’re trying to be Un. You also have dad skills, the best ever. ‘Cept, if they kick in at the wrong time...
“Mix in Glory, who to an nth infinity degree, is so far from a person--“
“I get the point.” He spared her from having to continue.
He was a variable they couldn’t afford. Everyone else knew how to keep their cool in these situations. With Veronica there, he couldn’t make that promise. And he didn’t want to endanger their chances because all he’d be able to see would be his daughter.
But Buffy couldn’t stop continuing. “Plus, if something happened to you, and Veronica...”
“You always watched out for her. Still do,” he told her gratefully, hands on her shoulders, trust in his eyes. “I won’t make you promise anything, just...keep it up.”
She hugged the man. That trust meant everything. “She’s walking back through that door, Mr. Mars. Everybody is. Haven’t worked all the details, but my friends, and my sister, are living through this.”
And the Slayer, that loner, solitary part of her and Faith, was going to help, whether it liked it or not. She was Buffy, goddamn it, and...oh yeah. Voodoo.
“Oh, uh,” Her hug reached its natural endpoint, “Veronica has her cell turned off, and we need to find her. Then we find the rest of the gang. You know how to, right?”
She remembered that day at Hearst. He’d showed up out of the blue looking for Weevil, and Veronica’s cell had been off then, too. It just served as a constant reminder to her girlfriend, that Keith would always be one step ahead.
He nodded, staring down at her, solemnly. “If I show you, this is a secret you must swear to protect at all costs. Until you’re of a very old age, and are so senile, that even if it did happen to *accidentally* spill out, no one would believe it.
“But most importantly, Veronica never knows. It’s the only card I have left to hold over her. The only thing I can still brag about. Don’t take that away from me, Buffy.”
No, no, no, no. He wasn’t putting her in this position.
“Me, hide something? From *Veronica*?” She swallowed. “Have you *met* her?”
________
“I didn’t ask for any of this!” Ben insisted to Willow--who’d run in with Tara by the hand--and Faith, now that they’d caught up to him and Dawn in the one-way alley. “I just wanted a normal life.”
“Yeah, got it tough, ‘Casey,’” Faith said in sarcastic response. Like he knew *anything* about a shitty life? “See how it could suck, few years out, sittin’ on all that green. Me, I like red.”
Her eyes moved from the doctor-in-training to the teenager. “Back off the kid. Slow.”
“Fine,” he said, releasing Dawn’s arm and holding his up. “Take her away from here. Fast as you can. I barely got us out; Glory could come back any second.”
Dawn ran to her friends and hugged the slayer like a vice, crying. “Faith! Oh my god! You’re here!”
“She doesn’t have to come back,” said Veronica to the young doctor, surprising everybody present. “You must’ve thought about it.”
The girls turned around to see her walking deeper into the alley, looking all the way past them, directly at Ben. If this were any other situation, she would’ve made a crack about him being cross-dressed in a ceremonial gown. This wasn’t any other situation.
“Veronica?” Willow had no idea where she’d come from.
But the detective walked directly past them too, until only a few feet separated her and her mark. An alarm went off for Faith, but the slayer didn’t quite know what it was warning her about, so she just shut up and watched.
“What’re you talking...?” Ben trailed off.
It didn’t take long for the “What’s next?” tension to ratchet up to, “Holy f...!” tension. Supplied by the gun Veronica pulled from her bag.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “Sorry destiny came knocking when a Dodge Dart was probably rocking, making your entire life *blow* from the Big Bang on. Nobody so pretty deserves that. Or this.”
Her hands didn’t shake as she pointed her father’s spare that she’d freed from the master bedroom’s safe, at the young, almost M.D.
“But you need to die.”