August 9: my friends and I, we've cracked the code [Sleepy Hollow]
Title: my friends and I, we've cracked the code
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Rating: T/PG-13
Crossover: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Spoilers: In the B:tVS "Normal Again" 'verse; after 1.08 "Into Darkness" for SH.
Notes: Follows 2013's that kind of luxe just ain't for us, in a 'verse where vampires might not exist, but evil still does. Title again by Lorde.
Summary: So yeah, Jen was Buffy's ride-or-die. Whatever her sister and her eighteenth-century Watcher-y type got up to was their business, up until it threatened that; but there was still such a thing as common sense. 1600 words.
Buffy kicked her feet, seated on the counter in the center of the big room Jenny's sister and her time-traveling partner called the Archives, and worried a piece of lemon hard candy between her teeth.
"Are they always like this?" she murmured to her fellow ex-mental patient.
At the far side of the space, under three big round windows streaming with late-afternoon light, Abbie Mills and Ichabod Crane stood well up inside each other's personal space, alternately flipping pages in a big age-spotted Bible spread open on a table and arguing about something in low, intense tones. He looked like an expy from some History Channel TV show; she looked like she'd wandered out of a procedural; and the big, sunlight-gilded room full of bookshelves, candelabras, and heavy wooden furniture looked like the set of one of those movies full of millennia-old mysteries and quests to save the world.
And together, they fight crime! she thought, amused. It was no wonder they kept tripping over witches and ghosts and cults and dead ex-buddies wound up by a demon and aimed their way. They'd need at minimum a makeover if they hoped to escape to another genre.
"Yeah," Jenny replied, shaking her head as she plucked another piece of candy out of the bag and tossed it onto her tongue. She was leaning against the same counter, elbows propped behind her back next to Buffy's legs, content to spectate while she had nowhere better to be. "You'd think Abbie at least would be a little more genre-savvy, but nah."
Buffy snorted. "Most of the demons I remember fighting were figments of my own imagination. Or visions of some other universe, if you want to be kind about it; not that it makes any difference in this one. And I still know better than to take the evil minion into the cell with the evil lieutenant after he gives a big mournful speech about how he can't stop the big bad from wearing him like a puppet and that it's all going to end in tears. Big surprise; it ended in tears. Evil gloats; that's what it does."
"Preaching to the choir," Jenny said, mouth pursed around the candy. "So much for the creepy dead coworker. What's your take on the ghostly third wheel?"
"The dead wife who gasp, shocker, was also the faithless fiancée of Ichabod's ex-bestie and current mortal foe? I think Moloch is licking his chops about all the tasty drama, and if he doesn't have half a dozen other rip-your-heart-out secrets stuck up his sleeves for good measure, he doesn't deserve the title Demon of the Apocalypse. Also: total red herring."
"You think?" Jenny turned to look at Buffy, raising her eyebrows. "I mean, I know I'm biased, because I can see my sister wearing her heart on her sleeve, but what's your reason?"
Buffy crunched the last of the sour lemon to satisfying, tasty shards, then ran her tongue over her teeth as she assembled her thoughts. "So, from what you've told me, that four white trees thing back when you were teenagers? That was Moloch."
"Yep," Jenny confirmed.
"The possessed, wanting to kill your sister thing? Also Moloch. Well, his servant. Whatever."
"Yep," Jenny repeated, tone considerably drier. "Which Abbie still doesn't know about, so keep your voice down, all right?"
"Gotcha," Buffy said, drawing a finger and thumb across her mouth. "Next up, Abbie's mentor being the first person the Horseman went after once he was finally freed from his watery prison...." She let her voice trail off.
Jenny sighed, getting the point. "Also Moloch. Just like he aimed the Horseman at Craine in the first place back in 1781. But what's that got to do with Katrina?"
"Moloch's been trying to kick the support structure out from under the modern Witness pretty much her whole life. You really going to play the odds he's not planning the same thing for the original? Including trying to keep the Witness themselves from, you know, uniting?" Buffy brought her cupped hands together suggestively about an inch apart to emphasize the uniting and threw her friend a skeptical look. "How convenient that he's had Ichabod's dead wife in his back pocket all this time."
Jenny frowned as she thought about that. "No-one leaves a prison the same way they go in. And two and a half centuries is a long-ass time for someone to develop Stockholm Syndrome. You think she's setting them up for something on Moloch's behalf? She's been helpful so far."
"If she wanted to help him, she would have just sent Abbie straight at him that time he was kidnapped," Buffy pointed out. Jenny had filled her in, and wow, the elder Miss Mills really was so gone on the guy it wasn't funny. Otherwise, there's no way she wouldn't have seen it, too. "That vision-blocking excuse was total BS. She could at least have told Abbie where the boundaries of the spell were-- if she'd been paying attention like she said. Your sister could've tracked him from there and got to those Mason guys before they poisoned him. Then they could have saved the whole sin-ectomy thing for after they had some idea how to kill the Horseman, and he wouldn't have lost his Shield of Mutually Assured Destruction already."
Jenny opened her mouth as if to refute that, then widened her eyes. "Okay, I got nothing on that one. Even if we say-- for argument's sake-- that she didn't mean for that to happen, it's hella sketchy. But how do we convince him of that?"
Buffy shrugged, leaning forward to reach into the bag clasped in Jenny's hand and retrieve another lemon drop. "We don't."
"What do you mean?"
"You know as well as I do that there's no convincing someone who doesn't want to be convinced. You think he's gonna be rational on the subject? Hell, I know I wouldn't be. You know I'd shank anyone who slandered my baby sister, and Dawn doesn't even really exist."
Jenny snorted. "So if we can't come at it from his side of things... how much do you know about apotropaic magic? I focused mostly on the anti-demonic stuff in specific, but I know you've been doing a lot of reading. We could try to block her instead of him, see what happens?"
"I find it kind of soothing and reality-affirming, after everything," Buffy agreed, wryly. "Vampires, for example, aren't actually a thing, but zombies? Surprisingly are. And it should work; that kind of warding is how the Masons hid what they were doing from everyone. I don't know which symbols they used, but there were some simple ones in the books, just overlapping circles. Carve some of those, nail up a few horseshoes and crosses, lay some salt circles, yadda yadda. Do it here, Abbie's place, that cabin he's staying at, your trailer. Anywhere else you can think of?"
"Probably Abbie's work; she's there often enough. They'll still be targets anywhere else, but... I think that's most of it," Jenny agreed, worrying at her lower lip. "You really think it'll help?"
"Only one way to find out," Buffy shrugged, rolling the candy over her tongue. "Next time they get called in for something and don't invite us along."
"Shouldn't be long," Jenny sighed, then frowned up at Buffy again. "Our trailer, by the way. Unless you're planning on moving back into your parents' guest room anytime soon?"
Buffy wrinkled her nose disgustedly. "God, no. I get that I was sort of frozen at sixteen in their mind, and it's not like I've got any marketable skills that aren't, you know, delusion related as far as they're concerned, but art? Not really my thing either. I'm either a poor-thing gallery assistant there or your kick-ass companion out here, and much as I love them, I know which one sounds like a much less suffocating way to live."
Jenny snorted, looking amused. "Yeah, I get that. So assume away, got it?"
"Got it," Buffy grinned back at her.
She may have spent most her late teens and early twenties lost to reality, but not all of what she'd experienced during that time had been bloody and traumatic, and that was something she could never explain to her parents. Not after they'd tried to convince her that killing her friends in that other world was the only way to heal. She hadn't been able to follow through in the end; and even if it had taken several more months for her to fight her way out of it naturally to 'live like a person' again, she was glad she hadn't. She did know what real friendship looked like, and even if they sometimes butted heads, Jennifer Claire Mills had been there for her ever since they'd first crossed paths. They understood each other, in a way very few other people could.
So yeah, Jen was her ride-or-die. Whatever her sister and her eighteenth-century Watcher-y type got up to was their business, up until it threatened that; but there was still such a thing as common sense. Evil prophylactics were like the normal kind: best deployed in advance.
She crunched away the second candy, then slid off the counter. "So, in the meantime. Where's good around here? They look like they're going to be awhile, and candy's only going to hold me so long."
Jenny grinned, then hooked her elbow through Buffy's and steered her toward the door. "That's right, I haven't introduced you to Mabie's yet. C'mon, my treat this time; we'll bring them something back, too."
-x-
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Rating: T/PG-13
Crossover: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Spoilers: In the B:tVS "Normal Again" 'verse; after 1.08 "Into Darkness" for SH.
Notes: Follows 2013's that kind of luxe just ain't for us, in a 'verse where vampires might not exist, but evil still does. Title again by Lorde.
Summary: So yeah, Jen was Buffy's ride-or-die. Whatever her sister and her eighteenth-century Watcher-y type got up to was their business, up until it threatened that; but there was still such a thing as common sense. 1600 words.
Buffy kicked her feet, seated on the counter in the center of the big room Jenny's sister and her time-traveling partner called the Archives, and worried a piece of lemon hard candy between her teeth.
"Are they always like this?" she murmured to her fellow ex-mental patient.
At the far side of the space, under three big round windows streaming with late-afternoon light, Abbie Mills and Ichabod Crane stood well up inside each other's personal space, alternately flipping pages in a big age-spotted Bible spread open on a table and arguing about something in low, intense tones. He looked like an expy from some History Channel TV show; she looked like she'd wandered out of a procedural; and the big, sunlight-gilded room full of bookshelves, candelabras, and heavy wooden furniture looked like the set of one of those movies full of millennia-old mysteries and quests to save the world.
And together, they fight crime! she thought, amused. It was no wonder they kept tripping over witches and ghosts and cults and dead ex-buddies wound up by a demon and aimed their way. They'd need at minimum a makeover if they hoped to escape to another genre.
"Yeah," Jenny replied, shaking her head as she plucked another piece of candy out of the bag and tossed it onto her tongue. She was leaning against the same counter, elbows propped behind her back next to Buffy's legs, content to spectate while she had nowhere better to be. "You'd think Abbie at least would be a little more genre-savvy, but nah."
Buffy snorted. "Most of the demons I remember fighting were figments of my own imagination. Or visions of some other universe, if you want to be kind about it; not that it makes any difference in this one. And I still know better than to take the evil minion into the cell with the evil lieutenant after he gives a big mournful speech about how he can't stop the big bad from wearing him like a puppet and that it's all going to end in tears. Big surprise; it ended in tears. Evil gloats; that's what it does."
"Preaching to the choir," Jenny said, mouth pursed around the candy. "So much for the creepy dead coworker. What's your take on the ghostly third wheel?"
"The dead wife who gasp, shocker, was also the faithless fiancée of Ichabod's ex-bestie and current mortal foe? I think Moloch is licking his chops about all the tasty drama, and if he doesn't have half a dozen other rip-your-heart-out secrets stuck up his sleeves for good measure, he doesn't deserve the title Demon of the Apocalypse. Also: total red herring."
"You think?" Jenny turned to look at Buffy, raising her eyebrows. "I mean, I know I'm biased, because I can see my sister wearing her heart on her sleeve, but what's your reason?"
Buffy crunched the last of the sour lemon to satisfying, tasty shards, then ran her tongue over her teeth as she assembled her thoughts. "So, from what you've told me, that four white trees thing back when you were teenagers? That was Moloch."
"Yep," Jenny confirmed.
"The possessed, wanting to kill your sister thing? Also Moloch. Well, his servant. Whatever."
"Yep," Jenny repeated, tone considerably drier. "Which Abbie still doesn't know about, so keep your voice down, all right?"
"Gotcha," Buffy said, drawing a finger and thumb across her mouth. "Next up, Abbie's mentor being the first person the Horseman went after once he was finally freed from his watery prison...." She let her voice trail off.
Jenny sighed, getting the point. "Also Moloch. Just like he aimed the Horseman at Craine in the first place back in 1781. But what's that got to do with Katrina?"
"Moloch's been trying to kick the support structure out from under the modern Witness pretty much her whole life. You really going to play the odds he's not planning the same thing for the original? Including trying to keep the Witness themselves from, you know, uniting?" Buffy brought her cupped hands together suggestively about an inch apart to emphasize the uniting and threw her friend a skeptical look. "How convenient that he's had Ichabod's dead wife in his back pocket all this time."
Jenny frowned as she thought about that. "No-one leaves a prison the same way they go in. And two and a half centuries is a long-ass time for someone to develop Stockholm Syndrome. You think she's setting them up for something on Moloch's behalf? She's been helpful so far."
"If she wanted to help him, she would have just sent Abbie straight at him that time he was kidnapped," Buffy pointed out. Jenny had filled her in, and wow, the elder Miss Mills really was so gone on the guy it wasn't funny. Otherwise, there's no way she wouldn't have seen it, too. "That vision-blocking excuse was total BS. She could at least have told Abbie where the boundaries of the spell were-- if she'd been paying attention like she said. Your sister could've tracked him from there and got to those Mason guys before they poisoned him. Then they could have saved the whole sin-ectomy thing for after they had some idea how to kill the Horseman, and he wouldn't have lost his Shield of Mutually Assured Destruction already."
Jenny opened her mouth as if to refute that, then widened her eyes. "Okay, I got nothing on that one. Even if we say-- for argument's sake-- that she didn't mean for that to happen, it's hella sketchy. But how do we convince him of that?"
Buffy shrugged, leaning forward to reach into the bag clasped in Jenny's hand and retrieve another lemon drop. "We don't."
"What do you mean?"
"You know as well as I do that there's no convincing someone who doesn't want to be convinced. You think he's gonna be rational on the subject? Hell, I know I wouldn't be. You know I'd shank anyone who slandered my baby sister, and Dawn doesn't even really exist."
Jenny snorted. "So if we can't come at it from his side of things... how much do you know about apotropaic magic? I focused mostly on the anti-demonic stuff in specific, but I know you've been doing a lot of reading. We could try to block her instead of him, see what happens?"
"I find it kind of soothing and reality-affirming, after everything," Buffy agreed, wryly. "Vampires, for example, aren't actually a thing, but zombies? Surprisingly are. And it should work; that kind of warding is how the Masons hid what they were doing from everyone. I don't know which symbols they used, but there were some simple ones in the books, just overlapping circles. Carve some of those, nail up a few horseshoes and crosses, lay some salt circles, yadda yadda. Do it here, Abbie's place, that cabin he's staying at, your trailer. Anywhere else you can think of?"
"Probably Abbie's work; she's there often enough. They'll still be targets anywhere else, but... I think that's most of it," Jenny agreed, worrying at her lower lip. "You really think it'll help?"
"Only one way to find out," Buffy shrugged, rolling the candy over her tongue. "Next time they get called in for something and don't invite us along."
"Shouldn't be long," Jenny sighed, then frowned up at Buffy again. "Our trailer, by the way. Unless you're planning on moving back into your parents' guest room anytime soon?"
Buffy wrinkled her nose disgustedly. "God, no. I get that I was sort of frozen at sixteen in their mind, and it's not like I've got any marketable skills that aren't, you know, delusion related as far as they're concerned, but art? Not really my thing either. I'm either a poor-thing gallery assistant there or your kick-ass companion out here, and much as I love them, I know which one sounds like a much less suffocating way to live."
Jenny snorted, looking amused. "Yeah, I get that. So assume away, got it?"
"Got it," Buffy grinned back at her.
She may have spent most her late teens and early twenties lost to reality, but not all of what she'd experienced during that time had been bloody and traumatic, and that was something she could never explain to her parents. Not after they'd tried to convince her that killing her friends in that other world was the only way to heal. She hadn't been able to follow through in the end; and even if it had taken several more months for her to fight her way out of it naturally to 'live like a person' again, she was glad she hadn't. She did know what real friendship looked like, and even if they sometimes butted heads, Jennifer Claire Mills had been there for her ever since they'd first crossed paths. They understood each other, in a way very few other people could.
So yeah, Jen was her ride-or-die. Whatever her sister and her eighteenth-century Watcher-y type got up to was their business, up until it threatened that; but there was still such a thing as common sense. Evil prophylactics were like the normal kind: best deployed in advance.
She crunched away the second candy, then slid off the counter. "So, in the meantime. Where's good around here? They look like they're going to be awhile, and candy's only going to hold me so long."
Jenny grinned, then hooked her elbow through Buffy's and steered her toward the door. "That's right, I haven't introduced you to Mabie's yet. C'mon, my treat this time; we'll bring them something back, too."
-x-