Aug 9th, Modifying The Plan
Title: Modifying The Plan
Author: selonianth
Rating: FR15
Crossover: Firefly
Disclaimer: Don’t own Firefly or BtVS. Both are owned by the indestructible Joss Whedon.
Summary: Buffy has a chat with our resident companion.
Buffy smiled to see her old friend in her cabin. “Hello Inara. I see the life I saved didn’t go to waste.”
Inara bowed her head in gratitude, “Thank you Buffy. I am honored you think so. I threw myself into my training after that day and now I’m one of the highest ranked companions.”
Buffy flicked her wrist dismissively, “Don’t thank me. It’s the truth. I may have stopped those two fools from ruining you but I didn’t make you work hard to get where you are.”
Inara shook her head, the woman who’d saved her always was so self-deprecating, “Regardless, if it wasn’t for you teaching me that survival can sometime demand refusing the laws of man I wouldn’t be here. Malcolm Reynolds is a survivor, he doesn’t care about the laws, only whether or not they’ll prevent him from keeping his girl flying. He cares more about this ship than anything.”
“Maybe not anything.” Buffy trailed off with a smirk.
Inara spun to stare at her, mind clearly running a mile a second, “What is it? What did you hear?”
“It’s not what I heard, it’s what I observed. When he stepped onto this ship he touched the rails like he was back home. But when he looked at you, I saw a man who wants something he feels he can never have.” It was a feeling Buffy was acutely aware of. She felt it every time she saw an old married couple in their easy, no stress love for each other. She could never get that because she’d never grow old.
Inara however snorted, “If that’s true he certainly never shows it. He’s so frustrating, he constantly barges into my shuttle for the most inane of reasons, calls my profession whoring, once he even taunted me about the way I select my clients.”
Buffy just stared at the companion, she sounded like a teenage girl in high school, “You know what the Madame of your house would say if she heard you talking about this?”
“What?”
If Inara wasn’t careful she’d make Buffy burst out laughing acting the way she was, “That he’s in love with you. He comes in here to annoy you because being snarky is just what he does. He calls your profession whoring because that’s the part of it that most frustrates him, it drives him crazy when you leave the ship to do your job to think of you laying with another man. It’s not him looking down on you and you damn well know it.”
Inara looked at the ground. She knew Buffy was right. As a companion she was trained to look into people’s motivations for things and she hadn’t been doing that with Mal.
“As far as his taunting of your selection of clients. Well, I can’t blame him for that. I’ve heard you companions explain it and I can’t help but laugh at it myself. You companions just can’t call it what it is, you use instinct, raw gut instinct, to determine if a person is worthy client material. There’s no aura reading being done, trust me on that.”
Inara scowled at Buffy. “Doesn’t mean he has to act like that.”
“No, but are you sure you haven’t been encouraging it? Verbal sparring with him when he comes in. Storming off in a huff when he calls it whoring. Guys like these things. I know you look damn yummy when you’re angry.”
Inara blushed, she’d almost forgotten Buffy was a lesbian. The blond had never explained why. She knew the other girl had been with men in the past, the blond had told her about a couple of her ex-boyfriends, but refused to do so now. “You’re right... I’ve been trying to ignore it instead of looking at it like I was trained. But what can I do? I can’t stop taking clients, I’d lose the most valuable part of me to the ship... and I do want to be valuable.”
Buffy rolled her eyes visibly, “You could be valuable in other ways, I know you were taught how to cook and we all tasted what you can do even with basic protein earlier.”
“But if I’m not a companion then Serenity isn’t welcome on some worlds, that would hurt Mal’s business...”
Buffy just smirked, she could fix that fairly easily, but how to tell Inara that... oh that’s an idea. “In three days, not two and not four, contact Madame Linae on Osiris.”
Inara’s face became quizzical, why was her friend telling her to contact the head of the companion guild over this? “Why?”
“Now that would be telling.” Buffy smirks at the companion.
Inara huffed, it wasn’t the most ladylike of expressions but being around the one person on the ship who’d known her since before she was a registered companion she felt it was ok, “Well if you won’t tell me that, will you tell me why you haven’t aged a day since you rescued me ten years ago.”
‘Crap...’ Buffy thought to herself trying, and failing, to come up with a decent excuse, “I aged well.”
Inara trained a look that was eerily similar to River’s ‘You’re a Boob’ look on Buffy. “Don’t give me that Buffy. You’re damn identical to the person who saved my life, body, and mind from that trauma. I may have been blind to how Mal felt, but I am not blind to this. Don’t treat me like a fool, it shames both of us.”
Buffy smirked to herself, looking up at the ceiling. “How much do you know about why Earth-That-Was really broke up?”
Inara frowned, how was that relevant? Still, Buffy never used the Socratic Method unless she was trying to make a point, she’d learned that really quickly during that long night after she’d been saved. That thought squared away Inara searched her memory for what she’d been taught about the destruction of the old planet. “After most the ships in the Exodus for Existence left the planet an earthquake went off, triggered by the destruction we did to the planet, and caused a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions and nuclear explosions. The resulting damage destroyed the planet. It is now little more than small rocks floating in the space of our old Solar System.”
“Well, you have part of it right. But only the part where nuclear explosions destroyed the planet. I was there Inara.”
“But that’s impossible, it was nearly-”
“Five hundred years ago? I’m aware. I set off those nuclear explosions, it wasn’t any earthquake. I was on one of the ships, I hit a button, and watched the explosions I caused rip the Earth apart. They triggered the earthquakes and giant super-eruptions.”
“Why would you do that? How would you do that? How could you even have been there?”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Buffy quoted, thanking the lord that her eidetic memory kept the play in her head over five hundred years since she’d last read it.
Inara frowned, it sounded like Buffy was quoting something, something old but it hadn’t been covered by Inara’s training which made it very old indeed. “What’s that from?”
“A poet from a place called England in the sixteenth century. He was quite famous, even up till the Exodus for Existence. It means that even the most intelligent and educated of people cannot explain everything, nor will they ever be able to,” Buffy responded. ‘Nor should they. Especially now that humanity is far out of their reach, terrifying them would only make it worse.’
“Why does that matter?”
Buffy pulled her boot knife, a long straight dagger, and slashed her arm deeply. Inara stared at it horrified until it healed in less than ten seconds.
“... How?”
“Magic. I’m not exactly human Inara. Haven’t been for nearly five hundred years.”
“What are you?”
“First a story. This sounds much better in a posh british accent with tweed but I’ll do my best. The universe is older than you know...” Buffy told the same origin story she’d been told, and that she’d told to countless mini-slayers over her years as Queen Slayer.
Inara felt a little dizzy. The story she’d just been told... it was enough to rock her world-views and she knew Buffy wasn’t lying. Taking a deep breath the companion looked Buffy in the eyes and asked, “So you were this Slayer?”
Buffy nodded in a gesture of affirmation, “I was.”
Now a part that made her even more curious, the story said that the slayer was a human girl... but Buffy said she wasn’t human anymore, nothing to do but ask, “But you were still human?”
Buffy chuckled at the memory, her mental scars at her removal from heaven long since faded, an advantage of what happened to her she supposed. She’d live damn near forever, but it made her much more mentally resilient than any mortal had any right to be. “At the time. Then I died. Twice actually. Well, three if you want to be technical.”
“How did you die twice?” Inara puzzled, her face the dictionary definition of confused.
‘Here’s the first kicker,’ Buffy thought to herself before she answered, “First time I was only dead for a few minutes, a friend brought me back with CPR. Then I jumped off a tower to save my sister’s life and was dead for several months before they brought me back.”
“That’s impossible!” Inara cried, just low enough that she wasn’t overheard. If she got heard someone might come looking, if someone came looking she wouldn’t get to finish the conversation.
Buffy faked reaching for her knife as she asked, “Do I have to pull the knife out again?”
Shaking her head very quickly Inara yelped, “No!”
Buffy just laughed at the companion. Of course, back then her ability to do that and heal in seconds freaked her out too. “Then trust me, it’s quite possible. Just not a good idea. It’s dangerous and not a nice thing to do, you never know if the person is in heaven or hell after all.”
Inara was almost afraid to ask, almost, “You weren’t human when you came back?”
Buffy shook her head with a sad smile. “No, I was still mostly human. No less human than the day I was chosen as a slayer at any rate. No, I didn’t change from human until much later. There was this thing, trapped in a hell dimension, called the First Evil. It was directing it’s pawns to kill potential Slayers, trying to eliminate it’s primary threat before it ever came out of it’s hiding place. Well, we found out, and decided that activating all the potentials was the only way to save them, so my friend Willow used me and a friend as channels for her power and cheated the spell that chose us into activating all the slayers. Well the section of me that gave me my power fed on that spell, it was the essence of a demon you see.”
Inara double-taked. The story that Buffy had just told her specifically said that demons wanted to enslave and kill humanity, not protect it, “Wait, if you were part demon, then why were you fighting for humanity?”
“Not all demons were evil, not all demons were good. The demon that gave us our power was somewhere in between, a beast of shadow, of a patch of grey in a mostly white and black world, neutral, for the most part. It was a demon with a very strong hunting instinct. It wanted to hunt, kill, and destroy other demons. Not because it was a good creature, it hunted the good demons too, but because it wanted a challenge. Didn’t like hunting humans though so eventually it just decided that the most challenging way to satisfy itself was to protect humans. When that part of me fed on the magic that was used to activate the other slayers it slowly started growing, converting the rest of my soul into a demon’s. Slowly even my DNA changed until I was no longer human at all. We didn’t figure it out until shortly before the Exodus. A demon managed to completely impale me with it’s claws and threw me against the wall. This should have been fatal, even to a slayer,” Buffy paused, her hand ghosting over where the claws had impaled her.
Looking back up at Inara she shrugged, “It didn’t even slow me down. I saw red and woke up covered in Demon goo with the others staring at me. They took me back to headquarters and inspected me, discovering that I was no longer a quarter demon like slayers are supposed to be in spirit. I was full demon, spirit and body. It even affected my mind to a certain point, I became slightly more ruthless, slightly more willing to kill human evil. I wasn’t just a demon slayer anymore. That’s why when the demons finally managed to win, opening a portal we couldn’t close to hell and unleashing hell on earth, I found a way to send a signal to every nuclear device on the planet and made sure that if we didn’t win, they wouldn’t either.”
Inara smiled at the very... human gesture. It practically screamed, ‘We might lose this battle, but we will win the war.’ “Admirable. Did it work?”
Buffy gave Inara a satisfied smirk. “Well I haven’t found, or sensed, any demons in nearly five hundred years. So I’d guess yea, it worked. Made my new demon instincts all kinds of happy too, so totally ending my enemies like that. To render their ability to affect their prey totally void and null...emphasis on void.”
Inara looked in Buffy’s eyes and knew that most people wouldn’t believe the blonde girl. And most who did would try to experiment on her. She could tell Buffy wasn’t lying though, and she knew the blonde wasn’t crazy. “I believe you. I won’t say the story isn’t a little crazy but I believe you,” Inara told the ancient slayer getting up. “I have to go. The captain intends to recruit you to the crew you know.”
“I know.” Buffy replied with a grin that promised mischief. “Go on now, you have to plan your seduction of the handsome captain.” She teased making the companion blush.
Inara didn’t say anything, too focused on subduing her blush, as she bowed and left Buffy’s cabin.
Smirking when she made the companion blush as she tried to leave gracefully Buffy stood and brushed herself down, straightening up her clothes she started the Tai Chi that had helped keep her centered when worried.
Author: selonianth
Rating: FR15
Crossover: Firefly
Disclaimer: Don’t own Firefly or BtVS. Both are owned by the indestructible Joss Whedon.
Summary: Buffy has a chat with our resident companion.
Buffy smiled to see her old friend in her cabin. “Hello Inara. I see the life I saved didn’t go to waste.”
Inara bowed her head in gratitude, “Thank you Buffy. I am honored you think so. I threw myself into my training after that day and now I’m one of the highest ranked companions.”
Buffy flicked her wrist dismissively, “Don’t thank me. It’s the truth. I may have stopped those two fools from ruining you but I didn’t make you work hard to get where you are.”
Inara shook her head, the woman who’d saved her always was so self-deprecating, “Regardless, if it wasn’t for you teaching me that survival can sometime demand refusing the laws of man I wouldn’t be here. Malcolm Reynolds is a survivor, he doesn’t care about the laws, only whether or not they’ll prevent him from keeping his girl flying. He cares more about this ship than anything.”
“Maybe not anything.” Buffy trailed off with a smirk.
Inara spun to stare at her, mind clearly running a mile a second, “What is it? What did you hear?”
“It’s not what I heard, it’s what I observed. When he stepped onto this ship he touched the rails like he was back home. But when he looked at you, I saw a man who wants something he feels he can never have.” It was a feeling Buffy was acutely aware of. She felt it every time she saw an old married couple in their easy, no stress love for each other. She could never get that because she’d never grow old.
Inara however snorted, “If that’s true he certainly never shows it. He’s so frustrating, he constantly barges into my shuttle for the most inane of reasons, calls my profession whoring, once he even taunted me about the way I select my clients.”
Buffy just stared at the companion, she sounded like a teenage girl in high school, “You know what the Madame of your house would say if she heard you talking about this?”
“What?”
If Inara wasn’t careful she’d make Buffy burst out laughing acting the way she was, “That he’s in love with you. He comes in here to annoy you because being snarky is just what he does. He calls your profession whoring because that’s the part of it that most frustrates him, it drives him crazy when you leave the ship to do your job to think of you laying with another man. It’s not him looking down on you and you damn well know it.”
Inara looked at the ground. She knew Buffy was right. As a companion she was trained to look into people’s motivations for things and she hadn’t been doing that with Mal.
“As far as his taunting of your selection of clients. Well, I can’t blame him for that. I’ve heard you companions explain it and I can’t help but laugh at it myself. You companions just can’t call it what it is, you use instinct, raw gut instinct, to determine if a person is worthy client material. There’s no aura reading being done, trust me on that.”
Inara scowled at Buffy. “Doesn’t mean he has to act like that.”
“No, but are you sure you haven’t been encouraging it? Verbal sparring with him when he comes in. Storming off in a huff when he calls it whoring. Guys like these things. I know you look damn yummy when you’re angry.”
Inara blushed, she’d almost forgotten Buffy was a lesbian. The blond had never explained why. She knew the other girl had been with men in the past, the blond had told her about a couple of her ex-boyfriends, but refused to do so now. “You’re right... I’ve been trying to ignore it instead of looking at it like I was trained. But what can I do? I can’t stop taking clients, I’d lose the most valuable part of me to the ship... and I do want to be valuable.”
Buffy rolled her eyes visibly, “You could be valuable in other ways, I know you were taught how to cook and we all tasted what you can do even with basic protein earlier.”
“But if I’m not a companion then Serenity isn’t welcome on some worlds, that would hurt Mal’s business...”
Buffy just smirked, she could fix that fairly easily, but how to tell Inara that... oh that’s an idea. “In three days, not two and not four, contact Madame Linae on Osiris.”
Inara’s face became quizzical, why was her friend telling her to contact the head of the companion guild over this? “Why?”
“Now that would be telling.” Buffy smirks at the companion.
Inara huffed, it wasn’t the most ladylike of expressions but being around the one person on the ship who’d known her since before she was a registered companion she felt it was ok, “Well if you won’t tell me that, will you tell me why you haven’t aged a day since you rescued me ten years ago.”
‘Crap...’ Buffy thought to herself trying, and failing, to come up with a decent excuse, “I aged well.”
Inara trained a look that was eerily similar to River’s ‘You’re a Boob’ look on Buffy. “Don’t give me that Buffy. You’re damn identical to the person who saved my life, body, and mind from that trauma. I may have been blind to how Mal felt, but I am not blind to this. Don’t treat me like a fool, it shames both of us.”
Buffy smirked to herself, looking up at the ceiling. “How much do you know about why Earth-That-Was really broke up?”
Inara frowned, how was that relevant? Still, Buffy never used the Socratic Method unless she was trying to make a point, she’d learned that really quickly during that long night after she’d been saved. That thought squared away Inara searched her memory for what she’d been taught about the destruction of the old planet. “After most the ships in the Exodus for Existence left the planet an earthquake went off, triggered by the destruction we did to the planet, and caused a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions and nuclear explosions. The resulting damage destroyed the planet. It is now little more than small rocks floating in the space of our old Solar System.”
“Well, you have part of it right. But only the part where nuclear explosions destroyed the planet. I was there Inara.”
“But that’s impossible, it was nearly-”
“Five hundred years ago? I’m aware. I set off those nuclear explosions, it wasn’t any earthquake. I was on one of the ships, I hit a button, and watched the explosions I caused rip the Earth apart. They triggered the earthquakes and giant super-eruptions.”
“Why would you do that? How would you do that? How could you even have been there?”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Buffy quoted, thanking the lord that her eidetic memory kept the play in her head over five hundred years since she’d last read it.
Inara frowned, it sounded like Buffy was quoting something, something old but it hadn’t been covered by Inara’s training which made it very old indeed. “What’s that from?”
“A poet from a place called England in the sixteenth century. He was quite famous, even up till the Exodus for Existence. It means that even the most intelligent and educated of people cannot explain everything, nor will they ever be able to,” Buffy responded. ‘Nor should they. Especially now that humanity is far out of their reach, terrifying them would only make it worse.’
“Why does that matter?”
Buffy pulled her boot knife, a long straight dagger, and slashed her arm deeply. Inara stared at it horrified until it healed in less than ten seconds.
“... How?”
“Magic. I’m not exactly human Inara. Haven’t been for nearly five hundred years.”
“What are you?”
“First a story. This sounds much better in a posh british accent with tweed but I’ll do my best. The universe is older than you know...” Buffy told the same origin story she’d been told, and that she’d told to countless mini-slayers over her years as Queen Slayer.
Inara felt a little dizzy. The story she’d just been told... it was enough to rock her world-views and she knew Buffy wasn’t lying. Taking a deep breath the companion looked Buffy in the eyes and asked, “So you were this Slayer?”
Buffy nodded in a gesture of affirmation, “I was.”
Now a part that made her even more curious, the story said that the slayer was a human girl... but Buffy said she wasn’t human anymore, nothing to do but ask, “But you were still human?”
Buffy chuckled at the memory, her mental scars at her removal from heaven long since faded, an advantage of what happened to her she supposed. She’d live damn near forever, but it made her much more mentally resilient than any mortal had any right to be. “At the time. Then I died. Twice actually. Well, three if you want to be technical.”
“How did you die twice?” Inara puzzled, her face the dictionary definition of confused.
‘Here’s the first kicker,’ Buffy thought to herself before she answered, “First time I was only dead for a few minutes, a friend brought me back with CPR. Then I jumped off a tower to save my sister’s life and was dead for several months before they brought me back.”
“That’s impossible!” Inara cried, just low enough that she wasn’t overheard. If she got heard someone might come looking, if someone came looking she wouldn’t get to finish the conversation.
Buffy faked reaching for her knife as she asked, “Do I have to pull the knife out again?”
Shaking her head very quickly Inara yelped, “No!”
Buffy just laughed at the companion. Of course, back then her ability to do that and heal in seconds freaked her out too. “Then trust me, it’s quite possible. Just not a good idea. It’s dangerous and not a nice thing to do, you never know if the person is in heaven or hell after all.”
Inara was almost afraid to ask, almost, “You weren’t human when you came back?”
Buffy shook her head with a sad smile. “No, I was still mostly human. No less human than the day I was chosen as a slayer at any rate. No, I didn’t change from human until much later. There was this thing, trapped in a hell dimension, called the First Evil. It was directing it’s pawns to kill potential Slayers, trying to eliminate it’s primary threat before it ever came out of it’s hiding place. Well, we found out, and decided that activating all the potentials was the only way to save them, so my friend Willow used me and a friend as channels for her power and cheated the spell that chose us into activating all the slayers. Well the section of me that gave me my power fed on that spell, it was the essence of a demon you see.”
Inara double-taked. The story that Buffy had just told her specifically said that demons wanted to enslave and kill humanity, not protect it, “Wait, if you were part demon, then why were you fighting for humanity?”
“Not all demons were evil, not all demons were good. The demon that gave us our power was somewhere in between, a beast of shadow, of a patch of grey in a mostly white and black world, neutral, for the most part. It was a demon with a very strong hunting instinct. It wanted to hunt, kill, and destroy other demons. Not because it was a good creature, it hunted the good demons too, but because it wanted a challenge. Didn’t like hunting humans though so eventually it just decided that the most challenging way to satisfy itself was to protect humans. When that part of me fed on the magic that was used to activate the other slayers it slowly started growing, converting the rest of my soul into a demon’s. Slowly even my DNA changed until I was no longer human at all. We didn’t figure it out until shortly before the Exodus. A demon managed to completely impale me with it’s claws and threw me against the wall. This should have been fatal, even to a slayer,” Buffy paused, her hand ghosting over where the claws had impaled her.
Looking back up at Inara she shrugged, “It didn’t even slow me down. I saw red and woke up covered in Demon goo with the others staring at me. They took me back to headquarters and inspected me, discovering that I was no longer a quarter demon like slayers are supposed to be in spirit. I was full demon, spirit and body. It even affected my mind to a certain point, I became slightly more ruthless, slightly more willing to kill human evil. I wasn’t just a demon slayer anymore. That’s why when the demons finally managed to win, opening a portal we couldn’t close to hell and unleashing hell on earth, I found a way to send a signal to every nuclear device on the planet and made sure that if we didn’t win, they wouldn’t either.”
Inara smiled at the very... human gesture. It practically screamed, ‘We might lose this battle, but we will win the war.’ “Admirable. Did it work?”
Buffy gave Inara a satisfied smirk. “Well I haven’t found, or sensed, any demons in nearly five hundred years. So I’d guess yea, it worked. Made my new demon instincts all kinds of happy too, so totally ending my enemies like that. To render their ability to affect their prey totally void and null...emphasis on void.”
Inara looked in Buffy’s eyes and knew that most people wouldn’t believe the blonde girl. And most who did would try to experiment on her. She could tell Buffy wasn’t lying though, and she knew the blonde wasn’t crazy. “I believe you. I won’t say the story isn’t a little crazy but I believe you,” Inara told the ancient slayer getting up. “I have to go. The captain intends to recruit you to the crew you know.”
“I know.” Buffy replied with a grin that promised mischief. “Go on now, you have to plan your seduction of the handsome captain.” She teased making the companion blush.
Inara didn’t say anything, too focused on subduing her blush, as she bowed and left Buffy’s cabin.
Smirking when she made the companion blush as she tried to leave gracefully Buffy stood and brushed herself down, straightening up her clothes she started the Tai Chi that had helped keep her centered when worried.