Don't Go Solo : Part 4 - Fourth Gear
Title: Fourth Gear
Series: Don't Go Solo
Pairing: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence
Setting: post-He's No Jack Sparrow and post-Introspect, Brazil
Word Count: 2,631 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: They're a long way from where they started. They're a longer way from where they're going. Xander learns that you don't have to know the fight to fight the fight.
Buffy wasn’t allowed to drive if he was on the same continent.
It was a joke he had made in good humor a long time ago, well before life got as complicated as college or crowd control. Back around the first time he had observed her driving skills-of which she had none-and the result it had had on Joyce's SUV.
She, of course, had responded with a punch to the arm, but it did little to disprove the fact when, several years later and halfway around the globe, she had informed him that she had wrecked more cars than you could count on one hand since he had left. That, and the fact that Amèlie had been able to arrange transportation for them whenever the entire group needed to get somewhere, kept Buffy from getting behind any wheels while she was with him in Egypt.
Apparently, it wouldn’t hurt to keep Michelle to a similar rule.
Xander wondered if poor driving skills were part of the slayer package, a thought that persisted until the wheels on her side came back down after the high speed turn.
Super strength, visions-sometimes, heightened reflexes, a complete loss of standard motor skills whenever a steering wheel was put in front of her.
“Learn to drive!” Michelle screamed through the window that wasn’t even lowered, her screech in response to a cacophony of blaring horns as they made the corner and sped after the fleeing car.
Xander stayed wisely silent, because he still wasn’t sure that Michelle wasn’t going to make him pay for denting the hood of her sedan.
“So, you’re old enough to drive, right?” he asked instead. He didn’t know what the driving age was in Brazil-he didn’t even know if there was a driving age in Brazil. Willow had elected to inform him of the red-light districts and human trafficking and drug running and bad guys, instead of things like where to get a burger or whether the girl who just sent you sprawling into the middle of a street had done so legally.
“Of course I’m old enough to drive!” she snapped at him.
He had difficulty placing her accent, but the closest thing he could call was American. As in, someone born and raised in America, even if their parents-or owners, or captors-hadn’t been. Maybe she was one of those girls that got kidnapped at a young age and spent her life as part of a trafficking cycle, breaking free only when she realized she could probably lift the car they were riding in.
It would, at least, explain why she was so desperate to catch up to just such a group of villainous scum.
“I, uh, I don’t want to sound like I’m criticizing you,” he began, but she cut him off before he could continue.
“Then maybe you should just shut the hell up,” she said almost conversationally, which was itself pretty disturbing in contrast to how she had been screaming at someone who hadn’t even been able to hear her just seconds before.
This time, it was more what she said than how she said it.
“Look, I’m busy, see? Car chase? Bad guys ahead?” Xander was almost deafened by a resounding honk from behind. Michelle glanced in the rearview mirror. “Big rig joining the chase?”
Xander pivoted in his seat, staring out the back window, and was surprised by how little scenery there was to be seen.
Really, there was just a really big grill.
“This isn’t funny,” he said. He blinked, rubbed his eye, and looked again. Still a big truck, still following much more closely than should have been reasonable. Still with a passenger pulling a machine pistol from beneath his seat and leaning out the window.
It was like old times.
“Swerve!” he shouted, and there was so much noise around them and so much ahead of them and so much behind them, all his senses were on fire. Like an action scene with music so intense that there wasn’t even enough downtime to breathe normally. Insanity made solid, as solid as the truck bearing down on them and the road that would shred the sedan if it was set to flipping.
He really expected her to just react. So the quizzical eyebrow she quirked in his direction was a little infuriating.
“We can outrun the-”
A series of clattering rounds drove a line between them, shattering the rear window and obliterating the radio. Michelle, for all the bravado she had just displayed, released a shriek that almost left Xander one-eyed and one-eared, before cutting the wheel so sharply to the left that, had there not been a street for them to barrel down, they probably would have died.
He was still holding out on that thought when looking left was a whole lot like looking up.
“See!?” he demanded, scrambling for something to hold onto as the car dropped flat a second time. It occurred to him that he really wished he could see blinking blue and red lights-or whatever color the police cars utilized when they were doing that whole policing thing. Africa had been bad enough. Even Cape Town’s boys in-in whatever color they wore in South Africa had remained pretty silent while a freaking gunship had chased him through the city’s streets. But that was one tame country in a continent that was anything but, so how could South America be the same?
Bullet holes appeared in the windshield as the semi’s passenger unloaded on them once more.
This didn’t make sense. He had put his dangers behind him, in a room full of a whole lot of bad guys that had wanted him dead-he’d beaten them to the punch. Nearly everyone that had had reason to want to kill him or arrange a grisly end for him was in the ground, either because of their own mistakes or because he had had no other choice but to put them there. Or, in some cases, because it was more convenient to put them there than to shake them, but he didn’t like thinking about that while he was on the toilet, much less when a semi was threatening to crush him.
So, of course, the first person outside his circle of friends he had deigned to talk to had been a slayer. And, of course, she had been trying to stop a group of human traffickers, people in a walk of life that Xander couldn’t exactly get behind. And when he’d decided to help her-
The sedan lurched when the big rig thumped against the rear, and Michelle struggled for control as the rear wheels began to lose their bearing.
“I thought you said you could outrun them!” Xander bellowed, glaring at her. She flipped him off. “And we lost the car!”
“Do you wanna drive, asshole!?” she shouted at him.
“What if I do!?” he replied, and she let go of the wheel before the sedan had even started going in a straight kind of direction again.
“Fine!” she shouted, unsnapping her seatbelt and sliding into the middle of the still moving vehicle. “Fucking drive!”
He stared at her in horror for all of a second before he noticed that the sedan was doing a kind of drifting thing, and by the time he had wrestled himself out of his seatbelt and scrambled across the seat to take the wheel, he only just barely managed to avoid scraping his door off on the wall of a building.
It was a good thing there weren’t any people on the sidewalk.
“You’re insane,” he hissed. He had taken to Radhi and Noelle and Callie-and Buffy and Faith and all the other slayers he had ever met. The fact that he was sort of forcing himself not to try and throw her out her door was testament to the fact that Xandery love was not in the same package of slayer perks as strength or crappy driving skills.
“And you’re a jerk,” she replied. “Making fun of my driving while there’s a semi chasing us.”
Xander cut to the right, trying to recall every detail of the chase he could. Adrenaline was probably helping, because he could remember the way the road had curved up ahead just before Michelle had cut off to the side. And they were going really fast, and the semi was sweeping around as it tried to make the same turn behind them-
And when he cut back onto the road they had been on, after its curve to the left, it was just behind the car Michelle had been on since the beginning.
A positive point in a negative situation, though. This was the last time he was ever going for a walk.
His phone buzzed.
Karma, that’s what it was. He’d promised Willow after getting back from Africa that he’d never try to hide from her or go without telling her something. He was relatively certain, however, that taking off and going to Cleveland was a black mark on that promise. And going for a walk while continually dismissing her calls wasn’t so hot, either.
“You are a jerk,” Michelle said, and he snorted.
“Right,” he said. “I’m a jerk. I’m a not dead jerk.”
He said it with the hope that it’d offer her a little perspective, but all he got was another middle finger.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing the big rig only just then making the last turn. Probably would’ve been good to tell Michelle that the key to getting away from a huge vehicle like that was to make as many turns as possible. Then again, that would have required a coherent thought process, which wasn’t always high on the list of things he had when he was being chased by something.
The car ahead was still speeding, but it was speeding on a road that was too busy for much in the way of evasive maneuvers. And whoever was driving the big rig didn’t seem interested in plowing through traffic to get to them, which either meant a little humanity on their part or a competent, if absent, law enforcement program.
Not the worst chase he had ever been involved in, but he wasn’t sure how long life would be life if every time he was caught in range of explosions and gunshots and bad guys was more intense than the last. All that was left was to unlatch himself from a jetpack that was also a nuclear bomb so that it could keep flying straight into the floating fortress of the enemy while he dove after the bad guy with the last parachute and wrestled it from him in free fall.
He blinked. Well, that was a weird thought to have while chasing some bad guys.
“I’m confused,” Xander said.
“I’m not surprised.”
“No, I mean, weren’t you supposed to meet with these people?” he asked. “Why’d they run? And why the big truck? That just seems-I don’t wanna say ‘gratuitous,’ but-”
“No clue,” she said. “They gave me a place, a time, and how much money to bring.” She nodded into the back seat, and it was only just then that he saw the briefcase. “I mean, that thing’s filled with sandbags, ‘cause I was gonna kick the crap out of these guys until they told me where the girls were. But you get the idea.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know why they freaked out. Maybe they saw you fall on my hood or something-I don’t know.”
Xander bit his tongue, because that was all that was going to keep him from shouting at her again. Everyone he knew saw things their own way. He was pretty sure that Buffy, for instance, still thought that that raccoon in Sunnydale had just been suicidal and, also, teleporting, rather than minding its own business a good ten feet off the road.
“Right,” he said. “Because of that. Yeah, I guess that might’ve spooked them. If the police had gotten involved, then-”
“There wouldn’t have been police,” she said. “Did you see that neighborhood? Cops go there, they get distracted.” She nodded to the car ahead. “That’s probably why they wanted to meet there. No cops, all they gotta deal with is one little girl.”
He laughed.
“Slayers aren’t little girls,” he said nonchalantly, checking the rearview mirror for posterity and finding the semi comfortably gone. Just a whole lot of fast-moving traffic, like there had never been a chase to begin with. It was almost calm now, like they were just following someone. And he’d done that with great success before, completely without being blown up or shot or shocked or stabbed or anything.
The look Michelle was giving him was odd, though.
“Slayers?” she asked. He blinked.
“Yeah,” he said. “You know. Strong and fast and stuff? Slayers.”
This time, she was the one to blink.
“You mean you know about that!?” she demanded, and if he had to label her expression, he figured he would have gone with ecstatic. Still unbuckled, she leaned toward him, her hands on the armrest between them, and got so close that he was well enough uncomfortable. “Hold up, you know what’s wrong with me!?”
Hadn’t they just been chased by a big truck? He glanced ahead to make sure the car was still there. Yeah, still there.
When he looked back at her, it almost broke his heart to see how much she was hanging on whatever words she was expecting him to say. It made less sense than it should have, because the Watchers’ Council always seemed to mess up when it really mattered. Buffy had gone through life without knowing what slayers were, whereas Kennedy had had a Watcher well before the crap had hit the fan. Kendra had been raised as a slayer for her entire life, almost so much so that she didn’t even know what a normal life was like.
Michelle had been at this for a year, but she had been alive well before that. And she was immersing herself in a fight-maybe not the fight, but a fight, and a worthy one. So why was it that she had no idea what was going on?
He cast an irritated eye on the car that was pretty much riding his ass, if only because he was already going pretty fast and changing lanes to keep up with the bad guys.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. “But yeah. I know.”
Huh. Her expression was almost beautiful, which was odd, because even if she, like all slayers he had ever seen, tended toward pretty, her prior, rough attitude was a little less than attractive.
She looked like she didn’t even know how to smile.
She looked like she’d forgotten about the car ahead, because she flew into a flurry of questions. When, how, why, was she human, was she messed up, was what she was doing right or wrong, all kinds of things, most of which he, of course, didn’t have the answer for. His phone buzzed, and she kept going, and a part of him wanted to scream and yell at Willow for letting a girl like this live in Rio de Janeiro without tracking her down.
“Why am I like this?” she asked, and she stopped after that, which made him think that this was the question he really needed to answer. He checked to make sure the car ahead was still there, and then he opened his mouth-
And then the car behind him pulled up to Michelle’s side.
And then the teenage girl in the backseat shot Michelle in the back of the head.
Not quite as action-y as I'd intended, but that's what the next part's about. I love setting things up early. HNJS was well into itself before the main plot really started developing, so I figured I'd try a more direct route this time. Big points and little points abound in this one, so keep your eyes opened.
Birthday fic tomorrow for skarman, this one a Faith/Xander story.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Anger is an energy-so channel it!
-Anonymous
Series: Don't Go Solo
Pairing: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for language and violence
Setting: post-He's No Jack Sparrow and post-Introspect, Brazil
Word Count: 2,631 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: They're a long way from where they started. They're a longer way from where they're going. Xander learns that you don't have to know the fight to fight the fight.
Buffy wasn’t allowed to drive if he was on the same continent.
It was a joke he had made in good humor a long time ago, well before life got as complicated as college or crowd control. Back around the first time he had observed her driving skills-of which she had none-and the result it had had on Joyce's SUV.
She, of course, had responded with a punch to the arm, but it did little to disprove the fact when, several years later and halfway around the globe, she had informed him that she had wrecked more cars than you could count on one hand since he had left. That, and the fact that Amèlie had been able to arrange transportation for them whenever the entire group needed to get somewhere, kept Buffy from getting behind any wheels while she was with him in Egypt.
Apparently, it wouldn’t hurt to keep Michelle to a similar rule.
Xander wondered if poor driving skills were part of the slayer package, a thought that persisted until the wheels on her side came back down after the high speed turn.
Super strength, visions-sometimes, heightened reflexes, a complete loss of standard motor skills whenever a steering wheel was put in front of her.
“Learn to drive!” Michelle screamed through the window that wasn’t even lowered, her screech in response to a cacophony of blaring horns as they made the corner and sped after the fleeing car.
Xander stayed wisely silent, because he still wasn’t sure that Michelle wasn’t going to make him pay for denting the hood of her sedan.
“So, you’re old enough to drive, right?” he asked instead. He didn’t know what the driving age was in Brazil-he didn’t even know if there was a driving age in Brazil. Willow had elected to inform him of the red-light districts and human trafficking and drug running and bad guys, instead of things like where to get a burger or whether the girl who just sent you sprawling into the middle of a street had done so legally.
“Of course I’m old enough to drive!” she snapped at him.
He had difficulty placing her accent, but the closest thing he could call was American. As in, someone born and raised in America, even if their parents-or owners, or captors-hadn’t been. Maybe she was one of those girls that got kidnapped at a young age and spent her life as part of a trafficking cycle, breaking free only when she realized she could probably lift the car they were riding in.
It would, at least, explain why she was so desperate to catch up to just such a group of villainous scum.
“I, uh, I don’t want to sound like I’m criticizing you,” he began, but she cut him off before he could continue.
“Then maybe you should just shut the hell up,” she said almost conversationally, which was itself pretty disturbing in contrast to how she had been screaming at someone who hadn’t even been able to hear her just seconds before.
This time, it was more what she said than how she said it.
“Look, I’m busy, see? Car chase? Bad guys ahead?” Xander was almost deafened by a resounding honk from behind. Michelle glanced in the rearview mirror. “Big rig joining the chase?”
Xander pivoted in his seat, staring out the back window, and was surprised by how little scenery there was to be seen.
Really, there was just a really big grill.
“This isn’t funny,” he said. He blinked, rubbed his eye, and looked again. Still a big truck, still following much more closely than should have been reasonable. Still with a passenger pulling a machine pistol from beneath his seat and leaning out the window.
It was like old times.
“Swerve!” he shouted, and there was so much noise around them and so much ahead of them and so much behind them, all his senses were on fire. Like an action scene with music so intense that there wasn’t even enough downtime to breathe normally. Insanity made solid, as solid as the truck bearing down on them and the road that would shred the sedan if it was set to flipping.
He really expected her to just react. So the quizzical eyebrow she quirked in his direction was a little infuriating.
“We can outrun the-”
A series of clattering rounds drove a line between them, shattering the rear window and obliterating the radio. Michelle, for all the bravado she had just displayed, released a shriek that almost left Xander one-eyed and one-eared, before cutting the wheel so sharply to the left that, had there not been a street for them to barrel down, they probably would have died.
He was still holding out on that thought when looking left was a whole lot like looking up.
“See!?” he demanded, scrambling for something to hold onto as the car dropped flat a second time. It occurred to him that he really wished he could see blinking blue and red lights-or whatever color the police cars utilized when they were doing that whole policing thing. Africa had been bad enough. Even Cape Town’s boys in-in whatever color they wore in South Africa had remained pretty silent while a freaking gunship had chased him through the city’s streets. But that was one tame country in a continent that was anything but, so how could South America be the same?
Bullet holes appeared in the windshield as the semi’s passenger unloaded on them once more.
This didn’t make sense. He had put his dangers behind him, in a room full of a whole lot of bad guys that had wanted him dead-he’d beaten them to the punch. Nearly everyone that had had reason to want to kill him or arrange a grisly end for him was in the ground, either because of their own mistakes or because he had had no other choice but to put them there. Or, in some cases, because it was more convenient to put them there than to shake them, but he didn’t like thinking about that while he was on the toilet, much less when a semi was threatening to crush him.
So, of course, the first person outside his circle of friends he had deigned to talk to had been a slayer. And, of course, she had been trying to stop a group of human traffickers, people in a walk of life that Xander couldn’t exactly get behind. And when he’d decided to help her-
The sedan lurched when the big rig thumped against the rear, and Michelle struggled for control as the rear wheels began to lose their bearing.
“I thought you said you could outrun them!” Xander bellowed, glaring at her. She flipped him off. “And we lost the car!”
“Do you wanna drive, asshole!?” she shouted at him.
“What if I do!?” he replied, and she let go of the wheel before the sedan had even started going in a straight kind of direction again.
“Fine!” she shouted, unsnapping her seatbelt and sliding into the middle of the still moving vehicle. “Fucking drive!”
He stared at her in horror for all of a second before he noticed that the sedan was doing a kind of drifting thing, and by the time he had wrestled himself out of his seatbelt and scrambled across the seat to take the wheel, he only just barely managed to avoid scraping his door off on the wall of a building.
It was a good thing there weren’t any people on the sidewalk.
“You’re insane,” he hissed. He had taken to Radhi and Noelle and Callie-and Buffy and Faith and all the other slayers he had ever met. The fact that he was sort of forcing himself not to try and throw her out her door was testament to the fact that Xandery love was not in the same package of slayer perks as strength or crappy driving skills.
“And you’re a jerk,” she replied. “Making fun of my driving while there’s a semi chasing us.”
Xander cut to the right, trying to recall every detail of the chase he could. Adrenaline was probably helping, because he could remember the way the road had curved up ahead just before Michelle had cut off to the side. And they were going really fast, and the semi was sweeping around as it tried to make the same turn behind them-
And when he cut back onto the road they had been on, after its curve to the left, it was just behind the car Michelle had been on since the beginning.
A positive point in a negative situation, though. This was the last time he was ever going for a walk.
His phone buzzed.
Karma, that’s what it was. He’d promised Willow after getting back from Africa that he’d never try to hide from her or go without telling her something. He was relatively certain, however, that taking off and going to Cleveland was a black mark on that promise. And going for a walk while continually dismissing her calls wasn’t so hot, either.
“You are a jerk,” Michelle said, and he snorted.
“Right,” he said. “I’m a jerk. I’m a not dead jerk.”
He said it with the hope that it’d offer her a little perspective, but all he got was another middle finger.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing the big rig only just then making the last turn. Probably would’ve been good to tell Michelle that the key to getting away from a huge vehicle like that was to make as many turns as possible. Then again, that would have required a coherent thought process, which wasn’t always high on the list of things he had when he was being chased by something.
The car ahead was still speeding, but it was speeding on a road that was too busy for much in the way of evasive maneuvers. And whoever was driving the big rig didn’t seem interested in plowing through traffic to get to them, which either meant a little humanity on their part or a competent, if absent, law enforcement program.
Not the worst chase he had ever been involved in, but he wasn’t sure how long life would be life if every time he was caught in range of explosions and gunshots and bad guys was more intense than the last. All that was left was to unlatch himself from a jetpack that was also a nuclear bomb so that it could keep flying straight into the floating fortress of the enemy while he dove after the bad guy with the last parachute and wrestled it from him in free fall.
He blinked. Well, that was a weird thought to have while chasing some bad guys.
“I’m confused,” Xander said.
“I’m not surprised.”
“No, I mean, weren’t you supposed to meet with these people?” he asked. “Why’d they run? And why the big truck? That just seems-I don’t wanna say ‘gratuitous,’ but-”
“No clue,” she said. “They gave me a place, a time, and how much money to bring.” She nodded into the back seat, and it was only just then that he saw the briefcase. “I mean, that thing’s filled with sandbags, ‘cause I was gonna kick the crap out of these guys until they told me where the girls were. But you get the idea.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know why they freaked out. Maybe they saw you fall on my hood or something-I don’t know.”
Xander bit his tongue, because that was all that was going to keep him from shouting at her again. Everyone he knew saw things their own way. He was pretty sure that Buffy, for instance, still thought that that raccoon in Sunnydale had just been suicidal and, also, teleporting, rather than minding its own business a good ten feet off the road.
“Right,” he said. “Because of that. Yeah, I guess that might’ve spooked them. If the police had gotten involved, then-”
“There wouldn’t have been police,” she said. “Did you see that neighborhood? Cops go there, they get distracted.” She nodded to the car ahead. “That’s probably why they wanted to meet there. No cops, all they gotta deal with is one little girl.”
He laughed.
“Slayers aren’t little girls,” he said nonchalantly, checking the rearview mirror for posterity and finding the semi comfortably gone. Just a whole lot of fast-moving traffic, like there had never been a chase to begin with. It was almost calm now, like they were just following someone. And he’d done that with great success before, completely without being blown up or shot or shocked or stabbed or anything.
The look Michelle was giving him was odd, though.
“Slayers?” she asked. He blinked.
“Yeah,” he said. “You know. Strong and fast and stuff? Slayers.”
This time, she was the one to blink.
“You mean you know about that!?” she demanded, and if he had to label her expression, he figured he would have gone with ecstatic. Still unbuckled, she leaned toward him, her hands on the armrest between them, and got so close that he was well enough uncomfortable. “Hold up, you know what’s wrong with me!?”
Hadn’t they just been chased by a big truck? He glanced ahead to make sure the car was still there. Yeah, still there.
When he looked back at her, it almost broke his heart to see how much she was hanging on whatever words she was expecting him to say. It made less sense than it should have, because the Watchers’ Council always seemed to mess up when it really mattered. Buffy had gone through life without knowing what slayers were, whereas Kennedy had had a Watcher well before the crap had hit the fan. Kendra had been raised as a slayer for her entire life, almost so much so that she didn’t even know what a normal life was like.
Michelle had been at this for a year, but she had been alive well before that. And she was immersing herself in a fight-maybe not the fight, but a fight, and a worthy one. So why was it that she had no idea what was going on?
He cast an irritated eye on the car that was pretty much riding his ass, if only because he was already going pretty fast and changing lanes to keep up with the bad guys.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. “But yeah. I know.”
Huh. Her expression was almost beautiful, which was odd, because even if she, like all slayers he had ever seen, tended toward pretty, her prior, rough attitude was a little less than attractive.
She looked like she didn’t even know how to smile.
She looked like she’d forgotten about the car ahead, because she flew into a flurry of questions. When, how, why, was she human, was she messed up, was what she was doing right or wrong, all kinds of things, most of which he, of course, didn’t have the answer for. His phone buzzed, and she kept going, and a part of him wanted to scream and yell at Willow for letting a girl like this live in Rio de Janeiro without tracking her down.
“Why am I like this?” she asked, and she stopped after that, which made him think that this was the question he really needed to answer. He checked to make sure the car ahead was still there, and then he opened his mouth-
And then the car behind him pulled up to Michelle’s side.
And then the teenage girl in the backseat shot Michelle in the back of the head.
Not quite as action-y as I'd intended, but that's what the next part's about. I love setting things up early. HNJS was well into itself before the main plot really started developing, so I figured I'd try a more direct route this time. Big points and little points abound in this one, so keep your eyes opened.
Birthday fic tomorrow for skarman, this one a Faith/Xander story.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Anger is an energy-so channel it!
-Anonymous