Rulesverse fic: Of Gods and Heroes
In the end, I didn't write NFA out of the Rulesverse. But it was a less catastrophic battle, and more of Angel Inc survived. This is a funny little interim admin!fic about the aftermath and its effect on the Council. It is mainly a setup for (I promise) my proper Spike in the Rulesverse adventure plot, but I hope it's fun in itself too.
Title: Of Gods and Heroes
Author: Brutti ma buoni
Words: c2000
Rating: PG13
Summary: the Rulesverse absorbs some additions
Characters: Giles, Spike, Illyria, Buffy, Faith, OCs
Setting: 2004, after Not Fade Away. See where that fits into the Rulesverse timeline here
“Spike’s coming home.”
They all knew what Buffy meant, though the castle wasn’t Spike’s home by any reasonable definition. He’d visited twice, flying in on Wolfram and Hart’s ultrajet to whirl Buffy away from her duties for a weekend, before returning to Los Angeles to “fight the moderately evil fight, making bloody sure it doesn’t get really evil on our watch.” It wasn’t perfection, but it was enough to keep Buffy mainly rosy and positive through the early difficulties of the Slayer Council’s establishment.
Giles was the first to respond. “Will he be staying long?”
Buffy was skipping, almost. “Yeah, I think so. He said everything was done.”
*
Things might not be done entirely, but they were certainly changing.
“So... you want to replace me?” Robin couldn’t have sounded stiffer if he’d been cast in concrete.
“No, no, quite the reverse,” said Giles, only lying a tiny bit. “We want to share your expertise more widely. And it would be a shame not to make use of our new colleagues in Los Angeles. They have perfectly splendid local knowledge.” Perfectly splendid? Did you spend five long years in California in vain? Sometimes, Giles despised his own slips into pomposity.
It certainly hadn’t softened Robin at all. “While I play principal all over again? Yeah, that’s peachy.” He hung up.
Robin would be an excellent squad manager, but he did have some reason for annoyance. Being bumped off the top of the North American pile must be infuriating. Thing was, and Giles was rather afraid he was still a snob about this, Wesley was an actual, fully trained Watcher, who had the memories of the full Watchers’ Academy training; that mattered. The fourth working Watcher in the world. It was the most exquisite relief, to know that there was a Wyndham-Pryce back at the Council. For a moment, Giles could pretend that all the past ten years of revelation and change were a bad memory.
Except, truthfully, they were a good memory in most respects. Change was good. The old ways of the Watchers were, too often, bad compromise and hidebound refusal to recognise new challenges. This world would be different.
For a start, the new Wyndham-Pryce in the new Slayers’ Council was staying in California, to be with his closest friends in their communal life of combating evil and rebuilding the great city they had half destroyed. His closest friends Charles Gunn and Angel the vampire, who were his equals in this endeavour. Not material that the Watchers Council would have accepted for a moment, despite their bravery and dedication.
Now they brought new challenges. Such as talking the excellent educator Robin Wood into recognising he was better suited to overseeing trainee Slayers in the field than he was at directing operations and negotiating with mystical entities. (Giles tried very hard to forget the aftermath of the Slime Slug plague Robin had failed to avert).
New challenges were linguistic as well as managerial. Wesley had refused to call himself a Watcher again. Charles Gunn had likewise rejected any job title that suggested “I’m an old white guy that never gets laid. Also: not planning on just watching.” Researchers? Trainers? Warlocks? No term really covered the whole range of potential jobs they could see the not-Watchers needing to tackle. Not just Watching indeed. Acting, to support the Slayers.
Giles still shuddered at the outcome of those discussions. Slayer Support Officers, heaven forfend. No one liked it. But no one cared enough to veto it, and in the end, it stuck.
Wesley and Gunn were working with the first few discreetly-recruited outsiders, with a combined intellectual and physical curriculum; still in development, but with luck it would be flexible and give them experts in a range of fields. Twenty candidates were training as new Slayer Support Officers in Los Angeles: demon playground become perfect practice ground. Not just Watching, truly.
Yes. It was starting to come together.
*
It wasn’t simple, naturally.
The Spike who arrived at headquarters looked pretty much done himself. With a battered rental car blacked-out to the point of being impossible return to the rental company. There was no ultrajet, no necrotempered glass, and no possibility of return.
“We may not have pulled down the temple on our own heads, but we had a fuckin’ good go at it, y’know.” Spike was chirpy, under the exhaustion. The exhilaration lingered, of tackling the Wolfram and Hart hierarchy from the inside, and seeing some of the outposts of their empire rotting and crumbling. A great climactic battle had been the cherry on top. He laughed in joy as Buffy hurtled out of the castle, and swung her round in the glorious sun-blocking fog. That relationship was going to stick.
Spike didn’t have much in the car. What there was, was the spare remnants of Angel Inc: Wesley’s books (to copy and return), an assortment of weaponry (which had been smuggled out of America, quite how no one knew), and Illyria.
*
Absorbing a cocky vampire was one thing, even if he was romantically involved with the head of the Council. Absorbing an Old One who was missing her guide was next to impossible.
Illyria took very poorly to rotas. She was potentially a valuable sparring partner, but failed to turn up to enough practices to be useful. She monopolised the vidscreen at night, trying to contact Wesley (who was avoiding her). Meetings of the Council sometimes ran over a background of Old One complaint at the lack of “suitable reverence for my relations with the Qwa Ha Xahn”. She sounded very much like a grounded teenager, vocabulary aside.
Conversely, Illyria also developed a small cult following among the Slayers. There was a run on blue mascara and leatherwear in Inverness, and a notable lack of volunteers to take weekend cover duties, in favour of the necessary extra shopping trips. Some of the girls even tried to imitate the God King’s vocal mannerisms, which became remarkably tedious.
Once you’ve heard one teenage Slayer declaring that, “The universe has nothing more fair than I. No entity deserves greater veneration,” you’ve really heard them all.
*
Illyria complicated life all round. Take, for example, the brainstorming day out which arose from Rona's casual complaint in a longer-than-usual theory session. "Look, there are like thousands of us now. Do we all have to be experts in vampires and ghoulies and frickin' leprechauns? Can't we maybe specialise?"
Giles opened his mouth to trot out the "ancient wisdom of the Watchers, shared with all the Council" lines but managed to stop, as his brain screamed at him that an important thought had been given to him. Imagine it... imagine a group with time to explore to the full the implications and ascension of Master Vampires. Or to devote their working lives to detecting the signs of Apocalypse. Or even to deal routinely with those other threats we face: the vengeance demon community, for example, would bear watching, if not actual schmoozing. Someone might even find out if there really were no such thing as leprechauns. Modernisation might actually work.
So there was a formal meeting; with flipcharts and brainstorming, and as many of the new Council as could participate in designing the newly specialised training.
"We need a weird shit squad. Seriously. Remember the puppet? And the robots?" Thank you Xander.
But Angel was nodding fiercely. "Evil puppets? They're awful." So "weird shit" and "puppets" went onto the list.
Then Illyria spoke, icy with self-certainty. "My brethren, even those so inferior they are to me as a woodlouse on the sole of a human's shoe is to the beauty and power of the sun, would scorn to treat with other than a dedicated representative."
"Okay, so we need a Gods section too." Buffy stared at the increasingly spidery diagram on her flipchart.
Giles felt that this was getting out of hand. But... they actually had Slayers to work on this stuff. If they could develop Watche- dammit, Slayer Support Officers in this pattern, the Council might even be better than he'd hoped.
*
Sometimes, having an arrogant blue entity older than demonkind could be extraordinarily gratifying too.
The fifth squad to go through the Slayer training was more awkward than its predecessors. Only two members were old hands from Sunnydale. As the Council reshaped itself, Faith and Buffy’s now-tried and tested training was replaced by a combination of Spike and Kennedy, who provided plenty of spark, but plenty of confusion too as they developed their own ideas. The girls were disenchanted, at times.
Rosita, particularly, was consistently furious. She’d left a fiancé back in Merida and nothing the Council could offer measured up to the life she’d left. Suggestions she might get back there were angrily shrugged off. “What? Go back to my hometown and kick the shit out of small-time racketeers? Crush Raul someday when I mistake him for a demon? Yeah, that’s gonna happen. All because some girls I never met before decided to ruin my frickin’ life.”
Illyria was not the first person to receive this diatribe. But she was the first to respond with, “Frick is not a word in my lexicon.”
“Fucking then. Ruin my fucking life.” Rosita wasn’t backing down.
“It is my perception that Slaying does not preclude a life of fornication. The Slayer Faith, in one instance... and the Slayer Buffy, who has replaced me in the vampire’s affections. I do not believe your fucking life has been ruined.”
Giles, listening to the conversation behind him in the rec room, tried not to guffaw at this. He was also hugely grateful not to hear Illyria’s views on Faith’s sex life. Leaving now would have been too obvious, so he settled in to enjoy the rest.
Rosita made a noise of sheer frustration. But she was obviously desperate to run off on the subject of the Choice, to the point of tolerating Illyria’s unusual take on her story. Possibly her squad-mates had finally refused to listen to any more. The complaints were familiar, and Giles tuned them out for a while, till...
“And your betrothed? Did he feel as you do?”
“He wasn’t thrilled, for sure. I mean, we were gonna get married, and now we can’t...”
“Your protests are feeble and foolish. Your lover the same. All barriers are surmountable if the effort is made.”
“But I’m gonna be some stupid Slayer. Not a wife and mom.”
“There is no biological barrier to either. Your barrenness is a choice. One you have made. Yet you insist that others have taken your choices. I find you absurd.”
Illyria stalked away. Possibly seeking someone to punch, judging by past experience and the way her shoulders were twitching. Rosita sat, mouth open, for a good five minutes before she moved. Giles wondered if it would be evil to employ the God King permanently as a guidance counsellor.
*
Wesley visited Slayer HQ some eighteen months after the great battle of Los Angeles. Illyria stood at the window for the two days it took between Wesley telling them he was coming and the moment he got out of the car at the castle entrance.
That obsession, thank the heavens, was not Giles’s problem.
Everything else seemed to be.
Wesley reported on good developments in the support training school. But,“There’s one thing that worries me. The Delenteria Codex is out there. Wolfram and Hart have lost track of it after the battle. You know what that means.”
“Yes, of course. It’s Apocalypse season again,” Giles sighed.
But that will be another story...
*
Title: Of Gods and Heroes
Author: Brutti ma buoni
Words: c2000
Rating: PG13
Summary: the Rulesverse absorbs some additions
Characters: Giles, Spike, Illyria, Buffy, Faith, OCs
Setting: 2004, after Not Fade Away. See where that fits into the Rulesverse timeline here
“Spike’s coming home.”
They all knew what Buffy meant, though the castle wasn’t Spike’s home by any reasonable definition. He’d visited twice, flying in on Wolfram and Hart’s ultrajet to whirl Buffy away from her duties for a weekend, before returning to Los Angeles to “fight the moderately evil fight, making bloody sure it doesn’t get really evil on our watch.” It wasn’t perfection, but it was enough to keep Buffy mainly rosy and positive through the early difficulties of the Slayer Council’s establishment.
Giles was the first to respond. “Will he be staying long?”
Buffy was skipping, almost. “Yeah, I think so. He said everything was done.”
*
Things might not be done entirely, but they were certainly changing.
“So... you want to replace me?” Robin couldn’t have sounded stiffer if he’d been cast in concrete.
“No, no, quite the reverse,” said Giles, only lying a tiny bit. “We want to share your expertise more widely. And it would be a shame not to make use of our new colleagues in Los Angeles. They have perfectly splendid local knowledge.” Perfectly splendid? Did you spend five long years in California in vain? Sometimes, Giles despised his own slips into pomposity.
It certainly hadn’t softened Robin at all. “While I play principal all over again? Yeah, that’s peachy.” He hung up.
Robin would be an excellent squad manager, but he did have some reason for annoyance. Being bumped off the top of the North American pile must be infuriating. Thing was, and Giles was rather afraid he was still a snob about this, Wesley was an actual, fully trained Watcher, who had the memories of the full Watchers’ Academy training; that mattered. The fourth working Watcher in the world. It was the most exquisite relief, to know that there was a Wyndham-Pryce back at the Council. For a moment, Giles could pretend that all the past ten years of revelation and change were a bad memory.
Except, truthfully, they were a good memory in most respects. Change was good. The old ways of the Watchers were, too often, bad compromise and hidebound refusal to recognise new challenges. This world would be different.
For a start, the new Wyndham-Pryce in the new Slayers’ Council was staying in California, to be with his closest friends in their communal life of combating evil and rebuilding the great city they had half destroyed. His closest friends Charles Gunn and Angel the vampire, who were his equals in this endeavour. Not material that the Watchers Council would have accepted for a moment, despite their bravery and dedication.
Now they brought new challenges. Such as talking the excellent educator Robin Wood into recognising he was better suited to overseeing trainee Slayers in the field than he was at directing operations and negotiating with mystical entities. (Giles tried very hard to forget the aftermath of the Slime Slug plague Robin had failed to avert).
New challenges were linguistic as well as managerial. Wesley had refused to call himself a Watcher again. Charles Gunn had likewise rejected any job title that suggested “I’m an old white guy that never gets laid. Also: not planning on just watching.” Researchers? Trainers? Warlocks? No term really covered the whole range of potential jobs they could see the not-Watchers needing to tackle. Not just Watching indeed. Acting, to support the Slayers.
Giles still shuddered at the outcome of those discussions. Slayer Support Officers, heaven forfend. No one liked it. But no one cared enough to veto it, and in the end, it stuck.
Wesley and Gunn were working with the first few discreetly-recruited outsiders, with a combined intellectual and physical curriculum; still in development, but with luck it would be flexible and give them experts in a range of fields. Twenty candidates were training as new Slayer Support Officers in Los Angeles: demon playground become perfect practice ground. Not just Watching, truly.
Yes. It was starting to come together.
*
It wasn’t simple, naturally.
The Spike who arrived at headquarters looked pretty much done himself. With a battered rental car blacked-out to the point of being impossible return to the rental company. There was no ultrajet, no necrotempered glass, and no possibility of return.
“We may not have pulled down the temple on our own heads, but we had a fuckin’ good go at it, y’know.” Spike was chirpy, under the exhaustion. The exhilaration lingered, of tackling the Wolfram and Hart hierarchy from the inside, and seeing some of the outposts of their empire rotting and crumbling. A great climactic battle had been the cherry on top. He laughed in joy as Buffy hurtled out of the castle, and swung her round in the glorious sun-blocking fog. That relationship was going to stick.
Spike didn’t have much in the car. What there was, was the spare remnants of Angel Inc: Wesley’s books (to copy and return), an assortment of weaponry (which had been smuggled out of America, quite how no one knew), and Illyria.
*
Absorbing a cocky vampire was one thing, even if he was romantically involved with the head of the Council. Absorbing an Old One who was missing her guide was next to impossible.
Illyria took very poorly to rotas. She was potentially a valuable sparring partner, but failed to turn up to enough practices to be useful. She monopolised the vidscreen at night, trying to contact Wesley (who was avoiding her). Meetings of the Council sometimes ran over a background of Old One complaint at the lack of “suitable reverence for my relations with the Qwa Ha Xahn”. She sounded very much like a grounded teenager, vocabulary aside.
Conversely, Illyria also developed a small cult following among the Slayers. There was a run on blue mascara and leatherwear in Inverness, and a notable lack of volunteers to take weekend cover duties, in favour of the necessary extra shopping trips. Some of the girls even tried to imitate the God King’s vocal mannerisms, which became remarkably tedious.
Once you’ve heard one teenage Slayer declaring that, “The universe has nothing more fair than I. No entity deserves greater veneration,” you’ve really heard them all.
*
Illyria complicated life all round. Take, for example, the brainstorming day out which arose from Rona's casual complaint in a longer-than-usual theory session. "Look, there are like thousands of us now. Do we all have to be experts in vampires and ghoulies and frickin' leprechauns? Can't we maybe specialise?"
Giles opened his mouth to trot out the "ancient wisdom of the Watchers, shared with all the Council" lines but managed to stop, as his brain screamed at him that an important thought had been given to him. Imagine it... imagine a group with time to explore to the full the implications and ascension of Master Vampires. Or to devote their working lives to detecting the signs of Apocalypse. Or even to deal routinely with those other threats we face: the vengeance demon community, for example, would bear watching, if not actual schmoozing. Someone might even find out if there really were no such thing as leprechauns. Modernisation might actually work.
So there was a formal meeting; with flipcharts and brainstorming, and as many of the new Council as could participate in designing the newly specialised training.
"We need a weird shit squad. Seriously. Remember the puppet? And the robots?" Thank you Xander.
But Angel was nodding fiercely. "Evil puppets? They're awful." So "weird shit" and "puppets" went onto the list.
Then Illyria spoke, icy with self-certainty. "My brethren, even those so inferior they are to me as a woodlouse on the sole of a human's shoe is to the beauty and power of the sun, would scorn to treat with other than a dedicated representative."
"Okay, so we need a Gods section too." Buffy stared at the increasingly spidery diagram on her flipchart.
Giles felt that this was getting out of hand. But... they actually had Slayers to work on this stuff. If they could develop Watche- dammit, Slayer Support Officers in this pattern, the Council might even be better than he'd hoped.
*
Sometimes, having an arrogant blue entity older than demonkind could be extraordinarily gratifying too.
The fifth squad to go through the Slayer training was more awkward than its predecessors. Only two members were old hands from Sunnydale. As the Council reshaped itself, Faith and Buffy’s now-tried and tested training was replaced by a combination of Spike and Kennedy, who provided plenty of spark, but plenty of confusion too as they developed their own ideas. The girls were disenchanted, at times.
Rosita, particularly, was consistently furious. She’d left a fiancé back in Merida and nothing the Council could offer measured up to the life she’d left. Suggestions she might get back there were angrily shrugged off. “What? Go back to my hometown and kick the shit out of small-time racketeers? Crush Raul someday when I mistake him for a demon? Yeah, that’s gonna happen. All because some girls I never met before decided to ruin my frickin’ life.”
Illyria was not the first person to receive this diatribe. But she was the first to respond with, “Frick is not a word in my lexicon.”
“Fucking then. Ruin my fucking life.” Rosita wasn’t backing down.
“It is my perception that Slaying does not preclude a life of fornication. The Slayer Faith, in one instance... and the Slayer Buffy, who has replaced me in the vampire’s affections. I do not believe your fucking life has been ruined.”
Giles, listening to the conversation behind him in the rec room, tried not to guffaw at this. He was also hugely grateful not to hear Illyria’s views on Faith’s sex life. Leaving now would have been too obvious, so he settled in to enjoy the rest.
Rosita made a noise of sheer frustration. But she was obviously desperate to run off on the subject of the Choice, to the point of tolerating Illyria’s unusual take on her story. Possibly her squad-mates had finally refused to listen to any more. The complaints were familiar, and Giles tuned them out for a while, till...
“And your betrothed? Did he feel as you do?”
“He wasn’t thrilled, for sure. I mean, we were gonna get married, and now we can’t...”
“Your protests are feeble and foolish. Your lover the same. All barriers are surmountable if the effort is made.”
“But I’m gonna be some stupid Slayer. Not a wife and mom.”
“There is no biological barrier to either. Your barrenness is a choice. One you have made. Yet you insist that others have taken your choices. I find you absurd.”
Illyria stalked away. Possibly seeking someone to punch, judging by past experience and the way her shoulders were twitching. Rosita sat, mouth open, for a good five minutes before she moved. Giles wondered if it would be evil to employ the God King permanently as a guidance counsellor.
*
Wesley visited Slayer HQ some eighteen months after the great battle of Los Angeles. Illyria stood at the window for the two days it took between Wesley telling them he was coming and the moment he got out of the car at the castle entrance.
That obsession, thank the heavens, was not Giles’s problem.
Everything else seemed to be.
Wesley reported on good developments in the support training school. But,“There’s one thing that worries me. The Delenteria Codex is out there. Wolfram and Hart have lost track of it after the battle. You know what that means.”
“Yes, of course. It’s Apocalypse season again,” Giles sighed.
But that will be another story...
*