Rift, Hellmouth, Same Difference (4/?)
Title: Rift, Hellmouth, Same Difference
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: "Buffy" through The Becoming, all of Torchwood.
Summary: Buffy gets sucked into the Hell vortex at the end of Becoming, only to end up on the rain-slicked streets of Cardiff. What's Torchwood to do with a lost Slayer?
Disclaimer: Joss owns "Buffy," RTD and the BBC own "Torchwood," I own my iPod.
AN: Thank you to the amazing revdorothyl for betaing!
Chapter One | Two | Three
Banner by the awesome skylar0grace
Chapter Four
“Is she still there?” Owen asked an hour later as he looked around for the snarky little blonde. Seeing that she was still hunched over the conference table, he snorted. “How was it that we got stuck watching her? If she’s not human, we shouldn’t be letting her out around Cardiff, even with our office boy as a chaperone. Why are we even giving her a chaperone or guardian, or whatever? Here I was thinking Torchwood captured aliens, when actually we're just glorified babysitters."
No one deigned to respond to Owen’s comments, with Ianto only giving him a pointed look before returning to filing the paperwork that Jack had miraculously completed while he was shopping with Buffy.
“If you’re going to be a babysitter, Harper, you’ll need a pay-cut,” came Buffy’s voice from the open door of the conference room. Owen, Tosh and Gwen all whipped around to see Buffy still sitting at the table with her head lying on her arms. “Also, popping gum would be of the good.”
“Excuse me?” Owen stuttered, surprised that she could hear him.
“I’m just trying to give you some tips if you’re going to go for the whole babysitter vibe,” she replied as she raised her head and gave him a look. No one commented on the lingering redness in her eyes, although Gwen looked like she wanted to give her a hug. “Don’t diss what you haven’t tried.”
“Touché, Buffy,” Ianto muttered under his breath, causing Owen to glare at him and Tosh to bite back a laugh.
“People actually let you take care of their kids? Not only that, but they paid you to watch their kids?”
“Yeah, it was a thing,” she answered as she made her way down to join them. Owen opened his mouth to make another snarky comment, but changed his mind and bustled back to the medical station to give the sex life-form inside a closer look. “So, what’s the what?” Everyone gave her a confused look. “What’s going on?” she clarified as she moved next to Tosh. Something about the woman reminded her of Willow, and she instinctively gravitated towards it.
“Well, you can help me with this,” Tosh offered as she pushed the file she had been working on towards Buffy. She opened it up and found that this was full of papers documenting the heretofore non-existent life of one Buffy Summers, now under the care of her maternal second cousin after the death of her parents.
“I didn’t know what to put on your transcripts, so I decided to wait until I got a chance to talk to you,” Tosh continued as Buffy nodded silently. Buffy Summers had grown up in the town of Santa Barbara, where her mother and father owned a local bookstore. They had died in a car accident, and Buffy had been sent to live with her mother’s second cousin. She had attended Santa Barbara High School, but the transcript included was blank. Included in the file were a passport, driver’s license (Buffy’s mouth quirked up at this), and a fund supposedly set up by her parents in order to provide care for her.
“Where’s this money coming from?” Buffy asked Tosh with a confused look on her face.
“We have a certain amount of funds we can use in instances like this,” Tosh explained. “Most of the money will be going to Ianto to help care for you, but there will be a small portion put aside for you regularly, so that once you turn eighteen you have some money of your own.”
“Thanks,” Buffy said quietly, stunned at the amount of work that they were doing for her when really they could’ve just let her go on the Cardiff streets to fend for herself. She felt touched and a little bit guilty for not telling them the truth about her, but she still didn’t fully trust them yet. Some part of her was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for this to all turn out to be some elaborate trap set for her by some mind-twisty demon who had it in for her.
“So, um, am I supposed to play fill-in-the-blanks with my transcript?” Buffy asked, trying to break the awkward silence that followed.
“Just let me know what classes you’ve taken and the grades received and I’ll do the best I can,” Tosh said as she handed Buffy a pen. Buffy bit her lip and wondered if she really wanted to share her grades with these people. She didn’t exactly fail any of her classes, but she wasn’t mad Willow-smart either, and the impact Slaying had on her study-time showed. Oh well, she mentally shrugged as she began writing in as much as she could remember. While she was doing this, she could feel Jack staring at her from the vantage point of his office and did her best to ignore it.
She was almost done when she saw something out of the corner of her eye. Looking up, she let out a gasp of surprise. “Was that…?” she asked Ianto with a half-formed sentence, pointing at the space above her where the creature had just been. “Was that a dinosaur?” Owen openly chuckled at her look of shock, while the rest of the team was more polite about it.
“Yes, that is our resident pterodactyl,” Ianto told her. “Her name is Myfanwy, which is Welsh for ‘my woman.’”
“Any particular reason you chose that name for your pet dinosaur?” Buffy asked, still more than slightly disturbed by the sight of the dinosaur. Seeing it drove home the idea that she was no longer in her dimension and was now someplace completely different. The ugly whom she had tangled with yesterday? Could have been just a new breed of demon she had never encountered before. This, however, was strange, even for her.
“I liked the sound of the name, and I like the song.”
“Hold up, Ianto. It’s also a song?” Buffy asked, as Ianto only shook his head at her and continued to go about his nightly tasks.
Soon the team was packing up and getting ready to do whatever it was they did at night. She watched them tidy up their stations and wondered idly how much longer she would be here tonight. The day was catching up with her and Buffy wasn’t sure how much longer she would be able to hold her emotions at bay.
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you it was rude to stare?” she asked out loud, directing her question to Jack, who had moved out of the office to the catwalk by the Rift thing. “You’ve been giving me the wiggins ever since dinner with all the stare-age.”
“Maybe you’re just so stare-worthy it’s hard to look away,” he countered as he made his way towards the stairs. Buffy recoiled and made a face.
“OK, eww with a side of icky,” she complained as she tried to mentally cleanse herself. “You’re like old enough to be my dad. Creepy much?” She knew it was probably said in good fun-she had seen how he interacted with the other members of the team when no one thought she’d been watching-but the consequences of her relationship with Angel were making her leery.
“I don’t look that old!” he protested. “Do I look that old?” he asked Ianto, who wisely chose not to comment.
“All I know is that dating men who might be that old isn’t high up on the list of smart career moves when you’re my age. Leads to stationary rape allegations or things like that.”
“I believe the correct term is ‘statutory,’” Ianto gently corrected her as he held back a smile.
“That’s what I meant. Or even, older women being all touchy-feely around guys my age” Buffy continued, taking Ianto’s correcting in stride. The buggy substitute who’d tried to eat Xander immediately popped into her head and she had to swallow to keep herself from crying.
“You sound like you have some personal experience in this matter,” Jack observed, determined to get as much information as possible out of this girl. Buffy just shrugged.
“Just going by what I hear,” she replied nonchalantly. And what I’ve seen and experienced, she added silently.
“As fascinating as this conversation is, it’s time for us to go,” Ianto interrupted at just the right moment. “Jack, why don’t you show her the lift, since she hasn’t seen it yet.”
“Lift? What’s the lift?” Buffy asked confusedly as Jack led her to a platform and helped her up. She started a bit when it began rising all of a sudden. “OK, that’s special,” she commented as they reached the ceiling, only to have it open and leave them at the base of the water tower. She looked at the people bustling around, enjoying the clear night while completely ignoring the two people who had just risen from somewhere belowground.
“Is there a reason they can’t see us, or do they just have a particularly bad case of ‘see and forget?’” Buffy asked Jack as they continued to watch the flow of people. If it was the whole rationalization-ally thing, then it must be even worse here than in Sunnydale.
“I could go with the technical explanation, but that’s confusing even to me,” Jack told her. “Basically, there’s an invisibility cloak over this small spot that protects us from being seen. Step off”-he demonstrated-“and you magically appear in their perception.”
“What’s an invisibility cloak? Is it as self-explanatory as it sounds?” Buffy asked as they made their way to where Ianto had pulled the car up.
“Harry Potter?” he asked, as if it should be obvious to her. “Allows him to get into trouble without being seen.”
“Ringing no bells here. Who’s this Harry Potter kid? Or man? What age is he?” Buffy asked as Jack looked at her in shock.
“Ianto, do the girl a favor and buy her a complete set of the Harry Potter books and have her read them,” Jack instructed “Immediately.”
“I’ll do my best,” Ianto replied before he pulled away from the curb.
“Wait, make with the ‘splainey’ please,” Buffy demanded. “What’s so big about these books that Captain Flirts-a-lot insists that I read?”
“Harry Potter is a global phenomenon,” Ianto explained, as he and Buffy drove home. “The final book is being released in a month and is probably the most anticipated book of all time. You might as well read them,” he instructed as they pulled into the parking lot of his flat. “You’ll stand out considerably, if you haven’t read them.”
“Are they really that good?” Buffy questioned.
“They may not be the greatest piece of literature ever written, but they do have something magical about them that attracts readers from every country and at all ages.”
“Is the author human, or is he working some sorta alien mojo over the people?” Buffy asked as they made their way down the hall towards the apartment.
“As far as Torchwood Two has been able to discern, she’s completely human,” Ianto said, correcting her on the author’s gender. “She’s just a gifted writer, that’s all.”
“Huh,” was Buffy’s only reply to that.
“Actually, I have all six books, so I can lend you them, if you want,” Ianto continued, looking away from Buffy. She looked at him closely. Were those tears in his eyes?
“Yeah, I think I’ll give them a go,” Buffy replied as she followed Ianto to his room. She paused for a moment at the door, unsure of whether she would be welcome to enter. She settled for hovering around the doorway, taking in the room that was just as neat and spare as the rest of the apartment. The sole exception to the whole deal was a box with the word “Lisa” written in neat block letters. Ianto went over to the box and pulled a book out.
“Here’s the first one,” he said quietly as he handed it to her. “Let me know when you’ve finished it, so I can get you the next one if you like it.” Buffy looked at the cover, where the words “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” shone over the picture of a red train.
“Thanks, Ianto,” she answered quietly, not sure what to make of this new addition to the picture she had in her head of Ianto. Who was Lisa? Why did Ianto have a box of her stuff stored untidily in his room?
“Is there anything else you need this evening, Buffy?” he asked as she moved towards her room. Buffy studied him for a moment before shaking her head.
“Nah, I’m good for now. You know,” she added, turning to look back at him, “you never answered my question from this afternoon.” Before he could answer, however, she went into her room and shut the door.
~*~*~
“Promise you won’t leave me again?” she asked Angel, who had once again invaded her dreams. She turned her head around and looked into his warm, soulful eyes.
“Of course, Buffy,” he answered, gently kissing the top of her head. They stood in silence by the water tower, silently watching the people go by without a care in the world. Then, a shiver passed through Angel, startling Buffy and causing her to turn when Angel spoke.
“You had your chance to kill me,” Angel whispered in her ear as he held her close in his strong arms. “Now let me have mine.” His eyes glittered maliciously as he lowered his face to her neck…
Buffy snapped awake, gasping for air and reflexively reaching for the spot on her neck where the dream-Angel had bitten her. Luckily for her, this time she didn’t scream and wake Ianto. She didn’t know how long she lay there waiting for sleep to come again, but it wasn’t working. With a low growl she reached for the lamp beside her and switched it on before picking up the book Ianto had lent her.
“Chapter One: The Boy Who Lived,” she began reading. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal…”
When Ianto woke up later that morning, he noticed the light in Buffy’s room was on. He knocked softly, before quietly cracking the door when he got no response. Peering in, he smiled at the scene before him. Buffy lay curled up on the bed with “Harry Potter” falling out of her hand. He let her sleep, only going in to quietly turn off the light. He would wake her up later.
Chapter Five
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: "Buffy" through The Becoming, all of Torchwood.
Summary: Buffy gets sucked into the Hell vortex at the end of Becoming, only to end up on the rain-slicked streets of Cardiff. What's Torchwood to do with a lost Slayer?
Disclaimer: Joss owns "Buffy," RTD and the BBC own "Torchwood," I own my iPod.
AN: Thank you to the amazing revdorothyl for betaing!
Chapter One | Two | Three
Banner by the awesome skylar0grace
Chapter Four
“Is she still there?” Owen asked an hour later as he looked around for the snarky little blonde. Seeing that she was still hunched over the conference table, he snorted. “How was it that we got stuck watching her? If she’s not human, we shouldn’t be letting her out around Cardiff, even with our office boy as a chaperone. Why are we even giving her a chaperone or guardian, or whatever? Here I was thinking Torchwood captured aliens, when actually we're just glorified babysitters."
No one deigned to respond to Owen’s comments, with Ianto only giving him a pointed look before returning to filing the paperwork that Jack had miraculously completed while he was shopping with Buffy.
“If you’re going to be a babysitter, Harper, you’ll need a pay-cut,” came Buffy’s voice from the open door of the conference room. Owen, Tosh and Gwen all whipped around to see Buffy still sitting at the table with her head lying on her arms. “Also, popping gum would be of the good.”
“Excuse me?” Owen stuttered, surprised that she could hear him.
“I’m just trying to give you some tips if you’re going to go for the whole babysitter vibe,” she replied as she raised her head and gave him a look. No one commented on the lingering redness in her eyes, although Gwen looked like she wanted to give her a hug. “Don’t diss what you haven’t tried.”
“Touché, Buffy,” Ianto muttered under his breath, causing Owen to glare at him and Tosh to bite back a laugh.
“People actually let you take care of their kids? Not only that, but they paid you to watch their kids?”
“Yeah, it was a thing,” she answered as she made her way down to join them. Owen opened his mouth to make another snarky comment, but changed his mind and bustled back to the medical station to give the sex life-form inside a closer look. “So, what’s the what?” Everyone gave her a confused look. “What’s going on?” she clarified as she moved next to Tosh. Something about the woman reminded her of Willow, and she instinctively gravitated towards it.
“Well, you can help me with this,” Tosh offered as she pushed the file she had been working on towards Buffy. She opened it up and found that this was full of papers documenting the heretofore non-existent life of one Buffy Summers, now under the care of her maternal second cousin after the death of her parents.
“I didn’t know what to put on your transcripts, so I decided to wait until I got a chance to talk to you,” Tosh continued as Buffy nodded silently. Buffy Summers had grown up in the town of Santa Barbara, where her mother and father owned a local bookstore. They had died in a car accident, and Buffy had been sent to live with her mother’s second cousin. She had attended Santa Barbara High School, but the transcript included was blank. Included in the file were a passport, driver’s license (Buffy’s mouth quirked up at this), and a fund supposedly set up by her parents in order to provide care for her.
“Where’s this money coming from?” Buffy asked Tosh with a confused look on her face.
“We have a certain amount of funds we can use in instances like this,” Tosh explained. “Most of the money will be going to Ianto to help care for you, but there will be a small portion put aside for you regularly, so that once you turn eighteen you have some money of your own.”
“Thanks,” Buffy said quietly, stunned at the amount of work that they were doing for her when really they could’ve just let her go on the Cardiff streets to fend for herself. She felt touched and a little bit guilty for not telling them the truth about her, but she still didn’t fully trust them yet. Some part of her was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for this to all turn out to be some elaborate trap set for her by some mind-twisty demon who had it in for her.
“So, um, am I supposed to play fill-in-the-blanks with my transcript?” Buffy asked, trying to break the awkward silence that followed.
“Just let me know what classes you’ve taken and the grades received and I’ll do the best I can,” Tosh said as she handed Buffy a pen. Buffy bit her lip and wondered if she really wanted to share her grades with these people. She didn’t exactly fail any of her classes, but she wasn’t mad Willow-smart either, and the impact Slaying had on her study-time showed. Oh well, she mentally shrugged as she began writing in as much as she could remember. While she was doing this, she could feel Jack staring at her from the vantage point of his office and did her best to ignore it.
She was almost done when she saw something out of the corner of her eye. Looking up, she let out a gasp of surprise. “Was that…?” she asked Ianto with a half-formed sentence, pointing at the space above her where the creature had just been. “Was that a dinosaur?” Owen openly chuckled at her look of shock, while the rest of the team was more polite about it.
“Yes, that is our resident pterodactyl,” Ianto told her. “Her name is Myfanwy, which is Welsh for ‘my woman.’”
“Any particular reason you chose that name for your pet dinosaur?” Buffy asked, still more than slightly disturbed by the sight of the dinosaur. Seeing it drove home the idea that she was no longer in her dimension and was now someplace completely different. The ugly whom she had tangled with yesterday? Could have been just a new breed of demon she had never encountered before. This, however, was strange, even for her.
“I liked the sound of the name, and I like the song.”
“Hold up, Ianto. It’s also a song?” Buffy asked, as Ianto only shook his head at her and continued to go about his nightly tasks.
Soon the team was packing up and getting ready to do whatever it was they did at night. She watched them tidy up their stations and wondered idly how much longer she would be here tonight. The day was catching up with her and Buffy wasn’t sure how much longer she would be able to hold her emotions at bay.
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you it was rude to stare?” she asked out loud, directing her question to Jack, who had moved out of the office to the catwalk by the Rift thing. “You’ve been giving me the wiggins ever since dinner with all the stare-age.”
“Maybe you’re just so stare-worthy it’s hard to look away,” he countered as he made his way towards the stairs. Buffy recoiled and made a face.
“OK, eww with a side of icky,” she complained as she tried to mentally cleanse herself. “You’re like old enough to be my dad. Creepy much?” She knew it was probably said in good fun-she had seen how he interacted with the other members of the team when no one thought she’d been watching-but the consequences of her relationship with Angel were making her leery.
“I don’t look that old!” he protested. “Do I look that old?” he asked Ianto, who wisely chose not to comment.
“All I know is that dating men who might be that old isn’t high up on the list of smart career moves when you’re my age. Leads to stationary rape allegations or things like that.”
“I believe the correct term is ‘statutory,’” Ianto gently corrected her as he held back a smile.
“That’s what I meant. Or even, older women being all touchy-feely around guys my age” Buffy continued, taking Ianto’s correcting in stride. The buggy substitute who’d tried to eat Xander immediately popped into her head and she had to swallow to keep herself from crying.
“You sound like you have some personal experience in this matter,” Jack observed, determined to get as much information as possible out of this girl. Buffy just shrugged.
“Just going by what I hear,” she replied nonchalantly. And what I’ve seen and experienced, she added silently.
“As fascinating as this conversation is, it’s time for us to go,” Ianto interrupted at just the right moment. “Jack, why don’t you show her the lift, since she hasn’t seen it yet.”
“Lift? What’s the lift?” Buffy asked confusedly as Jack led her to a platform and helped her up. She started a bit when it began rising all of a sudden. “OK, that’s special,” she commented as they reached the ceiling, only to have it open and leave them at the base of the water tower. She looked at the people bustling around, enjoying the clear night while completely ignoring the two people who had just risen from somewhere belowground.
“Is there a reason they can’t see us, or do they just have a particularly bad case of ‘see and forget?’” Buffy asked Jack as they continued to watch the flow of people. If it was the whole rationalization-ally thing, then it must be even worse here than in Sunnydale.
“I could go with the technical explanation, but that’s confusing even to me,” Jack told her. “Basically, there’s an invisibility cloak over this small spot that protects us from being seen. Step off”-he demonstrated-“and you magically appear in their perception.”
“What’s an invisibility cloak? Is it as self-explanatory as it sounds?” Buffy asked as they made their way to where Ianto had pulled the car up.
“Harry Potter?” he asked, as if it should be obvious to her. “Allows him to get into trouble without being seen.”
“Ringing no bells here. Who’s this Harry Potter kid? Or man? What age is he?” Buffy asked as Jack looked at her in shock.
“Ianto, do the girl a favor and buy her a complete set of the Harry Potter books and have her read them,” Jack instructed “Immediately.”
“I’ll do my best,” Ianto replied before he pulled away from the curb.
“Wait, make with the ‘splainey’ please,” Buffy demanded. “What’s so big about these books that Captain Flirts-a-lot insists that I read?”
“Harry Potter is a global phenomenon,” Ianto explained, as he and Buffy drove home. “The final book is being released in a month and is probably the most anticipated book of all time. You might as well read them,” he instructed as they pulled into the parking lot of his flat. “You’ll stand out considerably, if you haven’t read them.”
“Are they really that good?” Buffy questioned.
“They may not be the greatest piece of literature ever written, but they do have something magical about them that attracts readers from every country and at all ages.”
“Is the author human, or is he working some sorta alien mojo over the people?” Buffy asked as they made their way down the hall towards the apartment.
“As far as Torchwood Two has been able to discern, she’s completely human,” Ianto said, correcting her on the author’s gender. “She’s just a gifted writer, that’s all.”
“Huh,” was Buffy’s only reply to that.
“Actually, I have all six books, so I can lend you them, if you want,” Ianto continued, looking away from Buffy. She looked at him closely. Were those tears in his eyes?
“Yeah, I think I’ll give them a go,” Buffy replied as she followed Ianto to his room. She paused for a moment at the door, unsure of whether she would be welcome to enter. She settled for hovering around the doorway, taking in the room that was just as neat and spare as the rest of the apartment. The sole exception to the whole deal was a box with the word “Lisa” written in neat block letters. Ianto went over to the box and pulled a book out.
“Here’s the first one,” he said quietly as he handed it to her. “Let me know when you’ve finished it, so I can get you the next one if you like it.” Buffy looked at the cover, where the words “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” shone over the picture of a red train.
“Thanks, Ianto,” she answered quietly, not sure what to make of this new addition to the picture she had in her head of Ianto. Who was Lisa? Why did Ianto have a box of her stuff stored untidily in his room?
“Is there anything else you need this evening, Buffy?” he asked as she moved towards her room. Buffy studied him for a moment before shaking her head.
“Nah, I’m good for now. You know,” she added, turning to look back at him, “you never answered my question from this afternoon.” Before he could answer, however, she went into her room and shut the door.
~*~*~
“Promise you won’t leave me again?” she asked Angel, who had once again invaded her dreams. She turned her head around and looked into his warm, soulful eyes.
“Of course, Buffy,” he answered, gently kissing the top of her head. They stood in silence by the water tower, silently watching the people go by without a care in the world. Then, a shiver passed through Angel, startling Buffy and causing her to turn when Angel spoke.
“You had your chance to kill me,” Angel whispered in her ear as he held her close in his strong arms. “Now let me have mine.” His eyes glittered maliciously as he lowered his face to her neck…
Buffy snapped awake, gasping for air and reflexively reaching for the spot on her neck where the dream-Angel had bitten her. Luckily for her, this time she didn’t scream and wake Ianto. She didn’t know how long she lay there waiting for sleep to come again, but it wasn’t working. With a low growl she reached for the lamp beside her and switched it on before picking up the book Ianto had lent her.
“Chapter One: The Boy Who Lived,” she began reading. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal…”
When Ianto woke up later that morning, he noticed the light in Buffy’s room was on. He knocked softly, before quietly cracking the door when he got no response. Peering in, he smiled at the scene before him. Buffy lay curled up on the bed with “Harry Potter” falling out of her hand. He let her sleep, only going in to quietly turn off the light. He would wake her up later.
Chapter Five