Surrender to Love - Evil Twins (FR-15)
Surrender to Love - Evil Twins (FR-15)
Alt Title: Day 18 - Post-Slayer Love, the Beginning
Author: mmooch
Summary: After months of healing, Buffy finds a man to help her learn to love again.
Crossover: Leverage.
Rating: FR-15.
Word count: 2139.
Challenge: for the livejournal 2013 August Fic-a-Day Challenge.
Timeline: AU post-‘The Gift’ for BtVS; vague for Leverage.
Warning: OOCness on Buffy’s part, but really, who’s going to complain when it gets her smoochies with Eliot?
A/N: Let me know if you have any ideas for fandoms that you’d like Buffy paired with (male or female).
Disclaimer: BtVS/AtS characters belong to Joss Whedon/Mutant Enemy. Leverage characters belong to John Rogers, Chris Downey, and TNT. I claim no rights to any copyrighted material. Please do not copy or take this story without my permission.
Secessus Nightclub
6 months after ‘The Gift’…
“I’m gonna go to the back and get changed so I can go home,” Buffy called out to her replacement behind the bar. She was a bartender at one of those gimmick bars; part dancer/part cocktail artist - or whatever the term was.
Maybe she should have felt guilty for doing this instead of patrolling, but after the year she just went through, she just couldn’t drum up the emotions to care. As strange as it seemed, this helped her to reconnect to the world in a way that nothing she tried before could. She had even started to check around Vegas for vamp nests to take out. Not that she had any plans to become the Hellmouth’s Slayer again, but she’d help out where she could.
As for jobs, it was a lot better than being a waitress at a greasy diner, and worlds better than Doublemeat. Sure, some of the guys tried to get grabby, but the bouncers were good about stopping it from going too far. She didn’t mind letting them handle it, either. Only one person here knew about her past, and that was her boss, Lam - or Lambykins when she was feeling playful with him. Despite his past, she liked the guy, and he treated her like the little sister he never had. It was nice to have family again.
When she walked into the secure women’s locker-room, Buffy’s eyebrow went up to see a blonde stranger digging into the uniform pile.
“Uh, can I help you?” she asked.
Parker looked up, startled by the intrusion. She quickly used the lie they had come up with and said, “Just started tonight and looking for a clean uniform.”
Seeing as how Lam kept her informed about the new hires, Buffy seriously doubted that. “Yeah, see…I don’t believe you. I’m gonna have to take you to my boss’ office, and let him decide what to do with you,” she said, putting enough steel in her voice to make sure the other woman didn’t think she had any choice.
“You’re taking me to the office, now?!” Parker emphasized strangely.
That made Buffy’s spidey-sense tingle. “Yeah,” she replied suspiciously.
~~~~~~
Hallway
They only got a few steps away from the changing room before they were stopped by another stranger - a brunette this time. She went up to Buffy and using some weird foreign accent asked, “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the parking lot?”
Knowing that the parking lot was in the opposite direction, and given the odd timing of the encounter, Buffy’s bullshit meter spiked hard. “Hmm, this is interesting. Friend of yours?” she asked her blonde ‘prisoner’.
Parker’s eyes widened in shock at two of them getting caught by the same person. That almost never happened. “What? No! I don’t know who she is!”
Buffy immediately grabbed Sophie with her left hand while keeping a tight grip on Parker with her right. “Guess then you won’t mind getting to know her while you wait for my boss to talk to you both. C’mon,” she ordered them as she started down the hallway again.
“Pretty strong for such a tiny girl,” Sophie commented, trying to give Eliot a heads up that the person who caught them could be a fighter.
Glaring at the brunette, Buffy growled, “Do you want your arm to get broken? Calling me a ‘girl’ in that condescending voice is a good way to go about it if you are. Let’s go see who else we’ll find in the office… You know, the one you’re trying to keep me away from?” It annoyed her that it took this long for her to figure out what they were up to. She should have gotten it from the ‘office, now’ comment from earlier.
~~~~~~
Lam’s office
Opening up the door, Buffy saw somebody most obviously not Lam playing around with his computer. Given the other two intruders, she decided to act first and ask forgiveness later if she was wrong. She let go of the brunette just long enough to pick up a baseball from a nearby display stand and throw it at the black guy’s head to knock him out for a few minutes.
Then she reached into her pocket and grabbed two zipties to secure the women so she dealt with the guy messing with Lam’s computer. Something told her they were a slippery group, so she secured each limb separately. After they were all tied up, she began her interrogation, “Is there some reason you’re trying to break into my boss’ office? I don’t like it when people try to hurt him.”
None of them said a word. She sighed and said, “Okay, if you don’t want to tell me, you can always tell him or the police.”
Buffy saw the slight widening of their eyes and felt the tiniest breeze from behind her, telling her that somebody just came in through the door. Since they didn’t announce themselves, she assumed it was another intruder. Quickly pivoting on her foot, she grabbed the new one by the throat and pinned him against the wall.
“You know, it isn’t nice to sneak up on a girl,” she mock-complained.
Eliot was stunned at her moves. “How did you--?” he managed to choke out.
“I’m just good that way,” she quipped before studying him a bit closer. “You know, you kind of remind me of my boss - ‘cept you're scruffier and have that dangerous, sexy vibe. He's more like a preppy hottie - with just a hint of danger to him. Whereas you practically have billboard sign over your head, screaming 'Danger'! Maybe you're his evil twin or something,” she theorized, thinking about the different ways it could be true.
Then she heard a tiny voice talking. Huh, why had she missed that? Man, she was off her game tonight. Lam was never going to let her live that down…if he found out. Twisting the hottie’s arms so they were together behind his back, she lowered him to the ground so she could kneed on a sensitive pressure point that would keep him down while she found out how many more there were in this invasion.
Buffy pulled the listening device out of Eliot’s ear and put it next to her head. She heard somebody giving the team instructions and saying that he’d figure out a way to rescue them. She looked at the gobsmacked team and asked, “How do I talk back to him?”
Being the most pragmatic of the bunch, Eliot knew that the only way to get out of this with minimal damage was to let Nate come and try to bullshit the woman into either helping or getting out of their way. Maybe a little cooperation would help sway her to their side. “Put it in your ear and just talk,” he explained.
“Hey, Mr. Voice-in-my-head,” she cut him off, “If you don’t want to pick up your people at the local police department, I suggest you get your butt over here and talk to me face-to-face.”
Feeling the strength in the guy beneath her, Buffy used double zipties to keep him in place. Then she waited…
~~~~~~
A few minutes later…
There was a knock on Lam’s door and the bouncer stuck his head inside to tell Buffy she had a visitor. When he saw the people tied up, he raised an eyebrow, looked at her to see if she had everything under control, then escorted the man into the room. “I’ll check on you in five,” he promised on his way out.
“He’s so protective of me and the boss,” Buffy remarked fondly. “I’d hate to tell him that he has to break your legs because you tried to hurt either one of us.”
Nate took a deep breath, then decided to risk the con by telling the truth. Who knows, it might help; stranger things could happen. “Your boss isn’t a good guy. We have evidence that he uses blackmail and extortion to force people to help him, then he destroys their lives anyway.”
“Lam’s had a tough life and has made some monumentally bad choices in the past, but he’s not evil anymore,” Buffy defended the man who kept her from destroying herself after Dawn’s death. He was looking for redemption, and he decided to start by helping the Slayer.
Once he convinced her that Dawn wouldn’t want her throwing her life away, he shared his life story with her, warts and all. A part of her - the cynical part - thought he only helped her so that she’d side with him if the time ever came where he needed a Slayer on his side. But she didn’t have any better place to be, so she stuck around for a few days. That grew into a couple weeks, which grew to six months.
After all that, she thought of him as the big brother she never had. She would defend him like she would defend any other family.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t save him from an unscrupulous business owner in Las Vegas. As strong of a Slayer as she was, she couldn’t go up against the likes of Wolfram & Hart. If Lam didn’t play the front man for Zeke’s operations, Zeke would let Evil Inc. know where their prodigal lawyer ran off to.
If that happened, Lindsey Anson McDonald - Lam for short - would be shoved into a hell dimension where they would torture him for months or years.
“Lam?” Nate asked, confused by the name.
“My boss,” Buffy clarified. “Who’s office we’re in right now.”
“Just look at our evidence. You’ll see the pain he’s caused for years along the strip,” Nate urged.
“Years?” Suddenly a light went off in her head and she figured out who their real target was. “Then you have to be talking about Zeke. He’s the one that forced Lam into being his legit ‘partner’ so he can do his illegal stuff in the shadows. If you want to take that asshole down, I’ll be more than happy to help you…providing you find a way to keep him from hurting Lam. Even better, with the majority of his public businesses being in Lam’s name, it’ll make it easier to dismantle a good portion of his empire.”
“Assuming that your boss goes along with it,” Nate said. Her easy turn in attitude was a little disconcerting.
“He’ll do it,” Buffy replied confidently. “Anything to be free of Zeke.”
Days later…
Fortunately for Lindsey, Zeke was more used to blackmailing regular humans, or he would have had better contingency plans for telling Wolfram & Hart about their missing lawyer. A quick break in at a bank to steal the contents of a safety deposit box, and some delusion-causing drugs administered to the man before he was turned over to the police and nobody believed anything he tried to claim about anybody.
Buffy and Eliot worked together to deal with Zeke’s enforcers, and dismantle the parts of his illegal operation that Lindsey and Buffy knew about.
More than once, he caught her checking him out. Given the way she talked about her boss, he didn’t think she had similar thoughts about Lindsey. And since they looked so much alike, he was curious. After one particularly exciting fight with some of Zeke’s crew, she was giving him that hungry look again, so he figured the time to ask his question was right. “What’s different between me and Lindsey? You never look at him like he’s a steak and you haven’t eaten in days…not like you are looking at me right now.”
She stalked over and got into his personal space. He fought to keep his body from reacting, but if she kept it up much longer, he’d lose that fight. “He’s my brother by circumstance. While you two look similar, you are different men. He’s brains and you’re brawn. I happen to find brawn sexy,” she finished, running her hand along his arm.
“Good enough for me,” he said, leaning down to kiss her passionately.
“Let’s go to my place,” she suggested breathlessly between kisses.
“Great idea,” he agreed, driving her nuts with the kisses he was giving her neck and collarbone. If he kept that up, they wouldn’t make it to the car, much less her apartment.
With a little bit of erratic driving - and a lot of luck that they weren’t pulled over for it - they finally made it. The next day they could look for the buttons of the clothes they ripped off on their way to the bedroom.
A while later, Buffy laid back on her sheets trying to catch her breath. “I still think you’re the evil twin,” she said with a satisfied grin. “Thank goodness I like my men with a little darkness in them.”
A/N: Yeah, she let her slutty side out and slept with a guy she barely knew, but I know I can’t blame her.
Alt Title: Day 18 - Post-Slayer Love, the Beginning
Author: mmooch
Summary: After months of healing, Buffy finds a man to help her learn to love again.
Crossover: Leverage.
Rating: FR-15.
Word count: 2139.
Challenge: for the livejournal 2013 August Fic-a-Day Challenge.
Timeline: AU post-‘The Gift’ for BtVS; vague for Leverage.
Warning: OOCness on Buffy’s part, but really, who’s going to complain when it gets her smoochies with Eliot?
A/N: Let me know if you have any ideas for fandoms that you’d like Buffy paired with (male or female).
Disclaimer: BtVS/AtS characters belong to Joss Whedon/Mutant Enemy. Leverage characters belong to John Rogers, Chris Downey, and TNT. I claim no rights to any copyrighted material. Please do not copy or take this story without my permission.
Secessus Nightclub
6 months after ‘The Gift’…
“I’m gonna go to the back and get changed so I can go home,” Buffy called out to her replacement behind the bar. She was a bartender at one of those gimmick bars; part dancer/part cocktail artist - or whatever the term was.
Maybe she should have felt guilty for doing this instead of patrolling, but after the year she just went through, she just couldn’t drum up the emotions to care. As strange as it seemed, this helped her to reconnect to the world in a way that nothing she tried before could. She had even started to check around Vegas for vamp nests to take out. Not that she had any plans to become the Hellmouth’s Slayer again, but she’d help out where she could.
As for jobs, it was a lot better than being a waitress at a greasy diner, and worlds better than Doublemeat. Sure, some of the guys tried to get grabby, but the bouncers were good about stopping it from going too far. She didn’t mind letting them handle it, either. Only one person here knew about her past, and that was her boss, Lam - or Lambykins when she was feeling playful with him. Despite his past, she liked the guy, and he treated her like the little sister he never had. It was nice to have family again.
When she walked into the secure women’s locker-room, Buffy’s eyebrow went up to see a blonde stranger digging into the uniform pile.
“Uh, can I help you?” she asked.
Parker looked up, startled by the intrusion. She quickly used the lie they had come up with and said, “Just started tonight and looking for a clean uniform.”
Seeing as how Lam kept her informed about the new hires, Buffy seriously doubted that. “Yeah, see…I don’t believe you. I’m gonna have to take you to my boss’ office, and let him decide what to do with you,” she said, putting enough steel in her voice to make sure the other woman didn’t think she had any choice.
“You’re taking me to the office, now?!” Parker emphasized strangely.
That made Buffy’s spidey-sense tingle. “Yeah,” she replied suspiciously.
~~~~~~
Hallway
They only got a few steps away from the changing room before they were stopped by another stranger - a brunette this time. She went up to Buffy and using some weird foreign accent asked, “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the parking lot?”
Knowing that the parking lot was in the opposite direction, and given the odd timing of the encounter, Buffy’s bullshit meter spiked hard. “Hmm, this is interesting. Friend of yours?” she asked her blonde ‘prisoner’.
Parker’s eyes widened in shock at two of them getting caught by the same person. That almost never happened. “What? No! I don’t know who she is!”
Buffy immediately grabbed Sophie with her left hand while keeping a tight grip on Parker with her right. “Guess then you won’t mind getting to know her while you wait for my boss to talk to you both. C’mon,” she ordered them as she started down the hallway again.
“Pretty strong for such a tiny girl,” Sophie commented, trying to give Eliot a heads up that the person who caught them could be a fighter.
Glaring at the brunette, Buffy growled, “Do you want your arm to get broken? Calling me a ‘girl’ in that condescending voice is a good way to go about it if you are. Let’s go see who else we’ll find in the office… You know, the one you’re trying to keep me away from?” It annoyed her that it took this long for her to figure out what they were up to. She should have gotten it from the ‘office, now’ comment from earlier.
~~~~~~
Lam’s office
Opening up the door, Buffy saw somebody most obviously not Lam playing around with his computer. Given the other two intruders, she decided to act first and ask forgiveness later if she was wrong. She let go of the brunette just long enough to pick up a baseball from a nearby display stand and throw it at the black guy’s head to knock him out for a few minutes.
Then she reached into her pocket and grabbed two zipties to secure the women so she dealt with the guy messing with Lam’s computer. Something told her they were a slippery group, so she secured each limb separately. After they were all tied up, she began her interrogation, “Is there some reason you’re trying to break into my boss’ office? I don’t like it when people try to hurt him.”
None of them said a word. She sighed and said, “Okay, if you don’t want to tell me, you can always tell him or the police.”
Buffy saw the slight widening of their eyes and felt the tiniest breeze from behind her, telling her that somebody just came in through the door. Since they didn’t announce themselves, she assumed it was another intruder. Quickly pivoting on her foot, she grabbed the new one by the throat and pinned him against the wall.
“You know, it isn’t nice to sneak up on a girl,” she mock-complained.
Eliot was stunned at her moves. “How did you--?” he managed to choke out.
“I’m just good that way,” she quipped before studying him a bit closer. “You know, you kind of remind me of my boss - ‘cept you're scruffier and have that dangerous, sexy vibe. He's more like a preppy hottie - with just a hint of danger to him. Whereas you practically have billboard sign over your head, screaming 'Danger'! Maybe you're his evil twin or something,” she theorized, thinking about the different ways it could be true.
Then she heard a tiny voice talking. Huh, why had she missed that? Man, she was off her game tonight. Lam was never going to let her live that down…if he found out. Twisting the hottie’s arms so they were together behind his back, she lowered him to the ground so she could kneed on a sensitive pressure point that would keep him down while she found out how many more there were in this invasion.
Buffy pulled the listening device out of Eliot’s ear and put it next to her head. She heard somebody giving the team instructions and saying that he’d figure out a way to rescue them. She looked at the gobsmacked team and asked, “How do I talk back to him?”
Being the most pragmatic of the bunch, Eliot knew that the only way to get out of this with minimal damage was to let Nate come and try to bullshit the woman into either helping or getting out of their way. Maybe a little cooperation would help sway her to their side. “Put it in your ear and just talk,” he explained.
“Hey, Mr. Voice-in-my-head,” she cut him off, “If you don’t want to pick up your people at the local police department, I suggest you get your butt over here and talk to me face-to-face.”
Feeling the strength in the guy beneath her, Buffy used double zipties to keep him in place. Then she waited…
~~~~~~
A few minutes later…
There was a knock on Lam’s door and the bouncer stuck his head inside to tell Buffy she had a visitor. When he saw the people tied up, he raised an eyebrow, looked at her to see if she had everything under control, then escorted the man into the room. “I’ll check on you in five,” he promised on his way out.
“He’s so protective of me and the boss,” Buffy remarked fondly. “I’d hate to tell him that he has to break your legs because you tried to hurt either one of us.”
Nate took a deep breath, then decided to risk the con by telling the truth. Who knows, it might help; stranger things could happen. “Your boss isn’t a good guy. We have evidence that he uses blackmail and extortion to force people to help him, then he destroys their lives anyway.”
“Lam’s had a tough life and has made some monumentally bad choices in the past, but he’s not evil anymore,” Buffy defended the man who kept her from destroying herself after Dawn’s death. He was looking for redemption, and he decided to start by helping the Slayer.
Once he convinced her that Dawn wouldn’t want her throwing her life away, he shared his life story with her, warts and all. A part of her - the cynical part - thought he only helped her so that she’d side with him if the time ever came where he needed a Slayer on his side. But she didn’t have any better place to be, so she stuck around for a few days. That grew into a couple weeks, which grew to six months.
After all that, she thought of him as the big brother she never had. She would defend him like she would defend any other family.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t save him from an unscrupulous business owner in Las Vegas. As strong of a Slayer as she was, she couldn’t go up against the likes of Wolfram & Hart. If Lam didn’t play the front man for Zeke’s operations, Zeke would let Evil Inc. know where their prodigal lawyer ran off to.
If that happened, Lindsey Anson McDonald - Lam for short - would be shoved into a hell dimension where they would torture him for months or years.
“Lam?” Nate asked, confused by the name.
“My boss,” Buffy clarified. “Who’s office we’re in right now.”
“Just look at our evidence. You’ll see the pain he’s caused for years along the strip,” Nate urged.
“Years?” Suddenly a light went off in her head and she figured out who their real target was. “Then you have to be talking about Zeke. He’s the one that forced Lam into being his legit ‘partner’ so he can do his illegal stuff in the shadows. If you want to take that asshole down, I’ll be more than happy to help you…providing you find a way to keep him from hurting Lam. Even better, with the majority of his public businesses being in Lam’s name, it’ll make it easier to dismantle a good portion of his empire.”
“Assuming that your boss goes along with it,” Nate said. Her easy turn in attitude was a little disconcerting.
“He’ll do it,” Buffy replied confidently. “Anything to be free of Zeke.”
Days later…
Fortunately for Lindsey, Zeke was more used to blackmailing regular humans, or he would have had better contingency plans for telling Wolfram & Hart about their missing lawyer. A quick break in at a bank to steal the contents of a safety deposit box, and some delusion-causing drugs administered to the man before he was turned over to the police and nobody believed anything he tried to claim about anybody.
Buffy and Eliot worked together to deal with Zeke’s enforcers, and dismantle the parts of his illegal operation that Lindsey and Buffy knew about.
More than once, he caught her checking him out. Given the way she talked about her boss, he didn’t think she had similar thoughts about Lindsey. And since they looked so much alike, he was curious. After one particularly exciting fight with some of Zeke’s crew, she was giving him that hungry look again, so he figured the time to ask his question was right. “What’s different between me and Lindsey? You never look at him like he’s a steak and you haven’t eaten in days…not like you are looking at me right now.”
She stalked over and got into his personal space. He fought to keep his body from reacting, but if she kept it up much longer, he’d lose that fight. “He’s my brother by circumstance. While you two look similar, you are different men. He’s brains and you’re brawn. I happen to find brawn sexy,” she finished, running her hand along his arm.
“Good enough for me,” he said, leaning down to kiss her passionately.
“Let’s go to my place,” she suggested breathlessly between kisses.
“Great idea,” he agreed, driving her nuts with the kisses he was giving her neck and collarbone. If he kept that up, they wouldn’t make it to the car, much less her apartment.
With a little bit of erratic driving - and a lot of luck that they weren’t pulled over for it - they finally made it. The next day they could look for the buttons of the clothes they ripped off on their way to the bedroom.
A while later, Buffy laid back on her sheets trying to catch her breath. “I still think you’re the evil twin,” she said with a satisfied grin. “Thank goodness I like my men with a little darkness in them.”
A/N: Yeah, she let her slutty side out and slept with a guy she barely knew, but I know I can’t blame her.