Title: A Life Less Ordinary (1/5)
Authors: Starway Man and Nodakskip
Email: theop at kew dot hotkey dot net dot au, Nodakskip at aol dot com
Disclaimer: None of the Buffy or Angel references belong to us, but rather Joss and his gang of idi...er, geniuses. Anything taken directly from the TV episodes belongs to the writers in question.
Warnings: There is some violence, angst, character death and bad language in this one.
Rating: R
Category: Buffy/Angel crossover,Super AU
Author Notes 1: Thanks to Francis Eugene for invaluable suggestions and beta reading services. No offence or disrespect is meant to anyone of any religious persuasion with some of the subjects mentioned in this fanfic.
Author Notes 2: This story is initially set in BtVS season 3, during an AU version of "Lovers Walk". It then progresses to roughly the time of "Enemies". There is a little C/W femslash at the start, but not too much and not for long.
Summary: What if the whole fluke thing had happened somewhat differently? An African god decides to play around with the life of Xander Harris.
Spike's Abandoned Factory, Sunnydale, California
Wednesday November 25th, 1998
8:23 pm
Cordelia Chase tried to sit up on the decrepit old bed, her head throbbing with pain. "Uhh, feels just like that time when I got knocked out at a Neiman-Marcus sale. So, what are our options?" the young woman asked.
Willow Rosenberg didn't look hopeful. "Well, I figure either...I refuse to do that stupid love spell of his and Spike kills us, or I do the spell and Spike kills us."
Cordelia stupidly tried to shake her head, and closed her eyes while trying to deal with these scenarios. "Any other option?"
"He's so drunk he forgets about us, and we starve to death," Willow said in defeat. "That's sort of the best one."
"Willow, we're not gonna die," Cordelia managed to get out. "If Spike's acting like such a drunken idiot he'll get careless at some point, and then we'll make our move." She moaned, "Well, as long as that doesn't involve standing up..."
Willow tried to gently clean the sticky blood coming out of her companion's head. The redhead leaned in a little too close, and the feelings they'd both had for the last six weeks or so resurfaced.
It was the strangest thing, really; Xander had been unable to make it to Willow's house back around Homecoming, and his girlfriend had shown up instead that night for what had been called the 'clothes fluke'. Willow just looked down when she understood what Cordy wanted, "We're not supposed to."
"Yeah, but the rules kinda go out the window during impending death situations," the cheerleader pointed out.
Willow was willing to go along with that, and so they kissed. Intensely. Cordelia reached her arm around the redhead as she lay back, and Willow put her arm around Cordy's shoulder to tenderly hold her close as they made out.
Unfortunately, that was the exact moment the rescue party came down the stairs.
"You've got to be shitting me!" Xander Harris exclaimed in disbelief, even as his traitorous body got turned on by the sight of two hot girls doing...that.
Willow immediately rolled off of Cordelia and looked in shock at the two males. "Oz!"
Cordelia reacted in very much the same way. "Oh, God. Xander-!"
"Huh," Daniel 'Oz' Osborne said, looking stunned for once in his life. "Not what I was expecting."
Xander in the meantime still looked shocked. "My girlfriend and my, my...best friend..." He suddenly looked angry and betrayed as he dropped the stake he was carrying onto the cement floor, and then turned and stormed out the way he'd come.
Cordelia forced herself up to go after him. "Xander, wait!"
"What the hell for?" the young man shouted over his shoulder. Then he mumbled to himself, "No wonder sh-"
Xander didn't look back as he headed up the steps, and in his emotionally turbulent state he didn't hear the creaking of the wood till it was too late. The fifth step before the top gave way under his feet mid-mutter. The others yelled his name as he fell down into the newly-created hole.
Cordelia ignored her own pain as she climbed the stairs and looked down into the hole. What she saw was horrifying. "Xander!"
Her boyfriend was lying on his back, unmoving, with a piece of rusted rebar sticking out of his lower torso.
"Well, this just...sucks," Xander rasped out, before he slipped into blackness.
Sunnydale Memorial Hospital, Sunnydale
The next afternoon
"What the hell do you mean, I'm not on the list!?" Cordelia demanded of the nurse. A large bandage was now covering a lot of her left forehead.
"Exactly what I said," the older woman told her. "Mr. Harris has made it quite clear that he doesn't want to see you."
"But I'm his girlfriend!" Cordelia said, very upset, as she tried to force her way past, only to be stopped by a security guard.
"Please. We don't need to make a scene here, Miss Chase," the balding guard told her as he pulled her back.
"Let go of me, you rent-a-cop!" the fashion princess screamed. "Or I'll have my father get you fired!"
Willow tried to keep the peace. "It's okay, Cordy, I'll go talk to him and-"
"And you would be?" the nurse asked as she held her clipboard.
"Willow Rosenberg," the female teen said right away.
"I'm sorry, but you're not on the list either."
"What!?" Willow demanded. "But...I'm Willow! I'm his best friend!"
"Not according to what Mr. Harris was saying earlier." The nurse just shook her head and turned away.
Street outside Crestview Cemetery, Sunnydale
Three days later
Willow looked worried. "So, Xander's gonna be released soon?"
Her best friend nodded. "That's the rumor at the hospital lately. I mean he lost a lot of blood but none of his vitals were punctured, so they're gonna let him go home." Buffy hesitated for a moment. "You said you spoke to him, right?"
The Jewish girl looked down. "If you count him yelling at me to get the hell out of his room before he called security? Yeah..."
"I didn't want to upset him by asking but, um, has Cordy talked to Xander yet?" Buffy asked somewhat more cautiously.
"She snuck in yesterday as well," Willow replied, still downcast. "That...it didn't go too well either."
"Yelling?" the Slayer asked a bit fearfully.
"Oh, yeah!" Willow told her. "I tried to hold back that nasty old head nurse. But, um, I did hear Xander's mom calling her a slut more than once."
"Damn," Buffy whispered. It was like their little gang was now disintegrating all around her. "And Oz?"
Willow almost cried as she said, "I never knew there was anything inside me that could feel this bad. For the longest time, I didn't know what I wanted. I, I wanted everything, even something I once thought I could never want! And now...I just...I just want him to talk to me again."
"You gotta give him some time," Buffy told her best friend. "And be prepared for some major groveling."
"Oh, I'm ready. To get Oz back, I'm all over groveling," Willow said quickly.
Xander's hospital room, Sunnydale
Later that night
"How you doing, Harris?"
Xander looked away from the TV in surprise. "Faith? What are you doing here?"
"Just got done with patrol," the brunette Chosen One replied. "Thought I'd come see how you were doing."
Xander just looked at her for a moment. "I really don't have to answer that, do I?"
"Guess not," Faith said with a shrug as she came closer. "To be brutally honest, I always figured you'd be the cheater-"
"ME?!" Xander yelled.
"You're a guy, ain'tcha? Stands to reason." Faith shrugged again.
"Maybe. But I'm not that kind of guy." Xander continued sarcastically, "And hey, the situation? The low-class guy lands the rich, perfect high-class girl...so he must be the villain of the story?"
"If this was a Lifetime made for TV movie," Faith agreed. "Go figure. The boyfriends always go nuts or cheat." She sat at the edge of the bed. "I hear you're back at school soon?"
"Yeah, tomorrow in fact. And can you just see my huge excitement about that?" Xander asked with heavy sarcasm. "Lemme ask you something, Faith. What exactly am I supposed to do? Just go back into that library and act like everything's fine? That I didn't almost die, and that my two special girls aren't a couple of dykes who screwed me over?"
"I know what you mean. But hey, you have to have more friends than just those two losers," Faith said.
"Apart from you, Giles and Buffy? Sadly, not so much," Xander admitted. "That's my situation in a nutshell. I mean, I know people. And I'm used to how everyone on campus treats me. But school will not be fun tomorrow, y'know? The looks, the...oh, the hell with it. The Willow I knew is dead and gone, and Cordy and I probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway."
The temple of the Oracles, Los Angeles, California
The same time
"This is not at all how it should be," the male Oracle said in great consternation.
"The plans of the Powers are now in jeopardy," the female Oracle agreed.
"The Powers? Please! Don't you mean that outcast who will one day call itself 'Jasmine'?" a new voice rang out behind them.
The brother and sister whirled around and beheld a strange sight. In front of them, wearing a tribal mask, was a male figure they recognized as the West African entity known as Eshu. He was capricious being, said to serve as a messenger between the gods and human beings, the god of travellers and roadways, and he was not someone they were pleased to see.
The female shouted, "How dare you enter this sacred space!"
Eshu appeared nonchalant. "Well, since I am sacred, at least to some, why not?"
The male Oracle glowered. "You actually have the nerve to...who do you think you are?"
The divine messenger cocked his masked head to one side. "I know perfectly well who I am. Who do you think you are?"
The woman said snootily, "We are that which does not appreciate being talked to by someone like yourself!"
Her brother added, "Someone who knows no better than to come here on a whim-"
"A whim?" Eshu interrupted, a sarcastic smile somehow visible through the mask, which also hinted at tones of darkness. "I am here on anything but. Listen carefully, as I came here to inform you two idiots of certain facts. First, know that you are both being manipulated like puppets and will die by the hand of the demon Vocah soon enough. Secondly, you will not attempt to alter the sequence of events I have now set into motion on the Hellmouth. My favorite mortal from six years into the future...will have his dying wish granted."
The Oracles just looked at one another as Eshu vanished in a short burst of light. Even though they were the agents of the Powers That Be, this duo was neither omniscient nor omnipotent, despite the image they liked to put forward to the general public.
They were able to sense events, whether in the past, present or future. They could even manipulate time to a certain extent, as Eshu had hinted, with their ability to create temporal folds. Thus the Oracles used their powers and learned that the trickster god had been responsible for Willow and Cordelia entering 'more than friends' territory.
They also learned that Eshu hadn't lied: the brother and sister foresaw their own murder as Vocah killed them with his scythe. They perceived how this had been permitted to happen by 'Jasmine' as part of its long-term plans to assume physical form in the mortal plane.
The lights in the temple went out; the Oracles were never seen or heard from again.
Sunnydale High, Sunnydale
Monday November 30th, 1998
8:43 am
Xander slowly got out of Oz's van, as the short black-haired musician quickly came around from the driver's side. "You okay, man?"
"Peachy with a side of keen," Harris grunted, as they made their way from the parking lot towards the campus. "And hey, Oz? Thanks for the lift."
"Least I could do. I can't believe they kicked you out of that hospital so soon," Daniel shook his head.
"What can I say? My parents' insurance couldn't cover an extended stay," Xander hissed suddenly, holding his side as the two boys walked along.
"Stitches still holding?" Oz asked in his stoic but caring way.
"Yeah. I'll live," Xander grunted again. "How you holding up after...everything, last week?"
Oz frowned as they headed towards the front of the building. Eventually he said, "Not sure. But I actually lasted without thinking about Willow for around two minutes there. New record for me."
Xander snorted with laughter, then winced in agony at once. "You know the old saying, Oz. So please, don't make me laugh..."
By this time they had reached the interior of the school and the two teens parted company. The werewolf went to his locker where an anxiously waiting Willow tried to talk to him. But Oz blew her off, saying that he needed some alone time and it wasn't his problem if she wanted to talk in order to feel better about herself and the things she'd done.
Xander's morning adventure wasn't so uneventful. As he headed for his own locker he saw Cordelia headed towards him. She was looking damned hot in her brown leather skirt and jacket with matching top, and alligator high-heel d'Orsay pumps with a matching bag from Prada. ( Well, well, well. It looks like Queen C has definitely decided to pull out all the stops today- ) Before Xander could complete that thought, he was violently turned around by one of the second-string meatheads from the football team named John Lee Walker, and shoved against the wall.
"So you've actually come back, huh? I can't believe they let a cheater like you back into the same school as Cordelia Chase!"
The stitches were threatening to break open, and Xander was in a world of pain. But finally he managed to get past it and wheezed in confusion, "What-?"
"Come on, Harris, there's no point you trying to deny it. Everybody knows you got caught cheating on her, and that's why Cordelia dumped you last week. I oughta kick your ass right here and now!"
Xander honestly wasn't sure if he was hearing things correctly. ( Unbelievable! She cheats on me, plus I end up with a rebar through my stomach. And yet, somehow, I end up the bad guy here? That's it, I've had enough! I don't care anymore how much the Hellmouth has it in for me, I'm done being Sunnydale's butt monkey! ) he thought to himself in angry disbelief.
"There a problem here?" a throaty female voice interjected.
Both Xander and John Lee turned around to face Faith the Vampire Slayer, one in surprise, the other in annoyance. "Beat it will ya sweetheart. This don't concern you," the jock demanded.
Xander nodded weakly. "It'll be all right, Faith. I'll, uh, I'll see you in the library later. Okay?"
Ms. LeHane smirked, knowing that was purely and simply idiotic male ego speaking. Luckily, she was a hot chick with superpowers and so didn't have to listen to that sort of crap. "You want me to get rid of this jerk? Just gimme a hint, and he's gone..."
"Hey!" John Lee finally let Xander go to get into Faith's face. "I told you nicely to get lost-"
His voice was cut off as Faith wrapped a hand around his throat and effortlessly lifted the football player off the ground. "Now, I'm thinkin' that what we've got here? It's a failure to communicate," the young woman purred.
John Lee looked down in disbelief at the brunette bombshell manhandling him like a rag doll. Then he noticed the crowd watching them, including Cordelia and her entourage. The male teenager's pride and reputation took a savage blow, one that he knew they would never recover from before the end of senior year.
( Damn it! The other guys on the team are never gonna let me live this down! ) "Btsh..." he gurgled, unable to form the word properly.
Faith understood him though, perfectly well. Sending the jock a grin full of toothy humor, the Slayer casually tossed him away and linked arms with Xander, walking him down the corridor.
Harmony turned to the other Cordettes at once. "Oh my God, who would have believed it!? Harris went from Cordelia to that...that skank?"
"Well, he was always low-class scum. You finally came to your senses, right Cordy?" asked a girl named Gwen.
"Right," Cordelia said hesitantly. ( Darn it, I was hoping to get a chance to explain all this to Xander in private...I mean, nothing personal, but please. I do have a reputation to maintain! ) "Come on, let's get out of here. Coach Carson wanted us to work on our cheerleading pyramid today, remember?" With that the gaggle of gossiping schoolgirls walked off down the hall.
Later, when Cordy confronted Faith in private about that little scene, all the brunette Chosen One said was, "Hey, not my fault you threw away a good piece of ass just because you tried out for the other team. Still, honestly? Red seems a little...vanilla...for my liking. Now if you want a taste of some real booty, C – my door's always open."
Ears burning, Ms. Chase stalked away. When she learned that Willow had been trying to beg Oz to forgive her and take her back, and it was clearly and definitely over between them, Cordelia began to realize what a complete mess she'd gotten herself into.
Xander glared at her the moment she showed her face in the library. Buffy was disapproving, Giles was indifferent, and the other two weren't even acknowledging her existence anymore. As for Angel...oh, hell, who really cared what he thought? Hottie hunk or not, he was just a mopey vampire, and one that could go evil at any moment at that.
The cheerleader suddenly understood how one thoughtless, careless moment had destroyed all the real and meaningful friendships she'd forged over the last year or so. All she had left now were the airheaded sheep – who pretended to hang on her every word, but in fact liked her only for her money and social position.
( How do I get myself into these things? ) Cordelia thought miserably. ( More importantly, how do I fix this? )
The Bronze, Sunnydale
Monday February 1st, 1999
7:15 pm
After one last desperate attempt during Christmas, Willow had finally given up trying to get back together with her ex-boyfriend. The chasm between them had been bridged, granted, but after a long talk with Oz she had decided that deep down he wasn't what she was really looking for in a significant other.
Otherwise, why the heck would Willow have been making out with another girl behind his back...and one who'd been her bitter enemy for practically all their lives?
Cordelia's life hadn't been flowers and candy, either. Despite all her attempts to stifle it, the gossip that she had been cheating on Xander instead of the other way around had circulated throughout the school. Oz had mentioned to his friends that Xander had been with him during that night in question, and she had no way to refute that. After hearing of Oz's side of the story, and seeing the obvious injuries Harris had suffered, even the most dim-witted student on campus could smell something fishy. Irreparable damage had thus been done to her position as the head of the elite. But still, curiously enough, no one paid any attention to the wild and unbelievable rumor that Cordelia had been caught making out with another girl.
Be that as it may Xander and Faith had been hanging out a lot lately. Unfortunately, Buffy had gotten a little annoyed with Xander when she hadn't been able to get him and Willow to make up. Eventually Harris had decided he just didn't want to deal with Buffy's annoying 'me Slayer, do as I say' attitude anymore. And since Oz had grown more and more distant from the Scooby gang as time went on, who else was there to hang with?
Giles? Deadboy? Nosiree, thank you very much.
That was why tonight, the night when the Hellmouth was scheduled to open thanks to the Sisterhood of Jhe, Faith and Xander, two teenagers with backgrounds more similar than they knew, were at the Bronze. They sat at a table sipping their drinks, listening to the music, and observing the crowd. The band was loud, the way it always was, and Harris had to speak up in order to be heard.
"Look at 'em all, Slay-gal. They're just hanging out here, same as always, completely clueless about the real world all around them. The other day, y'know, I was trying to remember what it was like to be one of these ignorant schlubs you see all around you. And I swear, Faith, I got the shock of my life when I realized the closest I could get was when I staked Jesse," Xander pointed to a section of the nightclub, "right over there."
Faith just stared at her companion and was about to reply when Angel came over. "Faith, Xander. I'm looking for Buffy, have either of you seen her?" he asked.
Xander shrugged. "Library, last I saw."
Angel looked worried, "Something's happening. Very soon, if not right now. I've seen portents."
"What kind?" Faith demanded.
"Apocalyptic ones." The vampire turned to Harris. "If you see her, tell Buffy I'm looking for her. Otherwise, it's probably best if you stay out of harm's way for tonight."
Xander looked insulted as Angel turned and left. "Sure thing, Bossy the cow!" he muttered.
Faith grinned. "He's wearing enough leather to qualify, ya think?"
Harris ignored that and stood up. "What the hell, want a lift to the library? I'm sure Giles will have another life-or-death donut run he'll need me for by now."
Faith smirked again. "Hey, why not?"
The two teenagers went outside, and as Xander started his uncle's car his foot slipped off the clutch. The '57 Chevy Bel Air lurched forward and crashed into the car right in front, resulting in some slight bumper damage and a broken taillight on the other vehicle.
"Oh, God! Okay, okay, let's stay calm, it was just a little fender bender..." Xander started to babble. Unfortunately, the school psycho known as Jack O'Toole got out of the other car. "Oh, crap!" Harris gulped in fear as soon as he saw him.
Faith decided to deal with this herself as she started to get out of the Harris-mobile. Once out of the car she said to the new arrival, "You okay?"
Jack didn't appear to notice her. "Come on, Harris, step up and take it like a man. It's time for me to kick your ass into a brand-new shape!"
Xander got out of the car as well. "Uh, Jack, look, I can cover the damages. I don't have insurance in the strictest sense of the word, of course, but I do have a little money. The important thing is that we're all okay and we can work this out like, like reasonable..." Jack pulled out a very long hunting knife and held it up, "...frontiersmen?"
Faith didn't even have to think about it. A Slayer-strength kick sent the knife named 'Katie' sailing away, and then she and O'Toole instantly went at it.
Xander just gaped as the vicious fight broke out. "What are you?" Faith demanded in between punches. "'Cause I already know you ain't human!"
Jack looked surprised before he wordlessly raised his shirt for a moment and both Xander and Faith could see a number of bullet holes across his gut. "Drive-by three weeks ago," O'Toole said simply.
"Oh man, zombies again? Hey, didn't we already do this at Buffy's welcome-home party last year?" Xander turned his head skywards and asked this of someone up above.
Faith and Jack ignored him and quickly got back to fighting. Xander was just about to jump in himself when all of a sudden a flashlight shone into Jack's face the moment before he was going to punch Faith in the jaw.
"Hey! What's going on here?" the patrol cop demanded. Then the officer recognized Jack. "O'Toole? Well, now..." He withdrew his gun, and pointed it at the zombie. "Guess this is my lucky night, huh? Assume the position, I finally got you on an assault and battery rap..."
The policeman, still pointing his sidearm at the zombie, came forward whilst withdrawing his handcuffs. Jack didn't move, though. Faith looked briefly uncertain about what to do. Officially, this was her jurisdiction, but how to explain that to a meddling flatfoot?
"Uh, officer? I think there's a couple of gang members high on PCP coming this way," Xander's voice briefly distracted both the Slayer and the beat cop.
Jack took advantage of this fact to try to run for it. But the policeman aimed his gun and shouted, "O'Toole! Stop or I'll shoot!" Jack kept going as the cop opened fire, chasing after the reanimated punk.
Faith again looked unsure. "What do you think, we go after them?"
Xander nodded, "Better safe than sorry." Then he spied something that had fallen on the ground during Jack and Faith's little tussle. Harris picked it up and examined it. "Huh, a chicken's foot. Souvenir!"
Main Street, Sunnydale
Wednesday March 31st, 1999
6:24 pm
Things hadn't improved much in the last two months on just about any front you'd care to mention.
Xander never lost his virginity to Faith that night. After the apocalypse and Jack O'Toole had been taken care of, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce had shown up and the new Watcher had been instantly smitten with Cordelia. The girl had been mildly attracted to him too, despite her newly-acknowledged attraction to women, and started flirting with him whenever Xander was around. She'd become utterly pissed though when Xander hadn't reacted. He was beyond caring about Cordelia and her little games; he didn't talk to her at all anymore. He barely spoke to Willow, Buffy or Giles either.
But Xander had gotten more and more worried about Faith. Ever since that idiot Allan Finch had shown up in the middle of a vamp combat zone and Faith accidentally staked him, he had sensed the brunette Slayer slipping further and further away, becoming more solitary than ever. They never talked anymore like they used to. And the less said about a disastrous attempt at an intervention Xander had made, the better.
Curious about her activities, last night Harris had tailed Faith to an uptown residential building instead of the bug-infested motel he had thought she was staying at. It had been pretty obvious she was now living there...and that she might have met privately with the Mayor, because he'd spied Wilkins leaving the building not long afterwards.
Xander wasn't sure yet what to do with this information. He knew he had to do something, but what? Narc on Faith to the others? Sure, like he knew that was going to help in any way.
As he walked along during that warm spring night, pondering what to do about Faith, the young man saw her and Angel marching down the street with matching grim expressions. Xander said suspiciously, "Hey, guys! Where have you been? Faith, I've been looking all over for you-"
Angel casually punched him in the jaw without even breaking stride.
Now, whatever else he was, Xander wasn't a vampire or a Slayer. He simply didn't have their supernatural strength or speed, and so Harris fell limply to the ground, out cold. Faith didn't even look at him.
"That guy really bugs me," Angel muttered, as they left Xander behind in their dust.
Had either of them looked back towards the unconscious youth they might have noticed the blood starting to leak out of his split lip. Some dribbled down his chin and, as fate would have it, came into contact with the chicken foot 'souvenir' Xander had been wearing around his neck as a good luck charm lately.
A red and white glow seemed to surround Xander's body for a moment when the talisman activated itself. As the psychopomp conduit did its job, Harris continued to lay there, sprawled out on the street, unconscious.
Unmoving.
Changed.
Not far from the Master's underground cavern, Sunnydale
April, 1999
As Xander wired together the bomb detonator, he briefly marveled at how different things were now.
After Angel had hit him on the street that night, in his mind young Mr. Harris had awoken to find himself in a dark room of some sort. Not only that, he'd suddenly found himself face-to-face with an older version of himself, wearing an eyepatch.
In response to Xander's demands to know where they were and what was going on, the one-eyed guy had said something about being everywhere and nowhere and that this was the first step on his journey along the Great Path or some such nonsense. The male teenager had quickly realized that despite appearances the other dude present was not his future self.
No way. There were just far too many...inconsistencies.
For crying out loud, the so-called Future Xander hadn't even seemed to care about totally violating the Temporal Prime Directive! When Xander had called him on it, the fake Harris had morphed into a much taller and thinner African male, wearing some sort of tribal mask.
Eshu, for it was he, had then burst out laughing. "Harris, even at this age, you truly are just like I remember you from five years into the future! I hate to admit it, but I've actually missed you."
Xander had then heard the whole fantastic tale from one of the deities of the Yoruba people in southwest Nigeria and the descendants of former slaves in Cuba and Brazil. He had heard how, as a Watcher in the new Council, his future self had encountered the wandering entity in Africa. Eshu had explained that Xander had provided him with over a year's worth of amusement just by being himself and the situations he'd constantly gotten into on the Dark Continent during his travels.
"But then you died in Senegal, barely 23 years old. I thought to myself, what a waste! Such talent gone, such potential lost. That is why I decided to come back and change things."
"What do you mean?" Xander had asked, not sure if he wanted to know the answer.
"Behold my first lesson to you, Harris!" Eshu had declared. Before putting a hand to the human's head, and giving him the edited highlights of life up till 2005 in a series of visions. Xander had reeled back and screamed in horrified terror, refusing to believe what he'd just seen. But that had only made the African god of divinations laugh all the more. "Farewell, Harris. And I strongly suggest you be very careful in the choices you make from now on."
At that point Xander had woken up on the sidewalk. He'd noticed the chicken foot talisman had burned itself out into a crisp. Upon deciding it hadn't all been a bad dream, Harris had decided to get pro-active.
Refusing to join the others at the library and hear Buffy's lame excuse that Angel hitting him had all been just an act, Xander had broken into the local army base and obtained some Claymore mines. He'd also broken into Decker Hardware to get some steel boxes and a few other assorted odds and ends. The teenager was a man with a plan. He'd kept a low profile and stayed away from the rest of the gang as he waited for the perfect opportunity to execute it.
When it came he'd ambushed the Mayor after the man left Faith's apartment by knocking him out with a tranq rifle. Feeling totally sickened Xander had nonetheless dismembered the politician, separating the body parts into the various boxes. He had then brought the containers here to the one underground cave he knew was shunned by the fang faces. This place where the late, unlamented Master had lived was considered forbidden territory for other vampires.
"You know, Dick," Xander said to himself, as he knew the Mayor couldn't hear him in his current state. "I have only two things to say. One, I'm eventually going to settle accounts with Overbite for almost breaking my face in half that night on the street. And two, don't you think it's ironic that Deadboy's solution to Dr. Ronald Meltzer was the inspiration for my little plan for you?"
"The thing is, Dick," Xander went on, "I know you can't be killed till Graduation Day. Granted, once you became a huge-ass snake demon, I could take you out with the original plan we came up with. But funny how I don't want all those people getting killed as collateral damage up until then. So here's hoping whatever mojo you're using to keep yourself alive will run out of juice when the big moment comes, and you won't be a problem anymore."
Xander finally finished wiring the detonator together. Then he used the Claymores to bring the house down. He would have preferred dynamite or C4, but he'd had to make do with what he could get and luckily they got the job done.
His pseudo-soldier memory bank had told Harris that the distance he'd chosen where to detonate the mines was far enough away to be safe. What it hadn't told him was that it definitely wasn't far enough away to be clean. Xander coughed and spluttered, his clothes soiled and dirty as he made his way to the sewers and then up into Sunnydale's streets.
And who should he encounter but the one and only Cordelia Chase, whose car screeched to a halt as soon as she recognized him. "Xander? What the hell happened to you?" she demanded at seeing the male teen.
He hesitated before answering, "Nothing important. I was just, uh...there was a bit of a cave-in where I was just now." Harris stared at her, ignoring Cordelia's confusion at his polite manner. Even though she had cheated on him when they'd been together, he had to do it thanks to a few of Eshu's visions. "Um, Cordelia? What are your plans for after graduation?"
Miss Chase was surprised by the question, as well as the continuing lack of her ex's usual hostile attitude. "Well...why do you ask?"
Xander knew nothing about the Chase family's IRS problems, or that Cordelia's parents were soon going to abandon her forever. But he had seen what had happened to the cheerleader by 2004. "Look, if you're planning to go to LA to become a movie star? Trust me on this...don't. Apply for a student loan or whatever if you don't want to be dependent on your father's money, and go to college either here or someplace else. I mean, I'm sure you of all people don't want to live in a city that's full of demons," Xander told her firmly.
"How do you know Los Angeles is full of demons?" Cordy asked, more stunned than ever over how Xander had known she wanted to become an actress.
"Oh, it's just something I heard on the street recently," Xander prevaricated. ( And so what if that's not the whole truth? She doesn't need to know about Doyle, or inheriting his visions, or ending up dead in five years. This time around, assuming the info's legit – all that's gonna be a helluva lot different! ) He quickly walked away before she could ask anything else.
And somewhere up above, Eshu laughed again in delight as his mortal cat's paw screwed with Jasmine's plans but good. The outcast Power screamed in rage and swore to destroy the damned troublemaker at the first opportunity.
Well, as Eshu was supposed to have said at the end of the fable, "bringing strife is my greatest joy".
TBC...