Disclaimer: refer first chapter.
A/N: Not a short one this time, or at least not really. Sad to say, part of being fair to characters you don't like is trying to give them sound justifications for their embarrassments. Needless to say, for immortal characters Angel and souled-Spike annoy the hell out of me! (Buffy and Willow are still young, so they at least have an excuse.) But still, gotta be fair… because it's a bigger challenge. Why did you think I enjoy writing Xander so much?
The Usual Suspects?
Chapter Four: Coincidence? No, but still Punny!
—ox-oxo-xo—
"Great question, Angel! If only you were thinking this smart back when you did a deal with an evil law firm to alter your reality… But ah well; win some, lose some."
Whistler waved down Angel's protests.
"Now see, I got two or three criteria. First one's so obvious, it's like… what's the phrase you kids like using? Oh yeah – 'duh': most likely to agree. That's for the mission, for the twinning, all of it. Next one, is just as straightforward, at least to me: best for the mission. I can see at least a kinda shape of how the mission's meant to go, and I pick for the best chances of that happening.
"But with all that, I gotta keep in mind the third one, which is a big one when it's youse guys picking them: best team blend. That means, picking the one who will cause the least headaches just being there. Now that's for the team – but especially that's for the one who picked them."
"Oh. Oh!" Willow exclaimed.
"Yep, Ginge's twigged." Whistler grinned and continued, talking over the redhead's growl. "Buffy asked for you two. But your Spike? A little too close, a little too sore… A little too impatient. You two in a big dramatic tug'o'war, with Buffy in the middle? That leads to headaches, and a bad mix that throws the team out."
Buffy winced. She hadn't really thought of that…
"So, this Spike? Needs some redemption before he rears up for another go – besides, she ain't really the short-stack he's looking to impress. And you? Well, you got the 'cookies' speech."
Willow looked strangely at Buffy. "Cookie speech?"
"Sounds scrumptious." Spike deadpanned before snorting with laughter – and then stopping. "Oh wait! I can eat now."
"Yes, but if you start now we'll be at this for hours," Whistler told the newly minted humans. "You won't get hungry for as long as this takes – none of you will. And speaking of gimme's: another little reward for you all. You can pick seven people now."
"Wait, what?" Buffy asked. "Didn't you say something about me picking twelve people?"
Yeah, Whistler was acting much more like she expected now. Jerk.
"Close, but what I actually said was from six to twelve. Well, really it was five, but I knew you'd pick Willow first so that was another gimme. The better you do at this, the more people you all get to pick instead of having me pick them." He cleared his throat. "Like I said: seven people, not including Buffy. You're currently at three. Now have at it!"
—ox-oxo-xo—
"So, I have an idea," Buffy said to the other three. They had stepped away a little from the balance demon, who was looking over a yellowed scroll and ferreting food scraps out of his mouth with his tongue. "How about we all make a choice of who we want to help us? I've already got one, so…"
Granted, it wasn't the choice that a scarred and still-aching corner of her heart really wanted to make. But this was for an actual mission, so she just couldn't bring herself to justify asking for her. And in any case, this one was almost as good if her guess about who she could ask for was right.
Angel and Spike agreed and fell silent, debating their choices in privacy.
Willow, though, started worrying at her lip with her teeth. Much like she imagined Buffy to be, a large part of her was crying out for a lost love. But what about Kennedy? And, what about the mission? Either or both of them could be important, or at least pull their weight. But what if the mission needed someone different, someone unique and they didn't ask for them? But what if Whistler called for them anyway, and they needed their chance? Wait, what if they earned more people to pick? This was so confusing, it was like stressing over her tests, only worse!
In the end, she decided to put it off. There's be more chances later, right?
"I'll pick later, if that's all right Buffy?"
"You sure, Will?" Buffy looked shrewdly over at her best friend. It looked like she was having more trouble with her choice than Buffy had had with hers.
Willow took a deep breath, and managed to not whimper. "No, but I'll still pick later."
"Okay," she said with a shrug. Rushing wasn't going to make Willow change her mind. "Guys, have you made your picks?"
Angel nodded slightly, still looking unsure. Spike, on the other hand, was trying not to grin.
'…Well, close enough I guess.' She looked up to find Whistler quirking an eyebrow at her under his ugly hat. "Okay, we got three more picks."
"All right, hit me with them!" he said.
"My pick… is Giles. But!" she said with a hand raised in a stopping gesture, "I want a Giles who never betrayed me." Buffy found herself shrinking a little. She hadn't really meant it to sound like that. "Well, apart from the Crucio-thingummy, but just that. One who never abandoned us… You know what I mean, Whistler, can you do it?"
Whistler scanned down the scroll. "Yep, I get ya. Next?"
Angel was looking down at Buffy with a surprised smile. That really was a good loophole. In fact, maybe he could try it too? Cordelia hadn't been a sure thing; it didn't feel quite right to pick her for the mission just for having visions.
He shook himself and addressed Whistler. "I want— we can pick people too, right?"
Whistler nodded. "If you can't, I'll tell you first. Your pick?"
"Wesley, I want a Wesley who never betrayed me over Connor."
"All good, I know just the one," the balance demon enthused, ignoring the other three's murmurs of "Connor, who's Connor?" and ticking off something on the scroll. "Next?"
"I'm not picking anybody yet," Willow told him. He nodded and turned to Spike.
Spike shrugged, not caring particularly about whoever this 'Connor' bloke was. 'Cause he had a right humdinger of an idea and wanted to try it out.
"I want Drusilla. Not just any Drusilla, though – I want her with a soul, I want her…at least mostly sane, and I want her to still be a seer. Reckon you can do that, then?" he asked with a massive grin, making the others wonder if he was joking.
Whistler carelessly rolled up the scroll and stashed it away in his coat (which was not big enough to hold it, not that it didn't do it just fine anyway). He stared inscrutably at Spike, who never stopped grinning, for several seconds.
And then he started to applaud.
"Kudos to you, Mister Bleach – kudos indeed! Your challenge is accepted." He snapped his fingers, and added as three forms shimmered into existence, "And your choice is one of my mandatories!"
The quartet heard him, but were too busy staring at the three arriving newcomers to respond to his aside (or to notice the three faint flashes high above them as their new companions manifested). For all her unexpected selection, Drusilla's appearance was both the most flashy and the least sickening – she appeared with the same dust-to-flesh-to-life procession as Angel and Spike had.
The ex-Watchers, though, were an entirely different matter.
Wesley's body was, not to put too fine a point on it, broken – bones snapped and piercing muscle and skin, limbs misshapen, deep furrows and burns and vampiric bite marks covering his blood-drenched form. Giles, though was rotting – and demonic. Until the demon burst from its vessel in a cloud of dust and sublimated away, and the rot began reversing even as Wesley's body made snapping noises and its wounds healed over – the process repairing their clothing as it continued.
"Even if I was Angelus…" Angel muttered.
Within five seconds, all three of them were standing and stumbling. Wesley tripped over his own feet and collapsed, Giles barely saved himself from a tumble, and Drusilla turned it into an impromptu pirouette with a surprisingly cheerful giggle.
"…this would be disturbing."
The mad seeress skipped gaily over to them. "Hello, new-Spike! How are you this bright sunny day-knot?"
Spike's grin, which had never quivered despite the surprisingly sickening process of embodiment, softened. "Not bad at all, Dru. And yourself? It's been a while on my end. Couple years, even."
"Oh, Spike's still with me. Can't let him run around by himself. He might grab onto a Slayer and catch the wrong spark – they try their long games, they do so try." She began leading her childe's analogue in a slow waltz. "But your spark is right and true; I'll have my wish, and so might you."
"Um," Angel asked Whistler, "exactly how 'sane' is she?"
Drusilla lazily looked over Spike's shoulder. "Actually I'm just fucking with you. Hello to you too, knock-knock daddy." She stood aside as Spike fell over laughing and Whistler cracked up with him. Over by the two recovering Watchers, Buffy and Willow squawked at the sudden segue into crude speech and innuendo.
Angel blinked – then smirked. "I'll pay that one." He nodded thoughtfully. "You know, I was thinking that whole thing with Spike and Buffy was a little too strange to be coincidence…"
"Like you can talk," Spike snarked. "Who was it again who got whisked across the country for a lookie-loo at the little blonde girl, hmm?"
They all stopped and looked at Whistler.
The balance demon shrugged. "Yeah, the soul curse has some side-effects most of you never quite twigged to."
"Really?" Rupert Giles was standing with an arm around Buffy (initially for support, now because neither particularly felt like removing it), wearing an intensely curious expression. Next to him, an incongruously hard-faced Wesley Wyndham-Price looked similarly inquisitive. "I suspect you aren't alluding to the amplifying depressive effect we have already tentatively identified. Is there some other nuance to the spell that has gone unnoticed?"
Buffy looked sidelong at him. "Translation?"
Rupert examined the present analogue of his heart's most-loved daughter. The glint of enjoyment in her gaze was unmistakeable. "The soul curse makes Angel even more miserable than he should be. But there's something else, isn't there Whistler?" He gave Buffy an arch look. "Better?"
Buffy stepped away with a satisfied smirk. "Much – though I never heard about depresso-Angel being the curse's fault… Huh. Now what's wrong with Angel? Or the Angel back home, anyway?"
Whistler looked distinctly amused at Angel's expense as he answered. "Curses that dark – they're unnatural, and the nature of the world around them rebels against them. Even the curse itself rebels, if it keeps going long enough. That's why there's all the cheesy loopholes in the fairy-tale curses you know and slay – to balance the scales, and to have the curse weaken in ways and directions the caster can measure and monitor." He shrugged. "I never did get a straight answer from the higher-ups on whether they expected what happened. Personally though, I'd have thought the Kalderash would've had a better idea how their own damned curse worked."
"So…" Willow thought it over. "The curse wants to be broken. And the way to break it is to have a moment of perfect happiness…"
"Actually, it's a perfect moment of happiness," Whistler corrected. "Small but important difference – it reinforces the fairy-tale aspect. Otherwise just the right drug could do the trick."
"Huh, so that's why…" Angel muttered.
"Okay, perfect moment of happiness, perfect moment of— OH! Hah, Xander was wrong! It wasn't just sex with Buffy, it was the romantic making love to Buffy that did it!" the witch crowed.
Wesley deadpanned. "…Are you certain that is the aspect you should be fixated upon?"
"No! I'm still getting there," she snapped at him. "So, curse breaks by making love… curse increases chance of making love to break itself… Huh! And Xander's wrong again – but I guess he kinda still had a point." She nodded with forceful certainty – then blinked and looked at her curious audience.
"Oh! Sorry. Right… Xander and I had this pretty long-running debate over Angel and how he fell for Buffy, especially after we heard about Angel seeing her first in L.A.. Xander thought he had to be pretty shallow to fall for a fifteen-year-old girl. But I thought maybe he was going by eighteenth-century standards, I mean he hadn't been dating much since – and that was pretty much marrying-age for girls back then. But then Xander thought he should've picked it up anyway after a whole century with his soul. But then I thought, well, love at first sight – is that so unlikely? But then…"
She stopped and took a quick breath.
"We were both right, weren't we? Right, Whistler?"
"Weeell," Whistler drawled, "to tell ya the truth, Liam was pretty shallow in life. 'Drunken, womanising wastrel' would be a good description."
Everyone looked over at Angel.
"I want to argue, but…" He helplessly shrugged. "But it did cross my mind that Buffy was a Slayer. They aren't really known for getting much older." Angel looked down, frowning as his mind's eye focused on a distant memory. "I didn't really see myself being with her that way, anyway – no matter what I might have felt. I just wanted to be there for her, help her as much as I could while she lived. It wasn't until…" Angel looked up. "But there was always that hope, in the back of my head. That it might happen anyway. That…"
"That you got your fairy-tale ending," Whistler finished for him. "Yep – the Hawaiian did some fine work that night, but I still wish the bosses had let me check on you after that. 'Cause then, that was when you lost the mission. It stopped being about deserving redemption, and started being about deserving the girl. Which would've been fine, except for the curse."
"So…" Willow asked, just to be sure after that torrent of exposition, "he was being shallow, but it was because of the curse?"
"Close. He was depressed because of the curse – the original Kalderash clan crafted it that way. He was shallow because of the curse trying to break itself – that was a side-effect they did expect, but it turned out their descendants missed that bit."
"Hmm… I must say, that did sound somewhat damning on the Powers' role in events," Wesley mused.
"Since when is it ever that clear-cut, Head Boy? I'll cop to playing on his shallow side back at the start – I kinda had to, the depression made it too much of a headache to get through to him otherwise. But the Hellmouth was always a place where chaos and the Infernals held sway – the only time I ever came into Sunnydale was to stop the world being sucked into Acathla's greedy gob, and the little influence I pulled was literally all I could do without the other side getting a free shot." Whistler sighed.
"Honestly? Things had to go a certain way. Whether the Powers planned it, or just couldn't stop it – six of one, a half-dozen on the other. No way to know, and it's over and done with. Besides…" He stopped and gestured eloquently at the gigantic pit that used to be Sunnydale. "No more Hellmouth. That means the options open up for you guys. Which leads to here and now – assuming we ever finish up!"
"…We have drifted rather far afield, haven't we?" Rupert commented. "In fact, I believe we have not even been formally introduced as of yet."
The balance demon clapped once. "True! Now, you three caught the last show and tell for this lot, right?"
Rupert and Wesley nodded confirmation of that surmise. Drusilla, who had amused herself waving her finger in swirly circles three inches away from the frozen Xander's eye-patch in the meantime, called, "What truly glorious destruction. If only glory weren't so overrated…"
"…Right." Whistler shook himself. Even he could be thrown sometimes when sufficiently nutty seers were involved. "Well – your turn!"
Ending A/N: And yes, the Powers bug me too. But in this one… well, they're helping here. There's a reason they usually don't. Whether I can get to it without making it a big block of nonsequiturish exposition, will be the question.