(3/18/2017) Brain had some roadblocks on this storyline. Also, got addicted to Minecraft. I know, I'm years behind the trend, but it's just so addicting!
Thank you thedarkpokemaster, RHatch89, jkmp28, demon19027, philly cheese dude, and Maverick500 for the reviews! And everyone favoriting and following gets cake!
When Sam and the Ghostfacer duo reentered the school they found Dean and Giles hovering over a wiry man in a maintenance suit. The janitor was cornered sitting against the wall, his head in his hands, and appeared to be choking back sobs.
"Where's the gun?" Sam wondered.
"Dunno," Dean replied. "We looked up and down the hallway and found jack."
"Excuse me," Giles said sternly, "but who are they?"
"They're part of those Ghostfacers," Sam told him.
"What're you doing here, Ed?" Dean asked, annoyed. "You know you're on a freaking high school campus after hours, right?"
"Hey, we just witnessed an actual spiritual possession!" Ed cried indignantly. "That guy and-and-and the dead woman… we saw them! It was like, pow! sudden and complete takeover, man!"
"Got it on this baby right here," the cameraman said proudly. The red recording indicator flicked off as he hoisted the equipment down from his shoulder. Dean and Giles hurried over to join Sam and Ed in huddling together to look at the small preview screen.
It was taken, quite obviously, from a place of hiding, as the cross hatched markings prevalent on the screen reflected the patterns on a nearby classroom door. The black lines disappeared as the camera moved in towards the glass and followed the now deceased teacher down the hallway. She greeted the janitor in a friendly manner with nothing to suggest that they were anything more than casual acquaintances.
The change was abrupt. Within moments the janitor was yelling invectives while the teacher tearfully responded. They appeared to come to an emotional conclusion when a gun suddenly materialized in the man's hand. He said something that horrified the woman and she ran down the hallway and out onto the balcony.
Ed appeared on screen as he opened the classroom door. A few moments of bouncing video followed as the Ghostfacers chased after the couple. The motion halted as soon as the gun went off. After that, the video ended.
"The hell?" Dean muttered.
"It's that kid and his teacher from fifty years ago," Sam explained. "I was about to tell you guys when, well, that happened. Papers said that the police suspected they were lovers and she tried to break it off. He shot her then headed for the music room and shot himself."
"Crap." Frustrated, Dean threw his hands up. "That means the ghost is tied to the goddamn school."
"Is that bad?" Ed asked quietly.
"Means that even if we find this asshole's bones they're tied to the building. We'd have to burn the freaking place down."
"Please don't," Giles said as he pulled his phone from his pocket. "I'd suggest you all leave. I need to contact the authorities."
As soon as they had hit the parking lot, Dean grabbed Ed by his lapels and shoved him up against a car. "I'm only gonna say this once. Show up here again and I'll blow your head off."
"You can't do that!" the Ghostfacer objected. "We have just as much a right to investigate the paranormal as you do!"
"Ed, a woman just died," Sam pleaded. "You keep coming back like this and who knows which of you is going to be the next victim?"
"Fine. Just… fine. C'mon Kenny."
The brothers watched the somewhat dejected pair head into a rental car and drive off. "He's going to come back, isn't he?" postulated Sam.
"Yeah," Dean sighed. "Oh well. We better get going too."
The janitor was detained by the police. However, Giles said, truthfully, that there was no recoverable weapon and that he hadn't seen exactly what had transpired. The poor woman was certainly dead, but it looked as if there was nothing conclusively tying the man to the crime. Regardless, they hauled the janitor in for questioning and blocked off the area so that school could open for the day.
Sam noticed that most of his students were distracted and tense. He spent his first few classes just letting them (restrictively) surf the internet. His prep period occurred right before lunch and he'd intended to spend it relaxing with a chicken Ceaser salad. To his annoyance, Buffy, Willow, and Xander skipped their own classes for an impromptu meeting with him. Willow was lugging along a thick, oversized yearbook whose spine called out: "Sunnydale High School 1957."
"You know," Sam said irritably, "I am a teacher. Technically I'm supposed to report you guys."
Ignoring Buffy's snippy brother, Willow slapped the volume down on his desk and began flipping through pages. She ended on a tribute to Grace Newman, a pretty, young brunette who beamed happily from her stock school photo. In Memoriam was etched above her name. "I think this is the ghost," said the red-headed teenager. "Her or the guy that killed her."
"Okay, fresh new strangeness?" Buffy commented. "I dreamt about this woman the other day. Her and this young guy."
Willow continued turning pages until they came to the clubs and organizations chapter. They found Grace Newman again, this time standing in a photo with a group of other students under the heading, "Literary Club." Buffy quickly stabbed a finger at a handsome young man on the opposite side of the picture. "James Stanley. He's the one that did it."
"Your dreams are getting awesomely accurate, Buffy," an impressed Xander inserted. "You wouldn't happen to see me coming into big cash or, possibly, knowing the love of a woman? In a full-body sense?"
"Dude!" Sam exclaimed.
"Come on. I'm sure you remember the oh so perpetual lustiness that was your teenage years."
"Yeah, but I'm not airing the details in front of my little sister."
"He looks so normal in his picture," Willow said sadly. "He was smart, too. He made the honor role."
"He killed a person and he killed himself," Xander contradicted. "Those are pretty much the two dumbest things you can do."
"I know, but don't you feel kind of bad for them?
"I feel lousy," Buffy answered caustically. "For her. He's a murderer. He should pay for it."
"With his life?" wondered a shocked Willow.
"No, he should be in prison for sixty years breaking rocks and making 'special friends' with Roscoe the weight lifter."
Buffy's two friends and brother exchanged worried looks. "Are you okay?" Sam asked.
"Fine," she growled. "I think it's his ghost we're dealing with. Everything's too violent to be hers."
"Depends," her brother challenged. "It could be her, too, depending on the exact circumstances. Only way to be sure is to find out what they're trying to say."
"Who cares?" Buffy snapped. "We gotta shut him down before some other innocent guy shoots some nice girl and blows his brains all over the music room wall."
The bell rang in the ensuing silence. Xander broke the tension by clapping his hands and making a general inquiry. "Okay! Who's hungry?"
Dean was technically supposed to eat with the teachers in their lounge, but as the enamored lunch lady gave him free food and his sister normally partook in the cafeteria, he often just lunched with her and her friends. The trick was to be certain Snyder was nowhere nearby; the Principal had already given him fair warning not to fraternize with the students. Both Dean and Buffy's insistence that family trumped the lofty pedestal that teachers were supposed to sit on went ignored.
Buffy, Xander, and Willow were all stabbing morosely at their food. Dean even managed to snag a tidbit from each of their plates without a single outcry. He was inching for another of Xander's French fries when Cordelia plopped down next to her boyfriend.
"I hope you guys weren't planning on going to this Sadie Hawkins dance," she huffed, "because I'm totally organizing a boycott. Do you realize that the girls are suppose to ask the guys, and pay and everything? I mean, whose genius idea was that?"
"Some dick, probably," Dean deadpanned through his purloined potato.
"Exactly!" Cordelia exclaimed. "I mean—"
Whatever exposition the girl was about to launch into was cut off by a terrified scream from the table next to them. A female student was screeching at what presumably had been her lunch and was now a writhing tangle of snakes.
Dean jerked his gaze downwards and discovered similarly transformed serpentine lunch plates in front of his sister and her friends. Cordelia let out an ear-piercing shriek as her spaghetti-noodle-turned-reptile lashed up and bit her on the cheek. Repulsed, Xander reached out and yanked it away before hauling himself and his girlfriend up and away from the table.
The cafeteria quickly became a chaotic mass of reptiles and horrified students. Willow had followed Xander and Cordelia in fleeing the room, but Dean and Buffy stayed to rescue the other teenagers and herd the crowd outdoors. A stream of panicked students and only slightly less panicked serpents streamed from the school entrance.
Once he was finally outside, Dean glared at a particularly sluggish snake that was trudging through the grass in front of him. "What," he snarled, "the fuck."
With a grimace, Buffy toed the animal away. "James Stanley."
"Excuse me?"
"The name of the jerk pulling these stunts. We figured it out right before lunch."
"Great. Fan-fucking-tastic. Did you guys happen to also figure out what the hell he wants?"
"Not yet. But I think it might be time to go from Dr. Phil to Dr. Kevorkian on this guy."
Buffy, her brothers, and her friends Willow, Xander, and Cordelia (Willow had invited Oz but apparently the boy's band was scheduled to perform in Santa Barbara) gathered in the library late in the afternoon in order to discuss options. As the upcoming night would mark the actual date that James had murdered his illicit lover, Giles opined that the spirit might resort to drastic measures to get whatever it was that he wanted. Having encountered their fair share of restless ghosts, Sam and Dean agreed.
Their ignorance of the exact circumstances surrounding James and Grace's relationship made for all their current difficulties. Moreover, Sam discovered James had been cremated and Grace's remains had been flown north to her hometown of Sacramento. Even if they had wanted to salt and burn her bones they'd have never made it there and back before the night was done.
Research was the next option. They all selected something having to do with ghosts and got to reading. With great reluctance, Giles allowed Willow to peer through one of his less dangerous spellbooks on the caveat that she not try to actually do any of the spells she discovered until given permission.
Buffy, itching to have a stake in hand and a vampire to dust, took to staring into space. She eventually realized that Giles had been looking at the same page in his book for nearly fifteen minutes. The Slayer shuffled herself a little closer to her Watcher and quietly asked, "What's wrong?"
"Hm? Oh, um, nothing."
"Giles, that's the appendix. Unless you're trying to memorize every word in that book alphabetically…"
The elder man sighed and closed the back cover. "I just… I was hoping, somehow, that the ghost might have been Jenny."
"Why?"
Giles gave Buffy a sad smile. "I think, perhaps, I just wanted to speak to her one more time, to tell her how sorry I was."
"Sorry? Sorry about what?"
"For failing to protect her."
Buffy scowled. "Giles, Miss Calendar's death was not your fault. If it's anyone's it's mine. I should have dusted Angel a long time ago."
"Buffy, you can't—"
"Look look look look look!" Willow suddenly cried. Ignorant of the tension in front of her, the girl excitedly swiveled her book around to where Giles and Buffy were sitting. "A communing spell! It's totally doable. We just need a couple of things and-and-and we can ask James what he wants!"
Sam frowned pensively. "But what if what he wants isn't something we're willing to give him?"
"Then do we get to burn down the school?" an eager Xander asked. "Please say we get to burn down the school."
"Oh sure," Buffy scoffed. "When I burn part of the school down by accident it's not okay, but doing it on purpose…"
"For goodness sake," sighed Giles. "I think—what was that?"
As it was past seven, the school should have been empty. Even those who were likely to have stayed late, such as the janitorial staff and some overworked teachers, had taken the previous night's macabre events as a warning not to be in the building after dark. Therefore the hushed voices and hissing whispers that were now drifting in from the hallway were highly suspect.
Cautiously, Dean crept towards the library doors. The others, apprehensive, went silent. When the hunter suddenly straightened and rolled his eyes they all relaxed. They then stared in amazement as Dean yanked the door open and pulled in a weedy young man wearing a camera headset. Immediately tumbling in afterwards was the young Asian woman and Harry Spangler, both of whom ended up sprawled onto the floor.
"Didn't we tell you dumbasses to leave?" Dean spat down at Harry. He shoved the squealing boy in his grip off to one side.
An indignant Harry scrambled to his feet and brushed off his front. "Ed said that he saw definitive proof of a spectral anomaly. It's our duty to record and research the phenomenon!"
The young man was doing his best not to let Dean intimidate him, but when Giles came stomping up Harry had no qualms about cringing in fright. "Are you lot completely out of your bleeding minds?" the Watcher shouted. "The spirit has already coerced someone to murder a woman and now here you are offering yourselves up on a bloody plate!"
The woman drew herself up as far as she could and demanded, "Then why are you all here?"
Giles whipped off his glasses and glared. "Young lady, every single person in this room has encountered deadly supernatural forces and lived to tell about it."
"Often and unwillingly," Cordelia muttered.
"From what I understand, the lot of you are glorified thrill seekers that have no experience and no training, and are on a short path to being eviscerated by an angry spirit!"
Cowed by the Watcher's wrath, the three intruders huddled together and whimpered. In the ensuing semi-silence, Dean narrowed his eyes and asked, "Where's the rest of you idiots?"
"Around," Harry replied evasively.
The hunter's desire to wring an answer from the man went unfulfilled as a series of bangs echoed down the hallways. Alarmed, Buffy and her friends stood up and hurried from the library. They stopped at one of the school's exits and the Slayer yanked hard on the door.
"It's not locked," she grunted through her efforts, "but it's not opening!"
On the other end of the hall, Sam shouted back, "Door's stuck here, too!"
"We're trapped," Xander gasped.
"Thanks, Captain Obvious," Dean muttered. He then cursed, loudly, "Shit! All of our guns are in the car!"
"What's a gun going to do against a ghost?" Cordelia asked derisively.
"Salt rounds will dissipate them," Sam answered as he approached. "We should raid the cafeteria."
"You mean that room full of Voldemort's best friends?" Xander asked incredulously.
"What? Didn't they get them all out?"
"They tried," Willow said. "But the more they got the more showed up."
"Endless hiss-o-rama," added Buffy.
"I ain't afraid of snakes," Dean proclaimed before marching determinedly towards the cafeteria.
"Stay put," Sam ordered the rest of them. "Including you," he snarled at the Ghostfacers.
As her brothers walked away, Buffy took the opportunity to continue Harry's interrogation. She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and slammed him against a locker. "Your buddy, idiot number two? Where?"
The question was quickly answered as Ed and his cameraman came screaming down the nearest set of stairs. What had them spooked was readily apparent; a cloud of angrily buzzing insects was giving chase.
They sprinted for the library, Ed and Kenny close behind. Once back inside, Xander and Giles pulled the doors closed and held them. Their winged pursuers pattered against the windows. Strangely, despite the inch wide opening at the floor, the conjured bugs stayed on the other side.
A panicked Willow then asked, "Where's Buffy?"
An equally anxious Harry asked, "Where's Alan?"
Ed lunged forward, intent on charging through the cloud of stingers to go find their missing teammate. Immediately the buzzing from the outside became louder and the insects' movements more agitated. Harry pulled his friend away. "Don't do it, man! You're allergic."
"Now what?" groused Cordelia.
In a calm voice (that belied the panic he truly felt), Giles said, "Buffy and her brothers can handle themselves. We need to figure out how to get out of here."
"What about Alan?" Ed asked.
No one could provide a reassuring response.
Acknowledgement : Some lines of dialogue are taken directly from the episodes "Ghostfacers" (SPN 3.13), and "I Only Have Eyes For You" (BtVS 2.19).
Author's Note : Xander originally says Buffy's dreams are "wicked accurate." As a native speaker, I updated his colloquialism to reflect a proper Californian dialect. Like, totally.
I wanted so much to put in Giles thinking it was Jenny's ghost but just couldn't make it work. It would have had to involve a good deal of ignorance on the Winchesters. He just says some of the best lines in his ignorance.
