(4/13/2017) Little interlude before we dive into the finale. Maybe a gift for having to have waited so long for the previous chapter?

Note : Some lines of dialogue are taken directly from the episode "Becoming, Part I" (BtVS 2.21).

Thank you Sage of Wind Dragons, RHatch89, thedarkpokemaster, jkmp28, IoSolUno, and demon19027 for the reviews! And everyone favoriting and following get tiny sparkles!


April 4, 2005


Half-starved, Angel tried not to listen to the thumping of the human hearts all around them. Instead he stared, incredulous, at the ill-dressed thing before him. Everything about it smelled off, but what exactly it was he couldn't say. It wasn't a demon like it claimed, but it definitely wasn't human. "What do you want from me?" the vampire finally asked.

"I want you to see something," Whistler responded. "We'd have to leave now. You see, and then you tell me what you wanna do."

"Where is it?"

"Not it. Them. A family."


April 8, 2005


The little blonde was attractive and vivacious, but she had neither the sultry mystery of Darla nor the titillating madness of Drusilla. At that reminder, Angel swallowed the gorge in his throat. He washed it away by peering carefully out into the sunlight from the beaten up Chevrolet that he'd stolen and blackened the night before.

Whoever she was, she was blithely unaware of anything other than her lollipop and the search for whatever boy she'd mentioned. She did, however, keep glancing at his car with an odd expression on her face.

Eventually, the young man she'd been waiting for arrived. A tall, lanky college-aged boy wearing a backpack knelt down in front of her and yanked the candy from her mouth. "Boo."

"Sam!" the girl cried and threw her arms around the man's neck. This was definitely not the supposed, belly crawling boyfriend; this was someone unexpected, someone loved.

"Hey, Buffy. What're you doing here?"

"Queen Buffy is waiting for a peasant," she replied haughtily. The girl stuck her hand out as if waiting for the man to kiss it.

"Your brother is not kissing your hand," Sam replied wryly. He took the proffered fingers and lifted her to her feet instead. "Come on. I just got off the bus and I'm starved."

"Spring for a Starbucks and you got a date."

When an older man in a tweed suit approached them, the boy was immediately on alert. Sam stuffed his sister behind him as the man asked, "Buffy Summers?"

"Yeah?" she answered. Then, perplexed, added, "Hi! What?"

"I need to speak with you."

Sam crowded the man, his height allowing him to loom over the stranger. "Go away."

"But there isn't much time!" the flustered man explained. "She has a destiny."

"I don't have a destiny," Buffy said. "I'm destiny-free. Really!"

Angel lifted his eyebrows when Sam threatened the man with the purloined lollipop. If the vampire didn't know any better, he'd have thought the boy was handling a blade, especially when the sticky circle was jabbed into the stranger's whiskers. "I said: go away."

Reluctantly the man backed up, the candy still stuck under his chin. His gaze didn't leave the girl as the siblings walked away. Buffy began nattering on about this and that to her brother, oblivious, while Sam snuck glares backwards.

Angel had seen enough. He drove away.


The boy apparently went to Stanford and was here on a weekend visit. Buffy and her family had a relatively pleasant dinner late in the afternoon. There was some odd tension between the boy and his father, but other than that it looked oddly normal. As it was Friday, the teenaged girl was allowed an evening excursion with her friends while Sam elected to stay home to work on a paper.

Angel followed Buffy surreptitiously, the dark allowing him to ditch the car. She was cutting through the local cemetery, intent on going to a friend's house before heading to a local underage club, when the stranger from before waylaid her. He introduced himself as Merrick and gave a lengthy explanation to his presence. The vampire's suspicions were confirmed: the man was a Watcher.

This girl was the Slayer.

Her disbelief over Merrick's proclamation vanished in the wake of the sudden appearance of a local vampire. The Watcher tossed her a stake and shouted instructions. Buffy, the newly endowed Slayer, fumbled and shrieked but was eventually successful.

Angel sighed in relief. Merrick and Buffy talked for a long while about what was happening to her and why before she abandoned her entertainment plans and walked home, stunned.

Home was of little comfort. Her mother merely sighed and criticized her friends when Buffy explained that her excursion ran later than expected. The woman gave her daughter a kiss on the forehead and left the room.

Unfortunately, that was when the mood turned sour. As Buffy stared blankly at the window, her mother and father began a conversation about their daughter's lateness that quickly escalated into a fight. "Just because you can't discipline her," yelled the father, "I have to be the ogre!"

"I am not having this conversation again," came the angry reply.

"No? Then how about we have a different one. How about we talk about your old boyfriend's son using our house like his personal hotel?"

"Do you want to throw him out? Just like his own father did? What kind of a man are you?"

"What kind of man leaves a woman to raise his daughter on her own? I've been providing for the two of you for years and he hasn't given one goddamn cent!"

So Sam wasn't Buffy's full brother and the father wasn't Buffy's father. Angel looked In the window next to Buffy's where the boy was sitting at a desk. He paused in his typing and tensed up. After a few seconds, he shook his head before continuing to jab the keyboard.

Buffy, however, was still standing sorrowfully. She was clutching herself and was trying not to dissolve into tears. Angel's heart filled with pity for the poor girl, but he couldn't understand why Whistler thought this was anything particularly special. Even if she was the Slayer, nothing unusual was occurring other than what might happen among any other dysfunctional family. The vampire related this point to the creature half an hour later as they met in a sewer tunnel at the edge of town.

"Maybe," Whistler said. "But you haven't seen the whole picture yet. Here." The thing handed over a folded map.

When Angel opened it, a red circle was scribbled over a patch of green within the Angeles National Forest. "What's this?"

"Just head there and look. You got a good amount of time before sunrise. I'll meet you here," Whistler said as he took out a red marker and circled a second area. "Okay? I promise. This ain't a waste of time."

Bemused, Angel merely nodded and headed back to where he'd parked his car.


The bastard had sent him after hunters.

Angel had had to make a meal of a raccoon to maintain some measure of strength in order to keep hidden. Mostly he accomplished it by keeping up in the trees. The problem was, these two were good. Very good. Despite the fact that their main prey was a wendigo it was obvious that the vampire's presence hadn't gone unnoticed. Occasionally one of them would glance up in Angel's general direction with a pensive frown, but since he wasn't their primary target they let him be.

The pair had been in the woods already for a few days and quickly tracked and trapped the monster. After charbroiling the thing, the younger hunter let out a whoop. "Take that you son of a bitch!"

The elder one was peering out into the darkness of the trees. "I don't like it."

"C'mon, dad. Enjoy the victory for a second."

"There's something else out there. We should check it out."

"Seriously? Dad, we've been here for three fricking days. It's probably just an animal or something."

"Yeah, maybe."

Father and son made certain the fire wouldn't spread and began hiking away. "You know," said the young man, "we're really close to Los Angeles."

"Yeah."

"We could drop by and see Buffy."

"Not this time."

"Okay, then let's go north and see Sam. Or am I the only kid of yours that gets to see your face?"

The father stiffened but made no other response. Angel's eyes widened. This was Buffy's father and other half-brother. The Slayer had family that were hunters! Did she know? Was she a hunter? No, impossible, especially after that performance in the graveyard.

"You ever gonna talk to him again?" the young man demanded. "Hell, you even gonna mention him ever again?"

Angel watched the father back his son into a tree. The older man jabbed a finger into the other's chest and snarled, "Now you listen here, boy. I'm gonna say this once and then that's it. Sam left us. He decided to go off to that fancy school and fend for himself. So from here on out, don't bother trying to make this right because there ain't nothing you can do about it."

"Yes, sir."

"And you leave your sister out of this. Last thing she needs is to get dragged into this bullshit and going off getting herself hurt or killed. Got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." The father stepped back, then, astonishingly quick, prepped the shotgun he'd been holding and fired right at Angel.

The vampire managed to jump to a higher limb to avoid the spray. He inwardly cursed at Whistler again. When he risked peeping down, the two were peering upwards in his general direction.

"We going after it?" asked the son.

"Nah, we're out of supplies. Just wanted to make sure that whatever it is knows we ain't easy prey."

The pair walked off silently. Apprehensive, they kept glancing about into the trees, but Angel had no intention of following them any further. Instead, he headed for the second location Whistler indicated. He was unsurprised to find the creature already there, his ridiculously outdated clothes made even more ludicrous by the natural surroundings. "She's gonna have it tough, that Slayer," the thing said without preamble as Angel landed nearby. "She's just a kid. The world's full of big, bad things, and some of it's swimming around daddy and her big bros."

"I want to help her," Angel murmured as he mentally catalogued all he troubling things he'd seen in the past twenty four hours. "I want… I want to become someone."

"God, jeez, look at you. She must be prettier than the last Slayer." Whistler shook his head. "This isn't gonna be easy. The more you live in this world, the more you see how apart from it you really are. And this is dangerous work. Right now, you couldn't go three rounds with a fruit fly!"

"Then why did you send me after hunters?" Angel groused.

Whistler ignored the question. "You ready then?"

"Yes. I'll learn from you." The vampire eyed the open collared, obnoxiously patterned homage to the late seventies that the creature was sporting. "But I don't want to dress like you."

Whistler threw up his arms and began heading for the road. "Again, you're annoying me. You're lucky we need you on our side."


May 28, 2007


Whistler grit his teeth and watched the excavation from his hidden vantage point. He'd been hoping against everything that the damn Prophet was wrong, that this wasn't going to happen now right before Dean Winchester's crossroads deal was going to come due.

Yeah, his superiors had said to just let that one go, that it needed to happen, but Whistler had been watching the messed up little family for years now and had gotten pretty attached. Who wouldn't be? Plucky little Slayer and her self-sacrificing father and brothers gallivanting around and playing out a drama for the ages.

And now it was headed for an endgame.

The Prophet before this one had had his head way, way, way up his ass. He'd gotten all into his whole vision thing, quit being an accountant, started a business as a psychic, and began spitting out his prophecies as riddles because it made him look smarter than he was. That was why Whistler thought that he'd had to prep Angel to prevent the emergence of Acathla. But with the vampire's soul soiled once again, it wasn't looking like that was in the cards.

Whistler sighed. He had his orders: he wasn't to interfere with either Angelus or Dean. Then again, nothing had been said about the Slayer.

Maybe there was a way to salvage this mess after all.


Author's Note : Did anyone else know that Angel's stalker car was an Impala?

I think Whistler in the comics had further demony agendas but I changed him up. Mostly Buffy stuff will smoosh into Supernatural stuff, so we'll see what happens.