Outtakes

Part 1

These bits of the story are rather irrelevant and only written for my own amusement. There is a high chance that they wouldn't even be counted as humor under any rational measurement, or that the characters will not act as they do in canon. The inspiration for the Outtakes chapters was begotten after I read the Sailor Moon/Hellblazer crossover – I can't remember the author's name, but the 'fic is in the Vertigo section of the Comics part of fanfiction.net. Go and read – it's much funnier than my 'fics, even though yes, it's a Sailor Moon crossover. John Constantine accidentally gets a wand that turns him into Sailor Hellblazer, a girl. Heh.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Buffy realizes her feelings for Spike.]

"Spike! You pig! How dare you eat all my chocolate chocolate chip Haagen Dasc ice cream! I'm going to kill you!" Buffy snarled, whipping out a stake from wherever she conceals them in her tight clothing.

"I'd buy you another one, luv." Spike cautiously got a table between him and the enraged, ice cream deprived Slayer. Come to think of it, eating the Slayer's ice cream as a sort of payback for her getting his coat didn't seem to be a very good idea. Besides, the resultant sugar high was doing funny things to his brain.

Absently, he dodged a hurled stake.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Buffy finds out about Connor, Angel's son, whom he had with his vampire sire Darla. This ridiculous 'twist' is actually in the show – I mean, how can vampires have children?]

"You what?" Buffy's knuckles whitened over the 'phone as she spoke to Angel.

"I'm very sorry, Buffy… but yes, I had a son with Darla." Angel's normally smooth voice was broken with the guilty regret that again, he was causing Buffy pain.

"I know about that! Why are you calling him Connor? What kind of name is Connor?"

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Dawn goes out on her first date. Everyone else panics.]

"You know, Dawn, I have a feeling something's watching us," Michael, the extremely cute guy from the next class whom Dawn still couldn't believe had asked her out to a movie, said sheepishly.

Dawn looked around. "Well, I don't see anything."

"Yeah, it's probably just me being nervous." Michael smiled a little shyly. "You're beautiful."

Dawn blushed. "Thanks. You look good too."

"Which movie are we watching?"

Behind them, invisible, the Wizard's Eye floated.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Another of Willow's spells goes off accidentally.]

"Oops."

Nalfein sighed, trying to gather patience. He now looked like the spitting image of Legolas. "Willow… "

"I'm sorry!"

Actually, Nalfein reflected, Willow didn't seem particularly contrite.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Buffy agonizes over whether she should accept Spike. Insert angst.]

Buffy sat in her bedroom, counting on her fingers. "Bad things: he's an undead vampire, he smokes and he still professes to be evil."

"Good things: My first love was a vampire, normal guys have a problem with my strength, Spike doesn't smoke in my presence, and Nalfein is supposedly more evil, but he makes Willow happy. Spike is a good kisser, great in bed, he buys stuff for me, he treats me like an equal, that chip in his head prevents him from hurting people, he promised he'd never leave me, he gets on well with Dawnie, we can patrol together, he isn't afraid to speak what's on his mind, he's so sexy in leather – or in nothing at all – those blue eyes are beautiful, we have a lot in common, mom used to like him… and, he's made it quite clear that I own him as much as one person can possess another." Buffy sighed.

"What a choice."

[insert sarcasm]

**

[Fanfic Cliché: A New Evil in Sunnydale]

All of them looked at the poster. It was one of many that had been springing up around Sunnydale, like some sort of colorful paper plague.

"I can't bloody believe it," Spike said, finally.

"Britney Spears! Here!" Buffy muttered. "Oh god!"

"You know what this means, Buff," Xander drawled, then did an extremely bad parody of Britney Spear's routine, gyrating his hips. "Ooh I did it again, you know what ah feel… "

"Stop it, Xander," Dawn giggled.

"What can we do?" Willow asked. Nalfein's expression spoke plainly – the elf had no idea what was going on, and had actually been wondering what Willow would look like in the extremely skimpy outfit the girl in the poster wore.

"Demons in the audience," Spike said promptly. "At best they'd just eat some of her fans. Less of them the better."

"Spike!" Buffy glared at him. "Eating people is bad!" she paused. "Even Britney fans."

"Silence spell," Constantine suggested. "And make it permanent." He snorted. "'Least she's given up on sellin' her bleedin' 'I am a virgin' image. Friggin' ridiculous, that one, with all the clothes she wears."

"What clothes?" Spike smirked.

"Exactly!"

**

[Fanfic Cliché: A Stranger comes with a Warning.]

Constantine opened the door, and came face to face with the Phantom Stranger. "Bloody hell! Not you again! What is it now?"

The Phantom Stranger, unruffled, began to speak. "Constantine, you have been warned: an ounce of chocolate is poison to dogs." With that, he stepped back, and vanished.

Constantine blinked. "What the hell was that about?"

**

[Fanfic Cliché: AU characters meet.]

"This is the hundred-and-twenty-first meeting of Jarlaxles Anonymous," the Jarlaxle who sat at the head of the black oval table said, tapping his fingers on the glass table sheath in emphasis. "Today, we'd like to congratulate Jarlaxle-eight on becoming a Demon Prince of Hell."

The other Jarlaxles clapped politely in a rattle of jewelry, while Jarlaxle-eight stood up and bowed gracefully.

"We'd also like to wish Jarlaxle-ten the best of luck in his ventures on the Dow Jones, his continued striving for world domination, and in the monopoly court cases involving his company Microsoft."

Jarlaxle-ten, who looked like a human in a business suit and with spectacles and short-cropped hair, reached to his eyes and seemed to move something. The image of a human melted away to reveal his true form – a smirking dark elven mercenary leader, his eyepatch on his right eye now.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Mary Sue/Author Avatar.]

Constantine had known someone had been following him for a while. He'd even managed to get a glimpse of her, something not very difficult, as she made no attempt to conceal herself. She was a rather short girl of Chinese appearance, aged perhaps around fifteen to seventeen – shoulder-length black hair that looked uncombed and rather tangled, with stray strands sticking up in the air, a face that could not be called pretty even if one tried to be generous, nose a bit flat, lips a little too thick, dark eye bags that spoke of too many late nights surfing the Net.

Now, where had that last bit of information come from?

Her skin was pale and not tanned, and she was very thin, nearly painfully so. Flat-chested, with shorter hair, she could probably pass for a boy. Spectacles crept slowly down her nose as she ostensibly looked into a shop window. She walked without any grace, and if there was a word for her, it would be 'vague'.

Constantine shook his head, mildly astonished. What was this girl doing out of school?

[ah, brutal reality.]

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Angel confronts Buffy about Spike.]

"What do you mean, I shouldn't be seeing Spike?" Buffy growled.

"Buffy… "

"While you, of course, can sleep with Darla and have a child with her and sleep with Cordelia. Right… which century did you leave your brain in?"

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Killing the Slayer.]

Two vampires lay on top of a crypt, watching as, some distance away, Buffy and Spike patrolled. One of the vampires was sighting down a sniper rifle, while the other vampire was using the scope and giving directions.

"I wonder why we've never thought of this," the sniper-rifle-vampire muttered under his breath.

Suddenly, stakes fell out of the sky and impaled them through their hearts, turning them into dust. The stakes were marked 'No Buffy – No more show'.

Buffy and Spike turned in the distance of the short screams, saw nothing, and shrugged philosophically.

"Want to check it out?" Spike asked, as they strolled along.

"Probably just the wind."

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Some characters are moved to the 'real' world.]

"What do you mean Nick Cage is playin' me?" Constantine growled.

The director of the upcoming Constantine movie cringed behind his desk. "Well… Mr. Cage is a good actor… "

"He isn't bleedin' good lookin'! Do you think he friggin' looks like me, you berk?"

"No…"

"Right. I'm goin' to kill him now. Pick another friggin' actor. And when I come back I want to see your bleedin' plot fixed. I'm not a bloody New Yorker!"

[complaining about JC's character in the Constantine movie that'd be filmed soon being Nicholas Cage]

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Movie Parody.]

"Choose a pill – the red one, or the blue one."

"What?" Constantine stared at the man in a black leather duster not unlike Spike's. He had dark skin, and was bald – Constantine had encountered him in the street, and was wondering how much crack the man had smoked. Probably more than a few pounds, if the conversation that the man had struck up with him had been anything to go by.

"The blue pill will show you the real world, the red one will cause you to forget."

Constantine sighed, and wished for a moment that his life didn't involve him running into so many seriously fucked-up people.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: A character gets stuck on another world and gets into romantic situations with a popular character from that world.]

"I'm friggin' straight, you wanker!" Constantine yelled down at the elf. He'd managed to get onto an outcrop on a more-or-less sheer cliff with Meri's help, and he had no idea how he was going to get out of this mess.

On the other hand, if he ever managed to get back to his world, he could tell the girls that the object of their crush was even more handsome in 'real life' than in the movie.

"Meri!"

The phoenix laughed at him as the elf rather nonchalantly began to scale the cliff as easily as if he had been born with a lizard's grip.

[response to the incredible number of slash pairings in the LoTR Fanfic.net section]

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Buffy and Spike get on with it in an abandoned building.]

"Slayer, 'Queld' is not a word."

"Is too."

"Is not."

"Is too."

"Is not."

Spike saw the point between Buffy agreeing to play Scrabble with him in the abandoned building near the Magic Box – it was far, far away from any decent dictionary.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Willow turns evil.]

"Willow!"

Willow had 'accidentally' cast the spell that made Nalfein look like Legolas again.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" Willow smiled wickedly. "Stay there. I've got my camera this time!"

"Camera?"

"Um yeah, it um, makes flashes of light to um, allow people to see better. Do you mind taking off your clothes?"

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Spike is somehow unable to be hurt the normal vampire way.]

"Where's Spike?" Buffy asked Dawn curiously.

"Where else? The beach, sunbathing," Dawn rolled her eyes. "Ever since the miracle happened, he's been working on his tan. Seems to think it'd make him look better."

Buffy privately thought that Spike took some sort of perverse pleasure to exposing himself to things that would normally have killed him. He wore a silver pendant of a cross around his neck, and he bathed in holy water now.

He probably got off on it.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Cordelia gets a vision. Stuff happens.]

The 'phone rang, and Buffy answered, "Hello?"

Cordelia's voice sounded excited. "Buffy? I just had a vision, and… "

"Don't tell me – another evil coming to Sunnydale? One of us dying?"

"No, I just saw a lot of demons in some sort of concert… "

Buffy blinked, put the phone down, and yelled, "Spike!"

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Buffy somehow appears in ages past and finds a pre-vampire Spike.]

"Buffy, you look beautiful," Spike gaped. Buffy wore Victorian dress, the maroon satin flaring out from her waist over the cage and petticoats underneath. Buffy grimaced, not liking the corset, and wondering how the Slayers of old managed to do their job in these contraptions.

"We have to pick up Willow and Nalfein for the Renaissance festival," she reminded Spike as she followed him to the car.

"Your carriage awaits, madam," Spike bowed, opening the door of the DeSoto for her. Actually, their clothing wasn't strictly Renaissance period, but then, he doubted everyone would be accurate. Nalfein, for example, was going in his ceremonial robes, to try and pass for a court wizard.

"Well, you look good too, my Lord," Buffy grinned at Spike. His hair was not gelled up and dyed as usual, and the light brown fringe flopped over his eyes. Adorable in black doublet and hose and a wide-brimmed hat adorned with two crow's feathers, an elegant rapier hung at the hip.

Spike chuckled at her. The day at the festival promised to be fun, even though it was being held in LA and there was the chance that Peaches would show up.

**

[Fanfic Cliché: Buffy comes back wrong. Insert angst.]

Buffy looked at herself in the mirror and shook her head in resignation. Anya had been right – the black skirt, now that she had come home and had the time to look at it long and properly, did not match with the red blouse.

"Bloody hell," she muttered, unconsciously using one of Spike's favorite phrases.

Well, there was nothing to it – she'd just have to hope that the blouse and skirt matched with some other bits of her clothing. Hopefully, Dawn wouldn't notice that she bought the two at first for a matched set, or she'd willingly die and go to… wherever people went after death… and they'd have to pull her back if they wanted to.

**

Author's note and warning: The next part of Outtakes is likely to be NC-17, unless I get more inspiration for Outtakes… so far I don't find it funny at all. Eh well.