Part Three
AN: Alright, just so you know, the Buffy Bashing is mostly over (miscellaneous blonde jokes aside – don't deprive me of all, man), and on with the quasi-original stuff. Some of what I will write here will be to tie up loose ends to the end of the story (as it is fleshed out), but some of it (like Kendra's survival) is completely made up on the fly.
AN2: Another short chapter, but this will lead up to the big showdown between Xander and Angelus ... and within this chapter is the probable ending of a friendship.
It had been a month since the Judge had been taken apart by Buffy and her use of the rocket launcher – Kendra's temporary death seemed to be enough to call the next Slayer, a girl in Boston somewhere, but it also was enough to make the Jamaican-born Slayer seemingly regress into a fearfully withdrawn state. She rarely spoke for the first week and rarely seemed to be anywhere near at ease, save when he himself, Jenny or Dawn were around, but had started to come out of her shell a little more as the days went by – she was still her normal self, but little by little she seemed to come to terms with the fact that she had died, been brought back, and would have to deal with a life that she was really not ready to live due to her isolated upbringing.
He tried to help Kendra with as much as he could, but with his own vampire hunting methods and somewhat limited resources, so he generally took a two- hour bus drive to LA to hunt vampires a few nights a week, where he'd come across several windfalls of cash and even a vehicle, which would complicate things slightly, all said and done. What he needed, though, was some really specialized equipment ... and in Sunnydale, there was only one man to go to for that.
"Willy, do I REALLY need to tell you what'd happen if you tried to cheat me?" He'd been forced to go to Willy the Snitch to get some of the equipment he needed, as his own contacts within the underworld were non- existent. As such, he'd been forced to make certain ... assurances ... to the snitch that if Willy tried to short-change him or sell him out, that the reprisals would be very unpleasant.
"No, kid, you don't," Willy said somewhat fearfully, though that fear wasn't unexpected as he was looking down the barrel of a suppressed .45.
"Good." He picked up the rifle case that held the equipment he had ordered – a true M4A1 with SOPMOD attachments (OD sound suppressor, Rail Interface System, ACOG 4x scope and an IR/UV pointer/illumination), an AN/PVS-14 night vision monocular / scope attachment, and three more Claymores while he shouldered his large duffle that held another AT-4 and several dozen 1.25 pound blocks of block demolition charges, along with the detonators and linking detonation cords. It had not been cheap, but when one needed choice equipment, one had to be able to fork over the green, so it had taken a good deal of his liquid assets to pay for all of it. {AN: found this stuff in a book – picked what seemed to be better for a vampire and demon-hunting weapon}
He walked out of the bar unmolested and stashed both the duffle and the rifle case in the back of his new vehicle, an '89 Chevy Blazer, painted two- tone black and gray, that he had taken off of it's former owner, a vampire who liked to run both drugs and illegal electronics (pirated DVD's, software, etc.) nearly a week before back in Los Angeles. It was now his, free and clear ... after he had paid a forger to make the deceased's John Hancock magically appear after said deceased had blown away in the wind, and while that too had set him back, Xander still had enough to live comfortably off of with a little careful budgeting.
Even as he closed the back hatch to his vehicle, though, he caught their reflections in the glass and was forced to suppress both a grin and a grimace; someone had paid a pair of local PI's to keep an eye on him and while they weren't obvious, the two guys looked about as out of place as Queen Elizabeth at a Metallica concert in the part of town that Willy's was located. Deciding that they needed to earn their pay a little, he hopped into the Blazer and took off to tool around town a little, not really caring where he was or who was around him, and that's when the call came.
"Hello?"
"Xander? I can't reach anyone! Oh, God, they're trying to get in." Joyce's voice was scared, no, terrified and that caused a ball of ice to form where his heart was and a pool of acid to form in his stomach.
"Who, Joyce." He jerked the wheel around, performing a very illegal U-turn in the middle of a deserted street (it was getting close to sundown) before gunning the engine and racing off towards Rovello Drive.
"Um, I think its Buffy's boyfriend, Angel, and a few of his friends. Xander, what's going on?"
"I promise to tell you later, Joyce, but right now you need to get yourself and Dawnie into the basement and stay put. I'll be there in under five minutes, ignore the gunshots you might here and for God's sakes don't scream when I get down into the basement ... or ask too many questions when Buffy isn't present."
"Hurry, Xander." The call terminated even as Xander skidded onto Rovello Drive, reaching into the console of the Blazer for a pair of tracer-loaded magazines he always kept there just in case. Once he was at the house, though, he rushed to the back of the vehicle, grabbed the rifle case and removed the M4, pausing only briefly to attach the suppressor and load the thing, before he goes charging into the house that seemed to have been invaded by vampires somehow.
Reflex is what made him snap the weapon up to fire off a trio of quick rounds into a small group of vampires, one of whom seemed to worship Billy Idol enough to try and emulate him in physical appearances. This, though, brought about a screech from the same vampires that had been mumbling something about a 'Kitten' when they took down the Judge – he swung around and popped her too, her flaming dust falling around him even as his main quarry stepped into view, "Deadboy."
"Ah, Xander. I wish I could say it was go-"Angelus got no further as he was forced to throw himself off to one side in order to avoid being shot with the tracer rounds, and then took off through the back of the house, being followed by shot after shot from the flare-spitting weapon until he was out of the house. Alexander, though, kept on his ass and kept firing even as his first mag went dry, reloaded and resumed firing until he reached the edge of the neighborhood – he'd been forced to hop fence after fence to follow the bloodsucker, but the need to breath and screaming muscles made it impossible to keep up.
Humping it back to the Casa Del Summers, he kept an eye out for any vampires that might have slipped out of the house, which brought up a good question of how the vampires had actually gotten into the house in the first place. Soon, though, he was back at the house and was somewhat relieved to see that Buffy and the others had come back, "I can't find him, Joyce."
She rushed over and threw her arms around him, performing a nearly-perfect frontal sleeper hold even with the gun present, and babbled her thanks for responding, how good of a friend he was and may God bless him for helping her. Dawn soon attached herself to his other side and Buffy looked not at the scene, but at the weapon in his hand.
"Give me that gun, Xander. You shouldn't use them, let alone HAVE one."
"Back off, Buffy – now is NOT the time to bring up this issue." He untangled himself from Joyce and Dawn, slinging the gun around his shoulders and then tucking it behind his back, out of Buffy's reach, "What I want to know is how Angelus was able to get into the house without an invite, where you were that your mother couldn't find you and what we're going to do about Angelus."
"We're going to get his soul back to him, that's what."
"Yet oddly enough you don't seem too upset that VAMPIRES somehow got into your house, WITHOUT INVITATION, to attack your mother and sister. Funny, I thought you were more family-oriented than this."
She glared at him, "Don't go there, Harris. You are walking on this ice enough as it with the gun that I told you not to use."
"I'll use a sodding ICBM if I have to, Buffy – the name of this job is to stay alive and not everybody has Slayer-enhanced healing to where they can go hand-to-hand and not look like a red-headed step child the day after ass- beating day." Even though it didn't really register at the time, he heard Willow mutter, "Right here, you know," before going on. "And as I've stated before, Slayer, I will use whatever I have to use to stay alive, end of discussion. Now, how did Angelus and his cronies get into your house?"
"How should I know? It's not like..." Buffy's voice trailed off and her face began to pale, "Oh God no."
"What, Buffy?" Giles moved closer, "What did you do?"
"Um, I might have told Angel that he's, well, welcomed into the house at any ... time?" She looked pale and sheepish, a very bad combination, but he could have cared less at that point – she'd made her last mistake.
"Alright, that's it." Alexander whipped the M4 around from behind him and leveled it between her eyes, knowing that it was loaded with Tracer rounds and that both Joyce and Dawn were watching and listening, "Maybe your death will call a Slayer with a brain." Before he could pull the trigger, though, the front door exploded open and someone dressed in a military- style black suit came in, holding up a pair of suppressed pistols ... a very familiar someone.
"Don't do it, Squid! SEALs don't kill non-combatants – we're not like Charlie or those assholes that killed Pam and Doris." The man was slightly older than he remembered, maybe in his late forties or early fifties, but his eyes were still as hard as they had been back in Vietnam.
"Hello, John. How's Sandy?"
"Pissed at you, as always, but why don't you point that somewhere else rather than her forehead and we'll talk." At those words, Alexander slowly lowered the carbine, but didn't put it away, "Alright, now I heard why you wanted to plug her, but tell me what it is that you really want."
"For her to do her job and stake the son of a bitch, as per her standing orders – he's soulless, therefore he is fair game."
"You seem to know what is going on here, sir," Giles broke in, "but who are you and what are you doing here?"
"John Clark, Central Intelligence Agency, and I'm keeping one of our future operatives from killing that girl there, so if you don't mind..." John let the question hang and Alexander tried his best to not smirk at the collective looks of shock as John shrugged, "What can I say, the Company likes to recruit early."
"And you KNOW what we're talking about?"
"Vampires, demons, things that go bump in the night, you know, the usual – some of the US government knows of their existence and while we can not legally do anything about it, we, at the CIA, like to find ways around that ... and Alexander is one of those ways." It was a completely bullshit story – Alexander was sure that only Clark knew about the vamps and demons, and the rest was made up for the masses to hear.
"And how do you know Xander?"
"Alexander and I know each other by way of dual possession – those were my old fatigues that he got ahold of a few months back, so he was temporarily switched with my brain while I was, ahem, on leave with my wife." John looked over and grinned, "And Sandy knows who you are, kid, so I'd be careful about opening any packages from her."
"She's a nurse, John – First I shall do no harm, remember?" (AN: I know that Clark seems OOC, but remember, he was Xander for a little while, so maybe some of the humor passed over)
The Scoobies goggled at this, Dawn looking slightly upset for some odd reason, but John went on, "So, back on topic – where is this Angelus so we can eliminate him and I can get back to the house?"
"NO! You can't kill him ... I love him." Buffy's plea fell flat even as the Alexander pulled the carbine back up and settled it between her eyes, "You're going to have to kill me to stop me, Xander. I won't let him die."
"He's already dead, Buffy – kind of a prerequisite for being a vampire."
"Then I won't let you dust Angel."
"Angel is already dead, Buffy – he's Angelus ... or is he?" A thought cross Alexander's mind and a grin spread across his face, "Decision time, Buffy – is Angelus separate from Angel or are they the same person? Choose, or I choose for you."
"You'll let him live, then?"
"No, he's dust either way – Angelus is guilty of being a soulless vampire and of murder, Angel is also Angelus and guilty of his darker side's crimes. Make your choice – does he die easy or does he suffer first?"
Buffy looked scandalized, "That's Not Fair!"
He got into her face, "Neither is life, bottle blonde. CHOOSE!"
She got back into his face, sort of, seeing as she was much shorter than he was, "I WON"T CHOOSE!"
Alexander stepped back, his face a stoic mask, "Yet you still choose not to save him." That said, he turned on heel and walked out of the home, Clark following him, and the pair disappeared like wraiths in the night, leaving a shocked Slayer to think of her choices, non-choices and the Scoobies to ponder the revelations that had been made.
AN: Alright, just so you know, the Buffy Bashing is mostly over (miscellaneous blonde jokes aside – don't deprive me of all, man), and on with the quasi-original stuff. Some of what I will write here will be to tie up loose ends to the end of the story (as it is fleshed out), but some of it (like Kendra's survival) is completely made up on the fly.
AN2: Another short chapter, but this will lead up to the big showdown between Xander and Angelus ... and within this chapter is the probable ending of a friendship.
It had been a month since the Judge had been taken apart by Buffy and her use of the rocket launcher – Kendra's temporary death seemed to be enough to call the next Slayer, a girl in Boston somewhere, but it also was enough to make the Jamaican-born Slayer seemingly regress into a fearfully withdrawn state. She rarely spoke for the first week and rarely seemed to be anywhere near at ease, save when he himself, Jenny or Dawn were around, but had started to come out of her shell a little more as the days went by – she was still her normal self, but little by little she seemed to come to terms with the fact that she had died, been brought back, and would have to deal with a life that she was really not ready to live due to her isolated upbringing.
He tried to help Kendra with as much as he could, but with his own vampire hunting methods and somewhat limited resources, so he generally took a two- hour bus drive to LA to hunt vampires a few nights a week, where he'd come across several windfalls of cash and even a vehicle, which would complicate things slightly, all said and done. What he needed, though, was some really specialized equipment ... and in Sunnydale, there was only one man to go to for that.
"Willy, do I REALLY need to tell you what'd happen if you tried to cheat me?" He'd been forced to go to Willy the Snitch to get some of the equipment he needed, as his own contacts within the underworld were non- existent. As such, he'd been forced to make certain ... assurances ... to the snitch that if Willy tried to short-change him or sell him out, that the reprisals would be very unpleasant.
"No, kid, you don't," Willy said somewhat fearfully, though that fear wasn't unexpected as he was looking down the barrel of a suppressed .45.
"Good." He picked up the rifle case that held the equipment he had ordered – a true M4A1 with SOPMOD attachments (OD sound suppressor, Rail Interface System, ACOG 4x scope and an IR/UV pointer/illumination), an AN/PVS-14 night vision monocular / scope attachment, and three more Claymores while he shouldered his large duffle that held another AT-4 and several dozen 1.25 pound blocks of block demolition charges, along with the detonators and linking detonation cords. It had not been cheap, but when one needed choice equipment, one had to be able to fork over the green, so it had taken a good deal of his liquid assets to pay for all of it. {AN: found this stuff in a book – picked what seemed to be better for a vampire and demon-hunting weapon}
He walked out of the bar unmolested and stashed both the duffle and the rifle case in the back of his new vehicle, an '89 Chevy Blazer, painted two- tone black and gray, that he had taken off of it's former owner, a vampire who liked to run both drugs and illegal electronics (pirated DVD's, software, etc.) nearly a week before back in Los Angeles. It was now his, free and clear ... after he had paid a forger to make the deceased's John Hancock magically appear after said deceased had blown away in the wind, and while that too had set him back, Xander still had enough to live comfortably off of with a little careful budgeting.
Even as he closed the back hatch to his vehicle, though, he caught their reflections in the glass and was forced to suppress both a grin and a grimace; someone had paid a pair of local PI's to keep an eye on him and while they weren't obvious, the two guys looked about as out of place as Queen Elizabeth at a Metallica concert in the part of town that Willy's was located. Deciding that they needed to earn their pay a little, he hopped into the Blazer and took off to tool around town a little, not really caring where he was or who was around him, and that's when the call came.
"Hello?"
"Xander? I can't reach anyone! Oh, God, they're trying to get in." Joyce's voice was scared, no, terrified and that caused a ball of ice to form where his heart was and a pool of acid to form in his stomach.
"Who, Joyce." He jerked the wheel around, performing a very illegal U-turn in the middle of a deserted street (it was getting close to sundown) before gunning the engine and racing off towards Rovello Drive.
"Um, I think its Buffy's boyfriend, Angel, and a few of his friends. Xander, what's going on?"
"I promise to tell you later, Joyce, but right now you need to get yourself and Dawnie into the basement and stay put. I'll be there in under five minutes, ignore the gunshots you might here and for God's sakes don't scream when I get down into the basement ... or ask too many questions when Buffy isn't present."
"Hurry, Xander." The call terminated even as Xander skidded onto Rovello Drive, reaching into the console of the Blazer for a pair of tracer-loaded magazines he always kept there just in case. Once he was at the house, though, he rushed to the back of the vehicle, grabbed the rifle case and removed the M4, pausing only briefly to attach the suppressor and load the thing, before he goes charging into the house that seemed to have been invaded by vampires somehow.
Reflex is what made him snap the weapon up to fire off a trio of quick rounds into a small group of vampires, one of whom seemed to worship Billy Idol enough to try and emulate him in physical appearances. This, though, brought about a screech from the same vampires that had been mumbling something about a 'Kitten' when they took down the Judge – he swung around and popped her too, her flaming dust falling around him even as his main quarry stepped into view, "Deadboy."
"Ah, Xander. I wish I could say it was go-"Angelus got no further as he was forced to throw himself off to one side in order to avoid being shot with the tracer rounds, and then took off through the back of the house, being followed by shot after shot from the flare-spitting weapon until he was out of the house. Alexander, though, kept on his ass and kept firing even as his first mag went dry, reloaded and resumed firing until he reached the edge of the neighborhood – he'd been forced to hop fence after fence to follow the bloodsucker, but the need to breath and screaming muscles made it impossible to keep up.
Humping it back to the Casa Del Summers, he kept an eye out for any vampires that might have slipped out of the house, which brought up a good question of how the vampires had actually gotten into the house in the first place. Soon, though, he was back at the house and was somewhat relieved to see that Buffy and the others had come back, "I can't find him, Joyce."
She rushed over and threw her arms around him, performing a nearly-perfect frontal sleeper hold even with the gun present, and babbled her thanks for responding, how good of a friend he was and may God bless him for helping her. Dawn soon attached herself to his other side and Buffy looked not at the scene, but at the weapon in his hand.
"Give me that gun, Xander. You shouldn't use them, let alone HAVE one."
"Back off, Buffy – now is NOT the time to bring up this issue." He untangled himself from Joyce and Dawn, slinging the gun around his shoulders and then tucking it behind his back, out of Buffy's reach, "What I want to know is how Angelus was able to get into the house without an invite, where you were that your mother couldn't find you and what we're going to do about Angelus."
"We're going to get his soul back to him, that's what."
"Yet oddly enough you don't seem too upset that VAMPIRES somehow got into your house, WITHOUT INVITATION, to attack your mother and sister. Funny, I thought you were more family-oriented than this."
She glared at him, "Don't go there, Harris. You are walking on this ice enough as it with the gun that I told you not to use."
"I'll use a sodding ICBM if I have to, Buffy – the name of this job is to stay alive and not everybody has Slayer-enhanced healing to where they can go hand-to-hand and not look like a red-headed step child the day after ass- beating day." Even though it didn't really register at the time, he heard Willow mutter, "Right here, you know," before going on. "And as I've stated before, Slayer, I will use whatever I have to use to stay alive, end of discussion. Now, how did Angelus and his cronies get into your house?"
"How should I know? It's not like..." Buffy's voice trailed off and her face began to pale, "Oh God no."
"What, Buffy?" Giles moved closer, "What did you do?"
"Um, I might have told Angel that he's, well, welcomed into the house at any ... time?" She looked pale and sheepish, a very bad combination, but he could have cared less at that point – she'd made her last mistake.
"Alright, that's it." Alexander whipped the M4 around from behind him and leveled it between her eyes, knowing that it was loaded with Tracer rounds and that both Joyce and Dawn were watching and listening, "Maybe your death will call a Slayer with a brain." Before he could pull the trigger, though, the front door exploded open and someone dressed in a military- style black suit came in, holding up a pair of suppressed pistols ... a very familiar someone.
"Don't do it, Squid! SEALs don't kill non-combatants – we're not like Charlie or those assholes that killed Pam and Doris." The man was slightly older than he remembered, maybe in his late forties or early fifties, but his eyes were still as hard as they had been back in Vietnam.
"Hello, John. How's Sandy?"
"Pissed at you, as always, but why don't you point that somewhere else rather than her forehead and we'll talk." At those words, Alexander slowly lowered the carbine, but didn't put it away, "Alright, now I heard why you wanted to plug her, but tell me what it is that you really want."
"For her to do her job and stake the son of a bitch, as per her standing orders – he's soulless, therefore he is fair game."
"You seem to know what is going on here, sir," Giles broke in, "but who are you and what are you doing here?"
"John Clark, Central Intelligence Agency, and I'm keeping one of our future operatives from killing that girl there, so if you don't mind..." John let the question hang and Alexander tried his best to not smirk at the collective looks of shock as John shrugged, "What can I say, the Company likes to recruit early."
"And you KNOW what we're talking about?"
"Vampires, demons, things that go bump in the night, you know, the usual – some of the US government knows of their existence and while we can not legally do anything about it, we, at the CIA, like to find ways around that ... and Alexander is one of those ways." It was a completely bullshit story – Alexander was sure that only Clark knew about the vamps and demons, and the rest was made up for the masses to hear.
"And how do you know Xander?"
"Alexander and I know each other by way of dual possession – those were my old fatigues that he got ahold of a few months back, so he was temporarily switched with my brain while I was, ahem, on leave with my wife." John looked over and grinned, "And Sandy knows who you are, kid, so I'd be careful about opening any packages from her."
"She's a nurse, John – First I shall do no harm, remember?" (AN: I know that Clark seems OOC, but remember, he was Xander for a little while, so maybe some of the humor passed over)
The Scoobies goggled at this, Dawn looking slightly upset for some odd reason, but John went on, "So, back on topic – where is this Angelus so we can eliminate him and I can get back to the house?"
"NO! You can't kill him ... I love him." Buffy's plea fell flat even as the Alexander pulled the carbine back up and settled it between her eyes, "You're going to have to kill me to stop me, Xander. I won't let him die."
"He's already dead, Buffy – kind of a prerequisite for being a vampire."
"Then I won't let you dust Angel."
"Angel is already dead, Buffy – he's Angelus ... or is he?" A thought cross Alexander's mind and a grin spread across his face, "Decision time, Buffy – is Angelus separate from Angel or are they the same person? Choose, or I choose for you."
"You'll let him live, then?"
"No, he's dust either way – Angelus is guilty of being a soulless vampire and of murder, Angel is also Angelus and guilty of his darker side's crimes. Make your choice – does he die easy or does he suffer first?"
Buffy looked scandalized, "That's Not Fair!"
He got into her face, "Neither is life, bottle blonde. CHOOSE!"
She got back into his face, sort of, seeing as she was much shorter than he was, "I WON"T CHOOSE!"
Alexander stepped back, his face a stoic mask, "Yet you still choose not to save him." That said, he turned on heel and walked out of the home, Clark following him, and the pair disappeared like wraiths in the night, leaving a shocked Slayer to think of her choices, non-choices and the Scoobies to ponder the revelations that had been made.