This is all Disney property now, right? Because Buffy was owned by Fox? In any case, all characters and such are property of probably the Mouse and whoever else owns a piece of this giant cake. Certainly not me.
1945
As she watched the rapidly approaching Arctic sea beneath her, Eve Rogers allowed herself a moment of satisfaction. She'd had a long life for a Slayer, especially in a war like this one. They'd gone through three girls in as many years during the first World War, and two before her in the second. She was going out on a high note, finally finishing off the totenkopf demon that had been behind the many-headed forces of demons and vampires allied with the Nazis.
She really only had three regrets, if she was being honest.
The first was that she hadn't been able to save Bucky. They'd grown up together before she was identified as a Potential Slayer, managed to stay in touch before the war, and he'd kept her secret when they'd met back up again. She figured he was a little sweet on her, of course, and felt guilty that his death meant she'd never have to let him down easy.
The second was that she'd probably go down in history as the wrong gender. She'd had to sneak into the army pretending to be her older brother Steven (who'd died unreported in the vampire attack that had identified her as a Potential), still young enough to be all knees and elbows. Even after hitting her last growth spurt and Calling, which meant she needed to wear the extensively-tailored armored costume to keep passing as a boy, the Army brass wasn't willing to let the charade go. She'd been really looking forward to ripping the ACE bandage bindings off before a post-war press conference and letting the world know that women did have a place in combat.
The third, and biggest, was that she'd never gotten that dance with her replacement Watcher. Of course, she'd always be fond of Erskine and his clever grift about "super soldier serum" and "vita rays" to let her use her Slayer powers out in the open. But her heart belonged to Peggy Carter, and she was so close to overcoming the ages-old prohibition about Watchers fraternizing with their Slayers.
But, all in all, she figured she'd had a good run. The world would be much safer without that charismatic demon unifying the forces of darkness, and she was even now taking down a plane set to bomb America to where it could never do any harm. For a girl that loved her country and the world so much that she convinced her Watcher to let her sneak off to war even before she was Called, it would do.
She gave a wistful smile as she braced for the plunge into the icy waters.
1987
Peggy was ready to retire, and might finally get the chance. The Pyms had kept her hanging on for years. She had to keep an eye on the technomancer to make sure he didn't go the way of most who discovered magic while thinking they were doing science. The Watchers Council had urged her for years to eliminate the man, but he was too useful to the Division and too good of a person. Despite decades of decisions made in the name of espionage, Eve would never forgive her for murdering an idealist just because he was dangerously curious.
It was fitting that Pym's last mission, Peggy's last mission, was the same as Eve's: stop a missile using HYDRA black magic from blowing up America. And it was a sad irony that Hank had lost Janet just as Peggy had lost Eve. Peggy, with her Slayer dead, had let her grief drive her into her current job—a mole for the Watchers Council inside the US military-industrial complex. Hank's grief would drive him out.
With no more risk that the brilliant mad scientist's accidental discoveries of the secrets of the spriggan would lead to the military weaponizing the powers of the size-changing nature fae, Peggy could finally leave the job to someone else. Whoever eventually replaced her would have a real problem when it came to the supernatural, since she'd never managed to get another trained Watcher far enough into the organization: tweed and bookishness didn't mesh well with the American military mindset.
She was confident that eventually someone in the organization would figure it out. Or the Watchers Council would have to send the Slayer to pick up the pieces. But she'd more than done her part, and had earned a rest.
1995
Nick Fury wasn't sure what to put in his report. Danvers had clearly thought that the Kree and Skrulls were aliens, but she wasn't exactly the most reliable witness after years of brainwashing. It might have just been the spin a NASA-hopeful Air Force pilot put on her encounters with things that were far stranger. The place he'd accompanied her certainly hadn't been in outer space. Creatures from another dimension did technically count as aliens, but there might be a more accurate term for what they were.
If Danvers hadn't been so powerful, he would have made her stay. Run some experiments. If only the secrets of the universe were highly-advanced ETs, Nick would sleep much better. He'd felt more and more out of his depth the more of the weird stuff that came across his desk. Somehow Carter had made it look easy, but with her rapidly-dwindling mental faculties it was getting harder and harder to get her to consult. It was a real shame.
The biggest question mark for Nick was why Danvers had crashed into a chain video rental store in otherwise unassuming Sunnydale, California. Crashed as if she had fallen from space… or been on a ballistic trajectory from the side of town with the high school. He'd be inclined to look deeper into the town, but Maggie Walsh already had her own initiative planned for the area, and he didn't want to get in a pissing contest with the Army's favorite unethical biologist.
For the time being he'd just have to keep an eye on the place when he could. It wasn't like he had one to spare anymore.
1996
Phil Coulson liked the weird cases. He liked filling out the Index. He liked tagging 0-8-4s. It was usually an interesting change of pace from the run-of-the-mill espionage. He got to go places where people might not shoot at him, talk to people that might not lie to him out of habit, and sometimes his superiors would even let him keep some fun memorabilia.
This one was a bit of a stumper, though. Hemery High in LA had months of student disappearances and deaths. And then most of them had allegedly shown back up for the school dance. Which had burned down. That wouldn't have been quite weird enough for him to come in, except that there were far too few bodies found in the wreckage, despite evidence that the place hadn't burned hard enough to incinerate the corpses so much they couldn't be identified as corpses.
The teens he'd interviewed were already showing the kind of dissociation that was common in 0-8-4 cases, rationalizing the extranormal as something explicable. He was sure that the kids that had come back had attacked the dance for some reason, but everyone he talked to had a different explanation. Well, PCP was mentioned more than once, but he blamed that on after-school specials.
He really wanted to talk to the girl who'd allegedly set the gym on fire, but the principal had expelled her and she was in the wind. Coulson had already talked to her parents—a nice but slightly spacey art curator and a narcissistic dot-com entrepreneur—but they had no clue. They were so deep into their impending divorce, they might not have noticed that their daughter was expelled and missing for days if he hadn't asked about her.
Well, he had their number and they had his card. Hopefully he wouldn't be on another assignment around the world when someone finally found her. Hopefully she wouldn't be just another missing body of another mysterious LA death. Hopefully he was wrong about her close connection to the 0-8-4.
Shrugging, he made sure to open up a file for Buffy Anne Summers and cross referenced it to the still-unresolved case of the Hemery High disappearances. At least he'd found a cool souvenir in a suspicious, abandoned boudoir-like lair near the high school: a violin that had been modified to replace both faces of the instrument with transparent plexiglass. It would look great on his shelf.
Early 1997
Buffy was ready. New town. New school. No more bad-fashion-sense bad boys who left her in Vegas when the adrenaline wore off of their mismatched relationship. No more tweedy Watchers showing up to take over her life and ruin her social and academic calendars. No more time in the mental hospital lying about being totally normal until the psychiatrists let her out and then having to scramble to catch up on months of her sophomore year schoolwork. No more dodging weird periodic phone calls to her old house from some FBI guy pretending like he wanted to know the truth of what happened at the Hemery High dance.
No more vampires.
It was an exciting dream. It nearly lasted until gym class.
Buffy Season 1 and Season 2 through What's My Line? proceed without change. The rest of this chapter occurs during the events of (and alters) What's My Line? parts 1 and 2.
November 1997
Phil Coulson heard the lock rattling in the door of his low-budget motel room. It wasn't loud, but one got used to the sound of lockpicks in his business. It was way too early for maid service anyway, even if he hadn't put out the do not disturb sign. They probably didn't know he was awake, since he'd been filling out paperwork with only the room's desk lamp on.
Quietly retrieving his sidearm from his secure briefcase, and stashing the files while he was at it, the mostly-dressed SHIELD agent moved to have a good line of fire on the door while being out of immediate sight, careful not to move between the lamp and the window. There wasn't as much space as he'd like, but, then, you didn't get the fancy hotel rooms when following up a lead that was over a year old.
The lock finally clicked open. Coulson rated whoever it was a medium on the skill. He caught a glimmer of illumination from the pre-dawn motel's track lighting on red hair, and the silhouette of an imposing woman. Lockpicks already stowed, the woman had a knife in her hand, and began prowling like a jungle cat toward the room's bed.
She only got a couple of steps before noticing it was empty, so Coulson quipped, "I don't need turn down service, thanks."
The tall woman turned quickly toward him, raising the knife to attack but not following through when she noticed he was sighting at her point blank with his pistol. Her eyes only widened further when she recognized him in the lamplight. "Coulson," she frowned.
"Patrice?" Coulson replied, recognizing her now that her face was turned toward him. "Did I finally rate the Order's attention?" SHIELD had run across her eclectic order of assassins numerous times, and Coulson took great pleasure in having stopped this one in particular from completing two separate kills.
"Misunderstanding," she growled out. Given how surprised she was to see him, Coulson believed it. He noticed that she was wearing an agency-style suit not that different from his own.
He jumped to a conclusion and guessed, "Inserting yourself into a high school job fair? Slumming a little?" It had been her MO before: kill and replace someone relatively anonymous but with access to her target.
The flicker of the woman's eyes underneath her bangs told him he'd landed on the right answer. She flung her knife at him and he dodged easily, but it had just been a feint as the woman dived out the open motel door and leaped over the railing to the ground floor parking lot. She was long gone before Coulson got into position and decided whether he should try to take a shot.
Confirming that she was gone took a few minutes, in which Coulson found a payphone just in case the motel's phone network was compromised. "This is Coulson," he said into the phone, once he was properly connected back to SHIELD. "I was just attacked by Patrice the Panther. Order of Taraka. I don't think I was the target, she was trying to replace me for the Sunnydale High career day, so likely her target is someone at the school." He listened to the person at the other end of the line for a moment before replying, "Yes. Whoever you can send. I may be able to take Patrice if I have to, but she's a skilled fighter and there's usually more than one of these guys. And see if you can trace who else might be here and who they're after."
Hanging up, Coulson considered. He was only here at all because Fury was monitoring the town after the Danvers incident, and Coulson's own open case for Buffy Anne Summers had triggered a cross-reference alert when the school sent out a general request for representatives for their career fair. Apparently this was where the girl had gone after getting expelled from Hemery.
Coulson had accepted the invitation as a chance to finally talk to the girl about what happened at her old gym, and they had ensured that the girl would be recommended "Law Enforcement" by her standardized job placement test. So here he was under his FBI cover identity, just to hopefully finally close a case, when assassins showed up.
Fury was going to be so smug about his intuition that more was going on in this town than it seemed.
Willow Rosenberg was having an anxious morning. Buffy was skipping the career fair to investigate vampires for her Watcher, Giles; Principal Snyder didn't believe her attempts to cover for her friend; and both Buffy and their friend Xander had gotten their career fair results but Willow's were blank. Blank! Did she make a mistake on the test? She was certain she turned it in. It wasn't like it counted for points but she didn't want a clerical error to be added to her permanent record.
She wasn't sure if it was of the bad, but it was definitely not of the good. She might have peed a little when two men in government suits flanked her. One asked, "Willow Rosenberg? Come with us, please." Had she done so badly on the test that the government had flagged her? Did they know about her hacking?
"Excuse me?" she covered, thinking back to the advice she got about this situation from Hackers. But all her mind would give her was that she needed to hide the floppy disk in the boys' bathroom and get a pair of rollerblades. Neither of those was helpful.
"Let's walk," the man insisted, the two of them physically grabbing her and guiding her off behind a curtain. Behind it, a large section of the student lounge had been turned into a quiet space with… a waiter? "Try the canapé. It's excellent," her captor insisted.
Willow had definitely not expected her extraordinary rendition to involve canapés. She shook her head, baffled, at the waiter and asked, "What is all this?"
"You've been selected to meet with Justin Hammer, head of the world's leading electronics concern. The jet was delayed by fog at Sea-Tac, but he should be here any minute. Please, make yourself comfortable," explained the man who was apparently not a government agent.
"But I didn't even get my test back," Willow argued, a part of her brain waving a red flag about the aforementioned Justin Hammer and the truthfulness of whether Hammer Industries was really the world's leading electronics concern.
The man shook his head and said, "The test was irrelevant. We've been tracking you for some time."
"Is that a good thing?" Willow was pretty sure it was not.
"I would think so. We're extremely selective. In fact, only one other Sunnydale student met our criteria," the man explained, stepping away with his partner after gesturing to the couch.
Willow, for lack of anything better to do, stepped over and examined the short boy with colorful hair that she'd noticed around a few times recently. He did a double-take and offered her a tray of food he'd snagged. "Canapé?"
She sat gingerly on the couch and this time accepted the offered food, but before she had a chance to say anything, a wound-up ball of energy in a fitted suit burst into the room. The skinny man reminded her a little of her friend Jesse, who'd been turned into a vampire earlier that year. Both of them shared dark hair that was struggling, but failing, to grow into a proper beard.
"Found the food? Great! Ready for the pitch? Here it comes!" the man fired off, staccato, nearly dancing across the room to them. He was reminding her more and more of Jesse and Xander now, nerdy boys trying too hard to be cool. "Willow Rosenberg? Daniel Osbourne?" he checked.
"'Oz' is fine," the boy in question offered, sharing a look with Willow that was like, "Is this guy serious?" Willow nearly giggled at being included in the confidence, but managed to stifle it and turned her attention to the man, showing her serious face.
"Like the wizard or like the country?" the man quipped, then introduced himself, "Justin Hammer, though I'm sure you knew that." They hadn't. "Anyway, let me give you a quick introduction to Hammer Industries…"
He managed to get the TV in the room to play a slickly edited reel with way more explosions than Willow altogether considered necessary. While the company was mainly a defense contractor, it apparently did a lot with electronics, mechanical devices, and software.
As the video was finishing up, Hammer began, "Now I'm sure the two of you are very excited to–" He stopped talking as he noticed a woman pushing her way through the curtains. "No!" he insisted. "Go tell Tony to stop poaching!"
The woman was maybe in her late twenties, and had red hair a shade lighter than Willow's. She wore a professional skirt suit and heels—so effortlessly put together and poised that Willow suddenly knew who she wanted to be when she grew up. "Did you pay to set up a whole lounge for two students?" the woman asked, reaching for a canapé that the waiter was offering her.
"No! No canapés for her!" Hammer continued his tantrum. "This is a private event."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Hammer," the woman apologized, not that apologetically, glaring at the back of the waiter who was retreating with the snacks. "But Stark Industries did also sign up for this career fair."
"And where is Tony, anyway?" Hammer asked her, suddenly remembering to play to his audience. "Didn't deign to visit Sunnydale?"
She shrugged, "It's not my job to keep track of Mr. Stark." Something behind her eyes indicated, though, that with the rate that he was going through personal assistants since Edwin Jarvis retired that she knew it would be her job pretty soon. "Hi, I'm Virginia Potts," she directed at Willow and Oz, "But everyone calls me 'Pepper.' I'm here for Stark Industries."
"Willow," she introduced herself. "Did we really do well enough for all of this?"
"I do test well," her comrade in embarrassment grinned, then introduced himself, "Oz."
"You're practically in our backyard," Pepper admitted, moving up and sitting familiarly between the two students on the couch, leaving Hammer the man out. "I just had to drive down from LA. Mr. Hammer, aren't you from New York?" she asked pointedly.
"Hammer Industries has businesses all over," Hammer waved away. "In fact, we have a facility locally. Calax R&D. Maybe you've heard of it?"
Willow gulped, recognizing the company where the internet-based demon that had tricked her into thinking he was her online boyfriend had built his robot body a few months earlier. "I heard it was out of business?" she answered.
"Is it?" the man said, nonplussed. "I hadn't heard that. I'll look into it."
"Are either of you interested in working in technology?" Pepper asked.
"Oh, uh, well… I think I'm going to finish high school first," Willow managed.
Oz grinned disarmingly and said, "I'm not really a computer person, you know. Or a work of any kind person."
"Well don't you have some ambition?" Willow asked the boy, past Pepper who leaned back to basically let Willow do the recruitment spiel for her.
"Oh, yeah! Yeah. E-flat, diminished ninth," the boy said, making a guitar-playing gesture with his hands.
"What kind of music do you play?" Pepper interjected, realizing Willow didn't get it. "Mr. Stark is a big metal fan. Lots of employees at Stark Industries play in bands for fun."
"Hammer Industries, too!" the nearly-forgotten CEO insisted. "The Beatles! The Rolling Stones! Metallica! Van Halen! Pearl Jam!"
Oz couldn't contain a scoff at the man just listing bands, "Metal's cool," he answered Pepper. "We kind of just torture our instruments and hope something good comes out?"
Willow remembered where she'd seen Oz before. "Wait! No! You're in Dingoes Ate My Baby! You guys are good!"
"Thanks," he said, biting back a self-deprecating follow up.
"Well, if either of you decide you want more information, here's my card with my personal email on it," Pepper said, handing out her glossy Stark Industries business cards to the two teens.
"We're definitely getting email soon!" Hammer insisted, thrusting a pair of glossy Hammer Industries pamphlets at the teens. "But you can contact us by phone. International toll-free!"
"Thanks," Oz said, less genuinely than for the praise from Willow. "Can we walk you to your car?" he asked Pepper.
"That would be great," she nodded, standing. "Mr. Hammer," she acknowledged the rival industrialist.
As the two teens took the opportunity to slip out with Stark's employee, they could faintly hear Hammer berating his staff for letting her in.
After a long first day of the career fair, Phil Coulson had not managed to speak with Buffy Summers, but he had gathered a substantial amount of other data through indirect conversation with the students that walked by the law enforcement booth. "This town is strange," he opined to his dinner companions over takeout in a new motel room (under a different alias).
"How so?" Barton asked. The junior agent ate an egg roll with one hand and one free to grab his bow, in case another assassin came bursting in the door he was keeping an eye on.
"How many students and teachers would you assume die each year at the high school of a town this size?" Coulson answered the question with a question.
"One? Fewer?" May suggested, more relaxed than Barton. Even seemingly at ease, the small Chinese-American woman would likely be on any attackers before Barton could get an arrow nocked. "I'm not sure anyone died in my high school class."
"Didn't really go to high school," Barton shrugged, not able to give an answer.
"Sunnydale has at least a dozen each year. That's what I could confirm. And none of them with a great explanation," Coulson provided the answer. "The principal is in his first year. Last year, the old one was allegedly ripped apart by wild dogs."
"Gangs?" May suggested.
Coulson shook his head. "Some people floated that idea, but I don't buy it. It's the same kind of willing disbelief we see in 0-8-4 cases. Something unexplained is raising the death count."
"And the army has precedence," May said, reminding him about Walsh's Initiative which would be opening soon. "They won't appreciate it if we get too deeply involved."
"Going after Taraka gives us cover. We're not kicking over rocks, we're in hot pursuit." Seeing that his noodles were getting cold, Coulson finished a mouthful before saying, "Besides, Walsh reports to Ross. Ross is busy overseeing his off-books research projects at Culver University. I'd rather ruffle her feathers than his."
"I slept on the plane. I can do recon tonight," Barton offered.
"Sounds good. May?" Coulson asked.
"I'm not leaving you behind with assassins that might take another shot," May told him. "And I didn't get to sleep on the plane." After all, she'd been the pilot. "I can do recon in the morning, when you're safe in the school." Coulson smirked and she corrected, "Relatively safe. Don't be one of the dozen deaths for this year."
"The nightlife patterns are all wrong for a town like this," Barton shared over a breakfast of donuts in the car ride to the high school. He'd gotten in after midnight and caught a few hours of sleep. Clearly having Coulson and May's attention, he explained, "This town is small. Walkable. Nice out, even in November. But there's hardly anyone out at night. Most people travel in groups who do go. Get to their cars as fast as possible. I don't even think they realize they're doing it. By midnight, the few people I saw walking around moved like predators."
"Police presence?" May asked.
"Basically none," Barton answered. "Maybe there are some truly bad neighborhoods that I somehow missed, but I didn't see any patrols. Some cops going point to point in a hurry, probably to get home. Either this town is completely safe…"
"Or it's so dangerous even the police don't go out after dark," Coulson finished. "You want to get a daytime baseline for comparison today?"
Barton looked up with a grin at the bell tower looming over the school as they pulled up and answered, "I do indeed."
Coulson spotted her from across the busy crowd, splitting up from a redhead whose dress sense was strangely immature and a very short young man who dressed like a musician. He'd recognize Buffy Anne Summers from the research he'd done anyway, but school photos couldn't tell you that someone moved like a fighter. This girl did. Short, blond, and wearing the latest fashion, he'd still pick her out if someone told him an operative was in the crowd.
Why did a 16-year-old with nothing more serious athletically in her history than ice skating and cheerleading move like a SHIELD agent in her first year out of training?
May spotted it too, and Coulson asked her, "Run the rest of the meeting for me while I talk to the kid?"
Rolling her eyes at the much-less-interesting group of kids around the table, May nodded and muttered, "You owe me."
Making sure Summers signed the clipboard, Coulson advised the crowd, "We're going to split into two groups. First group, I'll call your names and you go with Agent May here." There was a murmur of approval as the group realized that they were possibly-interesting feds and not lame local police. "Second group stays with me."
He thought he managed to get through the list naturally enough before saving Summers for last, the only one in his group. But she glanced around and asked, suspiciously, "We aren't expecting more people, are we?"
"Sorry for the subterfuge, but I've been trying to have a chance to talk to you for over a year. Phil Coulson."
She blinked for a minute, then recognized the name, "The guy that kept calling about the gym?"
"The same," he sat against the table, hands clearly far away from any weapons, trying to project ease as she grew more tense. The bright light, crowd noise, and nearby press of bodies made it less of an interrogation. "I'd still like to hear your side of what happened there."
"Asbestos," she answered, too quickly, flip. "It was just full of asbestos."
"Wouldn't that make it harder to burn down?" Coulson asked, eyebrow raised.
Summers winced. "You sure?"
"Pretty sure." The girl didn't seem inclined to offer anything else, so Coulson went fishing. "And now the Order of Taraka." Another palpable hit. Summers recognized the name, wondered how he knew it. "They tried to kill me yesterday. I think because they wanted to be standing right here. To get to you?"
Summers was clearly reaching for an explanation. Trained to watch emotions, Coulson observed a young woman who wasn't scared of being pursued by assassins. She just didn't want him involved. He'd assume a child of organized crime, but he'd met the parents and investigated them thoroughly. Something else was going on. Something weird.
Before he could figure out how to press her, Coulson caught a glimpse of red bangs on a tall woman. "Summers! Down!" he told her as Patrice opened fire into a hallway full of kids. Somewhere behind them, he heard a boy yell, "Look out!" at the same time.
Rather than following his command and hitting the deck, Summers stayed standing but flowed around the gunfire, somehow dodging the trained assassin at near-point-blank range and grabbing Patrice's hands to push the large pistol toward the ceiling as more shots rang out.
Coulson wasn't far behind, and he knew May hadn't gone far enough with her group that she wouldn't also be seconds out. "Getting sloppy, Patrice," he tried to draw the assassin's attention as he pulled his own sidearm and faced her down. "Two botched hits in two days. Drop it."
It was a bit of a moot point because Summers had already all but wrestled away the gun from a trained killer who had a few dozen pounds and three inches of height advantage. Patrice immediately went for a holdout pistol, but then May was on her. He might be able to take Patrice on a good day. Summers might be able to take her. May definitely could.
Patrice realized it too, and tried to use her mass advantage over the two smaller martial artists to make herself a path. It almost worked, too, before another young woman blocked her way in a fighting stance. "T'ink you're goin' somewhere?" the Jamaican girl asked.
By the time they had Patrice in restraints, Summers and her friend had faded back into the crowd of onlookers and disappeared.
"W-was that a demonstration?" stuttered a short, dark-haired boy who'd watched the whole thing.
Unfortunately, Barton's assessment of the local police was accurate, and Coulson and May immediately realized that they couldn't turn over Patrice to the Sunnydale PD. At best she'd break out within hours. The local paramedics, conversely, turned out to be very competent, handling the graze obtained by the short musician who Coulson had seen Summers and her friend talking to. He'd apparently shoved the redheaded friend out of the way of Patrice's first shot and taken the hit.
"Vigilantes. Have to be," May suggested while they waited at the SUV for Barton. They'd fully restrained Patrice and buckled her in the back, talking quietly enough that she wouldn't be able to hear them with the doors closed.
"Would make sense," Coulson agreed. "They wouldn't trust law enforcement, even federal, if the town is so corrupt that nothing ever gets done about the crime problem."
"And we can't intervene," May reminded him.
"Except to deal with the assassins. I know," he reminded her. "But if we leave them a little insurance in case there are more Order members in town…"
"Insurance?" Barton asked, walking up, his bow and arrows stowed in a large duffle.
"We have to take this prisoner up to the nearest field office," Coulson explained to him. "And May and I have been made. But they don't know about you."
They finished the briefing then left Barton to try to provide overwatch for Summers and her team of vigilantes. Hopefully he'd be enough.
Barton had found the local vigilantes without difficulty. After all, it was still career day so strange adults in the school didn't stand out. And the kids' secret base was the school library. What he wasn't prepared for was for them to just sit around in there reading. For hours. Until nightfall.
He couldn't exactly hide in the library without getting made, and he couldn't wait out in the halls after the school closed so he had to pick a side of the school to cover. He realized he must have missed at least one person leaving when he clocked the Jamaican girl running back into the school. Minutes later, she left, leading three other teens and the librarian. He made a note to look into that particular individual.
Barton grinned to himself at how correct he'd been: it was a very walkable town. The group of five took one look at the librarian's tiny, primer-gray Citroën and just decided to use their feet to get where they were going. That suited Barton, since Coulson and May had left him without transportation. He was also a little chuffed that the one weapon in evidence was a crossbow in the hands of the older man. Though the dark-haired teen boy seemed to be carrying a large bucket labeled "liquid adhesive."
Slinking after the group wasn't too hard, even if the town was reasonably well-lit even though few went out after dark, but he noticed the Jamaican girl was wary. She might have made him if she weren't so focused on leading what seemed increasingly like a rescue mission. Speaking of missions: their destination finally proved to be an old, abandoned, mission-style church.
By the time Barton had climbed up and found a way into the upper balcony above a pipe organ, there was chaos in the nave below.
At the pulpit, a shirtless man and a woman in a black dress were tied together and hung by their arms from a rope, a dagger through their hands, which were glowing. Summers and the Jamaican girl were involved in a full two-on-many martial arts fight with several men with deformed faces, yellow eyes, and fangs. The librarian and the redheaded friend were wrestling with another of the deformed men. The dark-haired boy and girl that had come with the group were nowhere to be seen. And a dark-haired man dressed like a 50s greaser was hiding in the pews watching the fight for an opportunity to bolt.
Time to make a guess that his vigilantes were the good guys. It seemed an educated guess, at least, when their opponents were the monstrous legion. Barton loosed an arrow into the shoulder of one of the fanged opponents, going for disabling but unlikely to be lethal. And the guy just kept fighting with little sign of pain.
"Wooden arrow! Through the heart!" insisted the redhead, apparently not going to object to unexpected backup, though everyone that spotted him seemed surprised.
Barton didn't have a lot of wooden arrows in his kit. The two he did have were mostly in case of weird situations where he needed something non-conductive. This was definitely a weird situation. He loosed one into the center mass of the man the redhead and the librarian were fighting when he saw an opening. And the guy and his clothes instantly cremated into ashes. The arrow wasn't even left behind.
"Thanks, archer guy!" the redhead gave him a thumbs-up. Barton just gave her a small salute and turned to find an opening in the rest of the brawl. He'd worry about why his target had exploded later.
Getting the impression that this whole thing was about the couple tied up at the other side of the church, he took one of his aluminum broadheads and shot the cord holding them up by their arms, sending them crumpling to the ground. "Angel!" Summers shouted, and almost opened herself up to the guy who looked like Billy Idol after his face went through a windshield. Realizing his mistake of creating a distraction, Barton loosed another arrow at that guy's back. Unfortunately, he'd grabbed an aluminum shaft, and the man stayed up despite an arrow through the middle of his chest.
He didn't seem happy about it, though.
With the peroxide-blond man stumbling trying to pull an arrow out of his ribcage, Summers ran over and pulled the knife out of the hands of the couple. Barton took the time to grab his last wooden arrow and take out another of the incidental gang members, which evened the odds enough that the Jamaican was able to finish her remaining opponents off. Barton was still baffled as each target disappeared into a cloud of ashes.
In the time he'd been focused, though, the blond guy had managed to pull out the arrow, shoved Summers out of the way, thrown a torch (who illuminates a building with a torch?) onto old dropcloths, and started staggering across the church with the woman in the black dress. Out of wooden arrows, Barton aimed downward and sent another aluminum one into the guy, hitting him in the neck and causing him to stumble into the pipe organ. Barton had to move back up the balcony as the rusty old pipes collapsed, bringing most of the structure down on the couple.
Summers kissed the shirtless man who had apparently been her rescue target the whole time, and the Jamaican girl helped her drag him out of the church before it fully caught fire.
Barton didn't think there was much chance the group would turn on him, but he also didn't sign on to SHIELD to have to debrief evasive vigilantes. He'd let Coulson do it. Hopefully the more-senior agent would get something that made sense. Barton deliberately exited the church and sneaked away into the darkness without encountering the Sunnydale High martial arts gang.
"So, vampires?" Coulson asked Summers, catching her at the sidewalk just as she'd put her Jamaican friend into a taxi.
"Handled," the girl shrugged, not exactly denying it. "The archer was your guy? Thank him for the assist?"
"I will. I don't suppose you want to explain everything to us?" Coulson asked.
"Can't," she said, genuinely seeming sad about it. "It's on me. And it's a secret the government hasn't ever been good at dealing with. Apparently."
"You might find we're more open-minded than most," he shrugged. But there was a time to push and a time to pull. He handed her his card. "If you change your mind. Or if it just gets to be too much for you to handle on your own."
"This is a mouthful," she said, looking at the card spelling out Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division.
"We're working on it," Coulson smirked.
"That's it?" she asked. "No more calling me every week?"
"Can't say I'm not still curious, but if the bodies in the gym turned to dust like Barton says the ones in the church did, that at least explains LA to my satisfaction."
"Alright," Summers said warily, waiting for the shoe to drop.
Instead, Coulson just said, "Well. I better head out if I'm going to make it to headquarters in time to write my report. Good luck, Ms. Summers."
The girl nodded bemusedly as he headed back to the SUV. Sometimes you had to play the long game to get intel. And Fury was sure to turn up a lot more after what they'd seen in Sunnydale this week. Next time, they'd be better prepared.
And he was sure there would be a next time.
Other than this introductory chapter, the story will primarily follow Buffy, with digressions to other characters as makes sense for the plot.
This story uses Buffyverse cosmology, physics, magic, etc. with the MCU adapted to fit. That is, explanations from Buffy and Angel will take precedence, and origins, power sources, etc. from the MCU will be altered if they contradict established Buffyverse lore. The most obvious change is likely to be that "aliens" are generally actually demons (outer dimensions, not outer space), as alluded to in this prologue.
The first few chapters are a bit of a slow burn, as the additions from the MCU intrude upon Buffy's life and alter how she perceives and handles problems. Because the timeline starts in 1997, initial MCU involvement will primarily be in the form of SHIELD characters that were active in that period. Full-on Avengers crossover may have to wait quite a while, unless it makes sense to the narrative to trigger them earlier than their canonical 2009-2012 start.
Also, I realize Agents of SHIELD is no longer MCU canon, if it ever was, and each new show and movie may contradict something I invent, but that's the risk of writing fanfic for a moving target. That is to say, other than the changes to fit the Buffyverse, this should be at least MCU-compliant up through 2021 or so.
This story currently only has six chapters, and is not currently scheduled for more. If you liked it, though, please follow and review, and I may swing back to it when I have the time in my writing schedule.