Author: Cyclone
Feedback: Please be gentle.
Distribution: Gimme credit and a link.
Rating: Just a little bad language.
Spoilers: Anything and everything.
Disclaimer: The characters depicted herein belong to other people. I'm just borrowing them for a while.
Summary: After Halloween, everything changes. Sequel to Blackest Night. Part one of Emerald Flame.
Author's Note: Okay, y'know, the reason Blackest Night was originally a one-shot was because I saw only two ways to expand on it: Green Lantern Xander and Future Knowledge Xander. Both of them had already been done and done well by others, and I didn't want to retread ground already covered, so I intended to leave it as is.
Then I got this idea.
"You sure you're all right, Mom?" Buffy asked. Again.
"I'm fine, Buffy," Joyce assured her daughter -- again -- holding up her braced hand. "It's just a sprain."
The blonde teenager pouted, "I know, Mom. It's just... I worry. You shouldn't go out at night. It's not safe for you."
"But it's safe for you?" Joyce cocked an eyebrow.
"That's different."
"It always is."
Buffy huffed. How could she make her understand? The answer came unbidden to her mind: You could tell her the truth. She scowled at the thought, and not just because the thought came in Xander's voice. She banished the thought, huffed again, indignantly this time, and marched to her room.
Joyce shook her head and muttered aloud, "I wonder if I'll ever understand that girl."
Elsewhere, Xander frowned. Soon after Kendra had left, he had gone to Revello Drive and hunted down Bug Guy. He had easily disposed of him, but it had been too late for Mrs. Kalish, a neighbor of Buffy's who Bug Guy had killed in order to acquire a base of operations.
He had failed her.
He had never met Mrs. Kalish. She was just another of the many revolving "new arrivals" to Sunnydale. That didn't change the fact that he had failed her. He'd gotten careless, forgotten that there had been other victims, "collateral damage" dealt by the Tarakans in pursuit of their contracts.
Still...
Two down.
"Buffy."
"What do you want?" the Slayer scowled at Xander. They were in school, and she was still edgy about the Tarakans. Despite Xander's reassurances, the way Angel and Giles had freaked still bothered her.
Plus, there was that other Slayer too. The last thing she wanted was a living, breathing reminder that she had briefly been... well... not.
"You check on Angel since last night?" he murmured.
Buffy started, then glared at him, "What do you care?"
"Mainly?" he shrugged. "Because, as I said, they need him for the ritual. I'd rather have Dru weak and Spike in charge than the other way around. He's a hell of a lot more predictable."
"Oh," she blinked. "Well, yeah. I filled him in. He told me he was going underground for a while."
"Good," he nodded. "Where?"
"What?" she blinked.
"Where is he?" he elaborated.
"Why?" Buffy frowned suspiciously.
"I'm going to double-check."
"You don't trust me?" she pouted.
"I'm hedging my bets," he said simply. "So, where is he?"
"I don't know," she said. "We thought it would be safer if no one knew where he was."
Xander groaned. "Lovely. You do realize that also means we can't find him easily if we need to."
"Oh."
"Yeah," he sighed. "Nice to see you concerned about OpSec, but with need-to-know, there really are some people who need to know."
"'Opsick'?" Buffy blinked.
"Never mind."
Willow was... a little disturbed.
Willow Rosenberg was a genius, and like many geniuses, one of her greatest flaws is her curiousity. She couldn't stand to leave a book unread or a puzzle unsolved. In a way, that's what hacking was to her, just another set of puzzles to solve. So, now, when faced with the riddle of just what had happened between her and Xander in that other future...
Well, just yesterday, she'd gotten another piece of the puzzle. She had met Oz, who had, like her, been picked out by a Mr. McCarthy, head recruiter for the world's leading software concern. It gave her the jubblies.
He was a senior! And a guitarist!
Surely, Xander didn't mean that... that she and Oz...
It was impossible. Willow was a nerd. Oz, as a guitarist, was, by definition, cool. Nerds don't date cool people. If they date at all. It had to be something else.
Unlike most paramilitary forces, the Green Lantern Corps strongly encouraged creativity and artistic impulses. The reasons were twofold. Not only did the power rings that were the GLC's standard issue tools rely heavily on creativity, but the very nature of the GLC, in which individual members could expect to operate alone for months at a time, meant that the rigid adherence to regulations and precedents that other paramilitary forces relied on to maintain order could have disastrous results if a Lantern were faced with something completely unexpected.
Which tended to occur quite frequently. Patrolling a populated sector of space tended to guarantee that something new was always popping up somewhere.
Xander's artistic streak had begun with wood carvings. As a carpenter and experienced stake-carver, it had been a natural extension. He had a surprising affinity with wood; working with wood relaxed him, a sort of zen meditation thing, he supposed. He had expanded a bit beyond that, and sketching proved not to be much of a leap either, not with the amount of custom work he had done as a carpenter on the other side of the portal. He found that the easiest way to avoid disappointing a customer was to sketch out what he thought the customer wanted and have them review it before beginning the project for real.
Currently, though, it was lunchtime, and he was doodling aimlessly as he absent-mindedly scarfed down a sandwich.
"So... who is she?"
Xander jerked in surprise and looked up, "Who is who, Will?"
"C'mon, Xander," she glared, "I know we haven't been as close as we used to be, but I can still read you." She pointed at the notebook he was doodling in, "You've made so many sketches and wood carvings, I'd have to blind not to notice. You really miss her, don't you?"
Xander's gaze dropped to the half-finished sketch of Marina. After a moment, he simply nodded, "Yeah."
"So... who is she?" the redhead asked, taking a seat next to him. "I'd like... I'd like to know about the girl that made you happy."
"Sorry, Will," he said, shaking his head. "I just... I'm not ready to talk about her just yet."
"It helps to talk about it. Or so Mom says, anyway."
He chuckled, "I'm sure she does."
"Resolve face."
"Will," he said, "I was a Green Lantern there. You know how much willpower that takes. You really think that's still gonna work?"
"Resolve face."
"No, Will."
She began to pout. Complete with puppy dog eyes.
He twitched. She added a trembling lower lip.
Xander groaned, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose, "All right, fine." He opened his eyes again, but the look in them was distant, and he smiled faintly, "Her name was Marina."
After a moment, he tore himself from his memories and noted the blank look on Willow's face.
"She never appeared in any of the comics here," he explained. "She was Aquagirl."
"Oh," she nodded... then smiled and nodded for him to continue.
Xander never had gotten the details on the third Tarakan's first attack, last time around. All he knew was that the Tarakan had been posing as the police recruiter for Career Week and tried to shoot her.
Which, in his estimation, was a piss-poor way to try and kill Buffy. If anything, she should have just taken the time to identify Buffy as her target (though why she hadn't been provided with a picture was just as puzzling to him), then shot her with a sniper rifle from a couple hundred yards away when she was least expecting it. He wasn't about to complain, but the Tarakans did strike him as being remarkably... incompetent for a supposedly elite order of assassins.
The one-eyed guy had tried to wrestle with Buffy. The Slayer. When Angel was present. Even if Angel was human, all it would have taken was something sharp stabbed into something sensitive, and it would have been game over. Bug Guy had been a bit more competent, from what he remembered, setting up a nearby base of operations and scouting out the Summers home. How he actually intended to kill Buffy was something he didn't have enough clues to figure out.
It was something to ponder.
Were these assassins really Tarakans, or were they imposters, trying to cash in on the reputation?
Maybe they were trainees? Or probationary recruits?
With their reputation, the Tarakans should have been out of Spike's price range. Had they been more like, say, Curare...
Xander shuddered at the thought.
"All right, listen up, and answer when I call your name," came the woman's voice. "Buffy Summers."
Buffy raised her hand, and what happened next seem to move in slow motion. The Tarakan put the clipboard down and pulled out her sidearm, bringing it up to point it at Buffy.
Xander reacted on instinct. A green flare blinded everyone present, and the gun was ripped from the assassin's hands as she was thrown against the wall, pinned in place by a giant green glowing hand.
Buffy stared. "Xander?" she whispered in stunned awe as the Green Lantern, in full uniform, approached the assassin. He had reacted even faster than she had.
He nodded at the Slayer and said, "I'll explain later."
"A Stellar Sentinel?" the assassin blurted out in disbelief. Her voice was different now, distorted and deeper, with an odd echo to it. "Impossible!" she said. "The rings were all destroyed!"
"What did you call me?" Xander demanded, his face pale, as the construct hand slammed her against the wall again.
Her eyes flashed white, and her mouth opened, but no words emerged. Instead, a small, snake-like creature leaped from her mouth toward him, and he jerked back in surprise. Buffy caught the creature in mid-air and crushed it.
"Thanks, Buff," Xander said, looking at the creature. "What the hell is that thing?"
"Species: Goa'uld," chirped a computerized voice. It took a moment for them to realize it was his power ring speaking. "Sentient parasite native to Sector One Eight Eight Eight. Capable of overriding host body, regardless of host's willpower, via biological means. Possesses genetic memory and tends to be predisposed toward megalomania and god complexes. Note: Last record indicates a state of war between the Corps and the goa'uld."
Buffy blinked.
Xander blinked.
"Oh."
Author's Postscript:
Okay, yeah, BtVS/SG-1 is by far one of the most common crossovers in fanfiction, but I did hint at it in chapter four, and I've got a whole lot of ideas for expanding on this.
Regarding the "Stellar Sentinel" thing and how the ring knew about the goa'uld... well, you know as much as they do about it.