Chapter 17 Explanations Part 1

Author’s Note: From here on out I will be using ‘single quotes’ to designate thoughts and “double quotes” for dialogue.

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Andrew stood and stared at the sight. It was kinda … neat.

He had been walking to Jonathon’s because someone had forgotten to pick him up. You would have thought that being the Slayer’s sidekick would have made Cordelia treat him better. He contributed a lot more to the group and he looked way cooler in a cape then she would!

But this sight almost made it worth it. There was Spike, ‘The Hero’, being brave and carrying the weeping Willow from harm’s way. And the brave Slayer, following her man away from the danger and towards the safety of Jonathon’s house.

He sighed in contentment. It was so obvious that the Slayer needed their help. He wondered what she had ever done without them. Perhaps that was why she died so many times, perhaps she knew it and that’s why she had sought him and Jonathon out. Perhaps they had heroically saved her life, and she hadn’t wanted to tell them because she thought they would have been embarrassed.

A dreamy smile crossed his face. He stood there while Spike ran passed him and was jarred out of his trance when Buffy grabbed him and pulled him along towards Jonathan’s.

“OW, OW, that hurts. I can run. Ow not the shirt!”

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Faith surveyed the room and sighed. She never signed up for any of this! She had been innocently tying up Wesley so he couldn’t escape when Oz and Xander had *popped* into the room, unconscious and smelling faintly of burning petroleum. Jonathon had run over to them, eager to make use of his new first aid certification.

Then before she could do anything more then secure Wesley’s bindings, in *popped* Anya holding up Giles.

Faith stood up and stared at Anya, “What the Hell?”

Crossing over, she firmly pulled Anya into her arms, being careful not to jar Giles. Shaking her head she exclaimed, “What is this ‘Teleportation Day’?”

Before any explanations could be made, the front door flew open as Buffy raced in followed by Spike carrying a still sniffling Willow.


The next twenty minutes were a blur. Willow spotted Oz and Xander unconscious on the floor. She managed to leap out of Spike’s arms and knock Jonathon over in less than thirty seconds. It would have been funny to Spike if Buffy hadn’t started sobbing in his arms.

Anya looked confused. “Why are Willow and Buffy crying?”

Faith listened as Spike outlined the van incident. Her anger grew as she walked across the room. “Wesley, I thought you said the Watcher’s Council were only after Buffy and I? You never mentioned that they were going to try and kill everyone else. I should beat you senseless until you talk, you stupid...”

Buffy walked over and interrupted Faith. In a soft voice she started slowly, “Faith, leave him alone. He has always been an idiot when it came to the Council. He probably didn’t realize they would try to kill all of us.”

Faith backed up and started to turn around when she was startled by a loud slap. She looked up in shock to see a furious Buffy standing over Wesley. “Hey B, I thought you just said we shouldn’t hurt him for this.”

“Yeah, but I remember what he did last time. He was a prick in both timelines.”

Turning she walked back to Spike. “We need answers and we need a game plan. It’s Scooby time.”

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Buffy slumped her shoulders in exhaustion. The last few hours had flown by in a blur. Surprisingly all the answers had been right before them and the strategic planning had come from the least likely of sources. She was exhausted but happy. Just a little bit longer and all their problems would be solved.

It was Jonathon who noticed that a Council guy was lurking outside of his house. Apparently Andrew and him had been bored one day and decided that as the Slayer’s “associates” they should create surveillance around their homes and nearby “hotspots” in order to preemptively strike the bad guys.

It was rather strange that the duo had come up with almost the same exact plan for a computerized monitoring system that they had in the previous timeline. This time, thank goodness her home wasn’t on the monitor, but other places were such as the larger cemeteries and the outside of Jonathon and Andrew’s home.

She wasn’t surprised with a Star Trek KLAXON had shrilled out of Jonathon’s bedroom. What had surprised her was Andrew and Jonathon running out of the room, and then yelling for everyone to come see. The monitors were impressive, but the man lurking outside of the house made her blood run cold.

Xander, having recovered from his unconscious state had volunteered to go detain the guy and get some answers. They were still not sure how he and Oz got from the van to Jonathon’s house, how Anya managed to teleport, hell they hadn’t even known how many bad guys they would be up against.

Using the monitors to track the Council’s operative they had set up Buffy and Spike to distract him, by giving him a target and then Xander had snuck up and hit him with one of Jonathon’s frying pans. His only regret had been that Willow’s pans had gotten blown up with the van, they were much more effective weapons then the wimpy ones that Jonathon’s parents owned.

One tied up operative, and a tied up watcher later they had still been debating about how to take out the Council. She had been eagerly bouncing up and down wanting to use that Terminator line on one of them, something like “You are already dead to me” since technically they were all dead – blown up when the First orchestrating the bombing of Council headquarters. Spike thought it was cheesy – but she loved that movie, and the line was so neat!

Then the answer presented itself in a nice, neat, and completely boring solution courtesy of Anya. They had been discussing the Council when Jonathon asked what everyone had done when the Council blew up. She had been explaining all the work that Willow and Giles had done to restart the Council when Anya looked at her puzzled.

“You mean that Willow hacked into all the bank accounts and had full access to all their money?”

Buffy shaked her head in an affirmative nod. “Yep.”

“She found ALL their accounts?”

“yeah”

“So why don’t you take their money. It’s hard to put a contract on someone if you can’t pay them.”

“That would take to long, we need them to call off the goon squad now!”

“Honestly Buffy, haven’t you ever heard of Internet banking? They would know instantly.”

Buffy began to laugh almost hysterically. Something that easy couldn’t work against a massive secret organization…. Could it?

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“Okay Wesley, call Travers.”

“Quentin Travers please? This is Wesley Whydam-Price”

“Travers speaking.”

Spike watched as Buffy squared her shoulders and reviewed all the notes that Anya had written her. Taking the phone from Wesley, she spoke firmly and authoritatively. “Quentin this is Buffy Summers. Have you looked at your bank accounts lately? As of twenty-one hundred hours all your accounts have been depleted and transferred to untraceable accounts that I own. I expect you to call off your hired guns, reinstate my watcher with retroactive pay from the day he was fired, retroactively pay from Faith and I from the day we were called, full heath benefits for us, and ummm… a 401K plan? Oh yeah, and every time we avert an apocalypse each Scoobie gets a 5,000 dollar, oops I mean pound, bonus.”

Buffy looked up to see Anya mouthing the word consultancy, “Oh yeah and any work that non Council people do have to be paid as consultants. “

Quentin started to stutter and refuse when Buffy interuupted him, “You see the great thing about this is if you refuse I just keep all your money. It’s a win-win situation for me. Remember all you council’s guys are already dead to me…”
Everyone groaned and rolled their eyes with the exception of the nerd duo. They flashed her thumbs up. Buffy hung up and waited for the Council to call her back. She had a good feeling about this.

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Chapter 18 – Explanations Part 2

Buffy leaned back into Spike as she sighed in contentment. It had been a rough week trying to deal with the Council and still research all of the strange happenings that surrounded the gang.

They finally determined that Oz and Xander had teleported out of danger due to Willow’s protection spell implanted on the pouches that she had created. Willow was surprised to find out that she was the cause of the miraculous save. She was still self-conscious in regards to her use of magic.

While Buffy desperately wanted to boost her confidence level, she was weary of letting the young witch know too much about the future. There was so much heartache and bad decisions that had occurred. Hopefully support from the gang would help her realize her full worth independent of the magic.

The Coven was expecting Amy as soon as graduation was over. She had told Willow that she needed her help in a big fight before she went, but in truth she was waiting for Willow to meet Tara. Once the two witches fell in love, Tara could go with Willow for a semester abroad. They would get the chance to study both educationally and magically in England and would ensure two things. Willow had the necessary training needed to help her control her magic and Tara would be safe from harm’s way. Even though Warren shouldn’t be a problem in this timeline she wasn’t going to take the chance against a crazed man with a gun. She had almost lost Xander and Oz to humans. She wouldn’t lose Tara.

While Willow had inadvertently caused Oz and Xander’s teleportation, the question still remained about Anya’s latent ability. The last time she was human she had not retained any of her powers from her time as a Vengeance Demon. She had been fully human and while performing small spells had been relatively easy, she was no where as accomplished as she would have to be in order to perform a teleportation spell.

It was rather amusing to see Anya volunteer to undergo “testing” to determine what skills she still had. Of course the moment Giles had pulled out his notebook to start writing down information she pulled out a time-sheet and “clocked” in for her consultancy worked.

They quickly determined that she was not under the influence of any magical pouches, amulets or related objects. They were pretty sure that Giles wasn’t under any protection, since he had been the only person who had actually received an injury. More experimentation followed with careful applications of the words “I wish”. No wishes had mysteriously come true. Even reconnaissance at the Bronze with unsuspecting people uttering the magic words had yielded no results.

Anya had debated summoning either D’Hofferen or Hallie to see if they had any information on what had happened; however, the three of them remembered how unhappy D’Horrfyn was the last time Anya choose to become human, and they were leery of dealing with him or possible endangering Hallie in this time frame. Anya had confessed to them one night that while in purgatory she had eventually accepted her own death at the hands of the Bringers, but had been haunted by the knowledge that her choices had cost Hallie her existence.

Finally they had researched the spell that Buffy had performed in order for Anya’s future conscious to merge with her demon self and become human. The spell required that Anya’s ‘essence’ for lack of a better word, to be summoned and temporarily merge with her demon self giving both of them full access to her memories, thoughts and feelings. The two had remained separated until an agreement could was reached.

Both sides of her personality had to choose to remain human. If her demon had rejecting her future self, then the Anya they knew would have returned to Purgatory and the demon would retained no knowledge of what had transpired. Anya would still exist in that future they had lived, because it had already happened for them. However the demon Anya would not experience the same things in this timeline because she had not been called to Sunnydale for any vengeance wishes. Just thinking about it made Buffy’s head hurt.

When Anya chose to remain human she “merged” her future self with her present self. After more research they had determined that the merging had resulting in Anya being physically different then her previous human self. She was not a vengeance demon any more, hence the loss of the powers of the wish. However, she did retain the ability to teleport over distances. She had practiced a few short trips to the Magic Box for supplies. She managed those trips perfectly but any long jumps or jumps with multiple people were troublesome. They would have to experiment with her abilities to determine what she would eventually be able to do with practice.

There was also some question on whether she would heal faster or not. Anya had adamantly refused to allow herself to be cut to test the healing potential of her new state.

After a long weekend in Jonathon’s house they had untied Wesley. Buffy knew he would eventually come around, and once he had, he was surprisingly helpful in the research. Buffy could see why Angel would eventually employ him. He would be an excellent resource and perhaps a decent friend once he lost the Council-as-God complex.

The initial doubt seemed to be registering with him already. He had vehemently protested that the operatives had to have gone rouge. After the Council operative laughed at him for his naivety, he had become quiet and contemplative. It was a nice change.

Once he had been released he started to work on researching Buffy’s tiny fangs and mysteriously changing eye color. Giles and Wesley had debated the “facts” for quite a while and quite loudly.

Some of their more interesting theories were whether this had been a function of the mating process, a result of time travel, or due to the fact that she lived even after being killed by vampires twice.

Finally she got bored and told them that the changes felt more like the changes she had undergone while under the empowering spell she had used to fight Adam. It felt like Slayer powers and shadow demons then any kind of vampiric mutation. It was worth the frustration she had been experiencing just to see the look on their faces.

Of course they hadn’t believed her so she was slated for more slayer tests. Thank god she got paid for this now. She really needed some new clothes, and some new shoes. Oh, and a new watch to match the cute purse she picked up last week….

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