What Might Have Been:
Chapter One
Author: Clarity
Disclaimer: Joss. Is. GOD. I just try to interpret his works.
Summary: After the finale of Season 6, Buffy, Xander, and Dawn relive old, bad memories and wish that things were different. Anya makes it so. Little do they know that change isn't always good.
Rating: PG at the moment, possibly stronger later on
Spoilers: Pretty much everything major in the series. If it happened, chances are I'll mention it, and probably change it.
Relationships: Giles/Jenny, Xander/Willow, Buffy/Jesse, Buffy/Angel (slight), Cordelia/Riley, Tara/Patsy (OFC). Also, the gang in LA, which is mentioned but gets no camera time, is all paired off except for Angel: Amy/Doyle, Fred/Gunn, Wesley/Darla. Yes, I said Darla. Don't ask, just read.
Feedback: Please?
Author's notes: This is more of a background chapter, to set the scene for the next section. The basic groundwork for the AU is established, but there's not a whole lot of action. I just wanted to get this out, because the next section looks like it's going to be pretty long and _very_ angsty. Certain things will be confusing, but I promise I'll explain as we go along. Enjoy!
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Xander wasn’t sitting on the couch any more. It took him a moment to realize that the reason for this was, quite simply, that there wasn’t a couch any more. A moment later, he came to the conclusion that the rest of the furniture in the room was vaguely different than it had been a minute ago, too. Or had Buffy started keeping swords in racks on the walls like really pointy pictures or hanging plant baskets? He couldn’t remember-he wasn’t big on interior decorating-but he was pretty sure that big bookcase hadn’t been there a moment ago. It looked more Giles-y than Buffy-ish.
He would have asked her, but neither the Slayer nor her sister were sitting next to him on...well, on the floor where the couch had been a moment ago...any longer. So, cautiously confused, he got to his feet, promptly smacking his knee on an end table that he was sure wasn’t supposed to be there. Xander bit off a loud expletive, rubbing his leg and wishing he hadn’t said anything; though weirdness, in Sunnydale, was nothing new, it tended to involve some kind of demon or another that the Scoobies then had to kill. He didn’t want to attract this one right to him before he even knew what was going on. With that in mind, he was lifting one of the swords off the hanging rack, just in case, when the dog started barking.
Since, between the hyenas, Oz’s werewolf, and the hellhounds at prom, his experiences with various demonic somewhat-canines hadn’t exactly been stellar, Xander tensed carefully and raised the sword blade. The big dog that came running down the stairs didn’t seem demonic, but it didn’t need to. The huge bull mastiff was easily large enough to lick Xander’s face-or tear out his throat-without even standing up on its hind legs. It yipped happily, an unexpected sound from such a big animal, upon seeing him, and loped forward. For his part, Xander backed away slowly, raising the sword point.
“Nice doggy,” he tried to soothe in a somewhat-shaky voice. The dog tilted its head to one side, its excited yip turned into a confused whine, but it stayed put. “Good doggy.”
Then the mastiff started barking its head off.
“Apollo! Hush!” The scolding voice that carried downstairs sounded vaguely familiar to Xander, though he couldn’t place the woman it belonged to. “Michael’s sleeping, silly boy. It’s too early. Hush.” The dog-Apollo?-promptly shut up, leaving Xander to try and figure out why a pregnant woman in a robe and nightgown was coming down Buffy’s stairs at 5:30 in the morning. She bent down just slightly to scratch the dog’s ears, then tucked back the short black hair that was hiding her face and turned to face Xander.
In an instant, the point of his sword was quivering at her throat. Apollo let out another confused whine as the woman who looked exactly like Jenny Calendar-a pregnant, hair-cut, slightly gray and somewhat older Jenny Calendar, but Jenny Calendar no less-blinked in surprise.
“Xander, what the...what’s wrong? Is it Willow?” The surprise in her eyes flickered into concern. “Is she okay? What happened?”
“You tell me,” he managed in a low voice, pressing the sword tip forward just slightly. “Who or what are you, and why the hell are you wearing Miss Calendar’s face?” Apollo started growling again.
For her part, she just looked confused. “Xander...it’s me. Jenny. You know me. I just saw you last night, remember?”
He let out a small snort of disbelief. “Whatever you are, you really need to work on your cover story. Miss Calendar died over four years ago when Angelus snapped her neck. So you’ve got thirty seconds to tell me what you are, what just happened, and why you’re in Buffy’s house, or...” He didn’t bother to finish the threat-not so much because it was more effective, more because he couldn’t bear to tell even the image of the much- mourned dead computer teacher that he was going to kill her.
The Miss Calendar lookalike swallowed nervously. “Please put down the sword, Xander. I don’t know what happened, but I promise I’ll try to help. Just...put it down?”
“And what? You loose the illusion, show your demon face, and tear my head off? Or else your attack dog rips my throat out before I can blink. I don’t think so. Stop stalling.”
“I won’t. I promise. And Apollo won’t hurt you. He likes you, Xander, remember? You’ve known him since he was a puppy.”
“I’m pretty sure I would remember knowing that...beast. So start talking.” He did lower the sword slightly, though only because he couldn’t keep the heavy piece of metal up too much longer.
“Apollo, hush. It’s just Xander,” the woman soothed her dog, rubbing him behind the ears again. “I’m going to call Rupert now, Xander, okay? Will that be all right?”
Giles! Giles would help get to the bottom of this...except wasn’t he all beat up and half-dead in the Magic Box? Great. So she was calling for reinforcements. Unfortunately, he’d given her a curt nod before realizing that the ‘Rupert’ she called would probably not actually be the Giles he knew and...well, knew.
“Rupert! Sweetie, can you come here? Xander’s here, and he’s a little upset,” the woman called, not taking her eyes off the young man.
“Coming, Jenny!” the familiar English-accented voice came from upstairs, quickly followed by the just as familiar Englishman to whom it belonged. “Xander, what’s-” He cut off sharply as Xander raised his sword again.
“No sudden moves, okay? I don’t know whether you’re really Giles or not, but just...keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Xander, what on earth...” The Watcher rubbed the bridge of his nose tiredly. “What’s wrong?”
Xander was blinking rapidly at the sight of the ex-librarian as he came into the living room. “Okay, now I know you’re not really Giles. First of all, he would never walk around in nothing but boxers and a robe. B, he doesn’t have that many muscles, three, he doesn’t have scars all over his chest, and finally, Giles would _never_ walk around in nothing but boxers and a robe.”
The Englishman shot a look over at ‘Miss Calendar’, who quirked a small grin, as he tied his robe closed, quickly returning to Xander. “Xander, it’s half past five in the morning, and I just got out of bed five minutes ago. Last time I checked, this was my house. I refuse to dignify ‘B’ with an answer, and you know bloody well where I got the scars from. So, getting back to the point, what on Earth are you doing here so early the sun’s barely even up?”
“Okay...when, exactly, did the world go crazy?” the younger man demanded. “Last time I checked, this was Buffy’s house, just like it has been for the past...seven years! Not to mention her having been, oh, dead since junior year of high school, or you being all unconscious in the shop after Willow pulled her Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vadar-y switch to the dark side and sucked up all your magic to go destroy the world. And why are you looking at me like I’m the crazy one?” he added suspiciously.
“Dead?” ‘Giles’ asked the woman incredulously. She shrugged.
“So he’s been saying. I think he may have hit his head on something. Xander, honey, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“Don’t put your ‘let’s humor the crazy guy with the sword’ voices on for me! I was sitting on the couch that up until five minutes ago was right there with Buffy and Dawn, trying to figure out how our lives had turned into living hells since Jesse died.” The older two exchanged looks, which he caught. “Oh, no. Do not tell me that Jesse... never...died...oh, God, Anya.”
“And who’s Anya, Xander?” ‘Miss Calendar’ asked gently.
“Anya. Blonde, pretty, used to be called Anyanka? Vengeance demoness, lost her powers, got them back a month or two ago after I left her standing at the altar? Owns the Magic Box, really likes money? Am I ringing any bells here whatsoever?”
“Well, I guess that answers the question of whether he still remembers Willow,” the dark-haired woman sighed. “I just hope he hasn’t told her any of this yet.”
“Yes, he’s clearly not in his right mind...Xander, I’ve never heard of any Anyanka, nor any Anya, either. Buffy and Jesse bought the Magic Box a year ago when a demon killed the shopkeeper. And please, don’t go telling your wife you have odd, random memories of almost marrying some kind of demon of your own free will.”
“Ex-demon...wife? What wife? I’m not married.” He shook his head, more to himself, as he tried to muddle though some kind of logic. “No, Anya wouldn’t have granted our wishes, ‘cause that would have made us happy, and she still wants to leave me screaming and writhing in pain...besides, why would I be the only one here?” he muttered to himself. The pair that looked like Miss Calendar and Giles exchanged looks again as a loud thump sounded through the house.
“Oh, bloody...Michael’s out again. I should go-”
“No, I’ll go. At least he’s not saying that you’re dead, just under some kind of spell. And then I’ll call Willow.”
“Willow? Willow’s upstairs, passed out in Buffy’s bed, because we didn’t want the first thing she saw when she woke up to be Tara’s blood on the floor. And who the hell is Michael?”
The man who more or less resembled Giles shook his head and sighed as the woman turned and mounted the stairs. “Xander, I don’t know what’s happened with your memory, but will you please sit down, stop waving that sword around, and listen to me? Please?” With a sigh, he himself took a chair. Warily, Xander followed suit, not loosing his grip on the sword.
Jenny Calendar-Giles put her hands on her hips and looked down at the two-year- old sitting on the floor of his bedroom next to his crib. “Making a break for freedom again, Michael?” The freckle-faced little boy looked up at his mother with puppy-dog eyes and an ingratiating smile, and she sighed, softening.
“C’mere, you,” she instructed, kneeling down to pick her young son up. She grunted softly as she stood up. “Oooh, you’re getting too big for me to do this while I’m already carrying twenty-five pounds of extra weight. So tell me, what are you doing awake this early?”
“’pollo,” the toddler explained succinctly. “Woof, woof.” She smiled.
“Woof, woof is right. He woke us all up. So tell me, Mr. Michael, are you going to come with me to call Auntie Willow now that you’re awake?” He nodded happily. Slipping into her bedroom, Jenny picked up the cordless from the bedside table and hit the second speed dial button.
It rang several times before it was answered by a huge yawn and a sleepy “Morning?”
“Morning, Willow,” the technopagan greeted her student. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“Jenny...what time is it?” the redhead demanded on the other end, yawning once again. Which answered that question.
“5:30...I’m sorry, Will, but Xander’s in our living room, and he’s acting fairly incoherent.”
“Xander?” Immediately the younger witch sounded wide awake. “Oh, Goddess... is he okay?”
“Yes...well, sort of-”
“Sort of? Jenny, is he hurt?”
“Physically, no,” the elder woman answered truthfully. “At least, not that I can see. But he was rambling...he sounded very confused. I think something might have happened-”
“Confused...confused how? Like ‘how did I get here?’ confused, or like ‘who am I?’ confused?”
“Like...” Jenny paused a moment, trying to decide how much to tell Willow. She didn’t want to scare the younger woman too much, but Xander had sounded a little crazy. “Like ‘you died four years ago’ confused,” she finally admitted.
“Oh, Goddess. Can you keep him there? He’s not going to start running around Sunnydale, is he?”
“What? Yes, Rupert’s got him calmed down, but Willow-”
“Good. I’ll be over in ten minutes.”
“Okay...but Willow-”
Jenny was cut off by a click on the other end of the line. She sighed. The last thing this situation needed was Willow running in unprepared. It seemed that Xander hadn’t said anything yet to her that morning, but if he started going off again about being engaged to demons...Quickly, she hit redial, shifting Michael slightly to a more comfortable position. The phone rang eleven times before she gave up.
“Damn,” the witch swore uncharacteristically, then winced, shooting a glance at the little boy on her hip in the hopes he hadn’t heard. Luckily, Michael seemed utterly absorbed in the knotted semi-braid he was attempting to introduce to her shoulder-length dark hair, and didn’t catch it. With one hand, she reached absently up to untangle it; with the other, she was already hitting the phone’s first speed dial button.
“Come on, Mr. Michael,” she coaxed as the cordless rang. “You might as well help me make coffee while I talk to Auntie Buffy and Uncle Jesse.”
The two-year-old bounced happily as his mother headed for the stairs.
The first thought to stumble into the gears of Jesse’s awakening brain as they slowly creaked to a start for the day ahead and he blinked his eyes open was quite simple. Life, he reflected, raising his head to look down at the blonde head pillowed on his chest with sleep-bleared vision, is good. For the moment, he was content to leave it at that, one hand unconsciously moving to tuck an errant strand of that lovely golden hair back behind the ear of the aforementioned blonde.
Unfortunately for him, the second thought that came to mind was simply to groan, as the telephone lying heretofore peacefully on the bedside table began its shrill scream. And a moment later, of course, the entire scene of domestic tranquillity went to hell in a handbasket as Buffy sat bolt upright in bed, darting confused glances this way and that, and the baby monitor next to the phone lit up, producing a less shrill but more immediately significant sort of wail. Jesse let his head flop back wearily onto the pillow, reaching one hand out to silence the telephone, since Buffy’s hasty departure from the bed more or less indicated that she was going to deal with the other problem.
“If this isn’t another apocalypse, you’re going to regret it,” he grunted into the plastic receiver. “D’you have any idea how long it took to get Joy to sleep last night?”
“Well, Michael went through the teething stage at one point, too, so probably,” came the far-too-cheery voice of the Sunnydale High computer teacher. “How’ve you two been handling it?”
“We take a lot of catnaps,” the young man answered tiredly, noting with some relief that the loud wails penetrating the apartment had slacked off. “Jenny, please say you didn’t call at,” he peered at the clock, “a quarter to six in the morning to discuss childcare. Because if you did, Buffy...well, she’ll have something to say about it,” he finished lamely, too tired to turn it into a real threat.
“Believe me, I wouldn’t tick off a sleep-deprived Slayer under any circumstances if I could help it,” Jenny agreed heartily. “It’s not an apocalypse, but it’s really not a Tara and Patsy sort of thing, and I was hoping our most capable warlock could help me make something out of it.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Jesse informed his coven leader, “except when you’ve just woken my daughter up not two hours after we finally got her to sleep. What happened?”
“Xander seems to have gotten himself into a bit of a mess...” As Jenny trailed off, Jesse groaned again. Of course.
“What did he set fire to this time? It wasn’t another spellbook, was it? I thought he was only supposed to get involved with a spell under severely extreme circumstances.” Jesse loved his childhood friend like a brother, but it was a well-known fact that the former class clown had an uncanny knack for making spells go wrong. There was a good reason why Xander picked up a sword more often than he lit a candle. He had all the military training of a Marine SF-and Murphy’s own luck with magic.
Jenny sighed, calling Jesse back to the present, where he stood up and began searching for a clean pair of pants. If something really was the matter with one of his friends, he and Buffy would of course run right out to fix it, as always-with Dawn and Joy firmly in tow, of course. “No fire, this time,” that was a relief, “just some strange sort of memory thing. He showed up in our living room half an hour ago, shoved a sword at me, babbled something about me being a demon, or dead for years or something, and then started ranting about Willow destroying the world and some demon named Anya or Anyanka or something. His memory’s all messed up. He knows who he is, and he recognized me and Rupert and the house, but he thinks you and I are both dead.”
Jesse swept some of his hair back out of his eyes with the hand not holding the phone, shaking his head, not even surprised. “D’you think it was a spell, or did he just go and hit his head on a rock? Goddess knows, it could be either in this town...” Good old Sunnyhell. This? When you were a fairly talented warlock living with a Slayer, her monk-made little sister, and your 6-month-old daughter, this wasn’t even something to bat an eye at.
“I didn’t sense a spell right off, but then, I wasn’t looking.” No. No, of course, she wouldn’t be, not eight months pregnant. This late in her third trimester, the technopagan probably could have done a spell if she’d tried, but Jesse knew better than to expect her to risk her unborn baby’s well-being by channeling away life energy. “I was hoping you or Willow...”
“Of course.” This sort of call was so second-nature to Jesse by now that he didn’t even have to struggle to pull on his jeans with one hand. “She’ll be headed over there, but if Xander’s really acting wiggy, she’ll be too worried to do anything major...I’ll be over in a couple.”
“What about Buffy?”
Jesse poked his head out of the bedroom door, watching with a smile as his girlfriend fed their now contented and--blissfully--quiet small daughter. “My guess is, if nothing big and nasty is hanging around, she’s going to want to stay here with Joy. They need some mom and baby time, probably followed by a whole lot of sleep time. I’ll drag Dawnie with me, we can grab coffee and doughnuts or something on the way back.”
“Great. Thanks, Jess. I’m really sorry for waking you like that...I really do remember what it was like with Michael.”
“If you did, you wouldn’t be having another one,” he informed her dryly. “Seeya in fifteen, Jenny.”
“See you, Jesse.”
Shaking his head resignedly at the muddle that was his life, Jesse put the phone back on the hook, pulled on a random, not-too-dirty shirt that was lying on the floor, and headed out to the hallway.
“What’s up, sweetie?” Buffy asked, recognizing the look on his face. Joy had finished her bottle, and was now being adamantly coaxed into taking a plastic teething ring from her mother. Jesse rolled his eyes and pecked his lover on the lips.
“Xand-man’s gotten himself into a mess again...nothing big, just typical weird Hellmouthy stuff. Dawnie, you wanna come with me to Giles’ house?”
The teenager, just crawling out of bed, glared at him from the shelter of the bedroom she shared with her niece. “I wanted to be sleeping at six in the morning on summer break, but nooooo.”
“I was going to stop for doughnuts, but I can’t unless you’re with me to carry them,” he coaxed.
Dawn was on her feet in a flash. “Gimmie two minutes.”
NEXT
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