Sherliton’s Army 3/?
By Len
Rating: R – Spike and his dirty mouth!
Spoilers: ‘Gone’ – it pretty much branches off into AU at that point.
Teaser: Just when you think things can’t possibly get weirder than the Creature Who Looks Like The Things That Lived Behind The Washer In Xander’s Basement, it surpasses itself. This part: The Powers That Be enter the story, and suddenly everything in B:tVS since season 4 makes a certain degree of sense to W/Sers everywhere.
Note: I can’t write drama or angst to save my life. This is the result of me attempting to keep my head from exploding in the pre-finals season. Clichés abound, Evil Critters are borrowed from Sigourney Weaver movies, plot weaves like a drunken man, names are silly…you know, the usual. Have fun.
Archive: Find all previous parts at my site – Blood Magic:
( http://www.geocities.com/voodoo_bloodmagic/enter.html ), NHA, FF.net and Chelsea’s marvelous site, Breathe. If anyone else wants it, just let me know so I can visit. Or gloat. Same diff.
More Notes: Takes place in the same universe as my two short conversation pieces ‘Confusion, Confessions’ and ‘The Beginning’, and after these two stories.
Also: WILL FIC FOR FEEDBACK!!!
Part Three
Xander sat with his nose in a book, turning pages with one hand, his other holding the hand of his fiancée. Anya did the same, but nearly jumped out of her skin when the redhead next to her sat up as suddenly as if she had been shocked. Across the table, Spike shot up as well, and fell out of his chair.
“Ow. Bloody Hell…” he muttered from the floor.
Willow yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry about that. I must’ve drifted off. What are we doing?”
“Research,” Buffy answered. “There’s something weird going on.”
“In good ol’ Sunnyhell? What’re the odds?” Spike muttered. Willow ignored him, cocking her head to one side. “Oh. That demon? You know, I think I may have seen it somewhere before…maybe in…no. It wasn’t in the watcher’s diaries…or was it?”
“Actually, Wills,” Xander interrupted. “We’re trying to figure out why Fix-a-Dent over there was dreaming about frogs.”
“Frogs?” Willow asked weakly. She shivered. Spike, who was getting to his feet, sneered at him.
“Now why in Hell would I be dreaming of frogs? I don’t dream of frogs. Demons don’t dream of frogs. I’d much rather dream of—“ he caught Dawn’s eye, who was listening interestedly, and trailed off. “—other things,” he finished. “Anyhow, why the hell should you care about what I’m dreaming about?”
“Willow.”
Spike blinked and set his jaw. “I haven’t been dreaming about Willow.”
Buffy rolled her eyes and started pacing again. “Wills – what’s your greatest fear?”
“Um…dying?”
“Other than that.”
“Oh! Frogs! Especially the really fat green ones that come out after a rain and then get run over by cars and flattened, but they don’t die – they just sort of peel themselves off the street like a cartoon and jump onto your leg while you’re walking—“ in her agitation, Willow had reverted back to her old babbling habit. “—and you maybe think that the babies will be cute but no – the babies are tadpoles and tadpoles are just scary especially the ones that live in the birdbath at my parents house – I tried emptying it once and someone must have told them I was coming because every time I went near it the big fat frogs would jump at me and stick to my pants and—“ she paused for breath. The Scoobies, plus Spike, stared at her in in stunned silence. She smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. Frogs are scary.”
Four sets of eyes then swiveled from her to look at the vampire. He glared. “Fine, I was dreaming about frogs. What of it?”
“You dream of frogs, I dream of frogs. Kinda uncommon, isn’t it? We just got attacked by some ugly demony thing that looks like those things behind the washer in Xander’s old basement, we conk out…” Willow answers, and then pauses. “Dream transference?”
Anya nodded. “It looks like it. I once cursed an unfaithful merchant in Venice during the fifteenth century by transferring the dreams of his wife onto him. She wanted to kill him. He wet the bed every night. It was great.”
“Hmm.” Willow joined Buffy in her pacing. They walked in figure eights around the back of the shop.
“There’s one thing missing, though. The dream transference isn’t one-way. The people involved really just switch dreams. That’s what happened to the woman in Venice, and her husband was actually dreaming about his little trollop. She ended up killing him.”
Xander gulped loudly. Anya turned and gave him a radiant smile, one that Xander couldn’t help but respond to. For an ex-evil Vengeance Demon, his girl was absolutely gorgeous. The fact that she enjoyed male suffering was really only a minor drawback. “That’s too bad, hon. So that means that Willow should be having…ick.”
“Spike’s dreams. Huh.” Buffy halted her pacing and looked nervous for a moment. “Well, how about it, Willow?”
Alone. Burning. Desolation. Helpless. Alone. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I think so.”
Spike turned sharply to look at her. Fuck. What had he dreamt of? He was willing to bet it wasn’t something as harmless as frogs. He didn’t want her seeing any that. “Right - let’s stop this, then,” he demanded.
“According to this, dream transference is a spell – not really something your average Joe Demon can cause,” Xander said, inspecting the his book.
“Unless this was some sort of vengeance demon…Willow, do you have any scorned lovers that would want to cause you pain?”
Willow blushed up to her hairline. “Anya! No!”
“What? It’s possible.”
“And what kind of vengeance could be achieved by making Willow and Spike share dreams?” Buffy asked practically. They fell silent, thinking.
“Sound like our best bet is figuring out what’s the what with that demon that looks like those things that lived behind the washer in my—“
“Oh, for the love of Satan, we know what the sodding thing looked like already!” Spike yelled.
“Oh. Right.” Xander fell silent, and they all sat around, staring at the table.
“What about a location spell? We could track…” Dawn trailed off as her sister glared at her. “Oh yeah. Um….never mind.”
Willow closed her eyes and sighed. “I wish I could. But that’s probably not the best idea, huh?”
“Don’t fret, Will,” Spike said, earning surprised looks from everyone but the redhead he addressed. “We’ll find it. There’s always more than one way to skin a cat, after all.”
She quirked a grin at him. “You have such a way with words.”
“What can I say? It’s a gift.”
Xander observed the whole vaguely flirty exchange curiously.
~*~
There were a few small but crucial Truths that Arnold Sherliton had over-looked while composing his plot for Sunnydale domination. The first and most famous being: never go up against the slayer’s friends when the slayer is alive. But no less important is this: Good plans for domination almost always go bad. It’s a relatively simple concept, proved time and time again throughout history. This has a great deal to do with the quality of hired help Evil Masterminds are willing to settle for. However, in this particular case, it was doomed to fail from the beginning.
The reason was simple. Sid - a supremely powerful being who had sunken cities beneath the waves for merely displeasing him – was back from vacation. He had returned from his holiday in the Bahamas to find year-old coffee on the warmer and a dense backlog of cases on his desk at the corporate offices of The Powers That Be. And one of those cases – his pet case, actually – was in shambles.
The Almighty Sid was mightily pissed.
“This is horrifying!” he bellowed to his underlings that Tuesday in one of the conference rooms. “How on Earth did you People let things slide so badly?!” the iridescent Being shouted, throwing a thick report onto the table in front of him. He turned towards the other occupants of the room. “I went on vacation for three years. Just three years! And I get back here and the plan that was drafted by Fate and approved by the Powers That Be has been thrown completely out the window!” He paused for dramatic effect. “Well? What have you got to say for yourselves?”
A deceptively young-looking girl answered for her colleagues. “It was the contractor we hired – what was his name?” she wondered.
“Dmitri,” a gray mist seated at the end of the table supplied.
“Right. Dmitri. He went postal on us when we wouldn’t give him a promotion. Starting making bad matches right and left. First it was the vampire Harmony, then it was the slayer Buffy.”
Sid paced back and forth, his skin switching from metallic purple to blue to green and back again as he thought.
“And what of this girl, Tara? Is she the fault of Dmitri as well?”
The little girl looked sheepish. “Well, actually – she’s one of mine. After Harmony came into the picture, I thought I could make Spike a bit jealous by increasing her role in the scenario. It worked for a while…but then that irritating little Russian screwed up again.”
The Beings at the conference table watched apprehensively as their supervisor mulled this information over. Then he turned a lovely swirling pink color and looked up. “So what we have are two broken-hearted humans—“ Somebody coughed, and Sid amended his statement. “One broken-hearted human, one broken-hearted demon…a piddling little upstart attempting to take over the Hellmouth, and three weeks to get this plan back on track before we become the focus of a PTB investigation…is that right?”
One by one the Beings around the table nodded. Put like that, it just sounded…bad.
“Do want me to call Cupid in on this one? It’ll be a quick fix, and we can make things permanent later,” the gray mist suggested. Sid shook his head.
“Nah – keep everything in this office. Understand? This case is now confidential. And maybe,” he added, turning toward the large television monitors that made up one wall of the conference room. The Beings in the room watched as their clients – Willow the witch and “Spike” the vampire, stood up from a table and moved towards the door. The witch seemed to still be a bit dizzy from her encounter with the big black bug, and swayed on her feet, rubbing her forehead. The vampire watched her closely for a minute, and then guided her towards the door with a feather-light hand on the small of her back. “Maybe things will be easier than we think.”
His underlings all nodded and began to gather their files, shuffling towards the door. Sid’s second-in-command remained behind, smiling beatifically at the TV monitors that had just switched over to a picture of a suspiciously non-descript man. “And I’ll take over the supervision of this Arnold Sherliton creature, shall I?” She asked.
Sid smiled. “Have fun.”
