jedibuttercup

PG-13, B:tVS/Stargate SG-1; 3000 words. Part 7/8 of my Dawn + Clone!Daniel saga, See For Yourself.

Willow lowered her hands as she finished the last of her chant. Step one of Sealing the First Evil back up, hopefully complete.

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Title: See For Yourself, Part 7 - Class Protector Award
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds belong to Whedon and SyFy.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: B:tVS mid-7.15 "Get it Done", Stargate SG-1 mid-season 8, AU
Notes: Part 7 of See For Yourself.

Summary: Willow lowered her hands as she finished the last of her chant. Step one of Sealing the First Evil back up, hopefully complete.

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Willow lowered her hands as she finished the last of her chant. Step one of Sealing the First Evil back up, hopefully complete; thank goodness step two was supposed to be more symbolic actions on Buffy's part and less Willow-y spellwork. Her breath was already coming short, and her scalp sort of tingled, making her wonder what shade her hair was; she was also very, very aware of the influx of Bringers pouring into the basement.

She wished Giles had got back from his latest trip to England before this happened, or that Buffy had been willing to wait for him to return before trying it. She did trust Buffy, but the consequences if their plan went wrong-- for any reason-- were kind of terrifying. This was the First they were bopping on the nose, one of the oldest continually existing beings, if not the oldest being, in creation.

A hush fell over the room as something changed, and Willow tore her gaze away from the fitfully glowing Seal of Danzalthar to meet the scowling gaze of a second Buffy, arms crossed petulantly across her chest. The one standing across the seal from Willow turned too, lips thinning as she caught sight of the intruder.

"And what, exactly, was that supposed to accomplish?" the faux Buffy said.

Buffy took a step toward her double, subtly putting herself between its incorporeal form and Dawn. "I thought that would be obvious, even to you," she taunted it. "Me rejoining the Slayer line made it unstable; and unstable equals more room for you to move. So, I renounced myself from the equation. Simple as that."

"Oooh, so you stopped the door from opening any more than it had already." The First Evil gave a mocking shudder. "And in the process actually gave some of your own power away. I'm so scared."

The real Buffy smirked. "Yeah, and in a prison cell somewhere, a frenemy of mine probably just shivered too, and has no idea why. I don't get one over on Faith very often; I'll have to visit her later and tell her all about it. But that's not actually the end goal here. Sorry to disappoint. You think we didn't figure out the Seal needs something other than blood to close?"

"You renounced Sineya, and that wasn't even the point?" The First snorted, and then its form shifted again, to-- oh, God--

"Now this," it said, in a beloved and long-missed voice, "I've got to hear."

"Stop it," Dawn spoke up suddenly at Buffy's side, her voice breaking angrily on the words. "You aren't her. Stop it."

"Oh, but I've missed you, Dawnie," Tara's lush mouth curved in an unaccustomed smirk. "Haven't you missed me? More than Willow has, I'm sure." She-- it-- turned her gaze back to Willow, eyebrow raised in jarring scorn. "Really, Willow. You thought you could replace me with that arrogant child?" It gestured toward an indignant Kennedy, the only one of the Potentials they'd brought with them.

"No one's replacing anyone," Willow replied firmly, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice as she clenched her firsts. "She's her own person, with her own strengths to appreciate. Just like Buffy's her own being now. The first of a new line. We're going to add her binding to Sineya's-- and there's nothing you can do to stop it."

The First Evil's form shifted a third time, then: to another woman whose disappointed expression weighed even more heavily than Tara's. Willow could hear the breath catch in Dawn's throat at the sight.

"I might have expected something so inherently flawed out of all this drama," Joyce Summers's ghost said scathingly. "What line? You're just one being! You don't have the power to bind me. And even if you did, it would die when you do. I'm not seeing any incentive to call off my army, here. Isn't that what you're really here for? To try to threaten me-- me-- into leaving your precious Potentials alone?"

"They're not my Potentials anymore," Buffy countered, pained lines framing her eyes as she stared down her mother. "And I don't have to be a whole line. All I have to be is a part-demon with the heart and spirit of one of your kin, so the laws of similarity apply; like Sineya, but not of Sineya, so the streams don't cross. The Shadow Men gave that to me. And all I have to do with it is kick the door shut long enough for the original binding to take back over. By the time someone screws it up again? It won't be my problem anymore."

"And isn't that just like you," the First snarled. "Foisting your responsibilities off on someone else...."

Deliberately, Buffy turned her back on the ranting spirit, dropping to her knees at the Seal's edge. "Dawnie?" she said quietly. "You've done your part. Back up the others."

"You'll never succeed!" The First roared, exploding outward into a form as large as the whole room: something red-eyed and enormous and sharply clawed, crowned with horns. Then it vanished-- as a whole new tide of Bringers, mixed with a few demons and vampires for variety, began pouring into the Sunnydale High School basement to stop the former Slayer and her friends.

All the fighters moved immediately to meet them-- except Spike, who suddenly froze in his tracks. His eyes went distant, and he hummed something under his breath; then he morphed to demon face and turned his back on the attackers, gaze seeking out Buffy's across the room.

Willow gasped and raised her hands, ready to blast Spike if she had to. She and Dawn were the only ones free to act; Xander, Kennedy and Principal Wood were busy with a group of Bringers on her side of the room, and Dawn's friends Jon and Nick were taking the bulk of the other side since Spike had stopped fighting, abandoning their swords to fire blasts of blue-white energy from their sci-fi guns at anything that moved.

"Spike, what are you doing! You can't-- Spike! Nick!" Dawn yelled, trapped between her sister and her friends by the influx of bad guys. She had her crossbow still in her hands, but it shook like a leaf in a windstorm as her aim wavered back and forth between her friends' attackers and the potential disaster in their midst.

Inexplicably, though, Spike took only one step toward Buffy. From everything they knew about the trigger, he'd follow whatever the First had told him to do as long as it was active; the last time he'd attacked Buffy under its influence, he hadn't stopped until he'd got a taste of her blood. But now, Willow could practically see him fighting the command, gritting his teeth and growling under his breath.

The entire time, Buffy stared back at him, green eyes meeting angry gold. She was down on the part of the floor that sloped toward the Seal, off balance and off her feet, with no way to quickly react; a sort of resigned, determined energy radiated off her like heat. She didn't get up, or move, or do anything except look him in the eye and say four words.

"You promised me, Spike."

Spike jerked his head to the side, as if he'd been slapped. The humming stopped, and his expression contorted again; then he raised his voice, replying to something none of the rest of them could see. "No. I won't. I won't hurt her again!"

An inarticulate cry of disembodied rage filled the room, and Spike shook his head again sharply, shedding the demon face before turning to lunge into the melee around Dawn's friends. A big vamp had got past Nick's gun arm, pushing his weapon up and out of the way as it went for his neck; Spike wasted no time ripping its head clear off its shoulders. Then he shook off its dust, turning to the next Bringer trying to get past them.

Dawn let out a sob of relief, then turned her crossbow over to the mob facing Xander, Kennedy, and Wood, and fired past them to nail another vampire squarely in the chest.

Willow's shoulders slumped at the reprieve; she bent forward for just a moment, bracing her hands on her knees.

"Willow, you okay?" Kennedy called to her, voice worried.

"Peachy! Just taking a breath!" Willow called back, shakily. "You?"

"All good here!" Kennedy replied. "Just get it done!"

And on the strength of that reassurance, Willow turned back to Buffy again, ready to protect her for the final push. Praying to whoever would answer that her friend had been right, and this would all be over soon.

---

Nick had no idea what the hell was going on anymore.

He'd put together enough from the things they'd seen since stumbling into Buffy's living room portal adventure to get that the shapeshifting spirit taunting people in the town was some kind of Anubis analogue, an incorporeal overlord with a lot of corporeal stormtroopers. He wasn't sure how a mixed bag of underage vigilantes, a high school principal, and a vampire had ended up its mortal enemies; but if you took out the magic, it wasn't so different from his own experiences before he'd been cloned and woke up as a teenager himself.

It was all the rest that was really throwing him. Was he really supposed to believe that a high school counselor and her college friend could banish a being like that by the strength of their will? Could 'magic' as they practiced it be a form of psychic ability, like the gifts activated by advanced Ancient DNA? Was the 'Seal' they'd come here to access some kind of Ancient technology with ritualized activation mechanisms-- with potentially useful applications to the SGC? Or did he just want to think that, to put off dealing with the fact that the entire foundation of his understanding of the universe might have just shifted, yet again?

...Or to distract himself from the feeling of blood trickling down his neck, from where that last attacker's teeth had broken the skin. He'd been seconds away from adding yet another death to his tally.

"Nick, are you okay?" he heard Dawn call to him.

He shot another of the 'Bringers' twice in quick succession with his zat, and threw a quick glance over his shoulder. Dawn was standing near the center of the dirt-floored room, shifting her crossbow to cover whichever of her friends currently needed extra help. She was glancing his way too, wide, stressed blue eyes meeting his. She was a little disheveled, but looked mostly untouched except for the still-bleeding cut across one palm from where she and her sister had started off the Seal-closing ritual.

"I'm fine. It's just a scratch!" he replied.

"Of course he'd say that even if he was bleeding out-- but he really means it this time!" Jon added, loudly.

"You can stop helping anytime now," Nick said in a singsong voice, gritting his teeth as he turned back to the fight.

"Just being-- ugh-- a supportive friend!" Jon replied, slashing at the throat of one of the 'demons' mixed in with their attackers, a rocky-skinned creature bigger than Teal'c that had somehow, impossibly, shrugged off at least three zat blasts.

"Eye, stab it through the eye! I know that one!" Xander yelled.

Jon did as suggested, after his sword bounced off its armored neck-- and whooped as it slumped backward, dead. "Got it-- thanks!"

"No prob!" Xander replied as he turned back to his own fight; and then Buffy's voice rose again, cutting through all the other noise in the room.

It had only been a few hours since Nick had believed he and Jon had stumbled across some strange warrior goddess cult; keeping to that metaphor, what was going on seemed to be more or less an ascension in the older sense of the word, transforming a human being into the embodiment of something greater. He didn't remember much about the time he'd spent Ascended-- the Asgard cloning process hadn't affected those buried memories-- but he did still remember preparing himself for it. And the way he'd felt then looked a lot like the expression on Dawn's sister's face now, as he cast a glance at her over his shoulder.

"It isn't blood that closes the Seal. It's tears. Remorse. An expression of deep regret or guilt for a wrong committed." Buffy had tipped her head back, eyes fluttering shut as she focused on something internal, legs still folded beneath her. Her voice thickened noticeably as she continued.

"And I do regret; I regret so much. Every person I couldn't save. Everyone who died because they got involved in my fight, or because I made the wrong choice, or because I didn't get to them in time. Every friend that I hurt because-- because they tried to connect to me, and I cut myself off from them. Because that was what it meant to be the Slayer. To be alone. And now there's all these other girls suffering, because I came back when I wasn't supposed to and gave you a foothold in this world."

Another glance between zatting Bringers showed tears shimmering on her cheeks, and everyone else casting distracted glances at her, too. Nick thought about the guilt he'd carried for years, as Daniel, for opening the Stargate in the first place-- for exposing Sha'uri's people to destruction, for so many other worlds wrecked or changed because of his choices-- and felt a deep sympathy. Then he thought about how it felt to be adjacent to that now, with all the same knowledge and none of the power to do anything about it, and shifted his gaze to Dawn. The younger Summers' eyes shimmered with tears of her own, and his heart went out to her.

"But it ends today," Buffy continued firmly. "I'm not the Slayer anymore; I'm something else. Someone at this school once gave me an award for being the class protector. So let's go with that. I'm here to protect the people in this place, one more time."

Nick heard a hissing sound then, like water dripped on a hot skillet... and then the press of Bringers into the basement suddenly reversed flow like the changing of a tide. Within seconds, their group were the only beings in the room. The unnatural radiance that had poured up off the Seal began to flicker-- and the whole basement shook, sending all the fighters staggering in the dirt.

"No!" Angry, disembodied words echoed around them as they all braced themselves: the same roaring voice of the giant, ghostly form the First Evil had last used. "You can't stop me; I will overrun the...."

The light winked out; the earth quieted; and the voice cut off, as abruptly as if someone had hung up a phone.

"...evil overlords anonymous society?" Xander said tentatively, into the silence that followed. "'Cause I'm thinking that was a rule 24 failure, right there."

Jon coughed in that telltale way that meant he was covering a surprised snicker. "What, the one that goes: even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line, 'No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!' because death is usually instantaneous?"

"Yep, that'd be the one," Xander replied wryly, then headed for the center of the room. He was covered in cuts and scratches-- they all were-- but no one seemed seriously injured. "Uh, Buffy? You good?"

Buffy had leaned forward over the Seal to do whatever she'd done; she sat back on her heels, wiping at her face, then gave her friend a watery smile. "Can we not talk about anything I just said, ever again?"

Xander held a hand down to her, then pulled her up into a hug. "What, you said something? Sorry, I think my ears are full of dirt." Willow joined the hug next, dragging Dawn along with her, and all four clutched each other close for a long moment.

Willow went to Kennedy as they broke apart, and Xander stepped back to say something to Wood; Nick thought Buffy had headed for Spike, but he lost track of the details at that point, because Dawn moved his way the minute her sister let her go.

"We're gonna, um, have to put some antiseptic on that," she joked awkwardly, gesturing to his neck. "You never know where a vampire's teeth have been."

Nick smiled back, ruefully. "You know, I've experienced some pretty surreal things in my life, but I gotta say, I've never had a night like this. Was this... normal?"

"Not so much. I mean, yeah, once a year we have some big bad come through, but this was a little high on the extreme-o-meter. Good news is, though, once we take 'em down, we're usually clear for several more months? Barring, you know. The usual patrolling for vampires, and stuff."

"And stuff." Nick grinned at her. Then he remembered his own 'stuff', and his smile faded. Their last attempt to talk about who he and Jon were, and what they were doing in Sunnydale, had kinda been interrupted.

"Speaking of. Uh, stuff," he cleared his throat.

"Yeah, speaking of," Buffy broke in, Spike at her shoulder, raising an eyebrow at them both. "Let's get back to the house, make sure everyone's okay. And then I think it's time we had a certain conversation."

"You're probably right."

Dawn gave Nick an awkward, hopeful smile, then accompanied her sister out of the room.

Nick hung back as the others followed, exchanging a glance with Jon.

"I think this one's gotta be our call," Jon shrugged. "Jack wouldn't like it. But he's not here."

Nick took a deep breath, then let it out, reminded again of his thoughts about finding a new, equally important career out of the shadow of the original Jack and Daniel. "No pressure, then."


(x-posted to twistedshorts & at AO3.)