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jedibuttercupPG; Sleepy Hollow/B:tVS. 2100 words; a sortof-cracky AU fixit for the end of Season 3.
Abbie meets another universe's version of 'she who saves the world a lot.'
Title: Into Every Generation-- Whoops, Wrong Tagline
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: K+/PG, gen
Spoilers: Canon divergence for SH 3.18 "Ragnarok"; B:tVS generically post-series, no comics
Notes: I just got done detailing why I'm not participating in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
twistedshorts year, and found a TTHFFA pairing that spoke to me. Sorry? I just can't get over (three stories and counting, now) how Season 3 of Sleepy Hollow ended. So. A verging-on-cracky fixit?
Summary: Abbie meets another universe's version of 'she who saves the world a lot.' 2100 words.
Abbie Mills, one of two prophesied Witnesses to the Biblical apocalypse, had taken her bow before the full seven years of Tribulations were up.
Well, some versions of the story did have them down as martyrs; she'd known there'd be no promises. So she'd pulled her big girl panties up, smiled at her former mentor in that bar between phases of reality, and made her farewells to Crane. He'd be the hardest thing to leave behind, that was for sure; him and her sister Jenny. But they'd be okay. And if Corbin was right, some part of her would stick around, catalyzing a new Witness to stand at Crane's side.
Her story wasn't over yet. It just... wouldn't be Abbie Mills' story. And after everything she'd been through... well. She'd told Crane she was okay with it, and really, what choice did she have? She took a deep breath, and then stepped through the next door.
...Which turned out to have a much higher threshold than she'd been expecting. Abbie tripped over ethereal nothingness, and swore reflexively as she thrust out her hands just in time to break her fall against an unexpectedly hard, cool surface. She could feel her head swimming with the transition, and her palms stinging from the contact; and more than that, she could feel, something she hadn't exactly been doing since Pandora's Box had swallowed her whole.
And she was definitely still Abbie. Those were her same old familiar hands she was staring at, pushing against what looked an awful lot like a concrete floor. Wasn't she supposed to have forgotten all about her old life by now? "What the hell is going on?"
"Was that English?" she heard a startled-sounding female voice ask nearby; one that wasn't her sister's or Sophie Foster's or even Pandora's. "I thought you said she didn't talk?"
"I said the First Slayer didn't talk," another unfamiliar woman replied. "But that's not Sineya."
"It's not?" a man who wasn't Crane replied. "Well, that can't be good. Willow, what did you do?"
Abbie cleared her throat, slowly pushing herself back up to a kneeling position as she took in the three around her: a blonde, a redhead, and a brunet with an eyepatch, all slightly older than she was, standing in some kind of old warehouse-like building. Why was it always a warehouse?
"What do you mean, what did I do?" the first woman spoke again; the redhead, ignoring Abbie to focus on her male friend. "I read the spell exactly as we found it; I didn't even make the obvious substitutions to improve efficiency! All it's supposed to do-- the only thing it can do, as written-- is call forth, I think it translates as an enduring, or maybe eternal, female warrior spirit? The one most closely aligned with Buffy. I mean, the Slayer. It even specifies the bit about 'born again into every generation'; that phrasing should definitely have called Sineya!"
"Wait," Abbie tried again. "Did you just say spell? Are you seriously telling me yet another redheaded witch just dragged my life off course? Please tell me we're at least still in 2016 this time."
"This time?" The blonde finally focused on Abbie, looking alarmed. She was very petite, about Abbie's own height and dressed much pricier than the Mills sisters could afford, but her thinness seemed more the type that came from high energy and whipcord muscle rather than model-diet starvation, and as her gaze sharpened Abbie could see the experience in her eyes. "Wait, you've been summoned before?"
Abbie was wary of showing her hand to these people; she'd been burned, metaphorically speaking, by all too many witches since Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman had brought the supernatural to life in her town. But on the other hand, anything that could encourage her new hosts to explain, and maybe even send her back against all odds; well, she had to say something.
"More like dragged accidentally along for the ride when an enemy went joyriding through time and almost set off an apocalypse," she said carefully. She already knew they believed in magic; that shouldn't be saying too much. "None of which I particularly want to talk about right now, because you summoned me. Why?"
"Well, she certainly sounds like a Slayer," the one-eyed man replied dubiously, still talking to the redheaded witch. "Maybe she's, you know, whichever one currently holds the Line? The latest avatar of The Slayer, rather than the first? There were enough former Potentials the Council lost track of that we knew we couldn't have found them all, and she did say 2016."
"But isn't she a little old to be a new Slayer? All the others started out in the twelve to eighteen bracket, and even if it's been awhile since then...."
Abbie raised her eyebrows, nonplused. These people all looked in her age range, or maybe a little older, but they weren't acting like it. Maybe that came with fighting evil all their lives, if that 'twelve to eighteen' business was true; she'd certainly seen the effects on her sister Jenny, when she'd turned her back on the truth the first time they met Moloch and Jenny instead dove head-first into their mentor's supernatural business. But that didn't mean she had to put up with the rudeness.
Forget trying to be vague, then; she pulled her badge out of her pocket and cleared her throat.
"Excuse me? Let me introduce myself properly. Agent Abbie Mills, FBI; and if it matters to anyone here, one of the Biblical Witnesses from the Book of Revelation. Last I knew my partner and I were in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and we were trying to kill a waking god; but now I'm here. I've never heard the word Slayer before, I don't recognize any of you, and if it turns out I'm not actually dead, I'd very much appreciate it if you'd reverse whatever you did here and send me back where I came from."
Eyes went wide all around the circle; then the brunet and the redhead both looked to the blonde.
"Well, I guess that narrows it down, Wills; you forgot to limit it to our dimension. There's no god scheduled to rise this year, and we would have had warning if something like that was going to happen in New York; Wolfram and Hart would never stand for it." the blonde shrugged. Then she gave Abbie a crooked smile. "I'm Buffy Summers; there's nothing Biblical about me, unless you count burning vampires with crosses and holy water, but it sounds like I'm my universe's version of you: 'she who's destined to save the world a lot'. They call me the Vampire Slayer. This is Xander, and that's Willow, my partners."
"Nice to meet you," Abbie replied, dryly. She'd have to repeat that one to Crane; when she saw him again... if she saw him again. "I wish you luck with slaying your vampires, or whatever it was you called me here for; but you really need to send me back. Now."
And now she was starting to wonder whether any of what she'd seen in that dream-like in-between place had actually happened; and regardless, would he even believe it was her if she did show up after the way she'd let the Box take her? It wasn't like they had Katrina around anymore to check that her soul was really hers, if she suddenly turned up post-death the way Frank Irving had. They'd been burned too often to just believe that everything would work out okay.
Well, she'd do what she had to do. In the meantime... it looked like she'd have to put her trust in the skills of another redheaded witch.
The witch-- Willow-- was looking at a threadbare old curl of parchment covered in chicken scratch Ichabod probably would have been able to read; she bit her lip, then nodded to herself and looked up. "Right. Sorry! I think... I must have mispronounced a word or two just exactly right to mean something else; rituals are usually more about intent than semantics, but I'm not super familiar with this language. I think I can reverse it, and then try again? I can't guarantee you'll show up exactly where I pulled you from, because it's based on energy signatures, but it should put you next to the closest person to you before we grabbed you. Do you want me to try for Sineya again first, and then work on sending you back? I make pretty good apology cookies...."
"No thank you; I'd prefer a beer... with my partner, back in Sleepy Hollow," Abbie replied, dryly. "Though I might take you up on that if you manage to grab me again." It was one thing to know she was the end product of an ancient bloodline destined to watch over apocalypses in progress; entirely another to have something like this happen because of what she was, rather than who.
"I hear you on the beer," the man who'd been introduced as Xander replied, looking sheepish now. "Good luck, uh, putting down your god? Hopefully in a way that doesn't drop your town into a sinkhole after it? We've been a little hit or miss on that score, ourselves."
"You know, I don't think the First actually counted as a god...." Buffy mused, furrowing her brow.
Xander gave her a speaking look, surprisingly effective with just the one eye. "I was trying not to reference the other one, that took out the 'one girl in all the world' instead. Because that might be a little demotivating?"
"Listen to you using corporate speak, mister construction supervisor," the blonde scoffed further. "Besides, I got better."
"You and half the other people I know in this business," Abbie snorted. "And hopefully me, in a minute; if any of what I saw between there and here was real, I'm pretty sure my partner thinks I just walked into the light myself."
"Enough with the hinting, I think I've got it," Willow said, then looked with a firm expression and extended a hand in her direction.
The words the witch spoke next didn't sound like the Romani Greek or Latin or even Sumerian she'd got used to back home, but the wind that swirled up around her, blowing the witch's hair back and leaching the color out of it, fairly sparkled with the same eldritch feeling of magic; Abbie gave the woman who'd called herself the Slayer one last acknowledging nod, then closed her eyes and adjusted her stance, bracing herself for whatever might happen next.
She felt the wind snag her off her feet, and then a confused blur of sound, and then... she coughed as a damp, dusty, and very familiar scent filled her nostrils. She'd been transported to the brick-lined tunnels under Sleepy Hollow.
"Crane! Crane!" she heard someone else screaming, somewhere nearby.
Abbie opened her eyes again to a view of her partner sprawled out in front of her, as if he'd been trying to run from something and got knocked out in the process. So maybe the whole Pandora's death, destroying the Box, vision episode had been real? No sinkhole required?
"Crane," she shook her head, then knelt and pressed a hand to his shoulder. "Hey, wake up. Looks like we're meeting again sooner than I thought."
"Abbie?" he murmured, his eyes fluttering; then he sat up in a panicked rush, eyes devouring her face. "Abbie! But I thought...."
"Crane?!" Jenny's voice echoed down the tunnels again. She came into view a moment later, then gasped and flung herself at both of them, arms outstretched. "Abbie! You're here! How is this possible?"
"Never mind how," Abbie laughed, pressed between them both. "...I got better?"
Crane shuddered, then turned and wrapped his arms tighter around her. "Never do that again."
"No promises," Abbie replied.
There wasn't much she could do about witches from other dimensions, after all, or soul-stealing implements of mass destruction. Such were their lives, though; and even the lives of their counterparts in other realities, apparently. That wasn't what Ichabod needed to hear right now, though; or Jenny, after what had happened to Joe. Which reminded her-- if Frank could be brought back after six weeks in the ground because of a 'taint on his soul', did the Wendigo count? After all the people from Ichabod's era who'd cheated death one way or another, there should be something they could do.
She pulled back and smiled at both of her most important people. "But I'll do my best."
(x-posted totwistedshorts & AO3)
Abbie meets another universe's version of 'she who saves the world a lot.'
Title: Into Every Generation-- Whoops, Wrong Tagline
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Rating: K+/PG, gen
Spoilers: Canon divergence for SH 3.18 "Ragnarok"; B:tVS generically post-series, no comics
Notes: I just got done detailing why I'm not participating in
twistedshorts year, and found a TTHFFA pairing that spoke to me. Sorry? I just can't get over (three stories and counting, now) how Season 3 of Sleepy Hollow ended. So. A verging-on-cracky fixit?Summary: Abbie meets another universe's version of 'she who saves the world a lot.' 2100 words.
Abbie Mills, one of two prophesied Witnesses to the Biblical apocalypse, had taken her bow before the full seven years of Tribulations were up.
Well, some versions of the story did have them down as martyrs; she'd known there'd be no promises. So she'd pulled her big girl panties up, smiled at her former mentor in that bar between phases of reality, and made her farewells to Crane. He'd be the hardest thing to leave behind, that was for sure; him and her sister Jenny. But they'd be okay. And if Corbin was right, some part of her would stick around, catalyzing a new Witness to stand at Crane's side.
Her story wasn't over yet. It just... wouldn't be Abbie Mills' story. And after everything she'd been through... well. She'd told Crane she was okay with it, and really, what choice did she have? She took a deep breath, and then stepped through the next door.
...Which turned out to have a much higher threshold than she'd been expecting. Abbie tripped over ethereal nothingness, and swore reflexively as she thrust out her hands just in time to break her fall against an unexpectedly hard, cool surface. She could feel her head swimming with the transition, and her palms stinging from the contact; and more than that, she could feel, something she hadn't exactly been doing since Pandora's Box had swallowed her whole.
And she was definitely still Abbie. Those were her same old familiar hands she was staring at, pushing against what looked an awful lot like a concrete floor. Wasn't she supposed to have forgotten all about her old life by now? "What the hell is going on?"
"Was that English?" she heard a startled-sounding female voice ask nearby; one that wasn't her sister's or Sophie Foster's or even Pandora's. "I thought you said she didn't talk?"
"I said the First Slayer didn't talk," another unfamiliar woman replied. "But that's not Sineya."
"It's not?" a man who wasn't Crane replied. "Well, that can't be good. Willow, what did you do?"
Abbie cleared her throat, slowly pushing herself back up to a kneeling position as she took in the three around her: a blonde, a redhead, and a brunet with an eyepatch, all slightly older than she was, standing in some kind of old warehouse-like building. Why was it always a warehouse?
"What do you mean, what did I do?" the first woman spoke again; the redhead, ignoring Abbie to focus on her male friend. "I read the spell exactly as we found it; I didn't even make the obvious substitutions to improve efficiency! All it's supposed to do-- the only thing it can do, as written-- is call forth, I think it translates as an enduring, or maybe eternal, female warrior spirit? The one most closely aligned with Buffy. I mean, the Slayer. It even specifies the bit about 'born again into every generation'; that phrasing should definitely have called Sineya!"
"Wait," Abbie tried again. "Did you just say spell? Are you seriously telling me yet another redheaded witch just dragged my life off course? Please tell me we're at least still in 2016 this time."
"This time?" The blonde finally focused on Abbie, looking alarmed. She was very petite, about Abbie's own height and dressed much pricier than the Mills sisters could afford, but her thinness seemed more the type that came from high energy and whipcord muscle rather than model-diet starvation, and as her gaze sharpened Abbie could see the experience in her eyes. "Wait, you've been summoned before?"
Abbie was wary of showing her hand to these people; she'd been burned, metaphorically speaking, by all too many witches since Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman had brought the supernatural to life in her town. But on the other hand, anything that could encourage her new hosts to explain, and maybe even send her back against all odds; well, she had to say something.
"More like dragged accidentally along for the ride when an enemy went joyriding through time and almost set off an apocalypse," she said carefully. She already knew they believed in magic; that shouldn't be saying too much. "None of which I particularly want to talk about right now, because you summoned me. Why?"
"Well, she certainly sounds like a Slayer," the one-eyed man replied dubiously, still talking to the redheaded witch. "Maybe she's, you know, whichever one currently holds the Line? The latest avatar of The Slayer, rather than the first? There were enough former Potentials the Council lost track of that we knew we couldn't have found them all, and she did say 2016."
"But isn't she a little old to be a new Slayer? All the others started out in the twelve to eighteen bracket, and even if it's been awhile since then...."
Abbie raised her eyebrows, nonplused. These people all looked in her age range, or maybe a little older, but they weren't acting like it. Maybe that came with fighting evil all their lives, if that 'twelve to eighteen' business was true; she'd certainly seen the effects on her sister Jenny, when she'd turned her back on the truth the first time they met Moloch and Jenny instead dove head-first into their mentor's supernatural business. But that didn't mean she had to put up with the rudeness.
Forget trying to be vague, then; she pulled her badge out of her pocket and cleared her throat.
"Excuse me? Let me introduce myself properly. Agent Abbie Mills, FBI; and if it matters to anyone here, one of the Biblical Witnesses from the Book of Revelation. Last I knew my partner and I were in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and we were trying to kill a waking god; but now I'm here. I've never heard the word Slayer before, I don't recognize any of you, and if it turns out I'm not actually dead, I'd very much appreciate it if you'd reverse whatever you did here and send me back where I came from."
Eyes went wide all around the circle; then the brunet and the redhead both looked to the blonde.
"Well, I guess that narrows it down, Wills; you forgot to limit it to our dimension. There's no god scheduled to rise this year, and we would have had warning if something like that was going to happen in New York; Wolfram and Hart would never stand for it." the blonde shrugged. Then she gave Abbie a crooked smile. "I'm Buffy Summers; there's nothing Biblical about me, unless you count burning vampires with crosses and holy water, but it sounds like I'm my universe's version of you: 'she who's destined to save the world a lot'. They call me the Vampire Slayer. This is Xander, and that's Willow, my partners."
"Nice to meet you," Abbie replied, dryly. She'd have to repeat that one to Crane; when she saw him again... if she saw him again. "I wish you luck with slaying your vampires, or whatever it was you called me here for; but you really need to send me back. Now."
And now she was starting to wonder whether any of what she'd seen in that dream-like in-between place had actually happened; and regardless, would he even believe it was her if she did show up after the way she'd let the Box take her? It wasn't like they had Katrina around anymore to check that her soul was really hers, if she suddenly turned up post-death the way Frank Irving had. They'd been burned too often to just believe that everything would work out okay.
Well, she'd do what she had to do. In the meantime... it looked like she'd have to put her trust in the skills of another redheaded witch.
The witch-- Willow-- was looking at a threadbare old curl of parchment covered in chicken scratch Ichabod probably would have been able to read; she bit her lip, then nodded to herself and looked up. "Right. Sorry! I think... I must have mispronounced a word or two just exactly right to mean something else; rituals are usually more about intent than semantics, but I'm not super familiar with this language. I think I can reverse it, and then try again? I can't guarantee you'll show up exactly where I pulled you from, because it's based on energy signatures, but it should put you next to the closest person to you before we grabbed you. Do you want me to try for Sineya again first, and then work on sending you back? I make pretty good apology cookies...."
"No thank you; I'd prefer a beer... with my partner, back in Sleepy Hollow," Abbie replied, dryly. "Though I might take you up on that if you manage to grab me again." It was one thing to know she was the end product of an ancient bloodline destined to watch over apocalypses in progress; entirely another to have something like this happen because of what she was, rather than who.
"I hear you on the beer," the man who'd been introduced as Xander replied, looking sheepish now. "Good luck, uh, putting down your god? Hopefully in a way that doesn't drop your town into a sinkhole after it? We've been a little hit or miss on that score, ourselves."
"You know, I don't think the First actually counted as a god...." Buffy mused, furrowing her brow.
Xander gave her a speaking look, surprisingly effective with just the one eye. "I was trying not to reference the other one, that took out the 'one girl in all the world' instead. Because that might be a little demotivating?"
"Listen to you using corporate speak, mister construction supervisor," the blonde scoffed further. "Besides, I got better."
"You and half the other people I know in this business," Abbie snorted. "And hopefully me, in a minute; if any of what I saw between there and here was real, I'm pretty sure my partner thinks I just walked into the light myself."
"Enough with the hinting, I think I've got it," Willow said, then looked with a firm expression and extended a hand in her direction.
The words the witch spoke next didn't sound like the Romani Greek or Latin or even Sumerian she'd got used to back home, but the wind that swirled up around her, blowing the witch's hair back and leaching the color out of it, fairly sparkled with the same eldritch feeling of magic; Abbie gave the woman who'd called herself the Slayer one last acknowledging nod, then closed her eyes and adjusted her stance, bracing herself for whatever might happen next.
She felt the wind snag her off her feet, and then a confused blur of sound, and then... she coughed as a damp, dusty, and very familiar scent filled her nostrils. She'd been transported to the brick-lined tunnels under Sleepy Hollow.
"Crane! Crane!" she heard someone else screaming, somewhere nearby.
Abbie opened her eyes again to a view of her partner sprawled out in front of her, as if he'd been trying to run from something and got knocked out in the process. So maybe the whole Pandora's death, destroying the Box, vision episode had been real? No sinkhole required?
"Crane," she shook her head, then knelt and pressed a hand to his shoulder. "Hey, wake up. Looks like we're meeting again sooner than I thought."
"Abbie?" he murmured, his eyes fluttering; then he sat up in a panicked rush, eyes devouring her face. "Abbie! But I thought...."
"Crane?!" Jenny's voice echoed down the tunnels again. She came into view a moment later, then gasped and flung herself at both of them, arms outstretched. "Abbie! You're here! How is this possible?"
"Never mind how," Abbie laughed, pressed between them both. "...I got better?"
Crane shuddered, then turned and wrapped his arms tighter around her. "Never do that again."
"No promises," Abbie replied.
There wasn't much she could do about witches from other dimensions, after all, or soul-stealing implements of mass destruction. Such were their lives, though; and even the lives of their counterparts in other realities, apparently. That wasn't what Ichabod needed to hear right now, though; or Jenny, after what had happened to Joe. Which reminded her-- if Frank could be brought back after six weeks in the ground because of a 'taint on his soul', did the Wendigo count? After all the people from Ichabod's era who'd cheated death one way or another, there should be something they could do.
She pulled back and smiled at both of her most important people. "But I'll do my best."
(x-posted to
twistedshorts & AO3)
