Trace Coburn’s Plot-Tribble Sanctuary (snippets and offcuts, mostly Buffy-related)

[Death by Chains]

Scholastic Assistance Services, Balmoral Shopping Centre
15:23, Friday, March 29, 1996

"You're what?" Buffy blinked, a little blankly. "You're who the what now?"

"They gave you the 'one girl in every generation' speech, eh?" realised the crazy woman with the long dark-auburn hair and the faint Russian accent, her expression not unkind. "It's very Star Wars, gives a nice 'Chosen One' kind of feel to things, but there's a few problems with it. For starters, it skips a lot of really important details."

"You might be going a little fast, there, Taz," Misha noted dryly. "Give her a second to catch up."

"I... but... how?" the blonde finally managed.

'Taz' motioned for her to take her seat again, then flashed Misha an impish smile and quite deliberately draped herself across his lap, hooking one arm over his shoulders for balance and seemingly oblivious to the alarming creak from their plastic chair. (For his part, Misha caught Buffy's eye and gave her a helpless microshrug — tinged with a hint of smugness — before steadying his wife with both arms around her waist.) After a split-second's hesitation, she glanced at Giles and beckoned him over with a jerk of her head, waiting until all were seated before resuming. "Technically speaking, you're my replacement. There's a lot of politics and other bullshit around it, but the short version is, the British Council of Watchers have spent three years making an absolute dog's breakfast of 'running' the show out here. Back in November, they finally realised it, took a look at how hard it'd be to actually fix the whole mess, and decided it'd easier to just start fresh with a new Slayer."

Meaning me, clearly. "What do you mean, 'start fresh'?"

Taz unzipped the sleeve-pocket on her black aviator jacket, pulled out something that rattled, and backhanded it across the table. Buffy's reflexes absently snatched it out of the air, and she glanced down to look at it: a plastic vial, holding several mangled copper-and-grey lumps. "As 'retirement packages' go, four bullets in the back wouldn't have been my choice," the redhead observed sardonically. "Not that our 'employers' asked me beforehand. If they had, I would've warned them not to hunt what they can't kill."

"Some bastards just have to learn the hard way," Misha shrugged. "Rule One of Slaying: 'Dying is bad: don't do it.' Corollary to Rule One: 'If some bastard does kill you, take a breath, walk it off, then hunt him down and return the favour. See how he fucking likes it.'"

"But, since the Poms stuffed that up like they have everything else since March of '93, here I am, and here you are. And someone at the Council decided to actually put their brain in gear for a few minutes and make the best of things: they decided this" a handwave at the general situation "gave them a unique opportunity. Normally Slayers get trained by Watchers, and by-and-large they do an okay job — especially if you ask them! — but someone who can teach a Slayer the job from a first-hand perspective? That's a little less common."

"I'm... still stuck on the whole 'two Slayers at once' thing," Buffy admitted, giving the cuddling couple a baffled look. "I... how?"

"Killing a Slayer can be easy, or hard, but in my case, the trick is making sure I stay dead," Taz shrugged. "How'd I manage the Lazarus trick? I'm not telling!" she sing-songed at Giles.

"But she was dead, at least briefly, and that... led to your, uh, Calling, Miss Summers," Giles added.

"Oh," was all the blonde could manage to that. After a moment, she brightened. "But hey: if you're already here, and all up-to-speed with the local creature-features, you guys don't need me to do the Slayage thing. So, um... bye!" She all but bolted out of her chair, started to turn for the door —

"D'you mind returning my 'retirement package' before you go?" Taz asked with deceptive casualness.

Buffy froze and looked down at her hand, still holding the vial. Looked at the four bullets within.

"Don't worry: I'm sure the Council will arrange yours before the start of Second Term," Misha added meaningfully.

When the Californian looked up again, it was to give Giles a glare that held murder of its own. "You mean you people would —!"

"Oh, he wouldn't be the one to pull the trigger," Taz shrugged. "I doubt he even knows the people who would; they keep those things separate for exactly this kind of reason. 'Plausible deniability,' it's called. No, whoever arranges for you to meet with a mischief will be some 'renegade Watcher', someone 'acting on their own', 'against protocol and without official orders'." The acid on those phrases would have burned through plate steel. "That's who it was with me, after all."

"You have to understand, this 'apprenticeship' thing is a last-minute jerry-rigged idea, and not something they're married to — especially with how they feel about Taz being even vaguely involved, much less actively influencing a new Slayer." Misha shifted his wife in his arms a little. "There's a lot of people who don't think this 'mistress-and-apprentice' thing can actually work; there's a fair few who want to make sure it doesn't. And if you walk out that door, you'll be giving them the perfect excuse to either get a new Slayer to replace you and try again, or just 'cancel' the whole thing as a bad idea."

"I'd be interested in learning how you know so much about the Council's internal politics," Giles noted thoughtfully.

"'Get used to disappointment'," the younger man returned immediately, not even glancing his way.

 

[Death by Chains]

Inspired by a certain scene in A California Cainite in Mayor WIlkins' Court. This one is a scene (probable out-take?) from later on in She Came All The Way From America and contains mild spoilers for Falling Cherry Blossoms.




"Y'know, I actually got to do that, once," Taz noted offhandly. "'Snot nearly as practical as Cameron makes it look."

That got pretty much everybody's attention. Xander fumbled for the remote and paused the tape just as Arnie's inner HUD brought up the message { "HUMAN CASUALTIES: 0.0" }. "You used a minigun?" he blurted, wide-eyed as all his fellow younger Irregulars.

"We had a caper up in Japan a couple of years ago. The situation developed rapidly, as it does —"

Especially with you, Buffy noted, just a touch waspishly. She knew the older Slayer wasn't deliberately trying to overshadow her or make her feel irrelevant or inexperienced, but at times like this, when her barely three months of being a Slayer were compared to the redhead's three years — or was it eight? She'd said something about 'temporal folds' and 'parallel universes' earlier, right? — it was hard not to feel very much like the newcomer to the sisterhood.

"— and at the end, it turned into a stoush at a movie studio. It was a Yakuza thing, so there were goons with guns, their supporting mages, and the Demon Lord they'd summoned, joker named 'Zaszas'." Taz's eyes lost focus, and Buffy suddenly realised what people meant by 'thousand-yard stare'. "All kinds of bad news, that bastard."

After a moment, Misha's arm tightened around her shoulders for an instant, though he didn't look much better.

Evidently reassured, and jogged back on track, the Russian-born Slayer cleared her throat and went on. "Well, once we'd cleared out everything on the undercard, it was time for the main event, like it usually goes during these things. The three of us — me, and Misha, and Yukio — we all broke into the main ritual room. We got there about half a minute too late: their sorcerors had killed their victim and finished summoning Zaszas. So, we had to back off and go for some more firepower."

"And there was a minigun just... lying around?" Xander wondered, a faint note of hysteria in his voice.

"One of the props they had in the armoury," Taz shrugged. "They even had a pallet of live ammo, though Heaven alone knows how, considering Japan's firearms laws make the UK look like the Wild West. Tell you what, though? There's a lot of things that scene doesn't mention," she judged, a little ruefully.

"Oh?" Cordelia arched one perfectly-plucked eyebrow.

"First off, the weapon itself is the better part of twenty kilos, so anybody who isn't a Slayer or Mister T-800 there can forget moving fast while carrying it. Secondly, they're externally powered, usually electrically, so you need juice to run it; Arnie had a hidden extension-cord going off-screen, but the studio one had what was basically a car-battery in a backpack, and that was like twenty kilos in itself. Thirdly, there's the ammo: the backpack held a thousand rounds, about twenty seconds of trigger-time the way this one was rigged, and between the ammo and the feed-mechanism that was another thirty kilos in the backpack. Put together, the whole rig weighed more than I did!"

"Fourthly," Misha added dryly, "there's the teensy little detail of whether or not bullets will actually work on your target. I mean, we were shit-outta for other options, so we figured we might as well give it a go...."

"Zaszas saw me coming, all two-and-a-half-metres of him. He just smirked and held out his hands, and his war-kit just materialised in his hands, like that heater-shield and Godsawful chain-mace formed out of black smoke. I spun up the gun, he hunkered down behind his shield, I pulled the trigger, and... he must've reinforced the shield with magic, because when that bullet-stream hit it, it was like watching someone aiming a Roman candle at a glass window. Tracers deflecting up and around in all directions, FMJs sparking and bouncing all over the show — though thankfully, somehow, not back our way! — and the most hideous clatter.

"Worst part was, it did more to knock me about than it did him! My sunnies were enchanted for protection against flashbangs and noise, so the muzzle-flash didn't quite blind me, and the noise and concussion didn't quite deafen me; hell, in a confined space like that studio, the overpressure from the echoes probably should've outright ruptured my eardrums, so I ended up literally counting my blessings later. And all that recoil literally pushed me back across the floor by half a metre or so, combat-boots notwithstanding; I s'pose I'm lucky it didn't just throw me flat on my arse.

"Anyway, the minigun goes dry, and after a few seconds Zaszas peeks up over the rim of his shield and just smirks at me again, like he'd always known that was going to be a waste of time."

Cordelia arched one sardonic eyebrow. "You couldn't have shot around the shield?"

"After the first couple of seconds I went after all the pieces of him I could see behind it, mostly his feet and shins, his back shoulder, the top of his head... where the bullets didn't just bounce off, they tore away bits of flesh, but they grew back and closed over almost as fast as I could shoot 'em away," the older Slayer shrugged. "So, I hit the release on the harness, shrugged off the whole rig, and went back to doing things the old-fashioned way."

"'It was worth a crack, Nigel!'" Misha interjected. "'... uhhh, Nigel?'"

Taz chuckled at him sidelong, clearly getting a private joke. "The three of us ended up trying to fight this prick back-and-forth across and around most of the studio, usually two of us having a go at him with hand-weapons so the third could try to throw a spell at him, but none of that was making much of an impression. Didn't help having a thousand-odd loose seven-six-two casings scattered all over the floor, either. Of course, that worked both ways: more than once, someone ended up going arse-over-kite just as Zaszas was taking a swing. That morningstar of his had a head a good half-metre across, and the way he was swinging the thing, we'd've been crushed us to gravy if he'd ever managed a solid hit. Worst part was, as things went on we were starting to get tired and slow, and he just kept on trucking — probably using magic for extra stamina, or something.

"D'you know the most combat value we got out of that minigun rig? Bastard ended up tripping over the thing, so we finally had a decent opening. Yukio ran a naginata into his thigh, right up to the socket, and Misha gave him a kidney-massage with his axes. Me? I got the 'joy' of the finishing combo: first swing chopped off his weapon-hand, the backstroke carved open his guts, and when he stumbled to his knees, I grabbed my sword in both hands and gave him the Highlander Special." Another shrug. "So, yeah: there are some gribblies we can fight with firearms. And there are gribblies where a man-portable Gatling gun is most useful as a tripping hazard. The trick is knowing which is which in time to choose the right weapon for the job."

 

[Death by Chains]

For Christmas, I give everybody another chunk for my 'Buffy goes into an apprenticeship program' concept:

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"'Get used to disappointment'," the younger man returned immediately, not even glancing his way.

Click to shrink...

Still reeling under this latest blow to her world-view, Buffy almost didn't register the exchange. "B...but I never wanted to be a Slayer in the first place! And they'll just... kill me if I don't do it? That's not fair!"

"Oh, not in the least!" Taz agreed freely, again giving her a sympathetic look.

"It is not fair; it is not right; it is not just. It is not just; it just... is," Misha shrugged, careful not to dislodge his wife. "Besides, anybody who ever told you 'life is fair' was either deluded or lying."

"On the bright side," Giles inserted, giving his two younger colleagues (employers?) a reproving glare, "the events of last November have caused a severe shake-up at the Council, and... reforms are being pushed through. One of the first being that both Miss Zyrianova —"

"'Mrs.', thank you!" the redhead corrected sharply, with a plastic smile back at him.

He took a breath and carried on. "— Mrs. Zyrianova and you, Miss Summers, will be the first Council Slayers to receive direct remuneration for your services."

Buffy tried, she really did, but after a moment she turned a blank look to Misha and wondered, "Okay, I give up: what does that mean in English?"

"It's a ten-quid way of saying the Council's going to be paying us all. Supposedly a Watcher assigned to an active-duty Slayer receives a Council stipend that's supposed to cover expenses for both of them, something like five hundred quid a week, but after Cerian shot Taz, they looked through their books and found out she'd been sticking the whole stipend straight in her own pocket and dipping into the company till for more, besides. She's not the first or worst, either; they're still looking through their accounts to try to gauge how badly they've been rorted over the years, but that's their problem. For us, for now? They've set up a new arrangement: if they're going to conscript child soldiers" his nod took in the blonde, himself, and the woman still cradled in his arms "they're at least going to pay them properly."

Taz snorted, her expression still sour. "Hell, covering our outstanding expenses, including my medical bills, and giving us both three years' retroactive combat-pay plus an ongoing salary was the least they could do after all the bullshit that's gone on out here."

"And constituted your minimum condition to even consider mentoring Miss Summers, as I recall," Giles added, just a little snidely.

"Keep talking, sunshine: I can always turn this into a Union," she returned implacably. "The Council's already catching up on centuries'-worth of labour reforms that passed it by: I wonder how it'd cope with a little industrial action?"

"Oi: take it easy, eh? You can mobilise the proletariat later," Misha added dryly, giving his wife a gentle squeeze. "Council has to go through some paperwork trickery about getting us the money, but you, Buffy, will be getting about four hundred Ameribucks a week, all told. Which will scale up a bit, the longer you serve. Most of it will go straight into a savings fund accessible only in emergencies, including backpay for that business in Los Angeles, but they tell us that by the end of next week, you should have access to a cheque-account with a four-figure balance. Which gives us time to start teaching you the fundamentals of financial literacy, along with the Road Code."

"But to get the money, I have to be doing the Slayer thing," Buffy noted, turning her eyes on Taz. "I mean, you're here, you've got things under control, you don't need me!"

The taller woman let out a snort of scornful laughter. "Firstly, if this strikes you as 'under control', you really don't have any clue how much is going on and how bad things really are. Secondly, that sounds like you winding up to dump all this back onto our shoulders and try to go back to being a 'normal' teenager. I don't know which is more depressing: the idea that you'd be selfish enough to try that, or the idea that you're naïve enough to think it'd actually work. I understand why you don't want a bar of it, nobody sane would... but even putting aside the Council's 'superannuation scheme' for a minute" she pointedly leaned over and plucked the vial of spent bullets from Buffy's unresisting hand "that's... Buffy, that's just not how this works."

"Oh, come on: this is New Zealand!" Buffy scoffed. "How much trouble could there be here?"

The two locals traded a Did she really just say that? look, and Misha sighed, shifting his grip on Taz so he could check his watch. "I tell you what, Buffy: we'll do you a deal. It is currently three thirty-one p.m.. If you can make it to... let's call it ten o'clock tonight? And you haven't managed to find yourself hip-deep in schtuck somewhere along the way, we'll drop the subject for now. You can keep coming here for tutoring if you like, but we won't hassle you about gribblies or Slaying or anything until the start of next term. But if it does kick off? You come with us, you open your ears and your mind, and you let us start showing you the ropes."

Make it to ten o'clock without finding trouble? In this backwater little town? Given how hard I'm not going to be looking, that should be a cake-walk! "Okay: deal!" Buffy chirped. Hope you're ready to never see me again!

"Oh, and Buffy?" Taz added, giving the younger woman a slightly crooked, very tired smile. "Be careful about what you talk about, where, and to whom. In this room, you're probably safe saying the word 'Slayer', but the whole point of a 'secret identity' is that no bastard knows who or what you are. The gribblies around here know there's somebody knocking them off, but they haven't put together exactly who or what is doing it, and we'd rather like to keep it that way. If you go rabbiting on about being a Slayer, they won't just kill you; they'll knock off your Mum as well, then start looking for your helpers, which could lead them to us... and my family." The smile turned frosty. "If you can't keep your mouth shut, and it puts my mother, my husband, or my niece and nephew in danger? The Council sending assassins our way will be the least of your problems, because I'll bloody well kill you. And unlike them, I won't stuff it up."

– – – – – – –​

[Viewpoint: Taz]

As the door closed behind Buffy, Mister Giles looked at us with vague horror. "Are you sure that was wise? Even before the threats, which I must point out were thoroughly counterproductive, Miss Summers seems quite determined to plant her head firmly in the sand."

"She said out loud there's no way she's going to get into trouble between now and twenty-two-hundred hours," I countered dryly, slipping out of Misha's embrace. "On a Friday night. In Napier. Which is currently jam-packed with Stormhawks."

"I wanted to make it a midnight deadline. I'm a classicist that way," my hubby shrugged. "We talked about it last night, and Taz convinced me that'd look unfair. We don't want to make it too easy for her to claim we set her up to fail."

Which undoubtedly she would do anyway, but you do what you can with what you have, right? Besides, as it turned out he hadn't needed to: she'd done such a perfectly good job of calling Loki down on her own head! I sighed and dragged Misha up by one lapel to kiss the daylights out of him. After I let him fall back into his chair (and waited another few seconds, to let most of the dazed look fade from his eyes) I gave him a fatalistic shrug. "Can you hold down things for the rest of the business day? I'm going to nip into Woolies. She's just guaranteed we're going to need some things out at The Dacha." Granted, we'd already stocked up when we heard Buffy was on her way Down Under, but something told me extra would be a good idea right about now, and I'd long-since learned to trust my instincts that way. Like the motto outside St. George's Academy says, Amat Victoria Curam.

"Yeah, we'll be right," he finally managed. (Next to him, Mister Giles looked vaguely uncomfortable at seeing us pash each other up like that. Bloody Poms: too uptight for their own good. Or was it just him being a prude? Eh: either way, if he didn't like it, that was his problem, not mine.)

– – – – – – –​

18 Carnell Street
Napier, New Zealand
15:45, Friday, March 29, 1996

Their new house had a glass front on the living room, complete with sliding doors, and even as she turned in from the street, Buffy could see her mother sitting on one of the living-room couches, paging through the newspaper laid out on the coffee table. "Hey, Mom. How'd the interview go?"

Joyce Summers looked up at her daughter, smiling 'hello', but the question made her face twist in consternation. "It, um... it didn't, honey."

Buffy's stomach suddenly had a brick in it. Oh, God, please don't tell me those guys were right! "What? What happened?" she asked, taking a seat on the other couch across from her Mom.

"When I got there, everyone was very nice, very polite... and very confused. They ended up finding me some time to talk with the hotel's head of personnel, who was not the same person I've been talking to on the 'phone since November. This guy... nice as he was about it, he had no clue I was coming! He said he liked what he saw in my 'C.V.', that I impressed him in the face-to-face, and he promised to keep my name on file if they ever did need someone... but the job that I thought was locked in, the one that brought us out here, hasn't been open since July, and they don't have anything else for someone with my qualifications right now." The elder Summers spread her hands, helpless and baffled. "I bought a house to take that job, and it turns out it's all been a con. I just wish I knew why!"

And I know, but I can't tell you without you getting me put on another seventy-two-hour psych.-hold! The Slayer didn't say. "What? That's... who would do that!?" I am so going to give that Giles guy a talking-to when I get the chance! What the hell kind of sitch is this to drop us into? His bosses have so much explaining to do!

"I don't know, honey," Joyce sighed. "But I've been sitting here since the cab brought me back, going through the classifieds, trying to find something in the way of a job, and... it's not looking great, right now. I'm going to talk to the Department of Work and Income on Monday and see what they can do, but it probably won't be much since we're still fresh-off-the-plane."

"Is, uh, is there any chance we could just... go back to California? Maybe not L.A., but somewhere?"

That earned her a reproving look. "Nice try, but like I said, I already bought a house out here. We came to New Zealand to make a fresh start, and that's what we're gonna do. We just... don't have the running start I planned on. It's okay; I've got some cash that should keep us going until I work something out. Just, uh, don't plan on me buying you a lot of designer-labels in the near future, okay?"

It's not like anyone out here in Hicksville would even recognise designer-wear! Buffy knew that wasn't kind or fair, but after the day she'd had so far, she wasn't feeling too charitable.

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[As an aside, does anyone else miss mailing-lists like Yahoo!? If I'd lofted this sort of test-balloon on the XanderZone or some place similar, the readership was large enough and loud enough that they would've happily nitpicked and analysed it, giving me all kinds of feedback and suggestions to improve the concept. That kind of commentary-community seems to have started dissipating around the time that LJ and FB started ballooning....

[Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go tell some kids to get off my lawn. ]