Prompt responses!
Okay. Got around to the first few of these. More to follow, hopefully this week, but probably not. So.
For d_tepes
“Well, there’s your problem,” Chloe said.
Mal glared at her. “You’re not nearly as funny or cute as you think you are,” he said.
“Disagree,” said Jack-the-physically-younger. Chloe glared at him.
It was his damn fault they were here anyway. Sure, yeah, she could blame the malfunctioning whatever-crazy-space device it was, or she could blame the fact that her life was basically a super-powered electromagnet of weird, but really, it was Jack’s fault. She had told him not to put the meteor rock in his stupid little device, but when did the great clone of Jack O’Neill take her advice? Almost never, that’s when.
“How’n the hell does something like this happen?”
“One piece at a time?” Jack suggested.
Chloe sighed. “Captain Reynolds, if you are officially hiring us, then we will get working on this right away,” she said.
“You was recommended to me as the best investigators on this side of the Persephone,” Mal said. “So go. Investigate.”
Jack held out his hand, and Mal shook it.
“Okay,” Chloe said. “We’ll need a list of anybody who has a grudge against you.”
Mal frowned for a moment. “Locally, or just in general?”
“How big of a difference is it?”
“Uh… dictionary versus encyclopedia?”
“Start with local, then” Jack said. He clapped Mal on the back. “Don’t worry captain. We’ll get it back for you.”
Mal shook his head. “Who the hell steals an engine, anyway?”
For sroni
Author note: As far as I can figure, this is set in early season 4, so no relationshippal attachments present. Not actually sure that matters within the context, but that’s where it is in my head. Also: This went waaaaaay farther than I thought it was going to.
As far as Buffy could remember, this was the first time she had been grateful that Xander was wearing two god-awful, incredibly clashing shirts - one a button down, the other a heinously colored t-shirt.
“I still can’t get over how awesome that was,” Xander said.
“I did kind of kick some serious ass,” Buffy agreed. She pulled Xander’s button down tighter around herself. It was far too large on her, but quite comfortable, and it smelled nice.
“That was so awesome, I can’t even come up with a good Edward Scissorhands reference.”
“Thing was way uglier than Johnny Depp anyway,” Buffy said.
“Sure,” Xander said. “But when you did that kind of mid-air flippy thing, with the whole… kick… deal? That was bad ass. And then when it slashed at you real low, and its arms kind of extended out? Buff, you damn near went Neo on his ass, avoiding that.”
“I gotta admit,” Buffy said, “even I didn’t know I could bend like that.” She looked down at the ruined tatters of the blouse and bra she had been wearing. She wasn’t, it seemed, quite bendy enough to avoid her shirt being ripped to shreds, or having the straps on her bra sliced in two. Fighting topless and exposed was certainly not something she was used to. But she was the Slayer, and this blade-fingered thingy would have killed people if she’d let it go, so she had to finish the job, whether she was in danger of arrest for public nudity or not.
The end of the fight was pretty awesome, too, though. “And then,” she said, “when I kind of did the tuck and roll, like in the movies, and came up and actually knocked its head off? That was pretty cool, too, if a little disgusting.”
“Ah,” Xander said. “I uh… must have missed that part.”
“You what?” she said. “Why?”
“Well, you were… you know,” he said, waving vaguely in the direction of her breasts. “I kind of turned my back once I saw what had happened. It would have been rude, otherwise.”
“Aww,” Buffy said, hooking her arm through his. “Xander, that’s sweet. And seriously, thank you so much for the shirt.”
He shrugged. “You needed it,” he said. “And I had a spare.”
Buffy considered for a moment, then shrugged and thought ‘what the hell?’
“Demons are pretty tough sometimes, though. You know, they do occasionally get the upper hand, and I need a little help, or a distraction or something.”
“True,” he said, nodding.
“And I do feel better when the person watching out for me is actually, you know, watching out for me.”
“Fair,” Xander said.
“So I tell you what. From this point forward, if you and I are out slaying, and my clothes get shredded or whatever, and I’m exposed, you have my express permission not to turn away.”
Xander looked down at her, eyes wide. “Yeah?”
Buffy nodded. “For purely tactical reasons.”
“Of course,” Xander said.
They continued to walk in a comfortable silence back to campus, and her dorm. When they reached it, she turned to him.
“Hey, Xander?”
“Yeah, Buffy?”
“You said you turned away as soon as you realized what happened?”
“Yeah.”
“Which means you had to realize what happened first.”
“Uh… yeah.”
“So… you saw…”
“For a couple of seconds.”
She bit her lip, then looked up at him. “Can I ask… I mean you’ve seen boobs before.”
“In person, even.”
“How do I… how do they, you know. Rate.”
“Two thumbs up,” Xander said, actually holding up both of his thumbs.
Buffy sat on the small stoop at the entrance to Stephenson Hall, and Xander joined her.
“I kind of meant… like, in um… relation to Faith? It’s petty. I know. Sorry.”
Xander shrugged. “It is petty, but we’re allowed to be petty when people go bad,” he said. “And for the record, hers are bigger, but yours are both better shaped, and more uh… shall we say, more anticipated.”
“You mean you’ve been wanting to see them longer.”
“And much more sincerely,” he said.
Buffy patted his leg. “See you tomorrow?”
Xander nodded, stood up and then held his hand out to assist Buffy in standing. She took it graciously, and walked toward the dorm.
“Xander?” she called from the doorway.
He turned around, eyebrows raised questioningly.
Buffy looked around, saw that there was nobody near them, and pulled the shirt open and flashed him.
Xander grinned at her, and she pulled the shirt closed again, waved nervously at him, and went inside.
And, finally, for dhark_charlotte
Sam heard the unmistakable sound of the hammer on a revolver being pulled back, and he froze.
“What do you think you’re doing with that salt?”
“Um… okay. This is going to sound weird,” Sam said. He glanced around and saw… Harry. Dresden. The PI guy he had run into a few days earlier while doing his research. So, he was in Harry’s place.
Sam didn’t remember how he got there. He remembered being knocked unconscious, outside of his hotel, and a vague recollection of a big ball of fire. Then he woke up in this apartment, intact, relatively unscathed, and the only weapons that were no longer on his body were the ones that were sitting there, out in the open, on the coffee table in front of him.
He’d investigated the apartment, because that was what he did, and determined that the skull in the basement was haunted, and had set about to solve that problem.
He told Harry as much now.
Harry rolled his eyes and released the hammer on his gun, then lay it down on the shelf next to him.
“And you were going to, what, salt the skull and burn it?”
“Uh… pretty much.”
“Bob, back on the shelf,” Harry said.
“Oh, but Harry,” the skull said, its eye sockets glowing bright orange. Sam reeled backwards, falling on his butt. “I was going to have such fun floating around at him after he’d done his little ritual.”
“Bob. Shelf,” Harry said.
“Very well,” Bob said, resignedly. The skull floated back up to its shelf.
Harry turned to Sam. “So, what did we learn?”
“That you’re some kind of freak?” Sam asked, unable to stop himself.
“Well… okay, true. But we also learned not to touch other peoples’ things. And anyway, Bob isn’t haunting, the skull’s a vessel. He’s an elemental spirit.”
“And salting and burning the skull would have…”
“Just kind of pissed him off,” Harry said. “Come on, back up stairs.”
Sam nodded and legged it back up the ladder he’d come down, and Harry followed a minute later, presumably after talking to Bob.
“So,” Harry said. “You… are a hunter.”
“And what are you, exactly?”
“Me? Oh, I’m a wizard.”
“A wizard,” Sam said, deadpan.
“Yeah,” Harry said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small metal case, from which he withdrew a business card with his name, work address, telephone number and a list of things he did and did not do. “See?”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Sure. Why not?”
“Anyway, listen, I appreciate you trying to help out with the weirdo’s in this town, but there’s kind of a delicate balance between about a dozen different factions at the moment, significantly more than half of which want my head pretty much anywhere but attached to my body. So, I’m spending a lot of my time on that, and you’re kind of making it harder on me.”
“Factions?” Sam asked.
“Happens in lots of cities with entrenched supernatural baddies,” said Harry.
“So you’re, what, driving me out of town?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Harry said. “You can do whatever you want, go wherever you want, I don’t care. Just do me a favor, before you kill anything, give me a call? There’s all sorts of things bumping the night away out there, and some of them don’t really deserve getting whacked, you know?”
“I’m actually not hunting anything here,” he said. “Well, not specifically. I’m looking for an old friend of my father’s. Hey, maybe you can help.”
“I am a private investigator,” Harry said.
“Well, you know the area, and presumably some of the people in the business. Maybe you can help me find this guy.”
“What’s his name?” Harry asked.
Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper.
“It’s uh… Michael Carpenter,” Sam said.
Harry sighed heavily and sat down on his couch. He looked up at Sam. “You’re gonna be trouble for me, aren’t you?”
Sam shrugged. “I do tend to get into a lot of it,” he said.
Harry considered him for a moment, then shrugged.
He picked up the phone.
For d_tepes
“Well, there’s your problem,” Chloe said.
Mal glared at her. “You’re not nearly as funny or cute as you think you are,” he said.
“Disagree,” said Jack-the-physically-younger. Chloe glared at him.
It was his damn fault they were here anyway. Sure, yeah, she could blame the malfunctioning whatever-crazy-space device it was, or she could blame the fact that her life was basically a super-powered electromagnet of weird, but really, it was Jack’s fault. She had told him not to put the meteor rock in his stupid little device, but when did the great clone of Jack O’Neill take her advice? Almost never, that’s when.
“How’n the hell does something like this happen?”
“One piece at a time?” Jack suggested.
Chloe sighed. “Captain Reynolds, if you are officially hiring us, then we will get working on this right away,” she said.
“You was recommended to me as the best investigators on this side of the Persephone,” Mal said. “So go. Investigate.”
Jack held out his hand, and Mal shook it.
“Okay,” Chloe said. “We’ll need a list of anybody who has a grudge against you.”
Mal frowned for a moment. “Locally, or just in general?”
“How big of a difference is it?”
“Uh… dictionary versus encyclopedia?”
“Start with local, then” Jack said. He clapped Mal on the back. “Don’t worry captain. We’ll get it back for you.”
Mal shook his head. “Who the hell steals an engine, anyway?”
For sroni
Author note: As far as I can figure, this is set in early season 4, so no relationshippal attachments present. Not actually sure that matters within the context, but that’s where it is in my head. Also: This went waaaaaay farther than I thought it was going to.
As far as Buffy could remember, this was the first time she had been grateful that Xander was wearing two god-awful, incredibly clashing shirts - one a button down, the other a heinously colored t-shirt.
“I still can’t get over how awesome that was,” Xander said.
“I did kind of kick some serious ass,” Buffy agreed. She pulled Xander’s button down tighter around herself. It was far too large on her, but quite comfortable, and it smelled nice.
“That was so awesome, I can’t even come up with a good Edward Scissorhands reference.”
“Thing was way uglier than Johnny Depp anyway,” Buffy said.
“Sure,” Xander said. “But when you did that kind of mid-air flippy thing, with the whole… kick… deal? That was bad ass. And then when it slashed at you real low, and its arms kind of extended out? Buff, you damn near went Neo on his ass, avoiding that.”
“I gotta admit,” Buffy said, “even I didn’t know I could bend like that.” She looked down at the ruined tatters of the blouse and bra she had been wearing. She wasn’t, it seemed, quite bendy enough to avoid her shirt being ripped to shreds, or having the straps on her bra sliced in two. Fighting topless and exposed was certainly not something she was used to. But she was the Slayer, and this blade-fingered thingy would have killed people if she’d let it go, so she had to finish the job, whether she was in danger of arrest for public nudity or not.
The end of the fight was pretty awesome, too, though. “And then,” she said, “when I kind of did the tuck and roll, like in the movies, and came up and actually knocked its head off? That was pretty cool, too, if a little disgusting.”
“Ah,” Xander said. “I uh… must have missed that part.”
“You what?” she said. “Why?”
“Well, you were… you know,” he said, waving vaguely in the direction of her breasts. “I kind of turned my back once I saw what had happened. It would have been rude, otherwise.”
“Aww,” Buffy said, hooking her arm through his. “Xander, that’s sweet. And seriously, thank you so much for the shirt.”
He shrugged. “You needed it,” he said. “And I had a spare.”
Buffy considered for a moment, then shrugged and thought ‘what the hell?’
“Demons are pretty tough sometimes, though. You know, they do occasionally get the upper hand, and I need a little help, or a distraction or something.”
“True,” he said, nodding.
“And I do feel better when the person watching out for me is actually, you know, watching out for me.”
“Fair,” Xander said.
“So I tell you what. From this point forward, if you and I are out slaying, and my clothes get shredded or whatever, and I’m exposed, you have my express permission not to turn away.”
Xander looked down at her, eyes wide. “Yeah?”
Buffy nodded. “For purely tactical reasons.”
“Of course,” Xander said.
They continued to walk in a comfortable silence back to campus, and her dorm. When they reached it, she turned to him.
“Hey, Xander?”
“Yeah, Buffy?”
“You said you turned away as soon as you realized what happened?”
“Yeah.”
“Which means you had to realize what happened first.”
“Uh… yeah.”
“So… you saw…”
“For a couple of seconds.”
She bit her lip, then looked up at him. “Can I ask… I mean you’ve seen boobs before.”
“In person, even.”
“How do I… how do they, you know. Rate.”
“Two thumbs up,” Xander said, actually holding up both of his thumbs.
Buffy sat on the small stoop at the entrance to Stephenson Hall, and Xander joined her.
“I kind of meant… like, in um… relation to Faith? It’s petty. I know. Sorry.”
Xander shrugged. “It is petty, but we’re allowed to be petty when people go bad,” he said. “And for the record, hers are bigger, but yours are both better shaped, and more uh… shall we say, more anticipated.”
“You mean you’ve been wanting to see them longer.”
“And much more sincerely,” he said.
Buffy patted his leg. “See you tomorrow?”
Xander nodded, stood up and then held his hand out to assist Buffy in standing. She took it graciously, and walked toward the dorm.
“Xander?” she called from the doorway.
He turned around, eyebrows raised questioningly.
Buffy looked around, saw that there was nobody near them, and pulled the shirt open and flashed him.
Xander grinned at her, and she pulled the shirt closed again, waved nervously at him, and went inside.
And, finally, for dhark_charlotte
Sam heard the unmistakable sound of the hammer on a revolver being pulled back, and he froze.
“What do you think you’re doing with that salt?”
“Um… okay. This is going to sound weird,” Sam said. He glanced around and saw… Harry. Dresden. The PI guy he had run into a few days earlier while doing his research. So, he was in Harry’s place.
Sam didn’t remember how he got there. He remembered being knocked unconscious, outside of his hotel, and a vague recollection of a big ball of fire. Then he woke up in this apartment, intact, relatively unscathed, and the only weapons that were no longer on his body were the ones that were sitting there, out in the open, on the coffee table in front of him.
He’d investigated the apartment, because that was what he did, and determined that the skull in the basement was haunted, and had set about to solve that problem.
He told Harry as much now.
Harry rolled his eyes and released the hammer on his gun, then lay it down on the shelf next to him.
“And you were going to, what, salt the skull and burn it?”
“Uh… pretty much.”
“Bob, back on the shelf,” Harry said.
“Oh, but Harry,” the skull said, its eye sockets glowing bright orange. Sam reeled backwards, falling on his butt. “I was going to have such fun floating around at him after he’d done his little ritual.”
“Bob. Shelf,” Harry said.
“Very well,” Bob said, resignedly. The skull floated back up to its shelf.
Harry turned to Sam. “So, what did we learn?”
“That you’re some kind of freak?” Sam asked, unable to stop himself.
“Well… okay, true. But we also learned not to touch other peoples’ things. And anyway, Bob isn’t haunting, the skull’s a vessel. He’s an elemental spirit.”
“And salting and burning the skull would have…”
“Just kind of pissed him off,” Harry said. “Come on, back up stairs.”
Sam nodded and legged it back up the ladder he’d come down, and Harry followed a minute later, presumably after talking to Bob.
“So,” Harry said. “You… are a hunter.”
“And what are you, exactly?”
“Me? Oh, I’m a wizard.”
“A wizard,” Sam said, deadpan.
“Yeah,” Harry said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small metal case, from which he withdrew a business card with his name, work address, telephone number and a list of things he did and did not do. “See?”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Sure. Why not?”
“Anyway, listen, I appreciate you trying to help out with the weirdo’s in this town, but there’s kind of a delicate balance between about a dozen different factions at the moment, significantly more than half of which want my head pretty much anywhere but attached to my body. So, I’m spending a lot of my time on that, and you’re kind of making it harder on me.”
“Factions?” Sam asked.
“Happens in lots of cities with entrenched supernatural baddies,” said Harry.
“So you’re, what, driving me out of town?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Harry said. “You can do whatever you want, go wherever you want, I don’t care. Just do me a favor, before you kill anything, give me a call? There’s all sorts of things bumping the night away out there, and some of them don’t really deserve getting whacked, you know?”
“I’m actually not hunting anything here,” he said. “Well, not specifically. I’m looking for an old friend of my father’s. Hey, maybe you can help.”
“I am a private investigator,” Harry said.
“Well, you know the area, and presumably some of the people in the business. Maybe you can help me find this guy.”
“What’s his name?” Harry asked.
Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper.
“It’s uh… Michael Carpenter,” Sam said.
Harry sighed heavily and sat down on his couch. He looked up at Sam. “You’re gonna be trouble for me, aren’t you?”
Sam shrugged. “I do tend to get into a lot of it,” he said.
Harry considered him for a moment, then shrugged.
He picked up the phone.