Fic: Clay-footed heroes (Buffy, ensemble)
Title: Clay-footed Heroes
Author: Brutti ma buoni
Characters: Buffy and the guys (Xander, Wesley, Andrew, Gunn and some OCs)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1600
A/N: Written for tabloid_btvs: for the cover below. Not surprisingly, it's pretty damn silly!
A/N2: Set in and with some OCs from the Rulesverse, my post-Chosen AU. You shouldn’t need much Rulesverse background to understand the fic, except that Buffy heads a Scotland-based Slayer Council which Team Angel have also joined. Watcher-types are now (not very contentedly) renamed Slayer Support Operatives!
September 2006
“Hey guys, how was the-”
Buffy came to a crashing halt at the foot of the castle’s main stairs. Already, this was not of the good. They looked soggy. And bashful. And unwilling to spill.
“So, do I take it the quote unquote Slayer Support Operative bootcamp was a success? And I use pointy quote marks to emphasise how unimpressed we still are that you managed to leave all us womenfolk at home. Including all the female SSOs.” It took more than one breath to get all that out. But it was therapeutic, after a weekend’s stewing fury.
Eyeroll from Spike. Also from Gunn, Wesley, Xander (just the one eye, but clear roll-age), Erik, Silking, that guy from Hellmouth management, the Zombies squad kid and... too many guys.
“Guys?” The Summers toe tapped. The Summers teeth gritted. “Are you going to tell me what happened or-”
Just before she really let rip, Gunn managed to insert a, “Uhm...”
“Yes? Mr Gunn? You had something to say?” Buffy had been working on her sour-sweet interrogation. It showed.
Gunn almost shuffled his feet. Almost. He was tougher than that. “We may have a small residual issue arising from the training camp. Powerful forces were inadvertently disturbed in the course of an on-water exploratory mission.”
Management bullshit was something Buffy had also been working on. “On-water exploratory mission? Did that mission have a certain fishy theme? Like with rods and reels and fishing tackle?”
Now all the guys were shuffling. Someone may have mumbled “Maybe,” but no one would own up.
“YOU WENT ON A FISHING TRIP WITH THE GUYS!”
“Buffy, stop a minute love, that’s not the important thing.” Spike was frozen by a Buffy-glare.
“YOU WENT ON A FISHING TRIP WITH THE GUYS AND SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED AND NONE OF YOU HAS THE BAL- GUTS TO TELL ME WHAT!”
Buffy felt as though she could cough up a lung after the last outburst, but it felt so good to let out a long weekend’s worth of pent-up ire. Plus, she might eventually find out what had gone wrong - which: urgent, probably.
The sheepish guy-pack in front of her shuffled and coughed and re-jigged itself until someone was definitively at the front. Bad luck, Wesley.
“We, uhm, we, in the course of our expedition we-” Wesley visibly shook himself into Senior-Principal-SSO-mode. “We may possiby have discovered a primoridal survival, which, though long rumoured, had been largely discounted by all but the most extreme conspiracy theorists. In short-”
“Too late,” butted in Buffy, because who can resist a line like that?
“We appear to have concrete proof that there is in fact a Loch Ness Monster.”
Buffy’s jaw flapped in the wind a little.
Spike patted Wesley on the shoulder. “Well put, Wes. Except not really one, is it? Two, at least, plus this one.” He held up a bucket, and drew out a small, sad, damp strip of animal matter. “We caught a baby Nessie. It didn’t survive.”
The bunch of shamefaced men looked at their feet and sighed, sadly.
*
International occult-fighting organisations have mechanisms for dealing with this kind of stuff. There was a brief consultation about whether this was a job for Fairy Tales and Legends, or the Bizarre Emergency Squad. FTL got the gig, and were recalled from the Bavarian forest where they had been investigating another gingerbread outbreak.
International occult-fighting organisations move like cooling lava. Irresistible, but not that fast. Buffy, high on resentment and righteousness, was trying hard to wait for the appropriate backup, instead of leaping into the fray.
We don’t do that any more. We research. We ask appropriate questions. We delegate.
Distraction was needed. And the first thing that offered was torturing the hapless guys. They were still together in their group, some kind of solidarity working, though autopilot had kicked in and they had moved into the briefing room.
She eyed them severely. “Right, guys, we’re going to wait for the cleanup crew. But I’ll need some more details to brief them properly. So, spill. What happened?”
The hangdog pack shuffled itself again. Erik got pushed inexorably forwards. He blushed (a bad move for a freckled redhead in a green shirt), coughed, choked, recovered, and ultimately spoke. “We were on Loch Ness. The fish weren’t biting... Or maybe we were fishing wrong-”
-vehement though inarticulate protests from the vampire portion of the abashed menfolk -
“Or maybe it was too sunny or rainy or cold or something. But anyway, we caught, like, nothing. After a couple of hours, we were so bored it wasn’t funny anymore.”
Again, Spike seemed to disagree. (Who knew he was a fisherman?) But the group were nodding along with Erik’s words.
“So we were kidding about all the fish being magicked away, and then maybe we should have cast a fish summoning spell. And then I said- um- I said me and Silking just qualified in demon summoning with Andrew and it couldn’t be that different for fish. Like, we could tweak the spell and... it would be an interesting challenge of our SSO credentials... and so we, um, we did.”
“SUMMON FISH BY MAGICKS?” Back to Foghorn Buffy. The pack quailed.
Silking, far back in the group, murmured an audible, “Wesley refereed.”
It took a couple of seconds to percolate through Buffy outrage to make sense of that. “It was a fish-summoning contest? How many of you tried?”
“Just me and Erik,” said Silking, to his feet.
“And me,” said Xander, manfully.
Erik snorted, “Yeah, but you just stuck your head underwater and shouted something about fishy brotherhood.”
This, at last, explained something Buffy had suspected for a long time. “Guys. You were drunk, weren’t you? Tell me you were drunk!”
“Very. Very much with the beers,” confirmed Gunn, whose turn it was to speak (she could see Wesley jabbing him to force the words out). “It was a bonding exercise. With fish.”
The Head of the Slayer Council drew herself up to her full tiny height, drew a deep, deep breath, and, once they were braced for the bellow, said, very calm and level, “It was a training exercise.”
Silence.
“Wasn’t it?”
Buffy had never felt more like a mother, surveying her repentant ‘boys’. And in fact a spanking would have been about what they deserved, if only they wouldn’t have enjoyed it.
“So, what’s the damage? One dead mini-saurus?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.” Gunn was still speaker-designate. “But also... we think its mom is angry.”
“It has a mom?”
“I can’t say for sure. But there was a really, really big fishosaurus churning up the lake when we left.”
“It’s a loch, Charles.” Wesley, helpful as always in a crisis.
Gunn shrugged, only a little irritated, “The large body of water containing an enraged dinosaur. Maybe more than one. It was moving pretty fast when we left, didn’t get a great visual.”
No time for the Fairy Tales and Legends squad. Or so Buffy told herself, as she made ready to head off and settle this mess.
(It was just possible she wanted to see Nessie for herself.)
*
Of all the people to get between Buffy and a heroic ass-kicking slayage mission, Andrew was probably the one she would have put last on her list.
But it was he, holding up a hand in the middle of the castle exit. “Cease, Slayer. Stand down. Your heroism is not required.”
“Say what? Are you going to take on the great big monsters in my place?”
“I hear the Loch Ness Tourist Board would be really happy to keep them,” said Andrew, temporarily down from his Heroic Narrator pose. “They’ve never made more news bulletins. But no, you don’t need to slay them. Just send’em back where they came from. Unsummoning should do it.”
“Seriously? It’s that simple?”
“Foolish Slayer.” Buffy was nearly used to Andrew’s crap, but this time she must have shown her irritation, as he flinched visibly in mid-headshake. “Uhm, I mean, I think you know that keeping a spell going takes more energy than ending it. So we just end the summoning.”
Oh. “So, not the actual Loch Ness Monster?”
Andrew gave Buffy a “foolish Slayer” look she realised she might deserve. He was their top demon-mechanics guy, after all. “There’s no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster. This is someone’s idea of clever.” He arched a sarcastic brow, and aimed his questions to a point behind Buffy. “Mr Silking? Have you been playing Fantasy Demon Summons again? And not telling the guys?”
There was a guilty red-eared silence from Silking.
Then Xander shuffled his feet and said, “It’s possible I shouted ‘Come and get it Nessie’.”
Erik added, “I may also have been exploring whether the summoning spell might work on the Loch’s most famous mythical resident.”
It went on. Junior SSOs Buffy could barely recognise turned out to have been reading about mysteries of the deep, listening to the Nessie song, fondling small plesiosaur figurines... Gunn and Wesley between them admitted that they had been speculating about Loch Ness monsters and, “Who knows what the outcome of such concentrated imagination among persons of mystical talent might produce.” Also: “Shit. We were all thinking about that nessosaurus? Like amplified magical willpower. On the actual damn loch?”
Buffy’s head was in her hands long before they finished. Worse was to come.
Andrew tutted. “See? None of this would have happened if you’d let me go with them.”
And he went off to save the day.
Dammit.
***
Author: Brutti ma buoni
Characters: Buffy and the guys (Xander, Wesley, Andrew, Gunn and some OCs)
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1600
A/N: Written for tabloid_btvs: for the cover below. Not surprisingly, it's pretty damn silly!
A/N2: Set in and with some OCs from the Rulesverse, my post-Chosen AU. You shouldn’t need much Rulesverse background to understand the fic, except that Buffy heads a Scotland-based Slayer Council which Team Angel have also joined. Watcher-types are now (not very contentedly) renamed Slayer Support Operatives!
September 2006
“Hey guys, how was the-”
Buffy came to a crashing halt at the foot of the castle’s main stairs. Already, this was not of the good. They looked soggy. And bashful. And unwilling to spill.
“So, do I take it the quote unquote Slayer Support Operative bootcamp was a success? And I use pointy quote marks to emphasise how unimpressed we still are that you managed to leave all us womenfolk at home. Including all the female SSOs.” It took more than one breath to get all that out. But it was therapeutic, after a weekend’s stewing fury.
Eyeroll from Spike. Also from Gunn, Wesley, Xander (just the one eye, but clear roll-age), Erik, Silking, that guy from Hellmouth management, the Zombies squad kid and... too many guys.
“Guys?” The Summers toe tapped. The Summers teeth gritted. “Are you going to tell me what happened or-”
Just before she really let rip, Gunn managed to insert a, “Uhm...”
“Yes? Mr Gunn? You had something to say?” Buffy had been working on her sour-sweet interrogation. It showed.
Gunn almost shuffled his feet. Almost. He was tougher than that. “We may have a small residual issue arising from the training camp. Powerful forces were inadvertently disturbed in the course of an on-water exploratory mission.”
Management bullshit was something Buffy had also been working on. “On-water exploratory mission? Did that mission have a certain fishy theme? Like with rods and reels and fishing tackle?”
Now all the guys were shuffling. Someone may have mumbled “Maybe,” but no one would own up.
“YOU WENT ON A FISHING TRIP WITH THE GUYS!”
“Buffy, stop a minute love, that’s not the important thing.” Spike was frozen by a Buffy-glare.
“YOU WENT ON A FISHING TRIP WITH THE GUYS AND SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAPPENED AND NONE OF YOU HAS THE BAL- GUTS TO TELL ME WHAT!”
Buffy felt as though she could cough up a lung after the last outburst, but it felt so good to let out a long weekend’s worth of pent-up ire. Plus, she might eventually find out what had gone wrong - which: urgent, probably.
The sheepish guy-pack in front of her shuffled and coughed and re-jigged itself until someone was definitively at the front. Bad luck, Wesley.
“We, uhm, we, in the course of our expedition we-” Wesley visibly shook himself into Senior-Principal-SSO-mode. “We may possiby have discovered a primoridal survival, which, though long rumoured, had been largely discounted by all but the most extreme conspiracy theorists. In short-”
“Too late,” butted in Buffy, because who can resist a line like that?
“We appear to have concrete proof that there is in fact a Loch Ness Monster.”
Buffy’s jaw flapped in the wind a little.
Spike patted Wesley on the shoulder. “Well put, Wes. Except not really one, is it? Two, at least, plus this one.” He held up a bucket, and drew out a small, sad, damp strip of animal matter. “We caught a baby Nessie. It didn’t survive.”
The bunch of shamefaced men looked at their feet and sighed, sadly.
*
International occult-fighting organisations have mechanisms for dealing with this kind of stuff. There was a brief consultation about whether this was a job for Fairy Tales and Legends, or the Bizarre Emergency Squad. FTL got the gig, and were recalled from the Bavarian forest where they had been investigating another gingerbread outbreak.
International occult-fighting organisations move like cooling lava. Irresistible, but not that fast. Buffy, high on resentment and righteousness, was trying hard to wait for the appropriate backup, instead of leaping into the fray.
We don’t do that any more. We research. We ask appropriate questions. We delegate.
Distraction was needed. And the first thing that offered was torturing the hapless guys. They were still together in their group, some kind of solidarity working, though autopilot had kicked in and they had moved into the briefing room.
She eyed them severely. “Right, guys, we’re going to wait for the cleanup crew. But I’ll need some more details to brief them properly. So, spill. What happened?”
The hangdog pack shuffled itself again. Erik got pushed inexorably forwards. He blushed (a bad move for a freckled redhead in a green shirt), coughed, choked, recovered, and ultimately spoke. “We were on Loch Ness. The fish weren’t biting... Or maybe we were fishing wrong-”
-vehement though inarticulate protests from the vampire portion of the abashed menfolk -
“Or maybe it was too sunny or rainy or cold or something. But anyway, we caught, like, nothing. After a couple of hours, we were so bored it wasn’t funny anymore.”
Again, Spike seemed to disagree. (Who knew he was a fisherman?) But the group were nodding along with Erik’s words.
“So we were kidding about all the fish being magicked away, and then maybe we should have cast a fish summoning spell. And then I said- um- I said me and Silking just qualified in demon summoning with Andrew and it couldn’t be that different for fish. Like, we could tweak the spell and... it would be an interesting challenge of our SSO credentials... and so we, um, we did.”
“SUMMON FISH BY MAGICKS?” Back to Foghorn Buffy. The pack quailed.
Silking, far back in the group, murmured an audible, “Wesley refereed.”
It took a couple of seconds to percolate through Buffy outrage to make sense of that. “It was a fish-summoning contest? How many of you tried?”
“Just me and Erik,” said Silking, to his feet.
“And me,” said Xander, manfully.
Erik snorted, “Yeah, but you just stuck your head underwater and shouted something about fishy brotherhood.”
This, at last, explained something Buffy had suspected for a long time. “Guys. You were drunk, weren’t you? Tell me you were drunk!”
“Very. Very much with the beers,” confirmed Gunn, whose turn it was to speak (she could see Wesley jabbing him to force the words out). “It was a bonding exercise. With fish.”
The Head of the Slayer Council drew herself up to her full tiny height, drew a deep, deep breath, and, once they were braced for the bellow, said, very calm and level, “It was a training exercise.”
Silence.
“Wasn’t it?”
Buffy had never felt more like a mother, surveying her repentant ‘boys’. And in fact a spanking would have been about what they deserved, if only they wouldn’t have enjoyed it.
“So, what’s the damage? One dead mini-saurus?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.” Gunn was still speaker-designate. “But also... we think its mom is angry.”
“It has a mom?”
“I can’t say for sure. But there was a really, really big fishosaurus churning up the lake when we left.”
“It’s a loch, Charles.” Wesley, helpful as always in a crisis.
Gunn shrugged, only a little irritated, “The large body of water containing an enraged dinosaur. Maybe more than one. It was moving pretty fast when we left, didn’t get a great visual.”
No time for the Fairy Tales and Legends squad. Or so Buffy told herself, as she made ready to head off and settle this mess.
(It was just possible she wanted to see Nessie for herself.)
*
Of all the people to get between Buffy and a heroic ass-kicking slayage mission, Andrew was probably the one she would have put last on her list.
But it was he, holding up a hand in the middle of the castle exit. “Cease, Slayer. Stand down. Your heroism is not required.”
“Say what? Are you going to take on the great big monsters in my place?”
“I hear the Loch Ness Tourist Board would be really happy to keep them,” said Andrew, temporarily down from his Heroic Narrator pose. “They’ve never made more news bulletins. But no, you don’t need to slay them. Just send’em back where they came from. Unsummoning should do it.”
“Seriously? It’s that simple?”
“Foolish Slayer.” Buffy was nearly used to Andrew’s crap, but this time she must have shown her irritation, as he flinched visibly in mid-headshake. “Uhm, I mean, I think you know that keeping a spell going takes more energy than ending it. So we just end the summoning.”
Oh. “So, not the actual Loch Ness Monster?”
Andrew gave Buffy a “foolish Slayer” look she realised she might deserve. He was their top demon-mechanics guy, after all. “There’s no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster. This is someone’s idea of clever.” He arched a sarcastic brow, and aimed his questions to a point behind Buffy. “Mr Silking? Have you been playing Fantasy Demon Summons again? And not telling the guys?”
There was a guilty red-eared silence from Silking.
Then Xander shuffled his feet and said, “It’s possible I shouted ‘Come and get it Nessie’.”
Erik added, “I may also have been exploring whether the summoning spell might work on the Loch’s most famous mythical resident.”
It went on. Junior SSOs Buffy could barely recognise turned out to have been reading about mysteries of the deep, listening to the Nessie song, fondling small plesiosaur figurines... Gunn and Wesley between them admitted that they had been speculating about Loch Ness monsters and, “Who knows what the outcome of such concentrated imagination among persons of mystical talent might produce.” Also: “Shit. We were all thinking about that nessosaurus? Like amplified magical willpower. On the actual damn loch?”
Buffy’s head was in her hands long before they finished. Worse was to come.
Andrew tutted. “See? None of this would have happened if you’d let me go with them.”
And he went off to save the day.
Dammit.
***