A Collection of My Short Stories in the Buffyverse (and beyond/crossovers)

[Puppet]

I recently started expanding my writing and practicing a bit by writing shorter, drabble-like things and not having everything be Spuffy oriented. Now that I'm back on the boards (and because AO3 has nearly zero traffic whatsoever!) I thought I'd share it and see what you guys think 🙂

Each short story is based on 3 prompts that I pull from a box I have at home, containing episode names, character names, various ships, settings, crossover shows and so much more.

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He supposed it was the memory of his dear Janna that led him here.

After narrowly surviving the attack by Angelus and escaping the small town to heal elsewhere in peace, it wasn’t long before news broke among his clan that his beloved niece had been killed by the monster that haunted all of their nightmares. He had wanted to run back to the Hellmouth and deal with him succinctly, but the elder woman had forbidden it.

To this day, he still wasn’t sure why, but he had always had faith in their spiritual leader and he wouldn’t question her wisdom. Outwardly.

Four years. That’s how long it had been, now, since his niece had been buried under a false name by people who barely knew the real her. He couldn’t even visit her grave without feeling the anger building up under a usually quiet, reserved facade.

It was his daughter that told him, two years ago, to try and find ways to honor Janna, in his own little way. So that’s what he had been doing. Every now and then, when she came to his mind, he would find things to do that would’ve put a smile on her face, were she still here. Like learning how to work a computer.

And that had brought him here. On a blind date. With someone he met on the net.

She would be considered quite beautiful, he supposed, if only she would shut up about the damn unicorns.
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Prompts: Harmony. Blind Date. Enyos (Jenny's gypsy uncle).

 

[Puppet]

She was always the first one awake. It had never occurred to her, to wonder why. It was just how it was. She was up with the suns and he rose a little while later. The one time she had bothered to count it out, it had taken him about eight minutes and seventeen seconds to follow her into the waking world.

This morning, she woke to an empty bed, his side cold as if he’d never slept there at all. Despite that, her routine was too ingrained in her to be ignored, so the first thing she did after rising up was walk over to the lightest wall of the cave they called home, and carving another line into it; keeping track of the days, as she had been doing since shortly after arriving in this hellish place.

Right now, the count was at 1,822 days – her math was pretty good and she knew they would hit on five years any day now.

When the line was in place, she grabbed a weapon – just in case – and left through the mouth of the cave, in search of her companion. She would save any tears for what she found. She had learned to save what little emotion she had left, living in a place like this; you never knew when you needed a good cry and wouldn’t want to waste those tears.

Willow could admit that she was frightened, though. That would be okay, right? To be afraid? He was her only companion. He had saved her from her previous life, as the cow of one of the worst demons in this place. Taken her away, build her a nice cave home, and comforted her whenever she awoke from a terrible nightmare.

And when her gratitude had turned into desire, as she grew into womanhood, he had taken the next thing she’d given; herself. They had been living in a den of desire and affection for a good chunk of those lines on the wall and the thought of being without him...she would survive – she always did – but it would be much less enjoyable of a life.

The suns were high in the sky when she left the cave, walking across the green, green grass and listening for any sounds of disturbance. She hadn’t been walking long when she found what she was looking for, but she stayed back, noting that he seemed to be handling himself rather well.

He had been raised by an army general, he had once told her, as they sat outside and watched the moon shine down on them from a starless sky. Riley himself had been planning for a future in the military, himself. He was being scouted by a part of the government called the Initiative, when the portal had opened and sucked him through, into this world. This hell. This...Pylea.

He was meant for the army. Now he was hers. And neither would let anyone else take that away from them.

If Willow had shown up a bit earlier, she would have seen a snappily dressed black man in a nice suit, fighting her lover. But she was late and the man had been replaced with a green-skinned monster that didn’t look anything like the vampire it was. It was ferocious and strong and its claws were sharp and quick.

But Riley had one thing on his side that the monster did not; luck. As the killing blow was about to come, a portal opened up out of nowhere and distracted the creature, just long enough for Riley to reach for his weapon and cleave its head off its shoulders. They were both surprised when it turned to dust immediately after.

But that surprise was nothing compared to what Willow felt when she recognized the woman who came through the portal. The woman who had been only a girl the last time she’d seen her, sneering down at her with her friends. “Cordelia?”

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Prompts: Willow/Riley. Over the Rainbow (AtS Episode). Mr. Trick.

 

[Puppet]

He had known much fear in his long existence. Fear from his victims as he tore them apart on the field of battle. Fear for his own life as the priestesses came to him, banished him far away, for what felt like an eternity. And now, fear for his mistress, if he did not do as he was told.

It was almost time for him to go into hibernation, to conserve his strength for when his mistress’ time arrived, but until that the final puzzle piece had to be put into motion. He had already been in this cockroach of a town for far too long, planting the seeds and casting the spells, but there was still one thing left to do.

When the vampire returned to town, crashing drunkenly into the sign that welcomed outsiders to Sunnydale, he smiled at his luck. He would need to do very little to ensure that things went the way they needed to.

It wasn’t long now. The cheerleader would get her heart broken enough to shuttle her off onto the path that they needed her to be on, so she could give birth to his mistress just a few years down the road, and then utopia would be just a hairsbreadth away.

The Beast smiled.

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Prompts: Lovers Walk (BtVS Episode). Historical. The Beast (AtS S4).

 

[Puppet]

Growing up in a small town, the son of drunks, had made Xander fairly immune to people staring at him. Once his eye was gone and the hole covered with a black eye-patch, it became even more common. It began happening outside of Sunnydale and it could no longer feasibly be due to his folks.

He was a different man, though. He didn’t hide behind humor the same way he used to, before. Before Anya died. Before his hometown fell. Before his friends abandoned him. And now he recognized the stares in ways he never did before.

He saw them when he drove around in public transportation because he couldn’t drive anymore. He saw them when he walked down the streets, out shopping for some new clothes. He saw them when he saved someone from a vampire and they seemed more frightened of him than of the set of fangs that tried to kill them moments earlier.

It was like he was waking up after being asleep for years and he didn’t like how bright everything was.

Regardless of age or gender, they all stared. The mean people who chuckled under their breath, they stared. The kind people who cared about the less fortunate, they stared. The vampires and demons that attacked or befriended him, they stared. It was like they’d never seen an injury before. A permanent one, at least.

A part of him sometimes wondered if that was why his two girls had left him, too; because he was a constant reminder of their failure to protect him. As soon as Sunnydale was gone, they had gone back to their treatment of him during their senior year in high school; pushing him away ‘for his own good’.

Xander had gotten so used to the staring, in fact, that he almost missed it the first time it didn’t happen. Knocking on the door of the bright, pink manor, he smiled as he saw the face of his cousin, standing in the doorway with big eyes full of surprise.

“And here I worried you wouldn’t remember who I was,” he quipped, awkwardly fidgeting with the toes of his boots. “You gonna let me in?”

It wasn’t until he was shaking the hand of his cousin’s husband, surrounded by the good parts of his bloodline, that he realized that not a single one of them had stared. And, as the day went on and they invited him to stay for dinner, not a single question about his eye came up.

It was as if it didn’t even matter. And Xander liked that, quite a bit.

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Prompts:

Prompts: Xander. Post-Chosen. Charmed.

In case it wasn't clear, those girls and the guy at the end was the Halliwell's and Leo. Whether it was Prue or Paige is really up to the reader, it's just sometime after Piper and Leo got married.

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BTW, I could just post all the drabbles at once, but I wait to give any of you a chance to add comments, so feel free to do so. I figured I'd say that, in case some of you are holding off, thinking I don't want the interruption (like on my Christmas story) 🙂

 

[Puppet]

The endless bars had finally started to bleed together into one, blurry image. There was only one counter, only one bartender with a dirty rag, only one song playing in the dimming background noise of it all. And the alcohol, it all tasted the same, whether a cold beer or a bright, fruity drink or a stained glass of whiskey.

Everything was the same. Her pain was the same. Her grief, the agony that she felt with each step she took. Hence the heavy drinking. She ignored and instantly deleted messages from her mother, stealthily avoided her landlord until she got ahold of enough cash to make him happy, and tracked down bigger and badder monsters to fight.

She told herself it was to avenge and honor her lost sister, but the reality stared her in the face in those few, rare moments when she was stone-cold sober; she wanted them to kill her.

She wanted to join Julia in the glory of death.

A body sat down beside her, and that’s all it was; just another body. She didn’t care what gender or age or race or anything else, just that they left her alone. That they didn’t speak directly toward her. She wasn’t quite so lucky on this night.

As the other woman spoke, a piece of blonde hair entered into her field of vision and she now knew two things about the body next to her. And that was two more than she wanted to know. “That whiskey any good?”

Justine sighed and dipped a finger in her drink, not having enough energy in her to start a fight. “Does the job.”

Thankfully only silence followed, at least as far as her own personal bubble was concerned. But the illusion had been broken and Justine couldn’t help but hear everything else that came from her left side. She heard the other woman order one of what she had. She heard her sigh to herself. She heard her fingers tapping on the bar counter.

For some reason, it wasn’t as annoying as she would have expected. She supposed that, mixed with how drunk she was already, might have been why she ended up where she woke the next day.

The blonde was still to the left of her, but this time she was naked and they were both wrapped up in white sheets on an unfamiliar bed.

Justine barely remembered the night before, except for a few images here and there. The satisfaction deep in her bones told her that it hadn’t been too bad of a time, at least. It didn’t matter to her what the gender of her bed companion was, it hadn’t ever mattered even before Julie died and Justine broke in half. What mattered was the pleasure and even though she remembered very little, there had been plenty of that, for sure.

She slipped out of the bedroom, grabbed her clothes, and paused in the living room to put them on quickly. Barely glancing around her, she hurried to the front door and left, with the blonde in the bed still sleeping and unaware of what was going on around her.

Then again, Kate Lockley spent most of her days and nights as drunk as her latest bed-partner.

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Prompts: Justine Cooper. Fredless (AtS Episode). Kate Lockley.

I've used the episode prompt only as the setting, meaning this takes place before Holtz finds Justine and after Kate has been fired and left the show.