The Kitten, the Witches and the Bad Wardrobe - Willow & Tara Forever

General Chat  || Kitten  || WaV  || Pens  || Mi2  || GMP  || TiE  || FAQ  || Feed - The Kitten, the Witches and the Bad Wardrobe

All times are UTC - 8 hours [ DST ]



Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 13 posts ] 
Author Message
 Post subject: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun May 04, 2014 8:25 am 
Offline
23. Volumey Text

Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2005 1:23 pm
Posts: 3794
Topics: 5
(Wo)Men in Black - A Sunnydale based T/W Crossover with the ‘Men in Black’ universe


IMPORTANT CAVEAT - I don’t want to get hopes up or to mislead. This story MAY be a one-shot (and can be read as such for now). Or it may be a ‘teaser’ for the much longer ideas I have bouncing around in my head. I reserve the right to change things in the future and ask you to read something quite like it again if things go that way but I need to make changes.

That said, go watch this video on YouTube or at least the first part before the music and tell me you can’t see this how this can work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRuHk6Drj2U

Whether this goes further is entirely up to you as I’ve said below…

K


Story Notes: I like to do a longer post before the first post of my stories. Something to explain myself. Well, here it is. Have you looked at the video linked above? No? Well, go do that. Seriously. Now imagine certain characters… Right. That’s what I was thinking.

Regular readers of mine may well have noticed me saying that I’ve had a BtVS/Men in Black crossover in mind for a long time. Specifically I started with a slightly different version of this scene a few years ago but never quite finished it.

Well, now I’ve written a new version in just four days and had a lot of fun doing so. It might turn out to be just be a one shot, but I have this idea for a story based off this and the situation that results from the way I ended it. Yes, it’s deliberately leaving things hanging. It’s deliberately leaving you wondering where certain characters are or who the mysterious ‘he’ is. That said, you can probably enjoy it as a one-shot because it just might stay that way.

You probably do need to know Men In Black in at least passing detail (another quite old movie I suppose by now and after I already did Indiana Jones), but the key stuff to remember up front is:
how the MIB come in and make sure that people don’t remember the things they saw about the aliens because they get ‘flashed’ by a neuralyzer and told a different, more plausible story. There’s a LOT of mileage in what that can create, which is where I’ve gone here…
Oh, and the MIB use codenames based on letters of the alphabet. So ‘Jay’/J and ‘Kay’/K in the movies (the first letters of the characters real names…) I do that here too. Just with different letters. I’ll let you figure the characters out from there, but it won’t surprise my regular readers at all. (And no, W does NOT work well for that!! I couldn’t go around calling Willow ‘Dubya’ all the time so something else had to be done…)

So… I’m currently interested in pursuing the rest of this story. But I have a lot of other irons in my writing fire. Therefore, if you want there to be more of this story then you need to say so. I have this, some original stories and a continuation of W/T Raiders in my head right now and (to greater or lesser extents) have been working on all of them. It’s time for me to commit though.
I’m not taking votes or requests for prioritising. I just want to know if you think you’d like to read more of this story.

The Raiders sequel will be my NaNoWriMo story in November (as the last two have been) so that one is probably parked until then. (W)IB is just the thing that’s going round my head right now. BUT this… this only continues if I feel there’s a readership for it. It’s an old movie - but a good one - mixed with characters from a show that ended 10 years ago. So… on this one, don’t lurk. Say something. Anything. Otherwise it probably stays a one-shot. I’m happy with it just as it is now, I ‘can’ leave it alone. Honest. It won’t give me the shakes or anything.

If I DO write more of this though - like my other fic from the last few years - I will write the whole thing before I post any more. So even if you’d like more and I go with that, all I will do right now is confirm whether it’s coming or not. In terms of posting there will be a big gap of a few months at least as nothing else exists yet except ideas. I don’t even have a full story structure or an idea of how long it will be (but hey, it’s me so novel length at least).

So that’s the ‘nothing more very soon’ down side.

The up side of that way of writing - for those who haven’t read my stuff before - is that by approaching it that way I have no pressure on me when posting and can go pretty quick rather than either the quality suffering or you having to wait weeks between posts. Once we do get going it’s about every three days from the start through to the end. Overall, if I wanted a quality product, the timeframes are probably the same! I’ve left readers hanging due to medical reasons some years back and I won’t do that again. I hated it. I think they were let down by it too. So be patient and - once/if I say I will - then I will deliver.

Setting notes: Firstly, we’re in a mixture of the Buffy and Men in Black universes. But it’s MIB from the movies. I understand that the comics (which I never read) had them as some sort of vaguely fascist group. Not here! It’s the comedy edged movies I’m riffing on here. Specifically the first one. (I never saw MIB3 and in MIB2 - though I liked Lara Flynn Boyle - I never quite got into it)

Second, I need both Tara and Willow to be a little older in this story than was the case during canon events that you might recognise. Not much older, but essentially I’ve done that by getting the scoobies together in high school as friends but pushing them into college here. As written here, the events would’ve been from the end of S3 but the characters would’ve been in S4 or 5. I may yet want to add a couple of years to their ages if I find I need to. We’ll see, if things continue.

Third, remember that this was back in 2000 (for Buffy and earlier for MIB). The idea of tiny communicators or instant access to information wherever you were really was a way in the future and so more impressive in the film/story! We didn’t all have phones then. Those that did sure didn’t have the internet at our fingertips. Cameras were still cameras. Video was probably still on actual tape. Youtube wasn’t a thing… Yeah, back then MIB’s job was much easier and less focused on censoring Google.

Finally, in terms of events, yes, everyone was in Sunnydale but Buffy isn’t the Slayer. They’ve not been fighting monsters - or at least not within the lore - and (I guess this is important) Tara and Willow haven’t yet met.

Yet.

Can you guess what this story might be about then?

Let’s see.




I want so much to open your eyes, because I need you to look into mine - Snow Patrol ‘Open your eyes.’


Title: (Wo)Men in Black - A T/W Crossover Teaser - Part One
Author: Katharyn Rosser
Feedback: Absolutely, yes please. That’s why I write for this place, to engage in the discussion about the story.
Spoiler warning: After so much time since both the series and the MIB movie I’m not even dignifying this with an answer. If you love T/W then you saw them on Buffy and if you didn’t see the first MIB movie then you have no idea what this is about so… go watch it. You’ll have fun!
Distribution: This story was written for Pens. Pens is its home. No archiving off Different Coloured Pens and the Kitten Board please. No conversion to eBook or other formats please. Enjoy it here.
Summary: A teaser trailer, of a kind, for the series I’ve had in my mind for a couple of years now. Here a key event in BTVS canon runs smack into the world of Men in Black. Posts in 2 parts because it’s me. I can’t even make a ‘one-shot’ short.
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of the copyrights or anything else associated with BTVS or Men in Black. All rights lie with the production company, writers etc. I am making no money from this series of stories however all original characters and situations remain my property. There may be occasional use of ‘classic lines’ from the source series/movies or others for which full credit is given in advance to the original writers.
Rating: Occasional, tasteful, adult situations and contextual bad language.
Couples: Tara and Willow forever. 100% FAQ compliant, 100% of the time. Look it up if you don’t know what that means.
Text convention: Use of italics denotes either special emphasis if used for a single or a few words in a sentence OR first person thoughts if used for a whole sentence.
Timeline: Things happened a little differently in this universe. Buffy, Willow and Xander became friends in High School but weren’t monster fighting. Buffy wasn’t the Slayer. Maybe there isn’t even such a thing. Now they’ve graduated, Buffy and Willow have gone to college… Which isn’t to say that the things they fought aren’t around… Just maybe, a little different.
Notes: Please see the story notes above for this one.
Thanks to: A certain woman who read this with trepidation, knowing that - if it went over well - she might lose good chunks of my time to more of ‘that Kitten writing.’ A lesser person wouldn’t have said they thought it was good enough to post. :)



Please note this is post one of two for length but I can’t put post two up until it comes out of moderation and that could be when I’m not able to post the next part. Post 2 will be up within a day though.



Sunnydale, California.


“Maybe just a little more urgency?” Agent T suggested to her partner. They were already weaving in and out of downtown traffic at nearly sixty miles an hour.

Which, for their purposes, was still a little pedestrian.

“Really, T? You always get pissy when I hit the red button,” Agent F replied.

“No, I don’t.”

“Oh, yes. You do. You know you get pissy when I hit the red button. Remember the last time?”

T glanced down, looking at her partner’s thumb caressing the trigger that would just about launch them. Enough speed that, if Sunnydale had tunnels, then simple aerodynamics (and a whole lot of thrust) would’ve meant that they could’ve driven along the roof of them.

Upside down.

Because of the aerodynamics of driving at hundreds of miles per hour.

That was something she never, ever wanted to try again. At least not without good reason. Staying clear of New York and it’s tunnels seemed like a good way to do that. Just another reason why being assigned to Sunnydale was better than Manhattan.

“Crown Vic’s weren’t made to move that fast,” she chided, relieved to see F’s thumb shift away from the button. These cars were barely made to move this fast. Her partners reflexes were equal to the task though and they never came close to hitting anything.

“I don’t know what to tell you, T. This one was.”

From the ground up. This hadn’t been a retrofit either. The technology to make that kind of performance possible wasn’t out there in the public realm today, let alone back in the 80’s.

This car was almost older than she was. A cast off from Manhattan office where it had seen good service before a presence had been required here in Sunnydale.

And that it was an old car was just another reason why the red button didn’t seem like a good idea. Never would.

But all the same, more haste? Maybe?

“Well, I - I just don’t like it. And I didn’t say hit the red button. I just said that - maybe - a little more urgency was in order. Foot on the gas. That’s all. Foot on the gas, not the thrust.”

“Cool your jets, T. My foot’s down and I’m not even thinking about the brake. You know, now that I think of it, I’m usually the one looking to rush into trouble.”

“And I’m the one trying to prevent it being trouble in the first place,” T agreed, wincing as F swerved around a pedestrian with one hand on the wheel and not even looking at the road.

Knowing F could do it, doesn’t mean that she was able to - fully - relax.

“Well, it looks like we messed that one up. Dickie’s gone on the rampage and you know what we’re going to have to do about that.”

It wasn’t even a question, nor did she try to make it into one. She sighed, but only because her partner wasn’t wrong. Dickie was… Well, it wasn’t like he hadn’t warned them this was coming. But she’d really thought that after their last little chat they could’ve avoided this… unpleasantness.

Of course that was what they were here for. When things got unpleasant with their ‘guests’ someone had to make sure that the resulting stench didn’t overwhelm the entire world.

People weren’t ready for that. Wouldn’t be a long time yet. “Just… get us there,” she said.

“I’m on it. But what’s your problem, T? It’s just another night in Sunnydale.”

“People are probably dying,” she pointed out.

“People are always dying,” F replied, still not watching the road more than half the time. “Our job is to make sure that there are still some left in the world. That there is a world. And that it’s not us. In that order.”

Yeah… there was that.

Here they were saving the whole world. One day at a time.

Dressed in black.

————————————

“Willow - duck!”

She was proud of how fast she did as instructed just as the jet from the super soaker arced over her shoulder, a fine drizzle of holy water spattering her cheek and neck as Xander took the shot at the monster.

And melted its face.

Score!

“I’ve got your back,” he said.

She wasn’t sure why these things didn’t like water from the church font, any more than she was certain why monsters were attacking the graduating class from the High School but… they sure didn’t.

Score one for their old school librarian who’d insisted that they bring the squirt guns along and load them up like something from ‘Lost Boys’. He might’ve seemed crazy - after all, those vampires he kept ranting about couldn’t exist could they? - but then…

Look at what they were doing now? None of this could be happening either.

Except that it was.

And much as they’d come here to try and stop something they hadn’t understood but was going to be really, really bad - they weren’t making the difference that they needed to. Not the one they’d intended to.

They were just about staying alive. A success, for sure. But not enough.

“We’re not doing enough,” she gasped at him, stabbing at one of the monsters that was keeping them penned in. Vampire? Zombie? Whatever it was - it clearly only meant to hold them here so that… So something worse could happen.

Something they could see coming all around them.

If they lived, then she was probably going to get the blame for this one.

Probably.

After all, she’d been the one who wanted to come down and see the graduation ceremony because she’d been doing some coaching as a favour to one of her old teachers. Then she’d told the crazy librarian about it and then he’d been all ‘you have to go and stop something bad happening’ and then she’d had to ask Buffy and Xander to come with her because when it came to stopping things that were really bad, she wasn’t really equipped for that.

Turned out none of them were.

No, she hadn’t known this - whatever this really was - was going to happen.

And the thing was, these monsters that were herding them and keeping them all in a group weren’t the worst thing here.

I’m a smart girl, I can see how this is supposed to go. We’re obviously supposed to be food for the belly of the beast.

And the beast in question was an elected representative of the people. Because the one-time Mayor of Sunnydale was… well…

There was really no other way to put it.

He was a big snake. And that might sound all kinds of freudian but it was also undeniably accurate. You just had to look. He’d changed before their very eyes. And we weren’t talking about pythons or Discovery Channel big, but a giant snake that was going to make every snake in the world question his manhood and feel all kinds of inadequate.

Yes, it was that big.

And right now, size seemed to matter.

“We’re doing everything we can!” Xander insisted. “We can’t get past them to do anything else. We’re just trying to stay alive here. What else is there?”

She didn’t answer his question because she didn’t really have an answer to give. All she did was mutter. “Knowing what we’re doing would’ve been a start.”

This was quickly turning into a disaster. Being told ‘bad things’ were going to happen meant that they’d felt obligated to try do something about it. But ‘bad things’ were about as far as they’d gotten in terms of really understanding it.

Once there had been a Mayor. Now there was a giant snake.

Go figure.

It hadn’t been entirely unexpected, not if you listened to the ravings of Mister Giles, the High School’s old librarian, kicked out the year they graduated for being… well, a little paranoid and crazy. Now, a couple of years later, he was holed up with all the books that had been locked up at Sunnydale High.

But now it seemed like he might’ve been right all along. A lot of people were going to owe him an apology. It was tough to feel vindicated though.

Tough to feel anything but fear, actually.

Mayor. Snake. Even if they really didn’t understand how it had happened. After all, it was a bit out of the ordinary. Even if, for a moment, you accepted that men could turn into snakes then there were other questions.

Science wasn’t that much of a help this time. Biology might get you there. Maybe. After kind of a reach. A big reach. After all, it was true that everything was linked at a vestigial level. But you didn’t see people turning into fish or whatever, which was about as likely as the idea a man could turn into a snake.

Even if there had been that weirdness with the swim team…

But even if the biology worked out, the physics certainly didn’t add up. Man sized… man. Man sized snake. That worked - at least in terms of mass. But man sized man into giant snake that could wrap itself around a school, eat people whole in one gulp and must weight tons?

You couldn’t pack that much snake into a man sized package.

He hadn’t even been a big man.

Just… a local politician.

Her mom had voted for him last time around, she was pretty sure. So…

Why the death, destruction and snakiness now?

As the cartoon would say, ‘there were mysteries afoot.’

And ‘jinkies'.

Of course, in the cartoons you found out the monster was really a man in disguise. The old lighthouse keeper. The man who ran the funfair. The caretaker at a creepy boarding school.

She looked up at the giant snake as it dove down and…

Swallowed Principal Snyder in one gulp.

That’s definitely not the lighthouse keeper.

————————

“Oh-oh,” F said.

“Oh-oh?” T checked as they turned onto… Yeah, now she got it. “Oh. Yeah. Oh-oh.”

Now they could see the High School and… there really weren’t likely to be running any classes there next year.

Maybe not ever again.

“You told him about this kind of thing, right?” F asked, finally giving it a little extra gas so that the speedometer touched seventy when most people would be thinking about braking.

“I told him.”

“Good, because I sure as hell did too.”

Two warnings. It was an unwritten rule. Ignore two warnings and you were a violator. Any immigrant who’d been here as long as Dickie knew that. No question about it. In addition to the treaty which let him be here at all - and made the whole planet accorded neutral territory - there were plenty unwritten rules about it was going to be policed.

Which meant he knew where he stood.

And where they stood.

“I’d still going to try to talk to him,” T said, weighing the situation. Dickie was a giant snake. Wrapped around a school building and… there were kids there. Of course, you couldn’t unfurl yourself from a human sized ‘container’ and not open no less than three simply massive stomachs that’d feel really very empty after the transformation.

And there was your problem right there. He was hungry after the change.

“Sometimes you’re too soft,” F said.

“No,” she countered. She didn’t actually think she was soft. It was just… a different way of dealing with things. They each had their strengths, but where they overlapped was that they worked well together. It was as good a partnership as she could’ve hoped for. Between them, they could deal with anything. They’d proven it. “It’s for those kids. Not him.”

“Like I said, too soft.”

But even her partner wouldn’t just give up on those kids. She’d bitch about it - probably every step of the way - but F would do the right thing in the end.

Usually.

“Hmmph.”

“Okay, okay. We’ll do it for the children. But then we expedite his snakey ass? Right?”

She nodded. Agent F was much more comfortable with the ‘violent’ aspects of their calling, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t admit the necessity. Sometimes you just had to get these beings off planet. Neutral territory the Earth might be - the only such place at least in this galaxy - but the quid pro quo for that was that every arrival understood that they could be extradited if their behaviour didn’t meet certain standards.

And whose job it was to do that.

Everyone who came here, whether to claim sanctuary or to do business, understood it. They made their marks to confirm it at immigration.

Those who wouldn’t go… they got expedited instead.

A fast track solution.

Usually as fast as you could pull a trigger.

“Call it in?” she wondered, knowing very well what F was about to say. It was a little ritual that they had.

“After.”

Fair enough and besides, it was their responsibility. Their back up wasn’t supposed to that kind of job. That was why it was the back up. But she did hesitate for a moment, pondering. “Does he even have an ass?”

They both looked out at the giant snake and she imagined that similar thoughts were running through their minds at that moment. Giant snake? Ass?

“Remember that quad-dimensional roach from Infalas Three?” F asked.

Despite the name, much more like a worm. At least in their three, visible dimensions. “Uhuh?”

“Didn’t we decide we kicked it’s ass?”

“I think we were being metaphorical,” she explained, recalling the conversation. “And you’d been drinking when we were talking about it.”

“But only thirty seconds from sober,” F said. “Kay. Well, anyway, lets keep it simple. Whatever I kick, that’s his ass.”

She nodded, pleased with the solution. “Works for me.”

After parking they got out of the car and both took a moment to straighten their jackets. Knowing that these suits wouldn’t - ever - crease or stain didn’t change the fact that you just felt it was something you had to do.

It was - as they said just before you put it on - ‘the last suit you’ll ever wear.’

In F’s case also the first. Probably. That was one thing they’d never talked about.

But they - the pair of them - made black look good.

———————

“Buffy!” Willow yelled, running to her friend and grabbing the pointy-toothed, bumpy faced creature that was trying to… Yeah, now she saw it as a spectator she could tell that these things were definitely trying to bite them.

Did that make them more like vampires? Zombies bit too, right? In the movies? That was how the infection spread and other people became zombies.

But there was the slightly less fictional ‘zombie’ myth that originated in voodoo. And… why do I know all this stuff?

That’d be her geek-side.

She shoved the zombie-vampire-thing back. “Get off my friend, freak!”

Buffy’s right hook did much more to persuade him than her shove, but she thought she’d been getting the idea across.

Yeah. Bitch. Don’t hurt my friends.

“Thanks, Will.”

“De nada,” she replied. “Umm - Principal Snyder just got eaten.”

Buffy stopped, perhaps for the first time since everything had gone bad. Really stopped. Considered and then asked her question. “You don’t mean in a good way, right?”

“Not that I’m an expert or anything, I don’t think there is a good way - not for guys at least.”

Or for anyone without a current, romantic life.

Buffy pulled a face, showing just what she thought of that kind of diet.

“Point.” This time Buffy was doing the shoving. Shoving her. Moving her out of the way for… spin kick? Where had that come from? Buffy had always been very… well, Buff. But more in your cheerleader kind of way. Not Bruce Lee.

If she’d only done that to Cordelia Chase then she might’ve stayed on the team…

“Wow, Buff, you’re really taking those self-defence classes seriously.”

“I don’t know - they didn’t teach me that. It - just seemed to come… naturally.”

The bumpy faced biter thing was down on the ground beside the one she’d punched and might’ve been concussed. If it wasn’t then it should’ve been. Because… ouch. Buffy had really caught it, sent it spinning before it landed. Which should’ve been impossible because - you know - physics.

But physics, like biology, seemed to be on vacation. Or at least a short weekend break to the cabin.

“Do it again?” she asked, pointing at another attacker.

And another one went down.

“Wow. You’re like a lethal weapon or something.”

Buffy’s half smile vanished as soon as it flowered. “It’s not helping though - whatever these are, they’re trying to pen us in. Herd us to… that.”

The big snake.

Not wanting to speak for the others but she thought it’d be bad enough to get eaten (not in a good way) but worse than that to be joining Principal Snyder.

“We’ve got to do something,” she agreed. “But what?” There seemed little point to kicking the snake… Unless he had some vulnerables, somewhere… vulnerable.

If he was still a he.

“I was hoping you’d know, brain-box.”

“You’re the ones with the new, ninja skills. Me? I’m just little old me and - who’s that?” she asked, looking at what looked like a government issue car pulling up. A really fast and old government issue car, like off the TV shows. But even so… Was it help? The Feds? The police?

IRS?

As the occupants got out, she could see that they were both young women. Obviously so - even from this distance. One with dark hair, down around her shoulders. The other a lighter brown and fastened up, a little prim with it.

They moved with a calm assurance that she found… actually, impressive. They could see what was going on, took it in for a second, and then… just got on with whatever they were here for.

And whoever they were, they sure liked black… Black suits. Black glasses. Black car and probably shoes too.

But if they were going to be any use here then they’d better be packing bazooka and she couldn’t see how they could be hiding those in the suits.

Because, whoever they were, the cut just made those black suits look good.

Nope, no bazooka in there.

————————-

Absently T’s hand flicked upwards to check her inside jacket pocket. Yup, the neuralyzer was there. Just as it always was and it’d been no more than a habit to check. But they’d been spotted and there were people around. Lots of people.

That meant that all of them were going to have to forget everything that happened here.

Anyone who didn’t need to forget would be dead.

She was hoping for the former but this job taught you to plan for the worst.

“Think we need anything from the trunk?” F asked as they took in the scene for a moment.

She considered, looked at Dickie - or the parts of him they could see as he was entwined with the school building, ripping parts of it down not through malice but just as he moved. Bigger than she’d thought, for sure.

“Might be an idea,” she agreed.

One of the most surprising things, one that F still struggled with sometimes, was that size really didn’t matter. Look at both of them for a start, not exactly big girls. And both of them carried small, pistol-type disruptors of Arquillian design that - in the right circumstances - could flatten a small town before the power-pack even started to show amber.

They had access to a truly tiny weapon, one that seemed like a toy even in her small hands but when you fired it - if you weren’t braced properly - would throw you across a street.

So they knew, they really knew, that size (much as F might insist otherwise) didn’t matter.

And yet… they still sometimes felt the need for something, well, bigger.

Usually Agent F was plenty capable of making some sort of smutty joke about that. She’d proven it several times. Or maybe, with her lifestyle choices, they really weren’t ‘jokes’ but pertinent observations. But that was beside the point. Today, at least, F didn’t seem to need to tell her about bigger being better.

Opening up the old fashioned trunk, F reached in and tossed her one of the massive Tri-Barrel Plasma guns and then picked out one for herself. A flick of a switch and it was charged with a round selcted, ready to fire. Oh, and the sort of pump action effect you saw on every TV action show.

Just because.

Maybe it made the guys feel better somehow, but it really didn’t do that much for her.

No, not just guys. Her partner too. The way Agent F looked, the way she - almost - caressed the elongated barrel (even when she thought she wasn’t being watched)…

Guys and F.

Yeah, those two things went together.

Frequently.

But as the saying went, at least now they were loaded for bear.

And giant, alien snakes.

“Remember,” she said. “We’re going to talk to him first.”

She could see - or even feel - the wave of disappointment from her partner. But she accepted it. “What about all these others?” F asked hopefully.

Yeah… there were a lot of drones around the place. Like any vermin - cosmic rats jumping ship - you couldn’t keep them off the planet. They came in as little more than pests. Fortunately though they didn’t have the intelligence or the brains to do more than re-animate recently deceased corpses and wander around looking for trouble to get into. Occasionally one might act, somewhat, smart but they always revealed themselves in the end.

And then someone like them would find them and have them put them down.

Part of their public service mandate.

So she shrugged, not bothered either way so long as they helped the people who were trapped by them. “Sure.”

“Awesome. So you talk to Dickie, that was your idea, I’ll clean these guys out. Then we’ll see where we are.”

“F - ”

“I know!”

“Okay, then.”

They didn’t bother locking the car. Anyone who got in while they were gone would be flash frozen. And she’d watched her partner take a hammer to the last car thief who’d tried it and now he was - literally - resting in pieces.

The bureau was serious about its anti-theft devices.

But it had really left a mess they’d never quite been able to get out of the seats.

—————————

“Are those bazookas?” Willow asked.

“Huh?”

“Nothing - I was just wondering if those were bazookas?” When she could, she was still watching the two young women who’d pulled up in the black car. Black suits. Shiny silver weapons of some sort. Rifles? No, bigger than that. So big that they didn’t look like they should be able to wield them at all. But they did. With the same calm confidence that none of the rest of them were able to feel in the circumstances.

So were those the bazookas she’d wished for?

Heavier artillery than their super-soakers, that was for sure.

“Really - uh - not sure you should be looking at their boobs right now, Will,” Xander chided her.

“Bazookas! Not bazoomba’s!”

“You say tomato, I say tomato. Think I could have a little help?”

“Oh - sorry, sure.” While he held the bumpy faced bitty thing still, bent backwards in his grip, she took careful aim, adjusted her stance and then took a short at it run to… kick it in the nuts.

Trial and error had determined that even if it wasn’t taking these things out of the fight it was putting them down just as effectively as anything else they’d tried. At least for the ones that looked male.

Even if it made Xander wince. “Good job!” he said. “And… never, ever do that to me.”

“I won’t.”

“I want your word now.”

“I promise, I won’t kick you in the nuts.”

“So you were looking at boobs?” Xander asked with all the enthusiasm for the subject of just about any young man. Even one in desperate circumstances.

“No!”

Though, now he mentioned it…

Actually, nope, nothing had really changed. She’d always considered that boobs were just awesome and hadn’t ever really met anyone who disagreed.

“But - ”

“For the last time, bazookas. Not boobs. Look at those two.”

“I can’t - the suits are - it’s not easy to tell - ”

Even at this distance she was willing - if they had to do this - to say that no one walking into the High School grounds with black suits and big silver guns was likely to disprove her awesome theory about the boobage. But the guns, the weapons - what the hell were they?

She’d watched as much TV as anyone else and never seen anything like that outside Star Wars or… They looked like ray guns.

And could they really help? The confidence that those two had - seeming fearless in the face of a giant, school shaking snake - was actually kind of reassuring. But was it misplaced?

On the other hand, right now, any help looked like being really valuable.

She watched as the two women strode, as if the world wasn't ending right here, into the school grounds and… Wow.

That bitey creature that had come for them was just… Gone. The brunette had just pointed the silver rifle and pulled the trigger and… Atomised. Completely blown away. It didn’t even look like there were parts.

Poof.

Gone.

With plenty of purpose, the darker of the pair started to do the rounds of all the bitey-man sized things anywhere near her. Just levelled her gun. Pulled the trigger and… gone.

This while the other, the lighter haired woman just targetted the one bitey-thing that got in her way. She was obviously heading for the snake. Sunnydale’s former Mayor. No, he was still the elected Mayor, just a former human.

Now he was… something else.

Could they do that to him? Atomise him the same way?

Wow, that would’ve been easier.

“Buffy! Incoming - I mean, help - help is incoming. I think. Maybe.”

Who were those girls?

And where did they get those guns?

—————————-

“Di-“ T coughed, inhaling what was left of one of the drones Dickie had hired to make this work for him. “Great, I love the taste of drones.”

Agent F - who’d taken aim and blown the drone apart from a distance - favoured her with one of her big grins. She was in her element. Fighting bad guys. That was what she did, the detective work part of the role usually fell to her. If that was inconvenient in leaving her partner breathing in atomised drone then… Tough luck. “Don’t worry,” F said. “You’re welcome.”

Another cough, then she tried again. “Dickie!” She felt like she was being ignored when he didn’t come right around to her so she called him again, this time prodding his flank with the muzzle of the plasma gun.

Of course, last time they’d spoken he’d been a mild mannered local politician with a secret he was keeping from the voters.

You know, like most other elected officials.

He certainly hadn’t been in his native form like he was now.

It was most likely that he’d just not heard her though. He’d always been courteous and polite when she came to see him in his office. “Oh, hello, Agent T,” he rumbled as his head swirled around and giant - but recognisable - eyes came to regard her. She could see herself - almost full size - reflected in the pupils. “Can I help you with something?”

She kept the plasma gun pointing in his general direction. It was easy when he was so large and - well - all around. Missing him would be the bigger trick than hitting him.

All she was careful to do was not point it in his face. That seemed like it was too confrontational. Not to mention impolite.

It seemed like something her partner would do.

“Help me? Dickie - we talked about this. We talked about this more than once.” It was Dickie and he’d never really been any sort of problem with him until now. He’d obeyed the rules and always checked in when they - or their predecessors - had asked him too. Never violated the terms of resident alien licence. Never stepped foot outside his prescribed area.

Now he didn’t have feet.

But word had it he was even the very definition of a model politician - if there was such a thing - it’d probably been easy to write off the threat that he presented simply because… Well, when did politicians ever go through with anything they said they would?

He had…

Of course, that might be a very modern - and western - view. After all there were plenty of politicians in the past - and today in other parts of the world - who’d made good on their very dangerous polices.

Wars that had claimed millions of lives had been caused by those kinds of men and women, but not by politicians like Dickie. None of the other races had even noticed little old Earth until the radio messages that the world had started to emit in the early twentieth century had reached other stars and invited them to come visit.

He wasn’t the first alien to reach elected office, but you had to wonder what a politician who was a giant snake might accomplish?

Not much. This ended here.

Now.

“Aww, T - ”

“Don’t you ‘aww, T’ me, Dick Wilkins. What did I tell you would happen if you even thought about doing this?”

“T - ”

“What did I tell you?” she repeated.

“You said you’d extradite me,” he said and if a giant snake could have body language then his said ‘dejection’. Maybe a little sulkiness. Which was as alien on him as his current shape - after all, he’d been one of the most relentlessly upbeat ‘people’ she’d ever had to talk to.

“That’s right, I said I’d send you right back to Pardalan, didn’t I? Didn’t I?” She prodded him for the answer.

“Yes,” he sulked.

“And then what did I say?”

“Gosh - I - I don’t know, T. Nothing, I think.” This time it was his eyes that betrayed him. He was looking around. Looking for F, probably. He’d always been - rightly - warier of her. Most aliens were. A predator was something the whole galaxy could recognise.

Of course, underestimating her had caught a few of them out too.

“No, Dickie, you know what I told you. What was it? Come on, say it.”

“Aww, T - come on. You can’t do that to me.”

“Dickie, you’ve left us no choice,” F said, stepping out beside her. “Right, T?”

She felt a little regret as she nodded, knowing that they were playing by Arquillian rules. Warning and then… They both pulled the trigger together.

————————-

Split for length - continued in the next post which will be up as soon as I see this has come out of moderation

_________________
-------------------------
If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.

Chance in *Chance*
-------------------------


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun May 04, 2014 9:19 am 
Offline
23. Volumey Text

Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2005 1:23 pm
Posts: 3794
Topics: 5
Post 2 of 2 - split for length from previous post



“Whoa! Incoming!” Willow cried, spotting what was about to happen.

Unfortunately Buffy didn’t react in quite the way she’d hoped when she cried out her warning because she was facing the wrong way. She hadn’t waited to see what happened either. She’d hit the ground, covered her head with her hands and only looked up at her friend when she was sure that gravity had finished doing it’s work.

“Oh, Buffy…” Yeah… that wasn’t going to wash out. Not at all.

“Incoming?” Buffy asked, looking down at her. Her friend was dripping with… In the circumstances it seemed like ‘snake goop’ might be the best term.

There was - maybe one day - a joke there. A dirty one, one that they’d never tell in front of their parents but something that Buffy wouldn’t want to go back to… Oh, it was going to take a few months to get over this.

Her friend had snake goop running down her hair, her forehead, her shoulders. It was creeping it’s way into her top and there were… chunks. Not big chunks - one big chunk. More of an entrail really. Hanging over her shoulder and… yes, that was into the top of her shirt too. Whatever it was seemed to be oozing something darker than the rest too.

“It was incoming,” she said but in hindsight, she could’ve just screamed ‘duck.’

“What is it?” Buffy asked with it running down her face, her arms, her hair and her clothes. She already looked horrified, but couldn’t even see herself.

Honestly, it was worse than she’d imagine.

And in a Buffy shaped shadow, she’d avoided pretty much all of it. Sheer luck. It might be the best thing that had happened to her today - aside from reaching what appeared to be the end of this battle with all her limbs, teeth and lives intact. “I’m pretty sure it’s the Mayor,” she speculated. There’d been a boom and then…

“It’s what?” Buffy pulled the entrails from inside her top and found that it was looped back around her neck and down her back. Flung it away in disgust. Luckily not in her direction because it was still twitching and oozing…

Willow got to her feet, carefully avoiding Buffy’s proffered hand. After all, just look at it. Or rather what was covering it.

“See…” She pointed back behind Buffy and they both looked.

The body of the giant snake they’d had no idea how to fight was… Well, it wasn’t still. It was twitchy. But it wasn’t hurtling around causing mayhem and nor was it eating faculty members and kids who just wanted to graduate and maybe go to college.

She was pretty sure that wasn’t the platform Mayor Wilkins had been elected on. But she’d vote for that outcome any day. Given the alternative.

“Snakes do that right?” Buffy asked. “The twitchy thing?”

“Do I look like a herpetologist?” Willow replied.

“Will, enough with the penis and sex metaphors,” Buffy said. “And not a word about this either.” She flung some snake goop to make her point. “Really, not a word. I know you, you look all quiet and like butter wouldn’t melt, but you know what this looks like. Just never, ever, say it. Never, ever give Xander the idea. I really liked this top and now…” She shuddered. “I’m going to have to burn it. Maybe shave my head.

“And I’ll be in the shower for hours.”

She got that idea, she really did, but she couldn’t let the mistake go. “No! No - A herpetologist is someone who knows about snakes not - Buffy! You really thought I was talking about herpes? Now?”

“Sorry - Right now I’m all metaphored out. Must be the gunk. So is that what snakes do or what? Is he really dead?”

“I think so, I mean look at the hole… but I don’t think he was really a snake, Buff,” she said.

“That’s totally a snake,” Buffy told her. “Just… really, really big. Right Xander? Big snake?”

Xander was mussed, like everyone else, but he seemed to have avoided a dousing in whatever had been inside the Mayor. Ex-Mayor. There was going to have to be an election, probably a good thing compared to the alternative.

He wandered over, he looked more dazed than anything else. Maybe she did too. After all, until recently when he’d buffed up on the building site, he’d only ever run away from confrontation.

And she hadn’t even been to the gym since her freshman year at college.

They probably shouldn’t have come through this without a scratch. But it looked like they had.

“What?” he asked, out of it.

“Big snake?” Buffy repeated.

“Look - I don’t know what Anya’s been saying - ”

“No. God! Will you two get your mind out of the sewer! Look what we just did and all you can do is go on about herpes and penises and - ” Buffy protested, wiping creeping goop away from her eyes. “Don’t you dare say it!”

“Who’s got herpes?” Xander asked, wincing.

“Is it penises?” Willow wondered. “Or peni? I’ve never had to think about more than one before - not that - I’m grammar inquisitive, that’s all I meant. Nothing else. I’ll never need to use it - in fact, I’m just going to shut up - ”

“Okay - everyone just stop,” Buffy said. “What’s wrong with us? We… We just saw our old principal eaten, along with a good number of this years graduating class. I guess, maybe we knew some of these kids and… let’s not forget all this was done by a giant snake that someone elected.”

On behalf of her Mom, Willow didn’t admit to where the votes had come from.

“Don’t forget those fangy, bitey things,” Xander said. “I mean, I couldn’t do much about the giant snake - ”

“None of us could,” Buffy agreed.

“But them? Man, they were everywhere.”

“Buffy kicked their asses though,” Willow said. She and Xander hadn’t done too bad either, working as a team. “Look at them run too.”

“Yeah!” Xander called after them. “Not so bad now are you! You got beaten up a bunch of girls! And me.”

“Did anyone else think about all the things Mister Giles kept trying to tell us about?” she asked, seeing some recognition in Buffy’s eyes.

“Giles?” Xander checked.

“The librarian,” she explained. “In high school?”

“Ohhh, no, see, I didn’t go to the library. It was a little rule I had so I’d never be in danger of losing a book or bringing it back late,” Xander said. He’d come along because of what Buffy had wanted. And Buffy had come along for her…

Now they were both coated in Mayor Wilkins. Somehow, yeah, when they figured all that out this was going to be her fault.

“Didn’t work that way for all of us,” Buffy said. She’d spent plenty of time there, commanded all too often to wait there for her Mom to pick her up.

“But do you remember the things he used to say?” Willow pressed. “Apart from the stuff about not bending the covers of books back.”

“Or talking?”

“Or that. He always insisted that these things existed - or something that sounded a lot like them anyway. He said they were vampires or something… We thought he was a little - ”

“Nutso?” Xander tried.

“English,” Buffy offered.

“Eccentric,” she finished, certain that they had to be the same things he’d meant. After all, he’d never seemed ‘crazy’. Never bad enough to get fired - well, not until the end but that had been more to do with getting caught in the computer science lab with Miss Calendar… Anyway, he’d just seemed… English (until that moment).

And Eccentric.

Eccentricity was like tea. It just went with English people. Right?

Anyway, it looked like there were far fewer of those creature left to even make a retreat than there had been too. She said so, proud of them for that much at least.

“I don’t think that was all us,” Buffy pointed out. “Or even most of it.”

“Yeah…” she agreed. “And we didn’t do anything about the Mayor.” And some of the bitey things had been taken out by the women in the black suits and their shiny guns.

“I still say I could’ve gotten some dynamite from the site I’m working on,” Xander insisted. “We could’ve done this ourselves.”

“And you’d have gotten fired,” Buffy said. “If we hadn’t blown ourselves up. I love you, Xander, but you’re not an explosives expert. I’m pretty sure they have training for that sort of thing. Certificates.”

“Don’t forget we’d have got arrested. Probably by the FBI,” Willow pointed out. “They frown on people like us having bombs. They have a term for it, they call it ‘domestic terrorism’.”

“Plus, like what were we going to do?” Buffy asked. “Blow up the whole school?”

“I could’ve lived with that,” Xander said. “Apart from you guys - my memories of this place, not so great.”

All three of them looked around. Sunnydale High hadn’t been blown up but it was looking like working all summer wouldn’t see it ready for start of next semester. But that wasn’t their fault.

Nor was the fact it no longer had a Principal.

“What do you think happened then?” Xander asked. “To him, I mean?”

“He turned into a big snake, Will.”

“No, I mean - how did he end up a dead, big snake and all over… well you. And, everywhere.”

“I really think it was those women, the ones in black,” Willow said.

“Oh,” Buffy said.

“What women in black?” Xander asked.

———————-

“Special Services are on the way.”

But of course they were. That was what they did. Provided the suits, the weapons and then came along to clean up in their wake. The whole area would need to be sanitised. And there were a lot of people here who’d seen things they just couldn’t have.

“Another day in the MIB, another blown-up extra-terrestrial corpse. Maybe this time we should’ve called them earlier?” F suggested.

She peered at her partner. “Since when did you worry about Special Services response time?” It wasn’t that F was selfish. She just… had a particular focus. And that didn’t include cleaning up her own mess. She hardly put any effort into the memories that she gave the people she had to neuralzye.

One time she’d even just told them they’d had a ‘long sleep’. Creativity wasn’t F’s forte.

F shrugged. “This was only going to end one way, you know that. And once we saw the size of him?”

“Yeah.” Though whether that was down to the creature formerly known as Dick Wilkins or Agent F herself she wasn’t quite sure. She couldn’t - and didn’t - criticise her partners methods. They had different strengths and both of sets had their place - and their time. She was willing to talk more, putting more effort into keeping the lid on trouble before it even occurred.

F - well, she was more likely to shoot her way to saving the world. Or punch. Kick. Sometimes stab. That thermite blade she carried was pretty dangerous in a fight and she’d once watched her gut an Alternatian with it while it was still trying to kill them.

That had been impressive. Gutting him from the inside, and all. Like she’d been taking off a coat.

F had been right about Dickie though. She’d said he was going this way and how they’d have to deal with it.

But even so, even though people had died here, she thought it had been worth it. To try and prevent it from happening at all. You had to try. Yes, their responsibility was to keep the whole world safe - those were the stakes.

And look, it was still turning.

That didn’t mean that you forgot about all the individuals who were riding along with them though. She’d seen it in plenty of the older agents, including some she’d known very well. It was too easy to stop looking at the stars and see wonder rather than potential - and real - threats.

Too easy to look at a town, a house and a family and see nothing but collateral damage. She wasn’t going to let herself go that way and - if she had any say in it - she wasn’t letting her partner go that way either.

So, yes, she’d really had to try. What was done when they got here was already in the past. People who died were already gone. Once they’d pulled up, no one else had suffered. No one else had lost their lives.

And the thing was, they’d both actually kind of liked Dickie.

In this job you dealt with people a lot. And you dealt with a lot people who weren’t really ‘people’ per se or at least were a different kind of people.

People from other places.

Beings from five dozen worlds that she’d dealt with. And there were more besides that hadn’t gravitated to Sunnydale and she’d only met in passing or seen on her visits to headquarters.

Every one of them - except the hive minds of course - was an individual. More than that, each of them came from different worlds that had evolved different ways with different biologies. So yes, everyone really was different. Finding ‘people’ you could relate to in that mess was difficult.

The Honourable (and alien) Richard Wilkins had been one such a person. Civic minded, he’d practically built the modern town of Sunnydale once it’s unique energy signature (the quality that made it a little like a spa town for beings who valued those kinds of locations) had been discovered. He’d been its Mayor for the last several years and then - finally - he’d flipped. Gone back to his true nature.

It wasn’t like they hadn’t been warned.

Asking him to hold it all this time? Maybe they’d just bought time and helped no one in the long run.

And of course the politics had meant that they couldn’t extradite him for something he hadn’t yet done. Because this might not have been where he was born but… it was his home.

Sometimes she thought that F forgot that.

All the beings that came here had good reason. Sanctuary. Business. Vacation…

Dealing with that, they both knew that when they made a decision - even one that might risk the world - they had to play out the hand they were dealt.

That was the way it had to be.

If F had these same sort of thoughts that she did, she never admitted to it. It was one thing they really couldn’t talk about.

No matter how things went, they never second-guessed each other. They never criticised. Agent F was plenty capable of being judgemental. But never about her. She never even felt like she might be. They were a partnership through good and bad and - whatever F had left behind when she joined the MIB - having a partner, and a friend, was worth more to her.

Of course that went the other way too. She didn’t criticise or judge her partners screw ups. And there were some.

So long as the world was still here, it was all good. She’d been told that on her very first day. MIB didn’t expect perfection. There was a whole universe that proved that was the impossible. Good was good enough.

Most of the time.

“Okay,” F said, “lets get all these people rounded up before they start to drift away.”

“What do you think we should tell them?” she asked. Agent F was right. They did need to do just that. Things these people had seen that they should not have done. Could not have done. That was just the way it was.

F groaned saw through her question. It wasn’t about what the ‘right’ thing to tell them was. It was all about trying to get her partner to find something even vaguely ‘good’ for them. To explain away the gap they were about to insert in their reality “Oh, come on, T. This again?”

“This again.”

“No, I’m not doing this. Not again. See, here’s how it is. We flash them with the neuralyzer, tell them something that’s half plausible and let their minds fill in the rest. Then we hit a bar, pick someone up and go home. That’s all it needs to be. There’s no need to make it more complicated than that.”

She looked at her partner. That wasn’t it at all. After all the bar, only sometimes, but the pick up - never. She and F had different… standards.

After she’d killed something though? F just needed that.

Herself, she preferred to curl up with a good book.

“We have a responsibility to these people,” she said as she waved a badge vaguely and kind of suggested she was with the FBI.

She wasn’t.

And she implied that - maybe - she was called Agent Dunham.

Which wasn’t true at all.

And she was pretty certain the FBI didn’t even have a division that she’d claimed. But these people didn’t know that and so gave them their attention.

Which was all that they wanted.

“Yes, we do. And we just lived up to it,” F said. “You know what the man said. We’re the best, last and only line of defence these people have. Now, ladies. Gentlemen. This way, please. Yes, please gather over there. Yes, there. Ma’am - there, we’ll explain everything if you just give us your attention. Look, T, we lived up to our responsibility when we blew away that rampaging Pardalian.”

“Yes, Sir, if you could just gather in the quad? No, you need to come with us where we’ll explain everything.” She turned back to F. “Okay, we defended them - we did. But I mean a responsibility to leave things better than we found them when it doesn’t hurt us to do that.”

“So, to be clear, you’re not bothered by the lie,” F concluded. “You just want it to be a good one.”

“Yes - I mean, I know we have to fill their minds with things that they’re permitted to experience. I do. You know I’d never argue about that. But, really, all I want to is that we do that in a way that makes this somehow better than it would’ve been. Why not?”

They’d had this conversation many times, she and F . Much as they were different, they were well matched. Making this young woman her partner had probably been the smartest thing that Z could’ve done. They worked well together and had complimentary skills. Aside from that, they got on.

She wasn’t at all sure that many other people they worked with would’ve dealt as well with either of them.

“Better than the entire world being aware that Earth is host to a whole load of aliens, that they’re integrated into every day life and that velcro is actually toilet paper from a small world you’ll find if you hang a hard left from Aldebran?”

“Just better.” She turned to the woman who was trying to walk away from them. “Ma’am, yes you. I’m Agent Dunham with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ll explain everything if you’ll just all gather here.”

——————-

“So,” Xander said as they watched the two suits approaching. “I have a question.”

“Just one?” Buffy asked wearily.

“Yeah, but it’s a doozy and I think it’s on all our minds - big and small. It’s ‘what the hell was all that?’”

“I think we probably have to say,” Buffy said, “that monsters are real.”

“You don’t say,” Xander quipped. “Did the big snake give it away?”

“Will?”

“You sound like you’re asking me to be - Oh, definitive? So I have to say, why me?”

“Well, I’m tired and you’re the smartest of us all.”

“By a long way,” Xander said.

“And the science girl,” Buffy added, as if she didn’t quite agree with the degree of smartness.

“This is pretty far beyond science,” she said. Of course, she was just as curious as Xander. No, that was silly. She was way more curious than Xander. He could’ve done with a bit more curiosity. Except, obviously, where Anya was concerned. She could’ve lived with less curiosity about her. There was just something about her that was… kind of like what happened when you bit down on a piece of aluminium foil with a filling.

Yeah, just like that.

“Well, if it’s beyond science then what is it?”

“Umm… Unusual?”

“Well, thank you science!”

Not that Buffy was wrong to ask the question. What was this? Well, she could think of two ways of explaining it. Neither of which was very appealing to her ordered view of the universe. In fact she considered that she was doing pretty well to be thinking about both without just falling down and just weeping into her textbooks because both of them made a mockery of everything she was supposed to be learning - except to ask the right questions, of course.

“Okay, you want the options?” she asked, noticing how the two women in suits were gathering everyone up and not letting them wander off.

Not even to go look at the thing that had been trying to eat them.

“Sure.”

“Well, either it’s like ‘monsters from mythology are actually a thing’,” she paused for effect.

“Or?” Buffy asked.

“Aliens.”

“Aliens?”

“You say it like that,” she said, “but in terms of the science I’d rather believe it was aliens. Monsters like zombies and demons and vampires are all wrapped up in magic and spirituality and - sure - magic might just be science that we don’t understand yet, but I’d much rather it was aliens.”

Xander considered for a moment before coming back with, “I don’t want it to be aliens. Aliens have an unnatural interest in sticking things in people’s butts. I can do without that. I told Anya - ”

Willow shook her head. That was something they really, really didn’t want to know.

Of course she’d already had a hint that she’d never - ever - wanted, the reason had been because Xander had been telling her - asking her mostly - whether Anya was ‘normal’ and the answer (without knowing any of that) was ‘no, she certainly wasn’t.’

“Soooo - aliens versus monsters? That’s what we’ve come to?” Buffy’s question was absolutely to shut Xander’s confession down.

“I’m afraid so…”

“Sir, ladies, this way please,” the women in suits were herding people, leading them towards the quadrangle at the heart of the school. Of course the former Mayor had created a more ‘open plan’ route to getting there by knocking down a couple of low walls. A few noticeboards. The fountain.

Of, and classrooms.

“We’re with the FBI - please gather just over there and we’ll explain everything.”

They looked at each other. “Well, thank goodness the government’s here to tell us what’s going on.”

“Never mind that, thank goodness I hadn’t stolen that dynamite.”

Of course, Xander picked just the moment that the two agents could hear him to admit what he would’ve done.

———————-

“So?” T demanded.

It wasn’t often she demanded, but now she was. She’d asked the question and she wanted to know.

“Just put your glasses on,” F replied, already wearing hers. The black, custom Ray-Bans not only kept out the sun but would very specifically block the parts of the visual spectrum that would shortly affect all these people they’d been gathering up. Specifically the parts that dealt with memory.

“No.”

Not just to make them forget. If it had been that simple… No, the neuralyzer actually let you - compelled you actually - to suggest what had ‘really’ happened. Hours. Days. Months or even years. You could - if you wanted - change their entire lives. You could build a reality for them where they didn’t have to worry about drones trying to kill them, or giant snakes. The need for the human mind to work everything out would fill in the gaps that you simply couldn’t describe.

Everyone who heard it would come up with their own version of the new truth, build around whatever they told them. Come up with that truth and their minds, eager to accept simplicity, would do the rest.

It was part of the reason why they wore the anonymous, black suits and anything but the simplest makeup. So that they didn’t stand out in those memories. Even at this point.

No, they weren’t trying to make these people forget. They were going to put in place a reality for them all that had not, actually, been.

But they wouldn’t know any different. So she always felt like it was her responsibility make sure that what they chose was… worthy of what they were giving up.

That was why she refused to put the glasses on. It was all that would stop F flashing them with the pen-like device. Naturally F thought it resembled something else more closely.

“Not this again, T. C’mon. Put the glasses on.”

“No. I want to know what you think you’re going to say?”

Pulling her aside, F finally told her. It wasn’t actually a shock. “Okay, fine. Gang related. Probably on PCP.”

“Oh, come on! That again?”

“It’s a classic! And it works! This is Sunnydale. PCP capital of the state in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Just according to you and what you’ve put in their heads the last two years. Have you ever actually seen anyone on PCP here? Is that still a thing that happens, you know in the real world?”

“I have no idea,” F said. “But they buy it - they always buy it. So put your glasses on.”

It was then that she glanced over at the group of three friends, sticking together and whispering. The ones who looked like they’d been orchestrating this fight against… well, whatever they decided to tell them it had been. A gang on PCP? Could be. Was the girl with the red hair going to buy that excuse?

She looked like she was in college, finding her own clothing identity maybe. Smart. Pretty. Inquisitive face.

Why focus on her though?

Maybe a better question is, why not?


Their eyes met and… They were very, very green. Concerned. Curious. Disturbed - probably by the fact that two ‘FBI’ agents appeared to be arguing - and…

Absolutely beautiful.

She caught herself - almost - smiling in that girl’s direction and then, when she managed to pull herself from the warm, welcoming waters of those eyes, noticed how the red-head had caught herself smiling too. Half-smiling at least.

You didn’t expect smiles at the moment so… yeah, she noticed.

F was observant too. Catching both of them. “What?” F asked, looking where she was. “Her?”

“What’s wrong with - I mean, ‘her’, what?” She shook her head. It wasn’t something she could think about. They were about to make all these people forget what had happened here and to replace that memory with… something easier for them to swallow.

Not exactly the best way to strike up a conversation.

Wait. That’s what I want to do?

No… but I don’t want to lie to her either. She doesn’t look like she’d want to be lied to.

Which posed a bit of a problem, really.

Because that was how they kept people safe.

That was how they kept the world safe.

————————-

“I don’t think the FBI’s going to tell us the truth,” Xander said. He was trying to whisper, since the two agents were right there, but to be heard over all the other people…

Yeah, she was pretty sure it drew the agents attention. Stage whispers always did that.

“Why?” Buffy asked.

“You never watch TV?”

“The truth is out there…” Willow murmured, but she was more focused on the agent with the lighter hair. Those eyes… They’d looked full of truth. Concern. And…

Did a girl just look at me like… umm…

There it was again, they connected for a second time. Almost like… Almost electric. And like… the other woman couldn’t stop looking her way. My way.

And… I’ve not stopped starring at her either because…

It didn’t take much self-awareness to understand… I could lose myself in eyes like that.

Oh.

Okay.

Wow. then the other woman put on a pair of sunglasses. Hiding those eyes from her.

All the same, they were making crazy amounts of eye contact. Maybe it was the suit. She really did look good in the suit. Damn good.

Damn fine, actually.

With a double-syllable day-um.

But still… Umm.

Okay… after an afternoon of real terror and scary monsters she’d never forget for the rest of her life, that was something new to think about.

I wonder how you -

———————

“T? Yo, T?”

She was shaken from her… What was this? And who was that girl?

It was actually a relief to put her glasses on. Not because she didn’t want to look at that girl - she did - but she couldn’t help feeling that in return she was giving absolutely everything about herself away.

All her secrets.

All her desires.

Her loneliness and her accomplishments.

Everything.

The red-haired girl didn’t stop looking her way though, even through the glasses. And that little smile, it hadn’t ever really gone away. It kept… Like the girl was having thoughts and every so often, one of them made her smile again.

She has a beautiful smile too. People would probably give her the world to make her smile.

People?


Now she had her glasses on, Agent F seemed relieved that they could just get on with this. She put her hand on her partners arm, then - under the gaze of the red-haired girl - thought better of it and took it away again.

For some reason it seemed to matter that she not give the wrong impression to someone who wasn’t going to remember either of them in a couple of minutes.

F didn’t even notice the hand but the beautiful college student in the ‘my first shopping trip without Mom’ outfit certainly did. There’d been a flicker there. Disappointment?

Maybe…

I really don’t want us to lie to her. But… I can’t leave her with the truth either.

That wouldn’t be fair.

After all, this wasn’t just a job that she and her partner did. The salary sucked for the responsibility they took on and there was next to no retirement plan apart from ‘we’ll take care of you.’ If you lived that long.

No, she knew very well that it was a vocation. A calling. You didn’t do this for the money, that was really very clear. Even the company car was from 1987 via the Jetsons and the secrets…

And there was… There was certainly a kind of loneliness about it. One built of not being able to share anything of what you did.

Some, like F, never felt it.

Some, like her, did.

Some of their counterparts sought out people they could talk to. Told them everything and then neuralyzed it away… It’d always seemed selfish to her. But… she could understand the attraction.

And she could see that, maybe, someone like this girl with the red-hair would’ve been who she chose to sit at a dinner table with. Look across it, into those eyes and blew her mind… before unblowing it again.

By erasing your own existence.

You didn’t do this unless you believed in it. She’d been raised that way. Even her partner, a self-professed screw-up before MIB found her, was committed to the cause now. F understood and had her own motives that drove her.

They’d had their fingerprints burned off. Their identities and the names they’d been born with were just… gone. Not one record existed that they’d ever been born. They were told what to wear. Where to live and eat.

So to say what she was about to say… it wasn’t an easy thing for her.

“They tried,” she said.

“What?”

“They tried to fight. They stood up for themselves.”

F didn’t have much patience with that though. “And?”

“That has to be worth something.”

F shook her head. For her there was no try. Just kick it’s ass or get yours kicked in turn. “And it got a bunch of them killed. You know what ‘better’ is in that situation? Staying home and not fighting. Leaving it to the people who should be taking care of it.”

There was that…

She glanced at the girl with the red hair again. Unable to keep herself from checking whether the girl was still looking at her.

It obviously hadn’t gone unnoticed.

And that smile, just a flicker of a smile. Hopeful even… She was a good reader of people (and not-people). That wasn’t how people usually looked at what they thought was the FBI. Something else was definitely going on here. Something that really hadn’t ever -

No…

I have a duty to perform. Whatever your name is… I have to make you forget I was even here…

You won’t have done the things you did.

You never smiled in my direction because I wasn’t here for you to see, just like everything else I have to take away.

You never let me see those green, green eyes and wonder what it would be like to -


“But - ”

“Okay - Fine,” F said. “You want ‘better’? You want ‘creative’?”

“No - ”

“It’s okay, T. I got this. We’ll do it your way… Ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, please. I’m Agent, ah, Ness. This is Agent Durham.”

“Dunham,” she corrected. “I’m Agent Dunham. She always - she forgets, sometimes. My name - she - please, Agent Ness. Carry on.”

F gave her a look that was both amused and a little pissed off. It wasn’t one she was unfamiliar with. They did that to each other, sometimes. F was just… more obvious about her reactions. “We’re with the FBI and everything will be explained if you will just look right… here.” Holding up the neuralyzer, when every pair of eyes went to the tip of the pen-like device, T’s partner triggered it.

FLASH.

Every pair of eyes turned red as they reflected the light - just for a microsecond.

Even the green ones that had been looking at her like…

Let’s be honest, it was like she was interested.

Even if she did seem surprised by it.


The neuralyzer didn’t just flash, of course. It was much more complicated than that. It was alien technology, part of the original deal that had set aside Earth as politically neutral territory to be policed by the MIB. Needing weapons to defend themselves, the planet and their visitors, they’d negotiated for them. Then, almost as an afterthought, they’d been offered the neuralzyer technology and now it was a staple of what MIB did.

Keeping the real world as something people didn’t have to worry about. Letting them get on with their much more ordinary lives.

The first effect was to freeze everyone in place by taking away their desire to be anywhere else. The second to make the subjects extremely susceptible. To the extent you could reshape their memories (by offering other explanations) and even their future behaviour when those memories were strong enough to be formative.

Even though she’d understood it - and the necessity - for a long time, it was something she’d never really been comfortable with in concept. But when you saw how some people wasted their lives or hurt other people… it could be hard to resist and F rarely even tried. Her sense of natural justice was… swift and to the point. Which was why she had to worry now that F was taking responsibility for more than another incident in Sunnydale’s PCP problems.

Maybe it’s better it’s her though… After all, could I trust myself not to create a memory that might get this girl to ask me out?

Actually, yes, I could trust myself. I wouldn’t be doing this if I couldn’t.

But I’d regret not doing it. At least one night when I felt very, very alone.


It wasn’t wrong to be tempted, it was normal. It was human. Just so long as you didn’t act on it.

All I’ve done is meet those pretty, pretty eyes and I’m already wondering about asking her out?

That’s not me.


“Undoubtedly our valiant colleagues in your local police force,” F was saying, “Will conclude and inform you that this was a gang related incident, probably high on PCP.”

She started to interject, but her partner wasn’t done. Of course, she wasn’t really that surprised. F had done this before. Concocted a story so preposterous that it had to have some truth to it. At least from the listeners point of view.

Imagination would do the rest, filling in the detail that her partner didn’t provide. And - when the Sunnydale Police Department arrived - most of the people here would’ve convinced themselves about what they’d seen and their testimony would make it so.

Where was she going now though? F would usually leave it at that. She wasn’t one for complexity.

On the other hand her partner was one for winning any argument she actually engaged with.

“For some of you that will be an obvious, comfortable truth and if that’s something you can accept then you absolutely should. All of those who can, you should go and gather over in the corner there - wait for the police to arrive.”

F waited and most of the people here did as she asked, drifted away.

And she was impressed. She’d been doing this a little longer than F, but she’d never thought of testing those who needed to be neuralyzed. In that state they couldn’t think to deceive them, but now that the comfortable new reality was already revealed to them… That was all they needed.

The others?

She wasn’t at all surprised to find that the red haired girl hadn’t moved along with her two friends.

And so F continued. “The rest of you know that there’s something else here, in this town… Monsters. You won’t talk about it to anyone else, but amongst yourselves you know the truth. You - what’s your name?”

The blonde who was clearly friends with girl with the green, beautiful eyes spoke slowly, deliberately and utterly under Agent F’s spell.

“Buffy Summers.”

“Buffy? What kind of name is that - ? Never-mind. Buffy. You know the truth now. Monsters. Ghosts. Zombies and vampires. In fact you’re a vampire slayer. The[/] vampire slayer. And your friends help you out.”

All three of them nodded.

“The rest of these people probably owe you their lives today, but you know they’ll have a hard time saying ‘thank you’ because they won’t want to admit that there’s more to this than gangs and PCP. That’s a shame, but there it is. You don’t do this for the thanks. You do it because anything else would be [i]wrong
.”

She stood and watched as F tied this all up in a much neater bow than she had any right to be able to.

But improvising had always been her thing.

————————-

“What just happened?” Buffy asked, shaking her head.

“I think we just saved the world, Buff,” Xander said. “Like, again. This vampire slaying business just gets messier and messier. But… the body seems to have entirely vanished. I was expecting more bits of snake after we blew him up.”

“Well, I am the chosen one. One girl in all the world. Stands to reason that when I use dynamite, things stay blown up.”

“It always seems like two girls in all the world would’ve been better. Or a few thousand,” Xander said. “What do you think, Will. Think we could do with a few thousand Buffy’s? Like a Buffy Army? Will?”

“Huh?”

“A Buffy army?”

“I - I don’t think they’d fit in our room,” she said, absently.

“What are you looking at?”

“There was - There was a woman here? From the FBI?”

“What? No. What does the FBI have to do with this?” Buffy asked. “They need to leave this to the professionals. We don’t need amateurs in our way.”

They linked arms and left the scene of their greatest victory.

——————

“So, I-I have to say it… I mean, really?” T asked. They’d stayed largely silent until now but…

“You wanted better. You said.”

“And you wanted them to stay home, out of our way. What did you just tell them? You made that girl into the ‘chosen one’? A ‘vampire slayer’? Where did you get that from?”

“Well, if you mist know, I pulled it out of my ass.” F said, but the explanation wasn’t cutting it. “Okay, it was something I heard about - your - he told me about this one time that - .”

“Wait. He did that?” T asked sceptically.

“Ask him if you don’t believe me.”

“Of course I believe you - I just have a hard time… Aren’t you putting them in danger?” Especially that one girl…

“The blonde’s pretty limber, she was more than holding her own when we turned up. She can help keep the drones down,” F replied. “That’s why I called her a ‘vampire slayer’ and made them into the vampires. Pretty nifty, huh? And did you see her in action?”

“Oh, you’re not into her are you?” F’s flexibility wasn’t limited to her combat skills.

“No - but what about you and Red?”

Red…

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You’re going to try that. On me?”

“I’m not trying anything. There’s… Look, they won’t even remember we were there,” she replied. Not that it wasn’t something she regretted the necessity of, for the very first time. “But come on? Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Where did you get it from?”

“I told you. And it’s not my fault she’s called Buffy.”

“Maybe it is the name that makes it even more unbelievable. My - he wouldn’t do that. He just wouldn’t.” She knew that to her very bones.

“He was young, things were different back then, I guess. But I shit you not. That’s where it came from. Course… he never said it to anyone called ‘Buffy.’ That part, I’ll give you. It’s a fucking stupid name.”

“Its short for Elizabeth,” she said. “I - vampire slayers…”

“You want I should’ve made them ‘ghost-busters’?”

She considered for a moment. “No… I guess not. You might have - We might have put them in danger.”

“I told you. That chick can look after herself. She’s not as good as me, but she’s definitely better than you. She was doing just fine for an amateur. Did you see her fight? Seriously, she’s a natural, T. Stronger than she looks and when she believes that she’s special, she’ll become that. You know how it works. Most of it’s in the mind.

“But are you sure you’re not more worried about your red-haired little friend? Because… I think I probably just gave you an excuse to see her again.”

She looked F in the eye.

Saw the huge grin. “I fucking knew it, T. Because I know you better than you know yourself. How often have I been telling you that? This proves it.”

That… that might be true. Coarse and vulgar as F could be, they got on better than they ever should’ve been able to because - in a very real way - they got each other.

“There’s - Look, the chances are we’ll never see them again.”

After all, they’d be in trouble. Interfering in MIB business if they did.

“Hey, have a little Faith will you?” F asked with a wink.


***********************


Afterword:
If you enjoyed this ‘snippet’ (yes, I can call 12,000+ words a snippet, I’m officially labelled as ‘wordy’) then you need to say so, at least if you want to see more. Otherwise, it really won’t be written. I just don’t know if anyone wants this sort of story or if it’s just me.
Fair warning though, like I said at the start, I won’t be posting more until I’ve written the whole story (assuming there’s a readership) so we’re not going to see updates here anytime soon.
Also, I expect that as I develop the characters and scenarios more, I will need to revise this opening just so that the characters here are consistent with what develop as I plot out the whole story.

_________________
-------------------------
If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.

Chance in *Chance*
-------------------------


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun May 04, 2014 11:55 am 
Offline
6. Sassy Eggs

Joined: Mon Apr 25, 2005 2:59 am
Posts: 357
Location: Ontario, Canada
OK, as per request I'm de-lurking for the first time in several years. This story needs to be written -- make it so!

_________________
"There will always be magic with you,” Willow said softly. “Always.” -- Jixer, "The Instruments Available."


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun May 04, 2014 8:55 pm 
Offline
9. Gay Now
User avatar

Joined: Wed Dec 15, 2010 12:51 pm
Posts: 922
Location: Kaskinen, Finland. Citizen of Kitopia
Excellent beginning, can't wait to read more...

_________________
We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Buggered

Posting while nude improves your mood...


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Mon May 05, 2014 3:33 pm 
Offline
3. Flaming O
User avatar

Joined: Thu Oct 10, 2013 10:32 am
Posts: 75
Topics: 1
Location: North Carolina
First off I have to thank you for getting Will Smith's Men in Black song stuck in my head for the past day...
I am totally voting for this story to be developed and written. There is so much room to play within the Men in Black world and rules - aliens can look and act like anything you want them to. IF you were to make Buffy an agent she would be a lot like Will Smith's character in my humble opinion. I also think Willow would make a killer MiB. I would love to see how you develop this story including what goofy fun could be had with who else might be an alien.

-H.

_________________
Sometimes it feels like we are running headlong through the woods on a dark cloudy night from monsters we can't see towards a destination we don't know.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Tue May 06, 2014 12:18 pm 
Offline
23. Volumey Text

Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2005 1:23 pm
Posts: 3794
Topics: 5
Hey russ! Thank you for de-lurking. It's always nice (though it wasn't a ploy on my part!!!) You've hit the nail on the head. It needs to be a story. My ideas are character based, scenes dotted around the possibilities and an arc for T/W (can you guess what it is?!)

On the other hand, it needs a full story arc... If I can get to that then... that will help.

Thanks again

Zampsa - Might be a wait!!! Thanks

Loislane - That song has been in my head a lot longer. Every time it comes out of my exercise mix I start having to type ideas into my phone... LOL

Yes, there are LOTS of possibilities and lots of fun to be had. If I can find a story, as I suggested above. Of course, I could just do a T/W get together story in that world, but that seems like kind of a waste of the rest of the setting.

I won't spoil my thoughts, but I've given big clues of what could happen in the part already posted...

One significant character from canon certainly needs to be an alien. And not for the obvious reasons... :)

Still not set on whether this will work, but I am working on a scene right now.

Thanks for now.

Katharyn

_________________
-------------------------
If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.

Chance in *Chance*
-------------------------


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sat May 10, 2014 2:29 pm 
Offline
1. Blessed Wannabe

Joined: Thu Nov 28, 2013 4:57 pm
Posts: 5
Location: Canada
yes, please continue! I'd totally be into this story


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Thu Jan 22, 2015 9:24 am 
Offline
3. Flaming O

Joined: Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:35 am
Posts: 59
Location: Baltimore, MD
This was a cool teaser. I'd love to read a full story. That is, if you're still even thinking about writing it after 9 months or so. lol


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2015 1:48 pm 
Offline
23. Volumey Text

Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2005 1:23 pm
Posts: 3794
Topics: 5
Well... actually I still, kind of, am.

The delay has actually been due to the fact I've been writing two other T/W stories. One of which should start posting this week and the other (the third 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' parody/tribute) I've moved to writing now the other is done.

However MIB is in my mind. It's just seeking the core of the story that I need to sort out. Cool scenes I've got lots of (I think!) but the story needs to be found...

Definitely still on the agenda though.

Thanks!
Katharyn

_________________
-------------------------
If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.

Chance in *Chance*
-------------------------


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2015 2:17 pm 
Offline
7. Teeny Tinkerbell Light
User avatar

Joined: Sun Aug 08, 2010 6:33 pm
Posts: 573
Location: Los Scandalous, CA
This week?

:banana :applause :bounce :dumbo :bow :grin

_________________
The kitten formerly known as SMGOVAN ~Official Head of Security for the Finey_McFine fan club. Ass whippings will be handed out liberally!


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2015 2:31 pm 
Offline
23. Volumey Text

Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2005 1:23 pm
Posts: 3794
Topics: 5
Yes... in fact it's just awaiting release by moderators.

:)

And hi!

Katharyn

_________________
-------------------------
If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.

Chance in *Chance*
-------------------------


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2015 9:43 pm 
Offline
3. Flaming O

Joined: Sun Dec 01, 2013 2:35 am
Posts: 59
Location: Baltimore, MD
cool. I'm glad to hear it's still a possibility.

And awesome! A new fic starting this week! I can't wait.


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject: Re: (Wo)Men in Black - A Teaser... NEW 4th May 2014.
PostPosted: Sun Jan 25, 2015 11:57 pm 
Offline
23. Volumey Text

Joined: Sun Apr 24, 2005 1:23 pm
Posts: 3794
Topics: 5
I've just added the writing to my 2015 list of objectives. Due to the volume of other stuff, it may not all turn out posted this year, but I'll hope to get to the writing. There's definitely a story there, I just need to find it.

I think the issue for me is that - in the past - I liked to write 'definitive' stories. Like ones that reshaped the whole world and were 'complete' in the sense of being everything there was to say. I probably need to come at Women in Black more as a movie 'episode' than that. It simplifies the writing process, but does demand a kick-ass story idea because you can't just 'play in the world' to amuse the reader.

Anywho... thank you for making me think about it again. I love the creative part and it will help push ideas into my head!

Katharyn

_________________
-------------------------
If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.

Chance in *Chance*
-------------------------


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 13 posts ] 

All times are UTC - 8 hours [ DST ]


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  

W/T Love 24/7 since July 2000
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group