Author: Restive Nature (aka Bavite)
Disclaimer: The characters and fictional placings of either of these shows do not belong to me. They belong to Cameron/ Eglee (Dark Angel), Joss Whedon (BtVS) and Whedon/ Greenwalt (AtS). Only the story belongs to me.
Rating: 13 (for now)
Genre: Crossover of DA/ BtVS
Type: WiP
Timeline/ Spoilers: Post Season 5 for Buffy. Up to LAtR for DA. Story set in DA time.
Summary: BtVS/ DA crossover. Life brings about so many changes. Especially when one has just risen from the dead.
A/N- Not all of the events that took place in Dark Angel will be present in this fiction. And there may be more time passing between events than it appeared on the show. So I guess that makes this AU.
A/N2- Someone asked if I was going to be including AtS Season 5’s Illyria in this fiction. And sadly I have no plans to. Sorry to disappoint, but I hope you do enjoy the cameo’s of past characters that I will bring into the fiction down the road.
Chapter Five
May 15th, 2021
Alec stared at Logan, as the older man grew uncomfortable under his scrutiny, until the word finally burst from his mouth. "What?" Alec just shook his head. Logan heard a muffled giggle from the backseat and glanced up into the rearview mirror in time to see Max trying to hide her smile. He couldn’t help but grin back. He looked back at Alec expectantly.
"I’m sorry, but you have a cousin named Buffy?" Alec shook his head again. Max continued giggling and Alec twisted around in his seat. "And you can’t laugh. Remember Ralph?"
"Hey, you’re the one that suggested that," she retorted quickly. "It’s not my fault that she liked it."
"Okay," Alec agreed cocking his head to the side, "but at least it was a normal name. Unlike Fixit or Zero or Bugler."
"Well at least they were descriptive," she snapped back, although there was no rancor in her voice. "And those are nothing compared to Logan’s family. I think I’ve lost track of all the Bipsy’s and Mitzy’s." She glanced at the older man and was relieved to see that there was a grin on his face as well.
"Well that was just my father’s side," he explained. "Buffy was kind of the exception to the rule of nice normal names on my mom’s side. And you still can’t talk."
"What do you mean?" she demanded. She could see the glint in Alec’s eye as well.
"Honestly," Logan chuckled. "Who names a kid Krit?"
"Zack," she supplied immediately. "Who was a kid himself, so don’t pick on him."
"Well see there," Alec laughed. "That’s a good argument, but it in no way helps you or Logan’s cousin. Or Krit," he added. He turned to Logan. "So does your cousin despise her name or has she learned to live with after all these years." Neither one expected Alec’s teasing question to bring about the pain that swamped Logan’s face.
"Logan?" Max asked softly, immediately. Logan sniffed once and then glanced back at her.
"Sorry, it’s nothing," Logan assured them. Alec’s question hadn’t done more than bring up many memories, not all of them good. But he couldn’t have known that. "Buffy passed away when I was twelve." There was a short moment of awkward silence.
"Sorry man," Alec offered gently. He could see that it was something that still pained Logan. But the other man just waved one hand.
"It’s okay," Logan shrugged. "It was twenty years ago. I’ve had plenty of time to get over it." He continued to drive, even as he seemed lost in the memories. A small shudder went through him. "That was a bad year." He seemed to continue on, talking more to himself than them. "Too many funerals. Too much pain. And Dawn…"
"Who’s Dawn?" Max asked quietly. And it seemed to bring him out of his thoughts. Another smile graced his face.
"My other cousin," he clarified. "Buffy’s little sister. She was closer to my age."
"Oh, did she idolize her older sister too?" Max asked with a grin. She could certainly empathize with those feelings, even if the kids in her unit weren’t true blood siblings. And it brought the grin out on Logan’s face even more.
"Oh yeah," he chuckled. "Every time we visited or they came to see us, Dawn and I would follow Buffy around incessantly. Drove her nuts. Especially when she hit her teen years."
"How much older was Buffy?" asked Alec, puzzled. Logan thought for a moment.
"Seven years," Logan frowned. "She was born in January. I was born in November. Dawn was a year older than I was. And we had a lot more in common."
"Yet you still looked up to Buffy more?" Max asked. She’d thought plenty in the past on her own familial relationships. But she’d never really considered how Logan, an only child, might substitute cousins for roles that were lacking in his own immediate family.
"Well sure," Logan shrugged, his eyes still on the road. "Well, when I was really little, and they would visit she was always taking care of me. Playing games with me. We had fun."
"And as you grew up?" Alec asked. He was finding just as much interest in a subject that had never really related to him as it had Max. Logan glanced at Alec, seeming to find the best way to describe his elder cousin.
"Okay, imagine the generic television stereotype of life in high school," Logan began and already Alec was nodding. His love of television was just another little foible among them. "You had your jocks and nerds and popular kids, all that stuff."
"And what was Buffy?" Alec smirked as if he already knew it. Logan shared a conspiratorial grin.
"Cheerleader," he grunted. Alec sighed in appreciation.
"Was she hot?" He had to duck as Max’s fist flew through the air straight to his shoulder. "Ow! What?"
"That’s really insensitive Alec," she seethed. "You jerk."
"So what," he whined. "She’s dead. Do you really think she’s gonna care if I ask what she looked like?"
"But that’s not what you asked," she pointed out triumphantly. He rolled his eyes and glanced at Logan who was trying to hide a smile. Thank goodness there was someone who understand. He dipped his chin and widened his eyes until Logan got the message.
"Yeah, Buffy was pretty," Logan chuckled, slowing down a little as he took in a road sign in serious need of a new coat of paint. Apparently he was speeding, if only slightly. "And nice. But once she started to grow up, things were different."
"How so?" Max asked.
"Well, all of a sudden boys and clothes were so much more important," he gave an uncaring shrug. It was a fact of life with some kids. Buffy just happened to be one of them, where popularity meant everything. "I mean, whenever we saw each other over the summers and vacations, she was still nice to me, but she just didn’t have time for me. She was always on the phone." He thought some more. "I guess the reason I looked up to her so much was because even while she was part of the in crowd, she never was mean to me. She was everything I wanted to be, but wasn’t."
"Hot, blonde, popular, able to bend your body in impossible positions?" Alec teased. Again he received another light swat from Max.
"Why do you assume she’d blonde?" she demanded.
"She was a cheerleader," he shrugged.
"Not all cheerleaders are blonde Alec," she huffed.
"The good ones are," he laughed with a glint in his eyes, just daring her to reply. Then he’d be all over her for indulging herself in teen high school flicks herself. Obviously she realized this as well and kept her peace. They were quiet for a moment as Logan continued to drive. Finally Alec picked up the thread again.
"So how did your cousin die?" he asked carefully, but Logan didn’t seem perturbed by the question. He just gave Alec a wary glance.
"That’s a long story," he sighed. Alec glanced out the window, watching the trees on the roadside flashing by.
"It’s not like we haven’t got time," he grouched. Logan grimaced and gave a little twitch of his shoulders.
"I guess."
Max leaned forward, interested despite herself, but also sensitive to Logan’s feelings on the matter. "You don’t have to tell us Logan."
"That’s okay," he smiled sadly back at her in the rearview mirror. "Like I said, it was a long time ago."
"So what happened?" Alec nudged.
"She killed herself." Logan had to restrain his laughter. Not at the thought of what his cousin had done, but at the wide-eyed shock of the transgenics. It wasn’t often that he could catch them off guard, but he definitely had here. He could just see their thoughts. How did a pretty, popular teenager get to the point where suicide was an option?
"Oh, wow," Max finally muttered. "That’s just…" She wasn’t sure exactly what to say. She couldn’t really say she was sorry, for she didn’t think she had anything to be sorry about. But it seemed to be the word to use in uncomfortable situations like this. But if Logan was really as over it as he said, then she didn’t need to make him sad. There was already enough in the current events of their personal lives to do that.
"It sucks," Alec announced while Max was floundering for words. "Why’d she do that?" And unlike her, he had no compunction about asking. Especially since Logan was in the mood to answer.
Logan sighed and shrugged one shoulder. "There were a lot of contributing factors," he went on. "And there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know, or figure out until I was older." He gave them a brief smile. "People don’t like to tell little kids stuff like this." Both transgenics knew that Logan only meant to convey what his experiences were, but it just seemed to undercut the fact that as children, they were never saved from the gory details. In fact, in some cases they as children, were the causes of the gory details.
"Go on," Max prompted softly.
Logan sighed as he readjusted his hands on the steering wheel. "It started long before I ever knew that there was something wrong," he began. "I mean, I knew something was wrong when I heard that Joyce and Hank were getting a divorce. Buffy and Dawn’s parents," he explained unnecessarily. "I think the reason I was so upset about it was because I was afraid that my parents would get divorced as well. But then, I was six, maybe seven years old."
Alec picked up on what Logan was implying a little quicker than Max had. "You seriously can’t tell me that they broke up because their kid was having problems?" he demanded incredulously. Although he shouldn’t have been surprised. People were so eager to dump off responsibility of their own problems on whatever was convenient.
Logan shook his head. "I don’t think that was the only reason, but it did contribute to things," he explained. "No, when she was 15 Buffy started acting out. Complete turn around in her personality. All the stuff that used to be important to her, she dropped. Friends, cheerleading, school. And then, she just lost it completely."
"What happened?" Max spoke up from the back seat. Despite not knowing any of these people, she was interested. Perhaps because it was something that shaped Logan into the person he was today.
"At a school dance," Logan sucked in his breath and then spoke quickly as if to get something painful out of the way, " she burned down the high school gym and her parents had her committed."
"Whoa," Alec’s eyes widened. Logan’s cousin was a pyromaniac? That really didn’t gel.
"Yeah," Logan scoffed his agreement. "She was in the institution for about a month and a half. I think it was then that Hank and Joyce finalized their divorce. I remember that Dawn came to stay with us for a few weeks. She was a mess."
"I don’t doubt," Alec murmured with a glance back at Max. She seemed lost in thought, but he was quite prepared to let her be. Hearing this had to remind her of Ben, even if the situations were totally different. And he wasn’t far off. Max who had thought of Ben, was musing on the things that could make a child snap. There had to be a reason behind it. Even if it was as Manticore had assumed in Ben’s case, simple genetics. Maybe this Buffy had some depression or condition, an inherited condition that caused it. It could have been the environment she lived in. Or maybe it was something deeper.
"After Buffy got out of the mental institution, she and Joyce moved to Sunnydale," Logan continued. "Joyce found work at an art gallery there and the public high school didn’t seem to have a problem accepting Buffy."
"What about Dawn?" Max asked, sensitive from experience about the break-up of siblings. Logan and Alec had picked that up from her immediately, but it had long been part of her nature, to equate things around her in how she could relate to them. Everyone did it and so there was no reason for them to comment on it.
"She stayed with Hank then," Logan answered. As a child he’d felt bad for the girls. In truth, hadn’t even known that Buffy had been committed to a mental institution. It was only a chance conversation between his parents that clued him in to the fact. And being older and wiser, he’d begun to piece things together.
"So did Buffy continue her wild streak?" Alec asked with a mild undertone of humor. Personally, he was able to remain fairly detached from the story, not really knowing the people aside from Logan who had been involved.
Logan shook his head. "Everything seemed okay after they moved, for a while anyway. But then, let’s see, I was about ten, my mom got a call from Joyce. Buffy had disappeared and she was wondering if Buffy had come to us."
"Disappeared how?" Max demanded. The thought evoked shudders through her. When unit members or others disappeared in Manticore, it was never to a good end.
"Well, at first we thought she’d run away," Logan offered, including himself in the ‘we’, but in truth it was more of the same as before. Leaving the child out of the loop. And leaving him to piece this together when he was older. "But then later Joyce told my mom that Buffy had been accused of murder and kicked out of school. They’d had a big fight and Joyce kicked her out."
"Did she do it?" Alec asked softly. Logan shook his head quickly.
"No! Eye witnesses at the scene cleared her," he spoke vehemently. As messed up as his cousin had been, he was proud to say in a twisted way, that murder had been beyond her. "But she ran away before they cleared her."
"Where’d she go?" Max asked this time. Both transgenics were appreciative of how this story was helping pass the time and the more he spoke, the easier Logan seemed to feel.
"Back to LA," he shrugged. "But she went home after a few months."
"So if things had improved so much but then she was accused of murder, was that what made her snap?" Alec wondered. Logan made as if to speak and then seemed to reconsider. Obviously Alec had brought up a point that he hadn’t thought much of.
"That may have been part of it," he sighed as he pursed his lips. "But since it seemed to be a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I don’t know. Maybe to her it was a contributing factor to whatever was going through her mind."
"I think it probably did," Max’s voice was slightly shaky, again her empathy was getting the better of her. "She was kicked out of school, hunted like a criminal, isolated from family and friends. How could it not affect her?"
They mulled this over for a few minutes. "I don’t know," Logan finally conceded. "Although she went home and things seemed to go back to normal. She was accepted back into school. They really couldn’t deny her, seeing how she didn’t murder that girl."
"Why would the school be concerned about a murder if she didn’t do it?" Alec asked. "Aside form the obvious implications that she could be a danger?"
"Oh," Logan realized he’d left out details, and plenty of them. But the whole life story of his cousin could fill up many car trips. "Well, the girl was murdered in the school." Both transgenics nodded. "But as I was saying things were good again. I remember when mom and dad got a call from Joyce to tell us that Buffy had been accepted to Northwestern University." He smiled at that. The whole family had been excited about it. It seemed to be a mark that Buffy had made a turning point.
Even Max and Alec understood how big a deal that was. Before the pulse, Northwestern had been a fairly prestigious school. And students needed good scored to get in. This thought also occurred to Logan. "She apparently scored really well on her SAT’s. 1420 or something like that." Neither commented since those tests had been abandoned in favor of more comprehensive tests that had developed over the years. Alec briefly wondered if some of the testing that had been performed on transgenics in classroom settings might have contributed to that change. After all, their beginning in life had been prompted by human desire to produce something better and research the hell out of it.
"So the family was all proud, huh?" Max smiled. But Logan’s face fell.
"Yeah, we were."
"But then?" Alec prompted.
Logan took a deep breath before relating the next. "At her graduation, the high school blew up." As he’d expected, their eyes widened suitably.
"Was it… your cousin?" Max wanted to know, puzzled at how he’d phrased that.
"Well, the official police report was that a gas main exploded," Logan retorted; though the expression on his face convinced both that he certainly didn’t believe it.
"But you don’t buy that?" Alec chuckled.
"I don’t know," Logan confessed. "But given her history, it really made me wonder." He paused, mulling it over again. "But maybe it was the city gas lines. I mean, if you ever look into the history of the town, there was a lot of strange stuff going on. Even before Buffy and Joyce moved out there."
"Like what?" Alec frowned. Weird stuff? How weird could a town be? But Max wasn’t so dismissive. She was reminded of the time she and Logan had gone to Cape Haven. Of course, it hadn’t so much been the town that was weird, as the residents. But then, they’d been hiding a pretty big secret. She supposed that that was more likely to occur in small towns where everyone knew everyone else’s business. And they got protective. That’s why she liked the anonymity of larger cities like New York, LA and Seattle.
"Well, the yearly death count is amazingly high," Logan shrugged. "Yet all the other crime rates fall within the normal expected parameters of a town that size. And cemeteries. They have over twenty, both in and out of city limits."
"Well you know, that makes sense," Alec laughed. "High death rate, they need someplace to put them." Logan tilted his head back and forth as if acknowledging that statement.
"Yeah, but the thing that gets me," Logan started to rant, "is that the people living there never seemed to notice anything. I looked into it again later, with what records did survive after the Pulse. And the majority of cases were closed because people thought to be eyewitnesses either recanted or couldn’t recall any details to move a case forward. And the cops certainly didn’t seem to be inclined to do anything useful."
Alec turned minutely in his seat to arch a discreet eyebrow in Max’s direction. Maybe now they were finally finding out where Logan’s determination to take down corrupt sector cops and politicians originated. She simply gave a small shake of her head and clamped her lips together, silently warning him not to bring it up. She was still interested in this story and didn’t want Logan getting sidetracked. Alec sighed and turned back to the other man.
"But they went after your cousin, didn’t they, for that murder? That’s doing something?" he pointed out.
"True," Logan conceded. "But I don’t think they ever did apprehend the actual murderer, even with the information given them."
"Did your cousin ever have any more run-ins with the cops then?" Alec continued, also wanting to get Logan away from his soapbox.
"Surprisingly no," Logan smiled. "Like I said, after she got accepted into University, we were all kind of relieved. Although, in the end, she decided to stay in Sunnydale and attend the local college. Everything went good. Until Dawn moved in with them, I guess."
"Something happened with Dawn?" Max asked quickly.
Logan glanced up in the rearview mirror to give her a reassuring smile. "Mostly sibling rivalry. And apparently a lot of yelling and fighting. Remember, there was a six year gap between them."
"What difference does that make?" Alec demanded, puzzled. It was Max’s turn to giggle.
"For teenaged girls, a lot," she explained, as if he should already know this. "Plus I imagine that Buffy got used to being the child whom everyone focused on. Probably didn’t like having to share her mother again. And from what I understand, younger sisters are generally considered brats." She bit the inside of her cheek, wondering if Alec knew that she was considered the baby of her unit. When he said nothing further, she breathed a slight sigh of relief. Well, at least he couldn’t tease her about that. She turned her attention back to the older man. "But what made Dawn move in with them. I thought she was staying with her Dad?"
"Uh," Logan had to think a moment, as this had been something else hidden from him at that age. "Oh yeah, a blonde secretary, a trip to Europe and a child didn’t seem to mix," he offered scathingly, making it perfectly clear what he thought of his cousin’s father. Alec just grinned. It made sense to him.
"So aside from the sibling rivalry, things were still good, huh?" Max muttered.
"They were," Logan acknowledged, but then his face grew troubled. "Until Joyce got sick. He concentrated directly on the road as he spoke, unable to meet either of their gazes. Loss was loss no matter which way you cut it and it still had the power to make him ache. "She had a brain tumor. The doctors operated and removed it. But several months later, she had an aneurysm. Buffy was the one to find her."
"Poor kid," Alec murmured. Silence reigned for many long moments. And soon Logan was pulling off the road, into a small motel along the highway. As he rolled into the parking lot and slowed to a full stop, he rested his hands at the top of the steering wheel, seeming to intently study the tips of his blunt fingernails.
"That was the last time I ever saw Buffy. At Joyce’s funeral. A few months after that, Buffy was up on some construction site. She leapt to her death. We didn’t even know until six months after that when Hank and Dawn came to say goodbye to us. Even Hank had only found out that his daughter died a few weeks before that." He turned to the others and they could see the lines of strain, deepened by this remembrance. "Do you guys mind if we stop here? I’m really tired."
Max offered him a soft smile and a nod. Logan barely glanced at Alec, but the transgenic male made no protest. Logan opened his door and slipped out. He shut the door softly and moved up the wooden steps leading into the motel office. Alec turned around completely in his seat and eyed her speculatively.
"You know," he muttered, "that sure explains a lot."
"What does?"
"That whole story. Now I know exactly why Logan has a thing for you."
"It does not," she protested faintly. He just pinned her with a knowing look.
"Yeah Max, it does."
Chapter Six
No comments:
Post a Comment