Summary: The Scoobies have a small accident that leads
to some major changes in their lives
Rating: NC17
Timing: Takes place S5, shortly after Family but before Fool for Love
Disclaimer All kinds of gender stereotypes were harmed
in the writing of this story. Any injured copyrights were unintentional
Notes Mydeira is my Beta Nazi, but she knows I'm her bitch.
This story was inspired by a very old Star Trek fanfic titled The Procrustean Petard,
by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Of course, they didn't actually have sex in theirs . . .
The title is a quote from Storm Front, by Jim Butcher.
You haven't lived until you've heard James say those three words
together in that soft, caramel rich voice of his . . . guh.
Chapter 3 He Said, She Said
Giles and Willow arrived twenty minutes later to find the others seated around the living room in various emotional states and various modes of dress. They had resorted to the expedient of swapping clothes with each other. Xander wore an old oversized pair of sweats of Buffy’s (which were still too small for him) and Tara’s blouse. Anya was dressed in Spike’s jeans and Xander’s t-shirt while Tara wore Xander’s jeans, which were about three inches too short, and his flannel work shirt. Buffy was dressed in spare fatigues Riley had left in case of emergency. They were a little big all over, but they covered her. Spike had raided Buffy’s wardrobe for a pair of jeans that fit him like he was painted into them and a plain white t-shirt with the word “Bitch” printed in simple block letters across the chest. Joyce was more curious how such a shirt had ended up in Buffy’s dresser than that Spike had chosen to wear it. While the others were all barefoot, Spike was wearing a pair of red canvas low tops that looked suspiciously like Dawn’s.
Buffy was pacing the room in frustration, but Joyce found she couldn’t look at her daughter like this for too long. She was reminded too much of young romance, first kisses, whispered promises that were destined to be violated.
Everyone was relieved when the doorbell rang.
“I swear it wasn’t me!” Willow insisted vehemently as she came into the house. “I was in the programming lab all . . .” She froze in her tracks in the door. “Holy goddess.” She scanned them, assigning names to new faces, focusing on one. “Tara?” She crossed over to the couch to sit next to her partner, taking Tara’s hand and touching her face. Tara tried not to flinch.
Giles remained in the doorway, evaluating. And coming up with an observation he was none too happy with. “What is Spike doing here?”
Spike grinned. “Why, Rupert, ‘m touched you recognize me, what with the new digs ‘n all.” His sweet soprano shimmered with amusement.
“Shut up, Spike.” Buffy backhanded him on the shoulder.
“Oy, watch the upper body strength, Slayer, I’m a delicate little flower now.”
“You’re a vampire, Spike.” She paused. “You are still a vampire, aren’t you?”
He gave her a sour look, then gently shook his head, allowing his vampiric features to slip into place. Joyce had only seen him look like this once before, that night at the high school, and she had been too full of adrenaline and too ignorant of what she was actually seeing to remember it well. She often completely forgot that he was anything other than an unusual young man who occasionally enjoyed her company. But now . . .
He looked feline, his long, feminine features focused in along his nose and eyes. He ran his tongue ferally over sharp, ragged teeth and grinned, looking for all the world like a kitten toying with a mouse. “Still all monster, Slayer.” His voice was harsher now. He probably had to be careful of his tongue around those teeth. “You never could put an end to me as a man. Think you can do me as a girl, pet?”
“That is so cool!” a juvenile voice came from the dining room before anyone could respond to Spike’s innuendo.
“Dawn!” Buffy echoed Joyce’s exclamation.
With a stern look at her eldest, Joyce turned to her youngest. “Is your homework done?”
Dawn nodded, unable to take her eyes off of Spike as he shifted back into his human face.
“Then it’s bedtime.”
“But Mom . . .”
“Now, please.”
The girl turned, grumbling, to storm up the stairs to bed, ignoring the soft chorus of “Good night” from the assembled group.
“She’s just going to listen from the top of the stairs,” Buffy complained.
“You let me worry about that. You have other things on your mind.”
“Quite,” Giles intervened. “Let’s start with what happened tonight.”
Buffy narrated the events in the cemetery, punctuated by contributions from the others.
Willow squealed in excitement as Tara related the effects of the working she’d done. “So the thicken spell actually worked? That’s so great! Now we can . . .” She looked around at the others, abashed. “Talk about something else because this is so not the point now.” But Joyce saw her squeeze Tara’s large hand in excitement.
With a stern look, Giles returned to the conversation. “So this shockwave you felt, it was after you decapitated it?”
Buffy nodded, and Spike added “Felt like it came right up the handle of my axe when I slammed it in her gut. Felt like I could feel it with all my senses at once.”
“His,” Buffy corrected.
“No,” Spike replied, looking at her as though she were stupid, “her.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. At the last minute, the creature changed into a guy. About six feet tall, strong looking, blond . . .”
“I was standin’ right there, Slayer,” Spike insisted. “It turned into a girl. I’ll grant you the blonde, but she was five two if she was an inch, and she had a figure that would stop traffic.”
“Spike’s right,” Tara interjected. “It was a woman, but not quite so . . . statuesque.” She flushed. “And she had more auburn hair.”
Xander jumped in. “They’re both right. Dark hair, stacked. Only more athletic. And taller, five five or six.”
“Am I the only one that saw this thing as male?” Buffy complained.
Anya raised her hand. “Only your description is completely incorrect. He was tall, six foot four or so, with black hair and lots of muscles.”
Giles diligently noted down each description. “Did any of you see its face?”
They looked at each other, all shaking their heads negatively.
“It went back to normal after we killed it, anyway,” Buffy added.
Giles looked over his notes critically. “Well, there isn’t a great deal here to go on. I think our next step will be for me to examine the remains before the groundskeepers clear away the body . . .”
“Oh!” Buffy remembered, snapping her fingers. “We brought you the head.”
Joyce was surprised to see him roll his eyes with a smile. “You are too good to me, Buffy.”
“Well, hey, since you missed out on all the excitement . . .”
“And a right fetching little pepper pot you would have made, Rupert,” Spike taunted.
“But Giles,” Xander said before Giles could reply, “what’s happened to us?”
The Watcher set aside his notebook and thoughtfully removed his glasses. “It could be any of a number of things. It could be a simple glamour, although I doubt it. Too much detail of your original selves remain. Spike’s and Anya’s hair color treatments, Buffy’s vampire bite scars,” Joyce looked up at her daughter at that, who turned her head uneasily, revealing the three distinct sets of scars on the right side of her neck, one still pale from recently fallen scabs. She’d been bitten again, and recently. One more thing Joyce hadn’t known about. But Giles went on, “These are all signs of the body’s physical experience, and not something a sorcerer is likely to include in an illusion spell. It may be a genetic alteration, which wouldn’t alter any of the physical changes you’ve experienced except those directly related to . . . um . . . your gendered characteristics.”
“Such as?” Buffy asked.
Giles turned several shades of purple.
Spike snorted, amused at the Watcher’s discomfort. “Piercings, for one. Hard to have a Prince Albert when you’ve got no peter to put it in.”
“Yes, thank you, that imagery should lull me peacefully off to my rest tonight.”
“Priss.”
“Well,” Willow said, rising off the couch. “I guess I’ll start working the illusion spell angle. Just to confirm what we know it’s not.” She took Tara’s hand in hers, looking a bit confused when Tara seemed to resist. But the girl allowed her new, unwieldy body to be pulled up off the couch as well, and they headed toward the door.
“Will you have any troubles with your dormitory?” Giles asked, concerned.
“Nah,” Willow waved his concern aside. “It’s co-ed housing. Boys and girls are in and out of each other’s rooms all the time. Um,” she caught Joyce’s eye in embarrassment, “in a strictly platonic sense, of course.”
“Of course,” Joyce nodded knowingly, hiding her smile.
Spike rose from his slouch in the armchair as well. “May as well see what I can find out about this thing.” He looked down at himself. “Got the perfect disguise for a change. I’ll see what I can pick up.”
“Or who,” Buffy responded snidely.
He just grinned. “Jealous that I’m prettier than you now, Slayer?”
“Not hardly.”
He winked at her, then slipped out the French doors silently, presumably to leave through the kitchen door.
“Not much we can do tonight,” Xander said, also rising from his seat on the arm of the chair Anya sat in. “We’ll help you with corpse detail in the morning, Giles.”
“What do you mean we?” Anya complained, following him out of the living room. “You don’t look strong enough to carry a bag of groceries.”
He held the door for her, an incongruous sight. “Well, you always did want to wear the pants in the family, honey.” He winked at the adults and closed the door behind them.
“Mom, do you mind if I stay here tonight? Since I’ve got a single, it might be harder for me to explain things.”
“Of course, honey. I just put clean sheets on your bed the other day.”
“Thanks.” She sighed, a deep, tired sound. “They may be different muscles, but they all still hurt. I’m going to go take a hot shower and crash. Night, Mom. Night, Giles.”
When she was gone, Joyce moved over to collapse on the couch. “They’re really good at this.”
Giles moved to lean against the fireplace. “They’ve had a lot of practice. But yes, they are.”
“I mean, if something like this had happened to me, I’d be a wreck.”
“We’ve all had experiences at being something other than ourselves. Buffy’s been another girl entirely, Xander’s been possessed by demon hyena spirits and split into his positive and negative selves. Willow’s seen herself as a vampire dominatrix and I spent thirty excruciating hours as a Fyarl demon. And of course we became one amalgamated group entity when we brought an end to Adam last year. We have different markers for self than most people.”
“So it would seem.” She let her head fall back against the cushions for a moment, then looked back up at him, concerned. “They’re going to want to take these new bodies out for test drives, aren’t they?”
“I shouldn’t wonder. They’re of an age for sexual experimentation. Except for Spike, of course. But as he’s a vampire . . .”
“Don’t you think we should speak to them? About safety and protection . . .”
“I hardly think that’s necessary.”
“But what if . . .”
“Perhaps you’re right. I’ll sit down with the lesbian witch, the thousand year old ex-vengeance demon and the One Girl in All the World, who just happens to be your daughter, and discuss a young man’s responsibilities as a sex partner, while you review the birds and the bees from a woman’s perspective with the master vampire and your daughter’s best male friend.” She must have looked horrified, because he smiled. “They’re smart kids, Joyce. They’ll be fine. Besides,” he drew in a breath to sigh, “by the time we could sit down with them, it will probably be too late. I would imagine Anya and Xander will have fairly effectively deflowered each other by morning.”
“Good lord! Do you really think so?”
“I’m fair certain of it. Anya still hasn’t forgiven us for denying her the chance to explore the possibilities of having two Xanders at her disposal at once. I don’t see her missing a second opportunity for experimentation.”
Joyce thought about that, perhaps a little too hard. “I don’t think I can remember the last time I was that uninhibited.”
The look he gave her was potent, but his voice was velvety soft. “I can.”
She felt a delicious shiver run through her as her body remembered being that free. With him.
“Joyce,” he said softly, “just because the male population is too bloody ignorant to take you down off the shelf, don’t ever think that you are anything but a desirable, attractive and incredibly sensual woman.”
She met his gaze, saw a spark of the intensity that had drawn her to him that night. “Do you ever . . .” She hesitated, then brazened it out. “Do you ever think about what if? For us, I mean?”
He never took his eyes off her. “Every time I see you.”
Her heart was pounding now. “And?”
“And.” He dropped his gaze. “It’s my job to send Buffy into harm’s way, and yours to protect her. It wouldn’t have worked, however much we might have wished otherwise.”
They were both silent then. What else was there to say?
Giles was the first to shake it off. “Well, I have an early morning. And apparently a severed head waiting for my inspection.” He gathered up his books and papers, stuffing them back in their satchel, then straightening up again. “I’ll just leave through the back. No sense risking something foul leaking on your floors. Thank you for having us.”
She nodded, smiling sadly. “It was my pleasure. I learned a lot.”
“Good night, Joyce.”
“Good night, Rupert.”
And he was gone, leaving her alone in the house with her daughters and her memories.
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