lucetilogs | >> this is my endgame

>> this is my endgame

Who: [Bad username or site: gotmebones title= @ livejournal.com] & [Bad username or site: a_slayer_slays title= @ livejournal.com]
What: Now that the snark has subsided, these two need some quality time.
When: Mid-afternoon, Friday.
Where: House Seven
Summary: Damnit, Bones! I'm a Slayer, not a chess nerd.
Rating: PG-13ish

In the haze of the improving season, Buffy had begun to contemplate where she had once heard that there was nothing really good, or nothing really bad--except in how you thought about it. A significant portion of her guessed that it was probably some stale English class back at Sunnydale High. The day had probably been quite similar to this one, with green tinges of growth outside the window. Back then, she had probably been aching to get out and into the green. Today? Well, today there were far too many interesting things going on inside the four walls of the house. Electricity had sprouted, as if from no where, and it had not taken her long to make what use she could from what they had been given. All morning, House Seven was treated to the incessant dinging and whirring of a microwave being rather over-used. As Buffy plunged her fork into the soft belly of a pizza pocket (new food had arrived in the shops, after all), she did not care that it was her fifth today. The point was that it was a good day to be a twenty-first century kinda girl.

She was sitting by a window in the house's lounge, her knees drawn close to her chest and the plate balanced precariously on the tops of her feet. Her chin, set in the crevice between her knees, tilted and shifted for each delivered bite. By all accounts, she looked peaceful enough. But how long would that last, with a certain medical doctor on the prowl?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"You're talking to someone who was top of his class in anatomical and forensic pathology." He might as well said he was fluent in greek or even la-la land for all it was worth, but that system she flaunted was not one he was familiar with in the twenty-third century. "But I'm glad you at least studied and didn't let that demon thing consume your entire damn life." Apparently the marks she had acquired were good though, so she got some congratulatory respect from the doctor. That was not going to last.

"Xander?" He wondered out loud. "Is that another ex-flame... in leather?"

Don't feel too proud, McCoy. She only managed about a year of college. Of course, there were extenuating circumstances involved. Her mother's death, her own death, oh..and her psychology professor trying to murder her via a mutant demon thing.

But before she could add to her accolades, the Xander comment came out. And Buffy's jaw dropped. The piece she was holding on to clattered hard onto its new place, shoving his pawn out the way in one fell, vengeful swoop. "Xander...is a friend. A very good friend. We're kind of like the three muskateers, only with mostly better fashion sense. Xander, Willow, and me. BFFs since the first day of high school. You'll have to talk to Will about his ex-flameyness--of course, she doesn't really go for his kind anymore. He's a little too much, y'know, male."

She sat back. "Xander's pretty much the closest our gang gets to normal. No super-powers, just lots of heart. You'd probably like him."

McCoy watched the pawn roll off the board and spin in a circular motion on the desktop before re-seizing the felled piece and returning it back into the compartment with a distinct lack of mourning that even Spock would be proud of. Evidently this Xander Harris did not wear leather, which put a dent into the stereotype of the kind of men the Slayer usually hung around with.

"I'm sure I would." Anyone that used their heart instead of logic was sure to win favourable points with the passionate doctor. He pushed another piece forward and seized a black bishop with little flourish.

"Ex-flames." He echoed that aspect with a lofty sigh before Buffy could react in indignation at the loss of a bishop. The only vengeful one that he could think of was Jocelyn; he had learnt to never cross swords with a southern woman again, since he barely survived the break-down of their relationship and the messy divorce that followed.

"Xander has a lot of them. Some with literal flames." Buffy commented idly as she watched her bishop get taken into the Doctor's cruel hands. Xander was a demon magnet and always seemed to get the ones who secretly wanted to feed him to their young or slice his veins open to water an ancient seal with his blood.

But the Doctor's sigh made her twitchy. She didn't want him to follow her into memories-ville. That was usually a bad place for him. So, instead, she tugged up a new topic of conversation. Medical issues. "Near the last battle, Xander lost an eye. He's totally like some kind of modern, sweater-wearing pirate, now. Which is kinda ironic, because a few years ago? He was a pirate for Halloween."

Poor Xander. But did McCoy did enjoy the subject of medical issues, although it was difficult to believe that as his nose wrinkled up in disgust: "Good God." He exclaimed in amazement as he leant back in his chair.

"He was probably lucky that he got off that lightly. The guy who did it was...well, impressively evil."

Buffy could remember the fear permeating Sunnydale. A mysoginistic preacher, murdering young girls. Her potentials. "I got pay-back."

Even if Buffy could recall the fear that gripped the town and its population that she protected, it was lost on McCoy, whose only encounter evil had an unimpressive tally of two: one ex-wife and an angry Romulan from the far reaches of the future. And even then, the latter of that two didn't give a damn about the Chief Medical Officer although the loss of Puri was still something he tended to dwell on from time to time, but nothing to darken his expression.

"Oh, really? Here I was thinking he pissed off a couple of girl scouts." Pay-back was an interesting statement. "Stake him?"

"He wasn't exactly a vampire, so that's a no on the staking." Buffy slid her knight into place, getting lost amidst the shifting goals and plans. She could see the game sinking away from her.

"I sliced him in half with a scythe. That scythe." She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at the traditional Slayer weapon. "Well, not that exact one. But the real one, back home."

She admitted to this with cool, casual honesty.

He followed her jab at the weapon that was a featured display in the house. McCoy vaguely recalled the time she returned with the scythe covered in blood and feathers from the general she fought with.

"I can think of better ways to go."

"He murdered at least two teenage girls, ordered the slaughter of lots of others--and orchestrated the bombing of the Watcher's Council." Buffy might not have cared for the Watchers, but she had not wanted to see them dead. "Believe me, he deserved."

McCoy did not reply to that, but the way his face contorted into a scowl as she mentioned the murder of two girls spoke volumes of what he might have been feeling. "I agree and I don't usually do that."

"We have a rule." Buffy slid another chess piece into play. "Slayers do not kill humans." But then, realizing who she suspected Bones was getting his smoochies with, she back-pedaled. "Right. That? That came out wrong. Because we also don't kill vamps with souls. Or the kinds of supernatural folk that aren't out to munch on your limbs. And sometimes the Big Bads include some pretty humanish individuals. So what I guess I mean is...I know when something has to be left to the police."

She shifted uneasily. "The weird and the wacky? My jurisdiction. I'm not a vigilante. I don't go chasing stuff that's better left to the boys in blue. Caleb...the guy that got halved? He was a little bit more than the best SWAT team could handle."

He moved another piece that countered her move quite nicely and mumbled. "Good. I'd have to re-consider letting you stay here if you ever attempted to take down our housemates one day..." Sad thing about that statement was that the doctor knew that Emony and Spock would probably be an even-match for the Slayer with their alien physiology. The former had already threatened grievously bodily harm, but he worried more about her tendency to dredge up the past about a certain second host. That was male.

No need to dwell on that. He was straighter than a hypospray as he pulled a face. "You attract trouble, don't you." He meant that at home and in Luceti, even if her whines and heartfelt sighs aimed solely at Kadaj were scarce lately. Damn experiment.

"It's a bad habit I picked up, back home. Trouble always rolled into town looking to trade punches with the best in town and that usually happened to be me. There's something to be said about demons and their silly little attempts to compensate for something. Fang size of venom potency or who knows what."

Countered and shot down, she tried another tactic. Buffy slipped her second bishop out, leading it straight across a diagonal and capturing one of the Doctor's knights. She plucked the offending piece off the board and toppled it with the tip of her finger.

McCoy made a grumbling noise somewhere in his throat and it laced his words as he replied. "Depends what kind of venom you're talking about there, Summers. Hemotoxi venom assaults the cardiovascular system, while cytotoix targets the muscles, but neurotoix? That's the worst; that attacks the brain and nervous system itself." McCoy continued to ramble on about the medical diagnostics as he continued to move his pieces across the board and counter that sudden loss of his knight.

"The one that attacks the brain...that's what causes hallucinations, right?" She asked with that brilliant fake-casual tone again, trying to erase memories of the hospital with other incidents she knew of venoms. Like, how her blood was apparently the antidote for some strange vamp poison. Or how if you liked tree frog bellies, you get high. Not that she has ever licked a tree frog belly or experienced more than one or two really bad drunk-fests. It's just where her mind went to avoid--.

Buffy nudged another pawn into play.

McCoy hoped that no one licked her belly for crazy Slayer toxins as he took another chess piece after a moment of consideration. That was unsanitary.

"It can vary." The doctor said, sensing that there was some untruth behind that brilliant fake-casual tone, since he was doctor and patients always lied. "Why so interested?"

Buffy paused to consider her next move, her hands frozen over the board as she contemplated.

"Got poisoned once," she explained, distracted into truth by the visions of strategy before her. "Saw some stuff."

He raised an eyebrow.

"Good God."

"This demon had like neurotoxicish venom in this slicey things that came out of its arm. It got me and until an antidote was made, things were definitely of the odd variety."

Coolly, she moved her queen into play.

McCoy avoided the Queen that she put into play and took another bishop, ignoring the pawns that were still in play, whilst keeping his eye on the important pieces while not seizing the game away from her just yet. Let her work under the assumption it would be a close one.

"Whatever you might have seen, they were just illusions praying on what is inside your subconsciousness." He said quietly as he shifted in his chair and leant back, fingers linked behind his head, watching the chess board intently for her turn. "They can be disconcerting as hell and even upsetting, but that's all it is."

"Yeah. That's what we decided, in the end." She used her thumb to nudge a pawn forward, a ploy to block what she assumed would be a future attack on the queen. She mourned the second bishop but only coldly. The queen she cared about--the bishop could fall in her service.

"It was just so real, you know? Almost more real than real things were."

McCoy took the pawn put into play just equally as coldly as she had been when she mourned the loss of the bishop.

"The mind is a powerful thing; even more powerful than those inane Slayer powers of yours." Which was a way of asking if there had been any inkling they were beginning to return yet.

"Funny, that." She responded an a totally unfunny way. "The hallucination was all about being normal, too. Kinda. A hallucination that the real, vamptastic world was the hallucination, instead. That things were cool and I'd never left L.A. and mom--" was still alive. "And dad were still together."

Goodbye, pawn. Buffy ruthlessly pushed forward with the queen in order to take the piece that had taken her guard. The move left her last knight open.

"Do you want to be normal?"

Nearly there.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject