AGOL
2007-08-10 20:22:05 UTC
Title: "Shaggy Dog"
Parts: 1/1
Author: 'A Gentleman Of Leisure'.
E-mail: <***@btinternet.com>
Summary: After the destruction of Sunnydale, someone else comes looking
for the Slayer and friends.
Story Type: BTVS / X-Files crossover.
Rating overall: K+ (?)
Spoilers: S1-7.
Distribution/Archiving: Ask first please.
Disclaimer: No one here belongs to me - I've just borrowed them to
play with. All other Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights duly acknowledged.
Thank you.
==========================
"Shaggy Dog"
by
'A Gentleman Of Leisure'.
_____________________________
Scully sat up suddenly in the dark. It was utterly quiet. She shivered, now
wide awake. She and Mulder had just been re-assigned to Sunnydale, and had
only returned to the town the evening before.
She got out of bed and put on her shoes, pulled on her red fleece jacket,
and stepped out of the front door of the house that had been commandeered
for them. Outside in the full moon it was curiously cold, despite it being
mid-summer in Southern California, so she flipped up her hood and started to
walk.
There was no one around. The area was a total exclusion zone this close to
the crater. It was a strange feeling, a little unreal, walking down empty
streets in the middle of the night, not something you could do in
Washington, or any other big city for that matter. She felt as if she owned
the world - it almost seemed like she was the only person in it. There were
no street lights, just the brilliant moon, high in the sky, as if put there
by God so she wouldn't fall over her own feet.
Somewhere in the distance something howled. It sounded lonely, a solitary
creature in the darkness, looking for who-knows-what. It made her feel sad.
Then, away down the street, she thought she saw something moving between the
abandoned houses, slinking from one shadow to another. There! She saw it
again, a little nearer. It looked like a dog, just a solitary stray dog.
She snapped her fingers and it paused, turned its head, and then began to
pad noiselessly along the street towards her. It was a big, longhaired dog.
A very big dog, 'with eyes the size of saucers', she thought.
"Good boy. SIT!" she said firmly.
She needn't have worried. It came padding silently up to her and sat down
obediently, almost politely, just out of reach. It was a very, very big,
hairy dog indeed. Almost... too big... and too hairy.
"Good dog! I wonder what your name is?" Scully said to herself.
"Woof!" said the dog.
"What?" said Scully.
"Woof!" said the dog again.
"Woof?" said Scully, sharply.
"Woof. That's what dogs say, isn't it? Woof?"
Scully stared at the dog with her mouth open, for several seconds. "You...
spoke!" she said eventually.
"Maybe," said the dog casually, and scratched itself vigorously behind one
ear.
"You spoke, you actually spoke! You said Woof," Scully said accusingly.
"Oh, all right then," said the dog. "I admit it, I said Woof."
"You're talking to me, and saying Woof," said Scully. "Dogs don't talk, they
bark!" She sighed. "I'm confused. I wish Mulder was here."
"That name sounds familiar. A friend of yours?" asked the dog.
"My - my partner," said Scully. "Now wait just a minute. Dogs definitely do
not talk. How come you can?"
"This is Sunnydale," said the dog. "You've been here before, haven't you?
Years ago? You must remember what this town was like, surely?"
"Well yes, I suppose I do, but my name is Dana, not Shirley!" said Scully.
"Aha! The old ones are the best!" said the dog, and snapped at a passing
moth, revealing huge fangs.
"My, what big teeth you have!" observed Scully dubiously. "And I suppose
you're hungry too?"
"Wouldn't mind a spicy beanburger," said the dog hopefully.
"You're a vegetarian dog?" asked Scully.
"Surprised?" responded the dog, and she nodded. "Well I am, though to be
honest, I'm not actually a dog."
"I was just beginning to wonder," said Scully. "So what are you, then - a
wolf?"
"No. Or yes," said the not-actually-a-dog. "Sort of. But not exactly."
"Not exactly?" said Scully cautiously. "What does that mean? A cross-breed?"
"Half-dog, half-wolf? No, not that either. I'm normally only like this three
nights a month."
Scully considered this. She'd acquired a good store of esoteric knowledge
during her association with Mulder, and understood the implication of what
the 'not-actually-a-dog' had said.
"Round the time of full moon? Like... tonight?" she suggested.
"A cocoanut for Dana. Don't eat it all at once!" said the
'not-exactly-a-wolf-either'.
"You're a... a werewolf?" said Scully a trifle hesitantly.
"Hey, this is Sunnydale," said the werewolf. "Everyone's got to be
something. The town itself may only be a hole in the ground now, and the
Hellmouth may have been shut down and filled in, but there is still a
massive residual magical field permeating the entire area for miles and
miles. Why not werewolves? You met demons and vampires last time you were
here - I know, because the others told me all about it."
"The others?" Scully said.
"Yeah. You know. The Slayer and her friends - Buffy, and Willow and Xander
and Giles. Oh, and Dawn of course. They told me all about your adventures.
Great story - I'm really sorry but I have to admit that I laughed like a
drain, as Giles would have said."
"I remember him - the Englishman, tweed jacket. So did we meet, you and me?"
"No ma'am, I'm sorry to say not. I joined them a while after that. I did
live here, though. My name is Oz."
"As in Oz, the Great and Terrible?" said Scully, and smiled. She had read
her L. Frank Baum as a child, and never forgotten the stories.
"Daniel Osbourne, originally of Sunnydale, ma'am. I grew up here. You
remember Willow Rosenberg, the redhead?"
"Of course I do. We reds must stick together - we're outnumbered seven to
one, you know. Sweet girl."
"Yes, ma'am. Smart too. I was her boyfriend. Then, to be brief, I got bit.
My nephew - it's a long story. Caused a whole pack of problems. I went away
to learn how to control my changes, because I could have killed any of them,
just like that, without meaning to. I came back to visit a couple of years
later, but I was captured by this weird secret military organisation..."
"The Initiative, yes," Scully interrupted. "I know all about them. In a way,
Mulder and I were responsible for them coming here. Sorry about that."
"No matter, ma'am. Well, anyway, Buffy and the others got me out. Even Dawn
helped. Afterwards, since Willow had a steady girlfriend by then, I left
Sunnydale for good. Been studying at a Zen monastery in Hokkaido, Northern
Japan, ever since. Then I heard about what happened here, saw some video on
TV of the Buffster, and well - hey, I'm ba-ack! Took a little while to get
here, though," he added. "Was snowed in."
Scully and Oz looked at one another in silence, each absorbing the
information they'd just learned.
"They aren't here, you know, Oz," Scully said, cautiously reaching out and
patting him gently on the head. "They aren't dead, though. It's just that
nobody seems to know what's happened to them. They definitely got out of
Sunnydale - on the last bus of all as far as we can tell, but after a
sighting a couple of hours after the quake, or whatever it was, they drove
out into the desert and half of the group vanished."
"And those who didn't melt away into thin air?" Oz asked.
"Several injuries from some sort of a big fight - they were all Medivac'd to
Oxnard, and then on to LA, but after a week or so they all went missing,
too."
"Ah, that'd be the G-man's idea, of course."
"Apparently the group split in two parts deliberately, to distract us and
allow the Slayer and her friends to disappear. The latest information I have
is that a Sunnydale school bus, repainted yellow all over to conceal its
identity, was found just the day before yesterday, abandoned in one of the
long-stay car parks at Seattle Airport."
"Wow! Cool place to be!" said the werewolf. "Well, wherever they are now,
it'll be the last place you expected, and they'll still be long gone when
you finally get there."
He smiled, his head cocked to one side. It looked rather cute to Scully, in
a rather weird sort of way.
"Giles is a very, very smart dude, ma'am. And he was even in a rock band
once, you know, like me."
"So Mulder told me. Apparently, when he was at school in Britain on a
scholarship, he believes he actually saw Rupert Giles playing bass guitar at
a club in North London. 'The Railway Arms' I think he said it was called."
"Whoa! Really? That's a famous place in the history of early English
Rock'n'Roll. Good for Giles - and bass too. Man, that is so cool."
"Wait a minute," Scully thought. "Am I really talking to an American
werewolf about early British Rock music?"
"Bizarre, isn't it?" said Oz, seeming to answer her thoughts instantly.
"Apparently coincidences like that happen all the time - it's just that we
don't notice it."
"Douglas Adams - 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy'," said a voice from
the darkness behind Scully.
"Enter a wood cutter, to rescue Little Red Riding Hood," said Oz.
"Hajimemashite, Mulder-san! Oh, excuse me. I meant 'Good Morning, I am
delighted to meet you', Agent Mulder."
"The pleasure is entirely mine, I assure you," said Mulder, coming out of
the deep shadows into the moonlight.
"I didn't hear you coming," said Scully, surprised.
"As the actress said to the bishop," Mulder murmured, and she glared at him.
"Behave yourself!" she mouthed silently.
"Have we been able to help you, Mr Osbourne?" Mulder said. "Buffy and her
friends are probably safe, wherever they are."
"Whatever 'safe' means to a Slayer and her friends," said Oz. "Guess I'll
just have to go looking for them. Got to be sure."
"I hope you have better luck than we have so far. If you find them, will you
let us know?" said Scully.
"Or at any rate tell them we'd like to hear from them - that they're OK, and
to hear what happened to the town at the end," Mulder added. "It seems
everyone except a very small group had already left before the end, and we'd
really like to know why," he explained.
"Is that why you're all still here?"
"That, and some odd stories of certain things seen at night in the area
recently. Things seen by some of the military on sentry duty."
"Oh. I guess that would have to include me then," said Oz, sounding
apologetic. "And maybe some of the others who used to live here."
"People actually want to come back here? But there's nothing left but a
giant hole in the ground!" said Scully.
"Not exactly people," said Oz cautiously. "At least, not perhaps who you'd
call people. Sunnydale was a magnet for other folks too."
"Ah," said Mulder. "Understood."
Scully looked over at Mulder. "What?" she said.
"Remember our adventures in the cemetery that time?" he said.
"What!? Them? They'd want to come back here? But why?"
Just then the full moon was hidden by a drifting cloud, and absolute
darkness suddenly engulfed all three of them.
"Because there's no place like home?" suggested an invisible Oz.
When, a moment or two later, the cloud slowly moved on, Scully discovered
that she and Mulder were now standing alone in a deserted street on the
outskirts of a deserted town at the edge of a deadly desert. Faintly in the
distance somebody was whistling 'Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?' "
"Where'd he go?"
Mulder smiled. "If you were a werewolf, where would you go right now?"
"Anywhere but here, I would have thought," replied Scully. She shivered.
"You look cold." Mulder put an arm round her shoulders. "Let's go home.
Leave the night time to the original inhabitants."
*
Scully sat up suddenly. It was broad daylight, and inexplicably, Fox Mulder
was peacefully asleep in the armchair beside her bed, wrapped in, of all
things, her nice new red fleece jacket.
"Mulder? Hey, Mulder! Wake up...!"
END
============================
AN: This story is a sequel to "Statistical Anomaly", and to "Kyuuketsuki to
Shikeishikkonin" (which it immediately follows in my timeline,) and precedes
"Out For The Count".
3, & 5 to 10/8/2007
Parts: 1/1
Author: 'A Gentleman Of Leisure'.
E-mail: <***@btinternet.com>
Summary: After the destruction of Sunnydale, someone else comes looking
for the Slayer and friends.
Story Type: BTVS / X-Files crossover.
Rating overall: K+ (?)
Spoilers: S1-7.
Distribution/Archiving: Ask first please.
Disclaimer: No one here belongs to me - I've just borrowed them to
play with. All other Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights duly acknowledged.
Thank you.
==========================
"Shaggy Dog"
by
'A Gentleman Of Leisure'.
_____________________________
Scully sat up suddenly in the dark. It was utterly quiet. She shivered, now
wide awake. She and Mulder had just been re-assigned to Sunnydale, and had
only returned to the town the evening before.
She got out of bed and put on her shoes, pulled on her red fleece jacket,
and stepped out of the front door of the house that had been commandeered
for them. Outside in the full moon it was curiously cold, despite it being
mid-summer in Southern California, so she flipped up her hood and started to
walk.
There was no one around. The area was a total exclusion zone this close to
the crater. It was a strange feeling, a little unreal, walking down empty
streets in the middle of the night, not something you could do in
Washington, or any other big city for that matter. She felt as if she owned
the world - it almost seemed like she was the only person in it. There were
no street lights, just the brilliant moon, high in the sky, as if put there
by God so she wouldn't fall over her own feet.
Somewhere in the distance something howled. It sounded lonely, a solitary
creature in the darkness, looking for who-knows-what. It made her feel sad.
Then, away down the street, she thought she saw something moving between the
abandoned houses, slinking from one shadow to another. There! She saw it
again, a little nearer. It looked like a dog, just a solitary stray dog.
She snapped her fingers and it paused, turned its head, and then began to
pad noiselessly along the street towards her. It was a big, longhaired dog.
A very big dog, 'with eyes the size of saucers', she thought.
"Good boy. SIT!" she said firmly.
She needn't have worried. It came padding silently up to her and sat down
obediently, almost politely, just out of reach. It was a very, very big,
hairy dog indeed. Almost... too big... and too hairy.
"Good dog! I wonder what your name is?" Scully said to herself.
"Woof!" said the dog.
"What?" said Scully.
"Woof!" said the dog again.
"Woof?" said Scully, sharply.
"Woof. That's what dogs say, isn't it? Woof?"
Scully stared at the dog with her mouth open, for several seconds. "You...
spoke!" she said eventually.
"Maybe," said the dog casually, and scratched itself vigorously behind one
ear.
"You spoke, you actually spoke! You said Woof," Scully said accusingly.
"Oh, all right then," said the dog. "I admit it, I said Woof."
"You're talking to me, and saying Woof," said Scully. "Dogs don't talk, they
bark!" She sighed. "I'm confused. I wish Mulder was here."
"That name sounds familiar. A friend of yours?" asked the dog.
"My - my partner," said Scully. "Now wait just a minute. Dogs definitely do
not talk. How come you can?"
"This is Sunnydale," said the dog. "You've been here before, haven't you?
Years ago? You must remember what this town was like, surely?"
"Well yes, I suppose I do, but my name is Dana, not Shirley!" said Scully.
"Aha! The old ones are the best!" said the dog, and snapped at a passing
moth, revealing huge fangs.
"My, what big teeth you have!" observed Scully dubiously. "And I suppose
you're hungry too?"
"Wouldn't mind a spicy beanburger," said the dog hopefully.
"You're a vegetarian dog?" asked Scully.
"Surprised?" responded the dog, and she nodded. "Well I am, though to be
honest, I'm not actually a dog."
"I was just beginning to wonder," said Scully. "So what are you, then - a
wolf?"
"No. Or yes," said the not-actually-a-dog. "Sort of. But not exactly."
"Not exactly?" said Scully cautiously. "What does that mean? A cross-breed?"
"Half-dog, half-wolf? No, not that either. I'm normally only like this three
nights a month."
Scully considered this. She'd acquired a good store of esoteric knowledge
during her association with Mulder, and understood the implication of what
the 'not-actually-a-dog' had said.
"Round the time of full moon? Like... tonight?" she suggested.
"A cocoanut for Dana. Don't eat it all at once!" said the
'not-exactly-a-wolf-either'.
"You're a... a werewolf?" said Scully a trifle hesitantly.
"Hey, this is Sunnydale," said the werewolf. "Everyone's got to be
something. The town itself may only be a hole in the ground now, and the
Hellmouth may have been shut down and filled in, but there is still a
massive residual magical field permeating the entire area for miles and
miles. Why not werewolves? You met demons and vampires last time you were
here - I know, because the others told me all about it."
"The others?" Scully said.
"Yeah. You know. The Slayer and her friends - Buffy, and Willow and Xander
and Giles. Oh, and Dawn of course. They told me all about your adventures.
Great story - I'm really sorry but I have to admit that I laughed like a
drain, as Giles would have said."
"I remember him - the Englishman, tweed jacket. So did we meet, you and me?"
"No ma'am, I'm sorry to say not. I joined them a while after that. I did
live here, though. My name is Oz."
"As in Oz, the Great and Terrible?" said Scully, and smiled. She had read
her L. Frank Baum as a child, and never forgotten the stories.
"Daniel Osbourne, originally of Sunnydale, ma'am. I grew up here. You
remember Willow Rosenberg, the redhead?"
"Of course I do. We reds must stick together - we're outnumbered seven to
one, you know. Sweet girl."
"Yes, ma'am. Smart too. I was her boyfriend. Then, to be brief, I got bit.
My nephew - it's a long story. Caused a whole pack of problems. I went away
to learn how to control my changes, because I could have killed any of them,
just like that, without meaning to. I came back to visit a couple of years
later, but I was captured by this weird secret military organisation..."
"The Initiative, yes," Scully interrupted. "I know all about them. In a way,
Mulder and I were responsible for them coming here. Sorry about that."
"No matter, ma'am. Well, anyway, Buffy and the others got me out. Even Dawn
helped. Afterwards, since Willow had a steady girlfriend by then, I left
Sunnydale for good. Been studying at a Zen monastery in Hokkaido, Northern
Japan, ever since. Then I heard about what happened here, saw some video on
TV of the Buffster, and well - hey, I'm ba-ack! Took a little while to get
here, though," he added. "Was snowed in."
Scully and Oz looked at one another in silence, each absorbing the
information they'd just learned.
"They aren't here, you know, Oz," Scully said, cautiously reaching out and
patting him gently on the head. "They aren't dead, though. It's just that
nobody seems to know what's happened to them. They definitely got out of
Sunnydale - on the last bus of all as far as we can tell, but after a
sighting a couple of hours after the quake, or whatever it was, they drove
out into the desert and half of the group vanished."
"And those who didn't melt away into thin air?" Oz asked.
"Several injuries from some sort of a big fight - they were all Medivac'd to
Oxnard, and then on to LA, but after a week or so they all went missing,
too."
"Ah, that'd be the G-man's idea, of course."
"Apparently the group split in two parts deliberately, to distract us and
allow the Slayer and her friends to disappear. The latest information I have
is that a Sunnydale school bus, repainted yellow all over to conceal its
identity, was found just the day before yesterday, abandoned in one of the
long-stay car parks at Seattle Airport."
"Wow! Cool place to be!" said the werewolf. "Well, wherever they are now,
it'll be the last place you expected, and they'll still be long gone when
you finally get there."
He smiled, his head cocked to one side. It looked rather cute to Scully, in
a rather weird sort of way.
"Giles is a very, very smart dude, ma'am. And he was even in a rock band
once, you know, like me."
"So Mulder told me. Apparently, when he was at school in Britain on a
scholarship, he believes he actually saw Rupert Giles playing bass guitar at
a club in North London. 'The Railway Arms' I think he said it was called."
"Whoa! Really? That's a famous place in the history of early English
Rock'n'Roll. Good for Giles - and bass too. Man, that is so cool."
"Wait a minute," Scully thought. "Am I really talking to an American
werewolf about early British Rock music?"
"Bizarre, isn't it?" said Oz, seeming to answer her thoughts instantly.
"Apparently coincidences like that happen all the time - it's just that we
don't notice it."
"Douglas Adams - 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy'," said a voice from
the darkness behind Scully.
"Enter a wood cutter, to rescue Little Red Riding Hood," said Oz.
"Hajimemashite, Mulder-san! Oh, excuse me. I meant 'Good Morning, I am
delighted to meet you', Agent Mulder."
"The pleasure is entirely mine, I assure you," said Mulder, coming out of
the deep shadows into the moonlight.
"I didn't hear you coming," said Scully, surprised.
"As the actress said to the bishop," Mulder murmured, and she glared at him.
"Behave yourself!" she mouthed silently.
"Have we been able to help you, Mr Osbourne?" Mulder said. "Buffy and her
friends are probably safe, wherever they are."
"Whatever 'safe' means to a Slayer and her friends," said Oz. "Guess I'll
just have to go looking for them. Got to be sure."
"I hope you have better luck than we have so far. If you find them, will you
let us know?" said Scully.
"Or at any rate tell them we'd like to hear from them - that they're OK, and
to hear what happened to the town at the end," Mulder added. "It seems
everyone except a very small group had already left before the end, and we'd
really like to know why," he explained.
"Is that why you're all still here?"
"That, and some odd stories of certain things seen at night in the area
recently. Things seen by some of the military on sentry duty."
"Oh. I guess that would have to include me then," said Oz, sounding
apologetic. "And maybe some of the others who used to live here."
"People actually want to come back here? But there's nothing left but a
giant hole in the ground!" said Scully.
"Not exactly people," said Oz cautiously. "At least, not perhaps who you'd
call people. Sunnydale was a magnet for other folks too."
"Ah," said Mulder. "Understood."
Scully looked over at Mulder. "What?" she said.
"Remember our adventures in the cemetery that time?" he said.
"What!? Them? They'd want to come back here? But why?"
Just then the full moon was hidden by a drifting cloud, and absolute
darkness suddenly engulfed all three of them.
"Because there's no place like home?" suggested an invisible Oz.
When, a moment or two later, the cloud slowly moved on, Scully discovered
that she and Mulder were now standing alone in a deserted street on the
outskirts of a deserted town at the edge of a deadly desert. Faintly in the
distance somebody was whistling 'Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?' "
"Where'd he go?"
Mulder smiled. "If you were a werewolf, where would you go right now?"
"Anywhere but here, I would have thought," replied Scully. She shivered.
"You look cold." Mulder put an arm round her shoulders. "Let's go home.
Leave the night time to the original inhabitants."
*
Scully sat up suddenly. It was broad daylight, and inexplicably, Fox Mulder
was peacefully asleep in the armchair beside her bed, wrapped in, of all
things, her nice new red fleece jacket.
"Mulder? Hey, Mulder! Wake up...!"
END
============================
AN: This story is a sequel to "Statistical Anomaly", and to "Kyuuketsuki to
Shikeishikkonin" (which it immediately follows in my timeline,) and precedes
"Out For The Count".
3, & 5 to 10/8/2007