Categories > TV > Buffy the Vampire Slayer
A Day Late And A Dollar Short
2 reviewsPost Chosen. Crossover. Some days you’re the dog and some days you’re the hydrant; Xander gets the ‘honour’ of being both.
0Unrated
Title: A Day Late And A Dollar Short (1/1)
Author: Vlad_the_Impish
Rating: Nothing worse than the show
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the characters depicted in this story. I am not writing this story for profit; this is purely for entertainment value only (god I hope this has some entertainment value). Please don’t sue.
Summary: Post Chosen. Some days you’re the dog and some days you’re the hydrant; Xander gets the ‘honour’ of being both.
A Day Late And A Dollar Short
“Hey, kid, sorry to tell you this, but you’re dead.”
Xander looked at the Huggy Bear knock off with a mixture of shock, acceptance and anger, a potent mix that managed to keep him pretty much paralysed for the moment. The never ending whiteness of the room he was currently in was more than a little off putting, having been so used to the darker side of life, not to mention triggering his long dormant agoraphobia, and it only helped to increase his inability to move.
“I’m guessing that this isn’t some elaborate hoax by one of those tacky hidden camera shows, is it?” Xander asked, knowing the answer.
“‘Fraid not, kid; this is the real deal.”
Xander managed to nod in acceptance of that, the energy of stringing his previous sentence together already depleted. He shivered involuntarily as a strange sensation travelled down his spine, which given his supposed non-living status was odd, and he tried to think of what to say.
“How?” was all he could come up with.
“If it’s any consolation to you, kid, you went out swinging. Saved a few of your girls in the process too. Some of us up here are still trying to work out how you managed to blow up the petrol station without anything to ignite it with, but you’ve always seemed to pull off the impossible when you needed to.”
The memories were coming back to him now. A group of… devil worshippers for want of a better term had been abducting people on the motorway and removing their hearts. Going by the one eyewitness they’d found, a homeless man who had been sleeping on the hard shoulder not far from one of the abductions, Giles had worked out that they were followers of Azazael, one of Lucifer’s lieutenant’s who didn’t have the patience to wait for the end of days to set foot, or hoof in this case, on Earth.
Given that Azazael would make Godzilla look like a guppy, and had the power to turn the planet into a molten wasteland with but a gesture, it meant that they had to pull out all the stops to ensure his followers didn’t get a chance to complete their ritual. There had been an upside however, if you could call it that, in order for anyone to summon such a high, or low depending on your perspective, level demon to this plane, they required a lot of hearts to empower it; forty-nine if Giles’ information was correct and more often than not it was.
Only a dozen or so victims had been discovered so far, which meant that they had a chance of nipping it in the bud before it got too close to the wire. That had ultimately led to a showdown at a service station, where Xander and his contingent of Slayers battled the followers and their enthralled demon army.
When Xander felt that the tide was not turning in their favour, he decided to sacrifice himself to save the others. Triggering the emergency recall spell he’d had Willow cast on each of his charges, which immediately teleported them from wherever they were currently located to their headquarters in Shropshire, Xander had ensured that he was the primary target for the bad guys and had lured them to the neighbouring petrol station, blowing the pumps and killing them all an a huge ball of fire.
“What now?” Xander eventually asked.
Xander might not be the smartest person on the planet, but he knew that he would not be where he was, not that he actually knew where he was, if he was to simply go to his final resting place. He was kinda hoping that the whole ‘suicide being a mortal sin’ thing didn’t apply to his situation, as the prospect of being sent to the place that was no doubt filled with demons he or his friends had killed was not exactly appealing.
“Don’t worry, kid,” the kaleidoscopically clothed ‘man’ assured him, no doubt reading his mind, “There’s no way you’d travel on the down escalator. At the very least, those already down there are so scared witless over what you’d do to them they’ve convinced old Lucy to waive any rights he might have had over you. That’s the closest thing you get to respect from them, fearing what you’d do, and given that you ensured old Asbo didn’t get to start the party early, Lucy was in a magnanimous mood. Anyway, you sacrificed yourself for the greater good; that pretty much guarantees you your own personal cloud in the everlasting paradise.”
“If that’s true, why am I here and not there?” Xander asked, confused as to why he wasn’t yet at his final resting place. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not overly thrilled about the whole dead thing I’ve got going now, but if what you say is true and I’ve got a guaranteed spot in the happy place, why am I not there yet?”
“That’s where the apology comes in,” the other guy said, looking a mite nervous. “There’s been a… clerical error.”
“Which means…?”
“As far as St. Peter’s records show, you’re already up here.”
“Huh?” Xander said intelligently.
“They thought you were already dead,” he went to explain, “which is why every time until now whenever you’ve sustained an injury that should have been fatal, it wasn’t.”
“Still not getting you.”
“You got hit over the head with a Troll God hammer, kid. Twice. No mortal should survive a single blow, let alone two. A Slayer, who wasn’t holding back on the strength, strangled you and you lived to talk about it. A beam of energy meant to trigger the destruction of Earth hit you and you survived. That’s not counting all the ‘close calls’ you had over the years on normal patrols. The only reason you’re here now is because people in the know had a vested interest in the outcome of your fight and were watching.”
“How did this happen?” Xander asked, trying his best to keep his anger in check.
“It looks like when your friend Jesse was killed, they got confused and put your name down instead. They added his name to the list once they realised, but forgot to take your name off.”
“Oh.”
His paralysis suddenly gone, Xander moved faster than thought and slammed his fist into the other ‘man’s’ jaw, feeling a sense of satisfaction as he felt it break from the force.
“You’re telling me that my life has felt like a frickin’ TV show all these years because someone filed the wrong paperwork!?” he yelled, completely incensed.
The man, who Xander realised had yet to introduce himself, waved his hand over his face to heal the fracture in his jaw so he could answer. “You throw a mean punch there, kid-“
The second punch knocked him to the floor, which surprised him as while Xander was a force to be reckoned with, we was still only human. “The name,” Xander growled, “is Xander. Speaking of names, what the hell is yours?”
“The name’s Whistler,” he replied as he got up of the floor, “and as I was saying, Xander, with a punch like that you could have been a contender.”
“Nice to meet you,” Xander said sarcastically. “Now answer my question.”
“Alright. Basically, yes; someone had you filed as already dead, and only realised their mistake when they watched you blow yourself, and a couple dozen bad guys, up in a Jerry Lewis special. The problem now is that the big cheese feels that you’ve been slighted by St. Peter and, wanting to keep the cosmos intact by staying infallible, has decided that you should be compensated.”
“I know I’m going to regret asking this,” Xander said as he pinched the bridge of his nose, “but how exactly?”
“You get to live again, only as someone else,” Whistler replied simply. “By and large, reincarnation doesn’t take place, except for when it was necessary to prevent the End of Days from happening, so while this isn’t an offer made to everyone, there are precedents for it.”
“What’s the catch?” Xander asked immediately, knowing that you should always look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Good question,” Whistler told him, as not many thought to ask. “One, you won’t know who you were before you arrived here. Two, because you weren’t supposed to get a second go around, you’ll have to be sent to the future. Usually, you’re reincarnated as a child born the same moment as you died, but there aren’t any available slots.”
“How far in the future?”
“Does it matter?” Whistler asked. “It’s not as though you’ll remember this conversation.”
“Humour me,” Xander replied bitingly.
Whistler sighed, but acquiesced. “Around 500 years. Before you ask, it was the first place the big kahuna could place you without doing something… drastic.”
Xander could tell that whatever God might have needed to do, he didn’t want to know about it.
“These things always come in threes, so what’s the third thing?”
Whistler winced; he’d hoped Xander would have missed that. “Your… plumbing will be different.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll be a female of the species,” Whistler said bluntly.
“Oh.”
“So,” Whistler said after a pregnant pause. “Waddaya say?”
Xander wasn’t too sure about the conditions, but at the end of the day it boiled down to one thing. “I want to live.”
~*~
WHAAAH!! WHAAAH!! WHAAAH!!
“Congratulations,” the midwife said with a smile. “It’s a girl!”
“Well honey, what shall we call her?” the doting father asked his tired but happy wife.
As a nurse gently placed the baby into her arms, she knew the perfect name for her little girl. “Welcome to the world, River Tam.”
The End
Author: Vlad_the_Impish
Rating: Nothing worse than the show
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the characters depicted in this story. I am not writing this story for profit; this is purely for entertainment value only (god I hope this has some entertainment value). Please don’t sue.
Summary: Post Chosen. Some days you’re the dog and some days you’re the hydrant; Xander gets the ‘honour’ of being both.
A Day Late And A Dollar Short
“Hey, kid, sorry to tell you this, but you’re dead.”
Xander looked at the Huggy Bear knock off with a mixture of shock, acceptance and anger, a potent mix that managed to keep him pretty much paralysed for the moment. The never ending whiteness of the room he was currently in was more than a little off putting, having been so used to the darker side of life, not to mention triggering his long dormant agoraphobia, and it only helped to increase his inability to move.
“I’m guessing that this isn’t some elaborate hoax by one of those tacky hidden camera shows, is it?” Xander asked, knowing the answer.
“‘Fraid not, kid; this is the real deal.”
Xander managed to nod in acceptance of that, the energy of stringing his previous sentence together already depleted. He shivered involuntarily as a strange sensation travelled down his spine, which given his supposed non-living status was odd, and he tried to think of what to say.
“How?” was all he could come up with.
“If it’s any consolation to you, kid, you went out swinging. Saved a few of your girls in the process too. Some of us up here are still trying to work out how you managed to blow up the petrol station without anything to ignite it with, but you’ve always seemed to pull off the impossible when you needed to.”
The memories were coming back to him now. A group of… devil worshippers for want of a better term had been abducting people on the motorway and removing their hearts. Going by the one eyewitness they’d found, a homeless man who had been sleeping on the hard shoulder not far from one of the abductions, Giles had worked out that they were followers of Azazael, one of Lucifer’s lieutenant’s who didn’t have the patience to wait for the end of days to set foot, or hoof in this case, on Earth.
Given that Azazael would make Godzilla look like a guppy, and had the power to turn the planet into a molten wasteland with but a gesture, it meant that they had to pull out all the stops to ensure his followers didn’t get a chance to complete their ritual. There had been an upside however, if you could call it that, in order for anyone to summon such a high, or low depending on your perspective, level demon to this plane, they required a lot of hearts to empower it; forty-nine if Giles’ information was correct and more often than not it was.
Only a dozen or so victims had been discovered so far, which meant that they had a chance of nipping it in the bud before it got too close to the wire. That had ultimately led to a showdown at a service station, where Xander and his contingent of Slayers battled the followers and their enthralled demon army.
When Xander felt that the tide was not turning in their favour, he decided to sacrifice himself to save the others. Triggering the emergency recall spell he’d had Willow cast on each of his charges, which immediately teleported them from wherever they were currently located to their headquarters in Shropshire, Xander had ensured that he was the primary target for the bad guys and had lured them to the neighbouring petrol station, blowing the pumps and killing them all an a huge ball of fire.
“What now?” Xander eventually asked.
Xander might not be the smartest person on the planet, but he knew that he would not be where he was, not that he actually knew where he was, if he was to simply go to his final resting place. He was kinda hoping that the whole ‘suicide being a mortal sin’ thing didn’t apply to his situation, as the prospect of being sent to the place that was no doubt filled with demons he or his friends had killed was not exactly appealing.
“Don’t worry, kid,” the kaleidoscopically clothed ‘man’ assured him, no doubt reading his mind, “There’s no way you’d travel on the down escalator. At the very least, those already down there are so scared witless over what you’d do to them they’ve convinced old Lucy to waive any rights he might have had over you. That’s the closest thing you get to respect from them, fearing what you’d do, and given that you ensured old Asbo didn’t get to start the party early, Lucy was in a magnanimous mood. Anyway, you sacrificed yourself for the greater good; that pretty much guarantees you your own personal cloud in the everlasting paradise.”
“If that’s true, why am I here and not there?” Xander asked, confused as to why he wasn’t yet at his final resting place. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not overly thrilled about the whole dead thing I’ve got going now, but if what you say is true and I’ve got a guaranteed spot in the happy place, why am I not there yet?”
“That’s where the apology comes in,” the other guy said, looking a mite nervous. “There’s been a… clerical error.”
“Which means…?”
“As far as St. Peter’s records show, you’re already up here.”
“Huh?” Xander said intelligently.
“They thought you were already dead,” he went to explain, “which is why every time until now whenever you’ve sustained an injury that should have been fatal, it wasn’t.”
“Still not getting you.”
“You got hit over the head with a Troll God hammer, kid. Twice. No mortal should survive a single blow, let alone two. A Slayer, who wasn’t holding back on the strength, strangled you and you lived to talk about it. A beam of energy meant to trigger the destruction of Earth hit you and you survived. That’s not counting all the ‘close calls’ you had over the years on normal patrols. The only reason you’re here now is because people in the know had a vested interest in the outcome of your fight and were watching.”
“How did this happen?” Xander asked, trying his best to keep his anger in check.
“It looks like when your friend Jesse was killed, they got confused and put your name down instead. They added his name to the list once they realised, but forgot to take your name off.”
“Oh.”
His paralysis suddenly gone, Xander moved faster than thought and slammed his fist into the other ‘man’s’ jaw, feeling a sense of satisfaction as he felt it break from the force.
“You’re telling me that my life has felt like a frickin’ TV show all these years because someone filed the wrong paperwork!?” he yelled, completely incensed.
The man, who Xander realised had yet to introduce himself, waved his hand over his face to heal the fracture in his jaw so he could answer. “You throw a mean punch there, kid-“
The second punch knocked him to the floor, which surprised him as while Xander was a force to be reckoned with, we was still only human. “The name,” Xander growled, “is Xander. Speaking of names, what the hell is yours?”
“The name’s Whistler,” he replied as he got up of the floor, “and as I was saying, Xander, with a punch like that you could have been a contender.”
“Nice to meet you,” Xander said sarcastically. “Now answer my question.”
“Alright. Basically, yes; someone had you filed as already dead, and only realised their mistake when they watched you blow yourself, and a couple dozen bad guys, up in a Jerry Lewis special. The problem now is that the big cheese feels that you’ve been slighted by St. Peter and, wanting to keep the cosmos intact by staying infallible, has decided that you should be compensated.”
“I know I’m going to regret asking this,” Xander said as he pinched the bridge of his nose, “but how exactly?”
“You get to live again, only as someone else,” Whistler replied simply. “By and large, reincarnation doesn’t take place, except for when it was necessary to prevent the End of Days from happening, so while this isn’t an offer made to everyone, there are precedents for it.”
“What’s the catch?” Xander asked immediately, knowing that you should always look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Good question,” Whistler told him, as not many thought to ask. “One, you won’t know who you were before you arrived here. Two, because you weren’t supposed to get a second go around, you’ll have to be sent to the future. Usually, you’re reincarnated as a child born the same moment as you died, but there aren’t any available slots.”
“How far in the future?”
“Does it matter?” Whistler asked. “It’s not as though you’ll remember this conversation.”
“Humour me,” Xander replied bitingly.
Whistler sighed, but acquiesced. “Around 500 years. Before you ask, it was the first place the big kahuna could place you without doing something… drastic.”
Xander could tell that whatever God might have needed to do, he didn’t want to know about it.
“These things always come in threes, so what’s the third thing?”
Whistler winced; he’d hoped Xander would have missed that. “Your… plumbing will be different.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll be a female of the species,” Whistler said bluntly.
“Oh.”
“So,” Whistler said after a pregnant pause. “Waddaya say?”
Xander wasn’t too sure about the conditions, but at the end of the day it boiled down to one thing. “I want to live.”
~*~
WHAAAH!! WHAAAH!! WHAAAH!!
“Congratulations,” the midwife said with a smile. “It’s a girl!”
“Well honey, what shall we call her?” the doting father asked his tired but happy wife.
As a nurse gently placed the baby into her arms, she knew the perfect name for her little girl. “Welcome to the world, River Tam.”
The End
Sign up to rate and review this story