selenak

Firstly, I'd like to pimp the Heroes Crossover Fic-a-thon. Secondly, I shall do that by proving how much fun crossing Heroes with various other fandoms can be by doing just that (and thus ridding myself of several insane plot bunnies in short form). Said proof is below. Thirdly, if this doesn't convince you, then sign up and do it better, hmmmmm?

Title: Six Encounters That Did Not Happen

Disclaimer: Owned by NBC, Mutant Enemy, Bad Robots, Shaun Cassidy, the BBC and Jim Henson.

Characters:

a) Heroes: Nathan Petrelli, Mohinder Suresh, Mr. Bennet, Linderman, Meredith Gordon, Hiro Nakamura.
b) Other universes: Holland Manners, Sydney Bristow, Arvin Sloane, Lucas Buck, Buffy Summers, John Crichton, the (Tenth) Doctor.

Summary: Heroes crossed over with: Angel the Series, Alias, American Gothic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Farscape and Dr. Who.

Rating: PG 13

Thanks to:

wychwood, for beta-reading.

Six Encounters That Did Not Happen

I.

At some point during an otherwise quite entertaining lunch, Holland Manners began to wonder whether he wasn’t wasting his time. This disconcerted him, and not just because his time was extremely valuable. His instincts when it came to recruits for Wolfram and Hart were usually unfailing. He spotted them unerringly: the bright, ambitious law school students who were hungry enough to do just about anything the firm would want them to.

The young man in front of him fit the profile. As opposed to some of the other names in Holland’s list, he did have money of his own, but there were several kinds of hunger, and Holland had used his warm, paternal manner to good effect before. He was certainly burning with ambition, and the ruthless manner in which he had brushed off the fellow student who had wanted him to sign some petition earlier was promising, too. But he still hadn’t responded yet quite as Holland had expected him to. There was, of course, one obvious explanation, but Holland had hoped his potential recruit wouldn’t be quite that obvious.

“Of course, if you’re planning a political career, then serving with the DA does have its advantages,” Holland said, leaning back to allow the waiter to serve the second course. “But frankly, a career that is based on this kind of public service is usually mediocre. We count senators and cabinet members among our former employees, Mr. Petrelli.”

“I’m sure you do, Mr. Manners,” Nathan Petrelli replied blandly. “You wouldn’t have a list with you, would you?”

Holland looked at him. In one sense, he had been wasting his time. This young man wasn’t going to apply for a position at Wolfram and Hart’s. But he might still become a client.

“We’re not supplying blackmail material for free,” he replied, amused.

“And here I thought having worked for you would be a mark of honor in anyone’s CV,” Nathan Petrelli said.

“Naturally. Well, Mr. Petrelli, it looks like we won’t be working together… for now. May I propose a toast nonetheless? I am something of a wine connoisseur, and this particular vintage shouldn’t be wasted.”

He raised his glass. “To that which none of us ever knows,” he said, making a pause because his sense of rhythm demanded it, and found Nathan Petrelli had raised his glass as well, looking at him intently and finishing Holland’s toast before Holland could.

“The future.”

II.

Sydney Bristow hated her life. This had been pretty much a given since she woke up with two years of her memories gone, her boyfriend married to another woman and the discovery that she must have spent some of those 24 months working as an assassin of sorts, but meeting the bane of her life on a professional basis usually managed to add that extra-special badness. Leave it to Arvin Sloane to go from rogue agent and crime lord to CIA-employed double agent and self styled humanitarian; having manoeuvred the CIA into making her his handler was just a minor sleight of hand next to that giant rabbit.

“You must be joking,” she said flatly, having listened to his latest proposal.

“Not at all,” Sloane said, giving her that slight, fond smile that she used to find so confidence-inspiring in the seven years he had her fooled into working for him. These days, it gave her the creeps. “I’m quite serious. Trust me, you can’t allow someone like Linderman to acquire one of Rambaldi’s paintings.”

“Some mobster from Las Vegas outbid you in the pursuit of your sick obsession and you expect me to steal it back for you. No, of course you’re not joking. You would be insane enough to believe I’d say yes to something like that.”

“As insane as you believed me to be when I told you that you and your father would be working with me again?” Sloane enquired mildly. Sydney didn’t dignify that with an answer. She just glared at him, and he sighed.

“Sydney, I do not expect you, or the CIA, for that matter, to allow me to keep the painting. It will never come into my hands to begin with. I will simply give you the necessary data on Linderman and provide distraction.”

“Just out of morbid curiosity – you still haven’t told me why we should care about Linderman owning a Rambaldi painting. As far as I know, he hasn’t assembled any lethal Rambaldi devices yet. As opposed to certain people I could name.”

“Would saving .07% of the world’s population be enough of a reason for you?” Sloane asked. She really, really hated him, Sydney thought, and resigned herself to a trip to Las Vegas.

III.

“There’s no question about it,” Mohinder said urgently. He was so relieved to have finally found someone who didn’t hang up on him when he tried to warn them that he found himself talking too fast, Mumbai pronunciation coming to the fore. He took a breath, and tried again, more slowly. This man lived in South Carolina, in some town that was hardly on the map. Mohinder knew enough about the US to be aware that it meant the man would probably find it hard to deal with an Indian accent.

“You both have the genetic marker that identifies you as… gifted. If I can track you down, so can Sylar. Your life is in danger, Sheriff. Yours and your son’s both!”

“You know, I seriously doubt that,” said the man from South Carolina, sounding very amused indeed. “And that’s Sheriff Buck, with a B.”

IV.

When they found the news story about a Texas cheerleader who had saved a man from being burned alive and had miraculously made it out of the fire herself without a scratch, Buffy decided to investigate it herself. She was back in the US anyway to visit her father, and it was one way to get out of being called “Ma’am” for a while.

Her instinct for sussing out fakes from activated potentials was pretty well honed by now, and she didn’t need long to conclude that this Jackie person was a fake. Which left her with some time to kill in Odessa, Texas, before taking the plane to Los Angeles. Daytime, so there were no vampires in sight, and not even a measly demon, but she was being pursued by someone. Buffy deliberately went into the closest thing to a small alley she could find and jumped her pursuers; a tall black man and a guy in horn-rimmed glasses, who’d have reminded her vaguely of Giles, except for the gun he held. She went for the gun first, driven by bad memories.

“These things? Never useful,” she said, and made sure it could never be used again.

“Put her under,” Horn-rimmed Glasses Guy ordered his companion, who looked at her and frowned, then shook his head. Right. So she had business here after all. Or business found her. It usually did.

Both men had martial arts training, which apparently was their next option after Tall And Black failed to “put her under”, however he had intended to do that, but they were no match for a Slayer. She left the tall one unconscious and held Glasses against the wall in no time flat.

“What are you,” she asked, “some Initiative leftovers? Why were you following me?”

Credit where credit was due: uncomfortable as his position was, he didn’t look intimidated, and he didn’t give her the “but you’re only a girl!” speech, either. Instead, he watched her, measuring. Watcher who went rogue before Caleb killed most of them would have been her other guess, but a former Watcher would have known who she was and would have tried to use that drug they had against her, or at the very least a taser.

“You were stalking several members of the Union Wells High cheerleading team,” he said at last in a calm voice.

“I don’t stalk,” Buffy said, insulted. “That’s totally a v… a guy thing to do. I observe. What business of yours was that anyway?”

The edges of his mouth twitched in something that might have been amusement. “Call me a concerned parent.”

For some reason, perhaps because he did remind her of Giles, she decided to believe him, and let him down, keeping her eyes on him.

“I came because of the cheerleader-saves-man-from-fire story,” Buffy said. “Guess I wanted to meet a real hero. But she turned out to be a fake. No offense, if she’s your daughter,” she added hastily. “I’m sure she’s got other stuff going for her. I lied a lot during high school, too.’”

V.

As bars went, the one John Crichton found served as good as any to get drunk in. It was free of any people he knew, which was all the criteria he had right now. If he lost it around Dad, Olivia and Susan, he wouldn’t forgive himself. They had lost Mom as much as John had, and as opposed to John, they had actually been there when Mom died.

John ended up sitting near the only woman in the bar who looked like she was as set on getting drunk without any conversation and company as he was, a blonde his own age. He didn’t give her more than a glance at first, but after downing the first couple of tequilas, he noticed that she matched him shot for shot, and that the bar man opened the same type of bottles for them.

“We could pool resources,” he said before he could stop himself. His mother, his very dead mother who had died screaming of pain where he couldn’t hear it, would have said that it was against his nature to shut up in any one’s company for too long, let alone a curvy blonde with good legs.

The blonde gave him a look and narrowed her eyes at his uniform.

“Navy?” she asked. “God, I hate pilots.”

“IASA,” John corrected. She had a nice Texas accent. “But I am a pilot. So, what’s the navy done to you?”

“Never mind,” she said with a handwave. “Pool resources, absolutely.”

Several shots later, she said abruptly: “It’s my daughter’s birthday today.”

“You got kids?”

“Not anymore.”

There wasn’t anything intelligent he could have said to that, and besides, he hated the patronizing bullshit he heard day in, day out from all the people who arrived at their house after Mom died, so John figured she would, too.

“I hate this place,” he said instead, with the logic of the not nearly drunk enough. “This fucking place.”

The blonde stared at her glass and nodded, as if she had decided something. “Me too,” she said. “I could just burn it down. So we better go.”

They ended up in a motel after that. As drunken sex went, this was of the angry fucking each other’s brains out variety, and John was fine with that. He didn’t think of his mother once, and he was pretty sure she didn’t think of her daughter, either. But after, he found himself asking for her name.

“Claire,” she said.

“That’s your name?”

“No,” she replied, went into the bathroom and took a shower. Tequila and sex finally worked; he fell asleep before she came back. When he woke up, she was gone. He didn’t mind having to pay for the motel; that was what he had expected, but what did surprise him was that she left him a note. She’s not dead, it said. Just thought you might want to know. That wasn’t why I got drunk. Maybe yours isn’t either. Meredith.

Women, John thought, and the sight that greeted him in the mirror made him want to get drunk again.

VI.

“Hiro Nakamura,” the man said, “you’re a menace.”

The surprising thing was that he said it in faultless Japanese while looking every bit like an English college professor. Not that Hiro had ever met English college professors, but he was familiar with Hugh Grant. The man in front of him had the lanky figure, the striped trousers and waistcoat, and the way he pulled at his hair looked vaguely familiar, too. He looked utterly out of place on top of the Yamagato skyscraper, as did the blue box he had just stepped out of. If everyone else hadn’t finished their exercises and gone back to work, he’d have been arrested by security by now.

“You’ve been creating new time lines left, right and center,” the man continued accusingly.

“But I have to save Charlie!” Hiro insisted. “I have to get back to her!”

That was what he kept trying to do. Either his power didn’t work at all, or he ended up in Texas again, but not at the right time; so far, he had met, courted and lost Charlie three times already. And each time he failed again, he kept returning here without meaning to: to Yamagato, the unwanted seat of his father’s ambitions.

The strange man looked at him and sighed.

“You can’t,” he said, and now he sounded sad. His brown eyes didn’t fit the rest of his face, Hiro decided; they were like the eyes of an anime figure put into a live action movie. Not quite human. “Believe me, I know. I know all too well.”

“But I have to do something,” Hiro whispered.

“Go back to your friend,” the man said. “His timeline isn’t fixed yet, and he needs you. Go back, and live in the present. It’s easy to forget it exists, sometimes, but it does.”

“Is that what you do?” Hiro asked, because he felt he had to.

The man gave him a rueful look and didn’t reply.