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gehayi:
Five things Methos doesn’t regret, but can’t talk to Duncan or Joe about
1) The sheer amount of history accounts he falsified or destroyed, not just during his time as Adam Pierson, and not just while posing as a Watcher. He’s been at it from the time history was recorded in written form. The Egyptians made it easy, as there was always a pharaoh happy to take credit from his predecessor by having his predecessor’s deeds hammered out and his own name written all over the relevant temples, which offered great opportunities for hammering out other depictions as well. And why do you think there is no reliable contemporary chronicle of Alexander the Great in existence and all that came to us were accounts written much later, while eye witness memoirs like Ptolemy’s are lost? Not to mention that lost century or two before Charlemagne, though when conspiracy theorists wondered whether Charlemagne himself wasn’t invented by Renaissance historians Methos got worried a bit. It’s all for security, of course, but he is pretty sure both Joe and Duncan live in the delusion that not only are there not falsified records around in the world, but that somewhere, Methos keeps a chronicle containing the true story of what happened. Whereas even the “diaries” he had in his apartment for Kalas to find were fakes. What use is the truth to anyone anyway? Not as much as his continued existence is to Methos, thanks a lot.
2) On that note: he has told so many different stories about certain periods of his life, depending on who was listening, that in some cases, he doesn’t know which one is the true one anymore, and this does not cause existential angst or regret. He rather prefers it that way. But if course if he told this to Joe, Joe’s inner Watcher would insist on hunting for accounts that conflicted or confirmed with the anecdotes Methos indulges him with now and then, which might lead to Joe realizing 1) and going into a historian’s meltdown. And if he told it to Duncan, Duncan would probably insist on setting up something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Immortals, with Methos and Cassandra as the first two members. You see why Methos doesn’t say anything?
3) That threesome with Rebecca and Amanda back in the day. The reason why he doesn’t talk about this great one night stand is that describing sex with women of one’s mutual acquaintance, one of whom tragically dead and the other very much alive, is in bad taste. Not at all because Duncan or Joe would mention it to Amanda and Amanda would laugh and point out that this particular memory is an example of 2), and how can Methos be sure she’s not right about this, hm?
4) Being Methos, he’s good at avoiding duels – at least if he isn’t hanging out with certain boyscout trouble magnets – but every now and then, he meets a headhunter, and he never regrets winning and coming out alive. Not even if the Quickening of one particular occasion was one taken on September 2nd, 1666 and started the Great Fire of London. (Yes, the chronicles say it started in the bakery of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane, but see 1).) After all, what would London be now without all the buildings Christopher Wren got to be the architect for after the fire?
5) Outing himself to Duncan McLeod instead of hightailing out of Paris. This did cause a not yet ending chain of trouble but also revitalized him, and, well, brought passion back in his life. But frankly, if Joe and Duncan haven’t figured out he’s not regretting that already, they are dumber than Methos takes them for, so there is no need to talk about it.
Forsnickfic:
Five conversations Spike and Darla did not have
1) The one about the advisability of turning one’s relatives. Drusilla told Darla about the messy Anne business, and for a moment, Darla considered making it clear that adding anyone who could be a threat to her position as matriarch was a strict no, and wasn’t he supposed to be Drusilla’s new playmate and keep her occupied anyway? Then she reconsidered. She wasn’t too sure about young William anyway, and if he did have an aunt to turn somewhere now his mother was dust, they could simply leave him with her. Dru would find someone else. So Darla didn’t say anything.
2) The one about Angelus having been cursed with a soul. In retrospect, she wishes she’d have told both Spike and Dru, and had made it clear how important it was to keep that one gypsy family alive so she would have leverage. But at the time, admitting what had happened, admitting her own blind horror when sensing the soul in Angelus, admitting she had panicked like a mortal instead of acting with a cool head – it was simply unthinkable. She should have told them the truth after China at the latest, and this time remained silent for another reason. Explaining about the soul would mean revealing she had been desperate enough to take Angel back anyway. And that, too, just wouldn’t do.
3) The one where she asked him to turn her after she came back as a human and before Drusilla did. Darla did contemplate going to Sunnydale when she heard Spike was there. It would be somewhat humiliating to ask the kid for a favour, but at that point, she was desperate enough to ask any type of idiots, and Spike at least was of her own bloodline. In the end, she heard about the chip, and realised he’d turn her down anyway.
4) The one where she contemplated showing him the ropes of ghostly existence. Because of the manner of her final death as opposed to the rest of her life, Darla presented a dilemma for The Powers That Be, who couldn’t bring themselves to either consigning her to oblivion, putting her in hell or rewarding her with heaven. So she opted for being a ghost in order to be allowed to keep an eye on her darling boys. (That would be Angel and Connor, not Spike.) Granted, her one attempt at direct intervention wasn’t exactly a sterling success, but more indirect methods, like scaring Fred and later everyone else with visions until they realised the truth about Jasmine, worked out far better. (You didn’t think Jasmine really looked like a maggoty corpse, did you? Her true aspect was neither beautiful nor horrible but infinitely alien, given what she was, and probably would have evoked a non-reaction. But Darla dragged up a reliably scary image out from the world she had grown up in – just check those Elizabethan plays and poetry – and projected it, and it worked.) So when Spike showed up in Los Angeles, she considered giving him the ghostly what’s what. But then she remembered dear William getting them all hiding in a bloody coal mine and thought that Spike, in any form, should not have weapons at his disposal before he had some common sense knocked into him. So she remained silent.
5) The one where he asked her why she had never really liked him and she told him the truth. They were all formed by their mortal existence as well as their immortal one. No whore starts out rich enough to be thought of as a woman of property. No, she starts out as a street girl. And if there is something that makes an Elizabethan street girl grinding her teeth with impatience and antipathy, it’s a young well-to-do man whining about his lot in life and the hardship of not getting poems published or his adored beloved to love him back, especially if said whining is done in the company of a woman who has to have sex with at least six men a day to pay for her rent and the food in her mouth, and he expects the woman in question to play his mother as well which is so not what he paid her for. Darla’s Elizabethan contemporaries were long dust by the time she met Dru’s new playmate, but one look at him told her he was precisely the sort. She’d never tell him that, though. Spike would be immensely flattered to be compared to Sir Philip Sidney.
Forcallmesandy:
Five careers Connor could have had after Not Fade Away
1) The Rileys are disappointed and puzzled that given how well Connor did in school and in his first college year, he ends up working as a stuntman after suddenly dropping out of college. Some discreet enquiries among his college friends bring up a visit by Mr. Angel from Wolfram and Heart as the only unusual circumstance before the drop out, but Mr. Angel has disappeared from the face of the earth, so can’t be questioned. Connor says it’s what he wants to do. What he doesn’t mention is that it pays for a living and allows for enough time to patrol the night for demons and vampires. Which most other jobs don’t. Also, Hollywood is haunted like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes, when his two sets of memories mingle too much, he wonders what Cordelia would say if she knew he’s in the movies as she once wanted to be, but then he recalls he can’t ever know whether it was Cordelia who mentioned this to him, or Jasmine, or both, and tries not to think of it at all.
2) He shouldn’t have let Tracy talk him into a trip to Cardiff when they were in England, on their great hitchhiking-through-Europe tour. And he should have ignored the dark-haired guy in a leather coat standing on a rooftop. But from a distance, Connor couldn’t be sure; also, Tracy was already in the hotel room, so Connor climbed up to the rooftop. Without considering this wasn’t possible for most humans. This got him classified as an alien and locked up by the guy in question, who wasn’t Angel at all but someone who called himself Jack Harkness, and wouldn’t be convinced Connor was human. Especially after some instruments revealed Connor had indeed spent most of his life in another dimension. In the end, it was working for Harkness or remaining locked up. Connor had a feeling this wasn’t an unusual recruitment method for his new boss, who added insult to injury buy slipping Tracy retcon pills that made her forget all about Connor and return to the States. The thing was, though, that it felt familiar, all too familiar, and though he wouldn’t admit it, he did miss his father.
3) When he later was asked who inspired him to become an astronaut, Connor grinned and made a geeky reference to John Crichton, which usually failed because not that many people had watched Farscape. But neither his fake nor his real memories contained Star Trek, and naming Winifred Burkle the one time he did it had resulted in her parents tracking him down and demanding to know whether he could tell them where she had disappeared to, and nobody had told him that, either, though he had a suspicion about Illyria. Still. Fred, in the summer Angel had spent under the sea, trying to help him adjust to her world, had taught him the constellation of the stars and how you could tell in which dimension you were instantly by looking at them, and this had started it all.
4) Drusilla had not featured in any of the stories Holtz had told him, and nobody at Angel Investigations had thought of mentioning her, either. He should have staked her when she showed up in college one night, but her talk of “daddy” and “grandmother” and knowing him before he was born made him curious enough to hesitate, and when she told him her story Connor was stricken. It was as if she was his sister twice over; herself, and Daniel Holtz’ daughter whom his parents had sired for Holtz to find, in one person. That was why he let his guard down and did not move when she opened her arms to embrace him. Which was a rather finite sort of mistake. Dru wanted her family back, forever, and Connor was all that was left. Before the night was over, she had a new son and brother.
5) Illyria was the one who told him Angel and everyone else was dead. She also said she needed a new guide, or she would bring havoc to this dimension for taking Wesley from her, which he would not wish her to. Connor didn’t feel qualified to be anyone’s guide, and he plainly refused to believe Angel was dead – not like this, never like this – but with his memories recovered, he dreamed of Jasmine more and more. His daughter, whom he had killed. If he had been better then, had managed to show her he loved her without being compelled to by whatever made everyone else first love and then desert her, that it didn’t have to be either worship or destruction, that they both could continue despite of what they had done… but he hadn’t believed it then, either. Now he did. Jasmine was dead, but Illyria was not. And all of his parents believed in doing something instead of just contemplating your regrets. So Connor said yes.
gehayi: Five things Methos doesn’t regret, but can’t talk to Duncan or Joe about
1) The sheer amount of history accounts he falsified or destroyed, not just during his time as Adam Pierson, and not just while posing as a Watcher. He’s been at it from the time history was recorded in written form. The Egyptians made it easy, as there was always a pharaoh happy to take credit from his predecessor by having his predecessor’s deeds hammered out and his own name written all over the relevant temples, which offered great opportunities for hammering out other depictions as well. And why do you think there is no reliable contemporary chronicle of Alexander the Great in existence and all that came to us were accounts written much later, while eye witness memoirs like Ptolemy’s are lost? Not to mention that lost century or two before Charlemagne, though when conspiracy theorists wondered whether Charlemagne himself wasn’t invented by Renaissance historians Methos got worried a bit. It’s all for security, of course, but he is pretty sure both Joe and Duncan live in the delusion that not only are there not falsified records around in the world, but that somewhere, Methos keeps a chronicle containing the true story of what happened. Whereas even the “diaries” he had in his apartment for Kalas to find were fakes. What use is the truth to anyone anyway? Not as much as his continued existence is to Methos, thanks a lot.
2) On that note: he has told so many different stories about certain periods of his life, depending on who was listening, that in some cases, he doesn’t know which one is the true one anymore, and this does not cause existential angst or regret. He rather prefers it that way. But if course if he told this to Joe, Joe’s inner Watcher would insist on hunting for accounts that conflicted or confirmed with the anecdotes Methos indulges him with now and then, which might lead to Joe realizing 1) and going into a historian’s meltdown. And if he told it to Duncan, Duncan would probably insist on setting up something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Immortals, with Methos and Cassandra as the first two members. You see why Methos doesn’t say anything?
3) That threesome with Rebecca and Amanda back in the day. The reason why he doesn’t talk about this great one night stand is that describing sex with women of one’s mutual acquaintance, one of whom tragically dead and the other very much alive, is in bad taste. Not at all because Duncan or Joe would mention it to Amanda and Amanda would laugh and point out that this particular memory is an example of 2), and how can Methos be sure she’s not right about this, hm?
4) Being Methos, he’s good at avoiding duels – at least if he isn’t hanging out with certain boyscout trouble magnets – but every now and then, he meets a headhunter, and he never regrets winning and coming out alive. Not even if the Quickening of one particular occasion was one taken on September 2nd, 1666 and started the Great Fire of London. (Yes, the chronicles say it started in the bakery of Thomas Farriner in Pudding Lane, but see 1).) After all, what would London be now without all the buildings Christopher Wren got to be the architect for after the fire?
5) Outing himself to Duncan McLeod instead of hightailing out of Paris. This did cause a not yet ending chain of trouble but also revitalized him, and, well, brought passion back in his life. But frankly, if Joe and Duncan haven’t figured out he’s not regretting that already, they are dumber than Methos takes them for, so there is no need to talk about it.
For
snickfic: Five conversations Spike and Darla did not have
1) The one about the advisability of turning one’s relatives. Drusilla told Darla about the messy Anne business, and for a moment, Darla considered making it clear that adding anyone who could be a threat to her position as matriarch was a strict no, and wasn’t he supposed to be Drusilla’s new playmate and keep her occupied anyway? Then she reconsidered. She wasn’t too sure about young William anyway, and if he did have an aunt to turn somewhere now his mother was dust, they could simply leave him with her. Dru would find someone else. So Darla didn’t say anything.
2) The one about Angelus having been cursed with a soul. In retrospect, she wishes she’d have told both Spike and Dru, and had made it clear how important it was to keep that one gypsy family alive so she would have leverage. But at the time, admitting what had happened, admitting her own blind horror when sensing the soul in Angelus, admitting she had panicked like a mortal instead of acting with a cool head – it was simply unthinkable. She should have told them the truth after China at the latest, and this time remained silent for another reason. Explaining about the soul would mean revealing she had been desperate enough to take Angel back anyway. And that, too, just wouldn’t do.
3) The one where she asked him to turn her after she came back as a human and before Drusilla did. Darla did contemplate going to Sunnydale when she heard Spike was there. It would be somewhat humiliating to ask the kid for a favour, but at that point, she was desperate enough to ask any type of idiots, and Spike at least was of her own bloodline. In the end, she heard about the chip, and realised he’d turn her down anyway.
4) The one where she contemplated showing him the ropes of ghostly existence. Because of the manner of her final death as opposed to the rest of her life, Darla presented a dilemma for The Powers That Be, who couldn’t bring themselves to either consigning her to oblivion, putting her in hell or rewarding her with heaven. So she opted for being a ghost in order to be allowed to keep an eye on her darling boys. (That would be Angel and Connor, not Spike.) Granted, her one attempt at direct intervention wasn’t exactly a sterling success, but more indirect methods, like scaring Fred and later everyone else with visions until they realised the truth about Jasmine, worked out far better. (You didn’t think Jasmine really looked like a maggoty corpse, did you? Her true aspect was neither beautiful nor horrible but infinitely alien, given what she was, and probably would have evoked a non-reaction. But Darla dragged up a reliably scary image out from the world she had grown up in – just check those Elizabethan plays and poetry – and projected it, and it worked.) So when Spike showed up in Los Angeles, she considered giving him the ghostly what’s what. But then she remembered dear William getting them all hiding in a bloody coal mine and thought that Spike, in any form, should not have weapons at his disposal before he had some common sense knocked into him. So she remained silent.
5) The one where he asked her why she had never really liked him and she told him the truth. They were all formed by their mortal existence as well as their immortal one. No whore starts out rich enough to be thought of as a woman of property. No, she starts out as a street girl. And if there is something that makes an Elizabethan street girl grinding her teeth with impatience and antipathy, it’s a young well-to-do man whining about his lot in life and the hardship of not getting poems published or his adored beloved to love him back, especially if said whining is done in the company of a woman who has to have sex with at least six men a day to pay for her rent and the food in her mouth, and he expects the woman in question to play his mother as well which is so not what he paid her for. Darla’s Elizabethan contemporaries were long dust by the time she met Dru’s new playmate, but one look at him told her he was precisely the sort. She’d never tell him that, though. Spike would be immensely flattered to be compared to Sir Philip Sidney.
For
callmesandy: Five careers Connor could have had after Not Fade Away
1) The Rileys are disappointed and puzzled that given how well Connor did in school and in his first college year, he ends up working as a stuntman after suddenly dropping out of college. Some discreet enquiries among his college friends bring up a visit by Mr. Angel from Wolfram and Heart as the only unusual circumstance before the drop out, but Mr. Angel has disappeared from the face of the earth, so can’t be questioned. Connor says it’s what he wants to do. What he doesn’t mention is that it pays for a living and allows for enough time to patrol the night for demons and vampires. Which most other jobs don’t. Also, Hollywood is haunted like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes, when his two sets of memories mingle too much, he wonders what Cordelia would say if she knew he’s in the movies as she once wanted to be, but then he recalls he can’t ever know whether it was Cordelia who mentioned this to him, or Jasmine, or both, and tries not to think of it at all.
2) He shouldn’t have let Tracy talk him into a trip to Cardiff when they were in England, on their great hitchhiking-through-Europe tour. And he should have ignored the dark-haired guy in a leather coat standing on a rooftop. But from a distance, Connor couldn’t be sure; also, Tracy was already in the hotel room, so Connor climbed up to the rooftop. Without considering this wasn’t possible for most humans. This got him classified as an alien and locked up by the guy in question, who wasn’t Angel at all but someone who called himself Jack Harkness, and wouldn’t be convinced Connor was human. Especially after some instruments revealed Connor had indeed spent most of his life in another dimension. In the end, it was working for Harkness or remaining locked up. Connor had a feeling this wasn’t an unusual recruitment method for his new boss, who added insult to injury buy slipping Tracy retcon pills that made her forget all about Connor and return to the States. The thing was, though, that it felt familiar, all too familiar, and though he wouldn’t admit it, he did miss his father.
3) When he later was asked who inspired him to become an astronaut, Connor grinned and made a geeky reference to John Crichton, which usually failed because not that many people had watched Farscape. But neither his fake nor his real memories contained Star Trek, and naming Winifred Burkle the one time he did it had resulted in her parents tracking him down and demanding to know whether he could tell them where she had disappeared to, and nobody had told him that, either, though he had a suspicion about Illyria. Still. Fred, in the summer Angel had spent under the sea, trying to help him adjust to her world, had taught him the constellation of the stars and how you could tell in which dimension you were instantly by looking at them, and this had started it all.
4) Drusilla had not featured in any of the stories Holtz had told him, and nobody at Angel Investigations had thought of mentioning her, either. He should have staked her when she showed up in college one night, but her talk of “daddy” and “grandmother” and knowing him before he was born made him curious enough to hesitate, and when she told him her story Connor was stricken. It was as if she was his sister twice over; herself, and Daniel Holtz’ daughter whom his parents had sired for Holtz to find, in one person. That was why he let his guard down and did not move when she opened her arms to embrace him. Which was a rather finite sort of mistake. Dru wanted her family back, forever, and Connor was all that was left. Before the night was over, she had a new son and brother.
5) Illyria was the one who told him Angel and everyone else was dead. She also said she needed a new guide, or she would bring havoc to this dimension for taking Wesley from her, which he would not wish her to. Connor didn’t feel qualified to be anyone’s guide, and he plainly refused to believe Angel was dead – not like this, never like this – but with his memories recovered, he dreamed of Jasmine more and more. His daughter, whom he had killed. If he had been better then, had managed to show her he loved her without being compelled to by whatever made everyone else first love and then desert her, that it didn’t have to be either worship or destruction, that they both could continue despite of what they had done… but he hadn’t believed it then, either. Now he did. Jasmine was dead, but Illyria was not. And all of his parents believed in doing something instead of just contemplating your regrets. So Connor said yes.
