#also. joyce (and dawn) adore spike and dru. giles and jenny and kendra get along very well with darla. angel is good friends with faith.

[tenderjock]

#omfg I LOVE this whaaaat#spike and dru training slayers !!!!!!! and darla keeping everyone alive.... yesss#thinking thinking thinking#angel does his lurker bit yeah. he helps buffy occasionally and tries to sort of kind of be her friend from the sidelines#but he doesn't know how to handle her. how to go about getting properly closer to her. not that he particularly feels like he deserves to#so it's up to spike and dru to connect with her first#because it's not really darla's area either but she keeps the big bads off buffy's back in the background for a little while#buffy gets closer with spike bc I think drusilla would freak her out a bit at first. spike has to coax her into spending more time with dru#but once buffy got past the crazy dru and her would SO bond over just being girls. dru's invited to the sleepovers y'know#buffy's friend are WIGGED but NOT allowed to tell giles. willow has a whole crisis about it. xander grumbles a lot. but they don't#willow sort of gets on with angel. spike and her hit it off in their strange awkward understanding. dru thinks xander is amusing#this takes a while though to happen that's future stuff for now they're just buffy's vampires#I don't think any of them would really connect until s2. in s1 buffy's living two lives here#I think darla and buffy would meet last. she's heard about darla but she's never actually talked to her#I think buffy would appreciate darla being the more pragmatic voice of the four. she's obviously the leader and buffy can respect her#spike and darla would become buffy's nighttime mentors. the ones she looks up to the most#angel is still her first crush however. dru would be her last but when it happens it's BAD. hits her like spike's realization in canon#with spike and darla it's more gradual. they're friends first before they're crushes. it's more a more natural progression almost#but I agree with you nothing happens between these five properly for yearsss. mostly bc I want buff buff to be an adult first lol#lots of oo moments and omg! stuff with buffy and her vamps right but nothing real until probably s5#OH can you imagine a plot of riley being buffy's like last attempt of being a “normal” girl cause she's in college#and the vamps are SO sulky about it. so sulky. the girls hide it better but they're just as upset about it as the boys#OKAY I'm out of tags uh PLEASEEE tag me if you make more about this au. I NEED it I need it haha

@camellcat thank youuu for SEEING my VISION yes!!!!

i think the big reveal where buffy and giles and jenny and everyone meets the whole coven comes right as buffy defeats the master at the end of s1 ... and the four of them are super reluctant to face the master because theyre afraid of his power over them. but they overcome their fear because Their Girl Needs Them, because she's gonna die, because she's gone down to face the master alone -

in s2 angel and buffy sort of have a flirtation going on but its totally nothing serious, buffy is Very Aware that he's dating (?) immortal lovers with (?!) darla and she's, like, not competing with THAT. meanwhile spike and dru pop up like, hey buff you wanna do a SHENANIGAN?? and she's like YEAH. and her vibe with darla is a little bit. i'm imagining like the relationship between andy and nile in the the old guard, like weary, experienced, older mentor and furious, driven, idealistic newcomer.

idk who the s2 big bad is here ... i dont want any of them to lose their souls, at least not this early on tbh, but maybe someone that angel turned/mentored early on in his vamp days should come in and try to raise acathla? and because of [mumblemumble] some prophecy, buffy has to kill angel anyway to keep the world from ending. angel's very This Is My Fate about it, but buffy and darla and kendra try to find a workaround ... they cant, tho. kendra almost dies, darla saves her, buffy has to send angel to hell, she's on the run from the police, she gets kicked out of school, she gets kicked out of her house, she has nowhere to turn. spike and dru find her packing her shit into a duffel bag, with a half-formed plan to take a bus out of town.

"i got a car, luv," spike says. so the three of them head to l.a., leaving a scribbled note for darla.

buffy's living out of a motel room with the two of them for a few months, eating cheap takeout and working off the books at a diner to make ends meet. one day, dru's braiding her hair, singing little nursery rhymes that dont make sense, and buffy looks at the space where her reflection should be in the mirror and she goes, oh.

but its bad, right? because, like, Is She Gay? also, she cant be into someone else's girlfriend - also, she cant be into spike's girlfriend, in particular, because despite appearances spike is a good guy and he's her friend and it would break his heart and violate his trust and and and

so buffy does what she does best and she Represses The Fuck Out Of That Shit. they eventually go back to sunnydale, and she goes back to slaying with kendra, and angel comes back from hell, still ensouled but semi-feral, and it's normal. it's all totally totally normal.

and then this total slutziod named faith shows up, and she says she's a potential slayer, whatever that means, and that she has information that can help them.

theres an au somewhere in which the romani spellcaster that curses angelus doesnt just curse angelus, but rather curses every vampire of the aurelian line in a, say, twelve mile radius to get their soul back.

it's rough, especially for the first few years. spike's the weepiest, but angel takes it the hardest, oddly enough. dru's absolutely nutty over it, but she's always nuts, and anyway, having the three of them to wrangle gives darla something to focus on other than the weight of her sins. they manage.

(one thing she does is research what, exactly, has been done to them. when she finds out about the loophole - even a moment's happiness - there is a gut-lurching second where darla thinks to herself, i can end our agony. and then she thinks of her last kill, a young couple and their toddler. the father had begged darla to spare the little child's life, to take him instead. the mother had clawed at darla, covering her child with her body, screaming as she died.

rather than find that moment's happiness, darla begins new research, looking into ways to secure an immortal soul to a vampire's body permanently. closing the loop, as it were.)

spike eventually gets it into his head that he wants to do the slayer thing - not kill them, like he'd planned, but to help the poor girls. dru gives him the idea. angel leaves them, at that point, in the dead of night, without telling them where he's going. darla lets him go.

there's a girl in peking - xin, her name is, and she's understandably skeptical, but she accepts their help. they fight with her until she dies, a few months later, at the hands of an apocalypse. it breaks spike and dru quite badly - cuts spike's face up, too. darla gets them out, gets them back to europe. leaves them in italy. looks for angel.

she finds him eating rats in new york city, of all places. she shakes some sense into him and gets him some clean clothes, some blood, a place to sleep out of the sun. he's wallowing, which is to be expected, but how does he figure he's going to atone for his sins if he's rotting in the gutter like so much trash?

she's too practical, he tells her. he's too fucking dramatic, she tells him, and makes him eat some more pig's blood, cold.

darla tells him about spike and dru, what they've been up to these past few decades. he shudders when she tells him about xin, her throat ripped out by enemy fangs. angel's intrigued by the concept of helping slayers, but he confesses quietly to darla that he's not ready for that yet.

so they part ways again, with the understanding that they'll stay in touch. darla bounces around the americas, running into spike and dru - sometimes just dru, as spike is off chasing rumors of slayers - until the late 1990s, when she gets a call from angel.

angel's found a girl, and he wants to get the gang back together.