#to stuff in l.a. happening regarding a ''chase investigations'' run by cordelia. darla and angel occassionally pop by l.a. to help out

[tenderjock]

....

honestly now that we're not dealing with a xander that had to watch angel and buffy date in high school yeah he probably wouldn't be such an ass about her vampire lovers. xander is her best friend, he would get to know

i'm definitely not anti-xander, in fact i'm a big fan of, like, the xander that xander was not allowed to be by the cishet male writers of btvs :) i think theres a real solid good guy underneath the '90s casual misogyny and the internalized biphobia and the cringey, inconsistent characterization :))) he has such moments of shining beauty.

i also do love xander and anya being married but separated as almost a bit? like, they live apart but get coffee together every morning and bitch about nothing before they have to go to work. anya is avenging again and xander doesnt like it but he cant tell her what to do. xander is drinking again and anya doesnt like it but she cant tell him what to do, either. they have sex with each other semi-regularly and DEFINITELY dont have sex with other people.

("although we could," anya says. "oh yeah," xander says. "yeah, we could. if you - i mean, i wouldnt mind. obviously. i'm not your - i mean, i am your husband, but i wouldn't - it'd be fine." "you could have sex with as many or as few stupid, vapid sluts as would have you," anya says. "sure," xander says. "just my type.")

i think buffy and spike and dru have a special bond in this because of the summer they spent in l.a. and everything that came out of that. i mean, angel was buffy's big first crush, and darla was and remains her mentor, but spike and drusilla are her partners in crime in a way that even willow and xander - who are like her human partners in crime - dont quite get. and then when the three of them started having sex, it really drew them together as a trio.

tara's alive in this au but she's moved to berkeley in the s6-s7 summer break and broken up with willow after almost dying. because i decided so.

s7 faith and kendra come back ... idk i feel there are big changes here. robin shows up, obvs, and he hates spike at first because he mistakenly believes spike killed nikki so we get a really touching scene where spike tells him about how much nikki loved him, what she did for him etc etc - kind of the opposite of what happened in canon lmao. i think jenny and giles get in a big fight honestly, because giles is so not down with buffy having a vamp harem, whereas jenny is cautiously okay with it and supportive.

the potentials would be SHOCKED and i think a lot of them would question buffy's judgement and reasoning, too. it would cause a lot of tension. especially like

NEW POTENTIAL SLAYER: [stumbles to the kitchen to get a glass of water in the middle of the night] [four pairs of eye shine flicker in the pitch black kitchen] NEW POTENTIAL SLAYER: [shrieks]

#I keep thinking of how s7 would go honestly and ohhh my heart. I think it'd be so goddamn SWEET

also just the mental image of a big vamp cuddle puddle in the middle of a socal heat wave and buffy being able to snuggle in the center of all FOUR of her honeys without overheating ahhhhhhhhhh

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.