#umpty dozen resurrection fic wish scenarios and yet the literal fur vs. fang choice of death hasn't been

[lightdancer1]

After reading about some of the potential ideas for Buffy:

I was struck that while the Willow/Tara wish fic is a genre that's been used often enough, the 'Angelus decides to kill Oz instead of Jenny Calendar' idea surprisingly, very surprisingly given fandom hasn't appeared at all. To a degree this fic is kind of the anti-Witches and Slayers in playing very firmly within Whedon's sandbox rather than doing the Whedonverse as I would have done it, complete with actual full-scale Lovecraftian cosmic horror grinding against Buffyverse tropes.

Unlike Witches and Slayers, too, this is distinctly after the POD rather than starting with it and the reasons for Angelus's actions ultimately stem from the same reason he killed Jenny Calendar. He overhears Willow talking about her re-ensoulment spell and its modification and kills Oz....who discovers in his swansong that it was never quite about the Moon, as is established in the canon and gives Angelus a literal fight for his life that narrowly fails to kill him.

The butterfly effects, however, of this particular trauma nailbat hitting Willow rather earlier in Season 2 and her deciding to re-ensoul Angel out of spite and essentially seeing it as dishonoring her dead boyfriend if she accepted the terrorism behind killing him (and that is what it is on an individual scale via Angelus) cast a very wide shadow where canon firmly derails starting in Season 5 and things get rather more fun for the author than for the characters.

Unlike the other story, another way this is an anithesis of it is that since this is playing with Whedon's verse Angel gets more respect as he would in Whedon's take, unlike mine, and some of the pettier potshots at Xander Harris aren't there because that's the hazard of sticking to making something feel more like the original sandbox.

And it is a kind of fascinating path here that fandom just hasn't done anything with even though it's hardly a secret and given how much fandom doubles down on particular plots you'd think someone somewhere would have had 'what if Angelus did the Warren Mears thing in Season 2?' as a plotline, but no.