A Path Not Taken
By: spoiledsquish
Disclaimer: Not mine. If you don’t believe me, then watch Waiting In The Wings or A Hole In World for further indication that I don’t, nor never will, own them!
Author's Note: I thought up this fic as I was reading Gia’s “A Convenient Marriage” that I had saved to disk on my computer. I guess you could say she was my inspiration for this fic…I know this plot has probably been worked many a time, but I had to put a spoiledsquish turn on it! Also, there was never any Dawn or Connor, Doyle never died, Angel never slept with Darla, Lindsey never left town, Joyce never died (at least, not until years later, when Buffy and Angel’s kid was like, 13.) and in Pylea, there was never any Groo. Instead, there was just an alternate reality Doyle.
Distribution: My site, Seductive Web, PPA, Enchanting Place, Fanfiction.net, WTTS, PFYL, TEF, Sempiternal Beloved...If you host my fics regularly, feel free. If you don’t, just ask and most likely you shall receive.
Summary: Years into the future, a daughter of two former warriors is called in by the PTB to go back in time and make things right. Her life, and the fate of the world, depends on it.
Pairings: B/A, as per usual. Plus, mentions of C/D, C/X, and W/O. Mix in undertones of A/C, and B/S, and what do you get? Angst, angst, and more angst!
Rating: PG-13 to R for language. Could eventually turn into NC-17.
Spoilers: Really the whole BTVS series and everything just after S5 ep where Spike comes back, but Eve never ever surfaced. Mainly spoilers up to Buffy S6 and Angel S3, though there mentions of later seasons as the story progresses. This does take place as Angel is starting to think he’s “in love” (rolls eyes) with Cordelia and right after Buffy kisses spike at the end of “OMWF”. It’s AU from there and everything else is fair play.
Dedications: To Starrkitty, just ‘cuz I’ve always loved her site and her fic “Someone Else Is In The Wings”, which is nowhere to be found. I hope you update your fic and your site soon, girl! This fic is also dedicated to the only other person who has helped me to give me advice on my group website and fics, Donnatella.
Chapter 1
Los Angeles, California: 2025
Warrior. Fighter. Chosen. These are words you associate easily with my family. My name is Elizabeth Faith O’Connor, and my parents saved the world.
They’re heroes in their own right. My mother, Elizabeth “Buffy” Anne Summers, has died twice, sacrificing herself for people she loved and the world. And she did it all because she knew it was the right thing to do.
She was and still is a vampire slayer. Longest living one known to mankind. Her sister Slayer Faith, my Aunt, is second longest living one. They’re the first in a long of vampire Slayers.
Even got Aunt Willow to perform some witchcraft thing giving all these potential Slayers the power of knowing what the Slayer feels like when she’s in battle. That’s a whole other story, though, that I really don’t want to go into.
My father is Liam O’Connor, better known as Angel or ‘Angelus-The Scourge of Europe’, whichever you prefer. He killed millions of people before he fed on a gypsy daughter in Romania in 1898. He was cursed by her family, a pack of gypsies, and destined to have a soul for eternity, to remember all of those innocents he’d killed and to make him suffer for their deaths.
Too bad those gypsies weren’t around about hundred years later, when my parents met. My father lost his soul on my mom’s 17th birthday, only hours after they’d consummated their relationship. According to the gypsy curse, “one moment of true happiness, of content, one moment where the soul that we restored no longer plagues his thoughts, then that soul is taken from him.” And it was. He went on a killing spree for months afterwards.
Aunt Willow, bless her heart restored his soul. Somehow, Granddad Giles’ then girlfriend, Jenny Calendar, had drummed up a revised and mostly translated curse that she was going to perform as a makeup present to my mom for not telling her about her origin and her reasons for being in Sunnydale in the first place.
It would have worked, too, if my father’s counterpart, Angelus, hadn’t been at the factory that night. His crazy childe Dru had one of those visions or whatever it is that crazy people have… Anyway, she tipped him off, and Angelus broke her neck. He’d thought he’d gotten rid of all traces of that soul, but I guess Jenny had saved it onto a disk that Mom found one day while studying for finals with Aunt Willow.
Too bad Mom never got that chance to see Willow restore his soul. She was so blinded by her meeting with Angelus, she never saw the trap coming. Drusilla and his minions were sent to kill Mom’s friends and her then sister Slayer Kendra.
They injured Will, and killed Kendra while Granddad Giles’ was kidnapped and held hostage by Angelus. So, my Mom did the most important and biggest life altering decision that she ever made.
She killed my father. Not that that concerned me much, because he’s a vampire. She sent him to hell for three months, which in Hell terms is about a thousand years. He came back, thank god. Thus starting the whole drama of my parent’s relationship all over…
So, where was I? Right, Mom had sent dad to Hell. Anyway, he came back months later, all confused. The only thing he recognized was my Mom…Aww, sweet, huh? Anyway, they went through the on-again, off-again phase until Grandma Joyce convinced my dad that he was a distraction to Mom and convinced him to break up with her and leave town. That’s something I can never forgive and will ever forgive her for.
Daddy broke up with her on the eve of Prom, the most important high school moment of a teenage girl’s life! Mom went stag, and the senior class presented her with a first-time ever award…’Class Protector’.
Daddy showed up and they shared one last night of happiness, and then Dad disappeared virtually until Graduation Day. Aunt Faith, who was a big pain in the ass then, not to mention evil, poisoned Dad. The cure? Slayer’s blood.
Mom meant to bring him Faith, but their fight ended up with Faith nearly left for dead in a coma and with Daddy dying by the minute, Mom gave herself to him. Left a pretty nasty scar, too.
After the Mayor’s ascension (Mom’s nemesis at the time), Daddy left. No goodbye, no words, nothing. It was too hard on him, I guess. He came to Los Angeles to “fight evil and atone for his crimes.”
Whoa! I just channeled Uncle Doyle there. Anyway, he met up with Cordelia (whom I don’t consider to be a member of my family, by the way—I’ll let you in on that little secret later…) and a half-demon Doyle, and together the three of them fought the local evil.
Enter in Uncle Wesley. A ‘rogue demon hunter.’ He and street fighter Charles Gunn joined forces with my father and his friends to form “AI: Angel Investigations.”
A detective agency. Anyway, a year later, they hook up with an aura reading demon Lorne and rescue a former librarian Aunt Fred (who later married my Uncle Wesley!) from a different dimension called Pylea.
That doesn’t even begin my parent’s fucked up time. When Daddy got back from Pylea, Aunt Willow was waiting for him. I’m sure you already guessed it by now. Mom was dead. She sacrificed herself because she found out that not only was she a Slayer, but a Key to opening up about a million different Hell dimensions with her blood. Parts of her strength were made from Monks who sent her own blood to herself (am I still making with the sense here, huh?) to protect it from Glory.
Daddy came to her funeral. They’d had it at night because they knew Mom would have wanted it that way. He’d placed a single white rose on her grave before leaving town and the country, might I add, so that he could work through his grief of losing my Mom.
Then Mom came back, courtesy of Aunt Willow’s resurrection skills. She came back and almost killed herself that same night, if Uncle Xander hadn’t saved her. When Dad found out, they met in between Los Angeles and Sunnydale, where I’m assuming since they never actually told anyone-including me- that they fought… a lot.
Both went back to their respective places and both started to try and move on. Dad started believing what everyone around him was telling him… Things about kye-rumption and moira…about how Cordelia was his true soul mate, the one he was destined to be with, forever and always.
Mom? She went through a deep depression and started fucking my dad’s grandchilde, my Uncle Spike. He’d been in love with her since after he’d gotten defanged with a chip in his head and started re-obsessing about killing my Mom. Eventually, she ended it, just before her former boyfriend (the average Joe she dated for almost two years after Dad left) Riley Finn came back to town with his newlywed bride Samantha.
That’s when everyone found out. Found out about Mom and Spike, about Daddy and Cordelia…about everything. And for a moment, the world stopped going, time stopped ticking, and hearts stopped beating.
How had the world gotten so out of whack in so little time?