15Disclaimer: refer first chapter.
A/N: Okay, more like a couple weeks. Sorry, I got sidetracked. In the meantime, much thanks to studyofchaos (yeah, that could also fit), Muffyn1, dyri (I did say 'crack pairing', did I not?), Starway Man (yeah, that's actually the entire reason for picking this particular timeframe, for reasons hinted at below - as for Oz? think of it as a reminder of not just Willow's but Xander's spiritual links to him, back before much of the craziness) and Chronopie (yup, some laws of the Buffyverse are simply unbreakable) for their reviews.
To Grind the Organ of Divergence
Chapter 3: Experiment (Further Research Required)
or,
'…oh, and it was Dark Willow, in the canon dimension, with the chaos demon.'
—ox-oxo-xo—
Meanwhile, one hundred and eighty-seven years in the future and a handful of alternate realities over, the figure who held the final piece of missed information in the puzzle sat and observed the utter chaos she had wrought with a certain understated bemusement.
One of the many, many things that the terrible, lonely being that had once been the Wiccan witch Willow Rosenberg had learned over two centuries on Earth and a near eternity in realms of both the higher and lower planes of sidereal existence, was that it was in fact possible for magical entities to manipulate chaos demons – you just had to know how. (In fact, as she'd eventually worked out, influencing the inspirations of a range of demons was one of the PTB's favourite means of indirectly steering the Champions via the application of specific stressors. This approach was largely necessary due to the Balance's mechanics heavily discouraging the direct influence on Champions by those other than their stated lords and masters (PTB, Senior Partners, The First, the entities that powered spells, etcetera), who even then were required to do so only in certain prescribed ways.)
Of course, she'd actually done nothing more than drop her old childhood friend Xander Harris in a hell dimension to live out his worst nightmares and see if that would change the damned timeline – but noooo, that turned out to do nothing but spawn an alternate dimension too, didn't it?
Though she did have to admit, she would have never in a million years guessed that normal everyday Xander Harris could have turned into…that. Maybe there was something she could do with that…
After so long, the vast majority of the Xander Collective had passed on…at least, the first wave. Because as it turned out, most of the various extraplanar entities and bodies corporate had withdrawn to await the fallout following the Xander attached to Angel's gang calling in heavy reinforcements prior to the assault on the Circle of the Black Thorn and thus putting a massive dent in the entire Angel-as-Twilight arc of causality… Only to be locked out en masse when the First Xander had somehow pulled another miracle out of his ass and sweet-talked Gaia, of all the Goddesses, convincing her that she was much better off without them. And without Them, the Balance had both shifted and changed dramatically in nature and effect.
In that dimension, the magic was still fading away. Only, it was doing so far more gradually and with far more grace than it had here. The Slayer line had eventually dwindled back down to 'one girl in all the world'…only, this one was backed by the full and enthusiastic might of the N.S.W.X.C. (or, the New Slayers' (just in case), Watchers' and Xanders' Council), led squarely in the van by several dozen descendants of that regenesis of Xander Harris. Of course, it wasn't that impressive compared to the original wave, or even the original Xander. But then, the original Xander was still floating around – and in any case, the great majority of that Earth's hostile demons had been culled or almost so, to the point where the active Slayer and the N.S.W.X.C.'s remaining coterie of heavy hitters mainly stopped any dimensional incursions, collated their knowledge for a rainy day, and generally acted as a de facto police force for the supernatural underworld.
Maybe 85 percent of that first Xander collective had died with their chosen ones – which, most of them being Slayers, was relatively early in their lives. Approximately seventy of them had stayed behind for a while to raise the children (most of which had the 'Harris' dropped from their names for ease of differentiation), and perhaps half of those lingered a while longer to see the grandchildren before passing on to join their original loved ones in the afterlife. One mildly interesting factoid was that there were fewer Xanders in the heavens than one might have otherwise expected; it seemed that those blessed realms had their own inalterable standards, and only the Xanders who had lived long, full and enriching (or at the least full and enriching) lives in their own individual right were granted entry upon death. Others spent their time congregating in one of the far-flung hells, which several hundred Xanders had liberated and turned over to the euphemistically named 'eternal torment' known far and wide as 'The Endless all-Xander Gang-Banging of Anya Jenkins'.
Who was indeed a-wailing in 'eternal torment'. Yup. She'd checked.
There were still a few of the first wave out there. One still serving his old friend Dracula, while occupying his wives' attentions when the Dark Prince wanted some alone-time. One still putting Drusilla through a range of moderately exquisite tortures, with the odd drop-in on the Immortal (who incidentally, indeed had traded tips with Xander the Third – much to Buffy Summers' delight and exhaustion); nowadays the vampiric seer was somewhat saner, if leaning considerably further towards the masochistic end of the S&M scale, with a death toll that had tapered down to a mere few criminals per year. And one more still hung around to pester Angel, Spike and Illyria…although not so much Illyria, who he doted on in much the same way as the other two doted on their masters/pets. As for Illyria, she appreciated the low-level 'worship' and periodically experimented upon the strange delicacy that was called 'sex' when the occasional urge took her…
Somewhat interestingly, the last time she'd looked in on the hell dimension that Xander had briefly sojourned in, she had seen 'Xian Pu', 'Ku Lon's' granddaughter, playing with her own thoroughly whipped Xander-slave. Subsequent investigation revealed that the dimension's ruler had scraped together the remnants of Xander's siphoned energies (still a fair bit, though not enough to match even the First Wave Xanders), and given him to her granddaughter as a gift after getting over her disappointment.
And as for the First Xander, that singular anthropomorphic nexus of Free Will incarnate…
She stilled.
…was he staring back at her?
A long, laden moment followed, where two dimensions seemed to hold their collective breath…
Only for the two distant individuals to shake their heads with a certain sad finality.
With a little smile and a mouthed 'good luck, Wills', Xander Rosenberg-Harris turned away and caught up to his love, who darted a quizzical look at him. He answered with a distinctly non-committal shrug, which a far-distant entity accepted as the parting gift from an old, long-lost friend that it was.
On the negative side, she mused, there was no help from that quarter. On the positive, there would be no interference from that quarter either. And besides… (she cast her all-seeing eye back one hundred and eighty-seven years back, taking a much closer look at the underlying context of that timeline) …while the prior divergences were subtle, they were there. Which meant that she had actually hit an already extant alternate reality instead of spawning her own. Which in turn meant that some promise remained in this approach.
At the least, it would be something else to research while the remaining years ticked by on her planet called Earth, ever-closer to her personal, fated endgame…
Ending A/N: And here we come to the premise of each of the 'Divergence' series: that Dark Willow, over the years alone before her endgame (as per 'Time of Your Life', mid-Season 8 Motion Comics), attempted on multiple occasions to change the past in other ways – either hitting or spawning a good many divergent realities in the process. I've got about half-a-dozen floating in my head at the moment, most of them in somewhat unusual split-off points (for example with Sweet, or at the age of 4).
A second, underlying assumption is the reason that most of her efforts in this pastime focus on Xander. Namely, that as alluded to throughout, 'the Balance' is a Cold War-style detente where all sides keep a very close watch on their Champions, and discourage (albeit sometimes with mixed results) the attempted meddlings of interlopers high and low (such as Dark Willow-from-another-dimension). The peripheral pawns, though? The Xanders, and the Rileys and Jonathans and Gunns of the world? The game is built around their characters acting a certain way, which for the most part can be relied upon to shape events, unless it need be altered or removed occasionally to dis/encourage a series of events from/into occurring. It is because of this rare need for intervention, and thus the lax watch kept on them, that Dark Willow can slip in the odd interference at certain points, without the Powers, Partners etc. caring too much…or in this particular case, simply leaving the lot of them flat-footed.
'Lost Your Head?', in this context, could be considered an example of what would happen were Dark Willow to attempt slipping in interference at poorly-chosen points, i.e. those points where the various interested Fates would be watching more closely than usual. 'Graduating Divergence' is a better-executed attempt, where Dark Willow prodded him after The Zeppo's events to read something that he might not otherwise have read.
For the explanation, in case you missed it or were expecting something differect? Referred to why things went so far off the canon-track. Though as the second-to-last paragraph alluded to, events up to this point only (probably) nearly match canon - for no other reason than that I haven't watched or read anything beyond the first half of Season 8 and nothing of Season 9, so I've likely missed little bits. Think of it as Joss-proofing.
—ox-oxo-xo—
And while we're here…
(For those who lost track) The Pairings?
Willow/Xander (mostly platonic); Kennedy/fem!Xander/Willow; Dawn/Xander; Xander/Buffy(/The Immortal); Faith/Xander; Vi/Xander; Chao-Ahn/Xander; Renee/Xander; Satsu/Buffy-lookalike!Xander; Xander/Drusilla(/The Immortal); Dracula/his Wives(/Xander) Illyria/Qua'Ha!Xander; Ku Lon/Xander-shade (just the twice…or so); Shampoo/Xander-shade; Anya/hundreds of Xander. And those are just the stated ones.
Consider the parody complete…or at least, as complete as I'm gonna make it without wading into Adult-rated waters complete with scuba gear. Though if you want to write up a fivesome of Satsu and her Buffy-like fem-Xander getting it on with the BXI or WKX, or the eternal torment of Anya or whatever, then be my guest.