Arcadian Buffy
Parts 1 & 2

By Sam James

[email protected]

TITLE: Arcadian Buffy (1/?)
AUTHOR: Sam James
EMAIL: [email protected]
TYPE: Crossover - Buffy (post s7) and Joan of Arcadia (s1)
SUMMARY: Looking for a new life and new place to live, Buffy, Dawn, and Willow move to the town of Arcadia and wind up next door to the local police chief's family, including a daughter who talks with God.
SPOILERS: Spoilers through S7 of Buffy and through episode 4 (the Boat) of Joan.
RATING: PG
ARCHIVING: Yes, just email to let me know where.
DISCLAIMER: Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy, Willow, Dawn, Giles, and the whole slayer mythos and associated characters are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and 20th Century Fox. Joan of Arcadia, the Girardi family, and the town of Arcadia with its associated characters are property of Barbara Hall Productions, Inc. and CBS Productions, in association with Sony Pictures Television. The character of God belongs to God (as does everything else in the universe). Characters are used without permission and with no claim of ownership of anything other than plot.

Chapter One: Miscommunications

"It was a generous settlement, all told," Buffy told Giles over the phone. "They obviously didn't want anyone looking into what happened so all I had to do was drop a few hints about how suspicious it was that everyone in town seemed to be notified in advance while Dawn and I had to outrace the sinkhole and pop, an additional $20 thousand in the settlement."

"Wonderful, Buffy," Giles answered. Buffy and Dawn had stayed behind in California to deal with the paperwork from their lost house while the other slayers had had decamped to Cleveland and other hot spots to continue slaying. Giles, Willow, and Robin were working to rebuild the watcher's council, find new slayers, and mentor the existing ones. "Have you decided on your course of action now?"

Buffy swallowed. "I'm sorry Giles. If it was just me&ldots;" she paused. "But there's Dawn to consider. I want, no, I need, to give her a normal life. She's been through so much already with everyone dying on her and everything." She drew a breath and tried not to sound like a girl begging her father for car keys. "It will just be a couple of years before she goes off to college and then I'll be all Slay Girl again. But for now, well, call it a sabbatical. I think that after saving the world so much I deserve a little time off."

Giles chuckled. "I should say so, yes. And we have, if anything, a surplus of slayers right now. In fact, what we need now are trainers. I saw when I came to Sunnydale and than later when Wesley, um, replaced me for that short period, the need for more field experience for watchers to learn how slayers operate and such."

Buffy's frown was not visible over the telephone. "You mean you want to assign me to a Wesley wanna-be trainee watcher?"

Giles laughed. "More the other way around. I want you to train a new watcher, oh, and work with one of our younger slayers as well, too young to go into a dangerous area when we have so many older slayers around." He paused. "This won't be a full time job so you'll have time to pursue a more mundane career. And the new council will, of course, pay for your time."

"So I'll be telling the watcher to do, how to work with his slayer, and such."

"Exactly."

"Turnabout's fair play," Buffy muttered. "I could tell him to stop wearing tweed?"

"And he will, of course, pay at least as much attention as you did when your watcher advised on wardrobe choices."

The two laughed together remembering certain incidents when Giles had suggested outfits more suitable to patrolling.

"So now, where will you live?" Giles asked.

"I don't know. Someplace peaceful where everyone is nice. With good weather but no monsters or big bads. Oh, and it needs to have good schools for Dawn, plenty of jobs for me, and cute guys for both of us."

"You're looking for arcadia then." Giles joked.

"I am?" Buffy asked. "Where is that&ldots; oh, never mind, I'll find it on the Internet. Thanks Giles. Gotta run." She hung up and dialed the Internet.

Giles was left staring at the receiver.

"So how did she take it?" Willow walked in to Giles' sitting room.

"She actually liked the idea of training a watcher, although I fear she'll use the opportunity for petty revenge."

Willow smiled. "That's my Buffy. So what has you so puzzled then?"

"I fear that, for all our years together, Buffy and I still do not always fully communicate when we converse."

"So what's the sitch," Willow deliberately lapsed into slang.

"She gave the requirements for where she wants to live, and I happened to mention she was looking for arcadia. She seems to think I meant a real place. She'll be awfully disappointed."

Willow paled. "Giles. We're talking about a country that has a Hell, Texas and several towns called Paradise."

"My God."

Willow grabbed the phone and hit redial. But Buffy's phone was busy with her dial-up account. It therefore was no great surprise when she called them to announce she had bought a house in Arcadia, California at 2322 Euclid Avenue.

-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Helen Girardi, forty-five-year-old mother of three, hung up the phone, puzzled. "Luke!" she yelled.

Luke looked up from his videogame. "I'm busy," the fifteen-year-old responded.

His mother entered the room. "Did you make a website to help Mrs. Finnolt with selling her house?"

Luke wondered what he had done wrong this time. "It was all Joan's idea. She wrote the site, I just did the programming for her. It was one of her projects."

Helen frowned. Lately her daughter seemed to get engrossed in one project after another, picking and dropping them seemingly at random. The strange thing was, Joan did not always seem to enjoy these projects but appeared to act under obligation, or orders. While it seemed to end well in this case, she still could not help trying to remember what her dilettante Cousin Florine was like as a teenager.

Of course, if she even suspected that her daughter thought these projects were literally assignments direct from God, she would be far more worried.

"Anyway, that was Mrs. Finnolt on the phone," said the still-oblivious mother. "She wanted to thank you. Apparently the website worked. It sold the house for her."

"I guess that means we'll have new neighbors." Luke replied, idly hoping for a cute girl or two next door.

Chapter 2: The Welcome Wagon

"Avon calling," the frumpy fifthyish woman rang the doorbell to the Girardi home.

"Hello?" Luke answered, opening the door.

"Is there a young lady of the house present? I don't suppose you'd be interested in facial creams," the Avon lady tugged at the cheeks of the cute geekish teen.

"Yuck," he backed away. "Joan!"

In less than a minute, he was replaced by his sister. Tall for sixteen, with long chestnut brown hair, Joan sometimes seemed to be in a perpetual sulk.

"Can I interest you in some foundation makeup, maybe some lipstick?" the blue-haired lady asked.

"No thank you," Joan began to close the door but stopped when the lady said, "Joan, that's not very neighborly of you."

"God," Joan half sighed, half identified the Being at the door. Ever since her family had moved into town perfect strangers had constantly approached her, claimed to be God, and given her tasks to perform - everything from finding a job and playing chess to enrolling in AP Chemistry and building a boat. At first Joan had doubted, but God proved His omniscience by summarizing Joan's life and the prayer she had made to 'study hard, stop talking back, clean your room and even go to church, if I recall, if I let your brother live.'

"Neighborliness is important, Joan," the Avon Lady God said. "It's so important that I included it as one of the ten commandments. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ox. Oxen were very important back then."

"Don't covet any neighbor's livestock," Joan said. "Got it. Will do. Not a problem. Now go."

"Speaking of neighborliness," God continued. "I understand you have new neighbors. Why don't you serve as the Welcome Wagon. Bake them a cake. Introduce them to the community. Make them feel welcome. It's the duty of a neighbor. I put that in the Bible as well, 'The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.'"

She looked at Joan again. "Oh, and no, you cannot bake something twice as fast by doubling the temperature. So you better get started." She closed the door.

"Why me?" Joan moaned.

Meanwhile, next door, Dawn was complaining with far less reason. Of course, Joan's God had never tried to kill her so maybe Dawn was ahead on points.

"So, just whyyy does Willow have to live with us?" Dawn whined to her sister.

Buffy sighed. They had been through this already several times. "House big," she pointed at the nice, large house with four bedrooms, a kitchen and separate dining room, living room, and study. "Therefore, mortgage big," Buffy deliberately oversimplified. "Wallet small," she slapped her pocketbook. "College dropout, few job prospects," she pointed to herself. "High school student, part-time minimum wage," she pointed to Dawn. "Summa cum laude computer genius, big bucks," she pointed upstairs to where Willow was settling in.

"But the settlement from the government?" Dawn begged.

"Much of it went to the bank that held the mortgage, to the down payment on this place, and for replacement furniture and clothes." Buffy kept secret how some of the settlement money was carefully squirreled away in Dawn's college fund. She promised herself that Dawn would never have to work at the local equivalent of the Doublemeat Palace.

"Actually," Willow said, as she walked down the steps. "I won't be here much. I'll be running all over the place dealing with the other slayers and the watchers, sure much of that will be by email but the personal touch will be needed too. And the computer consulting can be done anywhere the Internet reaches. But I need a place to keep my things, collect my mail and such. You guys need a roomie who knows what's what and won't freak the first time a demon comes crashing in. So it's a perfect match."

"Sorry, Will," Buffy was embarrassed that Willow had heard Dawn's complaint. "It's just after all those months with everyone crammed into our house, Dawn just wants some time as a normal family. Inwardly, she was slightly bothered by everyone's casual assumption that evil would just come barging in, but realistically, she knew that the three of them would always be targets.

"I understand," Willow tried to sympathize. "I'm sorta an intruder in your family. But I thought that Dawn and I had got all sisterly and such, especially during that time when you were, well, not around."

"You did," Buffy assured her sometimes insecure friend. Both were carefully avoiding mentioning the time when Willow threatened to turn Dawn back into a blob of energy. "But she's a teenager and you remember how that was, embarrassed by family and by family friends. There are days when Dawn acts like she doesn't really want to have me around either."

The two gave each other big hugs. "Now, let's decide what furniture we need." The two went around the house, occasionally soliciting Dawn's input, while they wrote down what furniture was needed in various places. Then they decided to split up, Willow and Dawn to the mall to buy clothes and Buffy wanted to get a lay of the land. She certainly was not planning to patrol this supposedly demon-free town nightly, but felt that she should know the best routes just in case. Besides, she planed to stop at some furniture places to get the first look at what was available.

But right when they were about to leave, the doorbell rang.

"Welcome to the neighborhood!" an older woman and girl about Dawn's age said.

"Thank you," Buffy replied. "As you can see we're not exactly set up for guests, but&ldots;" Carefully not inviting them, she waved her hand, hoping that they would take that for an invitation if they were human. They did.

"Are your parents here?" the older woman, everyone immediately identified her as the mother of the teenager, asked.

Buffy and Dawn looked uncomfortable. "Actually, there are no parents. It's just us." Willow was looking around in fascination with something only she could see.

"You live alone, cool," said the teen. Introductions were done, although Buffy had to nudge Willow out of what seemed like a trance. Willow peered intently at Joan and Helen Girardi.

"I'll put the cake on something, I'll just be a moment." Buffy said. "Willow, give me a hand." The two moved into the kitchen.

"What's wrong?" Buffy asked when they were out of hearing range. "Are they not human or something?"

"No, they're normal as far as I can tell without doing a spell or something. It's everything else that isn't. When they came in everything sharpened. It's like the universe is paying extra-special attention to them. Somehow they, or maybe it's just one or the other, matter."

"Doesn't everyone?"

"Yes. Well, no, not in the same way. I'm telling you, something cares about what happens to them. Something powerful."

"Is it a threat?" Buffy, typically, focused on the potential danger. She got out some paper plates and plastic forks, that were all they had for serving.

"I don't know. Hopefully they live far down the street and won't interact with us much."

The two made their way back into the dining room, temporarily furnished with a card table and folding chairs. Dawn was happily chatting with Joan. She looked up as Buffy walked in. "Guess what!" she said excitedly. "Joan lives next door. They just moved in a few weeks ago. And she's in my grade!" Buffy and Willow exchanged a look.

The fivesome talked for a bit. Helen, looking around, asked when the truck with their belongings was coming and was rather shocked to learn they had none due to a giant sinkhole eating their former residence. She promised to lend them a few things from her basement and ask around the neighborhood. She asked what they did and seemed rather alarmed that Buffy had custody of her sister but no job. She was somewhat relieved when Willow, who had stopped being distracted when Dawn took Joan up to her room to see what could be done with it, put in that she was a computer consultant. All told, it was nearly an hour before the Girardis left.

After the door closed, Dawn put her hands on her hips and looked at Willow. "Isn't she a little young for you?"

"What!" protested Willow.

"I saw you looking at her and away from her constantly. You're interested in her. I can tell."

"Um, Dawn. Other set of interests," Buffy told her before turning to Willow. "I guess that means you were sensing Joan and not her mother."

"Yes, sort of," Willow replied. "But it's not sensing Joan. It's everything around her. It's like the universe has some special connection to her, is watching her."

"Spooky," Buffy put it.

Dawn began humming the song "God is watching us".

"Exactly, except that I'm not so sure it's from a distance," Willow referenced the song's lyrics.

"Oh, my God!" Dawn said, with unconscious irony. "Andrew wins the betting pool."

"Betting pool?" her sister asked, surprised.

"Yeah, we had a bet as to how long we'd be in this town before encountering the weird. Andrew bet we wouldn't last a whole day. I bet on Tuesday; major problems always seem to happen on Tuesdays."

Buffy and Dawn shared a look. Sometimes she underestimated her younger sister's resilience. After all, she had grown up around slayer stuff, or at least had the memories of doing so which was almost the same thing.

Between the visit and the discussion afterward, the three did not get out of the house until much later than planed. None of them then knew how crucial their timing would be that night.

To be continued.

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