Roll the window down.

Challenge #3

In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I just finished watching Pig today, so me being me, I got to wondering - could vampires of Buffy the Vampire Slayer hunt out truffles by scent? They've got the sensory capability to do so, which means it's a question of them wanting to do it or not, and that'd be dependent on a variety of factors. Whether the job is viable, how well it pays, impact on self-perception, willingness to get one's hands dirty to earn money, things like that.

So, would Spike be willing to hunt truffles in Oregon forests? Maybe. If something pushed him out there, which wouldn't be easy, because he's a very urban creature. He's someone who likes being around people. But maybe it's something he's grown to like doing. Maybe he likes the status he has among a very small group of people, one of which is Buffy Summers, restaurant manager - and even if Spike is an ordinary human forager here, Buffy remains someone who tries to sublimate her inability to control her inner life with attempts to control the world around her, and that translates easily enough from her being a Slayer to her being professional chef.

It'd also translate well from her being a Slayer to her working in emergency medical responder, which has the added pieces of character resonance in her making fast decisions about problems right in front of her and in her being able to clearly delineate things as either her problem or totally not her problem.

It's been observed many times that one of Spike's consistent character traits is that he's a caretaker. That, plus his capacity for understanding and patience with people that need his help, and a very do no harm and take no shit approach, he'd make an excellent nurse.

"Keeping people alive even though we know death is inevitable" works as a driving philosophy that's basically the same on a Hellmouth as a hospital. Throw in Angel as one of the hospital's best trauma surgeons who's recently broken things off with Buffy, Dru as a medical examiner and Spike's amicable ex who might well dream of opening a funeral home someday, and we're off to the races with Spike and Buffy both aware of each other in the ways of distant co-workers, but one day their paths cross...and it goes from there.

Their paths could cross with Spike being a voluntary cadaver for one paramedic-in-training Buffy Summers, who needs to practice procedures like injections and inserting breathing tubes into dead flesh to prepare for working on live bodies, and vampires are dead bodies which can talk back and heal up for clean skin for the next training session. Maybe Spike's well-compensated. Maybe he doesn't have a choice and the assignment was doled out as punishment. Certainly he's not going to let something like someone using him to practice tracheotomies keep himself from getting smitten with them.

Any of these could carry itself for at least 20,000 words. What they need more than a good hook is resonance. Not just making sure the characters are recognizably themselves in appearance and mentality and philosophy and speech patterns, but something that says let me show you the canon in ways you'd never imagined. That could be how the philosophies of "just keep fighting" and "if nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do" translate with good fidelity into this new situation. It could be an examination of how the traits that make someone successful at one calling map onto another profession.

I've written a lot of AUs, and I think my most successful series is something that's both very far removed from canon and grounded in it at the same time - a topic that I've talked about before - and I know that no amount of good prose could carry the story if I didn't understand what I was doing, not for plot, but for what I was trying to say about the canon. If the usual storytelling framework is gone, and I have to reinvent the metaphor, I'd better understand why I'm doing it.

In the case of "Set Off Like Geese" it was to reconstruct the all-human AU and directly talk about certain aspects of the canon that hit me hard - stripping away the magic so there wasn't anything in the way of what hit me, and build the canon back up from that.

Ask me about that rock band AU which I came up with some years ago and never pursued, because boy am I unqualified to write the Whirlwind as the second coming of Fleetwood Mac and Buffy as the record producer tasked with getting them in line, and boy howdy do I love thinking about the idea that no matter how big and exciting and glamorous and fun a job sounds, it's still a job to the people who do it.