fandomweekly | [#071] Slayer Instincts (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Theme Prompt: #071 - Skeletons In The Closet
Title: Slayer Instincts
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating/Warnings: PG / None
Bonus: Yes.
Word Count: 994
Summary: Anyone who seems too good to be true probably is, but how can Buffy make her mom and her friends see that? They all love Ted…

Right from the start there was something about Ted that Buffy just didn’t like. There was something not right about him; he was too smooth, too ready to bribe people into liking him by doling out homemade cookies, and mini pizzas, and expensive computer upgrades.

Buffy tried to tell people, but everyone, even her best and closest friends, dismissed her concerns as jealousy of some kind, like she was unwilling to share her mom with someone who wasn’t her dad, or she resented someone trying to take her father’s place, and okay, she wasn’t going to deny there was an element of that involved, but there was something else, something she couldn’t explain, something that set her Slayer instincts on edge. She just couldn’t explain exactly what, that wasn’t how instincts worked.

Still, nobody could be as perfect as her mom claimed Ted to be; it simply wasn’t natural. No, Ted had to be something else, something not human. Not a vampire, obviously, because vamps didn’t offer to take their lady friend and sundry teenagers to play mini golf in the middle of the day, due to the whole combusting in sunlight thing, but he could still be a demon of some kind. There were a lot of monsters that weren’t affected by the sun; some of them probably even liked getting a good tan.

Whatever. Anyone too good to be true probably had a few skeletons tucked away in their closet, and Buffy intended to find Ted’s, thereby proving once and for all that she was right, that what she was feeling was more than just jealousy or resentment, and that Ted wasn’t what he seemed to be. She’d figure out his secret and then she’d deal with him. All it would take would be some research and a bit of good investigative work, and okay, that might not exactly be her strong point, but she was sure her buds would help, if only to put her mind at rest. She wouldn’t even rub their noses in it when it turned out she was right and they were wrong! Parental issues? As if!

The mini golf outing at least proved one thing; Buffy wasn’t imagining that there was something off about Ted. What normal person would fly off the handle at a teeny bit of cheating then threaten to slap someone else’s daughter for calling him on it? If nothing else, Ted was a creep with anger issues, and possibly schizophrenic given the way he was suddenly all smiles when the others appeared. The change was so abrupt Buffy was surprised he didn’t give himself whiplash, but he’d shown his true colors, whatever that was supposed to mean.

“Got your number now, Ted. No matter how hard you try, you can’t hide who you really are. Not from me”

A little undercover expedition to Ted’s place of work did nothing to reassure Buffy. According to one of his colleagues, Ted was some kind of overachiever, which was fair enough, but he was also planning to marry his girlfriend in a couple of months. Girlfriend, as in Buffy’s mom, and that was just too much! Let Ted overachieve all he wanted on his own time, but no way was Buffy having him as her stepfather!

From that moment on, things went from bad to worse. First she found Ted waiting for her in her room when she arrived home from patrol, which would’ve been bad enough, but he’d completely invaded her privacy by going through her stuff and reading her diary, and then he slapped her so she hit back, and the fight continued out into the upstairs hallway, and then…

Buffy hadn’t meant to kill him; she’d kicked him, he’d fallen down the stairs, and his neck must have snapped when he hit the bottom. Slaying vampires and demons was one thing, but killing an unarmed man was the worst kind of nightmare. She could try to justify it to herself, he’d hit her first, she was defending herself, but she’d used her Slayer strength against a person and that was a world of wrong.

Dead men tell no tales, that was how the old saying went, but Ted proved the exception. Willow discovered his cookies contained a sort of tranquillizer, and the stupid mini pizzas probably did too. He’d been dosing Buffy’s mom, and her friends, probably with everything he cooked, only Buffy hadn’t eaten Ted’s cooking, on principle, so she hadn’t been affected.

Then dead Ted came back, not so dead, and WAY stronger than a normal human, and Buffy discovered there was a good reason for that; just as she’d originally believed, he wasn’t a human, or a demon, or a monster, except in the way that any psycho deserved to be classed as one. Funny how ‘robot’ had never crossed Buffy’s mind. Turned out Ted’s nickname, the Machine, was closer to the truth than his colleagues could have ever guessed.

As for the skeletons in Ted’s closet, they were just a little too real, although Buffy wasn’t the one to find them. That delightful experience fell to Xander, and she was pretty sure he’d never stop having nightmares about it. Who keeps the preserved bodies of their four dead wives in their basement closet? Robot Ted, that’s who. As keepsakes went, that was beyond gross!

Second time around, killing Ted was definitely deliberate, done as an act of mom defence, and not even close to murder. Robots weren’t people so technically he was more… decommissioned, with prejudice. Once again the Slayer saved the day, and saved her mom from a fate worse than death: Stepford mom, fifth wife of Robot Ted. Nope, no regrets over preventing that from happening.

There was a lesson in there somewhere. Next time Buffy told her friends there was something not right about some guy, maybe they’d listen to her; Slayer instincts were never wrong.

Well, almost never. Maybe she should work on that.

The End

[#071] Slayer Instincts (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

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