Twin Stars Over Opal City Chapter Two

Title: Two Stars Over Opal City (A Sequel to A Star Over Sunnydale)

A Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Justice Society of America Crossover

Chapter: 02 of 23  Preparations
Author: Red Jacobson
Rating: Teen/PG-13 (Nothing worse than the show itself)
Pairings: None

Word Count: <7,995>
Disclaimer: Come on now, if I owned these characters, do you really think I’d be writing fanfic? Joss owns the Buffyverse characters, and DC/Time Warner owns the others.

Distribution: FanFiction.Net, Archive of Our Own, Twisting the Hellmouth,
Feedback: Of course, constructive criticism is greatly appreciated, and flames will be used to
Roast marshmallows when I have a cookout.
Author’s Note: It’s been a while, I know, since I did anything with this story, but my muse has been nudging me for a little while to dust off my notes about doings in Sunnydale and Opal City.   Also, as you can see by the Rating, you won’t find the characters doing the nasty on screen. There may be references to certain characters having ‘sweaty snugglebunnies, but I’m not sure; the characters haven’t told me that yet.
Summary: The Aftermath of Halloween, 1997 and the rest of the school year.

Author’s Note on Beginning of Chapter:  The first section of the chapter is an edited and updated version of A Star Over Sunnydale, both to correct errors in the day/dates and to make some adjustments in the final scene to better fit the story my muse is telling me.

Sunnydale High School

Physical Education Department

Monday, November 3rd, 1997

After the Meeting in the Library

The Phys Ed department office was part trophy room, part morgue. Polished wood shelves overflowed with gold-plated athletes frozen in victory, but the rest of the space had the ambiance of a DMV: sickly fluorescent lights, metal file cabinets stacked two-deep, the faint, ever-present sting of chlorine from the next-door swimming pool. Coach Finstock sat behind a desk stacked with attendance sheets and what looked like an unfinished hoagie, his whistle and his authority resting on his prodigious midsection.

Larry waited at the door. He’d knocked twice—hard—then let the silence drag on. The Coach didn’t bother to look up. Just kept circling names with a red pen, a slow, steady rhythm. Larry eyed the “Attitude Determines Altitude” poster, where a bald eagle soared above a mountain range that, even to him, looked suspiciously like stock art.

“Coach?” Larry said, stepping into the room. “You got a minute?”

The pen paused midair. “I always got a minute for my number one linebacker, unless you’re here about your grades.”

Larry shook his head. “No, sir. I wanted to talk about... like, fitness training. For beginners.”

Finstock’s gaze flicked up, momentarily, then dropped again. “You volunteering to run a remedial P.E. class?” He scrawled something on the roster, then reached for the sandwich.

“Sort of. It’s for a, uh, mentorship thing. A couple of kids need to, you know, bulk up. Thought I’d get the real playbook instead of making it up.”

This time, the Coach looked at him straight on. Eyes like two blue beads embedded in dough. “Prattling about training plans. You sick, Blaisdell?”

Larry squared his jaw. “No, sir. Just figured you’d know what works.”

Finstock made a noise that might’ve been a chuckle or a digestion issue. He heaved himself out of the chair, waddled to the file cabinets, and rooted around inside without any sense of urgency. “All right,” he said, “I got you the goods.” He yanked out a folder, slapped it on the desk, and slid it over with two fingers. The cover said “PE 9 Weight Room Curriculum – Standard.”

“That’s it?” Larry flipped it open, half-expecting secrets or steroids. It was a spreadsheet of circuit routines, with motivational quotes in Comic Sans at the bottom of every page.

“That’s it.” Finstock bit into his hoagie. “You got a body, you do the work, you get results. Not rocket surgery. Every PE teacher in California’s got the same crap.”

From the gym on the other side of the security glass, a thin, nasal whine filtered in. Finstock gestured with his hoagie at the window. “You see that? That’s a cautionary tale, Blaisdell.”

Through the glass: Andrew Wells, straining beneath a bench press bar stacked with the smallest weights possible. Sweat dripped off his nose. His wrists quivered with every rep. The bar didn’t so much rise and fall as tremble in place, as if Andrew was negotiating with gravity rather than defying it.

Larry snorted. “Yeah. I see it.”

“Let’s see if your fancy mentorship fixes that,” said Finstock, already back to his paperwork. “Consider him your test subject.”

Larry left the office with the folder tucked under his arm, his path taking him straight into the linoleum-bright glare of the gym. Andrew’s spotter had bailed—the kid was alone, red-faced, staring up at the bar like it might collapse and crush him at any moment. Larry racked the bar in one motion, the plates clanging against the uprights.

Andrew gasped, his limbs rubber. “Was—thanks. I was doing a drop set. You know, to failure.”

Larry looked at the bar, then at Andrew’s biceps, which were barely thicker than the sleeves of his Sunnydale High t-shirt. “You got a death wish?”

Andrew blinked hard, pushing his glasses up his sweaty nose. “No. Yes. I mean—no. Just, uh, I read online that—never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

Larry didn’t move. “You wanna tell me what you’re actually doing here, or you just like wasting time?”

The blush crept from Andrew’s neck to his ears. He sat up, rubbing his arms. “It’s stupid. You’ll laugh.”

“Try me.”

Andrew’s breath shuddered out, and for a second, he looked like he might bolt. Instead, he blurted: “I dressed as the Atom for Halloween, okay? Al Pratt. The JSA guy. I thought I’d end up with the others, but I was in some... wrong place. I missed it.” He looked down at his shoes. “Now I’m just regular again.”

Larry frowned. “So you’re here to what, get superpowers from lifting?”

Andrew shook his head. “No! Well—yeah. Not like—” He flailed, hands making meaningless gestures. “I know it doesn’t work like that. But I figured, maybe if I started, something would change. Maybe I could get a little less... me.”

The words came out with a bitterness that surprised Larry.

He grunted, then dropped the curriculum folder on the bench beside Andrew. “Coach says you’re my guinea pig. You up for that, or you wanna keep free-styling until you snap your wrists?”

Andrew picked up the folder, staring at the cover with something like reverence. “You’d help? Really?”

Larry shrugged, which for him was like a seismic event. “Long as you’re not a quitter.”

“I’m not,” Andrew said, with a ferocity that shocked even him. “I hate this. I want to be stronger.”

The two of them stood in a silence that wasn’t quite comfortable, but wasn’t hostile either. Finally, Larry pointed at the squat rack. “We start tomorrow, first thing. The doors unlock at six o’clock. I’ll be there. You bring your own water bottle, towel and fresh clothes, and you don’t complain. Deal?”

Andrew nodded so fast his glasses nearly flew off.

“Deal,” he said.

They left the gym together, the echo of their footsteps lost in the hum of the empty school.

Women’s Basketball Court

Monday, November 3rd, 1997

Same Time as Previous Scene

The women’s gym was a pressure cooker. Bouncing basketballs, the shriek of rubber on varnish, shouted names and numbers echoing off walls painted a shade of jaundice only a school district could love. Cordelia Chase entered the chaos like she owned the place, which—by social law, if not city ordinance—she did. Her heels clicked, then squeaked, then stuck for a split second as she made her way across the court, threading through sprints and suicide drills with the muscle memory of a girl who’d ruled every hallway she’d ever entered.

The players ignored her. Cordelia ignored them right back. She went straight to the head of the gym, where Coach Danvers stood arms-crossed, whistle hanging from her neck like a sheriff’s badge, clipboard already drawn for whatever crime Cordelia was about to commit.

“Miss Chase,” Danvers said, without looking up. “This better not be about cutting gym class.”

Cordelia gave a polite, closed-mouth smile. “I don’t cut,” she said. “I delegate.”

Danvers arched an eyebrow, then continued scrawling notes, fingers thick as bratwursts wrapped around a chewed yellow pencil. Cordelia cleared her throat, loud enough for three rows of bleachers to hear.

“I need gym space,” she announced. “Preferably before school, unless your Amazon tryouts are sacred or something.”

Danvers set the clipboard aside with the care one gives to a ticking bomb. “What for?”

Cordelia flicked an invisible fleck of dust from her sleeve. “Some girls need remedial help. Total disasters. Like, can’t-tell-a-treadmill-from-a-turnip disasters.”

“Names?” said Danvers, unimpressed.

Cordelia hesitated, then improvised. “Five. Maybe six.” She didn’t have names, not really. Most of the Cordettes were still ‘under reconstruction’ after Halloween, and Cordelia doubted Ilsa the She-Wolf would be willing to give her the gym time for just Buffy and Rosenberg. The number sounded official enough.

Danvers eyed her, then the girls running sprints, then back to Cordelia. “Six AM. Early only. We have the JV girls coming in after seven, so you need to be out by then.”

Cordelia smiled with all her teeth, no joy. “Six is fine. I’ll bring coffee if it makes you feel less homicidal.”

Danvers grunted. “Just don’t let them break anything. Last thing I need is another insurance form.”

She reached into her battered nylon bag and produced a folder, which she handed to Cordelia like it was a subpoena. “Everything’s in here. Routine, safety instructions, emergency numbers. If they pass out, roll them on their side and call Nurse Powell, not 911. Clear?”

Cordelia took the folder, her perfectly manicured nails grazing the rough skin of Danvers’ palm. She held back a shiver. “Crystal.”

“Attendance is mandatory,” Danvers added. “I don’t do second chances. If you can’t commit, don’t start.”

Cordelia’s grin shifted. “They’ll be here,” she said, her tone promising pain to any girl who dared miss it. She was already composing the first group text in her mind—probably something about how failure to appear would result in irrevocable social death, or at minimum, excommunication from the yearbook candid list.

Danvers blew her whistle, hard and shrill, and the gym’s attention snapped from Cordelia to the next drill. Cordelia walked off, already picturing the look on the girls’ faces when they realized “remedial fitness” meant six AM, five days a week.

She liked that thought—a lot.

High School Library

Giles’ Office

Monday, November 3rd, 1997

Same Time

After school, Giles’ office always smelled like coffee grounds and old paperbacks. The majority of the building was empty now, leaving a hush that pressed in at the windows and made every clock tick sound surgical.

Owen sat on the visitor’s side of the desk, shoulders hunched, twisting the hem of his shirt. Giles had offered him tea, which Owen accepted—then forgot about, leaving it untouched, steam curling up in a thin silver wire. Ms. Calendar—Jenny, when the students weren’t around—stood at the bookshelf behind Giles, her head cocked as she pretended to scan titles but actually watched the conversation in the glass reflection.

“You recognized the name when I mentioned Dr. Fate earlier,” Owen said, voice so low it barely made it across the desk. “Nobody else seemed to notice.”

Giles steepled his fingers. “It is... not a name one comes across in the typical educational setting. For some reason, the Justice Society’s contributions during the Second World War and against the German Bund here in the United States seem to be ignored. I have a familial reason for being familiar with Doctor Fate. During the war, he saved my father and grandparents from a falling bomb, and they didn’t forget it.”

“That makes sense,” Owen huffed, “It makes a lot more sense than my parents' theory that it’s all just... archetypes and Jungian metaphors. They don’t think magic is real.”

Jenny snorted. “Your parents have clearly never lived in Sunnydale.”

Owen managed a ghost of a smile.

He took a breath, then reached into his backpack, extracting a battered composition book. He opened it to a bookmarked page and pushed it forward. It was a sketch—a helmet, angular, ancient, with symbols ringing the crown.

“When it happened, I saw everything. I saw every spell the real Fate had ever cast. Like, the structure of the rituals. I can draw the runes from memory.” He hesitated. “But when I try, it doesn’t work. At all. It’s like there’s a lock.”

Jenny moved away from the bookshelf, her arms crossed loosely over her sweater. “Maybe you need the right... context. Or a different key.”

Owen shook his head. “It's not that. Watch."

He traced a quick, looping sigil in the air. For an instant, the lines glowed gold—real, palpable, hot as a sparkler—and then fizzled to nothing.

Giles removed his glasses and polished them with a practiced, almost ritual motion. "You approach it like an equation, Owen. Which is admirable. But magic, at least in my experience, is as much art as it is science. If you treat it like a computer program, you’ll never achieve the necessary... intuition."

Jenny nodded, her dark hair falling into her eyes. "Magic isn’t just knowledge. It’s a belief."

Owen flushed, unsure whether he was being mocked or complimented. "It’s just, when the Helmet was on, I was Doctor Fate. I knew everything. Now it’s—" He snapped his fingers. "Like waking from a dream and trying to remember the best part."

Giles set his glasses down and leaned in. "Perhaps we’ve been approaching this incorrectly," he said. "Doctor Fate is a... legacy. But the individuals behind the mask—Kent Nelson, Inza, all the rest—they were human. Flawed. They made the magic their own."

He stood, walked to a shelf, and plucked an ancient, cracked volume. The leather squeaked in protest. "We will not force you into Dr. Fate's methods. Instead, we shall find what works for you." He turned to Jenny. "Ms. Calendar is quite proficient with alternative approaches, especially as they pertain to, ah, digital natives."

Jenny grinned, genuinely. "You ever code a spell before?"

Owen looked at her, puzzled. "Is that possible?"

She shrugged. "In Sunnydale? I wouldn’t bet against it."

Giles returned to his seat and slid the book across the desk. "Start with these. Write down what feels right. Bring it to me tomorrow."

Owen picked up the volume, the weight of it making him sit up a little straighter.

"Thank you," he said, voice steadier. "Both of you."

Jenny watched him pack up, then offered, "You’re not alone in this, Owen. The town’s weird, but you’re not the only one it’s happened to."

He nodded, mouth set. For the first time since Halloween, the ache in his chest lightened. Maybe not hope, exactly, but the absence of despair.

He left, the book held tight against his side, and as the office door shut behind him, the golden afterimage of that failed sigil hung in the air, visible only to those who knew where to look.

Oz’s Practice Space

Monday, November 3rd, 1997

After Dinner

The taste of the incense was bitter, but Oz breathed it deep anyway, a calculated act of masochism. The study had two windows, both shut tight against the night and lacquered with the residue of too many candlelit research benders. Somewhere upstairs, his mom was busy, working on the next chapter of her book. They weren’t to his taste, but enough people liked the stories enough to pay for them. So that made them great literature as far as the Osborn family was concerned. Oz let the sound slip away; his world, for now, was six feet by eight, dimly lit, crosshatched with the odor of old paper and Nag Champa incense.

He sat in the center of the rug, ankles tucked, knees high, back against nothing, eyes half-closed. A green velvet cushion (stolen from who knows where) kept his bones from fusing to the floorboards, but only just. A metronome ticked on the shelf beside him, needle set for 40 bpm: slow enough to tease, too fast for sleepwalking. Oz inhaled to four, held for seven, exhaled for eight. It was a pattern he’d read somewhere, the kind of ritualized breathing they used in monasteries or psychiatric facilities. He didn’t care which. His lungs caught the rhythm, and after a few cycles so did his head.

He was here to meditate, or more accurately, to practice not losing his mind. The full moon was five days out, but the wolf was already twitching behind his ribs—hungry, bored, sniffing at the leash. The first time he’d tried this, the wolf had torn loose by breath number two, and he’d come to on the porch, biting the neck off a warm six-pack of ginger ale. Now he could make it past the first minute. Progress.

Step one: visualize the animal. Name it. Feel the fur prickling at the edges of your personality, the way it stalked the periphery of thought. Oz pictured it as a silhouette, canine, hulking, with eyes that glowed not yellow or red but a weird, phosphor green. When he looked close, it was always in motion, pacing a cage that grew larger every time he sat down to do this.

Step two: introduce the other variable. Terry Sloane, also known as Mister Terrific, two-time Olympic gold medalist and a man whose personality was best described as “emergent property of compulsion.” Sloane had come with a wardrobe of postures, gestures, and uselessly perfect maxims, but most of all, he’d come with a presence—a way of occupying a room, a posture that made everyone else want to stand up straighter and try harder.

Oz let the memory play. Sloane is sitting at a desk, hands steepled, thumb and forefinger forming a triangle over paperwork, face impassive except for the twitch at the corner of the mouth. Sloane lifts a cup of coffee and drains it in a single, careful tilt, as if every motion had been mapped out with an engineer’s sense of efficiency. Sloane walked into a room of people who hated him and left with a signed confession and three new admirers. Sloane is moving through a gymnasium after hours, shirtless, chalked hands rapping out a set of planche pushups, the grunting replaced by a steady mantra of numbers.

On the inhale, Oz tried to mirror that presence. He pictured his own posture, adjusted. Shoulders back, chest out just enough to defy gravity, chin level. Spine upright but not rigid—alive. He could feel the difference in the way his heart beat, not just metaphorically: the pulse grew stronger, more assertive, not so easily bullied by the wolf. On the exhale, he tried to let go of anything not essential. The fidgets, the intrusive thoughts, the memory of eating something in the fridge that probably belonged to Giles. He let it all bleed out.

The wolf, for its part, noticed. Its pacing slowed. For once, it didn’t gnaw at the bars or howl. It just sat, observing, waiting for the next test.

Oz continued for another two dozen cycles. It was an act of discipline, and also a minor rebellion. Willow and Jonathan got to build weird science in their own late-night echo chamber, but Oz was stuck here, dissecting the interior architecture of his own self-loathing, one breath at a time. He didn’t blame anyone for that; it was the only way he’d survived this long. But sometimes he wondered how much of the “real” him would be left when the last of Sloane’s programming finally faded.

On the third shelf of Giles’s bookcase was a copy of some self-help paperback with a title like The Zero Point Mind. Oz had skimmed it once, unimpressed, but the phrase lingered. The idea of stripping down to nothing, of being so empty you could be filled with something new, appealed in a way nothing else did. Tonight, he aimed for zero point.

He let the wolf and the superhero cohabit for a while, observing the way they circled each other. The wolf, all appetite and adrenaline; Sloane, all logic and moral rectitude. He wondered, briefly, what would happen if he let them merge—if instead of suppressing the animal he could teach it to wear a suit, speak in Sloane’s deadpan monotone, maybe even hold a conversation without biting the other party. He smiled at the image. Maybe it was possible.

The metronome ticked. The incense burned low, filling the study with a dense, resinous fog. The world outside was still black, and the only suggestion of time passing was the subtle brightening of the sky behind the curtains.

Oz’s legs started to ache. He let the pain register, then imagined how Sloane would process it. Not by ignoring it, but by integrating it: converting pain into information, using that information to make the next repetition easier. He shifted his weight, rolled his ankles, and was struck by the sudden clarity of the movement. It was elegant, almost. He almost liked it.

After fifty breaths, he opened his eyes fully. The room had sharpened, every object rendered in high contrast, as if someone had turned up the resolution on reality. Oz stood, legs tingling, and flexed his hands. The tremor in his fingers was gone.

He checked the clock. Twenty-four minutes, a new record. He hadn’t once imagined sinking his teeth into anyone’s jugular, and for the duration of the exercise, he’d felt—if not happy—then at least in control.

The wolf would be back tomorrow, and the moon was not going anywhere, but Oz tucked those facts away for now. He swept the cushion into a corner, flicked off the metronome, and padded into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Oz was certain his mom would be pulling an all-nighter; she usually did when the words were flowing, so coffee was a must.

On the way, he caught his reflection in the glass of the trophy case. He stopped, examining the way he stood, the line of his shoulders, the measured set of his mouth. For a fleeting second, he could have sworn he saw a second silhouette overlapping his, invisible to anyone but him: the unmistakable outline of a man in a three-piece suit, arms folded, watching him with cool, professional approval.

Oz blinked. The image was gone. But his posture didn’t slip.

He poured himself a cup, black, and leaned against the kitchen counter. The sky was still gray, but the horizon hinted at pink. Oz counted his breaths, slow and even, and waited to see what the next day would bring.

High School Chemistry Lab

Monday, November 3rd, 1997

Evening

The Sunnydale High chemistry lab had moods, and tonight’s was subversive. Not dangerous—not yet—but subversive in the way only a locked after-hours classroom can be: air tinged with ozone from an overtaxed fume hood, custodial bleach fighting a hopeless rear-guard action against the faintly metallic tang of unsanctioned experiment. Shadows moved in pendulum arcs, alive with the nervous swing of a lone desk lamp—brass, scuffed, top-heavy—illuminating a patch of cluttered workbench and, behind it, the hunched silhouettes of two students who took extra credit as a blood sport.

“Stop, you’ll smear the nickel matrix,” Willow said. Her voice had that singsong edge it got when she was about to make a point nobody wanted to hear, least of all herself. She hovered at Jonathan’s shoulder, a ghost in a white lab coat two sizes too big, safety glasses pressed to the bridge of her nose and fogging with every agitated breath. The workbench between them was a disaster area: pipettes in various stages of abuse, a half-drained Red Bull can encircled by sticky rings, scattered drafts of what looked like both blueprints and breakup letters.

Jonathan ignored her—carefully, methodically. His hand trembled as he adjusted the diamond scribe, aligning the flight metal shard under the microscope objective, and for a second, Willow saw not the unimpressive fringe-kid with the untamable cowlick, but Hawkman, ancient and absolute, gripped by the certainty of a gladiator. He centered the slide, exhaled, and pressed the focus knob with the resolve of a detonator.

The lens clicked down.

Willow leaned in, bracing herself with a palm on the table (her hand, incidentally, inches from Jonathan’s; the distance oscillated, never quite reaching contact). “Well?” she asked. “Are we looking at Nth metal, or just an exceptionally shiny piece of rebar?”

Jonathan didn’t look up. “Matrix is weird. Lattice structure’s not repeating—see, here? It starts to spiral, and then it just… wings it.” He snorted at his own joke. “Like the crystal wants to change, but it can’t decide if it’s a solid or a gas. There are pockets of—” He adjusted the focus, blinked, went silent.

Willow waited. Patience, she’d learned, was like most chemical reactions: slow in the cold, but add heat, and something always happened.

He found his words. “There’s a fluid layer. Metallic glass, probably. But it refracts… it’s almost like the boundaries want to… flow.” He sat back abruptly, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Nothing in the Periodic Table does this. Not even close.”

Willow grinned, the way a bomb disposal tech does when the timer pauses at:01. “Then we have to build it,” she said. “If Carter Hall can do it with a chisel and a death wish, we can reverse-engineer it using a MakerBot and, you know, basic chemistry. That’s what science is for.”

He regarded her sideways. “And you’re the one who said the printer would never survive your ‘phase transition experiments.’”

She nudged his elbow, then immediately regretted the contact and overcorrected, elbowing a soldering iron off the bench. It landed on the tile with a metallic clatter, trailing a whiff of singed dust and existential dread. Jonathan rescued the iron with a tongs, set it upright, and waited for her to finish blushing.

Willow feigned composure by donning latex gloves with unnecessary flourish. “You have Carter’s memory, right? What did he use for base alloy?”

Jonathan hesitated. “That was a… little more myth than metallurgy. He started with meteoric iron, but every time the stuff got destroyed, it got… weirder. Layered. Like it remembered all its past lives.” He realized, a little too late, what he’d said.

Willow didn’t flinch. “Sounds familiar.” She stared at the fragment, the way a monk might contemplate a relic: not worshipful, but with a terror-stricken respect for its persistence. “It’s possible the memory… resonance… is what’s making the lattice shift. Like the more you use it, the more it wants to change you.”

She looked up, searching Jonathan’s face for signs of imminent transformation. “You haven’t been having, like, bird dreams, right? Flashbacks to ancient Egypt? Desire to leap off tall buildings?”

He made a face. “No more than usual. Why?”

Willow shrugged, gaze dropping to the shard. “When I touched the Helm, I started seeing equations. Whole theorems. At first it was useful, then it got…” She let the sentence trail off, but it was clear from the twitch at the corner of her mouth that it was still “getting.”

They both fell silent, lost in the shared, unspoken thought: What if the metal remembered more than just how to fly?

The flight metal, newly liberated from its plastic sample bag, caught the lamp’s beam and fractured it into a soft spectrum—blues and yellows, icy flashes like a tiny aurora. It was barely larger than a postage stamp. Jonathan rotated it with tweezers, angling it so the edge cut through the lamp-glow. Willow, with gloved hands, traced the fracture line, mapping with her fingertips the branching pattern of stress marks.

“Maybe it’s alive,” she whispered, not quite joking. “Or at least reactive. If we can get it to propagate—force a growth reaction—it might self-assemble the way bone does. Or coral.”

“That’s just wishful thinking.” Jonathan’s tone was flat, but he didn’t pull his hand away when she overlapped her fingers with his on the edge of the slide.

She met his gaze. “It’s science. Sometimes, wishful thinking is the only way forward.”

Jonathan swallowed, visibly, and something in his posture softened—shoulders drooping, chin tucking in. For a second, he looked like a kid who’d wandered into the wrong room at the wrong time and was afraid to ask for directions back. Then he set his jaw.

“We could stress it mechanically. Ultrasonic pulses, cyclic loading. Or run an electrical current—see if it changes phase.”

Willow nodded, already mentally rewriting tomorrow’s lab schedule. “If we start with a microgram, we might get a chain reaction. If not, we still have enough for X-ray diffraction and maybe a neutron scan, if we can get the faculty to ignore the requisition paperwork.”

He leaned in. “You’re the only person in this school with a neutron source, you know that?”

She grinned. “Perks of being the science nerd. Also, the Board of Ed doesn’t actually know what a neutron source is.”

A burst of laughter—sharp, spontaneous—cracked the tension between them. Jonathan smiled, and for a second it was an easy, honest thing, like he’d forgotten how to be nervous.

They got back to work, but the rhythm changed: instead of each operating in an orbit, they found a strange, collaborative dance. Willow assembled a makeshift electromagnet from scavenged copper wire and a physics-lab power supply. Jonathan fine-tuned the angle of the metal sample, his left hand steadying her right when the coil trembled. She prepared a notebook for data, scrawling equations with the feverish legibility of someone writing for an audience only she could see.

Each time they touched, the contact lingered a fraction too long. Maybe it was the science. Maybe it was the ghost of Carter Hall and Shiera Sanders, whose memory still echoed in the way Willow and Jonathan finished each other’s sentences, or the way they could argue for hours and emerge with the same conclusion. Maybe it was just the adrenaline.

In the margin of a data sheet, Willow wrote: “Hypothesis: Residual emotional imprint influences material properties.” She crossed it out, then, underneath, wrote: “Hypothesis: We’re not as weird as we think.”

By midnight, they’d exhausted every reasonable experiment and a handful of reckless ones. The sample hadn’t done much—shifted colors, maybe, changed density by a rounding error—but it had given them a handful of clues, and more questions than they’d started with. They’d also finished a six-pack of Red Bull and most of a family-size bag of Skittles, the wrappers and cans forming a kind of ceremonial ring around the flight metal’s resting place.

Jonathan capped the sample jar and pushed it towards Willow. “You take it. You’re better at not losing things.”

Willow accepted, tucking it into her coat’s inner pocket. “We’ll run the growth protocol first thing tomorrow. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

He looked at her for a long time, then down at his hands. “Hey, Will?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“If the metal is a memory… if the thing it wants most is to go back to what it was… does that mean—”

She interrupted, soft but sure. “We’re not them. We remember, but we don’t have to… repeat.” A pause, and then: “Unless we want to.”

He nodded, but it was clear he didn’t know which answer scared him more.

A clatter in the hallway—footsteps, a snatch of angry janitor muttering—snapped them both to attention. Willow swept the workbench clear, shoving equipment into drawers, wiping down the sample tray with the edge of her sleeve. Jonathan flicked off the desk lamp, plunging the room into a gray haze pierced only by the EXIT sign’s sickly green glow.

They stood in the dark, the distance between them suddenly infinite and zero at the same time.

“Tomorrow?” Jonathan asked.

Willow hesitated, then nodded. “Tomorrow.”

She left first, the echo of her footsteps fading quickly, but not the static charge she left in the air behind her. Jonathan waited a minute, collected his backpack, and padded after, down the corridor and into the uncertain night.

On the bench, in the darkness, the sample jar sat quietly. In the moment before the emergency lights flicked on, the flight metal inside seemed to shimmer—just for a second—as if, given the right conditions, it could remember how to be more than what it was.

Electronics Lab

Sunnydale High School

Monday, November 3rd, 1997

Evening

The only light in the Sunnydale High Electronics Lab was hospital-bright, the kind that drilled into your skull and left afterimages burned into your retina for hours. It was past midnight. The school’s janitorial team had finished their rounds two hours ago, their mop buckets echoing down linoleum halls before silence crept in. Now the only thing alive in the lab was Xander, hunched like a mutant vulture over bench #7, surrounded by a graveyard of failed circuit boards.

Oscilloscopes blinked. Power meters hummed. Somewhere, deep inside the guts of a discarded CRT monitor, a dying fly repeatedly body-checked the glass. Xander reached for his screwdriver and nearly lost it to the shaking in his hand.

He muttered, “Yeah, because caffeine was the problem here,” and popped open another can of Jolt. The taste was pure battery acid, but the real high was that moment when his hands stopped trembling for the length of one steady breath. He could almost pretend he wasn’t about to pass out face-first onto the schematic. Ted Knight’s cosmic rod plans, pulled from his memory, annotated in barely legible fountain pen, sprawled out before him. Xander’s own notes littered the margins: equations, doodles, a crude sketch of Wildcat punching out a robot shaped suspiciously like Principal Snyder.

He couldn’t tell if it was the headache or the fluorescent hum, but every ten minutes the words “gravitational lensing” started doing a little can-can at the edge of his vision. He wiped at his brow with a sleeve that used to be clean, squinted at the breadboard, and jabbed the tip of the soldering iron at the next resistor with surgical precision. Or maybe more like “amateur dentistry,” considering the smell of burning epoxy.

Xander was sure there were easier ways to gain Starman’s abilities, but for his own self-respect, he needed to understand exactly what the Cosmic Rod was and how it worked. Xander knew he wasn’t stupid; he wouldn’t be taking and passing the Advanced Placement math and science classes if he was, but this was one of the first times that he could actually use that knowledge for something besides taking tests. And if Ted Knight could jury-rig an anti-gravity field out of vacuum tubes and chewing gum, Xander Harris could build a microcoil from the school’s leftover AV budget.

Probably.

He cycled power again. The coil flickered, sputtered, then guttered out with a smell like melted Legos. That made seven failed starts since 9:30 p.m. He pushed back from the bench, chair squealing. The darkness behind the locked lab door suddenly felt much less secure.

He got up and checked the corridor, careful not to trip the alarm strip rigged above the threshold. There was a light on in the faculty lounge—a staffer, maybe, or the ghosts of teachers past—but nothing headed this way. He reset the alarm, muttered a string of “don’t be here, don’t be here,” and plopped back into his seat.

Three feet to his left, the pages of his newly purchased journal glared up at him, filled with the formulas from Ted’s memories, formulas so dense they could’ve collapsed under their own gravity. He had written them in a daze, connecting his memories to his hands, ink flowing across the page so fast that Xander didn’t know what he was writing. That had been yesterday; tonight, he was reading them with fresh, if tired, eyes. Squinting, Xander traced his finger down the margin: “If resonance persists in secondary loop, attempt doubled Faraday cage (see pg 17).” Page 17 was mostly a digression about the “tenacious mediocrity” of the American high school system, but hidden in the middle, a four-word bombshell:

Needs an emotional trigger. Test.

He snorted. “That’s so on-brand it hurts.”

The cosmic rod—hell, even the Junior version—was more than a battery with delusions of grandeur. Ted’s theory: Every user left a psychic imprint in the circuitry, a thumbprint of their personality, something about the unique way they bent the field when they powered it up. Willow would’ve called it “techno-magic.” Xander called it “another way the universe expects you to be special.”

He glared at the coil, as if by force of will it would stop mocking him. Maybe that was the trigger: you had to hate it just enough. He jammed his finger onto the contacts and flipped the switch.

The world went blue.

A sphere of light rippled out, contained by the coil, and for one blinding instant, the bench levitated half an inch, screws and wire bits doing a lazy orbit around the breadboard. Xander grinned, then caught himself and slammed the switch. The field collapsed with a WHUMPF and a spray of ozone.

His hands were still shaking, but the way his face ached from smiling was new. He’d done it. Not perfect—there was a stress crack in the solder, and the meter was already dropping—but it worked.

That was when he heard the cough.

Xander jerked back, nearly sending his Jolt can flying into the glowing prototype. The lab’s glass door was half-obscured by the blackout curtains he’d taped up, but there was no mistaking the silhouette in the hallway.

Giles. Of course, it was Giles. In tweed, with a briefcase, like he’d just stepped off the set of British Bureaucrats Who Judge You. His eyebrow said, “I’m not mad, just disappointed,” but his voice was perfectly dry:

“Xander, I’m aware you are enthused about the possibilities we discussed earlier, but are you aware that the school is, in fact, closed at this hour?”

Xander fumbled for a reply, checked the time, and decided the best approach was the truth, or at least the high-octane, sleep-deprived version of it.

“Just testing the design, need to make sure it works as expected. We found out Friday night that a working Cosmic Rod makes Buffy’s job a lot easier, and besides, science waits for no one.”

Giles set down the briefcase, let the silence grow awkward. “That’s… admirable, in a sense. However, most after-hours scientific endeavors do not involve surreptitious use of restricted equipment, nor the distinct aroma of what I believe to be burning insulation.”

The leftover ozone in the air practically lit up at the word “restricted.” Xander tried to shuffle the glowing coil behind a stack of old PC towers, but the field buzzed and sent the plastic casings rattling.

“Is that—?” Giles trailed off, then stepped forward and flicked the safety on the prototype. Xander braced for the “give me the device and see me after class” routine, but instead Giles just peered at the readout, then the schematics, then at Xander’s own ragged notes.

“I’m fairly certain that’s not within the district curriculum,” Giles observed. His tone was cool, but he wasn’t moving to confiscate anything.

“It’s, uh… extra credit?” Xander ventured.

Giles studied Xander’s bench with that signature English blend of disdain and curiosity. He nudged the Jolt aside with a pencil, thumbed through the open notebook, and asked, “You understand what you’ve built, I trust?”

“I mean, the basics? It’s a gravity lens. Supposed to counteract mass on a small scale. Like a super-precise anti-gravity thing. I think. Or it’ll turn my skeleton into oatmeal, depending on how you tune it.”

Giles snorted. He almost smiled. “Well. Perhaps leave human testing for another day, if you please.”

Xander nodded, then eyed his coil. The blue had faded, but there was a tremor in the metal—a residue, maybe. Or just his imagination.

Picking up his briefcase, Giles left with a brief smile and the surety of someone who’d seen worse, and Xander was alone again. But the fear was gone. In its place, a thin thread of hope. Or maybe just stubbornness.

He set his jaw and powered up the coil again. The blue light surged, brighter this time. The field held steady as a heartbeat.

This feeling was how it started, he thought. With junk parts, a stolen schematic, and just enough sleep deprivation to believe it might work.

High School Library

Upper Floor

Tuesday, November 4th, 1997

Early Morning

The second floor of the library was barely used; most students and staff tended to forget it existed, which made it perfect for Buffy’s purposes. The floor was a patchwork of tatami mats gone uneven and glossy from years of sweat and boot polish. The only light came from a clutch of bare bulbs in wire cages overhead, which made the air look thick and bruised.

Buffy stood dead center, stripped down to leggings and a faded tank top, hair cinched tight at the nape. She’d come to the room early, before the majority of the students arrived, because the thought of anyone seeing her mess up was anathema. The only audience she tolerated was the one inside her skull.

She closed her eyes and was instantly somewhere else.

Not a dream, not exactly. More like a wormhole through her own history. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she could see the world through another’s lens: Dinah Drake, the original Black Canary, legs like steel cables, jaw set, fists curled in perfect alignment. The memory of muscle tension, the echo of a training montage played on infinite loop. Buffy found herself repeating the old woman’s mantra without meaning to: Hands high. Shoulders down. Exhale on impact.

In the vision, Dinah squared off against a man built like a mailbox, his face already swollen from earlier rounds. She ducked his jab, pivoted on her lead foot, and hammered a combo—right jab, left hook, spinning elbow, knee to the ribs. Every movement was economic, precise, as if the laws of physics had been written for her convenience. The man staggered. Dinah grinned, tongue curling over her lip, and beckoned him forward for more.

Buffy opened her eyes, and the real room snapped back into place. She faced an imaginary opponent, squared up, and tried to duplicate the sequence. Jab. Hook. Elbow. Knee.

She missed the rhythm, lost the balance on the spin, and nearly fell sideways into the wall. Her pulse spiked; her ears rang with embarrassment, even though nobody was watching. She took a breath, shook her arms out, and started again.

This time it flowed. Jab. Hook. Elbow. Knee. She felt the air resist her, the slap of her own breath in her chest. On the third repetition, she added a feint, just like in the memory: a little skip, a shoulder dip to telegraph a fake. The mat under her bare feet creaked, then caught.

Dinah’s voice, impossible and clear, cut through her own thoughts: If you’re going to hit, hit. If you’re not, don’t pretend.

Buffy grinned, baring her teeth. “Thanks, Mom,” she said, not meaning it. She ran through the combo again, and again, until the moves bled together and her muscles stopped fighting the memory.

She pivoted to the rack along the wall and pulled down the bo staff—lightweight, smooth, maybe an inch taller than she was. She twirled it end over end, then found the midpoint and let it settle in her hands. Staff work was new; Dinah’s memories came with a full library of forms and routines, but no instruction manual on how to plug them into Buffy’s own body. She had to guess, mostly.

She squared up, inhaled, and launched into the sweep.

The first pass was all arms, too stiff, the arc wobbly. Buffy corrected, bent her knees, let her hips lead. The second pass was better. On the third, she nailed it: the staff sang through the air, caught the invisible attacker at the ankle, and finished with a sharp snap against the mat. The echo bounced off the window and back to her, magnified.

Buffy wiped sweat from her forehead, then let the staff rest against her shoulder. She checked her grip, flexed her fingers, and tried to conjure up the next move. In the mental replay, Dinah advanced, turned the sweep into a vault, and crashed down with a downward strike that looked like it could split a cement block. Buffy hesitated. She’d seen the move, but never done it herself.

She planted the staff, pushed off with her right foot, and tried to leap. It wasn’t graceful—she was too high, too slow—but she landed on target, both feet planted, staff extended. The landing jolted her knees, sent a jolt of pain up her spine, but she stayed upright.

Not perfect. But close.

She tried it again. And again.

By the tenth rep, she could feel the pattern lock in. The staff and her body became one mechanism, the movement less conscious and more instinct. She grinned and wondered if this was how it had felt to be Dinah: knowing the exact shape of your power, and how to unleash it at will.

A bead of sweat rolled down her cheek. She ignored it, turning instead to the reflection in the glass door that led to the brownstone’s hallway. She didn’t quite recognize herself: flushed, loose-limbed, eyes glinting with a feral confidence she’d never owned before, not even when she was just the Slayer.

She thought of Xander and Willow, probably still asleep, or more likely building something ridiculous either in the electronics or chemistry labs. She thought of Giles, sipping tea and pretending not to eavesdrop. She thought of the old days, the vampire nests, the Saturday-night patrols, and felt a weird, distant nostalgia for a life that now seemed trivial compared to this.

With the staff balanced behind her neck, she walked the perimeter of the room, feet light, toes landing silent. She rehearsed other sequences: a shoulder throw, a forward roll, a roundhouse kick that ended in a perfect back stance. Each time, she corrected herself, made micro-adjustments, and cataloged the improvement.

After thirty minutes, she dropped the staff back on the rack and did a set of pushups, knuckles to the mat, chest brushing the ground. She went to failure, then did one more, just to spite the ghost of Dinah in her head.

When she finally stood up, her arms were numb, her face bright with exertion. She exhaled slow and felt the satisfaction settle in. She wasn’t Black Canary yet, but she could see the outline—a shape drawn in negative, waiting for her to fill it.

She took a last lap around the room, hands on her hips, stretching out the fatigue. The only sound was her breathing and the slow pop of the radiator against the far wall.

“We’re not so different, you and I,” she muttered to the memory of the women in her head. The words sounded stupid in the echo, but she let them stand. In that moment, they felt true.

She left the training room with her head held high, sweat still drying on her skin, feeling for once like maybe—just maybe-the memory wasn’t in control. Maybe she was.

She closed the door behind her, and the echo faded. The new day waited, and she was ready to meet it on her own terms.

End Chapter Two

Chapter and Collected Story is on the Drive https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S9PWXRdmz3kvG0_5_XL_3UD_3LUi8-Gg?usp=sharing