Reversal

[madimpossibledreamer]

Main Points:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Iron Man Crossover (Self-Made Hero)
Summary: Restless goes a bit differently for Xander Knight.
Word Count: 530
Rating: Gen

        They shouldn’t be here.  They’d filed for emancipation, moved out, even filed a restraining order when Tony had turned up drunk demanding a cut of the money for having taken care of an ungrateful brat.  Sure, it haunts their nightmares and probably always will.  The location’s already featuring less often, as it gets more distant and he feels like he’s putting it more behind him.  Getting better. 
        At the same time, it seems inevitable that they would have ended up here.  Like some part of them is just trapped here, will always be.  There’s a horror, a frustrated, crying fear and freezing terror, as the man slowly descends the stairs. 
        “Don’t have the balls to do anything, huh?” he laughs, sneering, and in that moment something snaps.
        “When will anything I do be enough for you?” he screams, reaching out to punch his father, knock him back a little, only apparently he ended up in the armor somehow and his armored hand goes through.
        He freezes up again, watches the blood drip in horror, because angry or not he’s never wanted this.  The most violent his fantasies have ever gotten is Tony, drunk and mouthing off to something he shouldn’t.  Vampire, demon, whatever.  But even then, he hadn’t meant it, not really.  Nobody deserved that, just as nobody deserves this.
        The expression doesn’t change.  No shock, no remorse, no begging for mercy.  If anything, it’s…triumphant.
        “It’s so easy to go from hero to villain,” he rasps, blood spilling from his lips as he talks.  “For you, anyway.  You have blood on your hands.”
        “I didn’t…” he mumbles, wincing as he does, because this kind of thing always made it worse and it’s been long enough he didn’t remember.
        “You can lie.  Tell them it was self defense, that I was going to tear out your heart if you didn’t get mine first.  We both know you’re a lying piece of shit.”  And then he starts to fall, and they try to catch him, but he slips through their fingers, turning into a puddle of blood on the floor.  It doesn’t matter, though.  It doesn’t matter that he’s dead, because they can still hear him, Tony, Howard, an unwanted extra that they can’t just get rid of mafia style.  “Doesn’t matter, though.  Might be a primitive, but she knows trash when she sees it.”
        They open their mouth to argue, to say that they didn’t mean to, that he shouldn’t talk about her that way, but then Star interrupts to say that they are absolutely being hunted and by the way he’s not in a body and the Sorceror Supreme, as always, cuts through the fog and forces them to do the right thing, no matter how much pain they’re in.
        They’re out of their body, astral projecting as it were, and this isn’t reality, but a sort of hyper-reality, Dreamtime or whatever that shamans and sorcerors have been accessing since forever, an astral plane akin to the Mirror Dimension, and they can die in this world.  They might be able to talk, to reason, but they’ll need to be ready for the encounter if they’ll have any hope of survival.