Main Points:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Marvel Crossover AU (Self-Made Hero: The Infinity Mirror)
Summary: Giles finds the fifth of his recruits.
Word Count: 575
Rating: Gen
Dr. Winifred Burkle had an amazing life. She was well-respected. Her work did brilliant things for the world. She had an attentive, loving fiancé.
Of course, the key word there was had.
The things you didn’t know could and definitely well did kill you. Such as her fiancée was actually involved in a cult. Such as she was sacrificed, screaming, begging, unable to believe the betrayal, her still beating heart cut out to draw darker things into the world.
Illyria had a cult. She was a Goddess, worshipped by so many followers. She had the respect and even fear from the other Hell Gods and Goddesses, including that windbag Glorificus.
The key word there was also had.
The things she hadn’t known had led to her being trapped, entombed for eternity. The things she hadn’t known had led to one presumptuous human assuming a life of accomplishment would do for a sacrifice in her name. The things she hadn’t known had led, through spells passed down the centuries, to the human named Wyndam-Pryce to assume that a summoned Hell Goddess could be tamed.
Fortunately, there were things that this Wyndam-Pryce also had not known, and she rose in the former body of his fiancée, teeth bared in a snarl and eyes glinting in the dark in a way that human’s eyes did not. His screams and his blood against her claws grown solely for the fact that she has no weapon and feels the need to tear are sweeter than the heart lying in the bowl.
When she finishes, she is uncertain of her path. In her diminished powers, she feels the loss of her cult, and many of the other greats have been locked away over the years by mere humans. Yet she cannot return to the life of this ‘Winifred’. She doesn’t know enough about being human to do so.
Curious, she touches the heart, and relives the savage rage, the retribution that this former Winifred had exacted through the blessing of her dark Goddess, and decides this is enough. In thanks for her release, she will obliterate this cult from the earth, these humans who dared to rival the demons in their evil. She uses some of her power to preserve the heart, a little more to make her clothes that of her liking, and leaves.
She’s nearly done when some of them manage to unearth a ritual to travel into different dimensions, and escape, and she’s blind with fury. She takes out her frustration on every vampire above a Hellmouth and feels a little better.
She nearly kills one of the ringleaders when he reappears, only he convinces her that he was not and never was one of the leaders when he shows her his power, and it’s chaotic but not evil as the other’s was. “The ones you seek have allied with an enemy of mine,” he explains. “If you join us, we will hunt them down.”
She soon meets the others—a witch, a wolf, a knight, an assassin—and agrees.
Apparently, they are to rescue one other. A Slayer. A human created specifically to hunt evil, and the more in this hunt, the merrier. She has never had comrades before, never fought with others other than her followers, but as the knight jokes even as he traps one of the runaway cultists in a cage of his own karma with woven words, she decides she likes the feeling.
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