Disclaimer: They all belong to either Joss and ME, or Eric Kripke. Deal with it. I have.

Category: Supernatural crossover.

Time Frame: Story #2 in my "Dracula's Gift" series, and a follow-up to my earlier 'Destiny Rolled Snake Eyes,' which takes place in at the beginning of a very AU season Three.

Spoilers: None intended, but if you don’t know what happened up to this point, why are you reading this story?

Character Bashing: None.

Feedback: Of course!

Archiving: Talk to me first, please.

Author’s Note 1: This one is unbeta'd, as all of these submissions will be.

Author’s Note 2: As usual, “word” indicates speech, :: word :: indicates mental communication and { word } indicates a character's thoughts.

Author’s Note 3: This is story #12 for Challenge 6471: August Fic-A-Day 2011, and second in a series which is a response to TTH Challenge #588.

~~~

Chase Residence
Sunnydale, Ca

August 31, 1998


Cordelia Chase was lying on the couch in the family room of her parents' unquestionably palatial home, recuperating from the aftermath of her latest headache and trying not to worry overmuch about the reasons she'd been experiencing them.

Mother had been her usual self, flitting about whichever room Cordelia was in, murmuring vague reassurances that everything would turn out all right, while never really allowing more than the occasional, momentary touch to occur, and clearly wondering just how much more time she needed to allot to her daughter before she could reasonably voice whatever excuse she'd decided to offer her only child this time for her imminent departure to whichever hot spot she'd made plans to visit this month.

Daddy, of course, had already left, zooming off on yet another 'business trip' after taking time out of his so-precious schedule to fly down with her and Mother to Sanford ("Nothing but the best for my baby girl.") and have the doctors there fawn over another possible grant donor and then fuss over her, while still not being able to come up with any sort of explanation for why she kept getting these god-awful headaches. One of those idiots had even suggested that her headaches were psychosomatic, and she was having them as a way to get her parents' attention focused on her again, the way it had been when she was a child. *That* S.O.B. was lucky she hadn't followed up her initial impulse and punch his face in, because she probably wouldn’t have stopped before she'd beaten his brains out – assuming he had any, to begin with.

While she'd never admit it to any of her minions, the sheep that harkened to her every word when they were together at school, she was terrified, almost out of her mind with fear about what was be going on, and she didn't have anyone she could talk to about her fears about what was happening to her.

Well, that wasn't completely true.

She was pretty sure that she could tell Doofus-boy how she was feeling, and he wouldn't run around and blab everything to anyone else – especially if she told him not to – but the problem was, she wasn't about to spill her heart out to someone she wasn't going out with.

And from the way Xander had sounded when she'd spoken to him earlier this morning, and the way he'd said they needed to talk but avoided saying anything about what he wanted to talk to her about, she was pretty sure he was he was going to break up with her. After all, why would he want to be stuck with some hypochondriac flake? That was exactly what she would have done in his place, even as recently as last year.

She was considering whether she wanted to expend the effort of getting up and raiding Mother Dearest's alcohol stash when her depressed and melancholic musings were interrupted by a grating, somewhat whiny voice she didn't recognize.

"Hey, toots, nice place ya got here."

Opening her eyes, she winced – not only because of the bright light filtering in through the blinds, but because of the mindnumbingly god-awful outfit on the fashion reject standing just a few feet away.

"Who the hell are you?" the undisputed queen of Sunnydale High snarled as she held up a hand to shield her eyes against the light – and his clothes. "And how the hell did you get in here?"

"The name's Whistler," the apparent wannabe-be pimp informed Cordelia with a leer, "and I dropped by to have a little talk with your future.

"Or, what's a lot more likely, your lack of one," he added a moment later, his comment causing Cordelia to narrow her eyes and glare at him.

"What do you mean, my lack of a future?" she immediately demanded.

"Those headaches you've been getting lately," her uninvited guest said, apparently ignoring her question, "they come with visions showing you people who're getting hurt, who're in danger, right?"

"How'd you know that?" Cordelia asked, her face paling at his words.

"Those visions are an ancient, powerful force, kid," Whistler said. "Demons are the only ones who can withstand them, so I'm guessing you've got some demon blood hiding on one of the branches somewhere back in the family tree.

"But, ya see," he then went on, "your problem is that you're not a demon, you're pretty much completely human except for that demon trace that gave ya the visions, so sooner or later – and what I really mean is sooner, not later – those headaches are gonna make you feel like your head's exploding.

"'Cause it will be," he finished up.

"So why are you here, telling me all this?" Cordelia demanded, her face so pale that some people might have mistaken her for a vampire. "You enjoy watching people's heads explode?"

"Nah," Whistler shook his head. "I'm here because my bosses – they're called the Powers That Be; your buddy, the Slayer, knows who I'm talking about, so ya can ask her about them whenever she gets home – they can help ya with this problem you got."

"How?" Cordelia immediately demanded.

"Well, they'll kinda turn ya into a demon, ya see," he explained, "by implanting some demon into ya. Ya won't turn into a full demon, but ya'll end up strong enough to live with the visions."

"And what do your bosses get out of this?" Cordelia asked, eyes narrowing as she tried to figure out what angle these Powers That Be might be working. No one, whether they were human or demon, ever did anything simply out of the kindness of their heart. These Powers had to be benefiting somehow from making her part-demon.

"Well, if they do this, then ya'd be one of their Champions," Whistler admitted, "so you'd be pretty much obligated to follow whatever directions they want ya to follow, when situations like the end of the world show up.

"Kinda like what ya've been doing over the past year or so," he pointed out. "Just with the directions being a little more specific than the Slayer gets."

"I need to think about this," Cordelia said, not knowing what to say at the moment, but knowing she didn't want to give any sort of answer right away. "How long do I have before, y'know, before my head goes 'boom!'?

"I don’t really know there's any definite timeframes, toots," Whistler shrugged.

"I'll stop back in a day or so, for your answer and to see how you're doing," he told her.

"But I wouldn't wait too long to make a decision," he cautioned her before turning and walking away, around the corner.

Getting up to check, Cordelia made sure that her visitor was gone before walking back over to the couch she'd been lying down earlier and slumped into one corner.

Pulling her knees up, she wrapped her arms around her legs and let her head drop down and began crying, letting her fears and worries out in a torrent of sobs and tears.

"Hey there, little lady, there's no need to cry like that."

Looking up at the second instance of an unknown voice speaking to her inside her own home, Cordelia saw a dark-haired man with a somewhat scruffy-looking beard looking down at her with what appeared to be genuine compassion.

"What?" she snarled, sounding more that a little acerbic, even to herself, she had to admit. "Your bosses don't want to wait, so I have to give them an answer now, or they'll make my head explode?"

"Sorry, but I don't work for those clowns," the man shook his head at Cordelia's question.

"Actually," he said, after a moment's reflection, "I'm not the least bit sorry I don’t work for them, because they're nothing but a bunch of pompous, self-important assholes."

"So why are you here?" Cordelia demanded, her eyes narrowing in a combination of annoyance and frustration. "Come to make a pitch for whoever *your* bosses are, so I can have my visions and work for them instead?"

"Uh-uh, doll. That's not the way I do things," the man shook his head in disagreement again. "I just stopped to let you know that whatever Whistler told you, while it may be the truth, it almost certainly isn't the *whole* truth about whatever's going on."

"How do you know that?" the brunette demanded. "And just who the hell are you, anyway?"

"Well, I know some of Whistler's bosses from a long time back, and we disagreed a lot on how they did things, and about the way they used people to get what they wanted done," her second uninvited visitor told her. "So now, whenever I get the chance, I try to screw things up for them by letting whoever they're trying to manipulate know that they're not getting the whole story.

"And you can call me Loki," he said.

"Why are you doing that?" Cordelia asked, frowning at the explanation given her. "What? You'd like seeing the world come to an end?"

"Nah, that’d spoil all my fun, if I let that happen," Loki shook his head 'No,' again as he answered with a small grin. "But the way the Powers want things done isn't the only way the world could be saved – it's just the way *they* want it done.

"And that alone's a good enough reason for me to want to see it done another way."


FIN