Disclaimer: I'm not Joss Whedon. Or Jeff Vogel. Or affiliated in any way with their associated corporations, let alone their intellectual property rights. Rights which I clearly respect less than they do, what with totally cribbing Vogel's opening text-boxes.

Number: 1/1 (for story proper; omakes for anything following, of which there will be at least one chapter posted)

Rating: T

Warnings: mild violence & language, gratuitous character death (refer to the summary), YAHF (crossover explained in the ending a/n – and no, it's almost certainly not the one the chap-title might make you think), slight bashing of Willow and Cordelia (though that's down to interpretation, I just see it as IC in the changed context).

Summary: Because he really, really should have known better. A Divergence Series: Bad End fic.

(For a good end, which would never happen in my Divergence series because YAHF never ever ends well therein, any following chapters can basically be treated as omakes.)

Pairings: general (canon for episode).

A/N: …Yeah, it was only a matter of time before I wrote a YAXHF. In my defence I can only say that at least I had the common decency to kill off the poor bastard while I was at it.
The main idea behind this fic came about after I thought back to the Halloween episode and recalled that Ethan's shop was chock-full of generic costumes that didn't breach copyright laws. This costume could just as well have been tucked away on that set, meant as a pirate or period-soldier costume until Xander's inspiration ran away from him. Also, minor kudos to the person or two who inevitably did already use this joke as a YAHF.

Too Much Colour:
Redshirted!

—ox-oxo-xo—

The trial was completed, and the sentence was passed. There was no appeal. There was no need. It wasn't as if it was considered a terribly awful sentence, anyway.

After all, they had not committed one of the hard crimes. They were not thieves, or pirates, or murderers. Sentences for those offences were harsh and generally fatal. Hard miscreants inevitably died.

No, their crime was one of not fitting in. Of rebelling, or being peculiar in some way, or speaking out against the crown. And for those "soft crimes", the punishment was considered just, appropriate, and, most of all, lenient.

Well, at least it was considered lenient by those who fit in with society, those who got to live out the rest of their lives above-ground.

Living in the light of the sun, however, was a privilege that had just been stripped from them. All of them were taken to a portal, a one-way, permanent teleporter, and thrown in.

…

He comes to a strange town, unlike any he has seen before. Stars in what for all the world looks like a cloudy evening sky show him that something has happened that the soldiers who just threw them into the portal were not expecting.

The town goes on for what looks like miles in all directions. A neat road, formed from a hard, black rock-like substance, stretches on either side of him to nearby intersections, continuing onward in a network of paths that goes on far beyond the range of his vision in this dim light.

It is not actually that hard to see, though it takes a little while for his eyes to adjust to the glaring, ill-spaced night lighting that the town uses. As his eyes do adjust, he sees that he is in what looks like a residential district of some sort. Homes of one and two stories line the road, most separated from it by an expanse of lawn or garden and many with a well-crafted fence. Each property has a wide path leading from the road to an outlying section of the building, though most of the paths are a smooth off-white – the same pallid shade as the yard-wide strips bordering the black path.

He is standing in the middle of a carriageway. He hurriedly moves onto the nearest white strip, which feels just as hard under his boots.

There are people too – many of them screaming and panicking as they're chased by child-sized monsters! Most of the people pay little attention to him, but one woman, a young redhead in a revealing outfit, catches sight of him and quickly approaches.

Sadly, so does one of the small monsters. COMBAT!

—ox-oxo-xo—

Fortunately, the monster must have been suffering from very poor morale. It backed away and fled the moment he raised his sword at it. A sword that he is certain he did not have in his possession when he was thrown through the portal.

The strange spirit – a spirit that's even more intangible than usual – calls him Zander, or possibly Sander or Xanda, he isn't sure. He's pretty sure his name is John and always has been, but this "Willow" is adamant.

Something strange and unexpected is definitely going on. That much is blindingly obvious. The edged weapon, a steel short sword of reasonable quality, would have been confiscated as a matter of course – after all, who lets their prisoners carry blades? Same with the bronze shield looped onto his left forearm. The Empire's soldiers sent them into Exile with nothing but the clothes on their backs. (And their purses, food-bags and a basic pack-harness each – all empty, and now all missing.)

That's another thing. There is no 'them'. John had not been alone as he waited to say goodbye to the surface world. There had been others, all scheduled for the same fate. He had secured agreement from those others that they would team up, as they all used the provided scraps of leather and hemp to make their pack-harnesses. After all, they were going into a virtually unknown situation. Safety in numbers, right?

Well, he is here. And they aren't.

He is here, in an unfamiliar land of some sort, which is above-ground. He doesn't know much about the place where he was meant to be sent, but he does know it's not above-ground.

John would almost think he had lucked out, if not for all the rampaging monsters.

—ox-oxo-xo—

Soon after, their impromptu party increases by one. He is not particularly optimistic about her addition.

The new member, called Buffy by the spirit, is a noble of some sort. Whatever her actual name is, she certainly has the bearing of a noble, as well as the dress. He knows a little of noble fashion, but nowhere near enough to tell whether the dress is 'in season' for wherever it was she came from. Certainly, it appears impractical enough for the more ridiculous outfits he has seen young noble ladies sporting as they went about their business.

It is clear that "Buffy" is completely unprepared for anything like this.

John had been unarmed, dispossessed, with no money or even food to his name. But at least he knew SOMETHING was supposed to happen. He had been prepared, mentally and as physically as he could manage.

Willow is in something of a panic. Understandable – one minute she's a young woman escorting younger children on a festival outing of some kind, the next minute she's a spirit watching monsters attack everybody. But he has to admit that she seems to be dealing well with the situation despite that. He gets the distinct impression that while this situation is extremely weird, she has seen things almost as weird before and lived through them. And maybe she has, if she's a resident of this town and all this is an example of what happens in it.

At least she has a basic plan. Get to some house which the noble girl is carrying a key to, for whatever reason. Once there, contact an older and wiser associate, and tell him about what has happened. Follow the man's instructions. Straightforward and easy to understand.

The noble, though? She has not even the standard lessons in spell theory that children in the Empire undergo as a matter of course, something even children of the magic-hating Anama church on the Isle of Bigail are not permitted to miss out on. She seems reluctant to even believe in the existence of magic! And apart from basic training in letters and numbers and perhaps how to run a household, it seems she has learned little else if the rant about growing up to marry a baron being her purpose in life is anything to go by.

Willow is some kind of spirit, unable to touch anything. But she is familiar with, and knowledgeable about this town called Sunnydale, and at least everything is just as unable to touch her. He is cast adrift in an unfamiliar and hostile place – fortuitously, though, he has a weapon and knows his way around it. This "Buffy" is as lost as he is and even more confused, has nothing to defend herself with, and wouldn't know how to use it if she did.

Oh, and she's flighty and empty-headed. And has fainted at least once.

Safety in numbers? Sure. But the noble isn't going to be of any more help than maybe a set of eyes to keep watch for threats. And that is generously assuming she even knows how to do THAT much.

—ox-oxo-xo—

A small portrait of uncommon clarity, followed by a glance in a mirror in the home that Willow has led them to, proves if nothing else that the "Zander" the spirit keeps calling him is a dead ringer for John. Certainly he looks more like Zander than the noble looks like Buffy, though that might be the wavy brunette hair.

He talks to the noble lady.

"Name?"

She stares at him. He belatedly realises that it's the first word he has spoken since he came to this town. Though to be fair, Willow has made up for it by speaking A LOT.

The noble gathers her wits and straightens. "I am Lady Elizabeth, good sir. And you are?"

He formally introduces himself, and they speak for a short while. She is the only daughter of a baronet, landed gentry of a place called England. England is the seat and ruling kingdom of the "British empire" where she comes from. When he asks, she assumes (correctly) that he is from a distant land with different ranks of nobility and tells him a baron is the lowest rank of lord.

John has never heard of any of these names, but the spirit interrupts to tell them that those lands do exist in their world. Or rather, they DID – the Empire now calls itself a "Commonwealth", and is all but broken besides. The Queen (not "Empress" unlike Emperor Tyrant… ahem, Hawthorne) of the "United Kingdom", of which England is still the most powerful land, rules as nought but a figurehead, and her "Prime Minister" runs the government with the aid of dozens of like-minded people and a host of "public servants" (which sounds like a bunch or courtiers with a more friendly job title). The details are complicated and his head hurts trying to comprehend them.

She is interrupted anyway as a large, sharp-taloned paw smashes the glass viewing panel on the front door. The monster withdraws and flees after he slashes at it with his sword.

Willow seems to have given up the more detailed explanation as pointless by the time they have regathered themselves. She merely tells Elizabeth that they are in America, which was one of the Empire's more far-flung colonies at the time Elizabeth remembers but has since been independent for over two hundred years.

As for John… She is interrupted again before she can offer any guess as to his presence, this time by a high-pitched scream from the street.

—ox-oxo-xo—

It's times like this that he really wishes he'd gone for more magic training in his lessons. Something as simple as repeating the first-tier priest spell Minor Heal a couple times could have fixed this right up.

But no, instead he'd ignored his well of what the teaching mages insultingly called "Intelligence" in favour of swordplay.

The large, hairy monster that was chasing Cordelia had fled after a light taste of steel like all the other monsters he'd encountered tonight – but not before taking a swipe at him that he had not quite managed to block properly. It is only fortunate that the monster was weaker than its size suggested and its claws were fairly blunt.

A healer could have fixed his shoulder up in a few seconds. One of the other convicts he had been exiled with, he knows there was at least one who could cast priest spells, could have done the same. But he can not. Instead, he is stuck with an injured shoulder and honestly doubting he'll have the time to recover.

Willow is even more frantic than she's been for much of the evening, wringing her hands and repeatedly apologising for sending him to rescue "Cordelia". Elizabeth is at least making herself useful, helping him to pad and wrap his shoulder with the home's "first aid" supplies, with a respectably restrained amount of fuss over the blood. The party's newest member is…

As pretty as she is – and she is pretty, with her positively immodest (and enticingly damaged) clothing leaving not the slightest trace of doubt about that – there's no pretty way to describe it.

Cordelia is throwing a tantrum, screeching at the spirit over her perceived slight and tossing in a wide range of insults to boot. The personal nature of the insults makes it clear that the pair know each other from before whatever is going on happened. So does the source of the girl's offence. From what he can gather, Willow and Cordelia know and dislike each other, and Cordelia believes that Willow would rather John – or rather, "Xander" – wasn't wounded than Cordelia being saved.

John and Elizabeth trade a long-suffering look. Seems even the brainless noble can tell that this argument isn't helping matters.

The entrance of a pale, thin man from the back of the house interrupts the loud pair. Matters are again explained, this time to the man named Angel.

Unbelievably, Willow tells Angel and Cordelia in passing that John is a character from a "computer game", whatever a computer is. She can't say what game it is, only that it is an "old" game that Zander and someone named Jesse liked, and that Zander told her he picked out the costume because it happened to remind him of what he remembered one of the character "icons" looking like and thought it would be funny, and that her friend told her all that when he repaid her the ten "dollars" he'd borrowed to pay for the costume.

"I should've guessed the loser would go for something lame like that." Cordelia sneers. "Bet you wish you could save, you dweeb."

John stares, his mind still stuck on the spirit's completely ridiculous idea. Then he blinks, realises he's being insulted by the girl he just DID save, and flips her off. Only the newcomer's presence stops her from losing her temper again.

—ox-oxo-xo—

John stares down at the unconscious pirate with some distant satisfaction and an inexplicable sense of closure. …And also a great deal of pain.

That damn ruffian might not have been very skilled with his cutlass, but he has obviously had a great deal more practice wielding it in a combat setting than John did before this night. The fact that John had no choice but to assume that his opponent was another boy changed by his costume had hampered him in his fight as well. He could have stabbed the pirate early on, but held back from killing blows.

He needs to find a healer, or an inn, or even some more of that rather fine if non-magical "first aid". Any more combats like that, and he isn't going to walk away from them.

There is no healer available, and he doesn't have the gold to pay for an inn room even if they exist here and he can find one. At least more bandages are a possibility, if he can scrounge some up.

And at least Elizabeth is grateful for having her virtue saved, thanking him profusely.

Angel and Cordelia enter the alley. Elizabeth cries out and hides behind him.

Cordelia explains with exaggerated patience that Angel is a "good vampire". He has heard of vampires, a powerful type of undead monster that the histories said were stamped out of the Empire along with all of the other monsters many decades ago. He does not know if vampires, whether back in the Empire or here in Sunnydale, can be "good". But he does know that this one isn't hostile. That's enough for him not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Elizabeth looks to John, beseeching him for guidance.

He shrugs. "Friendly."

Elizabeth is easily convinced – more easily than he would have thought, given the way she'd fled the vampire's very presence the moment he revealed himself as no longer human – and shyly steps out to approach Angel. Her shyness doesn't look fear-induced, either.

He is surprised by that. But not all THAT surprised. The lady had been drawn to the classically handsome figure ever since they met. She's clearly eager to believe the best of him.

Of course, the touching scene is interrupted once more by a paradoxically huffing and puffing Willow. And she's brought company.

—ox-oxo-xo—

The barricade doesn't last for long. Neither does the fight. The blond vampire "Spike" came prepared, there's no more ground to flee to, and a dozen monsters all at once are simply too much for him and Angel. John doesn't even get the chance to change his tactics and go for lethal blows before the swarm of monsters tear him down and tear into him.

His last thought as he quickly bleeds out is that wherever the Empire meant to send him, would actually have been preferable to this hellish place.

And trapped deep beneath John's crumbling image, Xander's last thought is that Cordelia was right: he really DOES wish that he could have saved.

Or, y'know, not gone as a redshirrrr…

When Ethan Rayne resurfaced a couple weeks later, Willow and Buffy almost killed Ethan on sight, and Cordelia gleefully kicked him in the nuts. In fact, Willow was so incensed that she later followed Cordelia's example, then knocked the chaos mage out and sat on him rather than get caught up watching Angel's inner demon fight it out with Eyghon, just so he wouldn't get away like last time.

It took an hour to convince Willow to allow Giles to arrange for the Council to take Ethan away instead of murdering him out of hand. It took another three weeks before the furious, grieving redhead would speak to him.

It took nearly a decade for Rupert Giles to finally tell her just what he'd actually done with Ethan Rayne. Not to mention how he'd disposed of the body afterwards.

Ending A/N: For those of you who haven't read any of my divergence fics: canon!Dark Willow, from 180-plus years in the future, is repeatedly attempting to change the circumstances of her past (and thus, prevent her preordained death in completing the time loop featured in BtVS Season 8) by meddling in what inevitably turns out to be a series of close but technically alternate timelines. She's done this many times before, and will do so many more times again. One thing she's learned though, is that she can't steer events as she'd like when too many Other beings are paying attention. As such, any YAHF-type divergence is doomed to fail, and useless for anything other than killing off Xander and/or any such characters who aren't protected by their Champion status, otherworldly connections, destinies or…hell, might as well be blunt and just call it plot armour.

But she still does it every so often, for stress relief and a hobby, as well as for the odd time it does also kills off Buffy, Cordelia and/or her sickeningly mousy younger self. After all, this is DARK Willow we're talking about.

…

Now, for the crossover: In 1993, Seattle programmer Jeff Vogel released an two-dimensional (top-down) RPG for the PC and Macintosh called "Exile: Escape From The Pit". Basic plot is, a party of anywhere from one to six misfits has been tossed into a massive network of underground caverns with no known way out, and now has to decide what to do next. The graphics are rough and were fairly basic even when the game was released over twenty years ago, but the game was a lot of fun. More recently, Exile and its two sequels (both of which had been released by Halloween 1997, which is part of why I used it) have been retooled and rebranded as the Avernum Trilogy games, which you may be more familiar with. The present-tense I went with for most of this chapter is a references to the game's many text-boxes. So is John's habit of only speaking single-word prompts when actually being quoted, as is the use of CAPITALS instead of italics.

The default first character's icon for the first Exile game is a red shirt and hat, black pants belt and boots, holding a sword in one hand and a round shield in the other – think a Robin Hood-type in red instead of green, minus the archery. Pretext to this is that 12-year-old Jesse or Xander bought the shareware version of the game for a dollar back when it came out, convinced Willow to hack the game for the registration codes as a challenge (which, being Willow, it probably wasn't), and both boys enjoyed playing it greatly until a year or two later when they discovered hormones. Meanwhile, the game has been mouldering away gathering dust in Willow's old computer… but that's for the omake.

Cue trip to Ethan's. Xander spots the costume and is bugged by it until he remembers what it reminds him of, reminisces over playing games with Jesse, borrows $10 from Willow until he can dash home and repay her from his road trip fund, and buys the costume out of sentimentality (read: Dark Willow playing Xander's Muse) and to play off the inevitable joke about the redshirt.

Oops – joke's on him.

In case you were wondering? John (the default first character's assigned name) was about as useful as you saw above: reasonably fit and flexible, decent with edged weapons, and not a complete novice at defence – but no magic and no other skills apart than a knack for disarming traps. Seriously, he was just lucky the costume came with a sword and shield that happened to kinda match the icon, because the default Lv.1 character wouldn't even have started with that much. Xander ended up dying as a result of the game mechanic: John started with 20 HP, lost 4 to the monster chasing Cordelia, lost 11 more to Pirate Larry, and then lost HP in 1's and 2's until he hit 0 HP, lost more HP in one more tiny hit, and died. In Exile, with a party who can pick up the corpse (and hopefully the corpse's stuff) and hotfoot it to a priest, not so much of a fuss – here, it's bye-bye Xander.

Next (and probably last): … Maybe just enough colour? It'll be up in a couple days, and have a rather less grim ending for Xander. (So if you hate the Xander and just read this to enjoy his gratuitous death, you might want to skip that one.) In the meantime, feedback is much appreciated.