Disclaimer: (sings a few notes) …Nope, wrong pitch for Joss Whedon. Also, wrong accent.

Rating: T

Number: 2/3(?)

Summary: The tricky thing about divergence seeds is that they're not always immediately obvious, or immediate for that matter. Post-S7:22 'Chosen' (but prior to AtS-S5:1 'Conviction'), the hammer is finally drawn back…

Pairings: still canon.

A/N: Yep – no change in canon up to the end of Season Seven. This is the sort of divergence that apparently springs up out of nowhere, because its seed was actually planted in subtle fashion (ie. slid into an empty spot in the canon timeline) a fair way back to hide its origins. For GD, it was a few months – here, it was over a year-and-a-half back. Either way, here comes the wind-up…
Also: yay, new laptop, finally! Soz for the posting delays.

Tangent Stage Left: One Sweet Divergence

Chapter 2: Damn you, Xander…

—ox-oxo-xo—

The roller door retracted upwards with a prolonged metallic rattle, the noise making Xander suppress a wince as his head pounded in counterpoint. Wincing was bad, when your eye had just been ripped out not two weeks ago and the rest of your face was still not healed all the way up yet. And crossing Willow's ward-line did his headache no favours either.

Xander carefully stepped over and found the light switch, dim fluorescent beams illuminating the storage lock-up. His lone eye drifted over the moderately well-organised contents as it adjusted to the diminished light after being exposed to the sunny early-summer afternoon just outside. There was no real hurry – this was basically makework. Rustle up a couple things, check on a few others; any one of the baby Slayers could have done this…if, that was, they could pass the ward-line.

Xander and Willow had set up this L.A. storage lock-up back during the unavoidable five-month hiatus in the life of Buffy, and it had last been visited by him over the previous summer to tuck away some of the surplus…stuff they'd all collected over the year. (Probably they should have made time to come here and bank some more stuff before they'd thrown down between the jaws of Hell, but it was too late to think about that now, wasn't it?) More to the point, Willow's original spellwork only allowed for certain people to enter the lock-up without tripping the wards, and she hadn't had the chance to visit and update her work since stopping over to help with Angel's missing soul problem. So for now it was just the original Scoobies left on the invite list, though she'd been making noises about checking her work over. Personally he thought it more likely they'd just take it all with them when they moved…wherever they were moving.

There was a no-smoking sign on the wall. Given that he could now read the lettering, Xander figured that his vision had adjusted as much as it was going to. A clipboard was carefully examined, to check over exactly what he was retrieving and where it was most likely to be found. (No offence to her, but standard warehousing systems weren't something Willow tended to pay attention to – especially when it came to explaining the intricacies of arcane warehousing. 'Most likely', in this instance, translated to where Xander would put it. But chances were he'd have to look from top to bottom for at least one thing on the list.)

Again though, no rush. Sure, this had to be done soonish – but it was still basically makework.

Giles had made the right noises to placate the various teen-Oprah-like sensibilities that surrounded him nowadays, offering to talk with Xander about feelings and suchlike, but the Watcher had been perfectly willing to help him deal with things in his own way once the obligatory offer had been made and rejected. Xander had caught the flash of relief in the older man's eyes as they started generating and running over checklists of what needed to be done in the short- and mid-term to pave the way for their next move. True, using work as a distraction was probably not healthy, but Xander wasn't alone in his choice of coping mechanism. Many of the new Slayers were throwing themselves into their training, and for all of Buffy's anticipation of some much-needed vacation time, she was pressing her nose to the grindstone to get the set-up hammered out as well.

They'd all lost a lot of people. But in management parlance, that just meant less people to do more work.

Anya would've been key here…

His eye socket prickled warningly. Xander gathered himself – even ignoring all his own baggage, crying hurt these days.

…Seriously though, Anya would have been one very useful woman to have on hand. She'd had a well-acknowledged knack for eking out those little yet all-important slivers of profit in every transaction, even the ones that weren't so obvious. Sure, the rest of them would've rejected the less morally acceptable ones, but it helped just to know the option existed in case it could be applied elsewhere or in better ways.

(As for Spike…? Well, he didn't particularly care for himself. But he could see how Buffy, and Dawn to a lesser extent, would leap on the distraction.)

Xander blinked, and pursed his lips as he looked back down at the list. Enough lollygagging – he was here to be distracted, not to stand around moping like Sir Mopesalot, brand new C.E.O. of Evil and Eviller.

Some of the listed inventory was small and easily transportable, but there were one or two bulkier items, so he trundled out the pallet-jack and started picking. His lips moved as he worked out that he needed three different containers to avoid contamination or adverse reactions between different spell components and one artefact. (It was so much easier for him back in Sunnydale once he'd realised it was just like a different system of handling Dangerous Goods that he needed to learn – though it took a mix of Giles, Anya and nearly a week of slave labour at the Magic Shoppe before Xander learned enough to be trusted with the standard consignments, let alone the odd ones. Willow's run-on explanations had not helped in the slightest.) He ambled here and there, occasionally having to examine the shelves more carefully for the more recent items that Willow hadn't quite correctly sorted.

At one point, pulling out a thick tome that was on the list, he happened to spot one of the few books that was from his own collection (though not in a technical sense, no-one had noticed that). He spent the next minute determinedly humming an old snippet of less-painful catchiness from Monty Python – 'He's going to tell, he's going to tell' – and thought no more on it…

…Until he had to return to that shelf, and pull out another book that was next to it. And as that book tipped over into the newly made gap, a tiny clunk sounded as something slipped out from the back cover and tapped to a stop on the wooden shelving. Xander added the book in his hand to the large crate on the pallet, and investigated the loose object.

And he remembered.

And he took out the book it had fallen out of, flicking with a strange look in his eye over the last few pages where the amulet had slipped from.

And he laughed, long and hard and bitter and broken.

"…Could somebody, give me a little push?"

When the time came for long-term assignments to be handed out, Rupert Giles had painstakingly taken into account the various strengths, weaknesses and – not to put too fine a point on it – living conditions and stress levels of each person to be sent off to their missions. Or, at least he had tried to do so. In practice, there was only so much that could be reasonably accomplished with their current range of personnel. And even with the best of intentions, there could not but occur problems of a nature which he had failed to anticipate…or at least, hoped to avoid but failed to do so.

Robin Wood to remain in Cleveland, both to co-ordinate Hellmouth duties and to start their temporary schooling/training facility – that had worked gratifyingly well, considering the Hellmouth it was situated in the vicinity of; Faith, on the other hand, had clearly not coped well after following him. Willow and Kennedy were doing rather well in Rio de Janeiro in some senses, but they dearly needed someone to handle the logistics – or more accurately, the standardisation of their logistics – in an orderly, accountable and easily understood manner; not to mention reports that the partners were prone to treating their stationing as a long, leisurely vacation. (Specifically not to mention it, in fact. Thoughts of Willow and Kennedy indulging in their 'vacation' activities did not help with his blood pressure…) Buffy and Dawn in Rome…well. That, he had anticipated to an extent, though reports of Buffy's brief fling with the Immortal had left him wanting to sink his face into his hands in despairing exasperation.

Xander's assignment was always going to be troublesome – not because of Xander himself, but because his 'assignment' was the second-largest continent in the world, with a myriad of language barriers besides. That said, Rupert had been pleasantly surprised with the work ethic that Xander had exhibited in putting together the Africa brief before it had even been assigned to him. From the very first, the young man's focus had been on either repairing or creating a continental network of Watchers and associated contacts; a centralised headquarters, Xander had argued should not be the first priority – the priority was finding as many Slayers as possible and linking them up both with reinforcements and with resources of knowledge. In fact, once that network got off the ground, Africa wouldn't really need an overall director so much as a co-ordinator for the dozen-plus roving strike-team branches scattered in compounds throughout various supernatural hot-spots. Rupert had been particularly impressed at the effort Xander had gone to, to make contact with first Samuel Zabuto and then through him an impressive number of former Watchers who had 'gone native', so to speak, and formed their own informal links over the course of decades. Simply tapping into that network, as potentially unreliable as parts of it might be ('going native' having more than one possible connotation, after all) had by itself turned Africa from a monumental task to a mere headache-and-a-half.

In fact, Rupert had been more than somewhat tempted to take Xander to England with him and see about squeezing in some formal Watcher training in between attempting to recover the old Council's resources and build anew. But Xander's unanticipated skills in the areas of reorganisation and logistics had essentially doomed him to the very assignment that he had spent so much effort putting together – he was a valuable and increasingly valued asset as a troubleshooter, and needed to be deployed as such until things calmed down and Rupert could recall him to smooth the edges off. And indeed, Xander had taken the assignment with not even a token protest.

It was the others who had protested, largely on the grounds of his safety (at least out of Xander's hearing – which was easy for them, given the way that he left for Cape Town without more than cursory warning). Robin had been easy to persuade, once he'd been given a chance to read the brief in detail and was then informed that Xander himself had written most of it; for Nikki Wood's son, his first impression of Xander had been that of a friendly but professional contractor, not a goofy high-school student. Similar avenues of explanation had mostly reassured the others. Rupert's argument was two-pronged: firstly, that for all the innate dangers of the areas Xander was travelling, what he was actually doing was largely a managerial exercise in setting up branch offices (thus, implying that he would be keeping out of random regional fights) – and secondly, that the entire way that Xander himself had set up the brief augured for Africa being a temporary assignment. Once the groundwork was set, handing over the reins would be a simple matter. In short, Africa was not as dangerous as it looked, and he would be back in a few months, maybe a year.

As it turned out, he probably should have paid more attention to the 'temporary' part of that equation. Especially given that it was indeed Xander who had deliberately set it up that way.

Xander had spent a little over two months, repeatedly haring from one end of Africa to the other, forging together a coalition of former Watchers, magic users and a few relatively friendly demon clans. Already by that point there was a steady nucleus of nearly three dozen African Slayers, arrayed in trios with ex-Watcher and/or mystical backup, most of them actively seeking other Slayers between regional crises. Even better, great swathes of the continent were approaching both organisational and financial levels of self-sustainability – after all, certain First World currencies could stretch a long way in many parts of it, and a fair number of its governments were both amenable to and respectful of 'private security consultant agencies' that could be called in for certain matters which they knew better than to bring up with said First World nations in public settings. It was especially the case when said 'mercenaries' were often just as happy to negotiate for favourable treatment down the line as for material goods in exchange for their unfortunate yet essential services.

In short, it was increasingly looking like Xander Harris could be recalled only a few months after he'd set out.

Until he vanished.

And somehow prevailed on the African network to decline to enlighten one Director Rupert Giles regarding this state of affairs until nearly the end of November, when the Head Watcher formally adjudged Xander's assignment complete and asked for his recall to London.

—ox-oxo-xo—

That the ex-carpenter Xander Harris was not only virtually but enthusiastically ignorant about most aspects of magic was almost a truism among his Sunnydale friends and acquaintances. So at first, paradoxically, the only reason they might have had to believe that Xander had planned to disappear was the very fact that his subordinates had withheld that knowledge. And that wasn't to say that something hadn't possessed Xander and caused him to do so, either. After all, they figured, it wouldn't have been the first time…

But the inarguable fact was, that delay between disappearing and being discovered missing had proved to be crucial. It wasn't that Willow Rosenberg couldn't find him, though. It was that it would not be a quickly solved mystery. The relevant rituals established without ambivalence that Xander was no longer in Africa, or anywhere else on Earth for that matter. He wasn't in Heaven either, or at least not the one that Buffy had sojourned in. There was an uncertainty to the matter of whether he was alive or dead, but again referencing contrasts between her friends unearthed the most likely conclusion that wherever he was, he now read a lot like Buffy in that he had died but been either revived or resurrected. Beyond that, however, the mystic trails had gone cold in that handful of weeks. Actually tracking down where he was, was a far more daunting task than eliminating the places where he wasn't.

That was never going to stop Xander's longest and best friend. At least, that was the case once Kennedy slapped some sense into her, in a case of excellent timing – the revelation of a missing Xander being a predictably horrible destabilising factor on Willow's sanity and impulse control.

(It's worth noting that, in a dark corner of Kennedy's heart, she subsequently looked forward to seeing Harris again so that she could brag about saving the world the same way he had – only with much more Slayer badassery that he could ever have pulled off. The rest of her heart was filled with a far more comfortable feeling of gratitude that she was actually capable of steering Dark Willow back onto the rails. 'Cause honestly? That had been bugging her for a while, the fact that her best friend and old crush had been able to do something to save Willow that Kennedy hadn't been sure she could.)

It was also Kennedy, having heard the most about Xander's exploits from her girlfriend's stories, who suggested a short-cut to the process of winnowing down where Xander was. If Willow was so sure that a demon was responsible and Xander was so prone to possession, maybe they should make a list of what demons Xander had run across over the years and figure out which ones might still have grudges? It was an idea that Willow grabbed hold of with both hands and a manic grin on her face – because as stated, eliminating where he wasn't was easier than following cold traces to where he was.

It was a long list. It would have been a much longer list, if not for a lot of the names on it being dead. And it did get longer anyway when Angel, having by now heard rumours from Andrew of Xander being A.W.O.L., faxed through his own intelligence reports and added some more names, most of them at least technically human. But regardless, the names were ruled out, one by one.

It still took nearly a month for Willow to find his signature, albeit…altered, deep within the speculated realm of a certain Ba'Joxan demon they'd entangled with over two years ago. But find it she did, and exasperated she did get. And after putting out the call to her friends overseas, one of the world's most powerful – not to mention, impatient – Wiccan witches tore a hole into said hell dimension and barged inside to fetch her exceedingly stupid Xander-friend.

When Willow returned two days later, it was to find that Buffy, Dawn and Giles had all climbed on planes and joined Kennedy in Rio. And when the portal re-opened, the mostly-reunited Scoobies were met with a Willow Rosenberg who was…distinctly nonplussed. And carrying a large 'gift' package that transpired to contain one book (for Giles), a three-foot roll of parchment with a annotated list written on it (for Willow), a hat-box in which nestled a surprisingly stylish fedora that appeared to have been woven and fused together from a dozen thin lengths of fire-darkened, polished ivory and banded with thin, pale leather (for Buffy), and a single, beautiful detailed white-gold pendant (for Dawn).

…But no Xander.

Ending A/N: More detail on the gifts in the final chapter… whenever I get around to finishing it. Though kudos to you if you can guess their significance.