Title: Hunting Wabbit

Author: Jedi Buttercup

Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not. I claim nothing but the plot.

Rating: PG.

Summary: B:tVS, Terra Nova. Willow had lived through the gasping last breaths of Gaia once; she was not about to do it a second time. 2400 words.

Spoilers: Set circa TN 1.9 "Versus", as affected by this crossover-AU.

Notes: Ladies in action! Plus: tucking in another thread from the sixth drabble in the opening collection, "A Meeting of Equals".

The three women took a trio of speeder bikes out into the jungle for speed and concealment, heading OTG to a point half a klick from the coordinates where Mr. Shannon had been caught by the Sixers. One of them would have to double with Mrs. Tate on the way back, but according to Skye, her mother was usually just weary, not hurting; she'd be fine, as long as they strapped her close for the return journey.

Lt. Washington dismounted first, whipping out her sonic and standing guard while Buffy unshipped their rescue gear and Willow wove an illusion out of bark, frond, and notice me not to keep the Sixers from tripping over their ride home. Wash was wearing camouflage pants, a black tank top, and streaks of grease paint across her face beaded with sweat from the heat of the night; Willow and Buffy were wearing down-sized copies of the same uniform, from the soles of their tough boots to the ponytails securing their hair out of their faces. Willow had temporarily colored both Scooby girls' hair dark with magic to match the lieutenant; she imagined they looked like a trio of sisters, starlight glittering off sharp smiles and bright eyes as they slipped through the head-high undergrowth.

The leaf litter under foot was thick enough to blunt their footsteps if they were careful. Buffy and Wash kept switching places at point, scanning for any sign of trip cords or pit traps or wandering dinosaurs. Willow murmured a constant, silent cantrip under her breath to enhance their night vision, her first contribution to the hunt. Commander Taylor had offered lenses that would do the same thing, but there was no telling whether the Sixers had the ability to track Terra Novan tech to that level of detail; they'd figured better safe than sorry. If all went well, the rest of her contributions were going to be defensive, too. No sense warning the enemy what she was really capable of before it was necessary.

Besides: they were hunting wabbit. And the only way to catch what they were after was to sneak up on it entirely unnoticed. She'd found that out the hard way, in the wabbit's role, back uptime; she thanked the goddess that Buffy's luck had been there to catch her when she fell. Mira's people weren't going to have any such luxury.

They found the site of Shannon's embarrassment without much trouble, twenty minutes later. The Sixers had done a decent job rubbing out the scuff marks and disguising them with more of the decaying plant matter found scattered everywhere in the tropical climate, but the scars on the trees were a lot harder to hide. Rope and wire moving at speed cut deep into bark if not properly buffered, and the Sixers had been more than a little careless there.

Given their philosophies, Willow wasn't surprised. Buffy's silver-haired nephew thought they were there to strip the past to clothe the future; robbing one world to keep another on life support just a little bit longer. What was one scarred tree, in a valley they planned to clear cut at the first opportunity? It was like stealing from Peter to pay Paul, and just as likely to bankrupt both in the long run-- but as long as the worst wasn't going to happen in their lifetimes, they probably didn't care about the consequences.

Well, it was time that changed. Willow had lived through the gasping last breaths of Gaia once; she was not about to do it a second time, not when she could do something to stop it from happening. Not while she had the Slayer at her side. Once a Scooby, always a Scooby. She only W-worded that the others were there, too-- all of them, from the ones she'd grown up fighting vampires with to the more mundane friends she'd left behind in 2070. But they'd all lived full lives, whether with or without her; all she could do now was honor their memories.

Behind the tree where the trap was set, a faint path made by more than one pair of feet led off in the direction of moonrise. They filed along it, Wash first, but before they had taken more than a dozen steps, several bushes rustled off to the left. The lieutenant held up a fist, and Buffy and Willow froze behind her, just two more shadows in a forest full of them. Willow frowned as the rustling crept closer, then reached out to the fabric of life around them, tangling her senses in the skeins of energy that rose so easily to her touch; she could almost hear the song of the green that Illyria used to talk about, and twined with it, a throb of hunger, the tang of iron on her tongue.

It wasn't Sixers. Their intruder was a little more on the scaly and carnivorous side.

"Dormite," she murmured, voice barely louder than the scrape of stem and leaf from the dinosaur's direction. She pulled on the sleeping weight of the vegetative biomass around her, using its vast strength to maze claw and fang into quiescence. "Dormis. Dormite!" she commanded, projecting calm, satiation, and disinterest in the predator's direction.

The rustling slowed, then stopped, and the whatever it was settled to the ground with a heavy thud. Willow heard a noise like the coo of a sleeping dove, only fifty times larger, and shivered, releasing her grip on the magics again. Then she nodded to Buffy as the Slayer threw her a thumbs' up.

It had been so simple to reach out, the energy so clear to her senses; like diving into a cool, pristine lake. It held none of the addictive tarry jolt of Sunnydale's warped energies, or the exhausting, grayed-out weft of late twenty-first century Chicago. It felt amazing, and more than a little intimidating-- it was going to take some time before she felt comfortable with the changes.

Wash inched forward at Buffy's gesture, craning her neck for a glimpse of the interloper. Her eyebrows went up as she parted wide, palm-like leaves above its position; then she retreated, echoing Buffy's thumbs up. "Nykoraptor," she informed them. Then she started moving up the path again, leaving the dozing critter unharmed.

An it harm none, do what ye will, as Tara would have said. Willow approved. The dinosaur couldn't help the fact that it was hungry.

Bootprints multiplied ahead of them, circling around the base of a thick-boled forest giant, and the three came to a halt, gazing up along its length. One side of the tree was laddered, toe rests scraped out of the bark up to a platform several meters from the ground; several climbing ropes were also secured to its branches, tied up out of reach of casual visitors. A thin thread of smoke-scent drifted down from the platform, followed by a background susurrus of white noise: the living sounds of a few dozen people at rest. If anyone was awake, they weren't burning torches or shining lights anywhere within view.

Wash jerked her chin at them, then held up two fingers. They'd found the Sixer camp. Time for Phase II: finding Deborah Tate and freeing her.

"Can you do that sleep thing to the whole camp?" the lieutenant murmured intently, narrowing her eyes in Willow's direction.

The previous plan had involved a lot more sneaking; Willow didn't blame her for wanting to short-cut it. Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple. "I can make the sleepers stay asleep; and the tired ones nod off. But anybody alert? Not so much. Not unless I do it firmly enough to risk hurting people. Especially if I'm disabling their sonics at the same time." Injured people. The sick-- like Mrs. Tate. Or children, like the runaways Buffy had told her about. If Willow laid it on too thickly, and didn't promptly reverse it, some of them might never wake up. Especially with her magic reacting so differently.

Wash considered that, then nodded. "All right, then. Do what you can. Buffy?" She lifted a hand from her sonic and gestured toward the tree.

"Making like a monkey-- ma'am," Buffy smirked at her, then holstered her own gun and tested the handholds with a swift tug. Then she was up, quick as a blink, clinging to the tree in the dark to guard while Willow did her thing.

"All right. I'll have to stay here to keep it up, though, and I can't keep all three spells going at once. Be quick, or the night vision spell might fade while you're still up there." Unless she anchored the spell to them individually, or made physical modifications to their eyes-- but she was trying to avoid anything that delicate for the time being, too.

"Understood," Wash said, then set the toe of one boot in the lowermost cut in the bark, waiting for her cue to follow Buffy upward.

Willow let her eyes drift shut, then threw her head back and spread out her arms, building a mental net to snare the entire camp in its web. She couldn't reliably identify one lifespark apart from another, except to tell that there were a few awake; they flared brighter than the others, the colors of their auras slightly more vivid. She mentally tagged the two nearest her to keep them out of the weave, then started casting, quietly. "Tace; Tacete. Dormite."

The stationary sparks steadied in her mind's eye, gently lulled by the force of her will; the two tagged as friend burned brighter with impatience for a moment, then moved up and in amongst the others, searching for the weary soul they'd come to rescue. Three of the alert sparks she didn't know burned lower at her touch-- then flared up in fury, as she'd expected; they'd realized something strange was going on, and slipped out of her gentle grip before she could capture them with the others.

Two sparks, moving away from her; three sparks casting about, then zeroing in on the position of the intruders. Willow kept chanting, keeping up the mental pressure on the Sixers in hopes that it would at least slow them down, but she couldn't see what was going on to help any further.

One spark split off, gathering up one of the still ones, and retreated. Its companion stayed behind, fending off its three opponents-- Buffy? One of the others burned with a similar hue, though, confusing her.

Willow blinked her eyes open again just in time to see Wash's head appear over the railing above her, a bone-thin, drowsing body slung over her shoulder. Sounds of a scuffle followed close behind-- Buffy, still fighting the other three, the sound of a gunshot ripping after her. Not a sonic; she'd quieted those, but an actual old-fashioned bullet driver.

The shot shivered the web of serenity Willow was holding, and she winced, as much for the spell's sake as her fear for Buffy's health. One more of those, and people would start to wake up. She freed enough attention to gesture with one hand, yanking Wash and her passenger bodily over the rail; it wouldn't be the gentlest landing, but at least it would be quick. They had to get going.

Wash gave a wordless shout, clutching Mrs. Tate close and staggering a little as her boots hit earth. Then she stared at Willow, wide-eyed and panting. "Shit. Warn me next time," she said, easing Skye's mother to the turf, then drew her sonic with unsteady hands, aiming upward at the platform she'd come from. "Package secure!" she called, letting Buffy know it was time to retreat.

The sleep spell began to fail as the noise further disturbed the sleepers, and Willow bit her lip, mentally urging Buffy onward. The struggling sounds continued, still moving closer, though not as quick as she could wish-- until she could finally pick out a pair of female voices, arguing.

"You're going to regret not killing us in our sleep," one of them spat, angrily. "You think we'll give you the same courtesy when we take the colony?"

"I don't kill if I don't have to. Not anymore," Buffy replied, angrily. "You're not the only one who's been on the losing side of a war. Get over it! We don't have to be your enemies."

"You couldn't possibly understand why I'm here," her opponent growled, railing creaking behind her as she backed up at last into Willow's range of vision. She was dark-skinned, obviously strong-- probably their leader, Mira?-- but no one purely human should be strong enough to hold Buffy off without some modifying factor. Not good.

"Try me," Buffy spat, following her into view-- and Willow winced at the blood staining her right shoulder. Yep; she'd been hit. "I think you'd be surprised."

Mira flashed a toothy smile in return, glancing back past Buffy into the depths of the tree camp, and below them, Wash decided enough was enough. The lieutenant fired her weapon at Mira, sending the woman staggering; and Willow took the opportunity to sink her senses into the green again, sending a sudden welter of vines snaking down from higher branches to bind the Sixers' leader.

She felt that touch of strangely resonant energy again as her magic brushed against Mira's aura, and a spark of recognition shot through her; but what it meant would have to wait for later. It did make things more urgent, though, so she reached out for her friend the way she had for Wash, levitating her swiftly off the platform.

"Thanks, Wills," Buffy gasped, pressing the heel of her hand to her shoulder. "Lieutenant?"

Wash shook her head at the increasing noise above them as the rest of the Sixers started boiling out of their beds. "So much for subtle," she said. Then she reholstered her sonic and scooped up Mrs. Tate.

Willow nodded to both of them. "Go. I'll smooth out the tracks."

Not that it would be enough. There was something more to Mira, a potential that would never have flourished uptime with the fabric of the world's magic dead and drained. But the others would have to cut her free first before she could track them; the rescue party would still be safe, if they hurried. Just.

Willow grinned again, flushed with adrenaline, and followed her hunting sisters back to Terra Nova.

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© 2012 Jedi Buttercup.