Jenny was fiercely independent, and Janna was fiercely loyal. Who was the woman who had fallen in love?
(set during innocence; surprisingly canon-compliant)
ok. this does not count as new fic bc i wrote this in june of last year, posted it, & deleted it in an impulsive anxious move. it’s absolutely a love letter to jenny’s character, because she is a kickass lady who went through a lot and deserves to be remembered as such. kinda short but works really well on its own!!
It wasn’t exactly the most fun car ride. Rupert and Buffy sat in the front seat, talking in low, tired voices, and Jenny sat in the back and tried to regulate her breathing. So. Not great. But hey, thinking about her uncle’s mutilated corpse was distracting her from the fact that the exact moment Jenny had realized she’d lost Rupert’s trust, she’d also realized how much she loved him.
One could count that as a plus. Or maybe not. Jenny pressed her fingers to her mouth and tried her hardest not to think about anything.
“We’re close enough,” Buffy was saying, her voice sharp and acidic in a way Jenny hadn’t ever heard directed at her before. “You can walk the rest of the way.”
Jenny didn’t look at Rupert as she got out of the car. She didn’t think she could take looking up and seeing cold anger in his eyes. She waited until she was sure the car was far enough away that they couldn’t see her, and then she doubled over and threw up on the sidewalk. She stood there, swaying, and wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her leather jacket.
Later that night, she’d show up at the library, offer her help with the Judge, and find out just how remarkably unfixable things were.
“You’re a remarkable woman, Ms. Calendar.”
“You think so?”
At one-thirty in the morning, Jenny unlocked her front door, hung up her leather jacket, and walked slowly to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of water with shaking hands. It took her a moment to remember that she hadn’t shut the door behind her, at which point she dropped the glass. It shattered.
“Fucking piece of shit cheap glassware,” said Jenny very loudly, kicked the pieces of broken glass to distract herself from how terrified she was, and strode across the room to shut and lock the door. Her hands were still shaking.
The awful thing was, once she sat down and was alone and thought about what had happened, she was going to have to come to terms with the fact that she had lost absolutely everything she had ever loved in less than twelve hours. Her uncle—yeah, her feelings for him were pretty mixed, but that still didn’t change the fact that she had cared about him. Buffy, and Willow, and that musty, old-fashioned library, and Rupert.
Jenny wasn’t sitting down, though, and there was still a broken glass to clean up. She wanted another cup of water. Or maybe she wanted coffee. She probably wanted coffee. Raising her hands to brush her hair out of her face, she realized that one of the shards of glass had cut her cheek.
“Damn it,” said Jenny, and it almost sounded like a sob.
“A remarkable woman,” said Rupert again, and pressed his mouth to her neck, pulling back to thread his fingers through her hair and kiss her. Jenny kissed him back, pressing her hands against his chest and pushing him into the sofa cushions. He sighed, pulling her against him.
“Tell me why.” Though the words were playful, Jenny felt a strange vulnerability as she waited for his response.
Rupert was quiet for a moment, one hand playing absentmindedly with a strand of her hair. “You never back down,” he said finally. “When you think there’s a wrong, you do all you can to right it. I—admire that about you. Immensely.”
Jenny was more than a little bit taken aback by Rupert’s honesty. “What gives you that idea?” she asked, trying not to sound too uncertain. She’d never heard anyone say that about her before. She wasn’t sure if she believed it.
Rupert smiled, more of a smirk than the adoring grin Jenny was used to. “You bothered me for months about my bias against computers,” he said. “I feel as though that quite constitutes you doing your best to right what you saw as a wrong.”
Jenny laughed out loud. “Okay, yeah, I’ll give you that one,” she said, and kissed him again. “I’m pretty great.”
“Most certainly.”
“You know why else I’m great?”
“Excellent taste in librarian paramours?”
“Rupert, never call yourself my paramour again.”
The part of her time with Rupert that Jenny didn’t want to think about right now was that he’d cared about her more than a lot of people ever had. He’d seen good in her that extended beyond a pretty face and a capacity to play hard-to-get, and he’d met her sarcasm with a genuine desire to make her happy. Jenny had never met someone like that before. She didn’t know if she wanted to meet someone like that again, because all of a sudden all she wanted was him.
God, she should have known that eventually this would blow up in her face. She was starting to think that maybe she’d put off telling him not because she didn’t trust him, but because she was afraid that after she told him, she would lose him. And losing him was hurting a lot more than she’d been prepared for.
Rupert was soft, and he’d trusted her, and she’d broken that trust in such a horrible way. If she’d told him herself, no angry Buffy in the room, maybe he’d have been a little more willing to listen, but she’d been so afraid of losing him—
The coffeepot beeped. Jenny pressed the bandage on her cheek down one more time (it was still bleeding, but it wasn’t too deep) and walked quietly into the kitchen. The house felt empty and lonely, but maybe that was just because she felt so awful. Just last week she’d gotten back from a date with Rupert at two in the morning, energetic and giggly, and she’d waltzed around thinking about the way Rupert had kissed her before accidentally falling asleep on the couch. The house had felt so bright and alive then.
Jenny poured herself a cup of coffee and took a sip. The heat of the mug stung her hands, and she focused in on that instead. The ache in her hands, the comforting, bitter taste of black coffee, the way it felt to sit down on the kitchen floor in a thoroughly undignified manner. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone, anyway. No one to impress. No dazzling smiles she needed to toss over her shoulder, no neatly chosen outfits or witty quips. Just her, small and forgotten in whatever was left of the personas she’d created.
The Jenny Calendar Rupert had trusted and adored would be fixing things right now. The Janna her uncle had chastised would be turning to those with more experience and knowledge than her. Jenny didn’t know who or what she was supposed to be, but she did know that she was tired and this coffee wasn’t strong enough. Reluctantly, she pulled herself up from the floor, all but dragging herself over to the couch and placing her mug on the coffee table.
She lay down, curling up on the couch, eyes on her mug of coffee. She thought about how most of the time there had been two mugs there instead of one. She thought about how seamlessly Rupert had found a place in her life, even though she definitely hadn’t come here to find someone to share things with.
Jenny was fiercely independent, and Janna was fiercely loyal. Who was the woman who had fallen in love? Jenny considered this with the drowsy contemplation that came with emotional exhaustion, and then closed her eyes, drifting off to sleep.
She didn’t have nightmares about her uncle, or Rupert, or Angelus. She just dreamed that Rupert was holding her, his voice a warm murmur as she dozed in the early morning sunlight. It hurt to wake up.
Jenny had fallen asleep at a bad angle on the couch, and felt achy and sore. Stretching, she looked around her living room. The mug of now-cold coffee was still sitting on the coffee table, her leather jacket had fallen off the coatrack, and for the first time in a long while, she had absolutely no idea what Rupert was doing right now. She wanted to call him and apologize, but after being so coolly rebuffed, she didn’t feel brave enough to put herself out there again.
Jenny got up, picking up the mug of coffee and carrying it over to the kitchen. She placed it down on the counter and tried again to acclimate herself to how quiet and empty her house was. Usually at this time in the morning she was rushing out the door, thinking about world-saving and boyfriend-kissing and really nice things like that.
She hadn’t realized that she’d found a life here. So much of her life before Sunnydale had been driven by a desire to get out, to be free and unencumbered by duty or destiny, and she’d been doing pretty well at that until her uncle had called her up. She’d come in resigned and lonely, and she’d unexpectedly found someone else who felt just as trapped and tired as she did.
Rupert had been raised in the same world as Jenny, and she’d always wanted to talk to him about that feeling—like the walls were closing in on you whenever you heard the word destiny. Jenny hated the concept of finiteness, ideas based on rules that could never be changed. She hated that her responsibility was to be driven by vengeance, not compassion. What kind of a world was that, anyway? People hurting each other over and over because they’d been hurt by someone else…there was no room for growth when all you were trying for was pain.
Jenny wanted to change. It was why she’d fallen so easily in love with computers. There was so much creation involved in programming, so much innovation inherent in the very concept of a computer. It was such a human thing to invent, no matter how cold and mechanical it seemed, and there were still so many ways to improve it. Books were unchanging as soon as the ink dried on the pages, but the knowledge on the Internet changed with the times. Just like Jenny.
She wanted to tell Rupert all that and more. She wanted to talk to him, no secrets between them, no awful I’m-going-to-lose-him feeling in her chest whenever he gave her one of those shy smiles. They both had secrets, messy ones, and she wanted that to be something that could bring them together. But Jenny hadn’t told them, and now Angel had lost his soul, and from the way Buffy was looking at her, Jenny got the sense that she was getting all the blame for this particular secret.
It wasn’t like she’d known, though. If she’d known, she’d have told them immediately. Or—truthfully, she probably would have been more secretive about how she handled things, but she certainly wouldn’t have just stood by and let Angel be happy with Buffy. It was just that Buffy had the weight of the world on her shoulders, and Angel wasn’t Angelus, and Jenny hadn’t been able to bring herself to actively hurt two people she really did care about.
Angel wasn’t Angelus.
Jenny thought of her uncle, his blood on the wall. It felt like some distant nightmare. Angelus had done that, but it was Angel who would end up having to live with the guilt. Her uncle had been so determined that Angelus was meant to suffer, but giving Angelus a soul made him Angel, so what kind of punishment was that? All it did was hurt Angel, and all the people around him who wanted him to be happy. Like Buffy.
Like Jenny, in some mixed-up, messed-up way. He’d saved her life. She wasn’t about to forget that.
He’d saved her life, and what did she do? Stand back and let him lose his soul. Seemed a lot like Jenny was the real watcher in this scenario.
She looked around and up at the clock; half an hour before school started. Thank goodness Jenny lived close to Sunnydale High. “Well,” she said, and sniffled. She felt the beginnings of a sob, and shoved it down. There wasn’t time or reason for that. She already knew that things were bad between her and Rupert, anyway, so—
“Let’s get going,” Jenny said to herself, determinedly cutting off that train of thought, and headed to take her morning shower.
Rupert was in the teachers’ lounge when Jenny came in. Actually, Rupert was the only person in the teachers’ lounge when Jenny came in, because all the other teachers were usually in class around this time of day. Jenny had scheduled a free period at this time for exactly that reason; the first half of this semester, she and Rupert had made out on the same couch he was sitting on right now.
“Hey,” said Jenny softly, hesitating in the open doorway.
Rupert looked up, and for a moment, she saw the soft look in his eyes that always showed up whenever she entered a room. But then it faded, and both of them were unpleasantly reminded of the events of the night before. “Ms. Calendar,” he said stiffly.
“Listen,” said Jenny. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, but she knew she wanted to talk to him. “I—wanted to tell you—”
“If you’ll excuse me, I believe I have some research to conduct in the library,” said Rupert, an unnatural flatness to his tone as he got up from the couch.
“See you later, then?” Jenny asked, trying to keep her voice light and hopeful. But Rupert stepped deftly past her and exited the teachers’ lounge without an answer.
Jenny turned in the doorway, watching him go. He didn’t once look back.
The finality of the moment hit her hard. Her uncle, the reason she’d told herself she had to stay in this town, had been reduced to yet another Sunnydale fatality statistic. Her lover, the real reason she had stayed as long as she did, wanted nothing to do with her now that he knew every part of her. As long as Angel was gone and Angelus roamed free, there was really no way that Jenny could make amends with Rupert and the kids. There was nothing that Jenny could do but wait.
But then Jenny thought about how she’d waited for instructions from her uncle instead of asking why he’d sent her to watch Angel in the first place. She thought about how she’d waited for Rupert to find out the real reason she’d come to Sunnydale instead of actually telling him herself. She thought about how time and time again, for all her self-proclaimed determination to make change in the world, she’d stood back and stood by and waited, simply because the possibility of stepping into the fray seemed pointless and impossible.
It was impossible to fix things. By every standard she’d known, it was impossible to give Angel back his soul. But if Jenny stood back for the millionth time and waited for things to work themselves out, things could and would get worse for people she really cared about. Even if she didn’t accomplish anything, she still had to try for once.
And Jenny had never been able to deal with finalities. She couldn’t handle “unfixable” and “irredeemable” and she’d never accepted it. That was one of the reasons she’d been so hesitant to act against Angel in the first place. Angel wasn’t Angelus. Angel didn’t have blood on his hands when it was the blood that Angelus had spilt.
If Jenny believed that there was truly no way to separate Angelus from Angel, then she was just as unflinchingly set in her ways as her uncle. She wasn’t going to be that. Not ever.
It took Jenny a moment to comprehend the enormity of what she was about to attempt to do, and when she did, she felt the beginnings of self-doubt. This wasn’t just some magic charm that any garden-variety witch could pull off—this was ancient, legendary magic that she was going to have to find and translate. And she wasn’t a witch, she was a technopagan. Her specialty was writing programs, not—
Wait.
“Oh,” said Jenny, stunned by the simplicity of her idea. Then, “Oh my god.”
