TITLE: The Ballad of Ripper and Buffy 3/4
AUTHOR: Second Slayer
DISCLAIMER: It all belongs to Joss, the WB, UPN, Fox, Mutant Enemy and anybody else who feels they own it. Andrew still belongs to one my gay friends, and is still trying to pretend he's straight. All the people shamelessly namedropped belong to themselves.
FEEDBACK: Go on then.

Things didn't quite go to that plan, as within a week she'd convinced him that they really were meant to be together. Ripper had entertained her with his magic, surrounding her with dancing fairies one night while they were walking round the garden and changing the colour of his roses to the most beautiful red. She'd laughed, and said that Beauty had already decided that the Beast was what she wanted.

She made him waffles for breakfast one morning, the way she always had them - strawberries and a low-fat creamy topping stuff which Ripper would not normally have allowed into the kitchen. He didn't believe in low fat, reduced calorie or caffeine free. He'd spent long enough struggling to get enough to eat that food was one of his main hobbies. He'd never considered that there could be anything worth wasting a meal on in the healthy arena, but Buffy started showing him differently, and he immediately emailed his assistant to make sure that her style of waffles would be available next time they toured.

Spike tried to hate her for getting what he'd wanted for so long, but couldn't. He could almost see that in a different world he would have fallen for Buffy himself, though he knew the demon would have delighted in using any affection she showed him to torture her. There was something about her that just made his demon scream, and he would have made her suffer before he killed her.

She made an effort to get on with everyone, even tried to take an interest in Bex's cars, but she just couldn't understand how the Slayer could prefer a clapped-out MGA to her dad's brand-new car. She couldn't remember what exactly that was, but she knew it cost about the same as all of Bex's cars put together and more than the Summers' family home. It purred or it roared, it never screamed like Bex's cars tended to at speed, and it was the most beautiful shade of red. Bex's cars were mostly odd, muted greyish blues and greens - apart from her minis which had some of the most bizarre paint jobs Buffy had ever seen and the MGA which was an awful orangey beige colour. Bex loved it, Buffy thought it was the ugliest vehicle she'd ever seen, even after Bex showed her a Fiat Multipla.

Ripper and Buffy spent a lot of time just being around each other, chatting, sometimes with his friends around, though not hers - she thought it best to keep things a secret from her friends for a while yet. When it was warm enough, Buffy loved to be outside, walking round the grounds, the formal gardens, the landscaped gardens, the pool. She realised what Ripper had tried to do here - an English manor house transplanted to California. All it needed, she thought, was horses - a horse-drawn carriage and horses to ride. She suggested it to him, and he started looking into the possibility.

One afternoon they played tennis, and found they were pretty evenly matched, though Ripper naturally tired more easily. Even when they disagreed on things, it never seemed to be a problem. Even important things like whether Ocean Colour Scene were quite good or derivative crap.

They ate ice-cream from the tub with a single spoon - a sight which Bex described as 'completely vom-ish', a phrase she'd picked up from her 'normal friends'. She wasn't around the whole time, as she tended to nip back and forth from England. Bex had a lot of friends in Europe who she only saw occasionally and who had no idea Ripper was her father.

She had a flat on the outskirts of London, in a fairly average suburban area, which was where she would have them visit.

None of them knew about her sacred calling, or that she had any fighting skill. It was Bex's escape from her life, from being a rock star's kid, from being the Chosen One. With them, she was just another person from an internet mailing list, and not one of the more popular or remarkable ones.

Wesley didn't always go with her, but he did like her to patrol no matter where she was. Her trip to Norway to see a fencing expert with a big orange beard had featured a little excitement when she dealt with a local 'legend' which had been stealing farm animals for centuries, but which had started taking children when the economy had moved away from farming.

Her friend tried to teach her to fence, but she proved to be an utterly hopeless student, who couldn't even keep the foil held correctly. She would have found it funny if it hadn't been because she'd needed to spend several hours cleaning the demon goo from the sword she'd taken out the previous night.

Buffy didn't think she wanted her identity to be quite that secret, but she didn't want people knowing just yet. Parts of her wanted to shout from the rooftops that she was in love, that she'd met the most wonderful man ever and she wanted to have his babies, but the part of her that liked the idea of people suddenly realising after they'd known her a while, when they saw a picture of the two of them in some magazine, was far, far stronger.

Ripper was convinced when they ran out of things to talk about one afternoon and just lay, looking at each other, their hands together, for hours, perfectly comfortable with the silence. He looked at her and saw his future - saw that he had a future, something which had seemed unthinkable not so long ago.

Buffy was convinced when she found that she was no longer even looking at the sporty college boys, and was more interested in the poetry book from her Eng Lit class. Every classical hero looked suspiciously like a long-haired Ripper in her mind.

They settled down one evening, at Buffy's home, with a cup of tea each. Ripper stared into his cup for a while, before sliding down onto the floor in front of Buffy.

"You busy Saturday after next?"

"It's my birthday. I'll probably be going somewhere with Mom."

He rooted around in his jacket pocket, and pulled out a small box.

"Be too busy to marry me, then?" he said, flipping the box open.

He agreed, later, that she was, indeed, perfectly justified in tickling him until he cried.

Joyce took more convincing, but when the pre-nuptial agreements Ripper's lawyers had drawn up worked very heavily in her daughter's favour - to the extent that no matter who ended the relationship, Buffy was entitled to at least half of Ripper's fortune - she calmed. It wasn't the money so much as it being an indication of his sincerity. He clearly believed that this relationship was going to work, and was prepared to gamble with just about everything he had.

She confronted Ripper with the contract, and he looked at her, calmly. "None of this is worth anything. Love's the only thing worth trying to hang on to."

She threw herself wholeheartedly into the wedding preparations, suited perfectly to the job of shouting at people to get things done in a hurry. She was determined, now she'd made her mind up, that her little girl's day would be as perfect as possible.

The dress Buffy chose in the end was a huge cream silk pseudo-victorian confection of a thing and she paired it with a velvet and silk creation for Ripper, slightly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde. One the whole, he thought it could have been a lot worse - some of his friends had worn some truly monstrous things to get married in during the 70s. He could see why she'd chosen something historical, something the kids - assuming they had any - weren't going to be able to tease them for. A lot of women in a dress like Buffy's would look like they were drowning in silk, that the dress was wearing them. Buffy seemed to just know how to move in it, she never once trod on any part of it, or got it caught on anything.

One of Bex's friends had started a sort of running joke about Ripper's outfit, and quite soon it seemed that nobody could talk to Ripper, or even walk past him without going 'ooh! Stroky coat!' and having a feel. It got quite disturbing after a while, as it quickly spread from Bex's friends - who were usually very cliquey, refusing to talk to anyone else no matter how famous - to everyone else.

At one point five very attractive black women who he assumed were a band of some sort, had caught him at once and he'd had to be rescued by Buffy.

Bex as always helped her father organise the party - keeping Ethan's notorious influence away due to the presence of a lot of family on both sides - and it would be something people would talk about for oooh minutes. Hollywood has a short attention span, especially when you don't have the pictures in Hello! Magazine.

When you knew auntie Maureen was going to get drunk - again - on two glasses of wine and do her party piece on top of the piano, you really didn't want reporters there. For that matter, you didn't want Maureen there, and you certainly didn't want Uncle Roger if the bridesmaids were in the slightest bit attractive, but they were family, so there wasn't really a lot you could do about it.

Ripper was never particularly good at guest lists and so had left that side of it to Bex. Bex had a system for inviting people to parties which had always worked well. Invite everyone whose number you had, and then make the numbers up with people whose agents' numbers you had. Rock stars just didn't seem to understand that it was possible to have a really great party with 15 people and no sex or drugs. They had to have 200 people, half of whom you couldn't remember the names of, and so many drugs that even if you did know them, you'd've forgotten the entire party by the next day.

Ethan had been best man, and Spike unable to attend the ceremony at all, though as soon as it got dark he was making up for it by being everywhere, and loud. Buffy's father had tried to get involved, but Joyce was having none of it and gave Buffy away herself. They'd tried to segregate things out a little, after the service and the sit-down dinner. A marquee was set up on the south lawn with a very generous buffet and a dance floor, with a band playing things which the old folks could ballroom dance to. The lawn would take ages to recover, but sacrifices had to be made.

A bar and a more up-tempo band were arranged for the younger people indoors, and the pool area was where most of the celebrities would be. Things didn't quite go to that plan, as the children had generally been dumped on granny and granddad, and so were running riot on the ballroom dancing floor. Spike soon stepped in to keep them in line.

He turned out to be a fabulous children's entertainer, keeping them mostly out of the adults' way. Ripper had thought at first that the old vampire was frightening them into behaving, but then he saw him bouncing around with one on his shoulders, playing an inflatable guitar he'd got from somewhere.

About an hour later, a very noisy conga line made it's way round most of the party with the vampire at the front, and Bex at the back making sure none of the children got separated. Ripper wondered, as they went past, where the hell all the party hats and noisemakers had come from.

The ballroom had become rather more up-tempo at around 9:30, though the old folks seemed quite pleased. Not all of them kept dancing but many did - many of the oldest ones among them. A fair few younger people migrated there once word got around what had happened.

"Ere, Rupert!" one of Ripper's aunties called, making him cringe. She came over and, thankfully more quietly, assured him that she never thought she'd go to a wedding where Nigel Kennedy and Jools Holland would decide to take over from the hired entertainment. Ripper couldn't help wondering who the hell had invited Kennedy, if that's who it actually was. He'd never met the man, and wasn't sure he knew anyone who'd worked with him even. The room continued to be the Jazz and Blues room for several hours, various people taking the stage as they felt like it, many of them not known for that style.

Uncle Roger said something to Madonna which resulted in him having to spend quite some time attempting to remove cake from his toupee, but all in all, it could have been far worse. Auntie Maureen had been prevented from doing anything too terrible by the presence of a number of ageing hippies - someone had given her space cake instead of wedding cake, and she'd fallen asleep in a deck-chair, grinning and occasionally saying something about her feet having melted.

Buffy had invited a fair few of her friends, and many of them ended in one of the ornamental gardens where most of the Britpop types had congregated. What started as a very large group of musicians and young people drunkenly belting out Revolution had rapidly been turned into a punch-up by one of the Gallagher brothers. Bex waded in and ejected the worst offenders, before things could get out of hand and someone got even more rowdy and decided to recreate an album cover by driving one of her cars into the pool. Again.

Some time later, there was still a sizeable group in the rose garden, singing mostly Beatles songs through a haze of pleasantly herby-smelling smoke. American Pie was sung at least three times, and Yellow Submarine had seemed likely to continue forever. Queen songs were attempted, but declared 'too complex, man!' and someone had started playing something by Status Quo.

Nobody could work out which one of their tunes it was supposed to be, however, and the Beatles theme was quickly picked up again for an extended confusion mix of All You Need Is Love. Everyone was very sure about 'do do doo do doooo!' but the rest was a bit variable.

Frequent raid missions were dispatched to the buffet, this probably being the only reason *anyone* went near the suspicious yellow dip. Things went very quiet for a while when someone managed to get their act together enough to sing a few REM numbers, and finished on Everybody Hurts. It didn't last long, as more people arrived and they were soon singing enthusiastically again.

Joyce had been dancing rather close with Ethan last time Ripper had seen her, his view of everything over the top of Buffy's head. The bride's huge dress had been sweeping people out of the way whenever she moved, so she'd changed into a dress she'd bought in Regent Street, the very day she'd met Ripper... He'd changed out of the suit, which he felt rather silly in, (though, as Ethan had pointed out, at least she hadn't picked a period that would have had Ripper in tights) and was now wearing black jeans and a royal blue silk shirt. Bex had just raised one eyebrow at Buffy when she'd started talking about her bridesmaid dress, and so had ended up suited with the men. Her bow tie and jacket had been discarded, but she didn't bother changing. Buffy watched one of her friends being chased round the pool by some guy with long hair and no shirt on. It could have been just about anyone. It might well have been Uncle Roger, if he'd found a wig. Buffy had been working on Ripper's buttons as they danced, and was running her hands up his back nuzzling her cheek into his chest.

"Found something you like, love?"

"Yeah." She looked up, let her hands slip to his butt. "You. Can we disappear?"

"For a little while, I'm sure." He smirked. "I might be too nervous to perform." She smacked him, playfully, and they slipped away. The last thing Buffy saw as they made their way into the house was Andrew, still in all his clothes, drunkenly making use of the diving board.

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