The F.A.G. Vs The Music-Man
By ralst
Alex Cabot's head impacted with the smooth surface of the conference room table once, twice, three times before Olivia managed to place a freshly laundered handkerchief beneath her lover's quickly reddening forehead. Gabrielle of Potedia, who would normally have been the person responsible for banging Alex's head into the desk, was sitting beside her, teeth clenched around the cold steel of one of her Sais, as she watched the final image fade into black on the giant TV screen.
"I didn't think it was that bad," said Buffy Summers from her seat four places to Alex's right. "At least no-one died or turned homicidal."
Xena watched as the muscles in her wife's shoulders began to pop and the sound of bending metal assaulted her ears. "Buffy's right," she soothed, "considering all we've been through over the last few years, this really isn't that bad."
"At least some of them get to have sex," Olivia Spencer agreed, "even if we only have their word for it."
"And no-one's been gunned down on their wedding day," Silvia Castro added.
Arizona Robbins sighed, "I could have done without the singing," she said mournfully.
Alex's head rose from the tabletop. "It's not the singing I object to." She shared a rare non-homicidal look with Gabrielle. "It's him!"
"Him?" Buffy looked confused. "Which him?"
"Schuster," Gabrielle seethed, "the worst teacher in history."
"His dancing is very creepy," Silvia admitted, "but it hardly compares with being shot. ON YOUR WEDDING DAY!"
Everyone seated near Silvia moved four inches in the opposite direction until there was a two foot exclusion zone around the distraught redhead. "We realise that nothing quite compares to your ordeal," admitted Xena, "although some of us were beheaded and shot with a thousand arrows," she said under her breath, "but we can't allow personal tragedy to come between us and the state of femslash, now can we?"
Gabrielle beamed at her wife as Silvia nodded in acquiescence and Alex elbowed Olivia in the ribs for not making a similar speech herself.
"But," interrupted Natalia Rivera, "we all had our own Mr. Schusters and we still survived." She thought of Frank and shuddered. "At least he's not trying to break up the canon pair."
"Or get one of them pregnant," Olivia added, her own thoughts of Frank somewhat more murderous than her wife's.
"It's always about the canon pairs with you two." Buffy crossed her arms and pouted. "What about the subtext pair?" She'd kind of zoned out when everybody had started singing - they seemed to do that a lot - but she was pretty sure she'd seen evidence of the hair colour and fighting rules in play and that meant a subtext pairing wasn't far away.
"He doesn't mess with them, either," said Natalia.
"So what's the problem?"
Alex and Gabrielle scowled at the vampire slayer and mentally erased her name from the list of candidates for inclusion in the annual BFAG summer camp and spa. "He's annoying," said Alex, "and condescending," added Gabrielle, "and creepy," admitted Xena, "And judgmental," put in Silvia.
"So, he has his faults, who doesn't?" Buffy looked to Natalia and the two Olivias for support but all three refused to meet her eyes and she could have sworn that Natalia had just made the sign of the cross.
"Have you spoken to the girls?" Arizona interrupted, her Hippocratic oath forcing her to throw Buffy a metaphorical lifeline. "Do they have a problem with him?"
Alex and Gabrielle crossed their arms over their chests. "That's not the point," said Gabrielle.
"He's a menace," added Alex.
"So is Mark Sloan and Frank Cooper and Joxer and Spike and that little maggot Aitor," countered Silvia, "we all survived." She paused. "At least we survived in here."
"What's really bugging you?" Olivia Spencer demanded, suddenly aware that she and Natalia were due to meet their dopplegangers for shuffleboard in less than ten minutes and she hadn't even restocked the bar.
"Is it his chin?" asked Buffy.
Alex signalled for Gabrielle to take over, the blows to her head finally beginning to take effect, as the room began to spin and dancing girls with snakes for pom-poms cavorted around the room.
"They make him out to be such a good guy," said Gabrielle, "the moral centre of their screwed up little universe, but it's not true, he's a despicable human being." She knew it was flimsy, as Silvia would not doubt point out, he hadn't killed anyone on their wedding day or even threatened to break up the already broken up canon pair; it was just... "He ruins everything!"
Xena hadn't seen her partner this upset since she'd taken her to see Wicked on Broadway and Gabrielle had discovered that the green girl and the blonde didn't really run off together to have multicoloured babies. "She gets a little attached when it comes to musicals." She thought about mentioned the Calamity Jane incident, but she knew it was still a sore point, and she didn't fancy sleeping in the spare hut for the rest of the year. "They're her favourite form of entertainment."
"Alex is the same way," Olivia confided, as she gently laid her unconscious girlfriend on the ground and covered her with a well worn fleece. "I've lost count of the number of times she's dragged me to see Rent."
"Is that why we're here? So you two can sanitise your pet musical?" If it was up to Arizona musicals would be wiped from the face of the planet, and she was damned if she was going to waste her evening plotting the improvement of one. "The girls in that show are young and devious, I'm sure if they want to get rid of chin-boy and his weirdly nippled ward, they can think of a way."
Natalia got up and pointed towards the giant monitor on the wall. "Why don't you console yourselves with some femslash, I'm sure the writers have dealt with Schue and his acolytes in more ways than one." She pulled Olivia to her feet. "It is why we're here, right?"
Gabrielle watched as first Natalia and then the others left the room until it was just her, Xena, an unconscious Alex and Olivia Benson. "I guess now isn't a good time to outline our plan for kidnapping the show's writer and torturing him with Showgirls on repeat until he agreed to write out the character? No? Okay then."
The End