Fanfic / Pygmalion Lost

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Pygmalion Lost by Shoshi Cooper is a crossover fic between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who, taking place in the same continuity as her Adventures of a Line Hopper Series Fic. It features the series' Fan-Created Offspring of Buffy and the Doctor, Seo, and draws heavily from her experience in preceeding fic Trials and her arc in The Child of Balime season 3 (so expect Late Arrival Spoilers for the twist of said arc). The fic consists of 33 chapters, mostly published from February 22 to April 18, 2018.^note Chapter 31 was only released two years later by mistake.

The Doctor has just used what happened to Drusilla in 1860 as a trial for Seo when she just first started time-traveling and talks to Angel in 1998 to find out what can be done about it. Angel is convinced that the Doctor just wants to preserve the history of Drusilla's suffering and complains about it to a mysterious sunglasses-wearing woman, who is actually the tenth incarnation of Seo and is very happy to "correct" her first incarnation's inability to save Drusilla from Angelus.

Flash forward to an alternate version of Buffy's 17th birthday in 1997, where Tenth Seo is now a soulless Time Lord called the Goddess, having been tortured and turned by Angelus to replace the saved Drusilla, and has irradiated most of Earth and controlled the few places she spared to make this timeline's version of her parents suffer. However, there is still some hope for the world as Dawn notices that Seo programmed something within herself to keep her protective of her family if she ever turns evil, and the original timeline's Doctor lands there to help.

For chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the tropes and synopsis, see the Recap pages.

Tropes applying across the fic include:

• Ahem:
  • In chapter 2, Twelfth Doctor makes his first appearance in the fic by coughing to get Buffy's attention.
  • When the Doctor and Spike check out the Initiative's computers in chapter 31, they are interrupted by the Goddess clearing her throat behind them, revealing that she and the Initative commandos have got them surrounded.
  • As the Goddess mourns the loss of everyone she cares about in the penultimate chapter, she is interrupted by Spike clearing his throat as he wants to talk to her.
• Alternate Timeline: Most of the fic takes place in a version of Buffy season 2 which has changed a lot due to the Tenth Seo changing Angelus' turning of Drusilla.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • In chapter 14, Angelus asks whether the Goddess' plan to not just kill the Doctor now has always been her plan or just her plan since the good within her started influencing her. The Goddess hesitates to answer honestly.
  • Later in chapter 17, Angelus stops the Goddess in her tracks by asking whether she really would kill or even just hurt Dawn when she executes her plan of using the Key in 2001. The Doctor pierces through the Goddess' armor in the other direction by asking whether caring about Dawn is that bad of a feeling and whether she doesn't miss being truly happy as Seo. The Goddess can't truly answer either of them, and the deadlock is only broken by Angelus kissing the Goddess to get her lustful and biased towards him again.
• Badass Fingersnap: In the flashback to 1900, when Angelus comments that he isn't seeing the Goddess doing anything, she snaps her fingers and an asteroid she has set on Shanghai descends. It's also later shown that the Goddess has learned how to give and take away Angelus' soul at will to keep him in line and she repeatedly does it throughout the fic by snapping her fingers.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: Midway through the fic, it's revealed that the reason Angelus managed to capture, torture, and eventually turn Seo into the soulless galaxy-threatening Goddess, even though Seo is normally much smarter and more powerful than him, is because the Balance is compensating for Seo's action turning Drusilla into a godlike Keeper of Traken who spreads good influence over her side of the universe.
• A Birthday, Not a Break: The Goddess mentions that she always invokes this on Buffy's birthday, starting from dropping a dead body in front of her and calling her "Mom" when Buffy just turned five, and then matching the number of people she kills with Buffy's newest age ever since. For Buffy's 17th birthday shown in the fic, the Goddess has Angelus (who has his Face–Monster Turn a day earlier than in the normal timeline) pretend to be Angel and give Buffy a necklace that transfers the love and grief over Seo's fate from the original timeline's Buffy, leaving her physically (because the transfer triggers the same effect as Never the Selves Shall Meet) and emotionally drained until the next midnight.
• Bound and Gagged:
  • Buffy and the Doctor spend most of chapter 10 chained by the Goddess, and when the Doctor keeps asking the right questions to rile her up, the Goddess has Angelus gags him as well.
  • In chapter 15, Dawn wakes up tied up in the back of a van and Angelus adds in a gag to her mouth so that her screams would be muffled when he starts stabbing her.
• Brits Love Tea: Englishman Giles prepares some tea almost on instinct when the Doctor and Buffy come to his home in chapter 11, justifying it as maybe Buffy has turned English and would like the tea. When Giles gives them their second cup in the next chapter, the Doctor takes his while Buffy gives Giles a "Do I look English to you?" stare.
• Buffy Speak: To show that she is still 11 here, Dawn speaks in barely coherent strings of words whenever she has to explain complicated points of the plot.
  Wow, Dawn needed to grow up and learn some vocabulary. This whole preteen thing was making her really incoherent.
• Call-Back:
  • Angel knows enough about the Resurrection Gauntlet to tell Buffy because he has heard the same story about it as the one told in Torchwood's "Dead Man Walking".
  • In chapter 16, the Doctor brings up how he wiped out the vampires in The Bringer of Death and he uses the same method to give Angelus the same regeneration-energy burn, albeit non-lethally, so he can escape him.
  • In chapter 22, the Doctor realizes that both Drusilla and Seo are manipulating the universe using the same block-transfer method as the people of Logopolis.
  • In chapter 23, the Goddess mentions that Xander always spares his time to talk to her (Seo) whenever the world ending, like she said all the way back in Happy Endings, hence she trusts his words more than the Doctor's and needs Angelus to kill him when her conscience is growing again.
  • The Doctor eventually remembers being pushed to his breaking point in The Bringer of Death and surmises that the Goddess wants to tap into the power created by that to power her plans.
  • The Doctor realizes that the Goddess' real endgame for Drusilla is to make her the Goddess' arch-enemy who would still say "I forgive you" after everything, referencing how the Doctor said the same thing to the Master in "Last of the Time Lords".
  • In chapter 29, Buffy mysteriously disappears from her cell and it later turns out that Buffy is teleported away using the same method as Cassandra's in "The End of the World".
  • The climax has the Doctor remembering—after Buffy namedrops the Hellmouth—that the Zen-12 temporal bomb from Don't Be is still around during this point of time, and uses it to power the good guys' plan.
  • In the final chapter, it turns out that the right way to save Drusilla is to put her consciousness in the Library like the Doctor did with River Song in "Forest of the Dead".
• Cessation of Existence: It's later revealed that Angelus didn't just remove Seo's soul when he turned her into the Goddess, but burns it all away using the Judge's power. The Goddess later tricks the heroes into casting a spell that erases the soul of Elizabeth's timeline Angel completely, allowing her Angelus to come back while Angel is gone forever in this timeline.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In chapter 4, Xander references how the Watchers Council originally painted the Doctor as the absolute evil, as seen in Don't Be.
  • The Doctor compares the Blinovitch effect weakening Buffy as worse than the drugs given to her on her 18th birthday, forgetting that this version of Buffy only just turned 17.
  • The Goddess compares her making a masterpiece out of Buffy and the Doctor to the Quantum Crystallizer from Four Five Six.
  • When talking about how good Seo is with souls, the Goddess mentions that time she gave a Cyberplanner a soul when it should be impossible.
  • In chapter 19, the Goddess compares how it feels to be tortured by Angelus in 1875 to the Master's torture of her in The Years that Never Were.
  • In chapter 20, the Doctor remarks that this isn't the first time a normal human causes holes to be punched through the universe, mentioning the events of "The Girl in the Fireplace".
  • After showing off his psionics skill that looks like he is crafting a magic spell, the Doctor remarks that Morgan La Fey thought he is Merlin once in "Battlefield".
  • In chapter 28, Angelus tells Buffy that he met Bilis Manger, who mentioned how he tried to kill off Seo's family and friends in The Making of Bilis Manger but it backfired, so Angelus elects to not do the same thing when he plotted his own revenge on her.
  • As she orders Walsh to activate Adam in chapter 31, the Goddess jokes about his final fate in Something of becoming a fruit fly in the 39th century.
• Crapsack World: In 1959, the Goddess turns Earth into a nuclear wasteland with only a few places like Sunnydale spared by her so she can brutally rule over them. Even vampires like Spike prefer the world as in the original timeline as there is now barely any humans to feed on.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Years ago in the Alternate Timeline, Spike separates from Angelus and the Goddess after the latter turns Earth into irradiated wasteland with Angelus' support, as he realizes that the pair is willing to destroy everything for fun whereas Spike still wants enough of the world and humanity to survive for him to enjoy. In the present, Spike ends up teaming up with Buffy and the Doctor to undo the Goddess' work for the same reason.
• Fist of Rage:
  • In chapter 2, when Buffy is getting angry about how Willow's dad is going to be ritually sacrificed because Willow is friends with her, Buffy's hands are pointedly bunched into fists.
  • When the Judge says that the Goddess is "clean" (as in, completely evil) in chapter 6, the Goddess (who has been having trouble with her conscience getting in the way) gets furious and clenches her fists in reaction.
  • In the flashback to 1959, Spike's fists get shakier as he gets angrier over the Goddess flippantly admitting that her nuking the world killed a lot of vampires too.
  • In chapter 27, the first sign that the Doctor is right about the Goddess being jealous is the fact that she turns her hands into fists the moment he says that.
• Flashback: Since the fic skips from Seo saving Drusilla in 1860 to Seo already becoming the soulless Goddess in 1998, it uses flashbacks in chapter 3, 13, and 18 to show how Angelus tortured her in 1875 and important moments of their partnership during the decades of the Goddess' life.
• Forced to Watch: After the Goddess captures him and locks him down in the Initiative, she forces the Doctor to watch a video of Angelus brutally killing this timeline's Rose, with the scene afterwards showing that Angelus is still bloody from committing the deed. The Doctor nearly decides to try to kill the Goddess but Buffy manages to calm him down since his anger is part of her plan. Later, the Doctor points out that the Goddess averts this trope by not showing him footage of Angelus torturing Buffy too, because if she does, she would be forced to watch her lover enjoying someone else too. The Goddess can't dispute the point, but it angers her enough that she tells Julie to force the Doctor to watch the Rose footage over and over again.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite Seo taking Drusilla's place as the person sired by Angelus, turning the world into a barely recognizable Crapsack World, Spike still ends up pulling an Enemy Mine with Buffy in 1998 to stop Angelus and her lover from destroying the world due to Evil Versus Oblivion reasons.
• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  • In chapter 23, Xander is in the middle of talking the Goddess down when Angelus snaps his neck before he can finish his sentence.
  • In the climatic chapter, the Doctor is stabbed through the heart by Adam while in the middle of explaining what he needs to do to finish his machine. His body disappears into the machine right afterwards, forcing Spike to finish the machine with only the incomplete explanation.
• Neck Lift:
  • In chapter 13, Spike knocks Buffy unconscious by strangling her neck and hoisting her up.
  • In chapter 29, the Goddess grabs Professor Walsh up by her throat as punishment for letting the Doctor and Dawn escape, only sparing her because she still wants her to finish the project on Angelus.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Exaggerated when Angelus tricked Buffy into wearing a necklace that contains the love that her original timeline's self has for Seo, and merely touching her Alternate Self's love is enough to drain her energy and the Doctor says that she typically would have died from the Blinovitch effect.
• Point of Divergence: The Alternate Timeline of the fic is caused by Tenth Seo showing up to save Drusilla from Angelus and Darla just as she is about to be turned in 1860.
• Reset-Button Suicide Mission: The climax of has Buffy and the Doctor realizing that, in order to convince the Goddess to activate her reset switch and return the timeline to normal from before she saved Drusilla in 1860, they have to kill everyone whom she still cares about, including themselves. Drusilla herself also chooses to kill herself rather than live in the timeline where her savior suffers and loses her soul. The plan succeeds, although to ensure the Goddess wouldn't commit Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum instead, the Doctor makes sure that a copy of the saved version of Drusilla is transferred to the normal timeline, which convinces the Goddess that resetting the timeline is worth it.
• Shout-Out: The Goddess compares herself to Pygmalion (hence the title) from Metamorphoses to describe herself as Angelus' masterpiece. Pygmalion Plot is averted however, as the Doctor realizes that she calls herself Pygmalion to delude herself into believing that Angelus will ever love her (he won't) like in the story.
• The Story That Never Was: All the Alternate Timeline mess of the fic get reversed by the end, once the Doctor's plan to convinces the Tenth Seo to reverse everything back to before she saved Drusilla from Angelus succeeds.
• Targeted to Hurt the Hero: The Goddess' favorite method of tormenting Buffy and the Doctor in the alternate timeline going after their friends, having brutally killed most of the Doctor's companions and most of Buffy's friends and family in front of them. By the time the fic begins, Willow's dad is set to be sacrificed while Xander was put on the sacrifice's shortlist and Buffy knows at this point that the decision was made specifically to hurt her.
• That Man Is Dead: The Goddess tells the Doctor a couple of times that she is no longer Seo because Seo is gone, especially after she actually succeeds in destroying the last remains of her soul, leaving only someone who is basically Glory with Seo's memories and a new name.
• They Died Because of You:
  • In chapter 22, the Doctor sadly tells Drusilla that Seo's soul is gone because of her (since Seo saving pre-vampire Drusilla from Angelus leads to Balance Between Good and Evil turning Seo evil in her place), and consequently she causes the now-soulless Seo to kill her own friends and family with plans to destroy even more of the world. Drusilla is horrified and agrees to any plan that restores the timeline, even if she has to die in process, believing Seo doesn't deserve to become like that in her place.
  • In the penultimate chapter, as she lets Seo see Drusilla's dead body, Buffy tells her that Drusilla died of guilt of seeing Seo suffers in her place, meaning Seo doesn't save Drusilla after all and she just caused Drusilla's death.