Breaking Novikov
is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic by reenasas.
Buffy and Spike died alone and miserable. Dawn decides she’s going to go back in time and fix that. There may end up being consequences on an apocalyptic scale.
This work contains examples of the following tropes:
- All Amazons Want Hercules: The story reinforces the theory that any attempt Buffy makes to date someone normal would never work, because she needs someone who can keep up with her. Both Dawn and Spike can see this, and eventually Buffy realizes this too. Even Riley seems to realize this, though it doesn't stop him from threatening to stake Spike if he tries anything.
- Alternate Timeline: The time storm creates windows into alternate timelines. The author even manages to work in another story-verse of theirs in chapter 55.
- Back To The Early Instalment: Dawn travels back to season 4, just before Spike gets captured by the Initiative.
- Battle Couple: Buffy and Spike become one.
- Completed Fic
- Crazy Jealous Guy:
- Riley. He's always questioning Buffy's decision to trust Spike because, as revealed before he leaves, he knows Spike has a thing for her and suspects that Buffy would be happier dating someone more supernatural. And while his break-up with Buffy goes a lot better than it does in canon, he still threatens to stake Spike if he attempts to make a move on Buffy, despite the fact that he's no longer involved in Buffy's life and therefore it's not his choice to make.
- Angel. He doesn't want to cooperate with Buffy's attempts to cut him out of her life completely, immediately wants to know who she's dating, and after figuring out that it might be Spike, he leaves eleven messages on her answering machine and then drives all the way to Sunnydale after the first two, leaving the others as he's driving. All because she might be dating someone he doesn't approve of. Granted, the last message has nothing to do with this and it allows the Scoobies to find out about the force field surrounding the town, but it's still inappropriate behaviour.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Buffy. Seeing how awful other versions of herself are helps a lot.
- Door Stopper: The story is separated into three parts and has a grand total of 395,347 words, ranking it among the Top Ten longest stories on Elysian Fields.
- Everyone Can See It: Turns out that there was no need for Buffy and Spike to hide their relationship. The Scoobies figured it out on their own. Even Riley figured out that Spike has a thing for Buffy.
- Evil Versus Oblivion:
- Dawn convinces Spike to help her by telling him he’s dead in the future. Likewise, Buffy and the Scoobies are convinced that he wants to help because the world ending means his un-life ends right along with it.
- While not outright evil yet, Warren sticks around to help instead of running when it becomes clear that if the time storm isn't stopped, there won't exactly be anywhere he can run to.
- Faith in the Foe: When Buffy and Faith swap bodies, Spike is the only one who realizes that something's wrong.
- Fire-Forged Friends: Buffy and Spike, who start off hating each other but gradually become friends before falling in love.
- Fix Fic: Dawn travels back in time because Buffy and Spike died alone and miserable, and she wants to fix that. She also wants to try and minimize the damage that Glory caused and make sure the other members of the Scoobies don't ruin their lives like they did last time.
- For Want Of A Nail: Dawn's time travel causes a number of changes, both purposely and accidental:
- She manages to prevent Spike from getting captured by the Initiative, therefore he's never chipped. She convinces him to help anyway, which leads to him helping out more often including with Adam, who he never joins up with. This allows the Scoobies (especially Buffy) to be a bit more receptive towards him.
- Spike hanging out more also means he's able to figure out that something's wrong when Faith switches bodies with Buffy. He knocks her out and convinces the others that something's up, meaning that Riley never sleeps with her.
- The Key spell latches onto the time-displaced Dawn and she ends up becoming Buffy’s younger twin sister instead of her 14-year-old sister.
- Buffy and Riley break up far more amicably, thanks to Dawn helping them understand that it would never work out in the long run. Most notably, Riley never visits the bite houses.
- Dawn convinces Ben to kill himself in order to rid the world of Glory for good, so everything involving her in the latter half of season 5 never happens.
- The chaos caused by the time storm keeps Drusilla away from Sunnydale.
- The Nerd Trio are enlisted by the Scoobies to help them figure out what's going on with the time storm, meaning they won't become a problem in the future seeing as it ends with Jonathan and Andrew joining up with them and Warren getting out of town.
- Have We Met Yet?: Spike is the first person who Dawn meets when she goes back in time and she has to convince him not to eat her. Spike admits that she feels familiar, and it's explained later in the story that this feeling of familiarity was the very first case of the time anomalies that later become more common.
- Heel–Face Turn: Spike, as per canon. Only this time Dawn has to convince him to help without his chip. She's come to realize that the Scoobies refused to believe that Spike was changing because they chalked it up to the chip forcing him to help, so reasons that the only way she can make them see that he wants to change is if he makes those changes without the convenient excuse of the chip.
- Heroic Suicide: Realizing that it's the only way to defeat Glory, Ben kills himself, taking the Hell God with him.
- In Spite of a Nail: A lot of stuff still remains the same, either because Dawn is unwilling to change too much or because the timeline is attempting to righten itself:
- A chipped vampire still runs amok in Buffy and Willow's dormitory, though this time it's a random vampire instead of Spike.
- Despite Spike attempting to lay low, Buffy still sees him and goes after him… which leads to the events of "Something Blue" still happening.
- Buffy and Riley still date, because Dawn feels that Buffy needs the experience to realize that dating a normal guy will never work out. They break up around the same time in canon, only it's far more amicable.
- Joyce still dies, because Dawn knew deep down that since it was natural instead of supernatural, there was nothing she could do to stop it.
- Like Brother and Sister: Dawn and Spike develop this relationship.
- Love Transcends Spacetime: One theory that gets presented is that all the alternate timelines don't diverge all that far from each other, at least when it comes to a number of key events. From what we see, Buffy and Spike are meant to fall in love, and apart from one timeline that's strongly hinted to be the Wishverse, the two are always together in some form or another.
- The Matchmaker: Dawn came back in time to ensure that Buffy and Spike get another chance at happiness together.
- Mistaken for Romance: Buffy initially believes that Spike and Dawn are in love because of how close they are. She's shocked to learn that not only are they not, but Spike is in love with her.
- My Sister Is Off-Limits: Buffy mistakenly believes that Dawn and Spike are in love, and that Dawn came back in time because she stopped them from being together.
- Oblivious to Love: Buffy doesn't realize that Spike is in love with her until he shouts it in her face.
- The One That Got Away: Buffy and Spike were this to each other in the original timeline. They both ended up dying alone. Dawn travels back in time to fix this.
- Our Time Travel Is Different: Dawn's residue Key-ness allows her to travel through dimensions, and upon realizing that time itself is a dimension, makes a plan to travel back in time and change things. Over a year later, signs start to appear that suggest she may have broken both time and reality with her actions, though it's revealed that a time storm from a Hell dimension followed her through and has been feeding off of her changes to the timeline. Sending it back to its original dimension fixes the problem.
- Portal to the Past: Dawn is able to create one with her Key powers and she ends up back in season 4.
- Related Differently in the Adaptation: Dawn's presence in the past means that when the monks cast their spell, it latches on to her and makes her Buffy's younger twin sister instead of her 14-year-old sister.
- Reset Button: After the time storm is sent back to its original dimension, time resets back to around an hour before the gang converged on the Magic Box.
- Secret Relationship: Buffy and Spike don't tell the others (except Dawn) that they're dating because Buffy wants them to get used to having Spike around in more social settings before she tells them. They didn't need to, because the others had already figured it out.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The reason for Dawn's trip; she wants to give Buffy and Spike another chance to get together, but beyond that she also wants to make sure the other Scoobies don't make the same mistakes they did before.
- Shipper on Deck: Dawn for Buffy and Spike.
- Shipping Torpedo:
- Before leaving, Riley warns Spike not to try anything with Buffy or he'll come back and stake him.
- Just the thought that Buffy might be dating Spike is enough for Angel to leave her eleven messages on her answering machine and drive all the way to Sunnydale.
- Xander has a moment in the second-to-last chapter, but it's Played for Laughs.
Xander: What are you thinking, Buff? He's a vampire. A master vampire! Without a soul! And he's been helping and not killing, so I guess that doesn't really matter. But you have nothing in common other than bleach, and Angel's going to flip. And, and… And who am I kidding? Totally saw this coming. - The Stations of the Canon: Parts 1 and 2 tend to stick pretty closely to canon apart from a few changes here and there. This is explained in-universe in that Dawn is reluctant to make too many changes so things don't go completely off the rails. It goes completely off canon after Ben kills himself and Glory, and apart from the incident with April and Joyce's death, nothing is recognizable.
- Time Crash: After Glory's death, it looks like time is starting to collapse in on itself due to Dawn's meddling. It's eventually revealed that a time storm followed Dawn from a Hell dimension where all of time seems to exist all at once and has been using changes to the timeline to grow bigger.
- Time Travel: The main point of the story.
- Token Evil Teammate:
- Spike, like in canon. Though he doesn't really hang out with the Scoobies all that much when he's still evil, and by the time he does he's not really evil anymore.
- Warren is more a jerk than evil at this point, but he's only looking out for himself, is rude and condescending to everyone and only behaves after being threatened by Buffy and Spike. He gets out of town as soon as everything's fixed.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Xander and Spike are becoming this by the end of the story.
- Wrong Guy First: Riley for Buffy. This is actually why Dawn doesn't intervene in their relationship at first; she believes that Buffy needs to date Riley in order to realize that dating a normal guy would never work out and thus allow her to appreciate Spike.
- You Didn't Ask: While it's never outright stated, this is probably why Andrew never told anyone about the Rwasundi, demons that move through time, a lot sooner.
