"Buffy" is Doomed. Except it Isn't.

 You know, I think I'll just say it:

I told you so.

The new Buffy cannot possibly succeed because it's flying in the face of the fates and going the wrong way. It's as simple as that. I am not decrying the class and professionalism of Sarah Michelle Gellar's production team but, to me, it's as if they're trying to find their way through Carlsbad Caverns without a flashlight.

(Buffy the Infantry Officer. 11th November 2025)

As also explained in The Glorious 14th, I frankly think Somebody Up There is still stomping hard on you lot because you're still going the wrong way and still seem unable to join the dots together. Unable to work out that that I might just have bought a flashlight, got it right, found Buffy the Vampire Slayer's true continuation via that lost story arc and (as I myself just realised) continued a certain Xander Harris's own story arc into the bargain.

Just to be clear, I know Nicholas Brendon was oft far from perfect and I do not treat any person's death lightly. However, the novellas telling the tale of Dru and Xander were written between 2009-2013 and I am only discussing Xander the fictional character, not Nicholas the flawed human being.

Anyway, despite the events of the last two weeks or so fate or destiny may still be realigning itself to accommodate you lot, so I hope this time you listen.

That's because the inconceivable may be at hand. After the New Sunnydale debacle, I doubt Sarah Michelle Gellar will be lured back, the Buffy IP is owned by Disney and they're not going to give it to any other streaming services. Also, they simply won't be interested in your conflicting petitions or desperate rationalisations.

Neither am I.

That, plus the passage of time and the fact that fickle old Hollywood has the attention span of a mentally-handicapped gnat, means that your chances of getting any sort of new Buffy have narrowed considerably.

I'm therefore considering the near inconceivable possibility that, if I got it right regarding the lost story arc, I might be about the only game left in your town.

Funny thought, but here's one reminder: Dear Miss Landau is a true-life story written about two real people who still walk the Earth. It is a Buffy-related product, yes, and Drusilla does make fleeting appearances; but it might just be able to evade the wrath of Disney's lawyers like Kirk avoiding the wrath of Khan because it's my intellectual property, not Disney's.

The Dru Quartet (Drusilla's Roses, Drusilla's Redemption, Drusilla Revenant and Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires) is indeed illegal fanfiction but is written to the same standard or better than Dear Miss Landau, and the fictional stories are subtly intertwined with the true-life tales...

Please also note that my depiction of Dru got Royal Assent, you might say, from a certain Buffy actress.

I just finished your story. I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it. You managed to catch Drusilla’s voice and behavior so beautifully. The sad, lost, haunted feeling of Dru was there.

(Juliet Landau in Dear Miss Landau, 15th August 2009)                                                              

In fiction and in reality, Dru and I both went to the beaches of Point Lobos. After I met Juliet on Sunset Boulevard I walked up the hill to Candlewood Drive, where Dru and the Scoobies stayed after the war in the north. I even know Drusilla's address in Avalon...

And then, of course, there was Xander.

The truth is I didn't have the same uncanny connection to Xander I did with Dru. I'd just been reading Dru fanfiction and my favourite Dru and Xander story was Xander’s Secret, a piece of fanfiction written by Zillagirl in 2007.

In Xander’s Secret, Dru met Xander in London six months after the town of Sunnydale collapsed into a crater at the end of Chosen (Buffy's last episode). Xander started going to afternoon tea at Dru’s flat and began to fall in love with her:

“Druse, no offense, but I don’t think I’d like having rotten cream. Okay? How ’bout just plain old whipp—“ Xander stopped and spun in horror at the soft snarl he heard emanating from Drusilla.

“I do NOT make rotten food!” She spat at him angrily. How dare he say such a thing to her? And she had thought they were friends. Ohhhhh! Things like that made her so angry.

Xander looked on in shock, his horror subsiding somewhat, as her face shifted back and forth  from human to demon and back again. He came to realize, somewhat slowly, that she wasn’t going all evil and homicidal on him. She was angry… angry and hurt. He felt a slow burn of shame wash all over him. He’d hurt her feelings. Ever since he knew her, he was always amazed at how sensitive she was. How easily she was hurt.

(Xander's Secret)

I liked the pairing and that was all there was to it. There was no evil master plan. I wrote these stories because I wanted to, expected nothing to come of them and was instead catapulted into the Buffyverse.

The lost story arc is staying secret until it's all ever published, although I wish I could test it on a senior Buffy cast member in secret. Among other places, I tried to do so at a comic-con in Aberdeen in 2024. However, I can tell you that Xander appears in all four novellas:

Xander scanned the street again. Nothing, just shuttered storefronts, drifts of litter and the occasional 7-11 sign. Just that good-looking brunette in the long white dress floating languidly past.

She who walks in beauty by the night, he found himself thinking. She who looks…

Just.

            Like.

                        Drusilla.

Xander froze, snapped out of his reverie by the clear and present realisation that Spike’s ex-girlfriend, one of the former scourges of Europe and an insane killer who'd have made Jack the Ripper wet his pants in sheer terror, had come to an abrupt halt and was – right now – standing less than ten feet away from him.

(Drusilla's Roses)

“Ma Mère,” she said, feeling the voice of the novice nun sweet and strong within her, “may I say my culpas?”

The sister stood before her, serene but detached. Behind her a single candle, lit for Compline, the Office of night prayer, burned at the altar.

“You are Drusilla the vampire,” she said without inflection.

Dru bowed her head.

“I was once a novice nun, and I have a human soul.”

“Xander never stops talking about you,” the sister said. Dru beamed like a bashful girl when she heard that. The sister had seen much death and it had left her with little faith. She rarely felt at peace, and then only during the darkest hours of the night. But for the briefest of moments she thought she sensed the lost innocent behind the devil’s mask, and she made a decision.

“You are welcome in this house,” she said. “Sit with me and pass the hours of the night.”

Those few words brought long years of exile to an end, and the Church took its lost child back into the fold.

Xander left them like that. At the door, he looked back to see the sister and the novice contemplating the light at the altar.

Dru had woken screaming in the night sometimes, clutching desperately for Xander and shaking as he’d held her. Finally, she had explained why. Angelus had sired her at the convent, but as her heartbeat slowed, he and Darla had drowned her in a bath of virgin blood drained from the nuns.

It was an inspired perversion of purity, the blood helping the demon take firm possession of her before she rose. But her last human memory was of blindly smothering in a thick red haze as merciless hands held her under.

The Scoobies had been more than a little surprised to learn that a vampire could be scared of the dark.  There had even been a few sniggers, quickly muted. But they wouldn’t have laughed if they had known why, nor would they have wondered why Drusilla stared up at the stars so often, looking for the light.

Now it seemed she was rising again from the dark, but not as a demon. This time she sat with the sister, bathed in the light of grace, and on her face was a look of peace.

That lump she so often brought to his throat was back, and he welcomed it like an old friend.

He shooed the children away and went outside to wait for his lady.

(Drusilla's Redemption)

On the twenty-seventh day, Dru took the night off and Anne found her doing needlepoint in the common room in the wee small hours, an easygoing sovereign watching over her subjects with placid benevolence.

Her sovereignty had been hard-earned, though. A small fire burned in the nearby hearth, and in the half-light the legendary vampire looked like nothing so much as an old woman from another time, tired and bereft but quiet and dignified.

Anne sat down beside her and Drusilla arched an eyebrow in silent query while her needle softly clicked.

“Not going out on the town tonight, then?”

The vampire pondered for a time.

“I sent twenty-six people to their Maker at the institute. It may have served to save thousands, but it was still wrong. So I tasked myself to save twenty-six others.”

“God does not keep score, Dru, and I doubt he plays dice.”

Drusilla’s face was solemn and strong as she stared into the firelight, and Anne began to realise why Xander Harris had loved this woman so. At first sight she seemed shy as a child and weak as water, but when one looked again, there was a strength and selflessness no man could help but worship. She was not a princess, but a queen.

The sinful queen, though, was without her consort, and she knew it.

“I don’t play dice, either,” said she, “and I don’t know the score. All I want to do now is find my white knight.”

“Will he be there?”

Drusilla’s eyes misted over.

“If he is there, I will love him. And if he is gone, I will stand by his grave for a year and a day.”

(Drusilla Revenant)

The cancer had lurked deep in the lobes of his lungs before suddenly metastasizing, bursting out throughout his body before it could be caught, and from diagnosis to death it was no more than six weeks.

Xander refused radical surgery (“what are they going to do, hon, take out both lungs?”) and Dru had to watch as the tumours grew, as his stomach bloated from the drugs while the flesh melted from his bones and his skin took on the waxy pallor of approaching death.

As they both knew well, vampires had extraordinary stamina, but Dru slept scarcely at all those six weeks and Xander saw the circles beneath her eyes deepen until those eyes sat sunken in their sockets like bruised plums. Her hands recommenced their old shake, but she fed him, bathed him and cleaned up his mess without fail.

They talked of the past and the time they’d spent together, but she never dared broach the unspoken knowledge that lay between them:

That she could release him from his pain and give him eternal life, but only as a vampire.

Finally, he talked of it to her. It was late, she was almost collapsed at the end of his bed and the morphine pump was whirring like a ta-pocketa ta-pocketa machine.

“I know you could bring me back, love,” he said, “and you might think you were helping me, but I guess when I married you I knew one thing. That I loved you, and it wouldn’t be forever. I couldn’t love you enough to last an eternity. I could only love you a short time, but love you well.”

When she knew the end was near, she stood by his side. She stood for fourteen hours, holding his hand all that time, and when his last breath had gone she raised her demon’s eyes to the moon and howled.

(Spike & Dru : the Graveyard of Empires)

So there we have it. Of course, there's a part of this story you don't know. All I ask is that the lost arc be tested and if it works, that Dear Miss Landau and the Dru Quartet be legitimately reprinted and published.

Can you really afford to keep on passing it by and continue getting yourselves stomped?

Your call.