When I woke up the next morning...
We had changed the world.
I wondered, when I opened my eyes, if the people who still had no idea what the world was really made of? I wondered if they felt it too. The ones who were like Xander and me, P.B. Pre Buffy, and completely unaware of what was really happening around them? Did they wake up too, to that flicker of power and change? Was the floor they dropped their feet to something different? Or did eggs follow coffee, and toast follow eggs, as mindless as any day before, or after. Were they eating breakfast, now knowing something had been broken, and remade?
A very big something, by the way. I could feel them. They were waking up too, some of them for the first time.
They knew something was different.
And I wondered briefly if my parents did.
I was more inclined for that certain place, that they were with their coffee and eggs, safe from everything that happened, and everything that I was, with Aunt Eileen. But I still --
I remember looking over at Kennedy then. Just sitting up, and looking at her. She kept talking about how I glowed the day before, though I remembered the place I was, more than the side effects. But she was the one getting her glow on now, even sleeping. And I went from feeling how the world was different, to seeing how it was. As beautiful as it was? It scared me.
I was Buffy's best friend. For years, I watched her being the Slayer. I had absolutely no illusions left about just what that meant. What she had to do, what she had given up. The fact that she was the best -- no matter how amazing she was at it? Even if it came down to it, and on some crazy career day somewhere, it might have been a life she was actually voluntarily interested in? The truth was, Buffy didn't get to volunteer. There was no questionare. No choice.
And that was a choice I had just taken away from hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls. We'd asked Kennedy. We had asked Vi and all the others. But what about the others that were past those others?
And that was when I wondered just what I'd done.
I wondered, when I opened my eyes, if the people who still had no idea what the world was really made of? I wondered if they felt it too. The ones who were like Xander and me, P.B. Pre Buffy, and completely unaware of what was really happening around them? Did they wake up too, to that flicker of power and change? Was the floor they dropped their feet to something different? Or did eggs follow coffee, and toast follow eggs, as mindless as any day before, or after. Were they eating breakfast, now knowing something had been broken, and remade?
A very big something, by the way. I could feel them. They were waking up too, some of them for the first time.
They knew something was different.
And I wondered briefly if my parents did.
I was more inclined for that certain place, that they were with their coffee and eggs, safe from everything that happened, and everything that I was, with Aunt Eileen. But I still --
I remember looking over at Kennedy then. Just sitting up, and looking at her. She kept talking about how I glowed the day before, though I remembered the place I was, more than the side effects. But she was the one getting her glow on now, even sleeping. And I went from feeling how the world was different, to seeing how it was. As beautiful as it was? It scared me.
I was Buffy's best friend. For years, I watched her being the Slayer. I had absolutely no illusions left about just what that meant. What she had to do, what she had given up. The fact that she was the best -- no matter how amazing she was at it? Even if it came down to it, and on some crazy career day somewhere, it might have been a life she was actually voluntarily interested in? The truth was, Buffy didn't get to volunteer. There was no questionare. No choice.
And that was a choice I had just taken away from hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls. We'd asked Kennedy. We had asked Vi and all the others. But what about the others that were past those others?
And that was when I wondered just what I'd done.