Origin and Season One (Ch. 4)
Character: Buffy Summers
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1789
Setting: pre-Pilot
- Sawdust Bags -
The little bag split down the middle, sending a combination of what looked like sawdust and bunched-up newspaper flying. Buffy looked at the new pile of stuff, then at her bandaged hands, then up at Merrick.
Merrick was looking characteristically worried today, but she sensed the forecast may hold irritation. She decided to push it.
“So, I guess there's no Rocky montage involved here?”
He glanced at her with heavy lidded eyes. “I had to improvise.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” she took a seat on one of the crates either he'd supplied or the warehouse they'd taken over had come pre-packaged with. “I thought you Watcher guys were like an official thing.”
“I only just got here, Buffy, and the Council doesn't ship me equipment.” He walked to a crate pressed up against a corner, where there were several more bags. “We'll just have to make do for now.”
“Why not?” she asked, thumping her shoes against the wood. “The fate of the world is resting on my shoulders, and you've got me here training with old potato sacks and sawdust.”
He scowled at her, but said nothing, lugging another bag over to the crate with the one she'd torn open.
“So where'd you move from?” she asked, slipping a piece of gum from her pocket and popping it into her mouth.
He pulled the broken bag off and left it where it'd fallen. “What?”
“You said you'd moved,” she said. “Watchers are in England, right? But you don't sound all British.”
“I'm not English, no.” He pointed at the sack, “This one's ready for you. And spit out that gum.”
She ignored him, hopping down. As she approached she rewrapped the bandages for the zillionth time-they still didn't feel right even after a week of this. “So where'd you move from?”
“Tempe,” he supplied after a beat.
She thought, “Arizona, right?”
“Right.”
“You from there?”
“No.”
Talking to him was like pulling teeth. The first few days they hadn't said much, but the dourness was a downer, and frankly spending an hour or two socking bags wasn't doing it for her conversation-wise.
“I want you to try again with your basic punches. They're getting...” his voice trailed off. “A little better.”
“Hey,” she said, retaping the bandage again. “I'm a cheerleader, not Buffy Tyson.” She started hitting, aiming squarely for the little stars in the middle of the logo. She was already falling into a bit of a rhythm. Maybe it was the ancient generations of Slayer blood or whatever, but her fighting moves seemed to come more out of herself than what Merrick was saying to her.
“Loosen up more,” he said, taking the seat she'd vacated. “Flow like water.”
He had a thing about that, water and rivers and flowing. “'kay,” she muttered, trying to be like water, whatever that meant.
“And I'm from Saskatoon.”
She glanced over at him, still punching. “Where's that? Alaska?”
“Canada. Alternate kicks and punches on the hanging bag.”
Obediently, she turned to where a sack of sawdust was hanging from a hook, then began beating on it. “So they have Canadian Watchers?” she asked after she'd remembered how she was supposed to do it.
“There are Watchers all over the world.”
“Why'd you come down here?”
“Got sick of the cold.”
“So Sunny California seemed like the natural choice?”
“I moved to Arizona, if you've forgotten.”
She scowled, kicking hard, and the bag flew from the hook to land with a thwak! on the concrete floor.
He glanced over at it when she turned to him. “You've got to learn control. There's no use hitting them so hard.”
“Easy for Mr. Watcher to say,” she replied petulantly.
His face revealed little. Just a mask of irritation couched in a general air of worry. “Suppose that's enough for now,” he said. “Now your agility circuit.”
That was more fun, but she decided to grouse anyway as she took off her bandages, “I still think we should have padding in here.”
“You won't have padding out there,” he said again.
“But we're in here.”
“Buffy...” his voice was flat, long-suffering.
She dropped it. Sighing, she shoved the crate with the sawdust bag aside, clearing a long runway. Before last week, she didn't know if she even would've been able to move that, but now it only felt shifting a trashcan. Everything in her world seemed lighter, like feathers, and she still wasn't quite used to it. She'd asked Merrick if she could lift a car like Superman or something, and he'd said no, but one day she was probably going to try anyway.
“And spit out your gum.”
She glanced over at him. For a second she'd almost forgotten he was there. “Fine,” she said, then spit it into its wrapper and tossed it away.
“Remember what to do?”
“Yep,” she said.
She somersaulted forward, once, twice, three times, four, eventually melting into a roll. Sometimes she knew what Merrick meant about the water, more than he probably did. When she stopped thinking it was all fluidity. Like a river.
“It wasn't the cold,” he said.
She stopped, breathing. “What?” she asked, then flipped herself over a crate.
“It wasn't because of the cold,” he said again. “There was an incident in Tempe, a Watcher died, and they needed someone to guide the Slayer.”
This time she stopped moving completely. She was sweating, breathing hard, and she studied him. He was watching her sadly. “She was the last one, before me, I mean,” she said. It wasn't a question.
He nodded.
The air seemed to leave the room. “What happened?” she asked.
“She died.”
“That wasn't what I-” she started to say.
“I know.” He slid off the box. “That's enough for today.”
She just stood there, feeling the heat of the summer sun soaking through the building. “So, what, she dies and they just send you on to the next one?” her voice was incredulous.
“You needed someone with experience,” he replied, moving the sack back to the larger pile in the corner.
This time she walked over and took it from him. It seemed to weigh about as much as one of her notebooks. “Who are we to you?” she asked.
He hesitated, and she dropped the bag on top of the others, then turned back to him. “So one of us dies, the next one is called, and you just start all over again?”
“A Watcher usually retires when his Slayer does. This was special circumstance.”
“Retire?” she repeated. She hardly felt the heat now. If anything she felt cold. “You mean die?”
Pause. “Yes,” he admitted after a beat.
She was temporarily stunned by the bluntness of it, but she found her voice as she took a seat on the nearest crate. “That's great,” she said. “So...what? A few days after some vamp turns me into maggot meal you'll be sitting under a palm tree in Barbados sipping a martini with one of those little plastic umbrellas in it while a young cabana girl named Kiko invites you to the luau on island three?”
He stood there for awhile, so long she was starting to think she'd imagined voicing her little diatribe, but then he stepped closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Buffy,” he said quietly, “all Slayers have to come to terms with this, as do their Watchers. Your gifts come with a heavy price.”
She bit her lip, looking down at the floor. She felt like a little kid. “I didn't ask for this.”
“How often do we get what we asked for?”
She said nothing. Already she'd dusted a handful of vamps, and every day she felt a little stronger, but she could feel this eating away at her life. She just wondered how long it would be before it took it entirely.
“You must concentrate on training, Buffy,” he said after long moments had passed in silence. “Strong like stone, fluid like water. It'll keep you living.”
“Is that what you said to the other one?” she asked gloomily.
“I'm saying it to you.”
She met his eyes, then looked away, sliding off the crate. “I need to get home, before it gets dark. My parents are starting to wonder where I've been going.”
He glanced at her sharply. “You haven't told them?”
“No,” her voice was flat. “No, no one knows Buffy's grand secret.”
She led the way to his car, an old, ugly brown thing that looked like it was salvaged from the 70s. Merrick followed.
They drove back toward her neighborhood in silence, his eyes on the road, hers on nothing in particular. She kept thinking about dying, and if she would visit the next Slayer in her sleep as well. Did Slayers go to the desert when they died, or was it just the last one? Maybe it was a desert somewhere in Arizona. The place where she'd died.
The car stopped, and she realized they'd pulled up just outside her cul de sac.
“Rose Hill tonight,” Merrick said by way of goodbye.
“Alright,” she replied, opening the door. She'd be sneaking out the window again tonight, after her parents had gone to bed. She just had to keep praying Dawn didn't stop in for another late night visit.
She paused, a thought occurring. “Merrick?” she said.
“Yes?” he looked at her.
“If I, you know-I guess, when I die, what will you tell my parents? I mean,” she tried to find the right words, “would they just never know about me, about any of it? Would they just think I'd run away and died in some ditch somewhere?”
Again, he let the silence stretch out. “It's possible,” he said finally.
That pissed her off for some reason, but she didn't say anything more on it. Instead, she got out. “See you tonight,” she said, shutting the door.
As she walked down the street, she thought about dying, and about the questions she'd have to avoid when she got home. She thought about Dawn, and that first night when she'd asked if she'd been out kissing boys.
If only, she sighed, rounding the turn for her house.
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