Origin and Season One (Ch. 11)
Character: Buffy Summers
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1382
Setting: pre-Pilot
- Winter is Coming -
It'd been nine days.
Buffy thumped her pencil mindlessly against her binder as she stared at her math book, not really seeing it. She was sitting at one of the picnic benches between the field and the spine of Building A, under the shade of a tree. In the past twenty minutes, a few leaves had drifted from above to land on her workspace, and one did so now.
She caught it before it could blow away, then rubbed it between her fingers. It was bright yellow, a signal for the approach of a New England winter they would never have.
Exhaling, she let it go in the next gust of wind and watched as it drifted away, to join a growing layer on the field. Before the end of the week, it and the rest of them would be gathered up, stuffed into trash bags, and tossed or burned or whatever happened to leaves that fell onto manicured grass in LA. For some reason, that made her sad.
She looked back down at her book.
She had skipped classes most of the last week, sometimes to go hunting down in the sewers, and sometimes just because she felt like it. School had seemed like an extraordinary waste of what could be the last days of her life, but after a few days of skipping classes to mope she'd realized that wasn't any better. She may not have paid attention to more than three words her teachers spoke this week, but at least she'd come. If she was going to go out, she might as well do it without a more abysmal record than she'd already acquired since her calling. And if by some miracle she did survive the fight with Lothos-whenever he found her-she didn't want to have to face an impossible game of catch-up between detention hours.
She forced herself to read the words in her logic problem.
If cars talk, then pigs are red.
If there is a rally at school, then cars talk.
If pigs are red, then the moon turns green.
She usually didn't suck at these, but today her brain was mush, and everything on the next page and beyond was proofs, which she was bad at even on a good day-and she'd had precious few of those lately.
If there is a rally at school, then the moon turns yellow.
She crossed that one out.
If the moon turns green, then there is a rally at school.
If pigs are red, then cars talk.
If there is a rally at school, then the moon-
“Hey.”
She jerked and looked up, pencil poised like a potential weapon.
Tisha was standing there in a school hoodie, her cheerleading outfit visible beneath it. She was clutching her bag to her chest and looking at her like one might look at a large cat in a zoo whose cage was uncomfortably close to the visitor path.
“Hi,” Buffy said, voice catching in surprise. She put her pencil down.
Tisha stood there awkwardly for a moment, then gestured down at the table. “Mind if I sit with you?”
She blinked. “No.” Quickly, she shut her book and shifted her stuff aside. Tisha took the seat opposite her.
Her dream on the night of Merrick's death had only been partially prophetic. Her mother was still doing her laundry and Tisha was still alive, which were two checks in the plus column, but seeing her since had filled her with a keener sense of loss than even the hours after school when she normally would've been at the warehouse hitting bags of sawdust did. Tisha had been avoiding her more and more since she'd been kicked off the cheerleading team anyway, so she hadn't figured her effort at doing the same thing would attract any notice.
Apparently, she'd been wrong.
“I know we haven't talked much lately,” Tisha started. “You know, we've both been busy with stuff.”
“Yeah, sorry,” Buffy said softly. And she was.
“I'm sorry Tina took you off the team.” She nervously pulled at the zipper on her front, as if suddenly remembering what she was wearing. “No one could do the flips like you.”
“Miranda not filling the void?” she asked, not entirely without venom.
She seemed to color a bit. “No, not really.”
The bitterness drained away as quickly as it'd come. “How's everyone doing?” she asked, feeling odd for asking something she would've known without question back at the beginning of the school year.
“Eh,” she shrugged. “Chloe broke up with Sean.”
She felt like she'd missed a bridge. “Sean?”
“They met when Kyle took her to the dance.”
She thought back to that night. The surprise when her dad had gotten her the dress she'd asked for even after he'd said he wouldn't, that slow dance with Tyler to some awful power ballad she'd secretly liked. It all seemed so long ago now, even though it'd barely been two months.
“She dating anyone else now?” she asked.
“Matt. He's taking her to the dance.”
“Dance?” she repeated.
“The Halloween dance,” she supplied. “That's actually what I wanted to ask you about.”
The Halloween dance. She'd completely forgotten about it.
It was Hemery tradition for the freshman and sophomore grades to have the dance as the high school alternative to childhood trick-or-treating or the college frat party. Costumes were optional, but last year she'd gone as Cleopatra in an elaborate outfit she and her mom had spent weeks on, while Tisha had dressed as Marie Antoinette, marking the start of her brief blonde period. It'd been so exciting then, she couldn't believe she'd forgotten it now.
“What about it?” she asked.
“Are you going?” Tisha said. “I know you're not seeing Tyler anymore, but I'm not seeing anyone either. We can go together and make fun of the couples and assign them expiration dates...” her voice trailed off, and she bit her lip. “I mean, it just sounded like fun.”
Buffy stared at her for a beat, trying to process her words. She remembered how much fun she'd had at the dance last year, how pretty all the decorations had been, and all the cookies and snacks from the PTC that had lined the east wall. “I forgot about it,” she said honestly.
“Oh,” she looked immediately crestfallen.
“But,” she said quickly, hating that, “I dunno. I don't have a costume or anything.”
She seemed to brighten a little. “But if you did?”
She let the smallest hint of a smile tug at her lips, “Well, then I'd reconsider.”
“Are you doing anything today?” she asked, glancing down at the pile of schoolwork Buffy had pulled out when she'd been trying to determine what to do with her time.
“No, not really,” she said.
“Well, my mom and I were going to go shopping today anyway. Do you want to come?”
She realized she'd already fallen into the trap when she saw the pleading look in Tisha's eyes. “Sure,” she said.
Tisha seemed to glow slightly at the prospect. “Come on then,” she said, getting up. “My mom'll be here in a few minutes to pick me up, and you can borrow her cell phone to call your parents.” Immediately she reached for the bag on the side of the table, then began putting her things away.
Buffy took over the process after a beat, then hefted the bag over her shoulder and swiveled out from the bench. Tisha waited until she got up, and then they both set off for the pick-up zone.
For the first time in what seemed like ages, Buffy felt a feeling of normalcy. The darkness and the death that had so consumed her lately seemed farther away. She was going to the dance. She was going to be young, and she was going to dance to music with her fellow students in the darkened, school-free gym, and she was going to get away from being the Slayer for at least one night.
That wasn't too much to ask from the universe, was it?
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