Buffy Fic: I Wish You Well
Ficathon Entry: The Buffy Is The Hero Damnit Ficathon.
My apologies for the lateness of my entry - Next year I shall not sign up for a ficathon, do the Carnival, do a long-weekend trip to Margaret River, AND do my Christmas Cards all in the same weekend!
- Trouble
Characters: Buffy, some random vamps, anyone else you feel like adding in there.
What you'd like to see: Buffy looking back on her life and wondering whether or not she would have make the same mistakes. An introspective character study on Buffy, her life and her choices.
What you don't like to see: A defeatest attitude in Buffy. She sure did get down on herself a lot, but I really liked it when she got back up again.
Dear Buffy,
It takes a long time for news to come down here, but I only just heard about what happened in Sunnydale. Samantha did some calls and told me you'd made it out to England, and even tracked down Mr Giles' address for me. I guess I can only hope this reaches you. Samantha and I are both so sorry to hear. It must be very hard on you to lose everything like that. I can't imagine how I'd feel if there was no Iowa for me to go back to.
I hope you have no regrets, though. You did what you had to do.
Buffy sighs and puts down the letter. She has to give Riley points for trying, she supposes, but at the moment she's not feeling very charitable. Before she can role her eyes in even the slightest irritation, though, she reminds herself that there are 27 girls in the room that, at that moment, are probably not paying enough attention to their cross-bow lessons with Faith and are paying attention to her. So, she smiles as though the letter hasn't left her feeling uncomfortably annoyed, and turns her attention to weak aims and troubles with loading crossbows.
Except she can't. I hope you have no regrets, he wrote.
Regrets. She numbers them, sometimes, to give them some sense of perspective. What would she had done differently, if she'd known how it would end? Made her mother happier, been kinder to Dawn, somehow made her parents stick together, be happy, love each other as they had before they drifted apart. Been a better daughter.
She'd tried, once, to talk to Giles about her mother, about regrets and missed chances. Giles had tried, uncomfortably, to tell her that she had been 18 and 19 and had had no idea that her mother would die. At that age, he had said, every one thinks they're immortal, and that no one will ever die. (But I knew better, she tells herself now. I should have known better. I should have been better.) He'd told her that Dawn knows she is loved and never doubts.
She'd wanted to ask, "Do I love her because I've been made to?", but didn't, because what difference did the answer make? She loves Dawn. Dawn is her life, and trying to sort out what life would be like if there hadn't been Dawn was too difficult for her. She knows she should remember the time before Dawn was created, but there is no time before Dawn.
And still she wonders, as she reprimands Bao Ying for missing another target, if Dawn is the reason that things happened as they did. Did the Powers that Be warp reality, warp Buffy's life, around making sure that there would be no lover to supersede her love for Dawn? Was that the insurance, that the Slayer would take care of the Key because no one else would get between them?
She remembers Angel, and feeling at 17, at 18, that loving him was like living, like dying, like stepping into the sunshine and damning the heavens to burn them both. She remembers believing that if only they loved each other enough, if only they made nothing else matter, it would all work out - her future would be in his arms. They'd loved until it tore out his soul and ripped them both to shreds, and she has to wonder, sometimes, if things would have been different without Dawn.
She remembers thinking they would be together forever, and having spent so much time now with teenaged girls in various states of romance, she knows now her love was no more deathless than anyone else's, and that every teenager thinks her problems are the end of the world. She remembers hating herself for weeks for Angelus, for still loving him after he'd stopped being Angel, for not being able to kill him before he tried to kill everyone she loved, before Giles had been hurt, before Jenny had died, and wonders now how it could have been different if there hadn't been this need for her to love Dawn so completely; if there's an alternate version of her life where Jenny leads the classes on Magic and Willow teachers Computer Hacking 101 and Giles has no scars on his hands.
She leans against a wall to watch the girls, the Slayers, and reminds herself the alternatives don't matter. Dawn wasn't what had caused everything to fall out as it had with Angel, there was no plan to make her alone. Angel had been the one who had stepped from his path. Whistler had told her that it was Angel destiny to prevent Acathla from rising, and he had let his love of her get in the way of that. Every time she had the choice between love and fighting, she'd chosen to keep fighting, to put aside love for something greater. No regrets for that.
She remembers Prom, the dress she'd spent so long looking for, the dreams she'd had of her and Angel and how romantic it would all be, of someone finding a way to break the curse, of them finding that true happiness without him losing his soul, and how it had all crumbled to dust in a sewer. And how she'd put it aside and made sure the Prom was beautiful and safe for everyone else, and it had been - it had been perfect.
Even now, she can still remember Jonathan's voice. His thank you. The applause, the way people had really looked at her, the way the sparkly umbrella had sat in her room all summer, the thing she looked at every night before falling asleep. Class Protector. They'd known, without realising, exactly what she had been doing, and how she'd protected them.
Because she was the Hero.
Because she had stood up and fought and always fought and showed that no matter what, you could fight back. That the blonde who was supposed to die, quickly, as an afterthought, didn't always. And they'd taken that away and learned and realised they didn't need to die, either. And she remembers them standing up and ripping off their class robes, her entire graduating class, and fighting the Mayor-Demon and all the vamps and killing them. And even though some had fallen, they'd kept on fighting, and she wonders, now, if any of them still do.
She looks up then and she sees Faith, and sees her fighting, training, not giving in, not letting herself wallow in her past; she sees these girls, these Slayers, each one of them a hero-in-training, and sees them still fighting, and sees Andrew and thinks of Xander and remembers Riley and all the other ones who fight even if they aren't Heroes and she knows it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if things played out as they did because of Dawn, or because the Powers that Be needed Angel to be something else, or just because she was 17 and made the wrong choices, because in the end, she's here. She's the Hero.
No, Riley. I have no regrets. None at all.
My apologies for the lateness of my entry - Next year I shall not sign up for a ficathon, do the Carnival, do a long-weekend trip to Margaret River, AND do my Christmas Cards all in the same weekend!
- Trouble
Characters: Buffy, some random vamps, anyone else you feel like adding in there.
What you'd like to see: Buffy looking back on her life and wondering whether or not she would have make the same mistakes. An introspective character study on Buffy, her life and her choices.
What you don't like to see: A defeatest attitude in Buffy. She sure did get down on herself a lot, but I really liked it when she got back up again.
Dear Buffy,
It takes a long time for news to come down here, but I only just heard about what happened in Sunnydale. Samantha did some calls and told me you'd made it out to England, and even tracked down Mr Giles' address for me. I guess I can only hope this reaches you. Samantha and I are both so sorry to hear. It must be very hard on you to lose everything like that. I can't imagine how I'd feel if there was no Iowa for me to go back to.
I hope you have no regrets, though. You did what you had to do.
Buffy sighs and puts down the letter. She has to give Riley points for trying, she supposes, but at the moment she's not feeling very charitable. Before she can role her eyes in even the slightest irritation, though, she reminds herself that there are 27 girls in the room that, at that moment, are probably not paying enough attention to their cross-bow lessons with Faith and are paying attention to her. So, she smiles as though the letter hasn't left her feeling uncomfortably annoyed, and turns her attention to weak aims and troubles with loading crossbows.
Except she can't. I hope you have no regrets, he wrote.
Regrets. She numbers them, sometimes, to give them some sense of perspective. What would she had done differently, if she'd known how it would end? Made her mother happier, been kinder to Dawn, somehow made her parents stick together, be happy, love each other as they had before they drifted apart. Been a better daughter.
She'd tried, once, to talk to Giles about her mother, about regrets and missed chances. Giles had tried, uncomfortably, to tell her that she had been 18 and 19 and had had no idea that her mother would die. At that age, he had said, every one thinks they're immortal, and that no one will ever die. (But I knew better, she tells herself now. I should have known better. I should have been better.) He'd told her that Dawn knows she is loved and never doubts.
She'd wanted to ask, "Do I love her because I've been made to?", but didn't, because what difference did the answer make? She loves Dawn. Dawn is her life, and trying to sort out what life would be like if there hadn't been Dawn was too difficult for her. She knows she should remember the time before Dawn was created, but there is no time before Dawn.
And still she wonders, as she reprimands Bao Ying for missing another target, if Dawn is the reason that things happened as they did. Did the Powers that Be warp reality, warp Buffy's life, around making sure that there would be no lover to supersede her love for Dawn? Was that the insurance, that the Slayer would take care of the Key because no one else would get between them?
She remembers Angel, and feeling at 17, at 18, that loving him was like living, like dying, like stepping into the sunshine and damning the heavens to burn them both. She remembers believing that if only they loved each other enough, if only they made nothing else matter, it would all work out - her future would be in his arms. They'd loved until it tore out his soul and ripped them both to shreds, and she has to wonder, sometimes, if things would have been different without Dawn.
She remembers thinking they would be together forever, and having spent so much time now with teenaged girls in various states of romance, she knows now her love was no more deathless than anyone else's, and that every teenager thinks her problems are the end of the world. She remembers hating herself for weeks for Angelus, for still loving him after he'd stopped being Angel, for not being able to kill him before he tried to kill everyone she loved, before Giles had been hurt, before Jenny had died, and wonders now how it could have been different if there hadn't been this need for her to love Dawn so completely; if there's an alternate version of her life where Jenny leads the classes on Magic and Willow teachers Computer Hacking 101 and Giles has no scars on his hands.
She leans against a wall to watch the girls, the Slayers, and reminds herself the alternatives don't matter. Dawn wasn't what had caused everything to fall out as it had with Angel, there was no plan to make her alone. Angel had been the one who had stepped from his path. Whistler had told her that it was Angel destiny to prevent Acathla from rising, and he had let his love of her get in the way of that. Every time she had the choice between love and fighting, she'd chosen to keep fighting, to put aside love for something greater. No regrets for that.
She remembers Prom, the dress she'd spent so long looking for, the dreams she'd had of her and Angel and how romantic it would all be, of someone finding a way to break the curse, of them finding that true happiness without him losing his soul, and how it had all crumbled to dust in a sewer. And how she'd put it aside and made sure the Prom was beautiful and safe for everyone else, and it had been - it had been perfect.
Even now, she can still remember Jonathan's voice. His thank you. The applause, the way people had really looked at her, the way the sparkly umbrella had sat in her room all summer, the thing she looked at every night before falling asleep. Class Protector. They'd known, without realising, exactly what she had been doing, and how she'd protected them.
Because she was the Hero.
Because she had stood up and fought and always fought and showed that no matter what, you could fight back. That the blonde who was supposed to die, quickly, as an afterthought, didn't always. And they'd taken that away and learned and realised they didn't need to die, either. And she remembers them standing up and ripping off their class robes, her entire graduating class, and fighting the Mayor-Demon and all the vamps and killing them. And even though some had fallen, they'd kept on fighting, and she wonders, now, if any of them still do.
She looks up then and she sees Faith, and sees her fighting, training, not giving in, not letting herself wallow in her past; she sees these girls, these Slayers, each one of them a hero-in-training, and sees them still fighting, and sees Andrew and thinks of Xander and remembers Riley and all the other ones who fight even if they aren't Heroes and she knows it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if things played out as they did because of Dawn, or because the Powers that Be needed Angel to be something else, or just because she was 17 and made the wrong choices, because in the end, she's here. She's the Hero.
No, Riley. I have no regrets. None at all.