Origin and Season One (Ch. 5)
Character: Buffy Summers
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1418
Setting: pre-Pilot
- Day Jobs -
The bathrooms at Hemery High perpetually smelled like a combination of borax and antiseptic. It wasn't even that it was particularly clean in here, and, hell, stall number three was famous for its epic and indelible “Q&A with the Devil,” where many freshman learned the phrase “cocksucking blowhard” for the first time in their lives. But it smelled clean, and a bag of extra soap was kept in an unlocked metal cabinet over the dispenser.
Sighing, Buffy reached for it and dumped yet more of it onto her hands. She was truly starting to fear that she would never get this smell out of her hair, her skin, or her clothes.
Today it had come to her that her two AM patrols, as she was starting to think of them, were a luxury. Slayer strength came with the spiffy perk of only needing to sleep an hour or two a night, and as much as she never in her wildest hallucinations thought of herself as the Rambo type, being alone and in her element every night didn't suck. There was the life or death thing, and the whole having-to-crawl-in-and-out-her-window-every-night thing, but other than that, it was working out for her.
But this. This was just gross.
Today, for the first time, Merrick had called her at home, on the phone, to tell her to meet him at an abandoned building off Hazel Street, and that it had to be by midday. When she'd arrived, he'd handed her the sword she'd only recently figured out how to use, and told her a small group of S'yunradoodle-whatsitz were performing some kind of evil ritual, and if she didn't stop them, by nightfall twenty more would come and break into a local mortuary to start foraging for dead people.
She had felt the only rational response to that was “ew.” He had felt it was to go in with the sword, alone, and begin hacking off heads. There were four of them, and only one of Buffy. This didn't seem to concern Merrick very much, and before she could ask if this was how the last Slayer died, he had departed to watch her storm the gates from the safety of a bus stop across the street.
And so she, his dutiful Slayer monkey, had burst through a window in a dramatic shower of glass and old wood, to find four disgusting sludgeballs of sludge with beady little eyes and these tiny hands chanting around a circle of red dust and several colorful pieces of rock. She'd been stunned for a moment, as had they. The thought that these things inhabited the same planet as she did was bad enough, but then that they also, what, absorbed dead people too? What was this? What was her life becoming? Why had she cut class to do this? And how had no one noticed these things crawling in here?
After Slayer and Slayees had recovered from their mutual surprise at finding each other, fighting ensued. The things were about as agile as they looked, but their skin had been tougher than rawhide. She was exhausted by the time she'd cut the last one down, feeling both exceptionally undertrained and exceptionally underappreciated.
Merrick had met her outside, still worried, still clad in his ugly suit and uglier tie. She'd confronted him about his literal interpretation of the word “Watcher.” He'd replied that just as slaying was the Slayer's burden, watching was the Watcher's.
A joke, possibly his first since that fateful day slightly less than three weeks ago when they'd first met. He was making a joke while she was covered in the gooky blood of Cyan Whatsies.
Too disgusted for words, she'd gone to his car, grabbed the towel he'd at least been thoughtful enough to bring for her, and scrubbed the worst of the yuck off. Twenty minutes later, here she was in the school bathroom, knowing even as she stood there she was missing the start of her last class of the day.
She looked up at herself, at her long, blonde hair that had been pulled back into a pony tail. Scowling, she slipped off her hairband and let it loose, then scrubbed off a little patch of green on her cheek.
She had a feeling this was only the start. Merrick had been keeping her on hold for training. Patrols were like...applied training to him, no matter how close the calls were. But now he'd decided she was ready for the next step, to fully fulfill her destiny as the cork of Hell's bottle right here in the City of Angels.
She froze suddenly, the cogs in her brain mulling over one word: training. Training, training, Wednesday afternoons, last class.
Shit!
She hurriedly washed the borax off her hands, then bolted out the door. The halls were deserted as she ran down them and skidded to a stop beside her locker. The insane desire to just rip open her door with Slayer strength came to mind, but she pushed it away, hurriedly entering the combination and grabbing her little bag. She didn't have time to change, and she wasn't even entirely sure what time it was, but showing up had to count for something.
She tore down the hallway, her stylish yet practical sneakers making sharp clip! clap! sounds that echoed off the walls. It occurred to her as she rounded a bend and rushed down another corridor that she hadn't bothered applying much make-up this morning after she'd gotten Merrick's call, and her hair was messy from her fight. She was wearing long pants, a halter, and a half-zipped hoodie to hide the stains from the demons' blood.
Dear god, all she needed was some spandex and a pair of high tops and she would be one of those people she mocked.
She had just looped her hair back into a pony tail when she reached the gym, and she opened the door a crack to slip inside.
Exercise music was blasting from a boombox sitting on the bleachers as the squad went about its practiced motions. On the far right was Tina, who barked at Carrie to keep in line. She spotted Buffy.
“Buffy!” she shouted over the music, and everyone stopped, but she turned back to them, “Don't all stop, jeez!”
Buffy stood there meekly as Tina walked up, feeling like one of those girls who'd been caught trying to covertly slip into English after they'd been sucking face in the bathroom for the first ten minutes of the period.
“You're twenty minutes late,” Tina said by way of greeting, looking irritated. “And...what are you wearing?”
She shifted, “I'm sorry.”
“For your outfit?”
“For being late.”
She sniffed, “You should be sorry for both.”
Buffy felt a surge of annoyance, but she swallowed it. “And I am. Look, I'll go change, be back in five.” She gestured with her bag in the direction of the locker rooms.
Tina eyed her. She was captain of the junior varsity league, and general knowledge was that she wanted desperately to captain varsity. She had as little tolerance for team discordance as she did peanuts, which she was deathly allergic to.
“Fine,” she said after several extended beats.
Buffy nodded, relieved, then headed for the locker rooms. Tisha caught her eye as she passed, mouthing a silent 'What?', but Buffy shook her head.
The music muffled as the locker room door slid shut behind her, and she quickly stripped, feeling out of sorts. Cheering had been her life freshman year. It was where she had made all her friends, met all her boys. She'd had her new life less than a month, and already it was encroaching.
She paused, spotting several large, blotchy bruises on her arms and side where she'd been thrown against a wall. She felt immediately thankful that as short as the skirt was, the cheering costume had long arms, and all her marks would be covered. Coming up with a plausible story for her lateness was going to be difficult enough, but trying to explain those would've been another matter entirely.
Leaving her bag where it was, she quickly adjusted her hair in a mirror, grabbed her pompoms, and slipped back into the gym to take her place on the mid-left side. Monsters and demons were her night job, and she'd be damned if she was going to lose her day job to it.
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