FIC: Hide and Seek (Buffybot/Fred, PG)
TITLE: Hide and Seek
RATING: PG
FANDOM: BtVS/AtS
PAIRING: Buffybot/Fred
SPOILERS: Post-“Chosen,” S5 AtS
SUMMARY: Maybe Fred was always a cave dweller at heart, and Pylea had nothing to do with it.
PROMPT: For the femslash_minis Round 34, in response to brutti_ma_buoni, who requested scientific curiosity, a Pylea reference, and isolation.
Maybe Fred was always a cave dweller at heart, and Pylea had nothing to do with it. When she was a child, she loved hide and seek: folding herself up, silent and invisible, into cabinets, beneath beds, in the soft forest of her parents’ closet. In college it was libraries; in Pylea, actual caves. And now, at Wolfram and Hart, Fred felt most at home in her big stainless steel cathedral of a lab. There’s something about being cloistered that makes you feel not so alone.
Not that she was alone. Not exactly.
“We’re doing science!” the Buffybot said, swinging her shapely, caramel-colored legs. Her plump bottom, sausage-encased in a hot pink miniskirt, bounced atop the brushed steel examination table. Fred had learned not to tell her to be still; the Bot took things literally, and the last time Fred asked her not to move, she froze so completely she had to be rebooted.
“That’s right,” Fred said.
Fred adjusted her electrodes, and squinted to read the Ohmmeter. A thought struck her, and she looked up from the device. The Buffybot was watching her with wide, sparkling, Disney princess eyes.
“Do you know about science?” Fred asked.
The Buffybot preened, pleased to be engaged in conversation. “Of course! I’m made of science!”
“What do you know about science?”
“I know that electricity is made by electrons flowing in a current, and that Kirk is the best captain ever, and about the birds and the bees!”
Fred raised an eyebrow. “The birds and the bees?”
To her surprise, the Buffybot leapt from the exam table, and burst into song.
“Birds do it! Bees do it! Let’s do it! Let’s-”
“I get it,” Fred said. “Get back on the table.”
The Bot complied, but the ever-present cheer slid from her face.
“And I know that I can’t,” the Bot said.
“Can’t what?” Fred asked, reattaching the electrodes the Buffybot’s song and dance number knocked asunder.
“I can’t fall in love,” the Buffybot said. “Willow told me, when she was reprogramming me to be Super Fighter Buffy. It’s just made up in my programming. It’s not real.” Her bright eyes fell to her lap, her fingers bothering the hem of her skirt. “Because I’m not real.” The Buffybot’s bottom lip trembled. “I wish I could cry. The Other Buffy says crying makes you feel better. But only real people can cry.”
Fred turned off the Ohmmeter. She studied the Buffybot’s lovely, sad face, and she placed her hand over the Bot’s hand. It was just plastic and wires, but it was warm, and soft. It felt real.
“You know,” Fred said, “even for real people, love isn’t really real. It’s just a bunch of electrical and chemical impulses in the brain.”
The Buffybot sniffled, and looked up at Fred, her eyes wide with hope. “Really?”
“Really. So I bet you could. Fall in love. Really. Just like real people do.” And Fred realized, as the words left her mouth, that she believed them.
The Buffybot smiled. If this wasn’t real life, her smile would have summoned tweeting birds and small woodland creatures to come frolic around her.
Of course, if this wasn’t real life, what happened next would not have happened. If instead it was some fairytale or children’s movie, the Buffybot probably would have been swept off by Prince Charming. She would not have jumped up from the table again, and embraced Fred, and pressed her sticky sweet, surprisingly-indistinguishable-from-human lips against Fred’s.
But this was not a fairytale, and for a moment Fred was lost in sensation, in the comfortable contact of the Buffybot’s arms around her, her lips on hers, the comfort of being holed up all alone with someone else, for a change.