FIC: we ain't kids no more (BtVS, Buffy gen, PG-13)
TITLE: we ain’t kids no more
RATING: PG-13
FANDOMS: BtVS
CHARACTER: Buffy Summers
SUMMARY: Buffy comes to Cleveland. Set in the Wishverse.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for the buffy_genfic AU round for mierke who requested Wishverse Buffy before she comes to Sunnydale with the prompts Watcher, scar, and swordand without Buffy dying. Title from Adele’s song “Send My Love”.
Buffy's mother dries flowers. She takes wilted blooms and hangs them upside down until all the moisture is gone and they are dry and skeletal, their beauty forever frozen, as integral as their death.
***
Merrick died the night of the fire. Buffy doesn't know whether there was a funeral; first there were the police and then the doctors, and then Buffy wakes up in the unit one morning and it's been two weeks. They release her to her mother's custody, and before Buffy can find out about Merrick, her mother takes her home to where the boxes are all packed and says, “We're going to Cleveland and your father's not coming with us.”
***
Maybe they think she died in the fire, Buffy thinks, or that she's still locked up. Buffy waits, but a new Watcher doesn't come.
Buffy's mother places her hands on Buffy's shoulders as Buffy stands at the mirror fussing with the hem of her dress.
“This place is going to be different,” Joyce says. “A new start.”
Buffy doesn't hunt. She stays in the empty house, hiding among the towers of cardboard boxes. She fits herself into the shadows between the boxes, disappears.
She is walking home from buying milk at the corner store when she feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She turns just in time to see the vampire lunge at her, teeth bared, eyes yellow in the low light. It's like falling back in step to a dance you once knew; she doesn’t think, but finds her fist cracking against his cheek and her knee sinking into his gut. She isn't carrying a weapon, but that doesn't matter; she snaps a branch from a tree and buries it in his heart. Buffy dusts the ash off her jacket, collects the milk, and walks home.
Her mother works late and doesn't notice the bruise on Buffy's forehead or the tear in her jeans. After Buffy puts the milk away, she opens her hope chest. She pulls aside the scrapbooks and lacy dresses until she finds the false bottom. She pulls it up and looks at her armory. She runs her fingers over the stakes and knives, the crosses and the little bottles of holy water. It feels familiar, but also frightening. Buffy remembers the cinders choking her, the heat of the fire on her face as the gym came falling down around her. She returns the false bottom and piles her keepsakes atop it.
***
School starts. Buffy is going to buckle down. A new start.
Kakistos happens. She has been patrolling off and on, a few hours a week. Cleveland is boring for awhile--just your run of the mill bloodsuckers. And then one day Buffy's mother is reading the paper and the front page headline is about schoolchildren ripped apart.
Buffy has a sword in her closet hidden in a garment bag behind the dress she wore to the winter formal at her last school. She goes hunting.
“Slayer,” Kakistos says, looming above her. “I came for you.”
He dislocates her shoulder, breaks open her face. She leaves with a nasty wound and Kakistos impaled on her sword. When she gets home, she mops up the blood obscuring her vision and then looks at her torn face in the mirror in her bedroom. It leaves a horrible scar. She was so pretty once.
She has no friends at school. People whisper about the girl who burned her school down, the girl from the loony bin. She finds a drawing of herself in a bathroom stall with crazy eyes and a stake in her hand. At night she patrols around the school. She saves a cheerleader from a vamp, and the next day overhears the girl telling her friends thatBuffy Summers has friends on PCP.
Buffy puts away her pretty dresses, her pretty nail polishes, her pretty makeup. Blush and pink lipstick just accentuate the scar, so she rims her eyes black, like that will hide it. Buffy braids her hair down her back; it's more utilitarian. She has trouble remembering how she justified wearing all that long, pretty hair loose. She's lucky a monster didn't pull it taut in its claw, snap her neck.
Buffy's mother hangs dried flowers in Buffy's bedroom. They appear as if blooming on their own; sometimes Buffy doesn't see Joyce for days at a time. She's said something about therapy, and after that Buffy shuts her ears to her.
Buffy paws into her hope chest, collects crosses and stakes, the wood smooth and familiar in her hands. She goes a couple times a week to the church for holy water. The priest asks her to stay for service, but she never does.
Eventuality, the Council catches on, remembers her finally. Watchers come for her. The first two don't last a month. The third finally sticks, but Buffy doesn't need him. She doesn't need anybody. He tells her one night of a master vampire in California. She packs her duffel with her stakes and her sword, and thinks of those California girls, tanned and beautiful in their short skirts and cute hair and pretty makeup. Buffy rims her eyes with black, ties up her boots. She lingers in her room for a moment, her fingers hesitating on the light switch. There are dozens of dried flowers tacked up on her wall, and they are the last things she sees before she turns out the light.