It's 3:30 in the morning.
I have class at 7:30. And what am I doing? Posting yet another ficlet. The muse has STRUCK, in the rare but coveted-by-me Scoobie Lovin' form.
Title: List
Timing: A couple weeks post-Chosen (not related to any of my other fics)
Summary: It's finally come to writing it down.
She’s sick, sick to her stomach because it’s finally come to actually making the list.
She can’t shake the stupid feeling that nothing is quite right, that everybody’s this terrible hollow shell and only sticking around because they’ve been through too much to split up now. They’re different, she’s different, and it’s not a good different, either. Winning the world isn’t enough to smooth it over, to keep her from wanting to snap at them for stupid things like the way Willow gnaws on her pens.
Ok, then, she’ll start there. “Willow,” she writes, and even her handwriting is different. She presses the pen too hard now and all the letters are thick and stark. She dots the i with a heart, just for spite.
“Stuck around even after her fish got killed.
Gave up Harvard just to stay with me.
Skipped class to save Dawn.”
Buffy stares at the page. That can’t be it. There has to be something more, something now. Something out of the last couple of years. It’s stupidly hard to find, buried underneath a big gunky pile of anger about that whole “Survivor: Revello Drive” thing. But she was good to Dawn when Buffy couldn’t be, and she always cooked and wrangled the junior slayers and sometimes she’d stand just inside the porch door when Buffy was out there and it felt good to know she was hovering, and that she had the sense to hover and not barge right in and start a talk. Crap. She should be writing this down.
“Xander.” There. That looks more like handwriting’s supposed to. That’s a little easier, for some reason. Maybe because you can’t look at him and not see the loyalty, the love, the eyepatch. All that and he was still here, right down to the last second. Still here now. Anya might have been strange and a little mean, but she was his, even after the not-wedding. And yet there he was, one-eyed Xander, making cracks about “Diehard: Back with a Vengenace (Demon)” and slipping country mix cds under her door. Xander. What could you even say? She’d stolen a lot from him, starting right at the beginning with his second-best buddy and ending with the love of his life. Yeah, Buffy, way to inspire loyalty. But Xander… he inspired himself.
Stupid itching eyes. Must be a lot of dust in here to make them so runny. Maybe if she just scootched to the left a little…
Giles. He’d left. A hard breath, sucked in almost against her will. He’d left, yeah, but it only hurt so much because he’d done so much, been so much and… it was almost too painful to think about it. He was Giles. That kinda covers it.
She yanked the page out of her notebook, crumpled it and stuffed it in a pocket. I’ll see your “kinda” and raise you a “definitely.” The sick feeling? Long gone. But she must be allergic to that stupid dust.
Title: List
Timing: A couple weeks post-Chosen (not related to any of my other fics)
Summary: It's finally come to writing it down.
She’s sick, sick to her stomach because it’s finally come to actually making the list.
She can’t shake the stupid feeling that nothing is quite right, that everybody’s this terrible hollow shell and only sticking around because they’ve been through too much to split up now. They’re different, she’s different, and it’s not a good different, either. Winning the world isn’t enough to smooth it over, to keep her from wanting to snap at them for stupid things like the way Willow gnaws on her pens.
Ok, then, she’ll start there. “Willow,” she writes, and even her handwriting is different. She presses the pen too hard now and all the letters are thick and stark. She dots the i with a heart, just for spite.
“Stuck around even after her fish got killed.
Gave up Harvard just to stay with me.
Skipped class to save Dawn.”
Buffy stares at the page. That can’t be it. There has to be something more, something now. Something out of the last couple of years. It’s stupidly hard to find, buried underneath a big gunky pile of anger about that whole “Survivor: Revello Drive” thing. But she was good to Dawn when Buffy couldn’t be, and she always cooked and wrangled the junior slayers and sometimes she’d stand just inside the porch door when Buffy was out there and it felt good to know she was hovering, and that she had the sense to hover and not barge right in and start a talk. Crap. She should be writing this down.
“Xander.” There. That looks more like handwriting’s supposed to. That’s a little easier, for some reason. Maybe because you can’t look at him and not see the loyalty, the love, the eyepatch. All that and he was still here, right down to the last second. Still here now. Anya might have been strange and a little mean, but she was his, even after the not-wedding. And yet there he was, one-eyed Xander, making cracks about “Diehard: Back with a Vengenace (Demon)” and slipping country mix cds under her door. Xander. What could you even say? She’d stolen a lot from him, starting right at the beginning with his second-best buddy and ending with the love of his life. Yeah, Buffy, way to inspire loyalty. But Xander… he inspired himself.
Stupid itching eyes. Must be a lot of dust in here to make them so runny. Maybe if she just scootched to the left a little…
Giles. He’d left. A hard breath, sucked in almost against her will. He’d left, yeah, but it only hurt so much because he’d done so much, been so much and… it was almost too painful to think about it. He was Giles. That kinda covers it.
She yanked the page out of her notebook, crumpled it and stuffed it in a pocket. I’ll see your “kinda” and raise you a “definitely.” The sick feeling? Long gone. But she must be allergic to that stupid dust.