voice + action ✪ there must be some way to bring the hero home

[herotypical]

[ after a week of agonizing combat, buffy summers returns home with only exhaustion on her mind. despite all the excitement and crisis, there's little left to do other than collapse onto her bed and fall into a sleep fit for a weary, worn-out soul. morning sees her feeling no less -- shudder -- zombieish. the horror of the last week is bone-and-marrow deep and has yet to fully make itself known in her system. the slayer is running on auxillery humanity, stringing herself along from second to second until she can find a friendly face. find willow and...

and all she finds is an empty room. an empty closet. empty drawers. her best friend is gone. deported while she wasn't even looking. come the afternoon, after she's gotten the first onslaught of emotions out of her system, buffy sits alone on the empty bed. she addresses her journal: ]

Willow and I have this game we like to play. Willow Rosenberg. She was in town...but now she's not. [ a pause allows buffy to catch her breath. to stay strong. ] We call it 'Anywhere But Here' -- self-explanatory, really. Pick a fantasty-elsewhere to be and a fantasy-someone to share it with. I'm not talking about the obvious ones: home or family or anything even remotely whiffing of responsibility. I'm talking about fun. I'm talking about pure escapism. I'm talking Daniel Craig on the beach or Amy Yip at the waterpark.

I'll go first. Show you how it's done. [ but which escape route from reality should she take? ] The '88 Winter Olympics. The Saddledome. Calgary, of all places. Brian Boitano is taking the time to personally skate me through his gold medal routine. Perhaps there's hot chocolate involved. I, being made entirely of my own imagination, copy each move perfectly.

Got it? Good. Because now it's your turn.

[ when her broken little tribute to an absent friend is finished, she'll be searching out her injured pirate (wherever he may be convalescing) and it's off to good spirits, where she can be found working a shift behind the bar. ]

Comments

[herotypical]

She reached for that coat, now. Shaking it out.

"We'll just have to share the goodies at home, instead."

[all7seas]

"Mmmm? Eh? Goodies?"

He eased into the garment.

[herotypical]

"Candied apples."

Gently, she gathered his mane of hair and eased it out from under the jacket's collar.

[all7seas]

"Mmmmmm. Because you love me."

Eat your heart out, Hector Barbossa -- wherever you were.

[herotypical]

"Because Ikki -- Katara's granddaughter? -- was offering them and I was too polite to say no."

Because I love you, you goof. She carefully turned him about and leaned upwards to kiss his cheek.

[all7seas]

"You, too polite?" Oh what a lovely kiss. "Take me home, woman."

[herotypical]

"The politest."

She followed up her kiss with a pat on that same cheek. "Am I gonna have to fight off any angry healthcare professionals to get you there?"

[all7seas]

"Adele, possibly?"

Though no healthcare professional could hold a candle to McCoy's anger on any given day.

[herotypical]

A moment of silence as Buffy thought about it.

"I could take her." She looped her arm through his good arm. "Come on, then."

[all7seas]

"Supposed to be good for me to be up an' around anyway," Jack explained. "More better."

Though it was intensely uncomfortable at this point.


"She did save my life."

[herotypical]

...Buffy's acknowledgement -- nay, her gratitude -- was grudging at best. She simply didn't like doctors. Especially not nosy ones who had made as poor a first impression as Adele had. It had taken Bones months and months for Buffy to properly warm up to him. He -- and perhaps Maturin -- were the only physicians she deigned to trust.

"Then we'll take the scenic route home," she declared as she herded him out the door. It was an easy promise to make. The scenic route and the short route were one in the same, in a village as picturesque as this.

[all7seas]

There would have to be frequent rests. At one point, Jack would take another pill; there was nothing to chase it with. He leaned heavily on the Slayer and tried to focus on Seven. On home. No more zombies; no more infection; no more victims.

[herotypical]

At one of these rest-points -- on his infamous bridge -- she left him leaning on the rail while she stepped back. Gave him a bit of space. Buffy was beginning to wonder if this had been the best idea.

"In a few days, when the dust settles? The healers will come out of the woodwork. They'll be tripping over themselves wanting to heal you. Busybodies. Y'know. They all are."

Buffy hadn't let anyone but Jack try any of Nala's arts on her own injuries during the draft before this on, but she suspected Jack would not have as many scruples. Even still, she ached for Willow's healing instead. Buffy would have gladly delivered the pirate into her care.

At least there was Bones.

"How much does it hurt?" She asked as she eyed the pill.

[all7seas]

Would Buffy even understand an answer to that kind of question?

"No worse than any other gunshot wound I've ever had. No worries, love."

Jack hunched against the bridge railing; cold sweat trickled down the back of his neck and beneath his arms. Standing upright was becoming a real challenge -- it was so much more comfortable to lean and to slump. He needed to climb back into bed. But he was a pirate: pirates were used to that sort of injury.

[herotypical]

"...What a relief," she said with no relief at all in her tone. Her head turned. She could see Seven from here. It wasn't far. Not really. And maybe she need only do a better job supporting him. A better job being there for him. A better job doing all but carrying him.

But a glimpse of red in her periphery caught her eye. Buffy started to stare at his shoulder. "Your dressings..."

Crap. She dragged a hand over her face before holding it out. Offering it. "Not long, now. I'll get you cleaned up and coagulating once again."

[all7seas]

He reached up to touch a wet shoulder, suddenly circumspect...too much so to sound as miserable as he knew he could feel. "Is it just me, sweetness, or is autumn a particularly bad season for Captain Jack Sparrow in Luceti? A man can be careful. He can be so careful, and he can know just when to run, and then..."

And then a stricken, traumatized teenage girl can turn on him and shoot him. And he would never see it coming.

"Maybe he's just losing his touch, eh?" he added softly.

[herotypical]

Him and his Slayer both, she thought -- but didn't dare say. In fact, instead of saying anything at all, she grabbed onto his blood-smudged hand and covered its redness with her palm. Hiding it from sight. Buffy never used to be this fatally troubled by blood. It had always been a thing of utter power, certainly. But she'd never feared it. Not the way she did now. Thanks to the General. Thanks to the zombies.

She drew his arm over her shoulders and settled her free hand on his opposite hip. Buffy stood straight and strong for him. She could be his body and he could be her soul, if those were the matching parts of themselves that both needed shoring up. She could accept that much mingling of an identity now that they were home and the battle was done.

Slowly, she urged him to walk once again.

[all7seas]

He had to wonder at how it was always a woman who landed a bullet in his body in the end. He'd always been careless with the female creature. Maybe that was it.

"Want to watch a motion picture with me?"

[herotypical]

"...I'd like that. I have some time to spare, pre-bar. We could set you up with a nest of pillows. Maybe a little stool for your feet."

[all7seas]

"That's coddling."

He'd love it. Absolutely love it.

[herotypical]

"Fine!" He made her smile genuinely -- at long last -- on this very not smile-worthy of days. "You get the lumpy chair. No pillows. And I'm hiding the remote. That's the anti-coddling."

[all7seas]

"So cruel, you." But obviously Jack preferred it that way. And obviously he meant exactly the opposite. "Soon enough I won't be such an anchor 'round your lovely neck, eh?"

[herotypical]

With one fluid movement, she caught another arm under his knees and swept him off his feet -- bridal-carrying him just as far as the distance from Seven's walkway to its door.

"Eh. A woman would have to be an idiot to complain about an anchor that's so very not unappealing."

Buffy Summers: an individual who wasn't not comprised almost entirely of iron and double-negatives.

[all7seas]

A lesser man would have felt his manhood lessened by this carrying.

Not Jack.

"You love how appealing I am."

[herotypical]

"...That is, I think, the whole point of being appealing. The very definition."

She fiddled with the doorknob as well as she could with a pirate in her arms. A duck here and a twist there. But -- soon enough -- the outer chill gave way to the house's warmer, well-heated ambience.

Buffy kicked the door shut behind them.