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

[want_take_have]

She doesn't want to care. Coming home from the draft had left her bruised and exhausted and--not that she wanted to admit it--angry...because what was the point of caring and playing the hero if you were just gonna lose? As good as it had felt to be active and fighting again, the added complexity of the infested had taken their emotional toll. All Faith wanted right now was to sleep.

...But after ignoring the entry for a few hours, it keeps gnawing at her. So, finally, she throws on a jacket and slumps down to Good Spirits. When she steps inside, she makes her way straight to the bar, sinking onto one of the barstools as she sought to catch Buffy's eye.

"Yo."

[herotypical]

By now, Buffy has reclaimed more of her core solidity: that dependable aloofness that many mistook for detached superiority but which was, in fact, her single lifeline. Hanging on. Rise above. The older Slayer had just finished slinging back a weak-sauced screwdriver and was rinsing out the glass when she glanced up to see her erstwhile protégé and then her gridlocked enemy and now her...what?

Uneasy ally? Her disquieting coworker? Or was trying to label the no man's land between Buffy and Faith a little like tilting at windmills? Best to simply let it stretch on and cross it only when necessary. With a slight narrowing of her eyes, Buffy realized that Faith might consider this to be one of those necessaries. That entrance had been so decisive. Intentional.

So -- Buffy had to ask herself -- was this appearance prompted by her announcement?

"You made it back in one piece," she said in a voice devoid of either disappointment or relief. Deep down in her roots, of course, Buffy was glad the other Slayer had survived. The whole affair had involved far too much death already.

[want_take_have]

"Hey, you know how it is. Nothin' like a taste of horror and destruction to make you remember why you don't miss home."

Which was a lie, through and through, but it seemed like the thing to say.

"I see you're still kickin', too."

[herotypical]

"Yay me."

The surface, of course, gleamed. Impeccably tidy hair and subtle make-up. Every fold of her fashionable top artfully decided upon. Even her eyebrows seemed altogether too professionally cared for in the wake of so much war. But Buffy found it almost calming to control her physical presence down to every last detail. It made for a depressing truth: she was always at her most polished when her soul was at its most ravaged. Multiply that fact against how often she looked so polished, and..

No. Buffy didn't feel like she was kicking at all.

"It was bad out there. Worse than under the sch--" And she stopped. Faith hadn't reached that fight, yet. And that reminds her that Faith had patrolled plenty but hadn't done the outright war thing. Not yet. She didn't do it until they fought at each other's sides again.

"H-how did it go?" Swallowing her pride, she asked about Faith's time.