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

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

[ 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. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hah. Fair enough, eh?

The pirate you're thinking of is Jack Sparrow, correct?

His reputation tends to precede him, yeah.

[Wry grin.] He worked with an old ex-nakama of mine while he was here. We both agreed in hoping if his Blackbeard ever met mine they'd somehow destroy each each other.

[He rolls his shoulders though. Forgiveness? It's not something Marco does. Jack was hardly one of the ones Blackbeard used to kill his father, but he still can't help thinking he's an idiot for thinking he could dupe Teach. Then again... that's what Teach's strength was. He conned everyone. Marco, Whitebeard, the whole crew, the whole world. Everyone always thought Blackbeard was weaker than he was. Unambitious, stupid, lazy, easily used for personal gain. Until suddenly, he wasn't. But anyone who thought they could use Blackbeard or trust him anywhere near them after what he did to Thatch, after what he did to their crew, deserved worse than even what Blackbeard would do.]

[Marco waves a hand to shake away the dark thoughts.]

Jack's sort of an anomaly when it comes to what I know of pirates. I've seen a lot of pirates come and go over the last few decades, several eras change the shape of the world, and the men involved; but Jack is a puzzle piece I do not get.

He's not that tough to puzzle out with a bit of time and...well -- patience.

[ it's a lie, of course. buffy has spent years learning jack sparrow. still learning. ] He's anomaly when it comes to people. Not just pirates.

[A small laugh.] I'll believe you on the latter part at any rate.

I'm not that patient outside of my family, but we'll see. He's certainly interesting anyway, could be worth it.

Hmm. Maybe I'm biased, now -- but I've found that he is.

Worth it, I mean.

[Congratulations, you now have a phoenix shipping you. I'm sure this is totally a dream come true of some kind.]

That's good! [See this face? Totally shipping.] How long have you known him?

Since the day he arrived. Nearly three years. [ a deep breath. ] Dating for nearly two.

God, has it really been so long?

Wow. You've been here a long time then, eh?

[He's got to think about it for a bit. Didn't Jack say it was hard to meet or date girls in Luceti? Eh, maybe they were fighting at the time or something.]

Almost four, for myself. I had a year on him when he showed up.

Wow.

So this game; anywhere but here you play a lot then?

Me and Will did, yeah. Especially in high school. Because who wants to ever be there when they could be anywhere else?

I'll take your word on it. Pirate and all that, I didn't get any formal schooling. Such things tend to only be for rich or nobility. Sabo and Vivi don't seem to like it though.

The school part wasn't the worst. But the school-being-on-a-Hellmouth part?

Eh.

Hellmouth being where all the vampires come from, or something else?

More like the vampires are drawn to it.

That sounds unpleasant. So I guess that's why you had to move there, eh? What about Scotland?

Scotland was more about practicality. [ she waves her hand. ] But I'm guessing that -- in comparison -- you're more of a nomadic kinda guy. Right? After all -- pirate.

A little. As far as most pirates go, I probably traveled a bit less than most of them, eh?

My Pops was a pirate emperor so we protected his islands and mostly did a lot of business traveling between them rather than trying to explore the whole world.

Pirate...emperor. See -- that's what I don't get. Pirate royalty. That's so backwards.

[Laughs.] Because you're thinking it's like other forms of royalty. Pirates can't be ordered about by anyone they don't respect. That's why mutinies are rare, because if you don't respect a captain, he can't really make you join his crew in the first place, eh?

[So hypothetically you could be really overly trusting as a captain and get a whole crew of Blackbeards, but that would be... odd as heck.]

"Pirate Emperor" was an honorary title that came about from the other people. Pops and the others didn't start off trying to be a pirate emperor or anything. They just got called that when they were so strong they'd carved out their own territories to defend. It's like the bounty names, you don't get to pick those either, the marines or whoever just decide to give one they think is clever and explains a little about how dangerous you are, eh?

Even Gol D. Roger didn't want to be called the Pirate King. Especially since they started calling him Gold Roger. He wasn't trying to be a pirate king, he was just trying to make it to the end of the world before he died, eh? But he did the impossible, so they started calling him that. Ultimate pirate and all that.

Sparrow's a Pirate Lord. [ she confesses. admits. explains. she's still fuzzy on how it works. ] And Liz's the king. But it's all very...

I'm not convinced they base any of it on respect. Not really. Not at the heart of things.

He's mentioned his father before.

Maybe not, but pirate respect can take on many forms. Even my father's enemies respected him as the world's strongest. They wanted him dead because of it, but it was still an odd form of respect, eh.

His father...

[ buffy has never met the man. not truly. not outside of shift shake-ups. but she felt as though she knew as much as she needed to know. ] It's not hereditary. I don't think. It's not like Jack's dad was the lord and he..

[ but does she know that for certain? not really. all she did know was: ] Teague. He...keeps the code.

Right.

We don't have so much of a code in my world. Traditions, you know, paying Davy Jones a tithe if you play Davy Back, things like that.

But most of the stuff everyone's expected to know we made up ourselves and enforced ourselves. [Points to the tattoo on his chest.] Like everyone knows not to mess with this....

[Shakes his head. Foodvalten already fell in his time, and the more the Straw Hats come back, the more he learns about the other islands falling.] Or rather, they used to.

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