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

Current Music: http://youtu.be/GwhvKXczI4I

Entry tags:

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

The victory felt hollow for some reason. Jack brought his shrugged off hand to his mouth in a habitual gesture. Maybe she didn't care all that much about his rinks, as he'd thought.

No. No, she loved his rinks. She did.

She did she did she did. But she loved him, too. And somehow couldn't abide by the notion of already setting work in stone (or, in this case, ice) when he was still recovering.

"I guess," Buffy stumbled over the small talk, "it's not something we actually hafta be worrying about right now. Not yet. There are more important things."

"More important worries?"

Uh oh.

"Your healing. My spiffed up new training regimen. New Feathers'll be showing up, soon." And who would come? "I wanna give Will's...the empty room a good going over. Dusting and sweeping and new sheets."

Relief; these weren't TRULY DEADLY SERIOUS worries, then.

"Right! And all that shall come along as it always does. And us ticking smartly along in the midst of it all. No worries, sweetness. None."

Bold words from a shot-up man. But the pills were handy that way, too; they took the edge off of urgent and mundane matters alike.

"Erm....what training regimen, lass?"

"The one I just this morning decided I now need." Matter of fact. Blunt. Best not to hide her intentions, really. Because hiding anything always seemed to give her heartburn. Itchy palms. Shortness of breath. "It's been years and...well -- I used to more. Fighting and slaying every night. Kept a girl on her game.

Now..."

Flip flip flip. Oh! An old article about alternative shampoos. This should be very interesti-- "Mayonnaise?! Eugh."

Edited 2012-11-19 03:08 (UTC)

"Just this morning." It wasn't in itself a bad thing. Buffy was what she was: a slayer. Slayers were physical creatures, powerful, all gut and heart and motion. Of course they would spend a great deal of time training.

"I think you're on your game. You...you don't?"

"No. No, I don't."

She answered as smoothly as if she was ordering breakfast at Seventh Heaven. Or coffee at Sheena's shop. And then she remembered the merciful little tin of tea leaves left in her jacket pocket -- eyes sliding to the left to consider making herself a brew. Sheena had been so kind to provide this second supply. A tea for every ailment, there was. But maybe she would sleep just fine, tonight. Last night had been impossible, but...but he hadn't been here, last night.

"But you slayed Drusilla...."

Not yet knowing that the vampire was gone: "I did. Once. But that's not exactly the hottest reason to rest on my laurels, is it?"

One day -- one draft -- she might run into the General with all those powers stripped away. His and hers. It wouldn't matter then; he would overpower her. She knew that. The knowledge felt like a vital part of her. In her heartbeat and sinew.

"I've gone soft." She'd said it before -- often enough. This was the first time she well and truly meant it. "Softish. There's no harm in being the best me I can be, right? Especially...especially if the power cap keeps getting thrown around."

It might be nice to have some of her own muscle.

Edited 2012-11-19 03:35 (UTC)

"No harm at all," he replied quietly -- even wistfully. Jack liked the softer sides of Buffy Summers. He used to crave them after so much hardness. But they were, he knew, just a part of her. Just a facet.

"But I don't think being soft means you're not the best you. Is there a best Annie? You're you. You're her."

He reached up to touch her cheek. "And you'll be you when you're all old and wrinkly with no teeth. Or if you lost a leg like Sal. Or....other things."

He thought of Lorelai on the draft and almost smiled. That woman, he knew, had remained purely assuredly herself no matter what physical changes she had endured.

Still -- power caps -- Jack couldn't deny it. Those? Scary. Truly scary. The only biting fear he'd felt on any given draft or experiment or mission -- ever since the farmlands battle -- had been that Buffy Summers would lose her supernatural advantages and be at another's mercy.

And those others? Were not merciful.

A corner of her mouth twitched. It was terrible, this. The no man's land between sobs and smiles. He made her feel so uplifted and so undone all at once. Buffy tilted her cheek into his touch. All the same, she couldn't quite explain it to him. Not without explaining who she'd been back home.

He'd never had to see that Buffy Summers. She'd come to him pre-humanized, as hard as it might have been to believe. Spike had told her -- she'd lost her fight. He'd honed right straight in and saw the parts of her that were missing. She'd been found wanting. Why did that sting her so much?

"You didn't even need me out there. And it's not...It's not as though I need to be needed. No, I only need..."

She only needed to not need anyone else in turn. It wasn't about proving it to anyone else. Spike had been right about that, too. It was so self-centred. Self-indulgent.

"What could I have even done, huh? To stop you from getting shot. Nothing. With teeth or without." A sigh. "Or maybe I'd just get gold ones like you."

Never. Never in a million years.

"Me? I needed you. Needed. Wanted. Annie." He would avoid the tooth question for just now.

"And where was I?"

Already through. Already home.

Although she was very practically in bed, Buffy sat back up.

"I'm gonna make some tea. You want anything while I'm up?"

"No thanks, darling. Have your tea, eh? I'm...should sleep. Adele said lots and lots of sleep."

"Of course. I..."

Ugh. Every inch of her was jumpy and dissatisfied and hovering on the edge of a place she'd been before and didn't want to be again. Her legs swung over the edge of the bed and her bare feet touched the cold floor.

"Didn't mean to keep you up. It's probably bad enough I stole you from the clinic." Bad enough I wasn't there. "I'll let you sleep."

"Come back?" he suggested. "Drink your tea here? With me? You are the most medicinal slayer in the world, frankly."

"...I was gonna grab a few couch cushions, actually," she confessed. "But -- I'll be back. On account of you always having the most weirdly comforting compliments."

Medicinal.

"Don't you dare!"

Jack tried to prop himself more comfortably on the pillows. The pills were making him drowsy again.

"Don't you do that. You belong with me, woman."

She pushed to her feet and fished her tin of tea-leaves out of a jacket pocket. She had a very different kind of pain to dull. A different kind of drowsy.

"You won't even be awake by the time I get back!" Buffy...didn't challenge with this statement. Not really. But there was something there. Some kinda ache for conflict.

"Doesn't matter," he grunted, frowning. "Just...please?"

"O-of course."

If he wanted it? Of course. She tossed the tin in the air once. Caught it. And headed for the door. "Don't get up to too much trouble while I'm gone," she warned.

"Won't."

Unless by "trouble" she meant taking up more than his fair share of the bed. Jack slowly began to drop back into sleep, the pain numbed for the present.

(no subject)

herotypical - 2012-11-19 21:09 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only