herotypical | 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

You mean they like to hug people? Maybe I'd get along with them! But how come vegan sounds different from vegetarian?

Let's...put it this way. Do you eat cheese? Drink milk?

Sometimes. Those things don't cost animals their lives, so they're allowed in moderation.

Well. Vegans don't partake in any of it -- moderately or not. That's the difference.

Oh. Do you think they'd still like me?

I don't know how anyone couldn't. Like you, I mean.

You'd be surprised. But thanks. It's a nice thing to think.

...Come on. You must make much with the friendlies around here, at least.

Oh, definitely. I've made lots of friends here! But it's still not like everyone likes me.

But you're so...likeable.

Thanks! But I guess, at home... there's a lot of people who run on hate. A lot of people in the Fire Nation, they didn't seem to want friends at all or to reason with people. I was just the Avatar to them, a hope to the people they were trying to conquer who they had to stop. It's hard to make friends here, too, sometimes. I guess lots of people... they've been hurt a lot, so it's hard for them to trust others. Even though I like to tell the truth.

Well? I do like you -- but I still gotta tell you that just telling the truth doesn't make a guy trustworthy. Sometimes, it can be just the opposite.

I'm glad for that. But... Really? Isn't it better to be honest?

Dunno. Sometimes? Honesty can be pretty brutal.

[ or inconvenient. ]

I guess it can. If you have to tell people... bad things, I guess.

...Or things they're not ready to hear. Bad or not.

Yeah. The truth can hurt. I wasn't supposed to learn about being the Avatar until I was older. I'm not even that age yet. And all of us here... we shouldn't know our futures yet.

What age should you have been? When you learned?

Sixteen. Maybe I'd be able to take it better then.

I'm...not so sure. I think everything tends to feel more dire at sixteen.

Something to do with hormones.

Really? What age do... Slayers usually find out?

It depends...it depends on when the one before her kicks the bucket, Aang. But I was fifteen.

Oh. [His voice drops a little at that. Sounds like it would be as if he was a normal airbender until the moment Roku died. At least he had the monks subtly trying to guide him before he knew. Buffy couldn't have had any kind of preparation like that...] Would you like to have found out at a different age instead?

I dunno. Maybe? Some days, I think it'd be better if I never found out. And others I wonder if I could have done more good if I'd found out earlier. But it all worked out for the...for the okay, I suppose. If not the better.

I see. I understand a lot of that. Except I don't think I should've found out younger. I didn't want to be the Avatar at first. But now that I've actually lived through all this as the Avatar... It is what I am. I can't turn away from it without turning back on all the good I was able to do. Even with... with everyone I let down. I still was able to do good for the world. And it sounds like you did, too, Buffy.

[Voice]

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: [Voice]

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