Became

Became
post-Chosen
100 words from everyone on the school bus



Originally Faith wanted to be a rock star.

Now, okay, she’s on a road trip, and that squirmy kid in the front of the bus sorta acts like a groupie, but no way is Faith the main attraction on this tour. The only drugs being passed around are aspirin and Novocain, and Faith waves away both.

Nobody’s talking or sleeping or even goddamn breathing, feels like. Princess B sits quiet. No high-fiving or macking. No one pounding out a drum beat, humming a tune. No telling wicked stories about dark-nighted jam sessions and crazed fans.

Some Victory Tour, yo.

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Rona wishes she’d had a chance to recover from the broken arm before this.

Vi keeps shaking her, like Rona doesn’t know not to lose consciousness. When she was ten, little brother got clubbed in the head during an alley fight. Rona carried him to the hospital, watching his face the entire time, voice yelling, “Dammit! Stay with me!”

This whole thing -- the power struggle with Buffy, the tentative desire to not go back home, the injuries; none of it is new. Bad stuff happens here, bambamwhap, just like home, except without pausing for you to catch your breath.

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Andrew is hungry.

He wishes that wasn’t his primary concern, because, um, Spike is dead, and Andrew thought Spike and he could’ve been okay friends, maybe a little sharing of The Coat, and Anya is dead, killed right in front of him, courageous to her bitter end, and Andrew already misses her almost more than he misses Warren. And Jonathan, he misses Jonathan, wishes they’d never left Mexico – no, he, um, wishes they’d never killed Katrina, never even knew of The Slayer.

Sort of, in the dark recesses of his spirit, Andrew thinks Xander should punch him a few times.

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Kennedy is bursting with energy. She is uninjured, wishes the fight could’ve gone on a little longer so she could’ve thrown a few more Turok-Han into the ceiling and staked them as they fell.

Having Slayer strength is fabulous. Kennedy could pick up the bus and yell it out to everyone that she’s a hero now, they’re all heroes now, all the girls who are chosen. How can anyone stay silent with this power running through her?

Willow’s head lies against Kennedy’s shoulder, and Kennedy looks down in satisfaction. Won the fight, got the girl, saved the world – picture perfect.

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Vi is in her element – in charge and brooking no arguments. She is taking care of Rona, keeping an eye on the others, paying close attention to Mr. Wood, doing the chores. She doesn’t think that she was like this before – before the choice and the power – but it doesn’t matter. She can fight, she can help, and she will do what she can.

Vi remembers that she might have been shy before all this. She might have been self-conscious before the change. But here, now is all that counts. Life is short, she thinks sardonically, and shakes Rona again.

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Principal Wood drives the bus eastward. Blood is leaking from his stomach wound and through his bandages, but he remains at the wheel because it’s pleasant to watch the scenery change from canyon to grass to mountain. He feels oddly patriotic, strangely impressed with the beauty of the land between his two lives – New York and California. Can’t say that he’s ever thought about this country as his before.

Can’t say he’s ever thought about the Slayer mission as his before, either. He feels an affinity with the Slayers – not merely the mission, or their mission: it’s his mission, too.

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Dawn tastes guilt in her mouth, and she can’t swallow it away because of the mass of tears in her throat. The similarity of Spike’s sacrifice to Buffy’s jump two years ago hit her about twenty minutes ago. Someone with a soul, but more than human – that could mean a Key. Her sister died and then spent a year in misery after being brought back, because of Dawn; now her surrogate older brother is at the bottom of a crater, which might be instead of her, too.

She is evil, she knows it, to have caused death to another hero.

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Willow can’t believe that worked, the whole spell thing with the tapping into the essence of the Slayer. Right now she feels more exhausted than she did when she brought Buffy back; but the elation in having done well beckons to her and Willow basks in it, drinks it in and smiles a little. Super Willow has finally done something right in all her years of practicing the black arts – and it wasn’t even black. She feels a pang in the place in her heart where Tara lives, the place that expanded during the spell.

Willow whispers, “We did it.”

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Giles wants a lot of good scotch. Immediately. It pains him to think of Cleveland – to which, naturally, most of the group must assume they are headed – and all that lies in wait.

He thinks of the day he met his slayer, expecting a docile, manageable charge; instead getting an earful from a strange girl with a stranger name: Buffy. Oh, how much has happened since that day in the library . . . how much has changed even since this morning.

And Giles acknowledges that she has surpassed him, accepts this finality with quiet nostalgia and a father’s love.

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Xander wants to cry, but doesn’t understand the logistics– he can’t recall if his left eye’s tear ducts still work – and is afraid of the saltiness of tears getting into the wound. He wishes for the apocalypses in the days of old, when they did go miniature golfing afterward, when Anya pointed out that post-apocalyptic sex was bound to be even better than make-up sex, when Buffy didn’t sit alone after defeating the evil.

He’s willing to be the manly shoulder for his girls to cry on; that is, if his girls weren’t either dead or no longer really his.

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Buffy can’t take everything in. Contradicting feelings race through her blood: joy, dread, grief, understanding, loss, forgiveness, and most of all, peacefulness. She hasn’t felt at peace before, and the realization of the feeling, the gradual understanding of her contentment, is hard to fathom.

She knows that she still has the usual Buffy problems, but somehow everything is now okay. It’s as if the sun rose this morning, and Buffy sat alone, watching the rays lick the horizon and spread toward her.

But instead of stopping at her side as it always did, the light continued on and became brighter.

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I wrote that awhile ago: July 12, 2003. bandgeek reminded me of it when she asked for her FL to rec their own fics. Well, here it is, once more. I thought that I had put that in my memories, but I guess not. Took me some time to find again. I have all these other drabbles hiding in the land of Back-Dated Entries, too. Someday I'll go through and put them all nice and neat into my Memories; or not, because several of them suck.

So, Jingle, there ya go.