Chapter One
Buffy sighed for what she felt was the millionth time in the last six months. The problem was that she had been locked up in this place for far too long and she was beginning to think being here much longer was actually going to make her crazy.
Six months ago she had burned down the school gym on prom night, lost her watcher, killed lots of vampires and lost a bunch of friends as well.
Being only a sixteen year old girl she had been scared, so to try and explain her sporadic and what some might describe as violent behaviour she had gone to the two people she was supposed to be able to trust most in this world and told them about being the slayer and vampires.
Her parents, not being in the most positive frame of mind at that point in time (they had been fighting so much) had panicked and placed their only daughter into a mental institution.
Buffy realising that she couldn't trust anyone with the information about being the slayer stopped talking about it and told the psychologists that she had made it all up in a bid for attention.
Unfortunately the doctors thought that the attention seeking was the root of a much larger more disturbing condition and asked her parents if they could keep her in for a few weeks for treatment. The problem was that few weeks turned in to a month and the month turned into several and was still waiting to be released.
Buffy had pleaded with her parents to let her out that she wasn't crazy but the doctors had somehow convinced then that she was.
It didn't take Buffy long to realise the doctors wanted to keep her in this place. After her first few days she had tried to escape, it had taken six security staff and a bunch of tranquilizers to subdue her. She was guessing this was how the doctors first found out about her high pain threshold as well as her high resistance to drugs, medication and electrotherapy.
So every third day since she had been here Buffy had endured some form of experimental treatment, some of the sessions left her shaking for days others left her unconscious, but the worst part was, by the time her body recovered, before she had a chance to attempt escape she was taken in for another session.
For the first three months her parents had visited every second day, each of those times she had pleaded with them to let her out.
After those first three months her father stopped visiting altogether saying he was unable to see her unwilling to help herself get better. Her mother still visited every few days but Buffy found it hard to respond to her anymore. All the trust they had built over her childhood and into her early teens was slowly evaporating and Buffy found it hard to even talk to her now, she felt betrayed and no matter how hard she tried she wasn't sure she could ever forgive them for what had been happening to her these last six months.
While her position was pretty bleak, Buffy wasn't someone to give in and give up, she was trying to bide her time and was looking for the opportunity to escape, she was determined not to stay in this place forever. One of the main reasons was that being the slayer apart of her was craving to hunt, to fulfil its calling, and she wasn't sure how much longer it was going to be before she lost control and lashed out at whatever tried to harm her.
On the plus side not everything about her stay in the mental institute had been bad, she had learned a lot about herself in that six months, she realised she was much stronger , more independent and patient than she realised she ever could be. She had also learned a lot about her abilities as the slayer, the tests they performed taught her to listen to her body, to know when it was in pain, needed rest, when she should eat, and more than anything that she could go on even when she didn't think she could take anymore abuse.
So Buffy was waiting for an opportunity to arise that would allow for her escape, and for the first time in six months some luck was about to come her way.