Hey there! Here's a new AU Buffy ficlet I was inspired to write one day. I was watching this video titled "Lindsay Lohan on Learning to Pole Dance" on YouTube, and I was instantly prompted to write a ficlet where Buffy Summers is working in a gentleman's club (although not as a server or waitress, of course).

Then, I got some more awesome ideas for my "Buffy as a pole dancer" fic when I was reading this really neat AU all-human fic where Buffy works as an exotic dancer (in order to earn money so she can buy groceries and pay for her mother Joyce's visits to the doctor), and Spike is a lawyer. It's titled Siren's Song, and it's written by Seredipity on ff dot net. Plus, I suggest reading it, too, so that all you BtVS fans out there will be inspired to write your own fanfics, especially those with the prompts "Buffy", "exotic dancer" and "gentleman's club".

Anyway, I hope you like reading this as much as I did writing it. :)

Disclaimer: Genius Joss Whedon owns Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I own the fanfics I cook up from time to time.

In a Gilded Cage

Music pulsed through the club. The T-shaped stage was mostly lit up by crimson-colored lights. Her green eyes examining the entire club, twenty-one-year-old Buffy Summers, also known as Gypsy and wearing a beautiful white silk costume, felt butterflies in her stomach, as she usually did almost every time before she would step through the curtain and onto the stage.

In between shifts at the Cat Club (which was open to all sorts of people, and not just those who were twenty-one years old and over, but teenagers as well), Buffy would think to herself that, compared to how she felt after her dance number, the waiting to go on was definitely worse. After all, when one was nervous before doing something that was important to them (at least in Buffy's case), that was normally the time when horrible thoughts would strike like the cobras they seemed to be, with their fangs bared and eyes wide.

Buffy immediately shook her head and pulled herself back to the present mentally in order to focus on her upcoming number.

Well, here goes nothing, she thought.

Throwing her shoulders back and putting on a brave front, Buffy slowly pushed through the curtain, and then stepped over to the pole located on the right side of the stage. With that, she began her moves. First, she went for sliding the front of her body and down the pole, which made some of the men in the audience look at each other and nod; for them, that was a good start. Buffy seemed to think so too.

Then, wrapping one hand around the pole, Buffy began to walk around the pole for a few seconds. Finally, she straightened her body, wrapped her legs around the pole and swung herself around it.

After flashing the men in the audience a smile that was both sensual and sexy (which she had practiced for what seemed like hours in front of the mirror back in the dressing room before her shift), she landed perfectly on the stage – flat on her feet, of course.

She knew that tonight – Friday – was a big night. And it wasn't just big for her, either. Nope – Friday nights were also great nights for her audience as well. For them, it meant the approaching weekend, and also (every other Friday) payday for those who worked. They would usually come to the Cat Club to relax, and sometimes even watch her as she danced on the stage.

Maybe it's because they have money to burn, she thought. As that very expression flew through her head, Buffy secretly smiled to herself. For her, Friday nights meant a lot of money on the stage. More money meant large tips, and large tips, in turn, meant she was able to pay the month's rent for her apartment.

Her stage name, Gypsy, was a name she felt was unique. One reason why was because she had picked it out herself. After all, she felt that, onstage, she had the ability to entrance men, keeping their eyes focused on her, and also be tempting, seductive and alluring. Of course, she liked the sound of those words; they were pretty neat, and she had written them down in a notebook with her name on it, which she had started bringing with her every night.

In between shifts, which meant that she was on every other hour, since the girls would take turns every thirty minutes or so, Buffy would pull out a book of Greek mythology and leaf through it while sometimes watching the clock just in case the time for her shift had come already. For her part, Buffy would often do her best to arrive an hour – or sometimes two hours even – before work would start in order to get in some good, quick reading, as well as some ideas for how to improve some old dances or show off new ones. Even her boss, Jackie, had taken a liking to that, and also told her to keep up her coming to work early as well.

"I have heard it said, Buffy," he explained to her one day, "that it's better to be early than late – especially when it comes to one's job, too. I, for one, like that, and I also do my best not to be late to work myself."

Buffy felt she couldn't agree more there. After all, she had plenty of practice with getting up early in the morning, and that was partly because of her going to bed early, especially on the nights when she didn't have to work.

After her shift that night, Buffy was laughing. However, her laughter wasn't on the outside. Instead, it was deep down on the inside, where nobody else was able to sense it except her. Even after two years of working at the Cat Club, she was still unable to figure out why most of the men were so easy to fool sometimes. I don't get it. I mean, all I did was a shake there and a twist there... and bam! They were putty in my hands (although in a figurative sense and not literally, thank goodness).

After emptying the money from her robe into a bucket, she then sat down and got to work counting it to see how much she had gotten, while putting it on the dressing room table. "Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty," she began, speaking very softly while sorting through the bundles of cash. "And with the few twenties I've gotten tonight, that makes..."

She stopped and blinked. "Wow," she grinned, her smile fake only to her, while it looked real to outsiders or those who didn't know her very well. "I now have almost over five hundred and eighty dollars here."

After counting it some more, Buffy paused with a thoughtful expression for a moment, then said, "So, if I have more than five hundred and eighty dollars, then that means that I have... five hundred and ninety-five dollars, to be exact."

It was deep down, however, that Buffy knew how she really felt. She remembered the catcalls and wolf whistles from the men in the audience. Even they knew what she was, no matter how she presented herself as Gypsy while onstage.

Cheap.

Degraded.

A whore.

A slut.

A tart.

Tears threatening to rise again although she did her best to keep them at bay, Buffy shook her head and gripped the sides of the chair she was sitting on as she looked at the money on the table.

Money she had gotten by selling not only her body by taking her clothes off, but also her dignity, her looks, her beauty, and – quite possibly, her soul.

Buffy sighed as she scooped up the money and put it back into the bucket.

She's only a bird in a gilded cage...

At that moment, Buffy felt that the lyric from that very song from long ago – back in the year 1900 – was one that perfectly matched how she was feeling right now. Just like the woman in the song, Buffy felt as though she was the bird in the gilded cage (although the woman in the song was married to a rich, elderly man, while Buffy was an exotic dancer). To outsiders and the men in the audience of the Cat Club, she looked happy and seemed to be always smiling. But Buffy knew the truth – it was really all an act. A mask that she wore almost every night in order to hide her true emotions.

She wasn't really happy at all – not even with her job, even though it did pay more than a hundred dollars. In fact, she disliked it with a hot, burning passion. Apparently, when all those women who used to work as exotic dancers had spoken of being treated as objects rather than the people they were, Buffy believed they were very honest about that. She knew they had been right about that the whole time.

And now she knew how they had felt.

Happy and sad – their emotions all mixed up – all at the same time.

Well, I hope you'll give me nice feedback on this ficlet; I worked really hard on it and did my best with it as well.

Nice feedback is very much appreciated, please. :)