Title: "Quiet Americans"

Author: Karabair

Description: Post-"Chosen." An old face comes back for a new look at Sunnydale. Just a sliver of something -- I'm not sure what, if anything it will turn into.

Characters: Not telling.

Disclaimers: Shockingly, I am not Joss Whedon in disguise, I don't work for Mutant Enemy, but I use their creations with love.



(1/?)

It is a crater now. The emptiest thing he has ever seen, deep and wide and hungry, as empty as America. He has long ago memorized the photographs -- close up, far away, infrared, from space. He has seen the footage, backwards, forwards, and slow motion. The computer simulations, the grainy tape circulating on the Internet, stills in cheap magazines on the rack by gum and energy pills, nail files, pictures anywhere but on the evening news. He's seen the promise of them in his inbox -- Dear AOL User" "Dear Concerned Citizen" "Dear R87hKJ Fqqqrukl" -- next to badly spelled, enthusiastically punctuated promises of enlarged manhood, low-rate mortgages, naughty videos of Paris or Candee, Kimberly or Brigitte. Sometimes Buffy. "Top Sekret Sunydale footage!!!!" "WMD disaster in sunny suburbs -- See what the WHITTE HOUSE doesn't want you to KNOW!" He's worn out an index finger on the delete key. In the morning, the box is full again.

He has seen it in his dreams. Watched the tremble, the collapse, the yawning abyss, and every time he imagines the cause, at the center. He has no idea why, but every time he imagines the explosion of all the force and power and pain of a single heart, knowing that She must have been in the middle of it, facing the numbing pounding certainty of a world without Her. Only the fiercest clawing hold of the last waving strands of logic tell him that California towns don't fall into the ground for the sake of a broken heart. Not at any rate for his heart. He is only narrowly the type of man who allows himself to think such things, and he does not have a heart that takes worlds down at its breaking. His heart has been ripped and mutilated and devoured, and still it beats in his chest.

But he has come here to see the crater, to kneel by it. To rub the rocks and black charred sand between his fingers, and know the smell of it, the salt and charcoal bite of the earth against his tongue. And it isn't, after all, the hell-rotten sulfur that has woken him, every night for months, out of dreams in his lonely bed. No, he closes his eyes and picks up the sharp after scent of Sunday on a Midwestern lawn, the searing of red American meat tangled on the breeze with his brother's shout and his mother's laugh, easy like wind chimes. The touch on his arm of the first girl he laid, quickly and badly, on a shag carpet in the split-level's basement, while the frantic scales of his sister's piano practice echoed down the stairs. The air over this crater carries particles of everything Riley Finn has loved and left, everything that could never take him back even if he could bring himself to go. In the end, Sunnydale has burned clean.

Riley uses his hands to push himself upright and feels the weight of the words in his mouth. "It's a crater."

"It's a sinkhole." Graham speaks in his ear, so close that Riley stiffens but braces himself from turning, from showing surprise. The fear he feels now is stupid, so stupid, because he has known Graham Miller longer than anyone who has crossed his path in months, maybe in years, longer than he feels himself likely to know anyone again. Which is not to say that he can trust Graham, but only that if Graham of all people means Riley harm, then Riley is more lost, even, than he knows himself to be.