Author's Notes: What can I say; I have no idea where these story ideas come from. Uh, let's see, this is shortish, finished, and reflective on Buffy's part. Being a S/B shipper, I tend to have leanings toward her reflective sadness being partially related to his death, but y'know, pick what you want from it. I'm reading this amazing book, "How to read Literature like a Professor" and the ideas and experiments it's making me want to test out in my writing, are unbelievable. I blame the idea that summer can only be a metaphor for passion/life/youth/happy things, and my determination to make it not-so. Irony, what irony?
Summary: Ficlet. Summer as a metaphor. And it's not always pretty. Post-Chosen, Buffy POV.
Rated: PG
Date Started/Finished: October 16th, 2005
By Delenn
It's summer when she finally has time to breathe. To give up on the speeches and battle plans, so that she can sit down and live, again. For the first time in years.
And she is living. But she's mourning too.
It never struck her so off guard before, the sweet sunshine and warm nights.
She thinks that maybe it's because she's so far from home (there is no home anymore) and here, one can actually feel the seasons shifting steadily. One day closer to fall. One day farther from spring.
Or, maybe she was too busy just trying to live last summer, trying to reconcile that the annual almost-destruction of the world was nearly caused by her best friend. Trying to forget that, the summer before, she'd been dead. At peace.
While everyone else is trying to enjoy the last vestiges of sun, of the sunny Sunnydale California that they will never see again, she's hiding on a balcony, overlooking the water and keeping the walls between her and the sun.
It burns. Walking around in this boisterous place with all the tanned, happy people, she feels momentarily more dead than she did all of last year. And it hurts worse because now she actually wants to be alive.
Maybe the soft, calming glint of a summer sunset has never struck her properly before. Or she's just forgotten, too trained on the focus of the night.
Seven years of her life, two deaths, multitudes of monsters, and a California tan, all lost to the sweet, sickeningly-warm nights that could have been in July or January, for all the difference it made.
She's even a little bitter, hateful at the consistently shining world around her, when her summers have always been marked with death and pain and tragedy. Makes her feel like a bloody martyr.
This time, she doesn't know what to make of the warm, cleansing air. Not sure whether she should hate it, or rejoice. Because, of course, there's been death and tragedy and pain, so that all she wants to do, every time she blinks up at the daylight, is to curl up in a dank, dark cave and wish she had her darkness to hold her.
But there's also freedom. This time, the shackles that have destroyed her summers, turning them prematurely to autumn, are permanently gone, and she's left to her own, by everyone's choosing.
The darkness, the winter and fall and barely-spring have been there so long, she barely knows where to begin in the brightness. It makes her afraid and lonely and tired.
Clear, shining, white light is piercing through her soul and revealing all the flaws. She has to learn to stand in the sunshine again, before she can try out being human.
It's too soon, though.
The glare is still too bright, the days too long, and she thinks she'll wait a little longer, until summer crisps into autumn, before she'll try on that role again. Right now, the darkness is comforting despite the noticeable absence of its most notorious member.
She's mourning. And she's waiting. But, still…
Still…
For the first time, in so long, she's alive.