Father of Mine
NOTES: Been reading some depressing stuff that made me wanna write depressing stuff. Already in tears before writing this which is never a good thing, so we'll just see how this goes.
SUMMARY: Buffy and Xander chat about their respective parents. B/X friendship.
SETTINGS: Post 'Graduation', pre Xander's little road trip.
DISCLAIMER: So not mine.
SECOND NOTE: Disregard everything you know about Buffy's past regarding her dad. And also I have not and do not intend to see the movie of Buffy, so I'm taking liberties with certain stuff about her first Watcher.
(Stuff in italics is either emphasis on words, or flashbacks. The flashbacks are actually being spoken about, but the retelling of it in dialogue was pretty dull, so the flashbacks kinda work a bit better.)
ONWARDS:
"I can't believe you're really gonna go!" Buffy exclaimed, hitting her best friends arm lightly.
Xander grinned, excited about the prospect of finally getting out of Sunnydale. Of finally getting away from his parents. Of finally being able to do something for himself, by himself.
"Oh here," Buffy said, beginning to rummage around in the bag that had been thrown to the ground at the beginning of her visit to the Harris residence. She pulled out three rolls of film and put them on Xander's bed beside his half-packed suitcase. "I got these so you won't have any excuses for not taking any pictures."
He smiled, a little startled by her thoughtfulness. He'd never call her thoughtless to her face, he knew she had more important things to worry about than the finer details of friendship, but he was glad to see that she'd thought of something so seemingly small, and yet so incredibly significant.
He'd invited her over on a whim. It had been partly to do with procrastination. As much as he wanted to go on his trip, he really didn't like packing. So, he'd first called Willow who had already had plans with Oz. And then he'd called Buffy who had, surprisingly, agreed to come over.
"Thanks."
"No probs. You do have a camera, right?"
He nodded and put the rolls of film into his suitcase.
A resounding crash emanated through the house and the two teens suddenly went silent. Xander closed his eyes, leaning against his bed, breathing heavily. He couldn't help the slight panic attack that he had every time something broke inside the house. It just meant that his father was awake.
There was an unintelligible yell and then a slamming of a door followed by complete silence. Xander breathed out a breath he hadn't been aware he'd been holding, shocked that Buffy actually did the same. He looked at her curiously, surprised to see her usually pink cheeks had gone pale.
Buffy looked up, suddenly gaining an insight into the boy –man- that she'd been friends with for three years. She'd been to his house before, had heard the stories about his parents, but she'd never been privy to one of the Harris family shows. Willow had told her that it was horrible, and Buffy now firmly believed it. Of course, she knew only too well that things could have gone a lot worse.
"You must be looking forward to getting the hell away from here," Buffy said quietly, so quietly that Xander wasn't exactly sure if it had been Buffy speaking, or his own subconscious.
"You have no idea."
Xander Harris envied Buffy Summers. He envied her family, envied her seemingly perfect life. He'd attended more dinners at the Summers house then at his own house, Joyce Summers taking the boy in as something of a surrogate son, especially over the summer that Buffy had disappeared. Xander had desperately wanted the family life that Buffy had, with a loving mother and a normal household that stored only a few bottles of wine that would be drunk over the course of a few years, not over the course of a few days.
"Has he always been like that?" Buffy asked.
Xander sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He nodded and couldn't bring himself to look at her, shamed of his family, of his upbringing.
"Yep. Since before I can remember. Mom wasn't though. She used to be…she used to be better."
"What happened?"
He forced himself to look up. He had expected to see pity, and he hated when people pitied him. He didn't see pity though. He saw concern and friendship-love. He saw something almost…kindred in her eyes.
"She lost a baby when I was about seven. She wasn't the same after that," he explained. "I'm not sure of what happened, y'know, inside or anything, but the doctors said she couldn't have any more kids."
Buffy winced, feeling the universal sympathy that all people feel when they hear that a woman can't have children. Her own mother hadn't wanted another child, and was content with her only daughter in her life. But to be robbed of the decision altogether would have been excruciatingly difficult to bear.
"She wanted other kids?"
Xander nodded. "I have three uncles and two aunts on mom's side," he explained. "She came from a big family and she always wanted a big family of her own. Dad too. He was the middle kid of five brothers. He never used to be so bad. I mean, he's always drank, that wasn't unusual, but before mom lost the baby, he wasn't so bad."
Xander lifted the suitcase from his bed, closing the top of it. The conversation had turned too serious to be had standing with a bed and a suitcase between them. He placed the case on the floor and sat himself on the bed, Buffy following suit as she kicked off her boots. Buffy grabbed one of Xander's pillows and hugged it close to her front, Xander sitting indian style, his hands in front of him, nervously fiddling with the band of his watch.
"I guess things got difficult then. I mean, they were probably pretty bad before that, cos problems don't just spring up over night or anything, but things got worse. He was drinking and staying out til all hours. And then when he was home, he was yelling or-"
He cut himself off before he completed the sentence. Or hitting.
"He hit you."
It wasn't a question.
He nodded.
Buffy sighed, tears welling involuntarily in her eyes. She'd known that Xander's family life was pretty shocking. She could tell by the way he carried himself, the way he covered his feelings with jokes, the way he tried to get a laugh out of any and every situation. It was a defence mechanism, plain and simple. If he couldn't laugh at something, then there was something seriously wrong.
"I gotta admit, I'm really kinda jealous of you," Xander admitted, his eyes still downcast.
Buffy looked up, surprised by the statement. He'd never told her that, not once.
"Why?"
"Cos you've got this perfect family," he explained. "I mean, yeah, you're parents are divorced, but…at least you dad never hit you."
Buffy swallowed hard. This was the one thing that no one in Sunnydale knew. Except for her mom of course.
"Yes he did."
Xander looked up sharply, anger burning in his gaze. Their eyes looked, and Xander searched Buffy's eyes deeply, looking for any sign that she was lying to make him feel better. She wasn't. He knew the pain in her eyes wasn't faked. He'd seen his own eyes reflected back at him in mirrors for too long to not recognise the pain that betrayal caused.
"About a month before I was the Slayer," she continued. "Mom caught him in bed with another woman when I was fifteen. They were yelling at each other, mom kept hitting him and eventually, he hit back. I'd been watching from the stairs and…when he hit her, I just…exploded."
"A warrior before you were called," Xander whispered with a slight smile on his face.
Buffy returned the smile, but shook her head. "Not a warrior. A daughter. I jumped between them and dad grabbed my arm and threw me off to the side. Mom got really angry and slapped him, yelling at him about treating me like that. I got between them again, trying to pull mom away, telling her I was alright, it hadn't hurt. I was lying of course, but…I didn't want him to hit her."
"So what happened after that?"
Buffy breathed in deeply.
"Well, dad kinda slapped me, really hard. And then he just kinda stepped back with
this really shocked look on his face.
Things went back to normal after that.
Kinda strained, but nothing too bad.
He didn't hit either of us for a couple of weeks. And then Merrick showed up."
"Merrick?"
"My first Watcher," Buffy explained.
Xander looked completely confused.
"I thought Giles was your first Watcher."
"Nope. Daniel Merrick II. He taught me what went bump in the night, taught me how to kill the vampires. Things kinda went downhill after that. I was getting in trouble at school, I got kicked off the cheerleading squad, My principal called my parents, and, just my luck, I got home pretty late that night. To make it worse, I was pretty banged up already. No where obvious, but enough to make it hurt."
Xander knew where this was going. He'd never thought about her father before, never given thought as to why she and her mom had really moved away from LA. He didn't want to hear that this amazingly innocent girl had been through almost exactly the same thing he'd been through.
"Dad was waiting for me when I got home. He didn't even greet me, he just slapped me across my face. Kinda strange that the weakest hit I'd received all night was the one that brought me to tears."
"Where the hell have you been? We've been worried sick! Your principal called us today, complaining about your schoolwork. Or more correctly, your lack of schoolwork."
"I'm sorry-"
"Not yet you're not."
She shuddered, hating the memory of the worst evening of her life. Xander felt tears spring to his eyes.
"Where was your mom?"
"Out. She'd been spending a lot of time at the gallery she worked at, trying to avoid my dad as much as she could. And as long as I stayed out of dad's way, I was usually alright at home with just him."
"But not that night."
"Definitely not that night."
He'd hit her with more force than he'd ever used. She was used to taking blows far harder than the ones he was dishing out, but she found herself absolutely frozen. She couldn't think of a single move to block the attacks, couldn't pull herself out of the self-induced shock that she'd gone into. This was her father, her dad, her daddy. This was the one man that she was meant to trust, and he was hitting her.
She finally pulled herself out of it, bringing her hands up to stop the attack. Hank Summers stopped in shock. His daughter had a tight grip on his wrists and he was physically unable to release himself from her grasp.
He looked at her, completely bewildered. She was tiny, his daughter, standing no more than five feet three inches, and she'd restrained him. He burned with anger, annoyed at her defiance and pulled himself away.
He turned and Buffy thought it was over. She couldn't have been more wrong.
"I can't imagine going through something like that," Xander whispered.
Buffy looked up at him in confusion. He'd just about admitted that his father had been abusive and for him to say that he couldn't understand what she had gone through was bewildering. He noticed the look on her face and moved to explain.
"You were the Slayer and you couldn't fight back. You were stronger than him, you could have broken him in half. I can't imagine feeling so helpless when you're the strongest person physically and emotionally that I've ever met."
"When he hit me," Buffy said slowly as though she was only really just beginning to process her own thoughts on what had happened so many years ago, "I wasn't the Slayer. I wasn't some mythic warrior. I was just a fifteen year old who was shit-scared of her father."
"Did you ever fight back?" he asked cautiously.
She nodded, almost ashamed that she had actually fought back against her father. She knew within herself that he would have hurt her far worse if she hadn't done something to protect herself, but the part of her that had been brought up as daddy's little angel had rebelled against the thought of harming him.
For ten minutes on end the Slayer was on the receiving end of a brutal attack. Nothing unusual, especially at this time of the evening. But it wasn't a vampire or a demon that was doing it. It was a human. And not only was it a human but it was her father. Hitting back went against the 'Slayer's don't kill people' rule, as well as her basic upbringing of respecting her parents.
Finally, she'd had enough. Anger coursed through her veins. The portion of her soul that was purely a Slayer snapped at the brutalisation that was happening to her body. She jumped to her feet, having been thrown against a mirror that had shattered only moments ago.
She looked at her father angrily and hit back, a solid punch to his jaw that sent him staggering. The sad thing was, she'd pulled her punch, and she'd nearly knocked him off his feet.
She took advantage of his momentary distraction and ran for her life. She nearly tripped down the stairs, so anxious to get the hell out of her house, but she made it out the front door, fleeing so fast that an Olympic Athlete would have had trouble catching up with her.
She hadn't known where to go. She'd been running on autopilot, running down random streets, random enough for herself to get lost in. She had little to no desire to ever go back to the house, and losing her way in the darkened streets of a large city was the best way to ensure that she didn't g back.
She found herself in front of a familiar house, one of her mom's friends. With tears streaking her face, she approached slowly, not entirely certain that this was the best idea, but wanting –needing- to be off the streets. She took a deep breath and worked her way up to the door, knocking softly, praying that her mom's friend wouldn't ask too many questions.
The door opened and Sara Larson looked down at the bleeding and bruised girl, sheer shock and horror coming across her face. Without hesitation she pulled the girl into the house and shut the door, checking to see if anybody had been watching.
Sara pulled her into the living room, and Buffy found herself face to face with the very person she had been desperate to see for the last half hour.
"Mom!"
"I was so angry with her after that," Buffy confessed.
Xander couldn't believe what he was hearing. His earlier statement about not being able to understand how it would feel to suddenly be powerless when you knew you had more than enough strength to defeat a small army was just further reinforced.
"How come?"
"Cos she didn't leave him."
Xander nodded. He too knew that particular arguments anger. His mom had never left his dad even though Xander had begged and pleaded so many times for her to just leave. But Karen Harris was a woman who'd been conditioned into thinking that she was nothing without her husband.
"How long did it take?" Xander asked.
"Another month. It's kinda weird to think that if I hadn't been the Slayer, she never would have left. If I'd never burnt down that gym in LA, we never would have left. Dad just got so sick of putting up with 'my crap' as he so nicely called it that he announced that he was leaving."
"You didn't really believe him about the 'crap' comment right? Cos your crap is pretty damn important. Your crap saved your entire school, not to mention countless other people," Xander said, feeling the need to comfort his best friend in whatever way he could.
Buffy nodded, having told herself that many times to take away some of the stung that had been caused when her father had blamed the failed relationship between he and Joyce on Buffy. It had hurt, but Buffy had known that they'd been having problems long before she'd been called.
"I know," she admitted. She sighed deeply and gave him a genuine smile. "I've never told anyone about that."
"Not even Angel?"
"Not even Angel."
He was torn between breaking out into the Snoopy Dance or having his heart break into a million pieces because Buffy had never taken the time to confide her hurts to anyone. He'd always had someone to listen to him. Willow had known from the very beginning and had always offered him a place to stay when things got too bad. Cordelia too had come to know about his family woes, and Buffy herself had always known that things had been bad for him at home. But hearing that the Slayer had had no one to confide in, not even the Souled Vampire, it made the weight of it all seem just that much more.
"Thanks for trusting me," he said quietly.
She smiled and felt a tear trickle down her cheek. She didn't bother reaching up to wipe it away.
"Thanks for listening."
There was an awkward pause that neither one knew quite how to fill. With only a slight amount of hesitation, Xander shuffled forward and pulled Buffy into a tight hug, the Slayer relaxing into his embrace and wrapping her arms around his waist. It felt nice to finally get that off her chest, to have finally confided in someone that she'd been betrayed by the man who was meant to have been set as a measuring stick for all her future boyfriends.
They pulled apart simultaneously, almost by silent mutual consent. They stood and exchanged small smiles before Xander hauled his suitcase back onto the bed.
Buffy knew that somehow, their burdens had been made a teensy bit lighter. They were sharing their pain and their hurt, and it was okay. Buffy smiled ruefully. Their afternoon that was meant to have been a cheerful get together had turned decidedly bleak for the last half-hour or so, and they didn't need to be seriously depressed when they said their final goodbyes. Buffy switched from the unhappy topic to one that she knew would bring a smile to his face.
"So, what's your first stop gonna be?"
END
For all of those who have been following my fics (or epics as my flatmate has taken to calling them) 'In the Beginning' and 'Darkness of Sunnydale' and 'Act of Faith', my apologies for not getting updates out for a few days. I'm seriously lacking in inspiration, and have been getting weird little one-shot ficlet stories floating through my head (strange in itself cos I have trouble writing one-parters…). Anyways, never fear, I do intend to continue them and am hoping to get an update out for ITB within the next week.
Toodles.
K.