I wrote this in July for Camp NaNo "to see if I could." Posting as I finish up Pillars of Sand. :)

The Normal Life

by Bre

Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters or parts of this storyline. They belong to the brains of The Whedon, The Kripke and The Bays/Thomas. I also do not own the lyrics used.
Rating: R/FR18 (violence, language, dark themes and sexual references)

Author's Notes: Nobody bothers to read AN notes anymore so I'm listing them for easy reference:

-Written for July 2013 Camp NaNoWriMo. Credit for the original idea goes to TheDana. I just executed and embellished. A lot.
-No HIMYM knowledge required! I haven't watched HIMYM in a long while so things are definitely out of order. It's an AU, expect nothing less.
-I've only been to NYC a few times, and I've never lived there. I tried.
-Fun story, I work in a medical malpractice law office… and I still suck at medical jargon. Again, I tried.
-Playing by BtVS rules with the vampires and combining mythology on other aspects from both shows.
-Song lyrics are "The Dogs of War" by Pink Floyd, "Turn to Stone" by Joe Walsh and "Something Real" by Renee Stahl.
-This is written according to HIMYM tactics. Non-italics represent Buffy in first person, telling the story. Italics represent past scenes in third person.

Couples: Buffy/Dean, Buffy/Ted
Timeline: BtVS: Multiple years post S7; SPN: Multiple years post S8 (for the sake of this story, the gates of Hell were closed and Sam did not die because of it); HIMYM: Undefined. I am going against the timeline grain according to the show - run with it!

Summary: BtVS/SPN/HIMYM Crossover. The Hellmouth in Sunnydale has been closed for years and Buffy is living the happy nothing-Slayer-related normal life she always wanted in NYC until an attack one night reminds her of everything she thought she was okay leaving behind...

Chapter One - May 2018

you can knock at any door
but wherever you go, you know they've been there before
well winners can lose and things can get strained
but whatever you change, you know the dogs remain

I'm gonna tell you a story.

Tonight is my one year anniversary.

It has been exactly one year since everything got completely sucked into the crap fan for what is officially quantified as the bajillionth time - that's right, the bajillionth time. This girl right here? You're looking at the unofficial queen of Life Suckage. I guess I'm feeling a little nostalgic in that weird way where it was one of the crappiest days of my life, but also not at the same time…

I'm also waiting for someone and you look comfortable and talking to the trees just isn't the same, so story time it is.

Hey, don't roll your eyes. This is a story about all the cool things you see in the movies: blood, gore, scary goons, explosions, car chases... alright, those last two not so much, but you might get some good Slayer info out of this, which you know, you won't really be able to apply in the future because of the whole soon-to-be-dust factor, but hey. Yay knowledge.

So this is a story about being… cookie dough. Yeah, cookie dough. And then baking yourself. And then not liking being baked and letting yourself melt back to cookie dough… if cookies could actually do that…

Okay, that makes no sense at all, that's an awful analogy. Sorry, cue the nonsensical reference to something else that is kind of related, but also has nothing to do with it at the same time and wow, I am rambly tonight.

Maybe it's better saying I am an oatmeal raisin cookie and I wanted to try being a chocolate chip cookie. Switch out the ol' raisins for some ol' chocolate chips… because everyone likes chocolate, right? Even vampires?

Come on, don't lie.

And change is good! Most of the time. Although the kind of unfortunate part about trying to be someone else is you're born one way and most of the time that's just the way you want to be, even if you don't know it, even if you spend years trying to change it and ignore it and pretend like raisins are on the extinction list in your life…

This will all make sense, I swear. I suck at the whole story-preface-to-hook-you-in thing.

So once upon a time, there was a girl. She had a life. She went to school, she had friends and family and people she loved, and really, life was pretty good considering. But there was something about her that was a little bit strange.

I know what you're thinking: that's every single person on the planet, be a little more self-involved.

Well, smart guy, not every person on the planet is born with the destiny to be The Slayer. The one (or two or three in my case, but that's another long story) girl in her generation who runs around cemeteries, poking bad guys with pointy sticks and generally being as limber as a pretzel…

And that just switched gears into the land of the inappropriate, ignore that last part.

Anyway, this made her less than normal. More abnormal. Freakishly abnormal. And abnormal is just weird. It's that puzzle piece that has an extra part that doesn't fit anywhere, even though it came with all the other puzzle pieces.

And she really hated it.

She didn't really know she hated it though; it was a total sneaky hate spiral that suddenly blew up in her face one day. It was a destiny-hating kind of beast that lurked in the shadows, making you think you were fine with what life had handed you and that you were fine playing the part and that you were fine with the Canada-sized platter on which life kept piling the bad stuff.

But she did what she had to do. She took the reins of destiny and rode that puppy to saving the world a few times, dying a few times, watching her friends die or get hacked to pieces… Same old, same old.

She did what she had to do, all the while secretly despising it so much that she knew one day something would snap; when she would be ready to let it all go and just do something for herself, and her alone. Which is ironic considering being a Slayer is all about being alone.

But in the grand scheme of things, it's really you and all of humanity because evil isn't that picky, so the alone part I'm talking about doesn't apply to the Chosen One bit.

All of this led to her feeling a lot of guilt because she felt like she was supposed to be grateful that she had supernatural powers and the ability to kick anybody in the face… but it only made her hate it even more. The expectation alone was about the weight of giant ape holding dumbbells and sitting on your chest and it only led to her feeling this epically messed up superiority over everyone around her… which led to feeling like an even bigger jerk about her life and her role in it and even more sneaky hate spiral.

She loved her friends and family and she loved that they were able to maintain the journey by her side… but there were only so many people she could love and lose, so many times the world could dip into the peril bin and come out on fire and she was the only one with the fire repellant before you started losing your sense of duty. Before you were done watching your entire town disappear into a giant sinkhole because of a deranged spirit-bad-guy-wanna-be and… you just lost that special thing called "caring." When you decide that being a pillar of strength for everyone around you, carrying the burden, walking around with all the answers and the solutions, was slowly eating at your insides until there was nothing left but going through the motions.

Air in, air out. Punch in face, kick in shin. Go to sleep, wake up. Eat some food, drink some drink…

And guess what?

That day finally came.

The day when I realized my sister was attending school in England, thousands of miles away from me. The day when I realized my best friend had advanced to levels of witchcraft I could never even hope to understand or relate to. The day when I realized my other best friend had fallen in love with my sister and they were somehow secretly dating right under my nose. The day when the man I viewed as my mentor and father had about a couple hundred more children to look after. The day when I saw my sister Slayer stepping up and becoming better than I ever could in the role of anything leadership-like. The day when I realized that the world was overrun with Slayers and that I….

I just wasn't needed anymore. That destiny had let me go. That I was standing and holding up nothing but air… and that it was up to me to actually do something about it.

Wow, getting a little philosophical and little bit long-winded, my bad. But it really was like an epiphany slapped me in the face.

So I left Cleveland, left the Slayer house there in the hands of my capable second-in-command sister Slayer - I even gave her the scythe, this super badass ax/stake combo created specifically for Slayers that even you would be impressed to be on the other end of - and I just drove.

Just… drove. Borrowed some money from Giles, left and went… somewhere. Actually, I kind of went west a little before getting looped back around and somehow I eventually ended up in New York where I found myself in a little community college studying art history… and then a hop skip second later, I found myself a job as an assistant to a curator at one of the art galleries that frequented Manhattan like Starbucks did, you know, everywhere.

It was crazy. And fast. And… exactly what I wanted.

Things were great. Things were busy.I had everything I had always wanted, all the things I hadn't allowed myself to really dwell on; what that little voice in the back of my head had always whispered to me about the way things could be when I would cry myself to sleep during the Angel years or when I pretended to love people because I thought I should or when I would fight the desire to run away after my mom died or when I let a certain not-to-be-named vampire do things to me that I would never have imagined letting happen or when I turned around and watched that same guy, someone who turned into one of the most important people in my life, turn to ash right before my eyes or when I felt that heavy resigned feeling whenever the weight of the world landed on my shoulders because it was getting sucked into another freaking hell dimension again.

I had a job. I had an apartment. I went to bed at ten every night and woke up at five. I bought too many shoes and wore glamorous clothes that I would never have been able to afford to wear on my old 'kill, blood, dust' schedule. I was even entertaining the idea of getting a dog a.k.a. an actual living creature. There had been this whole goldfish incident trauma thing that kinda scarred me, but had apparently long since faded away by then.

Of course, that probably wouldn't happen since I did still kill my plants. I mean, they were in the sunlight and got watered, I never really understood the how of them dying but they still managed to wilt, literally right before my eyes… I even tried talking to them, soothing them… which only made them die quicker.

This was always kind of a Buffy issue. With everything. Probably why I was so good at the killing instead of the growing stuff… And also probably a good reason to be nice and keep listening, huh? A little less hissing a little more listening equals you get to live longer, buddy. Not like you're going anywhere.

If we have time, I can tell you the story of how I had to dig myself out of my grave, so I totally get how uneasy that is. Your foot is probably stuck on something.

Anyway, despite the killing of the plant life, things were going pretty smoothly. And to top off the cherry pie life I had created so far away from where my old life started, I fell in love. Like, I fell in love. Hard. With someone normal, someone silly, someone who could look at me and not see my past, not see what I had been, what I had become before Sunnydale went kaput.

Someone who accepted me for what I was at that point in my life and didn't pry into my past. He didn't even care about my past. He accepted the vague references and summaries that totally dodged the subject. He knew about the remaining family I had and that they lived out of the country mostly. That my hometown was a pit of dust because of a freak accident. He accepted that I had come from somewhere really dark and unhealthy and unwelcome compared to the "now" - and I didn't even have to go into the whole Slayer gig thing; the whole "supernatural things are real, yeah… Crazy, huh?" thing because it wasn't even a thing to go into.

He just… he accepted me. Without a second thought.

He was one of those guys who was probably too overly excited about the future and what it held for him and whoever was lucky enough to join in that crazy ride of love at his side. He was literally the most optimistic person I had ever met, and this is coming from someone who knows the early years of Willow Rosenberg. He was someone who accepted that we all came from somewhere, good and bad, dark and light, and only looked to the future, hopefully with that one special person.

And for a while, that person was me. And I really liked it. Not only was he a great guy - a mixture of my best friend's goofiness and one of my ex's calm doofiness with the large side of monogamy - but he also had this group of friends that made me feel right at home. A separate life from my old one that felt… good. Right. Comfortable. One that I was ready to spend the rest of my life fitting right into like nothing else had ever happened… like I hadn't died twice or like my best friend hadn't tried to end the world or that two of my boyfriends were super hot vampire guys with souls…

I was just little ol' normal me who worked in an art gallery and developed a really bad dependence on coffee.

And it was perfect. I was like this alternate version of Buffy. Being a Slayer didn't matter or exist, having to constantly save the world wasn't even on my radar… there were other people for that, other people to take over the putting-out-of-the-world-fire thing.

I was happy.

I was… free.

But wouldn't you know it, the past always finds a way to leak right back into your life, no matter how hard you tried to bury it.

But the surprise wasn't how it leaked in or how much it bulldozed me… but how I reacted to it.

It's a little bit like your past doesn't just disappear with a little "normal life" varnish…