Character: Buffy Summers
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2372
Setting: pre-Pilot

Expelled.

Buffy backed hard against the wall, staring blankly into the deserted corridor. The world almost seemed to be melting around her, and the silence roared in her ears. It didn't seem right, it wasn't right. She kept mulling the word around her head, over and over: expelled, expelled.

Expelled.

Swallowing, she slid down to the floor. The chairs at her side seemed like they were a million miles away. She rubbed fretfully at the scab on her hand, the last tangible evidence of her fight with Lothos.

It'd been three days since she'd killed him, and school was back on—at least it was for everyone else. Not for her. Not for Buffy.

Merrick had told her it would be difficult to keep her life, and she'd at least accepted the loss of cheerleading and a decent night's sleep, but this? Only delinquents with chains connecting the piercings between their nostrils and their eyebrows got expelled. They were the kids who smoked under the bleachers, who had sex out in the park, who were on the fast track to Juvie. Not her. She was Buffy Summers, B-average, cheerleader, socialite in training.

At least, she had been. But that was before she'd become the Slayer, before she'd been cutting classes, before she'd started fights, before she'd burned down the gym.

Her parents were still in there, talking to Mrs. Holloway. She wondered briefly what they were saying, but her thoughts were too erratic to ponder it long, and then she was back to staring. Her stomach was churning, and she thought she might be sick.

Inhaling deeply, she hugged her knees to her chest.

Things had been tense the whole weekend. The general consensus in the news was that the school had been attacked by a bunch of drugged out wackos with a tenuous connection to the Bloods, and that the school fire had been started accidentally. Behind the scenes, Buffy had been told that because her actions may have saved the lives of everyone in the gym, no one would be pressing any charges, but she was still apparently too dangerous to attend high school anymore.

And that was it. She was dangerous, wild, unpredictable. She had no Watcher to keep her on a leash, and everyone was afraid of the monster within her. She had gone beyond the level of types like Kyle. She wasn't just a bully or a rabble rouser—people were afraid of her.

Mrs. Holloway, her friends, even her family.

Once again, she found herself wondering what would happen if she ran for it. Not just from the area, but from the city, possibly even the state. She could go to Cleveland, or sneak onto a boat that would take her to England so she could find the Watcher's Council. Better yet, she could drop it all, move to Idaho, serve pancakes to potato farmers out in a county where the cows outnumbered the people. No one there would ever know who she was, or what she was, and maybe the Watcher's Council would assume her dead. Maybe that would be enough for them to call the next Slayer. Then she would be able to live to see her twentieth birthday, her thirtieth, her eightieth, have a chance to die in bed surrounded by the loving family she'd made for herself, and not in some alley that smelled like piss, with a demon who would dismember her before chewing off her face.

And she could do it too, right now, if she got up and headed for the door. She could be gone by nightfall.

But the reality was that she couldn't leave, not her post nor her family. It was too late in the game, and she couldn't stop seeing her parents' faces that night on the couch. If she left, she'd be letting them down, and they'd never know what had happened to her. And if she ever got lonely, she wouldn't be able to come back, and being alone scared her more than being the Slayer.

"Buffy?"

She looked up, blinking back the sudden moisture in her eyes. Her parents were standing there, her mom solemn, her dad unreadable. "Yeah?" she stood, swallowing. For half a second, she thought maybe it'd all been a mistake, that her parents had talked Mrs. Holloway out of it, that she could return to class.

But then Joyce spoke, "Come on, honey. We're going home."

She could feel the weight of their disappointment as she followed them back outside, to the parking lot. Opposite them, she could see the ugly, charred remains of the gym, and she quickly looked away from it to slip into the car. Her parents took their seats too, and they slowly pulled away from the school.

They drove in silence, Buffy staring out the window. All the buildings around here had a familiarity, and not just because she'd been driven past them hundreds of times. She'd walked by them it seemed just as many times, and suddenly the seconds slowed as clarity hit her like a steam engine.

They were near the little bodega and the maintenance store, near Merrick's warehouse.

"Mom?" she said before she'd even thought about it. "Dad, can I just...can you drop me off here?"

There was a pause. Joyce looked back at her. "What—here? Why?"

"Please," she said, her voice filled with a desperation she didn't know she felt. "Please, I...need to be on my own for a bit. To think. That ice cream place, down on Church Street."

Her parents exchanged looks. "You want to go to an ice cream place?" Hank asked.

"Yes, please," her tone bordered on a beg.

The car slowed a little. Her parents kept looking at each other, then back at her.

"You've just been expelled," her dad said. "We aren't going to celebrate with ice cream."

"I don't want to celebrate, I just need to be alone right now. I can't...I have to..." she didn't know what to say, but she needed to go, and the urgency of it twisted her insides. "Please, I have my purse, money. I'll walk. Just drop me here."

There was a stretch of silence, and the car rolled to a stop at the curb. Hank killed the engine and turned to her. "You're not meeting someone are you?"

"What?" she said. "No, no. I just need to walk, to clear my head. I know the way back. There's a bus station right on Elm. Please, I'll be home in a few hours."

Indecision passed through both their faces as her parents had a silent conversation, all the while desperation sped Buffy's heart. She was almost to the point of opening the door and making a dash for it when Joyce spoke, "Okay. Fine. But we want you home by five."

"Fine, yeah, sure..." she already had the door open. "Thanks."

"Bye," they both said.

She slammed the door, then set off. In the time it'd taken to get them to stop, they'd passed the little strip mall and gone over the train tracks, and it was all she could do not to run to retract the distance.

She had to get to the warehouse. She didn't know if she could stand sitting around her room, staring blindly at the books she would soon be returning. Both her parents had taken the day off when they'd gotten Mrs. Holloway's call this morning, and she could sense the fight brewing between them. She'd be caught in it tonight anyway, once her mother got into the wine, but right now, more than ever, she needed her Watcher. He wasn't there, and before this moment she'd been afraid to even return to the vicinity of the building, but she was past that now, and it didn't matter. She'd faced down the fire, locked eyes with the Devil—as it were. She couldn't live in fear of her ghosts, if only because they'd end up accumulating.

She was back in the alley, passing between dumpsters and broken bottles. And then she was passing the fence where she'd let the woman die, and then she was back outside the warehouse, her hand on the knob. Hesitantly, she pulled it, then walked inside, hand trailing along the wall. She found the switch.

The lights flicked on with a dull buzz, and Buffy stood there against the wall, staring blankly at the crates and the bags of sawdust and the scuffed concrete floor.

She didn't know why she was here.

Swallowing hard, she stepped forward. She didn't know what she expected to find, but it wasn't Merrick or his body. There was no sign of him anywhere, but all of his things were still here. His books were stacked on his crate, one lying open with a pen in its spine. On the east wall were the two training swords, and, below them, the extra box of stakes.

Everything was just as they'd left it last, frozen in time two weeks ago.

Hesitantly, she took a seat on one of the crates, then stared down at her hands, and at the long scab on her palm.

She squeezed it into a fist, closing her eyes. "I was expelled today," she murmured. Pain wormed its way through her body, constricting her guts. Her tongue felt like it was made of cotton. "I was expelled," she said again, louder this time.

The silence was loud around her, and she could hear the light buzzing. That was all the response she could expect.

She couldn't sit anymore, and she slid off the crate to pace. There were the the bags piled in the corner, there were the staffs he'd had her train with before giving her the sword, and all around was the sawdust and debris from her training. As far as she knew, he'd never cleaned up after their sessions, and she could see the detritus everywhere.

"Merrick," she whispered. "I don't know what to do."

Tears blurred her vision, and she wiped them away.

She could still feel herself in Mrs. Holloway's office, her parents beside her as the principal delivered the news. She'd been staring out the window, at the gym beyond the parking lot. It only seemed to be sinking in now that she was here, in the warehouse, that this was real. She'd never return to Hemery. She didn't know what she was going to do the rest of the semester, or the rest of the year. What kind of school would take an ex-cheerleader pyromaniac? And did she even have the energy to do it all again?

"This was why you had to come down," she said aloud. She was talking to Merrick, as if he was just in the other room, as if she hadn't let him die. "For the last Slayer, I mean." She exhaled shakily. "And this was why she was sorry."

She could still see her, the woman with the copper hair, and the desert under the blood red sky. She'd been so sad, and now she knew why.

Anger and frustration warred with her grief, and she reached for her sword. It felt cold and heavy in her hand.

"I killed him," she said, swallowing. "I cut his goddamn head off, Merrick, and I burned his ashes, and you know what? It didn't make a difference." Her anger ballooned, and suddenly she'd smashed through a crate with the battered old blade. "You're not any less dead."

She ripped the sword out, then sent it through one of the sawdust bags she'd left abandoned for so long. "Did you know when you first came here? Did you know what I was giving up?" She stared at the remains of the bag, and at that the explosion of newspaper and wood dust all over the broken crate and the floor.

It occurred to her how little she knew about any of it. Not only didn't she know Merrick's first name, she didn't know what he'd given up to come here, or who he'd left behind. Had he left his family for this? Did they know who he was, what he'd died for, or did they think he'd gone off and died somewhere like her parents would one day think of her? And if they knew who he was, did they know he was dead?

He'd told her she was a martyr for the grand scheme of things, that the universe was ultimately indifferent to the suffering of the warriors. But she wasn't a warrior. She was just a girl, and she belonged home gossiping to her friends over the phone, not standing in an old warehouse talking to her dead confidant.

"I suppose you'd tell me life's not fair," she laughed hollowly, glancing at her sword, and at the light shining off it. "That it's always darkest before dawn, that one day the light at the end of the tunnel won't be a train, but I don't care about the silver lining, Merrick, and I never did." The tip of the sword hit concrete, and she shrugged helplessly, "They'll send me a new Watcher, just as you were sent to me, and your Slayer before, and then we'll, what, go right on with it until one of us kicks it? Did you manage to come to terms with the inevitably of your death, Merrick? Because I sure as hell haven't."

Buffy stared at the blade, suddenly remembering Lothos and the gym, and the fire as it burned along the walls and on the floor and in their eyes. She saw him as she killed him, and felt the rush as he died.

And then she was back in the warehouse. She flung the sword away, hard, and it clattered along the floor before banging into the side of a crate. She sunk to her knees, staring at the sawdust and the newspaper.

"I'm just a girl, Merrick," she whispered, closing her eyes. "And you're not here to tell me what to do."