Road to Nowhere: The Magic Bus: Parts I, II, II.
All characters are the sole property of Mutant Enemy/Fox etc etcetera. and are merely borrowed by your officially humble author as an homage, tribute, fantasy, and attempt to keep the strangely inevitable and encompassing Buffyverse going in this time of drought.
Summary: An immediately-post-"Chosen", "what should have happened" story, with some alternate universe elements too. Blatantly pro-Spike and pro-Spuffy. The Sunnydale School Bus goes through the looking glass, beyond. What did, could have, should have, might have happened On The Yellow Bus after that Little School Bus That Could chugs off form Sunnydale....er, or un-Sunnydale--significantly leaving the (apparently) fallen behind. Buffy gets guilty, gets pissed off, then guilty again, and then goes off to do something about it. It's about time. This entry represents the first three chapters of an ongoing story.
Well, she thought just a little bit bitterly, Xander finally got his road trip.
She was trying not to listen to the sounds around her on the bus. Buzz, twitter, smack, sigh, giggle, blare.
This was one time she kind of regretted the unmixiness of Buffy and driving.
If she were driving, it might keep her mind off their endless conversation, the words they formed and the noises they made, crudely human and irrelevantly moored in daily life, relentless laughing, kissing, reminiscing, planning.
If she were driving, she could tell them to keep it down, that she had to concentrate on the road.
And if she were driving, maybe she could pretend she knew where they were going.
No. She meant where SHE was going.
Or why.
Xander was finishing one of his jokes; now Buffy really wished she had something to distract her. Bamboo shoots under her fingernails, or a Chemistry assignment, for example. An endless-loop tape of "Do You Believe?". Even a power-drunk reptile-wanna-be politician would do.
Drunk, now there was an idea. She wondered if anyone had thought to pack the bus with some "liquid refreshment". Not beer, though.
Buffy smiled to herself, just a tiny smile, remembering times that had seemed so perplexing, so tragic then, but that she could see were actually a little on the Archie-comics-side compared to, well, now.
She was dimly aware of girlish chirping, appreciative shouts, then a breath of silence as Xander delivered the punch line.
"So what does the Minister say at a vampire funeral?
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust!"
There was a general rush of giddy laughter from the crowd, punctuated by groans from Faith, Willow, and the more sophisticated Former Potentials.
Robin was asleep, or no doubt he would have groaned the loudest. Robin definitely had issues of the Alpha-male variety.
She heard a thud, then the well-known Harris "Ow", and then a deep female chuckle, and figured Kennedy hand done her companionable, slightly butch bicep-punching thing again. No doubt there would be a more stubbornly purple bruise on Xander's arm than would have appeared had Kennedy swatted him yesterday. Before.
Breathe, she told herself. You're misinterpreting them. They've just killed a bunch of Ubies, hence the neck-rupturer gallows humor. That had to be what they meant. When did you get so paranoid, Summers? Teehees at the expense of Ubies, that she could take. Nothing wrong with that.
Giles added his own Bon Mot: "As long as that dust includes a thoroughly dusted duster, oh, that dashed reeking duster, this Ripper is content. I'm sure it does--peroxide is so volatile, after all. And we always told him to stop smoking, but would he listen? Apparently not! Although you really must get some new material, Xander."
Trust the Watcher to puncture her denial, one way or another.
"You no like?" Xander pouted at Giles' mock admonition, equally mock hurt.
"Well, some respect for the dead might be in order."
"You mean for the dead undead. Or is it that the undead dead?"
Renewed merriment issued from the nubile audience gathered around him.
So, here at last, was his moment of triumph. True, it had taken yet another apocalypse to get it, and the death of many comrades in arms, including his lover, and hers…..
She edited the thought, but felt disgusted by what she heard. Although not, she realized, to her surprise, surprised.
Not since his little patheto love-spell-gone-wrong had Xander gotten attention like this from a bunch of rapt females who actually listened to him. Not HUMAN ones, anyway.
Or maybe it was not since his legendary and mysterious Strip Club For Ladies A Go Go Gig, but, like so much else, they'd never really talked about that. Else, like what ever happened to Ben? Or had White-Light Mom been a demon or an angel? At that word, Buffy quickly again fast-forwarded to another and more non-taboo thought. Or what had really happened to Giles in England. Or who said that teenage-boy to animal-predator-shape-shifting spells involve sexual-harassment related amnesia? Or did the First Slayer have hair extensions? Or, tip-toeing back into verboten territory again, what exactly, really, was this famous "message" business that ol' Will reportedly had instructed ol' Xand to deliver to ol' Buffy before she sent her inadvertently and inconveniently re-ensouled old vampire to Hell? Or, for that matter, what it meant for another vampire (a little less old, "hers" not so much)--to purposely, deliberately, obstinately, defiantly, advertantly-- go out and go THROUGH Hell, and back, to get a soul….
Okay, oops, moving on. She pushed herself to focus again on the scene in the bus.
They were all like Xander's groupies. Buffy almost turned around and spat out a reproach, but somehow her lips wouldn't move, her mind could not send messages that fanned out beyond her cocoon and into actual communication with others. Not even her best friends. Not even these people, dearest to her.
Dear, dearer, dearest….
Again, she concentrated hard on not thinking. On SAYING something instead, making a trademark quip, asking if Dawn had any chocolate or band-aids or Chapstick, if Giles had heard the weather report, if Andrew knew how to say BORING ROAD TRIP in Klingon, or didn't Robin think The Talking Heads would make an appropriate soundtrack for this ride, trying to connect, anything to put a full throttle brake on where that train wreck of a train of thought threatened to be inexorably rushing…
She couldn't even turn her head to look at them.
But through what seemed like a mist, a great fogged barely translucent shattered glass dome floating around her head, she looked on with a certain fascination.
Xander continued while they all listened and savored, chorusing ritually when indicated, with the winking familiarity of an old, frequently repeated gag routine, fondly and collectively remembered by all.
Rupert took up the chant, responded to his cue.
"Yes Xander. Don't taunt the demon. Er, vampire. Don't taunt the undead dead demon."
They were rolling now.
"Why, Giles? Can the clump of cinders, I mean the dead undead demon, hurt me?"
Now Giles sputtered, trying to hold back his laughter to retain the tone of icy dignity needed to give the line its pith, and nostalgic accuracy, as he delivered it.
"No" Giles continued, his composure reclaimed for the moment.
"No. It's just…..tacky."
For a coda, Xander, inspired, and egged on by the chant-and-response approval, picked up the stained, peeling and cracking plastic lid of a take-out coffee cup which Wood had used as an improvised ash-tray. Buffy could see he coffee-soaked stub of the principal's celebratory stogie still floated disgustingly in the dregs.
Xander stowed the now topless column of styrofoam carelessly on the floor of the bus where the choppy motion of the creaky stick shift periodically sent drops and spurts of repulsive cold brown fluid, looking like nothing so much as milky blood from a rotting corpse, into the over-air-conditioned but stuffy air of the bus-prison and landing randomly on one or the other of rapt admirers, all of whom were apparently so entranced by the lame performance, or at least by their own smug sense of jolly victory, that they seemed oblivious to the icky moisture, ignoring it or indifferently, inattentively wiping off the clammy drops back onto the floor, the rhythm of their merriment broken not even for a moment, like they were swatting off gnats so inconsequential that their deaths required not even notice, much less mourning. Then, with a flourish, Xander held up the small, sad, charred pile of black ashes from the "Get-Well Fast!! Cause Killing Makes Me Randy and Hungry" gift of an Havana cigar that Faith, keeping her hand in the Rascals-r-Us game with a little sub-legal smuggling n' stealing, had somehow managed to find for her man (along with a case of Mars Bars and fifty bags of spicy salsa nacho chips for herself to take care of the Hungry part), and, making a slow 360 degree turn, showed it around the circle dramatically, making sure everyone could see, like a magician about to perform an amazing trick.
"Actual Size As Shown"! Willow shrieked, beside herself with delight.
Except Buffy. Buffy didn't think it was funny. At all.
Giles was slapping his knee in appreciation of his own dry wit and aptly placed reference, banging and slicing away at it with an uncharacteristic loss of reserve, so lost in the riotous moment and shaking and palming so hard that the glasses he'd removed to wipe away from his streaming eyes the tears of jollity than ran down his face, and that he'd forgotten in the rampant hilarity were still clutched between his long, elegant fingers, nearly shattered with the motion as they bounced. Buffy had never seen him that way, or almost never, except maybe that terrible day, an apocalypse or so ago, when Willow was ending the world and Giles appeared like a bunny from a hat (a tug, again, although not really for herself…), and Buffy told him all the horrors of the last year--horrors, they had seemed then, but now just dumb. Or uneventful. And some, even sublime. And Giles' response had been similarly tittering: Laughing until he cried, crying with laughter until he doubled over, dragging Buffy along into the whirlpool circle of merriment, just for a moment, an anodyne of momentary forgetfulness. Things had gotten worse before they'd gotten better that day, but the laughter had been a tiny oasis that had helped her move on from her self-pitying paralysis into Necessary Action. And now, here Giles was bobbing and jerking and heeing and braying like a hyena (another blast from the past). Buffy was mesmerized by the unseemly sight.
And the New Slayers bounced up and down too, almost in unconscious syncopation, pogoing up and down and up and down again, high in the air and back down to earth, also hard, like super strong mutant kangaroos in a mosh pit at a rock concert.
The bus began to spin. No, it was her head.
Now the effort she desperately needed to make wasn't to try to force herself to talk to them, to join what was obviously, must have been, couldn't be anything else, just heedless and loose-lipped relief at being actually alive, another apocalypse behind them, one more story to tell to fat grandchildren.
She winced, another betrayal recalled, this time hers, that it was too late to take back. Or maybe not. Not entirely. That she would not push out of her mind, that was something she would have to take care of, to take back. Someday. No, soon.
Now, instead of struggling against her muteness, Buffy actually had to bite back her words, to fight to keep herself from hissing and snarling things at them that they would all regret, that would hurt them, that would hurt her, that would, she felt, literally burst her head apart and tear her lips as she spoke them.
Words, viciously aimed and deadly precise, not her Primal-powered kicks and Slayer-jabs and magic swords and ancient scythes, not even Mr. Pointy, had always been her most savage, wicked weapon. Sometimes she had used them against villains, against her enemies, to get them off guard, to prime them for the kill. But not always, not always. Her words were even more lethal when she shot them at the innocent, at the ones who loved, and trusted, and believed in her. At the one who would lay down his life for her. Who did. And the Words, unlike the leaps and feints and thrusts, had come from the girl, not the Superhero. She had always known this.
And if she'd learned anything, it was to rue what should never be said, and could not be unsaid.
Or what was unsaid, but needed to be uttered.
Besides, her friends didn't mean anything by it. Didn't intend to be cruel, or callous, or ungrateful. They were delirious, practically, exhausted and desperate for some relief. They were just blowing off steam.
They needed to.
They had almost died.
Almost.They had a right to.They had just saved the world.
Or someone had.
Road to Nowhere: Part II.
She must have fallen asleep for awhile.
She had closed her eyes, just for a minute, just to hit the pause button in her head, to stop the unbelievable believable actions of her friends from colliding with the furiously racing red-glowing tumbling images in her mind and combusting spontaneously.
Of course, Willow could have done the freeze-frame stuff, and probably the Puff-the-Magic-Conflagration maneuver too, for real. Willow could do the time-wacky the way some people can raise only one eyebrow; like being double-jointed it was an in-born talent that took a lot of practice….but Slayer powers or no, the only way Buffy could make time stop was to snooze. And even then…..
It had been dark when she closed her eyes.
Outside, the scene she remembered before she fell asleep was a stretch of desert, black and spare: the only brightness through the window were the stars, rushing past Bus-world like (unearthly wraith) phantom streetlights shining the way for the ghosts of nowhere.
She should have shuddered, but she didn't.
When she was little (had she ever been little?), she had woken up one sunny LA morning bounded kid-happy over the pale shag-carpet, down into the sunken living room, and found her blue and gold parakeet Dexter cold and still in his cage; she'd cried and cried, couldn't stop crying. Then her mom told her that Dexter had gone to live in the stars. That that was where pets and people and thingies who were loved went when they left the earth. If they were loved. If somebody loved them. So it was important to love people, because then when they left you, you would know they were happy in the stars, because you had cared enough to make sure they got there; and then you would be happy too, instead of sad, because you would never really lose them, and would always know, every night, where to find them. You'd just have to have loved them (having loved them was key, their having been loved was crucial), and then wait for the time each evening when the sun went down and the stars twinkled high in the endless sky.
She didn't know why, it was so simple, so obvious, so Joyce-an. But it had helped. She'd needed something to stop her tears, and she had taken what her Mom offered.
Even when things got really bad, maybe especially then, her Mom never lost her confidence that random bits of cliched generic soothers: cookies, fries, motivational speeches, dresses mooned over on a rack at an over-priced Shoppe suddenly appearing on padded pink satin hangers in her closet, popcorn oozing buttery goodness to accompany Freddie Prinze Jr. videos could beguile Buffy into suddenly forgetting her inconvenient destiny and onto the prom committee; Mom also had believed that one-size-fits all "limits": Groundings, homey lectures, exiles in dad-land, garishly burning stakes--the kind to which you tie your kid and her buds "for their own good", not the kind you euthanize vampires with--, "No!" said three times while clicking her Fred Braun pumps together, would somehow rewrite her She-Ra daughter into an Olsen twin: Of course, none of it ever worked, and Buffy had stopped having the time, or the patience, or the desire, to pretend it did.
But the Star World story, it had helped, really helped. With loss. With death. The only thing that ever had.For years, she'd remembered the star thing when she saw a sad movie, like an old re-run of Wuthering Heights, where a pretty lover tragically died.
Or when she stepped on a bug. Someone must have loved the bug, right? Its bug family, at least, for sure.
Or even when her cousin had just gone out like a used up match in that hospital, sudden and terrified and unprepared. Buffy loved her cousin. They were inseparable, adorable, like twins, everyone always said. It had been annoying, but secretly exciting. Because Buffy didn't like being an only child. She had been an only child….well, then she had.
Yeah, even then she had remembered about the stars.
But somewhere along the way, she'd forgotten. All those deaths, some she just couldn't stop from happening, many more that she had made happen.
And never once, not since Merrick had first taken her to that graveyard, not once that she could remember since that first encounter with her Life's Work, did she look up at the stars and salute a lost loved one, or take comfort in the little fable that she knew wasn't true, but believed anyway.
That graveyard, the first time: A strange scene, filled with a deeper night than Buffy had ever seen but somehow had always known about, with shadows and cries, with sights, scents, movements, and creatures that she knew she must be imagining, that she must be crazy to even imagine, but that were already then and instantly more familiar to her, ordinary even, than the lollipop she almost swallowed when Merrick appeared stiffly, the school bus behind him. That funny (odd-peculiar-funny, not Snoopy-Dance haha) uptight, somber determined little man, the ridiculous over-sized cartoon moustache brushing his upper lip so that just looking at it made her want to sneeze, dressed as he always was in the dullest black, with the yellow-crayon normalness of the school bus stuck like colorforms behind him….a little sad oops pinched her consciousness at the thought, but she was learning quickly not to ask herself "why"…of course, WHY had never been exactly a burning question for her….burning. Again, a psychic ouch. A big one, that time. She shook her head as if she could brush the images away like a puff of dust… another taboo word, and her mind fled to perversely consoling memories of that first weird, unwholesome burial ground landscape, which should have been so alien to a cute, sheltered (well except from her parents' screaming fights and icy silences) expensively highlighted pep girl from somewhere very close to 90210 whose favorite hobbies were spending her dad's cash and making out with boys at the movies--preferably stupidly amusing ones (that applied to the guys and the flicks)--but that even then, early on, had, in spite of the danger and darkness, provided a kind of comfort and feeling of home that she had never quite felt before, and that now was just her natural backdrop, as routine and effortless as back, then, before, shoe-shopping at the mall had been……
At that, once more, she felt the strange new blush. She was never big on the red flag anyway, but this blush was different: She had noticed it since she'd fled (Shame! Shame!) from the crater, rushed away before it could suck her, like a great grinning sucking chest wound, into itself and out of her waiting new world. Buffy felt the blush of deep remorse, regret spreading across not just her face, but seemingly over her whole body, seeping inward and flooding her very viscera like a reverse bloodstain….
Okay enough!! This was just…..morbid. What was the point of…..it all…if she was gonna sit around and brood (Besides, someone else she knew already had THAT job market cornered!) and tremble and choke as if she were still The Only One With The Weight Of The World On Her Shoulders? This was…..the first day of the rest of her life, wasn't it? She was gonna have to remember what it was like, what SHE was like, before her life became a genre tragi-comedy.
Buffy decided she would just have to entertain herself out of these Dark Thoughts. "Whistle a Happy Tune" and all: Except whistling (or singing, even humming for that matter) had never been one of the Bonus-giveaways that came with The Special Slayer Strength n' Skills Package: Even when the Musical Comedy King From the Black Lagoon had set all her Homies to warbling like incendiary songbirds, she could barely hit the flat notes! The only time she could remember being able to purse her lips and emit a sound at all resembling melody was, strangely enough, when she was invisible. Come to think of it, she'd found various creative uses for her lips that day….okay, that particular image required really desperate banishment measures: She tried to think of some of the Road Games that Joyce and Hank had attempted, often in vain, to get her and Dawn to play to stop the fighting when they were on the road in whatever year's latest version of the Summersmobile (the cars had gotten increasingly elaborate over the years, their expensive flashiness in direct proportion to the rising volume of her parents' arguments and the unpaid balance on the credit card bills) as they were driving to whichever unaffordable, garishly lavish, totally child-inappropriate resort Mom had picked for their "having fun" during the annual "Family Togetherness Vacation" that was yet another grasp at the thinning straw that was her and Hank's once-legendarily Romantic marriage.
Except it was too dark to do the "Whoever Finds the Fourth Red Camarro Gets to Pick the Next Rest Stop Game" or the educational ones Hank had loved inflicting on them, like "License Plate Math Quiz", or "The Spot and Spell The Animal Game". Besides, she had a feeling they were way out of "Tourists and Truckers: Red Apple Rest Stop, Your Next and Last Chance to Snack n' Pee for 50 Miles--Two Exits Ahead" territory, unless your taste in fast-food ran to roadkill, and in powder rooms to squat-sized ditches in the sand.
She looked outside, and was confronted with a darkness so void of luminosity that even she, who was used to staring down nothingnesses empty and black enough, outside and in, that a girl less born to the abyss would have become one with it and evanesced herself at least four Armageddons ago, could only gape. So positively null and crammed full of dense ebony-essence was it that even Buffy was awed and overwhelmed, and in a creepy, not an Oh! Praise Mother Gaia for the Bounty of Her Perfect Universe kind of way. Beyond the scratched and dusty windows, she could see nothing, not an iridescent stripe on the road, not a fragment of glinting gravel, not the wing of a night bird slicing past the corner of her eye, not a darting coyote or a distant neon sign, the kind that's acid flashiness you could hear almost before you could see it…..kind of like thunder and lightning, except, like, more oppositeishly. Right? You heard thunder AFTER you saw the lightning? She thought so at least. If not, then it wouldn't be opposite-y, at all, but an actual analogy.
She couldn't even exactly see her reflection in the crude and thick glass, gazed blankly at by how many generations of clueless and prematurely doomed Sunnydale High students? Only a vague suggestion of herself, outlined, bounced back at her, fuzzy, indistinct, sort of sinister and unformed: Buffy silhouetted in perforated lines, the colors washed out and funny as if someone had thrown a glass of water at a coloring book filled-in with magic marker….For some reason, this freaked her out more than almost anything else that had happened, or not happened, since they began their magic-carpet trajectory into the Interstate unknown…..she'd never really stopped to think before what it would be like to NOT have a reflection, to not see yourself, except as messages sent to you by a glimmer of love or a flash of disapproval through someone else's eyes, to depend on those messages to know who you were, since you couldn't see it with your own eyes, no matter how sharp, or trusting, or blue…..
Yeah, so even the stars seemed to have gone undercover, become fugitives along with them, or FROM them, somehow knowing it was too dangerous, or too shameful, to be exposed to the microscope of human sight, or the telescope of divine……for some reason, Buffy had the not unfamiliar feeling that she and her friends WERE fugitives, or at least refugees, even though, she reminded herself, for the first time in a long time, they had nothing to be running from. OR running to, either.
There was no (at least that they knew of; somewhere, somehow, unnamed but not unanticipated, there always was, always had been and always would be, SOMETHING out there behind or ahead, chasing after them or running away from them…..except that now, thanks to herself, and to that unfortunate, tressy, agelessly aged Wise Woman who had lately succumbed, one of the more recent, although not the most recent, victims of the often lethal Proximity to Buffy Summers Syndrome--a sharper and more vicious ouch of the pain-that-must-not-be-named plunged into her gut than any she had felt since this peculiar Flight Night had begun, and not, she couldn't help but knowing, although the knowledge intruded against her will, only for the poor noble Crone--and to the magic instigated by herself and performed by her Black, White, and Red "Wicca"/Witchy Best Friend, there were now several thousand more moving targets about, to distract whatever nameless pursuer was out there from their little Molten Core): No wizened Vampire cult leader chased after them, no trout-mouthed earth-swallowing stone idol, no military-academic complex-engineered Super Android, no homily-spouting, spider-eating Demon-aspiring mayor, no more-minions-than-taste, fashion victim, sister-cutting, skanky-ho Hellgod, no pimply misogynist-with-a-rocket-pack sub-human idiot, no puffed-up, dandruffy Jimmy-Lee-Swaggart on steroids snapping at their tails. Okay, they'd won some, lost others, with varying degrees of tragedy and triumph, but mostly, they'd outrun them all. Good times.
And they weren't rushing TOWARD anything either. Nothing identifiable anyway. Up ahead, there were no invisible loser-girls to stop from cutting up obnoxious cheerleaders, no demon roommates to thwart before they stole your soul and scarfed the last of your peanut butter; No dimension-bleeding rituals to halt before midnight, no cursed candy to confiscate before your mother and your mentor ended up in juvie; no hyena-possessions, fool-moon lupine transformations, Wicked Witch of the I-Mac nerd-and- worldicidal rages, alternate universe doppelgang stakings, barely pubescent whining sibling stupidly parking in the woods with Undead jerk rescuing, slutty Chosen-one-gone-nuts body usurping, mucous-shooting mid-life crisis father-figure with antlers recognition and rescue ops, no broody-boyfriend who fancies himself Hamlet attempted-hari-kari with sunrise in lieu of sword committing ……Buffy gulped. Hard. …..all of it their job, no HER job, to stop, all with the clock ticking and the meter running. The meter running on the Earth-as-they-knew it, on their lives, and on hers…always on hers. Now, there was no mission to speed to, no one to be saved (at least, no one who COULD be saved anymore) no sands pouring too fast through the hourglass, no shadow on the sundial circling like a vulture, as her head spun and her heart raced and she had to look, for everyone else's sake, as if she knew what she was doing and like she would get it all done, and on time. So why did she feel so panicked now, now that she was safer than she had ever been, and would continue to be safer than she could ever have imagined, even before The Calling, because the dreams had made her know, always, that safety was an illusion. But she was scared. More scared than she remembered ever being.
Because she was coming from Nowhere…..literally, it turned out, this time….and, for once, she had nowhere, nowhere to go. Nowhere she had to show up. No one expecting her. Nothing she had to do, or to be.
She looked out again, out and up. Pitch. Utter. Nothing. Not a single star, not a planet masquerading as a star, not a firecracker or a security beam or the blinking tail-light of jet that you could confuse, or fool, or wish yourself into thinking it was a star, if you needed to desperately enough.
It seemed that even the Star World, Mommy's Star World, the one she hadn't thought of, or been able to travel to, for years, had gone away. It's true, Buffy thought, that she hadn't visited it for awhile, but she had always, in some still-childish part of herself, figured it was still there, in the alternate universe of discarded hopes that everyone had, and she would find it again, if she only had the time, or the willful suspension of disbelief, or if she really really had to. And right now, she could sure have used the false promise of The Land of Beloveds in the Sky; she needed to believe in it, and to go there in the dark of the night and in the dark of her heart, more than she had in a long, long time. But there were no stars out, not anymore, or none that she could see, and Buffy had the feeling there wouldn't be, ever again, or not for a very long time, or at least, not for her.
Part III:
Okay. She had to distract herself, this was grotesque. But she was going to have to rely on auto-amusement, apparently. Everyone else seemed to be sleeping. She couldn't decide if she was weird for not falling into the Slumber of the Righteous, the Serially Sleep-Deprived, the Beaten-to-an-Ultra-Tough-Pulp, and the Deeply Escapist; of if there was something profoundly wrong with the rest of them for having the nerve, the denial, the lack of adrenaline, the inexplicable serenity, and, she tried not to even think, the unforgivable callousness, in the face of death and grief and horror, to be able to so effortlessly give in to REMS.
Probably it was her that was peculiar. It always was. But just as probably, she didn't really believe it, even though she knew that in the morning she would, tediously and self-deprecatingly. pretend, including to herself, that she did. Ye Olde Superiority/Inferiority thing, just like Webs, her amateur-shrink co-alumnus of Sunnydale High, had diagnosed--before she turned him into a puff of dust motes. Just one more charming, handsome, intelligent, sincere, and helpful undead casualty of her Sacred Mission to Preventively Murder Vampires. Yuppers, always making the world a better place, that was Buffy Summers.
Bitterness she was no stranger to, but genuine self-reproach was so unfamiliar that it came upon her like a flood of ice water. The thoughts and sensations she'd been trying so hard since they'd boarded the bus to stem with less success than the little Dutchboy with his finger in the dike…oh jeez, how she had played dumb with Angel about that, letting him instruct her as if she didn't understand a simple child's tale, a parable, massaging his ego because she felt guilty and condescending and angry at him for BEING condescending, and worried about him, as well as about that ego that needed further puffing up about as much as his hair did! And that was WAY before Willow met Tara (at that, Buffy was struck by the irony, no, irony was too lighthearted, and sometimes even enlightening, about the bloody-minded useless ridiculousness of just whom, when it all shook out after all these years, was gone, who had been sacrificed, by fate or by betrayal, or had sacrificed themselves, and whom had been saved, or saved themselves, and the consequences be damned!); if it had been AFTER, Buffy cringed, she could just have imagined the faux-stuttering and blushing and tasteless lesbian jokes she might have been tempted to make about the story of the Boy and the Dam to perk up ol' Liam by making herself look like an idiot, and Willow like a freak; and maybe to both titillate him, and to assure him that SHE was an old-fashioned girl who played on the right team, and to reassure him that she didn't hold what she had always suspected in him to be a secret, and maybe insecure, homophobia, against him. What a jerk. Buffy didn't want to stop to consider whether it was her, or her True and Eternal Love, who was the jerk.
Okay, she told herself, Summers, SLAYER, focus. On the moment. Scope out the scene.
Maybe there's one 'em of who is actually awake, one of 'em with a conscience, or a nervous system, or maybe just indigestion from that pineapple pizza they had grabbed (how had she ever eaten that crap, even back in high school?) from the drive-thru rest-stop pit outside of La Jolla, right before they had taken off to head into The Wasteland. Whose bright idea had that pizza been? With a start, she realized they had gotten it special, for her, they thought that they were giving her a treat: How long had it actually been since she'd even been able to LOOK at a pineapple pizza? Probably not since she'd stopped thinking the John Hughes oeuvre was underground cinema. Did they really think she had stayed still all those years, that she hadn't changed at all, through it all, that she was exactly the same ostrichy person who buried her head in incongruous pizza toppings and jumped up tales of hormonal adolescent angst draped in Rodeo Drive fashions, not to mention in the sand? Now she understood, although could not entirely pardon, why Xander had to Giles, sneered, when she had wrinkled her nose at the pizza order, "oh, yeah, the Buffster's too sophisticated for the Carmella Soprano a la Dole special these days.. Next she's gonna want something aesthetic, like a Flowering Onion thingie." Maybe I didn't hear him right. Must be. Maybe he said "tofu burger" or "Beluga caviar". Or asparagus. Sounds almost exactly the same as flowering onion. Sure it does. Sort of.
You can do it, Buffy, she ordered herself. You can just. Stop. Thinking. (After all, it's a pretty newly-acquired habit) And maybe play geography with yourself (as Wesley would have said, perhaps she could rephrase that one), or something. Big Bad geography, maybe, that would be fitting, and a kick: Troika; Acathla; Angelus; Sp…..
Maybe charades would be a more funner idea. But for that, she needed a co-conspirator. Better find one who's conscious, or alter the state of one who's not.
She adjusted her eyes to the dark, scrunching them up and squinting until she could make out figures in the ebony shroud that seemed to be surrounding the bus from the outside and wafting in from the eyeless desert like poison gas, filling its interior with an impenetrable dread, a void that made it impossible to see. Years of necessity, "working" in the dead, as it were, of night, plus the "Gift" of whatever supernatural or mystical or freakish or merely demonic mutation that made her what she was in the first place, whatever or whomever such might be, had combined nature and nurture to arm her with almost instant and razor-sharp night sight: Her eyes could cut the dark like a laser knife, and she moved about in the night like a cat, like a bat, like a wraith. But it wasn't working that way. She was having trouble seeing, identifying, making sense. Something was swimming in front of her, obscuring everything, but it wasn't a mist, or a monster, or an injury, or a spell. It came from her, from somewhere inside of her, and then on her; it was warm, and wet, it burned as it streamed down her cheeks until she wiped it away, firmly, and looked around at what passed now for reality.
The Potentiated were all curled up together, like a litter of parti-colored multi-culti kittens snuggling in an indistinguishable mass of temporarily banked undifferentiated bouncy energy. Except Kennedy, of course, who, though asleep, sat straight up, vertical as a stone sentry, guarding even in somnolence the soft, seemingly totally relaxed form of Willow, her arms encircling her girlfriend's feet like a sacred circle of protection. Willow's hair flowed around her, red and silky, interrupted now by a thin stripe of palest white, smoke rising up through a bright crimson fire; and, through Kennedy's slightly open sleeping mouth, Buffy could see the metallic glint of the studd-y tongue. A visual Buffy definitely did not need, no matter how desperately she was in the market for diversion, rose before her eyes and needed to be almost forcefully waved away like a plume of toxic smoke or a swarm of hornets.
Across the aisle from where reposed the pile of Rainbow- Kitty-Calendar mini-superheroines and the valentine shape of Siddharthurine n' Nancy, Buffy could make out in the darkness a flicker of merged silhouettes: Someone had no doubt turned her once-misdirected Slayer Strength to domesticated purposes and, probably with no more effort than one would exert on a weed, or a radish, plucked out a set of crunchily padded student-sized bus seats from their place; and someone else, no doubt relieved to encounter a renovate-and-construct task sufficiently simple and crude so that he could use his innate talent and hard-won skills without having to confront just yet the limitations and diminutions, most likely tragic, the loss of precision and elegance and virility that being minus one eye would inexorably bring, had planted it, anchoring its metallic roots to the floor of the bus after attaching the purloined bench horizontally to an originally settled pair so that they formed an ersatz, clever if hardly luxurious, chaise longue extending nearly across the aisle; on which reclined Faith, sleeping that curiously inanimate slumber, innocent and defensive simultaneously, that Buffy had noticed in person and in dreams, over the years: Not just Faith's palm, but her whole arm covered her eyes and face, the curve of her inner arm extended over it like an arrowless bow and her body coiled almost fetally; yet within this isolating hibernation her body was totally at ease and even child-like, her legs loose and dangling as a baby's and her expression as sweetly guileless. On her lap, looking like a lion's head, mane shorn and carved out of obsidian, rested the face of her wounded knight, his long arms extended on each side of his torso, and meeting behind Faith's back as if in reverence, prayer or contemplation; his weight, and it was substantial although not excessive, rested in complete, gratefully trusting surrender, on the Rogue Slayer's thighs and legs. Buffy caught her breath for a second: It was awhile since she had noticed how beautiful and manly Wood was: So large and looming, and sleeping so heavily and heedlessly, his eyes full of pain and of the relief of the temporary reprieve from it that a blanketing sleep can give, and of the longer-lasting but harder-to-trust relief of narrowly escaping a dark destiny, that had Faith's flesh, like Buffy's, not been made of more than human bones and blood, she would have winced even in her sleep and woken up stiff with bruises in the morning. A moment after her little sigh, Buffy was startled, although not surprised, by her indifference: She was no longer moved by Wood's power and beauty: Indeed, she didn't even see him that way, although objectively she knew others must. In fact, she doubted she had ever felt touched by his visage or character that way: He had been nothing more than yet one more of her last, ever more ineffective shields against….well, against nothing more than her own feelings, she supposed.