Chapter Four
It wasn't as if Buffy had wanted to go.
In her opinion, the entire scene stunk of 'A Christmas Carol'. But where Dickens had allowed Ebeneezer Scrooge to sing and dance and breathe and buy a Christmas turkey after the whole ordeal was over and done with, Ebeneezer Buffy was stuck standing over her own grave without the happy insight that she was viewing the future. The changeable future, nonetheless. That Scrooge bastard had it easy.
Instead, morbid as it was, she had wandered to a secluded nook of the Sunnydale cemetery where her funeral was being held and stood over her empty grave. She noted the blank face of the solid oak cross that stood as the marker, clearly the craftsmanship of a one Xander Harris.
She sighed and lowered herself beside the grave, wishing that she was corporeal enough to lean against a headstone. She hadn't slept since her . . . crossing; she couldn't for all she knew. Buffy was dead, but she still found the very act of existing to be almost as exhausting as she did when she still had a pulse.
By the time that the funeral service, having run a scant fourty minutes, had concluded, Buffy sheepishly admitted to herself that it was boring. She supposed that she should have cried, or moaned, or rattled some chains in a ghost-like manner and wept for what she had to give up. But frankly, what she was left feeling was a sense of boredom more than anything else. Oh, the speeches her friends gave were nice enough; they were what she would have said, had she been in their shoes. Best friend, blah, blah, blah, loved her so much, blah, blah, blah, so courageous, blah. Like an overly-long speech at the Academy Awards, Buffy knew everything they were going to say before they said it, who they were going to thank; she just wished she had the music to cut them off. Not that she wasn't grateful.
The one speech that gave the funeral some spark had been Anya's tragically short and outrageously inappropriate speech. Life, in Anya's words, was just like sex.
"When you're starting out, it can be strange or painful or vaguely unpleasant," she had said. "But after a short while, it feels nice. And then, just when you're starting to have a very good time, it ends. Before you get to have your orgasm."
Then, quickly: "But not with Xander. We have good orgasms."
And as swiftly as it had begun, it had ended, and Giles had Willow hold his glasses for him as he began to shovel the soil on top of her coffin.
Thunk. Thunk.
Buffy had peered over the edge of the hole to get one last look at her casket, only to find that it had been buried beneath a fine layer of earth.
Thunk.
The wind in the cemetery picked up, and the candles that had illuminated her gravesite flickered.
Flickered, then went out.
Buffy sighed, shivering despite herself.
Being dead sucked.