While Cordelia and Xander headed to her place where her mother was helping teach Xander actual dancing and Xander was looking forward to his reward - Lupe, the Chase's housekeeper's, cooking and the Cordettes were setting out to find out if geeks were date worthy for themselves, Buffy and her mother were continuing to talk, really talk, probably for the first time ever.

"When did this start, Buffy?" Joyce asked. "How old were you when this Merrick first came into your life?"

"It was my fifteenth birthday." Buffy answered. "The day my life changed forever."

"Almost two years." Joyce said quietly. "It wasn't long after your birthday that you started getting in trouble. You were accused of fighting, breaking a boy's arm. Did that really happen? Did you break a boy's arm? At the time, everyone assumed it was just a fluke, he was a two hundred pound football player and you were barely five feet and weighed maybe a hundred pounds."

"It really happened." Buffy confessed. "I hadn't gotten a handle on my strength yet and when he grabbed my butt, I just reacted. I grabbed him and threw him and his arm snapped." Buffy couldn't look at her mother, to this day that incident still scared her. Not because the boy had touched her without permission, but because she could have killed him. "That's when I agreed to Merrick training me, I was so afraid I'd hurt someone else by not being able to control my strength. During that time, Merrick cemented the 'he's insane theory.' I mean, obviously something was going on with me and he knew quite a bit about it and he told me about other Slayers he'd trained. But it wasn't any of that that made me think he was crazy."

"If that didn't make you think he was crazy, what did?" What could be worse than throwing a knife at a girl or taking her to a graveyard with a vampire crawling out of a grave?

"He told me we'd both been reincarnated to fight a particular master vampire that would soon be showing up in Los Angeles. He never did explain why he thought that or how he knew the vampire was coming to Los Angeles, but the vampire did show up about six weeks later."

"That would have been what, a few weeks before the dance where you burned down the gym?" Joyce clarified the timeline.

"Yeah." Buffy nodded. "He knew I was the Slayer and his name was Lothos, weird name, I know. I had a couple of dreams that involved him. Slayers sometimes have foreshadowing dreams, full of symbolic meaning and sometimes they're really clear."

"You dream about past Slayers and future events? From now on, Buffy, I want to know when you have one of these dreams. I want to understand them and what you go through. I - I honestly feel so helpless and I'm trying to figure out how to help you and talking through bad dreams, maybe that can help us both. I can give you a perspective outside yourself and help you deal with how the dreams make you feel."

"It's not easy talking about them, they feel very personal." Buffy replied. "But I'll try." She promised, after all Giles insisted on knowing about those dreams and he could be dismissive of how they made her feel. Talking about how they made her feel might help her deal with them, her Mom might be right about that, Buffy thought optimistically.

"Where did Pike come in?" Joyce asked, remembering the drop out she'd thought was a delinquent getting her daughter in trouble. "And why did he call himself Pike?"

"Because he hated his first name, Oliver." Buffy answered. "We met when his best friend started stalking him. Only it wasn't his best friend anymore. His best friend died and a vampire moved into his body. It remembered his life, but it wasn't him." Buffy sighed harshly and stood up, pacing. "And Pike knew it wasn't his friend anymore, even if he didn't yet understand it was a vampire. The boy he'd known for years, would never behave like that."

"Buffy, what is it? What happened that's got you so upset?" Joyce asked, standing up herself.

"I just realized, Pike staked his best friend and so did Xander. Both of them destroyed monsters wearing their best friend's faces. Both of them have to live with that. And both of them have been more concerned with helping me, than I ever was with helping them. It never even occured to me to wonder how that might have affected them. Am I a bad friend?"

"No, I don't think so." Joyce gently hugged her daughter. "Just a young girl trying very hard to deal with horribly overwhelming circumstances and changes in your own life. It can be hard to see passed your own pain and your own problems."

"Xander and I talked about something like that recently. I told him I couldn't see anyone else because of the hole I was in and he told me to yell and they'd drop me a lifeline and to remember I wasn't alone."

"When was this?" Joyce asked, suspecting they were finally getting to something that Buffy very much needed to get out.

"Not long after Halloween." Buffy said reluctantly.

"Why were you in a hole, Buffy?" Joyce pressed. "Was it literal or figurative?"

"Kinda both." Buffy took a deep breath and felt tears slide down her cheeks. "I died, Mom." She whispered to her horrified mother. "I died."

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A/N Incidents Buffy is describing come from both the movie and flashback sequences on the TV show. In the movie, Merrick did throw a knife at her and he did say they'd been reincarnated and the parents did go to a lot of parties, plus Buffy did throw a boy who grabbed her butt. Flashbacks from the tv show included visiting the graveyard and hearing her parents argue about disciplining her.