Title: Reflections
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Don't own a thing.
Summary: A couple years down the road Buffy reflects on her life. Angsty.
Distribution: It'll be up at ff.net eventually, and anyone who wants it can have
it. Just tell me where you took it.
Rating: PG-13
Authors Notes: The song is the Corrs' "All in a Day" from their album "In Blue".
Also, hey! This is not in fact a B/A 'shippy fic!
Feedback: It goes to
scwlc@yahoo.ca
******
She was preparing for a job interview when her glance caught itself in the
mirror. Hazel eyes stared back at her from a too thin face. There was pain in
those eyes, and Buffy couldn't believe it was her own face she was seeing. It
was as though she was looking into the face of a complete stranger. Who was this
woman with the empty gaze and sensible skirt and blouse?
And yet there was an uncomfortably eerie feeling of familiarity of the moment.
She could remember feeling this way before. Too many times in fact. The first
time, now more than a decade previous came to her with sharp-edged clarity.
//All in a day She saw the face in the mirror lie//
She had come home and lied to her mother. Telling her that she had been out with
her sometime boyfriend Tyler. Lied for the first time to protect someone other
than herself. Both her parents had been furious. She had gone to her room and
stared into the mirror hearing the shouting downstairs. The girl in the mirror
had killed something that night. For the first time in her life she had done
real violence to another creature. The hands that moved trembling to her face
had held a wooden stake, had plunged it through the breast of something that had
looked practically human.
That pretty face that she used to her advantage with members of both sexes and
all age groups hid a killer. Buffy had desperately silenced the sob that rose to
her throat.
//To her dismay She saw the child that was in her die//
That night, despite all her statements to the contrary, changed her in so many
fundamental ways she was still discovering them now. She had found herself
unable to stop the tears rising to her eyes and had cried in the bathroom until
her mother had ordered her down to dinner.
//And she cried All the night//
It wasn't the first night she had cried herself to sleep. It was the first night
her sobs had been inspired by such a deep-seated feeling of loss.
She stared at herself in her nice neat outfit and wondered where that sobbing
girl had gone. She had been replaced by this woman who looked somehow empty. The
emptiness pervaded her whole being. The image in the mirror reflected back
another memory at her. She had been sitting in her room, Angel behind her when
she glanced at the vanity mirror on her dresser. Looking into that mirror and
seeing nothing there had frozen her for a moment. She saw herself alone on the
bed, and for a moment she had fancied Angel to be nothing more than a figment of
her imagination.
For that moment there was nothing in the mirror but her, and Buffy had felt
completely lost. It was just so empty in the glass without him that she had to
turn away. Now, as she looked at the glass she knew there was no one hiding
behind a lack of reflection.
//'Cause what she sees She doesn't like//
That one evening it had been clear. She was alone even with him. Now, she was
alone period. The girl on the bed had been able to turn away from the
reflection. She could no more turn from that truth than she could change the
past.
//I'm twistin'//
Everything in the Slayer cringed away from the apparition in the mirror. The
empty-eyed creature in the mirror with nothing but her doppelganger behind the
glass to keep her company bore only a superficial resemblance to Buffy Summers.
//I'm turnin'//
She felt dizzy even as the face looking at her dazedly brought to mind more
memories. Seeing herself in the bathroom mirror at school as she prepared to
leave, and wondering, as she glanced there, about when her life had come to
centre on the slayer stuff. Wondering about when it had come to be second nature
to check her hair for bits of grass so it wouldn't show she had been fighting,
hiding the bruises she got from the fights so people wouldn't think her mother
was abusing her.
//I'm achin'//
When had it stopped hurting that no one seemed to care that she went through
torment for them? When had the pain subsided leaving her with nothing but
habitual responses to her friends and family? She knew that somewhere beneath
her empty centre was an agony so vast she didn't dare plumb it.
//And it's burnin'//
It had been there since that one night all those years previous that she killed
her first vampire and her whole world had changed irreparably.
//In one day//
Her life seemed full of these moments where everything changed. She may have had
few other things continue to be so consistent, but somehow it always seemed to
boil down to those moments where everything changed indefinably and totally.
//In one day//
So many memories came to her now as she stared into the glass before her.
Fighting and dying for a sister who wasn't real and who had gone as far away as
possible the moment she graduated from high school. Dawn was somewhere studying
in a student exchange in Moscow. She never called or wrote. Buffy occasionally
got an e-mail with Dawn's marks in it, but that was it. Her sister had never
quite forgiven her for dying.
//Just let me float Just let me drift on by//
She remembered the horror of waking up in her coffin and clawing her way out.
She remembered the way the anoxia had dulled her vision as she wandered
aimlessly down the street. She could remember the horror going from someplace
where there was no pain to a place where every moment seemed rife with it. She
had forgiven her friends for taking her from joy to agony, but they had never
forgiven her for not being in Hell so that they could rescue her.
She had stared into the mirror after lying to them about being in Hell and
wondered when she had drifted so far from the others that she would rather tell
them she had suffered than tell them she was suffering now. Again Buffy asked
herself when her friendships had come to mean playing a role to make everyone
feel self-important and righteous. Seeing the face in the mirror with all the
loneliness therein made her shiver.
//No more no pain I don't have tears to cry//
Desperation made her want to plead with the others to let her be. She had so
much to deal with herself, but somehow she was supposed to cope with it alone.
They wouldn't let her grieve, wouldn't let her indulge in any self-pity, it was
as though they thought her incapable of feeling loss as they did. Her empty eyes
reflected loss beyond the comprehension of most people. Staring blankly, the
image reflected the blankness inside that she had built to escape the pain.
//I'm twistin' I'm turnin'//
Buried deep inside there was still the sobbing fifteen-year-old girl who cried
out with every blow to her self-esteem, confidence, happiness and heart. That
girl knelt in the back of the Slayer's mind grieving her lost innocence, and the
loss of herself. A girl who understood that the pain she suffered was not, as so
many thought, the simple pain of leaving childhood behind. This was deeper than
that. Every night that she went out she suffered the loss of something more
fundamental. Her very humanity lay at stake.
She had to reach into herself for the part that was the Slayer. That part of
herself that had no humanity had to be brought forth to hunt and kill the
vampires and demons preying on the humans Buffy was so slowly moving away from.
She easily recognized the irony of this but could do little to change it. Over
time she had ceased to be even slightly amused by it. Still the vestiges of her
human self remained, as in the vampires she hunted and the people they once
were.
//I'm achin' And it's burnin'//
Eyes were said to be windows of the soul and Buffy could believe that. She could
believe it because nothing was in her eyes. She knew her soul had been driven
from her by the daily agony of living and so she had none. Slaying was no longer
a matter of duty, habit or pleasure. It simply was. Like her.
On second thought, she could see pain in her eyes, so perhaps she was simply so
used to the agony it had numbed to a dull ache. People say you can get used to
anything. Her eyes reflected that dullness. The quality of defeat springing from
too much time alone and too much pain to bear.
//In one day//
She had seen eyes go from soulful and loving to dark impenetrable pools.
//In one day//
Eyes, so like her own, suddenly no longer snapping with life and humour staring
emptily at the ceiling, the night sky, the inside of the lid of a coffin. That
she had seen even more often.
//In one day//
Friendship had changed to anger and hatred from one moment to the next all
because of events beyond her control. Faces that were always just behind her
eyelids sneered at her for her failures.
//I'm twistin' I'm turnin'//
She firmly faced away from the mirror and ignored the eyes that were no longer
in it that dug into her back. They followed her out of the corner of her eye in
reflective objects about the room. The glass over a framed print, a china dish
of her mother's she'd kept, the computer in the corner all returned that
terrifying gaze to her.
As she did every day, she paused, staring at the knives and stakes on the
weapons chest. So easy to simply make it all stop. She began to reach for a
knife, her eyes almost caressing the blade for the relief it promised. She
stopped. Slowly turned to the door and resolutely walked out.
A lifetime of habit could not be broken.
//In one day//
The End
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