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"One group, the Barbie Liberation Organization, formed by a graduate student from the University of California at San Diego, went so far as to swap the speech mechanisms of the Talking Barbies with those of G.I. Joes, causing havoc for the toy stores that received the tampered merchandise. The Talking Barbies were saying things like, 'Vengeance is mine,' while the G.I. Joes were saying, 'Let's go shopping.' This political art expresses the distress many feel about the status of women in our society and the symbols that threaten the self-esteem of females."
-Margo Maine, Body Wars, "Barbie Dolls & Body Image."
Buffy loves big battle scenes. They make it harder to critique fight choreography and easier to feel like the chaos is under the control of something bigger than herself. It's no different in real life.
Her knuckle splits open on the jaw of a vamp and the sure, straight arrow of her braid begins untangling alongside this world. She is losing everything: sound, the penny smell of blood, the bodies on all sides of her. Instead, her own body becomes everything, lines and curves and three yards away, two yards away, one, fight coiled in her gut, and she was never good at math, but this she gets. Communication. The macho stiffening of her shoulders telling this Master guy that he's dust in the five seconds before she's ready to stake him but he's readier to break her neck.
And down she goes. And in a stuffy little office in Jamaica, up another one comes. And after her, in an alley in Boston. And after her, and after her, and after her--Forever and ever, amen.
Buffy first knew she would drop out when her new English teacher announced that their next assignment would be writing about their heroes. The cute-in-a-Judd-Nelson-weathered-by-something-other-than-time-sort-of-way guy next to her had stuck his tongue between his teeth and whispered in her ear, "Orel Hershiser. Bulldog pitches smoother than anyone."
She'd stared at him blankly, refusing to give him the satisfaction of asking what an oral Hershey was and wondering instead if he knew how incredibly gay that had sounded. He shook his head in disgust and she went back to hiding behind her hair. She scrawled her own name on the desk again and again while the teacher explained the finer points of essay-writing, alternating loopy and harsh, like an oath she was taking to heart.
It was the kind of brainless paper Buffy had written countless times in L.A, on Dorothy Hamill and the unattainable perfection of the Hamill camel, Coco Chanel's brilliance in popularizing the tan, or, when she was feeling sappy, her mother.
Her mother. This was a subject Wesley had learned by now that she was touchy on. His first entry in the Watcher Diaries after finding her had read:
The Slayer is willful and obstinate. In my attempts to question her regarding the incident that caused her to flee California, she has offered little more than shrugs and terse claims that "they" got to her before she could escape "them." She will not elaborate on the identity of the aforementioned "them," and while I am aware that the Council has identified the bodies of Hank and Joyce Summers, their possible connection to the earlier death of Merrick Jamison-Smythe is unclear, as are the Slayer's whereabouts at the time of the murders. I recognize that is surely an emotional topic for her, but cannot help envying Mr. Giles his luck in narrowly avoiding having Buffy Summers as his charge.
Despite how poorly Wesley hid the Diaries (between his box spring and mattress, like they were porn), Buffy had made no effort to read them. She knew exactly what he thought of her from the tone of his voice and prissy hunch of his shoulders. She didn't care. She offered him nothing but boredom.
It wasn't too hard. She was usually too tired and sore by the time she got in at night to do anything but pass out on her cot. It was a relief, really, not needing to find ways to stifle her sobs so he wouldn't hear her through the thin walls. Only at the most unexpected times, when Wesley was nowhere to be seen, did she break down and become vulnerable again, become just a girl.
Like when she'd had to buy new clothes. In her rush to get out of dodge, she'd brought only one bag of stuff with her, and almost all of it was too warm-weather for the Ohio mildness that felt like constant winter to her after years of being fed on blazing sun. Once Wesley's tidiness had shamed her into so much as changing her clothes and he'd given her some money for whatever she might need now--she didn't tell him that what she needed was gone forever--she'd gone shopping. It had been far more joyless than the still-perky voice in her head had made it sound.
On the way to Macy's, she'd found herself walking into the Army Surplus store. Nothing like her old style, but Private Benjamin had been on TV while she'd trained the previous day, and what could she say, she'd been feeling particularly susceptible to brainwashing lately. All that lecturing her from the Slayer Handbook Wesley'd been doing had made her feel extra instrument-of-destruction-y.
Besides, buying anything like her old style would be just as much a lie as the voice in her head still urging her to do it. It was the voice of the Other Buffy. The Buffy who only thought that she knew the meaning of "lost."
This Buffy, though, tried on the heaviest, most battle-ready black boots she could find. This Buffy didn't believe in walking into situations with her eyes closed ever again. This Buffy believed in being overprepared. Like a kindergarten teacher. Or a Boy Scout.
She was transforming herself into a Boy Scout in front of the store's only full-length mirror and nothing told her to stop. It wasn't until she tried walking around in the boots that anything gave her pause.
Ice skates. She was reminding of nothing so much as trying on ice skates with her mother when she was four. She'd wanted the same kind of skates as Dorothy Hamill, even though she'd had no idea but kind of skates Dorothy Hamill wore. Her mother had picked a pair of bright white skates from a high-up shelf and told her, "This is the kind." And she'd tried them on and walked around in them, seeing if they made her feel like Dorothy Hamill.
Now she was stomping around in these boots, seeing if they made her feel like Judy Benjamin. She was doomed to a lifetime of ridiculous role models.
Buffy stood in front of the mirror and watched her old self cry.
When she got back to the apartment, Wesley raised an eyebrow at the name on the bag but said nothing of it. Instead he motioned her over and bade her to turn around. He closed his diary and set it beside him on the couch, then draped something around her neck and tied it in a knot.
It was a cross, a solid weight against her chest. He said simply, "For protection," and she was forced to remember that this wasn't a conventional war. No role models applied.
So now she had an oddly flattering if dull wardrobe, an ever-growing slay-count under her plain leather belt, a geometry class she had failed to attend even once, a paper about her hero due in two weeks, and no hero.
When she mentioned the assignment to Wesley in passing, he said, "It's a fascinatingly metatextual question for someone in your position, isn't it? Who is the hero's hero? Who is the savior's savior? Would you like sugar or milk? I myself was actually required to write something similar during my time in the Watchers Academy--"
A month in Cleveland and she was tired of reminding him that she didn't drink tea.
Really, she didn't. She drank coffee, black as the supposed mouth of Hell, from a tacky little diner near her school that made her glad at least her job didn't involve dressing like Heidi. Well, the coffee came to her black and then she poured seven sugars and some creamer into it, but that was besides the point. And detracted from the fearsome reputation she'd been gathering.
She had registered for school as Anne Summers, a name Wesley had instantly objected to without explaining why. The better to rile him, Buffy figured. The better to evade any lingering members of Lothos' gang.
But she'd found with time some pleasure in introducing herself to whatever nasties she was about to kill as "Buffy." It wasn't just the hilarity of watching them attempt to process that information. Her name carried with it every image she held at the back of her brain of herself in a sweater and pleated skirt, cheering. Tossing her hair unnecessarily. Surrounded by shiny, lip glossed girls hanging on her every word. Night after night, she shared her darkest secrets, then watched her secret keepers turn to dust. This, she knew, was the only way trust ever worked.
Then there was the one who got away. They were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after hours, the security guard's battered body bleeding all over a mannequin in a white Elvis jumpsuit. The glass around the mannequin now came in long, jagged pieces, and Buffy grabbed one up, holding it close to her body. Might not be wood, but it could probably slice and dice just fine. She'd taken to braiding her hair back, out of the way without fully giving into her new, butch look, and the braid stuck out, barb-like, from her head as she spun-kicked toward the vampire.
He grabbed her leg and upended her. She flipped backward through the air, landing in a crouch, facing him. He had soft-looking hair and a long face made more jowly by the fangs and she tried very hard to resist the temptation to call him a hound dog because that was just tacky. Instead, she kicked off of a nearby, unshattered case to tackle him, landing him squarely on the floor, her on his back, shard birthing a thin line of blood at the nape of his neck.
"Who the hell are you?" he hissed, going limp, and she answered, "I'm Buffy. And you're Buffy's breakfast." Buffy didn't know yet never to fall for it when they go limp, never to loosen her grip even the tiniest bit. One wrist slipped from her fists and the vampire grabbed her forearm, reversing their positions. He made as if to kiss her and slashed her across the lips with the stolen piece of glass instead. Then he laughed. And he let her go.
Buffy ran for the first time since coming home and finding her parents dead. She ran and left her name in the hands of someone still walking around to tell the tale. Her only hope was that he'd still be there when the sun rose in ten minutes and shone straight through the building's hundreds of panes of glass and into him.
Hoping is no more effective than wishing.
This was how the demonic population of Cleveland learned that Buffy was a name meant to be feared rather than laughed at, and how Buffy herself learned that scars didn't make her unpretty. After all, she found Wesley pretty, in the moments she was most disgusted with herself and he was the thing most steadfast in her life; his back, when he undressed, was a map of scars she would never ask about. She didn't ask him much beyond, "What new have you got for me to kill?"
He was a fast learner, didn't say much except to answer. Didn't even ask about the essay he'd found so interesting and meta-whatever. They were beginning to slide into their roles, developing an impersonal but working Slayer-Watcher relationship. She slayed, and came back to the place she could never call home to find him having fallen asleep while watching the news. True to the letter if not the spirit, and all that.
If she were to drop out, he probably wouldn't notice the difference. Funny, when not so long ago, he had been the one pressuring her to go back to school in the first place, touting all the good a thorough education had done him. Right. None of the teachers here even knew her name, the real or the fake. And while their eyes lingered on the new scar splitting her mouth the wrong way, their gazes were more voyeuristic than concerned. They asked even less than she did.
The English teacher with the uncreative assignments once asked her how she was doing. "Anna, are you adjusting well to a new school?" said with a wide smile. But the banality of the question combined with the woman's painfully familiar buttercream froth of hair and neat pantsuit meant that she was met only with a dead-on glare.
Scars and raccoon eyes and silence weren't nearly enough to scare this woman, but they were enough to make her stop trying. She wouldn't be surprised when Buffy stopped showing up--so many kids disappeared without explanation lately. What would have surprised her would have been Buffy actually turning in the treatise on the cultural lie of the hero she'd begun composing in her head on uneventful patrols. Too bad she'd stopped writing when she'd finally met the one thing that would have felt sacrilegious to put in a diary.
Her first thought when she'd found them had been that they had finally killed each other. That's what it had looked like, and perhaps that was intentional, though she'd never know. The living room lights had been left on, and the kitchen too. Police would later find an unopened bag of popcorn still waiting in the microwave, but Buffy would never get that far. Like any respectable person, she'd found the sight of her parents' dead bodies somewhat more gripping than the smell of Orville Redenbacher.
Her mother had been stabbed in the eye with one of her father's pens, the blue ones with the name of his law firm stamped on the side; it may have even been the pen he signed the divorce papers with. The things you think of, Buffy thought, in the brief seconds when she could think at all.
The name "Summers" was chopped in half by her mother's eye socket. The things you notice. The marred leather of her mother's new shoes. Her father's Disneyland tee shirt, Mickey Mouse now bloodstained like a depressed child's nightmare. The identical bite wounds on both of their necks. That was what shut her brain off and put her on autopilot, upstairs and packing whatever was within reach.
Coming to Cleveland hadn't been planned out. It had just been the first big city after a long series of buses got her far enough to believe that she could breathe like a person again. Buffy liked big cities. Much easier to hide in.
Then it had been days of living in a motel, eating from the vending machine and huddling in a corner with her eyes shut, recreating, against her better judgment, the tableau of her parents' dead bodies and her last glimpse of their faces.
Everything she ate, she threw up eventually. She'd clutched the room Bible to her chest and hoped the cross emblazoned on its front would be enough to protect her if vampires came through that door. She'd had no strength left with which to fight.
Then there'd been Wesley. She would later remark that she hadn't known Watchers could be so young, and he would bristle at that, but when he'd first appeared in her doorway, she'd thought only that he was there to finish her off. Then he'd looked away from her and at the floor instead while he began his rehearsed introduction and she'd known that he didn't belong there any more than she did.
His face had been clean-shaven and his suit pressed while she had been wrinkled and unshowered and could practically feel her dark roots growing in, but not too long ago, she'd looked as dignified as him. More so, because she'd never spoken to carpeting. If Buffy Summers could do anything, it was look you in the eye.
Now he could too. Every time she saw him--which was increasingly less and less as Cleveland's forces of evil seemed to grow more and more--he paid her the respect of an unbroken gaze. The news reports he watched faithfully every night had begun to take their toll in the fine lines of his face and stubble of his jaw. He looked so battle-worn that it that came as no shock when she saw him out one night, caught in the act of beheading someone that didn't go poof but sure as hell wasn't human.
She said nothing. He came home late that night and he said nothing either. The only time she saw his newfound shell break, she was sleeping in for a night, nursing a deep knife wound in her side, and his voice was low on the phone in what passed for their kitchen.
She may not have seen him, but she could tell from the start and stop of his voice that he was staring intently at the linoleum. The curtains were drawn, so she didn't know what time of day it was, and British time zones were all wonky, so that was no help. But the way that he said, "Father," told her more than he ever had.
She'd never written about her dad as her hero, even if he was the one to take her to ice shows and buy her closets full of shoes. She wasn't sure why; it just hadn't happened. He had also been the one to insist that she be committed at her first mention of vampires, so maybe she'd had the right idea all along.
Perhaps she and Wesley could commiserate about fathers, if they did the whole commiseration thing, which they didn't, because it would interfere with the whole stoic repression thing, which was really working out great. Compassion invited unfriendly demons when your life was waiting for people to die.
One night she came in and she kissed him. It was two sets of chapped lips and stubble that burned the places around her scar when her mouth drifted, her hand wanting to sneak up his shirt and feel his scars but just laying there uselessly between them.
She didn't know why she did it; if asked, she would have said that she'd fallen on him, except that the couch where he'd sat, wide awake, and her lonely cot weren't on the same path from the front door. Maybe she kissed him to reaffirm the girl in her who'd been silent since her memory ceased to be a carefully guarded secret. Maybe she kissed him to hear his voice break again. Maybe it just happened and she really didn't know what she was doing anymore.
She'd lost count of how long ago the paper on her hero had been due and with it, how long ago she'd last set foot in a school except to chase monsters through the hallways. It could have been weeks. It could have been months. She was the only hero she knew and even that was a myth from some nice, patronizing men in England who wanted her to feel better about being their weapon.
After she kissed him and he kissed her back and she ran out that door, ran like she'd hoped to be done running, she wasn't even theirs anymore. She was just a weapon in soldiers' garb, set loose in the hands of chaos and impending apocalypse. She was Buffy; she was the Slayer; she was a girl born from death.
Time passed--she didn't count--and whenever she returned to Wesley, it was as a stranger. They'd never been more than strangers, really. They didn't talk. They ate in silence. They didn't look each other in the eye. She wasn't sixteen anymore, but that might have been the problem. She wasn't sixteen and he didn't look like salvation.
Then one day, she came home and he told her that there'd been a call from Sunnydale, California. The name felt familiar in her mouth but she could no longer remember why. She didn't know that it had been meant for her beginning, but now would be her end. Weapons don't come full circle. They are fired and dropped by the wayside, the destruction they've wrought what lasts.