The Talk: The Talk
by The Traveller
Disclaimer: Buffy, Riley, Spike, Giles, Xander, Willow, Oz, Joyce, Cordelia, the Master, Drusilla, Professor Walsh, the other soldiers, Faith, Kendra, the Watchers Council, and all other BTVS series characters I’ve mentioned are the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, Inc. Merrick and Lothos are the property of 20th Century Fox. I’m not making money here folks, even at my real job, so please don’t sue me.
Recommended Musical Accompaniment: 3AM by Liv Kristine, Never by Crematory, Conspiracy of Silence by Godgory, The Insight and the Catharsis by Dimmu Borgir
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Buffy was folding her laundry on her bed, her demeanor pensive. There was so much to think about now; it seemed that she never had too little to consider in her quiet moments. Her door opened and she turned.
It was Riley. “Hi.” His expression was hesitant, as always, but this was not the hesitance of a man uncertain of how to approach a woman, but of someone who knew not how to broach a very delicate subject. Almost as an afterthought, he closed the door before speaking again. His eyes never left hers as he moved to sit on Willow’s bed. “I guess we need to talk.”
Buffy’s expression was distanced as she sat on her own bed. She was tired, none too thrilled with this recent development. “I guess we do.”
The silence that followed was chafing. They looked at each other, almost in expectation, then looked away, unable to bear the expression of questioning in the other’s eyes. They had both wanted, both daydreamt, both edged infinitesimally closer towards one another, but now their mutual discovery stood in their path, and it was a path Buffy Anne Summers had grown tired of having blocked.
“Who are you?” Riley finally asked, breaking the silence.
“The Slayer,” she replied calmly. She was used to this part: explaining who she was and how she had come to be, explaining the war between darkness and light in which she was a chosen player, even if others had outgrown their usefulness to the Powers That Be.
Her simple answer only confused Riley more. He looked around briefly as if in search of further explanation. “And that is?”
“The Chosen One. One girl out of every generation, chosen by the Powers That Be to fight the forces of darkness.” Buffy shrugged. “Sounds like a bad movie plot, I know, but that’s my life.”
Now Riley looked skeptical. “And you fight vampires?”
“Vampires, Hellmouth demons, mayors who turn into dragon-type creatures, demons who want to suck the world into Hell or just take ordinary people there for the purpose of destroying their souls; I’m pretty much your all-purpose demon-slaying gal.” Buffy looked at him squarely. “You guys seem a little more specialized.”
“This is nuts,” Riley replied. “You can’t fight demons all by yourself.”
“I don’t. I’ve got Giles, my Watcher. I’ve got Willow, who’s a witch, although that was recent. Before she was research gal, like Xander and Giles and Cordelia and Oz. But Oz is a werewolf; he split because he needs to work out some kind of wolfy inner turmoil. Cordelia moved to LA, and she’s working for… a private investigator now. Xander, well… Xander’s still kinda ordinary, but he’s good with the research and fetching of doughnuts.”
“This is insane!” Riley suddenly stood up, his protective instincts kicking in. “How can you possibly fight vampires or demons or whatever? You’re a freshman college girl with no resources, no backup, no safe headquarters to regroup-”
“Excuse me?”
Riley stopped pacing to look at her. She was so petite, and yet there she stood at her full five foot two, the very picture of fury, her blue eyes snapping at the insult he had so unconsciously delivered. The nearly pure hatred in those lapis orbs was enough to give him pause.
“Am I hearing things or did you just say I can’t fight vampires because I’m a girl?” Disgusted, she paced away from him, then turned back, more ready to do battle with him than she had been with any denizen of Hell. “And I thought the Council was stuck in the Dark Ages. You honestly think I’m incapable of fighting off these things- which by the way I didn’t see you having a clue how to deal with when you were actually face to face with something sans fangs- just because I don’t have some standard issue fatigues and a fancy version of a joy buzzer?”
Riley was stunned by her vehemence, unable to believe the venomous glare he was receiving came from the same eyes that had always seemed so vulnerable.
“I don’t believe this. Why is it that every guy in my life seems to think I either need protected or out-machoed? Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’ve been doing this for longer than you have? That maybe poor little vulnerable me might actually be able to kick ass and take names better than you can?”
“Look, Buffy,” Riley cut in, suddenly needing to defend himself. “We know what we’re doing; we’re on your side. If even half of what you say is true, then we’re fighting the same fight. Walsh has found a way to neutralize the creature’s ability to inflict harm-”
“Walsh? As in psych prof Walsh?” Buffy snorted disdainfully. “Just what I need: the bitch everyone loves to hate crashing my party with a bunch of pumped up soldier boys.” Then she looked at him. “What do you mean, neutralize the creature’s ability to inflict harm?”
“Professor Walsh has been working with vampires for some time now; she’s developed a neural implant that stimulates the pain centers in the brain whenever it senses the impulse to cause harm. We know it works; when we were attempting to recapture Hostile 17-”
“Spike.”
“Excuse me?”
The change in her was astonishing. Her sparking blue eyes narrowed to furiously glittering slits, and the tone in her voice nearly froze Riley’s blood. He had the fleeting impression of an avenging angel, come in all her golden fury to chastise a mortal for his presumption to assist the gods. “His name is Spike. But I don’t suppose that matters to you, does it?”
“Buffy-”
“After all, if you actually recognized the fact that they had names, it’d be a little harder to just round them up for Walsh’s scientific experiments, now wouldn’t it? I mean, if they have names, they must have been human at one point, and your precious doctor can’t be doing this groundbreaking research on someone you might know, can she? No, she’s only experimenting on creatures, hostiles, things, isn’t that right? So it’s okay to just stun them with electric shocks and let her play Dr. Mengele with them, then stake them while they’re too weak to fight or in five point restraints. It’s okay to create something that effectively starves them, forcing them into a tortured, weakened existence until they don’t even have the strength to run from something that will kill them. Starvation doesn’t kill vampires, Riley; they just become so emaciated that they can’t get away from the danger, and that’s if they’re out in the open with that damn implant stuck in their brains. What does your darling Walsh do with them in her little hidden bunker when she’s through with them? Just put a stake through ‘em when they can’t even fight back then have the janitor come in with the vacuum?” Buffy was angrier than she’d ever been in her life, so angry she could barely see through the haze of rage that had dropped over her brain like a morning fog. Never once had she thought she would be defending the rights of vampires besides Angel, but there she was, exuding the wrath of a goddess from every pore at the idea of such a death.
“Buffy, if you are what you say you are, I’d think you’d be glad to hear something like this. We could eliminate the threat that vampires present. You wouldn’t have to slay them anymore.” Riley had never seen her exhibit such passion, and yet it pulled at him, as if the depth of her feeling struck a deeper chord than the aura of vulnerabilty. “You could be a normal girl, lead a normal life.”
Something inside Buffy flared in that instant, something far stronger than the whining suburbanite side of her psyche that had always lamented her lot in life. Something far deeper and far more the core of her that was the Slayer and knew that now she could never truly accept mere normalcy in her life. She had been tested, and the mettle within her that had once been raw iron had been tempered to steel, and those flames, which were fed in part by Hell itself, now burst forth, as though his casual offer of the one dream she knew was beyond her reach was a backdraft out to consume he who was foolish enough to open a door on an inferno.
“Don’t you dare,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare offer me the one thing I’ve ever wanted at the cost of an honorable death to those I fight. At least when I stake a vampire, whoever it is dies cleanly in battle. They are soldiers of darkness, as I am for light. At least, in moments when their brethren remember, it can be said they died with honor, fighting to the death with the Slayer and her host. Can the same be said of the vamps you’ve killed? Or haven’t you killed any, Riley? Do you play at being a soldier, pretending you’re so brave, when all you do is collect Walsh’s specimens and then never look back? You’re hired muscle, Riley: you and all your boys. You haven’t the stomach to actually look a vamp in the face, knowing he was once that freshman you gave directions to, or that girl in high school you had a crush on, or the guy who bagged your stuff at the grocery store three weeks ago. Do your victims have faces, Riley? Do they have names and pasts and families who are looking for them? Or worse, buried them only a day ago and henceforth have to visit an empty grave?” When Riley suddenly looked stricken, she attacked the weak spot instantly. “Oh, did you forget some of them have graves? Do your boys even hunt in the cemetaries? Or do you wait for them to go hunting? Have you ever had to wait for a vamp to wake, watching the name carved on his tombstone, and wondered who his family was? Did this girl have a boyfriend? Is this gonna be another empty seat in my graduating class? I have.”
Riley sat down, feeling almost humbled by what she had to have gone through. No longer did he doubt her assertion that she was the Slayer, whatever that meant. But now, he wanted to know precisely that. “Tell me, Buffy. Tell me what you’ve seen.”
Buffy shook her head in wonder. “And now you ask. Now you want to know what it’s like to try crosses and swords and stakes rather than tasers and nets. To know that when it’s crunch time and the darkness gathers, you don’t have time to explain what you have to do to the people you care about the most, because the important thing is to keep the world from being brought down around their ears and you have to do it alone.” Slowly, Buffy sat on the bed, curling her legs against her chest and staring past them; it was easier if she didn’t look at him.
“This was dropped in my lap when I was just an airhead high school freshman in LA. I didn’t care about anything important; I didn’t have to. But then my first Watcher, Merrick, came and told me that I was the Chosen One, that he was years late, that I had to begin training immediately if I was going to save the world. I killed my first vamp that night, in a dark cemetary in LA and on a school night, no less. I came home and my folks were fighting. The more I got drawn into my fate, the more they fought, blaming each other for my increasing troublemaker status. People thought I was on drugs, that I was losing my mind. They didn’t know that I was trying to save their lives. Lothos was the vamp in charge in LA; he killed Merrick because I wasn’t strong enough to resist him yet. I killed him and a bunch of my classmates at the last freshman dance, and I had to burn the school down to make sure I had them all. That’s when I moved to SunnyHell.
“I thought I was free after that. A fresh start, a normal life. My new Watcher was Giles, the Sunnydale High librarian, and he even had a new head vamp all lined up for me to finish off. The s.o.b. bit me and left me to drown in his cavern when I finally went to face him. If it wasn’t for Xander, I’d be dead and the next Slayer would be running things now. Her name was Kendra.
“Kendra showed about halfway through the school year two years ago, when Spike had come to town looking to improve his lover’s health, Drusilla. Drusilla was insane, with almost as much power as Lothos and the Master had. Drusilla killed Kendra right before finals while she and another vamp were looking to raise the demon Acathla, so he would swallow the world into Hell. I split to LA for the summer after that. Just booked; the fight with the other vamp was rough, and my mom had just found out I was the Slayer, I was accused of killing Kendra, expelled from school. I just shut down and left. When I finally came home was when I realized that running didn’t help either, because even disappearing into LA’s not so nice district couldn’t hide me from who I was or what I had to fight. If anything, I ran straight into it again. So I came home.
“Then we had the fun of my senior year. Faith showed up, the next Slayer. She lived for the kill, a little too much, really. She’d had a tough life, and when she wound up killing one of the mayor’s aides by accident, it sorta pushed her over the edge. She’s in a coma now at Sunnydale General; the docs don’t think she’ll ever wake up.”
“What happened to her?” Riley asked gently.
“We were in a fight. She was trying to kill me; I wound up stabbing her with her own blade and she fell off the roof of her apartment building onto a passing truck. But I couldn’t afford to grieve. I had the mayor’s Ascension to deal with.
“You don’t know what you’ve really gotten into, Riley. You can’t know. You’ve never had to stake people you saw just a day ago, smiling and fangless and walking in the daylight with their mom or their dog or their best friend, or even just alone. You haven’t had to fight demons you can’t kill with stakes, or seen innocent people butchered for a demon’s cause. You don’t live with the knowledge that every vamp who knows your name can track you home, or where you hang out, and can target your family or friends in order to mess with your head or lure you into an ambush. You don’t see their faces in your dreams and know you didn’t have a choice, and the only solace you can offer your conscience is that they at least died fighting, just like you’d want to die. You’ve never seen the effects of real magick, dark or light.” She looked at him then. “I’m built differently than you are, you know. And not just that you have man parts and I have woman parts. I heal faster than you do, physically. You remember that cut one of the Gentlemen got on me?”
Riley nodded. “Yeah; did you get stitches for that?”
Buffy shook her head. When he looked about to scold her, she unabashedly turned and pulled her shirt up over her head, and then unhooked her bra. Both surprised and curious, Riley stood and leaned closer.
A thin line, slightly lighter than the rest of her back, was the only testament that she had been injured at all. Riley sat on the floor with a hard thump as Buffy pulled her clothes back on. “It takes me about twenty four hours to heal broken bones, Riley. If one of your guys gets hurt, he’s laid up for months, isn’t he?” Riley nodded. “I’m the Slayer, Riley. I have to heal faster, because I have to be harder to kill than your average college freshman girl. I have visions, too: prophetic dreams that give me the extra clues I need from time to time. Giles has the largest occult library in the country, entirely devoted to the research I might need to do in order to defeat whatever big nasty thing comes along. I’m the soldier in this room, Riley. You’re just a specimen collecter. When Walsh gets tired of playing with vampires, who’s next? Werewolves? Other breeds of demon not so easy to capture or neuter?” Her blue eyes were liquid with unshed tears as she gazed down at him. “Or will it be Slayers she decides to take apart?”
Riley gasped reflexively, horrified by the very idea of it.
“Will I be just another specimen, Riley? Part of yet another experiment to add to her resume? Or do you really think vampires is as far as she’ll go? I can’t afford to think that way, Riley, because I have friends who are just as extraordinary as the demons that I fight. I am as extraordinary as they are. Where will the line be drawn, Riley? And will it be drawn before one of you gets hurt trying to play soldier in a situation you aren’t prepared to handle? Are you ready to read the prophecies, Riley? To forgo science and deal with powers you probably don’t even want to admit exist? Because if you are, then you need to stop playing soldier and actually be one; and if you aren’t, it’s time to stop playing soldier altogether.”
Riley shook his head in wonder. There was such wisdom in her eyes. “Are you the same Buffy who falls asleep in psych class every other day?” he murmured.
Buffy smiled ruefully, reaching out to brush a lock of that sandy brown hair behind his ear. “Yeah, that’s me: slays all night and falls asleep during class Buffy. Just most people don’t know the slays all night part.”
Her smile was so soft, her face glowing in the aftermath of her rage, her hair in a wild disarray around her shoulders from her pacing. Riley couldn’t help himself. Gently, he leaned up, his lips gravitating towards hers.
They met her fingers instead. “Don’t, Riley,” she ordered softly. “This complicates what we wanted. Let’s not complicate this by adding what we want to the equation.”
He looked up into her eyes, wanting only to hold her, to make her nightmares go away, to promise her that he would never allow Walsh or demons or anyone else to harm her ever again. But he knew she was right. They had to deal with the obstacles first, not make the destination another hurdle to leap. “What do we do, then?”
“Go talk to Giles,” she replied. “That’s what we always do when something like this happens. You need to talk to him, and to Spike.”
“Spike’s there?” Riley asked, somewhat alarmed.
“We’re not thrilled with the idea, trust me, but we had to. In the end, Riley, some of the light falls to darkness, and some of the darkness is brought into the light. The good guys don’t win, Riley, not in this game. We just try to keep the score even.”
“Now you’ve lost me; you’re not trying to win?”
Buffy chuckled, pulling him to his feet. “We can’t, Riley. No more than they can.”
“Why not?”
A wisdom far beyond her years gleamed in those lapis lazuli eyes. “How do you know when it’s daytime if the nighttime never comes?” Smiling softly, she lead him from her dorm room, closing the door behind her.
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