When I was first Called—like, in the first couple of weeks when I started discovering my body's abilities—I had these vivid dreams every night. Not exactly nightmares, but not exactly pleasant, and they would always happen in some form. I saw this master vampire I had to fight, faced him dozens of times before I actually saw him. Since that time, though, my Slayer dreams have been more vague. Just images, hints; I'll wake up with the sensation that I've been fighting something—or fighting back to back with someone for something (not the same thing at all), but not vivid and quickly forgotten. Since I retired from being the active Slayer, I've had nothing, not even regular dreams.
I feel like I haven't slept all night. Now that I'm finally coming to the end of this institutional waking nightmare, every hour spent unconscious is one less hour I'm here...but tonight my body rebels. I count everything I can think of. Sheep, clouds, stuffed pigs, famous ice skaters, stakes...no, not stakes (although I might carry one in my purse when I leave here since I do know how to use it...just in case I run into weird stuff in the future...just in case I was wrong about my destiny not being real). I count things I can't wait to do when I get out of here; that's fun for an hour and thirty five minutes, by the red numbers on the blood pressure clock. What idiot thought counting was a good way to fall asleep, anyway?
The hospital bed morphs into an unfamiliar bed in my room at home, and I give a huge sigh of relief as I feel myself slipping into dreamscape. I love those dreams where I know I'm dreaming. The first thing I always do is try to fly, and the next is turn my little sister into something ridiculous with absolute impunity. This time, though, although I feel myself dreaming, I can't affect the dream.
I'm in a room that's not really my room—I mean, it is, the whole place is arranged and decorated so that it screams mine, but it's not that much like my real bedroom at home—and there's an unfamiliar black haired girl sitting on the bed. No, she's a brunette; she's just wearing black lipstick and eyeliner. She has an air of sophistication over a very real beauty, but I think she's younger than she looks. Her features are set, in an expression of steel. I feel as if I ought to know her, but I don't. Pain radiates from her, like the sophistication, but it doesn't either attract or repel me; it's just there.
The older girl fuzzes out and Dawn takes her place. They don't morph or anything, but I can't tell who sits on the bed when. Dawn is different too. She looks like I think she might look when she's my age. She's much taller, stronger, turning into a great beauty, and she's full of that same pain. I reach out to her.
Dawn is gone and the dark-haired, lithe girl who feels like she might have been my sister is back in her place. "Can't kick it's butt, B," she says. "But then, you knew that."
I'm dreaming and I know that too, but I find that I do know what she means. "It" is the pain I see in her and Dawn...the lingering horror of my own time in this place, and the pain I've seen in the few days I've been here in this institution. I just want to leave it behind me, and this girl is telling me I can't fight it. So? I already figured that one out; no need to send me a message in a dream.
I want to know who this girl is. She's me, my other half...me in a different way than Dawn is me, the person I might have been rather than a distilled version of the person I am. I can't straighten it out, and the dream is getting fuzzy while the sense of hospital bed and blood pressure monitor is getting stronger.
I use every bit of my will to stay in the dream. "Not going to try...to fight," I tell her.
"You have to," she says. Her voice is emotionless, but Dawn's voice, as my sister takes the other girl's place midway through the sentence, is filled with emotion. "Things worth fighting for..." Dawn says.
I want to hear the end, but the beginning of her phrase echoes in my hospital room as I wake. "Things worth fighting for..." My roommate is as quiet at night as she is, um, vivacious during the day, so all the other sounds from the hospital filter through our room. Then again, I should be used to that...
I know what woke me. The girl in the next room is crying.
I toss off the blankets and slip out of my room on those too small mass-produced hospital slippers. I check the hall to see if the coast is clear. Shellie is playing Solitaire at the nurse's station, and there's some janitor at the very end changing the towels, but other than that, everything is quiet and as dark as hospitals ever get. I pad from my room into the next.
As I push the door open, I wonder how I possibly heard Emma's sobs in my room. She's being so quiet that I can barely make out the noise from inside her room, and I'm listening for it. She hasn't heard me. She's in the bed farthest from the door, and she has her back turned to it.
I'm right next to her before she notices I'm there. "Hey," I whisper.
She sits up. Emma isn't really a girl at all, not the way I thought she was, although she can't be older than twenty. Her hair is strawberry blond, falling almost to her waist, and she has this kind of delicate grace that makes it look like she's a girl, at least from far enough away to obscure her haunted green eyes. Up close, she looks like she's at least twenty years old.
I can't think of anything to say.
She breaks the silence for me. "Did I wake you?"
"Oh...no," I lie. Well, maybe it isn't a lie; something did wake me, but I doubt it was Emma's voice. "I was just...restless...I came in to see if there was anyone else awake to talk to. Or go do a puzzle or something, if the Nazi Generals out there will let us out of bed."
"Oh." She scrubs at her face and gives me one of those fake smiles filled with pain that I've learned to recognize so well in the past week.
"You okay?"
"Sure. I've been better."
I think how Tasha used the same phrase, but when Tasha said it I believed her. Emma is...beyond me. I wonder if I should go back to my room.
She motions for me to sit down next to her, and suddenly she starts talking. Situations without resolutions, questions without answers. She's like me in that. Questions without answers. I won't give her the standard caveat, you have so much to live for. I don't know if she does. But I want her to fight.
I finally tell her that. Sometimes all you can do is make one little connection. Fighting is hard, and painful, and every day...and that's not just Slaying (which I'm not thinking about anymore), but life.
I can't put it all into words, but Emma seems to understand.
We stay there talking, right up until the doctors draw us away. I want it to be longer.
Mom strides into the hall like a woman on a mission (maybe she should be the Slayer...but now no one has to be, I promise myself), and shares a glance with Dr. Taylor, who's still here doing something or other.
"They say I'm sane-Buffy now?" I say. I try not to be sarcastic. As much emotion as I have rolled up in all of this, coming here, what I've learned, what I've been told—I don't want to jeopardize my chances of leaving.
"You can go home tomorrow, Buffy," Dr. Taylor says. "As long as you keep on your meds, I think you can keep these delusions from affecting your thoughts."
I pretend not to have heard his last sentence. That doesn't take much, as the weight of the rest of his words hits me. "Tomorrow?"
"Yes. Now, I have some affirmations for you, and I really do want you to work on these negative thought patterns..." Mom looks absorbed. I keep from yawning in the doctor's face. Tomorrow.
Emma comes up behind me. "I'm happy for you," she whispers.
"I know it's just for today, but this is something to fight for," I whisper back. "Living. Really living."
"I know."
A/N The character Emma is based on my scattered memories of Anna Westin, who I knew for about two weeks. So many people have done things in her memory; this is my own contribution to a woman who was and could have become a dear friend.
http://www.annawestinfoundation.org/annastory.htm
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