TITLE: Hardened, Jaded , Cynical
AUTHOR: Ragna (WritingGoddess@aol.com)
RATING: FRT
CLASSIFICATION: Giles POV; alt universe.
SUMMARY: Giles thinks about his former Slayer and how life's treated her.
SPOILERS: Set after "The Body."
DISTRIBUTION: Any sites with my fic up; you all have unspoken permission. I write it, you can post it. Everyone else just keep my name on it and let me know.
DISCLAIMER: If you don't recognize it, chances are it's my own creation. If you do, Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kazui Sandollar, FOX and the WB own it or them. Various friends of mine are holding characters hostage. You may see them by appointment only. The song is "Brackish" by Kittie.
FEEDBACK: Sorry I'm not home right now I'm walking in the spiderwebs so leave a message and I'll call you back...in other words, I want it.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Yes, I'm writing again! Everyone rejoice!
***
Cold day in Sunnydale. There's been a lot of those lately, chill days when the sun's hidden for hours at a time and it's safe for me to walk the streets in the daytime.
It's been a lot like this since Buffy left.
It's not that she died, that she left her legacy unfulfilled. Actually, it was very much the opposite. The Hellmouth's closed, the town's safe. Buffy was the best Slayer ever.
But she got so hardened...
It's not unusual, for Slayers to become cynical and bitter. Didn't think it would happen to her, though. Thought things would be different with her, this ray of sunshine in the ongoing sequence of Slayer after Slayer, accepting their eventual deaths with...well, I'm not sure with what.
They just accepted it, let themselves be used by the Watcher's Council and their Watchers and the demons they fought and almost always gave their lives up to.
Buffy wasn't someone I expected to get used and abused and turn out like the way she has.
I mean, she lost everyone. Angel. Riley, though why she cared for him remains beyond my comprehension. Her mother.
That was what hit her hardest, I think. She barely had time to get over that when she lost me. I was the shoulder she leaned on, the pillar of stableness in her life.
But she didn't lose me, now did she? I'm still here...undead, but still around.
She closed the Hellmouth for me. She lost her left arm in the process, and maybe that's why she's so hell-bent on living a bit of a normal life, as normal as she can.
She fulfilled my expectations of her, the promise I saw in her blossomed. And then it died just as soon as the Hellmouth closed, because she was faced, for the first time, with the normal life she'd always wanted.
She was no longer the Slayer, the Chosen One.
But to become so jaded, I'd never expected that. She took on so much responsibility in her short time as the Slayer that you'd have thought she would handle raising Dawn just as easily. But not so.
She knew magic could hurt as much as help. She knew that evil didn't just rest in the hearts of demons and vampires, that the normal everyday humans of this world had their fair share as well.
And she's become so jaded, so protective, that she's turned against everything mystical, even if her baby sister practices it.
And so my precious young Slayer has blossomed into a cynical and hardened mortal.
Pity, really.
She lost everything about her when she lost her powers. It's almost as though the essences of Buffy Summers was so wrapped into her being the Chosen One that when she lost that, she lost everything.
Anyway, there's nothing for me to do. I can't help her, no one can, really. The Buffy Summers I loved is but a distant memory, replaced by this Buffy Summers who I don't really know.
It's a shame. The world lost something so special it will never know how to replace it.
It may never even know just what it lost.
Cold days in Sunnydale make me think of her. And as her ever faithful Watcher, I watch this woman become even more hardened, every day. It almost makes me want to cry.