Chapter Text
The air was cold, sharp enough to sting if you breathed too deep. Crickets filled the night with their unsteady rhythm, the only sound that dared to break the stillness of the campus.
So when the lateral kick connected with the vamp’s face, the crack of bone echoed through the quiet like a gunshot.
It was another night of the usual grind—Buffy, out in the dark, fighting the good fight and protecting the world from the things that slithered, crawled, and clawed their way out of graves. And like most nights, it wasn’t a master or a nest leader—just another freshly risen corpse, still clumsy in its hunger and all too ready to become part of her late-night cardio routine.
The vamp pitched backward off the crypt’s roof, landing hard on the pavement below with a dull, wet thud. Dust rose in a pale cloud around him, drifting through the faint light of the cemetery lamps.
But the thing got up quicker than it should have. The body might’ve been new, but the strength—the strength was all vampire. Its eyes gleamed that hungry yellow, jaw unhinged, tongue twitching for blood. Buffy exhaled through her nose, stepped forward, and hurled another clean, graceful kick that spun the creature sideways and slammed it flat against the ground again.
A voice broke her concentration.
“Buffy?”
She turned sharply, heart tightening for a second. The name carried the kind of disbelief that didn’t belong here. Her eyes adjusted to the darker patch beyond the crypt and landed on Parker Abrams—standing stupidly under the half-dead tree, his face caught somewhere between relief and confusion. He looked lost, like he’d wandered into a nightmare with no map out.
“Parker?” she asked, incredulous. The sound of his name left her lips like an accusation, a question, and a memory all at once. What was he doing here—here, where her two lives were never supposed to meet?
A hundred things she wanted to say crowded her mind. She wanted to snap, to roll her eyes, maybe even plant a fist in that smugly apologetic face. But the shuffle of feet and the hiss of air behind her said otherwise—the vamp was charging again.
“Stay down!” she barked, her voice cutting through the dark like the edge of a blade.
The vampire lunged with an animal snarl, arms wide, claws out. Its swipe came fast—too fast for anything human—but Buffy ducked low, spun, and drove a punch into its gut so hard the sound of impact bounced off the crypt walls. The creature folded, wheezing, but lashed again in desperation. She moved before it could connect, body flowing with that instinctive, practiced grace that turned every motion into both dance and destruction.
And then—Parker’s voice again, sharp with panic. “Buffy!”
Her head snapped up. Two more vamps had dragged him halfway off his feet, his struggling form pale under their grip. Her pulse spiked.
Without thinking, she sprinted forward, boots pounding over gravel, and launched herself into the air. Both heels connected with undead faces in the same breathless second, the crack of impact reverberating through the night. The vamps toppled back in perfect, broken symmetry—dust spraying up around her as she landed, balanced, eyes blazing.
But that only turned their attention to her.
They moved as one—four hungry shapes breaking from the dark—launching themselves at her like ravenous wolves. Buffy dropped into a defensive stance, muscles coiled, eyes sharp. The first came at her too fast; she dodged low, feeling the rush of air scrape past her cheek, then twisted with the motion, slamming a palm strike into its chest that sent it stumbling back into the others.
And then it happened—instinct, muscle memory, routine.
A vamp lunged and she met it head-on, stake in hand, spinning once before driving the wood through its heart. Dust burst outward in a fine, glittering spray. The next came screaming at her, and she pivoted, letting the stake slide home with almost casual precision. The third barely made it close before she kicked it backward, dusting it mid-fall.
When she finally stopped moving, the night was still again. The only sound left was her breathing—and the faint hiss of settling ash. Four piles of dust circled her feet like the remains of a bad dream. Buffy stood there, fists still raised, body tense, waiting for another hit that didn’t come. She stayed ready, because habit demanded it. But after a moment, when nothing else stirred, she exhaled and let her shoulders fall.
She turned—and there was Parker.
He looked dazed, his face pale and eyes wide, like a man who’d just realized his entire world was a lot bigger and darker than he’d ever imagined. For the first time that night, he understood. Understood her. Understood what she fought, what she lived with. He took a few hesitant steps forward, still catching his breath, knowing now that she was his only safety in this kind of night.
Who else was going to protect him from the monsters in the dark? Batman? Not likely.
Etiquette—or maybe survival—forced him toward gratitude.
Still, there was something genuine in his face. A flicker of warmth she hadn’t seen since before everything fell apart.
He looked happy to see her.
He stared at her with that soft, apologetic look she’d imagined once or twice in weaker moments—the one she thought might make everything make sense again. The one she wanted to see after he’d slept with her and then told her it had meant nothing.
“Buffy…” he started, voice small now, stripped of its old confidence. “I don't know what to say. After the way I've treated you, and now I owe you my life.”
The words hit her harder than she wanted to admit. A nervous warmth rose in her chest; she could feel herself blush, a wave of flustered embarrassment she hated but couldn’t stop. Her pulse quickened, not from the fight, but from something softer—something she thought she’d buried. She felt light, almost giddy, like a little girl hearing her crush say her name.
“It's nothing,” she said, sheepishly, the grin tugging at her face before she could hide it. Maybe it was fine. Maybe things could still be fine.
“It's everything,” he said, stepping closer, his voice smooth again but quieter, more careful. “...You're everything. And I'm going to do whatever it takes to get you to forgive me. Do you think one day you might…”
“Noooo.”
The sound sliced through the air and snapped Buffy back to reality like a slap of ice water. She blinked hard, the edges of her fantasy dissolving into the sterile glow of the lecture hall—buzzing fluorescent lights, the low murmur of students shifting in their seats, the smell of overbrewed coffee clinging to the air.
A girl’s voice—soft, giggly, painfully familiar—bubbled up again just a few feet away. Buffy turned her head and there he was. Parker Abrams. The boy with the easy smile and the moral depth of a puddle. He was leaning in close to his newest conquest, wearing that same practiced grin, whispering something into her ear that Buffy didn’t need Slayer hearing to catch. She knew that tone, that rhythm, those words. She’d been the one sitting in that chair not long ago, the one glowing under his attention, thinking she was the exception and not the routine.
And just like that, the dream shattered. The fantasy of vampire battles and heroic rescues and Parker’s suddenly reformed heart vanished in a blink—poof—leaving only the unromantic glare of academia. Reality came crashing back down with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer made of midterms and heartbreak.
Down at the front, Professor Walsh was still talking, her voice cutting through the room with mechanical precision: Freud, subconscious, id, repression, control. The words floated past Buffy like ghosts. She tried to focus—she really did—but every sentence sounded like white noise under the louder hum of her own thoughts. Thoughts that all kept circling the same drain: Parker.
Parker and his smug little grin. Parker and that carefully disheveled hair that clearly took fifteen minutes and two mirrors to achieve. Parker and his habit of making girls feel like they’d just been written into a fairy tale right up until he decided to skip the ending.
Giles had told her, “You’re young, it happens.”
Yeah. Easy for him to say. Giles’ idea of heartbreak probably involved dusty tomes and an overdue library book (though perhaps he was just happy that at least this time it wasn’t a vampire who’d then lose his soul, turn evil and torture them, just a regular dickhead.)
As if there was some secret manual out there titled So You Slept With a Guy and He Turned Into a Douchebag: A Slayer’s Guide to Emotional Resilience.
She’d have paid good money for that one.
The truth was—it hurt. More than she liked to admit. Almost as much as Angel, and that was saying a lot. At least Angel had a curse. An actual, ancient, gypsy curse. Parker didn’t even have that excuse. He’d just been… him. Just a guy who smiled the right way, said all the right things, and then decided to forget she existed.
And somehow, that kind of evil felt worse than anything she’d ever staked.
Why was her luck so cursed?
Buffy slumped deeper into her chair, the plastic creaking in sympathy. Her notebook lay open on the desk, a battlefield of half-finished doodles and ink spirals that said more about her state of mind than any lecture notes ever could. Maybe it was time to call it quits on the whole love thing. It wasn’t exactly a Slayer-friendly hobby. Late-night patrols, undead exes, and the occasional apocalypse didn’t exactly scream “relationship material.”
Did Batman have a girlfriend? A real one—not the kind who got kidnapped or dramatically died in issue six? Because from what she’d seen in Xander’s comics, superheroes didn’t get happily-ever-after. They got sidekicks, trauma, and maybe a catchy theme song if they were lucky.
Still… a small, rebellious part of her whispered, two can play that game. She pictured herself doing what Faith did—keeping things easy, no strings, no stakes beyond the literal ones. Faith had mastered the art of not caring. Since waking up from her coma, she’d strutted through Sunnydale like the heartbreak fairy forgot to visit her. Messy? Sure. Emotionally stable? Not exactly. But it worked. Faith wasn’t moping over guys who couldn’t spell “commitment” if you spotted them the consonants. She wasn’t crying into her Lucky Charms every morning, either. She was out there slaying, flirting, living.
But Buffy couldn’t do it. Not really. She was too… Buffy. Too soft in the places Faith had built armor over. Too quick to hope, too slow to stop caring. Her heart was still caught somewhere between the Parker she wished existed—the one with flowers, ice cream, and actual remorse—and the Parker who was currently leaning in close to another girl, pressing “repeat” on the same old lines.
So she retreated to the only place where things ever worked out: her imagination. In the fantasy, she rescued him again, but this time he meant it. This time, there were roses and nonfat yogurt, or maybe even real ice cream, the kind that didn’t come with emotional lactose intolerance. There’d be soft lighting, maybe a little soundtrack swell as he apologized and promised he’d changed.
Because if God really had said, “Let there be bad luck for Buffy Summers,” the least He could do was let her daydream have good lighting and a happy ending.
“These are the things we want,” droned Professor Walsh, from somewhere in the academic void Buffy’s brain had long since vacated.
“...Simple things. Comfort, sex, shelter, food. We always want them and we want them all the time. The id doesn't learn it doesn't grow up. It has the ego telling it what it can't have and it has the superego telling it what it should want. But the id works solely out of the pleasure principle. It wants. Whatever social skills you've learned, however much we've evolved, the pleasure principal is at work in all of us. So, how does this conflict with the ego manifest itself in the psyche? What do we do when we can't have what we want?”
We go kill it, Buffy thought bitterly.
Then immediately grimaced. Yeah, great, maybe that was the kind of “problem-solving” that got Faith a punch card for Murderers Anonymous. Step one: kill. Step two: join the bad guy. Step three: get stabbed by your bestie and take a four month nap.
Okay, so maybe not the healthiest coping mechanism.
No, Buffy was going to handle heartbreak like a normal, emotionally well-adjusted young woman: by crying in the shower, mainlining ice cream, and ugly-sobbing through Pretty Woman for the fifth time while wearing sweatpants that actively repelled romance.
Professor Walsh was still talking about the id, ego, and superego. Buffy had long since stopped pretending to listen. Her pen moved lazily across the page, sketching a sad little heart impaled by a stake. A bit on the nose, maybe, but at least someone in this classroom was engaging with metaphor.
“…the id wants what it wants,” Walsh droned, somewhere far, far away in the distance. “The pleasure principle drives the self, unchecked by reason or morality—”
Buffy sighed quietly. Reason and morality were kind of her whole job description, and lately neither had been working out all that well.
By the time the bell finally rang, Buffy realized she had absorbed absolutely nothing beyond the vague impression that Freud would’ve been terrible at dating. She’d need to borrow Willow’s notes later—and by extension, tolerate Xander’s peanut-gallery commentary about “psychic ids” and “psycho chicks.” Professor Walsh, meanwhile, was already rattling off another list of required readings that sounded like a punishment devised by a particularly sadistic demon.
Buffy wrote down the first line half-heartedly, already aware it would end up buried somewhere under a pile of takeout containers and unfiled Slay reports on her desk.
She stood, stretching, and glanced around at the sea of people shuffling out—bright, talkative, caffeinated. She envied how normal they all looked. Just students, worrying about grades and roommates, not… vampires or emotional trauma disguised as Parker Abrams.
College was still a strange animal. Unlike high school, there were these long, yawning stretches between classes where you were expected to be productive—or at least alive. She was still learning how to do either.
Her plan for the next few hours was a carefully crafted balancing act: meet Willow at the cafeteria, cram some Freud to look like she understood civilization’s psychic framework, then swing by Giles’ place to update him on patrol routes and avoid any meaningful conversation about her “emotional growth.” Then home, where she could drown her sorrows in a pint of double-fudge and construct elaborate mental fanfics starring Parker Abrams groveling for her forgiveness.
The scenarios varied—sometimes he showed up on her porch with flowers and tearful declarations, sometimes he was held hostage by vampires and she had to save him (again), and once there’d even been an imaginary slow clap from the entire student body as he declared her “the best thing that ever happened to me.” In one of this increasingly elaborate scenarios, he even came atop of a white horse and they rode into the sunset while he played her a serenade with a guitar while gently placing her atop the white stallion…She wasn’t proud, but it helped.
Oh, and before all that—right after Giles, before her nightly graveyard routine—there was Faith.
The other Slayer. The one who’d killed, betrayed, and had been stabbed by Buffy herself before falling into a coma. The one Buffy was now, technically, responsible for.
The Council had wanted to ship Faith off to England for “rehabilitation,” which, according to Giles, was code for “a horror show of psychological torture that I wouldn’t, in good concience wish on the Unabomber” He’d fought them on it—Giles always did—and somehow convinced them that keeping Faith under Buffy’s supervision was a better alternative.
So now she was under supervision, living in Angel’s old manor and forbidden from leaving Sunnidale…and of course…under the supervision of Giles.
Buffy hadn’t been keen at first. The idea of spending quality time with the person who once tried to murder her wasn’t exactly at the top of her to-do list. But guilt had a funny way of breaking her resolve. She’d done it. She’d agreed. And now, on top of heartbreak, college, and apocalypse prevention, she was also Faith’s reluctant parole officer.
She sighed again, collecting her bag. The Slayer gig didn’t come with benefits, but it did come with an endless workload.
Maybe Freud was right. Maybe the id just wanted what it wanted.
Right now, Buffy wanted a nap, to punch something, and maybe a temporary lobotomy to forget Parker Abrams ever existed.
Instead, she went to study with Willow.
That was the plan, at least — a fragile little structure of intent that wobbled under the weight of distraction and emotional debris. Studying, she decided, was a kind of therapy — the kind where you stared at textbooks until your feelings got bored and left. And honestly? Sometimes it worked.
The library café was sun-drenched in that late-afternoon, dusty kind of way, all clinking cups and low chatter, the smell of espresso fighting a hopeless battle against the staleness of academic despair. So instead, Willow and her had grabbed one of the outside seats for a bit of sunlight, and the faint soundtrack of nature. Sitting on one of the umbrella’d tables that were just outside of the café, not too far from the window door that showed new books.
In front of her sat a small mountain of academic shame: two overdue essays for Professor Walsh — one on Freud’s theory of the subconscious, which mostly read like an erotic fever dream with citations, and one on Jung’s theory of personality, which was just Freud in a new hat. Then there was the medieval architecture paper for Professor Gustavssen (she still wasn’t sure if the Romanesque style was a church thing or a vibe) and an essay for Professor Koslokova on the early history of advertising — which, against all odds, she’d actually found fascinating before her heart had been shredded into tiny, metaphorical confetti.
Apparently, in the early 20th century, tobacco companies decided that emancipation and nicotine made a great marketing pair. “Torches of Freedom,” they’d called them — cigarettes sold as symbols of female empowerment. Buffy couldn’t decide if that was genius or evil or both. Maybe Freud would’ve called it sublimation; she called it a smokescreen — pun tragically intended.
The problem was that none of it mattered right now. Her brain, normally such a lively battlefield of sarcasm and strategy, had become a foggy, Parker-flavored wasteland. Every time she tried to read about the subconscious, all she could think about was how her own had clearly turned traitor, ambushing her with unwanted reruns of that night — the laughter, the warmth, the illusion of something real that had crumbled like wet paper.
She took a long sip of her coffee, wincing. It was cold. Of course it was. Everything lately was cold.
And then, as if summoned by the powers of narrative irony, Xander Harris appeared.
He emerged from behind a pillar like a sitcom side character making his big entrance, holding up a lighter and flicking it in front of her face with mock solemnity. The tiny flame danced between them like an impatient sprite.
“Rough day?” he asked, his tone suggesting that he was about to make it rougher.
Buffy stared at him. If looks could kill, Xander would’ve been the third undead she’d taken out that week.
“…Come on, Buff. Be a lonely drunk. Rough day?”
“Stop flicking at me,” she added when the lighter flared again, snapping shut with a metallic click.
“Work with me here,” Xander pleaded, entirely undeterred. “I’m finally an essential part of your higher-education experience! No more looking down on the townie. I’m the new bartender over at the pub. Got my lighter, my rag, my empathy face…”
He demonstrated said empathy face, which looked suspiciously like mild constipation.
Buffy blinked at him, unimpressed. She could feel the coffee’s meager caffeine battling valiantly against her existential fatigue.
“Aren’t you too young to be a bartender?” Willow piped in, lowering her own book — some towering text about fractal equations or Greek linguistics — and blinking curiously.
“Oh contraire, mon frere,” Xander declared, puffing his chest out like a penguin with delusions of grandeur.
“‘Mon frere’ means brother,” Buffy muttered without looking up.
“Then… ‘mon girlfrere!’” he countered triumphantly, fishing a laminated card from his back pocket.
It was, without question, the most tragic fake ID ever produced by human hands. The font was crooked, the name read “Xandré Harrossé,” and the photo featured Xander with a comically oversized mustache that had either been taken from a bad costume shop, or he was a secret member of The Village People.
He held it up like it was the Holy Grail. “Behold!”
Willow’s lips twitched. Buffy wasn’t sure if she was suppressing laughter or disbelief.
“You know what? It’s class time,” Buffy said finally, gathering her books with all the energy of a collapsing star. She wasn’t sure which class, exactly, but anywhere else had to be better than here.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Xander said, jogging after her as she rose. “So you are gonna come by tonight, right? To the pub? Grand reopening, new management, free peanuts?”
“Tempting,” Buffy said, adjusting her bag strap. “But I’ve got a busy schedule. I have to beg Professor Koslokova for mercy, then check in on The Young and the Psycho, and after that maybe I’ll swing by.”
Xander’s eyes lit up. “That’s the spirit!”
“Or the Slayer guilt complex,” Buffy said under her breath, but too softly for him to hear.
He followed them down the hall, still babbling about pouring the “perfect symbolic pint” or whatever, until their paths split — Willow veering toward the science building, Xander toward the Student Union, and Buffy toward the long, familiar ache of responsibility.
The hallways of UC Sunnydale buzzed with ordinary life: students laughing, sneakers squeaking, a burst of pop music spilling from an open door. Buffy walked through it like a ghost. She could feel the weight of her double life pressing on her from both sides — one half buried in footnotes and Freud, the other waiting for nightfall, crossbow in hand.
And somewhere in between those two halves was Faith.
And a sliver of guilt because, yes, Faith had tried to kill her…but so had she, and she had actually stabbed her and put her in a coma for a while.
She sighed and pushed open the door to the courtyard, squinting against the sunlight. Maybe later, after all this, she’d actually take Xander up on that beer. Just one.
“Earth to Buffy Summers!”
The words hit her like a splash of cold water, dragging her back to the alley behind the bar with all the grace of a falling anvil. Buffy blinked, dazed, her brain taking half a second too long to catch up to her body, which was still humming with the leftover adrenaline of combat. Dust clung to her jacket, to her hair — that faint, gray, glittery residue that vampires turned into when you stopped their undead hearts. It never came off clean. You could scrub it off your hands, but the smell always lingered — the faint, acrid tang of old leather, smoke, and decay.
When her vision cleared, she saw Faith — or more accurately, Faith in trouble, though the word “trouble” hardly did it justice.
Two vampires had her flanked. One was massive, a bald, tattooed mountain of a man in a sleeveless leather vest that looked like it had absorbed thirty years of bar fights and bad whiskey. His skin was the color of skim milk left too long in the sun, and his goatee was a greasy tangle that screamed “Hell’s Angel turned Hell’s minion.” His arms, pale and corded, were locked tight around Faith’s, pinning her like a doll. The other vamp, thinner but no less mean-looking, hovered in front of her, baring teeth like cracked gravestones. Both looked like they’d died sometime in the nineties and had never left the party.
Buffy’s brain rebooted. Her instincts took over. The vamp she’d been dealing with — a rail-thin reject from the same undead biker gang — was still snarling in her grip, pinned against a brick wall that was smeared with graffiti and grime. She shifted her stance, braced her knee against his chest, and drove her stake home in one clean, practiced motion. There was a sharp, dry pop, like a champagne cork, and the vamp disintegrated into a gray mist that drifted away on the night breeze. Buffy wiped a forearm across her forehead, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes.
When she turned — Faith was already doing what Faith did best: turning chaos into choreography.
With a low, feral sound that was half grunt, half laugh, Faith jerked her head back violently, slamming it into the biker vamp’s face with enough force to make the sound echo off the alley walls. Crack. The vamp roared, staggering backward and clutching his nose — which was now spraying blood, dark and syrupy, like ink from a broken pen.
Faith twisted free before he could recover. She pivoted on her heel and threw a perfect roundhouse kick that caught the thinner vamp in the jaw, the motion sharp and fluid, her body snapping like a whip. The impact sent him spinning into the hood of a nearby car with a hollow clang.
“C’mon, sweetheart,” Faith sneered, shaking her hair out of her face. “Dance with me.”
The first vamp came at her again, growling, one meaty hand reaching for her throat. Faith ducked low, letting his momentum carry him forward. Then, with a smooth, brutal grace, she came up under him, driving her fist straight into his chin — an uppercut that would’ve done Rocky proud. His head snapped back, his mouth twisting in surprise, and Faith drove the stake home, jamming it deep into his chest.
For a half-second, his expression froze — pure disbelief. Then he dissolved, the dust swirling around her like a halo in reverse.
Buffy had started forward, but she slowed, watching as Faith turned, eyes gleaming, ready for round two. The thinner vamp had found his footing again and lunged. Faith dropped her body low, almost in a crouch, feinting a punch toward his midsection — and then, in one sudden, fluid motion, brought her arm up in a brutal arc. The stake punched clean through his heart from below, right under the chin, and Faith held it there for a heartbeat, staring him down as if daring him to make it hurt.
“Guess not,” she murmured.
He exploded into dust.
The alley went quiet except for the low hum of the neon sign overhead and the sound of their breathing — quick, uneven, echoing off the bricks.
Buffy jogged the rest of the way over, but Faith was already wiping her hands on her jeans, rolling her shoulders, not a hair out of place despite the chaos.
“Thanks, blondie,” Faith said, her voice laced with biting sarcasm that could’ve stripped paint.
Buffy bristled. Old habits, old wounds — none of it had really gone away. Last year’s betrayals hung between them like fog, thick and poisonous. Giles had insisted they work together again, some desperate attempt at rehabilitation, as if mutual hatred could be cured with a few shared patrols and a prayer.
“Wasn’t my idea to come here,” Buffy shot back.
They were behind one of Sunnydale’s five bars — and this one, The White Snake, was the kind of place you didn’t so much enter as survive. The neon lights flickered like dying fireflies, and the parking lot was littered with beer bottles, cigarette butts, and the kind of clientele that thought parole was just a suggestion.
“Wasn’t mine either,” Faith said, smirking. “But hey, if you want me dead that bad, least you could do is finish the job yourself.”
Buffy’s eyes narrowed. “You’re hilarious.”
Faith shrugged “I know.”
Buffy opened her mouth, something sharp and probably regrettable forming on her tongue, when Faith’s ankle monitor gave off a shrill, beep-beep-beep.
“...I’d prefer not to have ‘Killed by Bikers’ on my tombstone, thank you very much...” Faith added, pressing the button to confirm she was, indeed, still in Sunnydale and not halfway to Tijuana.
Buffy folded her arms. “What are you doing?”
Faith jerked her chin toward the bar’s entrance, its flickering sign promising cheap beer and worse decisions. “Going in.”
“We killed the last vamp in the area,” Buffy said, incredulous.
“Yeah,” Faith said. “So now I’m gonna get a drink and a fuck. Or maybe two drinks and a fuck. Depends what’s on tap.”
Buffy’s jaw dropped. “You’re younger than me.”
“By, what, a couple months?” Faith smirked without much joy. “Congratulations on your seniority, Grandma.”
“I’m not twenty-one yet.”
Faith turned back, one brow arched, arms crossing over her chest in deliberate defiance. The pose pulled her tank top taut, showing off the faint new ink on her upper arm, that accompanied the one she had when they’ve bet — the edges of a winged serpent curling into old flame motifs, probably something related to Mayor Wilkins, given how much the snake was in emphasis.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but here…in California, and likely the rest of America, the drinking age is 21…” Buffy said, hands on her hips, every inch the exasperated parole officer to the world's most annoying evil minion.
“What are you, a cop?” Faith shot back. “So what? In Mexico it’s eighteen, so — Viva Guadalajara and go fuck yourself.”
“You’re not eighteen either!” Buffy yelled after her as Faith started walking again, her boots crunching on gravel.
“Yes I am! My birthday was in December, dipshit!” Faith threw the words over her shoulder without slowing down, lifting one hand to flip Buffy off as punctuation.
Buffy glared at her retreating back, muttering under her breath. “Fine. I don’t even know why I bother.”
Faith disappeared through the door, swallowed by the pulse of cheap music and worse lighting. Buffy stood there for a moment, the night settling heavy around her, the distant thrum of motorcycles and neon buzzing in the air.
She sighed, turning toward the street. The campus wasn’t far. Maybe she’d track down Xander, maybe take him up on that offer for a proper drink somewhere that didn’t smell like blood, motor oil, and blue meth.
Because if God had said, “Let there be only suckiness for Buffy Summers” then fine — she could live with that. But it better come with a tall, cold beer, at least halfway decent lighting and much, much better company.
Buffy stepped into the bar with the kind of hesitant determination that comes from wanting to forget and knowing you probably won’t. The night air had clung to her like static, sticky and electric, buzzing with unspoken things she couldn’t shake off. Her patrol was done for the evening; the vampires had been dusted, the world saved (again), and yet somehow she still felt hollow, scraped clean from the inside.
She had changed in record time — quick hands, quicker decisions — trading her scuffed patrol gear for something that pretended to belong to a girl who wasn’t exhausted by destiny. The red-and-white dress she’d grabbed on instinct made her look younger, fresher, almost like the college girl she was supposed to be. Her leather jacket lay folded in the car, reeking faintly of graveyard dirt and Faith’s ever-present haze of marijuana. The faint trace of it still hung in her hair, ghostly and sweet, like bad choices made by someone else.
The bar was warm, dim, and alive — a small, noisy world that smelled of beer, citrus, and cheap perfume. And it was filled with students, freshmen mostly, who’d gather at this point to build something of a social life, talking with newly made friends, connecting with old ones, discussing theories…like you’re supposed to do in College after all. The air trembled with the rhythm of some band that didn’t know how to end a song properly. Buffy let herself breathe it in, hoping that maybe if she stayed long enough, the noise might drown her own thoughts.
Her plan faltered the instant she saw Parker. Of course he was here. The universe liked symmetry — cruel, tidy symmetry. There he was, leaning too close to another girl. A different one. Not even the same one from Psych 101 earlier that day. His hand rested on the back of the chair like he’d done it a thousand times before, his laugh just loud enough for her to hear over the music. A laugh she had believed only last week was meant for her.
Her chest tightened. The pain wasn’t sharp anymore — more like a bruise pressed too often. She tore her gaze away, swallowing hard, and in the motion of pretending not to care, she walked straight into someone. A splash, a startled sound, the cold sting of liquid hitting her arm.
“Oh— sorry!”
Riley Finn. Clean-cut, broad-shouldered, and far too polite for this place. The beer splattered down his shirt in little golden arcs, and he blinked once, twice, then smiled — that awkward, Midwestern, it’s fine, everything’s fine smile. Buffy mumbled another apology, trying to sound breezy, but it came out brittle. He said something kind, she barely heard it. Her thoughts were still looping Parker’s laughter like a broken record. Riley excused himself and vanished back into the crowd before she could gather herself enough to reply.
Fine. Maybe she didn’t need to talk to anyone tonight. Maybe she just needed to be.
The bar counter gleamed under the soft wash of amber light. Behind it, Xander was fighting a losing battle against both gravity and basic bartending technique. The scene looked like performance art — bottles rolling, ice scattering, a freshman yelling something about “too much soda.” He wasn’t Tom Cruise in Cocktail; he was more like a sitcom version filmed with a laugh track that had given up halfway through.
Buffy slid onto a stool at the edge of the chaos. The wood was sticky. The air felt thick, the hum of voices blurring into white noise. Her reflection in the mirrored wall behind the liquor bottles looked faintly ghostlike — cheeks flushed, eyes a little too bright, smile half-formed and uncertain.
“Buffy!?”
Xander’s voice cut through the haze. He grinned, that goofy warmth of his always managing to show up at the worst and best times. “Rough day? Wanna tell me about it?”
Buffy’s lips twitched, not quite a smile. She nodded, slow and distracted, eyes drifting toward the floor.
If she weren’t so raw, she might have made a joke, maybe something snarky about how rough days were practically her major. But right now she felt like glass — transparent and full of cracks. She wanted to laugh, cry, punch something, maybe all at once. She wished she were someone else, someone who could shrug off heartbreak and not let it chew through her like this.
“It’s just…” she started, then stopped. Her voice caught. She exhaled sharply. “Parker’s problem with intimacy turns out to be that he can’t get enough of it. And I knew. I knew what he was. If he were tied and gagged and left in a cave that vampires happen to frequent, it wouldn’t really be like I killed him, right?”
“Buffy…” Xander said gently, voice softening like he was trying not to spook her.
“I’m a slut,” she said flatly, eyes locked on the half-empty glass in front of her.
“No.” His answer was quiet but solid.
“An idiot.”
“No.” He leaned closer, expression serious in a way that didn’t suit him but somehow fit.
For a second, they just sat in that small bubble of silence between jukebox beats and laughter. Then his boss shouted something about spilled beer and a busted tap, and the moment broke.
“Do not go anywhere,” Xander said quickly, pointing at her before darting off.
Buffy stared after him, smirking faintly. Sure. She’d stay right here. Until she didn’t.
The world outside her stool kept spinning — the clink of glasses, the low hum of conversations, someone shouting the wrong lyrics to the right song. She felt like a ghost moving through it all, unseen, untethered. Eventually she stood, restless energy buzzing through her legs, and made for the door.
She didn’t get far. Another collision — softer this time, her shoulder brushing against a tall figure. A splash. The scent of beer again, faint and sweet.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry! I just keep running into people today.”
The guy she’d bumped into laughed, easy and amused, the kind of laugh that didn’t hold grudges. “I can’t imagine anybody minding. You’re not thinking about leaving, are you? Because we’ve got a strict policy against that. Not until you’ve had a drink.”
His friends materialized behind him, grinning like a Greek chorus of mischief. The invitation hung in the air, wrapped in the glow of neon lights and lazy smiles.
Buffy hesitated, then let out a quiet, tired laugh.
Maybe she didn’t want to leave. Maybe she just wanted to stop thinking.
After all, a tall, cold beer — that was why she’d come here.
And maybe, just maybe, it would taste better if she didn’t drink it alone.