Fic: Building Character (BtVS)
Jul. 4th, 2014 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyHere's a different zombie fic bunny that grabbed me. I hope it works.
Title: Building Character
Author: Beer Good (beer_good_foamy)
Fandom: Buffy, season 6
Rating: PG13
Word count: 1900
Summary: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
zombi_fic_ation and the prompt "50. Buffy + any -- Buffy mostly came back right... mostly". Five perspectives on Buffy, after she comes back from the (slightly more) dead.
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises, please
Willow
She can see why Giles is so upset with her, though hey, she didn't exactly plan it like this, and it's not like he was around to help. But she'd been so close, and there was so little time. When the spell to Osiris was interrupted by the biker demons, Willow had woken up bleeding and hurting with Xander carrying her back to town as the demons still roared all around them, her mouth still tasting of snake, and when she realised the situation she'd just said NO. Buffy was already, like, 99% resurrected, if you can be a fraction of something that's that much either/or, and was she supposed to just leave her like that? That would have been worse than leaving her in hell. She'd researched this for months and knew there were options - nothing as good, sure, but still. And so she cast about for something that could finish the spell, did the magical equivalence of a want ad, and got a response. Hey, buy American. Y'know, in the larger, North-and-Middle-America-and-the-Caribbean sense. Too soon? OK.
But it needed to be quick, and Baron Samedi was very eager to help. Seems she has good credit with gods these days.
When they dug Buffy out and opened the casket, she saw Xander keep a close watch on Buffy's teeth, even though Anya told him once again that that's just a myth, this isn't a cheesy 80s horror movie; zombies only eat brains if instructed to by their zombie masters. And why on earth would her best friend want her to do that?
Not that Buffy's a zombie, obviously. She's just... kinda new. And it's not like they don't have experience with rehabilitating the not-conventionally-alive. Angel? Spike? Hello? This is their turf, they know this. They know her better than anyone. They can make her right again, make her remember who and what she is, even if she has to order her to. A person is a social construction built on memories and experiences, and they can fill her in on those. Besides, who really has free will, anyway, we're all products of our time and place and social mores and John Locke et cetera.
There was a moment when they cracked open the lid where she could have lied, told the others nope, didn't work, nail the coffin shut and bury her again, go on with your lives. But the moment was short, and it passed, it was so very fait accompli, and God, Buffy could never speak French to save her life... So she looked at the body in the casket, smiled, brushed her hair out of her perfectly healed face, and told her to sit up and open her eyes and... well, be Buffy.
Spike
He'd taken what was left of the Buffybot back to his crypt and stuffed it in one of the caskets nobody's using. He's not sure why. It was always a poor substitute, now it's just bits of metal, plastic, silicon and silicone that don't fit together anymore. And yet for a long while he'd open up the casket every other night, just to look at it, as if knowing that it's FUBAR will help bring the real thing back.
Maybe it has. He doesn't get to see Buffy very often. Not that they keep him out, oh no, it's just "Well" this and "Um" that and "She's been through a lot" and "She still has a lot of healing to do." All a fancy way of saying they're putting her back together and they don't need his input yet; sure, maybe later, to fill in a few memories of how to beat him up, etc. Once she's good old Buffy again.
So there he'd sit, turning the dead Buffybot's head over in his hand like some bloody amateur Hamlet. Angel's lame. His hair goes straight up and he's bloody stupid. Yeah, so what, you're telling me it doesn't?
And she is back, obviously. More and more every time he sees her. And he's ecstatic about it, in a weird theoretical way. Yet he can't seem to shake the eerie feeling that she smells wrong. Not different, not dead, just … I'm having this terrible feeling of deja vu. He's heard that joke before. It's not very funny.
He still has the Buffybot, but at some point he's stopped opening the casket. He wonders if that means he's buried it. Maybe he should say something over it. Seems a waste.
Dawn
Is this how everyone's memories of her work, she wonders; do they just get told to remember some basic outlines and then fill in the blanks themselves, or did the monks really come up with every little detail themselves? Because if they did, her extensive knowledge of boy band gossip says something disturbing about life in European monasteries.
She's already starting to forget how Buffy was when she first came back - or not forget, not in the sense of not ever having nightmares about it again, but not think of that silent, trance-like, blank woman as Buffy. (At least the bot smiled, she almost told Tara once.) Buffy's getting better every day, she must be filling in the blanks more and more herself; they moved past the "You're Buffy Anne Summers, you're the Slayer, we pulled you out of hell, I'm your sister" stage in the first few days. Then they can start working on the details. It feels weird, but nobody knows Buffy like they do, they can tell her who she is, what she likes, what she hates, what she's been through... Tell her, tell her to remember, tell her to be. "This is Mr Gordo. You got him when you were five. You used to scratch him right here, see, where his fur's worn away. This is Mr Pointy," etc. Some of it's pretty awkward, like Angel telling her every detail of their relationship, up to and including how he went evil, which Dawn isn't allowed to listen in on which is totally unfair because it's not like she doesn't already know about that stuff - and sure, there are times when it's tempting to lie, to fix some little detail. But even if Willow can order Buffy to forget something and start over, it's... weird. So honesty it is. Tell her she's a little bossy, tell her she kind of shuts people out sometimes, tell her about that time Dawn spilled ketchup on her prom dress. Sometimes they remember things differently and have to decide which one to tell her, but that's details. Tell her they love her, tell her she loves them, the worst is behind her, she's a hero and she can do this. Yes, it's that simple. Especially once she starts filling it in herself. Which Dawn is pretty sure she must be doing.
It takes almost every waking hour, making themselves supporting characters to Buffy so she can find herself. But it's worth it.
She starts talking after only a week, so English is obviously still in there, even if it's mostly repeating what they tell her about her.
After two weeks, Buffy laughs at a dumb gag in one of all the movies they've told her she used to love. She looks genuinely happy. Three days later, she even picks a tape herself from the shelf.
After four weeks, Buffy snaps at Dawn for stea… borrowing her hairbrush, the exact same way she did when Dawn was twelve. It's the happiest moment in Dawn's life.
She keeps getting better. She has to. Like, literally.
Giles
Of course, this is what he was trained for, he thinks. To take a blank slate and turn her into a warrior. Yet he can't help but feel it should be harder.
Years ago, Buffy gave him a photocopy of a comic strip which he's kept taped above his desk. In it, a young boy dresses up as his father, then orders his father to "Go do something you hate! Being miserable builds character!" He's kept it as a reminder of... no. He's kept it because she gave it to him. Because she wouldn't have when they first met. Because he wouldn't have kept it when they first met.
But the thing is, she's not miserable. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how hard he pushes her, even the first time she takes on a vamp and has to fight for her life, when he sees her pull off textbook moves she improved on years ago, she never complains. Even after he gets Willow to make her feel pain whenever a vampire gets in a lucky punch. How do you order someone to disobey your orders?
Along with the combat training - he's had to start at the very beginning, how to make a fist, how to stand on one leg, but he never has to show her more than once - he's tried to continue what she asked of him last year; to be less of a by-the-book watcher and train her for more than just surviving. Help her understand what and why she is. She nods, takes it all in, asks the right questions. Is appropriately horrified at the right things, frustrated by the lack of information, laughs at the right moments. Eventually she's even sarcastic again. She remembers everything he tells her, can repeat it back verbatim.
She loves it. She's happy.
Yet he finds himself deliberately pushing her buttons. Or the buttons he hopes she still has. He snaps at the others, drinks too much. What the hell is wrong with him? Does he want her to feel bad? Is it selfish to miss all the things she used to teach him?
Buffy
The day they tell her she's finished, they've taught her everything they can teach her about being Buffy Summers, just happens to be her birthday. She's 21. She's complete. The same Buffy she always was, everything nailed and bolted down in its right place.
She thanks them, tearfully, hugs them all, tells them they've given her the greatest gift ever. When Willow asks her what she wants to do with her special day, that it's all up to her to choose, she chooses the Bronze. The DJ (a Sunnydale High alum) lets her pick the playlist, all songs she knows she loves.
Later, Buffy goes slaying. She knows every cemetery by heart just like she knows all the backstreets, alleys and cul-de-sacs of Sunnydale, but she picks Hillside Cemetery for the view. She stakes the one vamp she finds in a perfect imitation of a move she learned years ago, with a quip she's told she came up with in just this sort of situation.
Then she stands on the cold grass, breathing deeply, looking down at Sunnydale spreading out below her. It's really kind of beautiful in the still of the night, the lights spreading out against the dark desert night, as if the world outside doesn't exist. It's not perfect, but she knows that she's been to hell, things could always be worse. Everything she's ever known, everything she'll ever know, is right here.
She loves her family.
She's free to do anything she can think of.
She is, for all intents and purposes, alive.
Title: Building Character
Author: Beer Good (
beer_good_foamy)Fandom: Buffy, season 6
Rating: PG13
Word count: 1900
Summary: Written for
zombi_fic_ation and the prompt "50. Buffy + any -- Buffy mostly came back right... mostly". Five perspectives on Buffy, after she comes back from the (slightly more) dead.No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises, please
Willow
She can see why Giles is so upset with her, though hey, she didn't exactly plan it like this, and it's not like he was around to help. But she'd been so close, and there was so little time. When the spell to Osiris was interrupted by the biker demons, Willow had woken up bleeding and hurting with Xander carrying her back to town as the demons still roared all around them, her mouth still tasting of snake, and when she realised the situation she'd just said NO. Buffy was already, like, 99% resurrected, if you can be a fraction of something that's that much either/or, and was she supposed to just leave her like that? That would have been worse than leaving her in hell. She'd researched this for months and knew there were options - nothing as good, sure, but still. And so she cast about for something that could finish the spell, did the magical equivalence of a want ad, and got a response. Hey, buy American. Y'know, in the larger, North-and-Middle-America-and-the-Caribbean sense. Too soon? OK.
But it needed to be quick, and Baron Samedi was very eager to help. Seems she has good credit with gods these days.
When they dug Buffy out and opened the casket, she saw Xander keep a close watch on Buffy's teeth, even though Anya told him once again that that's just a myth, this isn't a cheesy 80s horror movie; zombies only eat brains if instructed to by their zombie masters. And why on earth would her best friend want her to do that?
Not that Buffy's a zombie, obviously. She's just... kinda new. And it's not like they don't have experience with rehabilitating the not-conventionally-alive. Angel? Spike? Hello? This is their turf, they know this. They know her better than anyone. They can make her right again, make her remember who and what she is, even if she has to order her to. A person is a social construction built on memories and experiences, and they can fill her in on those. Besides, who really has free will, anyway, we're all products of our time and place and social mores and John Locke et cetera.
There was a moment when they cracked open the lid where she could have lied, told the others nope, didn't work, nail the coffin shut and bury her again, go on with your lives. But the moment was short, and it passed, it was so very fait accompli, and God, Buffy could never speak French to save her life... So she looked at the body in the casket, smiled, brushed her hair out of her perfectly healed face, and told her to sit up and open her eyes and... well, be Buffy.
Spike
He'd taken what was left of the Buffybot back to his crypt and stuffed it in one of the caskets nobody's using. He's not sure why. It was always a poor substitute, now it's just bits of metal, plastic, silicon and silicone that don't fit together anymore. And yet for a long while he'd open up the casket every other night, just to look at it, as if knowing that it's FUBAR will help bring the real thing back.
Maybe it has. He doesn't get to see Buffy very often. Not that they keep him out, oh no, it's just "Well" this and "Um" that and "She's been through a lot" and "She still has a lot of healing to do." All a fancy way of saying they're putting her back together and they don't need his input yet; sure, maybe later, to fill in a few memories of how to beat him up, etc. Once she's good old Buffy again.
So there he'd sit, turning the dead Buffybot's head over in his hand like some bloody amateur Hamlet. Angel's lame. His hair goes straight up and he's bloody stupid. Yeah, so what, you're telling me it doesn't?
And she is back, obviously. More and more every time he sees her. And he's ecstatic about it, in a weird theoretical way. Yet he can't seem to shake the eerie feeling that she smells wrong. Not different, not dead, just … I'm having this terrible feeling of deja vu. He's heard that joke before. It's not very funny.
He still has the Buffybot, but at some point he's stopped opening the casket. He wonders if that means he's buried it. Maybe he should say something over it. Seems a waste.
Dawn
Is this how everyone's memories of her work, she wonders; do they just get told to remember some basic outlines and then fill in the blanks themselves, or did the monks really come up with every little detail themselves? Because if they did, her extensive knowledge of boy band gossip says something disturbing about life in European monasteries.
She's already starting to forget how Buffy was when she first came back - or not forget, not in the sense of not ever having nightmares about it again, but not think of that silent, trance-like, blank woman as Buffy. (At least the bot smiled, she almost told Tara once.) Buffy's getting better every day, she must be filling in the blanks more and more herself; they moved past the "You're Buffy Anne Summers, you're the Slayer, we pulled you out of hell, I'm your sister" stage in the first few days. Then they can start working on the details. It feels weird, but nobody knows Buffy like they do, they can tell her who she is, what she likes, what she hates, what she's been through... Tell her, tell her to remember, tell her to be. "This is Mr Gordo. You got him when you were five. You used to scratch him right here, see, where his fur's worn away. This is Mr Pointy," etc. Some of it's pretty awkward, like Angel telling her every detail of their relationship, up to and including how he went evil, which Dawn isn't allowed to listen in on which is totally unfair because it's not like she doesn't already know about that stuff - and sure, there are times when it's tempting to lie, to fix some little detail. But even if Willow can order Buffy to forget something and start over, it's... weird. So honesty it is. Tell her she's a little bossy, tell her she kind of shuts people out sometimes, tell her about that time Dawn spilled ketchup on her prom dress. Sometimes they remember things differently and have to decide which one to tell her, but that's details. Tell her they love her, tell her she loves them, the worst is behind her, she's a hero and she can do this. Yes, it's that simple. Especially once she starts filling it in herself. Which Dawn is pretty sure she must be doing.
It takes almost every waking hour, making themselves supporting characters to Buffy so she can find herself. But it's worth it.
She starts talking after only a week, so English is obviously still in there, even if it's mostly repeating what they tell her about her.
After two weeks, Buffy laughs at a dumb gag in one of all the movies they've told her she used to love. She looks genuinely happy. Three days later, she even picks a tape herself from the shelf.
After four weeks, Buffy snaps at Dawn for stea… borrowing her hairbrush, the exact same way she did when Dawn was twelve. It's the happiest moment in Dawn's life.
She keeps getting better. She has to. Like, literally.
Giles
Of course, this is what he was trained for, he thinks. To take a blank slate and turn her into a warrior. Yet he can't help but feel it should be harder.
Years ago, Buffy gave him a photocopy of a comic strip which he's kept taped above his desk. In it, a young boy dresses up as his father, then orders his father to "Go do something you hate! Being miserable builds character!" He's kept it as a reminder of... no. He's kept it because she gave it to him. Because she wouldn't have when they first met. Because he wouldn't have kept it when they first met.
But the thing is, she's not miserable. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how hard he pushes her, even the first time she takes on a vamp and has to fight for her life, when he sees her pull off textbook moves she improved on years ago, she never complains. Even after he gets Willow to make her feel pain whenever a vampire gets in a lucky punch. How do you order someone to disobey your orders?
Along with the combat training - he's had to start at the very beginning, how to make a fist, how to stand on one leg, but he never has to show her more than once - he's tried to continue what she asked of him last year; to be less of a by-the-book watcher and train her for more than just surviving. Help her understand what and why she is. She nods, takes it all in, asks the right questions. Is appropriately horrified at the right things, frustrated by the lack of information, laughs at the right moments. Eventually she's even sarcastic again. She remembers everything he tells her, can repeat it back verbatim.
She loves it. She's happy.
Yet he finds himself deliberately pushing her buttons. Or the buttons he hopes she still has. He snaps at the others, drinks too much. What the hell is wrong with him? Does he want her to feel bad? Is it selfish to miss all the things she used to teach him?
Buffy
The day they tell her she's finished, they've taught her everything they can teach her about being Buffy Summers, just happens to be her birthday. She's 21. She's complete. The same Buffy she always was, everything nailed and bolted down in its right place.
She thanks them, tearfully, hugs them all, tells them they've given her the greatest gift ever. When Willow asks her what she wants to do with her special day, that it's all up to her to choose, she chooses the Bronze. The DJ (a Sunnydale High alum) lets her pick the playlist, all songs she knows she loves.
Later, Buffy goes slaying. She knows every cemetery by heart just like she knows all the backstreets, alleys and cul-de-sacs of Sunnydale, but she picks Hillside Cemetery for the view. She stakes the one vamp she finds in a perfect imitation of a move she learned years ago, with a quip she's told she came up with in just this sort of situation.
Then she stands on the cold grass, breathing deeply, looking down at Sunnydale spreading out below her. It's really kind of beautiful in the still of the night, the lights spreading out against the dark desert night, as if the world outside doesn't exist. It's not perfect, but she knows that she's been to hell, things could always be worse. Everything she's ever known, everything she'll ever know, is right here.
She loves her family.
She's free to do anything she can think of.
She is, for all intents and purposes, alive.
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no subject
Date: 2014-07-09 01:34 am (UTC)There's a Louis CK routine where he talks about being a parent, and mentions how every single mistake is accompanied by a "oh, well, I guess that'll mean ten years of therapy!" realization. The recognition that every single action will determine the course of a child's future is pretty frightening. And, you know, it's not Willow's place to parent Buffy into existence, but...it's also unclear what a preferable option would be at this point. Would letting her die be better, once she's at the 99% level? Of course, Willow's *also* obviously not cut out to be a parent, at this stage in her life, and parents do find that children rebel and that type of thing in ways that zombies can't. Just like Dawn couldn't rebel against any of her programming during the phase of her life which was just made up and could only begin at adolescence, like many children who only discover the possibility of independent existence around that time only obviously much more so. But, I mean, yeah.
The Buffyverse (and other mythological works) functions as a method of de-normalizing the things we take for granted about life, and then them appearing horrifying (or heroic, depending). If we don't actually have very well-developed intrinsic markers of what is right and wrong besides some of the most basic and obvious stuff -- "it's better for people to be happy than to be sad" -- then we rely on community standards at least to a degree, which allow us to accept certain realities of living, including (as above) the difficult question of how parents' behaviour influences children and to what extent that imparting of, heck, identity is ethical, or social control (there is a parallel between Spike's chip and the zombie master control, too, in addition to the Buffybot thing). We sort of have to accept that there is a standard mode of parenting, and a standard degree of social control, that leads to healthy and happy individuals, and that slightly less than that is destructive anarchy and slightly more than that is destructive tyranny, but I think if we take societal convention away it's not easy to prove from first principles that X is the exact proper level of imparting of mores and no more and no less.
Which, you know. I don't think we're capable of making those kinds of calls by ourselves, which is part of why Willow eventually goes close to insane, and why (BB spoiler for anyone else reading this) Walter White's fantasy dies in the desert outside civilization, etc. Something someone once said about an abyss, I guess. That I'm not sure that Willow is doing anything that's *that* different in kind (if definitely different in degree) to what is always happening all the time doesn't mean that it's not completely unbeaten territory, either, and I think it would hollow her out, and no one would ever truly know if Buffy was filled in.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-09 09:05 pm (UTC)True. That's pretty much the reason (though I hadn't thought about the impact of Vamp!Willow on Willow's view of the world, that's an intriguing idea) I had Willow namecheck John Locke. I may be wrong about this, Intro to Philosophy was a long time ago, but IIRC Locke's position was that "free will" is a meaningless concept; we want what we want, what matters is the extent to which we're free to act on it. Which I'm not entirely sure I agree with, but yeah, I definitely think that our "free will" is limited in more ways than we think. (It's also my problem with Sartre's existentialism - the assumption that everyone is free to ponder their existence on their own terms.)
The Buffyverse (and other mythological works) functions as a method of de-normalizing the things we take for granted about life, and then them appearing horrifying (or heroic, depending).
Nicely put!
(there is a parallel between Spike's chip and the zombie master control, too, in addition to the Buffybot thing)
And of Giles' (more parental) role. Remember Norwie's Giles and the Wild Woman (http://norwie2010.livejournal.com/4066.html) meta? To a certain extent, any socialising is a mild form of ideological violence - a necessary one, obviously, but the balance is delicate.
no subject
Date: 2014-07-10 06:30 pm (UTC)Yeah, I mean, a lot of my perspective comes from lots of time in the hard sciences, and I...have trouble seeing where free will in the Sartreian sense can enter into the deterministic/probabilistic series of steps. Even if we don't look at it from a physical perspective, I've sort of looked at it like this: if you create an exact copy of a person at a moment of time, and then put that person in an identical situation, can they make different decisions? If so, are they meaningfully the same person? If not, is a meaningful choice being made?
But, you know, I also know that I think and I do something *like* making choices, so, it's not as I'm a pure Lockeian either. (P.S. I never actually took Philosophy 101. I read Sophie's World, does that count?)
And of Giles' (more parental) role. Remember Norwie's Giles and the Wild Woman meta? To a certain extent, any socialising is a mild form of ideological violence - a necessary one, obviously, but the balance is delicate.
How could I forget? :) And I think we can add Buffy's fists, or the threat thereof, to the list as well. Buffy generally avoids the threat of violence to get her way in social settings -- but she knows, and her friends know, that it's there, all the time, waiting to burst forth, ala Living Conditions or Beer Bad or, more significantly, Normal Again. In Dead Man's Party, for instance, I think the way she starts to approach Xander threateningly when he starts laying into her is an underexamined moment -- Xander is attacking her with social violence, and she's at least using the *threat* of physical violence to get him back for it, or to stop him. It's unclear how to evaluate that situation. Oz immediately gets between them to calm them down from a fight, but, you know. It reminds me both of Faith/Willow in Choices -- "You hurt me, I hurt you back!" -- and also of Willow/Giles in "Flooded" where Willow enforces "I'll consider what you said!"-esque "compromise"-y peace at the barrel of an open-ended threat. And of course, Buffy threatens to kill any of them who come near Dawn in "The Gift," which is...certainly a form of control, and then it's hard to say whether it's justified or not, which goes somehow to the root of the moral dilemma in "The Gift" and....
Which is to say, the threat of violence is always present, and we can't actually erase it. We can pretend it's not there -- and to some extent, we might have to, at least a little bit, in order to "relax." The question is how to use it effectively, and when the "no fly zones" of social or physical behaviour that are enforced are proper and necessary ones, and when they are not.