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“Have you ever looked fear in the face and said 'I just don't care'?”
Buffy sighs as she sits on a swing in the middle of the park, swaying gently.
Faith had asked her that once, not long after she'd shown up in Sunnydale and turned their whole lives upside down. They'd found a nest while patrolling one night, one of the biggest nests Buffy had ever seen the Hellmouth spit out.
And, yeah, Buffy had been scared.
Actually, Buffy has been afraid since that first night in the cemetery in L.A. with Merrick. Every night, when she goes on patrol, as she closes the door on her mother's worried face, Buffy has to stop her hands from shaking, has to control her breathing so that she doesn't hyperventilate.
Because, at the end of the day, she's eighteen years old and she's putting her life on the line every single day to make sure the world keeps on spinning.
And it was bad enough when it was nameless, faceless creatures she was fighting and killing night after night; but then the facelessness became faces, became people she knew and loved. She hit Xander with a desk. She killed Angel. She almost killed Faith. It all just made her fear grow.
But it wasn't just that, wasn't just the fact that she was a supernatural warrior tasked with keeping her tiny little town from being overrun with demons and the like.
It was life in general. All the pitfalls of being a teenage girl.
SATs and high school and puberty and fighting with her family, and then her boyfriend left her, right before the biggest change of her life.
Yeah, she's the Vampire Slayer – or a vampire slayer, that's a weird area right now – and she's killed hundreds, if not thousands, of creatures, she's literally died for this job, but starting college is her biggest challenge yet.
Buffy wasn't supposed to get this far. As she looks around the park, she can feel the weapons she's carrying press against the various parts of her body and she laughs a little at the fact that she has a favorite stake (Kendra gave it to her), and a favorite knife (she stole it from Spike, with every intention of returning it blade first), and a favorite pair of boots for kicking ass.
She realizes this is all very weird, but it's what gets her through the day.
Merrick had told her that her life would be hard and short, so Buffy had come to terms with the fact that she probably wouldn't make it to her sixteenth birthday. Or her eighteenth. And now, here she is, about to start college with her best friend, another event that's going to change her life forever.
And she's still afraid.
Faith's words still echo in her head. They always have, ever since the Bostonian first uttered them, breathing hard and grinning like a lunatic even as blood poured from a wound in her head, her hair matted, while Buffy tried to hold in her guts and fix her dislocated shoulder at the same time.
Faith was never afraid. Of anything. Always the first to run into a fight, fists first, questions never. Always the first one to put up a fight if anyone questioned her, never afraid to stand her ground.
Buffy admired that about her at first, admired how she embraced her life as a Slayer, found joy and pleasure in it where Buffy never could.
Faith was already half past the point of no return, half past the point of oblivion, before Buffy realized that something was wrong. Maybe if she'd noticed earlier, if she'd tried harder to get to know Faith, to spend time with her when it didn't involve killing things, Buffy might have been able to help her, to pull her back from the brink, instead of literally forcing her over the edge.
She has nightmares about it. When she isn't dreaming about The Master or running Angel through with a sword or telling the future – because that's a thing that Slayers do – she dreams of that night, of watching Faith falling from that roof. Sometimes it's different, sometimes she doesn't land in the truck, just splats on the sidewalk. Sometimes, it's not Faith at all who falls, but Buffy herself and she looks into Faith's eyes as she falls, watches as they change from brown to green and it makes no sense, but it's one of the most recurring dreams Buffy has had in the last two months.
It doesn't seem like it's been two months since that night, since graduation, probably because Buffy's unconsciousness keeps making her relive it three nights a week, but two months it has been, and college is starting and there's some thing watching Buffy from that bush behind the slide. It's been there ever since Buffy sat on the swing. It's probably the vampire that crawled out of it's grave in the cemetery behind the park – because it's Sunnydale, there's always a cemetery behind somewhere. The one behind the kindergarten makes Buffy's skin crawl – because she was late for patrolling, too busy trying to decide if she needed to take all her shoes to college or if she could leave some behind and come back and get them when she needed them.
She sighs again, because this is what she's facing for her the rest of her short life, putting off the stuff to her that is mundane but is everything to normal people in order to stick a piece of wood into a dead person.
For her sixteenth birthday, she moved to the Hellmouth.
For her eighteenth birthday, she was stripped of her powers, her mother was kidnapped and she still managed to save everyone.
She's starting college in a week and her next big milestone birthday will be her twenty-first.
She wonders what gift she'll be given for that. Retirement, maybe?
Of the permanent or voluntary kind has yet to be established.