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Red	By : Prophecy Category: -Buffy the Vampire Slayer > General Views: 5499 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Five: Loaded

Save me. Save me from myself.
Drowning in the wishing well.
I will try to rise above.
I am never good enough.
I want you to know that I needed time alone.
Don't you try to tell me that you really didn't know.
All I ever wanted was to never leave this bed.
And I want to tell the truth - my smile is just pretend.
- Bif Naked, “After Awhile”

Fourth of July. The flashing lights soaring and exploding above our heads. Golden blasts sinking down to the breaking shore and lighting the sky and earth on fire with a brilliant technicolor glow. The sizzling embers scalding the sand as bells rang high from the hilltops and filtered up from the valleys and across the country Americans sat and considered the cost of their freedom, the spilled blood of the fearless warriors, all ghosts of the distant past now.
It passed us by, our heartbeats matching the ebb and flow of the ocean before us. She looked as though she belonged in the ocean, as though she were a part of it. Sand coated her golden sun-scorched body, glistening from flaxen head to long toes, stretching and curling and dipping into the salty water. My sunburnt wheat-field city girl mermaid, wrapped in a chrysalis of sand grains and clothing. She didn’t belong here. She truly belonged in the wild, finding her way through the tangly slimy slippery seaweed kelp reaching out to wrap their wild tendrils around her slim ankles. Past dozens of schools of electric rainbow fish, the snapping clams and docile bottom-dwellers.
I drowned when I was two. They say you can't remember back that long, but I can.
My father took me to the beach and waded into deep water and he held me tight and he held me closer and just when I felt safe he dropped me.
'Swim, baby, swim!' he told me. Swim and breathe and flap and float and the water was murky and deep. Salt stung my eyes and tender nose and throat, barely used to the air of the earth yet, and here she is. Pale dirt-baby in Mother Earth's womb, twisting and tangling in the gripping grabbing plants, trying to clutch to Daddy’s legs but they moved.
The darkness faded, my body limp, my lungs soaked as he lifted me against his chest and kissed my peachy-fuzz head and patted my chubby chunky thighs. I learned to breathe again, and the sun warmed my near-frozen baby's limbs.
Just when I felt safe, just when I trusted him and started to forget, he dropped me again. I was angry this time, I was terrified and livid, a blast of fire and rage coming from my chest where my heart pounded frantically. I kicked and punched and bit and the ends of my thin soft Johnson & Johnson's hair flashed in front of my eyes. I was an animal, I would rip into the water until it released me and then the sun was on my face again, and Daddy laughed and smiled and clapped and he picked me up, still clawing and tearing like a jungle cat, like a baby panther.
He wasn’t teaching me to swim after all; he was teaching me something much more important: that nobody, not even my own flesh and blood, could be trusted. He taught me that if trusting someone the first time around was stupid, then it was even more so to trust someone a second time. He taught me that in the end, everyone would turn their backs on me.
He taught me that the only person I could depend on was myself.

The fireworks burst and streaked across the sky above. The bonfire cracked and sizzled, lighting the entire stretch of beach. I watched the girls running across the sand, tagging each other and throwing a ball back and forth between them. The smell of the salty air mixed with the scents of hot dogs and marshmallows cooking, and I soaked it all up while laying beside the fire, the log under my head a hard but comfortable pillow.
Kennedy dropped to the ground beside me and handed me a stick with a toasted marshmallow on the end.
“You looked like you could use a sugar high.” She leaned back against the log and I smiled as I bit into the crispy sugar.
“I figured you and Red woulda snuck off to a more.. private.. part of the beach by now.”
Kennedy smirked. “I could say the same about you and Buffy, yunno.” I shrugged, polishing off the marshmallow and stabbing the stick into the sand. I wasn’t even sure where Buffy was at the moment. Ken frowned a little. “Trouble in paradise?”
I shook my head. “No. No trouble. I think ‘paradise’ might be pushin’ it, but. It’s not every day we get to hang out on the beach, watch fireworks, chill at a bonfire..”
“Have fun.” Kennedy supplied quietly. I nodded. Fun was at a serious premium since Sunnydale. We had all been trying so hard to keep busy; planning and discussing and looking to the future. Doing anything we possibly could to keep ourselves from remembering the cost of our freedom. The freedom every one of us now had; the freedom to choose to be a Slayer or not to be a Slayer. A freedom that came on the backs of our friends, our sisters. The dead that lay deep beneath the earth where Sunnydale once stood. Children who would never return to their parents; names no one but us would ever know. Lives we would all carry with us forever.
We all took solace however we could; comfort wherever we could find it. For Buffy and I, that meant fucking as much as possible for as long as possible. Everything that happened was balanced on her delicate shoulders; all of the loss, all of the pain. There was something deeply fucked up about the fact that we were surrounded by Slayers now and more lonely than ever. But every day it became clearer that there was something different about the newly-activated girls. The truth was they weren’t ever going to be Slayers the way we were. They weren’t ever going to feel that slight buzzing, tingly feeling deep in their guts that I felt any time B and I were close. They lived in a world where being a Slayer meant being part of something bigger than yourself. Our slogans weren’t much different from the slogans used by the Marine Corps. A warrior family that promised to have your back until the day you died. Semper fi.
These girls would never know what being alone was.
So when B came back up the beach, skin golden and her eyes empty, and took my hand, I stood and walked with her silently. Laying together on a blanket on the sand, covertly tucked away behind the dunes on the other side of the jetty, I watched the sweat trickling down her face, reflecting the moonlight and pressing her feet into the sand. I entered her slowly and our hearts pounded hard in unison as her back arched, the crashing waves swallowing her gasps. She came hard, her hand clutching my hair, and as one we rolled over together, her hands already mapping their way across my skin. Goosebumps prickled up and down my body and I let myself let go, floating away but somehow more anchored to my body, to the earth, to her, than ever.
Afterwards, I lay panting and let her curl against me. Her cheeks were still flushed, her hair wild, and she looked alive. She always did after.
A few days later, she told me the only time she felt alive was with her skin pressed to mine. She told me nobody would ever understand her the way I did. And then she told me she loved me.
Every night after that, my dreams were full of sensations that would be tied to that moment for as long as I lived—the cool air sweeping over my skin as she got up. The dampness of the tears that landed on my arm when she whipped her head back towards me, ripping her arm from my grasp. The empty, barren feeling inside me as she slammed the door behind her. The gnawing, relentless guilt over the lies I told her to make her leave spreading across every inch of my body. I tried to tell her that I didn’t know how to love, but like every feeling I ever had in my life, it came out of me in a tumble of acidic bile and rage and hate.
And then the dark thing inside me that had pushed her away and made sure she would never come back, grew bigger and bigger until it swallowed me whole.

Interlude: Present Time

Shadows dance lazily across the walls in the dim moonlight. Branches reaching up, coiling around the light fixtures. I blink slowly, watching the tendrils as the bowl I just smoked starts to kick in. It seeps into me slowly like a rising tide. Muscles going limp. Everything becoming softer, more gentle. I lift my arm a little and it tingles. Start scratching at the healed slashes across my wrist. So angry. Pull the scab off, blood's dripping now. I do this three more times, wrenching open the most recently-healed cuts.
The blood rolls gently down my arm and I grow calm as a memory comes back. A dark place. Alone, lungs fighting for breath. Then another memory, this one dingy and overexposed—everything dishwater grey, the paint on the walls cracked and peeling. Yellowed fluorescent lights buzzing quietly above. Padded cuffs anchoring my body to a bed, my back arching as I screamed wildly and struggled against them.
I go to sleep, and when I sleep I dream about a soft, dark green carpet beneath my feet as I stand at the side of a casket. I lay a rose on the closed lower lid, and I apologize in a whisper, my voice shaking just a little. I apologize and I take a breath and I finally look into the coffin.
My own face stares back at me, and suddenly I can’t stop screaming.
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