Slayer Memories 2
Okay, here's the first Buffy POV section of the continuation of "Debriefing Dana"
Slayer Memories Part One here.
Kimberly Eggers, “Call me Kimmie”, was the clinical psychologist Giles found. She’d worked with the watchers before which helped a lot. Job interviews went easier around the council if you didn’t have to go through the “vampires are real” part.
Buffy was pretty sure Kimmie had believed in vampires before coming to work for the council, and possibly fairies and aliens too.
“What adult woman goes by ‘Kimmie”?” Buffy demanded, arms crossed, scowling through the wire-mesh protected windows of the make-shift psycho ward they’d made out of the north end of Giles’ estate. Kimmie was with Dana, probably driving the poor girl mad - madder - with her exaggerated expressions and gestures.
“Careful Buff, glass condo talk there,” Xander said. He shifted his weight onto his back leg, squinted out of his good eye, and threw another knife at the target pinned to the big old oak tree. “How was that?”
Buffy tore her eyes away from the windows. Oh, right, she was supposed to be helping Xander. She walked up to the tree and wrenched the fat throwing-dagger out of it. “Turn around, five paces, again,” she said.
“Yes, mistress,” he rolled his eye, but turned and counted out steps.
“I don’t think they’re helping Dana as much as they could be,” Buffy said. “I mean, she’s a teen-ager and they have her doing all these kindergarten arts and crafts. You can see she finds it humiliating!”
“Buff?” Xander held out his hand expectantly. When Buffy didn’t respond he said, “Kinda can’t throw a dagger you’re holding.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Buffy handed it over.
She watched dutifully as Xander threw again, and missed. He sighed and muttered and went to retrieve the dagger himself from the grass at the base of the tree. “They call him Xander: Root Slayer,” he said.
“I just think she should be training. Learning to control her strength, like I did. We can secure the gym just as easily, and hey! Maybe if we weren’t constantly treating her like a prisoner, she wouldn’t try to get away. Does anybody think of that?”
Xander scraped dirt off his dagger against the edge of his boot, leaning against the tree for support. “Buff? Why don’t we call it quits? Your mind’s not on this. I could get Rosita to work with me.”
Buffy grimaced. “Sorry. Maybe we shouldn’t practice on this side of the building.”
Xander shrugged. “It’s the fattest tree. Give me a few months, and I’ll be ready for those skinny oaks on the north lawn.”
***
“We’re in the middle of a therapy session,” Kimmie said with the most insincere of smiles. “Why don’t you come back later?”
Dana looked up miserably from a paper covered in looping pink flowers.
Buffy held her ground. “Actually, I came to talk about that. I think we should… for therapy’s sake… I mean, start Dana on some occupational therapy.” Buffy nodded, proud of herself for coming up with the term.
Kimmie frowned. “I’m not sure we have the facilities, and I’d hate to have her out in the public. She is a very special patient.”
“I was thinking more ‘slayer’ occupation,” Buffy said. “We have the best facility in the world for that.”
“You want to train her to fight?” Kimmie lost her ever-present smile, though her drawn-on eyebrows were as high as ever. “An unstable psychotic? You want to give her martial training?”
“She isn’t going to get stable sitting around here all day with nothing to do.” Buffy crossed her arms and stepped closer, noting with pleasure the anxious step back the therapist took. “And she is in the room, by the way. I hate it when people talk about me like I’m not there, don’t you, Dana?” Buffy turned to the mad slayer.
Dana’s hands parted over her drawing. She set down her crayon and looked at Buffy, attentive, but clearly not knowing how to react or what to say.
“Would you like to learn some tricks?” Buffy asked. “Some…” she glanced at Kimmie’s horrified expression - rendered clown-like from the drawn-on eyebrows. “Some cheerleading?” Buffy smiled, proud of her concession.
Kimmie frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose…”
“Cheerleading?” Dana tilted her head.
“You know, like at football games?” Buffy stepped back and raised her arms, elbow then extend, one at a time, with imagined pom-poms.
Dana smiled, a flicker of eagerness breaking through her usual mask.
“I really must object. Dana isn’t an ordinary patient. She has super-strength.”
“Pfft. So do I. I got over it.” Buffy held a hand out to Dana.
Staring for a moment, Dana slowly took the proffered hand and let Buffy draw her to her feet.
“Are we going out the brown door?” Dana asked.
Kimmie shook her head vehemently. “Absolutely not. Miss Summers, if you insist on having some training exercise, it can be done in here, and AFTER Dana’s art therapy session.”
“Dana, do you even LIKE art therapy?”
Dana quickly shook her head.
“I must strenuously object! You cannot interrupt my planned therapy. Dana needs a disciplined schedule, an orderly…”
“Yeah, whatever. Come on, Dana, can you do jumping jacks?”
Sometimes, Dana would get the most childish looks on her face. Joy. She clapped her hands and nodded. She was easy to love at times like those.
Kimmie watched with a disapproving scowl as Buffy got Dana to do some calisthenics.
So Buffy didn’t know jack about psychology - well, she never did finish Dr. Walsh’s course - but she did know that SHE, at least, dealt with emotional trauma best through exercise.
Not that she was going to dwell on how she’d used that strategy in the past… already she sometimes saw Dana looking at her and wondered what she saw, if she knew Buffy’s every horrible little secret.
She was waiting, she realized, to find a pornographic picture among Dana’s childlike crayon drawings. Perhaps that time at the Bronze… you know, just to be extra-embarrassing.
Buffy smiled at Kimmie now and again, to reassure her, as she tried to think of ways to put martial-arts moves into cheers. She was just like Mr. Miyagi! Wax on, wax off - pom-pom left, pom-pom right.
Buffy organized her schedule, and no one (except Kimmie) complained or even noticed. Three days a week, she went down to Dana’s room and they practiced cheers for Team Slayer between Art Therapy and dinner.
Dana exercising reminded Buffy of doing cheer routines with Dawn, when Dawn was seven and Buffy was trying out for Junior High cheer squad and even an obnoxious little sister beat out stuffed animals for practice. Buffy realized she must have been horribly bossy - telling Dawn to stand here, stand there, raise your arms, no not like that, dummy!
Her only excuse was, hey, made-up memories! (She wondered how people without made-up memories dealt with their casual cruelty to younger siblings.)
Dawn had been like Dana was now - not interested in the perfect control, just enjoying the motion of her body and playing with the pom-poms.
Buffy bought the pom-poms special, from a cheer supplier online - no tacky little-kid pom-poms, or sport-fan fakes, these were the real McCoy. Dana delighted in stuffing her face into the big puffs of plastic, or shaking them to hear their unique noise.
Buffy hadn’t felt nostalgic for cheer in years. She forgot about her sneaky plan for martial arts training, and revised all the cheers she remembered from her old school, and the few she’d learned for try-outs at Sunnydale.
It was therapy for both of them, really.
One day Buffy came in, and Dana held a picture out to her. It was Spike, again. Dana smiled at her in what Buffy was sure was a knowing way.
It was creepy. Dana was innocent, practically a kid. Why did Buffy assume she was leering?
Dana was getting better at drawing. Spike was standing in this one, his black coat standing out stiffly from him on the sides. Two blue circles for eyes and a cartoon fang mouth, but she knew it was supposed to be him. Little pink slashes for his cheekbones. She wondered how he’d feel, seeing this, and her eyes misted. She imagined him acting affronted, but secretly pleased, in that way of his that fooled no one. “And she’s got my coat all wrong,” he might say, pointing disdainfully at the black trapezoid that stuck out from his stiff form.
“That’s very good. You don’t have to keep giving me drawings,” Buffy said. “I know… I know you’re trying to be nice, but seeing Spike, knowing he’s gone, it doesn’t make me happy. You understand? It hurts to remember.” Buffy put the picture back on the little table face-down. “Why don’t we leave the past behind and work on the future? I was thinking that we could perform, for the others. What do you think about that? Me and you, doing cheers for the watcher’s council? I’ve wrote some… they’re kind of lame. ‘Giles, Giles, he’s our man, reading books only he can’.” Buffy shook her head.
Dana frowned and flipped the picture over. She slapped her hand on it, angry, and glared at Buffy as though daring her to touch it.
“Okay… okay, sorry. Didn’t mean to cover up Spike. He’s very pretty. Really.”
Dana raised her eyes to Buffy’s. “Why are you sad? Doctor Giles told me his arms are back on. He’s not gone. Only this isn’t LA, that’s all. He’s there. We’re in England.”
“No, don’t be silly, he…” Buffy frowned. “Slayer memory?”
Dana shook her head.
***
Buffy’s heels clacked deliberately down the length of the second-floor salon. Giles rose from the couch where he was reading the newspaper. “Buffy? I’m really not in the mood for interruption…”
“Good. I have enough mood for both of us.” Buffy stopped directly in front of him, every line of her countenance screaming her desire to hit him. Instead, she pushed a piece of cheap drawing paper at him. “He’s alive, Giles. He’s alive, and you knew about it.”
“What? Who…”
“Spike.” Buffy clenched her fists. “You did it to me again. Is this to protect me, somehow? I’m not a teenager anymore.”
Giles sank back into his seat. “Oh.” He set his newspaper aside.
“’Oh’, he says. Dana kept babbling about having met Spike, but she’s crazy, right? Then she says ‘Doctor Giles told me he’s all right.’ Isn’t that nice.”
“It was his decision, Buffy, not mine.”
“Who’s decision?”
Giles sighed. He took off his glasses. “Spike’s.”
Buffy felt a hard lump in her throat. Up until just that moment, a large part of her hadn’t really believed. “He’s alive,” she said, again.
“Undead, still, yes,” Giles said. He rubbed his temple. “Death isn’t what it used to be.”
Part Three -->
Slayer Memories Part One here.
Kimberly Eggers, “Call me Kimmie”, was the clinical psychologist Giles found. She’d worked with the watchers before which helped a lot. Job interviews went easier around the council if you didn’t have to go through the “vampires are real” part.
Buffy was pretty sure Kimmie had believed in vampires before coming to work for the council, and possibly fairies and aliens too.
“What adult woman goes by ‘Kimmie”?” Buffy demanded, arms crossed, scowling through the wire-mesh protected windows of the make-shift psycho ward they’d made out of the north end of Giles’ estate. Kimmie was with Dana, probably driving the poor girl mad - madder - with her exaggerated expressions and gestures.
“Careful Buff, glass condo talk there,” Xander said. He shifted his weight onto his back leg, squinted out of his good eye, and threw another knife at the target pinned to the big old oak tree. “How was that?”
Buffy tore her eyes away from the windows. Oh, right, she was supposed to be helping Xander. She walked up to the tree and wrenched the fat throwing-dagger out of it. “Turn around, five paces, again,” she said.
“Yes, mistress,” he rolled his eye, but turned and counted out steps.
“I don’t think they’re helping Dana as much as they could be,” Buffy said. “I mean, she’s a teen-ager and they have her doing all these kindergarten arts and crafts. You can see she finds it humiliating!”
“Buff?” Xander held out his hand expectantly. When Buffy didn’t respond he said, “Kinda can’t throw a dagger you’re holding.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Buffy handed it over.
She watched dutifully as Xander threw again, and missed. He sighed and muttered and went to retrieve the dagger himself from the grass at the base of the tree. “They call him Xander: Root Slayer,” he said.
“I just think she should be training. Learning to control her strength, like I did. We can secure the gym just as easily, and hey! Maybe if we weren’t constantly treating her like a prisoner, she wouldn’t try to get away. Does anybody think of that?”
Xander scraped dirt off his dagger against the edge of his boot, leaning against the tree for support. “Buff? Why don’t we call it quits? Your mind’s not on this. I could get Rosita to work with me.”
Buffy grimaced. “Sorry. Maybe we shouldn’t practice on this side of the building.”
Xander shrugged. “It’s the fattest tree. Give me a few months, and I’ll be ready for those skinny oaks on the north lawn.”
***
“We’re in the middle of a therapy session,” Kimmie said with the most insincere of smiles. “Why don’t you come back later?”
Dana looked up miserably from a paper covered in looping pink flowers.
Buffy held her ground. “Actually, I came to talk about that. I think we should… for therapy’s sake… I mean, start Dana on some occupational therapy.” Buffy nodded, proud of herself for coming up with the term.
Kimmie frowned. “I’m not sure we have the facilities, and I’d hate to have her out in the public. She is a very special patient.”
“I was thinking more ‘slayer’ occupation,” Buffy said. “We have the best facility in the world for that.”
“You want to train her to fight?” Kimmie lost her ever-present smile, though her drawn-on eyebrows were as high as ever. “An unstable psychotic? You want to give her martial training?”
“She isn’t going to get stable sitting around here all day with nothing to do.” Buffy crossed her arms and stepped closer, noting with pleasure the anxious step back the therapist took. “And she is in the room, by the way. I hate it when people talk about me like I’m not there, don’t you, Dana?” Buffy turned to the mad slayer.
Dana’s hands parted over her drawing. She set down her crayon and looked at Buffy, attentive, but clearly not knowing how to react or what to say.
“Would you like to learn some tricks?” Buffy asked. “Some…” she glanced at Kimmie’s horrified expression - rendered clown-like from the drawn-on eyebrows. “Some cheerleading?” Buffy smiled, proud of her concession.
Kimmie frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose…”
“Cheerleading?” Dana tilted her head.
“You know, like at football games?” Buffy stepped back and raised her arms, elbow then extend, one at a time, with imagined pom-poms.
Dana smiled, a flicker of eagerness breaking through her usual mask.
“I really must object. Dana isn’t an ordinary patient. She has super-strength.”
“Pfft. So do I. I got over it.” Buffy held a hand out to Dana.
Staring for a moment, Dana slowly took the proffered hand and let Buffy draw her to her feet.
“Are we going out the brown door?” Dana asked.
Kimmie shook her head vehemently. “Absolutely not. Miss Summers, if you insist on having some training exercise, it can be done in here, and AFTER Dana’s art therapy session.”
“Dana, do you even LIKE art therapy?”
Dana quickly shook her head.
“I must strenuously object! You cannot interrupt my planned therapy. Dana needs a disciplined schedule, an orderly…”
“Yeah, whatever. Come on, Dana, can you do jumping jacks?”
Sometimes, Dana would get the most childish looks on her face. Joy. She clapped her hands and nodded. She was easy to love at times like those.
Kimmie watched with a disapproving scowl as Buffy got Dana to do some calisthenics.
So Buffy didn’t know jack about psychology - well, she never did finish Dr. Walsh’s course - but she did know that SHE, at least, dealt with emotional trauma best through exercise.
Not that she was going to dwell on how she’d used that strategy in the past… already she sometimes saw Dana looking at her and wondered what she saw, if she knew Buffy’s every horrible little secret.
She was waiting, she realized, to find a pornographic picture among Dana’s childlike crayon drawings. Perhaps that time at the Bronze… you know, just to be extra-embarrassing.
Buffy smiled at Kimmie now and again, to reassure her, as she tried to think of ways to put martial-arts moves into cheers. She was just like Mr. Miyagi! Wax on, wax off - pom-pom left, pom-pom right.
Buffy organized her schedule, and no one (except Kimmie) complained or even noticed. Three days a week, she went down to Dana’s room and they practiced cheers for Team Slayer between Art Therapy and dinner.
Dana exercising reminded Buffy of doing cheer routines with Dawn, when Dawn was seven and Buffy was trying out for Junior High cheer squad and even an obnoxious little sister beat out stuffed animals for practice. Buffy realized she must have been horribly bossy - telling Dawn to stand here, stand there, raise your arms, no not like that, dummy!
Her only excuse was, hey, made-up memories! (She wondered how people without made-up memories dealt with their casual cruelty to younger siblings.)
Dawn had been like Dana was now - not interested in the perfect control, just enjoying the motion of her body and playing with the pom-poms.
Buffy bought the pom-poms special, from a cheer supplier online - no tacky little-kid pom-poms, or sport-fan fakes, these were the real McCoy. Dana delighted in stuffing her face into the big puffs of plastic, or shaking them to hear their unique noise.
Buffy hadn’t felt nostalgic for cheer in years. She forgot about her sneaky plan for martial arts training, and revised all the cheers she remembered from her old school, and the few she’d learned for try-outs at Sunnydale.
It was therapy for both of them, really.
One day Buffy came in, and Dana held a picture out to her. It was Spike, again. Dana smiled at her in what Buffy was sure was a knowing way.
It was creepy. Dana was innocent, practically a kid. Why did Buffy assume she was leering?
Dana was getting better at drawing. Spike was standing in this one, his black coat standing out stiffly from him on the sides. Two blue circles for eyes and a cartoon fang mouth, but she knew it was supposed to be him. Little pink slashes for his cheekbones. She wondered how he’d feel, seeing this, and her eyes misted. She imagined him acting affronted, but secretly pleased, in that way of his that fooled no one. “And she’s got my coat all wrong,” he might say, pointing disdainfully at the black trapezoid that stuck out from his stiff form.
“That’s very good. You don’t have to keep giving me drawings,” Buffy said. “I know… I know you’re trying to be nice, but seeing Spike, knowing he’s gone, it doesn’t make me happy. You understand? It hurts to remember.” Buffy put the picture back on the little table face-down. “Why don’t we leave the past behind and work on the future? I was thinking that we could perform, for the others. What do you think about that? Me and you, doing cheers for the watcher’s council? I’ve wrote some… they’re kind of lame. ‘Giles, Giles, he’s our man, reading books only he can’.” Buffy shook her head.
Dana frowned and flipped the picture over. She slapped her hand on it, angry, and glared at Buffy as though daring her to touch it.
“Okay… okay, sorry. Didn’t mean to cover up Spike. He’s very pretty. Really.”
Dana raised her eyes to Buffy’s. “Why are you sad? Doctor Giles told me his arms are back on. He’s not gone. Only this isn’t LA, that’s all. He’s there. We’re in England.”
“No, don’t be silly, he…” Buffy frowned. “Slayer memory?”
Dana shook her head.
***
Buffy’s heels clacked deliberately down the length of the second-floor salon. Giles rose from the couch where he was reading the newspaper. “Buffy? I’m really not in the mood for interruption…”
“Good. I have enough mood for both of us.” Buffy stopped directly in front of him, every line of her countenance screaming her desire to hit him. Instead, she pushed a piece of cheap drawing paper at him. “He’s alive, Giles. He’s alive, and you knew about it.”
“What? Who…”
“Spike.” Buffy clenched her fists. “You did it to me again. Is this to protect me, somehow? I’m not a teenager anymore.”
Giles sank back into his seat. “Oh.” He set his newspaper aside.
“’Oh’, he says. Dana kept babbling about having met Spike, but she’s crazy, right? Then she says ‘Doctor Giles told me he’s all right.’ Isn’t that nice.”
“It was his decision, Buffy, not mine.”
“Who’s decision?”
Giles sighed. He took off his glasses. “Spike’s.”
Buffy felt a hard lump in her throat. Up until just that moment, a large part of her hadn’t really believed. “He’s alive,” she said, again.
“Undead, still, yes,” Giles said. He rubbed his temple. “Death isn’t what it used to be.”
Part Three -->