Fanfiction: Play With Me At Recess
The first day of school feels like the first day of your life - you’re looking forward to it because the other little girls in the apartment next door are in school and they’re really, really smart and - albeit not the best clothing in the world - it’s better than yours. So you look up to them and play with them a little, even if their mom doesn’t like you, until they start school and become cooler and older, so you figure this being your first day, you will too.
The books are dusty, musty, among other things but they have pictures and big words inside of them. Colorful and bright, you’re in awe with them. The librarian is really nice and lets you read as much as you want.
You have no one to sit with at lunch and no one to play with at recess. So you come home and you go to your room and you cry and cry until your mom tells you to shut up, because there are more important and worse things than the first day of school, like paying bills and having a job. You really don’t believe her, because being a grown-up is cool and you’re a firm believer in this.
In third grade you meet your very first best friend ever and forever, because she smiles at you with bright eyes and is unfazed by your off-putting frown. Instead, she makes it disappear with a “Hi,” and a “Will you play with me at recess?”. You agree to and both of you hit it off like no-one’s business - a term your mother uses quite often in relation to all of the friends she has over every night - and you play with each other, and she’s so cool that when they try to take the slide away from you, that she talks them into letting all of you play, and everyone shares the slide instead and the cool people seem to like you now.
You are allowed to go over to her home to spend the night and her parents are so nice. She has a dad and you wonder why you don’t have one of those, and he’s so incredibly good to you that the urge to have one springs itself upon you and all you can do is admire your new friend, because she’s so lucky, with so many cool things. They cook you dinner and it’s more food than you have ever seen in your life and you stuff your face full for a good thirty minutes, until you feel like your tummy is humongous in comparison to, well, everything. And you say this out loud, because ‘humongous’ is such a funny word and everyone has a good laugh. You go to sleep that night feeling good because you made them smile. You made someone smile. And Taylor, your ‘BFF’, has an arm wrapped around you, clinging to you as if for life - telling you how great of a friend you are. “Friends forever, Faith!” and you believe her.
Your mom doesn’t allow you to spend the night for a while and you count the hours until it’s time for bed, so you can wake up in the morning and go straight to school to meet her. However, during the summer, you can’t and it’s agonizingly slow - just being at home with Mom, and all she does is yell at you a lot and, thank goodness Taylor’s mom taught you how to make cereal, because without this knowledge you’d starve.
You guys are together at the beginning of fourth grade and she talks to you a little less, but you don’t care because school is better than being at home, anyway. Which seems off to you because Taylor can’t wait to go home everyday and maybe it’s because she has one of those Dad people. Maybe. You try talking to your mom about this and she shrugs you off, then when you ask about it a week or two later, she yells at you and gives you a spanking because certain things aren’t supposed to be talked about in this house. Even if it’s not even a house. Taylor called it an apartment, because she’s the one who has the house. And why are you being spanked for something you didn’t even know was in your Mom’s ever-changing rule book, anyway? You go to bed then go to school.
You’re in the middle of fifth grade when your grades are so good that Taylor is jealous and you can’t believe it, because she’s the smart one out of the two of you. You both decide to help each other out, because she says you’re smart too, even if you don’t believe it, and now both of you guys can be equally smart. So you study together during class, even if it angers the teacher sometimes, because your mom will only let you go to her house every now and then. Until she starts letting you over more often, usually when she has plans to stay out all night, and once you had to go home with Taylor.
The longest you’ve had to stay at their home is a week, then they made your mom’s bail.
A few weeks later Taylor dies in a car accident and your mom doesn’t tell you, even if her parents called, and you go for a week wondering why Taylor isn’t at school. You simply cannot cry enough and your mom points out that you’re being weak. Maybe you are. But there’s the biggest black hole in your heart right now and you’ll never be the same.
You have to go to sixth grade - which is now an entirely different school - alone. You don’t know anyone because there’s about three hundred new kids from other schools that you don’t know and it seems so goddamned hopeless. Everything is new but you don’t care. You went through the entire summer alone because your mom has been spending more and more time at that stupid bar or whatever she calls it, you haven’t listened to her any lately so you wouldn’t know anyway.
No friends today and you’re afraid of what tomorrow might bring.
Your mom brings home some guy when you reach half-way through seventh grade and he’s really nice. She stays at home a lot more often because he’s there and she’s real happy with him. So you decide to be happy too. He takes you out for ice cream and suddenly you have a dad like Taylor did, and it feels like this is the one thing you owe her, is to be happy. So you open yourself up and he’s really, really nice.
Then he forces you to fuck him and you feel fast like all those other girls at school. You try to tell Mom but she says you’re lying, lying, and that you don’t want to see her happy. So he stays and it happens again and again and you know Taylor’s dad wasn’t like this, so you think of something, someway to prove to your mom that you’re not lying. That he’s really hurting you. So you set up a situation where your mom can walk in from her new job and catch him doing it, and she kicks him out, then hates you because you’ve got boobs and an ass now and you’re already hotter than she is, so that explains why he wants you over her, and all you want for her to do is hold you and tell you you’ll be okay.
In highschool you meet Sinead, who’s really cool and apart of this group of kids who’re into tons of weird shit, and you hop at the chance to be apart of it. Middleschool had you all by yourself the entire time and now that you’re in the big leagues, you’re finally getting noticed. Not to mention your body’s a killer - ‘smokin’ in every possible way.
You blow your way through the boys (even if your real first time was so fucking different from your mom’s good ol’ rapist of a boyfriend that you cried) and get hooked on drugs, ‘cause that way you don’t have to remember shit about your mom, and then one day she’s killed by this weird looking thing with yellow eyes and you don’t know how, but you turned it into a big pile of dust. The next day you’re approached by some woman who calls herself a watcher and you a slayer, and you’re so high on whatever the hell one of Sinead’s boys gave you that you believe it, because she agrees to take you away from your old life and teach you how to kill weird creeps like ‘vampires’. You’re not hurting inside because of your mom, you’re not.
She makes you quit drugs and it’s one of the harder things you’ve done, but you do it, and she’s oh-so proud of you and you feel like she’s faking the sincerity. But she keeps proving herself over and over again and you can’t help but believe her. She trains you, feeds you, and gives you a place to live - it’s all fine with you, so it doesn’t matter if she’s being fake or not, you won’t let yourself be open enough for any of that to matter.
Sinead moves in because this woman wants you to have a friend and Sin’s been having it rough for a while, and you two become tight, like you and Taylor were - but you could never be friends like that with anyone anymore, so you settle on a little less than ‘best friend’. You actually have a good relationship with Steve but whoops, he turns out to be a klepto, and then you catch your new boyfriend Kenny screwing one of the girls at school, so you decide to stay single for awhile, it works for you.
You’re attacked by some big butch vamp named Kakistos and he rips your watcher into so many little, unrecognizable pieces, while you’re off fighting his fucking alligators and shit, but you get to watch anyway, because you don’t know what the fuck to do. He preaches the five basic torture groups as he digs in and she screams, screams so loud that it drowns out the sounds of your sobs. He calls you weak because you’re crying and suddenly he looks exactly like your mom - one in the same, all the very same.
You run after slamming something into the guy’s eye. You don’t know what will happen to Sin, because you’re too chicken to stick around and help her.
You remember she mentioned something about Sunnydale and another slayer, Buffy. You know you’ll be able to deal with Kakistos if you have another slayer around. But you don’t want to deal with him, so you decide that first you’ll go to Sunnydale then wait around until he finds you, then take off - leaving this Buffy to deal with him. From what you were told, she’s a good slayer. Better than you, probably. But that’s a thought for another day.
When you get there, they welcome you with open arms and you’re kind of hurt that Buffy had never heard of you. You’re surprised that this slayer’s so small.
Buffy reminds you a lot of Taylor. She has cool things. A group of friends that were a trip to hang out with, a mom that cooks, a watcher that’s still breathing… Her house is beautiful and your motel room is a piece of shit. The fact she’s boinked the things you’re supposed to kill is a little off to you.
Kakistos shows up and you try to run but she makes you stay and you hate her for it, temporarily. But she helps you, she really helps you, and together, you both fight away your demon. Maybe there’s a chance for you here.
You almost call her Taylor when you go out for steak right after and she looks at you kind of quizzically. It isn’t your fault so you don’t care.
You expected things to play out a little differently, but instead everyone sort of loses interest in you, and you end up gaining another watcher. You don’t want or need another watcher, but she’s so much like your old one, in the small ways - so you open yourself up. You can’t help it. You need someone here and everyone else has a someone.
Buffy lies, she isn’t like Taylor at all. Your new watcher isn’t like your old watcher at all, she’s evil, like the guy that raped you is, and the next day you decide to stay at your motel room. Buffy stops by but you’re not fooled by her, not at all. She’s shiny, bright, great, and loved, but she isn’t Taylor. So who are you?
You build up walls that weren’t there before and play little-miss-confident. You do what Buffy does - better - simply because you’re bitter about all the things she gets to have when she’s not a Taylor. Jealousy? Whatever. Then you - the both of you - accidentally kill this guy and they all turn on you so quickly and this isn’t your world. This happened a lot in Boston. Why was it such a big deal?
Blood on your hands, so much blood. Your watcher died that way and next thing you know you’re strangling one of the guys you slept with and all you can think about is your mom’s boyfriend and Steve and Kenny. Burning, bright, dark shades of red all over. You’re so far gone and you don’t care. No one here cares. None of these people care.
The mayor’s evil and you join his side and you. don’t. care.
Weeks pass by in a blur of red and black. The only thing that stands out is the fact that this guy is exactly like Taylor’s dad, if Taylor’s dad were evil, and you wonder, shortly, how her parents are doing right about now - if they’re happy together, because they deserve to be. You get tricked into a plot by Buffy and all of her pals, but it was just to find out about your tricks, so being angry seems a little bit too moot for you.
You shoot Buffy’s great boyfriend with a poisoned arrow then you two have a fight on the roof of your building. Finally, it’s going to be over. You’ll land on top, you’ll prove that you’re better and you can rise above all this stuff that’s dogging you. But instead she stabs you and Taylor would never ever do that and you look into her eyes and you want to cry, die, forgive, forget and you see your momtaylorwatcherrapistkakistosohmygodwhoareyouanymore before you refuse to let her do this to you and throw yourself off of the building, onto a passing truck, and out of this life and into a coma and this is absolutely the best thing you could have ever done for anyone.
When you wake up, around eight months later, you think - you’re borderline psychotic and no one visited you while you were in a coma, and it’s so fucking typical. You never dreamed that you would end up where you were now. And there was no way that anyone could get away with putting you there. What type of person could? So you find out that everything that was, the mayor, your entire life… was finished.
You steal Buffy’s body because she doesn’t even fucking deserve the life she has, and you decide not to spend time thinking about Taylor or Sinead, or whoever, because that part of your life seems so distant to you now.
But Buffy gets her body back and you’re in a church where you’ve never been before. You feel like you’re being judged, judged, and it felt so good being Buffy, being a good person. And you’re bad. Badbadbad. So you run away again. You’ve perfected the skill by now.
When you reach Los Angeles, you torture the guy who was supposed to be your third watcher, and you ask Kakistos for help and pick apart the five basic torture groups from memory. You hate everything right now. But Angel busts down the door and you all go out the window like you and Buffy did, except Angel is a good person and you beg him to kill you. You’re bad and evil and wrong and Taylor would be so disappointed in you right now and who are you except a horrible, horrible person who doesn’t deserve anything and suddenly it all makes sense, because this mess is your fault so you deserve to die. So you beg him to kill you.
But he doesn’t.
Instead he gives you back your soul in some strange kind of irony and he chooses to help you over Buffy, then you turn yourself in and think about third grade as the bars to your cell slam shut.
Angel visits every now and then and slowly rebuilds your hope. The guards try to make you cold, like your cellmates, but your mind is slowly - slowly - settling down. You have control here. You can manage. The new smile on Angel’s face tells you this.
When the guy you tortured comes to get you out of jail to help save the world you aren’t sure if he’s out to kill you or save his friend. But right now he reminds you so much of who you were that it’s hard to look at him. Did you do this to him?
You get back into the swing of things and Angel is his evil self again. You go in with your head held high and you come out with too much stuff you didn’t want to know and in yet another fucking coma. But now you no longer look up to Angel, because you two are equal. You’re equal in ways that aren’t things to be bragged about, but it feels good to be equal to someone again. So you leave with a little satisfaction and go back to Sunnydale to help there.
You’re welcomed to Sunnydale with stupid, useless drama. Buffy’s hitting you just ‘cause she can and nothing’s really changed. It’s hard to see how you ever wanted to be apart of this group of people, when they’re cold and cruel and entirely fake.
You tell Spike about the guy with the bullwhip, you just leave out the part about him being your mom’s boyfriend and your rapist all in one.
You deal with everyone’s shit, you’re not proud when they choose you over Buffy, and you give the role as leader back when you fuck up. You’re just here to take down the big bad. Because you’re a slayer and there’s nothing else for you to do. You’ve made the most horrible mistakes anyone ever could and the only thing you can do is make up for it and seek forgiveness. You stand at the edge of the hellmouth with this group of people you don’t care all that much for anymore, but they’re the ones that you need to be forgiven by the most, and then once you’ve paid your dues - if you ever do - you think you’ll head out and see if Sin’s still out there. Everyone smiles and even if it’s not because of something you’ve done, you’re glad that they’re just smiling with your presence hanging around. It’s enough.