"Happy Birthday"
Author: Claire
Feedback: queenclaire@chickmail.com
Rating: PG
Pairing: None
Summary: This is a pretty sad fic that visits an alternate reality,
where Buffy never came to Sunnydale...
"The cake had to be perfect. Joyce Summers examined it critically from all angles. Was the icing smooth enough? Was it perfectly round? Was there anything she could be faulted on?
It was a special cake, for her special little girl. Only Buffy wasn’t a little girl anymore, was she? Sometimes Joyce had to remind herself of that. Buffy had grown up. It was her twentieth birthday tomorrow and she was an adult now. But Joyce still thought of her as a little girl. She always would, she supposed.
Everything in her life centered around Buffy. It always had, but even more so after things between she and Hank had fallen apart. That was why she hadn’t moved out of the city, even though she would have loved to. She couldn’t leave her little girl.
She examined the cake once more and decided it was ideal for Buffy. Her twentieth birthday… Joyce couldn’t believe it.
"The mother’s coming in today," Jessie Coleman told another one of the nurses as they made their daily rounds.
"The mom of the Summers kid? Jeez, just what we need. It breaks my heart to see her," Diana Wilson responded.
"More than four years now. She hasn’t learnt to let go. She refuses to accept what happened. Her daughter’s never coming out of that coma. But she won’t let us turn off the life-support. Legally we can’t do it until she lets us."
"In that case, the law’s pretty screwed up. The girl’s a corpse."
"Shhh! She’s coming," Jessie warned, as Joyce walked down the corridor.
"Can I go in to see her?" Joyce asked the young nurse.
Jessie smiled. "Of course."
Joyce walked into the tiny room where her daughter lay. She hadn’t left here since the motorbike accident that had put her in a coma shortly before her sixteenth birthday. Hooked up to several machines, she was little more than a corpse. Her heart pumped, her lungs breathed, glucose travelled through her veins, but without the machines, she was nothing.
"Happy birthday, Buffy," Joyce whispered. "I made you a cake."
She was going to wake up. She had to.
Joyce knew her daughter could hear her. She knew that Buffy wasn’t gone. Gone? That was impossible. She was just somewhere else. Maybe dreaming. She’d always been a daydreamer….
"I’ll leave the cake here," Joyce told her daughter. "Do you want me to sing happy birthday to you? Okay, then, I will."
"Joyce." She turned around to find her ex-husband standing there.
"You’ve got to let go," he told her.
She turned towards Buffy again, ignoring his words. "It’s her birthday today."
"She’s dead, Joyce."
"Don’t you say that! Don’t you ever say that!" she screamed. "She’s not! She’s not, she’s right here!"
Outside, Jessie and Diana exchanged glances. Another scene. Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays. Always the same, always the fighting. And yet Hank wouldn’t let them turn off the machines either. Deep down he couldn’t let go either.
The screaming continued over the lifeless body of Buffy Summers, while somewhere in the realm of fantasies and dreams and unconsciousness, her spirit had her own world, of demons and monsters, of love and pain, where she was the superhero and saved everyone, and she lived her life the way she was meant to before that accident…
And Joyce Summers once more refused to turn off the life support, and Hank Summers agreed, because ostensibly he didn’t want his wife to be too upset, she was already very cut off from life and the official death of their daughter could destroy her, and really because he didn’t want to have to say goodbye to his beautiful blonde daughter either, and so it continued.
The End