BtVS Ficlet: Double Life

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Title: Double Life

Fandom: BtVS

Author: badly_knitted

Characters: Buffy

Rating: G

Spoilers: General for the first season, before Joyce learns that Buffy’s the Slayer.

Summary: Buffy feels torn in two by the double life she has to lead.

Word Count: 345

Written For: My own prompt ‘BtVS, Buffy Summers. By day she's a schoolgirl, by night she's the Slayer. Sometimes she wonders which is the real Buffy,’ at fic_promptly.

Disclaimer: I don’t own BTVS, or the characters. They belong to Joss Whedon.

By day she’s a schoolgirl and by night she’s the Slayer. Sometimes she wonders which is the real Buffy and which is the mask she wears to conceal her secret identity.

Her mom thinks she’s just an ordinary teenager with some behavioural issues and a tendency to get into trouble, while half the time Giles treats her like a warrior instead of a person. If it wasn’t for Willow and Xander, she thinks she might go nuts, if she hasn’t already.

Hiding her Slayer activities from her mom has always been difficult, but since moving to Sunnydale, it’s gotten even harder. In a place so full of demons and monsters, she’s almost never off duty. She hates seeing the look of disappointment in her mom’s eyes every time the school calls about her skipping classes, or starting fights, and she hates knowing how much her mom worries about her, but if she knew the truth she’d worry even more. So she lies to protect her mom from the truth, and she knows it’s for the best, but that doesn’t make her feel any better about doing it.

The burden of guilt over everything she’s putting her mum through weighs her down, so for her mother’ sake, she puts on the carefree teenager mask and acts like everything is completely normal. Then at night she puts on dark clothes, slips into her Slayer persona, picks up her stake, and sneaks out of her bedroom window to patrol.

She feels split in two, wanting to be a normal girl yet bound by her duty as the Slayer. She’s scared she’s losing some important part of who she is somewhere between the two faces she shows the world, some essence of Buffy that’s leaking away every time she switches from one to the other. One day, it might all be gone and then she’s not sure what, if anything, will be left. How much of yourself can you lose before all that remains is a dried up husk? That’s something she hopes she never has to find out.

The End

Comments

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With Season 2, the show was just hitting its stride, and then RTD basically destroyed it. Still, it means that Torchwood fanfic writers have a lot of scope for writing stories. It's the fandom I started out with, and still the one I write the most for (with FAKE coming a close second), and that's largely because anything goes. The Rift means that anything can fall through from any place and any time, plus alien technology can do anything a writer wants it to. Add to that all the different genres possible from heartbreaking angst to complete crack, and all the potential crossovers... It's the perfect fanfic fandom. Most of the time I ignore CoE - except for writing fixits - and even ignore Owen and Tosh dying. Having the whole team, amd extras, to play with is more fun.