Objects in the Mirror

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part II

I’m not human. I may not like it, but I have to see it. That doesn’t mean I’m not a person.

I keep telling myself that. It doesn’t help. Or maybe it’s too soon, maybe I have to let it all work in before I can start to make any sense out of it. Right now it’s still too new to be anything but crazy.

Like me, maybe.

Things are mostly back to normal at home and at the Magic Box, at least up top where you can see what’s happening. Buffy and the others are still a little careful around me, but that doesn’t leave me all PO’d the way it did when I knew they were hiding something from me but didn’t know what. Mom alternates between ‘Wherever did my baby girl go?’ and doing a complete freak if I wait five measly minutes before I take the laundry out of the dryer. Nobody says much about THE SUBJECT, but the things they do say … well, it’s kinda obvious they’re more weirded out by how I acted, the first day or so, than by all the primal-energy, mystical-Key, six-month-old teenager deal. They’re afraid I’ll go off the deep end again, they’re trying to keep my spirits up and behave naturally and reassure me that nothing’s changed.

That means something, right? They wouldn’t care about my feelings if they didn’t care for me. Right?

Spike is the only one who doesn’t treat me any different, and the only one who’ll talk about it without being pushed into a corner. For him it’s all, ‘Okay, so you were born October past. Fine, just don’t block the sodding telly.’ Doesn’t dodge it, doesn’t make a big deal out of it, doesn’t act like I’m this delicate fragile flower who’s also stupid and annoying. Angel was never really comfortable around me — sister issues, I guess — but Spike has always been just the coolest.

Not that he was much help when I first found out. He’s really considerate most of the time (and gets insulted if I say anything about it), but he’s never exactly been Mister Empathy, and that first night he was so … I don’t know, I guess ‘intrigued’ is the right word, even though at the time it looked like he thought it was funny … anyway, he was so caught up in working through what it all meant, he never noticed what it meant to me. ’Course, I wasn’t really showing much reaction on the way back from the shop, I was still too rocked for it to really soak all the way in. Wasn’t till after I got home that I started the big dramatic meltdown.

I’m still mad. At Buffy, Giles, all the others who hid the truth from me. I’m not a child, I don’t want to be protected like that. So I really am mad … and at the same time, I can’t help feeling guilty over how worried they were when I did my vanishing act the next night. I was so messed up, I don’t even remember how I wound up at the hospital (and my little chat with the guys in the psycho ward is something I’d rather forget), but from what I hear, it’s a miracle I managed to slip through the Slayer/Scooby APB. Which, toward the last, put me in a first-class position for brainsucking, but they found me in the nick of time, just like always. (Well, it feels like always. Actually, it was only the sixth time in four years I’ve needed rescuing … no, I’m forgetting, only the last six months count, so that would make it the second time … but the memories make me who I am, even if they’re not real, so maybe I should count them after all … never mind.)

What does count is, they were there when I needed them. There because I needed them. Buffy’s little speech about ‘Summers blood’ helped wrap it up for me, but none of that would have mattered if they hadn’t cared enough to hit the streets the moment they knew I’d gone missing.

I’ve seen them fight before, including some times they didn’t know I was watching, but usually it was either one-on-one, Buffy and the icksoid of the week, or a crowd scene with all the Scoobies facing off against a gang of vampires or hell-hounds or henchmen. This was the whole group against Glory, and it was way obvious that she had them seriously outnumbered.

I understand now why Buffy let that crazy skank lip off at her in our own house. If she’d fought her then, there wouldn’t be any house left, probably, and maybe not any Buffy or any me or any entire-block-we-live-on. I know how strong Buffy is, I’ve seen her bench-press cars, and Spike is almost as strong as she is and twice as nasty. And they had help, Giles firing from the sidelines and Xander distracting Glory with a crowbar, while Buffy unloaded everything she had on the frizzy hellbitch. Nothing did any good.

No surprise that it was Willow who saved the day. The way she and Tara work together is so awesome, Tara is this beautiful gentle spirit but she knows things, just by being there she makes Willow able to channel enough power to light up half the West Coast. Willow is the smartest person I know, and one of the most loving, but Tara with love is like Willow with computers, it’s as natural to her as breathing. (Although Willow’s not so much with the hacking lately, I can’t remember the last time I saw her do anything more complicated than key in a report for one of her classes.) They zapped Glory off to who-knows-where, and after that it was all tears and hugs and hot fudge sundaes.

They care about me. No getting around that. They care, and they worry, and they want everything to be normal again.

As if.

I must have been in worse shape than I knew, because I can’t think why else I’d have so much trouble remembering my talk with Ben. He is just so gorgeous, and so calm and nice and understanding. He didn’t have a clue what my real problem was, he couldn’t have, but I know he tried to make me feel better even though we hardly know each other. I could have this total major crush on him …

… except, what’s the point? It’s easy to see he’s already been marked with the super-potent blonde-big-sister mojo, just like Xander was before Anya got her hooks into him. If Buffy doesn’t actually have him in her sights yet, it’s only because she’s been busy. Give it time.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s what she needs.

Maybe she’ll marry him. And then when I’m older I’ll have this hot, passionate affair with him, and she’ll find out and be all crushed and outraged, it’ll be this whole big intense Jerry-Springer-cubed deal, and then who’s the special one?

Okay, even I know that kind of thinking is nuts. Are these things buzzing through my mind because I’m hormonally fourteen years old, or because I’m just an imitation person? Plus, let’s not forget about the crazy.

I guess I should stop using that word, because I don’t really believe it. Crazy is when you’re totally out of touch with reality or totally out of control, maybe both. I wasn’t either one, not even when I was so far off in the way-out-there it’s a wonder I didn’t snap off and fall into some bottomless pit. I knew the truth of things — that was the problem — and I knew what I was doing and why. I cut my arm to see if I would bleed. I burned my journals because they weren’t real: you could see them, touch them, believe in them, but they were just lies turned solid, like me. I left the house because it wasn’t my home at all.

I let myself warm up to Ben because he’s new. I only met him in the last few months, so every time he saw me, spoke to me, smiled at me, it actually happened. Whatever history we have is real, not made up.

The others … they can’t understand what that feels like, no matter how much they try. They look at everything they can remember about me, and know it’s just the result of some spell, and they have to rewrite this four-year chunk of their lives. For me, it is my life. And I could deal with that, really I could, you’re supposed to be working out all these identity problems when you’re fourteen, I could pretend I was in a new place with amnesia and just tell myself that this was where my life begins, everything that’s Me starts now.

Doing it for myself, I could handle that. It would be a lot harder to do it for the rest of them. I wonder if any of them have thought out that part of it? I’m not into philosophy yet, I won’t have to take any of that stuff till I’m in college, but everybody knows the old, “I think, therefore I am.” Well, yeah, but I’m not what I think I am — or thought I was — because everything I thought I was, was invented by some doofy old monks. And it’s as true for the others as it is for me.

More for them, maybe. I get to start over, clean slate. Weird, and it hurts, but still pretty simple. For Buffy and the rest, it gets a lot more tangled. They’re real, they’re human, they always have been … but they’re not who they think they are. My memories are just this giant block of bogus, and I can toss them all out and say Screw ’em. All the others, they have to look through everything they remember from the last four years — more for Buffy, less for Tara and Spike and Anya (like anybody cares about Anya, her human life is just as phony as mine but with cheaper workmanship) — and wonder what’s real and what’s not.

To me, to all of us, Xander is the guy who faced down Angel-when-he-was-evil. Stood up to him, half-bluff and all guts, and made him give up on his little plan to send my liver to Buffy as a get-well present while she was in the hospital. That’s the Xander we know. Except, he never did that, he couldn’t have if I didn’t exist (in a human body) before last year. So the Xander we know, isn’t.

Willow and Tara didn’t come to love each other they way they remember, during the big dreamquest, because I wasn’t there to get them wondering about how Buffy was acting when it was really Faith, wearing her body. Giles didn’t kick the snot out of Ethan during Halloween, ’cause there was no eleven-year-old Me to insist he make Buffy take me to the cool new costume shop with the nice owner who “talks just like you do”. (That also means I never actually turned into a four-foot dragon, which is kind of a gyp.) Without me to let it slip about Buffy sending the ring to Angel, Spike wouldn’t have had any reason to look for the Gem of Amarra in L.A., which means he didn’t get chipped when he thinks he did. I never planted the breeding pair of rabbits in Anya’s apartment, so the whole chain of events that ended up with her kissing Riley (gag, choke, barf) and Buffy finding out about the Initiative, just plain didn’t happen.

If it’s our memories that make us who we are, then every one of them has a “who am I really?” problem that makes mine look like a skit on Sesame Street.

None of them has said anything about that, so I don’t know if they’ve thought about it. I have, because …well, what else is there for me to do? But, like I said, I can deal. I can play the same history-begins-now routine for them that I have to do for myself. I mean, that’s really what you do anytime you meet someone new, right? So I just expand it a little, get myself some positive imaging tapes, and Maintain.

Yeah, nice if it was that simple. It’s not, though. On one side I have all these memories that go back years, and I have to work through them not being real. But, on the other hand, there are things I wish weren’t true, only they are. All the good things go away, and this is what’s left:

Buffy, so scared she’s practically attacking me. Buffy crying on the deck out back. Buffy shredding napkins in the waiting room. She tried so hard, she did everything she could to put on a brave front, but she thought Mom was going to die. I knew it was possible, but I never believed in it, not really, not till I saw Buffy hug the surgeon so hard I thought he’d pop like an overnuked chimichanga. That’s when I realized: she’s seen so much stupid, pointless death, so many people lost for no good reason, she knows it can happen anywhere. To Mom, to us. No matter how special you are, nobody’s safe.

That was before I knew I was really just this big green glow-y whatever, but for a second there I was outside my head and in Buffy’s. I don’t mean telepathy or mystical communion or anything like that, I just knew how she felt because I was able to put myself in her place. She’s nineteen years old (then), been battling all the gross ugly howly things since she was practically my age, and she’s about to lose her mother. Ghosts, vamps, demons, sorcerers, she can fight all that but not this, here she’s helpless. One bad break, one blood vessel growing in the wrong direction and it’s all over, she had a mother but now there’s nothing left but memories …

Memories. Mom used to sing that while she was doing the dishes, sing it till I thought I’d go bughouse: Mem’ries / of the path we left behind / misty watercolor mem’ries / of the way we were … Only we weren’t, because there was no We, I wasn’t there.

The rest of them, I can learn all over again. Xander may not have stood up to Angel, but he did fight to protect me from Harmony, and Glory. Anya cheats at Life. Willow keeps learning new things, and Tara is proud and pleased and at the same time trying to stop her from getting too far ahead of herself. Giles got himself a midlifecrisismobile to replace the Citröen Xander wrecked. Spike has this Juliet Mills fixation. Buffy keeps Angel’s jacket even though she’ll never talk about him.

History starts now. I have time, for them. But Mom …

… Mom …

If Mom died, Buffy would hold onto all she could remember, try to keep it alive, because she wouldn’t have anything else. And I wouldn’t even have that, all my memories are phony, a scrapbook full of shitty fakes like some PhotoShop nerd pasting himself into a mambo scene with Angelina Jolie.

I’m not human. So my nose isn’t running, and my throat doesn’t hurt, and these aren’t tears.
 

[ Note: Duncan (Dpjrugby@aol.com) was inspired by the reference to Dawn at Halloween to produce this drawing. Send him your comments! ]
 

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