Once in a Lullaby
Feb. 13th, 2004 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleMy Normal Again ficathon entry. Err, it is due today, right? The Xanderslash is done, just needs one thing clarified, will post it in about 10 minutes.
Title: Once in a Lullaby (Five Things That Happened Somewhere Else)
Author: Doyle
Rating: PG-13
Notes: for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stakebait. I went for the third option you gave, the one about who the other characters are in the asylum reality. And not just because that option let me write Holden and reference the original movie. Honestly.
**
Buffy has a disconcerting habit of killing her doctors.
Dr. Nest is first. He has some success, including a few minutes of real awakening that go unmatched until one summer four years later, but he's still only assigned to her for a short time before his transfer to New York. His replacement makes detailed notes about Buffy's nightmares, about how she calls Nest The Master. It alarms her parents enough to call for an investigation into the man's conduct, but nothing is found.
The doctors that come afterwards don't fare much better. Dr. Wilkins is fatherly and laid back. Snyder and Walsh both prefer firmness and a refusal to pander to her stories.
For all three, their fictional deaths are as cartoonishly inventive as they are appalling - blown up, eaten, skewered. Snyder lasts three years, Walsh less than five months, Wilkins somewhere in between; but in the end, they all admit defeat.
Buffy's parents aren't thrilled to find their daughter's case is being handed over to someone barely out of grad school, but Dr. Webster is charming and enthusiastic and what choice do they have?
Holden knows a lot about vampires. He didn't, before he was assigned to this hospital and this patient. Now he spends his off-hours getting to know Ms. Rice, watching a lot of movies of varying quality, tracking down junior members of staff and guys he knew in college who are into roleplaying. That fascinates him in particular because of the parallels to what Buffy's doing. Her delusions are a roleplaying scenario writ large.
He tries discussing this with her, or at least in front of her, and it proves to him that no matter how blank she may appear at least some part of her is still in this world, because barely a week later she gives herself new archnemeses in the form of three geeky D&D playing boys.
It takes more than a year for her to incorporate him into Sunnydale at all. When he shows up in her fantasies he knows his days are numbered, but is surprised at how fast it happens.
"Hey," he chides her gently, "come on, I only get to be a vamp-of-the-week? How about a big bad? At least a Master Vampire."
But her eyes stay fixed on a spot on the wall, open and unfocussed.
**
When she was a little girl, her mother read her to sleep at night. Buffy doesn't remember this, not exactly. She doesn't remember a book called The Story of Three, about two girls and a boy who were best friends. One of the girls was a redhead. At five, Buffy wanted that hair. The boy was called Alexander. She always liked the sound of that, just the last two syllables.
After she first found Sunnydale, she made friends from bits and pieces of her life, like dolls cut from paper. Xander's appearance came from someone she once saw in a commercial, his humor from a boy she'd known in elementary school; Willow, with her brains and shyness, was a mixture of Kelly and Alissa, girls far too uncool for her junior high clique, but who came to visit when she was first hospitalized.
She is uneasy with Willow and Xander these days, though she tries to deny it. Even if she could understand that she made them from a childhood she's finally beginning to outgrow, she would try to cling on to them. For most of the past seven years, they've been her backup, her supporting characters. Sometimes she's felt like they're all she has.
**
The last boy she was dating before she… became ill (her mother's description) comes to see her for the first time in her second year of treatment. He sits with her in the rec room, uncomfortable and pale, and haltingly fills her in on what's up with the Hemery High alumni.
"Did we burn down the gym?" she asks, because he confuses her and makes her remember wrongly. She remembers the prom -
Jonathan gave her the class protector award and she danced with Angel and Angel was leaving but Angel was in hell but Angel was evil but it was her birthday and Angel was leaving (always, always) but it was Halloween and she was dressed like a girl Angel would love but
She grinds the heels of her hands to her eyes. He confuses her. How is she supposed to remember what's happened and what's going to happen if he keeps confusing her?
Concentrate on what she knows: it's parent-teacher night. She has to make lemonade or Doc… Principal Snyder will be mad. Her mouth twists in a tiny, confused smile as to why she would think that little troll was a doctor, and then she forgets it ever crossed her mind. Lemonade. She should find Willow.
Someone is talking to her. A boy, with bleached-white hair and a scar on his eyebrow that wasn't there last time she saw him, was it? Has she met him before? She wore his leather coat over her white prom dress, except that was Angel, and it wasn't the prom, it was the Spring Fling.
It's okay. She remembers now.
She blinks, and wonders who the boy sitting with her is.
"Pike," he says when she asks, his voice hurting and desperate. "Pike, Buffy, remember? We went out for a while back in school. Before…"
But he's lying, because Pike had dark hair and no scar, so in Sunnydale she calls him something else.
**
Richard Wilkins, in the year before he finally gives up on the case, achieves a breakthrough of sorts. He becomes the very first person to introduce a new character to Sunnydale.
He works on the premise that to Buffy, Sunnydale is real. Therefore, she's not going to pay a damn bit of mind to someone who tries to convince her different. Makes sense, in that case, to study the case notes and the diaries her mother turned in and the interview transcripts, and when he reviews the notes he's made he realizes something.
Buffy's imaginary world has a plothole.
"Buffy," he asks genially in their next session, "who was called when -" he checks the papers, but the ink's smudged. "Kennedy? When Kennedy died?"
"Kendra," she says. He only hears because he's used listening for it, that head-down mumble that makes her sound permanently under hypnosis.
The poor kid, Wilkins thinks, his professionalism getting away from him. He clears his throat. "Sure, that's the girl. Kendra. So who's the new Slayer?"
He's attuned to the nuances of this girl's face, and so he sees the flickering uncertainty as she tries to figure out why she doesn't know.
In the moment before she can choose an answer and her world rewrites itself, he tells her about Faith, the name pulled from the air.
It starts out as a clever psych in-joke-cum-therapy-tool: Faith is Buffy's shadow self, her Jungian opposite. She's the dark side of the Slayer equation, the one who gets to take on the impulses Buffy is ashamed to have, and for a while it's a valuable insight into his patient. He thinks there might be a paper in it.
Not all that surprising when Buffy links Faith with him, or her fantasy version of him (he'd be lying if he said he didn't appreciate, on some level, his casting role as the Machiavellian villain). What does surprise him is how often he finds himself thinking about Faith outside his working hours, as if she's a character in a book he can't put down. He gives her a past and a personality and a smart mouth that would drive him crazy on a real woman.
Buffy casts him as Faith's father figure, and he recognizes the parallel she's drawing. Herself and Giles. Him and Faith. Dark reflections.
And he's Faith's creator, true, but on the getting-rarer nights with his wife his mind sometimes drifts to his beautiful Galatea of a fantasy, and he may feel guilt but he doesn't feel the littlest bit like her father.
**
Cordy! is in its ninth season. It's tipped for another stack of Emmys this year. The episode's a second-season rerun. Not one of the good ones, but Buffy can't tell the difference. To all outside appearances she's staring out the rec room window, not looking at the TV.
She doesn't look up as Dawn sits beside her and cheerfully starts to tell her about her day.
"I mean, I'd drop calculus, but it's the stupid math requirement. Like you even need math to be a psych…" She stops herself. It seems mean or something to say the p-word, even if Buffy can't hear her. A strand of hair is falling in front of the girl's face. Dawn wants to push it back, but doesn't. Buffy doesn't like to be touched.
She's been a volunteer visitor for nearly two years now, since she was eighteen. She likes to think Buffy can hear her, even when she's only reading aloud or complaining about her classes. She chatters brightly about her friends and family, describing faces and funny quirks of personality to fill the spaces left by the other girl's silence.
At home, she talks about Buffy to her brothers as if she's just another friend. Riley's kind about it, asking the right questions and giving her encouragement when she needs it. Andrew still hasn't got a grip of that tact thing, and he flips out at the thought of her spending time with the violent crazy people, unquote.
Dawn wishes she had a sister.
Buffy breathes on the window in a puff of hot air and drags her finger down the misty patch left behind. She draws an H, and then an E, and just as Dawn is sure she's going to write 'help' or 'hello' or even 'hell', something to show there's a girl in there trying to get out, someone changes the TV channel. Buffy jerks her head as the Lucy theme starts up, and looks at Dawn and smiles.
"I have to patrol," she says, sounding normal. "Will you be okay by yourself?"
"Sure," Dawn says softly, giving in this time and catching a long strand of blonde-brown hair in her fingers. "Spike said he might drop by later." She ignores the small quiet voice that sounds like her girlfriend and tells her she shouldn't play along - because Tara is beautiful and smart and wise but she doesn't know Buffy, has never seen her - and instead she tries to remember whether Buffy likes or loves or hates Spike this week. It's hard to keep track.
The channel changer flips on, till the TV's back to where they started. "Harmony!" Cordelia Chase shrieks from the TV set, "What the heck are you doing under Wesley's desk? He's going to be here any minute, he will freak if he sees you." Pause. "In, like, a totally English way."
The studio audience laughs and laughs.
END
Title: Once in a Lullaby (Five Things That Happened Somewhere Else)
Author: Doyle
Rating: PG-13
Notes: for
stakebait. I went for the third option you gave, the one about who the other characters are in the asylum reality. And not just because that option let me write Holden and reference the original movie. Honestly.**
Buffy has a disconcerting habit of killing her doctors.
Dr. Nest is first. He has some success, including a few minutes of real awakening that go unmatched until one summer four years later, but he's still only assigned to her for a short time before his transfer to New York. His replacement makes detailed notes about Buffy's nightmares, about how she calls Nest The Master. It alarms her parents enough to call for an investigation into the man's conduct, but nothing is found.
The doctors that come afterwards don't fare much better. Dr. Wilkins is fatherly and laid back. Snyder and Walsh both prefer firmness and a refusal to pander to her stories.
For all three, their fictional deaths are as cartoonishly inventive as they are appalling - blown up, eaten, skewered. Snyder lasts three years, Walsh less than five months, Wilkins somewhere in between; but in the end, they all admit defeat.
Buffy's parents aren't thrilled to find their daughter's case is being handed over to someone barely out of grad school, but Dr. Webster is charming and enthusiastic and what choice do they have?
Holden knows a lot about vampires. He didn't, before he was assigned to this hospital and this patient. Now he spends his off-hours getting to know Ms. Rice, watching a lot of movies of varying quality, tracking down junior members of staff and guys he knew in college who are into roleplaying. That fascinates him in particular because of the parallels to what Buffy's doing. Her delusions are a roleplaying scenario writ large.
He tries discussing this with her, or at least in front of her, and it proves to him that no matter how blank she may appear at least some part of her is still in this world, because barely a week later she gives herself new archnemeses in the form of three geeky D&D playing boys.
It takes more than a year for her to incorporate him into Sunnydale at all. When he shows up in her fantasies he knows his days are numbered, but is surprised at how fast it happens.
"Hey," he chides her gently, "come on, I only get to be a vamp-of-the-week? How about a big bad? At least a Master Vampire."
But her eyes stay fixed on a spot on the wall, open and unfocussed.
**
When she was a little girl, her mother read her to sleep at night. Buffy doesn't remember this, not exactly. She doesn't remember a book called The Story of Three, about two girls and a boy who were best friends. One of the girls was a redhead. At five, Buffy wanted that hair. The boy was called Alexander. She always liked the sound of that, just the last two syllables.
After she first found Sunnydale, she made friends from bits and pieces of her life, like dolls cut from paper. Xander's appearance came from someone she once saw in a commercial, his humor from a boy she'd known in elementary school; Willow, with her brains and shyness, was a mixture of Kelly and Alissa, girls far too uncool for her junior high clique, but who came to visit when she was first hospitalized.
She is uneasy with Willow and Xander these days, though she tries to deny it. Even if she could understand that she made them from a childhood she's finally beginning to outgrow, she would try to cling on to them. For most of the past seven years, they've been her backup, her supporting characters. Sometimes she's felt like they're all she has.
**
The last boy she was dating before she… became ill (her mother's description) comes to see her for the first time in her second year of treatment. He sits with her in the rec room, uncomfortable and pale, and haltingly fills her in on what's up with the Hemery High alumni.
"Did we burn down the gym?" she asks, because he confuses her and makes her remember wrongly. She remembers the prom -
Jonathan gave her the class protector award and she danced with Angel and Angel was leaving but Angel was in hell but Angel was evil but it was her birthday and Angel was leaving (always, always) but it was Halloween and she was dressed like a girl Angel would love but
She grinds the heels of her hands to her eyes. He confuses her. How is she supposed to remember what's happened and what's going to happen if he keeps confusing her?
Concentrate on what she knows: it's parent-teacher night. She has to make lemonade or Doc… Principal Snyder will be mad. Her mouth twists in a tiny, confused smile as to why she would think that little troll was a doctor, and then she forgets it ever crossed her mind. Lemonade. She should find Willow.
Someone is talking to her. A boy, with bleached-white hair and a scar on his eyebrow that wasn't there last time she saw him, was it? Has she met him before? She wore his leather coat over her white prom dress, except that was Angel, and it wasn't the prom, it was the Spring Fling.
It's okay. She remembers now.
She blinks, and wonders who the boy sitting with her is.
"Pike," he says when she asks, his voice hurting and desperate. "Pike, Buffy, remember? We went out for a while back in school. Before…"
But he's lying, because Pike had dark hair and no scar, so in Sunnydale she calls him something else.
**
Richard Wilkins, in the year before he finally gives up on the case, achieves a breakthrough of sorts. He becomes the very first person to introduce a new character to Sunnydale.
He works on the premise that to Buffy, Sunnydale is real. Therefore, she's not going to pay a damn bit of mind to someone who tries to convince her different. Makes sense, in that case, to study the case notes and the diaries her mother turned in and the interview transcripts, and when he reviews the notes he's made he realizes something.
Buffy's imaginary world has a plothole.
"Buffy," he asks genially in their next session, "who was called when -" he checks the papers, but the ink's smudged. "Kennedy? When Kennedy died?"
"Kendra," she says. He only hears because he's used listening for it, that head-down mumble that makes her sound permanently under hypnosis.
The poor kid, Wilkins thinks, his professionalism getting away from him. He clears his throat. "Sure, that's the girl. Kendra. So who's the new Slayer?"
He's attuned to the nuances of this girl's face, and so he sees the flickering uncertainty as she tries to figure out why she doesn't know.
In the moment before she can choose an answer and her world rewrites itself, he tells her about Faith, the name pulled from the air.
It starts out as a clever psych in-joke-cum-therapy-tool: Faith is Buffy's shadow self, her Jungian opposite. She's the dark side of the Slayer equation, the one who gets to take on the impulses Buffy is ashamed to have, and for a while it's a valuable insight into his patient. He thinks there might be a paper in it.
Not all that surprising when Buffy links Faith with him, or her fantasy version of him (he'd be lying if he said he didn't appreciate, on some level, his casting role as the Machiavellian villain). What does surprise him is how often he finds himself thinking about Faith outside his working hours, as if she's a character in a book he can't put down. He gives her a past and a personality and a smart mouth that would drive him crazy on a real woman.
Buffy casts him as Faith's father figure, and he recognizes the parallel she's drawing. Herself and Giles. Him and Faith. Dark reflections.
And he's Faith's creator, true, but on the getting-rarer nights with his wife his mind sometimes drifts to his beautiful Galatea of a fantasy, and he may feel guilt but he doesn't feel the littlest bit like her father.
**
Cordy! is in its ninth season. It's tipped for another stack of Emmys this year. The episode's a second-season rerun. Not one of the good ones, but Buffy can't tell the difference. To all outside appearances she's staring out the rec room window, not looking at the TV.
She doesn't look up as Dawn sits beside her and cheerfully starts to tell her about her day.
"I mean, I'd drop calculus, but it's the stupid math requirement. Like you even need math to be a psych…" She stops herself. It seems mean or something to say the p-word, even if Buffy can't hear her. A strand of hair is falling in front of the girl's face. Dawn wants to push it back, but doesn't. Buffy doesn't like to be touched.
She's been a volunteer visitor for nearly two years now, since she was eighteen. She likes to think Buffy can hear her, even when she's only reading aloud or complaining about her classes. She chatters brightly about her friends and family, describing faces and funny quirks of personality to fill the spaces left by the other girl's silence.
At home, she talks about Buffy to her brothers as if she's just another friend. Riley's kind about it, asking the right questions and giving her encouragement when she needs it. Andrew still hasn't got a grip of that tact thing, and he flips out at the thought of her spending time with the violent crazy people, unquote.
Dawn wishes she had a sister.
Buffy breathes on the window in a puff of hot air and drags her finger down the misty patch left behind. She draws an H, and then an E, and just as Dawn is sure she's going to write 'help' or 'hello' or even 'hell', something to show there's a girl in there trying to get out, someone changes the TV channel. Buffy jerks her head as the Lucy theme starts up, and looks at Dawn and smiles.
"I have to patrol," she says, sounding normal. "Will you be okay by yourself?"
"Sure," Dawn says softly, giving in this time and catching a long strand of blonde-brown hair in her fingers. "Spike said he might drop by later." She ignores the small quiet voice that sounds like her girlfriend and tells her she shouldn't play along - because Tara is beautiful and smart and wise but she doesn't know Buffy, has never seen her - and instead she tries to remember whether Buffy likes or loves or hates Spike this week. It's hard to keep track.
The channel changer flips on, till the TV's back to where they started. "Harmony!" Cordelia Chase shrieks from the TV set, "What the heck are you doing under Wesley's desk? He's going to be here any minute, he will freak if he sees you." Pause. "In, like, a totally English way."
The studio audience laughs and laughs.
END
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2004-02-13 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-13 01:48 pm (UTC)By the way, the Horrible Pairing o'Doom for the Cordython started writing itself at one point and ate my brain and now I feel icky and dirty. Ew. Ewewewew.
no subject
on 2004-02-13 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-13 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-13 03:16 pm (UTC)And the Cordy! show being on in this world? Totally awesome.
Pike changing his appearance and her assimilating him as Spike was also an especially awesome touch.
And this: She is uneasy with Willow and Xander these days, though she tries to deny it. Even if she could understand that she made them from a childhood she's finally beginning to outgrow, she would try to cling on to them. For most of the past seven years, they've been her backup, her supporting characters. Sometimes she's felt like they're all she has. Made me all misty.
In short: love it.
no subject
on 2004-02-13 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-13 03:50 pm (UTC)it's due today? Eep! I thought it was tomorrow!
Mer go home and write now.
Mer
no subject
on 2004-02-13 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-02-14 01:50 am (UTC)Anyhow - your very own fic request has now been posted - it's called Past and Present (http://www.livejournal.com/users/debxena/46069.html), and I really hope you like it :)
no subject
on 2004-02-14 04:03 am (UTC)Re:
Posted by (Anonymous) - on 2004-02-14 01:54 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe:
Posted byno subject
on 2004-02-16 04:18 am (UTC)*friends*
no subject
on 2004-02-17 02:56 pm (UTC)::adores you::
Re:
Posted byno subject
on 2004-03-21 01:51 am (UTC)The last line is just perfect.
The pacing throughout, and the writing itself, were so good. This is an excellent fic. :)
(no subject)
Posted byno subject
on 2004-05-01 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-05-21 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-05-22 08:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Posted byno subject
on 2005-02-17 08:12 pm (UTC)So, this was excellent. I've got a deep, deep love for the Normal Again-verse and this was the most expertly-done fic I've seen about it yet. I haven't seen the ficathon about it, yet, so I'm going to dig around for it. But if you have the link close-by, please hook a girl up.
This was seriously good. Loved the psych lessons, loved the canon references, the fanon allusions, AND the reference to Pike/Spike. Loved it.
no subject
on 2005-03-13 08:43 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-08-28 11:00 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-10-12 09:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-01-30 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-11-23 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-01-15 03:02 am (UTC)And then I forgot about it, and went to read other stuff...
But every couple of months, I track this down again. Because it's just so excellent to reread. I'm kind of addicted to this story.
Thanks for writing!
no subject
on 2008-11-18 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 04:51 pm (UTC)Love how all those characters are installed into the 'Normal Again' universe - especially the Pike merge into Spike.
Poor Buffy.
no subject
on 2009-04-03 12:36 am (UTC)