William Chapter 1: Blurred Reflections, a buffy: the vampire slayer fanfic

"We are born naked, wet, and hungry, and get slapped on our ass... then things get worse." - Anon.

If you'd known that going stark raving nutters was this fun, you would have done it years ago instead of just letting it play peek-a-boo with the people around you in small doses.

We wouldn't have let Dru have all the fun. We would have joined her in her shrieking and had a gay old time ripping our hair out by the handfuls and eating filth instead of tying up her hands and making sure that anything too nasty like drain cleaner and dogshit were kept well out of her reach.

Until now, you were an amateur, doing things by half measures:

William cried a lot in private because he knew without ever being told that nobody liked him because they thought he was weird and because he didn't know how to be any other way.

They were right, mate, we were weird!

After chipping, Spike whispered and screamed lewd obscenities at everyone he met and made grandiose plans that inevitably detonated in his face when he wasn't holed up in his various lairs drinking himself into a stupor to kill the pain.

Ahhhh, the soddin' good old days, miss 'em? Hell yeah!

You on the other hand, have free reign to shriek, gibber, flail, flap, screech, bellow, thrash, slam your head against hard objects when you can find them, and roll around in your own excrement the moment the orderlies forget and turn their backs on you.

When you're insane on this level, you can do anything and people look the other way, excusing your behavior because "He can't help it, poor thing" - it's the ultimate freedom.

If you thought becoming a vampire was liberating, you should try going nuts.

It's brilliant!

Can't handle reality?

Don't acknowledge it -instead, yelp, screech, claw at your eyes, and lie on your back flailing your arms and legs like the man-sized cockroach you are.

Don't want to remember things that were done to you?

Or did to others?

Go all catatonic like Dru on one of her good days and enjoy the beautiful serenity of an empty mind while outside for all you know someone could be pouring gasoline on you and striking a match - why should you care?

Same for when we don't want to remember the things that we did to the people around us!

The food's terrible and they won't let you smoke or drink, but to have someone around who'll pick up after you, wipe the shit off your body after you've had a good wallow, and keep you from cutting your throat on a piece of broken mirror is a fair exchange.

They took our mirror away after that. Now we have to look at ourselves in the steel one embedded in the lavvy wall - all cold and blurry. Blurry's because they took our glasses away the first day because we tried to use them to stab the bloke what had the bed next to us with them because we didn't fancy the sound of his snoring. It also means we can't read, but there's sod all to read but torn up ten year old magazines, so who cares?

When you're insane, you can take your clothes off and wander around naked, mumbling to yourself while you wank off to your evil heart's content, hoping that somebody will step in your jizz, slip, fall, and break their bloody necks and then laugh hysterically until you wet yourself when it does happen!

Don't like the orderly who's in charge of you? Shit yourself and have the satisfaction of not only smearing it all over his clean white coat but of his badly concealed disgust at having to clean you up like a great big enormous baby while you laugh at his expression because he can't do a damned thing about it as long as the doctor's looking.

And oh, the doctor? If you don't like him/her, you can always unzip and let fly!

Six years of expensive education just so that you can be a urinal to a lunatic with serious impulse control problems? How very bleedin' bloody funny!

Spike was too busy being cool and protecting Dru from herself to ever have any real fun. Later on he was too busy being the Slayer's and than his sire's whipping boy to have time to indulge.

Willie didn't know how. Even if he did, he was too much under mummy's thumb.

Poetry was his only escape, but you?

You?

You can do anything because all you have left to you is your own body and it's wastes. Now that's freedom, I tell you!

Keep it up mate, because sooner or later they'll get tired of us doing this and take away all our clothes and put us in a diaper and a one piece coverall like something a great big baby would wear, with a zip in the back that as limber as we are, we can't reach. But when they do, we'll just find another way to piss them off.

Maybe we'll just go in for target spitting or nosebleeds. That'd be grand; bang our face on something hard like an orderly's forehead and get ourselves a great big old gusher all over the place like a lawn sprinkler, with us lapping it up off the floor just like in the good old days when we were free and trapped all at the same time!

Should you get too whacky?

Why they throw in all those free drugs!

A whole pharmaceutical rainbow cornucopia of uppers-downers-sideways... aaaaaaaannnnnnd... oblivions!

Brilliant!

Needles, pills and syrups - too bad they don't throw in a free prize after we've taken our fiftieth lithium, say, a bottle of Jack Daniels or something, but a bloke bloody well can't have everything!

Speakin' of shit and pills, how about vomit? Some fun there! All that lovely medication in it's upper-downer-sideways-oblivion technicolor glory and the horrible food spewed on the world, down the crapper, onto the floor, onto people you don't like, and yourself.

Wheeeeeee, some fun there!

Too bad you didn't think of this sooner so they could have wired you up with electrodes and sent the volts through your nut, or better, beat the Initiative to it and slice your brain up through your eye sockets so that you can be just one more happy idiot?

Wheeeeeeeee!

If it's so much fun then, being insane and having people you hate pick up after you, then why can't you stop crying?

If it's so much fun, how come you want so very badly to go home?

Where's "home" mate? We've no place to go should we ever get out, we've dirtied every nest that we've ever made and rendered it unlivable.

If this is so bloody funny, how come you aren't laughing? And when you do, how come you can't stop?

If this is so fuckin' great, this insanity thing, how come if any of our old enemies came to visit us, we'd start crying and beg for them, even that bastard Xander, to take you home with them so we could creep into their basement and hide behind the hot water heater in among the bags of potting soil and piles of old newspapers until it all goes away?

Why did you have to run away after you shanshued?

Why?

Because we hated everybody and thought we could make it on our own when for our entire vile existence on this earth we've always had somebody else to pick up after us, somebody to look out for us even if they said they hated us.

We were tolerated, mate, tolerated and marginally maintained, that's what. We needed them more than they needed us - they kept us sane.

The Initiative was nothing new, not really, they were just a symptom.

A symptom of what?

That even for a demon you were bent.

Seriously bent.

So we couldn't function? So what?

That's what the booby hatch is for - people, and you are people now, right? Not an animal, not a demon, not a...you're people? It's for people who can't cope.

And you couldn't.

The world grew up and abandoned you when your back was turned for over a century.

Left you washed up on the beach like a dead crab, mate, all white bellied and stinking, for the gulls to pick at.

You found that nobody wants somebody that can't function - so one bad job after another because for all your cunning, the only thing left to you was that or crime and ever since Spike gave you your body back, you just weren't up to the challenge. So one night you got fired one time too many, drank your pay and drove head on into a bridge abutment...

...splatto!

Too bad the doctors did their job because you survived.

Too bad they listened to your ravings while your were unconscious.

Too bad they took them seriously. Particularly after you went to the AA and the NARCANON meetings as ordered by the court once you could walk without crutches after you deliberately ran your car into that bridge abutment and started telling all: Vampires? Slayers? Who the soddin' hell ever heard of that?

That's not real! Rent, bills, and traffic tickets are real...then there was that old scar tissue in your nut, deep in your brain. They found that when they were picking the pieces of your coconut out of the soft pudding of your brain after you tried to kill yourself because when Lindsey brought you back to annoy your Sire, he didn't have the common decency to have left that out of your melon just the same as he left your borrowed soul intact... and you made the mistake of telling them who gave you that scar tissue, didn't you old mate? Perhaps you shouldn't have relished telling them the parts where you murdered girls slowly so that they knew what was being done to them even as they died...

Bloody stupid, that was, honesty!

They found your driver's license in you wallet and took it seriously. Now you're a Ward of the State - a psychotic nobody named Billy Tully because what the Initiative started with it's gouge and slice, Wolfrum and Hart finished with their paperwork. Now why didn't you actually look at it when Harmony handed it to you, instead of grunting, "Yeah, great, whatever!" before you jammed it in your coat pocket and forgot about it because you had a bottle of something expensive that you'd pinched off Peaches and an ambitious secretary in a black silk nightie with a whip waiting for you on Angel's desk with her legs wide open?

Thanks to your carelessness, we're dead meat, mate! Just like a baby left in a cardboard box on the courthouse steps one night. Only the wolves crept into town and ate us, leaving the mystery of our little chicken bones and eggshell skull strewn all over the front lawn next to the VFW flag pole and the Civil War monument of the constipated looking sojerboy that doesn't look like anybody in particular.

That's you!

And the people you left behind in your pride?

They don't know where you are.

Probably don't care either, not after what we've put them through all these years. Otherwise, if they did, wouldn't they have come looking for us by now?

Nope.

"Him? Good riddance. God, what a cock-up!"

So why did you keep crawling back to them time after time, regardless of what you said or did to them or what they said or did to you?

Because they were all we had.

You can love, you know it, your kind, well what you once were, could love. Dru understood love better than you did, stupid, brilliant, beautiful ugly Drusilla. How come in your love you twisted everything that came near you?

Because that's the nature of your Beast, to bend, twist, smash and pervert everything you/it touches. To be unable to tell the difference between love and hate, and to act on it without thinking.

We were bloody good at it!

If you could just get to a phone, call one, call all of them, even your Grandsire, and beg their forgiveness, would they? Would they come rescue you? Or would they just laughingly hang up and leave you in this nightmare? You're too frightened to find out, to find a way to get to a phone, a mailbox, anything, but you're too dangerous to yourself and others to be allowed near the real world.

Speakin' of memories, how about your memories? Which ones are real?

Was William real? Was Spike?

Or are you what those papers that Wolfram and Hart cooked up for you before you left the fold what's true?

Did the earth really swallow an entire town with you on the bottom being all heroic and sacrificial lamb-like, or are you just plain old fucked up Billy Tully, the unwanted son of a G.I. and a nice English girl who died because she liked heroin a little too much; who got sent to backwoods Mississippi to live with your drunken father who beat the living shite out of you every chance he got?

Were you a vampire for over 100 years living a life of magnificent cruelty or just a nobody, the mean kid that nobody liked who always sat at the back of the classroom throwing spitwads and setting fires?

Were the Scoobies and the Slayer a secret group protecting the world from evil that you sometimes helped but mostly hindered, or were they just some bunch of High School losers that you went to school with who were inexplicably tolerant of you no matter how badly you treated them? The same group of kids who occasionally let you sit with them in the lunch room when generally people pointedly got up and moved to a different table whenever you sat down next to them because you didn't know how to make or be a friend with anybody including yourself?

Was the Slayer a fighter in the Army of Light or a cheerleader that you rutted after desperately knowing that she'd as soon pick up a fresh, steaming dog turd with her bare hand as even look at you?

Were you the sheltered, smothered son of a Victorian mother or a filthy little boy who screamed obscenities and threw rocks at passing traffic in a small Mississippi town before the State stepped in and took you and your little half-sister Dru away from your father?

Were you a magnificent killer, feared and beautiful, the scourge of a continent, or were you a sobbing little boy apprehensively hiding under the bed from your foster father who's come to bugger you for the fourth time this week since the State placed you with him and his wife because you were so small and pretty for a boy that he "just couldn't help himself"?

What is real?

Tell me, please, somebody tell me what is real?

The mirror is real, but is the face that's looking back at you real? Looking at your blurred, unshaven self in the mirror after a 100 plus year absence - is that real or is Billy Tully, hated bad boy, mean kid who sets fires and hits people for no reason real?

You remember Willow as a witch doing wonderful magics that you can't begin to comprehend, but you also remember sitting behind her in the eighth grade; copying the answers on her geography test when you weren't smacking her on the back of the head and putting gum in her hair to make her cry. You remember the humiliation of because you were so intent on cheating you didn't realize that you'd copied her sentence, "Billy Tully is a big mean poopy doo-doo head who eats his own boogers when he thinks nobody's looking!" as the answer to "What is the capital of Argentina?" The teacher called you up to her desk and made you read it out loud to the rest of the class before she sent you swaggering outside but mortified on the inside to the office for detention.