WHO: Buffy Summers WHEN: Sunday morning WHERE: Summers residence. SUMMARY: Buffy's thinking about memories and home and missing people and birthdays. WARNINGS: Parental death mentioned in passing.
Sometimes she wondered if she'd get memory updates ever. She hadn't while she was at Atlantis, and that hadn't seemed that big of a deal, and then she'd ended up here, in Texas of all places. Texas felt a little like the anti-California to her, sort of like a world in which she'd ended up in like, Cleveland.
She'd been here for over a year now, just barely, but she'd arrived just before her 21st birthday and now it was her 22nd, and she was still here.
It was longer than some had stayed, and she could have received some sort of memories.
She knew things happened at home, but in Atlantis, she'd mostly tried to stay away from that knowledge, and here she hadn't sought it out much either. Now she wondered whether that was better or worse. Would she be glad she was here if she knew about home, or would she just miss home all that much more?
Probably, as Buffy sat with a laptop at the kitchen counter, drinking coffee, and staring at the empty Google search page, it was somewhere in between those two things. Because she did miss all of her family and her friends. And there were some things that were easier here she knew. The times when she really felt her mother's death were fewer, because nobody was here, and when nobody normal was here, it made the absence feel less particular to her mom specifically.
But then there were moments, like this one, when the house just felt really big. No Dawn. No Xander or Willow or Tara or Giles. Nobody but her.
Maybe that was the thing to change, really. Like, she'd been here a year and no one from home had shown up, and that was okay, cause she'd made friends with her Quidditch team, and she had Sam. This brought a smile to her lips because Sam was tall, and hot, and very knowledgeable about demons and monsters, and consistent company which wasn't something she was going to take for granted at all, but he didn't live here.
She stood up, went to coffeemaker and poured out more coffee and then turned around leaning back against the counter. She could definitely rent out at least one of the upstairs bedrooms. The spare one maybe, not Dawn's - just in case - and not her mom's - just in case - but the spare one. Cause it'd be nice to not be the only person in the house and surely someone else in this crazy group of people might be interested in a place to stay.
She supposed too that she could offer herself up as a guardian to someone if they needed it, but it seemed like most people had guardians or people they knew when they came through. She took a sip of the coffee. Offering a room might make the most sense and she'd do it.
But not today. Today was her birthday and it was a Sunday so she had no work, so she was going to take care of herself. Which meant getting dressed, a trip to buy something fantastic to wear, and possibly ice cream.