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marigoldbaker · 18 days ago

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life's a bitch and then you keep living

She attends the funeral and Buffy punches her in the face. She’s getting used to it.

title from my beloved bojack horseman.

this fic possessed me when i was reading a different fanfiction that ended with one of those like -- one character dies and their immortal romantic partner decides to die along with them -- and it made my brain feel so many complicated feelings that i decided to excise them through this and didn't sleep until i was done. i am never done with my forevergirl. <3

i'm adding it under the cut because ao3 is going to be down for a few hours and i feel like posting my first jenny calendar fic in almost a year and then ao3 is inaccessible is uhhhh a little evil lol. trying to be nice to any existing jenny audience i may have...

She’s not graceful about it. That’s what’s really fucked. Probably, if it had been him, he’d have had some sort of romantic, Byronic spiraling-out, never loved again, burned everything down trying to avenge her, something like that. Him and his big fucking feelings that she never completely knew what to do with, never knew how to look directly in the eye, had to look away from when she admitted to her own.

They weren’t really anything. They didn’t have time to be.

She attends the funeral and Buffy punches her in the face. She’s getting used to it. She came expecting worse, so maybe that’s her grieving, wanting to feel it—wanting to feel more of that clawing, awful horror instead of clawing, awful nothing. He made her feel things. Her life was colorlessly superficial and he was a fucking Monet, full of soft, bright, out-of-focus-but-it’s-all-right sentimentality, and now he’s gone, so she can just go back to being a burnout failure of a comp sci teacher who never did anything truly worthwhile with her life. She could have had a destiny, a purpose, something, and she let that purpose kill him, because she wouldn’t commit to feeling it.

Vengeance. Love. Anything. She wouldn’t commit. She wouldn’t throw out that old blood, but she wouldn’t throw herself in with it, either. He’d chosen, at least, in the end—he’d dug his heels in and stuck to what he’d been before her, and if she’d done the same, there’s a sliver of a chance he’d still be here, sending her cold looks in the hallways. Reminding her that—well—maybe it would have been the wrong choice, but it would have been a choice. That would have been something.

She examines the blossom of a bruise on her cheek. Purple and red. Two of her favorite colors.

~~~~

So here’s a not-choice of a choice: she’s still teaching. You’d think she’d leave, or stay, or do something: this is neither. She stays where she is. She’ll freeze herself in amber, be that not-a-person that he fell in love with, that fictitious and beautiful woman who really wasn’t anything but what he wanted her to be. She’s Jenny Calendar. She teaches computer science at the local high school. She smiles only sometimes, jokes with the faculty, encourages the kids to be the best and brightest, and when blood gets on her shoes, she smiles like a fucking Stepford wife, because that’s what you do in a town like this when you’re not one of the people who knows how to fix it. Of course there are the people who sob and cry and try to change things, but she’s not one of those people anymore. Those are the people who get killed.

Willow drops her class. The kids huddle in the library still like they’re chasing a ghost, waiting for him to step out from the stacks, translucent, clinging to his job and his responsibilities even in death. He fucking would. She’d go in there and wait too if she thought he’d have anything to say to her.

When she dreams of him, it’s never the good shit, like when she talked him into driving down to the beach with her on a school day, wore a skimpy-but-tasteful bikini under her work blouse and flowing skirt, got to hear his indignant Jenny when he realized she’d been planning for this and hadn’t bothered to so much as pack him some swim trunks. She dreams about roses and roses and blood and roses and blood and the way the candlelight glinted off his glasses, glinted in his empty eyes.

She wonders if he’d have been fooled—if it had been her on the bed. He was always such a fucking romantic. She knew the goddamn second she walked in. Felt it in the air. When he was romantic, there was always an undertone of goofy excitement to it—he couldn’t pull off sensual operatic bullshit, not unironically. He wouldn’t have even tried for it. He’d have talked himself out of it in the first few seconds, convinced she’d have laughed him out of California, and god, maybe he’d have been right; she was such a fucking bitch.

When he was romantic, you felt it right down into your bone marrow, because it wasn’t the kind of bullshit you got from guys who thought they were being smooth and were really just assholes. He said the kind of things that knights said to princesses, and he’d say it right after Jenny had just gotten done making fun of his tie, but it only happened once or twice without him stammering too much to get the words out. She’d wait, though. She always waited for him to finish. Sometimes the bell rang before he could, before they’d kiss, and she’d linger in the hallway, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Never doing anything. Never doing anything right by him.

~~~~

When the new Watcher comes to the library and she sees him with his fucking tweed suit and his fucking round glasses and his fucking British accent, too young to die like her heart, why do they keep sending fucking kids to this fucking death trap of a nightmare of a town—she corners him in the faculty room, shoves him up against the wall, says, “You leave, you son of a bitch. You leave. You are not him. If he died, you’re not gonna last a fucking week, and if you last longer than that, I will kill you myself,” and it’s only because Snyder doesn’t give a shit about anything and she’s passing the athletics team like he asked that she doesn’t get some sort of disciplinary write-up.

Buffy comes in the next day and stands in her doorway like a ghost. Staring. Jenny says, “Fuck you,” and shuts the door in her face, which isn’t exactly the kind of blank you-can-kill-me-if-you-want impartiality she was going for, but what the fuck ever. Everything is ruined forever. The love of her life is dead.

~~~~

The Watcher keeps living. Buffy kills Angel or Angelus or something; Jenny doesn’t care. She remembers the floppy disk almost three months after Rupert’s death and goes down to that old mansion with it, sits outside—they’ve all cleared out, of course, or maybe Buffy’s killed them, or maybe they’re still there and they’ll kill her. Jenny doesn’t care.

She says to the empty air, “Well, I guess you got what you wanted after all, you sick fucking asshole,” and then she breaks the floppy disk in half. She doesn’t give a shit what anyone wants anymore. Not her family, not Buffy, not anyone. Who the fuck cares about the philosophical implications of Angel and Angelus? Rupert is dead. That’s it. End of fucking sentence.

Someone sits down next to her, light as a ghost. She doesn’t turn to look. It could be a vampire, it could be Buffy, it could be someone else, but whoever it is, it doesn’t matter, because the moment she says anything to them, that’s something unfurling within her, towards change, and she won’t let it. She’s Jenny Calendar, hollow girl. She is completely untouchable. And Rupert Giles is dead.

The someone who’s next to her says, “Not the sort of town you want to be alone in.”

Jenny doesn’t answer.

“I loved him too,” says the man. “Just so you know.”

So then she does know who it is, a little. Lets her head fall against his shoulder, a little. He’s about as important as she is around these parts, which means he’ll be gone by the morning. That’s the way it works when you love Rupert. He’s the sun and you’re the earth and the minute he’s gone—

“The Mayor hired me to drug every adult in town with enchanted candy in a few months’ time,” says the man whose voice she really does remember. “I’m staying here until then. Hidden from the eyes of the Slayer, of course.”

“Yeah, you have fun with that,” says Jenny.

“I’m inviting you to stay,” he says.

“No, you’re not,” she says. “You’re just not. I’m not helping you with shit. I’m done being something important. I am just fucking done, Ethan.”

Ethan’s quiet for a moment. “Then why are you still here?”

Because death is action and life is inaction and Jenny, demonstrably, is a woman of inaction. Jenny, if she takes an action now, will have taken one too late to save Rupert. Jenny, if she had taken an action then, could have saved Rupert, could have fucking done something, and refuses to grow into or past the version of herself that let Rupert die. She will not become someone who could have saved his life.

“I think you two would have been very happy together,” says Ethan. There’s a derisive edge to it. “You have the same goddamn martyr complex. The same sort of insufferable refusal to change when faced with the inevitable unpredictability of the world that we live in.”

“Yeah, whatever,” says Jenny. “You’re still sitting out here with me. You think you’re any better?”

“I don’t need to be,” says Ethan. “He’s dead.”

He gets it, Jenny thinks.

~~~~

Five months later, there’s a bunch of candy, inexplicably, in the area. Jenny picks up a bar and takes a bite and suddenly she’s hacked off all her hair, set a cop car on fire, and doubled over in the Sunnydale High parking lot, crying so hard, so, so hard, crying like she hasn’t cried since she was sixteen years old, so hard she’s going to throw up, thinking about what it would have been like if Rupert were here right now.

She wakes up the next morning and books an appointment at the salon. Evens it out.

~~~~

Five months after that, Buffy and her friends are in college across town, and Jenny’s teaching a new group of kids, and it’s all really starting to blur into a comforting haze of nothing, an endless blur of gray. Whatever she was before, whatever she could have been, she’s Jenny now, the masquerade mask of a woman with nothing behind her eyes, beguiling and bewitching and empty inside. A lie made up to hold something real.

The real girl is dead.

~~~~

Five months after that—

~~~~

It’s printed on the list of new students for the new semester. Intro to Comp Sci. Dawn Summers.

Somehow Jenny does not feel equipped for this. At all. Dawn is Buffy’s little sister. They haven’t met before now, mostly because Dawn was—was—her mind skips like a record playing wrong—because Dawn was too young at the time to be involved in much of anything, so Dawn’s impression of Jenny has to have been through secondhand information provided by Buffy.

Computer Science is not a mandatory class. Dawn could have very easily chosen not to sign up for this. Dawn very much has.

Jenny feels—

Feels—

That is what is wrong with the sentence; the rest does not need to be finished. Jenny feels. It’s been nothing for years and now it’s—something. Curiosity? Apprehension? She sits down at her desk and stares at the printed letters, trying to will them into a name that doesn’t matter. Sure that, somehow, she can do it.

~~~~

Dawn is a model student. Jenny compares her obsessively and repeatedly to Buffy, but also to Willow; she has aspects of both. She steels herself for Summers antipathy, a hand across the face, but Dawn treats her as though they’ve never met before, and somehow that hurts too—imagining her scrubbed from the lives of these children like she’s nothing. Never mind that she stepped away and did it first. Rupert mattered. Rupert changed the fabric of everything, and Jenny loved him. Failed him. She’d thought at least—

She’d thought at least that would mean something.

Dawn turns in her first assignment. It’s close to perfect without being Willow-levels of meticulous and slightly obsessive prodigy, which means that Willow isn’t helping her. She’s doing this herself. Jenny wants to ask why. She can’t ask why. She wants to ask why. It’s just not an option.

Dawn misses school every so often. No explanation. The fifth time this happens, she comes up to Jenny’s desk after class, which freezes Jenny’s goodbye-everyone smile in rictus. But Dawn’s only ever seen her tense and strange, so, luckily enough, Dawn doesn’t seem to really notice exactly how tense and strange Jenny is right now.

“Ms. Calendar?” she asks. Her face is blank, open, sweet—nothing but a teenage girl. “Do you have a minute?”

Jenny throws herself bodily into that shell of a mask of a woman and says, “Yeah, sure, Dawn. What’s up?”

“It’s just.” Dawn wavers. “You’ve kind of excused my absences every time without even asking that I make up work? I was looking at my grades when they came in, and I thought they’d be way, way lower, which I was totally okay with. Sorta thought you were the kind of teacher who doesn’t give the opportunity to do catch-up assignments, and I was a little too nervous to ask, ‘cause you always seem a little strung-out. Not in a bad way!” she hastily adds. “Just…I don’t know, I didn’t want to bother you? Especially after being gone as much as I am. But I got my grades, and it doesn’t look like you marked any of my missing assignments. Pretty much gave me perfect scores. So I was just wondering—”

“You were wondering why,” Jenny finishes.

Dawn smiles gratefully. It’s the kind of smile Buffy used to give Rupert. It claws a hole into Jenny’s chest and starts ripping her open, slowly, vivisecting her at her stupid fucking meaningless desk.

“Pretty much!” she says.

Jenny says, “I had your sister in my class.” That’s about all she can manage.

“…Oh,” says Dawn. She looks a little bemused. “Huh. You know, that’s not usually the response to Buffy.”

Yeah, well. Buffy doesn’t go around punching just any teacher in the face, kid. But Jenny can’t exactly say that to Dawn.

“She never mentioned you,” says Dawn. “Were you…did you guys get along?”

Jenny’s hand flickers to her throat. One of the other dreams she has, a lot, is one where Buffy kills her—on the desk, at the funeral, at school, on the sidewalk, like she’s an animal, like she’s an evil thing. Those are the dreams that hurt the least.

“Okay,” says Dawn. “Well. Uh. Cool talk, I guess?” She’s doing that Buffy thing, where she smiles with bemused annoyance, bouncing on the balls of her feet, puzzled-but-she-thinks-it’s-funny. Sisters. Jenny sees it every day. “And thanks for the grades, but you really don’t have to—”

“Yes,” says Jenny. “I do.”

There’s something too much about the intensity in her voice. She knows that the second she speaks. Dawn pulls back a little, still smiling, but now there’s a bit of Willow to her—that mystery-solving curiosity. That determination.

Jenny decides to let her try. Death is action. Life is inaction.

~~~~

The next day, Dawn is at her desk again. She doesn’t look ready to kill Jenny, but she does look a little miffed.

“So you do know Buffy,” she says.

“What did Buffy tell you?”

“Uh, literally nothing. Do you have siblings?”

Jenny has a hundred family ghosts on her shoulder and her dead parents are two of them. She might not have been an only child if things were different. They’re not.

Dawn seems to take her silence for the answer it is. “Well. All Buffy said to me when I asked her was leave it alone, Dawn, which is literally so-o Buffy of her, like, can you even believe? I mean, what am I supposed to do, just—”

“Leave it alone?” Jenny dryly suggests.

“Come on,” says Dawn. “I’m not doing that.”

She sees her, for a second. Buffy. Standing in front of her desk, smiling sharply, that other ghost girl she failed—sunlight and bubblegum, bruised by the world but still so hopeful. Thrumming with joy and possibility. Twirling her hair over Angel because no one told her not to do it, or maybe because everyone told her not to do it, or maybe—possibly—because sometimes loving someone makes you forget what’s smart and what’s safe.

Jenny sits up a little. She says, “Your sister decked me in the face at her Watcher’s funeral. You want to find out more? Ask her about that.”

And credit where credit is due—Dawn doesn’t flinch back with oh-my-gosh teenage horror. She tilts her head just a little, eyes narrowing with that Summers spirit, and smiles almost appreciatively.

“Thanks, Ms. C,” she says. “I owe you one.”

~~~~

Buffy shows up at Jenny’s house after hours. Without preamble, she says, “Stay away from my sister.”

Jenny says nothing. Waits for the blow.

Buffy turns on her heel and storms away. Jenny watches her, curiously, and wonders if Buffy knows that she holds no power over a woman who dreams of what it would be like for the Vampire Slayer’s hands to close around her throat again. Buffy kills monsters. That’s what she does.

~~~~

Of course Dawn shows up at Jenny’s desk again after class, and this time, when she does, Jenny actually smiles. It feels strange on her face—a smile in a way that doesn’t hurt. It makes her think about how much everything else does, all the time.

Dawn sits down on the edge of the desk and says, gleefully, “Buffy got so mad.”

“Yeah,” says Jenny. “I bet.”

“She’s totally not going to tell me,” says Dawn, “but I asked, so now you totally have to. Why’d she punch you in the face?”

Jenny takes out her wallet. Takes out the folded-over ticket stubs: Admit Two for a monster truck rally from 1997. “Give her these,” she says. “Tell her where I was keeping them. See what happens.”

~~~~

And honestly, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen. She’s hoping Buffy kills her.

But Buffy doesn’t come at all that night.

~~~~

This time, Dawn doesn’t bounce up to her desk. She places the ticket stubs back down in front of Jenny a little shakily, mouth trembling.

“She cried all night,” she says. “This isn’t fun anymore. I don’t want to know.”

Jenny picks up the ticket stubs and puts them back in her wallet. Rummages in her desk drawer, instead, until she finds the thing that she can’t look at anymore. Hands it to Dawn.

Dawn stares at it for a very long time. The tremor in her hand increases. She lets the photo strip flutter back down onto the desk, on top of the ticket stubs: Jenny and Rupert tangled up in the tiny booth, laughing. Jenny’s lipstick is all over Rupert’s face. He’s too big to fit in the booth and she’s mostly on his lap. They’re luminous.

“That’s—” Dawn says.

“Yeah,” says Jenny.

“So you’re—” Dawn says.

“Yeah,” says Jenny.

Dawn sits down on the edge of Jenny’s desk. Her eyes are a little wet. She doesn’t say anything, just picks up the photo again, staring intensely at it like she’s trying to burn it into her eyes.

Jenny says, “He was the love of my life.”

Almost two seconds later, Dawn says, “My mom’s in the hospital.”

Jenny holds out her hand, palm-up. Dawn takes it.

~~~~

Buffy’s on her door again that night. She’s hammering hard on the wood. Jenny gets up, opens the door, and Buffy says, desperately, tearfully, “I’m sor—”

Which isn’t what she’s fucking supposed to do. So Jenny shuts the door in her face.

~~~~

Dawn doesn’t come up to Jenny’s desk after class. She comes in at lunch instead. Jenny asks, “Don’t you have friends?” and Dawn just sort of laughs wetly and offers her a carrot stick, which is a hell of a lot better than Jenny’s current lunch of choice, which is whatever she wants from the vending machine, because she doesn’t eat lunch anymore. Rupert had been making hers before Angelus snapped his neck and killed them both.

They eat in silence until about five minutes before they’re supposed to go, when Jenny says, “I don’t want to be in a world where he isn’t.”

“Yeah, but you are,” says Dawn. “And the thing is, you kind of have to be. I mean, if my mom dies, I know she’d lose it finding out I died too, and then you gotta deal with all that junk in heaven when you’re supposed to be having fun with the angels. You really want your first moments with Giles again to be all about him telling you how mad he is you didn’t do a good job at living without him?”

Which makes Jenny laugh so hard she chokes on a carrot stick. Lucky thing. She can say the tears are from that.

~~~~

Dawn comes with two lunches the next day. “Nobody ever sees you eat,” she says, and Jenny’s about to turn it down when she realizes it’s actually just greasy fast food in a deceptive paper bag.

“Oh, what the heck, Buffy?” Dawn demands. “Come on! She never lets me just have a burger and fries for lunch?!”

“I can’t take this,” says Jenny immediately.

“What?” Dawn groans. “Oh, man. Look, she gave me the lunch because I asked for an extra one.Does that make it better? Does that make whatever weird thing you guys have okay?”

“We don’t have—” Jenny stiffens defensively.

“Just eat the friggin’ burger,” says Dawn.

Jenny eats the friggin’ burger. Grudgingly.

~~~~

Buffy comes in at Parent-Teacher Night. Her eyes are a little sunken; she looks older and more tired than Jenny remembers. Nothing even half as luminous as her sister, who’s chattering away in that nervous Summers-babble style where she’s trying to make sure everyone’s just talking about computers. She’s in the middle of some tangent about programming that makes it very clear she has no idea what’s going on in class when Buffy says, “Are you even washing your hair?”

“You sound like Cordelia,” says Jenny. Her mouth twitches. “Are you two still friends?”

“We weren’t friends before.”

“Excuse me for not keeping up with the intricacies of your high school social life,” says Jenny, brows raised. “I was a little busy—”

“Busy doing what?” says Buffy. “Stepford-wifing it up? You were goddamn creepy all through senior year. We kept on trying to talk to you and you’d just look through us.”

Jenny doesn’t actually remember any of that. She doesn’t really feel like arguing the point. “Get me a better shampoo, then,” she says. “Slay the monster that is my greasy and terrible hair.”

“Take better care of yourself,” says Buffy.

Why do you even care, Jenny wants to say, but some small part of her really does know why. It’s awful, the knowing.

“…does anyone want to see my program?” Dawn asks, a little hysterically.

Something occurs to Jenny. “Where’s Joyce?”

Buffy sort of smiles. It’s the kind of smile that hurts; Jenny can see the hurt in her shoulders and her hands. “Mom’s…not doing well,” she says. “But she’ll be better. We think.”

Fucking goddamn it, Jenny does feel something, thinking about Buffy losing Joyce on top of Rupert. How the fuck is that fair? She can’t get punched in the face and fix it. She can’t take the hit and be the villain, the problem, the thing Buffy could have killed to keep the right person alive. She can just sit here, mostly a stranger, basically nothing, and try to think of something to say that isn’t—

“Fuck that,” she says. It sounds—real. “Fucking absolute goddamn bullshit. As though you haven’t been through enough! Both of you! Living here! Why don’t you just pick up your sister, take your mom to an LA hospital—I have a credit card,” she’s rummaging in her purse, “take my goddamn credit card, go start just buying shit—”

“Ooh, absolutely!” says Dawn.

“Dawn, don’t,” says Buffy, blocking her sister’s hand. “We don’t take credit cards from people having a mental health crisis.”

“It’s not a mental health crisis, it’s a state of being,” Jenny corrects her.

“It’s not a state of being, it’s the worst hair I’ve ever seen,” Buffy counters.

“This is fun,” says Dawn. “I want to take Buffy to talk to my science teacher now.”

“Not everyone’s Ms. Calendar,” says Buffy. “Ms. Calendar has emotional problems.”

“God, you are a bitch now that you’re not in high school,” Jenny observes, which makes Buffy actually laugh. A real one. It doesn’t match her eyes or the tightness in her mouth, but—it sounds like that bubblegum girl.

~~~~

Jenny casts the bones and reads the cards and prays for a miracle when they all say the same thing: death, death, death, death, death. She whispers it into the wind: please, if it’s a punishment for my inaction, please, I’ll do anything, I’ll be good, I’ll be better, if those girls get to keep their mom. Please, whoever’s listening, it’s worth losing him if those girls get to keep their mom. They’re young enough. They’ve lost enough. I’ll do anything. I will be anything. I will drown myself in blood, I will give myself to Hecate, I will bring back any monster, make myself the monster, just so long as—

~~~~

And of course prayer does fuck-all and Dawn breaks down in a class that isn’t hers. Art class. As though Jenny didn’t have enough bad blood with the art department. She finds out two days later when Dawn still isn’t in class and she ends up having an actual, embarrassing panic attack, has to stagger out into the hallway because she can’t breathe, can’t stop thinking about that little baby sunshine girl strewn out in an alley with her throat cut. When did it start fucking mattering again?

Someone catches her arms. For a moment, the grip is so strong, and she almost thinks—Rupert—

Xander says, “Hey. Hey, Ms. Calendar. Hey. It’s okay.”

Jenny actually does start crying. It’s really humiliating. Worse than that is the fact that Xander, who she remembers as the world’s most annoying fifteen-year-old, is suddenly a strong, solid college student who can help her over to a chair while she sobs hard enough to throw up. He holds her hand the whole time.

“It’s okay,” he keeps repeating. “It’s okay. Dawn asked me to come and check on you. She thought—well, we forgot—” He fumbles. “We didn’t know you and Buffy were friends again.”

Friends is a really weird way to describe “Buffy shows up outside my house sometimes with shampoo,” but Jenny’s still crying too hard to correct him. She buries her face in her hands and tries to remember how to breathe.

“She’s okay,” Xander says. “She’s—” His voice breaks a little. “It’s. Uh. Joyce.”

At which point Jenny actually does throw up on her own shoes.

~~~~

Xander takes the shoes and walks her to his car. He’s holding her hand, which is weird, but so is Joyce Summers being dead. So is whatever Jenny’s going to have to say to Snyder about skipping her own classes to throw up on the floor outside of the library.

“Anya might have shoes that fit you,” he offers. “Her feet run a little bigger than yours, but.”

Anya’s shoes are terrible. Impractical business-girl heels. Jenny ignores them entirely, clambering into Xander’s passenger seat and sinking back against the chair until it reclines.

“Yeah, you know what, sure,” says Xander to himself, and gets in, starting the car. “So, uh, how’ve you been? Anything new going on? Kinda thought you’d leave, after—all that shit went down sophomore year.”

“Inaction is death,” says Jenny. “Action is—” No, wait, that’s not right.

“…Neato,” says Xander. “Can I put on the radio?”

She doesn’t answer. He turns it on.

And you can’t fight the tears that ain’t coming, or the moment of truth in your lies—

“CAN YOU TURN OFF THE RADIO,”says Jenny.

“Geez,” says Xander, “who died?” and then he starts laughing really hard and really loud, hyena loud, until he just doubles over on the steering wheel and starts crying.

Jenny stares at the ceiling. Thinks, bizarrely, and almost warmly, that this would be the kind of moment that Rupert would describe as his own personal nightmare, which is enough for her to sit up in the car a little.

“Hey,” she says, and sort of whacks Xander on the shoulder in an attempt to pat him. “Uh. There, there?”

Xander keeps crying. Jenny gives up and goes back to lying down.

One time she and Rupert tried to have car sex and he almost threw out his back on top of the crossbow bolt wound she inflicted. One time she drove Buffy to the docks with Angel in the backseat and Buffy in the front seat and both of them trying to convince her Buffy should be in the backseat—her resolute in her determination to at least halfway live up to her promise to her uncle, never mind that Buffy shouldn’t have ever been in that car in the first place. One time—

Xander’s crying is beginning to even out. Wetly, he says, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It wasn’t even—it wasn’t even like—monsters kill people here, not—”

“Xander, things just die here,” says Jenny. “This is the worst fucking town in the history of the world.”

“So why are you still here?” he demands.

“Rupert’s grave is still here,” says Jenny, and realizes with a small and painful jolt that this is the real reason.

He rubs a hand across his face and says, shakily, “Let’s get you home.”

~~~~

Dawn and Buffy both rush her at the door. She doesn’t know why she’s expecting this when it happens. They both just tumble into her like puppies, like it’s what they’re supposed to do, and she holds them so fucking tight, just about collapses to the ground with them. Nobody’s crying. Nobody’s saying anything. Buffy’s face is tucked into her hair.

From somewhere far away, Willow says, “Ms. Calendar?”

Buffy says, “The finances are a mess. And funerals are so expensive.”

Jenny says, “Now who’s asking for the credit card of a woman having a mental health crisis?”

“Yeah, well, I’m a woman in a mental health crisis. Make a donation.” Buffy’s holding Jenny hard enough to bruise. Jenny doesn’t give a shit. “You should be failing Dawn. She’s learning nothing in Comp Sci.”

“I do whatever the fuck I fucking want.”

Jenny lets go of them both, a little. Dawn looks dizzy with relief. Buffy is just meeting her eyes with this firm intensity, nothing hostile to it, but nothing at all like the light and frothy teenage girl who looked cheerfully through her. Maybe it’s the first time they’re actually looking at each other.

“It fucking sucks,” says Buffy.

“Yeah,” says Jenny. Maybe she’s crying a little. “Yeah, it does.”

“And it never—never stops hurting.”

“Yeah.”

“Never.”

Jenny reaches out and catches Buffy’s face in her hand. “Are you keeping up with your classes? I’m not letting you drop out.”

“I do whatever the fuck I fucking want.”

“Not on my dime.” She squeezes Buffy’s shoulder. “You’ll take a semester off and then it’s back to the grind. And maybe we’re moving to LA. What the fuck are we still doing here?”

“We need—”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“There’s still—”

“I don’t give a shit, Buffy, we’re done. We’re done.”

Buffy smiles a little. “Yeah, okay,” she says. “LA. We’re done. Let the hell town eat itself.”

No one’s there to stop them, anyway.

#fic #jenny calendar #jenny and buffy #jenny and dawn #i think the thing that really hits about writing for jenny now is like #whenever i do it just means so fucking much to me.#i am not just writing to keep writing for her forever.#whatever i produce now is very .... from my heart! <3 #also deeply harrowing and all about grief and horror but yknow

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