Chapter 14: Scars
Author's Notes: The paths are crossing but not yet convergent. Please be patient while the story unfolds as it must. Your patience will be rewarded.
Mother's Day
It was a Summers Mother's Day family tradition. First thing Sunday morning, the girls would make breakfast in bed for their mother, who would feign surprise at the treat and dutifully eat whatever was placed before her with cheerful good grace. Even if it were technically inedible, the result was always the same: praise and gratitude for a thoughtful loving gesture from her two girls, and a silent promise to herself that soon she
must teach her daughters how to cook.
And so it was that on this Sunday morning, fourteen year old Dawn Summers single-handedly continued the tradition by awakening her mother and attempting to place a tray of Mother's Day breakfast treats before her. Unfortunately, this year, Joyce was not up to the game.
"Go away!" came the muffled moan from beneath the covers.
"Mom! It's Mother's Day. Time to get up." Dawn gently coaxed.
Inarticulate mutterings drifted up out of the comforter, and Joyce attempted to sit up and see what on earth Dawn was going on about. "Wha...Dawn, do you know how early it is?" Joyce mumbled tiredly.
"It's not early. It's nine." Dawn patiently explained, holding the heavy tray before her.
"I'm not in the mood for this...today...take it away..." Joyce muttered dismissively as she laid back down and pulled the covers up again, trying to block out both sun and food.
"But it's Mother's Day..." Dawn trailed off. She couldn't believe her mother was doing this to her, on today of all days. "It's tradition."
Joyce was in no mood. "Dawn, I said go
away!" she snarled and put the pillow over her head to block out the day and her daughter.
Dawn stood there with her tray in her hands, feeling very hurt and also very stupid. Obviously, the only daughter Joyce wanted to hear from wasn't there today. Dawn felt stupid for even trying to keep the family traditions alive.
She felt soft tears wet her face as she took the tray of food back to the kitchen and left it on the table, untouched. She wasn't sure what to do now. She began to cry harder.
Looking at the phone on the kitchen wall, she decided she was going to call her dad and tell him what was going on here, beg him to come home. And then she was going to have herself a good cry and go to the mall to buy some new bikinis for summer.
Dawn Summers was more than hurt. She was angry. And she had had enough.
When she called her dad's cell phone she was surprised to find that he was actually in town for Mother's Day, driving in from the airport even as they spoke. Hank had also made some decisions, and he'd had enough, too. He reassured Dawn that he would take care of everything and to go ahead and go out and leave her mother to him. He was back.
For the first time in months Dawn felt some cautious optimism about the home front. Daddy was coming back. Daddy would take care of her, even if her mother no longer cared to.
When Hank came home that morning, he roughly awakened his wife and poured coffee into her with ruthless determination. He'd had some months of soul-searching while traveling around the globe. The surface story was that he was working all those months, but in reality he used his work as an escape from a family he could no longer bear to be near for any length of time. He didn't know the deeper reasons as to how or why his family was so shattered, but he did know that the immediate catalyst was his eldest daughter. Buffy. There may have been problems bubbling underneath the surface, and certainly he had to bear his share of the blame, but it was Buffy who had inadvertently ripped the lid off and shown them all what really lay below. And now she was gone and those left behind were also left staring at the remains of their happy home, now just a hollow shell of the family they had appeared to be.
And so he had finally made some decisions. He was not going to throw away his marriage or shirk his family responsibilities any longer. The family was falling apart and he wasn't going to let that continue any further. He was going to shape up, and he was going to make damn sure that Joyce did too.
That Sunday in May, Joyce and Hank had a long, emotionally draining confrontation about where they'd been and where they wanted to be. Joyce agreed to allow Hank to pour out all of the liquor, and would enter a program for alcoholics. Her behavior toward Dawn this last year and especially on that morning was starkly laid out before her; it was an eye-opener for Joyce, and she was deeply ashamed of herself. She wanted more than anything to save her marriage and be a good mother to the one daughter she still had left.
So Hank and Joyce made plans that day. Plans to save their marriage, their home, and their daughter. Buffy was lost to them, they could do nothing to save her any longer, even if they knew where she was now. But Dawn was still there, crying out for love and attention, and by God they were going to do right by their youngest girl. They would pull the Summers family together, happy and whole: Joyce, Hank, and Dawn. Buffy had made her decisions, and now they would make theirs, as a family: mourning for Buffy and what could have been was done. It was time for the Summers family to move on.
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Three thousand miles away, that same daughter found herself in a very subdued mood for her first Mother's Day. She missed her own mother, and was still getting used to the idea that now she was a mother, too. There was a surreal quality to the entire day, and a restless discontent that she couldn't quite put her finger on.
Faith had Sunday off, and had made Buffy breakfast that morning as a special treat. Then she left to spend some quality time with Robin before the club opened for the day. Faith had just recently told her that she had quit her job at the auto shop to become a waitress in Robin's club. Buffy wasn't happy about that, but felt that it was Faith's life and surely she knew what she was doing. She couldn't imagine, herself, working as a waitress in such a club, but she and Faith didn't think along the same lines on that subject. And the tips Faith brought home now were very good. At least there was that.
*Live and let live.* Buffy was trying to live that philosophy where Faith was concerned. It was hard sometimes.
Fred had stopped by with a present that confused Buffy initially.
Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Buffy sincerely thanked Fred for the book, while inwardly wondering what kind of baby advice a Vulcan tv character could offer a new mother. Once Fred understood her confusion, she broke down in helpless giggles, then quickly explained that
Dr. Spock and
Mr. Spock were two entirely different people. Apparently this Dr. Spock guy knew a lot about raising kids. Fred swore by him, and Buffy felt that was good enough for her. It'd have to be; Buffy noticed that it was a very thick book.
When Faith returned home late in the afternoon, Buffy left Katie in her hands and took the bus to the beach to sit and think and watch the sun set. She really needed some alone time to get her thoughts together, and to hopefully find some peace for her troubled heart. She was surprised that the holiday had caught her so off guard, and wondered at the reason for it. It was a melancholy that Buffy did not often permit herself to experience, so when it came suddenly upon her, she was shaken by it all the more.
She found a comfortable place on the rock jetty jutting out into the ocean. She silently watched as the sky became imbued with soft reds and purples, and the evening star made it's first appearance. It was a lovely sunset, the end of a melancholy yet peaceful day. When the sky had turned full dark, Buffy rose and made her way back to the bus stop and home.
******
On the pier that day, at the same moment that Buffy was seeking for quiet peace within the beauty of nature, another sixteen year old stood at the end of the fishing pier smoking a cigarette and drinking straight from a bottle of Jack Daniels secreted beneath his coat. He hated Mother's Day as a general rule; hated being reminded that his own mother was in England getting on with her new husband and her new life, a life that did not include him any longer. He had been sent to his uncle in Sunnydale when his parents divorced two years previously; his mother's new husband having no use for a teenage boy in his life, and his father understanding clearly that he was in no position to raise his son without changing his own libertine and chaotic lifestyle. So at the age of fourteen he was sent packing to his uncle's family in America; a sensitive child made more so by the turn his family life had taken and the sudden uprootedness of his existence.
His uncle was a good man, as was his wife a kind and patient woman, and they both loved the boy dearly. But the hurt and the anger ran deep, and the boy didn't exactly adjust easily into a California lifestyle. So the boy decided that the sensitive child he had been needed to toughen up and he adopted a swagger and a style that reflected this new persona, although the sensitive poet within him remained untouched.
This outward change had the added benefit of attracting good male friends and also proving quite attractive to the opposite sex. And his first girlfriend turned out to have been his first great love. She showed him a side of life, love, and sex that until then he had only dreamed about; she was his dark goddess, and he worshipped at her altar.
That his great love turned out to have been a little crazy, and ultimately cheated on him with half the members of the house band at a local club, cut him to the core. He was a romantic idealist at heart, and he had naively assumed that their love would last a lifetime, pure and unpolluted by the outside world. That it had lasted only a little more than a year was a truth he found devastating. For the second time, a woman had hurt him beyond the telling of it. But it was easier to be angry than to be in pain, less hurtful to cause suffering than to experience it.
Thus it was that the boy put his romantic idealism away, and became the sort of man he had previously only viewed with contempt. Women were not to be trusted. Women had trampled his love underfoot; his heart he had freely given but in return received only ridicule and pain. He had learned the lesson well, and he would turn it around on his tormenters, these girls and women. He would no longer give his heart to the opposite sex. He would pursue them, seduce them, and use them without remorse.
His carefully crafted tough persona had now reached inside and he had become that man in truth. From now on, he was the Big Bad. No woman would get close enough to hurt him ever again.
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Please remember - this is a love story at it's very core, but it's not time yet. Please be patient, read, and review and let me know what you think. Thanks.
Sara