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the great cereal mastermind
by Amand-r
DISCLAIMER: Do not own any of the characters here. They belong to
Whedon, Mutant Enemy, other places... disclaimer will not protect me
from being sued, but please don't. I'm losing money on this, as I called
off work today...
For the BtVS-AtS lyric wheel. Yummers. Thanks to Gyrus for the lyrics:
"Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Oh, how I love writing
to songs I can put on autoloop in my own player. Lyrics at the end.
First Buffy fic. Yeargh. Might be last Buffy fic. Brain hurts. Not
really a story, more of a character thing. CRAP! After this week's ep,
some of these people are dead. Think...before this week.
*~*~*~*~*~*~***~*~*~*~*~***~*~*~*~*~*~*
The Great Cereal Mastermind
by Amand-r (deparsons@earthlink.net)
*~*~*~*~*~*~***~*~*~*~*~***~*~*~*~*~*~*
You pour the cereal for everyone. It's a worthy job, you know, cereal
pourer. Apparently your attention to the little things has given you
this job. No one here knows such trivial things like when Storm
officially shaved her hair into a mohawk (Uncanny X-Men #173), or when
Tim Drake officially became the latest Batman (Batman #442, but he
didn't don the new costume until #457), and so you have decided that
*someone* here should pay attention to mundane detail:
Row one, six bowls:
1. Buffy: AppleJacks.
2. Anya: Special K.
3. Willow: Muselix.
4. Spike: Nothing, but you put the bowl there for symmetry.
5. Giles: Giles isn't here, but this is your bowl. You call it Giles's
bowl because then it gets you into the first row of bowls, a petty thing
that you insist upon because you are cereal man, and an ex-evil villain,
and therefore deserve more respect. 6. Dawn: Lucky Charms. They're
stale, because she's the only one who eats them, but she doesn't seem to
care. 7. Xander: anything, whatever you have left over. Sometimes you
combine all the dregs together and you enjoy his face as he scrapes the
sludge from the bottom of the bowl just to get the few whole cereal
pieces that are in there.
Row two: seven bowls:
1. Kennedy: a banana, unpeeled, and a plum.
2. Molly: AppleJacks. Imitate the slayer in all ways.
3. Rona: Nothing. She doesn't even get a bowl. She gets an empty coffee
mug, which she will fill with coffee and fifty pounds of sugar. 4. Nora:
Cheerios 5. Zoe: Cheerios, but with three spoonfuls of instant coffee
added. 6. Amanda: Two Nature's Way granola bars, which she will pour
milk over and stab repeatedly with her spoon until she likes the
consistency. 7. Chao-ann: Golden Grahams, but no milk. Everyone thinks
this is odd, but when you offer her the milk jug (you switched over from
a carton ages ago) her eyes go wide and she shakes her head vigorously.
There are more rows, but they wait in the back to be pushed forward like
the little lines of soldiers that they are, and you man the battle table
very well, because you used to beat Jonathan's ass at Stratego before
the two of you discovered Rifts, the role playing game. After that he
had played a juicer hyped on crack and killed your ass, but then Warren
had come in with this character that had a plus forty EVERYTHING and
killed everyone in the first five minutes of the game, which wasn't very
fun, but it actually was. This was also the moment Warren took control
of your group, and you treated him like he was his character, though you
didn't know it at the time.
It was the oldest trick in the D&D book, and you forgot it: The DM is
only the DM in the game, and you are not your character.
In the best of times, you're a feeb. No really. You are. Everyone knows
it. They even say it to your face.
You know it too, that's the secret shame of it, really, but you just
can't help it, when its obvious that this moment in the kitchen with all
the Slayerettes and Anya and Willow is just like that episode of The
Facts of Life where Mrs. Garrett told the girls that they were all going
to have to pinch pennies because the mortgage--
Lame lame lame. Besides, Blair was way more stacked than Anya was. Ever.
But that's a moot issue anyway, you decide before you even voice the
idea, because Mrs. Garret would never make eyes at Jo the way that
Willow is looking at Kennedy and you decide right there that maybe you
should find the camera again, even though Willow is just probably
looking for an excuse to go all Fairuza Balk on your ass.
You are the cereal master, and no one ever says anything about it. Not
even Buffy, who is the first one to pick up her bowl and take it to the
dining room table, where everyone has taken to eating because the cereal
bowl army has occupied the kitchen countertop front.
Then again, maybe the reason no one stops to consider your abilities is
that you have none. It's not as if, you know, you can possibly use this
measly job to prove your usefulness to the house full of slayerettes,
but then again they didn't like The Board, and they weren't that keen on
the video documentary, and you are pretty sure that they won't like your
latest idea, where everyone gets t shirts with their names on them, and
like, a symbol, because then it would be all uniform, and everyone would
have a place to "go."
You have even divided everyone into teams, like the gold and blue team,
but you are considering that everyone might want to design their own
logo. You're pretty good at art, and you know this silkscreener over on
the other side of town who has a Mac and the latest Adobe PhotoShop
Deluxe that can--
Oh wait, he's a vampire now.
So instead you pour some cereal into Willow's bowl, and get the rest of
the AppleJacks to put into your own bowl, thinking that Molly will be
pissed that there aren't any left, but you deserve them more. You are,
after all, in the first row. And if she has anything to say about that,
well, you're the cereal master.
And an ex evil mastermind. Thing.
***
Being the cereal master means that you also have to clean the mess up
afterwards, but even that has its own sort of zen-like Mr. Miyagi wax-on
wax-off quality to it so you don't really care. They all stack the bowls
on the countertop for you, a little tower of Babel that you imagine you
take apart in the manner of the mighty Jehovah, which is the way the
name should be given, according to Jonathan, who is Jewish.
Was Jewish.
You are the cereal master. You are the great deconstructor of chaos. You
wash the bowls and make them free of crust and milk and sugar scrapings.
And if your hands get all Palmolive-y clean in the process, well then
score one for you.
All the bowls are the same pattern, because Buffy's mom must have bought
them in like, triplicate. No one has broken any of them yet, despite
that one spill with an ancient Hoderian fire axe that Kennedy had been
playing with on her way out the door to the backyard.
It is when you are washing the dishes that everyone leaves the room, and
you are left with yourself. You are actually more afraid of this than
anything else, but you can't tell anyone that because they would all
scrunch up their faces and laugh at you. You see him in your nightmares,
you see him in your dreams, but that's never scary. You somehow know
that you're dreaming because you've been able to lucid dream ever since
you took that psych course in your junior year in high school, and you
thought that lucid dreaming sounded cool. Ever since then, you can
banish that stuff simply by realizing that you're not awake.
This is probably why the First likes to come to you while you're alone.
Sometimes it's Warren, but lately, It likes to be Jonathan, which is
unsettling because, well...
Because you killed him.
Since they wired you up like an extra in an episode of Starsky and
Hutch, you haven't really been able to get anything out of the First, if
you ever could at all, though at this point you suspect that it comes
for you simply out of boredom. You like to think that your new backbone
has a lot to do with your character and not the things you have been
thinking since Buffy made you cry over the seal under the school. It
probably knows about that too, but it hasn't said anything about that.
It doesn't really say much, just gets a few sniping remarks in before
you turn to it and in a shaky voice tell it to go away because you are
washing dishes.
Funny, but the last time you told it that, it had looked surprised, but
it had left. So now then, the new thing is to take dishes and cereal
pouring very seriously, because if it's enough to keep Jonathan from
whispering in your ear how evil you are and how you should kill all the
Slayerettes, then you'll keep washing until your hands prune.
And you don't wonder what Buffy thinks of all of this, because she
doesn't. And neither does anyone else, except maybe Dawn, and that's
only because you think that sometimes, only sometimes, if things had
been different, you could have taken her back to your house and shown
her your vintage never-been-opened Age of Apocalypse Blink action figure
and she would widen her eyes just like you had when you had seen it in
the store, and say, "Cool..."
But she won't, and you won't even go back to your parents' house,
because you won't survive this. You're a Red Shirt and you know it, but
it still sucks to think about it
Because in reality, you're one microscopic cog in the First's
catastrophic plan, or something equally bizarre and traumatizing. You
have to be or It wouldn't keep coming to see you. The interesting thing,
you think as you swirl Buffy's bowl under the tap, is that as the
designated cereal pourer, you are also one microscopic cog in Buffy's
catastrophic plan, but in both cases you don't really know where that
leaves you, except in the kitchen, waiting to be greased by the First
and spun like a top.
Then you think of Resident Evil Two, and how Leon needed to get that
gear to make the clock in the police station work so that you could get
the knight plug for the downstairs generator, and you feel better,
because until you found that cog you were totally stuck and couldn't go
anywhere.
But then when you were Claire and got the cog in the second part of the
game, it really sucked, because the Tyrant 101 had come through the wall
and scared the shit out of you. You had screamed like a girl and Warren
had called you a pussy like he did the other morning when Warren himself
had come through the wall to bother you in the middle of washing the
second wave of bowls.
But of course, it wasn't Warren.
Sometimes, when you're with others and don't have to worry about Warren
and Jonathan, you like to think of yourself as a tortured soul, like
Spike or that other souled vampire -Angel?-- because you know that for
them, ghosts might pop up out of nowhere to torment them, and this just
fuels their broody magical resilience and makes them look even more
heroic to the ladies, though that really hasn't happened for you. In
fact, you are sure you get more ghostly invaders than anyone in this
house, and still here you are, the lowest rung on the totem pole.
Sometimes you wish you had never heard of Warren.
Though it had been cool, for like three weeks, being an Evil Mastermind.
END
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Nick Cave the Bad Seeds---Red Right Hand
Take a litle walk to the edge of town
Go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms,
like a bird of doom
As it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires,
in the humming wires
Hey man, you know
you're never coming back
Past the square, past the bridge,
past the mills, past the stacks
On a gathering storm comes
a tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with
a red right hand
He'll wrap you in his arms,
tell you that you've been a good boy
He'll rekindle all the dreams
it took you a lifetime to destroy
He'll reach deep into the hole,
heal your shrinking soul
Hey buddy, you know you're
never ever coming back
He's a god, he's a man,
he's a ghost, he's a guru
They're whispering his name
through this disappearing land
But hidden in his coat
is a red right hand
You ain't got no money?
He'll get you some
You ain't got no car? He'll get you one
You ain't got no self-respect,
you feel like an insect
Well don't you worry buddy,
cause here he comes
Through the ghettos and the barrio
and the bowery and the slum
A shadow is cast wherever he stands
Stacks of green paper in his
red right hand
You'll see him in your nightmares,
you'll see him in your dreams
He'll appear out of nowhere but
he ain't what he seems
You'll see him in your head,
on the TV screen
And hey buddy, I'm warning
you to turn it off
He's a ghost, he's a god,
he's a man, he's a guru
You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
his red right hand
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