Chapter Text
Buffy hoped the world would not end that day. She hoped the powers that be would give her a little bit of time to make the most of the dreadful situation she found herself in. But when you are facing a shower in a bed and breakfast that looks like it was plumbed in the nineteenth century, and you have been warned to expect a maximum of five minutes of hot water, it’s probably best to assume the worst.
“Mum!”
“Darling?”
“Mum.” It would have been rude to add ‘get in here now’. “Mum get in here now.”
“I could hear you just find from the bedroom sweetheart. What is it?
“Of course you could hear me from the bedroom. Our room is negative square feet. It’s a void in space and time. The shower is haunted and we shouldn’t have come here.” When she spoke out loud, she realised she sounded like a petulant child and this was the last day she wanted to sound like a petulant child. It was the day in her whole life when she had most wanted to sound grown up, capable and wildly intelligent, but it wasn’t happening. “Why are we here? We shouldn’t be here. No day that starts with this shower should be good. It’s a sign from the universe that we should have stayed home and hidden under our beds rather than making significant life decisions.”
“Buffy…”
“Did I mention the shower is haunted?” Buffy knew she had maybe three seconds left before her mum said something sensible and she had to calm down. But she didn’t want to calm down. She wanted to be right and she wanted to run away. She wanted to be warm and she wanted to be clever. It didn’t feel like a day where she was going to get either.
“It’s your first day at Oxford. It’s very understandable that you’d be nervous. I was nervous when I moved to university. But you are going to be fine. You know what happened to me my first day?”
“You met dad?”
“I didn’t meet your father til the second year when I was brave enough to start at the newspaper. I spent almost my whole first year hiding in my flat eating microwave meals and calling your grandmother three times a week. But this isn’t going to be like that for you because you’re my beautiful, shining, extroverted Buffy. I really think this is going to be a new start for you.”
Less of a new start than you think.
“I wouldn’t be leaving you here if I didn’t know you were going to be okay.”
“Do you really trust me in a haunted shower?”
“I really do. Hurry up and get clean sweetheart. We have to move your stuff in by ten or the porter chases us out of the city with knives, according to this form we were sent.”
“Thanks mum.”
When Joyce shut the door behind her, Buffy sank down on the floor to the side of the tub and wondered how she had aged a century in the last week. The last year of secondary school had been spent entirely clinging on to the idea she would move away and everything would be better. Applying to Oxford was more a way of imagining what a future would be like if she could have one than a real plan. She was almost late to submit her portfolio of essays because of a demon with what seemed like a thousand eyes. She actually was late to her admissions test because of a demon with no eyes. The application was a dream of an imaginary future where she was better, and she deserved chances, and anything in her life other than creeping around the cemeteries of her small seaside town could matter to anyone.
Her mum was so overjoyed when she got the letter but Buffy could barely make herself speak. At the time, she was worried about being away from Angel, which made her feel pretty stupid there on the bathroom floor. She had been thinking he would travel to her on weekends, lurking and waiting for her to come out of classes in the city’s many picturesque and ancient churchyards. If she had really believed that would happen, maybe she was far, far too stupid to be here. Without her intending it to, her head sank down into her hands and she wondered why any of this was worth doing at all.
On the cuff of Buffy’s yummy sushi pyjama top, a salmon roll with a creepy little grin looked up at her and she took a deep breath. She didn’t want to be weepy bathroom floor Buffy. She wanted to be go-get-em-girl power student Buffy. She didn’t spend all that money of Joyce’s on notebooks and silly little highlighters and rollerball pens to give up here, on the floor under some dreadful plumbing.
So she would pick herself up and remind herself of the four things she absolutely knew for sure:
Buffy was the vampire slayer, the one girl in all the world chosen to stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.
Against all the odds, all her teachers’ and probably also Angel’s expectations, Buffy had got into the University of Oxford. She had even received a personal email, in multiple paragraphs, from her new personal tutor telling her how delighted he was to welcome her. His style was too verbose and a bit stilted but he seemed like a nice enough guy, this Professor Giles.
Oxford had forty nine cemeteries in the city, some of which contained famous and potentially demonic famous people.
And when she had used her mother’s janky dial up internet to post on a discussion board for new freshers and ask if anyone else was living on her staircase and wanted to say hi, she got exactly one response, from a sweet girl called Willow.