Introduction
Season:
First | Second | Third | Fourth | Fifth | Sixth | Seventh
Other Bodies | Episodes | Dramatis Personae
Ramblings | Links |
The SETI Slayers | Fanfic
| Fear, Itself | Wild at Heart |
Buffy battles a vampire in a Sunnydale cemetery. Parker sees her doing it. She warns him to stay out of the way while she continues to fight.
Two more vampires show up, grab Parker and start to drag him away. Buffy runs after Parker, and knocks the vampires away from him with a flying double kick. She quickly dusts the three vampires.
Parker is grateful for the rescue. “Buffy, I don’t know what to say. After how I’ve treated you, and now I owe you my life.”
“It’s nothing,” says Buffy.
“It’s everything,” says Parker. “You’re everything, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get you to forgive me. Do you think one day you might—”
“No!” giggles a girl, and Buffy comes out of her daydream in Professor Walsh’s psychology class. The giggling girl is sitting a couple of rows ahead of her with Parker.
Professor Walsh is lecturing on Freud’s theory of the id, ego and super ego. “These are the things we want. Simple things. Comfort, sex, shelter, food. We always want them and we want them all the time. The id doesn’t learn. It doesn’t grow up. It has the ego telling it what it can’t have and it has the superego telling it what it should want. But the id works solely out of the pleasure principle. It wants. Whatever social skills we’ve learned, however much we’ve evolved, the pleasure principle is at work in all of us. So, how does this conflict with the ego manifest itself in the psyche? What do we do when we can’t have what we want?”
Buffy slips back into her daydream. This time after she dusts the vampires Parker is there with flowers, and a pint of Häagen Dazs icecream.
Xander meets Buffy and Willow in an outdoor cafe on campus. Buffy is still looking miserable. He flicks a lighter in front of her. “Rough day?” Buffy just looks at it. “Come on Buff. Be a lonely drunk.” He flicks his lighter again. “Rough day?”
“Stop flicking at me,” says Buffy.
“Work with me here,” says Xander. “I’m finally an essential part of your collegy life. No more looking down on the townie. I’m the new bartender over at the pub. Got my lighter, my rag, my empathy face.”
Willow asks if Xander isn’t a little young to be a bartender. Xander pulls his ID from his shirt pocket and shows it to her. Willow looks at the picture of Xander on it, complete with a fake mustache. “I don’t believe this is entirely on the up and up.”
“What gives it away?” asks Xander.
“Looking at it.”
Xander quickly pockets the ID and tells her it doesn’t matter. He’s the one who will be asking to see people’s IDs now.
Buffy still isn’t in the mood to tell Xander her pretend problems, but Willow is willing to play along with him. “I’m pregnant by my stepbrother who’d rather be with my best friend who’s left me with no place to live. No food except this bottle of wild turkey which I drank all up.” Xander gives her a blank look. “That was me being tanked and friendless for you.”
“Gets my Oscar nod,” says Xander.
Buffy and Willow have to leave for class. Xander invites them to drop by at the pub to see him that night, but Willow has a date with Oz at the Bronze.
Buffy and Willow get up from their table. Xander follows along behind them. Buffy is still hoping that Parker is going to come back to her. “Maybe he’s just having trouble dealing. I mean, don’t guys sometimes put the girl they really, really like inside these deep little brain fantasy bubbles where everything’s perfect? They do that right? Maybe I’m in his bubble and then pretty soon he’s going to realize that he wants more than just Bubble Buffy and he’ll pop me out and we’ll go to dinner and it could happen right?”
Willow thinks that Parker is just no good. Buffy should give up on him. “There are men, better men, wherein the mind is stronger than the penis.”
“Pfft! Nothing can defeat the penis!” shouts Xander. Buffy and Willow give him a look. He looks around to see if anyone else noticed. “Too loud, very unseemly.”
Buffy and Willow go back to ignoring him. Buffy is still worrying about Parker. “He can be really sweet. I’m telling you I think he had intimacy problems because of the death of his father.”
Willow isn’t interested. “You got troubles, tell em to the bartender.”
“That’s right,” says Xander. “Cause the bartender’s always ready to listen.”
Xander’s first evening on the job isn’t going too well. He’s having problems keeping up with all the orders. Buffy comes in and looks around for him. She spots Parker, who’s there with the girl he was talking to in class. Buffy is so distracted by Parker, that she runs into Riley, causing him to spill his drink on himself. Fortunately it’s just water.
Riley doesn’t seem to mind much while Buffy apologises. She tells him that she was distracted by Parker.
“Right, Parker and his latest conquest,” says Riley. “You know, that boy should have his attention span checked.”
“He’s kind of a girl chaser, huh?” says Buffy.
“Sets ’em up and knocks ’em down,” says Riley. “I guess maybe I’m old fashioned, but my father always says if you want to be a gentleman—” He notices that Buffy isn’t paying attention. “You don’t even care what my father says.”
Buffy apologises for her distraction. Riley tells her that he has some people to meet, and goes.
Buffy watches Parker start kissing the girl he’s with.
Things have slowed down a bit, and Xander tries to start a conversation with a pretty girl who’s sitting talking to her friend at the bar. It goes well until another guy—Colm—interrupts. He just ignores Xander and starts talking with the girl himself. Xander is a little upset by this but Colm is unconcerned with Xander. Colm thinks that he and his friends are the future of the country, while Xander is just a bartender. Colm is a pretentious ass. He orders a pitcher of Black Frost beer, and four glasses for him and his friends. Xander starts to insist on seeing some ID first, but the bar owner—Jack—orders him to just give the guy the beer.
Xander puts Colm’s money into the cash register, and spots Buffy sitting nearby. She is not happy. She has finally figured out that Parker’s problem with intimacy is that he can’t get enough of it. “If he were tied and gagged and left in a cave that vampires happen to frequent it wouldn’t really be like I killed him really?” she asks. She’s beginning to think that she’s a slut and an idiot.
Xander tries to tell Buffy otherwise, but his boss orders him back to work. “Do not go anywhere!” Xander orders Buffy, while he heads back to work.
Buffy starts to leave, but runs into a guy—Roy—and dumps his beer on him. Roy doesn’t mind either. He invites Buffy to join him and his friends—Colm, Hunt and Kip—for some beer. Buffy accepts.
Willow and Oz are at the Bronze. Willow tells Oz that she has a copy of her psych notes for him, since he missed the lecture today.
Oz suddenly gets a strange feeling, as the band playing that night begins to perform. Their lead singer comes out on the stage. It’s the girl who had attracted Oz’s attention when he saw her a couple of weeks earlier on campus.
Oz seems to be fascinated by this girl as she sings, and Willow notices his distraction. She asks him if he knows her. Oz doesn’t really. He knows her name is Veruca, and her drummer is a friend of his, but this is the first time he has heard the band play. Oz continues to watch, entranced.
Back at the pub, the guys have got Buffy chugging beer. She drains her glass, and burps.
Colm refills Buffy’s glass. “The thing that the modern day pundits fail to realize is that all the socio-economic and psychological problems inherent in modern society can be solved by the judicious application of way too much beer.”
“My mother always said that beer was evil,” says Buffy.
“Evil. Good. These are moral absolutes that predate the fermentation of malt and fine hops. You see…” Colm loses track of his thought. “Wait where was I?”
Buffy isn’t sure, and Kip tries to bring Thomas Aquinas into the conversation. The other three guys shout him down. They don’t want Kip to get started on him again.
Colm remembers where he was. “Beer. Had the earliest morality developed under the influence of beer there would be no good or evil. There would just be kinda nice and pretty cool. Everything would be different.”
“You guys really like to hear yourselves speak don’t you?” asks Buffy.
They guys think they’re losing Buffy, and start asking her what she likes.
Buffy holds up her glass. “Well, I don’t hate this for a start.”
Xander is keeping a worried eye on Buffy from behind the bar.
Willow returns to their room from the showers next morning, muttering to herself about Veruca. Oz and Veruca had talked after the band had finished performing, and Veruca had dismissed Willow as a groupie. “Buffy, have you heard of this Veruca chick?” she asks. “Dresses like Faith, voice like an albatross?”
Buffy doesn’t seem to hear the question. She’s still in her pyjamas and is fascinated by her TV. Buffy’s brain does not seem to be working this morning. “I’m suffering the afterness of a bad night of…badness.”
This worries Willow. “You didn’t. Not with Parker again?”
“No,” says Buffy, “with four really smart guys.”
This worries Willow even more.
“I went to see Xander,” says Buffy, “and then I saw Parker, and then came…beer.”
“And then group sex?”
“Pffft, gutter face. No.” Buffy hits Willow on the shoulder a little too forcefully. “Just lots and lots of beer. It’s nice. Foamy. Comforting. It’s…beer.”
Willow greets this news with little relief. She doesn’t like the idea of Buffy drowning her sorrows, but it’s time for them to go to class. Buffy gets up and heads for the door. Willow stops her. It would be a good idea for Buffy to get dressed first.
Buffy is still pretty out of it in psych class. Willow is starting to get more worried about her.
When the lecture ends Buffy sees a girl in the row in front of her pull a sandwich out of her bag and start to eat it. Buffy’s hungry, so she just reaches forward and takes the sandwich for herself.
“Buffy, are you okay?” asks Willow.
“Sure,” says Buffy, with a mouth full of sandwich. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
In the back room of the campus pub a complicated collection of chemical apparatus drips its product into a barrel of Black Frost beer.
Buffy goes back to the pub that evening to join her new friends for another night of beer. The quality of their conversation has dropped considerably. They are mostly saying “You stupid,” and pushing one another around.
Xander watches them, getting more concerned about Buffy. He’s so worried by her that when a pretty girl at the bar starts telling him how bad her day has been, and asks for a light for her cigarette, he just shows her the “No smoking” sign.
Colm leans close to Buffy. She sniffs at him. “Smelly head!” She shoves him away.
Colm retaliates by pushing Roy off his chair. They all laugh.
Oz catches up with Willow as she is heading out of her room. He hadn’t been able to get her on the phone, she’d been at the library. He asks her if she wants to go to the Bronze with him again. He’s been asked to sit in with Veruca’s band, Shy.
“Two Veruca shows in two nights?” asks Willow. “Sure you want to share your groupie?” She tells Oz she can’t come. She’s on her way back to the library for more studying.
The pub has pretty much emptied out—except for Buffy and her new friends—who are still calling each other stupid. Xander goes over to the jukebox and turns it on.
Buffy jumps up from the table, and runs over to the jukebox. She is delighted by the singing box. She climbs up onto it as she listens to it. Xander tells her it’s time for her to go home.
Buffy hits the juke box. “Want more singing. Want more beer!”
“No, I’ve cut you off,” says Xander.
Buffy thinks about that for a couple of seconds. “Did it hurt?”
Xander has had quite enough. He lifts Buffy off the jukebox starts to carry her toward the door. “Out you go!”
Buffy doesn’t want to go. “No! Want beer. Like beer. Beer good!”
“Beer bad!” Xander drags Buffy toward the door. “Bad bad beer! What the hell am I saying? Buffy, go home, and go to bed.”
“Say bye!”
“Bye!” Xander gives Buffy a final shove toward the door.
“Bye,” says Buffy. She walks out the door.
Back at their table, Colm looks around in confusion. “Hey? Where girl go?”
Willow enters the Grotto, a coffee shop located in the basement of a building near the campus. It’s nearly deserted too, except for Parker and a couple of other people. Parker is sitting alone at a table studying. Willow decides to give Parker a piece of her mind.
Parker doesn’t seem to get what Willow is complaining about. He feeds Willow the same line he had given Buffy about how he thought she understood that there was no real relationship between them. He thought she knew it was just sex. He’s sorry that Buffy misunderstood and is hurting because of it, but there is nothing he can do about that. “I’m impressed that you care so much about her. You’re a good friend.”
Colm, Roy, Hunt, and Kip have quit talking altogether. They just grunt and slap at one another. Roy starts to pull off his shirt, but he’s having trouble figuring out how to do it. Colm gets up and heads for the bathroom.
It’s closing time, and Xander comes by to settle up the bill and toss them out. Hunt pulls a wad of bills from his pocket and tosses it on the table. Xander pulls out enough to cover the bill, and then asks how much the tip should be. This is much too complicated a question for them, so Roy just pushes the entire pile of money at Xander.
Some crashing noises start to come from the bathroom. They worry Xander, and he heads for it to make sure Colm is okay. Colm breaks out through the door before he gets there. He has been transformed into a neanderthal. He knocks Xander to the floor.
Roy, Hunt, and Kip are scared by what they see, enough that they actually manage to string a few words together into sentences, but then they start to transform too. Xander wakes up on the floor surrounded by cavemen.
Xander gets to his feet, and the four cavemen back him up against the wall. He pulls his lighter from his pocket, and flicks it under Colm’s nose. He backs off a bit.
Colm watches the flame. “Fire bad!” Then after a few seconds he starts to lose his fear. “Fire pretty!”
This will not do for Xander. “Fire angry!” He advances toward them, holding the lighter out in front of him. The four caveguys back down, and Xander chases them out the door, and locks it behind them.
Xander rushes into the pub’s back room to tell Jack what just happened.
Jack isn’t concerned. “They had it coming. I’ve been taking abuse from snot nosed kids for twenty years. I mean they’re always coming in here with their snotty attitudes, drinking their fruity little microbrews, and spouting out some philosophy like it means a damn thing. Thinking they’re different than us.”
“They are now!” says Xander.
The four cave guys run through the campus. They stop by a tree, and Hunt tries eating some of its leaves. Colm starts to climb the tree.
The branch Colm is standing on breaks, and he falls out of the tree. Roy stands over him laughing. Colm gets to his feet, breaks off a piece of the broken tree branch and bashes Roy over the head with it. It’s his turn to laugh now, and Kip and Hunt join in.
“They ain’t,” says Jack. “That’s the great thing about beer. It makes all men the same.”
“Why are we talking about beer? The guys are—” Xander figures it out. “The beer.”
“Neat huh? My brother-in-law’s a warlock. He showed me how to do it.”
“No! No neat. I served them that beer. I served Buffy that beer.” Xander starts to leave, but turns back to Jack. “How much beer would you say a person would need to consume before they seriously started questing for fire?”
“Relax,” says Jack. “It will wear off in a day or so.”
“In a day or so someone could get killed!” Xander heads out the door. A couple of seconds later he comes back. “You’re a bad, bad man.” He goes.
The caveguys run through the UCSunnydale campus. They’ve all armed themselves with tree branch clubs. They dump over a trash can, and start tossing the garbage around.
Kip becomes fascinated by the traffic driving by on the street. He wanders out into the road. One car narrowly avoids hitting him, but a second does. It knocks him to the ground. The other caveguys gather round Kip, and the boy who was driving the car gets out to see if Kip’s okay. The caveguys start shouting and waving their clubs at him, and the boy turns to run. The caveguys attack the car. They beat on the hood, and smash its windows with their clubs.
Colm stops attacking the car, and sniffs at the air. He smells something he likes. He looks around and sees a couple of girls walking along the sidewalk. They see him, and they start to run. Colm, Roy and Hunt chase them, leaving Kip still lying in the street.
Xander arrives at Buffy’s dorm with Giles. He tells Giles that he cut Buffy off before the others, so she may not have reverted all the way to caveperson status. Giles does not approve of Xander having served Buffy any beer at all.
“Well excuse Mr. ‘I spent the sixties in an electric Kool-Aid funky Satan groove.’” says Xander.
“It was the early seventies and you should know better,” says Giles.
They enter Buffy’s room. They find her there drawing stick figures on her wall with lipstick, but at least she still looks human. She hits at the largest of the pictures with her palm. “Parker bad!”
Willow and Parker have shifted to a couple of more comfortable chairs while Parker tells her about himself. “I have yet to find a girl that I can just…you know, sit with. Feeling totally at ease, spewing whatever is on my mind, or even sit with comfortably in silence. Willow, can I tell you something kind of private?”
“Okay.” Willow smiles. “I mean I feel you’ve shown me a perspective I hadn’t really thought much about before. What is it you wanted to tell me?”
“Just…” Parker leans forward and puts his hand on hers, “that I’ve enjoyed talking with you, here, tonight.”
“Me too. I mean with you,” says Willow. “You know, I’m wondering something…about you.”
“What?”
“Just how gullible do you think I am?”
Willow totally has Parker’s number. He will do and say anything to get to jump a girl’s bones. “It’s all about the sex. Find a woman, drag her to your den. Do whatever is necessary, just as long as you get the sex! I tell you men haven’t changed since the dawn of time!”
Colm, Roy and Hunt come crashing into the Grotto, dragging one of the girls they caught with them, and carrying the other.
“See!” says Willow.
Roy comes running forward and bashes her and Parker in the head with his club.
Buffy spins around on her desk chair while Xander and Giles watch her. Giles thinks it’s fascinating. Buffy falls off her chair, and pushes it away. She turns to her TV. She wants to see the pretty pictures, but she can’t figure out how to turn it on.
Giles thinks that Buffy doesn’t seem to be in any immediate danger. He suggests that Xander stays with her until she comes down.
Buffy’s attention is attracted to Xander. She walks up to him. “Boy smell nice.” She starts to nuzzle him.
Giles thinks that it might be a better idea just to leave Buffy alone while she recovers, and they can both go look for the others. Xander tells him that Jack said the beer should wear off in a day or so.
Mentioning beer was a mistake. Buffy wants more beer. Giles tells her that she can’t have any.
Buffy turns and glares at Giles. “Want. Beer.”
“Giles, don’t make Caveslayer unhappy,” warns Xander.
Buffy pounds her chest. “Buffy strong! Buffy get beer!”
“Buffy get—” Giles doesn’t finish. Buffy kicks him, pushes Xander aside and runs from the room. Xander pauses to check on Giles before he goes after Buffy. When he gets into the hallway there’s no sign of her. He and Giles split up to search for her.
The caveguys have built a barricade of broken furniture across the entrance to the Grotto, and they have made themselves a little fire.
Roy kneels beside the unconscious Willow. “Woman! Mine!” He gets to his feet and hoots.
“Woman!” hoots Colm.
The caveguys all start to hoot, and dance around the Grotto. They don’t notice when their fire begins to spread.
Roy sees some donuts behind a glass counter top, but he can’t figure out what’s blocking his hand from reaching them. He turns to the others and finally notices the spreading fire. It has totally blocked off their escape from the Grotto.
Xander catches up with Buffy on the campus. She isn’t having any luck finding more beer. He tries to get her to come along with him, but she starts to get angry again.
“Hey, hey, we’re good. Remember the boy. Boy smell nice yeah?” Xander holds his arm out for her to sniff. “Is there any part of Buffy still in there?”
Buffy sniffs at the air, but it isn’t Xander she is smelling this time.
Xander turns and sees the smoke from the fire at the Grotto. “Oh no!”
“Fire bad!” says Buffy, and runs toward it.
Buffy arrives at the Grotto, runs in, and down the stairs. She can’t get past the flames. She looks around and spots a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. She goes and gets it, but wonders what she’s supposed to do with it. She seems to know that this device will put out fires, but she has no idea of how to use it. After fumbling with it for a few seconds, she tosses it into the flames. She looks around for something else.
Buffy spots Willow through the flames, still lying on the floor unconscious. A little thing like a fire isn’t going to keep her from her friend, so she leaps across the flames.
Xander arrives outside the Grotto. He tries to follow Buffy inside. He can’t see anything through the smoke and flames, and is driven back outside. “Where the hell’s Giles?”
Giles is describing Buffy to a guy in the dorm. “Blonde, um, about this tall.” He holds out his hand at shoulder height. “Walks with a sort of a sideways limp.”
Buffy looks around for a way out. She spots a window high up on the wall opposite the flames. She jumps up, grabs some overhead pipes, and uses them to swing herself up to the window and knock it open. She drops back down to get Willow.
The caveguys see the open window, and push a bookcase underneath it, making themselves a ladder to climb out. The two girls they’d dragged in follow them.
Buffy picks up Willow and carries her up to the window. Xander is on the other side and helps Willow out.
Buffy goes back for Parker. He’s just waking up when she gets back to him. Buffy looks around and sees one of the discarded tree branch clubs. She picks it up.
“Oh god, help me!” coughs Parker. “I can’t breath. Buffy, what do we do?”
Buffy bops Parker with her club, and knocks him out again. She picks him up, and heads for the window.
The Sunnydale Fire department cleans up after the fire. Buffy is sitting on a bench nearby with Willow, still holding her club. “Buffy tired.”
“Was there a lessen in all this?” asks Xander. “What have we learned about beer?”
“Foamy!” says Buffy.
Xander accepts that.
Buffy walks over to the van in which Xander has locked the three caveguys. He doesn’t know who it belongs to. It was just there, and unlocked.
Buffy looks in at the caveguys. Parker walks up to her. “Buffy, I don’t know how to say this. I’m sorry for how I treated you before, it was wrong of me, and…I’m sorry. You were great tonight really. I may not deserve this, but do you think you could forgive me?”
Buffy bops Parker on the head with her club.