THE GREAT CEREAL MASTER-MIND

BY AMAND-R (DEPARSONS@EARTHLINK.NET)

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..

AUTHORS NOTES: 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 Slap & Tickle – Amand-r’s site

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The Great Cereal Master-Mind

by Amand-r

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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:

Buffy: AppleJacks. 2. Anya: Special K. 3. Willow: Muselix. 4. Spike: Nothing, but you put the bowl there for symmetry. 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. Dawn: Lucky Charms. They're stale, because she's the only one who eats them, but she doesn't seem to care. 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:

Kennedy: a banana, unpeeled, and a plum. Molly: AppleJacks. Imitate the slayer in all ways. 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. Nora: Cheerios Zoe: Cheerios, but with three spoonfuls of instant coffee added. Amanda: Two Nature's Way granola bars, which she will pour milk over and stab repeatedly with her spoon until she likes the consistency. 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.

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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

Sorry for the style. Andrew is fun, but manic. I think. I also imagine that Andrew would think this song is about him, but it's soooooooo not.

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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
(Organ solo)
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

REAL END.