There are seven of us left in this class, rattling around in a room built to hold twenty. Thirty-five per cent, that sounds about right. Take one hundred people, put them in Sunnydale, and expect round about thirty-five of them to live.
Nothing wrong with my math skills, huh?
Don't know so much about Hamlet, though, so this essay's going to be kinda short. That's probably just as well. Write down some shit - anything will do, they never read it anyway - then get the fuck out of here. Get back to Giles' and start planning our next raid. Shakespeare, I don't have a clue about. Ask me about vampires, though, and we're talking. Giles taught me all he knew, and that subject I'm a world-class fucking expert on. Heh. World-class fucking. Giles pretty much taught me all he knew on that subject, too.
Yeah, okay, I watched too much Beavis & Butthead when I was a kid. Sue me. Chances are I'll be dead before we ever get to see each other in court.
So; how do I fuck thee? Let me count the ways. Oh, wait - that wasn't Shakespeare, was it? Oh well. Whatever.
Fuck: best word the English language ever produced. Apparently it started off as an abbreviation of 'For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge' did you know that? Cool, huh?
The really good thing about fuck is that it's a man for all seasons: versatile is its middle name. Let's start with the most common - well, around these parts, anyway - version: exclamation of despair. As in 'Oh fuck, this is bad.' Don't know when Hamlet might have said it, so let me use an illustration from the yet-to-be-written masterpiece 'Xander' instead.
Our hero's first introduction to the wonderful world of vampires: his best bud, Jesse, comes knocking to see if he wants to come out and play. Not so unusual in itself, that's been happening since they were about five years old. No, the difference this time is that Jesse is knocking on the first floor window instead of the door, and the kind of play he has in mind has less to do with skateboards and a lot more to do with blood. Jesse has new toys to play with now; shiny yellow eyes and nice sharp teeth.
Hence: oh fuck, this is bad.
Accurate assessment of the situation there, young Harris. Go to the top of the class.
Second: 'fuck this shit'. In Sunnydale, usually followed by 'I'm out of here.' If you've got any brains. Unfortunately, yours truly wasn't at the front of the queue when they were being handed out. Not that I really think my parents were either, but obviously whatever they did get was enough to let them realise that Sunnydale isn't the best kind of place to raise healthy, happy teenagers in. So they decided to just skip the whole raising part altogether. Can't say I care. It's kinda cool having the house to myself. And at least it doesn't smell so bad any more.
Of course, I'm not the only one challenged in the mental department: Oz and Giles have plenty of brains between them, and they're still here. But then Giles does get hit on the head a lot. That's got to have some kind of effect. Might even explain what he's doing with me. I'm not exactly what you might call a catch, you know? I'm a skinny little runt with more scars than skin and a sense of humour that's - well, I think corroded is the best offer I've had. Giles deserves better than me, a lot better. He's the kind of guy who should have had a destiny. Should have been noble and dignified and worshipped by all the cute little geek kids. Should have spent his time teaching those kids, not cutting the heads off their abandoned bodies.
Yeah, well. Lot of things that should be, aren't. Welcome to life in Sunnydale.
Oh, and Oz? That fucker's just always been crazy.
Which leads me nicely to the third on the list: 'fucked-up'. Applicable equally to people and situations. I'm fucked-up, you're fucked-up, we're fucked-up, this is fucked-up.
Any questions?
Fourth: 'fuck you'. Expression of defiance and/or anger. Not really effective on vamps though, since they tend to treat it as an offer. And you really, really, don't want them to take you up on it. Trust me. In that kind of situation, you go through the first four versions of our trusty friend 'fuck' pretty damn quickly.
Back to our epic 'Xander' for examples:
Our hero, and you will remember that we've established he's not exactly the sharpest tool in the box, has at this stage in the story decided to go rescue his friend Willow from their friendly neighbourhood vamp raiding party. Okay, yeah, the boy's an idiot, but he's got this thing in his head that all his friends are disappearing around him and he should try to do something about it. So off he goes, armed with a washing up bottle filled with holy water, and a stake he's made out of some kind of deckchair thing he found lying around.
By now, there are certain places in town that have got a kind of 'no-go' rep; the Bronze being number one on the list. So of course, that's where our intrepid adventurer heads to.
He bursts in, saves the day and the girl, and they all ride off into the sunset together to live happily ever after. Right?
Yeah, in the Disney version. The real one's a bit different.
In the real one he does the bursting in part okay, but it all goes downhill after that. See, it turns out that he's already too late to save either the day or the girl. The sun's set and the girl's been vamped, and it was game over long before he got there. Story of his life, really.
"Oh fuck," he says to himself. "This is bad."
But it's not all bad - he gets to have a touching reunion scene with his ol' best bud Jesse. And 'touching' really is the operative word there. Fuck this shit, he thinks, but it's just a bit too late for that. They've got him pinned down, and he sure as hell isn't getting out of there any time soon.
So our hero is now at the mercy of some seriously fucked-up villains. "Fuck you," he says, because he doesn't want to die looking like the coward that he is. A bit of deathbed - or deathfloor, really - bravado always goes down well in the movies.
But in the movies someone always says 'cut'. Well the vamps say that too, they just don't usually mean it the same way.
They like him, you see, and they don't just want to kill him. They want to play with him first. So they strip him, and he pisses himself with fear but they don't really seem to care. They hose him down, and they slap him around a little - not too much, they want him conscious, it's no fun otherwise - and then they -
What? Go on, take a guess.
Yep, they fuck him. Did you get it? Bet you did.
He regains consciousness just in time for use number five: Thank fuck for that. One of the rarer positive uses - an expression of gratitude.
In this instance, gratitude for a rescue operation. A proper one. Giles and Oz and Larry, and some other guys who didn't make it out, whose names he never even knew. They drove the vamps back just long enough to cut him down, bundle him up and get him into the waiting van. Oz gunned it, and they brought him - or, what was left of him - back to Giles'.
Did you wonder why it was that I never left town after my folks did? There's your answer. What happened to me - well, you don't leave something like that behind. Wherever you go, you don't ever leave that behind.
So I stayed, and learned to fight. Not to kill, because those things don't deserve the dignity of that word. To exterminate. That's what you do to vermin. The vamps call us the White Hats, but to me we'll always be The Exterminators. You can take the boy out of the comics, but … well, you know how that one goes.
We don't let each other out of sight, if we can help it. Especially after the sun's gone down. It leads to some interesting evenings, but hey. These are interesting times, after all.
Which brings me to use number six; the rather versatile 'fuck me'. This can be used to signify surprise ('well, fuck me if that wasn't Principal Snyder's rotting corpse I trod in there.") or disbelief ("Fuck me! You mean they're finally sending a slayer to help us out here?") or genuine sexual need ("Fuck me. Now.")
I say that a lot. To Oz, to Larry, to Nancy sometimes. Mostly though, I say it to Giles. Why? Well, I could tell you a lot of stuff about how he gets it - gets me - and how many times he's saved my life. I could tell you about how badly his world has been ripped apart, and how he needs some kind of connection - any kind, just to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but then that would imply I had some kind of depth to me, wouldn't it? Truth is - well, hello? Have you looked at him? Dude's hot, man.
So we fuck, and 'fuck me' becomes 'fuck you'. Fuck you, Willow, you didn't beat me. Fuck you, Jesse, you didn't break me. I'm still here, I'm still alive, and when Giles puts his cock in me he does it because we are alive. Because we can feel and we can give each other pleasure in ways that you will never understand. When he uses his mouth on me he does it because he wants to give, not take away.
I fuck him because it defies you. It's a stand against everything you're trying to do, everything you are, because it's a celebration of life. And - fuck it - yeah, it's a celebration of love, too. Anyone got a problem with that? If so, let me introduce you to our heavyweight champion, my alltime favourite, number seven:
Fuck off.
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