Summers House, Sunnydale, February 2003 (Tuesday Fandom Time)

She'd been looking forward to this field trip, like, a couple of weeks ago. Well, sort of; Kennedy and camping had never really gotten along, and they'd be tenting it in the desert this time, so there wouldn't even be the relatively plush amenities that the Fandom cabins had. Plus going on a vision quest to meet the spirit of the First Slayer wasn't her idea of a really fulfilling experience. But bonding time with "her" girls, plus some more insight on the whole Slayer-y gig? Wasn't all that long ago that it would have beaten the hell out of sitting around the house waiting to figure out what their next move should be.

It was kind of hard to be enthusiastic about that now, since her current rooming situation made not thinking about the complications impossible, which made everything more and more awkward, to the point that she couldn't buckle down and freaking think half the time. So that was stupid, and it made her annoyed at herself, which led to some seriously stupid screwups during training.

So never mind the field trip; she had her own mission. ( Personal thing, yeah, but what good was she going to be if she couldn't get focused? )

[[nfi/nfb/ooc-okay as per usual; some discussion of past npc death. preplayed with the spectacular wesleynotponcy as notagoodwatcher. 1 of 2 today, and yes, i am overhauling "the killer in me" rather a bit. rather. this is pretty much all made up for the purpose of saying this is not gonna go as in canon, though a couple of canon bits from the episode were the basis for it.]]

One of Sunnydale's Twelve Cemeteries, February 2003 (A Couple of Hours Later/Tuesday Fandom Time)

The sun still shone brightly in a clear sky in this town, impending apocalypse notwithstanding. The grass was still green, a bird still trilled a carefree melody in a nearby tree, a breeze still fluttered her collar lightly.

That didn't make this any easier to do. Actually, it had the opposite effect.

The cemetery-- a specific one of Sunnydale's dozen-- looked different by daylight; that wasn't a surprise. The trippy part was that this midday walk, more than any monster she'd ever fought in Fandom or any horrific sight she'd ever seen including the carnage in Agio, made her want to turn and run. Vampires and demons she could handle; she was sure of that now. This was something completely different. No running, though. She wasn't going to end up like Annabelle, running right toward the thing that terrified her so much, and maybe this wasn't a Turok-Han but Kennedy had never done regret so metaphorically it was pretty much the same.

Kennedy made her way through the older part of the cemetery toward the newer plots; around an ornate obelisk and over a crushed floral wreath, scanning the headstones ( until she spotted what she'd come for and walked toward it with more uncertainty in every line of her bearing than she'd ever displayed in her life. )

( 'Okay, beyond awkward,' Willow said... )

[[here there be tl;dr and woe and oh god i am sorry. nfi/nfb/ooc-okay, i still feel like apologizing for this, the usual drill. look, i'm not gonna lie, i've had the first part of this written up in drafts for like two years already. preplayed with the incomparable willbedone, and completely off-script, yes, but part of my remix of btvs 7x13, "the killer in me." also this song is, i swear to god, freakishly perfect for this.]]