Small Town, Small Fish
Faithtastic

Two hours to go.

Cordelia glanced at her fake Gucci watch for the fifteenth time in as many minutes. Two hours before she boarded the Greyhound bus and got out of Sunnydale for good, leaving behind almost-friends, dead classmates, and the tattered shreds of her once cherished reputation.

Not that it mattered. They were small town, small pond, and she was destined for greater things. She was going to be an actress and she was going to find her fortune in LA. Or at least lose herself in the city where nobody cared that she'd dated maxi-loser Xander Harris, that her father was a tax fraud, and that her mother was too wrapped up in her own fading beauty to notice anything.

She'd survived her high school Graduation. Literally. She'd lost count of the classmates who hadn't. Flipping through the yearbook made her tearful for all the wrong reasons. Seeing all those faces, the Prom pictures, field trip snapshots. She barely knew most of those who'd been slaughtered; she'd picked on a lot of them because they didn't wear the right clothes, or hung in the wrong crowds, or whatever. Stupid, petty reasons, just so that she could feel superior.

But she couldn't feel guilty just for the simple fact of being alive. Blind luck had chosen her and for that she was grateful. And she wished Buffy, Oz, Giles, and even Xander and Willow all the best but she really couldn't be around here anymore. Waiting to be picked off by some skanky vampire or a demon so ugly only its mother could love it. That was not the life for Cordelia Chase. Thanks to Daddy dearest, college wasn't an option.

All that left was leaving town. It was time to rely on the only person she could, to rely on the thing that had always got her through - her looks.

LA was going to be all parties and pretty boys, valet parking and premieres, glitz and glamour, and Sunnydale would be nothing but a speck in her memory.

She was going to be a star.

Cordelia. Alive. Watch.