Note: um, vikingprincess gave me a very funny prompt and it somehow came out all serious and depressing *g* but I've never really written Riley, so that's cool. I'm not as familiar with Riley canon as I could be, so it's possible I've botched his backstory. but I think it was just implied he had a happy family life, and that's still possible within this context so....yeah I dunno. haha. it's set during Bs5, when he's all disillusioned and depressed.

the first sentence is vikingprincess's prompt, though I've modified the tense.

Riley had never had any intention of spending the rest of his life as a chicken sexer.

He’d tried to explain this to Graham once, and had ended up the butt, so to speak, of endless chicken-fucker jokes for the next six weeks. Then again, he wasn’t sure what else he had expected from a guy who owned every season of South Park.

He had left Iowa to escape a life-long career in poultry science. Chicken sexing was most definitely in his future. After all, Iowa produced 13% of the country’s eggs.

These were the types of things they taught you in Iowa public schools.

He’d spent his first few years out of high school working for ConAgra. Not as a chicken sexer—that was a career aspiration. He handled thousands of chicks a day. There was no pride to his work, and he came home every day reeking of bird shit.

The female chicks got tossed back into circulation to become layers, and the males…well, the males were thrown into the meat grinder alive.

Riley could sympathize. He sometimes felt he would turn out that way if he stayed.

So he had left Iowa. Joined up to be all that he could be. And when he’d been hand-picked for a special operation, put through rigorous training, and made an officer—Maggie Walsh’s right-hand man—Riley thought he had finally found what he was looking for. That he was doing something important with his life, worthy of respect.

He'd been so blind.

But then he’d met Buffy, and his life had turned upside-down. And he realized he was closer to his roots than he thought. It turned out he was disposable, as big a nobody as he was always destined to be. The demons he had hunted were all just dumb animals, but he’d been tossing them into the meat grinder for years. And at the end of the day, he stunk of it.

No wonder Buffy didn’t love him.