Disclaimer: Not Mine!
Summary: She was only human...
Spoilers, Timeline: Set after Graduation Day Part 2.
Please review!
A/N The rest of my stories are on hiatus, and may be for some period of time - basically, I've hit a plateau. I'm hoping that writing a few new one-off stories and the like will re-awaken my muse, but to be honest I have no idea when I'm likely to update anything else. I'm extremely sorry to anyone who has been waiting patiently for me to update, and I promise that the second I start to write again I'll let everyone know. Check out my lj (tammy0001 . livejournal . com ) for more.
She never thought she could hate anyone so much, with such… passion. Yes, she felt hatred for others – as beautiful as it would be to say that she never angered, never wanted to cause another harm, never hated, she was only human, after all. Only human… And yet, she had never before thought she could harbour so much hatred towards another being, never thought she could feel nothing inside but a sick twisting of her gut that told her to kill, maim, destroy. She had always been a good girl, a kind girl, if a little ditsy, one who nursed sick baby birds back to health, who helped strangers carry things, who defended those unable to defend themselves.
She never thought she would wish somebody dead.
Oh, sure, she wished that way about the evil things in life – she was a Slayer. Her job was to destroy the forces of darkness, was to bring destruction on those who preyed in the night. She could slay vampires and demons with no thought, for they were inherently evil, and she held no remorse for their destruction. But she never thought, never dreamed, that one day she would want to cause the pain that she defended others from, never thought that she would feel that darkness, that primal instinct to kill, directed at another human being. Never imagined herself feeling a grim satisfaction, even pleasure, at the feeling of taking another's life…
But she was only human, after all. And human nature is, at its very core, that of a savage. We hunt, we kill, we maim, we destroy. We seek revenge on those who wrong us, and we protect our loved ones with a brutal ferocity, hunting down those who cause them pain and wreaking vengeance with all our might. Human nature is dark and light, black and white, with infinite shades of grey in between. And so, it was inevitable. But that didn't mean it was expected.
She scrubbed her hands for hours afterwards. Macbeth had nothing on her. She couldn't seem to get rid of the blood, it stained her hands, stained her skin, stained her soul… She could feel the anger and the shame and the guilt worming their way inside of her, twisting her stomach into knots and making her want to retch. Only human… And yet she had nearly done it. Nearly taken the life of the one person in this world that could ever truly understand her, and yet was as different from her as was possible. A mirror and a polar opposite all in one. The dark to her light, the yin to her yang. The black to her white. And between them they held every shade of grey.
They were only human.