Empty

Rating: K+

Genre: Angst

Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and produced by Mutant Enemy and 20th Century Fox. All rights remain with the copyright holders and no infringement is intended. This work is not for profit.

A/N: I was trying to get into the mind of Buffy in Season 6. It's a dark and depressing place!

I wake, I dress, I make Dawn breakfast, I see her off to school, I go to work, I go home, I talk to my friends, I slay vampires.

It means nothing.

The slaying, my sister, my friends, my life. None of it matters. I don't even know if this is real, this too-loud, too-bright, too-harsh world that I have come to. It all seems wrong, alien, cruel.

Before, there was peace, there was love, there was happiness. Now there is nothing - just a vast empty space within me. I see, I hear, I touch, but I do not feel. They say I am alive again. So why am I still dead inside?

My friends want me to be happy. They care about me. I want to care too, but I can't. So I play the part, I put on the Buffy mask to hide the emptiness, and I pretend it's all OK.

It's not.

Sometimes I think this is a nightmare and I will wake up. But I never do. And sometimes I think that this must be hell. Maybe that's where I am meant to be. I must have done something terrible to deserve this. I wonder what it was.

Is it because I can't feel - is that why I was thrown out of heaven? What kind of person can't love, can't cry, can't laugh? I know it's wrong. I'm wrong.

I am what I have always despised - a dead, unfeeling thing. So I guess I do deserve to be in hell after all. A part of me wants to lie in the dark and accept my punishment.

Another part still reaches out, searching for what I used to be, clinging to the illusion of real life. It seeks for something that can make me feel alive.

And here, if I needed it, is the proof of my wrongness. For there is one thing that can make me feel - and that thing is as dead and unfeeling as I am.

I should shun his company, should turn towards the light, but I don't. I crave what he can give me and I am too weak to resist. For a moment I can forget what I am. I imagine that I am alive again.

Then I remember and I know... I know why I deserve to be in this hell. And that knowledge is a part of this hell. So my crime becomes my punishment.

Locked in a never ending circle, I watch myself descend further into the mire. I watch as he descends with me, our mutual destruction assured.

And it means nothing.