She lets herself be human on Sundays.
The rest of the week, well, not so much. Mondays she's perfect. She's rested, and competent, cold, calculating, icy-cold-perfect in a way that she can't be any other day, because she was human on Sunday.
Tuesdays she does everything that needs to be done with an efficiency any robot would envy. She is cool, aloof, and shrewd, and doesn't falter after stabbing someone in the stomach, and then stepping on their abdomen to wrench out the knife. She turns and walks away, and calmly washes the knife and then changes her shirt, and was it really Sunday only two days ago?
Wednesdays she successfully ignores the whispers. Frigid bitch, psychopath, murderer she hears and ignores and she can, because she has Sundays to be human.
Thursdays are easy. She does what needs to be done and it's been so long since she's felt, and it is still a long, long time until she has to feel again. She is strong, and wonders if it would be hubris to cut off her breast, since it is not a bow she carries. She fights with the same dedication, though, and at the same cost, though she won't think about that because it's not Sunday.
Fridays people won't look her in the eye. Not those that are (were) close to her, not those that like (liked) her, not even those who maybe, just perhaps, once-upon-a-time loved her. No one loves/likes/is close to her now. She never lets them see her on Sundays, because that would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?
Saturdays she's practically gangrene, rotting away inside, which is hidden by precise movements, by the remote expression carved onto her face, but the stone wall she's built is so thin that it will break apart, melt, if even one single drop of water can escape and slide down her face. She's the perfect little soldier, doing what no one else could ever, would ever do, but she does it anyway because she can remind herself, repeat, pray- so close, so close, so, so… because its almost (so close) Sunday and she can make it, she can, she must, and its almost Sunday, almost Sunday, almostsundayalmostsundayalmostsun…
And then she lets herself go. It's Sunday, she tells herself, its Sunday, it's safe now, it's Sunday.
She cries. She cries for the people she has killed, the suffering she caused because it needed to be done, she cries because she is human again and can recognize the parts of her that are so dead that they have fallen off. She listens to songs that make her cry, sad songs that trigger memories she only recalls on Sunday- the death of her parents, when her cat got run over by a car, the people she's loved and lost, all permanently, but God, the ones that ache the worst are the ones that are lost only to her. Not all her losses were caused by death- some were casualties of necessity. If you have friends, then you are human, and she can't afford that.
She watches her favorite movie, the one her parents raised her on, and she repeats the lines and lets herself believe them, even though she knows that it's all a lie, that life's not like that, and she knows that even if true love existed (not for her, never for her) that death would stop it, that death stops everything- it doesn't matter whose (friends, enemies, lovers, strangers, parents, family, oh God, Ron) but by its very nature death ends.
She knows why she fights, why she lives the way she does. It is a fact that she only considers today (because they need her, because no one else can, because no one else should have to, and oh, please, let her save them), because the other days it is not reasons but actions that are required.
She read once, she no longer remembers where, or if it was truth or fiction, that there
was a place where one person from a village accepted all the blame, all the guilt of the town, and suffered for it. She is their scapegoat by her own volition, so that no one else has to be dirty, defiled like this. Every man's death diminishes her, but she is saving the others, so she doesn't mind. Much.
She doesn't mind that she has lost everything she has ever held dear, that when (because, even now, she has to believe that they will) they win, she will be shunned, that no one will ever accept her, that she has forever fallen from grace. And that's how it should be. What she is doing is wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong that on Sundays she is sick, and that tastes better than her own self-loathing. But even that is shoved aside, because she is fighting so that no one will ever have to make these choices again. She is fighting to protect the clean, the innocent, those who have never forgotten what it means to be human.
It is because she has Sundays that she has managed as long as she has. These tempests of emotion are cathartic; sifting through her own conflicting feelings saves her from exploding. She is able to release enough so that, come Monday, she is able to keep from expanding so much that she collapses to the ground.
She knows that she is fighting for a time that will never come (for her, at least; perhaps for the worthy.) She is fighting for Sunday, for when she doesn't need to save up her guilt and grief to release at a carefully selected time (because, even though she knows better, she can't forget that Sundays are God's time, and her one last tie to her past is her refusal to defile the little that remains sacred in her world) because there will be know grief.
She is fighting for a month (a year, a decade, a millennia) of Sundays.
Because Sundays she can be human.