Suffocation
by Drusilla


She can feel the earth sighing beneath her and the night is calm. Lights twinkle from windows and lamps and stars, from reflections in the road still wet from rain. Tonight like all nights, there will be victims who must be saved. She'll stand as a shadow not unlike a grim reaper, only her eyes will be closed and her fists clenched tight. She won't need the famed scythe. She can die on her own with every breath she pretends to take.


And she breathes deeply. Because she still loves this place. She cannot remember when she wasn't a part of the cycle that is life here, when she wasn't running after or away from some demon, when she didn't have magic as a part of her. She can't imagine it anymore. She can't remember the days when her problems were composed of Xander and Xander alone.


But she can remember what it feels like to kill a man.


She didn't feel it then. She didn't feel the disgust that rolls inside her today. She didn't taste the stench of the *something* that engulfed her, because she was *consumed* then. Hate and anger and revenge and power and everything that shouldn't be mixed, they all found their ways somehow underneath her own electricity. Today she wavers and her teeth come together in sickening sounds reminiscent of splintering bones.


She walks on because tonight's monster doesn't care what she feels. It doesn't know who she is, doesn't know the power within her---tonight's monster knows only the smell of its kill, and the stench of the *something* that engulfs it at the moment the soul slips away. She wants to laugh a little bit at her hypocrisy, but her throat can't find the right sounds. The result is something strangled. A drowning kitten's mew. Pathetic as she is, but she doesn't have time to feel sorry for herself now.


The screams are far away but she doesn't run. There are tears forming in her eyes but she won't let them fall, not anymore. Isn't she too old for that? It's all past. Tonight like all nights, there will be victims who must be saved, and she wonders as her breath suffocates her whether there is anyone out there who can save herself.
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