A/N: This is my first ever fanfic! Originally written for a school assignment on the book, but I was encouraged (aka tortured until I agreed) to post it here by a friend. Reviews greatly appreciated!

Ode to the Oleanders

I foolishly thought you were sent by the angels to save me.

I believed in such things as angels then.

I saw you and suddenly I knew faraway jungles and exotic islands,

cities from books- Paris, and Moscow,

names that taste like a delicate, expensive chocolate on the tongue, mysterious and sophisticated.

All this from that first glance, from meeting your eyes.

I should have known from your eyes, my darling.

For they were dark, dark vampire eyes,

eyes that have relished in thousands of years of others' anguish.

You knew, didn't you? Knew how I drowned, helpless, in those eyes from the very beginning.

The two of us blossomed together like the most poisonous of flowers,

rushed and passionate, deadly and deceiving.

I thought it love. You knew better.

But still I fell, dizzy in my white dress days

of wide eyes and pink shoes,

landing in bliss before the emerald city you created for me.

And when the green glasses were torn from my eyes,

when I fell, battered, to the ground, wishing for death,

you left; that last, cyanide laugh

echoing in my ears.

That is the one you have destroyed, my sweet.

The girl you left lying in the dirt has learned to stand on her own.

And I look back on that girl on the cold floor,

that child filled with compassion and hope,

and I rid myself of it like bile.

I push out every goodness and dream, until I can feel the sour taste of it rising,

and I cleanse my soul of it forever.

I will never again contract such a disease.

And in the place of my innocence I grow a cold, hard stone,

filled only with cruelty and the fire of revenge.

And I am impregnated by it, this stone of my newfound strength,

and I feed it and coo to it as a mother does her unborn child.

I am a woman now. I am the woman in black, with the bright red lips

and the same dark, dark eyes I once so revered in you, my dear.

Now I drive them as wild as you once drove me.

I become fire, flickering and beckoning,

and they writhe and burn before me,

and the stone inside me that feels nothing

nevertheless warms with a bitter joy.

I spit up the poison that you fed to me

once upon a time

and feed it to them in every kiss and sigh and moan.

And I control them, my love. They are mine.

As I write, my sweet, it begins to rain, and I laugh and laugh,

because you will never know me in my madness.

You may come back to me, for fate is eerie in its cold tricks and ways,

but you will not know me, not ever again.

And I will smile, and build you your own city of emeralds,

and then I will spit the very last of your own poison down your throat.

And that moment it will hit you,

that it was you who shaped the void inside me,

that I will never have to regret the stone I built inside myself.

But you?

You will very much regret what you have done.

Oh darling. I have no doubt that we shall someday meet

in that place of fire and ice.

Until then, ever yours.