A/N: Response to a 20 minute challenge I found ages ago and couldn't get out of my head. Can't remember where I found the challenge or even what it exactly was, but here goes…

Disclaimer: I own nothing. All Buffy characters belong to Joss Weldon and that isn't me.

FOR THOSE I HAVE LOST by Kiara

Start Time: 18:19

A year has passed since he died. One year. It seems a lot when you're five and three quarters, but on the grand scale of things it isn't really that long…especially when you have stopped fully living.

My name is Buffy Anne Summers and I'm supposed to be dead. I died. I was at peace. I was finally happy. Then they brought me back and I was tired. I was alone. I was unhappy. But he was there.

Back then, he made the pain stop, just for a little while. But it always came back, but less so than before. Then it was gone. Not completely gone because once you've experienced true happiness and total peace, the haunted feeling never really goes away, but it had dulled so much that I could get on with my life.

They, my friends, thought I was cured, but I wasn't. Distracted maybe, what with the sex, Willow going evil and then the fight with the First, but not cured, never cured. Then when the distractions stopped coming, I stopped living.

That was a year ago exactly. When he sacrificed himself, like Anya did. Anya. When I came back she didn't treat me like I was breakable. She didn't treat me like I was crazy…well she did, but she told me to my face and didn't talk about me behind my back. And Anya thought everyone was a bit crazy. She treated me like she always did and I never got the chance to thank her for it. And now she's gone too.

Just like I couldn't thank Tara for always being there for me too talk too. She never judged me; she just listened and tried to understand. I even told her about Spike. She was shocked, but she understood, well maybe not understood but she empathized. She could forgive almost anything I did and she would come running whenever I needed someone to talk to. She never told anyone, not even Willow; it meant a lot that I could trust her. But like Anya and Spike, she's gone. And, unlike me, they're not coming back.

One year since I gave up on life, but now I want it back. I was given a second chance for a reason, right? So I'm going to use it. But this time, I have to live without Spike, Anya and Tara. Without the distractions, the normal-isity and the neutral confidant. This time I have to do it for me, not for anyone else. Well, for me and for them. And for the world who needs it's protector.

I'm not coming back here again, not back to the crater. I don't need to be where their bodies lay to remember them, all the good memories and not-so-happy-but-they-made-them-better times. These visits don't help me move on, and I can't live in the past forever. I have to get my life back on track and start living in the present with Dawn and Willow and Xander and all the slayers still counting on me. That's what they would have wanted.

Start living… for me and for those I have lost.

Finish Time: 18:19