Looks like I posted another day. You guys are soooo lucky. Remember that.

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Kiley looked around, wondering just what was happening. She wanted to take a few moments… days… years… to figure out just what the heck had happened to her, but it didn't look like that was going to happen right away. She couldn't see anything, and found herself growing more and more frustrated as time passed. Or as she thought time passed. She didn't know where she was, or what was going on, and nothing irritated her more than not knowing the situation.

Gradually she grew aware of a lightening of the darkness over towards her left. She waited patiently for what felt like a few minutes, then decided that patience was the most overrated of all the virtues and tried to move off towards it. First at a walk, then at a jog, then at a run, she moved towards it as fast as she could. To no effect.

"Dammit!" she screamed, nerves frayed beyond her ability to bear. She threw her head back and screamed out her frustration, a long unending shriek that was ripped from her very essence. After it began, it seemed to take on a life of its own, clawing its way out of her throat before growing to fill what had once been silence. It echoed strangely against the blackness, seeming at times to come from someplace other than her own throat, as if there were other souls trapped in the blackness with her.

It began to scare her as it went on past the time that her lungs could have possibly supported. She tried to clamp down on it, to stop it, to gain control but it eluded her. Grimly she attacked her scream, stopping her breath and clenching her jaw shut. Even then it tried to escape, coming out muffled a few moments longer before finally conceding defeat. Echoes continued to ring in her ears, her scream sounding like a chorus, then a lone voice, and then finally trickling off into silence.

It was a heavy silence, fraught with foreboding. She was tempted to make a comment of some sort, but refrained, unwilling to hear what it might be distorted into. She resumed walking towards the faint source of illumination, but it was more out of a need to be doing something than she thought she might get anywhere. It was as if that scream had stripped her of her willpower, and all that was left was a need to be doing something, anything.

So she was shocked when she realized that the light was getting brighter. Shocked, but still not motivated to move faster. She plodded along, moving closer to the light, or the light moved closer to her. She couldn't tell anymore.

Then she saw who was in the light, and rage washed over her, filling her with something that passed for energy and masqueraded as spunk. She stopped moving, crossed her arms, and glared. As the being moved closer, she waited, ire growing as she thought on all the indignities she had suffered at her hands.

"I might have known this was your doing," she said flatly, passing by anything even remotely resembling a pleasantry.

"What's wrong, dear?" was the solicitous reply.

"What the hell were you thinking? I only wanted two things. Love. Peace. I'm in the middle of a rotting desert, shot, and living at the whim of a merciless killer. Plus," she emphasized the word, "what the hell did you do to me? What am I now?"

"Oh dear." The melodious voice seemed a bit sad. "You have screwed things up, haven't you?"

"ME?" Kiley carefully didn't scream, remembering the disaster earlier but she wanted to. "How do you figure that?"

"I can't have set things up for you much more nicely. I picked a nice man for you, lonely and not too likely to be picky as long as you were the right species."

"But I LIKED my species. Why did you have to go and change me like that? Without any warning, even?"

A puzzled look crossed her face. "What would be the fun in that?"

"A hell of a lot more fun than I'm having right now," she ground out through clenched teeth.

"Oh. No, I meant fun for me. I get so much enjoyment out of watching you fumble through things. Like this whole Ace thing. You had better wrap Knives around your finger soon, or she'll grow up and he'll want her instead."

"She can have him," she mumbled, but her heart wasn't in it. "Why a plant?" she asked more loudly, hating the plaintive edge that crept into her voice.

"Did you really think he could love you if you were human? One of the reasons I picked him was because he's in a position to take whatever comes his way. He can't quite afford to be picky, either."

"Picky? What does that have to do with love?" she asked, forcing down a wail. "I wanted love. In all the universe, the best you could do for me was find a guy who couldn't be picky?"

"You were a difficult case to place," Dream Dancer mused. "Not many men would want a girl like you."

Kiley's heart dropped, and she grappled with it to keep it from breaking entirely. "Oh."

"I mean, who would want a screwed-up, psychotic, ex-assassin who can't decide exactly what she is anymore? Who would want to be saddled with someone with as much emotional baggage as you, if they had any choice at all?"

Kiley felt her face begin to crumple. "But… he seemed…"

"Attracted?" she finished up as Kiley fumbled to a stop. "Pheromones. Vash will think you're attractive, too, but he's so besotted with Meryl that you would have no chance with him, even if he did decide to overlook your past."

Kiley found herself sprawled on the floor and wondered when she had fallen. "So it's all just… biology."

"Of course it is. What, did you actually think for a moment that it could be love?"

Kiley grasped for something, anything. "But what about peace?"

"This is so much more fun for me to watch," she was told coldly, and then the darkness took her again, whisking her away from that horrid place and the implacable vision that had stolen and warped all of her dreams.

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Didn't see that coming, either, huh?

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