[A/N: This is set at the beginning of season three, just after Buffy comes back from Los Angeles.]

I Wonder. . .

I don't even know what they except me to do. My entire body is numb, and any movement I make is a forced one. They don't understand that, though. Because I'm the Slayer. I'm expendable. I can't feel like they do.

. . . I'm only human. I wish they could see that.

I guess this whole Slayer gig isn't really this big, Movie of the Year experience it's made out to be in all of Giles' big, dusty books. I wonder if any of the other Slayers had to do anything like what I have done in these past few months.

I wonder if they've ever slept with a guy only to have him wake up a souless monster who wants to torture, kill, and maim your friends and family. I wonder if any of them had to kill the love of their life to save the world. - Or maybe they just staked vampires at night, and actually lived during the day.

For a moment, I wonder what it's like to really live.

And then I wonder if I'm being too dramatic. Maybe I'm just young, and this is the world I'm going to have to live in and I'm just discovering it. If that's the way of it, I don't know if I want to.

Willow pulled me out of a daydream earlier. I told her that I was just tired from the long summer, and she told me how much they all had missed me for the eleventh time this week. I had grown tired of her saying that. There was this hidden blame in her voice that threw my heart in my throat at first. . . until I started to become furious for her inculcated guilt.

I left, then, and on my walk home, I continued my daydream.

Angel wasn't gone. He wasn't in hell, but with me. And we were walking on the Sunnydale streets again. Angel wasn't a monster, he wasn't hellbent on the destruction of the world itself, and he loved me again. He was just Angel -- just as he'd been when I thrusted a sword through his chest.

I felt a pang in my heart at that moment, and I couldn't even remember my daydream.

And then I wondered what Angel felt just before he was sucked into the rapidly widening maw of Acathla. . .

And I cried.