Note: I realize this story needs editing but I figure I'll edit it more thoroughly once I finish it. I know it's going a little slow right now and you're wondering where's Spike and so forth. But I just wanted to get more into what state of mind Buffy is in.

Therapy

Wide awakened out of spinning
Round the safest orbit
You controlled the ordinary
I was grateful for it
Wide awake in the beginning
Trembling after the fall
Only half my world remembers
While the other half revolves

- Finger Eleven

She ran her fingers through her hair. Her hands streaked with saline from wiping away the tears that stained her cheeks. The smell of smoke littered the air and she groped at the pack of cigarettes in her pocket. Her jeans felt so tight against her hips. She felt her fingers turning red as the box squirmed out of her pocket and into her hands. Her fingers shook while she grasped a cancer stick in between her fingers then placed it to her lips and pulled her silver rimmed lighter open and lit the cigarette. The air quickly filled with the smell of nicotine. She barely noticed. The smell stayed with her no matter what she did to get rid of it. Nicotine on her fingertips and on her tongue, in her clothes. She sighed evenly, quickly before exhaling smoke into the air upwards as she tilted her head.

The sky looked as if it were caving in on her. On Rome. It's jaws ripped through the atmosphere and coming closer and closer to the ground. She imagined herself walking on her hands and knees to keep the sky from falling on her. It wasn't a beautiful night but nothing felt exceptionally beautiful anymore. The nights she remembered for their beauty and simplicity were the nights she spent with Spike before he died everything else after that held very little meaning. It was her fault she didn't. He had given her this life to look forward to and yet she couldn't look forward to it without him. Everything resembled life but just felt lifeless. Her moments with Dawn were few and in between. Dawn had her own life, away from her. It was easier that way. It kept Dawn out of danger and it kept her in her own head, thinking too much about her dead lover. He was always dead, she thought except now he was gone. His time had run out and hers kept going. Wasn't he the one that's immortality ran deeper then her own?

She ran her tongue over her lips like she did so many other times while the in betweens from inhaling and exhaling. The taste stayed with her. He stayed with her that way. Still only Giles knew about this, about her addiction. What she knew had turned into an addiction like their first attempts at a relationship. It turned unhealthy with high amounts of sex and abuse she found that she treated cigarettes that way. Pretending they weren't there. That she wasn't addicted. That they made her feel something she so obviously missed, every day. But the cigarettes used her. She knew this. But maybe now she was using them back. She told herself she could quit whenever she wanted. That it wasn't something that mattered but deep down she knew that wasn't true. It mattered, just like breathing mattered. It mattered because he still mattered to her. She couldn't shake the memories. They were a force field inside her brain spreading to her entire system like a triggering disease that drives you insane.

She would talk to him sometimes. He would be there beside her. She knew he wasn't real but she still talked to him like he was and even went to touch him knowing it would only be air once her fingers reached his flesh. She would tell him in choking sobs how angry she was with him for leaving her and then that she knew he didn't want to. That he loved her and that she loved him. That he did the right thing but it didn't cure the pain of losing him to the hell mouth. Her mind deceived her. Her thoughts ran blood red with thoughts of him. Her dreams became nightmares of a time she no longer had. She relived that last night they had together over and over in her head and cried into her pillow, wishing so deeply they could've had more like that the last year they spent together. She blamed herself so much of the time for never believing in him till it was almost too late to be anything at all. She knew it wasn't completely true but she couldn't stop herself from thinking it. He was a hero now.

She leaned her body against the brick walls outside her balcony, watching the city gleam with desire and mystique. It was a gorgeous city. She knew that. But it wasn't home. She missed home with all its vampires and hell mouth business. She missed it. Things weren't predictable in Rome. But she wasn't the only slayer anymore. The Slayer maybe but she didn't have to carry the weight on her own anymore. Her life was hers. It belonged to no one else. She was capable of coming up with new rules for slayers to obey and live by and they were her rules. The rules she had lived by. The rules that had and still kept her alive. She knew she wasn't the smartest girl when it came to books but with life she knew she had more experience then most people and she used that experience to get what she wanted out of other people around her. She hadn't had to avert the apocalypse at all in the time she'd been in Rome. Bagged a bunch of vampires, some demons but nothing huge. Nothing that could change her universe. She wasn't bored, content maybe in Rome. In the city that's problems weren't as intense she found some sort of peace.

Her eyes looked down towards the street. The sidewalk littered with people on the weekend trying to get home from some club or other. Tourists getting lost. She often ran into tourists on the street while walking around, smoking her cigarettes. The tourists would cough as she blew smoke into their faces while they tried to speak to her in Italian asking directions to such and such a place. She would tell them she was an American in English and they would look relieved. She'd point them in the right direction then keep smoking and walking along. The streets in Rome were pretty. She didn't have very many big cities to compare them too. While on the cross country tour of the US to find all the slayers New York City hadn't been a priority and she missed that city altogether only seeing it from the horizon across the Hudson river in New Jersey. She could compare the streets of Rome to those in LA but the comparison was feeble. LA was an American city where everything old was torn down to create the new, almost like the cycle of people. Rome was an old city. The cobblestone streets were old along with so many of the buildings they restored every year to keep from falling down.

She wasn't high up. Fifth floor. The buildings weren't huge there. Everything was a reasonable height except the museums, which were huge and she often got lost in trying to find something from a century he would've remembered. He was always more articulating when it came to fine arts while she could barely get through finger painting in Pre School. She dropped her cigarette to the cement ground of the balcony and then placed her heal of her shoe on it. She watched the smoke dwindle down to nothing then bent down to pick it up wanting to leave no evidence of her addiction anywhere she quickly threw it off the balcony knowing it wasn't the best thing to do to such a pretty city but she couldn't bear Dawn finding out or even Andrew. She turned her back to the city and opened the wide glass door and stepped back into the apartment where no one was except her and the silence. Dawn was at some school event and Andrew was out of town. Most likely in England with Giles on some watchers retreat. She picked up the perfume from the coffee table and sprayed herself with it. Her clothes began to smell like violets in the spring. The smell of nicotine quickly fading except from her lips and tongue.

The living room was small and nothing was broken so unlike her old living room. The windows never got shattered and the coffee table never ran into a demon and the lamps stayed in tact. But it always felt lonely, missing of all those elements she knew so well. The disasters. Spike. It was missing Spike, sprawled out in the chair in the corner, watching her sometimes pretending to ignore her. She fell onto the couch, deeply sinking in and closing her eyes to only see his face. The indents of his jaws. His lips curving up to smile at her. His hands against her spine. The thought was broken with the sound of the door opening. Dawn's key twisting in the door. She leaned over the couch grabbed a breath mint and stuck is quickly in her mouth. Then watched as the door opened and Dawn's body came flying in. Her memory of him still in tact was pushed to the back of her mind to retain some sort of normalcy that was supposed to make sense. Even though it never did.