Author's Note: Like I said, I'm on the fence about this because it's not really Spoby, it's more Spencer/Alison.

Day One-Hundred Sixty-Seven: Haunted by Dan Gautrau and Iman Osman

"I saw Toby this morning. He seems fine," Emily said tersely as we sat in The Brew for our ritualistic morning coffee.

I nodded curtly before taking a sip of my coffee.

"You never did tell me why you broke up? Or is it a sensitive topic?" Emily was clearly not beating around the bush.

"I guess…everything with A and Alison just got too much for us to handle. He couldn't handle the pressure."

Lies. I knew he was fine. I saw it all the time. I saw him all the time because we hadn't broken up at all. Though, still…I was pretty sure that it would be less complicated if we were broken up. He made me happy, of course—I wouldn't be with him otherwise—but I felt like that feeling of being together was gone so long ago. Sometimes, I felt like I was stuck in the past, when we were young and dumb and neither one of us was so touched by A or Alison.

I couldn't put my finger on it and I couldn't really explain my own thoughts, but Emily telling me about my own boyfriend made me irrationally annoyed. I knew she didn't know he was my boyfriend, but still…I didn't have to hear about how great he had been. It just reminded me that I was just the opposite. I may have played Lady Macbeth in the school's production of the Shakespearean tragedy, but I was apparently not that good of an actress; I couldn't even convince myself that I was fine. He could—evidently—fool everyone around him.

What happened to it getting easier as time went on? It just seemed to be getting harder and harder to hide my dirty little secret—no, our dirty little secret.

I blame Alison for everything. I always have and I always will. I should've went with my stupid instinct and never trusted her in the first place; she's nothing but trouble. Well…she was nothing but trouble.

After finding out about Mona's murder in jail, I knew it was the work of Alison, in some way, shape, or form. Alison was just the epicenter of everything. Alison was the cancer of this town that had to get cut.

I saw the pictures. Don't ask how I saw them, but I got a photo of every single inch of the Vanderwaal house following Mona's murder. I saw Mona's—or her killer's—bloody handprints, bloody footprints…everything.

Those pictures will forever be ingrained in my mind. Mona was a monster at one point, but nobody deserved that kind of a slow, painful death.

So I came up with a plan. I needed Toby's help. None of the girls knew, but I'm sure they all—sans Emily, possibly—would be okay with it. Alison deserved to die. In the end, everyone deserves to die, but she deserved it more than most. Besides, Alison DiLaurentis ought to have left a beautiful corpse for everyone to admire at the open-casket funeral, right?

I read in a book once—I'm not certain which one, but it doesn't matter—that a gun can be fired by anyone, even the well-meaning idiot. A knife can be stabbed repeatedly into the flesh by anyone with the bodily function to do so. Someone can cause asphyxiation if they have the mental—and physical—strength to do so. All of those paled in comparison to the real genius's form of murder, which took careful plotting out and patience.

Poisoning.

Nobody would know if I, Spencer Hastings, poisoned Alison DiLaurentis, because it could've happened for any number of reasons, by any number of people. Alison was not the best at making friends; a lot of people would've wanted her dead.

I needed to choose my poison carefully. I narrowed it down to three poisons after thinking it through a few times: arsenic, cyanide, and chloroform.

Arsenic was easy to obtain; you could buy it as any kind of ant or rodent poison. Alison was a pest that needed to be gotten rid of, akin to a rat. Best of all, buying ant or rodent poison wasn't really anything to raise alarm. After all, Andrew Campbell would be able to back me up when I said that I had a little pest problem; we would just be talking about a different kind of pest. He would be thinking of one with sharp teeth, beady eyes, and ugly little claws, while I was thinking of one with blonde hair, perfect cupid bow lips, and a deadly, poisonous smile. Arsenic seemed like the clear-cut winner. At first.

The other thing about arsenic was that it was a slow, obvious killer. It caused convulsions, bloody frothing at the mouth, and would be clearly found in a postmortem examination.

Cyanide was a little trickier. I would actually have to make it, but it was a good thing I was pretty good at chemistry and had witnessed Melissa make it for her final biology project in 11th grade. (She did some experiment about taxonomy and insects. The cyanide apparently killed them quickly without discoloring them…or something like that.) This one was a much more favorable method of killing her. Though making cyanide would be hard, giving it to her would be rather easy. If the autopsy wasn't done in two days, no trace of the cyanide I made would be in her body. If the detectives were quick, they could possibly get the scent of bitter almonds and maybe they could connect the dots about her blue lips. But the Rosewood PD wasn't really that swift.

Still, my favorite method (and poison) was Chloroform. It would be easy to make, and much easier than sodium cyanide. Once Alison was asleep and alone in her house, all I'd have to do was rub Vaseline on her lips and put the chloroformed rag on her nose and mouth. It would look like a plain old case of suffocation, especially after I (gently) put all the sheets on top of her face and put a necklace on her cold, lifeless body. It would look like the necklace caught onto her sheets and in the struggle for air, she accidentally suffocated herself with her sheets. The icing on top of the cake was that chloroform wasn't detectable in autopsies. It was the perfect recipe for murder.

Where did Toby come in in all of this? He was my helper. My sidekick. And although he didn't even graduate high school or take the Chemistry AP he was supposed to take at the end of 12th grade, he was a very good chemist. He would know how to make chloroform or at least help me out with it.

Besides, I couldn't keep the truth from him. He wasn't a spiteful person, but I knew that at the bottom of his heart, he wanted her gone, too.

I planned it out perfectly. It would be a night that Mr. DiLaurentis was out. Alison had finally gotten comfortable being at home again. It would be perfect.

I could pick a lock like nobody's business, so getting in there was a breeze. Toby and I had our carefully made chloroform and I had the Vaseline. We were quiet as we crept into her room. She didn't even stir when I put the Vaseline around her mouth. Toby soaked the rag in chloroform, being careful not to inhale any of it himself, and I took it from him. I slowly brought it to her mouth.

What happened next will haunt me forever.

As soon as I put it on her nose and mouth, her eyes widened. I wasn't sure if it was just my imagination or a guilty conscience, but her pupils looked dilated and she looked at me. In that one look, it looked like she was begging for…forgiveness. It was like she was bargaining with me for her life.

I was frozen. I just continued to hold the rag to her mouth. She began to try and fight, but the chloroform was quickly taking over her. Toby did his best to gently restrain her, but the damage was already done. I was already haunted by Alison DiLaurentis. And she wasn't even dead yet.

It took a few more minutes for her to fully succumb to the poison. I knew she was gone when I watched her grip on the sheets, once—for lack of a better word—deathly tight, let go completely.

After that, I was too numb to do anything else, so Toby had to pull the rest of it off. He seemed completely unattached. I couldn't tell if it was a defense mechanism or what it was.

I never expected to get so emotional over the death of a girl I sometimes wished never existed. But I did. It was more than a year later and I was in college, but I still woke up every single day and thought about Alison's face right before she died.

The police wrote it off as death from accidental asphyxiation, even though the situation was a little more than suspicious. Time had played its role in clearing my name; nobody really talked about Alison's death anymore, except for when the anniversary of it rolled around, and then, it was only to say, "Oh, what a shame. She was so young."

And I was always going to be stuck in that one night I killed a girl.

Sometimes I would sit with my friends and realize how oblivious they were to everything. They no longer dwelled on Alison's death, but I did every day. And they didn't even notice that.

But when I sat with Toby, he saw just how haunted I was by it. He saw past my façade. I wasn't fooling him.

"Is it all because of how she struggled?" he would ask as he brewed a cup of coffee, strong, just like I liked it.

I was always too numb to answer. With him was the only way I could be in my natural state: paralyzed.

"If she didn't, would you still feel the same?"

I would just shake my head.

He would bring me our coffee and sit beside me. "It's okay to take someone out of your life if you feel like they're toxic."

But maybe I was the toxic one. Maybe he needed to cut me out of his life.

"Hey," he would say, interrupting me out of my thoughts, right before he'd take my hand. "We're in this together, remember?"

And then I'd remember that he committed murder, just like I did. He had to live with it like I did.

He was as haunted as I was, even though he didn't show it.

Sarah: I'm not going to tell you because I am literally going to get so angry over PM and I'm just not doing that anymore. I just...thanks.

MilaMizz: YOU DIDN'T WATCH HELLO KITTY? WTF? (what's the forecast, obvi.) Oh, well, I guess fair is fair because I really hated Avatar when I was little. Hello Kitty was my boo. Oh, I don't know if you hated the fact that Ali died or whatever. Did you think I was writing slash fic? Lol. Nope. Especially not Spencer with Alison (Spencer with Hanna, maybe, but definitely not Spencer with Ali).

AL3110:Yeah, Spencer was me in the last one-shot, too. And you didn't tell me. Hope you loooove this one too.

The next one-shot will be Ups & Downs by Kendall Payne. I think the scenario is a bit familiar in multi-chaps and I decided to do it in a one-shot. -Kayson