It's the next night and you've been in a haze all day. You need that to be over. She asks you if you're sure about patrolling two nights in a row. She trusts you when you say yes, you're sure. She shouldn't. You're almost glad that tonight when you leave, she's awake and at home. You can't linger and you can't think, and the moment you glance at those old scars, you know that you probably wouldn't have spent long at the mirror tonight anyways.

Again you're not sure when you get home, how long it's been. She's left a note to say that there's been reports of more vampires than normal on the east end of town, and so that's where she is, and she writes you should get some rest and that she loves you, with a little heart next to her name. Is this the group that she was on the call with Willow about that she's chasing? You're not sure. You almost whisper

"I love you too"

inside the empty kitchen, just to fill the silence, but your voice sticks in your throat like tar before you can even try. That's been happening a lot lately.

You think you'll try to cook tonight, so you chop vegetables. Sometimes you wish you could disappear, and this is a moment where you have too much time to think about that. You drift again, and you drift so far that you don't notice that you're gone. Not until you feel the knife slice across your finger, and damn, that stings. You had forgotten. One of many things never remembered, from a past you tried so hard to push away. It makes the tips of your fingers tingle pleasantly in the way that murder always did, and you try to push that feeling away too. This is not the time. It's never going to be the time, not now, not after so many years.

Your heart thuds in your chest. Oh, right, you have a beating heart. Right, you aren't dead. You're not dead or falling off of the roof of a building or waking up forgotten in a hospital, and your life is good now, and the photos on the fridge remind you — she's there and she's in your life and she's yours and you're hers, and you have friends for the first time in too many years. You're not back in that motel and you aren't back in prison and you're not a scared little kid in Boston. So why does this feel the same as that always did? What the fuck is wrong here? Why do you hope for an apocalypse when the last one almost destroyed it all?

And in the haze of thought, even despite your life being good now, even despite there always being somebody there to notice – not like when you were twelve, then fourteen, then seventeen – and especially despite your logical knowledge of what a good idea is, you take the knife with you as you leave the room and abandon the cutting board by the sink. And you know that was a bad idea as you flip the blade over once, twice, five more times in the palm of your hand. And you know, logically, that it's a bad idea to lock yourself behind the door of the bathroom, and you know that the sparkle in your eyes won't come back if you do this, that you won't feel any more real if you do. And you know it's just good luck that the kitchen cabinet is always stocked with bandages and gauze, and it's just good luck that she doesn't walk in the front door and find you sitting on the floor, back against the counter, still holding the blade and looking as tired as you've felt down to your bones since the week after Sunnydale. But these logical thoughts are hidden in the back of your brain. The thoughts that repeat countless times over, the ones you can hear, they tell you that you deserve this after everything you've done. Your thoughts tell you that a lot.

Later, after the fear of getting caught catches up to you, you find yourself staring at the mirror in the bedroom. It's still not your reflection staring back, still not your face or your body. You need to change something. You've never been so static for so long. You need to run. Maybe if you run away and you leave town, and you disappear and leave it all behind like you always have, you'll feel real again. Maybe that's what you need.

But of course you never would. You're not sure if you even could. You have friends now, you have Buffy, you have this life of your own that's everything you ever needed and everything you've ever wanted. Maybe you just need to sleep the urge off, sleep off the endless regret that always seems to find itself lodged just beneath your ribcage, setting the scar there on fire.

So you wipe the makeup off, throw an old hoodie on. Your reflection is still not your own. But you don't lie awake this night, thinking that over, not like you have been, not like you feel you should be. And you properly sleep for the first time in days.

You dream.