Self-Doubt

"He ain't your friend. I am. And you gonna chose that over me?"

The voices all sounded really far away, just like mine had when I'd been singing not so long before. Almost like it hadn't been a part of me at all. Something that they wanted more for in the moment than I did, and yet I'd been more than willing to...try? His voice was the emptiest though, and the only reason it could really be heard at all was the anger behind it. And that didn't even feel like it belonged to him either, that he had a right to it. Something borrowed then...something to fit in with, or maybe hide behind?

I knew about those things.

"Looks like. It's about the mission, bro. He's got it. You don't."

My eyes flashed over to Gunn. Even though there was just as much anger there, it was real, and deep, and it belonged to just him. Whatever it was. The rawness there was somehow even soothing. And I felt like the weakest of things for finding something to hold onto in it, something to keep me here. Gunn, Wesley, and Angel, and Lorne. Everyone else behind me was looking at the floor, I could feel it. But between fingers and arms and hands I kept looking at them. Kept trying to stay in this place, cause as horrible as it was just now? It was better than the other.

"Oh - so - you think, just because you're letting that monster live you got the mission, huh? Well, as far as I can see, a monster lover ain't no better than a monster, and I kill monsters. That's what I do. - So - anybody wanna walk out of here tonight, they gonna have to show me. Come on! Step on up and do what your friend here wouldn't: kill the vampire - and you can leave this place. Otherwise - stay and burn with the rest of them. Who wants to live."


This might've been it then? Is this the part where I got to run away, so fast until the horizon blurred and I got past thinking what was even going by? I'd almost perfected that by now. Blurs were soft, and memories the sharp ones, right? Dulled edges for when your hands aren't steady or strong enough to hold anything else. I wasn't like them, and no matter how much I watched and studied, or made my walls a sea of planning of how it might be possible, I wouldn't ever be. None of them ever would've gotten lost for that long, not ever. So maybe this was it then. Time...time to run.

They'd be blurred too, from the running, smears on ink on cracked paint. On stone walls.

I stood slowly, never planning on looking at them from then on. So of course I did. I wasn't even strong enough for that. And suddenly it wasn't just enough to run, I had to make Angel understand too, even if it couldn't...

"I'm sorry. I just - I don't wanna die."

I managed just those words and the boy with the empty face handed me the crossbow with an even emptier smile. The feel of it there in my hands was as sharp as any of those unwanted memories. The newest ones were there now, faces in the room fitting into warmer places in my head, some of them real, and some just imagined. Just more of what I always did. And that horribly empty smile, nothing more to it than the scarecrows that lived in my head too, from somewhere in my childhood. Scaring nothing more than the birds, and never for very long.

Never...for very long.

Nothing more than straw. All emptiness, except for that. And even that was taken, belonging to someone else first.

"I'm sorry. - I just can't die in here."

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