![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm going to have to agree with Cordy on this. Picking a single most dangerous thing out of all the things we've seen and done? It isn't picking through a haystack for a single needle, it's picking through haystacks made up of nothing but needles. Piles of haystacks. A whole barn's worth when you really start thinking about it.
But maybe that's where the line is too, the one that makes the question answerable. If I stop looking at all the we in my life over the past few years, and focus on the me, then it's there. When I do that, Pylea seems an easy enough answer, and maybe even the obvious one. But the truth is once I got past the getting there, and the running away, and the hiding? It was the safest thing I ever did. Sure, I hid. But I also fought back. I did what I needed to do to survive, to keep going. There's a point when you stop thinking of things as dangerous or not, and that the knowing which it is stops even having an impact on your decisions. Trying to make sure that you get to see the next day isn't anything other than that. Trying to make sure you see it to the next day.
So when I put all that on the other side of things, but still look at what I've done on my own, that only leaves one time I'd really call dangerous, and that is everything with Jasmine.
And maybe the contrast added to it. Maybe if I hadn't been so blissfully happy, so sure that things were finally going to be ok for everyone? Maybe all that hurt wouldn't have been there too, adding to the edge and making it that much sharper.
Any of it was dangerous on its own, but all of it stays together in my head in a big blur of events that is hard to seperate. Running from my best friends. The ones who knew the most about me, and were ready to use that however they could. Worrying if the three locks on the motel door were going to be enough to hold, when I didn't even know for sure exactly what I was trying to keep out, except for the face that wouldn't let me sleep at night. Just cry. Every night, over and over. And that was dangerous too, in it's own way. I knew I needed sleep and strength and steady feet underneath me, and I couldn't stop crying.
One, I'm done. But if two holds true and if three will be --
The lack of sleep, the rhymes in my head, a senseless chatter that battled with with what I really needed to work through. The part with just what had happened and what was she, and how could I fix this? It felt like I was going to shatter from the inside out.
And then all those faces looking at me, and all of them with her eyes. If felt like they saw things that even I couldn't. Deep things, inside things. The same ones that were threatening to break so. The car exploding, the fire and the glass, and time with a flesh eating demon that still makes my skin scrawl. All of it was different, all of it because I was alone. And I think if it had been a momentarily aloneness I would have been better at being strong, and at pulling through with less tears and hurt.
But through all of it, the most dangerous thing I ever did was level that gun at Jasmine and pull the trigger. I knew I was showing too much, shaking too much as it ripped through her, and into Angel. Because the moment he was on top of me, the same gun pressed hard into my jaw, I knew. I knew that the one thing that had worried me most since using Lorne to shield my escape from the hotel, was absolutley true.
That if I was wrong? That if Angel didn't look up and see what I did? Then that was it. Even -- and at the moment I knew it was an impossibly big even - if I somehow got away. I knew I'd never get a chance to help them again. I would have willingly walked away from my friends, from the family of my choosing.
That we'd never be that again.
And that I would've failed them.
That is the most dangerous thing I've ever done, and place that I have ever been.
But maybe that's where the line is too, the one that makes the question answerable. If I stop looking at all the we in my life over the past few years, and focus on the me, then it's there. When I do that, Pylea seems an easy enough answer, and maybe even the obvious one. But the truth is once I got past the getting there, and the running away, and the hiding? It was the safest thing I ever did. Sure, I hid. But I also fought back. I did what I needed to do to survive, to keep going. There's a point when you stop thinking of things as dangerous or not, and that the knowing which it is stops even having an impact on your decisions. Trying to make sure that you get to see the next day isn't anything other than that. Trying to make sure you see it to the next day.
So when I put all that on the other side of things, but still look at what I've done on my own, that only leaves one time I'd really call dangerous, and that is everything with Jasmine.
And maybe the contrast added to it. Maybe if I hadn't been so blissfully happy, so sure that things were finally going to be ok for everyone? Maybe all that hurt wouldn't have been there too, adding to the edge and making it that much sharper.
Any of it was dangerous on its own, but all of it stays together in my head in a big blur of events that is hard to seperate. Running from my best friends. The ones who knew the most about me, and were ready to use that however they could. Worrying if the three locks on the motel door were going to be enough to hold, when I didn't even know for sure exactly what I was trying to keep out, except for the face that wouldn't let me sleep at night. Just cry. Every night, over and over. And that was dangerous too, in it's own way. I knew I needed sleep and strength and steady feet underneath me, and I couldn't stop crying.
One, I'm done. But if two holds true and if three will be --
The lack of sleep, the rhymes in my head, a senseless chatter that battled with with what I really needed to work through. The part with just what had happened and what was she, and how could I fix this? It felt like I was going to shatter from the inside out.
And then all those faces looking at me, and all of them with her eyes. If felt like they saw things that even I couldn't. Deep things, inside things. The same ones that were threatening to break so. The car exploding, the fire and the glass, and time with a flesh eating demon that still makes my skin scrawl. All of it was different, all of it because I was alone. And I think if it had been a momentarily aloneness I would have been better at being strong, and at pulling through with less tears and hurt.
But through all of it, the most dangerous thing I ever did was level that gun at Jasmine and pull the trigger. I knew I was showing too much, shaking too much as it ripped through her, and into Angel. Because the moment he was on top of me, the same gun pressed hard into my jaw, I knew. I knew that the one thing that had worried me most since using Lorne to shield my escape from the hotel, was absolutley true.
That if I was wrong? That if Angel didn't look up and see what I did? Then that was it. Even -- and at the moment I knew it was an impossibly big even - if I somehow got away. I knew I'd never get a chance to help them again. I would have willingly walked away from my friends, from the family of my choosing.
That we'd never be that again.
And that I would've failed them.
That is the most dangerous thing I've ever done, and place that I have ever been.
