I'm learning to breathe on my own...

It's not like I'm brave. I'm not. Not like them anyways.

I guess it can seem that way, sometimes, from the outside looking in. They seen what I've been and what I've done and who I used to be, and wonder and worry about the who I am now and think -- she's brave and she's strong. Because there isn't any other way she would have made it this far.

But the truth of it is, we're still different. If someone had pulled me aside, and gotten past the part where I told them they were crazy? Had explained just what those five years would be like, what exactly it would mean? I would have run away. As far and as fast as I could from everything that would send me there. I'd still be home, and my folks would still be happy and yes. For Daddy's sake, there would probably be a baby or two in that chest of drawers by now. And it'd be safe.

But even when I got there, it still wasn't about being brave. It was whatever got me from one day to the next. There were so many of them that was nothing but sameness washing over you with the double suns that all I had to tell them apart was notches in the stone. And there were some so -- not that I can't even forget them, not matter how much easier it would make things. I did what I had to. There wasn't a chance to be brave. There wasn't a choice.

I did what I had to.

So I guess there's still a part of me, every morning, waking and wondering if they're going to figure out just how different we are. How I'm not like them, no matter how much we all pretend. It isn't that I don't try. That I don't do everything I possibly can to help. But, well. You just got to look to see how different they are. And how special.

How brave.

I would never, ever want to hurt them. Never. But somehow I have.

Wesley with my words and Lorne with a knife -- though I swear that didn't hurt him anything like knowing the person that held it -- and Charles. Just by being me I hurt Charles. He saw first, I think, before any of the others how I'm not everything they thought. Sometimes when I want to feel better about myself I think that no one ever could be all that. But then I remember what I see in them, and I don't like my thoughts at all anymore. I was my only company for a long, long while. You would think I would be a bit better at it.

So I've hurt myself too. Wesley and Lorne and Charles and even Jasmine. Knowing what I know about her, what I've seen in her and how I loved her and I can't help but think how unkind I've been. How I've betrayed her. So much my thoughts are hurting all over again, because I'm smarter than this. It shouldn't have taken this long and there's more than such a thing as feeling loyalty just because you're told to, or feeling it for someone because they've earned it. Day in and day out, night in and night out they've made most anything possible.

I'm about to shoot her, but that doesn't matter.

She told me.

I'm about to shoot him too, and it does matter.

He showed me.

I just hope that it works, and that maybe even a little after that he forgives me. Because it isn't about being brave. It's about believing. It is about what gets you up, and puts you to bed and makes the days more than just a tick on the wall between. I might not like my thoughts, but I understand them. You've got to take care of what's worth believing in.

I believe in them.

I'm going to help them.

And it'll be ok.

It has to be ok.

Setting exercise - Write a scene of your muse eating a meal. Focus on the setting, and illustrate the surroundings that he or she is dining in. It can be in their home, outside, in a restaurant, whatever, but it must be someplace that the muse would IC'ly eat.


It's heaven.

Fred's very, very sure it's heaven right there in paper colored pleasure, all dyed in the sorts of oranges and reds that aren't really the kind to be found in nature. No, these are manufactured hues for manufactured paper for manufactured foods, which is to say it's been a good five years since she's had anything like it. They're not bright, but the burn her eyes anyway. Her little bits of heaven.

You just stop seeing certain things anymore, and sometimes they cease to be. And you try and remember them. There's taste, and texture, the way a voice sounds when it's not shouting at you, they way honest to goodness electrical lighting lights up a person's whole being, and they can't hiding anything. From you or yourself. Every facet, every flaw just lit up like a Christmas tree. All you've got to do is look to see. And if in the end you choose to blink and squint your eyes so those lights and lines blur a bit? Well that's on you.

Just like the taco is...on you. Fred can't even be sure who shoved it in her hands. The girl with a tree for a name had taken Angel away to talk about the girl they both knew. Which of course left Fred with a bunch of people she didn't. Know, in any well or real way. But they'd listened to the bit about tacos it seemed, and now the small sack filled her hands. They were distracting her and she was distracting them. Back and forth and back and forth because if it's one thing Fred knows? It's listening. And they're trying to listen to the talking going on outside, even if they don't want to admit it. The not admitting it is where the food comes in.


She takes two steps back, then three, then two more. Eating's not something she's accustomed to doing in public anymore, especially with all those eyes on her. Normally there's the part when she has to steal her mean first too, with the running that comes after. So the bag is hugged that much closer even as the back on her knees hit something soft. Fred lands on the small circular sofa with an unexpected woosh of air, mouth drawn up in a nervous bow. She pulls herself even deeper into the upholstery, and that's when Fred revises her religion a bit.

Heaven is brightly wrapped tacos and this particular bit of fabric.

It's old Old, and used, and loved. One half of it sits higher than the other just below her, and the smell of it mixes itself up with the beef and tomato in her hands. There's soap, where someone's obviously tried to get a cleaning it. Real, actual soap. Fabric softener too, maybe bits of it left behind by the last person that sat there. So it helps her see a crampt wooden room with dappled afternoon light, filled to the brim with white bits of electrics way part their prime, and a soft, brown woman with more than enough good years left to call her own.

There's sweat, and dandruff, a small burn hole just to the left, and a flash of white where the covering is clear worn away on the right. It's people, and love, and age, and the not-cave, and about all the normal Fred's about to be able to handle in that moment.

It's holder her, and she's holding it right back.

So she opens up her first taco, and steps right through those heavenly gates. Which are somehow made of golden arches topped with a sombrero. It's the not normal in her back again, but she's plenty used to that my now. Fred thinks, sometimes, it might get a little lonely without it.

The taco itself tastes like a test. Will it be a good as she remembers? As wonderful as all those flavors she clung to for so very long, desperate to recreate? It's a taco and a memory and herself. She's going to sink with it, she expects to. Because it can't possibly be what wants it to be. Bits of the wrapper are inside Fred now, because she's eating it that fast. It's a five-year famine coming to an end.

Fred smiles, and it's everything but angelic.

But it tastes right.

Just exactly right.