It's just enough to feel your breath on mine [To warm my soul and ease my mind]

[denial]

takes place immediately after this

It’s not just a river in Egypt

She curls up next to him, clingier than usual, so close that a slip of paper wouldn’t slide between them. Her nose is buried in the hollow of his throat and she can feel the hair on his chest tickling her skin and it all makes her want to cry. She’s trying to deny it with every

Single

Breath

And yet she knows, the end is coming. It’s near and it’s here and they’re almost over. This is desperate and clingy and she spent months when she was eighteen doing this. She knows what the end feels like and the words are pressing against her teeth, tangled up in her tongue but she can’t force them out. She thinks maybe it’s easier to be left because of imagined infidelity than to be left because she’s a freak of nature. It’s going to hurt no matter what, like pulling her lungs and her heart out but she thinks it’d be a novel idea to be left for something so completely normal.

Not that she wants to be left.

And particularly not by him because he makes her laugh and being here doesn’t hurt. She doesn’t scramble for a way out when she’s with him and she doesn’t think of everything she’s lost. She’s stopped waiting for the pain, which is of course precisely when it shows up.

Just

As

Scheduled.

She burrows impossibly closer, her lips brushing against his overheated skin and tears sting behind her eyes as the masochist in her chants:

lasttimelasttimelasttimelasttimelasttimelasttimelasttime

And she wants to scream that it can’t be the last time. It can’t be because of the way he holds her tight and mumbles in his sleep, something about how everything is alright and she should sleep, Summers. The nickname makes her breath catch, as if she weren’t having a hard enough time breathing, and she nods. She closes her eyes but she doesn’t want to sleep because when she wakes up it will be here and she will have missed it all so she takes a deep breath and lets herself plunge into denial for just a little while longer.

It’s also a river in Egypt and she’s booking a cruise.

Nothing is what it seems [ Rp with stillacrime] (incomplete)

She never meant for him to think she was dying

Watch it as the starts disappear to nothing [The day the world is over]

[RP for stillacrime]After this by a couple of hours or so.

Buffy waited until she was certain Danny was asleep and slipped out of bed. Normally, if he'd had a bad day, she would have sluffed off the slaying and stayed home with him. She couldn't tonight and she knew it. She'd upset a whole nest, a little gang by killing their leader and they were going to be out tonight causing mayhem and trying to establish who the new leader was going to be. In her experience that often including racking up individual body counts. She really didn't want that so she tossed on a pair of jeans, a tank top and grabbed her favorite vamp slaying, wooden heeled Jimmy Choos off the dresser. She snuck into the living room, picked up her bag with the stakes in it and slid out the door without a sound. She slipped her heels on and took the stairs down. Once outside she paused and took a deep breath. She waited a few seconds, listening and absorbing and getting in touch with her slayer side. She took a couple of stakes out of her bag, stashed it in an alcove behind a trash can and put one stake at the small of her back in her waistband. The other one got tucked into her waistband at her left hip. When she started down the sidewalk again she was in predator mode. She was heading back to the area she'd killed the female vamp the night before. She'd discovered that vampires were territorial in New York City and they tended to stick to an area or a neighborhood.

Cookie Dough, more than it's cracked up to be

Half Baked: (Chocolate Fudge Brownies meets Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough) A Crazy Concoction of Chocolate & Vanilla Ice Cream mixed with Fudge Brownies & Gobs of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

OK, I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking. I'm not finished becoming whoever the hell it is I'm gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day I turn around and realize I'm ready. I'm cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat— or enjoy warm, delicious cookie me, then...that's fine. That'll be then. When I'm done.

Okay I’ve come to realize a couple of things since that infamous speech. First of all that Andrew cannot be trusted and he’s a sneaky little rat. Second of all, there is nothing wrong with being cookie dough. So I’m half baked. I’m cookie dough and maybe that’s all I’m ever gonna be. Maybe some people aren’t meant to be finished cookies. They’ve got gooey centers and chewy outsides and they’re just cookie dough. And maybe I’m one of those people. Normally I wouldn’t say I was gooey on the inside, metaphorically I mean. Literally…I’m very gooey but then so is everyone human. Great now I’m thinking of blood cookies.

The point is not gooeyness or crispy outsides or chocolate chip. The point is I’m not finished. Maybe I’m never going to be finished. Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life evolving into something else. I’ll always have to deal with the changing and the moodiness and that feeling that I’m not done yet. Maybe it’s part of being a slayer or maybe, just maybe it’s something that everyone goes through and no one ever tells you about. We just walk around thinking everyone is finished except us. It’s a big conspiracy. A cookie dough conspiracy and there’s some evil mastermind orchestrating it all and making certain we’re all off kilter thinking there’s something wrong with us when really there’s something wrong with the whole human race. And maybe it’s not even something wrong with us. Possibly that’s the way PB&J made us because he/she/it/them get their kicks off on watching this whole flawed, screwed up soap opera the way Spike get his kicks watching Passions.

Besides, I don’t have to be cookies. Some people like to eat cookie dough. Shut up, Dawn. I swear to God I’ll hang you by your ankles off the balcony until all the blood rushes to your head and you forget your name.

You keep me smiling [You keep me safe in a crazy world]

13 things you must have to keep you happy.

1. Dawn safe and happy.

2. Danny

3. Giles stodgy, safe and British ensconced in his library.

4. Willow happy, healthy and good witchy.

5. Xander see above except with the witchy, since he’s not.

6. Chocolate (now see we’re getting to the petty)

7. Shoes

8. Food in the fridge

9. Roof over my head.

10. Mochas!

11. Vampires to hunt. I am what I am and that’s a necessary evil for a girl like me.

12. Rocky

13. Angel, relatively okay. Somewhere in the world.