68.6: Stay
Immortality didn’t suit her, really.
If she could’ve found the sense in it, the reason for it, maybe she could’ve reconciled with it. A parent should not outlive their child, and she had never intended to. Sometimes she thought the Powers were punishing her, punishing her for being jealous of Claire and the others, angry that they would go on and leave her behind. Punishing her for letting herself be brought back from the death they’d planned for her. That maybe she’d been meant to die on the battlefield, that her life had been a sacrifice for her war, and she’d defied them. Or allowed others to defy them, because she’d wanted more time, just a little more time.
Well, she’d certainly gotten that. Death never reached for her again.
And she’d been happy, for a while. God, so happy. Happy enough that she’d made peace with the rest of it. She’d helped make a new world. She’d helped rid it of so much evil--not just fought it off an evening at a time, but banished it for good. She was content, more than, with her handful of limited, mortal years.
She sank into a depression of sorts, for a good 80 years, after their daughter died. Time rolled on, the world changed…and she slept through it, mostly. He stayed with her. She wasn’t sure how many would, but he did. None of them gave up on her, and it was all that kept her from drowning. She pushed herself out of it because they deserved better from her. Her husband deserved to have a wife that could at the very least lift her head from the pillow every morning.
The others had died. Hank, Karina--even Annie eventually followed them all into whatever came after.
And still, death never reached for her again.
Hundreds of years went by, and she wasn’t certain that she could claim with any honesty that she’d been truly happy for a single moment of it.
He deserved better than that. He deserved to have the woman he’d fallen in love with, the woman he’d made promises to, not the colorless husk she’d become, drained of all her vibrancy, her love for life, her glitter, her wonder. She’d lost that, all of it. She wasn’t even sure if her blood still ran bright and red.
A selfless woman would walk away, would let him go and find someone that could make him happy, but she wasn’t a selfless woman. She was utterly and irrevocably dependent on him. She had no purpose without him, no reason to exist except to be his.
For better or for worse, selfish or no, she stayed.
Patient: Baileigh Solis
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (OC)
Word count: 445
Partner: Julian Sark (Alias), rp based for dontrightly_die (Firefly AU)