Self preservation can be so many things. Perhaps you know that your own heart would stop beating once anothers did, and you have to save them to save yourself? You'd do whatever it took to save that other person. Take a bullet for them, kill, travel to the far reaches of the world to find a cure for what kept the two of you apart... And then you return, and she's with someone new. Someone who's perhaps better for her than you.
That's when you try to forgive.
Muse: Oz
Fandom: Buffy
(crossposted to
theatrical_muse )