Humans -- by Luisa


Rating: PG

Description: Spike does a little 'soul searching' with a captive Willow.

Note: Dedication - To everyone.

Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all its characters.


I.

I never thought before I killed. It was an instant thing, like switching off a light before leaving a room. Someone's light went off while mine glowed brighter somewhere inside of me. I never considered it in terms of justice or injustice, there was no inner voice asking me difficult questions. Kill, that was the operative-word. Take, just another way of putting it.

I was separating them from their feelings, their thoughts, their memories, their illusions. They fought for them wildly, but I was always the strongest. I believe I wanted all those things more than they did. Each piece of the human puzzle gave some meaning to existence. A dream or a wish sometimes shone brighter than a million suns. That sunlight was precious to me because it warmed me when nothing else could. And I never questioned whether I had a right to it. I did and that was all. In the end I knew I wanted to exist more than they ever had. I possessed the faculties to relish life and make it beautiful. They didn't.

Ugly bodies, superficial minds...boring jobs, nagging wives. I had it all figured out, I knew them better than they knew themselves. And I bestowed upon myself the right to rob them of what they didn't need and give them what they'd been wanting all along. Peace. Something at the back of my mind told me as I was doing them a favor. It took me a while to realize that they'd never asked for it and even then I couldn't help thinking that they were confused. They didn't know what they wanted until I gave it to them. When my mouth closed on them, there was bliss on their skins. I tasted their enlightenment, their recognition. It was just one more feeling, their last one at that. I cleared their minds by absorbing all that cluttered it, but never gave them the chance to start over. Their new-found knowledge was useless. It just made them struggle less hard and give up more easily.

A man once guessed what his fate would be. His words were: "Go ahead and do it. But please make it painless." My first instinct was to have him beg. I moved towards him, broke his neck and left him there. I didn't feed from him. When afterwards I questioned myself about it, it seemed obvious why I had done it that way. The smell of his blood hadn't been to my liking.


II.

It was the girl who first gave me an inkling to the wider picture. She didn't want to die. Her blood was tinged with anger and rejection. I could see it and sense it. It was like a concrete wall between me and everything else inside her mind. The experience was dreadful to me, not only because it shattered my whole perception of the way things were, but also because it came from someone like her. I was taken aback. She was just a girl, no better and no worse than thousands of others.

Loneliness was eating away at me at the time. I grabbed her, moved for the kill and then dropped her. She fell on the ground. She wasn't dead because I wanted her alive. Being alone was becoming unbearable to me, I craved for some sort of presence beside me. The girl happened to be around at the right time.

She was unconscious for a long time. She didn't even move when I prodded her with my foot. I gave up and decided to wait. Looking at her helped pass the time. She was thin and red-haired, pale as a sheet. Her clothes were half-torn and there was blood on her collar. Finally I just got tired of waiting and crouched on the sidewalk next to her. I took hold of her shoulders and hit her twice across the face. She stirred and moaned, opening her eyes. When she saw me, her whole body winced. I could feel myself gazing at her and seeing her skin grow almost transparent with fear. When I let go of her, she fell back on the pavement, closing her eyes as if to shut out something gruesome.

"Get up." She opened her eyes and stared at me. I was in no mood for a pair of piercing, green eyes directed at my face, so I pulled at her wrist until she got up and staggered behind me.

"Now get this into your head. We're gonna drink, I'm gonna talk and you're gonna listen."

I heard her sigh. "Fine."


III.

She wasn't used to heavy drinking. First she gasped as the vodka slid down her throat and then, as the hours crawled by, she started looking sick. The liquor had made her bold and all her fury and frustration were aimed at me. I could feel her becoming restless and wanting to leave. She'd been listening to me go on and on about humans and their pathetic, useless existence. When I described to her what I felt when everytime I killed one, she tried to get up.

"Where're you going?" The vodka had taken its toll on my thinking and speaking abilities. I could barely get my tongue around the words. But my hand was on her arm. She blinked dazedly for a few seconds and then frowned. Her eyes grew darker.

"I can't listen to you anymore. Go ahead and kill me, but just shut up from now on!" For a moment, I actually felt like bursting into laughter. The situation was surreal. The girl getting all mad, the half-empty bottle, the darkness and the icy concrete...was I still on earth?

She hadn't finished what she wanted to say. Her fear was gone and I was in no state to revive it. At a certain point, I felt like ripping her throat out...but didn't.

"Do you think people want to die?!", she asked. "They don't! Nobody wants to die. The idea just grows on them when they find out they have no choice. So stop making it easier on yourself by assuming you're their benefactor or some crap like that! This world is really bad, but people cling to it fiercely. It's all they have and they don't want to let go. If you point a knife at them, do you think they'll step towards it? They won't! People are not out there waiting to die. A blue sky is enough to make them want to live. And if the next day that sky is gone, they'll remember it and wish for it over and over again. They hope it will be there when they wake up in the morning."

For me, it was like having my head slammed against a wall, my thoughts morphing into something alien and twisted. I was looking at the reverse of the coin when I didn't even know it had one. The girl spoke hurriedly, grasping for the right words. I think she felt sorry for me at one point, though I can't see why she should. When she had finished, she wrenched her arm from my grip and ran away. Just like that. I was incredulous, to say the least. I didn't try to stop her, maybe because I wanted to be left alone. To think about things. What she'd said changed it all. My head was throbbing with the knowledge that I was wrong. The fact that people didn't want to die irked me because I'd been convinced of the opposite and now it seemed that I'd never even begun to get it.

It wasn't like what she said made a big difference on the surface of things. I still killed people, they still died. But the thought that the people I killed were infinitely more complex than I'd imagined haunted me all the time. I kept on slaughtering them, but my heart wasn't in it anymore. It seemed too much like the inconsequent waste of a very good thing.

The End

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