From Claire, who is a meme dealer, but I can't say much since I did it to her

( Salty or sweet )

( Soda )

( Gum )

[MM] Regina Spektor lyrics

(continued from here)

Oh, we couldn't bring the columns down
Yeah we couldn't destroy a single one
And history books forgot about us
And the bible didn't mention us, not even once
You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first

=================================

It was like waking up into a whole new world.

She no longer had to fight against her nature, because all of the things that pulled her out into the night were gone. It was the first time in so many years that her life felt completely her own. Nothing was drawn to her, nothing crawled under her skin. There was nothing left of that life except the other girls who survived. After a few years, she even stopped looking over her shoulder.

She watched her child grow from a girl into a teenager into a woman. Bright and strong and beautiful. Happy and loved.

Time passed, but it never seemed to touch her. It takes years for it to really sink in. That she didn’t just look good for her age: she wasn’t aging. There were no lines on her face or grey hairs to complain about. She felt the time. It just didn’t show.

At her daughter’s graduation, she looked around at the faces of other mothers, some familiar to her, some not. Even factoring in the opportunities for Botox and lifts and nips and tucks, none of which she’d had or needed, she knew she didn’t look like she could’ve possibly been the parent of an eighteen year old girl. Neither of them did…but she knew that Julian never would, now, and had spent so much time accepting it, accepting the fact that she would have to age and grow old alone.

She was afraid to acknowledge it, or talk about it, or let any sort of hope in, so she ignored it, until it became an issue that could no longer be ignored.

Eventually a reset button was needed. New names and identities, a new place to live, and she became her daughter’s elder sister to the public eye rather than her mother. They adjusted their lives around her, so that they could remain in her life, close to her. Still she didn’t change. She poured over books, Watcher’s diaries, even though she knew it was pointless, there was no precedent. Slayers didn’t live this long. Twenty years, thirty, going on forty years after she’d been called--that didn’t happen. Four Decembers, that was a generous long life for one of her kind.

Time passed. She felt it, but not once did it show.

The same pearls she wore to her daughter’s graduation, she wore to her funeral. A little piece of her broke away and shattered, ground into powder, and couldn’t be repaired. The first piece, and sadly, it would not be the last. But it would prove to be the biggest piece, the hardest, the most painful break she would feel in what would come to be a long, long life.

She buried her child. The child that, when asked, she would have to pass off as her grandmother. They buried their child, their strong, beautiful, bright and brilliant child.

Time passed. Somehow, they kept moving with it.