Dedication: To my best friend. I can't believe I had to leave you...I admired you so much.
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I sat numbly on my bed, trying to find a way to record the events of the night in my journal. How do you write about something like this? You don't, I finally decided. Trying to mold my raging emotions into words seemed sacrilege somehow, and I didn't want to defile Buffy's memory in my mind in any way.
I leaned back and tried to relax, as I let memories wash over me. I recalled the first day I had met Buffy...when the new girl had refused to follow Cordelia and had broken free of her to be friends with *me*. Right then, Buffy earned my loyalty for life. I am by nature a very loyal person, and when I actually find someone who is worthy of my admiration, I would go through hell and back for them. I know I would have for her, if that's what she had needed. Buffy had never been anything but kind to me, and I asked nothing more. It was my choice to be so devoted to Buffy while she was here.
I knew when I saw her that Xander would fall head-over-heels for her. Did this bother me? Not really. As I said, I would walk through fire for someone who had earned my respect, and Buffy certainly had. I think that watching Xander love her was a little bit of hell for me, but I took it bravely and silently.
Buffy had been my someone to stand behind. She had shielded me from the world, but she knew when to push me out there and make me stand on my own. She was my window to look through when I couldn't bring myself to open the door. What I wouldn't give to have that safe feeling back.
All this ran through my head as the fact that she wasn't here anymore started to sink in to my muddled thoughts. Tonight had been the final chapter...the fall of the great Slayer. It's funny...you admire someone like that, you acknowledge ungrudgingly that that person is everything you want to be, and you start to think that they're immortal. That they will never die. I know I must've thought that about Buffy, but that illusion had been brutally severed tonight, a connection broken and a protector lost. She fell at the hand of the kind which she was destined to kill, and the irony of her defeat was painful.
They killed her. Just this once, she hadn't been fast enough, she hadn't been alert enough, she had let her guard down. She had turned, a split second of lost concentration as I called out to her for help, and a stake, one of her own weapons for god's sake, had ended an era with a swift stroke through the heart. I remembered Giles's anguished cry, as he rushed to her, and I think I cried out myself, but I can't be sure. Giles and Angel knelt on one side of her bleeding body, and Xander and I on the other, holding her as she struggled for her final breaths. Giles spoke roughly to her, pleading.
"Buffy, don't you give up. Don't you leave, damn it, Buffy..."
She had looked slowly, painfully, to each of us in turn, memorizing our faces in the final moments she had here with us. Her eyes dropped closed, she took one final breath, and she whispered, "I loved you all." The air left her lungs for the last time, and they never filled again.
I was stunned. Angel screamed, a feral scream of the hunt for revenge, and took of into the night to destroy her killer with all the hate he had in him. Xander held Buffy with one arm and me with the other. I tried to take my eyes away from her still form but I couldn't...I was sure she would come back and I didn't want to miss it when she did. Surely any minute she would sit up, and smile...?
I think Giles took it worse than any of us. I know that the look of failure and immeasurable pain on his face while he held his dead Slayer in his arms will haunt me for years to come. She had been his reason, and now his reason was gone.
I don't know how I'll ever let her go. When Buffy took her last breath, I was right there with her, dying a little myself, experiencing it right along with her, because even at the hour of her fall, I refused to go back on my unstated promise: to walk through hell for her. And believe me, it was hell to watch her go.
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