Disclaimer: Buffy and Anita Blake do not belong to me. Cause, honestly, if they did, I wouldn‘t have to write fanfics, right? The Song belongs to Snow Patrol and is called Somewhere a clock is ticking.

A/N1: I feel the need to justify this fic, I really do. But I don't know how. I guess I just needed to write this.

A/N2: Everything I know about Anity Blake is second hand knowledge, so opinions and suggestions are highly appreciated. This is for my baby sis, who bought me the Snow Patrol Album.

EDIT: Revamped 01/18/2007.





Solar



There were no colors. Whatever colors the world might once have held, they were all gone now. Bleeding into one another like the water color pictures she used to draw for him and him only.

But today there was only the gray of angry skies mourning for the light of their world.

The Slayer was dead.

I’ve got this feeling that there’s something that I missed

He could tell that the people standing around her grave, clinging desperately to each other, had no idea who he was. He, the silent blonde man with those ice cold, dead eyes.

They’d never know now, that the only link he ever had to them had been severed. They’d never know that she had been the one who had put some warmth and a semblance of life back into those eyes whenever she had been around.

They would never know the way she had laughed when he had lifted her tiny body and swung her around, telling her that she was the center of his world. Before.

And now he would never know those people that she had made her center. He didn’t want to know them, but he would have liked to have seen what they had seen. He would have liked to have held her when they had held her and told her that things would be alright again.

That was his one regret, not being there when his baby sister turned into the stunning being that now lay so still and lifeless.

Don’t you breathe

He didn’t know how it happened. He would never know because there was no one he could ask.

Dawn, that tiny slip of a broken girl, with his blood flowing in her veins.

He could barely stand the sight of her. She was her sister’s spitting image, those big eyes blue like his, the small features. She had been part of her life that he had never gotten to see. She was the reason the only link he had ever had to his life before the hate and the rage had been severed. She was the reason his sister was dead and for that he hated Dawn Summers with a passion.

He hated her for having had to open that letter, a week ago. Five lines only, beginning with I’m going to die... and ending with remember that I’ll always love you. He had thrown his half full mug of coffee against the wall, where it had shattered like a bomb.

Not enough. Not even close.

Donna had come running and so had the kids, asking him what was going on and he had taken a single look at them. Just one look and he had been disgusted. They were cannon fodder. They were meat and nothing more. Bundles of flesh and sinew with a heart inside that beat too fast and felt too much. He found himself comparing them to her. To the way she had picked up the pieces that had been made of her heart at the age of four. To the way she had made herself as hard as he was without losing the life from her eyes.

She had been his equal. Donna and the kids were nothing.

Something happened, that I never understood

They were weak, like this teenage girl, weak and human. Breakable. They all were.

Edward despised humanity as much as he despised the supernatural that had ripped his parents to pieces when he had been fifteen and she had been four. He remembered clutching her tightly to him, so tightly it had to hurt her, but she hadn’t made a single sound. Not that night and not for a long time after. Today he was sure that was the reason for the cold he felt so deep inside whenever he went looking for his heart.

Her silence.

He had watched his parents being slaughtered but what had truly killed anything akin to humanity inside of him had been her tightly locked lips and the tears that refused to fall.

She had broken that night.

Broken like he had, but she had been too young to understand. He had.

And then Auntie Joyce and Uncle Hank had come along and taken them both with them. He had stayed barely half a year because he couldn’t stand them and they were scared of him. Scared of his eyes, clear as glass with endless plains of nothing behind them.

He made them promise to love his little princess and then he had left to kill every last one of the things that had broken her.

You can’t leave

For years there had been letters, filled with stories he used to tell her at bed time and with pictures that she made, just for him. With time her drawings had turned into photographs of her and her new family, her and her friends, her and the life she had.

Every second, dripping off my finger tips

More than a decade of her life, portrayed in pictures and words only. He had let time slip away because he had been scared of her, of the humanity she reignited within him. Her tiny hand in his and he could almost forget his hate.

Wage your war

And then suddenly she was there, on his doorstep with a bag over her shoulder and that cold in her eyes that looked back at him from the mirror every morning.

She had killed.

She had killed her lover and become like him. In some sick and twisted way he had been proud. Proud because he always knew that she had it in her, ever since she had opened her mouth again, after three months of silence to tell him with all the authority of a four year old that she would kill the monsters.

He had been waiting for her to fulfill that promise ever since.

And the following summer had been a dance.

She had fought and killed with an efficiency that rivaled his own. She had been ruthless in her blinding pain and loathing for the world that had taken not only her first, but now also her second family.

But the rage had faded and the broken girl had started to become something like whole again and it had been over. The humanity had crept back into her eyes after only four months and he knew that he had lost her again.

Edward was a sick and twisted fuck and as long as she had been there with him it had been beautiful. Then he had sent her away again.

Another soldier, says he’s not afraid to die

He had sent her away because once more she had turned into the little girl he killed the monsters for and because she had her own war to fight.

Because no matter how much he loved the killing machine she had become, he couldn’t stand to look into those eyes and see the horrors she had watched, replaying themselves over and over and over again.

Well, I’m scared

She had left and he had been alone again, left to kill off what humanity she had planted in him.

He could see them now, standing a little away, safe in the shadows. Killers, like him, like her.

She had been a creature of darkness, like them, but there had also been light in her. It was that perverse mixture of light and dark, that contradiction, that beautifully twisted sense of death around her that had drawn them all. They had been nothing but moths to her flame.

In slow motion, the blast is beautiful

And how she had burned. Slayers never made it past 20 and still she had refused to give up. She had lived.

Faster, brighter, louder than humans could understand and often she had left broken bodies in her wake, but oh, how she had lived.

A symphony of life in the middle of death, a solar explosion in the deepest of nights. She had given his life beauty.

Doors slam shut

And now she was dead.

Somewhere a clock is ticking, but it's hidden far away

Buffy Summers had made his life something more than death. She had done it ruthlessly and wildly, too bright and too harsh, like she did everything, a little desperate, but she had succeeded.

She had once confessed that he was her greatest worry. She knew that her friends would take care of each other, but she was worried about what would happen to him when she was dead.

Safe and sound

He turned, as abruptly as he had appeared, leaving the cemetery behind and with it everything he had once been.

He left behind that fifteen year old boy, who had been willing to protect his sister to the very end and the man that had hungered for each of her letters and the spark of humanity that had broken upon watching her become like him.

His sister was dead.

And Edward was finally free.

Safe and sound

Safe and sound

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Now tell me how much of a sick puppy I am?