The Queen Slayer {2}

Alone In The World

MILAN, ITALY

Life was a difficult thing to get through. The world would throw obstacle after obstacle at you, forcing you to fight and claw your way through every moment. For some though those obstacles, were simple acts, ones that might just cause emotional turmoil. While others resulted in more physical altercations to fight through.

Life was different for everyone, and the trials they faced were specific to the individual.

For an unlucky few, life was unnecessarily cruel, forcing the trials to leave the person flailing in the air like a helpless leaf. Struggling to find even the smallest of reasons to keep going.

What made life worth the pain of those trials?

What were the moments of light within the darkness?

What made someone want to rebel through all those harsh trials, to defy the odds and keep clawing back up through the dirt, latching onto the earth that seemingly kept punishing them, trying to take away their hope?

Would the circumstances leave the person doing things they weren't proud of the survive? To keep living for just a chance, of tasting some form of hope.

Hope and light within the dark that was never truly guaranteed.

For Buffy Summers, there were a few moments that she focused on when she found herself wanting to crumble. Moments she used to push through those trials as they beat her down, trying to get her to surrender to the darkness that death offered her. Trying to convince her to allow herself to be swallowed into an unknown abyss.

7 years of struggling through life. Yet, she refused to just measure her life in the number of years of pain. She had to focus on the people around her who had touched her heart, the people who she herself had touched. Granting reasons to fight through the difficulties of life, despite the trials inflicted upon their souls.

Life was an individual war for every person, only ending when that final moment before death came.

Buffy had died three times in the course of her life, and each time she came back the struggle to keep moving forward became a little hard to grasp. Her first death at only 16 had been the easiest and while she had been terrified, it wasn't the most fear she had experienced during one of her deaths. Her second death at the mere age of 20 was so unlike the first time the Grim Reaper had tried to claim her soul. There hadn't been any fear, while there had been physical pain, there had been nothing but peace.

Her third death at 21 was the one that now haunted her the most.

When she had been her most helpless and vulnerable. Terrified out of her mind as she was put through torturous agonising pain more intense than anything she had ever experienced in her 7 years as The Slayer. However, despite the horrific trial the world had put her through, it was the easiest death to climb back from, to find something to keep living for.

Because she had been fighting for her daughter.

Her daughter who was now gone, stored away with Rebekah Mikaelson, probably on the other side of the world right now.

A lot could change in 24 hours, Buffy knew that more than anyone in this world.

24 Hours ago she had been a sobbing mother, handing her daughter away for what could possibly be her entire life, and now here she stood. Gone were the tears that had been staining her cheeks as she forced herself to place her daughter in her father's arms, watching as he walked away with her; sending her into the unknown.

Instead Buffy was a woman on a mission, her harsh, cold and calculating eyes moving tactically as she leapt from rooftop to rooftop under Milan's midnight sky.