The Gentle Cycle
Insomnitic
Girl finds guy. Guy is fairly winsome and highly malleable. Girl takes guy. They are happy.
Guy leaves girl for someone younger, cuter, perkier.
Girl transforms into the embodiment of righteous vengeance, curses guy with impotence, club feet, crop blight, plagues of locusts, various communicable diseases thought to have been long eradicated, and really, really bad hair...
I wish.
No, I mean, I take that last part back. Why couldn't we just have the first bit, with the happiness and the fully located shoulders and the unhealthy associations between sex and the smell of fabric softener sheets?
Right now it's just me and an empty box of Downy, sitting in his basement, waiting for him.
I wish that Xander were more than the same old story. For a while, I thought just maybe he was different. Honestly, idiocy must be catching in this town. A millennium of smiting them down and I can't smell a Normal Man when his double-crossing face is right under my nose. Sometimes, I miss Cordelia -- which is pretty ironic, considering I ended up in this mess because Xander was wronging her around town in the first place. That should have been a big warning flag.
I'll be home soon for unspeakably passionate romance...and would you mind switching the load over while you're there?
The thing that sucks about being a regular human is that you get angry. Truly, deep-down, bone-cracking angry. I mean, demons talk about anger, rage, revenge, but they don't really know what it's like to sit with anger, to have it kick down your door and take up residence in your brain when you don't want it there. Anger you can't do anything about because...because...the cute-as-pie, utterly inept little witch your boyfriend still stares at even though she doesn't even like men lacked both the decency and the skill to retrieve the amulet that would let you fix it all.
Oh, and Anya, honey? Could you make sure not to put all my sweaters through on hot this time?
Well, you wouldn't even need the amulet. Not if you could slowly build back up until the insurmountable agony of being so wronged by the one you loved -- combined with a few readily available kitchen herbs -- screams through the dimensions and summons forth a cooperative demon. You could start small. With, say, vanishing a sock or something.
But, either way, say you did get your powers back. Hypothetically. In the face of such unbelievable good fortune, you have to deal with the Vampire Slayer who has taken up demon-killing as a day job. The Slayer who has also, apparently, spent most of her limited spare time for three years stringing your man along...The Slayer who happens to be the older sister of Someone Younger, Cuter, and Perkier.
Dawn.
I thought I was being paranoid. I mean, she's like five and her eyes are too big and her neck does this funny slope thing that some might consider swanlike and endearing but which I find bizarre. And it's not that I don't like Dawn. Well, I try to like Dawn. After all, it's not even her fault. It's just that she's stealing him whether she realizes it or not and the whole thing is unfair. They like the same things. The same games and music and some weird television show about animal rampages in Australia. I'm almost eleven hundred and twenty-two. How am I supposed to compete with youth?
I bet he would never ask her to move the laundry.
Of course, I bet she would never accidentally put a pair of red sweatpants in with all his white T-shirts...
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