A thought flashes through your mind, and you manage, somehow, to gasp out a question, to ask him if it will hurt very badly. And he pushes against you hard, trapping you between the wall and his body, and looks up at you with wicked yellow eyes and a feral mouth. He tells you that it's overwhelming - extraordinary - all consuming. It's need and want and life and death and pain and pleasure all intermingled into an inexorable and inevitable moment of clarity. Then there will be the tang of iron and salt in your mouth; blood and strength drawn into your body with your last breath. And you will fall. And you will rise. And upon rising you'll be strong and healthy and eternal. You will never again fear sickness or aging or death. You will have conquered them. And you will finally be alive.
You smile, because it will be so good to be without fear; you haven't felt like that for months. He bends his head and smiles against your neck, you can feel the scrape of teeth against your throat. And if he's thinking of someone else while he does this to you that's okay because you'll be getting what you want.
You'll be strong and healthy and eternal and you'll be there for your girls forever. And he pauses. And he hesitates. And he lifts his head and looks at you with blue eyes and a trembling mouth. He tells you that you are a good woman and a good mother, and that might change. He says that he can't spare Buffy the pain of your sickness and aging and death because the pain of your strength and health and eternity will be so much greater.
He leaves you then, with your head spinning and your knees shaking. He walks deeper into the earth as you sink to the ground. You would curse him, but you think that it would only be a drop in the ocean. A smudge on the black ash that once was his soul.
You hear a voice from the other room. Mom? it calls, curiously. Mom? it repeats, urgently. Mommy? it bleats, plaintively.
So you rise and you follow the voice and you call out reassuringly that mommy is here.
That she'll always be here.
And you wish with all of your heart that this was true.