I want to live.

"This… this is the best… the best gift I've ever had, honey. This is the best there could ever be. This is all I want… for you to try."

And Ariel would live. She would heal. Chyna was certain of it.

But there was something she wasn't certain of. Would she live? After everything she went through with Vess-- don't think about it.

The doctors had said she made a marvelous recovery, her ability to bounce back was stunning. But bounce back from what? She couldn't even remember falling to the earth, allowing gravity to give her the chance to bounce back. She knew she had been dangerously close to the edge many times; how defeated she had sounded while speaking to Vess, how she had almost committed suicide.

But she had never truly hit rock bottom. She hadn't gone through with ending herself. She was alive. Untouched. Untouched and alive. But for how long? What if another killer would go after her just because she was now famous, thinking her first experience had weakened her? It didn't seem all that farfetched. Her face was on the news a lot now, she was practically a celebrity. Celebrities were often targeted by murderers or rapists. Or both.

Could she handle going through something like that again? She sat down on her couch, and thought about it for hours, her mind going through every single situation she could think of, doing her best to discern what her reaction would be.

When she was finished, the results of her self-research hadn't been good. She couldn't stop thinking about him. Edgler Foreman Vess. She knew that every movement, every word that her kidnapper (or whatever) would make or speak, would send her into a flurry of memories of the unique serial killer. She wouldn't survive, because she would go mad thinking of him.

Her mind then flickered to a distant memory that seemed like something someone wouldn't ordinarily remember at a time like this. Thus was the wonders of the human mind.

A few years ago-- God knew she couldn't remember just how long it had been-- she had been in a waiting room, ready to be interviewed for a job. It had taken at least nearly two hours for her name to finally be called. Out of pure boredom, she had pulled a tissue and pen out of her purse and scribbled down:

THINGS MOST LIKELY TO KILL ME

Laura's driving

Public bathrooms

Palmettos

Woltz

Doberman Pinschers

She hadn't understood her own joke behind the last one, it just sounded like a silly thing to put at the time, but in a few years it wouldn't seem funny at all.

Chyna closed her eyes, returning to the present. She wouldn't survive. Even if she was never targeted again, she would always have his face lingering somewhere in the back of her thoughts. She added another thing to that damned list:

Edgler Foreman Vess

It seemed she really would go insane long before she was dead, after all.

A/N: I've been wanting to write something for Intensity for quite some time now. I don't know where this came from, really. It just hit me this morning, October 11th 2008. Review?