ShyTemptress - LMAO! Be patient, sweetie.
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Title: Adrienne
Author: Naeryn, aka Megan
Feedback: Goddess, yes!
Distribution: Tell me where and give me credit. Other than that, fill your boots. *pauses to wonder where that phrase came from*
Rating: Rated T, for Teen.
Notes: News about Oz, and some questions *subtly* resolved. To you, anyway. Tara's still clueless
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CHAPTER 3
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“Dead?” Tara’s jaw dropped in shock. “What? When? How?”
“Three good questions, I suppose… it… it was just over four years ago. After you left, we were all worried. We didn’t know if you were dead or… I freaked out. I still felt for you, a lot, I just… I belonged with Oz, then. He understood. He stood by me like never before. We beat Adam that year – you remember, I told you about him?” Tara nodded acknowledgement. “Well, Buffy, Xander, Giles and I all did this spell where we became this sort of super-Buffy. Giles was the mind, Buffy was the hand, Xander was the heart, and I was the spirit. The rest of all of us was there too, but… you know. Dawn showed up shortly after that, a couple of months.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wasn’t there before.”
“But I remember her.”
Willow nodded. “You would. She wasn’t… she’s not entirely human. I mean, she is now, but she used to be this big glowing ball of energy called the Key. Her blood can rip down dimensional walls. We fought a hellgod to save her life; Glory wanted to use her to break down the walls between the dimensions to return to her own. There were these monks that took care of the Key, but Glory came after them. They had to do something to prevent the Beast – that’s what they called her – from getting the Key. So they made it human and sent it to the Slayer in the form of a sister, knowing that Buffy would protect it with her life. Luckily, it didn’t quite go that far… Buffy managed to knock Glory off the tower – the ritual had to be performed way up high – before she could bleed Dawn. If the ritual had begun, the only way to end it would have been for… for Dawn to die.” Willow shuddered at that. “She was so brave. She didn’t know I knew, but I heard her, in her room. She swore that if Glory ever got her hands on her and managed to start the ritual… she was prepared to kill herself to end it, to save all of our lives.”
Tara inhaled sharply. “I knew she was stronger than Buffy gave her credit for. I don’t doubt she would have done it, either.”
“No… she definitely would have done it. Glory shared a body with Ben, he was an intern at the hospital who… oh, God, you don’t know, do you?”
“Don’t know what?” Tara’s voice edged on panic. How much pain had passed through their lives while she’d been up here, raising her daughter?
Willow swallowed hard. “It’s… Joyce. She had… she had a brain tumour. She went in for an operation and they managed to get it all, but… a couple of weeks out of the hospital, she… she had an aneurysm. Buffy came home and found her, lying on the couch…” She shook her head. “Everything was quiet that day. It was like… even the birds stopped singing. Dawn tried to bring her back, once. Resurrect her. It… we don’t know what she actually brought back, she broke the spell before she saw what it was. I thank the goddess for that.”
Face pale, Tara blinked back tears. It wasn’t fair, Joyce was such a good mother, such a good person. She’d reminded Tara a little of her own mother.
“It was just a month or so after that that Glory attacked… she had this thing she did where she… ugh, it was disgusting. She stuck her hands in… inside someone’s head and… stole their minds. Their sanity; they were left babbling, muttering idiots with no sense of… anything. She did that to Riley. He… he died too. In the final battle, right at the end… he charged some of Glory’s minions – Buffy described them relatively accurately as hobbits with leprosy – they killed him.
“That’s when Oz… that’s when he died. I was doing a spell, trying to figure out a way to bind some of the hobbit things, and I didn’t see the bolt… one of them fired a crossbow at me. Oz… jumped in front of it. Took it in the gut. He died, protecting me, even though… our relationship had pretty much faded by that time. We weren’t really together, we shared a bed but not ourselves, we were… close friends, but no more. Not really.” She didn’t say it, but Willow knew the reason. She didn’t see Oz the same way anymore, or any man. Her mind, her heart, all of her was too full of Tara for her to see anyone as anything more than a friend, no matter how she tried, how she knew she was where she was supposed to be. She shook her head, giving a bitter smile. “His last hurrah was literally a hurrah. He had that kind of droll sense of humour, you know? Last thing he said was ‘I love you, Will. I don’t regret this. Hurrah.’ He lived long enough to see Ben die in the fall off the tower, for me to kiss him, one last time, and then…” She wiped her hand furiously under her eyes.
Tara reached out, placing her hand on Willow’s arm, trying to comfort without intruding. “I’m all right, really. I still miss him… I loved him. He was my best friend, my chance. I’ve made my peace with his death, which, you know, stuns me completely. Took me awhile to accept that anyone would ever be willing to do that for me… die for me. I think the part that I’m still mourning is my future.”
The hand withdrew, leaving Willow’s arm cold and aching dully. Tara looked confused. “What do you mean? Your future? I know you don’t have one with him anymore, but surely you still…” She also wondered about Willow’s apparent insecurity. She hadn’t realized before how deeply it apparently ran. She couldn’t see that there were people who would die for her? She could think of four off the top of her head, one of whom already had.
“I’ve had my chances. It’s… it just feels like I’ve used up all my chances now. First there was Xander, right? I was absolutely crazy for him. We moved at the wrong time, and that fell apart, and it made Oz and I fall apart too. Then there was Oz… we fell apart twice, but managed to work it out. Until he died… even up until that point, we weren’t really together, but I always thought we’d wind up that way, even if just by default. Then there was you. We weren’t together long, but… three strikes, you’re out, you know?” An echo of loneliness made itself known in Willow’s voice.
Tara shook her head. “I don’t think it works like that, Will.”
Both women sat in silence for long moments, until a loud crash resonated from the kitchen, followed by a child’s cry. Tara’s face took on a look of horror. “Adrienne.” They stood up together and bolted into the kitchen.
Tara careened to a stop just inside the kitchen, Willow a half step behind her. Both women were horrified at the sight before them. A plate lay on the floor, shattered, and Jamie, a little boy of about three or so, was curled up in one corner of the room, staring at Adrienne. The girl sat in the middle of the shards of glass, blood seeping from a gash across her arm and a nasty bruise quickly forming on her cheek.
Hurrying forwards, Tara stepped artfully around the glass and swooped Adrienne into her arms. Her slippered feet kicked the shards aside as she made her way to the sink to clean out her daughter’s wound, and assess how bad it was. She hoped it wouldn’t need stitches.
Willow herself darted around the pile of broken plate and over to the little boy in the corner, kneeling before him in a crouch. Gently, she placed her hand on his shoulder and eased around him, blocking from his view the blood on the floor. “Hey. Your name’s Jamie, isn’t it?”
His face gathered itself into a tight, puckered look, and he began to cry, finally free of the sight of the blood on the floor that had shocked him into silence. Willow pulled the little boy close to her, letting him cry. She cast a glance over at Tara.
Up at the sink, Tara was relieved to find that the wound wasn’t terribly bad. It was long, and would probably scar, but the bleeding had stopped almost entirely already. Adrienne had a few small, shallow cuts on her feet as well, but those would heal quickly. She looked down at Willow to see the redhead holding Jamie. She smiled relief and saw the expression mirrored on Willow’s face.
“Come on Will, let’s put these kids to bed. We’ll get Jamie down, then wrap up Adrienne’s arm and give her her… oh.” She looked over at the clock; she hadn’t realized how late it was. It was seven thirty at night, she and Willow had talked for several hours. “Okay, maybe not a nap. Definitely bed.” She picked Adrienne up off the counter and braced her against her hip again. “Can you take Jamie up?”
Willow nodded, altering her grip on the little boy slightly and picking him up off the floor, careful to keep the blood and shattered glass out of his line of vision. “I’m right behind you.”
Moments later, Jamie lay in his crib and Adrienne sat on the toilet in the bathroom. Tara was rummaging around underneath the sink.
“Tara…”
“Yeah, Will?”
“Can I talk to you outside? It won’t take two seconds, I just need to ask you something.”
Tara looked over at Willow, curiously. “All right… stay here, Adrienne. I’ll be right back.”
They both stepped outside, Tara inquisitive, Willow nervous. “Since you left, I’ve been practicing magic. I’m pretty good at… well, I wanted to know if Adrienne knows anything about magic? I could heal her arm, and it wouldn’t leave a scar, but I don’t want to freak her out or anything.”
Tara looked unsure. “Heal her arm? You’re that powerful?”
“Yeah… I’m really careful about it though. After you left, I thought I should keep doing some of the reading we were… I found some accounts from people who were using magic for everything, and how bad it got, and addictions and all that… so I’m careful with it. After Glory got Riley, I sort of went after Glory a little… used dark magic, but it freaked me. Too strong, and it burned. Has sort of a metallic taste too. I did a cleansing and never touched the stuff again. But, yeah, I have a fair amount of power in the healing department. I fixed Buffy’s broken rib once, though I’m not sure how much of that was just regular Slayer healing.”
“You… kept up the reading?” Tara looked surprised, but not unpleasantly so. She shook her head, now wasn’t the time, no matter how much she wanted to know about Willow’s little excursion into the darker side of magic and her cleansing afterwards. “Yes, she knows about magic. She’s seen me do one or two spells, and I’ve told her that when she’s a little older I’ll start teaching her spells as well as the theory and laws of Wicca she’s learning now… yes, all right.”
Willow smiled, glad to have this opportunity to do something for her daughter. She gave Tara’s arm a quick squeeze, and then turned and headed back into the bathroom.
Kneeling in front of the little girl, Willow reached up and lightly touched the cut, smiling gently. “Hey there. You don’t know me very much, I know, but I’m going to have to ask you to trust me, okay? Your mommy will be right here beside you.” She gestured over at Tara, who was now crouched beside Adrienne, holding her hand tightly. “I’m going to try something to make the pain go away.”
With the strength of a girl twice her age, Adrienne nodded, swallowing her tears. She tightened her grip on her mother’s hand, looking away as Willow’s hand covered her wound completely. Yet, somehow, she couldn’t keep looking away as a faint glow emanated from the pale hand. She smiled as a honeyed, tickling sensation flooded her arm, flowing out from her fingertips and through her shoulder to fill her whole body.
Willow lifted her hand from Adrienne’s injury, smiling as she saw the skin there whole and unbroken, only a faint line marking where she’d been hurt. Tara looked over at her, wonder in her eyes. She seemed about to speak, but was stopped when her daughter yawned widely and her eyelids began to droop heavily shut.
“Er… yeah. That tends to happen. People get tired, since I have to draw on their reserves a little to speed up the healing process and… a – ” she cut herself off with a large yawn. “And it makes them tired. But I draw mostly from myself, and that kind of makes me tired too…” she shook her head. “I should go, now. You put Adrienne to bed and… can I come by tomorrow?”
Tara was still staring at her, agape. What had she learned, what had she done in the five years since they’d known each other? Apparently they still had very much to talk about. “Um… yeah. Yes, of course. Around one? I have some errands to run in the morning…”
Willow smiled. “One it is.” She looked over at Adrienne, half asleep on the toilet, waiting to be carried into her room and the arms of slumber. “I’ll see you then.” Her smile turned wistful and she hurried out of the room and, subsequently, the house, before Tara could say another word.
Picking up her child, Tara sighed. This wasn’t what she expected to happen at all.
by Rachel » Sun Jun 19, 2005 9:00 pm 
she's been through so very much in her life (I assume you're sticking to cannon with regards the way her family treated her?) & she's been alone for almost all of it. Aww, I wanna give her a big hug.
and i can't wait to see what happens when Adrienne finds out willow is her other mommy and i feel so bad about what tara all went throw after willow choose oz, and i agree with JustSkipIt about the hole Oz is dead or left Willow it makes the choice to be with Tara less meaningful. cuz it kindy leaves you wondering if she would have choose tara if he was still around unless she left him befor he die then it wont be so meaningless especially if the reason she left him was cuz she still love tara or something along those lines. but even so i still love this fic and can't wait for the next update so keep them coming please!!
. Love sam xx
Poor Willow, that's an awful lot to deal with.
).
