"It's a Fantastico Life"
Part 2. Extra Curry CoolerRating: PG-13 Minor sexual references and adult themes.
So, how did Tara and Willow actually meet?
It was a question that was at the front of both Tara and Willow’s minds quite often in the days after they were first reunited in this, the real world. Fortunately, they have both retained an interest in magic, and there is a sequence of incantations and mental exercises that they have both found very helpful. It has another use, which I will tell more about a bit later. Although they were both very busy; Willow with work, Tara with work and her thesis, and both of them with impending parenthood and trying to rebuild some of the social bridges that had been lost or damaged in the transition between realities, they both managed to set aside at least one free evening each week to sort out their memories.
It’s more of a series of relaxation and focussing exercises rather than an actual spell; at least, that’s the way Tara and Willow did it. They would arrange themselves in comfort in their living room. They would join hands, chant, breathe in unison and together they would open their inner eyes; then they would relive in exquisite detail a few days of their past. They began the process slowly, but by the middle of their second trimester they were very good at it, and could fly through a whole month of their lives in the space of a single night. So what you must understand is that what I am about to relate happened before I was born. It has come to me through Willow and Tara’s explorations through their past, through their journals, photographs and their conversations.
At the end of her junior year of high school, Willow - the real one - had a little time on her hands. This was very different to her situation in the universe of darkness where, in the absence of Buffy, Willow had been obliged to spend most of her nights fighting vampires and the rest of her time hoodwinking her parents. In reality, Willow, with her parents’ encouragement, had spent most of the summer on campus of her local university doing a series of bridging courses.
Willow remembered a golden summer. Always sunny, the campus uncrowded and green, the tutorial rooms and halls containing only the keenest and brightest of students; some of them like her, high school kids testing the waters; some, university students helping out with research projects, and others, graduates justifying their grants. There were no queues, no raised voices, and no annoying proselytes. It was the way Willow always imagined university would be, and from the moment she set foot on campus, it only confirmed to Willow that this was where she wanted to be after high school, and although she had been generally shy and reserved during her school years, she spent most of that summer wearing a cheeky grin. Small wonder then that she fell in love that summer.
It was about a week before the end of her university sojourn. The campus was starting to fill up as students returned from their summer breaks. Willow was mentally preparing herself for the end of her courses and her return to high school. She was walking between classes one morning - it was sunny, of course - when she literally walked into a person coming the other way.
Willow’s folder and books tumbled to the floor, her heaviest text striking her a painful blow on the foot. “Ow!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” was the reply, in a warm, melodic voice. The contrite speaker was a young woman of similar height and age to Willow, with shoulder-length blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. “I’m most awfully sorry,” she repeated, crouching and helping Willow regather her things. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.” The map of the campus she was holding in her left hand trembled.
“It’s okay, I wasn’t looking either,” Willow answered, which was true. Her attention had been caught a moment earlier by a pair of birds flitting from tree to tree.
“You hurt your foot,” the blonde observed, almost squirming with distress and embarrassment.
“It’s all right, really,” Willow said, and the pain was indeed settling to a dull ache. She could put her weight on it; she didn’t think it was broken. She straightened, sucked in a deep breath and for the first time took a good look at the woman she had run into. Looking back at her, the blonde blushed. “Oh.” As often happened when she met new people, Willow was stuck for something to say for the moment.
“Um…” the map trembled once again in the embarrassed blonde’s hand.
“Could I help you? What are you trying to find?” Willow’s words tumbled out all at once. Call it instinct or fate; Willow’s only priority at that moment was to delay parting company with the other woman, though if anyone had asked her why at that moment (and Tara did ask her why, some weeks later) she would have replied that she didn’t have the faintest idea.
“Oh no, I mustn’t keep you,” the blonde protested unconvincingly. She didn’t want to part ways just yet either. “You were going the other way.”
“It’s okay, I’d be happy to help,” Willow smiled.
“Well,” the blonde turned the map around, almost dropping it. “It’s this.” And she pointed out an obscure administrative office.
“Oh, I know!” Willow said brightly. “It’s this way.” And she led the way.
“Are you doing this because you don’t want to see anyone else get hurt by me?” the blonde asked as they walked. Willow made a non-committal noise in her throat. “I’m Tara, and I’m a klutz,” the apologetic one added.
“I’m Willow, and I’m sure you’re not, really,” the redhead replied.
“Are you a tutor?” Tara asked suddenly.
Willow explained hurriedly that she was in fact still in high school, which seemed to surprise her companion. She saw Tara to her destination, and they parted company when Willow suddenly noticed that she was two minutes late for her next class.
The next day, Willow was entering the cafeteria, when she noticed Tara doing something apparently intimate with one of the soda machines.
“Hey Tara!” she called, walking up to the blonde.
“Willow, what am I going to do?” Tara answered unhappily. “My diary’s fallen behind the soda machine and I can’t reach it. You’d think they would have stopped to help.”
“Who would?”
“Oh, these two guys,” Tara snorted. “ I was just putting my books on top of the machine to get out some change when they came past. They were kidding around with a football or something and one of them bumped me.”
“And your diary fell behind the machine?” Willow finished the story for Tara.
“Yeah.”
“And they didn’t stop and help? Real gentlemen,” Willow sneered.
“Nothing I can do about it now,” Tara looked the machine over anxiously.
“Maybe you can tilt it and reach behind?” Willow suggested.
“It’s really heavy.”
“You tilt; I’ll hold,” Willow offered.
“Are you sure?” Tara seemed uncertain.
“I trust you.” A glance passed between the two young women then. On the surface, it was a simple exchange to overcome an everyday problem. But there was a tenuous undercurrent of communication there; a question and an expression of hope.
The moment passed in an exquisite silence. Tara grinned shyly then, and together they managed to tip the machine just far enough over for Tara to retrieve her precious diary. Willow was panicked for just a second; she was taking the weight and Tara was around the back reaching for her book. Willow glanced at the labels on the machine; the warning notice that said: “
Rocking or tilting this machine can result in injury or death. Machine will not dispense free product.” She was suddenly fearful: if she slipped, the great heavy thing would come down on top of her, resulting in death by soda, but if she pushed the machine back upright too soon, it might break Tara’s arm. But the next moment, Tara was back by her side, and together they set the machine back safely on its feet. As they were doing so, Tara’s hand brushed ever so lightly over Willow’s. So warm, Willow thought.
“You saved me,” Tara smiled then. “Thanks.”
“It was nothing,” Willow grinned back. They both stopped talking for a moment then, and laughed self-consciously.
“Would you…like to have lunch with me?” Tara asked tentatively, prepared to be disappointed but hoping with all her soul not to be.
“I’d love to!” And for the rest of Willow’s week on campus, they were more or less inseparable.
Don’t say that Tara entered Willow’s life more than a year earlier; say rather that in the dark world, circumstances kept them apart. Her mother’s death, her father’s sullen embrace of failure and bitterness, Donnie’s bullying and abuse, all of these had been barriers to Tara’s natural progress from high school to college. In retrospect, it was a minor miracle that she was only delayed for a year.
Which is not to say that Tara’s true path through high school into college was smooth and rosy. Her mother was ill, desperately ill for at least a year. The rounds of chemotherapy and radiation seemed endless; Julia would barely be recovering from the last when the next one fell due. Each was greeted with deeper dread; and each left her weaker than the last. Just to complicate life a little more, Donnie went off the rails for a time; he was just about old enough to drink alcohol and take his bike out on the highways; foolishly he started to do both at once. He might have seemed to be a bluff and tough carbon copy of his father, but the fear of losing his mother tore into him deeply and prodded him into doing some self-destructive things. Luckily the crisis passed; her treatment completed, Julia Maclay began to recover, and Donnie came to his senses with the loss of just a little dignity, some skin, a broken scaphoid and some minor cosmetic damage to his already scruffy Yamaha.
All of this happened early in Tara’s high school years, and these were not the happiest of times for her. Tara for the first time in her life deeply detested school; how could an institution be taken seriously when it took her away from doing the only thing that mattered: looking after the person she loved more than anyone else in the world. She was just as scared as Donnie about losing her mother, but instead of harming herself, Tara began to commit herself more and more to helping to run the household and the farm, and her schoolwork suffered. Later, when the medical reports began to sound more optimistic, Tara had to change roles again, a process she found equally difficult. I shouldn’t let mom do this, she’s been sick, I need to help out as much as possible. “Tara, I’m not an invalid. I’ll do this. Go do your homework.”
By the time high school graduation rolled around, although Tara’s grades had more than recovered, she still had great difficulty with the idea that she might go on to college, because it meant moving out of home. She might need me; what if she gets sick again? I have to stay.
“What is it going to take, beautiful? Do I have to push you out the door?”
“Mom, I’m worried about -”
“Me? Cancer? It’s my cancer, my remission; let me look after it. This is your life, young lady; you mustn’t miss this opportunity. Your father and I have been putting money aside for this for years. Now, when’s the date your classes start?” Tara told her. “All right; you move there a week early and get to know the town and meet some people. Think of it as a holiday.”
“But mom…”
“No buts, except the one you’re going to shift when you pack your bags, young lady.” Julia tried her best to look stern, failed, and they both collapsed in laughter, and hugged each other tightly.
“I’m gonna miss you so much, mom,” Tara said then.
“Me too.”
When Willow left campus after that last week, she made the startling discovery that for the first time in her life, she didn’t want to be at school. She was teased quite a deal about that, when other students at Willow’s high school learned just how she had spent her summer and concluded that Willow’s newfound moodiness and short temper and her generally bad attitude were because she was so eager to get back to college and now considered schooling to be beneath her. But they were only partly right. Willow missed campus terribly, that much was true; but the biggest reason was that she was falling deeply in love with Tara.
Tara for her part was already there. It was sweet agony for them both, particularly for Tara, who had spent the better part of her senior high school year coming to terms with her own sexuality, and not a lot of it had been pleasant; the last thing she expected was to put another person through the same thing.
“It’s okay, really,” Willow reassured her one evening, as they lay in one another’s arms under the covers together in Tara’s dorm room.
“Are you sure?” Tara whispered. “I just can’t stop thinking about last year, and the isolation and the loneliness…”
“But you didn’t have anyone, you told me,” Willow argued. “I’ve got you. So it’s better.”
“Definitely better?” Tara’s brow wrinkled.
“Yes,” the redhead smiled and they kissed.
Willow was right. It was better, though not perfect, not by a stretch. When Willow told her mother, it was okay. Even Ira was all right about it, although both of Willow’s parents fretted, saying that Willow was very young to be so definite about such a thing as her choice of partner. Even though they had been saying for years how mature and intelligent their only child was about everything else. But Willow wasn’t quite ready to come out to anyone in school, and that included her best friend Buffy Summers. Buffy met Tara quite early in the school year, and the three of them went out for coffee and movies several times, but the exact nature of Tara and Willow’s relationship remained hidden from Joyce Summers’ eldest daughter until just before the end of the school year.
One thing about memories; it is a lucky person (or cat) who can spend a lot of time looking back and having no regrets. Just a couple of weeks after Willow and Tara found each other in this world, I was asleep on the couch one night when the front door opened. The witches had been out for the evening, and now they were back. I sprang onto the floor and trotted up the front hall to greet them, as is only polite.
Tara and Willow both cooed and patted me, but it was obvious that their minds were on other things. They had been over at Joyce’s for dinner, and this had clearly been the source of much conversation on the way home.
“Wasn’t that just the spookiest thing, what Dawn said?” Willow was saying.
“I thought it was sweet,” Tara smiled.
“Sweet?”
“It’s not like she’s never met you before,” Tara said. “Back in high school, you would have been around at Buffy’s all the time. She must have seen a lot of you.”
“You as well, Tara. Don’t forget that she met you quite a few times the first half of my senior year. But after that, a big nothing for nearly four years. And now tonight she takes my arm and says to me: ‘Willow, I can’t explain it, but I have this feeling I’ve grown up alongside both of you these last few years. After Buffy went away, whenever I was down or in trouble, I’d always think to myself: what would Willow and Tara do, right now? And I always found the right answer.’” Willow’s lip trembled as she related Dawn’s words.
“Darling, I heard it all. I thought that was so sweet. It was like the Dawnie we both remember,” Tara smiled.
“I know, but can you feel the creepiness? Do you think she - knows, Tara?” Willow wondered anxiously.
“No, I don’t think so,” Tara said.
“But - do you think she might still be the Key? Tara, maybe that’s why she’s still here. Because she has to be?”
“No. Dawn is not the Key,” Tara pronounced. “Buffy clearly isn’t the Chosen One, so any Key wouldn’t have been sent here under her protection.”
“Poor Buffy,” Willow changed the subject. By this stage they were in the kitchen, making tea. I resumed my warm spot on the couch. “I feel like I’ve let her down.”
“Willow, please,” Tara pleaded. I added my own chorus of disapproval, perhaps a bit too loudly.
“Goddess, Miss Kitty, you’d think no one ever feeds you!” Willow exclaimed. I settled my head back down on my paws and didn’t attempt further conversation that evening. Life is full of these little misunderstandings. “Where was I? Tara, at Homecoming when Xander - Lex, got Buffy pregnant. You remember, we went over this two nights ago. I wasn’t there. I showed up for an hour, alone, then I went to your place and I spent the night with you. I wasn’t there for Buffy.”
Oh, Willow, Willow. You have to let go of the idea that this is a world of your creation. You are not responsible for everything that happens here. Do you think that if you had stayed at Homecoming, you would have spent the evening watching what Buffy was drinking? Would you have spotted Lex with a hip flask and confiscated it? Would you have popped up at an awkward moment when Lex was trying to steal a kiss, and steered the MV Buffy into safer waters? Or do you suspect that Lex slipped Buffy something a little stronger; a crushed tablet or two, stolen from his mother’s medicine cabinet, and that you might have stopped him? Willow, mother, you weren’t there, I wasn’t there, you don’t know what happened and there’s nothing we could have done. Be content with the memories of that night in Tara’s arms.
I must say that I prefer this world infinitely to the world of the Wish. Some things still are not right, however. The rotation of the planet is an excellent example. It’s most inconvenient; I find my sunny spot on the rug, it’s at the perfect temperature, I lie down for a nap, and before I know it, the Earth has rotated, the damned sunny spot has moved and I have to get up and find it again. It’s the reason that catnaps were invented - ask anyone.
(To be continued)
It only served the carpenter to save the day. Kitty's take on that finally made me laugh.
world.
is. The simplest solution is to have 
enter college a year earlier, and Willow meet her as described. It's only the simplest solution, mind; there are numerous others.
, B 
. The part with Anya is great - it becomes more and more apparent that some people (
Actually - that wouldn't bug me that much...a cat's gotta eat. If I were dead I wouldn't be around to provide the Friskies...I doubt I'd really be in a position to care much either way.
). The females bring home the bacon (or impala or water buffalo) and cook it up in the pan!