Emma, I like my lot. A lot. But you still sound pretty verbal to me. Thanks for that!
And now, here's the conclusion.
Title: Terra Firma Chapter 18: On Firm Ground.
Author: Tulipp. Email:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Please. Distribution: Please let me know.
Spoilers: Everything.
Rating: PG-13 in this part.
Pairing: W/T.
Summary: Epilogue.
Disclaimer: The characters and settings here were created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, but I am borrowing them to do my own thing. No money involved, only some necessary revisions. I have also borrowed tiny bits of dialogue from “Choices” and the “Angel” episode “I Will Remember You.” It just made sense to me.
Acknowledgments: Please forgive my got-carried-away-ness here, but I must thank the people who helped me in the writing of this story. Thanks to Darkmagicwillow, who started a conversation way back when that just hasn’t stopped. And to TromDeGray, who has me thinking about all sorts of things new to me. And of course to my wonderful and talented beta readers…Ruby, who was there from the very beginning with her good eye and her great suggestions. And Ruth: the legend, the friend, the reader. You have both been angels. And, of course, to J., who knows that the final version feels so much better when you’ve been through every painful sentence of the rough draft.
Of all the things I hoped for in writing this story—to write something, to practice and maybe improve, to give myself some closure after season six—I never expected that I would also make new friends. And for that, I am really grateful.
Most of all, thanks to everyone who posted feedback to this story; I appreciated every word more than I can tell you. It really makes such a difference to find out what people see when they read. And, of course, thanks to everyone who read, whether you posted feedback or not. In the end, I miss Tara, and I want her back. Thank you so much for reading my way of making that happen.
Terra Firma
Chapter 18: On Firm Ground
As the light in the east steadily increased,
it revealed to me more clearly the new world
into which I had risen in the night,
the terra firma perchance of my future life….
It was such a country as we might see in
dreams, with all the delights of paradise.
--Henry David Thoreau
Dawn thought that the windstorm was finally over.
She sat on the front porch with her open journal on her knees and watched the quiet sprinkling, the mist of rain, all that was left of the storm that had raged through Sunnydale that afternoon. And she was thinking.
It was hard to believe it had only been a week since she had remembered everything, only a week since she had discovered that she had brought Tara back, had healed her and healed Willow. It was still pretty mind-boggly; it made her head spin.
The past months—all the months since Buffy had died—had been like…like a tornado, or maybe a hurricane: strong winds blowing them all down over and over again, flattening them against walls and knocking over houses and ripping up trees. To Dawn, life had felt like that for so long. Like every time they had all started to stand up again, a new gust of wind knocked them all flat. Blew away hope and life and everything that was normal.
But now, the storm was over; the winds had calmed. Dawn nodded; that sounded good. She picked up her pen again and wrote it down. She was still writing when a high-pitched yelp caught her ear, and she looked up to see Willow and Tara running down the street toward the house. They were both drenched, their hair plastered to their heads, their skirts sticking to their legs, and Willow’s furry backpack hanging limply from one hand. Her other hand clasped Tara’s tightly.
They were both shrieking with laughter, their hands swinging, heads thrown back, faces lifted to the rain. Dawn couldn’t help smiling as she watched them run. She hoped they wouldn’t trip.
When they reached the Summers’ driveway, they stopped running, and, still laughing, Tara caught Willow around the waist with her free arm and kissed her, and Willow’s hands and furry backpack slid around Tara’s back. It was a pretty long kiss, Dawn thought, right there on the street, in front of…Janice’s house and everybody. She giggled. She hoped Janice was watching. If she only saw how much they loved each other, she might get over her heebie jeebies about two girls kissing.
Watching Willow and Tara kiss….well, it made Dawn feel shivery. It made her hold her breath. She wondered if she would ever meet someone who would make her feel like that. Did healers get true love, she wondered? Did Keys?
Janice was kind of funny about stuff like that, though. Dawn had wanted to talk to her about being the Key, but in the end, she couldn’t decide what to say. Or when. Or how. She had a feeling that maybe she and Janice weren’t such good friends anymore, that maybe things between them had changed. Buffy had said more than once that she should probably have more friends her own age, but…but it was just easier to talk to Tara and Willow and Buffy about things. They understood.
And maybe that was okay. Janice could be kind of…stormy. And right now Dawn felt more like being calm. Like thinking. There was so much to learn, after all; Giles had already started giving her books to read and talking to her in that earnest and excited way she’d heard him use when he talked to Buffy about training. His Watcher voice. Only now he was going to Watch all of them, not just Buffy. He hadn’t said that, not exactly, but Dawn could see that it was true.
Giles had talked to her a lot this week.
“We still don’t know much, Dawn,” he had said, looking at her seriously over the tops of the glasses that had slipped down his nose. “You brought Tara back, but we have no way of knowing if that was, ah, if that was something specific to Tara herself, or to your connection to her and to Willow, or if….”
“Connection? What do you mean, connection?” Dawn asked, not understanding, her mouth slightly open. She shook her head slightly, but then she understood. “Oh,” she said then. “You mean Glory.”
Giles had nodded slowly.
“But I thought that she couldn’t use me anymore,” Dawn felt a momentary panic, a rush of air in her throat. Giles was quick to reassure her, touching her elbow.
“And she cannot,” he said reassuringly. “The Professor…he was right about that. But there is a kind of connection among the three of you now, Dawn. That trace of Glory in Willow and Tara…in some sense, it’s in you, too. And maybe that was what enabled you to bring Tara back. I’m just not sure. But,” he had looked at her steadily then, “but it might have made a difference. It might not work the same with…anyone else.”
Giles watched her, his eyes narrowing with concern. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, and Dawn thought she knew what that was. The thought had occurred to her: if she could bring Tara back, could she heal anyone? Could she resurrect anyone? Could she bring back…? But no. She sighed.
“I know I can’t bring back my mom,” she murmured, looking down so that her hair fell over her face. She had known that somehow, known that it was too late to save her mother. Too late to save so many people. She’d had a feeling. She had lots of feelings these days that she didn’t really understand, white-green flashes that might be memories or emotions or...Keyness.
Giles said that perhaps, with the right training, she could learn to see those flashes more clearly, begin to understand herself. Her power. Dawn thought she could hold onto that. She thought it was something she could do for her mother, for her memory. And then Giles had hugged her.
Dawn hugged herself now as she watched Willow and Tara giggling their way up to the front porch, holding hands and calling out to her. Tara put a hand on Dawn’s shoulder as she passed and squeezed gently.
“I hope you’re feeling new wardrobey for tomorrow,” Tara said, and Dawn nodded eagerly: milkshakes and a movie and buying new clothes for Tara. Unlike so many of the days of the past months, tomorrow had a shape she could recognize.
So often since first learning that she was the Key, Dawn had felt insubstantial, bodiless, without form. As if the slightest breeze could knock her down or carry her away. As if she was the breeze, drifting unseen around the people she most desperately wanted to notice her. To pay attention.
That was what had always attracted her to objects, to the small weight of bracelets or necklaces or key chains or lipsticks. It wasn’t just that she could take them without people seeing, although that had been kind of fun, too. In a super evil way, she quickly corrected herself, ducking her head so that Willow and Tara wouldn’t see the way her cheeks flushed with shame. But those trinkets… they had shape. She could put her hands in her pockets and feel them there, and they weighed her down. They kept her from blowing away.
But she didn’t have to worry about that anymore. The wind was no longer a threat. She practiced breathing every day with Willow now, the way they’d been taught at the Coven, and she found that it held her, it made her feel solid. And it made her aware in a way she’d never been before. Sometimes, meditating with Willow, Dawn thought she could see the air inside her mind, see it green and growing. And she knew that everything was going to be okay.
Because she had family. She had her whole life ahead of her. And she had a gift after all: something that was just hers.
Dawn had come in out of the wind. And she was standing on firm ground.
****
Buffy surveyed the muddy earth of the backyard.
She had, for so long, hated the earth. Hated the way it crumbled for the clawing fists of the endless line of new vampires who rose up through it. Hated the way it teemed with crawling things who eventually ate away at the flesh of the people you loved who had died. Hated the way it had suffocated her when she had awakened in her coffin, choked her dry and pressed against her nostrils and her eyelids and her tightly closed lips. Hated the way the grass had seemed to spin as she lay on it, shot and bleeding and fading, and then shaken and cracked and seemed to spit out monsters when Willow’s grief had threatened to swallow them all up.
But now…it was different now. Everything was different now. Even the backyard….in the places where the grass had grown sparse over a dry summer, it was muddy. She thought of Tara alive again. Willow casting. Giles home and staying. Dawn writing in her journal. And Xander and Anya…maybe dating.
Buffy had been thinking about Anya all day. In some ways, Anya had seemed like a minor presence all summer; she was often gone, off venging, doing God only knows what kind of evil. And yet…it was hard to reconcile the vengeance demon with the girl who had checked in on her almost every day all summer. The girl who had asked about Willow each time she and Buffy spoke and who had researched the best grief books to send to England. The girl who seemed to be letting Xander back in despite herself.
The girl who had wanted to stop her from hurting Spike.
Buffy had stopped herself; she knew that. But Anya had come just in case.
“You could have made it happen,” Buffy had said quietly to Anya the next day, after she and Xander had arrived at the house and the others had drifted into the dining room to talk. “A wish. You could have, but you didn’t.”
Anya had matched her even gaze, her eyes smiling but her lips firm. “I don’t know what you mean,” she’d said.
“Come on, Anya,” Buffy had crossed her arms over her chest. “My anger called you there…you said so yourself…but you didn’t encourage me. You could have made it worse, but you didn’t. You only showed up to tell me Spike was human, didn’t you?”
Buffy had raised an eyebrow.
Anya had held her gaze for a long moment, and then sighed and looked away. “It’s not the same as it used to be,” she’d said sadly. “Vengeance. My heart’s just not in it, you know?”
Buffy had looked at Anya incredulously, and then she had just laughed and laughed. And after a moment, Anya had joined in. When Xander had come into the kitchen to see what was going on, Anya had swung herself down off the counter and kissed him. It was only a peck, but it seemed to ground them all.
Buffy heard laughing in the hallway now, and then Willow and Tara burst into the kitchen, giggling and soaking wet. “I got all my classes,” Willow said happily, dropping her wet backpack on the floor. “I mean, I have to retake a couple of classes from the spring quarter, but my other professors gave me Incompletes instead of failing me, so I can just take the finals now and move on!” She bounced toward Buffy and threw her arms around her, and Buffy felt the cold wet seep through her t-shirt.
“Will,” she complained, pushing back gently, “you’re getting my clothes all wet!” But she smiled in spite of herself, and Willow giggled and kissed the tip of her nose before spiraling back over to throw her arms around Tara again. Tara grinned at Buffy over Willow’s shoulder. Buffy didn’t think she’d ever seen either of them so openly, so spontaneously happy. They’d been acting like little kids all day, except for the kissing and the…oh, well, and the tongues. They were joyous and innocent and in love…and normal.
It was all Buffy had ever wanted for any of her friends, to have a little bit of normal. It was all she had wanted for herself, but she’d known for some time, deep down, that she would never get it. And she had worried that Willow might never get it, either, but…she had more hope now. With Tara back, she had more hope for all of them. Even…she could almost admit it …even herself.
As for Dawn…well, she wasn’t sure. She had wanted, at least since she had known the truth about Dawn, for her sister to have a normal life. She wanted to see her, someday, as just a normal girl, in the arms of a normal boyfriend or—she glanced at Tara, who was patting Willow’s face and hair dry with a kitchen towel—girlfriend. That was all she wanted.
Willow spoke, but the words were muffled, and Tara laughed and pulled the towel away. “So tomorrow then, okay?” Willow said, “just you and me and a couple of mochas?” Buffy nodded. She was looking forward to spending time with Willow, just the two of them, like they used to do before life became so…hard. It had been a long time. Too long.
“Go dry off, you two,” she said lightly, watching Tara put her hands on Willow’s hips and push her towards the door. She heard their laughter echoing down the hall, and she felt again—as she had felt so often over the past week—grounded. Willow and Tara touching and laughing…Buffy didn’t remember laughing much with any of her boyfriends. Not that kind of laughter, anyway: the easy, bubbly, generous laughter of people who have what they want. She sighed, just a little.
“Buffy?” Willow had poked her head back into the kitchen, her green eyes shining. “I promise we’ll be back down before everybody else gets here. And we’ll clean up. And I’ll help get dinner ready.” She raised her eyebrows at Buffy and smiled impishly.
“Okay,” Buffy said wryly. “You can hold the phone while I tell them which toppings we want.”
“You know,” Willow said before disappearing again. “I kind of love you.” Buffy felt the warmth of her words and the warmth of her eyes from across the room, warmth like the late afternoon sun that had finally made an appearance, starting to dry the rain-streaked windows.
Buffy glanced out at the backyard again. It was such a relief to see Willow smiling, such a relief to see her more…rooted than she had been in so long. Full of life on. They were all so much more rooted and full of life.
Like the earth. Buffy realized it with clarity that had been a long time coming. Earth had been only death to her for so long. Death and dust and decay. But now, through the drying streaks of rain on the kitchen window, she could see that the earth was living. It soaked in water and damp and reflected sunlight, and it grew things. It yielded. You could plant things in the earth and watch them mature.
And the earth was solid. You could stand on it and fight the evil that crawled out of it and embrace the friends who stood next to you on it. She might not ever have a normal life, Buffy knew. And she might not have a long life.
But she had family. And she had a purpose. And she had a good fight left in her.
Buffy had reconciled with the earth. And she stood on firm ground.
****
Tara sank back against the bathtub and let the water lap gently over her breasts and stomach.
More and more, as the days passed, she could feel the distance of the time she had missed, see the ripples it had caused, although she saw them in her friends more than she felt them in herself. Xander and Anya…they were still struggling, obviously, but the venom she could remember flaring up in Anya only days before she had died was gone, replaced by a sadness and hope that could only have come about with time. Xander seemed…taller, stronger, more resolved, and she thought that, too, had come about with a summer of throwing himself into work. Into creating something after so much destruction.
He had crooked a finger at her when Giles and Dawn were clearing away the pizza boxes and loading the dishwasher, and she’d gone out on the porch with him, a little wary even though she knew that he had finally accepted that Willow would be casting again.
“Listen, Tara, I want to tell you something, and I don’t want you to say no, so just hear me out, okay?” He spoke quickly, his eyes darting around, and Tara realized he was nervous. She couldn’t imagine what he was going to say. She just nodded and leaned against the house, pressing her palms back against the solid wall.
“I know things are kind of up in the air for you right now, what with no scholarship and no money and…well…the whole coming back to life thing,” he had said, shrugging his shoulders and sticking his hands deep into his pockets. Tara noticed for the first time that he seemed slimmer than he had before, more muscled.
“Yeah,” she’d said, sighing a little at the memory. Willow could easily hack into the university’s computers and reinstate Tara as a student, maybe adding a note about mistaken identity or something, but the fact remained that Tara’s scholarship had been given to someone else, someone who needed the money as much as she did. Tara had refused even to consider taking it away from her.
“Tara, listen. I’ve saved a lot this summer, enough to help with your tuition and clothes, whatever, until you’re, you know, back on your feet. I have enough for you to replace all the stuff you lost and for tuition next quarter and some extra for…well, for whatever you want. I’m just going to give it to you….”
“Xander, no,” she had said. “I can’t take your money. I’ll get a job and save up until I can afford to go back. Maybe I can get a loan.” She had bit her lip at that, though, knowing that it would be difficult. Who would give a loan to a recently not-dead college student? But Xander had made it easy for her.
“There’s not that much I can do,” Xander had said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and tilting his head at her. In the dim yellow of the porch light, the scars on his face gleamed. “I can’t do spells, I can’t Watch, I can’t Slay, I can’t unlock anything,” he went on, and Tara realized with a start that he wasn’t envious of the others’ abilities. He was proud.
“But I can build things. And I can make some money doing it.” He lifted his chin then, and, looking at him closely, Tara saw how much he wanted to give this to her. For Willow. For herself. And she had been overwhelmed. And she had accepted.
And so those practical worries that had begun to trouble her were receding, like Xander’s fears were receding, like Willow’s desperation and sadness were receding. Like waves. She moved her hand in the water and made a little wave, feeling the wet wash over the knee that jutted out of the water.
In the outer reaches of Tara’s awareness, she heard the drip of the tap, and the quiet sloshing as she moved the sponge back and forth over her legs, and a soft click.
She thought of the familiar terrain of Willow, the pale, freckled landscape of her back. The safe shores of her face. The solid comfort of her hands. Tara lifted her ankle out of the water and imagined Willow looking at it, caressing the curve with only her eyes. She imagined Willow’s narrow fingers closing around it, imagined the gentle pressure and then the soft trailing up, up her leg, the bare touch on the outside of her thigh.
She imagined Willow’s fingers gripping her hipbone for a moment, squeezing slightly, and then moving again, trailing their feather-weight up her ribcage and whispering at the underside of her breast. She arched her back at the thought, and the tips of her breasts rose out of the water and hardened in the cooler air.
“Oh, see, now you’re just showing off.” Willow’s quiet laugh reached through Tara’s daydream, and she smiled but did not open her eyes. She arched again, and then let her breasts sink back under the water, and tilted her head so that Willow could see the way damp tendrils of her upturned hair clung to her neck. She ran the sponge over her arm and then under the water, touching herself with it.
After a moment, she opened her eyes and looked directly at Willow, who leaned against the doorframe, towel in hand, her head resting against the wall. Standing there in her pink leopard-print pajamas, her hair still damp from her own shower, quietly watching and waiting, she melted Tara.
Tara pulled the plug out with her toes and stood, feeling the trickle of water down her legs and hearing only the sucking of the water down the drain and the sea rush in her ears. Willow was waiting with the towel, and Tara allowed herself to be dried off, to be turned and patted down and lingered over. The towel was warm and dry, and Willow’s breath on her skin was hot like fire.
Willow took the towel away and held out her robe, and Tara slipped her arms through the sleeves and laced her fingers through Willow’s. She studied their entwined hands for a moment, and then she lifted Willow’s hand and pressed her lips against it.
“You know what I love about you, well, one thing I love?” she asked suddenly, lifting her head and looking Willow in the eye. She felt, for a moment, the fire that flickered out at her from the green, twin licks of flame that warmed her outside in.
“No,” Willow whispered, and for just a second, her eyes flashed hungry and chilled behind the fire. “Tell me. Tell me one thing.” So familiar. So Willow.
“You steady me,” she said softly, and she saw the warmth flush Willow’s cheeks as she smiled. Tara reached up and touched Willow’s cheek with the tips of her fingers. She had come back from the dead to see that flush, to feel that warmth. She cherished it.
A little later, in their room…their room that used to be Buffy’s but was now theirs…Tara tossed aside the pink pajamas and stretched her fingers out across Willow’s collarbone, feeling the still-damp ends of red hair brush against her fingers and tilting her head as she watched Willow’s lips part at the contact.
“I think you’re teasing me,” Willow said softly as Tara’s palms smoothed their way down her chest, barely touching the sides of her breasts before feathering against her stomach and stopping to brush the hollow of her hips until Willow’s eyes fluttered closed. She laughed, a light, breathless laugh, as Tara’s fingers moved around her hips to her back, one finger tickling the dip at the base of her spine.
Tara pushed Willow back gently until the backs of her legs bumped up against the bed, and as Willow laid back, she shrugged off her robe and crawled up over her. She just looked at her for a moment, looked at her open eyes and her open mouth. Poised above Willow, their breasts near but not quite touching, their breaths matched but not yet mingling, in that long, silent moment of just-before, Tara knew that in her life before returning to Willow, she had felt like a boat on the ocean. Sometimes she had drifted along on the surface of calm, and sometimes she had been tossed about on waves that threatened to capsize her at any moment, but always she had been drifting. In those long months after she had left Willow, she had at least learned to swim better, but still, she had drifted. But now….
Now, she only knew that something had happened to them, something profound and overwhelming, and they had almost drowned in it, she and Willow. But here they were, whole and complete and together.
Slowly, slowly, she lowered herself down onto Willow, who was smiling at her; she lowered her lips onto Willow’s lips, and she felt herself buoyed by that solid and familiar landscape, welcomed onto the shores of her homeland.
She had family, and she had a new life, and she had Willow.
Tara had made it through the waves to the shore. And she was standing on firm ground.
****
Willow woke suddenly from dreams of fire.
She dreamed of the flames of dark magicks shooting out from her own palms. She dreamed of the inferno in her mind when she had drained Rack, of the firestorm it had taken to kill Warren. She dreamed of the scorching empty ache of losing Tara, and the constant, endless blaze of guilt and shame that she had taken life. It burned like the eternal blue fire of an inner ring of Hell.
She dreamed of the red fire of blood and rage. And she woke suddenly, gasping from the heat, desperately thirsty and craving water.
Tara was there, as she always was now, with a cool hand on her hot skin and a glass from the bedside table. Willow sipped it gratefully, and she leaned back against the headboard and closed her eyes, letting Tara’s fingers in her hair and on her skin soothe her blistered mind.
“I wish I could forget that it happened, all of it,” she whispered, opening her eyes but not looking at Tara. She felt her pulse calming a little with Tara’s touch, and she relaxed.
Tara propped herself up on her elbow and reached out to tuck a strand of Willow’s hair behind her ear. She let her hand fall onto Willow’s shoulder and rest there.
“Sweetheart, you can’t,” she said softly, and Willow heard the solace in her voice like a salve on a burn. “Willow, I don’t know why it all happened, but you can’t forget it. We can’t forget it. There’s something in it that we have to remember, something important.”
“I know,” Willow sighed, falling back onto her pillow and staring up at the ceiling. “I know. But it just feels so strange, so surreal, like it happened to someone else. Like…like I watched it on TV, you know?”
“Like a bad after-school special,” Tara said quietly, but there was a laugh in her voice. “What, I’m dead, and you’re evil?”
In spite of herself, Willow laughed. “I know, I know,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. But it just seems…sometimes….like it couldn’t have been real.” She turned her head to look at Tara again, to remind herself—the way she reminded herself a hundred times a day—that Tara was there.
She relaxed a little and focused on Tara’s hand trailing lightly over her skin. She thought of the night before, of Tara’s damp back pressed against her chest, of her own lips burning kisses onto Tara’s neck, of her fingers sliding around Tara’s hips and meeting between her thighs, of Tara’s wet gasping. She felt her stomach flutter.
“Maybe,” she said, rolling onto her side to face Tara, “we could take our minds off it for a little while.” She raised her eyebrows and hoped that Tara could see the suggestion in the dim room. It was early still, and the pre-dawn light had only just begun to filter into the room.
Tara squeezed her fingers, and Willow saw her half-smile. “I have a better idea,” she said, dropping Willow’s hand and sitting up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, reaching for her robe. “Put on your pjs.”
Willow sat up reluctantly. She found her discarded pajamas on the floor and slid into the pink legs, fumbled with the buttons on the shirt. Then she looked up at Tara, who was waiting by the door, holding out her hand.
They tiptoed down the stairs hand in hand, not wanting to disturb Buffy or Dawn, and Tara silently led Willow through the house to the back door. “Remember this?” Tara asked softly, and her lips twitched in a smile. The sleepless nights after Buffy’s death had often ended with a sunrise. Dawn always made things better.
In their old way, Willow sank down onto the bottom step, and Tara sat on the step behind her, her legs hugging Willow’s hips. Willow leaned back and felt Tara’s arms wrap around her from behind. The sun would be coming up soon, and it was nice to be outside in the dark with Tara. It was familiar and quiet and cool and damp. It felt like Tara surrounded her.
“Will we always wake up with bad dreams?” Willow let her head fall back against Tara’s chest. She felt Tara’s lips in her hair and then her chin resting on the top of her head.
“For awhile, maybe,” Tara said, pulling her closer. “But I guess if we didn’t wake up from bad dreams, we wouldn’t be up now. We wouldn’t see the sun rise.” Willow didn’t have to look to see Tara’s hopeful half-smile.
“We could try just setting an alarm,” she said dryly, and Tara laughed softly. Willow hugged Tara’s arms to her chest and sighed. “Will I always feel like I can’t breathe when you’re not around?” Tara’s sigh matched her own. “Like none of this is real if I can’t feel you touching me?”
“Willow, baby,” Tara murmured, hugging her a little more tightly. “I’ll always be touching you.”
Willow thought about that for a moment. So much was uncertain. So much was indefinite, still. They both had some of Glory left in their minds; they both had magicks in them like blood or breath. The past held death and grief and mistakes and wrong, and the future was unknown.
“Just…just stay with me,” she whispered. “Will you stay with me, Tara?” It was the one question she’d never been able to ask before, the one question she’d never felt she deserved to ask.
And now…she knew the answer. Everything had changed. Everything except loving Tara. And Tara loving her; that was the same as ever. Willow felt the answer in the whisper of lips on her hair, in the clasping of arms around her shoulders, in Tara’s knees gently squeezing her from either side as she leaned back.
“Always,” Tara said, her voice low and hoarse.
Willow lifted her face to Tara, her gaze flitting from Tara’s eyes to her lips and back again. She thought Tara had never looked lovelier than she did at that moment, with her tousled hair and her sleepy eyes, wearing one of Buffy’s old and tattered bathrobes. Her throat tightened with want, and she watched Tara blink slowly and lean down to kiss her. At the first soft touch of their lips, she felt a sigh run up Tara’s body and down hers.
It was just one kiss, one soft and cool and chaste kiss, but for that moment, it was enough, and Willow turned her face to the sky again. The sun was starting to rise, the beginnings of morning red against the receding night.
They watched silently, curled together on the steps.
Willow had felt for so long that she was on fire, that she was being consumed by flames of fear and anger and, in the end, grief. She’d felt that she was a volcano, always threatening to erupt, always about to consume everyone around her in a river of flame. She had been as scared of herself as others had seemed to be; she had known herself to be a raging force, violent and disruptive. She knew she still felt hot and thirsty. She couldn’t promise that she would never erupt again, never make the earth tremble or the air grow hot or the water dry up.
But she knew now…she was learning now…that magick wasn’t a flame that burned you from the inside out. It wasn’t a flood of lava that burned everything she touched. It—she—wasn’t a volcano, raging and out of control. She wasn’t about to erupt. She did have fire in her; she always would, and fires sometimes flared out of control. But maybe her fire could be more like a candle, she thought. A candle to celebrate her friends. A candle to help light the way for Dawn. An extra-flamey candle to love Tara.
She relaxed against Tara, who was holding her; she felt the familiar arms wrap around her, and she felt herself soothed by Tara surrounding her, the flames dying down a little as she leaned into the cool blue of her beloved.
She had family, and she had magick, and she had Tara. She had love that was solid enough to stand on.
For once, Willow let the fire inside her warm instead of burn. And she knew she was, at last, on firm ground.
The End.
Edited by: Tulipp at: 9/23/02 1:27:38 pm
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at: 9/15/02 7:48:41 pm
