Okay, next part
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“You brought her back?” Willow said, finding that she did indeed need to take a seat next to her ex-love.
Oz reached for her hand and answered quietly. “It was never meant for her, I mean I thought it would be me and it was a long time ago…”
Willow, already on the edge of an emotional breakdown, tried to stay calm. “Oz, I don’t understand, what do you mean it was supposed to be you and if she’s back then where is she?”
Oz sighed, and then decided that he needed to tell Willow as simply and as quickly as possible the events that led to her girlfriend’s return last night.
“It was our senior year, my second,” he said, smiling slightly. “You, um, you cheated on me with Xander...”
Willow looked like she was about to interrupt but Oz silenced her by squeezing her hand.
“I didn’t understand how you could do that to me, you know? I loved you, love you still and I figured you felt the same way…”
Willow turned and looked at him. “I did Oz, that was just a fluke type of thing.”
“I know,” he replied, again reassuring her with his smile. “I started looking into spells, dark rituals, things to bring you back to me.”
Willow looked at Oz in shock. “Dark magicks?” she asked.
Oz nodded.
Willow started to laugh, slowly at first then more forcefully. Her laugh however, could not be construed as one of amusement but one of deep-rooted irony and just a hint of despair.
“You used dark magicks on me?!?” she asked, her laugh now grating, desperate, verging on utter devastation.
“I…”
“Cause if you did,” she said, laughing. “Then that means I was hooked long before Tara, long before Glory and with the getting out of control and trying to destroy the world.”
“Willow stop,” Oz said. Now holding both of her arms in his, trying to calm her. “I didn’t. I thought about it but I didn’t. I can’t seem to do anything to hurt you, ever.”
Willow’s eyes softened. “Oz, I …”
Oz put a hand in the air, blocking out the words she was about to say. His heart breaking in a million pieces, realizing that he was so close to the woman he loved. He was hearing her voice, seeing her face- all the intricate features that made her unique, her mouth, her emerald eyes and even her distinct smell- earthy, woman, Willow.
Being close to her again was torture, he wanted out, away, wanted to be at a safe distance, away from her beauty and away from her pain. For if anything radiated out of her at this moment it was pain. It came off of her in waves, pain for losing the one person she loved, the one person that made her complete.
The fact that it wasn’t him, that he wasn’t the one she pined for made him extremely jealous and God, it hurt. That he felt jealous of a dead woman made him feel like dirt.
Lost in the conflicting emotions of jealousy and guilt, Oz decided that one thing was most important above all. Willow was in pain, he loved Willow, he couldn’t stand seeing the person that he loved suffer so, even if what he said extinguished the slight possibility that he harbored in his heart for her return to him, he had to tell her.
“I didn’t use dark magick,” he repeated again. “Instead, I found a book, slim, simple, small. In it there was a spell, it wasn’t very complicated and…”
Willow interrupted again, disbelief evident in her eyes. “You found a spell that brought her back? You? Oz, I know spells, okay. I mean, I had them going into me for God’s sake.”
“Will, be quiet,” he said softly, not turning to look at her, his eyes remaining focused on a spot on the carpet.
“The spell,” he continued. “Didn’t appear to do anything, which is why I forget I had done it. It was a safety net. In case anything ever happened to me. I was mad at you, hurt and angry but I still loved you.”
Oz paused and looked at Willow. She held on to his hand, her knuckles white. Her eyes expectant, willing him to continue. “It basically said that if your love for me was pure and if somehow you lost me, I wouldn’t be lost forever. Only long enough for you to realize what it was that you lost.”
Willow let go of Oz’s hand and stood up, pacing around the room, trying to figure out what it all meant. It was jumbled in her head, confusing, frustrating. Finally she turned to him and said, “Huh?’
“I figured it different. The losing me part, that was when you cheated on me, me deciding that we couldn’t be together, well that was me being lost to you forever. That pure love thing, well you said that you loved me and that what happened with Xander was a fluke and then the rest well, I kind of glossed over. I didn’t read it right and I didn’t understand. I basically thought it meant that you would realize what you lost, fully, completely realize what you gave up and then once you did, I’d be able to be to return to you. Sort of like a getting even thing.”
Willow just shook her head. “I still don’t…”
“Only, I couldn’t stand being without you. I couldn’t stand to give you the time to realize it, so I talked to you and we got back together and I forgot all about the stupid spell. Until the day I heard that Tara was shot. I was thinking about how much pain you would be going through, what that must be like and how I never wanted you to suffer that much, then I remembered, in passing, the spell. Something about it nagged at me, you see, something just quite didn’t fit. I found the book, looked it up again.”
He laughed softly.
“It didn’t say anything about me, it said whomever my beloved loved, her soul mate.”
Willow began putting together the pieces of the puzzle.
“My soul mate is Tara,” she said, looking at Oz apologetically. “My love for her is pure. I lost her,” she continued, flinching slightly at the memory of her lover falling in her arms. “I realized I lost her, realized she was gone at the funeral. So then she came back?”
Oz nodded.
Willow, ever the skeptic, not wanting to put her hope in something completely only to have it backfire on her and shatter her last bit of self, still had doubts.
“Okay, then why didn’t it work when you left? Why, when I realized that you were gone, that you weren’t coming back, why didn’t you come back?”
“Well one, I did. I came back for you Willow. But I think that was purely me, and not having to do with the spell.” He turned away from her gaze instead focusing on the sunlight that filtered through the blinds on her window. “I was never your soul mate.”
Willow, loathe to cause Oz more pain, wanted to say something to the contrary, the words on the tip of her tongue. But she found that she just couldn’t lie. Instead she let the comment go and focused on something else.
“That’s why she came back to me,” she said. “After she left me, when I crashed the car and I was strung up on the magicks, I realized I lost her.”
“You crashed a car?” Oz asked.
Willow dismissed the question, instead focusing on the deep buzzing going on in her head. It made sense, it all made sense.
And realizing that, she knew that she had her love back.
“Tara is alive?” She asked. More to herself that to Oz. “She’s really alive?”
Oz shook his head. “See, that’s the thing, I don’t know.”
