Hello everybody. My prompt was: Tara gets jealous. This might not have been the direction my prompt person was hoping I'd head in, but I enjoyed working on this, and I hope ey, and everyone else, enjoy it as well.
Happy new year. Kay
The Green-eyed Monster
Tara had wanted a cat since the summer after her senior year, the one she spent living out of a repurposed cake van. Her family had never been good company, except for her mother when she wasn’t sick or sad, and Tara had never had more than one or two friends, but still, there had always been people around. Weston Hall at UC Sunnydale housed quiet people who didn’t often leave their rooms. Alice, the other freshman girl across the hall, would smile at Tara while they brushed their teeth sometimes, but she didn’t really count as a friend. The Wicca group certainly didn’t. So a cat would be good to keep her company.
Willow mumbled next to her in bed, and Tara shook off her thoughts of pets and turned to look at her lover in the moonlight. Everything was black and gray in the darkness, but Willow’s hair still held the promise of color. Tara brushed it out of her face, where it lay splayed from Willow’s tossing and turning. A strand must have tickled her cheek, because Willow giggled in her sleep.
At first, Willow’s late night ramblings had startled Tara, who did not sleep much or easily. Their first night together, Willow had yawned herself to sleep on one side of the twin bed, and Tara had balanced herself at the far edge of the mattress, afraid to invade her friend’s personal space. Muscles tight and heart hammering, Willow’s heat brushing against the skin of her shoulder even though they weren’t touching, Tara had lain awake, listening to Willow’s breath and studying the shadows her curtains cast on the wall. Even the five hours a night Tara usually slept seemed out of reach, but in the end she started to doze. Just when she started to dream herself, Willow had shouted, “Prepare the salt cannons! The slugs are advancing!”
Tara had jumped and tumbled off the bed.
Now, Tara wrapped an arm around Willow’s waist and pressed their naked skin together, reveling in the privilege of the touch. She nuzzled Willow’s ear and kissed it, then settled her head into the nest of Willow’s hair, her chin on her sleeping lover’s shoulder.
Willow sighed and murmured, “Oz.”
Tara tensed. Willow moaned and shifted, and Tara pulled away. Outside of the covers, away from the pocket of heat she and Willow had made, the room was cold. She pulled her ragged cotton bathrobe around her and padded to the chair in the corner, beside the window.
Oz, the ever-present menace to her happiness. But then, he was the one thing that would make Willow happiest, and Willow’s happiness was Tara’s. Wasn’t it? She glanced over at Willow on the bed, sleeping with a smile on her moon-drenched face, and the corner of Tara’s mouth quirked up. A draft welled up in the room, and Tara pulled her legs closer to her chest.
When she was younger, Tara had had a cat. She had found him, and she and her mother had cared for him, and Tara had named him Sparkles. Despite her love and care, Sparkles had shown interest in no one but Donny, who ignored him completely. Tara took a beating for feeding Sparkles tuna, and the soreness of her rear end had been the only result of her bribery. She made a leash for the cat and took him on walks, but he only walked to Donny. Finally, she had tried to simply hold Sparkles in her arms, and the cat had scratched her across her face in a mad scramble to escape.
“You caught sight of the green-eyed monster,” her mother said when Tara cried and cursed the cat.
Jealousy had been new to Tara then. She asked her mother if her eyes would turn green when she became a monster, and sometimes Tara still checked her eyes for any sign of verdigris. Especially when Oz was lingering nearby.
What Tara knew about Oz was limited by the sobbing tales Willow had told her a few months ago, when they had met. He had played bass guitar in a band, been quiet and gentle and secretive, and had slept with another werewolf, who went after Willow in a fit of green-eyed monster evil. Oz had torn the throat from the girl, who had lazed in a chair two rows behind Tara in her Celtic history class, perking her ears only at the legend of the Irish werewolf.
Tara had known what Veruca was and avoided her out of fear that she would smell the demon in Tara’s blood and consider her a territorial threat. Tara had made an even greater trespass onto marked territory now. Oz lived here, in the moon-washed room with his body lined up against Willow’s, never cold or confused; Tara was a visitor in this place until the vacationing owner returned.
Maybe he wouldn’t, Tara told herself, but that wasn’t quite the point. Oz had left, dropping Willow into her lap as he went, but he was still here. Willow could pick out the bass in any song Tara played on her little boom box, and she named the phases of the moon whenever she caught sight of it. Even the way Willow wrapped her arms around the necks of large, friendly dogs made Tara lonely. Oz didn’t have to come back and reclaim Willow as his own; she would never belong to Tara at all.
And this was a good thing. Tara had made the mistake, before, of thinking that if Willow could love a werewolf, she could love another kind of demon. When Willow had asked her to do the spell to locate demons with her, though, Tara had woken up and faced the difference: Oz was infected. Something had happened to him that wasn’t his fault. What had happened between him and Veruca, the hurt he’d caused Willow, was a symptom of sickness, not an act of evil. Tara had evil in her veins. In the end, she was to blame for the pain she caused. Sabotaging the spell had bought her time, and she could buy more as it slipped through her fingers, but in the end, she was a monster. And Willow had enough monsters in her life.
This was what Tara resented most. When Oz came home, he would be home for good, and life would go back to normal. Oz changed, he was a monster for a while, but he had the chance to change back. Tara never would. What she would lose would be lost forever. Her love, her freedom, gone the way of her mother, to a place where she would never touch them again. Willow stirred, and Tara ached to touch her. She rolled over, and the blanket slipped off her naked shoulder, and her arm hit the cold, empty space where Tara had been. Groaning, she raised up on her elbow and squinted around the moonlit room. Tara swept across the space between them, pulling the blanket back over her and coaxing her down onto the bed. Willow smiled as she nuzzled back into the covers.
“What are you doing up?” she asked.
Tara shrugged. Willow studied her face.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, sweetie,” Tara told her, running her hand against Willow’s hair. “I just um, I don’t sleep that much. But I’m okay.”
Willow scowled. “You’d tell me if I kept you up, wouldn’t you?”
“You don’t keep me up. I sleep better when you’re here.”
“Well I sleep better when I’m being snuggled,” Willow said. “And it’s past your bedtime, missy.”
She held her arms out into the cold room, and Tara climbed into them, rolling over Willow to her own side of the bed. Willow squeaked when Tara’s cold feet slipped under the covers and brushed her skin. They worked the bathrobe off and out of the bed, and Willow kissed her harder than a person who just woke up in the middle of the night should be able to manage. When they pulled away, Willow sank back onto her pillow and put a hand on Tara’s cheek. Tara kissed her palm and smiled down at her.
“Your eyes,” Willow whispered.
Tara dropped Willow’s hand and put her own fingertips around her eye, as if she could feel a change in them by touching her face. The green-eyed monster. Willow had seen.
But Willow pulled Tara’s hand away from her eye. “They’re beautiful.”
A chill of panic was warmed by the love Tara felt at this gesture of affection. She turned it over in her mind like a precious coin in her hands, and tucked it safely away.
Tugging on the hand she held, Willow guided Tara into her arms and held her there. “You should probably close them though, if you want to sleep,” she said.
Tara smiled, letting her worries fall crumpled like her bathrobe on the floor.
In the morning, Willow buzzed and flitted around the room, rehearsing their plan for the day: breakfast, class, a walk in the beautiful Sunnydale sun, and then Tara’s first official Scooby meeting.
“So this’ll be different than the other meetings I’ve been to?” Tara asked.
“Absolutely. See, all the others you’ve been to are emergency meetings. There’s plenty to do when there’s not a crisis, though. Scoobying is a round-the-clock kind of deal, what with the constant demons and the observations of any interesting incidents and preparing for any possible upcoming crisis. Of which there are plenty. Just, not today.” Willow took a breath and glanced out the window. “At least, I hope not.”
Tara grinned at her. “Today’s for recon, then?”
“Right.”
Willow kissed her and dashed off to Stevenson Hall to change clothes. Tara watched the door close, sweeping a chill into the room as it went. The room was cold and empty, and frankly, more of a mess than she could clean up before class. She picked her bathrobe off the floor and dressed slowly, mulling over her thoughts of the night before.
She needed a cat, Tara decided. That way no matter what happened, she wouldn’t be alone.
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