Title: Sins of the Children
Author: Paul aka Darth Pacula
Distribution: Knock yourself out, just ask first. ( That means yes if you're not sure )
Feedback: Go nuts. The more the merrier. Unless you're all wanting to roast me at the stake that is. Then, less is more.
Disclaimers: I own diddly squat, except the original characters, and the setting, which are products of my own deranged imagination.
Summary: It's been two years since the warlock Nameless haunted their lives, but Willow and Tara are about to find out that the many sins of their dead son cast a long, and pervasive shadow.
Rating: PG-13, maybe R at times for a touch of violence.
A/N: This is the sequel to
'At Any Cost', so if you havent' read that, this might not make a whole lot of sense. But then again, it might do that even if you have read it.
Thoughts are in
italics.
**********
Part 1.
From the diary of Katie Davis -
Dear Diary,
It's been more than two years now since Timothy died, and I still dream about him sometimes. Other ten year old girls dream about ... I dunno, normal stuff I guess. Ponies, clothes. Their latest crushes. As if any of us know anything about romance! Please! They're just copying adults, trying to play at being grown ups.
Me? I had to grow up two years ago, when ...you know. God! I feel so lame writing this! What am I supposed to be, the narrator for my own life? As if! But Tara suggested that it might help me, I dunno, deal with stuff I guess. She promised that she'd never read it, and made Willow promise the same thing. Tara, I trust. Willow? Well, let's just say that she's the reason I hide you, Diary.
Hah! Would you look at this?! I'm talking to my own diary! Still, that's hardly the strangest thing going on in this house. How can it be, when I live with two gay witches in the house given to them by their impossible, time-traveling son?! Not to mention the vampire-slayer who lives across the street!
Whatever, it's cool. So, where was I? Oh yeah, Timothy. Or Nameless as he called himself. I still dream about him, even more than I dream about the vampires that .... you know. Those dreams, I hate them, just like I hate all bloodsuckers. One day, when they finally realize I'm old enough, I'm gonna help Willow and Tara kill them. Vampires, I mean. But at the moment, every time I even bring it up, Willow just about starts hyperventilating! What a goof ball, right?
Yeah, but Timothy. He saved me from the vampires, and he killed them all. Don't get me wrong, I don't have like a crush on him or anything. I mean c'mon! He's even older than Willow and Tara, weird as that might be, and seriously messed up. He's a mean, snarky jerk ... not to mention the whole dead thing.
It's weird (yeah, like none of the rest of this is!) but ... it's like he's not really dead. When I dream about him, it's like he's talking to me. It's like he's still watching us. Which is ridiculous, right? If Timothy could've brought people back from the dead, he never would've done what he did.
Today would have been his birthday. I know that, because it's the baby's birthday, and the baby is him. Sorta. Most pregnant women, they have a rough idea of when they'll have the baby. Willow, she had the exact date and time, down to the second. Willow being Willow, she had her doubts. She went on about all this stuff about randomness, chaos theory and causality ... but in the end, the baby came exactly when Timothy's notes said it would.
Which made it that much stranger when he turned out to be a she.
I wasn't there (kids aren't allowed in the delivery rooms, jerks!) but Tara always laughs when she tells how Willow actually had an argument with her own doctor, because she didn't believe she'd had a girl rather than a boy. Kinda ironic, right? When Willow's all about the girl-love ...
I can't believe I just wrote that! I'm actually blushing!
Yeah, so anyway. Timothy was actually Chloe, Chloe Joyce Rosenberg-Maclay. How's that for a mouthful, am I right?
So, in a way, Timothy isn't dead, he's just had a sex change. (I crack myself up sometimes) But there's still a dead body in that isolated grave that the Scoobies dug, and Timothy's still dead, so I still remember him. The others don't talk about him much.
Tara and Willow, they prefer to focus on their living kid, I guess ... kids I suppose, if I count myself. I think Buffy still feels guilty, cuz she was the one who actually killed Timothy. I don't blame her though. I think she expected me to, that's why for a long time they never told me how he died. But in the end, I know she was played, just like he played everyone else.
See? Jerk, like I said.
But he did save my life, so I still remember him. I still visit his grave, alone out there in the woods. I know at least some of the others do too, because there's flowers there whenever I go. I -
**********
“Katie!”
The sound of Tara's voice, harassed and mildly desperate, make Katie look up from her desk and her open diary, her pen resting frozen upon the page.
“Yes?” she called back, hoping that this was just an attempt to determine her presence inside.
“Can you come down and give us a hand?” was the inevitable reply.
So much for that hope, thought Katie with a wry grin.
Yelling out a resigned acknowledgment, Katie finished scribbling a last few words in her diary and, with a furtive inspection to determine that she wasn't being watched, returned the book to its hiding place behind the bottom drawer of her bedside table.
She didn't seriously think that Willow would violate her privacy, but she'd seen firsthand her foster-mother's thirst for knowledge, and had decided to try and keep Willow from out the path of temptation. When it came to Katie herself, at least. When it came to Tara, there was no force strong enough in the universe to counter that temptation.
Once her diary was secreted away, Katie slowly trudged downstairs, operating on the hope that whatever task Tara wanted her assistance in might be completed before she arrived. Katie wasn't especially lazy per say, but for the last few months she been projecting that image on the grounds that she was nearly a teenager, and it was past due time for her to muck up just a little.
The house where Katie lived with Willow, Tara and Chloe was, as she'd noted in her diary, the same house where Timothy had lived, using the alias of Timothy Garner to spy upon his mothers and their friends. Two stories high, and comfortably large for a family of four, their home differed only slightly from all the others in the neighborhood.
On the outside at least. On the inside was an entirely different matter indeed. Most of the house wasn't that unusual, if you ignored all of the cunning hiding places that had been added to virtually every room to store a variety of esoteric weaponry. The real difference lay in the basement, which had been the proper lair of the warlock who had called himself Nameless.
Most people in Sunnydale used their basements for the storage of various odds and ends, like Christmas ornaments, old clothes and the like. Willow and Tara instead inherited a rabbit's warren of tunnels and chambers, magically burrowed out the ground as if by a giant gopher. The greater part of Nameless' wealth still resided there, in the form of countless artifacts and weapons, obscure machines and vast collections of magical lore. Katie still remembered with a smile Mr Giles' almost indecent glee at the knowledge contained within.
But for the most part, Tara kept the basement securely locked. She said it was because they didn't know what potentially dangerous items might lie within, but Katie had the feeling that it was a more emotional and personal reason that kept Tara out. More than any other place in the house, the basement remained Nameless' domain, and his presence, for lack of a better word, remained strongest there.
“There you are!” muttered Tara in good-natured exasperation as Katie finally slunk into the lounge room. The room currently resembled the site of an explosion, if the bomb largely consisted of party streamers, confetti and silly string. Katie raised both eyebrows in amazement at the sight.
“Having fun are we?” she quipped.
“Nonono, sweetheart! Don't do that!” begged Willow hopefully, and Katie turned to find her other foster mother crouching over the perpetrator of such chaos. Chloe Rosenberg-Maclay, two years old today, sat happily in the middle of the floor, red-gold locks run through with a riot of multicolored confetti, a cannister of silly string clutched possessively in her pudgy little hands. And it was aimed directly at her mother.
“Momo!” Chloe cheerfully burbled, and opened fire. Willow straightened with as much dignity as she could muster, which wasn't much when her entire face was plastered with silly string, and glared at her partner, who was regarding the scene with gentle good humor from the safety of the other side of the room.
Tara replied with a shrug and a look that clearly said, 'She's your daughter'.
Willow turned to Katie with a smile so manufactured that Katie knew exactly what was coming. “Katie, sweetie,” she asked as she attempted to wipe her face clean, “How would you like to do me a massive favor?”
“Let me guess,” Katie drawled, “You want me to mind the terrorist while you two finish up the decorations?”
“Would you?” Willow blurted hopefully as Chloe coated her mother's nearest leg with a burst of silly string.
Katie shrugged. “Disarm her, and you've got a deal,” she countered. In a display of strange synchronization, both Katie's and Willow's heads turned as one to face Tara, girl and woman alike wearing pleading expressions. The subject of their focus sighed mightily.
“I don't see why I always have to be the bad cop,” Tara muttered beneath her breath, but she still abandoned her work on the far side of the room, and moved to confront her errant daughter.
“She listens to you,” declared Willow helpfully. Her comment was only really helpful in that it suggested that Willow herself didn't need to do anything.
“We all do,” added Katie, struggling to keep a straight face. The single crooked eyebrow Tara directed in her direction told Katie it had been a forlorn hope. A similar expression was aimed at Willow also, promising a much more in depth discussion at a later period, then Tara was bending down.
“Mama!” Chloe brightly greeted her other mother, and opened fire again.
**********
As Katie escorted her foster-sister out of the room, fighting back the urge to laugh at both of her foster mothers, something followed her.
It was not a corporeal being, this presence, not at the present anyway. Nor was it in any way visible, or detectable by any conventional means. Neither Willow nor Tara sensed any trace of this entity, despite the fact that it had been spying on them almost constantly for more than two years now.
Invisible and intangible, it floated after the two children, a swollen, formless cloud of focused, dispassionate malevolence. It watched over them as they moved from lounge room to dining room, it brooded high in a corner as Katie sat down to watch as Chloe busied herself with a pile of toy bricks.
Whispers trickled through the air of another sphere of reality, undetectable to any ear, natural or supernatural. The entity communicated with its fellows, hours worth of discussion flickering past in mere seconds. A consensus was reached. A decision was made.
A featherlight touch upon the recesses' of Katie's mind provided a moment's distraction that Katie would never realize came from an outside source. A similar touch upon Chloe made her loose interest in her blocks, and toddle alone down the polished corridor towards the kitchen. A third and final touch disengaged the locks on the door leading down into the basement.
The magic naturally present in Chloe's blood, responding to the resonant echo of sympathetic magics emanating from below, did the rest, luring the innocent toddler down into the former of lair of her alternate self.
The lair of the self-proclaimed monster, Nameless.
To be continued ...