Replies:


leanhart- Tara may be loosening up a bit, now that a few things are going right… at least within the safety of her own room, with her supportive-to-the-nth-degree girlfriend. Neither she nor Willow is entirely up-front about what they are thinking/feeling because this is all so very personal, and so has the potential to do devastating, possibly lasting harm. This may well come back to haunt them.

Zampsa- It seemed like a natural use for a not-really-prehensile tail. ^_^ Useful, isn't it. The next meeting of Willow and Jean should be interesting to write- I'm not quite sure how that's going to play out, but I didn't think that Willow would be willing to sit in the background forever. She's too much of an interventionist.

inspiron- I have this mental image of the sequence; Jean is going back to her hotel room, fiddling with the card key as she opens it. Pulling it loose, she closes the door, but the attention to the key has made her unaware of the person in the room that the audience can see over her shoulder… Willow, face shadowed, with hands steepled before her. Classic horror setup, and I know it's not gonna happen that way, but I can just see WillowBrain trying out the idea. Tee hee. The demon gets ambushed, for once.
I'm wondering if it's clear that the Ideal that the succubi see has next to nothing to do with thinking. No decision is made. That's why Willow is so petrified when she figures it out. She can't just think Tara-Tara-Tara and force herself into absolutely idealizing the physical Tara above anything else… though under the right circumstances, it works out that way. This will come up again, yes. Don't all the issues come up at least a half dozen times? ^_^ Let's me be lazy, I think, and not have to come up with new ones.
Willow is in the immediate support phase. Tara is having sufficient problems that Willow's own issues are almost completely sidelined. If the brakes don't work, you don't point out that you don't like the paint, or the fender is dented, or the air conditioning smells funny, or you shouldn't leave your turn signal on so often. Once the big problems are laid to rest, then the little things can raise their ugly heads. Willow's not particularly good at voicing the little issues (the vamp-feature wiggins confession was a major thing for her to do) until they coalesce into big issues- big enough to be worth getting upset over. Then… watch out.
Re: Tara's non-judgment of Willow's being torn over loyalties/responsibilities. It's something she would completely empathize with- though Willow takes it as a sign of her own inadequacy (ie: why couldn't you help), Tara would more likely take it as a sign of her own moral failing (ie: why didn't you help). It's a subtle difference, but important in the fundamental nature of their thought processes.

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A few fun stats on Changes, Ch 1-11 (since I changed files after that):

1. The first chapter (2 posts) could have been a freestanding short story with 3,945 words.
2. File word count (including titles, warnings, and such): 60, 985
3. Pages in the Word document: 143
4. Days passed in story time: 5 (Weds->Sun)
5. Episodes of canon covered: 3 (one was irrelevant, so off camera)
6. Number of Willow POV chapters: 4
7. Number of Tara POV chapters: 8
8. Number of other POVs 3 (1 Giles, 2 Anya)
9. Number of views so far (not counting from the old Chat Potpourri thread): 3738, with 77 posts
10. Number of individuals who wrote in at some point: 15


-Never

Great update.

Ch 14


Angst Level: In the overall story, higher than the shrill squeal of a Twilight fan. This chapter's no big deal.

(Yes, I know there are non-squealers too, but after seeing 2000 fans packed into a room at ComiCon this past year and hearing them all at once? Permanent aural damage in the upper registers, I swear)


Disclaimers/Notes: I think that the song is by the Pussycat Dolls, but since I'm only using two lines and changing one of them, I somehow doubt they'll mind. Also, this is the first time that I've written a section and then realized that 2/3 of it was utterly superfluous. I deleted 10 pages of material and started over from pg 4. This keeps to my 'no edit' policy in that it was just a big ol' purge. Literary bulimia.

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"Don'cha wish your girlfriend was - Hot – Like - Me? Don'cha wish your girlfriend was a - Geek – Like - Me?"

"For someone who says she's petrified of singing…" Tara had a look of stifled amusement, having paused from packing up her school bag to observe when the impromptu performance had started.

"It's not singing, it's chanting. To music." Willow slipped into her jean with a bit more wriggling than was strictly necessary, amending "Barely even music."

She was putting up a front and they both knew it, but it felt too good to be getting out of the room to be anything less than stoked. Stir-crazy was totally inadequate for what spending the entire day before within the space of a double bed had done with Willow's brain. True, it had been more manageable with her being all sloth-like, but when Tara had suggested another day off it had sounded like an invitation to San Quentin.

I wonder if San Quentin has good internet access…

The singing was part of an effort to keep her cheerful spirit blatantly obvious. She hadn't been doing quite as good a job of it earlier, dragging through her morning routine even more than was traditional. She hadn't even realized until she'd been grimacing into the mirror, grumpily noticing that she had dark rings under her eyes that were more worthy of finals week than a day of bed rest. Dark rings had made her wonder what she'd look like with dark smudgy things like Tara's. More like a lil' raccoon, with their adorable sneaky-bandit face? Or more like a ferret, which was, as far as she was concerned, a snake with fur?

She'd concluded that her hair made a red panda the most likely choice, which was coolness-on-wheels because everyone knew that red pandas were so adorable that they could be used to diffuse hostilities in the Middle East. Willow had used the mirror to glance over her shoulder, thinking to see if Tara's smudgies were more like a lemur or more like the coatimundi that was on loan at the zoo when she caught the hidden look of distress aimed at her back. Her Baby was hurting again, because she thought she saw Willow suffering… which made for a great big feedback loop, because being the source of that hurt made her stomach all twisty- and she still didn't have a reserve for twist-age added to the general physical bleah.

Breaking that loop was vital, especially since she really felt infinitely better than the prior day. Tara had needed her, she had been able to provide- so no regrets. Plus, she could go to class today, which was an unexpected bonus. Jean was just an alarmist, or not very bright. Or both. She'd grinned. It was just a matter of taking that internal contentment and pushing it past the residual undertow of ickiness.

She'd straightened up and set out to make her best attempt at peppy. A bright smile confirmed her previous conclusion; definitely red panda… While she was happy enough for now, one of these days she hoped to graduate out of 'cute' and end up in the general vicinity of 'hot mama'- a thought which had lead to the song bouncing into her head. She'd started humming it as she turned and started picking through the Designated Willow Drawer for something to wear.

"I wouldn't call you a geek." Tara gave a little frown, which Willow paid absolutely no attention to. Her girlfriend disapproved of her verbally deriding herself to a degree that was both charming and a little excessive. Disparaging remarks could be made in fun and being your own target was convenient- no problem with offending anyone.

"Hey- geeks are in!" She bounced over, not liking how the jostling made her head start to ache but determined that her mind could conquer weak and rebellious flesh. "We have reclaimed the word and proclaim it proudly!"

"That's not nerds?" Her girlfriend teased, handing over the shirt Willow was gesturing for. It was the Tara-Lips shirt, which the uninformed sometimes mistook for a Rolling Stones logo. Didn't they know that the Stones had a dog-like tongue lolling out on theirs? It was more of a Rocky Horror kind of lips- and she really needed to see that movie some day. It was like a college rite of passage, right up there with the quoting of Monty Python- you had to do it before you knew better.

"Oh no- 'nerd' is a 'geek' without da skillz." She made sure to pronounce the Z. "It's an important distinction. They've got all the dorkiness, none of the perks."

"On behalf of dorks the world over, I must object." Tara had, of course, been dressed and ready for quite some time. Her moving around had been Willow's wakeup call, followed by the far more appropriate and happy wakeup call of a peck on the head. Why did she go for the widow's peak when there were perfectly serviceable lips just a scant distance below? Truly one of nature's mysteries.

"So, hit the caf', go to class- I hafta do some stuff at the library, but later do you wanna meet at the Magic Box?" Tara's room had lost some of its immediate appeal in the process of being stuck on there and the others might know something about how Mrs. Summers was doing.

Tara assented with a nod, "I might be late though… tutorial."

Willow refrained from rolling her eyes. This was important stuff and Jean was only a momentary annoyance. She would run back up to her granny-flat in Napa, link them in with the online demon community, and they could be rid of her. Now if only she would take Anya with her, the world would be a shiny place.

"After seeing Granma then." The redhead grinned through Tara's disapproving look. "Unless I can go with?"

With a thin smile her girlfriend shook her head. "Maybe later? I'll ask, but she had a pretty rough introduction." Tara closed her eyes, pausing for moment.

It took just over two seconds for the horns and ridges to recede, the darkness around her eyes being the last thing to recede. Willow hadn't mentioned about the other little changes she'd found the night before last. None of it would show through the clothes, so she might as well wait until things had stabilized.

Although, that would give me an excuse for Thorough Investigation again... Willow took advantage of her ogling privileges as Tara bent for her shoes. How can she not know she's beautiful?

True, her usual defensive pose didn't exactly show her assets to good effect. The shoulders up, arms folded across herself as she preemptively winced away from a cruel world. If only that world saw her when the uncertainty fell away… but in the mean time, Willow wasn't upset at having dibs. Finders keepers, losers weepers and all that jazz. The world had missed its chance and whenever it finally came around, it could very well keep its hands to itself.

To be fair, Willow fully intended to keep TaraHands to herself. And TaraLips. And pretty much all the TaraBits… Terabits? That would be a trillion bits of Tara. 137,438,953,472 bytes of Tara. 131,072 megabytes of Tara. Still not enough Tara to go around- just right for one Willow.

Maybe that's how much storage space is needed if I tried to define her curves… very nice curves… y'know, I sense a research project here- which would, of course, require extended and Thorough Investigation. Willow realized she was grinning like an idiot and had completely spaced out for at least a minute. It was the curves that had done it. They were all in the right places, and then there would be the waveforms when they were in motion. Not to mention the regression on resistance to pressure applied, which would probably be quite complex, since it depended just where you were touching. That meant gathering lots of data points. Very hands-on stuff.

A disturbing thought wormed its way into her consciousness, trying to fracture the good mood. She meandered over to the nightstand, ostensibly to pick up her computer from where it had been charging nearby. After a momentary hesitation she lay her hand over the protective charm that lay there. She waited for her head to clear, for the fog of being utterly twitterpainted to fall away.

Nothing.

No excuses. You are just plain smitten… or a total dawg. Willow blushed. It was good to know that the Purveyance O' Pulchritude wasn't particularly active yet. On the off chance that she'd see Jean later she stuck the charm in her pocket- conveniently accessible, but inactive without direct skin contact.

"Are you okay?" Tara's hand graced the redhead's shoulder as she packed away her computer.

"I'm going to start charging a dime every time you ask that." Willow held the hand in place and turned, ending with Tara's arm round her shoulders and their faces scant inches apart. "Though I could take it in trade…"

The hesitant grin was more habit than appreciation and Tara's brows drew together as she waited for the actual answer to her question. "You just looked, um, flushed…"

"Nope." The State of Denial was a great place to live- low taxes, good schools, thriving economy. Yes, Willow intended to stay here for a good long time. She and Tara parted to finish their preparations; Tara feeding Miss Kitty and checking her litter, Willow packing up her notebooks in reverse chronologic order. Purple, blue, green for today- 400, 475, 510- a nice spectral progression. That had started from her "green notebook for the class in room 510- I wonder if anyone will get it" attempt at subtle humor.

How did Tara describe that one… oh, yes- 'unique'. Which is a kind way of saying 'you're being a freak, but I'm glad it amuses you'.

"Ready?" Tara waited by the door, expectant.

"Always." Willow tried not to grimace at just how much her bag felt like it was weighing her down, pushing a spring into her step with the thought of caffeine. Caffeine could spike her through until Tara was happily in class. Then Willow could drag as much as she wanted.

-------------------------------------------

With semester finals looming all too close, regular class study was trumping Glory-demon study at the Magic Box's back table. As scary as it was to know that there was a demon out there that had bested Buffy on two occasions, beyond a weird snake thing that didn't actually hurt anyone, there was no sign that she was doing anything. The body counts weren't any higher than usual and Spike hadn't complained about any new conspiracies that he was being left out of. Finals had a time limit and once they'd figured out the Glory thing, grades would still be there, determining whether Willow would qualify for Phi Beta Kappa. It had been one of her mother's points of pride and even if it wasn't from an Ivy, there was no way in frell that she wasn't going to get it too.

Statistics was the flavor of the moment. Math was nice, especially applied math. There was always an answer and it didn't change based on who taught the course. Willow had no idea how Tara could suss out what her professors wanted for their essays. It was like they each had a personal agenda that you had to agree with or be told that you hadn't "captured the inner meaning of the work". She'd been lucky to get her English prereq out of the way with a freshman seminar on Extinction. No profound novels to interpret and ruin the fun of by dissecting sentence by sentence.

Giles had given her the news on Mrs. Summers earlier. Buffy and Dawn were coping with their mother's odd outbursts despite being understandably spooked. Her surgery had been scheduled in three days at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center- a pretty name for San Bernardino's county hospital- with a Dr. Hsu. Until Friday Buffy was the primary caretaker and, due to seizure precautions, the primary driver. Everyone had made a mental note to avoid walking near major streets.

Willow had a theory about Buffy's driving issues. It was a Slayer problem. Buffy probably had an innate sense of everything around her most of the time, so when you plopped her into a box of plastic, steel, and glass, she'd lost the reflex to check her surroundings. Plus, if your reflexes are that good, it's not scary for you to tailgate. You know you can stop in time- it's just the poor normal folks that get twitchy. The same with the sudden lane changes. Or taking turns without slowing down. And taking her attention off the road? Probably a piece of cake.

Or she could just be an awful driver. Willow chewed on the end of her pen, rereading the section on Spearman's Rho. Heh. Linear, like a 'row'. Math jokes- proof of a severely disturbed mind.

Giles thanked another customer cordially, before sighing and pulling out a fifteen pound compendium that he had been poring over. He had been getting as frustrated as any of them with the utter lack of information, but had labored on anyway. It was admirable dedication, but there was also the sad fact that there wasn't anything else in his life. Slayer support, Magic Box, tea. He needed a hobby- or better yet, a girlfriend. Did they call them that at his age? Or was it "lady-friend"?

Speaking of girlfriend, what was taking so long? It was getting late, and she had to study too. If Jean made Tara's grades slip… well she was a demon, she was supposed to be evil. Maybe then Tara would realize it. Evil didn't have to eat babies or rob stores. Evil could sneak up and ruin GPAs.

Right on cue the bell over the Magic Box door jingled, admitting a tired looking Tara. She brightened noticeably when she saw Willow and headed straight over. She dropped her books with a thud and slid next to the redhead with a smile.

"How's it going?"

"All better now that you're here."

"Flatterer." Tara bumped her shoulder affectionately, pulling out a book that looked like literary anesthesia.

"How'd your 'session' go?" Willow wanted to ask in more detail, but that would have to wait till the shop was free of customers again. It shouldn't be long- Tuesdays weren't exactly a retail madhouse.

Tara considered before offering, "Strange?"

"She hasn't done anything weird, has she?"

"I can't think of anything since this all started that I wouldn't call weird." Tara's eyes were following the last customer out the door. With the jingle of the door closing, she elaborated uncomfortably, "Today was… practice. Shifting."

Shapeshifting had seemed like a much cooler power before she knew where the shapes came from. It had been a rare occasion that Tara looked at people's auras before, typically only with permission or when she was feeling in some way threatened. Willow had to admit that she wouldn't be quite so reserved. Not that she'd go reading everyone she saw, but at a time like this? When she couldn't tell what troubling her girlfriend? It would be nice to get some kind of hint.

The hypocrisy of her own discomfort at being read the same way didn't escape her. However much clearer the auras had become for Tara, it wasn't telepathy. Willow could deal with empathy. It was the insight into subconscious fantasy that still wigged her. Even a step beyond that, she didn't particularly fancy the idea that her girlfriend had been out all afternoon scoping out those fantasies… and probably turning into a few of them.

Some of her thought process must have shown on her face, because a moment later one of Tara's hands covered hers. Her look was one of apology and some trepidation. For the past week it had become all too common. Again Willow found herself swallowing her objections. In a completely rational world, practice was necessary, even laudable. She clung to that with her mind as she closed her hand around Tara's twined fingers, raising them to brush her lips over the knuckles. It was as close to PDA as she could go without Tara pulling away, even when the only other person there was Giles.

"Find out anything new?" She kept her tone interested, kicking out her disapproval.

Tara looked away for a moment, blushing slightly before replying with bemusement, "People want what they can't have? Or… there's a lot of unrealistic ideals out there."

Willow nodded for her to continue, but the bell over the door jangled again, admitting Jean. Today she'd eschewed the form fitted clothing, opting for an early-nineties combination of khaki's, a white button-down left open over a dark tank. The sunglasses perched on her head seemed silly, given that it had gotten dark almost a half hour before.

"And she decided to come back, why?" The redhead released Tara's hand, scooting away just slightly as she discretely retrieved her protective charm. She palmed it such that Tara could see the reason she'd moved out of contact. It didn't need to be worn- only in direct contact. As much as she wasn't fond of Jean, there was no reason to be rude about putting the pendant on in plain sight… not yet.

The succubus had struck up a conversation with Giles, who seemed all too delighted. Willow narrowed her eyes- mystic meddling, investigators interest, or just flattered to be the focus of a flirting foxy female?

"I think she made dinner plans with Anya?" Tara didn't sound too sure of that, but supported the theory with slightly greater confidence, "They really hit it off the other day."

"How appropriate." She replied caustically. The little look of censure from Tara made her decide to make her own supporting argument, "Just- demon… ex-demon… dinner, a couple drinks, talk about the good ol' days of mayhem and torture- Anya's probably dying to hear all the latest tricks in bed."

It would appear that her argument hadn't endeared her to Tara, as the look went another notch toward disapproval. "There's more to Anya than that."

Yes, there is; money. Can't forget the money. I bet she leaves lousy tips.

"So you were telling me about this portfolio?" It was easier to ignore the succubus than to try to come up with something pleasant to say about her.

"Um. So… I learned something? While we were, ah, looking around?"

When everything turned into a question it wasn't hard to guess Tara was purposely leaving something out. She was as fantastically bad a liar as Willow. Except for the 'turning into a demon' thing- that was a lie she'd been using her whole life. A reasonable thing to do, under the circumstances. You get to know someone, only to find out that they are involved with the killing of demons. Not exactly conducive to confession. It wasn't like she could come out with it on the first date either.

"Mmhmm?" Willow hoped that whatever this new thing was, it wouldn't require any more understanding. She was running out of understanding- still under threshold, but close.

"When you use the charm, it's like your aura gets all blurred out. I looked into a guy at the mall that looked like that- so I asked." Tara inclined her head slightly toward Jean. The succubus was leaning over on the counter, still chatting animatedly. Giles seemed to be enjoying himself, but Willow was gratified to see Jean pull back sharply when she swatted at his arm over some joke or another. The Watcher must have had the sense to keep one of the charms on him. Willow returned her attention to her girlfriend, reassured.

"She said there's two possible reasons; either they aren't human or they don't have any ideal to see."

Both of those points begged the question, so Willow peaked her eyebrows and asked ambiguously, "Why not?"

"Well… nonhuman's aren't potential p-prey." Despite faltering on the word with a little wince, Tara didn't back away from it, "And the others… just don't have a fantasy?"

"Is that possible?"

"Rare, at least according to Jean, but I guess it makes sense… if there are heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals- why not asexual?"

It was hard to imagine. The attraction between two human beings was an essential part of human nature- pervaded society in an integral way. They even had classes about it. Willow moved on to the second part of the equation. "And you can't do the look-see if they aren't human?"

Tara shook her head. Willow couldn't stop the smile that started. "So you could, say, tell if someone was a vampire?"

One of the things that made vampires so dangerous was their ability to blend in. Cemetery patrols were easy, in a way, because there was no guess-work. At the Bronze, though? At a coffee house? There was some Slayer sense that Buffy had, but the rest of them were blind. Tara looked like she was considering the idea.

"Do you think you could just scan over a group and find them?" Willow didn't notice that Jean had joined them at the table until the succubus answered,

"Only if she stops avoiding looking." A wry grin accompanied the implied criticism. "You must be Willow."

Willow straightened slightly, "Yup."

"You're doing awfully well for your second day out."

Willow flushed, not liking how she was being regarded and not entirely at ease with Tara and her private life being public knowledge. "Maybe women bounce back faster than men."

Jean gave a wicked little grin at that, but it faded with her next words, "Not with this. And it really will kill you if you don't let her-"

"We know the risk."

"The young are always so sure they know…" The brown eyes were pitying. "but the question is, do you really understand?"

"We're going to figure it out."

Willow was surprised, swallowing her own response. Tara's voice had been quiet, she hadn't even been looking at either of the other women at the table, but there was steel behind her words that was unmistakable. Jean seemed equally taken aback, though she settled into what looked more like resignation than acceptance of the concept.

"I thought I should try." With that the succubus stood and started perusing the shelves with an active indifference.

Willow had to stifle the urge to seek out Tara's hand and the comforting squeeze that they both needed. Nothing like the threat of death to round out a fine Tuesday night. She started to think through all the things she'd intended to ask Jean.

"Hey guys!" Buffy popped in, the bell clanking loudly from her manhandling the door. She looked cheerful enough on the surface, but the edges of her smile were frayed. She hesitated a moment when she saw Jean, reminding Willow that she hadn't been there the night the succubus arrived. Well, there was a place to start.

"Hey Buffy." She waved her pen, inviting the Slayer over, adding with saccharine sweetness, "This is Jean- she's the succubus we told you about."

-----TBC
Chat post 3/27/10 at 9:45 due to hoping for stragglers.

SJ- Thank you, as always.

Not my most content filled chapter, but at least it was fun and kept us abreast of Will's state of mind.

-Never

Yay for great update-y goodness... I hope Willow and Tara very soon have a quiet talk session about what Jean teaches to Tara and how that affects their lives...

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We few, we happy few. We band of buggered.

Posting While Nude Improves Your Mood.

Yay Tara for telling Jean that they will figure it out! I liked seeing Willow's thoughts, hopefully she and Tara can talk soon.

_________________
Ripples - Pretty Much Perfect and The Sequel to the Sequel, Who's That Girl?
Every Step That I Retrace/Always Leads Me Back to You/But I've Loved You All Along
Road to Recovery, The Call/The Lightning Strike, The Sun Will Rise

Loved the amble through Willow's mind. You did the 'busyness' very well - I was tired just reading it. lol The stress of their lives currently is just unbelievable.

So Tara's making progress with being a succubus, and has discovered an ability which Willow (of course) instantly sees as being useful in their fight against the demon world. And makes it clear to Jean and Willow that she's determined to figure out how to live without 'using' random people to feed off. Go Tara. Always did admire that steel underneath.

btw - I'm gonna ask a stupid question here - I don't get the 'joke' of green for 510. Is there one? As an (in)famous country-woman of mine is often quoted - 'please explain?'.

More please.
Anne

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Spells for Two

Every path has its puddle. Old English Saying... I think I just stepped in mine...

Replies:

Anne- The meandering-brain sections are probably the easiest thing for me to write... I figure that Willow-babble is what is actually going on in Willow-brain most of the time, but she usually gets it more coherent before actually speaking. Wonder how that nifty use of Tara's second sight will come in to play... ^_^
There is a point at which Tara will put her foot down, and when she does, there is little likelihood of her budging. Jean pushed to that point when she decided that it wasn't enough to be talking to Tara about the danger of staying with Willow- and went straight for Willow. What Jean has said is the same thing Tara has explained already to her girlfriend, but Jean has no business interceding. It's one of those neat things about being quiet- when you do speak out, people listen.
*snerk* 510 nanometers is the wavelength of green light. Humor, as we can see, is relative.

Zampsa- The girls have been going over what Tara learns bit by bit, although there are still some missing chunks... it was pointed out to me that no one has told Will explicitly "If Tara doesn't cheat on you, you will die. Period." although there's been a lot of "you could die if we don't find a solution"- which always leaves the door open for hope.

leonhart- As I said to Anne above- that was out of line for Jean to bring up in that situation. If she catches Willow alone though...

Thanks for reading!
-Never

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Changes

NeverChosen,

First and foremost, thank you so much for bringing us this wonderful story! I love Willow and Tara, and while seeing them happy and in love together is so very, very soothing for the soul, seeing them in love yet miserable together is angstily delicious. (Angsty-O's! Get your doctor-demanded dose of delicious diva dyke drama to-day!)

I've been putting off leaving feedback on this story mostly because the last time I did so on another story, the author quit updating that story completely, and I'm a little superstitious about causing another writer's block of doom. >_>

When I read about the gag gifts that Jeanette's daughter bought her, I broke out into delighted laughter, but I'm ashamed to admit that the "University of Houston" reference went completely over my head when I first read it. Doubly embarrassing is the fact that I was born and raised in the greater Houston area. It wasn't until a clue hit me on the head the next day and I image-googled UofH that I found the college mascot was in fact... the cougar. Well played Never, well played. And I absolutely love your rendition of Willow-thought-babble. Didn't you know that cows always come home in time for supper? It's a well known fact *g*.

I have a question, if you don't mind: What does Tara experience when she satiates the Draw? Is it completely indistinguishable to her from any sexual release before her 20th birthday, or is it more like a nether-realms spell, in that she can feel that there are forces both mystical and physical that are -ahem- flowing through her?

And now, Big-Headed Ivory Tower Prognostication Time™! Assuming that everything Jeanette has said is completely true, namely that Willow -no matter how many double-mochas she drinks- cannot satisfy Tara's Draw by herself, and given that Willow and Tara must both stay alive (duh), then in terms of writing devices I can see three options for long-term resolution, broadly speaking:

1: Deus Ex! (Machina)

Some mystical artifact, spell, or other MacGuffin related to the Hellmouth, Succubus lore or possibly Tara's mother (maybe even Dawnie as the Key) helps to augment Willow's ability to feed the Draw, helps to diminish the Draw such that Willow may be able to slake its thirst without outside aid, or neutralizes the Draw entirely.

2: Love the One You're With

Willow and Tara accept the necessity of having a sexually "open" relationship in order to help feed Tara's Draw while maintaining emotional fealty to each other, in much the same arrangement as Jeanette and her late husband had. This is certainly the least attractive option from Tara's standpoint, likely Willow's as well, however it is not necessarily out of the question if both girls are open and honest with each other about their feelings and boundaries.

3: Poly Wants a Hug!

Willow and Tara enter into a polyamourous relationship with another woman. This is differentiated from having an "open" relationship in that Tara would only ever engage in sexual relations with one additional partner with whom she shares an intimate and emotional relationship instead of multiple, consecutive strangers. Willow's involvement with the third woman would ultimately have to range anywhere from friendly acceptance to full out romantic entanglement, and vice versa.

I'll admit, this last scenario is the one that I find the most intriguing, as it not only adds a multitude of new relationship dynamics, but it also requires all parties involved to develop the one thing that many relationships lack and which all of them need, communication: Not just telling each other about good things such as desires and dreams, but also relaying effectively anxieties both for and caused by all parties involved, and establishing and following guidelines to which everyone can agree, such as whether or not all parties must be present during sexual activity and how to avoid unfairly biasing one partner against another in the course of an argument.

(Mind you, I'm speaking at the very least half way out of my ass on this point, as my relationships with family and loved ones are rarely as open and communicative as Willow and Tara's, so liberally apply sodium chloride to what I've written so far and make of it what you will.)

As much as I would love to see the third resolution, there are two significant challenges involved in its implementation that may prove to be daunting obstacles. First, who would this woman be? Given that Willow would sooner flunk all her courses on purpose than contemplate a poly relationship with Anya, that Buffy -as Tara described her- really is completely, unequivocally, irredeemably straight, and that the age difference with Dawnie is deep into Squick territory, that basically leaves Faith. Anyone else would have to come either from another universe (read: Crossover) or be an original character (read: Mary Sue). I personally doubt that Buffy is the 100%, Grade A, certified Mrs. Heterosexual USA she oft protests to be, and getting her to see the benefits of a Sapphic relationship could be a long, arduous, angst-ridden and completely entertaining journey. However, if Tara's assessment of Buffy in chapter 7 really is Word of God, then keep in mind that there aren't that many other fish in the sea. The second obstacle is that depicting such a relationship is almost certainly a violation of the Kitten Board's charter and mission statement, and -barring an official waiver- any exploration thereof would have to be done outside of the KB community and readership.

Willow and Tara have been shown time and time again to have tremendous resilience in their relationship, but they're also both clearly imperfect emotional beings. When you gave us the scene where Willow gently admitted to Tara that her physical metamorphosis freaked her out a little and Tara did not completely fall apart at that admission -despite that being one of her greatest fears, you showed us the strength of their devotion to each other and their ability to communicate with one another. When Willow hid how much Tara's Draw had a draining effect on her, and when Tara remained painfully quiet whenever Willow referred to Jeanette as an inherently evil demon, you showed us how they both still have personal foibles that can cause interpersonal friction and prevent completely honest communication. Their collective resilience and their individual flaws are excellent characterizations, and I commend you for being able to capture both with the affection and quirkiness that we've come to love.

Thank you again for bringing us this story, and I can't wait to read more when it comes along.

Love,
Ryan.

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"As Willow placed a kiss on her hair, Tara tucked her head underneath Willow's chin and breathed in the scent of Willow's skin. She fell back into her dreams while silently telling Willow the words of her heart, her lips brushing against the soft skin of Willow's neck."

-- "Doppelganger Redux"

Ryan- First, your feedback made my day… ^_^ v
I tend to believe that the greatest compliment a person can give me is not heap praise, but to show that they have taken in what they have read, that they spared the brain cells to mull it over, and then been kind enough to write it out despite the prodigious time required. If I can weasel criticism out of it, that's a bonus (hurts for a moment, helps for lifetime).

Now that I've lauded your words, it's time to address them.

As you probably read earlier, this is not an outlined fic. It is part of my attempt to loosen up and trust that I can write what needs to be written in a meaningful way without resorting to my usual obsessive structure/edit/re-edit practices. It makes rereading painful for me, but *shrug* seems to make people happy as is. Due to this process, there are a lot of things that I haven't really decided on… but the eventual solution is one that I've known in its basic form since day 2. Day 1 was spent worrying about how I'd better come up with a solution so I had some clue that I could stay within KB rules.

Yes, that means it will be KB friendly; no canon characters insanely jumping between the green-eyed wicca and her devoted mate, and also no OCs stupid enough to try. Jean's words, by the way, should not be considered gospel… for all that she knows, she's already had some inaccurate predictions. As with any character, her knowledge is limited to her own experience, plus there is the contingent of readers that questions her motivation.

I always thought that Willow-babble was an expression of what goes on in her head. The ideas would flow like this continually, making connects that are sometimes tenuous, sometimes brilliant- but unless she's flustered, she has enough social savvy to filter it into proper sentences.

The Tara Draw Experience (sounds like a new Disney ride) is something that, were I not a prude, would probably be something related to sex. Sadly for her, a prude I am and a prude I shall stay- the deep burning that she experiences is just another hunger, another thirst. It is a powerful motivator and there is a visceral satisfaction to appeasing it, but as with her Buffy Incident, it is not actually sexual in nature. That just happens to be how her species has adapted to tapping into the energy they need- it's not the only way but, as discussed in the big "how did this evolve" chat, for them it is the most efficient. If Tara were, for example, to hide under Xander and Anya's bed and bite somebody's ankle at an appropriate moment (imagination going to odd places right now), the sensation would be the same. Any benefit from… associated activities… is a bonus, not an extension.

The solution… it would be no fun if I told you! This story is based on procedural discovery, leading towards an eventual solution. If I had to point to one of your categories, it would be Deus Ex Machina… but I'm not inclined to use "we found the right spell that fixes everything". Too simplistic- it devalues the trials that lead up to it. Also, why wouldn't any of the other succubi have figured it out? Jeanette tried her hand at monogamy on three occasions that she's mentioned, and it is the tragic result of that which reinforces her warnings. *stifles further explanation for fear of revealing too much*

Communication is big, especially since I keep hopping POV. Nobody knows for sure what the other is thinking, and their assumptions are not always right. It annoys me to see fic that make the characters appear to have a hive mind. Part of the joy of our characters is that they have their own experiences to draw from, their own fears to bow to or face, and their own limits. To archetype them; Willow is the optimistic fixer that feels inadequate, Tara is the fatalistic martyr that feels unworthy. Compare/contrast is fun with these two…

Thank you for taking the time to offer such a complete evaluation. I find myself wanting to answer your questions with information that I've been holding for later use, so please forgive me if I seem less than complete in my responses. I will not stop updating, not if I can help it- I despise unfinished fics that lure me in and leave me hanging… I don't read them if I know they are incomplete (yes, I'm a hypocrite that wants people to read my continuing story but won't read others till they're done). So far I've been pretty consistent at 10 pgs per week…

Feel free to join us in chat some time! I'd love to hear your comments during live presentation of the latest bits.

-Never

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Changes

Great update.

*Yawn* late night update...

-----Ch 14 Pt II

"Jean." Buffy made the name into a greeting, if a somewhat stiff one.

"Or 'Mildred'." Willow added. Tara poked her in the ribs with an elbow. There was no reason to be rude and making known that she'd been investigated was hardly going to make Jean any more inclined to be friendly to the others. The succubus had quickly hidden the look of shock that had swept across her face, now flashing a guileless smile at Buffy.

"I'd try to shake hands, but you've got one of those magic doohickeys on, don't you." A spread hand and a shrug kept the words from sounding confrontational.

"You understand though, right? I mean- you're a demon," Buffy explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She came over to table-side, addressing the witches, "How's the studying?"

"Meh. I need to run these problems through again." Willow twirled her pen at the papers in front of her. It was mathy-looking, but might as well have been Greek, for all that Tara could decipher it. Actually, Greek would have been easier- they had dictionaries for that. Willow sounded reluctant as she offered, "Did you want company for patrol?"

"Nah. I got it covered. Need the quiet time."

"Dawnie's at home with your mom?" Unspoken was the additional Alone?

"Xander's over there." Buffy started back toward the front of the shop. "I better get going. The Hellmouth waits for no one. If Riley-"

"The Hellmouth? It's here?" It was Jean again, her genial look faltering.

"You didn't know? I thought it was some kind of demon magnet- you'd feel it or something." Willow said with a skeptical grin. Tara was glad she hadn't added 'evil' to the description.

"I knew there was one in California. I just… never looked into it." Jean's expression was slowly clouding, looking like she was trying to remember something buried in her subconscious. Whatever it was, she must have found it, because Tara saw her eyes flare briefly before flicking back up to Buffy.

"Yeah, so- you might want to take a cross or something if you go out at night. Lotsa vampires." Buffy frown suddenly, looking to Tara. "You guys are okay with crosses, right?"

She nodded, but her attention was back on Jean. If they hadn't been talking about this very subject earlier, she never would have noticed…

The last place Jean had taken her that day had been what the succubus had termed "the local hardbody shop". A gym. One of those places Tara had never actually set foot in nor ever really intended to. It was important, Jean had insisted, because they were more likely to find someone whose idea of beauty was in line with American Gladiator.

The line of reasoning was this; succubi were not loved by either demon or human world, and at some point she would run into someone who wanted her dead. Hiding was the best course of action, followed by running, but when you couldn't do either, you at least needed to look like you could fight- and in the worst case, be strong enough to make your punches count. It had been a disconcerting experience- although most of the other shifting that afternoon had been just as discombobulating. She'd convinced herself it was all about bluffing.

Jean wasn't bluffing. As she made innocent inquiries about the Hellmouth to Buffy and Willow with one hand casually hook in a pocket, the other hand laying at her side drew Tara's attention. The succubus was turned just enough that the other girls wouldn't be able to see, but Tara had the slightest view of her claws emerging, then fusing as they lengthened into a foot-long blade. It was so very subtle how the three fingers that supported it had likewise slowly bound together, the bones in her hand shifting into a rigid line from a forearm newly corded with muscle just visible before vanishing under her sleeve. There had been no rustle in the cloth, nothing more suspicious than innocuous little motions of changing her posture, but knowing what to look for made Tara aware that the shift was not confined to that hand. If not for the loose over-shirt the others might have noticed the surreptitious shifts of the succubus' frame broadening, subtly expanding. Through it all Jean's banter hadn't paused. Slow, concealed, without a specified template to adapt to- this was what shifting could be, in the hands of a master. Tara would have been impressed, but for the realization;

Jean was going to take Buffy's head off.

Or try to.

"Jean! Sto-!" She was halfway out of her seat, the words of warning formed but not fully uttered when the scene erupted. Jean swung her bladed hand in a sudden arc paralleling the floor, missing Buffy's neck by a hair's breadth as the Slayer dodged backward.

"Tara- RUN!"

The succubus' words drowned out Tara's and she began to reverse her motion for a second strike. Buffy had dropped her stance, already moving to meet the charge as she chambered a fist with smooth familiarity. There was no time- it would be over before she could incant a word, even if the right spell had come to mind.

A decorative shield provided what she needed, tearing loose from the wall in time to intercede between the combatants. Buffy's fist hit it with a crash, immediately followed by the shriek of Jean's blade against the other side. Their combined force spun the shield, turning both combatants as if in a revolving door before clattering away to the side. Buffy's momentum had carried her a step beyond Jean's reach, but she whirled and leapt back toward the still stumbling succubus.

This time Tara resorted to shoving a chair between them, forcing Buffy to abort her kick in favor of avoiding a nasty spill. The extra moment gained her the time to finally give her words voice,

"STOP- both of you."

Buffy fell back a step, while Jean stood warily, bladed hand at ready, breathing hard and not deviating in her attention on her opponent. The Slayer, at least, seemed willing enough to put the fight on hold.

"Just listen f-for second." This had to be put to rest before things got any further out of hand. She started to round the table.

"Tara- she's the Slayer." Jean hissed with frightened vehemence, "I knew I'd seen her somewhere-"

"You knew what Buffy looks like?" Willow's agitation reminded Tara of her girlfriend's fears of Buffy's cover being blown via the online community.

"Not her name- but word gets around. There's an old year book picture…" Jean finally glanced aside to Tara, her expression turning from desperation to betrayal, "You knew?!"

"She's a friend…"

"She's a Slayer- they kill our kind. How long did you think she was going to let you live?"

"Hey-" Buffy's indignance brought her a step as she straightened out of her fighting stance. The moment she moved, Jean suddenly skidded backwards- though perhaps skidded wasn't the right word, given that she'd crossed almost half of the room. It had involved a motion that seemed more at home in a video game; jumping backward, skimming no higher than two feet above the ground in a wide arc as if gravity had lost most of its hold until she'd landed on the lower part of the loft stairs. She clung to both railings as if ready to launch elsewhere, eyes locked on where the Slayer stood looking unimpressed.

"Let's stay put for a moment, shall we?" Giles's words were steady, as was the crossbow he had trained on Jean.

"That was so cool- can you do that?" Willow's face lit up and she gestured at where the succubus had pulled off her maneuver. Whatever tension Tara felt from the confrontation seemed to have entirely passed her girlfriend by. With a bemused shrug that covered the tremble from her heart's hammering she answered, "I… don't think so… can I" If she knew just what had happened, she might figure it out, but so far the only hint was blatant disregard of physics.

"Of course you can. Just push backward as you levitate-" Jean's words were distracted as she looked between Buffy and the crossbow Giles held.

"Ooo- like air hockey!" Willow chimed in.

"Kinda like the floaty thing you guys did at the Bronze?" Buffy asked curiously.

Tara blinked, furrowing her brow as she looked to Willow, "I thought that w-was you."

"Nu-uh. Well, some- cuz it seemed all romantic- but I was just carrying me. I can't hold up two people." Under her breath she added, "not yet, anyway."

If that wasn't Willow, then was any of the other floating? Tara had simply assumed it was her girlfriend that had been adding that dimension, whether consciously or not. She couldn't lift a person telekinetically by herself- not without Willow's power backing her and certainly not without complete focus. At her birthday party at the Bronze she had felt Willow drawing magical support from her, but even as she acquiesced internally she had been awed that Willow could keep them both aloft. Even one person was impressive, but two… it had been enough to start that twinge of worry in her mind as she marveled at the level of power being displayed- without ritual, without words, without so much as breaking a sweat.

Tara couldn't accept that she had initiated that event. She would have felt the strain, even if she had managed to cause it without conscious thought.

Jean was standing very slowly from where she'd caught herself. Tara hadn't seen when, but the claws had returned to a perfectly human hand, just as the other signs of the shift had retreated. The succubus cast a dubious eye on her. "It's usually the first sign that your quickening has started… pretty big clue, really."

"I just assumed…" Tara ducked her head. She'd assumed it was a lack of control on Willow's part over her explosively advancing magic, with misfired spells only fueling that growing unease. Her lack of confidence had been misplaced and she felt horrible for having doubted.

With a low whistle, the succubus' skeptical look turned to one of wry understanding, "You really had no idea… just thought it was a spell... Your tail must have been quite the surprise."

"Um- I hate to break in, but can we finish this?" Buffy crossed her arms with an impatient look, "Cuz I need to go patrol."

"Jean, despite what you may have heard, a Slayer is not an indiscriminant killer. While typically their interactions with the demon world have revolved around their martial duties, that hardly means-" Giles laid his crossbow aside deliberately, though it remained conspicuously cocked.

"They aren't called 'Wait-and-see'-ers. 'Slay'er makes the job pretty clear." The succubus cut in harshly.

"Hey- let's all remember who attacked who here." Buffy continued to radiate righteous annoyance.

Jean raised her hands as if in surrender. "Okay then. I made a mistake. Does that mean I can leave?"

"As long as you don't hurt anyone, I don't see why I should waste time hunting for you." Buffy shrugged. "No harm, no foul."

With a wary nod, Jean edged around Buffy, retreating slowly toward the door as she said flatly in Tara's general direction, "Can you give Anya my regrets? I don't think that I can make it tonight."

Incomplete truths had caused harm again, and it was her responsibility. Tara shook herself free of her torpor, hurrying to catch the succubus. She could feel Willow a step behind her and hoped fervently that her girlfriend wouldn't hinder her attempts to salvage the situation.

"Jean- wait." Tara spotted Jean immediately, halfway to where her car was parked. She hadn't gone far- the stiffness in her gait evidencing just how much the brief fight had cost her.

The succubus stopped abruptly, rounding on her furiously, "You knew! You knew, and you didn't say a word that there was a Slayer here. I think I'm buying you time to escape, and you- you're a friend of hers?!"

"I c-couldn't-" Tara scrambled for the right words. Confrontation made her mind quail, composure scampering away and robbing her of the placating phrases that would have come naturally in any other arena. As her words died out, Willow took over in a righteous huff,

"You're a demon! You talk about secrecy being such a big deal for you guys- well there's only one of Buffy, and all it takes is a lil' forum post telling who she is- it doesn't take long before somebody figures out where she lives a-and decides to burn down her house, or run over her with a truck, or shoot her from across the street, or poison her water-heater, or-"

"Can you blame us? That-" Jean flung a hand toward the Magic Box, "is one of the reasons that my kind disappear. Half the time we don't even know we've lost someone till months later- no one can ID the body if they were shifted when they died. Maybe your friend is the Dali Lama of Slayers, but how are we supposed to trust that?!"

"Well, you'd didn't give her much of a chance." Willow retorted. "Hi. How are ya- let me cut your throat-"

"What else should I have done?" The succubus' anger began to crack, showing her underlying fear, "I'm a lover, not a fighter- if I don't strike first, I'm up shit creek without a paddle-"

"Oh, yeah, preemptive action- that makes it all better-"

"Will." Tara laid a cautioning hand on her girlfriend's arm, only to regret it as the contact sent a shock down her arm, making her pull away with an involuntary hiss. The sound brought Willow's attention and concern back to her. "Let it go. No one was hurt."

Willow swallowed whatever harshness she had been about to utter, settling for a scathing glare back at Jean. The succubus composed herself, speaking with stiff civility,

"No, but there was no way to know that would be the case."

"I talked to Buffy about you the day you arrived… she's not going to do anything to you." She pressed on, both to defend her decision and in some far-fetched hope that Jean wouldn't abandon her for it, "I told you before- she was the f-first person I fed off of… and I'm still here."

Narrowing her eyes, Jean responded slowly, "… and that would be why it didn't kill her. She's 'not like other people'... I think that's how you put it."

"I'm sorry. I…" What else was there to say? She hung her head. Her judgment call had come home to roost- how could she not take responsibility for her actions…

"You're a good girl, hun, but I think you can understand why I'm leaving. I just haven't figured out if your," this was aimed at Willow, "little detective work means I have to make myself a new life to go home to."

"What? No!" Willow's guilty look made clear that the information was already in hand. "Well, yes, I guess I could pass it on to somebody meaner than Buffy, but- no! I didn't mean for you to go all Tarantino on each other- just- you have all the cards here. You know what's going on, you have this whole community thing, and-and," her voice shifted into a plea, looking to Tara as her words addressed them both, "I needed to be sure she was safe."

"Will- she's never done a thing to warrant that-" If Tara had any inkling that her girlfriend had intended to leverage Buffy against Jean's cooperation, she would have found a way to keep their meetings separated from any contact with the Scooby Gang. Jean's follow-up was bitter, if less hostile than it had been,

"But she's right. For the same reason I can't bring myself to stay- she has no reason to believe that I don't have some kind of ulterior motive here."

"I didn't know you'd figure out who she was- I just thought that Buffy should know who you are, just in case…" Willow was slowly backing down, cringing slightly as she spoke.

"In case I was some kind of psychotic?" Jean prompted sarcastically.

"In case you were like every other demon that hangs around the Hellmouth." Willow replied pointedly.

"Hey! Talk about racial profiling- you just stereotyped an entire species!"

As embroiled in their own conversation as they were, no one had noticed Anya's approach. The ex-demon was slightly out of breath as she addressed Jean, "I apologize for being late- I didn't realize my ride had been drafted into being an orderly for the evening. He did promise me a much better ride later to make up for it, but that didn't make it any quicker getting here."

"I don't think I can stay Anya. It turns out we're sitting on a Hellmouth and there's a Slayer that frequents your place of business." Jean replied with forced neutrality, "Excellent use of innuendo, by the way."

"The Hellmouth? I didn't think it was relevant." Anya betrayed no particular guilt. "I mean, I would have told you tonight- it makes the housing prices here amazingly low. And Buffy's a total soft-serve."

"Soft-serve?" Willow echoed incredulously.

"Well, she didn't kill Angel, she didn't kill Oz, she hasn't killed Spike, there's a known demon bar that she pretty much ignores-" The ex-demon started ticking off fingers.

"-and you." Willow added brightly.

"Well, yes, but I can't do much anymore now that I'm human." Bitterness warred with resignation and settled on aggrieved. "So you're leaving because you're scared of Buffy?"

"I'm leaving because no one saw it fit to tell me about her- warning or just a general heads up." Jean shook her head and turned to continue to her car, "You have my cell, Tara- once I'm back up north I'll get it active again. Can I trust they you'll at least tell me if one of your friends changes their mind about the 'live and let live' policy? So I have a chance to abandon my life before I lose it?"

"Of course." Tara hunched further, guilt twisting her stomach in increasingly intricate knots. She felt the sting of Willow's hand on her back, intended to comfort but resulting only in further tension as she willed herself not to jerk away. "You've done so much for me… I can't begin to repay you- even if I knew how."

Jean paused, pulling out her keys and looking back over her shoulder. "Pay it forward, hun. I've had enough kindness in my life to know the world needs more of it."

Her car chirped as she approached and without another word, the succubus climbed in and drove away.

"Well, that bites." Anya glared without any particular target. "She was going to tell me what to look for when we go apartment hunting."

"You're moving?" Willow looked to Tara, who shook her head. It was news to her too. She slid away from the punishing contact with her girlfriend as subtly as she could, not quite holding in the sigh of relief.

"Well, no. Xander is. And I'll be there pretty much constantly, so I need to make sure he doesn't find some other dank little basement to burrow into."

"Xander's moving?" Hurt puppies should take lessons from Willow. Being uninformed was bad enough, but the redhead was Xander's lifetime friend. Tara knew that there was no reason to expect that Xander would tell her girlfriend before he told his, but Willow wouldn't see it that way.

"Well, unlike you, he has a job. Steady income means he can sign a lease. Or maybe a mortgage, if that's a better idea in this market. Not that I'll know, now that you drove off the person with twenty-two years of experience in California real estate." Anya sighed as Willow bristled.

"She didn't mean you particularly." Tara clarified under her breath. She shivered, the cool of the evening breeze finally penetrating the residual warmth from indoors and chilling the sweat she hadn't noticed before. Even for late November it was chillier than usual and she hadn't thought to start carrying a sweater yet. A still cross Willow joined her in following an equally stymied Anya back into the Magic Box.

They were met just inside the door by the exiting Slayer. Anya brushed by without a word, while Willow rolled her eyes at the ex-demon by way of explanation.

"So..?" Buffy stopped just short of the steps and Tara paused as the door closed behind her, eyes on the ground.

"She's, um, leaving." Tara didn't blame her. Even knowing Buffy, she'd questioned whether it would be the Slayers duty to hunt her down. If there had been a death in the first days of her quickening, the way Jean had thought… she wasn't sure. More likely than a death sentence would be a warding, like the one they had set up in her dorm room, but in a place she knew she could be prevented from harming anyone. She shook her head- it was all conjecture based on an event that never happened.

"You really didn't tell her about, y'know, all of this?" Buffy made a vague gesture.

"I didn't think it was my decision to make." She offered up the inadequate reasoning with an uncertain shrug, looking to the Slayer for understanding.

"This may be selfish, but after I heard about the whole demon online network thing- I'm kinda glad you kept it quiet." Buffy bounced up the steps.

She'd said something else as well, but Tara didn't make it out. She'd twitched backward involuntarily at Buffy's sudden move for the door, her back hitting it with a muffled ding as the impact jostled the bell above it. Her world had contracted to that moment- back against the door, Buffy two steps away and headed toward her, no way out… her breath stuck in her throat.

She's protected. She's herself. She's safe from me. She would never.. if I hadn't- The stream of assurance did nothing against the blood pounding in her ears or the flare of her basest instincts to flee or fight.

Buffy halted again with a questioning look. Tara realized she'd been asked a question and swallowed against a dry throat before she could push out the words. "Sorry… W-what?"

"Do you think she's still going to let you get hooked up with that?" Buffy repeated, oblivious to Tara's reaction. "I feel like Typhoon Mary- spread the social benefits of Slayerness to everyone around me."

"Typhoid. Typhoid Mary." Tara peeled herself away from the door. It had only been a moment- a sudden recall of an event she'd just as soon forget- but she flushed in embarrassment at her reaction to Buffy's simple nearness. Her deep burning hunger was no more than a toasty warmth within her- even if the Slayer hadn't held one of their protective amulets, the Draw should have no more effect on her than any of the other incompatible people she'd met that afternoon. Even those affected no more than gave a second glance after they passed too close. And all the reason in the world wasn't making the panic disappear.

What she couldn't feel, she could pretend. She gave Buffy an unsure smile, "I don't know if she will or not… maybe not right away?"

"Maybe when she sees nobody is trying to track her down- calms down." Buffy gave a nonchalant shrug. Tara slid aside, letting Buffy brush by her to leave as casually as she could. It was then that she saw behind the Slayer to her girlfriend, who stood rigid in tight faced enmity, eyes boring into the back of the Slayers head. Even as she saw it the look vanished into Willow's usual affable innocence as if it had never been.

"Besides, if we need in on their, we have our very own code monkey to give us a master key-" Buffy looked back toward Willow with appreciation. The redhead met the look with a proud grin, all evidence of the controlled fury she'd shown a moment before gone as if it had never been.

"Be safe." Tara held the door for a moment as Buffy left with a little wave that acknowledged her words. She let the door fall closed with a sigh, feeling her heartbeat diminish as something eased inside her. This was her problem, not Buffy's- she needed to control her reaction and any trace that it was there before Buffy noticed. She couldn't let her take up that guilt again, not when Tara knew too well that she didn't deserve it.

"Is it too late to say I'm sorry?" Willow waited for her before heading back to their study table. "I didn't think it would blow up like this."

"I wish you hadn't told her what you'd found."

"Well, I thought it would put her off balance- maybe get some idea what she's trying to get out of all this." Willow sat back down, unhappily eyeing her book.

"Legacy. Meaning. Some sense that she made a difference…" Tara mused. "Not so different from anyone."

"But she could've been angling for something Hellmouthy." Willow's chagrin was still in full swing.

"I know." Tara stopped as she found herself reaching out to her girlfriend. She meant well, precluding the appropriateness any resentment of what had resulted. Willow saw as Tara pulled her hand away and with a grimace unwound the charm from where she'd strapped it against her wrist, stuffing it in her pocket with distaste. Free to do so, she scooted till their shoulders touched, offering a hand but not taking Tara's until the gesture was returned.

"Do you think there's any point to trying to study more?" Willow asked morosely. "My brain is pretty much saying that it's got a free pass for the next hour."

"Time to get dinner, maybe?"

"Sounds good." The redhead acquiesced. "Then study with fueled brains and spirits! Like the Little Engine That Could."

"I think I can." Tara agreed, starting to pack away her things. She welcomed the distraction from her whirling disappointment over Jean's departure. There was so much left to learn, so many more questions unanswered. She told herself sternly that she could call, that she hadn't entirely lost the woman that had started to become both mentor and friend.

----TBC in Part III
From Chat Fri 4/2/10 at 9pm

Great update.

Yay for great update-y goodness... Too bad Jean left... I truly hope that the key incrediant to cure Tara's Draw will be True Love between Willow and Tara...

_________________
We few, we happy few. We band of buggered.

Posting While Nude Improves Your Mood.

aww poor Tara... Hopefully Jean will stay in touch...

Can't wait for more

_________________
Ripples - Pretty Much Perfect and The Sequel to the Sequel, Who's That Girl?
Every Step That I Retrace/Always Leads Me Back to You/But I've Loved You All Along
Road to Recovery, The Call/The Lightning Strike, The Sun Will Rise

Preview, Ch 14 Pt III
Next time on Changes: a red tide, grade inflation, a pork chop, Playboy, a paperclip, a steam engine, the NBA, and feng shui. All on Saturday night around 9pm, assuming chat is amenable.


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Replies:

leonhart- I like Jean too much to do away with her altogether, but we may not be seeing her for a while. She's not going to get over what happened overnight.

Zampsa- I suspect that True Love will have something to do with the answer… although it may be in a far more mundane capacity than you imply. True Love is what keeps them together through it all… and there will be more.

SJ- Glad you approve and I hope to keep it up.

-Never

I'd already written the reply to Chapter 14, but had to save it to Word, as time ran away from me before I could post it. So here's my feedback for the last 2 chapters....

Chapter 14

Oh how I utterly adored internal Willow babble. You write her mental meanderings so well. It must be extra exhausting for Willow trying to put on a happy face when you’re still feeling a little low. I’m sure Tara sees through Willow’s forced perkiness, but appreciates the sentiment nonetheless.

I was rather amused by your explanation of Buffy’s driving habits. Lol

I enjoyed reading about Willow’s state of mind in this chapter, but I’m really keen to see her just speak her mind, instead of always censoring her words and swallowing her objections. I sense this isn’t too far away…


Chapter 14.2

I liked that Willow spoke up a little bit more. Kudos!

I thought it was strange that Jean didn’t know she was on the Hellmouth – I always just assumed it’s a demon-sense (like a sixth-sense trait for demons…lol)

The confrontation between Jean and Buffy was great, although fleeing the scene ultimately won out in the battle of ‘fight or flight’ for Jean. I was surprised that she attacked with such gusto, but understood her reasoning behind needing the initial strike.

Oh…Tara’s been working out. Willow’s in for a real treat! *wink wink* I like that Tara has gained some insight into herself and her capabilities. She’s stronger than she imagines (and not just physically).

It’ll be interesting to see how Tara handles the situation now that Jean has left and she’s got no-one to learn from. Willow will obviously search every available resource for a solution, but in the end, I’m certain it’ll be their combined powers that will be the key.

Reply, then Ch 14, Pt III

inspiron- Willow is doing her best in a bad situation, with all the devotion that we have come to expect from her. There will always be, in all characters, a huge litany of thoughts that they simply cannot bring voice to. Willow has an enormous amount of stress piling up on her, with no appropriate outlet- every potential target has a valid reason for her to force herself to play nice with. Willow's expectations of herself as best friend/girlfriend/Scooby won't let her respond any differently. A few biting remarks might not be much, but it is as much speaking out as she gets… and even that can have consequences, as the confrontation between Buffy and Jean has evidenced.
Re: 14.2- Jean is very much a part of the human world, and while her part in the demonic community made her aware of what a Hellmouth is and that she should look out for the Slayer that lives on it, she'd have no particular reason to care. What about a Hellmouth attracts demons, anyway? I always wondered. I have a theory… and that's what writing fanfic is for. ^_^ To pretend I'm right. Anyway, Jean's reaction to Buffy was likely related to the few brushes that she's had with hunters in the past. There is no mention of this history but it can be inferred from her warnings to Tara, and this encounter all but confirms it.
Tara hasn't been looking at the potential positives of what she is now capable of. The inherent implications of shifting into another person's form, even a fictional one, is off-putting enough that she'd not dwelling on the potential uses. Luckily Willow is good at tangential thinking, which leads to looking at things from many and varied perspectives. There is still a big block for Tara, though, no matter what Willow comes up with; the ends might be valuable, but the means are still weirding her out.

As always, thank you for all your comments... sorry for the discohesiveness of my reply, but I'm writing this altogether too late at night...
-Never

-------------------------------------Ch 14, Part III-------------------------------------


Note: I forgot that the UC system is on a quarter schedule, not semester. This makes more sense in story time-wise too, so I'm going to pretend I've been using the correct wording the whole time.
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They packed up, said goodnight to Giles and tried to apologize to a snitty Anya again with no particular result. The vigilant walk back to campus was uneventful, while the cafeteria was predictably unexciting. They were debating which of their dorms to study at when Tara recalled that Stevenson had a Common's Study Break party scheduled, which would be a raucous affair with only two more weeks before quarter finals.

On the way over to Willow's dorm, the conversation turned back to Jean's departure. The redhead expressed again her regret at initiating the events leading up to that, which Tara accepted without rancor. The deed was done. Blame wouldn't change the outcome, so acceptance was the most reasonable path. There was so much she wished she had been able to ask, but she could only hope that Jean would leave open their lines of communication.

"What was it that she was teaching you today, anyway? I mean, you said it was the shapeshifting, but what was she showing you about it?" Willow kept a brisk pace, hugging her computer case to her in an effort to retain as much heat as possible. The cold was still deepening, but the walking had helped warm them to a degree. Tara debated deflecting the question to a less uncomfortable subject the way she had earlier, but that would only delay the inevitable. It wasn't like it should be embarrassing. Much.

"Trying different ones, getting used to them…"

"Like breaking in a pair of shoes?"

"More like, um, I'm the shoe, and I have to break myself in for a bunch of different feet?"

"That doesn't sound fun."

"It's… odd. I kept getting my feet tangled up with the Twig."

"Twig?" Willow raised a hand for clarification.

Tara blushed, examining the ground ahead. "Jean said it w-was a good idea to remember the forms with some kind of name until I got better at recalling them. The shifting isn't as easy when you don't have what you're shifting to right there in someone you can see in front of you."

"Still, uber-useful if you see someone you want to avoid. Or scope out a meeting before the person knows you're there."

They had started out fairly tame. Jean had pointed out a good target, waiting until they had passed and were headed away before checking for security cameras. She'd then told Tara to shift, despite being in plain sight. No one was looking at them, she said, and they would see what they expected to see, thinking that they'd just been mistaken before. Eventually she would be able to shift gradually enough to do it inconspicuously, whether on camera or in someone's conscious view.

Slow was hard, when there was a template. Reaching out, it was like threads pulled her almost instantly into the shape she had viewed. She'd caught on from the first that she needed to stand still for this, after the sudden shift in her center of gravity had almost pitched her on her face. The ponderous pace that she'd had when trying to work from her imagination evaded her when she tried to put it into practice with a viewed form. To be able to extrapolate her own shifts would come eventually, the succubus had said, but it took complete familiarity with basic shifts before she could even contemplate that.

Jean had added that she should try at least one male form, exhorting her that she could then buy Playboy without getting stared at, but Tara had remained entirely unswayed on that front. Wearing another person's body, even a fictitious ideal from someone's unconscious imagination, was already bizarre enough. There were some places she just wasn't going to go.

The gym had been another point she thought she'd be balking at, but as it turned out even gym rats didn't idealize scary Chyna types. She'd pulled something akin to Serena Williams out of that particular experience, which seemed to satisfy Jean's requirements. She'd also learned what the shift couldn't do- the increased muscle mass gave her the strength expected, but she didn't get the benefit of endurance that an actual athlete would have achieved. Jean had grumbled that it was the one detriment to not having to worry about your figure- it took away a big chunk of the motivation to exercise. Tara had thought the exercise rather pointless- of the violent encounters she was likely to have, there were precious few that fell between "can't give away what I am by shifting" and "nonhuman stronger/faster/meaner than anything I can shift into anyway". And the bluffing angle? She was a firm believer that if you were going to threaten something, you'd best be prepared to follow through- and half the time, even if she did, she couldn't convince anyone she was serious.

She realized she had fallen deep into her own thoughts when Willow spoke again. "So what are some examples? Besides the Twig…"

"The Girl Next Door was first- Jean found that one." That had been the most comfortable, being fairly close to Tara's own size and shape. It had still been a shock to look at her reflection in the window of Crate and Barrel as they walked by it, a stranger's eyes staring back at her from a face so unlike her own. The bangs had been annoying too. Tara hadn't had bangs since junior high and having the dark brown hair drift in front of her eyes had almost driven her to distraction.

"Uh huh?"

"Then Fashion Twig- like the ones in the ads for designer clothes? Taller than Jean even, but… I felt like there was about a pork-chop's worth of space between my belly button and my backbone." Willow could probably say the same, now that Tara thought about it. She glanced over. Her love had horrific eating habits, alternating from mochas, donuts, pizza, and kid-oriented snack food to neglecting to eat for a day and a half at a time. It was like she had no sense hunger unless she was reminded, and from that point it was probably the taste buds doing the motivating.

"Can I see?"

"Um…" What was the best way to say this? Oh yeah; NO! She settled for a diplomatic, "Later? When I figure it out better?" Willow should understand that- like a project that needed to be finished before it was shown.

"Shucks… Meh, I'd rather have you-you anyway." That earned the redhead a grateful smile. After proceeding to Swimsuit Issue and the never-to-be-repeated one she'd called Malibu Barbie, Tara had found that the experience had produced a rather paradoxical result to the one she had imagined. Borrowing bodies could have been the seed of horrible comparisons and suffering self image, but really it had made her that much happier to be herself. When appearance could be changed so easily, the potential for obsessing over perceived inadequacies evaporated.

They arrived at Willow's dorm, passing a huddle of boys in intent discourse over the weighty decision of quality, as exemplified by the inimitable In-N-Out Burger or quantity, as could be afforded at the matchlessly mediocre McDonalds. Truly, an exercise of higher education at its finest.

"How many finals do have this time around?"

"Just two. The others are projects. You?"

"All finals. History should just be scantron memory stuff, but PoliSci says there's an essay. How can they grade that many essays? Grad students? How do they standardize the grading? At least Stats and O-Chem have answers. My programming class is gonna be the mystery- this is the first year, so nobody's seen what the testing looks like." Willow checked her pockets for her keys before swinging down her bookbag to retrieve them. "Did you know that some of the frats collect all the tests and keep them on file? Most of the profs reuse their questions- it's a total cheat but they can't search the houses, so they can't stop it."

"Grading doesn't usually bring out people's best behavior."

"If they just look at it like sports- I bet they would get all huffy if somebody cheated in a game." Willow's room smelled faintly of rat food, not quite covered by the residual aroma of a sandalwood incense stick on the dresser that showed recent use.

"The stakes are different." Tara reasoned, setting down her bag.

Early on Willow had been utterly shocked when she found out that Tara's candle collection was actually lit on a regular basis. Somehow Willow had equated her social deference with mental docility. It was an amalgam of her mother's freeform sensibilities and having lived under her father's structured authority. An it harm none, burn all the candles ye want. At least until someone tells you to stop.

It was a far cry from Willow's strange system of following rules to the letter until there was a cause worthy of breaking them. Tara's decisions were based on the rules themselves, not the issue that came in conflict with them. Still, in the end the result was the same; the rules were bent, broken, bypassed, or otherwise reinterpreted, whatever their reasons were. Two good girls with their naughty little secrets.

"Have you heard them talk sports? They lose a game and you'd think it was the next apocalypse- and believe me, I know apolcolypses." She pronounced the plural like 'ellipses'.

"I meant… if they can't pass their classes, they get pulled off the team?" Far be it from her to suggest motivation related to a degree or graduate school, when something so dire was at stake. It wasn't like they were UCLA, or even UCSD. The Sunnydale Razorbacks were more on par with the UC Davis Aggies, if she was any judge. Which, she had to admit, she wasn't. There had been that embarrassing incident of trying to join the discussion over a football game and bringing up when they scored a 'goal' in the second half.

Willow made a nasal sound that indicated just how much she thought of that line of logic. She checked in on Amy before pulling out her Statistics book and bouncing onto the bed to sit against the headboard. Tara moved to join her when she heard something that spelled disaster for their study plans.

"Are they..?" She looked to the western wall.

Willow cocked her head but didn't have to listen long before it became clear that the slow rhythmic squeaks were not coming from Amy's exercise wheel. Her shoulders drooped. "That would be my dear neighbor Chelsea getting a visit from Avedis the Amorous Armenian. It's only going to get worse."

"Screamer?"

"Not usually, but she's a moaner and he's a grunter- and they tend to take their time."

"Nothing wrong with that..." Tara didn't quite hide her grin.

"Fundamentally… no. I could do without the full auditory experience though." Willow grimaced toward the wall. "You can't study if I put music on, right?"

Tara shook her head. "At least it's not surround sound."

"Ungh- you've had that?"

"Freshman year. I was in Amend Hall between people who were… making the most of living away from home?"

"And Anime-Nut Gina as a roommate, right? Hence learning all the secluded corners of the library." Willow nodded sagely.

"Especially useful when studying osculation." She arched an eyebrow at her girlfriend, who stuck her tongue out in response. She didn't bother to smother her wicked little smirk. "Mmm- promises, promises."

That had been a fun discussion, when she'd first mentioned it. Willow had been quite impressed, wanting to see the math that she had been working on until a very confused Tara had rephrased her meaning. The dual definitions of the word weren't exactly incompatible, but it had sent Willow into one of the first minor snits of their relationship. Tara had panicked, not seeing the exaggerated annoyance for the playful façade it was. It wasn't until they had met again and Willow had made a point of using some truly obscure word that had obviously looked up for the occasion that Tara had realized that her word had been taken as a challenge- one the redhead didn't like losing, but was more than willing respond to in kind.

Half the time she didn't really intend to initiate another volley- like the prior morning… it really had sounded like 'callipygian', which was both too funny and too flattering to go unremarked on. The riposte had garnered her a fun new word too, which was hardly a deterrent.

"Do you know any good muting spells? Or a silencer one that we could turn inside out?" Willow scowled as a particularly prominent, shuddering gasp intruded into their conversation.

Tara shook her head, "I'd need a cotton boll… hibiscus leaves might work, but I doubt it."

"Mm. Don't have either." Willow had pulled a tackle box out from under her bed, checking quickly through the numerous compartments despite knowing, Tara was sure, the location of every dried herb she had stored there. Using the dried counterparts of the components their spells needed wasn't usually ideal, but in the absence of a back yard to garden in, the convenience was hard to argue with. "Where can we go? The Coop's got a big band fundraiser powwow, the Pump will be closing soon…"

The predicted vocalizations started in earnest, and the importance of their plan of egress seemed to grow. Willow was starting to get a contemplative look on her face, one that Tara worried was going to turn wicked if her love's mind went where she expected it to.

"Do you want to try the library?" Tara suggested tentatively, hoping to break the line of thought.

"Too quiet, actually- I think I'd fall asleep." Willow confessed. She'd been spritely enough so far, but the dark rings under her eyes that had seemed to be fading away were making a comeback, reminding Tara that her girlfriend was still recovering. In spite of that fatigue, a moment later Willow's eyes lit up.

"I've got a better idea. Grab the comforter- I think I had a sleeping bag in here…" Her face disappeared into the recesses of the closet as Tara complied with her instructions. She raised an inquiring eyebrow when Willow emerged, which was met with an enthusiastic grin as her girlfriend also added a picnic blanket to the pile.

"I found out that there's access to the roof. We'll have to make our own light, but we could roll up like lil' pigs in lil' blankets with our books, all snuggly and studious… and I think that you can see Mars- or was it Venus? Anyway- one of them is really clear right now."

"You have a lantern or something? I don't think a candle's going to work to read…" Tara had an inkling what Willow would suggest, which was confirmed when her girlfriend made a wiggly fingered gesture that was almost certainly indicated magic. It didn't sound like an ideal study situation, but it would get them out of the audio-voyeurism room, before what she worried would be Willow's suggestion, in the face of having to abandon their study plans…

Competition.

With a blush that was both from anticipatory warmth that ran down her spine and embarrassment over the concept Tara pulled the comforter around her like a poofy parka. The scent of Willow pervaded the fabric, which didn't help to settle the inner minx that seemed to have woken. They headed out and down toward the dead end of the hallway.

"Right up here-" Willow pulled open a door that looked more like a broom closet than a stairway, disappearing in it. "It was locked when I first moved in, but then I saw some guys coming out of here this morning."

This pointed more to someone simply forgetting to lock the door than permission, but it wasn't as if they were going to go smoke pot or throw water balloons off the roof. It wasn't responsible people that these rules were made for… but there was still the thrill of illicit activity as she mounted the stairs.

Emerging on the roof she paused, checking that the door wouldn't lock behind them before allowing it to shut. Her eyes adjusted slowly now that the light from the stairwell was gone, the city lights largely blocked by campus foliage and the edges of the roof. Willow had already tossed the picnic blanket down, barely visible in the light of a waning crescent moon, her breath making little clouds as she arranged her Statistics and Tara's History of the Modern World texts on it.

Fully dark adapted now Tara realized just how clear the sky was, the countless pinpoints of light scattered across it like celestial cookie crumbs. The blinking lights of plane moved slowly in the west, far beyond earshot, was the only movement across that vastness. She heard Willow join her, the slight crunch of gravel follow by a subtle warmth of her presence.

"Your breath's poofing like a little steam engine."

"So I'm full of hot air?"

"Like a dragon then. An elegant one, not like Puff." Willow bumped against Tara's shoulder, wrapped too tightly in her unzipped sleeping bag to mobilize her arms. She'd probably be shivering, regardless. The redhead had no tolerance for cold air conditioning, let alone a frosty night.

"Better… you wanted light so we could get some studying done?"

"I've got it." The confident words were followed by a wiggle as Willow extracted a hand from her cocoon. She offered it to Tara. "I couldn't even pull the curtain telekinetically yesterday… it's about as simple a spell as they come, but do you mind backing me? Don't wanna risk another headache n' all."

By way of answer Tara took the hand, looking inward as her power twined with Willow's. There was no pressure against her this time- if anything, she felt a slight drag. She'd tried to show Willow how to get an idea of her own reserves, but it was like trying to describe an aura. Or trying to describe how to listen to someone who had never heard. Tara's mother must have done it somehow, but she had been so young that she didn't recall the process.

"Candeo." Tara couldn't feel the mental matrix that Willow was using and the abbreviated incantation didn't give her much clue. Her own spells tended to be in English, but there were a smattering of Latin, German and Gaelic as well. The call for light that she knew was longer and she'd always channeled through a crystal to do it, but Willow was ever trying to make the process more efficient.

There was nothing wrong with efficiency, per se. Willow had an extraordinary grasp of the mechanics behind the magic, like the basic science behind a concept. Tara might strike the match and know how to use it, but Willow would be able to say why it lit. She might burn her fingers with it, or set something on fire that she didn't intend, but on the other hand, she could take the principles and create gunpowder from them if she set her mind to it. And accidentally set it off.

The magic involved wasn't taxing, threading into a steadily expanding ball of purple-hued mist that glowed increasingly bright, but there was an unsteadiness to it. Tara felt her girlfriend push in an attempt to stabilize it, which seemed to have the opposite effect. The light pulsed once, then began to diffuse. Tara tried to touch it with her own magic, but even as she did, the ball 'popped'. The light that rushed towards her eyes and she blinked, wincing away. They really should have just asked around for a couple of flashlights.

"Eheh. Well, it is light…"

The wry words prompted Tara to open her eyes, looking at the hand Willow held to eye level. It glowed faintly, as did every bit of the redhead's exposed skin. Checking, Tara found that she hadn't been spared. A night time bug that had the misfortune of passing through flitted away, a glimmer that disappeared into the night.

"I'm not sure it's enough to read by…" Seeing her girlfriend's crestfallen expression forming, Tara added quickly, "- but it's pretty."

"It wasn't supposed to do that. Well, duh, of course not- but it should have worked."

"Invocational magic is tricky. The environment can affect it more without some kind of stabilizing element, so you have to adapt… pushing it can just set the balance further off." She hoped it didn't come off as preachy, but there was a reason that pure invocation was avoided. Added to that was that Willow's sense of ambient magic was sketchy at best. She had the power and the knowledge, but it was in the situational adaptations that couldn't be planned for that she faltered.

"It was supposed to use the moonlight, concentrate it, but not in a single point- more like indirect lighting- without a specific source." Willow's shoulders were hunched and her words peevish, but Tara knew by now that it was all direct inwards.

"Do you have anything crystalline on you?"

"I don't thi- oh wait- earings!" Willow reached to take one out, her comforter falling from around her as she did. "Just itty bitty quartz bits, but that should be okay, right?"

Accepting the minute crystal Tara nodded. It wasn't the size of the structure, but the structure itself that did the work. Citrine would have been better or, though not technically a crystal, a chunk of ulexite would have been ideal. She could work with it regardless, just adjusting a bit for the differences.

"Ushas- guide and comfort, child of sun and fire," a point of light began to form over Tara's upraised palm just above the shining earring, "walk beside us in darkness, grace us to see what it enshrouds."

The effect was not as aesthetically pleasing, being a simple source of radiance too bright to look directly at the center of, but too weak to give more than a few feet of luminescence. The spell was one of the first she had ever learned, one that she really didn't need anything but the words to perform, but the crystal would help decrease the chance of contamination from the vestiges of Willow's spell. Too late she realized that using a possession of her girlfriend's would conversely draw the spell to her residual energies- there was a sense of snagging and then the little light began to coruscate despite Tara's attempts to rebalance it. The tiny sparks seemed to gravitate toward them, melting into their existing glow.

"Well, at least we're brighter?" Willow suggested in a blatant play for placation as she pulled up her sleeping bag again.

"Still can't read with it." Tara kneeled on the blanket, passing her hand over her book. She could make out the cover, but 12 point font would be impossible without almost guaranteed eyestrain.

"We can't very well go back downstairs looking like this…" Willow plopped down next to her. "Owie. Knees not likin' the gravel."

"Sometimes… the Goddess is trying to tell us something. Like- tonight is not going to be a study night? Maybe we should listen…" Pulling off her comforter and spreading it under them, Tara scooted close and was obligingly admitted under the Willow sleeping bag. "Mmm. Much nicer."

"It should fade in the next hour or so, I think." Willow still sounded downcast, "I'm sorry- I'm really not winning any points tonight, am I."

"Then you'll just have to find a different way," Tara replied pragmatically, taking advantage of their proximity to steal a kiss.

"Mmm. I have a lot to make up for- this may take a while."

Their banter continued for a time, punctuated by increasingly daring degrees of kissage. When had 'kissage' entered her otherwise rather pedantic vocabulary? Her inner editor protested, but was squelched by the acceptance that a living language would inevitably adopt new words.

Warming considerably and breathing a little harder Tara pulled back at the feel of wandering Willowhands. Making out in the clear night air on a dorm roof was one thing, but this just wasn't the time or place for anything further. A grumpy little noise was followed by attempted pursuit. The yearning burn inside protesting the pause only enforced a growing suspicion.

Tara wiggled out of the blanket, the cold air hitting her in an icy wave. Sometimes it just plain sucked to have to be responsible. "Will- do you still have the charm?"

"Yeah- right here…" There was a motion under the blanket, followed by a very soft, frustrated, "Creeping crabapples! Why?! Why-why-why."

Tara shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. The answer to the bridge between ardor and prurience was the same as before- the Draw. It was again becoming a force that both pulled them together and drove them apart, all too soon. "I'm sorry…"

"No. I should've known- I just- it's hard to know what's me and what's the field-thingy. There's both, but it all feels like me." Willow flopped down on her back with a helpless groan, pulling the comforter they had been swaddled in over herself. She lifted an edge in invitation and Tara slid over beside her, relieved at rejoining the residual warmth.

They lay there silently for a time, staring blindly upward while mired in their own thoughts. Tara was again trying to figure out what to do with the glaring problem at hand. There were a few basic approaches… one; somehow make it so she didn't have to feed this way, or did so less often. Two; make it so the process was more efficient, so that what she did wouldn't tax her girlfriend so desperately. Or better yet, three; find a nonhuman substitute source. Four; find a way to amplify the energy Willow produced during… the process. With a mental sigh she decided that, since she had no clue how to accomplish any of these, she might as well add to her wish list a number five; divine intervention.

"Why do you think my spell went wonky?" Willow asked, her voice sounding brittle but loud in the silence. "It worked fine when I tried it before."

"Where did you try it?"

"The Magic Box."

"Well, it's set up to be clean in there." Surely Willow remembered the days-on-end reshuffling of furniture and decorum to adhere to the best feng shui advice that Giles could find. Luckily they'd avoided a fish tank. Then had come the actual blessing of the space in every tradition that the Scoobys' combined experience could conceive.

"Clean?"

"Purified? Free of outside influences?" Tara shifted, her hand brushing Willow's and with the sensation of having run a wire brush over the skin hugged it back against herself. It was better that Willow wear the charm, keep a clear mind… but it still hurt in a way that had nothing to do with her smarting hand. "There's this… haze in Sunnydale. I mean, ambient magic is always there, but there's so much of it here."

"Huh." Willow fell silent for a moment before stating definitively, "like tossing a paperclip."

Tara waited, hoping for a clue to her girlfriend's logic. She wasn't disappointed.

"That didn't make sense, did it… it's like, what if the spell is like tossing a paperclip, but there's this big ol' magnet in the room. Sometimes the paperclip just falls, cuz it's one of those cheap plastic ones- but the metal one might zip off in a totally different direction, unless it's a big one- but even then it's shifted around."

Tara nodded. This was one thing she could speak about with confidence, "Kind of. Spells that are entirely from within aren't really affected, but using anything environmental means having to account for the fluctuations in that environment. Like the spell is in a river- there's rapids and eddies and stuff, so it can push the spell around if you don't look ahead, but if you work with the current, it can sometimes help…" She didn't add that if it weren't the Hellmouth, there was also the option of channeling that ambient energy itself. There had been enough amateur magic users pulling off impossibly powerful spells in the stories Willow had told her to know that to be as true of the Hellmouth as it was of naturally sacred spaces… though the types of magic each environ encouraged were wildly different. That reminded her, "And anyone casting in the environment changes it- like what happened with the rose spell." Or my light, she added silently, still embarrassed that she'd lost her hold on it.

"I wonder… are people like paperclips? Not in the doing whacky stuff way- but if you leave a paperclip on your magnet, it becomes magnetic… there's a lot more people using magic in Sunnydale than seems normal- at least, from what I've read. Even Xander has cast stuff, and he understands about as much about magic as a Chicken McNugget."

It was an interesting thought. She hadn't really seen any profusion of magic users on campus, but a large portion of the student body originated elsewhere. In the town itself, though, there were far more wizards and their associated misadventures than could be coincidence. Most weren't intending harm, but had so little understanding of what they were doing that they didn't appreciate the enormity of it. Tara's mother had taught her that their power was unusual, never to be flaunted, and they must always remember whence it came. The demon within gave them power beyond what most witches achieved in a lifetime- she had dared to hope that it was just hereditary talent during those few hours she'd believed herself truly human.

The ambient magic of the Hellmouth was tremendously strong. If she'd had the chance to visit campus before arriving with her suitcase and a few boxes, she would never have chosen to live in Sunnydale. Entering town had made her think of what migrating birds must feel when they hit the LA smog. Her consciousness of Sunnydale's malign atmosphere had faded with time, filtered out by virtue of its constant presence until she thought to pay attention to it. It had simply never occurred to her that people who grew up here might be as affected by their environment as the fauna that grew near hot springs.

That would also explain some of Willow's meteoric rise in ability. Even with Giles' resources to study and the help of her departed high school teacher to get her started, it was almost inconceivable for her to have attained as much as she had. She could barely sense the magic in herself, let alone in her environment- that by itself should have stymied all but strictly ritual spell work. Instead of her spells going awry, they should never have come into existence. That spoke to a tremendous underlying talent, one that had blossomed now that she was finally gaining real understanding of what she was doing. Between that and the drive that pushed her to ever more challenging spells, was it any wonder how dramatically her abilities had progressed?

"I think… I think you might be right." Tara looked over at the still-glowing redhead beside her, pensive gaze fixed upward. In the scheme of the world, Tara knew her talent was two standard deviations from the norm, but it would be another twenty years before she could approach her mother's power. Willow had already surpassed that- with the Hellmouth shifting the Bell curve an unknown degree to the right, where would she fall in it? And if she was, as Tara was to her own cohort, two standard deviations above the norm…

"Do you think it's permanent? Or it would wear off if we left town?"

"I don't know… Mr. Giles might." Tara decided the time was right to start laying the groundwork of a suggestion she knew Willow was going to object to. "We could find out. Take a road trip or something."

"That would be neat. Figure out some kind of standard spell to use- something quantifiable- then stop at intervals and keep trying it. See what happens- then we'd have an idea of environmental confounding factor stuff. I could probably borrow my mom's car." Interest was there, with an edge of growing enthusiasm. "Then stop somewhere and see whether there's a decay from day to day. After the quarter ends, maybe? If things are quiet?"

Tara knew what she meant- if demonic threats let them go. If Buffy's mother was well enough that the Slayer could concentrate on her duties.

If there were no conceivable way that Willow could be needed.

Or if Willow could be convinced that the other Scooobies could survive without her for a few days, without simultaneously devaluing what she did for them. Tara could also see holes in the proposed experiment, but it would be overly captious to point them out immediately. Besides, chances were that Willow was already fully aware of them and was busily scheming how to work them out. In fact, she was fairly sure her girlfriend would suggest that Tara act as a control subject… though if she used the phrase "control subject", there would be repercussions.

"Do you think that has anything to do with Jean being wrong?"

"About?"

"Well, she keeps expecting things to be worse after… y'know… the feeding thing." Willow looked over and Tara found herself avoiding those curious eyes. "Maybe you take energy from the magic first, before hitting the rest. It has to be something like that- I can't have been magically tapped out twice in a week without even casting unless it were going somewhere."

"Maybe."

"That could be why her waiter-guy wasn't hit hard either… if he has the Hellmouth's minty aftertaste, then he could have a fair magical reserve even without being a practicing mage."

It fit. They knew that magic was contiguous with the force of life within- hence Willow's bloody noses and migraines, or the pukey aftermaths Tara remembered from her own excesses. Jean had over fifty years as an adult succubus- it was unlikely that she would be off base without some aberration. The Hellmouth could easily be the source of that aberration, whether through the magic Willow suggested or some other means.

"Did we all get a head start?" The soft words would have been inaudible under most circumstances, but on their hypaethral perch above the sounds of the campus below, they carried to Tara's ears the taint of doubt. "Like, I'm cheating just by growing up here?"

"You can't call it cheating. Not unless all those marathon people from Zimbabwe are cheating." It wasn't cheating, it was grade inflation- but that wouldn't make Willow any happier and it wasn't like it was a competition, anyway. Or a race. That's what Tara had kept telling herself, anyway, as she fell further and further behind. "You can't help where you grew up, and it was up to you to learn to use what you've been given."

"Like the NBA." Willow concluded, sounding somewhat mollified.

"Lacking in diversity and overpaid?"

"No." Tara could hear in the single syllable that she'd managed to amuse her girlfriend, so she just waited for the explanation to follow. She noted absently that their glow had almost entirely faded, bringing the stars into even sharper relief and exposing the almost invisible smudge of a nebula.

"I mean… like, say you want to be in the NBA, but you're five foot four. No matter how hard you work, it just isn't going to happen. It's only when you get the tall people that it starts to become a contest- there's still dexterity, motivation, opportunity, and a lot of practice, but until you're over that threshold, there's no point in even thinking about it. So Sunnydale is like a land of tall people- the Hellmouth gives us a magical leg up on everyone else… but it's still up to you to make use of what you have or not, and maybe you don't want to work that hard, or maybe you never see a magic text, or maybe you have trouble memorizing the spells."

Tara nodded, even as something inside grumbled about the unfairness. If she wanted to think unfair, she should look no further than the mirror. Her own talent was hardly ordinary, but she had been a big fish in a little pond. Sunnydale was the ocean and a red tide was in bloom. And so long as she met her own standards, what did it matter, anyway? Well, it might matter if a shark tried to eat her, but that was taking the metaphor a little too far.

"You know what's weird." Willow said suddenly, breaking her out of her grumpy thoughts.

"Japanese commercials are weird." She pointed out facetiously, but with utter seriousness.

"Yes." The redhead acknowledged with a momentary pause as her train of thought backed up and reset. "And also… you know some of the stars we're looking at- they don't even exist anymore?"
Such gloomy commentary was unusual from the redhead, making Tara aware, once again, of just how much she was counting on her girlfriend to deal with. Evil Blonde Demon searching, Buffy family-stuff supporting, keeping up her grades, and relaxing with a girlfriend who was spending half of her time a step away from total meltdown… and the other half either couldn't touch her or was sucking the life out of her.

Something had to change.


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Posted in chat 4/10/10 at 9:15pm PST.

Aww I feel so bad for them both! Poor Tara is so worried! I hope they can figure out something soon!

_________________
Ripples - Pretty Much Perfect and The Sequel to the Sequel, Who's That Girl?
Every Step That I Retrace/Always Leads Me Back to You/But I've Loved You All Along
Road to Recovery, The Call/The Lightning Strike, The Sun Will Rise

Yay for excellent update-y goodness... Good that they made some progress on figuring out the fundamentals of magic around Sunnyhell... I hope they very soon figure out how to use that in their advantage to cure Tara's Draw or make it less harmful to Willow... They sure need alone Draw-free snuggle time to really reconnect and work out their worries....

_________________
We few, we happy few. We band of buggered.

Posting While Nude Improves Your Mood.

Hi. Sorry to not have given feedback for a couple (or so) posts. I look eagerly for your updates, but don't always have time/energy to respond.

I'm enjoying your story. It's a given that it's how we handle adversity that shows our true selves, and there's plenty of adversity to go around in the Buffyverse. However W&T have copped an extra helping and the form of it actually prevents them from giving mutual support and comfort to each other, just to make things more difficult. It's interesting to me to see how they cope with that.

This discussion on the rooftop (btw, love the image of them all glowy) seems to me to hint at the tip of the solution (I hope there is one) to Tara's succubus condition (if I can call it that). Can't wait to find out.
Anne

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Spells for Two

Every path has its puddle. Old English Saying... I think I just stepped in mine...

Great writing.

Midweek Replies

Anne- No apologies, please! The fact that you leave me notes already puts you on my good side, regardless of frequency… and I have to say that waiting for a few updates gives you more to say, both in content and in how things play out. *eyes widen* Aaaaand I just realized that sounds like I'm telling people to leave feedback less often... which was not the intent! It's more like: whatever schedule works for you, it works for me. *nods* Better.
Glowy W/T was just something my mind latched onto… I get stuck on these visuals and keep hoping that I can convey what I see- plus, it was a convenient device to keep them up on the roof, unable to study, and so segue into the canon stargazing sequence. It also let me do a little bit of Tara vs Willow magic contrasting- I wonder if I spend too much time on the differences between our girls and not enough on the similarities. Differences make relationships fun. Similarities make them last. Or so I've heard. ^_^
The thing about adversity is that it so seldom comes in neat little sequential packages- and there are so many implications to my one point of divergence from canon that it would be a total cop out not to try to juggle them all. I would also argue that our girls are doing exceedingly well in the mutual support/comfort arena- it's just not comfort of the sweaty kind. The question is, how long will they be able to cope with their own concealed burdens, given the effort of trying to bear those of their partner?

Zampsa- Ooo. I moved up to "excellent update-y goodness". Yay me!
I love to write those expositions on the mechanics that I've used to try to make sense of Buffy-verse magic. There's so little consistency to it that it's kinda fun to figure out how it can all fit together. These mechanics are certain to play a role in resolving Tara's feeding issues (I keep imagining a "The Care and Feeding of Your Succubus" pet manual when I say that)- but the question is how to use them to that advantage. So far it's been more a matter of explaining why things that have already occurred have ended up as they have. There are still resources our girls haven't tried yet… maybe a hint lies therein…

leonhart- Tara, as I see her, has too much insight into the situation not to worry- and the clock is ticking… On the writing side, I have to wonder if all these people hoping that Will and Tara find a solution are asking me to hurry up and end this. ^_^;

SJ- As always, thank you for the encouragement.


-Never


Random additional stuff:
Edited to change:
Changes Sketch Album

If there is interest, I can post a few more of these sketches.

Wow, those are really good and helpful sketches...

_________________
We few, we happy few. We band of buggered.

Posting While Nude Improves Your Mood.

I found it rather amusing that Tara was able to morph into a Serena Williams lookalike…and Malibu Barbie. LMAO!!

This chapter was fairly lighthearted in comparison to others. I enjoyed the banter between W/T as they tried to find a quiet place to study. I also liked how you described the magic and the fact that Willow still has a lot to learn. I wonder if the spell would have worked properly if Willow still wasn’t drained from the feeding, although it did provide quite a nice image of 2 little glow-worms wrapped up in a warm blanket.

Hmmmn…something has to change alright! When you put it all together like that, Willow sure does have a lot to deal with – here’s hoping they can safely find a way for Tara to feed soon…

I appreciated the images you provided and am definitely up for seeing more.

Hi Never!

Although I was online a couple of weeks ago and was able to give my thoughts directly during chat, I'll reiterate the general sentiments again, if you'll allow me the indulgence.

By and large, the single most confusing aspect of Ch. 14 part deux (... I can never say "part deux" without being reminded of the movie "Hot Shots: Part Deux!" wherein Rambo ala Charlie Sheen aims a bow-and-chicken at a hapless mook.) is Jean's seemingly irrational behavior. Certainly, she has her own personal motives that are unseen, and though she tried to present herself as nothing more than a benevolent tutor to Tara's emergence as a junior succubus, her attack of Buffy has left me wondering whether Willow's inherent distrust isn't entirely unfounded.

Yes, I can understand fight-or-flight instincts as a cause for irrational behavior when confronted with a seemingly overwhelming threat... except for the fact that the only part of Buffy that Jean was able to discern as overwhelmingly threatening was her title. In all of her (albeit limited) interactions with Buffy, right up to the moment Jean attacked her, the Slayer was her usual perky, talkative and non-combative self. Buffy was not described as anything worse than dismissive of Jean's demonic status, and yet Jean completely flew off the handle once she realized Buffy's true nature.

I look at it like this: If you're staring at a very large Doberman with very sharp teeth inside of its own territory, and it's just looking at you with a slightly cocked head, you don't start throwing sticks at it. You wait until it loses interest and then paws off to another section of its yard before you beat your hasty retreat.

To recap: Jean attacked someone who was clearly stronger than her and inside of her own base of operations, someone with whom Tara was clearly familiar -if not friendly, and someone who was in no way exhibiting any signs of aggression. So yeah. (Her logic does not resemble Earth logic.) I actually very much liked Jean's character up to this point, however this event really skewed my perceptions of her, and now I have no idea what to make of her. There are stupid mistakes, and then there are stupid mistakes.

Tara's guilty reaction to her explosive departure is fairly in keeping with her mild Martyr complex, as you described it earlier, and especially understandable is her mourning for the guidance, tutelage, and almost matronly influence that Jean's presence provided. After her situation with the Draw has stabilized however, I'd be curious about the conclusions that Tara draws about Jean's departure once she tries to put things in a more objective viewpoint. I realize that Tara's very personality tends towards demonizing herself when people important to her are hurt, but she's also shown a remarkable amount of clarity and dispassionate maturity when analyzing other people's situations.

Willow's reaction is very much in keeping with the nasty little "nyah-nyah-nyah" streak that she keeps poorly hidden whenever anything tries to take away her Tara-time. And although I feel bad for Tara's loss, in this episode I was blowing a raspberry right along with Willow.

So, to paraphrase one of Matt Groening's works: "(Sweetly) Don't let the door hit you on the way out, (Nastily) because we don't want any ass-prints on our door!"

And of course, as mentioned earlier, Tara's moment of panic with Buffy in the Magic Box after Jean's departure is a very realistic and believable rendition of a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder flashback.

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Now, onto Ch. 14, part trois!

Willow, for all of her lovable quirks and her nurturing nature and her towering intellect, can really be quite daft sometimes.

Quote:

"Still, [shape shifting is] uber-useful if you see someone you want to avoid."

Willow is doing several things with this line, and this isn't the first time she's done these things either.

First and foremost, she's trying to put a positive spin on something otherwise bad so that Tara can perhaps see some silver lining to what is clearly a distressing situation. She also did this for Buffy back in the season three episode where in Buffy obtained the ability to read minds against her will. This would be really sweet of her if it weren't for the fact that it keeps back-firing by making Tara long ever more forlornly for normalcy.

Second, I get the distinct impression that Willow is entertaining a kind of catharsis for a little bit of her own jealousy. In the season three episode with Psychic Buffy, she very clearly exhibited distress not over the negative ramifications that Buffy's newfound power implied, but rather the fact that her already extraordinary friend had just become that much more extraordinary and thus rendered Willow's already limited aid further more superfluous. (Again, this goes back to the differences between the two girls that you pointed out earlier: Tara is haunted by an inadequacy of will to render aid, where as Willow is haunted by an inadequacy of capacity to render it.) So, in order to alleviate Buffy's distress over her new-found power and at the same time prove her own usefulness, she tried to present situations wherein the ability in question could provide an intelligent, tactical advantage. I see a similar situation here: Willow already admired Tara greatly as a tutor and companion and lover, so when she saw Tara gain this profound new ability, Willow felt her own abilities were subsequently diminished in importance. Therefore, she attempts to compensate by doing what she does best: Offering an intelligent analysis of how the new ability can offer a tactical advantage that Tara couldn't otherwise see.

What Willow failed to learn with Buffy in season three, and what she again fails to realize now with Tara, is that both girls were in the early stages of mourning for their perceived loss of normalcy, and any extrapolation of how their new ability can increase their capacity to render aid -Willow's own raison d'être- is completely irrelevant and almost abrasive to the person she's attempting to cheer up. What provides the most gratification to Willow is the furthest thing from the mind of Buffy and Tara.

Despite their profound love for each other, their own insecurities are working to add considerable friction to an already difficult situation. *This* really is the way good conflicts should be written, because both parties are in the right, and yet at the same time they are both making bad mistakes that are true to their characters. Bravo, I say, bravisimo!

Quote:

"Somehow Willow had equated [Tara's] social deference with mental docility."

How, I'm curious, has Tara come to this conclusion? Is she being more dismissive of her own cognitive capacities, or of Willow's respect for them? Either way, she's not being particularly fair to herself or her lady love.

Quote:

"[Tara's religious candle-burning] was a far cry from Willow's strange system of following rules to the letter until there was a cause worthy of breaking them. Tara's decisions were based on the rules themselves, not the issue that came in conflict with them."

I'm afraid I don't quite grasp the full subtleties of the distinction made here. Obviously there is a difference of personality at play in this observation, but what exactly Tara discerns from the difference eludes me.

Quote:

"Especially useful when studying osculation."

One of the reasons that I love your story telling is that occasionally you'll throw in a word or reference that I've never heard of before and compels me to research it... and then snicker in barely-smothered laughter once the realization sets in. (What was it that Hobbes said to Calvin of dropping water balloons? "It's that moment of dawning realization that I live for.") Anyways, heretofore I had not heard of that word, and once I saw it I immediately tabbed over to Wikipedia to do some research.

What I found was a very steamy article about contact between curved bodies, double-cusping, and bi-tangents (that's so hawt).

By god, Never has found a synonym for kissing that also doubles as a homonym for a field of mathematics! And how can this be? For she is the Kwisatz Haderach!

(Bonus points for anyone who understands the reference without using the Wiki link *g*)

And I really wouldn't describe either Tara's (or your own) vocabulary as "pedantic", rather I like to think of them as "full, well-rounded -rubenesque, even- and a little quirky."

The scene on the roof of course highlights the urgency of Tara's need to control the Draw, but it also brings up a question that was only partially answered from earlier: If Tara may be able to satiate the Draw without necessarily engaging in intimate relations (I.E: Biting Anya's ankle at an opportune moment), may she also conversely engage in intimate relations without simultaneously feeding the Draw? (Logic does not necessarily support this, if only because only the contra positive of a given conditional statement is always true, rather than the inverse or the converse. [Given: If A, then B. Contra positive: If not B, then not A.])

A question struck me while I was writing this review: When a person becomes a vampire, their personalities become radically altered by the physical obliteration of normal neuro-chemical behavior inhibitors and the about-face-turn regarding the morality of murder (Vampires as described in the Buffy-verse [and further explored by Katharyn Rosser's Sidestep Chronicles] do not hold any inherent compunctions against murdering either a human being -little more than cattle to them- or another vampire -unless that vampire is either stronger than they are or provides some kind of service that would be excessively difficult to replicate). I wonder, does the maturation of a succubus engender a similar change in personality as a result of a change in physiology, or are any changes merely the result of normal dynamic adaptation to a change in one's situation? If it is a combination of the two factors, how much more sway does one have over the other? And most importantly, how is Tara herself changing, and what implications do these changes have with her relationship with Willow?

Tara needn't worry for long, things are indeed changing and at a rapid clip as well, but to what end remains to be seen.

Thanks so much as always for writing! I also, like Anne above me, apologize for not being consistent with responses to updates, but believe me when I say that you provide a source of joy and intrigue.

... and ye gads, I got just a tad long-winded up there, didn't I? Sorry >_>

TL;DR - Great update! Look forward to more.

Love,
Ryan

_________________
"As Willow placed a kiss on her hair, Tara tucked her head underneath Willow's chin and breathed in the scent of Willow's skin. She fell back into her dreams while silently telling Willow the words of her heart, her lips brushing against the soft skin of Willow's neck."

-- "Doppelganger Redux"

Replies then Update.


First of all, my apologies for getting behind schedule. Life happened… and it's still happening, so I suspect that I'm going to be dropping my weekly schedule until after May 13 or so. Sporadic updates may occur, life permitting.

As a consolation measure (because I am just egotistical enough to think people may be disappointed by the delay), I'll have another couple of sketches up soon.

--

inspiron- Every time I type your name, I imagine one of those announcer voices saying something along the lines of "Inspiron! A force of justice in a troubled time!" or some such. ^_^
The way I've described magic here, you realize, is taken through the filter of Tara's perception on the matter. She's very focused on the interrelation and effects of what she does, plus she's looking at it all from a very mysticism-friendly viewpoint. Willow, even if she had more than 2 years of study under her belt, would describe things far differently… using the vocabulary that best shows her insight into the matter- which would likely stem from the hard sciences (in fact, I once put together a Lil Willow's Guide to Magic cartoon sequence in which she does a Powerpoint show on how she sees it).
Would the spell have worked under other conditions? Maybe. Willow's constant attempts to streamline the casting process may also have something to do with it… which are justified, given the conditions under which she needs sometimes needs to cast.
The next chapter addresses a potential solution… one that readers have brought up several times now. The post following that will deal with the results of that. (Vague enough for ya?)

TZep- I loved having you for storytime again… As much joy as your analyses bring me, I will never complain about when or how often you choose to give them. Quality, not frequency (I'd say quantity, but I appreciate the length at which you are willing to write to provide me with your insights).
My reply to the message above is taking a while- I'd rather do it properly than brush off what you've discussed. I must ask your indulgence for the delay, but I will respond fully sometime between this post and the next.


And now, my longest section to date...
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Ch 15


Angst Level: Overall, higher than Sharon den Adel's vocal range (whom I regularly fracture my voice trying to sing along with in the car). This chapter is moderate, building higher toward the end.


It had been a long, strange night, Willow reflected as she leaned against one of the carefully spaced shade trees in the UC Sunnydale main quad. Basking in seventy-two degrees of wall-to-wall sunshine didn't quite dispel the incongruous feeling of jet lag that always followed one of those nights. Strangely enough, she hadn't really felt any worse this morning for the bare three hours of sleep she'd gotten than the prior morning after eight. Whatever residual dearth of energy had existed then must have recovered, only to be replaced by the aftereffects of a crazy Tuesday night. Not just normal crazy either, but chock full of crazy- crazy hospital people, a crazy people-killing, goo-spewing bug monster, a half-crazy Mrs. Summers making Buffy half crazy and Dawn mostly freaked.

They'd tried to keep Buffy out of it. After she and Tara had seen the meteor crash, she'd made the calls to everyone else. They had skills… it wasn't like they needed Buffy for everything. They'd done the legwork- found the identity of the monster, found the reason it was there, but after running their handy locator spell on some Qweller goo, leaving Buffy out of it had turned out to be a non-option. It would have been too much to try to sneak into her house and take out the monster without bothering her- though Willow had suggested it anyway. So in the end: Buffy kill bad guy, roll the credits, everyone to bed... only to wake up three hours later to a beeping alarm clock that was surely in league with the forces of darkness.

Next quarter Willow had made sure that there were no early Wednesday classes on her schedule- even though it meant putting off the Latin course she kept meaning to take. Again.

Giles had said something about a Qweller having to be summoned, which spelled badness lingering in Sunnydale. Badness lingering meant more tracking, which meant more not-study-time and more not-researching-to-help-Tara. It was sad to think about it this way, but now that she knew she was a viable Succubus Snack the lack of progress on that front was a little less distressing. For once the Hellmouth was pulling for her, not against.

The revelation- yet unproven, but now that she'd thought of it, almost certainly true- had been bittersweet. Magic was just one of her useful skills, and probably the least reliable, but it was one of the few things she could do that had an appreciable 'wow' factor. Nobody appreciated the programs that she'd built over long hours, the back doors she'd carefully constructed over the past 4 years in so many of the city's systems, the frustration when those were found and shut, as they inevitably were. It was slow, methodical, heavy on preparation and worst of all, movies and TV made it look easy. Get some info from the DoD? Can you have it by lunch, Willow, or is an hour too little? What do you mean, you can't get into the hospital records- you did it last month. They didn't understand, but they thought they did. After all, if it only took Kate Libby ten minutes, what was taking her so long?

Magic wasn't like that. Those who understood it knew enough to realize the magnitude of what she was doing. Those who didn't at least saw the sparkliness and the instant gratification. And when it failed? There was no having to look up and say "sorry, this code right here means I can't do anything more" and see the disappointment in their eyes. The bleeding and pain were no fun, but they were plain to see- evidence enough to scream "I tried- I did my best" loud enough that anyone could realize her effort for what it was.

Tara made it look so easy. The waylaid light from the night before was the first spell since the Floating Rose to escape her, and Willow was fairly sure it was for the same reason. Not only did she manage to mess herself up, but the inertia had pulled Tara's usually infallible spellwork down with her. Two strikes for Rosenberg. And not being able to let Buffy spend a quiet night with her mom after early patrol? Way to go.

Even with a head start in the mojo department, what good was she doing? A few rituals- all of which Tara was more than capable of performing. She didn't have the repertoire of invocations needed to be really useful on patrol- and without Tara's stabilizing touch, even those were iffy. The in-between-ies were still Tara's realm. Yes, Willow had more push, but knowing about the Hellmouthy influence cheapened that power she had managed to acquire. Without that push, would she ever have persevered through those first pencil pushing days? Before she could even raise it?

How had Tara done it? She'd said her first telekinetic nudge had been in sixth grade, with over a year before she could move anything heavier than a leaf. She still had trouble with anything artificial- a distinction that Willow didn't really understand. Even plastic was just oil, which was just dead plant processed by both time and man. 'Natural' was a very relative concept. Besides which, force applied to an object didn't care what the object was. It just pushed.

Speaking of pushing, she'd had an interesting idea of how to help Tara with the Sector O' Smut-worthiness. It wouldn't do anything for their own issues with it- the very reason they'd adjourned to separate rooms despite the temptation of post-squicky-monster comfort-type snuggles. Not to be mistaken with snugglies, which was the problem. Contact precautions were in effect again, and that was getting old, fast. Wear the charm, no more disinhibited naughty urges- beyond what was normal and healthy and didn't really warrant blushing every time she thought about them- but also a moratorium on even innocuous touchy feely-ness. Take it off and she still had to keep her distance, and worry just how much of her normal and healthy feelings were normal and healthy.

"There ain't no justice." She declared conversationally to the quad in general. Luckily the quad chose to prove her wrong, with Tara coming into view, smiling as their eyes met. Then the quad decided to stick it to her and she noticed the noticing going on around Tara, which said girlfriend ignoring to the point that it was blatantly obvious just how uncomfortably aware of it she was. Willow twitched as a hacky sack 'accidently' arced over, startling Tara as it plunked against her shoulder. Blonde dreadlocks bounced like jellyfish tendrils behind a mushroom cap of red, gold, and green. She couldn't see the face of the poor hopeful as he took the 'convenient' opportunity to strike up a conversation, which was probably just as well. Tara ducked her head, curling up under the attention like seaweed in the sun… and that image was just not doing it. Hermit crab? Maybe, since she was sort of scuttling sideways to bypass her latest admirer. A hermit crab with a very pretty shell. Willow nodded. It would do.

"Hey." She greeted Tara as her girlfriend sat down with a faded smile. "I was wondering what I should do if he kept following you."

"I was wondering myself." Tara murmured as she glanced back to check for pursuit. "At least he was nice about it."

"Did he offer you a 'special brownie'?" The redhead asked brightly, not wanting to dwell on 'nice' being different from the other encounters.

"Lunch at that vegan place on Munroe, actually." Tara furrowed her brow in mild consternation, "Do I have a tattoo on my forehead that says 'vegetarian' or something?"

Willow remembered with a flash of guilt that she'd been under the same impression once. Tara must have noticed, immediately looking contrite for her words and falling silent. She shifted off her knees to sit in a sort of sidesaddle pose that made it evident that her tail was not cooperating with her attempts to keep it gone when in public. "I tried it for about a month in high school- but in retrospect I think it was mostly to bug my mom. Have you ever thought about it?"

Tara shook her head, expression carefully distant, "Dad didn't truck with the idea- he works for a bunch of ranches and some of the little ones would pay him in livestock, so meat was pretty much a constant at home." She opened her pack and pulled out a couple of submarine type sandwiches with the cafeteria label on them, "On that note, meatball or turkey?"

"Ooo- still toasty. Turkey, please." The redhead realized that she'd completely forgotten about eating, for all that 'see you at lunch on the quad' sort of implied mutual food consumption.

Tara handed it over, but jerked back as their fingers brushed. The sandwich, thankfully still wrapped, fell to the grass and both cringed.

"Sorry! Are you okay?" Willow caught herself reaching for the hand, her reaction to check for injury aborted as her brain caught up with her. With a self-censuring growl, she grabbed for the knot that held her protective charm to her wrist. Whatever she ended up feeling from Tara's Field O' Horniness, it would be easier to deal with than this hands-off policy that selectively punished the innocent party.

"No- keep it on. It just… startled me." Tara sounded bitter, not meeting Willow's eyes as she spoke and rubbing her hand against her side. Frustration crept through a breach in her calm into the low, tight words meant only for herself, "God- why can't I control this? I had to leave History- people were getting…" She trailed off in a stressed exhalation, closing her eyes tightly for a moment. When she opened them, it was as if the emotion had been washed away, leaving only a dull acceptance.

"There is a solution, you know." Willow offered cheerfully, scooping up the sandwich and peeling the paper open. No peppers, lotsa mayo and pickles galore- Tara must have known she'd take this one. She kept an eye on Tara's reaction as she started eating. Her girlfriend hadn't responded, but her hands lay limp in her lap now, holding her sandwich there more by their presence than by intentional grip.

"It's too soon… y-you can't miss class again tomorrow."

At least she'd considered the suggestion. That was better than the last time.

"I can, actually- I won't pretend I'm thrilled by the idea of missing lab, but it's better than suppressing the urge to throttle all the creep-azoids that keep hitting on you." She'd meant it to be a joke, but by Tara's concerned glance, she'd let her own tension seep through.

"Will…"

"I know- stupid to feel threatened- not like you're going to say yes- you aren't, right?" That got her an incredulous look. "But it bugs you, which means it bugs me. And I'm not a fan of bugs- even pill bugs, after last night- so…"

"I can deal with the… people." Tara started listlessly unwrapping her sandwich.

"Mm-" Willow perked up, mouth too full of toasted turkey sub to speak, but establishing her intent in the seconds it took to chew. "I remembered something that might help- from one of your books, actually."

Tara raised her eyebrows, listening as she bit into the messy, sauce-laden sandwich she held. Willow was certain there was some kind of cantrip she used to keep it from dripping all over her- the inevitable result when the redhead braved any sandwich that fought back.

"My pronunciation is going to be heinous here, but I think it was called 'In Voller Sicht Versteckt'?" Indeed, to her own ears her words sounded a little like she was coughing up a hairball. "In the crumbly ochre one on the bottom shelf, with all the itty bitty written in translations in the margins? And can I mention again just how nice it is that your relatives didn't use eponyms for their spells?" At Tara's passing grin, she continued, "So- I know it's meant for hiding stuff, but what if we could do it on, well, you? Do you think that being magically uninteresting would keep the wanna-be players away?"

Tara chewed on the idea along with her food. "I don't know… if you're actually looking for the thing, it doesn't work…"

"But that's the beauty of it- if they don't know to look for you, you'll just… get passed by. And class? Raise your hand and the prof sees you, but till you do- they won't even realize you're there. It's perfect!" Willow realized she was bouncing and tried to curb her enthusiasm- mature college students do not bounce. She settled for a happy wriggle. Remembering the spell had been such a coup. The idea was to be able to leave valuables in the open, protected, but to those who knew they were there, not invisible. More… unobtrusive. Invisible had bad memories of Marcy and, more recently, of Tara's panicked spell of selective blinding- plus the 'requires a coven of at least five' was a bit of a deterrent.

"But on a person…?"

"It should be OK for classes, crowds- in a little room it wouldn't do any good, but… maybe we can look at it? Later?"

Tara's eyes focused on something behind Willow and her reluctance evaporated, "Right after class."

Happy, but a bit surprised Willow looked up as a shadow fell over her. The figure causing it was a heavy set guy in jeans and a Halo T-shirt, shifting from nervously and clearing his throat before starting what must have been a speech he'd rehearsed a half dozen times before working up to trying it.

"Yo- Tyra, right? I sat next to you in History today…"

The blonde sighed, wilting, but with a studied politeness listened to Joe Schmoe without bothering to correct him. Willow geared up to help make clear just how unwelcome Joe was, fingers twitching with the brief fantasy of choking the living daylights out of him, any appetite she had departing in the face of potential public confrontation. Setting a public example might buy then ten or twelve minutes of uninterrupted peace… but that set off a bout of cold sweat at the thought of all those people Looking and Judging and maybe making a big, loud example really wasn't the best choice. Tara would be mortified. Yes, that was the reason she was going to steam quietly and hope that Mr. Third Wheel would glance in her direction. Then he could benefit from the Glare of Death that Willow was getting too much practice with lately.

She waited. She listened. She watched like a hawk for any cue from Tara that a thorough, albeit discreet, verbal dressing down of Romeo would be welcomed, and not regarded as abusing a person whom her girlfriend saw as a victim. She seethed in silence, and she waited.

----------------

Tara sat on the mats in the back of the Magic Box, which had a lingering stench of sulfur and rosemary, trying her best to concentrate on the French Revolution. It was one of the more exciting parts of history- danger, intrigue, burning of irreplaceable artwork- but her mind refused to cooperate. It instead chose to linger on that constant inner burn and her burgeoning sense of futility.

Her initial attempts with Willow on the obfuscation spell had gone without hitch; the bobble-head Einstein they had chosen for the trial run still sat in plain sight on the Magic Box display case, defying Anya to notice and remove it. Flush with success, she and Willow had gone to try the spell on herself. There had been one little oversight; to be the object of the spell, Tara couldn't be a part of casting it. The spell was designed with a single caster in mind, but to use it on a human-sized target there was just too much power involved for one person to handle without coming up with some kind of ritual to back it.

Willow had wanted to try anyway, with her usual 'if I try hard enough, it will work' conviction. Tara had managed to talk her out of it only by promising that if they didn't figure something out by night, she would concede to her girlfriend's desire to repeat the 'traditional method' to solve her problem. She'd been well on her way to despondence when Willow had added a correlate; if they did find an answer, she was expecting celebratory snugglies. And if it were a partial answer? Both traditional and celebratory snugglies.

It never ceased to amaze her how her girlfriend could rouse her out of depression, whether with irrefutable logic or incomprehensible silliness. She'd never have believed when she left home that she would ever hear someone make the words Energizer Bunny sound sexy.

If only the feeling would last.

Tara shifted on her perch again, trying to get comfortable before her tail went numb again. Anya had wanted her to stay out in the main Magic Box, ideally near the front window so that they could use the Draw to bring in customers. She had been certain that Tara could make them a fortune by selling overpriced trinkets to potential admirers, citing the tendency of besotted men to apply money to gain a girl's favor.

Needless to say, Willow had not approved of the idea. It had been all Tara could do to both stave off the potentially very vocal refusal and diplomatically decline Anya's suggestion before retiring to the back room.

"How's it going?"

Willow came in from the main shop, her look conflicted. Tara put aside her book, still on the same page as half an hour ago, and slid down from her the mat stack. Her tail thanked her for the return in circulation by tingling unpleasantly.

"Slow. You?"

"Good enough. Xander came by a minute ago to pick up Anya and he had an idea." The redhead smirked. "Yeah, I know- Xander. Idea. But it's one of those just-crazy-enough-that-it-might-work kind of ideas. Like, one of those things you dismiss because, duh, not gonna work- but when we talked about it, it just might. Except for the part where it's crazy-" It sounded like Willow was going to keep going with the prevarication until she was stopped.

"What was it?" She might go for crazy at this point. Just seeing Willow, fidgeting in her corduroys and pastel blue Cheer Bear T-shirt, was stoking that distracting burn into a more heated yearning. If it had been a more appropriate desire, she'd have been happier, but it was more of a nummy-still-warm-cookie-in-front-of-you feeling.

"He'll explain in a sec- Anya wouldn't let him come back here till he got the other charm from Giles." Willow seemed chagrined at even the mention of that necessity.

"Hey! How's my favorite seductress?"

The sound of Xander's cheerful exuberance almost made up for his phrasing. Tara managed a wane smile in return, which was more than could be said of Willow's blatant consternation. Xander back peddled quickly, "And I mean that in the most non-red light district, committed relationship way imaginable."

"Brilliant plan?" Willow prompted.

"Yeah! See, it's this thing- I was thinking about you and Buffy." He paused for just a moment too long and Willow swatted his arm. "And then it hit me- you bit her, right?"

Tara ducked her head, nodding.

"And that let you do your thing, right?"

She furrowed her brow, but heard no hint of castigation in his tone. Do her 'thing'? "I didn't intend to…" She trailed off at Willow's look of encouragement, her hands itching to reach out for that support.

"But that worked for you, right?" Xander again prompted her for confirmation.

"Not for her, though…" Tara shook her head, seeing several possible places this could be going and liking none of them. "If it h-hadn't been Buffy… Xander, I could have killed her."

"See- that's the thing- what if it was someone who really deserved it?" Turning to pace in a caricature of the classic Sherlock Holmes, Xander started to lead her toward his proposition.

"No one deserves to die. A-and who gets to judge?" She was left wondering how Willow could have even entertained this line of thought. She crossed her arms over her belly and the uncomfortable fire within it.

Willow rushed to explain, reaching out, but stopping short of punishing touch. "He means-"

"Spike!" Xander spun back towards her, making his point with dramatic flourish.

"-vampires," Willow finished flatly, shooting him a glare of vexation.

Tara stopped her mental retreat, glancing back up to the two Scoobies. Xander was maintaining his pose in proud expectation of approval, while Willow looked more tentatively hopeful. She should have known that they wouldn't have suggested murder. Although she couldn't imagine doing anything to Spike- he was brutal, irascible, contemptuous, but strangely protective in his own obstinate way… and surprisingly well read. Vampires might be basically evil, but as comfortable as she was hearing about the 'dusting' adventures of Willow and the others, she wasn't sure that she could hold their life in her hands and knowingly extinguish it. Even if it was an unnatural life.

"They're going to go poof anyway, so it's efficient. Like, if you're going to kill the cow, isn't it better to use it for burgers and seat covers than just saying "yay, dead cow" because of the inherent evil of, uh, cows? I think I derailed that, but they always made it sound like the Indians were really virtuous for using the whole animal and not wasting the sacrifice," Despite the wavering confidence of her words, Willow punctuated her statement on a pleading, "and the irony is a plus."

"Irony- good for the soul and prevents anemia too," Xander concurred with an overly serious nod.

Again, the logic was there. Would it be so different to kill a vampire than to kill a chicken? Her father had always been the one to do the deed, but there had been little question as to the origins of the chickens handed over to be plucked and prepared, or of the split pig strung up by its hind legs, waiting to be butchered. She wanted to say that the death of a self-aware creature was different than an animal, but what defined self-awareness? Pigs were smart, social, sensitive creatures. Yes, they would happily drink the blood if their fellow's throat was slit- and frequently did, when one was pulled for slaughter…

But this wasn't a pig. This was a vampire. A creature who reveled in the pain and misery of others… in theory. Spike didn't do that, other than the occasional mocking remark and professing of his own evilness. Still, she couldn't form a proper rebuttal. Her objections were purely emotional and, she had to admit, based more than a little on her apprehension regarding how that encounter would play out. It seemed a bit farfetched to think vampire would be so obliging as to sit quietly and wait to be bitten- and what if it behaved like Buffy had? Vampires were evil- they wouldn't hesitate.

"H-how…" She tried to figure out how to voice her concerns, but came up blank.

"You have to go home- you can't just stay here all night!" The training room door swung open forcefully and Buffy entered in a fit of pique, her comments shot rapid-fire over her shoulder at an equally irate Dawn.

"She called me a thing!"

"You know she doesn't mean that… look, Giles going to be there in like, an hour, to do the tea and crumpets thing with her till I get home- it's not like anything's going to happen."

"Right- no big roach monsters on the ceiling trying to kill us."

Neither sister seemed to have noticed the others in the room yet, focused entirely on each other.

"You're going home, and that's final!"

Dawn's eyes narrowed further and there was a momentary question whether the building tirade would fulminate or fizzle. She realized they had an audience and raised her chin stubbornly, stating with absolute loathing, "Fine!" She spun and stomped off.

"Hey Buff-Stuff! Can we get your input here?" Xander draped his arm over the practice dummy as if it were a long-time friend.

"Oh. Hey." Buffy blinked and refocused. She had a pair of stakes in her hands from the supply box and slid them into her jacket as she approached. Tara forcibly kept herself from stepping away, giving a brief smile of greeting.

"Do you think you'd be able to capture a vamp for us?" Willow asked without preamble.

"I've heard they make lousy pets," she was cautioned with a smirk. "Impossible to house break, for one thing."

"Though I bet PETA wouldn't give you any hassle if you decided to use'm for experiments." Xander countered.

"You know, I'd hoped PETA would shut down the Initiative for us after Adam took over… that would have been nice." Buffy shrugged. "Why'd you ask?"

"Well, there's this theory- we were thinking about how vampires can survive on pig blood and avoid all the messy human problems- so, what if Tara could survive off vampires?" Willow looked nervously back to Tara, as if waiting to be scolded. "Not in the smoochy-feedy sense, but more the arrrg-chomp."

Buffy rubbed at the heel of her hand, where the skin was mostly healed, but still showed signs of the wound it had sustained. She flexed it a few times as she spoke, "I guess. I mean, I can't exactly bring one home in a doggie bag, but if you guys wanna come with? I bet I could hold one down for a couple of seconds."

"On patrol?" Tara looked up in surprise. While Willow hadn't really tried to keep her out of that particular aspect of the 'Scooby lifestyle', she'd implied more than once that she'd rather keep Tara out of that arena. For all her guilt over the choice, Tara had never questioned that, content to stay on the less glamorous, though safer, side of Scooby-age.

"Sure- why not?" Buffy didn't seem to think anything of it, but Willow broke in,

"Wait! Why? We can bring one back here! Knock it out," The redhead pantomimed a karate chop, "o-or a net? Or- oh! Chains! We chained up Spike pretty well in Giles bathroom- that should work! Does Riley still have one of those stun-guns? Practical and humane-"

"-says the girl who wouldn't let me stop her from patrolling with me?" Buffy arched a perfectly plucked eyebrow.

Tara realized where this was coming from- to capture a vampire, bring it here, then go back out to finish patrol would keep her away from home that much longer. With her mother undergoing major surgery in less than two days, these hours were too precious to squander.

"It would be easier to go with her, wouldn't it?" Tara looked to Willow, who seemed to be debating an argument with Buffy or going with the idea. Her words tipped the scales and after a momentary tight annoyance, her girlfriend was beaming at her.

"Yeah! It'll be great!" Willow's eyes shone with newfound enthusiasm. "It's not exactly a thrill-a-minute, but you can see the poofing! You haven't seen a real poof yet, have you?"

Tara shook her head. It hadn't been on her list of things to do this morning, but she might have missed it.

"Almost as good as the fireworks at Disneyland- but for different reasons." Xander noted, which was confirmed by Willow's emphatic nod.

"You coming, too?"

"He is not," Anya's voice rang out from the doorway. "We're going to be rocking the casbah tonight and he smells funny after patrol."

"And on that note, ladies." With a wave Xander headed for the door. "Have fun."

"Wait- can you give Dawn a ride h- oh, never mind." Buffy sighed. "God, what is it with little sisters?"

"It's our rebellious streak."

Buffy glanced at Tara's guileless features, wavering whether she was joking or not before looking to Willow for a cue. The redhead's eyes betrayed her mirth, but she kept an equally serious tone, "That's my girl, alright- flouting authority willy-nilly."

The Slayer relaxed slightly. "Right. I totally pegged you for the delinquent. Sordid past full of little-sisterly acts of contempt. Seriously though- it's gonna be at least an hour and a half by the time I get her home and detach myself from the whining."

"No problem- Tara should probably catch a nap first anyway, after being up with the bug thing all last night."

"Sorry you guys had to run all over- what's with all the insane-os showing up? Any clue?"

"Nope. Not even the right time for a full moon official lunacy effect- but we know the Qweller was definitely summoned."

"So now we have not only infectious schizophrenia, we have someone trying to get them killed?"

"That's the long and short of it."

Tara only half listened to the exchange. Another long night, then. It made her tired just thinking about it, but they couldn't wait. The burn inside was telling her that and by all indications the Draw was going to be entirely unmanageable by morning.

"So I'll see you at Restfield around nine-thirty, ten-ish?" Buffy was slowly heading toward the door, evidencing no great enthusiasm for shepherding her sister. "I'll call right before I leave, 'kay?"

"Sounds good-ish. We'll probably just hang out here… it's getting dicey back at the dorm with the…" Willow made an airy gesture.

"The people mackin' on your Honey?" Buffy suggested.

"Something like that." Willow's face was cheerful, but her voice was strained, bordering on contentious. "You'd know how it is even better than I would."

Buffy didn't respond, but neither did she wither from the words. When her eyes met Tara's, the witch only shook her head to the silently offered apology. Accepting that, the Slayer turned and headed into the main shop, yelling. "Dawn- we're leaving!"

"God- tell the whole block, why don't you." There was the sound of the front bell, with Dawn's fading words, "is it bad that I don't even know what a casbah is, but I know exactly what Anya was talking about?"

"And by 'exactly', you mean the vague, non-detailed sense-" The door shut, blocking further conversation.

Willow sighed, her characteristic vibrancy sloughing away once her audience had departed. Tara wanted so much to simply hold her for a moment in silent support, but was left to just standing awkwardly with her tail lashing in unspoken concern behind her. She didn't bother trying to still it now that it was down to the two of them- the thing had a mind of its own when she was agitated.

"Study more or try to catch a snooze before tonight?" Her girlfriend looked to her for direction. "I was gonna help Giles close up- maybe look around a little more on the Qweller thing."

"I'm not getting anything out of reading right now." Tara wished she had it in her to tell Willow to let it go and take the chance to rest, but that was her own selfishness speaking. She might be able to set it all aside, but her girlfriend wouldn't find any peace until at least one of the mysteries hounding them had been resolved. She could feel the toll it took when the group floundered- Willow seemed to feel her role was in bridging between Mr. Giles' archival knowledge and the immediate situations they found themselves in- the theoretical and practical. When neither offered her a foothold to work from, she felt the responsibility of letting them down on both fronts. It was an untenable position that she tried to hold, but Willow applied the same attitude to it that she applied to everything else; if I try hard enough, it will work out.

That was what made school such a comfort. The rules applied. Effort was rewarded and structure could be counted on.

"You really should try to nap then- patrol is cool but... it is dangerous. I can give you the do's and don'ts on the way there." Willow's enthusiasm was more muted now, the effort of maintaining the facade beginning to break down. She read something in Tara's eyes and turned quickly toward the main shop, "I'll wake you up when Buffy calls, 'kay?"

"Will you be alright without resting?"

"Fine… I'll be fine." Willow shot her a worn grin. "Lotsa practice."

As exciting as the prospect of patrolling was, Tara had no doubt that she could sleep. Whatever endless wellspring of energy seemed to fuel Willow was a mystery- what fatigue she was showing was entirely emotional. It was hard to be the source of that emotional turmoil, for it made her girlfriend that much less willing to reveal it and that much more defensive on the few attempts she'd made to address it. She sighed, sliding back on the mats into a reasonably comfortable curl, head cushioned on her arm.

"Lookit what I found in the bargain bin!" Willow popped her head back in before waving a gaudily ornamented throw pillow. "From when Dawnie spilled her nail polish last week- remember?"

Tara nodded, catching the pillow that was lobbed toward her. She suddenly realized something, "Did the burbur root come in?"

"Not yet. As soon as it does I was going to whip up a few more of the charms… you don't mind?" Again, the conflict of sensitivity and known need passed across her girlfriend's features.

"I thought there were only three?"

"There are."

"But…" Tara tried to think of a way to say what she needed to without revealing more than was necessary. She tried, "Buffy has one, you have one, and the other is getting passed around."

"Xander handed it off to Giles when he left." The redhead blinked, brow furrowing.

"Dawnie didn't have one?"

"No… and she wasn't affected…" Willow followed her line of thought but her face cleared as she dismissed it, "-but that just kinda confirms that her crushing on the guys at her school isn't just a phase."

There was more to it than that, but again she was faced with how much to say. The last time the Draw had been this strong she'd been locked away in her warded room, only coming in contact with Buffy… For better or worse, she'd been insulated from most of the symptoms.

Willow should know, she decided, if for no other reason than to understand why Tara had spent much of the afternoon examining the ground as she walked. Embarrassment was a personal failing, and what she'd learned could be important.

"It's… more than that." She braced herself for Willow's reaction. "Her aura- it's hidden. The same as yours, Buffy's, and Xander's were."

"You looked?" Willow was more confused than upset, though her disquiet was clear. "You were looking? Just at the auras o-or…"

"No!" Now came the harder part. "Sort of. I… You know how when you're hungry, it seems like you can smell something cooking from a mile away?"

Willow was curling her arms around herself defensively, "And we're all walking bags of piping hot popcorn."

"I can't not see it. Not since around three this afternoon." She closed her eyes, hugging the pillow to her.

The glimpses from absolute strangers were bad enough, but she'd also gotten an eyeful from Mr. Giles from across the shop. She'd assumed he would have the charm, but it turned out that Anya had taken custody. There were some things you just didn't want to know about some people- that you shouldn't know… but what is seen cannot be unseen.

"So it's not just the Draw that's kept you back here…" Willow wasn't looking at her, still looking unsettled and a little hurt. The redhead cocked an eyebrow uncertainly. "Maybe there's a 'No Minors' clause?"

Tara shook her head morosely, wishing it were so. "The auras are there, but the images are hazier the younger they are."

"Ew." Willow wrinkled her nose. "So, like, twelve-year-olds?"

"But not Dawn."

A pause lengthened and Willow started pacing, the gears of her brain visibly starting to churn. Before she could start hypothesizing, Tara added her last concern, "There are others I can't see…"

"The genuinely uninterested, yeah, which I think we can cross off in someone who chooses her movies based on the 'stud-muffin' factor. Unless she's fronting. Do you think she's fronting?" Willow rode the line between hopeful and disappointed, but Tara shook her head, not shrinking away from the potential implications of her final suspicion,

"I can't see an aura unless they're human, Will."

"But it's Dawnie! Annoying sometimes, yes, but inhuman? Wouldn't you have noticed the aura thing before?"

"There was never a reason to look."

"Then Buffy- she gets ooky when she's around supernatural stuff."

"She's been really upset, with her mom and all… she could have missed it." She sighed. "I don't know what it means."

"Something replaced Dawn?" Alarm was starting to filter through, "She- or 'it'- it could be after Buffy! We've got to-"

"We have to know something before we start throwing accusations at her sister… it's less than two days till her mother's surgery."

"Maybe try the general demon finder spell again? See if there's a dot on Buffy's house?"

"I don't know how far we can trust that- it didn't show us where Glory is."

"We should talk to Giles… maybe he can do something to check when he goes over there tonight."

Tara nodded, sliding back down and following Willow back to the main shop. Mr. Giles was about to head out, jacket on and keys in hand.

"Giles- can you hold up for a minute? This is kinda important, potential major issue type stuff..."

"Of course." He tucked the keys back in his pocket.

"It's about Dawn… does she seem, I dunno, different?"

Tara watched Willow squirm, wanting to just lay out everything she knew and see whether Mr. Giles could make it less worrisome. She wouldn't though, not if it meant sharing that invasive aspect of Tara's ability.

"Different?" Mr. Giles' glasses shone, the reflected light from the back room masking his expression for a moment.

"She… we think she's been replaced by something. A not-human something. We don't know what, or why, and… and you look very unsurprised by all of this." Willow shifted gears instantly from concern to hesitant confusion.

Mr. Giles removed his glasses, examining them thoughtfully, but not moving to polish them, "It's not for me to say, really… but there is no cause for concern."

"But Buffy needs to know! And we need to figure out what it is- what to do."

"You already know." Tara said softly.

"Yes." Giles confessed just as quietly, replacing his glasses.

"If it's not for you to say, who does get to say?"

"Buffy." Tara answered this time, looking for confirmation from Giles and received it.

"Buffy's in on it, too?" Now it was betrayal in Willow's voice.

"If it were dangerous, they would have said something." Tara tried not to give away her growing suspicion, but Willow seemed to have already reached the same conclusion,

"It's… it's the Key, isn't it. You sent her somewhere and replaced her with the Key!" Willow's wide eyed accusation fell on an entirely impassive Watcher.

"No." Tara hugged her arms around herself. As if the world weren't complicated enough. "She is the Key."

"And somehow this never came up?!"

"You should speak to Buffy-" Mr. Giles reiterated.

"Buffy has kept this quiet for four plus years! You bet I'm going to speak to her-" Willow fumed, hands clenching.

"We can't. Not yet… her mother…"

"Dawn doesn't know." The Watcher seemed to have reached some sort of decision. "Buffy brought the information to me as soon as she knew, and she made the decision- Dawn cannot find out. The Key… it's millions of years old, but it's only been here in Sunnydale for a matter of months."

"But… if she's always been the Key…" Willow looked back at her for an answer, but Tara had none to offer.

"What we remember- it's been created. All of it. The monks that had protected the Key were annihilated by Glory, but before they were, they transmuted it into human form, sent it here, and created the entire history of… Dawn."

"And we've all been jerked around by this? Two minutes ago I was scared to death that something had hurt Dawn and taken her place, and now you tell me she didn't even exist until a couple of months ago?"

"Oh Dawn…" Tara felt her chest constrict as she thought about it. "She's going to find out- one way or another, she will."

"But until that time, Buffy has asked that she not be told." Mr. Giles fixed his eyes on Willow, firm, but not harsh, "I trust you can respect that."

"But… but…" Willow looked so lost. "How can we know what's real, if we can't even trust what we remember?"

"We can't. Everything we experience is a memory, in a way. Dawn is really Buffy's sister, for all intents and purposes, and always has been in every way that counts."

"She n-needs to know what she is," Tara tried to voice just how important that was, and only succeeded in breaking her words, "she needs to know from someone that loves her, before she finds out for herself."

"Whether I agree or not is of no consequence… Buffy has made the choice. In deference to her situation, I would ask that you wait until after the surgery to question her judgment directly." Again, Mr. Giles' words were stern, but his countenance understanding.

Willow was shaking minutely, seeming to use every muscle at once to force herself into a sort of calm. She nodded stiffly once, turned heel and headed back toward the training room without a word.

Tara lingered for a moment, watching a moment more before returning to Mr. Giles' face. His concern was plain, but the verdict was unchanged.

"She has to know… but we'll wait." She looked toward the back room again. "Willow won't hold out long, but we'll wait."

"I know… and it's probably for the best." There was a jingle from his key-ring. "I'd best be off."

"Goodnight."

"Be careful tonight…" He seemed to want to say more, but closed the door behind him without saying more.

Tara took a long breath, looking inward for the calm she needed. Willow would need to vent, would need compassion, but she also needed to find some kind of reconciliation with Buffy's decision before they met the Slayer in just over an hour. She raised her head and walked back toward the training room, shedding her own misgivings as she readied herself for the task ahead.




>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>TBC

Preview, Ch 16
Next time on Changes: Be vewy qwiet. We'a huntin' wampaiyaz...
Need I say more?

Curious to see if the plan works... and lol at the Elmer Fudd preview...

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Ripples - Pretty Much Perfect and The Sequel to the Sequel, Who's That Girl?
Every Step That I Retrace/Always Leads Me Back to You/But I've Loved You All Along
Road to Recovery, The Call/The Lightning Strike, The Sun Will Rise

Yay for great update-y goodness... So now Willow & Tara knows that Dawn is key... I wonder how Tara's vampire feeding thing goes, I don't think she gets a full charge from a vampire, and I don't think vampire feeding is viable long term solution unless they start a vampire farm for Tara to feed on...

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We few, we happy few. We band of buggered.

Posting While Nude Improves Your Mood.

Great update.

Replies followed by a Process Blurb that I've been saving



Ryan- Delayed, but hopefully worth the wait…

Ch14 Pt II
Jean's reaction to the utterly unthreatening Buffy is indeed extreme. Part of me wants to say "well, it sounded right at the time" and privately cringe at my lack of realism… or plead "it's for the sake of drama" (which is a total cop out in a medium that has no ratings or requirement to sell stuff)… but even if the backstory is never brought up, there really is motivation that drove her reaction. Maybe it'll come up, maybe it won't. If nothing else, the girls will almost certainly be talking about it again (though not very soon, due to writer foibles and where I anticipate the story heading).
Your Doberman illustration bloomed in my imagination… Jean stands in a yard with said Doberman cocking its head at her. A little red-furred terrier is growling threateningly off to the side, with a well-chewed garden gnome from Jean's (distant) house at its feet.
I'm glad I'm getting the PTSD thing… that saying "write what you know" is hard to stick to sometimes, and it's nice to know I'm not too far off.

Ch 14 Pt III
Willow is ever the optimist- it's one of her defining features. I think you described well the disconnect in her utilitarian view of Tara's various new traits/abilities and Tara's discomfort with their implications. Remember that it's only been a week now- not a lot of time to adapt to a life-changing event, and not enough time for Willow to get a complete handle on Tara's often-repressed feelings toward what is happening to her.

Re: "social deference vs mental docility
I think part of the issue was my phrase of "mental docility". This has nothing to do with mental capacity, but more to do with the willingness to accept rules without question. Moral types (especially shy or deferential ones) are frequently seen as being very law abiding because they do not exhibit outward disregard for authority. Willow probably started out with the assumption that deferential/moral Tara would be just as much a "banana before lunch is an act of rebellion" degree of a rule abider as she is/was.

Next, the difference I was pointing out was in Willow's and Tara's approaches to choosing what rules they break, as I see it. For Tara, it is about deciding that the rule is not one that should be upheld. Those that should, will. Those that shouldn't, won't until they cause a problem or are enforced. Willow just needs a reason, and then any rule is open for interpretation… and she is certainly someone for whom it is better to say 'no' (playing on her wish for approval) than to put up a barrier (ie a challenge).
An illustration; say there is a computer lab that has posted hours of 12 – 4pm for students, and after 4pm is for staff only. After seeing that there are never any staff using the lab anyway, Tara would ignore the posted hours until they were either pointed out or her use of the lab had the potential to inconvenience someone. Willow would keep to the allotted hours, until she had a project due on short notice. Then she'd stay through staff time, sneak back after the building was locked, and possibly jack into the school's processors (which she had figured out how to do previously for pure curiosity's sake) from home. When the crisis was over, she'd be ill at ease continuing to ignore the times allotted.
This is not to say that Tara would never bow to expedience or Willow wouldn't engage in passive resistance for ideological reasons- it's just a tendency to approach from different angles.

Kwisatz Haderach
I confess, I never got around to reading the Dune series, so I Wiki'd it… Learning new things is one of the joys of creation, leading me places I never thought to look. Although… I'm confused as to my connection with the term- as I understand it, it describes a prescient person who can act to manipulate which future occurs. Essentially, they are a precog without the futility. *thinks hard on why this would apply to me*

Re: No feedin', just makin' whoopee
Good question. ^_^ This might have been touched on during the "celebratory snuggles" talk, but it's entirely possible that no one has realized that potentially sucky (pun intended) issue.
BTW, the "pedantic" thing stems from Tara being less likely to use words like "suck-age" or "poofed"- she's much more a words-actually-in-dictionary kind of girl. Her use may be quirky, but not so much the words themselves.

Re: changing morality of vampires vs succubi
The point you bring up is a possibility that has terrified Tara for much of her life. She believed that without constant control over her feelings and thoughts, as well as whatever else was happening at home, she would become either evil or at least morally disinhibited enough to be dangerous to those around her. She might have had some confidence in her control, given that she chose to blind the Scoobies to her anticipated metamorphosis… but perhaps she had some preparation in place to prevent herself from hurting anyone which she would have enacted that night, still before the anticipated change. Regardless, she did not know what to expect. She worked on the assumption that becoming a demon meant that she would lose her innate goodness, making her prone to evil unless she maintained absolute control over her thoughts and feelings.
Will there be a change? Maybe. Probably not as drastic as the vampire version- I work off the idea that the demon in the vampire has the memories, many of the traits, but is intrinsically not the same as the person whose body they inhabit. A succubus is not being taken over by a new entity, but undergoing a physical/mystical maturation. She was a demon from the day she was born- she just functioned in a fashion indistinguishable from a typical human until her twentieth birthday.

Long winded response, I know. I just want to address all the thoughtful points you bring up… but one of these days I may have to cut back. I think I just chewed up my whole writing time for the week. ^_^;


leonhart- The next update will answer your curiosity… you'll just have to wait a little longer than usual.


Zampsa- A vamp farm? Heh. "Remember to milk the vamps before dinner, or they get grumpy- and we need to muck out the barn soon" floats through my mind. At this point the girls are willing to entertain increasingly far fetched ideas, even if it's just to get them through the next week.


SJ- Thanks. ^_^

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On Editing:

Not editing this story has been a personally informative exercise. Since all my prior editing was done in a "two steps forward, one step back" process, making it concurrent with continued writing, I hadn't really thought about it. I'm not talking about the big edits- structure and content (I haven't really learned how to do these, though my first beta on Missing helped- here's a shout out to you, Jas!)- that require massive overhauls of other sections to make work. I'm talking about the little edits… which are the things that make me wince when I look back at Changes.

Micro-edits are occurring as I go. I've given up on stopping myself from working on things within the same paragraph or two so that it isn't too painful. This was after one too many occasions of realizing that I'd used the same verb twice and the same adjective three or four times over the space of a six line paragraph. That was beyond embarrassing, reaching towards unreadable, so the micro-edits stopped being guilty indulgences and started to be just another part of the process. It's the next step up that I am suffering for not doing.

Most of my 'pretty words' must come about during the chapter-level edits. I don't think in metaphor as a rule, but love the depth than can be gained from using it. It's something I would (hopefully) add in/rewrite after looking at a scene as a whole and ruminating on it for a while to figure out what works. By the same token, I keep thinking of better words for what I'm trying to say. Even if I've stopped myself from using, for example, 'worn out' more than twice in the same breath, it isn't until later (usually at an inappropriate time, like in the middle of grocery shopping) that I have my "erg, why didn't I think to use 'haggard' or 'drawn' or 'faded' or if it's Giles, maybe 'shattered'" moment.

Likewise, it isn't until rereading that I realize just how much my own mindset is affecting my semantics- I have days that it looks like I'm running on a sixth grade vocabulary (which is where you're supposed to write for newspaper articles and most modern fiction, sadly), while I have others where I look like I'm trying to be pretentious (I don't have to try- it comes naturally ^_^;). In rereading I can come up with more precise ways (which, yes, means more long words in many cases) to convey not just my meaning, but the tone behind that meaning. Wording in prose is like lighting in a visual scene- when it's done right, you don't notice it but it adds immensely to the atmosphere… when it's not done right, it distracts or worse, precludes your immersion by breaking your suspension of disbelief.

That's in most things… now if you're reading Tulipp, it's a little different. I read her fic once to feel it, once to understand it, once to study it, and once again for sheer awe. The wordage is its own story which, independent of content, is a piece of art. Am I trying for that? Not any time soon- I know better than to try to leap from a crawl… but everyone needs a dream.

-Never

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Woot! Jixer updated one of my "definitely read again if completed" list fics! Hope springs eternal!