Time Heals All: a Willow/Tara fic with a terrible title
Author: Big_Pineapple
Feedback: Yes, including title suggestions, line edits, and general comments
Spoilers: vague reference to all seasons
Setting: Pre-season six and onward, AU.
Rating: PG-13, I think
Disclaimer: Copyright law. My girlfriend explained it to me once, but we were both falling asleep. Thank you, Mutant Enemy, for giving me Tara, but you jumped the shark.
Summary: Tara uses Willow's suggestions to try to make the future better.
Part VII: Tabula Rasa, section 2
Wesley arrived three verses into the rhyme Angel was chanting about how hungry he was. Cordelia was sitting on the floor in a heap of papers and books, turning pages with one hand and holding a crossbow up with the other.
“What on earth is happening here?”
“I’m so hungry I could eat the blood from children’s unwashed feet…”
Cordelia switched the crossbow into her other hand and rolled her eyes. “Angel’s crazy. I was going to ask Giles for the gypsy soul curse, but he’s crazy, too. I think there’s something weird going on, and until I figure out what it is, Angel is staying in the bathroom, so if you need to go, you’ll have to talk to the dentist next door or something.”
“He could break down the door,” Wesley observed.
“And if he does, I’ll kill him dead.”
“I’m so hungry I would drink the lifeblood of a mangled mink. I’m so hungry, oh…”
Wesley stared at the bathroom door. “Do you suppose there’s a way we could feed him? I’m finding this rather disturbing.”
Cordelia shrugged. “There might be some straws in the drawer by the coffee pot. Stick them together and feed them under the door or something. Just hurry up and help me; research is boring.”
Wesley brought a cup of blood from Angel’s apartment upstairs and tried to make a viable train of coffee stirrers. He spilled some blood, and Angel’s shoulder hit the door, making it splinter. Cordelia told Wesley to just pour the cup out and let him lick it off the floor. It didn’t seem the most sanitary solution, but it was the quickest and therefore safest for them.
“Do you know who the heck Tara Maclay is?” Cordelia asked.
“Ah yes,” Wesley replied, “the tall blonde girl who sang at the funeral. Lovely voice, impeccable pronunciation of the Latin.”
“I didn’t see her.”
Wesley scoffed. “Given the amount of makeup running down your face, I’d wager you didn’t see much at all.”
“I was thinking about Buffy,” Cordelia muttered, and Wesley regretted his harshness. Nerves, he was about to explain. Men in combat, you remember. But Cordelia continued. “And spiders. Why did they have to bury her in the woods, anyway? Wasn’t she surrounded by enough creepy stuff when she was alive?”
Sighing, Wesley descended into the pile of books Cordelia had amassed. “Why do you ask about her?” “Angel got a call from her, said I should tell him right away if she called again. Didn’t make any notes about her, though. Maybe something’s after her, and it’s using this amnesia thing to make her more vulnerable. Like the band candy! Do you know a demon that does that?”
“That eats candy?”
Cordelia was disgusted. “No, amnesia? Jeez, Wesley, keep up.”
“Well, there are demons who can disorient their victims, but it typically relies on proximity. The Viledente demon, for example, can cause temporary madness by breathing in its enemy’s face, and the Ramjack must make physical contact… Perhaps we should check for stings? It would be a purplish color in a bull’s eye pattern, typically on a place that’s warm and soft, like the midriff or the buttocks.”
Cordelia handed him the crossbow. “Well, I’m not checking Angel. I’ll make Giles and the Scoobies strip. Keep researching.”
Anya answered the phone. “She says we have to examine each other’s warm, soft places for stings.”
Tara blushed. “F-for what?”
“Purple bull’s eye,” Anya answered, and she started to take off her shirt. “Alright, who’s gonna examine me?”
Alexander started to raise his hand, but Rupert jumped up and interrupted. “Dear, I believe there is a bathroom in this establishment. We can check ourselves in the mirror there.”
“Couldn’t hurt to be thorough,” Alexander offered, but Rupert just glared at him.
“I’ll go first,” Willow said, and she started opening doors. “Hey, a work-out room! And here’s basement storage. Bathroom bathroom… Here it is!” The redhead waved and disappeared. Tara giggled.
“We could check less personal places while we wait,” she suggested. “Arms and necks and stuff?”
Willow could barely turn around in the bathroom. She fell against the sink trying to pull her shoes and socks off. No marks on her legs; good. She pulled her shirt up over her head, and a black crystal clattered to the floor. Examination yielded nothing special. She shrugged and tucked it back into the half-hidden pocket at the hem of her shirt, thinking, “Maybe I’m a witch, too. Maybe Tara and I do spells together.” Her mind wandered off down a path of her and Tara spending quality time together, and she checked her back, stomach, and arms absent-mindedly before redressing and exiting the bathroom.
The others cycled through one by one. Alexander discovered a large purple spot on his thigh and ran out of the bathroom in nothing but boxers, shrieking, but it was only a bruise. No one else found anything.
When they called Cordelia back, she shrugged and told them she’d keep looking. It was getting late now, and she considered telling Wesley she’d get Chinese take-out for dinner, but she was afraid the word dinner would start Angel singing again. Stomach growling, she picked up the book that sounded least-likely to depict demons with erections and bloody fangs and started skimming the pages for words like “forgetting,” “amnesia,” and “bat-shit insane.”
“Hey, these are pretty,” she said, showing a picture to Wesley. “Forget-me-nots. Traditionally burned to ease grief, these plants have no magical potential.”
Wesley squinted at the page. “Magical potential? Ah yes, perhaps we should look into spells as well. Our assailant could easily be a magician of some kind.” He followed a cross-reference from forget-me-nots to mind control plants, then handed Cordelia a book of spells. “Tabula Rasa. It means ‘blank slate,’ more or less. See if you can find it.”
An hour later, the phone in the Magic Box rang again.
“The woman says we should look for a black crystal,” Rupert reported.
Alexander laughed. “Like that weird 80’s movie, with the puppets?”
“I um, I think it’s ‘The Dark Crystal,’” Tara said. “And I think I like that movie.”
“Why can you remember that, but not your own name?” Anya asked. Tara shrugged.
“She says,” Rupert continued, cutting off further digression, “that someone may have placed a spell on us, and in order to break…”
“You did this!” Alexander yelled. “I told you she did this! What did you do, witch?”
Tara backed away from him and started unloading her pockets: a billfold, two tissues, a crumpled piece of paper with a phone number scrawled across it, and twenty-one cents. She crossed her arms and glanced at Alexander. “That’s all I have.”
“So where did you hide it?” he shouted, advancing. Willow cut in front of him.
“She said that’s all she has. What do you want her to do, strip?” Her fury was hampered by a blush. Naked Tara. Not the appropriate thought to be having right now. And then she started to panic.
“Let’s see your pockets,” she demanded, trying to draw attention away from herself while she figured out what to do. The pocket was hidden. If she held her arm right, she could cover it, and then she could slip off and hide the crystal somewhere. Why did she have it in the first place?
Alexander dumped a large wallet, a cell phone, some candy bar wrappers, and a set of keys on the center table. Rupert added keys, a photocopy of his passport, and a handkerchief to the pile, and Anya, who had no pockets, dumped makeup, chicken feet, and a neatly clipped stack of twenty-dollar bills with everyone else’s stuff.
Willow dropped her wallet on the table and shrugged. “I don’t have pockets either.”
“Bad design,” Tara said, and Willow smiled at her. God, what a wonderful smile. There was something familiar in it, too, and in the way she moved, her lips parted, her foot twitching nervously while she put her weight on her other leg. She wanted to assure her somehow that things would work out by morning; she wanted to assure herself that she wouldn’t lose touch with this pretty girl, even if they had only been random customers in a magic shop. Why would Willow be in a magic shop? Tara scanned her clothes for pentagrams, tried to isolate some fiber of her that was magical, aside from the magical feeling of butterflies in her stomach. Sandals, long green skirt, no jewelry on her fingers or arms. Her shirt was black, which didn’t mean anything, clinging in places but looser around the waist, with what looked like a pocket stitched into the side furthest from her. But it couldn’t be a pocket.
Willow shifted her weight to twitch the other foot, and Tara realized she had been staring. Her eyes flickered up to the other girl’s eyes, and something that was coiled inside the girl lashed out, like a snake striking at Tara’s face. She jumped.
“What’s wrong with you?” Anya asked.
Tara blinked. “Oh, I-I was um. I was thinking maybe, I mean, this is a m-magic shop, right?” She glanced again at Willow, who was nothing but a pretty girl holding her arm in a funny way. “Well, maybe none of us did the spell. Maybe someone else did, or tried to, and they left the crystal lying around somewhere. We could check, the um, the shop?”
Rupert nodded. “It’s certainly worth trying. With all the bloody nonsense going around today, I wouldn’t discard any idea out of hand.”
“Me and Anya could check the basement,” Alexander offered.
“Why don’t you check the workout room,” Rupert scowled. “Fewer things in there for you to break, I’d wager.” “Willow and me could take the basement,” Tara said. “I mean, better for you guys to stay up here with the register and…”
“I agree. Keep them away from the money,” Anya insisted.
“Well, I should probably go down and make sure they don’t disturb…”
Tara interrupted. “But, I mean, you guys haven’t had any time to spend together, and that’s um, i-important. I mean, a store is, personal?”
Of everyone here, Willow would have the best chance at getting rid of the crystal down in the basement with Tara. “It sounds good to me. So, plan? Okay.” She grabbed Tara’s hand and fled toward the basement. The skin of her palm tingled.
Tara stayed behind her, down the stairs and into the cluttered storeroom, watching Willow move. The feeling of those eyes on her back made Willow shiver.
“It’s funny,” Tara said, “the things you do remember. Memories get stored in different places in the brain: faces, names, events, are separate from feelings, words. You can forget you ever knew a person and still remember what their voice sounded like. We don’t even know who we are, but we still have instincts, personality. Sexuality.”
Willow stopped digging through a box of rags and bones and looked at Tara, who was running her finger under the labels on the shelves.
“I don’t know why I remember that. About memory.” She gave Willow a crooked smile, and Willow’s knees started to fail her. She propped herself up against the side of a filing cabinet. Tara laughed. “You’d think I could remember something useful.”
“Well, we have feelings,” Willow gulped. “Those are pretty strong.”
For a moment, Tara hesitated, her fingers sticking to a place where tape had been peeled away. She hadn’t expected seduction to work, not really. Her second plan was to tell the pretty redhead she had a spider on her. That would have been more straight-forward. Why had she gone with seduction, anyway? She looked into Willow’s eyes and watched her chest rise and fall, the speed increasing as her gaze lingered.
Instinct, Tara decided, and she stepped forward.
“Something in your hair,” she murmured, plucking imaginary fuzz, smoothing the red hair around Willow’s reddening face. She leaned in a little more, a gesture she could excuse by saying the light was so low, and tilted her head. Willow closed the distance, kissing her frantically and running her hands along her shoulders.
Tara let her hand grab Willow’s side, then slid it down, escalating the kiss to a fever pitch to keep the redhead distracted. Her fingers slid into the secret pocket and wrapped around a sharp, hard object. Tara ripped away, knocking Willow off balance, and held the black crystal up in the dim light.
“Hey!” Willow shouted, and then she froze. Dread built in her gut as she watched Tara close her hand around the crystal and crush it.
When the memories returned, they were silent. Willow was simply aware, in the span of a heartbeat, of the look on Tara’s face, what the hardening in her eyes meant.
Shards of white crystal flickered to the floor when Tara lowered her opened hand to her side. They fell in a trail as she turned and climbed the stairs, leaving Willow shaking and alone.
Xander was wandering back from the training room when Tara strode out from the basement and started reloading her pockets from the pile on the table, shaking from the effort of holding back tears. She shot a glance at him that made him stop short.
“Can Willow stay with you for a couple days? She can live in the house while I’m away, but when I come back I want her gone. I don’t care where she goes.”
“What? Away, stay… what?” Xander spluttered.
Giles took her by the arm. “Tara, what happened?”
“Direct confrontation pisses her off. I could have told you that. Should have. God, why can I not stand up for myself?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand…”
“I tried to guide her. That didn’t work. I tried talking, I tried threatening. Both ways, I got my ass kicked. So now, I’m leaving.”
“For where?” Anya asked.
“L.A. Angel’s going to teach me how to fight. I’m sick of this, I can’t…”
Giles held up his hands, trying to stop Tara’s momentum. “But you’re not thinking this through! How will you get there? How will you care for yourself? And what about Dawn?”
“Dawn’s coming with me,” Tara answered. “I know how to take care of myself, and her. I’ve done this before.” She took a breath and gazed around the shop, avoiding the questions in her friends’ eyes. “I can do this.”
The next morning, half-dead from lack of sleep, Tara clung to her scrap of self-confidence and rang the bell on Mr. Alvarez’s front desk. The mechanic appeared from the back, wiping his hands on a filthy red rag.
“Got another van to sell?” he laughed.
“I need a van,” Tara told him. “The camper you’ve had sitting in the lot for two years now.”
Mr. Alvarez looked at Dawn. “This gringa is crazy,” he told her. “That van is shit, taking up space. Better house than you showed up in, though, yeah?”
He pulled a set of keys off the panel of hooks on the wall and tossed them to Tara. She took Dawn by the hand and led her out to a dilapidated camper van parked in the middle of the used car lot. There was still a dent in the hood from when the last owners had hit a deer.
Tara unlocked the door and climbed the steep steps inside. Dawn followed, looking around and wrinkling her nose.
“What’s that smell?”
Tara inhaled deeply and sighed. “Venison. Deer jerky. Kerosene. Smells like home.”
Dawn laughed. “Your redneck is showing.”
“The last van I had smelled like cake. The one I sold to Mr. Alvarez? I told him I wished I’d had one like this, it would have been nice to cook.”
“When did you have a van?”
“High school,” Tara answered. “I bought it with the money my mom left me, fixed it up so I could live in the back all summer, until college. I couldn’t stay at home one minute past graduation, so I hid the van in the lot behind the football field. I left so fast my mortar board blew off on the highway.” She uncovered the gas stove and traced the burners lovingly. “I lived that way for two months, in the back of an old cake van, eating the food they throw out behind grocery stores. We’ll eat better than that in L.A., I promise.”
Dawn stared at her. “Why are you telling me this?”
Tara stared out the window above the tiny kitchen sink. “I-I don’t know. Trying to convince myself it’ll be good. To be free again? I was happy that summer.” She laughed. “But someone caught me brushing my teeth in the Wal-Mart bathroom and called the police. They figured out I was a student, called the administration, and they let me move in early. That’s how I ended up with a single my freshman year. I sold the van to Mr. Alvarez, told him I wished I’d had a camper like this.”
Tara sank down on the couch, and Dawn sat beside her.
Mr. Alvarez clambered into the van and grinned. “Nice, huh? Forget the mileage and the deer-sized dent in the hood. It runs.” He turned to Tara. “So crazy, you buying?”
“I’ll rent. I just need to get to Los Angeles. I can keep the sign in the window; maybe someone’ll buy it.”
“Who needs a camper in Los Angeles?” Mr. Alvarez laughed.
Tara gave him as much of a smile as she could muster. “Rich people live there, right? Rich people are crazy.”
“Rent it,” Mr. Alvarez muttered. He stomped down the steps, shaking his head and talking to himself in Spanish about paperwork. Through the camper window, Dawn watched him disappear into his office.
“Tara?” she asked when he was out of sight, “Why do you keep running away?”
Tara tucked a strand of hair behind Dawn’s ear, flashing a smile that might have been a wince.
“I don’t,” she said. “I came across the country to find a life that was my own. Now I have to learn how to protect it.”
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