In another part of Sunnydale, Willow watched Buffy gracefully execute a back flip, roundabout and snap kick. The vampire launched into the air and slammed into the mausoleum wall. He made a satisfying thud.
"Will, I really think you're getting ahead of yourself. Tara is getting better. It's just going to take time." Buffy declared as she neatly slid her stake between the vampires ribs and then jumped backward to avoid getting vampire dust on her new black pants.
Willow shook her head. "She's getting better, but only in little bits. Sure the seizures have stopped and she's been able to sleep most nights, but--"
"But she's not herself, I know that, Will." Buffy walked back to her friend, grabbed her bag of weapons off the ground and looped her arm into Willow's. "Come on. I want to check the north corridor, I think someone's going to be rising tonight, or tomorrow."
Willow fell into pace beside Buffy. "But it's more than that, Buffy. It's also that Tara and my Tara didn't say anything about side effects following the rejoining. I don't think they knew there would be any. If anything, they were mostly worried about me."
"Which makes you think they didn't know everything when they committed to the spell or conjure of whatever it was." Buffy concluded, not happy about Willow's concerns, but very happy that the red head was finally willing to discuss them. All of her previous attempts to get Willow to talk about her fears had been stonewalled.
"Which makes me think we need to find out exactly what Tara did. Except we can't because she used the magicks from her reality, not ours." Willow added, flatly.
Buffy's sensitive ears picked up a rustling in the bushes. "Anya's been researching the elementally things Tara talked about."
"And she still hasn't found anything. She's as stymied as me." Willow said, dejectedly. She'd called the vengeance demon before her evening class, and as much as she appreciated Anya's support, hearing more "non-news" only increased her frustration.
"Not in the books, at least." Buffy agreed as she focused her eyes on ground about fifteen feet to her left. A grin formed on her face as she spied a fat opossum darting for the nearest tree, definitely not hostile. The Slayer returned her concentration to Willow. "Which is why Anya put in a call to Giles." Buffy reported the news quickly, hoping Willow would be so distracted by the message that she'd forget the identity of the messenger.
"Anya called Giles?" Willow asked, her tone and manner quickly changing from disbelief to anger. "I thought we all agreed to hold off on calling Giles for the time being?"
Buffy turned to catch Willow's eyes. "Will, I still don't get why you don't want us to call Giles. Why wouldn't we want to call Giles?"
"He's still a part of the Watchers' Council. And you know how they like to interfere with things. They might want to..." Willow trailed off.
Buffy pulled Willow to a stop. "Want to what?" For a moment she though Willow wasn't going to answer her.
"They might want to take her away." Willow explained quietly. She breathed in deeply and caught the faint scent of sea salt on the air. "To study." She said, quietly.
Buffy looked carefully at her best friend. "What do you mean by study?"
"It's what they wanted to do with me." Willow looked down at the ground, her embarrassment palpable. "After I left the coven, they wanted me brought back to the Council. Giles had to call in just about every favor he had to get them to back off and let me come home."
Bad memories of being tested by the Watchers Council filled Buffy's head. She reached for Willow's fingers. They were like ice. "You never told me."
Willow watched as Buffy tenderly closed her fingers over her own. "Tell you what? That the Council wanted to study me like I was some freak of nature."
"We're not the Council and you're not a freak." Buffy snapped.
Willow took another deep breath. "Buffy, it was how everyone looked at me, Xander, Anya, even you." The admission hurt, and she knew it hurt Buffy too, but hiding the truth hurt even more. "Those first couple of weeks after I came back from England--" Willow swallowed a lump in her throat. "All of you kept a pretty wide berth of me."
Buffy opened her mouth to object, but Willow wouldn't let her. "After what I did, I would have kept a wide berth of me." Willow looked up into the sky to watch the wind carry clouds across the half moon. She thought of Oz. Of all her friends, he never ducked the truth, even when it came to leaving her. "Dawn was terrified of me one second and angry the next. Anya was waiting for me to crash and burn. Xander," Willow's voice broke and tears filled her eyes, "Xander just wanted everything to be the same. But it couldn't be. I killed people."
No longer able to look at her best friend, Willow focused her gaze on a group of tipped over headstones. "Sometimes I still can't believe it. I'm a killer: me, Willow Rosenberg, class geek, fearer of frogs and murderer. I look in the mirror and half the time I don't even recognize the person looking back at me."
Buffy's voice was a low growl. "Yes, you killed. Yes, you crossed the line. But as far as I'm concerned, Rack was self-defense. "
"And Warren." Willow asked quietly, voicing the name none of them were willing to speak.
The words fell from Buffy's lips like splinters of ice. "There wasn't one of us who didn't want him hurting. There wasn't one of us who didn't want him dead. I was playing all rational girl, and inside all I wanted to do was hunt him down and make him pay for what he took from you, from all of us." Buffy swallowed. She heard Willow wince and realized she was squeezing the red head's fingers and let go of them. "I acted all disappointed with you, but inside I knew."
Willow watched an expression pass over her best friends face that she'd never seen before. "Knew what?" She prompted.
Buffy's voice turned cold. "Knew that if I'd been under the powers you were under I would have gone after him myself."
Willow refused Buffy's claim. Her guilt could not be shared. "No, Buffy, you'd never have gone that far. You're the hero, remember?"
"Will, he shot me." Buffy eyes narrowed as the anger she'd kept hidden surfaced. "He shot into my house and he killed my friend, and he took from my best friend her reason to live. The whole time we were hunting you down, trying to stop you, inside I was thinking of what he'd done and what he'd almost done." The Slayer's body shook as she fought to maintain her self-control. "Will, what would have happened to Dawn if you hadn't saved me. She'd already lost mom and she'd lost me once before. She'd lost Tara and she would have lost me a second time. God, Will, you took a life, but you gave me mine back." Buffy flashed on an ill-formed memory of the emergency medical technicians lifting her body on to the stretcher. "Will, I wasn't going to make it. You saved me."
Willow couldn't listen to Buffy's confession. She needed to keep the guilt for what had happened for herself. Her Tara had been right; it was the only way she could someday put it behind her. Sharing her guilt with Buffy would only make it harder. "That doesn't make it even. There is no "even" here, there's no scoreboard, there's no accounting of checks and balances. I killed Warren and Rack. I saved you, but I also nearly killed Dawn." Willow's stomach twisted over the memory of taunting Dawn for being weak and useless. No matter what Buffy thought, all that really mattered was what she had done, what she could have done. She alone had taken lives. "I hurt Anya and Xander. I tortured Giles. Buffy, I did those things. I can't take them back. I nearly killed all of you. I nearly killed the world." And as always, saying the words, bringing the things she'd done into herself, helped her to let go of some small part of the pain. Owning the truth of what she'd done was the only way she could move forward. The familiar warmth she felt whenever she remembered Tara's wisdom settled her stomach.
"But you didn't." Buffy interrupted, and this time she didn't wait for Willow's objection. "You didn't kill any of us, you didn't kill the world. You stopped."
Calmer, Willow shook her head. The credit was not hers to take. "Xander stopped me."
"Xander made you remember who you really are, and you stopped yourself." Buffy argued, her tone growing angrier.
A sly grin appeared on Willow's face. "You know that he's always going to be my hero for that?" She waited a moment before adding. "Yep, Mr. Broken-Yellow-Crayon-Guy will always be my hero."
The Slayer blinked. It took her a moment to realize Willow was tweaking her, a sign she wanted their argument to stop. "Just so you remember that I'm your hero, too." Buffy joked.
"I'm not forgetting." Willow's grin faded slightly. "I'm pretty lucky. I've lots of heroes, Xander, you, Giles, Dawn, Anya."
Buffy didn't want to lose the moment. "Anya's your hero, too?" She teased. "In that case, I want off your hero list."
Willow couldn't let Buffy get away with it. "Oh, liar, liar, pants on fire. You adore Anya."
"Adore, come on, Will. That is so not the right word." Buffy bumped Willow's shoulder with her own, and started walking again.
"We all adore Anya." Willow said, falling into pace with her friend. "What sucks is that it took Xander dumping her at the altar for us to figure it out."
"Tara always knew." Buffy said quietly.
Sorrow passed over Willow's face. "Tara could see the best in everyone."
"Is it harder now?" Buffy asked. She knew her question was dumb, how could things be anything but harder?
Willow looked away and nodded. "Yeah, it's harder. Harder in all sorts of ways." She jammed her hands in her coat pockets. "It's harder because I don't have my Tara to talk to about all the ugly stuff inside my head, which sounds all selfishy and whiney but it's what I feel. And one of the big mistakes I promised my Tara I'd stopped making was trying to hide my icky feelings."
A smile flickered over Buffy's face. Each day it seemed like she was getting a little bit more of her Willow back. "I know I'm not your Tara, but, if it would help, maybe you could let me see some of those icky Willow feelings. After all, you just got a big taste of icky Buffy feelings."
"Not icky, Buffy, understandable." Willow defended. "He did so many things to all of us." Still unable to meet Buffy's eyes, she kept her gaze on the ground. "And it's harder because I know I'm not being fair."
"What do you mean? Who aren't you being fair too?" Buffy asked, prompting Willow to say what Buffy already knew.
"I look at her, and she's not the person I want her to be. And it's not fair, to her, I mean." Willow tiredly rubbed her forehead. "I'm not making any sense. The pronoun problems alone are making me nuts."
"Well, since her name's Tara, I guess we call her Tara, and maybe we call the Tara we lost, our Tara." Buffy's forehead furrowed. "But she's our Tara, too."
"It's confusing." Willow hooked her am around Buffy's. "If only she would just wake up. I miss talking to her." Willow confessed. "And I know that sounds ridiculous. It's not like we really had a chance to get to know each other."
Buffy again hesitated before asking a hard question. "Are you really missing talking to her, or are you missing talking to our Tara."
"Again, I'm not sure. Maybe both of them, maybe not." Willow said, appreciating Buffy's willingness to ask. Not that long ago, none of her friends trusted her enough to ask the hard questions. "Not very fair, huh."
"Not very." Buffy agreed, her tone gentle.
Willow exhaled, sharply. Her breath streamed upwards and ruffled her bangs. "And then there's the other thing. The thing none of us is talking about."
"The new big bad that's coming our way." Buffy whispered.
"That would be the thing we're all not talking about." Willow kicked a small stone off the narrow path.
Buffy sighed, mentally ticking off the current list of problems before putting them into words. "Not to be confused with the not talking about what happened between me and Spike, or Spike and Anya for that matter. Or where William the Bloody ran off too, or how we're going to explain new Tara to anyone outside the Scoobies. " Buffy glanced at Willow. "Have you given that much thought?"
Willow shook her head. "Not really. So far I've just avoided the subject when it came to my parents. But I'm going to have to explain it to them one of these days."
"Want some advice from the Chosen One? Don't explain anymore than you have to." Buffy ran her eyes along the cemetery fence line. Some vamps thought they could blend in with the fence shadows. They were wrong. "Sunnydale is like the championship North American city for looking the other way when the impossible happens. You'll probably need to explain to your parents, although given how long I was able to keep my mom out of the loop on the whole slayerdom thing, maybe not. Most people aren't going to ask, or even want to know, so take don't tell."
"Don't ask, don't tell?" Willow said, her expression skeptical.
Buffy smirked. "Hey, this is one of the few situations where that policy might actually work."
Willow's shoes slipped as they stepped around a large puddle. She caught Buffy's outstretched arm, managing for once not to get the hems of her jeans wet. "Thanks. Did it rain last night?"
"Will, this is the first night it hasn't rained in the past week. See what you miss when you don't go on patrol with me."
"I think it's supposed to rain again day after tomorrow." Willow glanced up at the sky and was surprised to notice Orion's belt. When did the winter stars come back, she wondered? "Getting back to the 'how to explain the new person who looks just like our Tara issue' you're probably right about the whole not dealing plan, and right now I'm thinking that any plan that involves dealing by not dealing is good. But I guess the not dealing plan is probably not the best plan for dealing with whatever the hell is coming out way. Or all things Spike. Or, what the heck, lets not forget all things Xander and Anya." Oxygen becoming something that required dealing, Willow took a deep breath.
"I want them to get back together again." Buffy laughed at herself. "God, I'm beginning to sound like Dawn."
"She just wants everyone to be happy." A memory of Dawn nearly jumping up and down in the hallway when the teen discovered she and Tara had reconciled stabbed at Willow's heart. The joy had been so short lived.
Buffy watched Willow's expression grow sad and guessed what Willow was thinking. "Kind of amazing Dawn still believes that happiness can be a possibility, huh?"
Willow gave Buffy a measuring look. "I'm going to try to believe that too."
"You going all optimisticy on me, Will."
"Totally optimisticy." Willow asserted. "I'm changing the ringer on my cell phone to play some oppressively cheerful tune and I'm going to increase the number of primary colors in my wardrobe."
"I don't know, Will." Buffy shook her head in mock disapproval. "Behavior like that may make people think you've joined a cult. Just think what Giles would say."
"Giles remembers all of my tee shirts and sweaters featuring kittens, puppies, and happy flowers. Giles would say nothing." Willow brushed her fingers along Buffy's jacket sleeve. "What if I just whistle a happy tune and keep my frown turned upside down."
"Subtly is always a good thing." Buffy said, and then jumped as her cell phone unexpectedly rang. Grimacing over her un-Slayer-like behavior, she pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. Xander's name flashed on the small color screen. "Hey, what's up? You change your mind and decide to come out on patrol. I kidnapped Willow after her computer lab and we're at the north end of Evergreen Cemetery, near the Tovington Mausoleum."
"Tell Xander he should come out with us. It would be like old times." Willow started to cajole, but then stopped when Buffy held up her hand and shook her head. She felt her stomach begin to twist as she watched Buffy's expression grow concerned.
"How long has she been missing?" Buffy asked, her tone tense.
Suspecting that she already knew the answer, Willow asked. "Who's missing?"
Buffy looked helplessly at her best friend while asking over the phone. "Is Dawn still with you?" She listened to Xander's answer and then responded. "Okay, you head over towards the old high school and the hospital. We'll head over to the park and then the University. Those are the two places she hung out before. If she's on foot, she couldn't have gone far."
Buffy snapped her phone shut and slipped it back into her pocket. "Somehow, and I don't have all the details, Tara got out of the house when Dawn wasn't looking."
"Got out? How?" An image of the blonde wandering the streets flashed through Willow's mind and sent her into high panic.
Buffy glanced about as if she expected Tara to pop up in the cemetery. "How doesn't really matter. We can find out the details later. But right now we need to look for her."
"Well, do we know if she walked out on her own? What if someone took her?" More images rushed through Willow's head, but this time of demons breaking into the Summers house.
Buffy grabbed Willow's arm and began pulling her forward. "Dawn didn't think anyone got in the house. She was in the kitchen talking on the phone; when she came back into the front room, Tara was gone. She started searching the neighborhood and ended up at the Magic Box. Now, she, Xander and Anya are searching by car."
A third possibility crossed Willow's mind. "Buffy, what if she didn't just wander off, what if she ran off?"
Buffy shook her head refusing the possibility. "Will, we can't think about why right now. We need to look. She couldn't get far. She doesn't have any money and we're the only people she knows. I'm more afraid she'll get picked up by the police or something."
"The police?" Willow hadn't thought of that possibility. "If the police find her, they'll want to take her to the hospital."
"Which is why Xander's going there to look for her."
"But she's afraid of hospitals. I promised her she wouldn't have to go." Willow pleaded, not caring that things were beyond Buffy's control.
Buffy pulled Willow to a stop. She looked carefully into her best friend's eyes. "Will, we're going to find her."
Willow tried to believe her, but inside her mind's eye all she could see was a vision of Tara alone and afraid and stumbling in the dark. Fear and worry and guilt burned inside her stomach. She'd made a promise to her lover to take care of the blonde witch, and now that promise was broken. Her hand held tightly in Buffy's, she let herself be guided towards the entrance of the cemetery, quickening her pace to match the Slayer's. The park was only a few blocks away, and but the University was nearly an hour by foot. They needed to move fast. Tara needed her, and she needed Tara more than she could admit.