Title: Four Months After
Rating: PG 13 (at least for this installment)
Pairing: W/T (although as this is after months of them being apart, only technically)
Feedback: But of course! You all know how to reach me. But on my jockstrap phone -- please, just ring once.
Distribution: Maybe. Let's see how it turns out first.
Disclaimer: All characters, as you know, belong to Joss Whedon, except those that I created, but are only minor incidental characters, so who cares.
Spoilers: Season 6, "Tabula Rasa," probably "Smashed" and Joss Knows what else. Most of this is guesswork.
Notes: Basically, with everybody writing about the impending break-up of Willow and Tara, and Willow's probable estrangement from the Scoobies, I decided to tackle it from the other end -- The Long Road Back.
Part 1.
The young woman lay on the gurney as it crashed through the doors of Sunnydale General’s ER, the paramedics pounding alongside. She looked about as dead as a live person could be, her red hair hanging lifelessly about her head, her face deeply lined. Her pupils didn’t respond to light, and she was too deeply unconscious to feel the IV’s feeding plasma and DW-5 into her scrawny body. She looked on the keen edge of malnutrition. Only the fact that she was breathing, has a pulse, and blood still trickling from her left nostril, had prompted the paramedics not to head immediately for the morgue.
"Where’d you find her?" Dr. Everett Malcolm barked, supervising the nurse and the orderly as they cut away the girl’s shabby, dirty clothing. He was already putting on gloves, not the thin, surgical kind but the thicker ones almost indistinguishable from the ones sold by Playtex for cleaning the toilet at home. This girl looked like she’d been living in the sewer, and smelled it too.
"Alleyway off Delaney," said the head paramedic. "Right near the Espresso Pump. Don’t look like she’s had much caffeine, though."
"She hasn’t had much of anything for awhile," Nurse Ziyang muttered. "Hmmm…no needle tracks. Looks like junkie, though. Probably doing video porn to pay for it, although with a body like hers…"
"That’ll do, Ziyang," Malcolm snarled. His job was hard enough without giving in to the cynicism that drifted in her with the indigent and the dying, more often than not the same individual. At the same time, there were the genuine inexplicable occurrences that happened more in the five years he had been in this small town than in fifteen in San Franciso. He’d heard all the tales about Sunnydale being a suburb of the Twilight Zone, and the last few years had made it harder to dismiss the stories as water-cooler bullcrap.
"Any sign of, uh…neck rupture?" He used the well-worn euphemism for the puncture wounds that seemed, at times, to be almost epidemic in this town. His imagination, if not his medical training, supplied the diagnosis of the wounds.
Nurse Ziyang examined each side of the girl’s neck, then shook her head. "Nope, not a vam—" That was as far as she got.
" Don’t!" Malcolm muttered, turning a dangerous shade of burgundy. “Don’t say that word. Just because you all talk about such things in between the times you pretend you’re working—!" The silent orderly staring at him finally forced him to calm down. "Type and cross-match, do a red-cell count, and a quick-screen with that new analyzer. She might be on something regardless." He snapped a question at the orderly. "ID?"
He shook his head, dreadlock flailing about. "No, sir. She might’a gotten ripped off, but I don’t see signs of a struggle…" He trailed off, realizing that he was a bit out of place, but Dr. Malcolm nodded, agreeing with his snap assessment.
With her vitals low but stabilized, Dr. Malcolm let his attention wander a bit, to a nagging feeling that had been in the back of his mind: the feeling that he had seen this young woman before. Young? he thought for a second, because the woman lying half-naked on the examination table before could pass for thirty-five on a good day, with artistic lighting and a professional make-up artist. But he was sure he had seen her before, within the last few years, as a teenage girl. A coma, brought about by severe head trauma, that was it. It had something to do with another case, a teenage boy with a broken forearm bone…and something about another girl, a Bahamanian national who had someone entered the country without Customs having a record of her, who ended up having her throat slit by a razor-sharp knife that had someone not left any metal specks for the particulate analyzer to pick up.
This girl, the redhead, she had an unusual first name, starting with 'w'. The last name was “Rosen…” After that, his memory failed him.
"Transfer her to ICU, and have Serology monitor her. Schedule an EEG, too." He had a bad feeling about the nosebleed. Malcolm went out to the main ER station and inquired the head nurse to run a check on the partial name he had. In less than a minute, he had his answer: Rosenberg, Willow D.
The file had an extensive list of in-case-of-emergency-please-call numbers, some of which had been crossed-off, others appended. Two even had the area code for Los Angeles, with the legends C. Chase and Angel Invest. beside them. One might be a bank, the other a brokerage, maybe. There were also several cross-references to other files: Harris, Alexander L.; Summers, B.A.; Maclay, Tara J. The last one, he vaguely recalled, had been one of a rash of sudden onsets of psychological dementia last year, where an abnormally large group of people seemed to lose I.Q. points in a bad poker game. Malcolm recalled that the Maclay girl had been the only one to miraculously recover.
Rosenberg’s file has her vital statistics. Born 1981. He looked over at a nearby calendar. She was just twenty-one years old. Sweet Jesus, he thought, she looks like a forty-year-old bar hag! I guess I better call some of these numbers.
As he looked for a free phone, he saw Rosenberg being loaded onto a gurney and shipped off the the intensive care unit. Nurse Ziyang walked over to him, carrying the ER log for him to sign. "What do you think, Doctor?" she asked, her voice for once free of sarcasm and bitterness.
"I think it’s a good thing this girl had a lot of friends, at least at one time," he said, holding her file up in emphasis, "'cause she’s gonna need 'em." He dialed the number next to Summers, B.A.; he had a feeling that one would provide him with the most answers.
Four months after.
*******
Part 2.
The SUV pulled up the driveway of 1630 Rivello with a conservative confidence that the young woman behind the wheel only partially felt. The front doors on both sides opened to reveal Buffy Summers unbelting herself from the drivers side and Tara Maclay on the passenger side.
"You're getting better," Tara remarked as she hauled her backpack from the floor between her feet and got out.
"Yep…didn't even ding the trash cans. Sanitation is safe in Sunnydale." After stepping out of the SUV and slamming the door shut, Buffy arched her back, stretching tired muscles. "How come I can slay vampires all night but a day of lifting boxes in a retail store poops me out?"
"Um, because…you're a Slayer, not a boxer?" Tara ventured, hopeful grin in place, eyebrows raised, mugging for a laugh, ultimately having to settle for a wan smirk and a friendly scowl.
Buffy shook her head as she led the way to the kitchen door. "It's good to know that your penchant for snappy comebacks, like my driving, is a work-in-progress." Tara nodded in agreement as she followed the Slayer into the kitchen, setting her pack of college textbooks on the formica island top. Tara had been giving Buffy pointers in the fine art of automobile piloting while she had been staying at the Summers house. Buffy has pleasantly surprised her today by picking her up at the university after her last class.
"Work go okay today?"
Buffy shrugged. "It's a living…so to speak. At least the manager's still being cool about that demon attack last month."
Her new job at the local S-Mart had been going fairly well until the squad of Hyach demons, summoned no doubt by the trio of nerd hackers that Dawn had dubbed "The Lame Gunmen," had tried to kill her – without even waiting for her lunchbreak. One minute she was shelving microwave ovens in the Housewares department, the next she was trying to keep her head from being forcefully separated from the rest of her body. Amazingly enough, not only did the manager, whose dark eyes, dark hair and jutting jaw reminded her somewhat of Xander, provide some decent late-innings assistance, he managed to smooth everything over with the crowd of panicked shoppers ("Look, lady, you came in here to buy a vacuum cleaner. Ya gonna let a bunch of demons scare you offa that? You and your carpet are gonna be sorry tomorrow…"), and incidentally, not fire Buffy on the spot.
"These things happen," he said with a world-weary shrug, as if he had prior dealings with the forces of darkness himself. "You did good, kid. Now, clean up this mess."
Tara blinked rapidly. "Does, does he still wear that…glove-thingy…"
Buffy nodded. "Michael Jackson does Excalibur. I smell Serious Back-Story with this guy. For tonight, however, I officially Don't Care." She looked around the kitchen, peering first towards the dining room, then to the living room. Most of the lights in the house were still off, even the sun had set about an hour ago. The house had that preternatural quiet that usually comes from being completely unoccupied. "Doesn't look like Dawn's home…was the light on in her room when we drove up?"
Tara shrugged. "I really didn't notice, I-I was preoccupied with…" she trailed off.
"…with hoping you weren't going to end up wrapped around a telephone pole, I get it." Buffy finished, more distractedly than with any rancor. She set her purse down on the island, then as an afterthought removed the wooden stake that she always carried there.
Tara's eyes widened. "I-Is there something here?" Her own mystical early-warning system wasn't blaring, but she knew that Buffy's Slayer senses were far more battle-honed than hers.
Buffy shook her head. "I'm not getting a tingle. Still…" She raised her face towards the ceiling. "Dawn?" she called loudly. The second and third times she called got no more response than the first. "C'mon," she muttered to Tara, who doffed her coat and laid it on the island.
"Got your backside."
Buffy made it halfway up the stairs before the exact phraseology sank in, making her stop suddenly and face Tara, who almost ran into her from below. "You've got my…what?"
"Your backside. Y'know, I'm covering the rear," she replied, before what she said sunk in and made her blush. In another situation, this would have been ripe for a comment, but in the middle of Stealth Reconnaisance, Buffy decided to table it for another time. Motioning to the stricken Tara, she continued upstairs.
Dawn's door was closed, the light from her desklamp visible under the crack. Buffy motioned to the blonde witch, pointing out the door and the light. Tara nodded. They might still be overreacting, but considering the circumstances they lived under, not to mention Dawn's occasional penchant for unauthorized walkabouts, the two of them could live with the indulgence of overreaction.
Stake and defensive spell at the ready, Buffy and Tara crept up to Dawn's door, flung it open --
-- to reveal the teenager sitting at her desk, doing her homework while listening to the latest pop compilation through the headphones she wore over her ears. The suddenness of the door of her bedroom opening caused her to emit a quick shriek, which of course made Buffy and Tara answer with cries of surprise of their own.
Buffy was the first to recover her breath. "Didn't we do enough vocal exercises this year?" Tara rolled her eyes, but Dawn got a chuckle from that comment. Her mirth was cut short by the glares she got from her sister and…female older friend of indeterminate relationship.
"W-why didn’t you turn on some lights when it got dark?" Tara asked, a little more vexed-sounding than was her wont. "It's dark as hell downstairs!"
Buffy looked as though she wanted to comment in some way about that, but then thought better of it. "Headphones on when you're alone in the house. Why don't you just hang a sign up that says: Vulnerable Young Girl – Please Come Eat Me, Mister Nasty Demon?"
"Nice visual," Dawn muttered, wrinkling her nose at her sister. "I just like listening to music when I do my homework. It's too...quiet around here. Since…" She couldn't quite bring herself to finish the sentence, and neither Buffy nor Tara felt any better about the subject.
"I'm hungry," Tara piped up, in a desperate and transparent effort to change the subject. "Why don't we all go downstairs and f-fix dinner?"
Dawn rolled her eyes and she followed the other two out of her room. "C'mon, it's Cheap Burger Night at…"
"No!" and "Can't afford it!"
"But I'm sick of pasta!"
Buffy smiled in her oh-so-superior way. "Then get a job. Put on some water to boil."
After dinner and dishwashing, Dawn retreated back to her room to finish her geometry while Buffy and Tara sat on opposite sides of the dining room table, respectively balancing a checkbook and finishing the outline for a paper on Interpersonal Dynamics.
"Wanna see a movie tonight?" Buffy asked, putting a stamp on the envelope to the gas company, which included a check and a please-don't-set-the-dogs-on-me letter, one she was considering photocopying into a standard form.
"Can we afford that? Or are you thinking of borrowing one from Xander?"
"Oh, definitely The Harris Collection. Who needs BlockBuster with him around?"
Tara smiled. She added a final line to the outline and shoved it into her notebook. She really wished she had something else to occupy her mind before the evening videofest and later the obligatory nightly patrol through the local cemetaries. It was during these times of mental inactivity that her mind tended to wander towards the subject – the person – that all three occupants of the house tried the hardest not to think about.
"You're thinking of her."
Tara's head snapped around to face Buffy, who was putting her billpaying/correspondence paraphenalia away in the glass-fronted cabinet. The Slayer turned back to the witch and said, "I know that look, Tara. That's your Where-Is-She-And-What-Is-She-Doing-Right-Now look. Little subtitles are running underneath your face, y'know."
"I know. I c-can't help it. I miss her so much." Tara's voice cracked on the last two words. She abruptly stood up from the table, almost upsetting the chair before she grabbed the back of it to keep from crashing to the floor. She strode a few steps through the front foyer towards the living room, stopping just past the stairs. When she turned, she was not surprised to see that Buffy was two paces behind her.
"I didn't mean it as criticism," Buffy said gently. "I miss her too. All the time." She stepped closer, put her hand on the blonde wiccan's shoulder, and drew her close. For the thousandth time in the last four months, the two of them embraced one another, trying to draw strength from one another to banish the pain and uncertainty caused by someone they both cared deeply about. Four months of Tara occasionally coming to visit, bringing or making dinner, to Buffy and Dawn's cajoling her to move back in after having kicked Willow out, of evening patrols, of Scoobie Gang videofests, of battling and finally defeating the Lame Gunmen, of long talks and deepening friendship and occasional arguments and one remarkable food-fight which produced the first genuine laughter either one of them had made in recent memory, and mostly of wishing that there was a third person in these hugs, a certain red-head wiccan/hacker who would roll her eyes and mutter something about "oxygen becoming an issue," whom they wished would come back into their lives so the three of them could make everything better, together.
The ring of the telephone blared into the moment, making the two women jump apart self-consciously, as if they had committed an indiscretion. For no reason either Buffy or Tara could identify, the culturally-ingrained impulse to answer the phone seemed to be on vacation. Even after the third ring, neither had made a move to pick up the receiver to see who it was.
Dawn, in the kind of irritation only a teenager could muster properly, barreled halfway down the stairs. "What, are you guys deaf? Aren't you going to pick up…" It was then that she saw identical expressions on her sister's and her friend's faces, and she knew.
They knew.
Four months after.
******
Part 3
"Mr. Worf – do you know Gilbert & Sullivan?"
The dark-skinned man with the prosthesis on his forehead replied uncertainly in his deep voice, "No, sir. I have not had time to familiarize myself with the new crewmembers."
Xander Harris chuckled around a mouthful of popcorn, as his fiancee Anya blinked in surprise. "Why is that funny?" she whispered to him. Instead of answering, he gestured towards the TV screen, which showed the DVD of Star Trek: Insurrection.
Patrick Stewart replied in his trademark clipped British tones that Giles could have taken lessons from. "They're composers, Worf. Earth, nineteenth century. Data was rehearsing a production of H.M.S. Pinafore before he left." A few taps at faux computer buttons later, Stewart, Michael Dorn and Brent Spiner were trading verses of "A British Tar" back and forth, while cool models of shuttecraft flew across the 40-inch screen.
Anya wrinkled her pert nose at the three actors singing in the middle of a Swell Battle Scene. "This has an uncomfortable familiarity about it."
Xander nodded. "Tell me about it. But, at least they're not singing about how they secretly hate one another or stuff like that." Anya mock-scowled at him, but said nothing. "They get to wear those cool uniforms and play around with the best toys ever made. And get paid for it! I was born in the wrong universe," he concluded, sighing dramatically.
"My poor Xander," Anya said, patting his arm sympathetically as they sat on the couch in his – their – apartment. They had finished dinner a little while ago; Xander, in a pre-emptive strike to prevent Anya from sucking him into a marathon session of Let's Plan The Wedding, had popped in the movie. He was thinking of inviting Buffy, Tara and Dawn over just as a backup, but Anya seemed content for an evening of Trek-watching. She had even remarked how sexy she thought Patrick Stewart was. Xander found himself not only completely free of jealousy from that remark, but rather pleased that if he should go bald in his later years, he might not have to join Hair Club for Men.
"Why don't they do movies with Kirk and Spock and those guys anymore?" Anya piped up a few minutes later.
"Honey, I think they're just too old to do movies anymore," Xander said, not sounding entirely convinced himself. "I mean, I grew up watching these guys," he gestured at the screen, "do their thing. The Original Series just looks so cheezy now, I can hardly get into it. I mean, Willow's first computer looked more sophisticated than those blinking lights and stuff they had back then!" Xander frowned, noticing that he could not remember how many days it had been since he had mentioned Willow. And to think we used to talk every day for years and years. I thought we'd have adjoining rooms in the Old Folks Home...at least until we started hanging with Buffy; then, seeing the next sunrise become a lofty goal. Still…
The atmosphere at the Summers house hadn't felt that tense since the night of Buffy's Welcome Back Hootenanny, right when Xander and Willow and Joyce had sorta ganged up on Buffy. That night the tables had been turned slightly, because Willow had been the one in the hot seat this time. The three of them were in Willow's room, formerly Willow and Tara's room.
"You're actually kicking me out?" Willow had cried, incredulous. She had stared at Buffy as if the Slayer had crawled out from under a rock ( graveyard dirt, maybe, Xander had thought but wisely not expressed at the time, but not a rock).
"Will, I personally don't care that much that you get such a jones for magic, at least if you were just hurting yourself," Buffy had said, keeping her voice level with a visible effort. "No, actually, I do care, but I figure, Big Girl now, doesn't need me holding her hand, and frankly, if you're so stupid as to let Tara walk out of your life, you deserve to have life kick in you in the ass a little." A tear ran down her cheek, but she didn't pause to wipe it. "But you being here puts Dawn in danger, and that I won't have. I. Won't. Have It."
"God, you actually think I would do anything to hurt Dawnie—" Willow replied, her eyes decidedly teary as well.
"Uh, hello, that wonderful memory-eraser spell you did, nearly got us all killed! I mean, what were you trying to accomplish, huh? Was it some grand scheme to make me forget where I was after I was dead?"
Willow had nodded then, not in agreement but in supposed understanding. "That's what this is about, isn't it? You're pissed off that I yanked you back here and not hanging with St. Peter—"
"Oh, c'mon Will, if I was that resentful of what you did, I would have told you right off! But I didn't, did I?"
"No, Buffy, you didn't. You told Spike." Willow didn't even try to keep the disgust out of her voice. "Spike, of all people! You can't even talk to me anymore, you have to have congress with the Living Impaired?"
"This is so not about me," Buffy replied, nonetheless hurt that Willow's comments had cut deeper than she would have liked. "Tara was right, you've been using magic to do everything from getting the mail to unclogging the drain!"
"Don't you dare throw Tara into this!" Willow hissed dangerously. "You don't have such a great track record with your lovelife that you can dictate to me how to run mine!"
Xander, at that point, chose to step in. "Whoa-ho-okay! C'mon, everybody time out here! Let's break for ice cream before Round Two of Recrimination Roller Derby!"
"I suppose you're on her side, huh?" Willow sneered at him. He couldn't recall her ever sneering at him, except in mock anger.
"I haven't chosen any 'side', Will, and don't you think—"
"Why don't you lecture him on his lovelife, Buff? Here's Mr. Walk-On-The-Wild Side for ya!" Willow shook her head at him. Xander was on the verge of seeing if the face in front him was a mask and the person standing next to him was some evil demon masquerading as Willow Rosenberg. "Why in God's name are you marrying her? I mean, talk about buying the cow when milk is cheap!"
Xander almost laughed at that, insulting as it was, but restrained himself. "Again with the This-Is-Not-About-Me-This-Is-About-You. Will, we've known each other our whole lives. So, please, believe me when I say, A, you're really getting seduced by the Dark Side of the Force, and speaking as a child of alcoholics, I know what I'm talking about; B, you should have done anything, I mean anything, to keep Tara from leaving, because she is quite possibly the best thing to ever happen to you; and C, regarding my bride-to-be, go piss up a rope."
Willow's expression darkened, to the point where Xander was afraid her eyes would go DefCon Black on him and she would fry his ass like bacon in the microwave. Buffy, thankfully, stepped forward and said, half-warningly, half-pleadingly, "Will…"
The redhead shot up a hand, silencing her friend. "Don't. You want me gone? I'm gone." With a final contemptuous look at the both of them, she slowly turned around the room, gesturing dramatically, magical sparkles coming out of her fingers. Every possession of hers that the sparkles touched disappeared. After a full 360, she stomped out of the room, out of the house and out of their lives without another word.
"Well, I'm really kind of mystified as to why they stopped numbering the movies," Anya muttered, breaking him out of his reverie.
"How do ya mean?"
"Okay…you had Star Trek II, Star Trek III, IV, V and VI; then the next ones, they didn't have numbers."
Xander mulled that over for a second. "Eee-yuuonnhh. Is there a point in the near future, babe?"
"Well," she said with that bright-eyed expression that meant she thought of something that probably no one else in six thousand years of recorded history had thought of before, "this movie is the ninth one, right? So it should have been called Star Trek IX: Insurrection." Off of Xander's perplexed nod, she continued: "That sounds a lot like Star Trek: Nine-Inch—"
Mercifully, the ringing of the phone cut off the ex-demon's soliloquy. Xander grabbed the cordless handset with the speed of a Jedi Master and punched the TALK button. "Xander's House of Sexually Explicit Puns, how may I help y-- Buffster! How's it goin'? You guys…what? She's…what? Where?" He had sat up so suddenly that he had unintentionally pulled out of Anya's grasp. She was about to remonstrate with him when his hand sought hers, instinctively reaching out to her for comfort. The stricken, yet oddly hopeful expression on his face made her shut up and act, for once, like he often wished she would.
"Okay. We'll meet you guys there…we're a few minutes closer…okay. Hey, don't talk like that. Everything…all right. We'll see you there. Bye." He almost pushed the OFF button, then a sudden thought made him put the handset back up. "Buffy! I-we lo-- Damn." He punched the button, then tossed the handset on the table and set back with hit-with-a-wet-frying-pan look on his face.
Anya moved closer to him. "Xander…what did Buffy tell you?" She put her other hand on his far shoulder, trying to give him strength and not being entirely sure if she was doing it right. "Xan—"
"They found Willow."
Anya sat back suddenly. "Dead?"
Xander, for his part, was too far gone to be irritated with her bluntness. "Alive. I mean, they didn't – Buffy and Tara didn't find her; somebody brought her to Sunnydale General. She's in pretty bad shape, but she's alive." He stood up to look for shoes, keys and wallet.
"Are they sure she's not a vampire or anything demon-y?"
"Ahn, for God's sake--!"
"I'm trying to be comforting! And-and I don't know what to say, I never know what to say! I keep looking for that book, Humanity for Dummies, and they don't have it! I mean, Sex for Dummies, who needs that? But I—" She wrung her hands in her characteristic manner and looked so distressed that Xander couldn't get very mad at her.
"Anya, focus." She halted herself and nodded. "We're going to the hospital. We're meeting the others there."
She nodded. "Be ready in one minute."
One minute, forty-three seconds later, the couple exited the apartment. Behind them, the forgotten DVD played on to an unwatched screen.
Four months after.
****
Part 4
"I hate this place," Dawn said from the backseat as they pulled the SUV into the parking lot of Sunnydale General.
"They should assign us our own parking place," Buffy muttered, riding shotgun while Tara drove. Tara had gently suggested that her more experienced hands on the wheel might have a better chance of getting them there in one piece. Buffy, not feeling like arguing, had agreed, adding only "And if you do mess up, at least we're headed in the right direction." Tara gave back anon-committal expression and said nothing as she got in. She had remained silent during the drive, responding to Buffy's and Dawn's inquiries as to her emotional well-being with brief, almost curt replies.
Buffy couldn't blame Tara for keeping things under wraps. Now, with the dark bulk of the hospital looming over the three of them, she had an insane urge to pile everyone back in the SUV and drive home without looking back. Screw this. Why do I need this grief? After Giles virtually abandons me and Dawn, after Riley bails to play soldier, after Mom…then I can't even die right! Willow decides to pull a "Lazarus, come forth" on me and rips me out of my eternal reward back into what I laughingly call life. The stupid bitch wants to be Wicked Witch of the West, let her. Just Leave Me Out of It.
The thought rolled around her head for about three seconds before Dawn piped up. "Buffy – you coming?" The owlish eyes on her young face reminded Buffy of how much her sister had seen in so few years, and it made her heart break. Willow once looked like Dawn did a year ago, innocent and untainted. Before Glory. Before Adam. Before the world taught her that you can give and fight and struggle and it all just never stops, and it changes you, the fighting and the knowledge of what you do and what you have to do, how could it not—
"'Gaze not into the abyss, for the abyss gazes also into you,'" Tara suddenly said, the longest sentence she had uttered since they left the house.
"Whu-huh?" Buffy said, startled how Tara's extraordinary empathy picked up on her mood.
Dawn rolled her eyes. "Shakespeare. Booorrring"
Tara shook her head. "Frederick Nietzshe. Merely, depressing." Without another word, or even a come-on gesture with head or hand, she started across the parking lot towards the hospital, leaving the Summers sisters to scramble to catch up. The three young women strode through the main entrance on the hospital, finding Xander and Anya waiting in the lobby. Immediately Buffy rushed up to Xander and threw herself into an embrace, which he returned. Unspoken, their mutual thought hung in the air: Thank God, she's alive.
Anya went to hug Tara, but the blonde witch reached over and grabbed Anya's arms in what looked to be a consoling gesture, but one that effectively stopped the ex-demon in mid-hug. Anya, confused and a little hurt, rushed over to hug Dawn, who was rather startled at the unexpected affection.
Buffy finally released Xander, who was grateful that his ribs were still intact. "Have you talked to anybody?" she asked. Xander looked away for a second and made several non-committal sounds.
"Xander was scared to go up without you," Anya supplied helpfully. Xander reddened and coughed some unintelligible syllables. Dawn managed to look amused. Tara, for whatever reason, remained impassive, as if barely aware of the conversation.
"Miss Summers!" Buffy – and Dawn – turned to find an older gentleman in medical scrubs making his way towards the group. "I'm Dr. Malcolm, we spoke on the phone. Yes, I thought it was you when I saw your name in Miss Rosenberg's file."
I'm getting too well known in this town, Buffy thought glumly, before realization burst in on her. "Uh, wait, you said you weren't sure it was her, she didn't have any ID…"
"She regained consciousness about ten minutes after I called you. In fact, I just left her."
"How is she?" Xander asked.
The doctor's eyes flickered, a look Buffy knew all too well. "What? What's going on? What are you not telling us?" The Slayer edged towards the physician, who in spite of years of dealing with distraught friends and relatives took a half-step backwards in fear of several structural damage to his body.
Tara laid a hand on Buffy's arm, as if her strength alone would be enough to keep her friend from tearing Dr. Malcolm a new orifice. "Buffy, calm down. He's trying to help."
"Well, obviously, Willow's transformed herself into a vicious hell-beast," Anya blurted out, "and he's having a hard time dealing with it, or telling us about it." She was about to elaborate when she noticed the decidedly unfriendly looks that not only Buffy but also Tara were giving her. Xander, for his part, sighed his usual Please-God-kill-me-now sigh. Dr. Malcolm gaped open-mouth at her, clearly put off his professional stride.
Dawn suddenly let out a burst of laughter, so exaggerated that everyone's attention was involuntarily drawn towards her. "Oh, Anya! That was so funny!" She turned towards the doctor. "She has the wildest sense of humor, y'know, always breaking the tension and stuff! She just kills me!" She glanced at Anya, hoping that the ex-demon would pick up the cue.
"Yes, that's me entirely with the inappropriate humor," Anya said, nodding in over-enthusiastic agreement. Dr. Malcolm's expression gave the Scoobies the impression that he wasn't entirely buying this story, but since he really didn't have an alternative in mind, decided to drop it.
"Why don't we go in here," he gently suggested, indicating a small lounge off the main entrance. The gang followed him in and, after his indications to do so, made use of the several chairs and couches. The doctor sat down in the remaining chair which formed the natural "head" of the group.
Buffy looked at Tara, to see if she wanted to start the questioning. However, the witch's face was impassive, looking back at Buffy blandly. Oooo-kay, Buffy thought. "Doctor, what's wrong with Willow?"
He cleared his throat perfunctorily. "When Miss Rosenberg arrived, we deduced that she was suffering from severe malnutrition and anemia." At the gang's sudden changes in expression, he added. "It doesn't appear that the anemia is due to sudden traumatic loss. We couldn't find any puncture wounds or lacerations that would account for it." He looked away for a second, then plunged in again. "We did standard tox-screens, because our first thought prolonged drug use as the cause of her condition. Those turned up negative. Frankly, I'm at a loss why a twenty-one-year old woman, otherwise in good health, could end up on this condition. It's almost as if she's run a marathon and forgot to feed herself for three weeks."
Tara stiffened, as if jolted by static electricity. Buffy looked at her, then at Xander, knowing that they all thought the same thing: magic. Willow may not have gotten a kick from champagne or cocaine, but she would have gotten a belt out of magic.
Still, they could hardly say that to Dr. Malcolm, could they? Buffy looked back at him, and noticed by his expression that he was waiting to tell them something else.
***********
Willow knew, somehow, that they were coming into her room before they arrived. Something, she knew, just made it inevitable. Tara had tried – oh, Lord, how she had tried -- to teach her about karma, about how everything in the universe was connected on a level that most people couldn't see, even those who were inclined towards magic. Finally, Willow had grasped the concept, though the learning curve was the worst she had ever had to endure. It was hard because she herself had made it hard.
****************
"Your friend, Miss Rosenberg, has been pushing herself, however and for whatever reason, past the physical limitations that we all have, and has…ended up damaging herself."
"Oh, God," Dawn moaned, closing her eyes, and for the thousandth time in seven months, saw her mother's body on the steel examining table in the morgue, her complexion grey with necrosis. Only now, the ash-blonde curly hair had become straighter, darker, redder, the body slimmer, shorter and the eyes were still open, open and staring at nothing because she was dead, Willow was dead…
Tara reached over and took Dawn's hand in her own, hardly seeming to react herself to Dr. Malcolm's words. Dawn, her black thoughts interrupted, gasped in shock, then recovered herself and nodded in gratitude.
Xander found his voice first. "What do you mean, 'damaging herself'? How?"
****************
At first Xander thought they had the wrong room. That's not… he started to say, and then her eyes shifted over in his direction, reflecting the light over her bed, and he knew it was her, but it couldn't be Willow, he knew Willow Rosenberg, and no way could she ever be…
So lost in his reverie was he that he didn't notice Buffy had stopped walking and bumped into her.
*************
"It appears that she has suffered a cerebrovascular event," Dr. Malcolm said, his clinical detachment making the diagnosis seem almost palatable.
Buffy's eyes widened, her heart pounded suddenly in her throat. "An aneurysm?"
"No," the doctor replied, sharply but calmly. "There's been no rupture of any blood vessels in her brain. X-Rays have confirmed that much. What they did find, however, was severe constriction of the cerebral blood vessels, which had restricted the flow of blood to certain sections of the brain…"
Tara turned to the doctor, her voice preternaturally calm. "A stroke."
******************
The right side of Willow's face looked pretty much as it always had. Perversely, it was that side that was facing the door of the room. It wasn't until you got in the room proper that you could really see the lower left eyelid drooping slightly, the left corner of the mouth turning downwards, and the claw-like left hand that was lying limply on top of the blankets.
The gang, even Anya, stood in shocked silence, unsure of what to say.
The figure on the bed stirred a little. She smiled warmly, or at least tried to. Unfortunately, the fact that her face didn't entirely respond to commands anymore made the smile come out, perhaps not grotesque, but certainly not pleasant, either.
"Hey, guys," she said, the slur in her words hitting them like a stake through the heart.
Four months after.
************
Part 5
"So…Will," Xander ventured, after almost a minute's awkward silence. "How was Belgium?"
In spite of the situation, in spite of the pitiful figure of Willow Rosenberg half-sitting, half-laying in the hospital bed, Buffy had to smile. "You've just got a jones for Belgium, don't you?" She looked over at Willow, who was attempted a bemused expression. "He never changes."
"Nope." Her voice was remarkably clear, and her eyes tracked together perfectly well. If it wasn't for the left half of her face doing an reasonable impression of Droopy, the cartoon character…
"It's good to see you," Dawn ventured with false cheeriness. She edged nearer the bed, wringing her hands nervously.
"You too, Dawnie," replied Willow, smiling before self-consciously forcing it away. She saw the teenager nodding nervously, while keeping an uneasy distance. "You can come closer, sweetie, I'm not contagious." Her /s/ sounds were a little slurred, but perfectly understandable.
Dawn suddenly dimpled and sidled over to gently hug Willow. Buffy was uncertain if that was a good idea, considering certain things Willow had done over the past year. I can't believe I'm even thinking this. This is Willow, for God's sake! A year ago, I'd have bet my life that she would never—okay, actually, I'd be betting Dawn's life that she would never hurt her. But then, Willow was always the smartest of us, and she fell into the biggest hole there is with her eyes wide open. No, not fell – stepped into it willingly. Am I supposed to trust her, or not? She looked over at Tara, standing beside her. The blonde witch was looking downward at the floor, a posture that Buffy had not seen her do in a long time.
"We were all very worried about you," Anya began bluntly (and true to form). "None of us knew where you were, although we did have that unconfirmed report of someone answering your description at a coven in Los Angeles…"
"That was me," Willow acquiesced. Then she reconsidered. "At least, I think it was. A lot of things are kinda blurry. You guys, you should see inside my head, it's like MTV After Hours, but without the cool hip-hop or grunge-band music."
"Memory loss is supposed to be very common with extended experimentation with dark forces," supplied Anya.
"Ahn," Xander muttered, noticing the can-I-kill-her-now glint in Buffy's eye.
"No, Xander." Tara surprised everyone at that moment. "Let her finish. Or, better yet, let's hear it from the source." For the first time since she entered the room, Tara looked at Willow directly. "Why don't you tell us how great it was, how you got a rush off of doing magic twenty-four-seven, without someone like dumb ole me to just, y'know, get in your way, or someone like Buffy to, like, denigrate you, or demote you to Side-Kick, First Class?" Buffy looked askance at Tara, who didn't notice or just plain didn't care. It was the look of cold fury on Tara's face that amazed Buffy even more than her words. "C'mon, Willow! I mean, the magic was a lot more important to you than us, more important to you than me…" She leaned over the bed, sticking her face almost into Willow's. "Tell me…how good was it for you? Get a real good rush? Do a lotta spells? Huh?" The redhead didn't answer, just hung her head miserably. Tara straightened up and looked at the woman who half a year ago was her love and her life. "You make me sick."
She turned on her heel and started towards the door. Buffy grabbed her sleeve. "Tara, don't."
With surprisingly vehemence, the blonde wretched her coat arm free. "Don't tell me d-don't." She walked out of the room.
With a jerk of her head, Buffy indicated to Xander to follow Tara out. He did so, but not before flashing Willow that said How could you, Will? The recipient of said look bowed her head in shame.
The corridor outside Willow's room was devoid of people. Xander could not immediately see which way Tara went, although a door in the distance seemed not fully closed yet. It was just as good a place to start looking as any.
The plate above the door said CHAPEL. For some reason Xander couldn't quite fathom, it seemed appropriate. He pulled open the door and went inside, fighting down an urge to sing, "Stopped into a church/I passed along the way." Anya still teased him about summoning the Demon Lord of the Dance.
He spotted Tara in the front row of small benches and made his way there. He was vacillating between two mind-sets, the I Know How You Feel, I Feel Like She Betrayed Me Too frame and the How Could You Kick Her Like That When She's Down. He hadn't decided which one would prevail by the time he moved to sit next to Tara. She acknowledged his presence with a glance and a smile.
"Y'know, I can't even remember the last time I was in a church," he said. "Funny…it seems the only thing I've gotten out of church in the last few years is a quick dip in the nave for a free bottle of holy water." He was relieved to see a small smile on Tara's face at the quip. "My family used to go to church every Sunday…and then my parents would get crocked Sunday night, so I'd go over to Willow's. She and I used to compare notes, y'know, what with the church and the synagogue had you do; I mean, she thought it was weird that they would feed me this little wafer and tell me it was the body of Christ. 'So, how does Your Savior taste?' and I'd say—
"—like chicken!" Tara finished.
"Oh. You've heard that one."
"Yeah. I mean, I asked Willow once if fried mayor-snake tasted like fried mayor-chicken. See, if you assume that all –" She broke off when she saw that he was chuckling. "Did-did I say something funny?"
"Yes!" he guffawed, then lowered his voice, seeing as they were in "church." "Had to happen sometime. No, I mean…uh, let me see….I came in here with a point, I swear… "
"You were mad at me for blowing up at Willow."
"Well, yeah, I think-- How do you do that? I thought Willow was Marvel Girl, but you're just total Professor X on reading people's feelings."
"I'm sorry," said Tara, hanging her head down again. "Not about the Professor Marvel thing, I mean what I said to Willow. It was mean and selfish to rub it in like I did, when she looks like…she…" Tara began to sob uncontrollably. "Did you see her? Did you see her?" Tears sprang her eyes dripped down her face in torrents.
Xander, feeling a bit damp in the oculars himself, reached over and pulled Tara to him, saying, "Yeah…I saw her." Together, the two friends cried over the woman whom they both loved.
Four months after.
Part 6
The quiet sighs had faded into a comfortable silence as the sun went down. A hand reached down to the foot of the bed and drew a blanket and sheet over two bodies that had suddenly become chilled in the aftermath of intense lovemaking. The larger of the two women turned onto her side and stretched an arm over her lover, as if afraid that she would somehow escape.
"I knew you'd come back," Tara whispered as she held Willow in the twilight.
The redheaded witch turned to the blonde, a neutral expression on her face. "You shouldn't have let me go."
Tara winced at the accusatory tone. "I had no choice. I was becoming as lost as you."
"But we'll always find each other. Right? So how can we get lost?" The setting sun seemed to divide Willow's face, darkening the left side into bloody shadows.
"When we lose who we are. There was something in your head that wasn't you, and someone in mine that wasn't me."
Willow turned away then, staring up at the ceiling. "Why couldn't you help me?"
Tara sat up, hugging her knees to her breasts. "I told you. When they found out who you really were, I wouldn't be able to help you." She looked down toward the end of the bed. "It was inevitable. They just couldn't see who you were until it was too late."
The figure on the other side of the bed reached over with her left arm to grip Tara's leg. The arm was puckered with open sores, with fluid cascading down onto the bedspread. Wide-eyed, Tara turned to regard her lover…
…and beheld the horror of Willow Rosenberg, half-dead, the left side of her body a mass of rotting flesh, the left side of her face disintegrated, the left side of her mouth frozen in the false grimace of tissue necrosis.
Yet, somehow, the right side of her body, pink and flush with health, was somehow worse. Illusion or not, the living flesh seemed to be trying to crawl away from the dead. In contrast to the left eye, blackened and shrunk sightless in its socket, the right eye seemed alive, desperate, as if it somehow knew the fate that had befallen its neighbor.
Gagging, Tara leapt off the bed, unconsciously dragging the blanket and sheet with her. Not the brightest move she ever made, as that just exposed more of the half-and-half horror she had just had sex with. "W-W-Willow…?" she cried, barely able to look at the travesty and yet unable to look away.
Someone, the half-corpse managed to look smug. "It's not as if you haven't been there yourself," it said, its words slurred by half-dead lips, the rotting hand pointed to the mirror over the drawer-chest.
Tara looked, and was horrified to see a desiccated skull sitting on her shoulders, with holes near her temples, as if someone could have used her head for a bowling ball, and the skull still had eyes, it had her eyes…
Tara came awake with a gasp that she barely managed to keep from being a full-blown scream. Sweating and nauseous, she looked around to see that she was alone in her room at the Summers house. She took a few deep breaths, which did little except tell her that the nausea was not going to pass her by without decorating the bed sheets. Immediately, she bolted to the bathroom, where her stomach surrendered the contents of last night's dinner. Thank God her hair was still scrunchied-up.
It's a shame, really, something in the back of her mind said, halfway through the ritual of Praying to The Porcelain Goddess, because Dawn's turned into a halfway decent cook…
When she had finally finished that little chore, she flushed the toilet and stood on shaky legs to wash her face, particularly the inside of her mouth, at the bathroom sink. A quick look inside the cabinet revealed – yes! – mouthwash. Swishing the minty liquid around her mouth to get rid of the vomit taste, Tara ended up with a mouth that tasted like…well, minty vomit.
"Plaaagh."
Tara opened the door of her bedroom gingerly, listening for the sounds of one or both of the Summers sisters getting up in response to Tara's bathroom activities. Thankfully, neither one seemed inclined to stir. Buffy had been rather tired this evening – extra-heavy vamp activity and, though she would not admit it openly, a quick liaison with Spike – and Dawn slept like the d-- Log. Like a log.
Closing the door and sitting on the bed, Tara tried to make sense of the dream, or rather, tried to come to a reasonable interpretation than the one that pretty much had stamped itself on her brain the moment she woke up. In the two months since Willow had returned from the unknown, Tara had not gone to see her, nor had she evinced much interest in the news of her progress, at least to other people. In truth, she had absorbed every detail of the prognosis of Willow's stroke, of the regimen of physical therapy she was undergoing as an outpatient, and of her living situation at her parents' house.
She had passed by Casa Rosenberg three times in the last few weeks since Willow had gone there upon her discharge from Sunnydale General. Tara was not worried about "the in-laws," as Xander liked to jokingly call them on Tara's behalf. Ira and Sheila, after a period of substantial awkwardness, hemming and hawing, and questions of every stripe from "Are you sure it's not a phase?" to "Are you planning on artificial insemination? Oh, a doctor friend of mine just donated!" pretty much accepted that their one and only daughter was in love with a woman. A non-Jewish woman, at that.
("You think she might, y'know, convert?" Sheila had asked Ira in the Rosenberg kitchen, when Tara was not as out of earshot as they had thought, one night after dinner.
"Tara? I'm still working on Willow!" replied Ira.)
Tara just couldn't get up the courage to go see her. She tried to tell herself that it was because she hadn't forgiven Willow for the memory-erase spell, or for breaking her promise not to do magic. Granted, she hadn't. Really. But the real reason, one that she couldn't admit to Buffy or Xander or Dawn (although Anya, with her typical and annoying perception, has sussed it out and been subsequently sworn to secrecy) was that she couldn't look Willow in the eye after her stupid outburst at her hospital bed. The person you often find it hardest to forgive is yourself.
Tara lay back on the bed and stared at the off-white ceiling, as if it was accusing her along with her subconscious.
"Okay," she said. "I got the message."
***********
