Just a quick post Gift fic from a casual lurker.



Stay.

by Devlin



Her head is on my chest, one vigilant ear listening to my heart beat. She hasn’t moved in over an hour, probably doesn’t think she can. I haven’t moved either. Haven’t wanted to. If I asked her what she was doing, I’m not sure what she’d tell me, but I don’t have to ask because I know. As long as she keeps listening, then my heart will keep beating on and on, and I’ll stay alive. And as long as she keeps her arms around my waist like a vice, I won’t move, I won’t leave, and I won’t go back to where ever it was Glory put me a few days back. That’s how she needs me to be. Not gone like I was. And not dead like Buffy is.

And I want to be this for her. When there was nothing left to do at the hospital, and nothing left to say to Dawn, Xander or Giles, we came back to her dorm room. We both gravitated towards the bed instantly, and wound ourselves into this position. “I need you to stay,” she said. So I haven’t moved. I know she wasn’t being entirely literal, I’m well aware of the 500 different things she was probably thinking about when she picked those words, but I figured it was the best way to let her know my intentions. I liked Buffy, and she might even have liked me, but none of this is about me. Joyce’s death was hard on Willow, but this is going to be unimaginably worse. So if she needs me to stay, for the hour or the year, then I won’t move a muscle.

I won’t pretend that this is how I’d like to be spending my return to sanity with her in an ideal world. With Dawn standing up on that pedestal and the world threatening to end, I admit to wanting it all to be over largely so I could be back here with her, and be safe, and be in some phase of relief. Just a little calm after the storm, that was all I really wanted. But with Buffy’s body plummeting 100 feet into the ground, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I feel guilty for the entire line of thought, of course. I knew there was much more at stake than some alone time with my girlfriend, but I couldn’t stop the disappointment.

There was one spot of relief, though. At least she wanted to come back here, instead of going to her parents’ house. Maybe she just wouldn’t know what to say to them. How would she explain what a 20 year old girl was doing on the top of a giant platform hastily constructed by escaped mental patients? I guess she’d find a way. I may not know how to put it into believable terms, but she has a lot more experience with this kind of thing than I do. It’s like Xander said. “We do morgue time in the Scooby gang.”

But we’ve done our morgue time for today. And I guess this, right now, is the calm after the storm that I wanted. So Willow holds on tight, death grip on my waist, leaving an increasingly large wet spot on my shirt each time her tears pick up again. I move one hand from the top of her head down her cheek, and she tenses.

“Stay,” she tells me. Softly, and a little urgent.

“Always,” I say. A little wrinkle forms between her eyebrows, and I know what she’s thinking. That that’s something I can’t promise. There’s nothing for me to respond with. I mean it, which we both know, so more words won’t help anything. I just pick a new resting place for my hand on her head, and settle in again. This wasn’t how I pictured our reunion, but I’ll stay here if she needs me.