Chapter Text
Okay, here’s the thing: Willow understands, better than almost anybody, how much she fucked up.
Sure, everybody else watched her implode, in some way or the other, but Willow? She lived it. She is acutely aware of each and every moment of her downward spiral, no matter how much she had ignored the signs until they were staring her in the face. None of the others had felt the black magic that coursed through her veins and whispered into the crevices of her brain. None of them still feel that strange anxiety she does with every spell.
And none of them will ever understand what it felt like to hold the love of their life as she died, or how it felt to truly want to carve the rest of the world that remained into pieces.
Nobody else understands what it feels like the hold the universe in their hands, ready to crush it into dust, but Willow does.
So yeah, Willow knows that she fucked everything up. And she knows that Tara suffered more than most. But she still— Goddess, she still loves Tara so much, even if it isn’t her place to anymore.
That’s what she thinks about when she leads Tara off the front porch and back into the house. The hollow look that haunted Tara’s eyes earlier this morning has faded, but the marks the First left behind haven’t disappeared. She’s quiet as she walks, and she trails after Willow in a manner that seems almost mindless. The new confidence she’s gotten used to from Tara in the past few years has given way to the quiet, contemplative nature that reminds Willow of the Tara she first met back at Sunnydale University.
And yes, Willow had loved that Tara, too. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worrying. It doesn’t mean that the half-blank expression on Tara’s face doesn’t crack her chest open.
Willow isn’t in a position to pry anymore, though, so she keeps her mouth shut at. It’s a skill she’s gotten pretty good at lately. England did a lot for her in terms of self-improvement.
Instead, she drops into one of the dining room chairs, and cracks open the book in between them when Tara takes the seat next to her. The two of them duck their heads over it, Willow pointing out certain lines and passages while Tara takes notes on a legal pad.
They're quiet while they work, and the air between them isn’t tense, but Willow’s throat feels thick with the words she’s swallowing down. She wants to say I heard it. She wants to tell Tara that she heard everything she said to the First about her, She wants to tell Tara just how much it meant to hear her stick up to her own mother on behalf of Willow and her magic. It isn’t something she deserved, not from the girl who got burned from the fire of holding Willow’s hand.
If anything, that makes it mean so much more. Her eyes water just thinking about it, a heavy emotion swirling around in her stomach. It doesn’t help that the whole speech sounded eerily familiar to the one the First had given her, back when it wore Tara’s body.
I mean, Goddess, Willow, it had said. Was everything that happened not enough to tell you this isn’t the right path for you anymore? Did what happened to me matter to you? Did us falling apart do mean anything to you?
(Yeah, Willow had figured out that it wasn’t Tara eventually, sure. But she hadn’t known at first. The echoes of her voice, even if it was a falsehood, still burns.)
She pushes down her own internal struggle and focuses back on the magic. While she’s never been Faith’s biggest fan, that doesn’t change the fact that Tara is, and she’s still one of the only two slayers in the world who has real-life experience.
And, to Faith’s credit, she had won some points from Willow when she took a knife to the stomach for Xander.
For a long time, the two of them don’t speak, and the one sound is that of flipping pages and the pencil scratching across paper as they translate the spell into a Latin incantation. It’s almost companionable, save for Willow’s own internal monologue that runs on repeat like a skipping track.
After half an hour, Tara’s voice shatters the silence.
“Did you know that my father died?”
Willow jerks up from the book so quickly her neck cracks, and she winces— both at the pain and at her own reaction. Tara’s face is neutral, in a crafted sort of way, like she’s forcing the expression.
“No,” Willow says, her voice soft. “When?”
“Last year,” Tara answers. “I thought Dawn might have told you.”
“She probably didn’t think it was my place to know.”
(Willow leaves the she isn’t my biggest fan, anyway unspoken.)
Tara hums, a non-committal noise that offers no opinion on Willow’s last statement. “I thought it was him. When I felt the First.”
Willow gets that. When the First had appeared to her, there’d been a horrible sense of wrong that crawled down her back before she even saw it. Knowing Tara, she’d been more attuned to the air around it— she must have known what is was the second she felt it.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I haven’t really talked about it since it happened.”
Regret swells in Willow’s chest. “You don’t have to—”
“No, it’s okay.” Tara says, cutting her off. “I just… thinking about him still hurts. Knowing how much he hurt me, and still loving him despite it… it’s hard to balance. He was my dad, and even if he wasn’t a good one, he still was. And it’s different, after you lose one parent.”
“Different?”
Tara’s lips twitch into a grimace for a moment. “I left home the first chance I had, but when I did, I had nothing. Almost no money, and no real friends to speak of,” she explains. “And I don’t regret it; I found a lot more for me in Sunnydale than I had back home, but… after losing my mom, even if I didn’t want to be anywhere near him, it still felt like he was the only thing I had left for a long time.”
“You had us.”
“I did, eventually,” she continues. “But that first year in Sunnydale, when it was just me on my own… I didn’t make any friends. I didn’t really meet anybody. If I didn’t have my dad, twisted and warped and as far away from me as I was, I was alone.”
The admission sits heavy in between them. Willow thinks back to those first few months they met, to the shy girl with half bleached hair and a quiet stutter. Willow had been head-over-heels for her the moment she heard Tara's soft laugh, even if she hadn't known it at the time. Who could blame her? Tara was warm, and kind, and one of the smartest people she had ever met.
She was the easiest girl in the world to get to know, and it had broken Willow's heart that not a single other person in the whole school had cared enough to try.
“You aren’t alone anymore,” Willow says. Even if Tara knows that, she has to say it anymore. “You’ve got so many people who care about you now, both L.A. and here. I know… things are so different than they used to be, but you’ve still got us, too.”
You have me , Willow’s heart cries from her chest. You’re not mine, but I’m still yours. You’ll always have me.
(It’s too much to say. She keeps it to herself.)
Whether or not Tara picks up on that from the tone of her voice, she smiles. “I know.”
The silence lapses back over them, but it doesn’t last. They get maybe a minute past the conversation before Tara is speaking again.
“Willow?”
Willow glances back up at the sound of her name. “Yeah?”
“I heard... I’m sorry that the First used me to get to you.”
The breath leaves Willow’s lungs like she just collided with a chest high railing. Their last topic was unexpected, sure, but this one feels like a punch to the gut. Her first thought is that Tara has somehow learned to read minds over the past year, but it’s a fleeting idea; if she has, she would have surely heard something in Willow’s thoughts earlier this week to drive her away somehow.
“Who told you?” She asks, unable to get her voice any higher than a whisper.
“Robin,” Tara replies. “I know it wasn’t his place to, but… it helped me understand what it wanted. It helped.”
For a moment, Willow hates him. It’s a dark feeling that washes over her for half a second, before she shoves it back down. “It wanted me to stop using magic,” she says, instead of letting that angry burn consume her.
“Because it’s scared of you,” Tara points out. “Not because that’s the right decision.”
“You don’t think it is?”
“I think it’s your decision to make, and it doesn’t get to be somebody else’s,” she says. “You’re the only one inside your own head. Nobody else knows your limits the way you can. And I think that if you want to stop, it should be because you don’t feel safe, not because an evil entity wants you to. Especially if it thinks that using your— me is an appropriate way to manipulate you into doing so.”
Willow’s heart catches over the stumble in the sentence. “It’s okay,” she says, trying to switch tracks instead of focusing on it. “It wasn't your fault. Besides, I knew it wasn’t you. I mean, I didn’t at first, because you were… you know, alive, but I figured it out.”
There’s a moment Tara studies her for a second, like she wants to ask how. Willow holds her breath under the other girl’s gaze. She’s afraid if Tara asks, she’ll open her mouth and too much will come out. She’ll say something that’s too revealing, or puts pressure on Tara to respond in the right way. It’s the last thing Tara needs right now, and the last thing Willow wants to give her.
Tara must read something in her face, because she tears her eyes away and focuses on the book instead.
This time, the conversation stays gone once it dies out. The front of Willow’s brain still buzzes with the hundreds of words she’s forcing herself to leave unspoken, but it feels dimmer now, more settled. It’s easier to focus on the text they’re reading when her thoughts fade into background noise. Tara, for her credit, seems to feel the same. The glaze that had descended over her eyes is gone, and they actually seem bright as they skim through the end of the spell.
It takes another twenty minutes to finish translating what they need, and ten more after that to tweak what they’ve got written down. When they've finished, they’re left with almost a full page of Tara’s careful handwriting, which when read allowed, should (in theory) be a spell to heal whatever’s going on inside of Faith’s head to keep her unconscious.
In an ideal world, Willow would love to take her to a hospital and get her hands on the CT scans the doctors would surely order. They’ve performed plenty of physical healing spells on Faith, sure, but there’s no way to tell if there’s anything more serious going on with her brain that they can’t see without technology. This spell is good, but only if her coma isn’t held in place by some neurological damage they can’t see.
But the way the entire team from Los Angeles had shifted at the idea of taking Faith to a hospital shut that down pretty quickly, especially when Fred pointed out that they would not only have to drive out of town to find a hospital that’s still open, but that they would also have to then break her out of said hospital.
So, this has to do.
“Is it good?” Willow asks, glancing over at Tara. The blonde nods.
“It’s ready,” she says, setting down her pen. “I think.”
Willow leans over, eyes skimming over the paper as she does her best to ignore just how close they are right now. “Looks like it,” she agrees. “You ready to try it?”
“There’s no good reason to wait,” Tara replies, standing from her chair and gathering the notepad into her arms. Willow follows her, and the two of them make their way to Buffy’s room.
Faith is still sprawled out in the center of the bed when they get there, with Angel and Fred sitting on either side of her. The latter stands when he sees them enter.
“Another spell?”
“We’ve got something,” Willow replies. “It should probably work?”
She hates the way her voice lilts up at the end, like she’s asking a question, but she can’t stop it. There’s no way to tell if the spell will actually work. Not until they do it, at least.
“That’s good,” Fred says, glancing at them before turning her gaze back to Faith. “She’s going to need some sort of nutrition fast.”
“Oh, it’s not to feed her, it’s supposed to wake her up.”
Both Angel and Fred’s eyes snap to her as she speaks, and if she were the same girl she was four or five years ago, she would shrink under the weight of their combined stares. As it is, she straightens her shoulders.
“It’s going to wake her up,” Tara corrects, and unlike Willow, there’s no hesitation in her voice. A hint of desperation, sure, but confidence to back it.
“Even better,” Angel says. “We’ll get out of your way.”
“Where you are is fine,” Willow assures. “We need her head.”
She and Tara make their way up to the top of the bed, taking one side each and leaving Faith in between them. Tara props the notepad up against the headboard, set just right so that the both of them can read it, before she reaches for Willow’s hand.
A jolt of electricity races up Willow’s spine at the contact, but she pushes it down and focuses on the moment. She has magic to do, and it’s the first time she’s done it with Tara since everything happened. Longer than that, even; the two of them haven’t done a spell together since before the original break-up. The last thing Willow needs to do, after everything, is muck everything up again.
She reaches out with her free hand and places it against Faith’s head, thumb on her temple. Her skin is warm but sweaty, almost clammy. Across the bed, Tara mimics the movement, and the two of them start chanting in Latin.
It’s more intense than she thought it would be, the spell. It leeches energy from her chest and drags it out through the tips of her fingers. A faint glow emanates from where she and Tara are touching Faith’s head, gold at the edges. She doesn’t dare look away from, but as it brightens, she can hear the small gasp that falls from Fred’s lips.
Their chanting picks up in volume as they go, as if something is reaching down Willow’s throat and pulling the words out of them. It’s almost out of control, and the anxious feeling that stirs in her stomach makes her want to withdraw, but she holds fast. She can feel it working as it pours into Faith, and she just to hold on for the rest of the ride.
When the spell ends, there’s a few seconds where nobody moves. Willow doesn’t even dare to breathe against the stillness of the room, staring down at Faith, and—
Faith’s eyes, bleary and unfocused, drag open.
Willow catches it, the flicker of relief that melts Tara’s worried expression. It only lasts a moment before the blonde’s face goes slack, and she starts to crumple. Angel surges forward, the movement so graceful Willow wonders if he expected the other girl to faint, and catches her falling body in her arms.
Her heart lurches in her chest for a moment, before she remembers just how much that spell took from her. There’s a weakness in her own limbs, and the single upside to her rampage from last year is that her own magical reserves are extensive. If she’s feeling it enough that her legs are shaking under her, Tara must be near to tapped dry.
Magical exhaustion is no joke.
Despite the fact that Tara has just fainted, and Faith is coughing from her spot on the bed, something inside Willow feels light. The apocalypse is still waiting to drag them into hell, but for a moment, she has the distinct feeling of foresight that things might just work out for them all.