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The bullet misses by six inches and embeds itself in the wall, whistling past Tara’s right side.
She and Willow stare at each other, wide-eyed, too in shock to even panic, until they hear Xander screaming in the backyard. They approach the shattered window, caught between hesitancy to approach somewhere a bullet just came whizzing out of and Xander’s obvious distress.
As they move closer, they can hear that he’s screaming for Willow or for Dawn, telling them to call 911.
Willow turns on her heel and thunders down the stairs, Tara in tow. They burst out the back door and Willow’s yelling back at Xander, asking what happened. Tara looks at Buffy and the ugly red blotch spreading across her sweatshirt, then averts her eyes to the door Willow left open. Bugs will get in, she thinks, then chides herself for gaping at an open door while an open wound gapes in Buffy’s abdomen.
Willow sprints past Tara, who’s standing uselessly on the deck, and grabs the phone from the kitchen. Tara can hear her dialing, then talking to the 911 operator. She can’t look at Xander, arms covered in Buffy’s blood, attempting to apply pressure, and she definitely can’t look at Buffy, pale and bleeding in the dirt, so she turns and follows once again.
She lays a hand on the small of Willow’s back as Willow tells the dispatcher her address. Their? Tara supposes it doesn’t really matter, not when Buffy is staining the grass red with blood.
Willow drops the phone to her shoulder and cradles it there. “She says they’re on their way,” she tells Tara.
“OK,” Tara says, but Willow’s already turned to go back out the door.
“Yes,” Willow says on the phone, “she’s still breathing but she’s looking really pale…”
The ambulance makes it in time. Willow and Xander ride in the ambulance with Buffy, and Tara is left to take the car, get Dawn from Janice’s, and meet them at the hospital.
She sits in the sweltering car for a minute before the turns the key, wrapping her fingers around the too hot steering wheel and resting her head on the back of the seat. She feels so, so tired. It’s all just too much to take, lately. The breakup and the beginnings of rebuilt trust, and the giddy enthusiasm of picking up back where they left off, and the kissing and the euphoria and the makeup sex and the bullet that could’ve killed her and the bullet that very much could still kill Buffy…
She inhales until her lungs feel so full that it becomes uncomfortable, then pushes the air out in an audible sigh.
She turns the key and puts on her game face. Dawn needs her.
“She’ll be fine, right?” Dawn asks from the passenger seat, balancing her bag on her knees. “Slayer strength and everything?”
“I’m sure she will, sweetie,” Tara says, even though she feels anything but sure. Slayers have been dying for hundreds of years. Sure, Buffy is strong, but she isn’t invincible. Slayer healing has its limits, and Tara really isn’t enjoying finding out what they are.
“Tara,” Dawn says, “I’m not a kid.”
Tara looks over at her. Dawn’s grown half a foot in the time she’s known her, but in a lot of ways, she’s still so young, so insistent on not being considered young, so obsessed with getting her sister’s attention that she’d steal from the Magic Box just to get a scrap of it, even if it was just a lecture on how wrong stealing was.
But in a lot of other ways, she’s not, anymore. Tara knows how to read an aura, and Dawn’s is full of more pain than most adults. Even if she couldn’t, she thinks, she’d still be able to tell from the sad, vacant look Dawn gets on her face when she thinks no one’s looking. Dawn is so afraid, she thinks. Tara’s afraid, too, and she knows from laying her head on Willow’s chest at night and listening to her heart thump double-time that she is too. She wonders when they all started hiding it from each other.
Tara’s been afraid a long time, since long before she met Willow, but it’s a different kind of fear now. She’s no longer afraid of being a demon, but she can never quite shake the fear that she’ll be found out, seen for how unworthy she really is. She remembers sleepless nights where cold fear twisted her world, distorting it a million ways like a funhouse mirror. She remembers seeing things that weren’t there and ignoring things that were. She remembers the way that fear had ruled so much of her relationship with Willow, the way it had made her follow Willow everywhere and agree to everything. It had made her cruel sometimes, too, accusing Willow of being fickle and not serious about their relationship, had made her drive Willow away.
Glory had seen her, she remembered, in a way no one else had, not even Willow. She supposed sticking your fingers into someone’s brain gave you a certain level of insight.
And she’d made it all come true, everything Tara had feared about herself, and all the ways she’d known everyone was going to leave. She really had been alone, left by everyone she’d ever loved, facing the twisting blackness of her Glory-imposed insanity.
“Of course, you’re not a kid, Dawnie,” she lies, because Dawn still sort of is. They all are. Death and pain and trauma haven’t made them older or wiser, she knows. It’s only made them sadder and farther from each other.
They arrive at the hospital to find Willow and Xander huddled anxiously in a waiting room chair, playing a game of chopsticks. They look so young, she thinks, like little kids passing the time between classes.
“Have you heard anything?” Dawn asks and they stop, withdrawing fingers into pockets like any display of anything but pure, blind panic is disrespectful.
“They said they’re operating,” Xander says.
Willow reaches for Tara’s hand and she takes it gratefully, sinking down into the seat beside her. Willow lays her head on her shoulder.
“I don’t know what I’d have to done if I’d lost you,” she whispers.
Tara squeezes her hand.
“Let’s not find out.”
Buffy’s operation goes smoothly, and she’s discharged within a couple days. She’s never been more tired, she says, and spends most of her time in her sweatpants, on the couch or in bed. Willow, Xander, and Tara take over patrolling. It’s harder without Spike, but he’s disappeared, and no one seems to be saying anything about it. Tara gets the sense Xander and Buffy know more than they’re letting on, but she doesn’t pry.
Buffy calls her into her room on the pretext of healing magic. Tara’s certainly not powerful enough to heal a bullet wound, but Buffy says she can probably do something for the pain or to get her to sleep through the night, and Tara doesn’t protest. She gets the sense Buffy wants company more than magic, anyway.
With Spike gone, Tara’s become Buffy’s #1 confidant. Buffy murmurs to her quietly about why Spike left, and her heart sinks, but she does her best to keep the horror off her face.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says.
“I had to tell someone,” Buffy replies. She doesn’t ask why she doesn’t tell Willow (or talk to Xander, who already knows), because she already knows the answer. Sometimes the people close to you are just too close. Sometimes you need a little bit of distance.
“Will you come lie down with me?” Buffy asks and Tara’s surprised. Buffy’s a hugger, sure, but this is an intimacy usually reserved for friends much closer than they are. She’s a confidant, but she’s mostly Willow’s girlfriend, not Buffy’s friend, and she knows that. But who is she to deny a girl who’s been shot and assaulted in the same day? She lies down next to Buffy and stares at the ceiling.
“I’m happy for you guys,” Buffy says, now clearly fighting the effects of Tara’s sleep spell. “You make me believe in that kind of stuff for me.”
Tara can’t think of anything to say to that, but Buffy’s asleep anyway. She lays there until she thinks her movement won’t wake Buffy up, then slips back to her own room.
Tracking down the Trio takes a grand total of a week. Tara does a spell to locate them, Buffy borrows a bulletproof vest and helmet from Xander (Tara’s told it’s left over from a Halloween in high school, a story she’ll definitely want to hear in full later). While she and the other Scoobies sit guarding Warren and Andrew, Buffy and Jonathan disappear down an alleyway to talk before reappearing an hour later, Jonathan looking teary but unharmed.
Then he turns state’s witness. The trio aren’t on the hook for everything (Buffy notes, in a disgusted tone, that there won’t be any justice for Katrina), but between the shooting and Jonathan’s testimony about the diamond heist, all three are probably going to go away for a long time.
“I wonder what Buffy did to Jonathan,” Xander muses to Tara the next day as they drive to the grocery store.
Tara shrugs like she doesn’t know either, but she suspects Buffy didn’t do anything except talk to him. Buffy may hide it behind a harsh exterior lately, but there are deep wells of compassion there. Xander might’ve forgotten the night she’d nearly gotten them all killed, but Tara certainly hadn’t. They’d barely known each other then, skirting the line between friends and acquaintances, but Buffy had still stuck up for her, simply because it was right.
With her family and Trio gone, there’s nothing to do but live, at least until another threat emerges, so she does.
But she can’t seem to shake the feeling that something is wrong.
It’s 3 AM and Tara has resigned herself to another more or less sleepless night. She can feel Willow pressed up against her back, feel her slow breathing on the back of her neck and the steady press of her arm slung over Tara’s shoulder, but none of it feels right the way it used to. It feels suffocating, somehow, but Tara chalks that up to the hundred-degree heat more than anything.
She extricates herself as gently as she can and watches, smiling faintly, as Willow sprawls diagonally across the mattress, pressing her face into a pillow. Tara loves her. She really does, always and forever, which is why she doesn’t understand why nothing feels right anymore. They defeated the Trio. Classes are over. She should be having fun with her friends, going to the beach and staying out too late at the Bronze and staying in bed until noon. And she does all of those things, and they’re fun, but something heavy and sad follows all of them, and no matter how tightly they press together, it won’t go away.
She steps as quietly as she can down the stairs, careful to miss the few steps she knows always creak.
She’s pouring herself a cup of tea when she notices the back door slightly ajar. She grabs one of Buffy’s axes and heads out slowly, ready to swing, but there’s nothing out there except Buffy, sitting with her own cup of tea and staring out into the blackness of the night.
She could creep back into the house, but between Buffy’s slayer hearing and Tara’s blundering around looking for the axe, she knows Buffy already knows she’s there.
“Hello, Buffy,” she says, quietly, more out of politeness than any real need to warn Buffy about her presence.
“Hey.” Buffy turns and smiles at her. “Come sit.”
Tara does, settling next to Buffy and wrapping her arms around her knees. She gazes out into the backyard, up at the same stars she’d watched from a rooftop with Willow what feels like a million years ago.
“How are you holding up?” Tara asks.
Buffy shrugs.
“The same.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I don’t know. Some days I don’t think about it all, but then some nights I wake up shaking. I just don’t understand. He took care of Dawn, and he also did… what he did. And I just can’t reconcile those things in my head, no matter how much I try. And I should hate him, and it’d be easier if I did, but I can’t forget either of those things, but I can’t make them make sense together either.”
“I get it,” Tara says, and listens to the crickets chirp. There are a few things she can’t reconcile either. She lies awake at night trying to merge the girl who kept notes of what she ate for breakfast with the girl who used Lethe’s Bramble on her, but it’s like oil and water, and she just can’t get them to go together.
“How could he love me and do that to me?” Buffy asks, not looking at her, her gaze fixed in front of her. It’s easier that way, Tara knows. To tell someone these sorts of things when you don’t have to look at them.
“I don’t know,” Tara says, because she really doesn’t. “I don’t know how someone can say they love you, but then chip away at all the things that make you you.”
“What does that mean?” Buffy turns to look at Tara, but it’s Tara’s turn to stare resolutely into the middle distance.
“It’s just… who we are, it’s just genetics, and our experiences. And I don’t like any of my genetics.”
“You’re nothing like your family.”
Tara swallows. “I mean… I hope not. But then all that’s left is what I’ve experienced, you know? And when that’s taken from you, who are you, even? And if those experiences are all erased, and all that’s left is what she wanted, then how am I different from Warren’s robot girlfriend? Should someone just let my batteries run out?”
“No, no, no,” Buffy says, wrapping her arm around Tara. “Of course not. You’re a person, and you know it only happened the one time. You’re you, Tara. You’re just yourself.”
“But how do I know?” Tara asks, leaning her head onto Buffy’s shoulder. “I mean, how do I know it was one time? How much of me did she erase?”
“She wouldn’t erase you, Tara,” Buffy says. “She loves you.”
“She does,” Tara agrees, but she knows love has nothing to do with it. Love, possession. It all gets so blurry for people like Willow and Spike.
Tara takes a deep breath.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come back,” she says, and Buffy hugs her tighter.
“I’m so glad you did,” Buffy says. Tara can’t find it in herself to answer, so she stares forward into the night, listening to someone’s dog barking in the distance.
A week later, Tara finds Buffy outside in the middle of the night again. This time, she comes equipped with a steaming mug of tea.
“Sorry,” Tara says. “I thought I might find you out here.”
“Well, you found me.”
She sits next to Buffy.
“It’s such a beautiful night,” Tara says, breathing in the smell of the dew settling on the grass and watching the lights of a plane flying over Sunnydale.
“Did you ever want to fly somewhere?” she asks Buffy.
“Yeah,” Buffy says. “All the time in high school. I wanted to go off to Paris and leave all the demons and vampires behind.”
“Did you ever go?”
“No,” Buffy says, blowing on her tea. “I knew it was just a fantasy. They’d just follow me there.”
“Sunnydale was my Paris.” Tara says, and she laughs a little, though there’s nothing funny about it. She closes her eyes and takes a moment to remember it all. The intoxicating terror of applying to UC Sunnydale. The feeling of satisfaction when her father had finally agreed she could go. The all-consuming terror he’d change his mind. “I know it’s not as grand, though.”
“No, it is. I mean, I get it. It was a fresh start.”
“Yeah,” Tara says, resting her head on her knees. “Do you think I’ve wasted it?”
“No,” Buffy says. “You got Willow. You got Dawn. You got all of us. How could it be a waste?”
Tara picks a pebble off the porch and tosses it into the garden.
“I don’t know.”
Buffy takes a long, hard look at her.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Tara says, exhaling. “I think I am.”
“Does Willow know?”
“No. I haven’t told anyone. I didn’t even really know myself until you said it out loud.”
Buffy turns around and glances at Dawn’s window. The light is still on. Since Spike left, she’s been leaving it on, so he’d have somewhere to go if he ever came back.
“I don’t know if she can handle anyone else leaving.”
“I’m not leaving her,” Tara says softly. “And I’m not leaving you.”
“But… you’re going.”
“Just out of this house. But I’ll still be in town. And even if I left, got shot or eaten by a bear or moved to Paris, I’d still be your friend, Buffy. Even if you don’t want me to be anymore.”
“Of course, I still want you to be! I just… I’m trying to wrap my head around it. Things seemed like they were going so well.”
Tara drums her fingers against the side of her mug.
“I think… I think there are some things that just can’t be fixed. And you don’t know until you try to fix them. It’s hard, when you love someone so much, to realize you have to say goodbye.”
“I get it,” Buffy says, thinking of how, years ago, she’d sent Angel to hell to save the world. “I get it.”
When Tara tells Willow she’s leaving, Willow takes it with a kind of dead-eyed acceptance, like she’d seen the writing on the wall. Maybe it had been obvious to everyone but them, because when she told Xander, he’d merely shrugged and asked if she needed any help finding a place or moving her stuff. The only one as blindsided as she’d been was Dawn, who sobbed for a whole afternoon.
“I just don’t understand what happened,” Dawn says to her from the passenger seat, when Tara takes her to the mall in an attempt to distract her. “It was going so well.”
“Sometimes things just get too hard,” Tara says, though she knows that’s no sort of explanation.
“Aren’t you supposed to work through hard things?” Dawn asks irritably. “That’s what you always tell me.”
“There’s some things that can’t be worked through.”
Dawn asks more questions, but Tara can’t really answer, so she puts a Joni Mitchell CD and thinks about circle games, and about how there’s no going back.
Buffy drives her to her new apartment, which is in equal parts kind and terrifying, since Buffy is a notoriously awful driver and everything Tara owns sits in her trunk, ready to smashed in an accident.
“I’ll drive carefully,” Buffy promises, as she drives fifty over the speed limit.
Tara nods and holds onto the console in quiet terror.
“I’ll help you unpack when we get there. With slayer strength it’ll be over in like, forty-five minutes.”
“Thank you,” Tara says quietly. “But won’t Willow be mad?”
“Let her be,” Buffy responds. “I’m her best friend, she’ll get over it. And besides, you’re my friend too.”
Tara smiles a little and looks through the windshield onto the open road. She slips the Joni Mitchell CD into the CD drive.
“Ugh, not this, can’t you listen to something from the last decade?” Buffy teases, though she makes no move to turn it off, and they sit quietly together, listening.
There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game