Work Text:
1. The Pack
“I ate a pig?” says Xander. “I mean, the whole trichinosis issue aside…yuck!”
It’s a brand new, hyena-free school day, and Buffy, Willow, and Xander are climbing the Sunnydale High staircase slowly, basking in the California sun and the feeling of a town and a high school returned, however temporarily, to normal. Buffy leans towards Xander with her best reassurey face. “It wasn’t really you,” she says.
“I remember going on the field trip, and then going down to the hyena house, and next thing some guy’s holding Willow and he’s got a knife,” says Xander.
“You saved my life,” says Willow, smiling.
“Ahem.” The three look up to see Giles a few steps above them. “You did indeed save Willow, and you deserve congratulations for acting so admirably in that regard. But Xander, I think it would be best for everyone if you gave up this ruse that you have suffered some kind of memory loss.”
“But I did! I remember flashes, maybe, but that pig thing—no way! Hey—I didn’t do anything else, did I, around you guys? Anything embarrassing?”
Buffy and Willow share a glance, then nervously shake their heads. Giles, however, stops at the top of the staircase, blocking the three from walking any further. He has removed his glasses and is wiping them on his shirt.
“I’m not sure what you did, Xander, but I’m sure you remember what it was. And from the lengths you are going to try to distance yourself from the experience, I would venture to suggest an apology to either Willow or Buffy is in order?”
Xander looks down at his beat-up skater shoes. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I…I’m sorry, Buffy. I don’t know what came over me, but I guess that’s not really an excuse.” He looks at her. “We cool?”
Buffy crosses her arms. “Not really. I don’t know why you lied--that makes it all so much worse.” She takes Willow’s arm. “We should get to class.” As the two girls walk away, Giles pulls Xander aside, his face stern.
2. Consequences
“Buffy?” Buffy looks up, glad for a distraction from deciphering the old print in the first of a whole stack of demonology books. It’s just her and Xander in the library at the moment—Willow has a lab report due the next day (“Before all this demony Scooby research came along, I never would have left something like this so last minute, Buff!”), and Giles has gone to brew more tea.
“Yeah?” she says. Xander looks nervous—he’s ripping a history worksheet into a neat little pile of scraps on the table, which Buffy thinks is probably not the greatest coping mechanism.
When he says nothing, Buffy tries to smile encouragingly. “Angel told me how you tried to talk with Faith,” she says. Xander stiffens, and she continues, “Xander, it wasn’t your fault she tried to kill you, and I appreciate the effort, I really do. She’s just…none of us know how to get through to her right now. It’s OK that your plan didn’t work.”
“Yeah, I know. Our connection was more like a piece of string than a steel cable. A breaky piece of string. But that’s not…it’s not really the attempted murder part that’s giving me the wiggins. If you know what I mean.”
Buffy shakes her head. “You’re going to have to explain that a bit more. I’m confuso-girl over here.”
“See, before she did the hands on my throat thing,” says Xander, looking down at his history assignment confetti, “She did a bit of the…hands in other places thing.” He smirks in a way that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Oh?” Buffy raises her eyebrows.
Xander shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t like that.” He takes a deep breath. “Tell me if this sounds crazy, and I’m only saying it because she could tell someone her version of what happened, and can you maybe not spread this around?” Buffy nods. “But yeah, she was on top of me, and kissing me, and it just felt—I didn’t like it. I mean, a part of me did, a very specific part”—at this Buffy is worried she blushes—“but I didn’t want it to be happening. Is that—could that be rape, Buff?”
Buffy reaches out her arms and the two hold each other as best they can across the book-laden table. She searches for the right words. “I think if you want to call it that, you totally can. That’s, like, major suckage. I’m really sorry that happened to you.” Major suckage? That’s the best she can do? She is supposed to stand against the forces of darkness! But this is a different kind of darkness, one they’re all only beginning to comprehend.
It’s a long moment before they break the hug.
3. Seeing Red
Tara pulls Willow’s keys out of her messenger bag as she approaches her former—and possibly future—home. She left her set of keys behind when she moved out, and they seem to have been lost in one of Willow’s magic supply purges. “We’ll get you new ones tomorrow, baby,” Willow said this afternoon. “If you want,” she added, and both women remembered how many questions were still hanging in the air between them. “For now, you can use mine. Let yourself in—I’ll be back as soon as I’m done my calculus midterm.”
When she reaches the front door of 1630 Revello Drive, however, Tara finds it unlocked. Maybe Dawn is home, she thinks, or maybe Buffy has already returned from patrolling. She opens the door, and is about to head to the kitchen to make sleepy-time tea—Willow’s favourite post-test-writing beverage—when she notices a familiar black leather duster hanging over the staircase railing. Does that mean Spike and Buffy—? Should she give them some privacy? Tara tiptoes towards the back of the house when she hears a noise she doesn’t expect. It sounds like Buffy is crying.
Heart pounding, Tara ascends the staircase, not sure what she’ll find at the top. She remembers Buffy’s tearful confession to her not long ago in the living room of this very house. Is she crying about Spike again? Or is the leather jacket just a coincidence? Maybe something has happened with the Trio, or, oh goddess no, with Dawn.
The cries are coming from the bathroom. “Buffy?” says Tara, knocking on the door. She hears another sob, then Buffy’s voice, shakier than usual: “Yeah?”
“C-can I come in?” asks Tara, her stutter, mostly absent these days, betraying the nervousness she feels at what she might find on the other side of the bathroom door.
“Sure,” says Buffy. She doesn’t sound sure to Tara, but Tara pushes the door open and enters.
The room is filled with the steam of a half-run bath, the mirrors fogged, the tiles slightly slippery. Buffy is sitting on the floor by the bathtub, her robe askew, her hair a mess. Her face is red with tears. Tara sees a purple bruise blossoming on one of Buffy’s thighs.
“Can I sit?” she asks gently, gesturing to the space on the floor beside Buffy. Buffy shrugs and nods. They sit in silence for a long moment, watching the condensation slide down the surface of the mirror. Finally, Tara says, “Do you want to talk? Or do you want me to go? Or—or Buffy, I can just sit here, if you just need someone to be with you right now.”
Buffy seems to be thinking for a minute. Then, she says, “Spike was here. He—oh god, Tara, he tried to rape me. I fought him off, but…” Buffy trails off, her words hanging between them in the steamy air.
Tara wishes she knew the right thing to say. Is there a right thing to say? “Buffy,” she begins, “I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve that; nobody does.”
“Didn’t I?” says Buffy, her slow, silent tears turning to loud, gasping sobs. “Didn’t I deserve it? I used him, I knew he loved me and I—I fucked him, even though I didn’t feel that way, just because I wanted—I don’t even know, Tara! And what if I led him on? And what was I doing, anyway, sleeping with—with a soulless demon like that? I knew he would hurt me. What if I wanted that? What if I was asking for it? Oh god.”
“No. Buffy, no matter what you did, he had no right to do that. No one ever does.” Tara feels angry, so angry, like when Willow told her she did the memory spell “to make things better.” Violate you? I didn’t mean anything like that. I just wanted us not to fight anymore.
Buffy is silent for a minute. “I know,” she says finally. “And I defended myself, I got so angry at him, I told him he was out of line. I just can’t help thinking—I mean, why did I—why am I such a mess, Tara?” Buffy throws her arms around Tara’s body and hugs her tight enough to remind Tara of the whole super strength thing. Tara tentatively returns the hug, and they sit like that for what feels like forever. Buffy begins rocking back and forth, and Tara keeps holding her, murmuring, “It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t deserve that. It’s not your fault.”
Buffy pulls away first, wiping her tears with the sleeve of her robe. She laughs, but there’s no joy in the sound. “I keep doing this to you, Tara, just falling apart every time I see you. I’m so sorry, really. I’m probably the least fun person to be around, especially now that you and Willow are making with the making up.”
Tara puts a hand on Buffy’s shoulder. “Please don’t apologize,” she says, biting her lip. “I’m your friend, and you’re going through a lot right now. It’s OK.”
Buffy smiles ever so slightly. “Thanks,” she says. “You know I’d do the same for you, right? You can come to me about anything.”
“Thanks,” says Tara, but she knows she can’t. Buffy has too much on her shoulders already, what with the resurrection Tara sometimes regrets taking part in, and Dawn, and bills, and demon slaying, and Xander and Anya’s wedding disaster, and the Trio, and now this. She almost tells Buffy everything, there beside her on the bathroom floor, almost tells her about the moment Xander stepped on the crystal and her memories flooded back and Willow’s body against hers went from feeling comforting to horrifying in an instant, and about the terrible feeling she gets in her gut when she thinks of the times she and Willow had sex that she might have said no to if she’d remembered their fight. She opens her mouth, but then Buffy starts crying again, and Tara realizes this isn’t the time, and that really, it might be a long while before Buffy is able to take on any more of other people’s pain.
Tara realizes something else as well. When Buffy goes to her room, Tara goes to the kitchen and puts on the kettle. While the water boils, she rummages around in her bag for a pen and paper, then sits down at the island where she spent a summer feeding Dawn pancakes and trying to make conversation with the Buffybot, and begins to write. When she is finished, she sets the paper on the counter beside a warm mug of sleepy-time tea and a set of house keys with a cat-shaped flash drive keychain. Then she slips out the front door.
When Willow comes home, head spinning with multi-variable differential equations, she finds the tea, and her keychain, and the note. She has to read it through three times before the words start to make sense. It says, Willow, sweetie, I’m sorry. I thought if we started again we’d both feel better. I thought I could trust you again, because I do love you, but it still hurts so much, the way you violated my mind, and kind of my body too. When I’m with you, even when I’m really happy, I can’t stop wondering if what I’m feeling is real or if it’s just another spell. I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being with you, it’s that I deserve to be happy and safe, and I wish I felt safe with you but I still don’t. I can’t do this. I love you more than anything, but Willow—this is goodbye.
4. Grave
Spike’s soul hits him like a punch to the gut and he lets himself collapse to the cave floor, spent. Hot, stabbing guilt rips through his body like teeth through flesh—and oh, he has dug his teeth into so many bodies, and suddenly their memories are bubbling up inside him and he feels himself gasp as though choking on the final screams of long-dead victims. He isn’t sure how to even begin to exist like this; it feels like more than his body can hold, like his skin is stretched too thin over the bulge of inadequate apologies.
He knows one thing, however, with perfect clarity, even as he feels his mind fracturing and his body going impossibly tense. This plan, these trials, this soul—they haven’t made him into the man Buffy deserves. His love still burns in a way that feels more dangerous than warm, and while his newly-amplified guilt may very well reign him in better than a chip ever could—while memories of his hands against her wrists, of hot bathtub steam and cold tiled floor, are pounding against his chest worse than the demon he was just fighting—he knows he could still do it. It’s easier to fight it now, easier to see the wrongness of trying to force someone to feel like that, but it’s not as though his frustration, his anger, his obsession have melted away.
All along, Spike realizes, he has assumed it was the demon in him that made him hurt Buffy like that, when really, it was the man. Bollocks.
5. The Killer In Me
Kennedy looks around, disoriented by Amy’s teleportation spell, to find herself back in Willow’s bedroom, the sheets still rumpled from when she was pretending to be sick earlier that day. Willow—or is it really Warren now? The figure keeps switching back and forth—stands by the chest of drawers, holding something Kennedy can’t make out.
“Well, that was a hell of a thing,” says Kennedy. Willow turns, and Kennedy sees what Willow’s holding—a bunch of tiny pink flowers. What is going on?
“This is what I am,” says Willow. “What I do.” Her body morphs into Warren’s once more. “I took the woman I loved—the woman I will always love—and made her be how I wanted her. I tried to control her, mess with her mind.” She’s Willow again, and she’s running her hand over the flowers, and Kennedy thinks she sees flashes of magic. “We should have been forever, but even before she died I kept messing it up,” she says, back to Warren’s body once again. “So what makes you think you’d be safe with me, bitch? What makes you think I’ve changed?” Kennedy can see tears in Willow’s eyes, her red hair flickering with Warren’s spiky brown, and the potential slayer tries to think of what to say. Fuck, what has she gotten herself into? And why does she sense this girl is worth it?
“Willow, is this you talking, or Warren?” Kennedy asks.
“What makes you think it couldn’t be both? I did this, and so did she—I hurt someone I loved a whole lot. I don’t know if I’m any better than him.” Willow is crying for real now, and Kennedy tries to take a step closer, but Willow holds up the flower. “Know what this is? I could make you forget this ever happened. I have other tricks too, just like Warren did.” Willow drops to the floor. “Oh, Katrina, baby,” she says, back to being Warren, staring at someone Kennedy cannot see. “Tara, I’m so sorry.”
“Willow,” says Kennedy, kneeling down beside her. “I don’t think you want to hurt me. I think you know why that wasn’t OK, and if Tara could forgive you for it, then I forgive you too. This is just magic, and I think I’m figuring the whole magic thing out. It’s just like fairy tales.”
“What are you doing?” asks Willow as Kennedy leans in.
“Bringing you back to life. Showing you I trust you. Trust that you’ve changed. Can I kiss you, Willow?” Slowly, apprehensively, Willow nods.
As Kennedy feels Warren’s rough lips morph back into Willow’s smooth ones, she slips the witch a little tongue. Kennedy has never met a girl who felt her piercing and didn’t later confess to imagining where else that tongue could go. Kennedy knows she could walk away now, but she also knows she isn’t going to. She’s taken a lot of leaps of faith lately—what’s one more?