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Willow dies happy. She dies after a night with Tara. She dies having beaten addiction. She dies forgiven. She dies knowing that her best friends are making up outside. None of that matters because Willow is twenty one years old and has her life in front of her – or had, up until the shot blasts through her and Tara’s blue sweater is splattered red. None of it matters because Tara loves Willow and she doesn’t want her to die, even though she does, cradled in Tara’s arms, while Tara sobs.
Xander runs into the house when Tara tells the paramedics that another person has been shot upstairs. His hands are streaked with Buffy’s blood, and as he runs, droplets leave his fingers and dot the route through the house to the stairs. One of the paramedics follows him, and Tara trails after them both, the hope that made her run downstairs for help rapidly draining away again. Her body feels very heavy, like she is walking through deep water. Watching through deep water as Xander clutches at Willow’s hand and calls her name over and over. The red streaks on his fingers smears up his wrists. Willow’s blood and Buffy’s, mixing on their best friend’s hands.
“I’m sorry” the paramedic says, “She’s gone.”
Xander howls. Tara stands staring, which is perhaps why the paramedic feels the need to explain, “The bullet hit her heart. I’m afraid she died more or less instantly.”
“Yes, I know” Tara hears herself say, “But how? Why?”
Buffy is taken away in the ambulance. Tara and Xander follow in the car. They leave Willow lying on the bedroom floor but Tara tells herself – speaking to herself through her stunned mind – that Willow wouldn’t mind. Willow has discarded her body like a shed outfit, like one of her bright, fuzzy sweaters or comfy dungarees. Willow would want them to go with Buffy just as surely as Buffy would want them to stay with Willow. But Willow, being dead, gets the deciding vote.
Dawn is still in school. Tara goes there after the staff at the hospital reach some degree of certainty that Buffy won’t die too. Half way up the steps to the school building, she stops and stares down at her sweater, noticing again that it is spotted with Willow’s blood. Blood that circuited Willow’s body, powered by Willow’s whole and beating heart. It doesn’t seem right that it is cold already. Dawn can’t see the blood so Tara pulls the sweater off, turns the blood to her body and ties the sweater round her waist.
Anya shows up in the hospital a few hours into their long wait to see how hurt Buffy is. Distantly, Tara wonders who called her. It must have been Xander, for all that he has barely said a word. Dawn has been nestled against Tara’s side, tucked under her arm the whole time. But, when Xander is off pacing on the other side of the room and Dawn leaves to call her dad, Anya murmurs, “It was Warren, wasn’t it?”
“Yes” Tara frowns. She doesn’t want to say Warren’s name. She wants to keep it off her tongue and out of her ears. But she has to ask, “Is it on the local news or something?”
“No.” Anya glances back towards Dawn, who is stabbing numbers into the pay phone at the other end of the corridor. “I felt him.”
“Felt –?”
“His desire for vengeance.”
“Oh.” Tara winces. This is another loss for Xander, and for poor Dawnie. For Buffy, when she wakes up. When. To Tara – terrible to admit, even in her own head – it makes no difference at all. Willow is dead. Why care what Anya does?
She remembers how Willow never trusted Anya, not completely. Would Willow be unsurprised if she was here? Sad to be right or just resigned? Suddenly, Tara isn’t sure. Isn’t sure what Willow would say and Willow isn’t here to tell her. She has her arms wrapped around herself. She tightens her grip.
“I drove to the house to warn Buffy” Anya continues, “But no-one was there.”
A wave of sorrow engulfs Tara because Willow was there. Willow was there. She feels she has been dropped from a great height into a cold and vast blue-grey ocean. She is drowning.
When Dawn returns from the pay phone, Tara shoots Anya a look, a Don’t tell her you’re a vengeance demon look. Anya smiles uncertainly. Willow, Tara thinks, would understand. Willow always understood Tara’s looks. Goddess, how can she bear this?
“I couldn’t get through to dad” Dawn tells them, “So I called Giles. He’s says he’ll be on the next flight.”
“He was speaking metaphorically” Anya tells her, “The next flight is probably in five minutes and he won’t be out his house and at the airport in time. He just means he’ll be here as soon as he can.”
“I know that” Dawn says, though without much heat.
Giles will be here soon, Tara tells herself. Distantly, she recognises that it might help a bit. Closer up, she can’t see how.
Dawn slumps into her vacated seat, resumes her position against Tara’s side. Tara puts her arm around the girl automatically. Dawn says, “Hopefully Buffy will be awake by the time he gets here” and Tara thinks, right, because that is what we are all waiting for. Because there are still things to wait for and worry about. How strange that the world kept spinning after her mom died and will keep on spinning now, with Willow dead. How almost callous of it. She tightens her grip around Dawn to remind herself that it isn’t callous at all.
Buffy doesn’t die. Tara is aware that Willow would be very happy about that. Tara will be very happy about that later, when she can feel anything at all.
The police take photographs of Willow on the bedroom floor. They take witness statements. Then they take Willow away.
Xander remains hollow-eyed on the couch while Tara cooks food which Dawn dutifully picks at. When Tara encourages the teen to go to bed, Xander glances up and says, absently, “Yeah, you should sleep, Dawnie.” It is the first time he has said more than one word at a time since it happened. From the howl to the hospital and home he was reduced to brief acknowledgements: “Right” and “Okay” and “Oh”. Maybe this is why Dawn obeys, leaving Tara to make coffee for herself and Xander. It gives her something to do. Besides, they might need to drive back to the hospital; The caffeine will help them stay alert.
Willow’s absence is so palpable as they sit sipping coffee that she almost goes all the way round to become a presence again. A Willow-shaped hole in the air between them. Where is she, Tara wonders. Which afterlife did she find her way to? What is it like there? Not knowing where Willow might be makes her heart flutter, makes her senses jolt to alertness as if she could spring up and run out and find her girl.
“I never thought this would happen to us” Xander says, interrupting the spiral. “I mean, you hear about it, don’t you? Gun violence. But I didn’t think it would happen to any of us. I was expecting demons, or vampires or something not this. This is worse.” He looks to Tara like she will say something comforting. She can think of nothing. Xander sets his mug down, only half drunk and they watch the steam curl and fade. “How can we stand this?” Xander asks, and still Tara can think of nothing to say.
Tara doesn’t ask anyone else to clean the bedroom. She could ask Anya. She could maybe ask a neighbour. She couldn’t ask Xander, grey faced on the couch, staring off into nowhere. No, Tara would have to ask Anya or a neighbour. Or maybe she could call someone from college, one of the women she has been living with since she and Willow split. Or even a cleaning firm. All these options occur to her. But the thing is, Tara wants to be the one to clean the room. Maybe it’s macabre, but she wants to be the one to pick up the glass, piece by piece, to scrub the blood from the carpet. Willow’s blood, which swam in Willow’s body when Willow was still in it. She wants to fold her red spotted blue sweater and put it away in a shoebox she finds under the bed. She wants to add a shard of glass from the shattered window and keep it, sharp and jagged forever. She isn’t sure why.
Buffy is transferred overnight to a hospital in LA. It will need to be paid for so, the next day (the first Willowless day), Anya arrives at the Summers’ house to busy herself with the paperwork. Xander glances up as she enters, then stands. “I um, I should be going” he says, “Let me know if the hospital calls.”
“I will” Tara promises. She worries about where he is going, alone and grief-stunned. She worries about whether he slept at all on the couch while she lay sleepless in Buffy’s bed because it was empty and closer to Dawn’s room and because nothing could induce her to sleep in the bed she shared with Willow, which is now empty in a way that Buffy’s bed isn’t. But Tara got up this morning, she put on clothes and she made Dawn’s breakfast and that is all she can do: She can’t think of what to say to make sure Xander is alright.
And he is not alright. How can he be?
“Have you spoken to her parents yet?” Anya interrupts her thoughts.
For a moment, Tara thinks of Buffy and Dawn’s father. But then she realises, “Oh, Willow’s parents? N-no. The, the police, they…”
A kind half smile flickers across Anya’s face. “I was thinking once I’ve gone over Buffy’s insurance policies, I could get some copies of some photos to give them.”
This makes a lot of sense. Willow’s friends and Tara probably have more photographs of Willow since she started college than her parents do. Tara nods, even though photos seem meagre substitute for a living child. An only child.
Giles arrives a few hours later on a red-eye flight and seems to magically know what to do and say. Or really, he knows what to do and say because he has been through it before, which is the opposite of magic when Tara thinks about it. He phones Dawn’s school to sign her off for the foreseeable future (there isn’t much of it to see anymore), then goes out to buy a lot of food so they won’t have to worry about that for a while. He checks on Xander and reports that he is “as well as can be expected”, a euphemism that could cover more or less any scenario and which Tara finds she cannot face questioning. Then Giles hugs Tara, then sits with her through the wretchedly slow minutes that time has ground down to without resorting to platitudes.
Dawn wants to visit Spike before Giles drives her to LA. “He should know about Buffy” she insists. So Tara accompanies her through the cemetery to the vampire’s crypt. Spike isn’t there. Clem tells them he will likely be gone for a long time. It isn’t a matter of great importance to Tara. In this new, Willowless world, everyone except Dawn feels several paces removed, as though she is watching them through a fine blue mist. Shadows and silhouettes, all of them. Tara cares about Buffy, Xander, Giles and Anya fiercely, but her caring feels more like knowledge than emotion right now. All her emotions feel sealed away, eking painfully out only when she cannot help it. She can’t possibly find it in herself to worry about Spike right now, even though Dawn goes off to LA with concern for the vampire written across her face. Between worry for her sister and grief for Willow, Tara wonders that Dawn can find the room.
Anya deals with insurance, phones the Doublemeat Palace and researches welfare that Buffy can apply for to get her to pay the bills until she is well enough to work. Briefly, Tara envisions a world where she visits Willow in hospital, in a world where the bullet was an inch higher or lower or to the side. Pictures telling her that, don’t worry, she phoned the college and they said not to worry about needing time off. Then she snaps back to reality with a painful jolt.
Anya stops being busy only once, while Giles and Dawn are at Buffy’s bedside and Xander is in his apartment doing whatever he was doing when Giles visited. Should she call him, Tara wonders. She should call him. She fingers the edges of the book of poetry she is reading – novels require too much concentration in the Willowless world – and wishes he’d call her. And then Anya sets aside the papers she is looking over and twists to watch Tara. “You should try to sleep” she suggests.
“I h-haven’t been, really.”
“Would it help to be out the house? You could go to wherever you’ve been since the break up.”
The break up feels a long way away and Tara realises that Anya doesn’t know, “We made up. We skipped to the kissing part.”
Anya takes this in with a sad smile, and Tara is reminded that for all she doesn’t look it, Anya is actually very old. “That’s good” she says.
“Why?” It seems remarkable to Tara that anything about this could be good.
“She had one last night of happiness.” Anya shrugs. Then she pauses, apparently struggling to read Tara’s face. Adds, “It might not make any difference right now, but it will. When you look back on it in years.”
Goddess, thinks Tara, years without Willow. And Anya is wrong, of course, because it won’t get easier and because, “If we hadn’t made up, she wouldn’t have been standing by the bedroom window that time of day. If we hadn’t made up, she wouldn’t have been shot.”
“If Warren hadn’t shot her, she wouldn’t have been shot.” Anya pauses, then turns the chair to face her fully. “All you’d need to do is make a wish, you know. Then he’d die painfully. If he was really lucky.” She lets that sink in, then adds, “I could do it, or I could put out a call. A lot of vengeance demons specialise in wishes from family of murder victims.”
The book is still open on Tara’s lap. Startling to realise that she hasn’t thought much about Warren today, for all that he is the man who stained her life red and took the world away.
“You could wish for anything to happen to him. Anything at all. If you want ideas –”
“No thank you.” Tara is surprised to find that she doesn’t care all that much about what happens to Warren. Actually, it doesn’t really feel like he killed Willow. Perhaps that is just shock and denial whispering in her ear, but it feels like Willow was killed by a violent world, and by human evil in general, and not by one embittered man. Willow is too strong, in every sense of the world, to be taken down by a man like Warren.
But then, men like Warren kill strong women every day.
“I wish…”
Anya leans forward a little. Tara notes that she looks almost hungry. Really, of course, it will be D’Hoffryn who feeds. Tara has read about that. Vengeance demons tread a fine line between human and demonic, being as they are still-souled once-human women plucked from their mortal lives and granted immortality by D’Hoffryn for as long as they grant wishes. He doesn’t do it for free. The pain caused by the wishes, it’s what he eats.
“I wish…” Could she wish for no more women to be murdered? A wish like that would change the world. But at what cost? Because there always is one. The wishes never turn out the way the wishers want. More pain for D’Hoffryn to feed on.
Probably Willow would be brave enough to find out. Tara stumbles. “I w-wish…” Would it be safer to just wish Warren dead, clean and instant? What cost could there be to that?
Being like him, that would be the cost.
If only Willow was here. She would know what to do. “Anya?”
“Yes?”
“Can a wish bring someone back from the dead?”
For a moment, Anya looks as old as she is. “No. It can’t. It wouldn’t be vengeance.”
For a moment, Tara feels a flicker of disgust. Power to take life but not to give it? What is the point of that?
But then she remembers how frightened Buffy looked when they pulled her out of heaven. How broken. Perhaps it is kinder to let Willow be. Unless, “Could a wish make it so they never died?”
“That’s the same thing. It doesn’t work like that.”
Fresh pain quivers Tara’s soul. So things won’t get better. But maybe she can save other people this pain if, “Then I wish no-one else will ever be murdered. Ever.”
Anya deflates a little. “Still not vengeance.” She slips closer to the edge of her seat, reaches solicitously for Tara’s arm. “You’re trying to fix things and that’s not what vengeance is. Just try to focus on Warren. On how much you hate him and the awful thing he’s done. Doesn’t a man like that deserve to be wished into hell?”
“He’ll go there anyway.”
“So send him there sooner.”
That is all this is, Tara realises. She can’t wish Willow back and she can’t wish other women safe. She can only wish hell on Warren a little sooner than he’s going to get it anyway and at the cost of serving – albeit indirectly – a monster like D’Hoffryn. At the cost of reaching for the very worst in her mind and giving it to a demon to play with.
Anya is still watching her. After a moment, Tara realises why. “Oh. I, um. I won’t wish.”
Anya draws back a little. “But why?”
“Because I’m not him.”
“You think you have to be him to do harm? To someone like him? That’s stupid.”
Anya looks so puzzled and sad that Tara has to quash an urge to apologise to her. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Good, because I don’t.” Anya turns back to the paperwork and stares at it. “You know, I was rusty on the whole vengeance thing. Since I got back into it, it didn’t feel as fun as it was before I met all of you. But I get it now. I get why it’s needed.” She sighs, then stands. “I think I’m done here” she says, very gently, then fetches her coat and leaves. Because the paperwork is complete, it takes Tara a long time to realises she was actually referring to their friendship.
Xander doesn’t call. He folds himself away into his grief. He doesn’t visit the house, or visit Buffy in hospital, relying instead on Giles and Tara to bring him news, along with food which they cram into a fridge that doesn’t seem to be getting any emptier. It is simultaneously both completely understandable and not all that helpful. Tara is very aware that they are both navigating the same ocean but only one of them still manages to do Dawn’s laundry.
How ruthless she must be, she marvels, to think such a thing.
Dawn slinks downstairs a few nights into the Willowless world, and leans against Tara as she washes up. Tara has her hands full so she leans her head to rest on the child’s head. Dawn whispers, “I was so mean to her about the magic.”
“She knew you love her, Dawnie.”
“Did she? Are you sure?”
“Yes.” There will, Tara realises, come a day when she won’t know what Willow would think of a person or situation. But on this matter she can still speak with authority. “She loved you very much and she knew you love her.”
Mrs Rosenberg is a force to be reckoned with at the press conference, all in black, with sharp eyes and sharp tone as she urges the public to come forward with any information. She insists on Tara being there, though the police decide to “Keep things simple” by euphemistically referring to her as “the victim’s close friend”. Mrs Rosenberg grips Tara’s hand fiercely while she speaks. She doesn’t cry for the cameras, refuses to be someone else’s idea of a grieving mother. She holds her ocean inside, where they can’t see it.
Tara doesn’t let all the pain show on the surface either. If she did, there would be no end to it. So she cleans and does the laundry, she cooks Dawnie’s meals because someone has to. Inside, she is still drifting on her ocean like a survivor of a ship wreck. She is distantly aware that Giles is also taking care of things. They work around each other, wordlessly taking on distinct and somewhat gendered roles to keep the Summers’ household ticking over. Giles drives her to pick up her books, clothes and Miss Kitty Fantastico from her shared student digs. He takes out the trash, he pays the bills, he drives Dawn to LA for hospital visits. Tara changes the sheets on all the beds but the one behind the closed door. She checks on Xander, still empty-eyed in his dark apartment. She cooks. She lets Giles phone Willow’s parents about funeral arrangements, lets him call the bank, answer the neighbours’ questions. She sits with him in the garden where Buffy’s blood has already seeped into the earth like an offering.
“I dated a man for the best part of the seventies” Giles tells her out of the blue and Tara looks at him. Ordinarily she would be surprised, and would have to try and hide it, but this is the Willowless world where surprise – like everything else – is muted and blue. Here, she simply waits for him to go on. He says, “It was…a very different experience to being in a heterosexual pairing. We couldn’t be open in public places. Where other couples could kiss and hold hands, we had to share looks and not too many of those.”
Did he ever tell Willow? Tara wonders. The invisible ocean shivers, rocking her on a fresh wave of pain at the thought that she will never be able to ask Willow the question. She knows from losing her mother that the waves keep coming. She has sailed this ocean before.
“It created a particular bond” Giles goes on, “An us against the world sort of feeling.”
“Like me and Willow had” Tara says, “M-more than maybe Willow and Oz.” Oh goddess, who will tell Oz?
“The world has changed since then, of course. I’m sure the two of you didn’t have to be as careful as I did. But I know that other people’s reactions would have been something you sometimes had to cope with together.”
“We, we get some second glances” Tara admits, “Some sleezy comments from college guys. Sometimes people ask…asked…if we were paying together or separately. And when we said together, sometimes they’d know. A-and usually they’d be fine about it but we could see them know. If we were a boy-girl couple, no one would be surprised.”
Giles nods. “It’s not better or worse than any other relationship but it is different. It shows you different things about yourself, too. To be with a person of the same sex, you need to learn and accept things about yourself. To be at peace with going against societal expectations, you need to engage in a certain amount of soul searching. Being with someone of the opposite sex usually requires no such thing.”
“It was Willow who had to do the-the self discovery. I already knew.” Tara grips one hand with the other.
“I’m sure she was happy to discover that part of herself. She loved you very deeply.”
Loved, Tara notes. Can Willow love now, wherever she is? And where is she?
“What I mean to say is, there are aspects to your relationship that your friends won’t understand unless you choose to tell them. And just losing a partner at all it’s, well it’s thankfully not something many young people have experienced.”
“But you have” Tara remembers. Willow told her about Jenny Calendar. Tara wishes suddenly that she’d met her.
“I have. So if you ever need to talk – day or night – you can call me.”
“Thank you, Mr Giles.”
Buffy is still unconscious in the hospital in LA. It is an enviable position to be in. There is a lot Tara would give to be unconscious right now. A lot she would give – the darkness in her whispers – for Willow to be the one unconscious and Buffy to be the one dead. But she doesn’t want to think about the pain that would cause Dawn and, of course, Willow, so she quashes the traitor thought, prises it from her mind and hurls it into the ocean inside her. She focuses on talking to Buffy, in hope that Buffy can hear her. She tells her about Xander and how he can’t do laundry while lost at sea. “M-maybe it’s a guy thing” she concludes, “When my mom died, Donny and I both grieved but I also cooked.” Still no response from Buffy, so Tara adds, “You can’t die, Buffy. Xander wouldn’t survive that and then it would just be me and Dawn left.”
“And me” adds Giles, who has come back in from getting lunch without her noticing. “I wouldn’t just abandon you.” He comes in to sit beside her. “But Buffy isn’t going to die.” He says it like he has simply decided it will be so and Tara nods, although she is far from convinced. The world, after all, has done awful things before.
Giles drives her home. As the road slips past under the car, Tara tells him, “We skipped the hard part. B-but we would have had to go back to it. We would have needed to talk about everything that happened.”
“And you’re not sure you would have stayed together in the end?”
“I am sure we would. I’m sure we would have grown old together.” Or is that, Tara’s traitor thoughts whisper, the grief talking? Grief which shadows her, blue and grey and gentler, in some ways, than the fractious pain of a break up. No one can ever take Willow away from her again. Willow, who died loving her. Tara pushes doubts and darkness away, makes an effort to focus on reality. She tries, “We would have made things work. I’m just not sure how. I’m not s-sure what we would have looked like after. Or during. I-I mean, I don’t know if I would have moved straight back in, or how much magic Willow would have ended up being able to do again or how comfortable I’d be with her doing it. Or how much we would have talked about…about everything that happened.”
“And now you’ll never know” Giles finishes, quietly.
“And I feel like a fraud.”
“A fraud? Why?”
“Everyone’s treating me like the grieving widow. But we broke up! I left her!”
“Tara, you left because she was abusing magics. Living with an addict is never easy.”
“Love isn’t easy. I could have stayed.”
“Willow knew that you loved her. She died knowing that.”
“She…she slept with me. Back when she was doing too much magic. After she wiped my memories.” Tara finds she has wrapped her arms around herself protectively and she lets them drop. Bracing herself against Willow feels like a betrayal.
Giles takes a deep breath and his fingers tighten against the steering wheel. “I am so very sorry.”
“It was… I needed to talk with her about it. One day. When we’d finished kissing and making up. But now I can’t so I’m carrying it around. I’m filling up with all the talking we should have done our last night.”
“You didn’t know it was your last night” Giles tells her patiently, “And would you have done anything differently if you had?”
“No.” No, she wouldn’t have raked up the past if she’d known Willow would die in the morning. She would have done exactly what she did: Held Willow close. Made love to her.
Even if it meant she had to carry the unraked past around with her forever. “Mr Giles? If…If we hadn’t made up, she probably wouldn’t have been standing at the window.”
“Now, I won’t have you blaming yourself for that. All the blame in this belongs to Warren. Do you understand?”
“Yes” But understanding and feeling are different things. But then, Tara thinks, watching the desert pass, would she change it, if she’d known? If she had to choose between never being with Willow again or Willow dying, would she choose so Willow lived?
Of course she would.
Buffy blames herself. “I should have stopped him” she tells Tara, “This is all my fault.” This is the first time they have seen each other since Buffy woke up so they are hugging, and Buffy says it into Tara’s hair.
“Buffy, no!” Tara pulls away to look at her. She reaches for the right words to say, and finds what Giles said to her. “All the blame in this belongs to Warren.”
Buffy doesn’t seem completely convinced but she says no more about it. Possibly she can see how much it would hurt Tara.
Oz hugs Tara at the funeral, after she has read a poem she carefully chose and will never be able to read again. She gets a lot of hugs that day. Mr and Mrs Rosenberg, Giles, Dawn, Willow’s distant relatives, girls from college, Willow’s tutors. A lot of people from Sunnydale High show up too. “A lot of them didn’t even like her” mutters Xander at the wake, after he has given Tara his own hug, the sort of hug a drowning man gives a life raft.
“Don’t let her parents hear you say that” Giles chides.
“Well they didn’t.”
“We’ve all grown up a lot since high school” Oz tells him, a soft growl in his voice.
“The funerals of young people are always full” Giles says and Tara supposes this is true. People notice death more when it happens to the young. When Giles takes Xander’s arm and steers him away, she says as much to Oz.
“I guess so” he says. Then he adds, “She said she wouldn’t be surprised if we met up when we were old. She didn’t really mean it. She meant that we’d always have a connection.”
“S-she loved you very much.” Tara hears herself use the past tense and shivers.
Oz nods. “You too. Which makes us really lucky.”
“Yes” agrees Tara fervently and then she puts on a comforting smile for Dawn when the girl emerges red eyed from the bathroom. Smiles are things to put on, these days, like blue sweaters and black dresses.
And Willow’s love. That is something to be portioned out. Carefully stored up and shared like a precious resource.
A group of watchers arrive at the Summers’ house a few days after the funeral, and Giles leaves with them. “When will he be back?” Dawn asks when Oz drops her back home in his van, “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know, Dawnie, but he did say he’d be back soon.”
“How soon is soon?”
“How was the beach?” Tara tries, “Did Oz buy you ice cream?” but of course it doesn’t work and Dawn just glowers. The glower doesn’t worry Tara. Dawn doesn’t glower out of malice, only as a way to ask for help. And Tara wants to help but Giles didn’t tell her where he was going.
“I’m calling Buffy” Dawn declares, and she proceeds to call the phone beside Buffy’s hospital bed like she is telling on Giles and expects Buffy to ground him when he comes back. It is the first time since the red-stained day that Tara finds something funny, which makes it also the first time that she wants to share something funny with Willow and realises she can’t.
“Buffy already knew he was going” says Dawn in a huff when she puts the phone down. “But she wouldn’t tell me where.” She folds her arms. “Must be watcher slayer stuff that we’re not important enough to know about.” And they don’t know about it for another few days, when the watchers return and do various spells that they don’t explain to Tara, but which she recognises as wards and something similar to the magical warning system she and Willow put in place at the Magic Box when Glory was after Dawn. That done, they speak into a walkie talkie: “Okay, Giles, bring in the package.” And then Giles walks in with –
“Who are you calling a package?” asks a tall brunette who Tara doesn’t recognise. Dawn does: The girl tenses beside her.
“I’m sorry about the spells” Giles tells them as the watchers leave.
“What’s she doing here?” demands Dawn.
“Buffy will be in hospital for weeks yet, Dawn. We need a slayer.”
“It’s okay, Dawnie” the brunette – Faith, Tara supposes – adds, “I’m just here to fill in.” She turns to Tara. “Willow’s girl, right?” she says, “Hey, I’m sorry about what happened to her. I ever find the jerk who did it, I’ll –” She catches Giles eye “…throw him to the watchers, I guess” she amends.
“Th-thank you” Tara manages. First Anya, now Faith. She is getting sick of people offering to kill Warren for her. None of them can offer to bring Willow back. Tara would let a thousand Warrens live if Willow could come back.
“You’re here to slay demons, Faith” Giles reminds her, “Not to look for Warren.”
“Sure, got it.” Faith offers Tara a smile. “Think of me as your live in back up slayer.”
“Live in?” Tara’s repeats, her mind snagging on the only part that is relevant to her right now
“We’re hiding her here” Giles explains, “Hence the wards. Faith is something of a fugitive from the law, I’m afraid.”
“Giles here got the tweed brigade to bust me out.” Faith slaps Giles on the back, none too gently. “Magiced the locks open and the cameras off and away we went.”
“The council provided most of the magic” Giles adds.
“I go back in when Buffy’s back on her feet.” Faith’s grin slips.
Let’s hope that’s soon, Tara almost says, for Buffy’s sake. But then she realises how it would sound for Faith’s sake and swallows her words. Tries, “Well you arrived in time for dinner.”
Faith needs to sleep somewhere while she stays, whatever Dawn has to say about it, and Tara wonders briefly about giving the second slayer the room where it happened. But then she thinks about all Willow’s things. If Faith moved in, she would be closer to what is left of Willow than Tara is. Or Tara could take Willow’s things into Buffy’s room, where she has been sleeping, but then they would need to be piled up in boxes, ever visible. So Faith gets Buffy’s room – much to Dawn’s disgust – and Tara moves back into the room where it happened. Later, she will think about how no-one ever tells you just how hard it is, sliding into a bed you once shared with a lover who is now dead, the first time round. No-one ever talks about the soul crushing despair of it, of how you almost stop breathing for a moment. Of how you weep yourself into sleep. Or of how, despite all that, you find it in yourself to get up in the morning and make breakfast all the same.
She sorts carefully through Willow’s possessions. There is a sort of ritual in it, she finds, and as such, a sort of comfort.
“I found that” Giles agrees as he folds clothes into a box, “When I did this for my parents.”
They must have been a lot older than Willow, Tara thinks but doesn’t say. When her mom was suffering near the end and wished it would stop, a neighbour said “What’s a few more weeks’ pain compared to eternity?” right to Tara’s face and Tara had almost cussed her. Time has a strange relationship with the dead. A few more weeks or years or decades, it all matters so much at the time. It matters that Willow didn’t get enough time compared to Giles’ parents. But also it doesn’t. Also the neighbour had a point about eternity. Because Willow and Giles’ parents and Tara’s mom, they will always be dead now, no matter how many years they had and didn’t have between them. The difference, she thinks, will be eroded as the years pass. But would she give the difference, the years or decades of it, off the end of her own life so Willow could die old?
Of course she would.
“What did you do with their clothes?” she asks, to put these thoughts from her mind.
“Oh much the same as this” Giles indicates the boxes. Clothes to take to Willow’s parents, clothes Tara will keep, clothes to go for charity. Even a box of clothes Giles will give directly to a homeless shelter in LA when he visits Buffy tomorrow. Part of Tara hopes the homeless will appreciate Willow’s cosy, bright coloured sweaters but most of her shudders at the idea of anyone who isn’t Willow wearing Willow’s clothes. She is keeping Willow’s favourites. She is also keeping her jewellery and her books, apart from the jewellery she set aside as keepsakes for Buffy and the books she knows Willow would want Dawn to have. For Xander, there are photographs, though Tara has kept plenty of those too. Giles asked only for a copy of one photo, of Willow, Buffy and Xander high-school aged and laughing together. Tara puts the original, still in its frame, in the box under the bed, with the shard of glass and the blue sweater.
Tara considers dropping out of college. It just seems so difficult to fit in around everything else, around doing for Dawnie, making sure Xander eats, visiting Buffy and just existing, just waking up every day in the Room Where It Happened and rising and washing and feeding Miss Kitty. When did it get so difficult (She knows when). But then she remembers the years she spent dreaming of college and the risks she took to leave home and she calls her tutor, asks about her options for catching up on the work she’s missed. She starts going to lectures again, leaving Dawn at the Magic Box with Giles (“Rather good of Anya to leave when she did” he comments, “It gives me something to be busy with”) and her college friends come through with notes which she reads, then rereads when her grief sapped brain won’t absorb anything the first time round. She gets Dawn to quiz her when she comes home.
Buffy missed the funeral, on account of still being in hospital. “I keep telling myself she wouldn’t mind” she tells Tara, “I mean, in front of her family and the guys from college it’s not like I could talk about the big stuff, is it? I couldn’t talk about how she helped save the world or about how she stayed in Sunnydale for me…” Buffy trails off, looking stricken. “If she hadn’t done that…”
“It was her choice to do that, Buffy” Tara assures her, “She told me about it.”
“But she did it for me! And if she hadn’t…”
“If she hadn’t, I never would have met her” Tara says (and would Tara choose to never meet Willow if it meant Willow lived? Of course she would).
Why are they both so quick to blame themselves, she wonders. They didn’t shoot Willow.
“I’m sorry” says Buffy, “I’m not trying to make it all about me. It just…It’s filled me up. The pain of it.”
“I know. S-sometimes I feel like I’m drowning.”
“I’ve felt like that all year” Buffy replies, “But when I woke up here it was like I’d resurfaced at last, you know? And then Giles told me about Willow.” She takes Tara’s hand and they sit in silence for a while because what is there to say? Tara wishes she could tell Buffy to stay resurfaced, to float amid her ocean and not drown in it like she did all year after Willow pulled her back to life. But that would probably just make Buffy feel bad. Pressure to be happy doesn’t make a person happy.
Willow would have been so glad to see Buffy happy at last.
“I hope she went where I went” murmurs Buffy and Tara resists the urge to ask what it was like because she knows that that is just one of many places Willow might have gone and thinking about it won’t help Buffy. Instead she squeezes her hand and hopes back.
Dawn returns to school and comes home quiet. “People don’t get it” she tells Tara. “I say my sister’s best friend died and they think I must be fine then because its not like she was my best friend.”
“Willow loved you” Tara replies, “That’s not about to change no matter what anyone says.”
Dawn’s expression softens. “Sorry” she says, reaching for Tara’s hand, “I can’t even imagine what it’s like for you” and Tara doesn’t tell her what it’s like for her, because it is too much for a child to know and because it can’t really be compressed into words.
Xander drinks too much. “Like father like son, I guess” he tells Tara when she visits with a casserole that won’t fit in the fridge. It is a statement that makes her think of Donny. It also makes her say, “Willow wouldn’t like to hear you say that.”
Xander flinches, lifts a bottle and drinks deeply. “Not much danger of her hearing.”
“So her opinion doesn’t matter anymore?”
“Is that what she is now? Someone we quote from when we need to win an argument?”
Breathing in deeply, Tara pulls her anger to the back of her mind where it drowns in her ocean. She sits beside Xander on the couch and says, “Well I know I’d want her on my side in an argument.”
“But she won’t be on our side again will she? Not in an argument, or a fight or just to go bowling.” Xander takes another slog of his beer. “She’s gone.”
“You’re right. She’s gone. But Buffy’s not. Or Dawn. Or Mr Giles. And they need you, Xander. Not your dad.”
If it was Willow delivering this pep talk, Xander would probably pull himself together right away. It being Tara, he doesn’t. But Tara sees her the moment that Xander, adrift on his pain, finds the compass of her words, sees their distant light. She pats his hand and stands. “Eat something” she tells him as she heads out the door.
Faith slays, slinking off in the evenings and coming back blood streaked at daybreak. She tactfully avoids Dawn and Tara is passingly surprised, because nothing that Willow told her about Faith suggested that Faith had tact. She wonders how much of the mismatch between what Willow said about Faith and what Faith is actually like is due to Faith changing and how much it is down to Willow not liking Faith very much. She wishes she could ask Willow about that, even if Willow bristled and took offence like Tara can picture her doing. She has Willow’s bristling, Willow’s offended dignity all stored up in her mind for safekeeping.
Willow would hate Faith being here. But possibly Willow would see the practicality of it too.
Mrs Rosenberg packs her bags, weeks later, and Willow’s childhood toys and books and Willow’s clothes and photographs, and Willow’s solemn, grief-mute dad into her car and leaves Sunnydale, pausing to hug Tara and promise to stay in touch. Months later, she will found a research group to examine the root causes of gun violence. Years later, she will publish a book on parental grief. Decades later she will write papers about the connection between certain sections of geek subculture and male violence. Mrs Rosenberg burns, like Willow would, taking pain and transmuting it into raw, red, action-fuelling rage.
Tara doesn’t burn. Her grief is quieter. She writes no books. She doesn’t follow Warren through criminology journals or across however many miles he ran. Nor do the police, who close the case soon after the Rosenbergs leave town. There is, they tell Tara, too little to go on. Warren fired the shot and ran and he could have run anywhere. It is a big country. A big world. With no Willow in it.
Buffy comes home, bandaged and fragile-seeming, but getting stronger every day. She lets Faith keep her bedroom and sleeps in Dawn’s bed, Dawn sleeping on an airbed on the floor and not minding in the least. Once she is strong enough to patrol, she offers Faith her protection if she wants to stay but looks relieved when Faith declines. “I got a girl waiting on the inside” Faith explains and Buffy says, “Oh” like Willow said she did when Willow came out. For her part, Tara wonders if Faith might understand, the way Giles understands, just what it is she has lost, and if she should have tried talking to the second slayer about something other than meal timings and how to use the washer-dryer, but it is too late now. Faith goes back to prison.
Giles goes home to England and Tara tries to be happy for him though really, she doesn’t want him to go, even though he says “I’m just a phone call away. And you’re welcome to visit, you know.” Time was, Tara would be excited to be invited to England, but she always imagined visiting alongside Willow. The thought of travelling the world without Willow hurts too much to contemplate right now.
Xander turns up at the Summers’ house the day after Giles leaves and asks, “How’s Buffy?”
“Out on patrol” Tara tells him.
“That soon, huh?”
“She’s been out of hospital a few weeks.” Briefly, Tara pictures Willow out of hospital for a few weeks, in a world where the bullet was an inch higher or lower or to the side. Probably Willow wouldn’t be patrol ready just yet, lacking slayer powers. Probably she’d be curled up in bed watching movies with Tara.
“Like everything’s back to normal” Xander mutters and Tara realises he has been drinking, and is glad Dawn has gone to bed already. She makes coffee and toast, and Xander eats and drinks as directed, hunkered in an armchair while Tara sits beside him on the couch. “I lost my job” he tells her conversationally, “Turns out you need to be sober and show up to keep one of those.”
“You’ve shown up here” Tara points out, keeping the at last inside.
“Better late than never, I guess.” He sighs. “I know I’m screwing this up. It’s just. It’s just I don’t know how to live without her, Tara. I mean, I literally don’t. I don’t know how to eat and put on clothes and just get through a day and then another day and she’s not here.”
Finally, Tara thinks, someone says it out loud. But that thought won’t help Xander so she thinks for a moment what she could tell him instead. “Willow didn’t like Tolkien” she says.
“Huh?”
“Or C.S. Lewis. She didn’t like the way Tolkien wrote women. She didn’t like how Lewis kept Susan out of heaven for liking nylon and invitations.” Xander, she notes, is watching her hungrily, absorbing this Willow story he wasn’t part of and hasn’t heard before. How many precious memories must he have to share? This is what she has missed, not having him here. She goes on, “She said once if those two made it through World War One, imagine how many men didn’t who could have gone on to write things she did like, only they weren’t as lucky as Tolkien and Lewis. And that’s kind of like us, you know. Because Oz said we’re lucky, that Willow loved us. And think of all the people who would have met her and now they won’t. But we’re lucky.”
Xander considers this. “Yeah. Lucky us” he says, and Tara can’t tell if he is being sincere or sarcastic. Possibly he can’t tell either, being drunk and all. She adds, “Xander, Willow would want you to be okay.”
“But how can I be? How can any of us be okay without Willow?”
Good question, Tara thinks. But she manages an answer: “I don’t know. But do you want to help find out?”
Spike returns to Sunnydale a few weeks later. He is broken and rambling and maybe if the red stained day hadn’t happened, Tara would find it in herself to help him. As it is, she can’t. She portions out her time and patience in a careful order, Dawn, Xander, Buffy, Giles, and there is none left for Spike. Dawn is anxious to see him, sneaking down to the school basement in her lunch breaks and reporting back when she comes home. Buffy’s response is muted for reasons she confides to Tara late one night after patrol. “But he won’t hurt Dawn” she reassures her, “The chip still works on her. Anyway, he has a soul now. And a head full of ghosts, apparently.” But they soon learn that Spike’s ghosts are not ghosts at all.
Tara is there at the beginning, when Giles arrives back in Sunnydale with a group of frightened potential slayers. Tara has graduated at last, a little behind her class but the certificate is framed in the Room Where It Happened and she thinks Willow would be proud of her. So she has time on her hands and fills it with preparing for war. “Huh” says Buffy, “Your definition of preparing for war is surprisingly peaceful.”
“There were camp followers in most wars all through history” Tara points out as she lays out another cot bed for the latest potential before heading back into the kitchen to get started on dinner. “Someone has to feed the army. An-anyway, I’m not really a fighter.” Willow, she thinks, would be more useful. But if Buffy is thinking the same, she doesn’t show it. She clasps Tara’s shoulder and tells her, “I’m just glad to have you on the team.”
The First wears Willow’s face when it visits Tara alone. Really, Tara knows she should yell and scream when it does this, but it offers her a promise, early on. It will never appear to the others looking like Willow, so long as Tara doesn’t scream. So long as she doesn’t call for Buffy. “Like Buffy could do anything anyway” the First points out, smirking with Willow’s face. It has a point, Tara thinks. Buffy can fight the Bringers, but the First is unpunchable. Buffy is no more able to cope with the First looking like Willow than Tara is – and Tara will probably still have to either way. There is no need for Buffy to suffer too. So Tara doesn’t scream.
The First can’t be trusted, of course. But it seems to keep this promise at least. After all, the others would have said. Dawn would have screamed. Xander would have wept and Buffy would have fumed. But they don’t. Probably the First enjoys the Willow-shape being Tara’s private torment. Just their little secret. It is not unbearable. The Willow-shape makes it bearable. The First is a cruel mimic, recreating Willow’s bubbly, enthusiasm for Tara, for books, for magic and for life. But the First also stirs a darkness into its portrayal, an edge that Tara doesn’t remember. Probably that darkness was never really in there, Tara thinks. She would remember. “What about when I wiped your memory and slept with you?” the First asks, twisting Willow’s hands in a parody of anxiety, “Are you telling me there was no darkness then?”
“I forgave her for that” Tara whispers.
“Not out loud.”
Not out loud, Tara concedes but wherever Willow is now, she knows. She has to know, or there wouldn’t be any good in the world.
“Maybe there isn’t” chirps the First, twisting Willow’s mouth into a smile. “Any good, I mean.” But Tara takes no notice of what it says. It is surprisingly easy to ignore what the First has to say. Instead she focuses on its appearance, on the wonderful, horrific Willowness of it. She collects details at each visit. The exact way the light catches the gleam in Willow’s eyes, each gesture, each whisper of her voice. She looks forward to the First’s visits almost as much as she dreads them. It isn’t healthy. But Tara reassures herself that if she ever doubts that her visitor is anything other than evil, she can simply take its hand. Nothing there. Willow was always warm.
“You didn’t avenge me” the First whispers in Willow’s voice and Tara sighs because of course the First doesn’t understand what it is to be human. The way a person has to human her way through a world full of other humans, some of them doing terrible things. “Vengeance demons don’t just hurt the wish’s target” Tara reminds it.
“But you didn’t have to do it that way, baby. You could have done it yourself.” It slinks closer. “I’d have taken the world apart to find him” it whispers and Tara knows in her bones that that much is true.
Buffy is distant, focused. She does not have the luxury of being a camp follower, and must lead at the age of twenty two. She is unfailingly polite towards Tara and frequently impatient with Dawn. “It would be different if I was a potential” Dawn mutters one evening, sat at the kitchen island while Tara stirs yet another stew. Stew is useful, she has found. Stews, sauces, chilis. If in doubt, throw more in. It is amazing how much growing girls can put away, not to mention Faith. Buffy, in contrast, eats less and less these days.
Privately, Tara doubts that Buffy would give Dawn an easier time if she were a potential. They are not having an easy time either.
“She’s got a lot on her mind, Dawnie” Xander reminds the child.
“Yeah, and none of it’s us” Dawn retorts, but then she sighs and gathers herself. She is growing. Growing enough to say, “But I get it. The pressure’s on. When the world doesn’t end, that’s the time for the sister bonding.”
“And scooby bonding” says Xander, doing such a good job with the blithe optimism act that it even fools Tara for a second.
It is not that she doesn’t believe they will win. She just isn’t convinced that they will all be there to see it. The world has never been that kind before.
Xander goes on, “Once we send the First packing, I’m taking you all out for dinner.” He carefully doesn’t look at Tara and she concentrates on her cooking. Like actors on a stage, they can keep the pretence going as long as they treat each other like characters, not as people who can also see through the act. Probably Dawn isn’t fooled either, and plays along for them while they play along for her.
“She doesn’t want to play” pouts the First later, making a cute little moue of Willow’s mouth, “I came to her as Buffy and she just threw a mug through me. Little scamp.” It slinks closer, doing sexy Willow. Tara watches it out the corner of her eye. Like Xander, the First is an actor. Look too closely and the pretence crumbles, and Tara can see the unbridled cruelty wearing Willow’s face like a mask.
“I could let her live” breathes the First, “If you give me one of the others. A life for a life, it’s balance. And balance is important, isn’t it, baby, like you’re always saying about magic?” Really, Tara talks about magic very little these days. With Willow gone who could she share that with? As for the rest, the First knows as well as Tara does that she will not slit the throat of a sleeping potential or slip poison into her food, not even so the First will spare Dawn, not even if the First could be trusted to spare Dawn, which it can’t. It is all part of the act, these occasional attempts to get Tara to hurt one of the girls (“Just one, baby. For me.”) and it is all becoming increasingly half hearted.
“I’ll take Xander though” the First whispers, “And then I’ll have the full set.”
“You don’t have Willow” Tara whispers back, “Not really. And you never will.” Maybe she should tell Giles about these visits, about her understanding with the root of all evil, her promise not to scream. But Giles has a lot on his mind, like Buffy, like all the others, and not screaming isn’t so hard. It is not as though it would fix anything.
Kennedy listens when Tara tells her the other thing she could never tell Giles, lying awake a night or so before the end. “I wanted it to be Willow in that hospital bed” Tara tells her, “W-which means I, I wanted Buffy dead instead. Just for a moment.”
Kennedy shrugs. “So you’re human.”
“That isn’t all good” Tara reminds her, thinking of the First. But she doesn’t want to talk about the First here, in this little oasis she, Faith and Kennedy have in the Room Where It Happened, three queer girls in a house full of teens who don’t know who they are yet and might never get the chance to find out. But Faith isn’t here tonight. Tonight it is just Tara and Kennedy, conversing in the dark.
“She must have been really special” Kennedy muses and Tara feels that sense of panic she feels when she is with someone who wasn’t lucky enough to know Willow, that sense that she has a duty to convey just how special Willow was but how can a person be fully conveyed with just words? But words are all she has so she tells Kennedy about Willow’s fierce intellect, her determination and her quirky humour. Somewhere along the way, Kennedy slips into her bed.
“W-we shouldn’t” Tara tells her.
A soft laugh. “Why not?”
“We d-don’t really like each other that way. We’re just scared that we’re going to die.”
“Well we might. So why not comfort each other? You worried it will be awkward if the world doesn’t end?”
“No.” Tara smiles because post world saving awkwardness is a nice thing to think about. Small problems, in that bright, happy time.
If the world does end, or if Tara does, she quite likes the idea that Willow will be the last – and actually the only – person she had sex with. But that thought reminds her more of the purity balls her dad took her to than of Willow. Willow, Tara knows, wouldn’t mind her taking some comfort in Kennedy tonight. And comforting Kennedy in turn suddenly seems like a wonderfully defiant thing to do, a way to boldly rebuke the First, and Warren, and her dad and all the people and beings who don’t want two queer women to be happy if only for tonight. It is, in short, a Willow thing to do. Proud and brave and red. So Tara reaches for Kennedy in the dark, and returns her kiss.
Tara isn’t there at the end, the day Sunnydale crumbles in on itself and takes Buffy, Spike, Robin and Faith with it, folding them into the earth. Tara takes Dawn away before the battle, on Buffy’s insistence. She packs her life into a suitcase, puts it in her car alongside the shoe box and the box containing a hissing Miss Kitty. Then she calls Dawn outside and persuades her to get in the car, arguing and cajoling and – when all else fails – playing the Willow card. “Buffy can’t lose anyone else” she tells the child, “I can’t lose anyone else.” And then it turns out she can, because when she learns that Buffy is dead, that Faith is dead, she doesn’t break. She stays unbroken for Dawn. They all do. Xander and Giles show up days later, grim faced on the doorstep of the motel room Tara found on the edges of a little desert town that none of them stay in long. They all hug and cry and they don’t break. Buffy would be proud of them. Later, Tara will wonder, was it worth loving Buffy, and later Faith, just to lose them so soon? Of course it was.
Kennedy visits once, after she leaves a hospital in LA with her arm in a sling and shadows in her eyes. She shows up on the doorstep of the apartment Tara, Dawn and Xander moved into with Giles’ help and she and Tara sit in separate armchairs and sip instant coffee. Kennedy says, “So we’re both still here.”
“Yes” says Tara, “Both still here.” The post world saving time isn’t as bright and happy as she had hoped. For all that she knew they wouldn’t all make it, the post world saving time she’d been picturing had Buffy and Faith in it.
If she had died, she wonders, would she go to the same afterlife as Willow? Has Buffy gone there now? Comforting to think of them both together, but Tara knows that there are countless numbers of heavenly dimensions and that Willow and Buffy could be eons apart. But then, maybe the rules are different in heavenly dimensions. Maybe the barriers between them are blurred. Because if Willow and Buffy are not together, how can it be heaven?
“I haven’t seen it since. The First, I mean.” Kennedy darts a look at Tara and Tara wonders if she knows. Surely not. She was so careful. But the girl could have overheard, could have not known what to say.
Then she sees Kennedy’s fear and realises she is after reassurance, not confirmation. She is able to honestly tell her, “Me neither.” Of course, the First isn’t dead. It didn’t perish like Buffy and Faith and poor Spike, who Tara has barely managed to think about amid her grief for the two slayers, and Robin, who she never knew. But Tara senses that the First won’t be back. Perhaps it had hoped that they might still turn on each other at the end after all, act on the evil ideas it whispered in the darkness. Perhaps it hoped that Tara might kill one of the girls to save Dawn or that one of the girls would abandon the rest to save herself. Perhaps it doesn’t know what to do with their unity. Out of nowhere, she thinks of her childhood Bible studies group. John 1. The Light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood it. Perhaps the First isn’t merely being a sore loser. Perhaps it realises now that it will never understand them.
Kennedy nods, reassured. “We sent it packing.”
“You did.”
“You too. I mean, I know Buffy made you clear out at the end there, but you still helped.”
“I didn’t do a lot.”
“You got Dawn out. Buffy wouldn’t call that not a lot.”
A little wave of pain surfaces from one of the newer oceans inside Tara, the Buffy Ocean. Kennedy adds, “I’m sorry about Buffy.”
“Did you see it happen?” Tara can’t stop herself from asking. Later she realises that she needs confirmation that it happened at all. Buffy was always so strong. It doesn’t seem possible that she is gone. But Kennedy shakes her head. “No. I heard it was quick, though. In case that helps.”
“It does” Tara lies, and thinks about how it didn’t help at all with Willow either. If Willow had died slower, she might have been saved. But, she reminds herself, Buffy had been in the middle of a bloody battle and lying injured amid the fighting would have been terrible. She will try to take comfort in quickness.
“It was quick with Vi too” Kennedy adds, “Did you hear about that?” and Tara nods because Xander already filled her in on how Vi was briefly called after Buffy and died a few minutes later. Rona is the slayer now and Tara wishes her well. She wishes her friends like Buffy had. Friends like Willow.
“I knew it wouldn’t be me.” Kennedy sets her mug aside. “I’m too old.”
“Too old to be a slayer, maybe. But you are still young.”
“I guess.” Kennedy nods. “I’m one of the lucky ones, right?”
“What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. I’m not exactly qualified for much. School always took a back seat to training.”
“Mr Giles is restarting the Watchers’ Council. He might have something for you.”
“I’ll look into that. Thanks. Hey, will you be okay? I mean, where will you Sunnydale guys even live now?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Well” says Kennedy, “When you figure it out, look me up.”
“Thank you” says Tara even thought they both know she never will. It was a one time thing.
Dawn considers England, when Giles offers, and Spain, when her dad finally says Tara could come too. But Xander will still be based in the USA when he isn’t flying around the world on Council business, and Oz is back from around the world, and has a house in San Francisco so they go there. Dawn settles into school as well as she can in the circumstances, which is not all that much. “But it’s not like it’s forever” the child tells her. Not a child anymore, not really.
“But she’ll always be your child, in a way” says Oz and Tara realises he is right. Buffy didn’t call Hank Summers to get Dawn out of Sunnydale. She asked Tara.
Tara finds work with a publishing company. She saves and moves them to a place of their own, so they can stop subletting off Oz. She grieves. For a while, the local news is full of the stories of the people who escaped Sunnydale and the people who didn’t. It summons up old ghosts and she finds herself wondering, sometimes, where Warren ended up and who he hurt there, or if he hurt no-one else and quietly lived his life like he’d done nothing wrong. She wonders which would be worse. “Or” says Dawn, “Third option, maybe something ate him. We can always root for that.”
Tara can’t help but think that would be better, particularly for whoever Warren might have come across. Doesn’t try hard to help thinking it, in fact. In fact, she knows that she owes Warren nothing, not vengeance, not anger, not the restless thoughts she sometimes slips into giving his whereabouts. She resolves to put him out of her mind and she succeeds.
Cousin Beth turns up on the doorstep years later, tear streaked and steely. She stays for a few awkward weeks, helping with the housework while Tara balances working and commuting and laundering the mountains of clothes Dawn brings when she visits from college. Then Beth finds a job out of state and puts the few possessions she accumulated during her stay into the battered pickup truck she arrived in. They keep in touch, but only casually. Christmas cards, the occasional email. Eventually they will be facebook friends, Dawn having set Tara up with an account “so you can see all Xander’s photos of Africa” but Tara doesn’t sign in all that much and Amy mostly just posts photos of her dog (a large and sharp toothed thing, which Tara suspects her cousin keeps partly to feel safe) which Tara dutifully responds to with likes and heart emojis. It is not at all how Tara pictured what it would be like to be back in touch with family. She had imagined either being reduced to returning, head lowered, taking her position at the kitchen sink, or a furious denouncement. All or nothing, seeing them every day or never again. But of course, she hadn’t foreseen Beth escaping. Maybe she should have. She did, after all. Sometimes she wonders what Donny is doing these days or if he could have been saved by a braver sister. Willow would tell her no, and that it wasn’t Willows job anyway and sometimes Tara listens. Her dad, she doesn’t think about at all. He has retreated to the same dark place as Warren and Tara has no wish to follow him there.
Tara joins a coven in Devon, on Giles’ recommendation, when Dawn moves to London to work for the new council. Staying in San Francisco without Dawn is not an appealing option for all that Oz is there “And anyway” says Oz, “It’s not like I can’t visit. I’ll just check the lunar calendar before I book my flights.”
The coven is a little like a convent, an insular group of women, gardening and chanting day after day. Only the gods are different. And suddenly, Tara has a lot of people to talk with about magic. It is not the same as talking with Willow, but she never expected it to be. Tara would love to know what Willow would make of the coven and of Devon more generally. Would love for Willow to be here, walking the smooth pebbled beaches with her and cooing over the little thatched cottages. “She is here” says Dawn, “in a way. In a way where you’ll always remember her.” But it isn’t enough. So Tara makes the Willow remembrance more tangible, creating a memorial to replace the grave Sunnydale swallowed. She plants a willow tree in the coven’s garden and carves Willow’s name into its trunk as soon as it grows big enough to take it. She doesn’t bring Willow flowers. She brings stones, knowing the Jewish tradition. She wishes she could bring some of the many crystals the coven owns, knowing that Willow would love them, but they are communal. Though regular rock has its own sort of beauty. Rock is old, ancient elements blended and tumbled together through magma and layers of time, all to wind up here, under Willow’s tree. So much better than flowers, when Tara thinks about it. She didn’t know much about Judaism and Jewish culture until she met Willow and Willow hadn’t really told her all that much. Willow had shifted her focus by the time their paths crossed, exploring magic and the paganism it trails, remnants and reconstructions of a myriad of polytheistic faiths. But now Tara reads the torah in the coven’s library, and text books about world religions and the philosophical writings of Jewish scholars and the more she learns, the more she finds to like. She wishes she could discuss it all with Willow but then, she wishes she could discuss everything with Willow. She wishes Willow could walk the pebbled beaches and pick out her own stones. She wishes Willow could greet Xander, Oz, Giles and Dawn on their visits, wishes that Willow could bounce with excitement on the increasingly rare occasions that they visit altogether. And so it goes on, and Tara would drown in it if she let herself so she focuses on the coven’s work instead. She performs minor healing magic for humans and benign demons afflicted with supernatural ailments. She lifts curses and casts protection spells. She helps the slayers indirectly, when the Council ask. First the girl who came after the girl who came after Rona, then the string of girls who come after her, none of whom were in Sunnydale and none of whom Tara meets in person. She and the rest of the coven help with research, and the occasional spell.
Tara was the coven’s youngest member when she first came here. She learns a lot from the older witches, but, eventually, younger witches arrive and Tara has a lot to teach them. Eventually, she is the oldest.
When Anya returns, Tara stares at her a moment, then reaches, slowly and deliberately, to take her hand. She is solid. Tara relaxes. It has been so long but the precautions still serve.
“Oh, that” Anya dismisses, “I heard about that.”
Tara smiles at her. “You look so young.”
“Well, you look so old but you don’t hear me going on about it.” She sits down on Tara’s battered sofa, the one she keeps by the fire for when Dawn and her grown up children, and their almost grown up children visit (“You live here all the time” Dawn points out, “You don’t know how cold and draughty it is for us city folk”).
“Xander would be proud of me, not commenting on your age” Anya points out, “He was always on at me to be more considerate about that sort of thing.” She speaks as if it were last week. Perhaps it feels like last week to someone who has lived so long but, if that is the case, Tara finds it is not an experience she shares. To her, Anya and Xander’s romance feels like something that happened unfathomable eons ago, in another age.
She stoops to deal with the fire. The girls from the coven keep her well stocked in kindling. The wood they bring is magicked so that it will not give off carbon. They are all very keen on a new form of earth magic aimed at healing the scars mankind has inflicted on the planet, on giving and taking, on balance. Tara approves in a distant sort of way, on the increasingly rare occasions that she can follow their conversation at all.
“I was there, you know” adds Anya. “At his funeral. I just kept myself hidden.”
“You didn’t have to. Neither of us would have turned you away.” It had been neither by then, not none. None implies a group of over two. But by the time they put Xander in the ground, there had only been Tara and Dawn left of the group, Giles having passed away nearly decades before and Oz a year before that. Dawn had wondered, after, if suppressing the wolf all that time hadn’t done his health any good, but Tara suspects that, had he known, he wouldn’t have changed a thing.
“The thing about being immortal is it all stays a mystery. Where the mortals go next.” Anya looks at Tara like she might enlighten her but of course Tara has no idea where Xander went. Anya asks, “Do you think they all wound up in the same place?”
“I hope so at least. I used to think, if Buffy didn’t end up where Willow is, how could it be heaven?”
“Maybe it isn’t. I mean, maybe it’s just an in between place.”
Tara rises stiffly from the fireside. Time was she could magic up a fire, but her magic, like the rest of her, is aging. “Purgatory?”
Anya makes a dismissive gesture. “No, like here. The human realm. A place with good and bad in it. I always thought the afterlife could use more of that so people could carry on making mistakes and changing. It’s not like mortals get a lot of time to do that.”
Tara considers this. “That could work. I know Buffy would have loved more time to make all the mistakes that come with being a normal non-slaying person. And Willow was hardly done learning at all.”
“Oh, I wasn’t even thinking of them. I was thinking of all you grey heads. You’re what, eighty?”
“Ninety three.”
“Oh, that’s still nothing. You could still use some mistake making time.” Anya frowns a little. “It’s what I learnt being human those few years. How they never stop growing.” The frown deepens for just a moment, and then she smoothes it out, turns a clear young face Tara’s way. “Speaking of mistakes, it’s not too late, you know. You could still swear revenge.”
Tara frowns. “On Warren? I assumed he’s been dead for years.”
Anya waves a dismissive hand. “I mean on men in general. On the whole messed up system.”
“I think I’d rather change it.” Tara hopes that, in her own modest way, she has changed it. Not in a blazing, dramatic way like Anya might want her to think vengeance will give her, but bit by bit, one good deed at a time, the way people do.
“There’s no-one here to judge” Anya points out, “No-one here to get mad at you if you let yourself not be all meek and perfect for a moment.”
Tara smiles. “Perfect? I’m nothing like perfect. The thoughts I’ve had, Anya.”
“So why not act on them? It’s pretty old fashioned, you realise, being all passive about it. Women stopped doing that around the time they lost the corsets.”
They didn’t, Tara thinks. Anya was a demon right up until 1998. She can’t guess at all the little compromises women must have made in the decades before that, and the decades before them but, “It’s not like that. I’m not trying to be some perfect little victim like my dad would want. Really, I’m selfish. All this time, I’ve been prioritising my own healing because I know vengeance would destroy me.”
Anya considers this. “In other words, you’re not the Bride from Kill Bill and you don’t really want to be?”
Tara gives Anya the smile she reserves for baffling pop culture references.
Anya says, “I don’t get it.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“I mean, who wouldn’t want to be Uma Thurman?”
“It sounds like you’ve kept up with human society.”
“Oh, don’t expect that to last. I did the first time round as well, but after a few hundred years I lost track. It’ll be the same this time.”
Tara isn’t sure. It sounds a little like Anya simply wants to believe this. But in any case, “I won’t be around to find out.”
“No. You won’t, will you?” Anya considers this for a moment. “Is that scary?”
“Sometimes. I think the hurdle of it is. How it will happen and when and will I be on my own.” Probably, she knows, she will be on her own. The girls visit but mostly she is living pretty quietly here. It just doesn’t feel that way because of all the books.
“And the after?” asks Anya, “That part’s not scary?”
Really, that part is too big to even think about. Thinking about it stirs Tara up to the depth of her oceans. There is hope amid the swell of thoughts and emotions it brings, of course. Hope that she will go wherever Willow went. Wherever all of them went: Her mom, Buffy, Faith, Oz, Giles, Spike, the women from the coven, the brave girl slayers that Tara never got to meet. But that hope seems presumptuous, so all she says is, “I don’t get any say in that part. All I can do is live a good life.”
“Well you have. You didn’t even swear any vengeance.”
“I thought you see vengeance as good?”
“Oh, I do. But a lot of humans disagree.” Anya twists a smile. “Usually while something’s eating them.” She shrugs. “And even a lot of the humans who don’t find themselves on the sharp end of a wish think it’s better to be all pure and forgiving.”
“It’s not forgiving. I never forgave him.”
Anya tilts her head slightly, in a way that reminds Tara she is not human anymore. “But there’s no thirst for vengeance in you. There never has been. I’ve never been trying to persuade you to use it, you know. I’ve always known I need to plant it there first.”
“Oh.”
“So if you don’t hate him and you don’t forgive him, what do you think of him?”
“I don’t. I don’t think about him. I have better things to think about.”
Anya nods once. “Well, I still don’t get it.”
“I know you don’t. I think a lot of people don’t.”
“I was always surprised that none of the others called on me. I think they all thought about it. I could feel the spark of it sometimes.”
“But they didn’t.”
“They didn’t. I guess there was more to being human than I ever got round to finding out.” Anya stands. “Well, I had to try. I’m going away, you see. D’Hoffryn wants me to spend a few centuries establishing a vengeance branch in a lesser hell dimension where a subspecies of demons have got themselves souls. Spike really started a trend there. And it’s useful because a soul lets them wish. The thing is, it takes a soul to really hate someone as much as it takes to love them.”
Tara isn’t entirely sure that is true. Willow told her all about Angelus.
“Goodbye” says Anya, a brisk dismissal that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. Tara feels a brief horror at the thought of never seeing her again, and of never getting to ask, “Anya, tell me honestly: Do you think Willow would mind? That I didn’t avenge her, I mean. Because she would have avenged me.”
Anya stares at her a moment, then sits back down. “Yes” she agrees, “She’d have had killed anyone who hurt you. Or made them really wish they were dead. She’d have denied it, of course, but she always had a big potential for vengeance. I mean, proper vengeance, with the blood and the screaming? She had it in her.”
Tara thinks of the darkness the First found in Willow. Had Willow really hidden it so well? Or was Willow herself unaware of it, having never had to resort to it? “The First thought so too.”
Anya makes a dismissive gesture. “Well what does that sack of evil know? It never met Willow.”
“It knew her darkness though. It knew all our darkness. It just couldn’t see anything else and there was so much there. That’s why it lost.” That is why it will always lose, Tara realises. It is not the slayers but the light inside them. The hope and the kindness. No vengeance there. “But do you think Willow would have hated me because I didn’t make that wish?”
“No” says Anya immediately. “I never said that.”
“Back when you first asked me to wish, you made it seem like a sort of duty I had to Willow.”
“I never said that either. I said Warren deserved it. Different thing. I never said anything about what duty or about Willow would want because it had to be your vengeance. Your choice. I thought it would be good for you.” She sighs. “Not to mention, I wasn’t allowed to do it myself. Believe me, I tried. But then Hally reminded me about that stupid rule, and I knew it had to be one of the rest of you. So I asked you and I was so certain you’d go for it.”
“And you never asked the others when I said no?”
Anya shrugs again. “It seemed not okay to go against your wishes. What was the word Buffy used to use? Ooky?”
Ooky was a Willow word. Tara had forgotten it, but she remembers now. She smiles. So rare now to encounter a memory of Willow that isn’t worn to familiarity. Tara even has her old elementary school books now, inherited from her mother. She knows Willow’s careful five year old handwriting but she forgot the word ooky. Hearing now, it feels like Willow was briefly here in this room, like she said the word. A Sunnydale word. For all its many, many faults, Tara had been happy in Sunnydale.
Anya goes on, “Besides, bereaved families aren’t my specialty and it’s not like I didn’t have a career to restart. No offence to Willow but she took a lot of offence at me a lot of the time. I tried for her but I wasn’t about to warp my whole existence around it.”
“Not like she would have done if I had died.”
“No.”
“The First said that Willow would have torn the world apart for me. But I couldn’t have done that and still be me.”
“I guess not. And Willow loved you. Not Uma Thurman.”
“But she would have done it for me.”
“But are you sure she would have wanted you to do it for her? I mean, would you have wanted her to do it for you come to that?”
“No” Tara realises. She has never thought about it that way before, what with the scenario involving her being dead and therefore as unable to influence Willow’s reaction as Willow was to influence hers. “She couldn’t have been her either if she did that. But she’d have done it. Like a sort of sacrifice. And I didn’t make that sacrifice for her.” A part of her recognises that she built herself back up instead of tearing anything down, a non-sacrifice that Willow, loving her and all, might have approved of. But the rest of her hurts and doubts.
“And she wouldn’t have wanted you to” Anya tells her. “I wanted you to. I wanted Warren squished. And I wanted you to feel better and vengeance always worked for me. But –” she stands up “I guess you’re one of those strange humans that really don’t fit with it. And – just for the record – I still don’t get it. But Willow was smart. She’d have figured it out. She wouldn’t have hated you. She couldn’t do that and still be Willow. Goodbye, Tara.”
“Goodby –”
And Anya is gone. Tara sits in silence for a very long time.
Then she gets up. She has just said goodbye – or most of the word – to the last scooby left, besides herself and Dawn. But life has a tidal pull to it, one that Tara is long familiar with, and it doesn’t surprise her that she is able to continue with her day much as if it were any other. She makes coffee and settles down to read. Outside, the garden is warm and bright, the sun dancing over the grass. After she has finished reading, Tara decides, she will go out and walk in the garden. She will sit under the willow for a time.
When they died my love for them
Did not vanish or fade away.
It stayed about the same,
Only a sadder colour
And I can feel their love for me,
Same as it ever was.
(From Death Is Smaller Than I Thought by Adrian Mitchell)