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Sometimes when Willow is alone in her very empty bed, listening to the gentle rhythm of Buffy’s snores, her heart feels like an iron band is crushing it slowly. It isn’t a foreign feeling. It’s there during classes and Scooby meetings, and dealing with this week’s apparent apocalypse.
But during the night it’s far far worse than even her over extended vocabulary seems fit to deal with. Outside, the moon’s light reflects off of the double paned windows, sending skittering dancing rays of soft moonlight floating around Willow.
Once, the moon had entranced her. As a child she would sit at her window long after she should have been asleep, watching the moon. She tried to memorize the craters and valleys she could almost see from her room. She spoke to the moon in lieu of parents who just didn’t care, reporting back to it all the facts of its nature.
By the time she’d met Oz, the moon had taken on a more sinister. It was a herald to a world protected by the sun. It heralded the vampires, demons, ghosts and ghouls. Sometimes Willow had wondered if the sun had spoken messages to them, hidden in sunlight, messages they’d forgotten how to hear.
But then, after Oz, it had all changed again. The moon was always still in her mind, but now it was more mathematical. What was today? How many days until the full moon? Was the cage secured? Would her parents be out of town again or would she and Buffy be holding foe sleepovers while she watched over her transformed boyfriend?
Now though. Now it had all changed again. Oz was gone. The moon had reshaped itself again, a beacon of what she had lost. Something she could not forget. Each night when she saw the pale lights skittering around her like mice in shadows, the iron band tightened. Each night, she would fall asleep long after Buffy had returned from patrolling.
She wanted him back. More than anything else she had ever wanted, she ached with it with every molecule in her body. If she could have made herself incorporeal, just floating in his wake until she could bring him back, she would. Each day was a new pain. There was no word, no letters, no phone calls. Oz wasn’t just gone, it was almost as though he’d never been here at all.
Devon hadn’t spoken to him, and the Dingo’s had fallen apart in his absence as well. Willow had a few fleeting things of him that she could not disengage herself from. Pictures, dozens and dozens of pictures, song lyrics, a few notes from high school. They filled her with nostalgia, still a bitter aching thing that made her body hurt.
But the things she missed most about him were gone. His smell, waking up wrapped in his arms, the way he’d look at her, and the world would stop. All gone now, lost to her. Instead she wrapped herself in the memories, and cried herself to sleep. Some day, she told herself, some day she would stop looking for his van. The love she felt would be tempered with grief, and time, and the reality of what had occurred here.
Tonight she would wrap the veils of memory around her. She would count the days of the moon. She would pile up her extra pillows behind her back and try to pretend it was him. Willow would close her eyes and make believe that her world hadn’t come crumbling down around her ears.
She knew it was a lie, and a painful one at that. But until the harsh glare of the sun broke through to her unconscious she could believe. She fell asleep with the echo of Oz’s voice echoing through her ears, beckoning her down and into sleep.
“My whole life, I’ve never loved anything else.”