Steph, thanks so much for the nice words and the little clapping guys and that green thing.
And Snippygal, cute. But careful what you wish for....
And now, a little early and a bit longer than any previous chapter....
And yes, there is a Cliffhanger here. Be forewarned.
Title: Terra Firma Chapter 14: Sore.
Author: Tulipp. Email: tulipp30@yahoo.com
Feedback: Please. Distribution: Please let me know.
Spoilers: Everything.
Rating: PG-13 in this part.
Pairing: W/T.
Summary: Bruises start to heal. Don’t they?
Disclaimer: The characters and settings here were created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, but I am borrowing them to do my own thing. No money involved, only some necessary revisions.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Ruby for the comments last time that really made so much difference this time. And to Ruth for reading so well and for being always, always right. And finally, thanks to J: for plotting, for endless questions about why characters do what they do, and for Vermont. Big love, babe.
Terra Firma
Chapter 14: Sore
The sight of you is good for sore eyes.
--Jonathan Swift
Willow watched Tara sleep in the weak morning sunlight that filtered through the curtains. She knew that Tara had stayed awake to hold her, to keep watch, and she wanted to feel guilty about that…but she didn’t. Instead, she felt loved and protected, and she had missed that feeling so much. And Tara could sleep now that it was light outside, and their nightmares were safely tucked away. For a little while, anyway.
She leaned against the headboard, Tara’s head in her lap, and thought again that it had all happened so fast. She could hardly believe it still, but she did believe it. She believed in this miracle, Tara’s bare skin pressed against hers under the sheet, Tara’s tousled blonde hair falling over her legs and stomach. It was everything else that she didn’t believe: death and killing and pain. But it had happened; it had all happened.
She shook her head, buried a hand in Tara’s hair, feeling the warmth of Tara’s scalp against her fingers. Her other hand trailed down Tara’s bare arm, feeling the shoulder and the elbow and wrapping her fingers possessively around the wrist until she could feel the pulse beating under the skin.
Under her fingers, the arm stirred, and Tara’s head moved, and Tara opened her eyes and looked up at her. Willow felt a rush of love so powerful she thought for a moment it would knock her out. She gripped Tara’s shoulder to ground herself.
“Morning, sleepyhead,” Willow murmured. Tara smiled lazily and started to lift her head but stopped, grabbing her neck with her hand.
“Ouch,” she said, wincing. She rubbed her neck with her hand, moved her jaw, shifted her legs. “Oh, God.”
Willow felt the blood rush into her cheeks. “Did I hurt you?” she whispered. It was the thing she was most afraid of now, the thing she thought she might be most afraid of always.
Tara rolled onto her back and looked at Willow with eyes so deeply loving that Willow almost felt she’d been kissed. “Never,” Tara said seriously. “I’m just kind of…sore. Um, everywhere. Aren’t you?” Willow just blushed, suddenly feeling very shy.
The sheet had pulled back when Tara had rolled over, exposing Willow’s lower body. Tara’s eyes narrowed with concern at the dark purple bruise that spread over her hip, the skin almost black with broken capillaries. From her fall, Willow realized now, when Tara had first appeared.
Tara ran a finger over the skin. “That looks painful,” she murmured. “Poor thing.”
“I didn’t even feel it,” Willow said honestly. She touched Tara’s cheek with her palm. “I don’t feel anything but you.” It was true; her heart pounded with Tara; her skin hummed with Tara. She felt the heat from Tara’s cheek seep into her palm, warming its way up her arm and into her chest and down, and she felt her lust return. Again.
“I want to feel you again.” She grinned to take the edge off her need, to make it playful. She wanted to be playful.
Tara closed her eyes, her head dropping back onto Willow’s stomach. “Willow, darling,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “I don’t think I can. Four nights in a row….”
Willow blinked. “It’s only been…” she started to say, then stopped. Of course for Tara it had been four nights. They had talked about this in the dark, about the fact that Tara felt the passage of three months as only a wrinkle in her mind, a little empty place. But really, the time hadn’t passed for Tara, not like it had for her. Willow kept forgetting that. It was hard to grasp.
“Four nights,” she said, trying to make her brain understand it. “I know.” Tara did look exhausted, bluish smudges under her eyes. “I know,” she said again, grinning again as her fingers traced their way down Tara’s neck, pausing to tickle the hollow of Tara’s throat. “And you should definitely rest…after.” Her fingers paused again on the top swell of Tara’s breast. Tara shivered, and Willow giggled a little bit as Tara’s eyes darkened.
She started to let her fingers circle, but Tara reached for her wrist and held it tight. Willow stopped, surprised, and glanced uncertainly at Tara’s eyes, the smile fading from her lips.
“Willow,” Tara said softly, and she reached her other hand to Willow’s chin, rubbed her thumb on the soft skin underneath her jaw. “Willow, I love you.” Willow’s eyes fluttered at the words; they caressed her.
She felt dizzy; for a moment she couldn’t speak, couldn’t find any words that would give shape to her love for Tara. It was a forest fire, it was an ocean, it was a planet. It was everything.
“I love you so much,” she murmured finally, knowing how inadequate the words were as she leaned down to brush Tara’s forehead with her lips. But Tara pushed down on her chin, and Willow’s lips ended up on Tara’s mouth instead, and she felt Tara’s hot breath. After a moment, she pulled away, breathless.
“More,” Tara said, reaching a hand around to the back of Willow’s neck.
“I thought you needed to sleep,” Willow teased, feeling the blood rush down her neck and up her thighs. Tara’s breath came out in a gentle laugh.
“I will,” Tara said. “After.”
****
Buffy looked up from the stack of Magic Box invoices she was double-checking when Willow entered the kitchen early the next afternoon, damp-haired and loose-limbed. “How’s Tara?” she asked coyly.
Willow glanced at the wall clock and looked away quickly, biting her lip. Buffy hid a smile as she watched Willow cross and uncross her arms. Finally, she just let her arms drop and folded her hands in front of her. “She’s still pretty tired,” Willow said. “You know, with…being alive and…everything. She’s asleep.”
“Yeah, it sounded like you were both getting lots of…sleep,” Buffy said lightly, smiling as Willow’s face flushed deep pink.
“But we were really quiet,” Willow protested, crossing her arms over her chest again. Buffy thought how good—how really, really good—it was to hear the rise in Willow’s voice, to see her embarrassed. To see her any other way but ashamed or empty.
“Slayer hearing,” Buffy reminded her. And she’d heard an earful. She slid off her stool and went to Willow, squeezing her shoulder. “You look good with the blushing, Will. I’ve missed that.” Willow smiled at that and sank down onto the closest stool. “Let me make you one of your drinks, okay? I want you to eat something, so don’t say no.” Buffy pulled a glass from the dish rack.
“Um, Buffy?” She turned to see Willow eyeing the toaster thoughtfully as Dawn entered the kitchen with a stack of comic books. “I think maybe I could eat something else today.”
“Ooh, ooh, let me make it for you,” Dawn gave a little hop. “Please, Willow, let me make you something. I can make quesadillas—the real kind, not the peanut butter kind.”
Buffy paused, glass in hand. She knew that Dawn and Willow had gotten closer over the summer; she knew from phone calls and postcards that as much as Willow had tried to hold her grief in, to keep it behind closed doors, she had sobbed in Dawn’s arms more than once. And she knew that Dawn had cried for Tara on Willow’s shoulder. She hadn’t been there to see it, to see the trust that they had re-established between them, but she saw it now in Dawn’s shining eyes and in the acceptance of Willow’s smile.
“Sure, Dawnie,” Willow said, reaching out to tousle Dawn’s hair playfully. “A quesadilla sounds good.”
In the end, Willow ate three while Buffy and Dawn fussed over her, and Dawn would have slid a fourth onto her plate if she hadn’t refused, covering her plate with her hands and moaning that she couldn’t possibly.
“You have an appetite again!” Dawn squealed happily, and then went off to answer the phone. “Hey, Janice,” she said into the receiver, disappearing around the corner to the hallway.
“Yeah, Will,” Buffy teased, “any more appetite and I’m going to have to separate you and Tara so that poor girl can get some rest.” Willow blushed again and giggled, and although Buffy noticed that she looked around almost guiltily after she laughed, she had laughed. She even stuck her tongue out the way she used to do, just the tip. Buffy hadn’t seen Willow do that in months.
It struck Buffy, suddenly, a little sadly, that no one had started laughing again like that after she had come back from the dead, but she pushed that thought away quickly, tucked it under the protective layer of Slayer that she wore like sunscreen over a burned and peeling heart.
“I’m just going to go check on her, Buffy, okay?” Willow slid off her stool, but she waited. Her laugh had faded as quickly as it had bubbled up, leaving her brow wrinkled and her hands clenched to her chest. “I’ll just peek in, I promise, and come right back, but I just want to make sure….”
“Absolutely,” Buffy said, understanding Willow’s need to see Tara for a moment, to reassure herself that she was still there, sleeping safely. “I’ll be here.” And Willow smiled again.
Buffy watched her go, noticing again the way Willow’s arms and hips swayed freely as she walked, and she felt a lump form in her throat. She had dreamed of this moment, not a Slayer’s dream of portent and prophecy but a girl’s dream of seeing her friends happy. Including Willow. God, who was she kidding, especially Willow.
And she was happy for Tara and Willow, so happy it hurt. But it reminded her, too, how much she missed that kind of love. The kind that swept you off your feet at night and wrapped around you like an extra-large oxford-cloth shirt in the morning, scented with after-shave and coffee. The kind that she’d only had with…with Riley. Maybe by the end it had become hard and hurtful, been infused with pain and anger, but in the beginning, it had been lighter. It had felt good. It had been a bandage, a salve.
Buffy thought now that she hadn’t recognized it as love soon enough for that very reason, because it hadn’t hurt. And when, before—or after—those early days with Riley, had love not hurt? At least with Riley, before he’d pimped his blood out, before he’d left, love hadn’t left her wanting and him cursed. It hadn’t left her sick at heart and him violent. It hadn’t left him evil and herself sore.
****
Tara pushed away the remains of the dinner Dawn and Buffy had left her and tugged again at her shirt. Willow had heard the shower running when Tara had finally, finally dragged herself out of bed in the late afternoon and brought her a shopping bag full of clothes.
“Anya got them,” Willow had said with a grateful tremor in her voice, but Tara had only been relieved to see the jeans and the skirt, the shirt and thin sweater, a pair of sandals. “She even got you underwear.” Tara had wondered, in the shower, what she would do when she ran out of the few articles of her clothing that had remained in Willow’s closet and bureau drawers, and so the bag of clothes had been a relief.
It would be ungracious, surely, to notice that the outfits Anya had chosen for her were…well, more Anya than Tara. And so she tugged at the tight shirt and realized with a sigh that there were all kinds of practical matters she was going to have to figure out. School, for instance. She didn’t think that her scholarship had a resurrection clause.
She hadn’t mentioned this to Willow yet; it was too soon, and Willow was still so raw, still an open wound. It had been all she could do to convince Willow to go for a walk with Buffy and Dawn, to get some fresh air while Tara woke up and ate dinner. She knew that Willow was afraid to leave her, afraid even to stop touching her, but Tara thought that Buffy was right to say it was necessary. Baby steps, Buffy had told Tara, squeezing her hand sympathetically. Just an hour or two.
Tara had expected that it would be hard for Willow, that brief separation. What she hadn’t expected was the void she would feel the minute Willow left, turning her pale face to look at Tara one more time as Buffy and Dawn tugged her out the front door. It was different, somehow, from sleeping and knowing that Willow was in the shower or the kitchen, different from her solitary walk of the day before, when she had desperately needed time just to think.
This time, she had bit her lip, crossed her hands behind her to avoid reaching for Willow as the door closed. And it had been, already, a painfully long, endlessly stretching hour when she couldn’t see Willow, couldn’t make sure that she was all right. An hour when she had to trust that someone else was taking care of Willow.
But it was more than that. If she was honest, it was an hour when she was alone, and that frightened her. It was like…before, in the white place. She had been alone before, and being alone now, in the dining room of a house she had once lived in, with her plate of salad and re-heated quesadillas and the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall, she felt dizzily surreal.
What if she had dreamed the last two days? What if all this were just a trick of her mind? What if this were just her own cozy heaven, but really she was still dead and in the ground, and Willow was still….
“Stop it,” she said out loud and pressed her hand against the small and greenish fingerprint bruises that Willow’s grip had left on her arm the evening before. That helped, feeling the bruises. Willow had left an impression on her. She was here.
“Stop what?” She glanced up, startled, to see Xander leaning in the kitchen doorway, shoulders slumped and looking as tired as she still felt. His feet dragged across the floor, and he sank into a chair and set a bottle of beer on the table.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s nothing. I was just….”
“Worrying about Will?” Xander took a swig of his beer.
Tara half-smiled and nodded. “And about me, too, a little bit,” she confessed. “It’s strange, you know? I mean, Buffy used to talk to me a little bit about what it was like for her, but…I don’t think it’s the same.” She pushed her fork around her plate again for something to do, for somewhere to look.
“Anya told me to tell you that we saved some of your stuff,” he said quietly. “I know Buffy’s got a lot on her mind right now, so maybe she didn’t mention it, but she and Anya went to your dorm room after…and got some books and magick stuff and…well, I don’t know. There was some jewelry, I think. A blue rock. Photographs. Some stuff Buffy said Willow gave you.” He picked at the edges of the beer label. Tara thought he seemed nervous, thought he was talking to avoid some other conversation.
“They had to hurry because your father was coming to get your things, and they wanted to ask Willow what to get—what was important—but that was before she started talking again, so….” Tara’s stomach lurched at that, and her fork scraped against the plate. They both winced at the noise. “So….”
“Xander,” she interrupted. “What do you really want to talk about?” He set down his beer bottle and met her gaze for the first time. He smiled a little.
“I forgot that you could do that,” he said. “You always could do that.” He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his words came out in a rush. “Listen, Tara, I know it must be kind of confusing right now, but we have to talk about this. Someone has to talk about this. Buffy and Giles told me about the spell in the Magic Box, and they both said it was fine, but I have to ask. What exactly do you think you’re doing with Willow and the magicks?” Tara waited for more, but he didn’t say anything.
“Xander, it was okay last night. She was okay. She didn’t go over the edge. It was fine. I could feel it…I could feel her, and she was okay. ” Tara’s brow furrowed. She didn’t know how to explain it so that he would understand.
“Yeah, that’s what Buff said, too,” he said slowly. “And it’s a step; I get that. But what about when you’re not around, Tara? What happens if Willow gets tempted to go Wicked Witch of the West again…maybe for a good reason…and you’re not there? You can’t be with her 24 hours a day, not forever.” He leaned forward.
Tara’s mouth felt suddenly dry. She licked her lips and wondered where Willow was right then. Her hand shook slightly as she lifted her water glass and sipped.
“You don’t know what it was like,” Xander continued before she could speak, his voice quiet. Tara steeled herself against what she knew was coming, some description of Willow’s brutality, but Xander surprised her. “Tara, she woke up at night screaming. She wanted to die. You just don’t know.”
“You think that was my choice?” Tara asked, hearing her voice grow louder. “You think this is easy for me? You think I want to know that she suffered so much and was alone?” Tara heard her voice trembling and pressed her lips together. Her stomach churned.
Xander shook his head in. “Tara, she wasn’t alone. That’s just it. You weren’t here, but she had the rest of us.” He took another swig of beer.
“Is that what this is about?” Tara asked, confused. She wasn’t sure exactly what they were talking about, and that was oddly familiar. There was always a subtext with the Scoobies, always something lurking underneath the still waters of conversation. “Xander, I don’t want to get in between you and Willow. I swear I don’t.”
“Tara,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, gripping his beer bottle with both hands. “You went away and left her, and the rest of us had to pick up the pieces, and now you want to come back and change all the rules.” His voice was even and taut.
“I didn’t just ‘go away,’ Xander,” she said tightly. “I was dead, remember? I was dead. I didn’t choose to leave.” Anger was an unfamiliar emotion to Tara, but she felt it rising in her chest now, squeezing her vocal cords, choking her words.
Xander let out a puff of breath. “Yeah, well you may have died three months ago, but you left Willow a long time before that.” Tara felt his words as a slap.
“Don’t you talk to me about leaving,” she said, and her voice shook with anger. “Don’t you dare. You were too busy leaving Anya at the altar to notice that Willow needed help. If she’d really had the support she needed when she quit the magicks, then maybe she wouldn’t have lashed out like that after I died.” She narrowed her eyes at Xander. “So where were you then?”
“I think that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, don’t you, Tara?” he said coldly.
“You don’t know how it was between us,” she said heatedly. Some corner of her mind realized that she was still gripping her fork, pointing it at him. “I did what I thought I had to do. I did what I thought was right for me and right for Willow.”
Xander looked at her for a long moment. “That’s what I thought I was doing now,” he said tightly, and his fingers clenched into a fist, the knuckles whitening as Tara watched. It was familiar, that fist. That rage. Xander had made that fist after Joyce died, and the same memory that had flashed into Tara’s mind then waved over her now.
Her mother had died, and grief had clawed at Tara like an animal, ripping her from throat to stomach, leaving her exposed to an emptiness that yawned and screamed to be filled. For a long time, she couldn’t even cry.
The emptiness seemed to grow larger all the time—at home, where she couldn’t fill it with laundry or cooking or secret casting in the closet of her bedroom, and at school, where she couldn’t fill it with studying.
She found one thing to fill that emptiness, finally, in the shape of a dark girl with short, spiky hair and a nose ring. Tara hadn’t actually liked Luz that much, hadn’t liked the way she cut class to smoke clove cigarettes, hadn’t liked the way she sometimes mocked Tara’s stutter, hadn’t liked the way she had no time for Tara except the time that they could grab, after school but before Tara was expected home to make dinner, for the awkward kissing and groping in Luz’s car that formed their entire relationship.
That, at least, she had liked. It had felt…almost good, almost like living, having someone’s hot lips press against hers, having someone’s arms holding her. It wasn’t much, but it took the edge off the emptiness for a little while.
Until they were caught half-dressed, as they should have known they would be, by some kids out looking for a lost dog. Friends of Tara’s brother. And Donny was waiting when she got home. “Just wait until Dad finds out,” he’d sneered at her. “Just wait until he gets home, you little witch.”
“It’s none of your business,” she had said weakly, although she knew it wouldn’t matter, but Donny had laughed in her face.
“You sick demon dyke,” he spat out, and he had raised his hand. “You’re a shame to your Mama’s memory.”
Without thinking, without making a conscious decision, without filtering the urge the way she always had done before, almost always would do after, Tara had made a fist, had murmured a couple of words, and her brother had doubled over in pain, clenching at his stomach and falling to his knees. She had squeezed her fingers tight, and that fist of her own rage and grief had caused Donny to scream with the pain. And for a second, just for one second, the hurt was gone. The emptiness was filled.
“Don’t ever touch me again,” she said, her voice tight with anger. And she had left him on the kitchen floor, contorted and writhing, while she went out to the barn and cried, sobbed because her mother was dead and she had let her down. Not by kissing Luz—her mother would have accepted that, Tara knew—but by using the magick to hurt.
By becoming the demon.
Donny had left her alone after that, at least physically. But Tara had felt sick anyway. She had cast on purpose, cast in order to hurt someone, cast because she could. And it had felt so, so wrong. She would almost have preferred a beating to that knowledge, that she could be violent and cruel to protect herself, that she could lash out with magick like that. She would have slept easier at night if she had actually used her first, smacked Donny or the table or the screen door.
So she had known, instinctively, when she saw Xander pull his fist from the cheap plaster of Willow’s dorm room and clench it, looking with something like satisfaction at the blood on his knuckles, what he felt, how that contact of his fingers with the hard wall had seemed, for just one second, like relief.
And she had known, because she remembered, that it faded quickly, so quickly. She had caught Xander’s eye and smiled at him, a little, through the grief of her own remembering, and she had spoken the only words of comfort she knew. “It hurts,” she had said.
Now, Tara’s unfamiliar anger fizzled as suddenly as it had flared up, draining away from her chest and leaving only that same sick feeling in her gut.
“Xander,” she pushed back her chair and walked around the table to where Xander was sitting. She sank into the chair next to him, perched on the edge of the seat, facing him. “I know you want to take care of her, I know you do, but you’ve got to trust me to do that now. She’ll always need you, but right now,” a wrinkle creased Tara’s forehead as she said words she knew it would hurt Xander to hear, “she needs me more.”
He looked at her for a long moment, and then the taut line of his jaw loosened, and his fingers unclenched. “You know, Anya was right about one thing,” he said finally. “I have these two women, and they’re the loves of my life. One of them doesn’t need me because she’s the Slayer. And the other one doesn’t need me because she has you. I don’t have anyone who really needs me.” He smiled, and there was pain in his smile. But there was also, finally, acceptance.
Tara reached out tentatively and touched the scars on his face, as she’d wanted to do since she’d first seen them, and Xander did not flinch. “Anya needed you,” she said quietly. “She still does.”
****
“I still do,” Willow said suddenly, insistently.
The evening air was warm and dry; it was still a relief to Dawn after a summer of damp. She felt good, great even. So maybe they didn’t have the Key business figured out yet, but Tara was alive and eating her quesadillas right now, and Buffy was smiling and swinging Willow’s hand in hers.
Dawn thought that Buffy had been extra touchy with Willow all day, and that made sense to her. She had felt Willow’s whole arm shaking when they had pulled her through the front door of the house to take this walk. knew that Willow just wanted to be around Tara. Dawn thought that she would be the same way; she kind of felt that way now. She wanted to see Tara all the time, to remind herself. Like a bruise. You knew it was there, but you wanted to keep pressing it anyway, to remind yourself that it hurt. Only that was stupid, she thought now. Tara wasn’t a bruise. Bruises were bad. Bruises hurt.
“Still do what?” Dawn asked, confused. Buffy had thought they might run into the Poet while they were out, but after an uneventful walk, they had been talking about ice cream, about whether they should pick up milkshakes to take home.
“Still think we should stop at a pay phone,” Willow said, biting her lip. “We should call the house. Make sure Tara is okay.” She was breathing fast, and in the light of the street lamp, her face looked pale. She shifted nervously from one foot to the other.
"Will," Buffy said gently. "You can do this. We'll be home in twenty minutes. Just hang on, okay? Nothing's going to happen in twenty minutes, right?"
“Well, maybe you could tell me something to get my mind off it, then,” Willow said finally, giving in. “You should tell me the riddle. I didn’t hear it the first time.”
Dawn looked uneasily at Buffy, and Willow caught the look.
“Please,” Willow said quietly, almost desperately. “I’m not going to break if you tell me something hard, I promise. Even if it’s something bad. I’ll try not to fall apart. I know Tara’s not here to hold my hand," her voice caught, "but I want to help. I can handle it.”
Buffy didn’t answer at first, and Dawn could see her thinking, deciding. They had worked out their ideas about the riddle and the Key with Giles the night before, but it all seemed kind of unimportant right now. And there was no reason in making anyone feel bad. If she was the Key, she was the Key, right? Okay Sarah Sarah, or something like that.
What mattered, Dawn and Buffy and Giles had decided, was that clearly all three conditions had been met before she’d left for England. And that meant that her powers had been unlocked for months. Although if that was true, Dawn thought now, scuffing her shoe along the pavement, then being the Key totally sucked. Forget a car; being the Key couldn’t even get her extra allowance. Or, apparently, a milkshake.
“Can we at least talk about the headaches,” Willow asked, pleading, but the clanging noise of a metal trash can rolling out of an alley ahead stopped her.
“I thought it was too quiet,” Buffy said with a sigh. “You two stay back.” She stalked ahead, but in spite of her warning, Dawn gripped Willow’s arm and followed her sister.
Dawn could hear the voice as they approached the alley, a voice that, as they approached, became familiar. Peering around the corner of the alley as Buffy marched ahead, she could see two shapes wrestling in the street. It was dark, and Dawn couldn’t see more than dim outlines, but the shape on top had horns coming out from either side of its head, and…yuck, were those more horns sticking out from its hips?
Beneath the horned shape was something else, and that, Dawn realized, was where the voice was coming from. “My name is Ozymandias,” the voice was shouting, “king of kings.” Weird, Dawn thought. Talking about some over-the-hill rock star and his stupid reality show.
“The poet,” Willow murmured. Dawn frowned; she hadn’t paid that much attention in English lit last year.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” The shape on the bottom shouted and kicked out, and the monster flew back, sliding along the pavement to end in a heap at Buffy’s feet.
For a moment, it didn’t move, but then Buffy cleared her throat. It looked up at her, and even in the shadows, Dawn could see the leer.
“Well, someone’s feeling horny,” Buffy said, and she lifted her booted foot, brushed against it with her hand, and shot it out at the monster’s chest, pushing down with her boot as the creature slumped to the pavement, a trickle of something dark oozing from its chest and its mouth. When Buffy pulled her foot away, wiping it on the pavement, Dawn caught a flash of metal on the sole of her shoe.
“Nothing else remains,” the other shape said.
“When did she go all Inspector Gadget?” Willow asked Dawn under her breath.
But Buffy wasn’t finished. She stood, hands on her hips, and called out to the other shape, who had stood up and was limping forward, toward the circle of yellowish lamp light at the end of the alley.
“So I hear you do a mean limerick,” Buffy was saying, but Dawn thought there was something familiar about the slim sway of hips, the slope of the shoulders.
“You know, ‘there once was a vigilante,’” Buffy continued, standing still. “Why don’t you tell me the next line? Because I haven’t had much time for reading lately.” Her voice was light, but as the shape took another step forward, Buffy stopped, suddenly, and Dawn saw who it was.
The hair was different, longer and almost brown, and the face was hard to make out under the bruises and the blood, but it was definitely him. Beaten within an inch of his life, it looked like, and probably sore all over, judging from the limp and the way he held an arm close to his side, but him. Dawn’s stomach clenched with disgust.
He took another step, and then sunk onto his knees in front of Buffy, pulling his shirt apart at the neck and lifting his bloodied face to her. “I’ve been waiting for you, Slayer” he said, and there was no poetry at all in his voice now.
“Spike?” Willow whispered hoarsely, and Dawn felt her arm go rigid.
“Spike,” Buffy said grimly, and she pulled a stake from her jacket.
In that moment, Dawn was struck dumb with dread. She looked at Buffy, whose lips tightened and who seemed not to realize that she held her stake up, poised and ready to strike. And Giles was not there to stop her.
Then Dawn looked at Willow, whose eyes flashed dark and who seemed unaware that she had raised a hand, the fingers stretching toward the figure on the ground and quivering slightly. And Tara was not there to stop her.
And Dawn reflected, in that surreal way that allows a person to be completely within a moment and completely detached from it at the same time, that this would probably be a good time to be the Key. If only she knew how.
To be continued in Chapter 15, “The Poet and the Pendulum.”
Edited by: Tulipp at: 8/26/02 10:24:14 am
i can't believe i forgot your little green thing this time! 
Edited by: 