Oh tk, you're so nice.
Title: Terra Firma Chapter 17: Synchronicity.
Author: Tulipp. Email:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Please. Distribution: Please let me know.
Spoilers: Everything.
Rating: PG-13 in this part.
Pairing: W/T.
Summary. Finally, an answer.
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. And there's some dialogue from "Entropy" in here, so I'm borrowing that, too.
Acknowledgments: To the usual suspects. Ruby and Ruth and J. What would I do without these women? Wonderful readers, all of them. They see it all.
Terra Firma
Chapter 17: Synchronicity
And I knew
That this was the hour of knowing,
And the night and the woods and you
Were one together, and I should find
Soon in the silence the hidden key
Of all that had hurt and puzzled me—
Why you were you, and the night was kind,
And the woods were part of the heart of me.
--Rupert Brooke, “The Voice”
Dawn flinched with the stab of a headache, and Willow understood. “It was you,” she breathed out, her computer brain kicking in to make connections. She squinted and tried to see in the outline of the hair framing Dawn’s face a trace of the figure in her vision. She’d always assumed the woman was one of the Guides, but as she searched through the databases of her memory, she could come up with no details to contradict what she suddenly knew to be true.
“I always forget,” Dawn murmured, the groove in her forehead deepening as pain settled in. “I start to remember, but I always forget.” She looked up, and Willow saw a question in Dawn’s pleading eyes. She wanted to remember.
It could only have been a moment that Willow paused, her hands wrapped around her cooling coffee cup, her eyes locked with Dawn’s, Tara’s tense fingers stretched across the denim-covered bone of her knee. It could only have been a few seconds—just long enough to think, to remember, to know.
It seemed like longer.
Long enough to fill in the white-blurred face of the woman who had gotten her out of bed and forced her to start living again. To remember that Dawn had been standing right outside when she’d opened the door to see where the woman had gone. To remember that Dawn had had her first headache only hours later. To remember that Dawn had emerged from every headache at the touch of Willow’s hands with phrases on the tip of her tongue, phrases like “she’s coming.”
To remember—and surely she had only missed this before because she had spent the summer clawing her way through a swamp of grief—that after Dawn’s headaches, she had always, always felt a little bit better…not less sad, never that, but a little less suicidal. She’d assumed at the time that it was the simple relief of distraction.
All this occurred to Willow in a moment.
And that moment was long enough to realize three things. Dawn needed to know what she had done. Tara needed to know how she had come back. And Willow knew how to help them answer their questions with magick. She had to help Dawn see inside that headache. That was where the answers were. That was the key.
She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed in and found that white spot of calm and held on to it, the way the Guides had taught her. She could do this for Dawn. She would do this for Tara.
Lacing her fingers through Tara’s on her knee and squeezing gently, Willow spoke to Dawn, whose hand was still curved but stiffening around her fork, whose mouth was twisting. To Willow, it was a familiar sight, Dawn’s eyebrows knitting with pain, her left cheek twitching just under her eye, her lips curling back over her small and even teeth. Instinctively, she leaned toward Dawn, ready to press a palm against her forehead, to make the pain stop….
And she realized, abruptly, that she had always made the pain stop before. And Dawn had always forgotten before. Willow sat back.
“I can help you remember, Dawnie,” she said. “But you have to trust me. Can you do that?” Dawn nodded, her eyes widening at Willow for just a moment, but her neck was already tensing, her body already going rigid.
“Buffy, it’s okay,” Willow said calmly, her voice sing-song and lulling. “Dawn’s having a headache, and I want us to let her, but it won’t last long, and when it’s over, she’ll be fine. Is that okay?” She knew, even with the pressure of time, that she needed to do this right this time. To ask permission. Not to violate. This was important.
She was aware of Tara and Buffy exchanging a reassuring look, aware of Giles in the background glancing involuntarily at the pendulum, neglected now on the countertop. But she was concentrating on Dawn, focusing on the crease in her forehead, the wrinkle in her mind where memories and answers were folded away.
She felt rather than saw Buffy crossing the room, coming out from behind the counter to stand by Dawn. “Tell me what you need, Will,” Buffy said, her voice was calm and firm. Willow resisted the urge to throw her arms around her friend in gratitude, in simple thanks for that warm support. She needed to concentrate on Dawn right now.
“Just stay close,” she said. “Don’t touch her, but stay close. I think that touching is what stops the headaches, but we need the headache to happen so Dawn can remember.”
Buffy nodded. Tara squeezed her knee again and let go. Dawn made a small whimpering noise as she clutched at her head. Willow closed her eyes and focused on slowing down the images that rushed through Dawn’s brain, images that clashed against one another, that screeched and railed into a piercing noise.
Willow helped Dawn to remember.
Spike on his knees. Hurting with death and life. Hurting with the memory of centuries’ worth of pain inflicted, centuries’ worth of harm done. Hurting with having to live again, having to feel again, having to try to stand up under the bloody and heavy weight of the past. He wouldn’t stand. He couldn’t stand. He grabbed at Buffy’s arm, trying to press the point of her stake against his heart, and Dawn’s eyes fluttered, Dawn’s head wrinkled with pain.
She saw then that there was another her floating in the air: a projection, an image, a Key. And that self was talking to Spike. Well, not talking exactly, but thinking words that Spike seemed to understand. Just as she had first projected herself into Willow’s grief, she now projected herself into Spike’s anguish. “You still have your humanity,” her Key self was saying. “You always did. You must reach into yourself for that life and leave the dust behind.”
Dawn knew that it hurt, it always hurt, but…it hurt less this time. That was distance, maybe, or practice. And after a little while, Spike stopped trying to grab Buffy’s arm. And then he looked up at her.
And before that…the Magick Box. Someone nearby had created a doorway, and they were trying to open it, and Dawn felt the chance. She had been calling Tara all summer, calling the name with her mind, sending out signals into the white void and getting no response. No response but Willow’s pain. No response but Willow’s wounds.
Until today. Today there was…a door. Today there was a way. It was white on white…a bowl of milk by the chalk outlines of a doorway, and there was a pinprick of red…the red of bloodied rope, the red of a birthing chant, the red of sheets on a bed. Dawn had felt it, and she reached out with her mind and she opened the door. “Tara,” she called, and she opened the door. And then her mind went black, and she fell back, and when she opened her eyes, she had felt calmer. “She’s here,” she had said.
And Tara was here.
Tara watched as Willow, without opening her eyes, rested her hands on Dawn’s shoulders and murmured a few words. Both sets of eyes then blinked open, and Tara smiled as Willow leaned forward and rested her forehead against Dawn’s. She stayed that way for a moment, hands on Dawn’s shoulders, but she was smiling, the corners of her mouth turning up with relief, the pink of success flushing her cheeks.
“I opened the door,” Dawn said, her voice tinged with wonder. “I opened the door for Tara. I called her, and she came through the door.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Tara had felt her pulse quickening as she listened to Dawn talk, had felt her skin warm as she watched Willow focusing on Dawn, her eyes closed, her face serene, her lips slightly open and hinting at a smile. She was never more beautiful, never more luminous, than when suffused by magicks this way; Tara had always thought so. Seeing Willow that way again—how long had it been?—reminded Tara of their first spells, of clasped hands and candles and fingers trailing circles of white. Of the way Willow’s eyes flashed open with one kind of magick and fluttered closed with another.
For Tara, it had been an odd few moments, listening to Dawn’s quiet narration. She was, in a way, hearing the story of her life, how she had come to be…again. She had recognized in Dawn’s words her own dream, or her own memory. That almost-white doorway in the midst of the white. Hearing her name called. Moving toward the door—if it could be called “moving,” that floating and bodiless process of traveling through a series of not-places to a place, a door. Seeing on the other side of the doorway a something…a color…a pinprick of red. The red hair of her only love. The red sheets of their bed.
She had moved through the doorway toward that red and found herself in her body. In her bedroom. In the Summers’ house. Feeling new. And feeling loved. Delivered from white into the red and beating heart of her family.
Buffy had inched over to Tara while Dawn was talking, while Willow was focusing, and now the two stood close, shoulders touching, as they watched Willow smooth her hands down Dawn’s hair and over her cheeks. Dawn seemed a little stunned, but at Willow’s touch she relaxed, her lips softening and her eyes widening as she realized what she had described. Tara watched Willow’s fingers calm Dawn and smiled. She knew what that felt like.
Tara had come full circle, she thought now; they all had. She had seen Willow lose herself in the magick of forgetting, and just now she had seen Willow find herself again in the magick of remembering. She had seen Dawn motherless and hating death, and now she saw her mothering and giving life. And she saw herself, she who had tried to be a mother to Dawn the best she could, now cradled in life by the love of a young girl.
Willow and Dawn still sat quietly, head to head, but Tara realized that both Buffy and Giles were looking at her, asking a silent question. She could only nod mutely. How could she find the words to acknowledge her own rebirth? What sentence could even begin to thank the teenager who had just unlocked her death and opened the door back to her life with Willow? What could she possibly say?
The others seemed to feel the same; Buffy moved silently to put an arm around Dawn’s shoulders, and Willow pulled her head back from Dawn’s; she opened her mouth but did not speak. She seemed as unable as Tara to find words. She looked simply…overcome. Tara moved to touch her. To steady her. To take Willow’s trembling hands in hers.
Giles was less…speechless. He had been watching thoughtfully, one hand rubbing his chin, but he stirred now and leaned forward on the counter, pulling his glasses off and reaching toward Dawn. His eyes glinted with excitement, his lips parted slightly. Tara had rarely seen him respond that way to anything outside of a book. She liked it.
“Synchronicity,” Giles said, his voice holding something like awe.
“What?” Tara tore her eyes away from Willow long enough to look at him.
“Synchronicity,” he said again. “The confluence of events that appear to be linked but in fact have no discernible causal relationship. You see…” he took a breath, but Dawn interrupted him.
“Um, Giles? Some of us are still in high school?” Dawn raised her eyebrows, and Giles smiled ruefully.
“I suppose you could call it a happy coincidence,” he said. “Your mind, Dawn…the Key part of your mind…was reaching out again and again, looking for a doorway to open, but with no luck. But when it reached out at the same time that the Professor was casting his resurrection spell…synchronicity.” He nodded to himself, looking pleased.
“As for the headaches…well,” Giles’ brow furrowed with thought, and he settled his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “They would seem to represent moments of intense mental strain as well as a kind of, ah, channeling.”
Dawn frowned. “Channeling?” asked, glancing at Willow a little warily.
“Channeling pain,” Giles said gently. “Obviously, we don’t have all the answers right now, but from what you’ve described, it sounds as if your headache was a direct response to Spike’s pain. And Willow’s. And, of course, Tara’s.”
“I get it,” Dawn said excitedly. “I took the pain away, I made it into a headache.” The corners of Giles’ mouth turned up slightly, and he nodded.
“But Dawn,” he said, tilting his head at her. I can’t help but wonder how you knew what to do. On some level….that is, somewhere deep down…you had to know that you wanted to do this. But how? How did you know to try and get Tara back?”
Dawn bit her lip, and twisted her beaded necklace, and thought. And Tara watched Dawn remember.
The house had been empty and still, and the bedroom had been quiet. Dawn wasn’t sure she had ever been anywhere so quiet. No clock. No water dripping in the bathroom. No birds outside the window. Just…quiet.
When she had first come into the room, she had sunk down along the wall by the door, too shocked by the sight of Tara lying twisted on the floor to do more. She had sunk down and pulled her knees to her chest and stared, unable to move or make a sound or even blink. She had simply stared, and her mind seemed full of the word “no.”
She had had no idea how much time had passed. She had simply stared.
But at some point later, she had found herself sitting next to Tara on the floor by the bed. Had she crawled there? Had she stood and walked? She had put her hands on Tara’s body, had felt the soft cotton of the blue shirt and the rougher cotton of the pants and the silk of the hair and the cool and springy skin.
She had come back to herself with a start, realizing that she was touching Tara everywhere, laying her hands on her. It was to comfort…Tara or herself…but some other part of her, she knew now, had been paying attention.
Memorizing. As if it might be important later on. As if there might be something to know about the shape and the size and the contours of Tara’s body. As if it might be something that later, much later, she would be able to heal.
“You memorized me,” Tara said now, and Dawn nodded. It was true. Buffy could see that it was true, and she felt a rush of relief. They knew now. They didn’t have to worry about fallout. About Glory, or something worse.
“But that means that Dawn’s Keyness would already have started,” Willow said, her lips pursing in confusion. “Didn’t you say that the events had to happen before the Key powers kicked in?” Giles nodded. “So, that would be…first killing without a weapon, and then seeing a wish undone, and then forgiving her greatest threat?”
Willow bit her lip and glanced at Tara, her face paling. “Well, that doesn’t work then,” she said. “I didn’t threaten to kill Dawn until after she sat with Tara’s….” Buffy could hardly hear the last word. But Willow seemed to shake herself, then, and she looked at Giles with a firmer face.
“She couldn’t have acted as the Key until after that, Giles,” she said. “Because I was the greatest threat. You know that. We all know that.” Buffy kept her grip on Dawn’s shoulder but she reached forward and touched Willow’s face with her fingers.
“No, Will,” she said softly, smiling at the incomprehension on her friend’s face. Willow was so used to thinking of herself as the wicked witch that she couldn’t even see when someone else was to blame. “Willow, no, it wasn’t you. I knew you’d find a way to blame yourself, so I didn’t want to tell you until you could see…until we had proof. And now we do.”
Willow looked at Buffy searchingly, her mouth slightly open, and then she glanced at Giles. “I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “I told Dawn I wanted to kill her. What could be a greater threat than that?”
Dawn shook her head. “No, Willow, that’s not what you said.” Buffy watched her sister’s face soften. “You said you would turn me back into the key. Back into a ball of pure green energy.”
Willow shrugged her shoulders. “And?” she said. “What difference does it make? I was still totally evil. I was still threatening Dawnie. I mean, I know that everyone has…forgiven me”—she seemed to choke on the words—“but you can’t pretend it didn’t happen. I did that. You can all pretend to forget that, but I remember.” Buffy watched Willow’s eyes flash dark with pain. “I remember.”
Giles stepped forward, moving past Buffy to put a hand on Willow’s arm. “My dear girl,” he said, wrapping his fingers gently around her elbow. “You are always so intelligent, so brilliantly smart…when it comes to everything and everyone but yourself.”
Willow frowned. “But Giles,” she started to say, but he held up a finger to shush her.
“Willow, if you had turned Dawn back into a ball of green energy, then she would still be the Key, don’t you see?” She looked at him blankly. “You would only have been returning her to her essential nature. She would still be the Key.” Giles spoke slowly, kindly, as if he understood that Willow would resist his words, refuse the balm that he was offering her. “You may have been a threat to Dawn’s human self, Willow, but you were never a threat to the Key.”
Willow blinked and stepped back. “But…but I was,” she said, her eyes shifting, glancing at Tara, and then Buffy and Dawn, and finally settling back on Giles. “Who else was there?”
Buffy watched her carefully and saw that, as had so constantly been the case since the night of the car accident when Dawn’s arm had been broken, Willow could not see past her own guilt. Her own shame. But that had to change; it had to change right now because Willow wasn’t alone in her mistakes. She never had been.
“Will, there was me,” Buffy said gently, smiling a little in Dawn’s direction. She had made her apologies already, and she had never believed in dragging things out. What was done was done. “I tried to kill Dawn. And the Key is part of Dawn. Willow, I tried to kill all of you. And you forgave me, didn’t you?”
“But I tried to end the whole world,” Willow said; she looked almost angry.
“So did I,” Buffy’s voice was firm, holding Willow’s gaze until her eyes flickered a little with recognition. “So did I. Don’t fight me on this one, Will. It was me. This time, the greatest threat was me, and Dawn had to forgive her greatest threat, so she had to forgive…me.”
And Buffy turned to Dawn. “Do you remember?”
Dawn remembered breakfast. Stacks of pancakes, boxes of cereal, piles of toast. Starchfest. Dawn had wondered if Buffy had been talking to Tara; she always believed in feeding people to make them feel better.
But she had seen Buffy watching her across the counter, practically smelled the guilt wafting through the kitchen. But then, pancakes always smelled like guilt to Dawn when someone besides Tara was making them.
And, yeah, Dawn still felt like there was something to be guilty about. Buffy had tried to kill her, tried to kill them all, tried to end their whole world. Had tried to deny her family. And Dawn hated that, hated how everyone kept breaking her family up. She was tired of that.
“I didn’t know if , you know, if you had plans this weekend,” Buffy had said with her arms full of cereal boxes, “but I thought, maybe we could….”
“Hey Buffy?” Dawn had said. Buffy had looked at her, and Dawn had felt a need well up. A need to forgive. Not just to feel it but to say it. To show Buffy and to have Buffy feel it. She spoke quietly “I’m gonna be okay with the basement thing. Really. You weren’t you.”
“This isn’t guilt,” Buffy said, “I want us to spend time.” But a current of understanding sparked between them. They spoke about hanging out, about pizza and movies, but under the conversation, Dawn felt something growing. She felt awake, she felt energetic, she felt animated. More alive than ever before.
It was alive inside her, that energy. Like grass, shooting from the ground, like photosynthesis, this growing thing. It tickled at her, like new blades of grass growing up the inside of her arms, through her veins. She felt alert; she felt strong. She felt like she could do anything, like she could….
“Why don’t I come patrolling with you tonight?” she’d asked Buffy. She hadn’t thought of patrolling right away, but she wanted to do something, and what Buffy did with her energy was patrol. That was what Buffy always did when she had extra energy. All those late nights. She patrolled.
But Buffy was not pleased. “Oh,” she said. “And then? Maybe we can invite over some strangers and ask them to feed you candy.”
“Well, you guys went out patrolling every night when you were my age” Dawn had tried another tactic. She wanted to jump and down, to hop, to run, something, to fix things, to do good, to do something.
Buffy had smiled. “True, but technically, you’re one and a half.” Some corner of Dawn’s mind had protested that in a whisper, had reminded Dawn that in fact she was ancient. She was older than any of them, older than Sunnydale, older than California. Older than people. She was the key. She was…
She was late for school . And after school…after math and gym class and boys and phone calls, she had just…forgotten.
But Dawn remembered it all now. It was like waking up in the middle of a dream, in that moment when it was still possible to remember every detail with utter clarity: color and texture and the sharp, sharp edges of objects and events. Usually, a dream like that faded quickly; by the time you went to the bathroom or turned on the light, the edges blurred, the colors faded, and by the time you woke up the next morning it was gone.
But this time, the dream was still with her. And it wasn’t a dream, not really. These were things she had done that she simply hadn’t been aware of. But now, remembering, she could feel that green energy inside her again, that green that was always there at the edge of the white noise of her headaches. The green of not being ready. The green of growing.
She was the Key. She wasn’t one and a half; she was ancient. She could open doors and make people feel better. Look at Spike. Look at Willow. Omigod, look at Tara. She had brought her back. She had somehow used her Key power without realizing it, and she had brought Tara back from the dead. Wow. Wait until Janice heard about this.
But it was kind of confusing. She didn’t really understand it: how it had happened, what exactly she had done. And everyone was looking at her. Tara looked overwhelmed. Willow looked grateful. Giles looked intrigued…and pleased. And Buffy…Buffy looked proud.
Buffy slid her arms around Dawn know, hugging her tightly “Mom told me once that she knew you were precious,” Buffy whispered. “Important to the world. And you are.”
Dawn leaned into her sister’s arms. It felt good, that hug. It felt like family. Out of all of this, that was the one thing that made sense to Dawn. That she had fixed her family. Found a bandage to put over the wound that death had made. That made sense. But the rest…the how….
Dawn squeezed Buffy hard and then pulled back, crossing her arms over her chest, shifting her weight to one hip. She wanted to know. “Hello, still a teenager with a teenager brain here. It’s not like we get Key Studies in school. What does this mean? Who am I? What do I do?”
“It’s simple,” Giles said, smiling at Dawn, and it was a real smile, one that curled up into Giles’ cheeks. “You are the Key, Dawn, and what you do…well, what you do is you heal. You’re a healer.” He beamed at her and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to dab at his eye, and Dawn blinked. Was he crying because of her? Was he so happy because of what she had done? Not Buffy or Willow or Tara but her?
A healer. She turned the word over in her mouth; it sounded strange, kind of old fashioned. She was a healer, and she was standing in the kitchen with a Watcher and a Slayer and two witches. It was weird. But at the same time, it felt…normal. It was something that was hers, something that she could do. And that felt good. She wasn’t just the little sister anymore. She was a healer. She was the Key.
The kitchen door opened, then, and Xander walked in, speaking to Anya over his shoulder. “So maybe tomorrow?” he was saying. “ I mean, I know it’s not much, but we could….”
Xander stopped mid-sentence, and Anya stopped next to him, put her hands on her hips and surveyed the others. “Everyone except Dawn is crying,” she said. “And everyone looks so…happy. Why does everyone look so happy?” She tilted her head and looked at Dawn, critically at first, but then she smiled slowly. “And why weren’t Xander and I involved in whatever event has led you all to share this obviously wonderful moment?” Xander reached for her hand, and she squeezed it and moved a bit closer to him without seeming to notice that she’d done it.
Then Buffy was throwing her arms around Xander, and Tara was hugging Anya, and Giles was hugging Tara, and everyone was talking at once, and the room—the very air—felt lighter and cleaner and fresher than it had in a long time.
And then Willow was standing in front of Dawn, beaming and tearful, and Dawn looked at her and saw love she thought she might drown in. “Dawnie,” she said, and she clasped Dawn to her tightly. “Thank you, Dawnie. Thank you.”
Dawn just laughed with delight, and she felt it again, that energy, that breath of life coursing through her, making her feel vigorous and spirited. She was growing. She was a life force, a healer.
She was alive. And she was rooted. And she was green.
To be continued in the 18th and final chapter, “On Firm Ground.”
And, um, there’s no artsty-fartsy stuff going on here. Not here, no way. 
) that Willow needs to divulge herself of the self-blame.
i'm so sad the fic is ending in one more update!!!! 
we'll just have to coax you into writing some more stories.....%20Tara%20Avatars/cast154.jpg){kind=small}
at: 9/13/02 8:07:30 am
, but you've made a very likable character for me here. Thank you for that. I'm always blown away by your color imagery as well. Your use of red was especially powerful. A birthing chant indeed. I always say I hate to see wonderful stories end, but for me, Terra Firma has moved beyond wonderful. It is a powerful, moving, deeply emotional tribute to these charaters as they should have been portrayed - as they are embraced by Kittens. So, I feel like it's alright that it's ending. It should end. All I can do now is wait for the final chapter and pay you my second highest compliment after, of course, necessary - Beautifully Done.
...fic's coming to an end?? tk looks and Tulipp, shrugs and smiles while hugging her tightly it's ok, everything's good...I'm still happy how this has been turning out... 
More hugging in the last chapter. But yes…finally, in the end, something that makes the title of the story mean something. I hope. *crosses fingers.* Thanks!