Title: Terra Firma Chapter 3.
Author: Tulipp
Email address:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Please.
Distribution: Please let me know.
Spoilers: Everything.
Rating: PG in this part.
Pairing: W/T in spirit and in flashbacks. Soon to be in the flesh.
Summary: Willow and Dawn return home. Glimpses of Dawn and Willow at the Coven. Doc prepares to bring “her” back.
Disclaimer: All characters, and various plot events that set up this story belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, etc. I am borrowing them and making no money.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Ruby for gentle and insightful beta reading, to J for plot advice. Also a nod here to Rally and TrueXena, whose videos inspire. You’ll see what I mean.
Previously: Set three months after “Grave.” Willow and Dawn have spent the summer at a coven in England, Willow trying to deal with her grief and Dawn suffering from strange headaches and visions of an unnamed “she” coming. Various people remembered good things about Tara and also the events after her death.
Terra Firma
Chapter 3: Little Headaches
“The point of vision and desire are the same.”
--Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
From the hallway of the Summers’ house, Buffy saw Willow hesitate on the threshold of the front door. “Willow, come in,” she said. Willow stepped through the door, and then, she and Buffy both recognized the exchange for what it was. Their eyes locked for a brief, uneasy moment.
Xander following behind, missed it. “I really thought you guys would have more stuff,” he said lightly, setting the bags down on the hall floor. “Little broomsticks or maybe hats. You know, souvenirs.”
Willow stood still near the base of the stairs, her eyes traveling the territory of floor and wall, seeking out the familiar. And the new. She didn’t seem to hear him.
“There was a village, but no gift shop,” Dawn said. She, too, glanced around the hallway.
“Well, maybe it was better that way,” Xander said, standing up. “No temptation for y….”
“Right then, “Giles interrupted, frowning at Xander. “Willow and Dawn must be very tired after. . . .” His voice trailed off. Dawn had joined Willow, and they were both looking at a framed photograph that Buffy had hung in the entryway after they’d left.
It was Tara, seated at a table in the Magic Box. The open pages of several books were just visible on the table in front of her. Tara was looking up, at something or someone just outside the frame of the photo. Her lips were slightly open, as if she was about to speak. One braid fell forward, brushing her shoulder. Her blue eyes seemed to dance.
Willow lifted a hand and touched the image of Tara’s face. Her finger trailed down the glass, lingering. Buffy, leaning against the doorframe, watched her. Xander and Giles both looked away. The room was dead silent.
After a long moment, Willow seemed to rouse herself. She turned her back with effort. “That’s nice, Buffy,” she said quietly. Buffy hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until this moment, and she let it out with relief.
“I think,” Willow said. Her voice was low, and the others strained to hear her. “I need some sleep. But….” She glanced at the stairs, then away.
“Willow, you’re in Dawn’s room tonight,” Buffy stepped forward and touched Willow’s arm. “It’s already made up for you. Dawn and I are going to do the whole sister sleepover thing in my room.” She glanced at Dawn, who nodded. “Unless maybe you want to sleep over too?”
Willow exhaled. She reached for Buffy’s hand and squeezed it. “I think I just want to be alone tonight,” she said, her eyes darting to Xander, then Giles, then Dawn. “I’m sorry…I just….”
Giles took a hand out of his pocket and patted Willow’s shoulder. “We’re glad you’re back, Willow,” he said. “We’ll all be here tomorrow.” Willow swallowed but didn’t move.
Xander swung into action, scooping Willow’s bag off the floor. “I’ll carry your bag up, Will,” he said, gesturing toward the bag. “Settle you in?” Willow’s eyes flitted from Dawn to Xander. She nodded.
The others watched them go. Giles took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with a tired hand. Buffy had thought the summer had been hard enough; she’d spent it grieving for Tara, her friend. But now she needed to help Willow grieve for Tara, her lover. The hard part was just beginning.
But Dawn was waiting, and Buffy turned to her sister. “So,” she said, “what’s with the matching outfits?”
****
“Dawn, tell me.” Buffy made room for her sister on the bed. “How are you, really?”
Dawn settled herself back against the pillows. “I’m okay, Buffy,” she said. “I miss Tara.” She plucked at the bedspread. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I mean, I know she is, but it’s like I can’t really believe it. I keep thinking that she’s just going to walk through the door.”
Buffy propped herself up on one elbow. “I know what you mean,” she said softly.
“It’s like when Mom died.” Dawn nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “I miss Mom, too.”
Buffy scooted a little closer to Dawn. “Dawn, I’m proud of you,” she said. Dawn looked up, surprised. “You helped Willow. I know she’s still in a bad way, and I know it’s going to take time, but at least she’s…I don’t know…talking.”
Dawn bit her lip. “She cries every night,” she said softly. “Her room was right next to mine. And I think maybe she has bad dreams.”
Buffy nodded. “I know,” she said. For a moment, her eyes clouded over, and she seemed to Dawn to have gone away. Then she came back.
“So what was England like, anyway?” she asked.
Dawn thought.
England had been cool and green. For Dawn, it had also been sadness and confusion. And headaches. When she thought of it now—from the distance of a day and a flight—she remembered the landscape as the wrinkles of migraine, as the green-tinged white that seared her mind and brought with it noise. And voices.
They hadn’t begun right away, the headaches. Not until after Willow had dragged herself out of her week-long catatonia. In fact, when Dawn thought about it, she thought that in some weird way, the headaches had actually been a good thing. Not that she wanted to go through that blinding pain, but…had the headaches actually helped Willow? It had seemed so, the first time. . . .
Dawn didn’t remember exactly what she had been doing when Willow first crawled out of bed. She had been standing in the hallway, on her way to…or from…somewhere when the door to Willow’s room opened, and Willow…thin and gray faced…looked into the hallway and saw Dawn.
“Did…” Willow’s voice was hoarse from disuse. “Did you see someone?” Dawn looked around.
“Someone?” Dawn asked. “It’s just me out here.” Willow started to turn away, but she seemed uncertain. Tentative. And she looked…awful.
“Would you…maybe…want to take a bath?” Dawn suggested quickly. She didn’t want Willow to close herself up in her room again. “I could…get you some clean clothes. Maybe something to eat?” After a pause, Willow had nodded.
After Willow had bathed, and dressed, and accepted a few spoonfuls of soup, she let Dawn lead her outside, into the park. They had just walked, not together really, but near.
Dawn had stopped to tie her shoe, and while she knelt, Willow had wandered ahead. Dawn could see her when she looked up, receding; she was walking along the low stone wall that separated the park from the drive.
She’d glanced back at her shoe, and then her field of vision had gone white, and she had fallen to the ground, her hands flying to her ears, to block out the power drill pitch and the low mumbling roar.
“Dawn!” she had heard the shout from under the din, and she tried to focus on it.
When she opened her eyes, she was lying on her back on the grass, and Willow was kneeling next to her. Dawn’s first thought was relief that the noise had stopped. And her second was that there was, behind the grief that had shrouded Willow’s face for so many days, a spark of something. Concern. Worry. Life.
That had been the first headache, Dawn thought. And it had only been a little one.
“Dawn?” Willow had said again, laying her palm on Dawn’s forehead.
“Dawn,” Buffy said again. Dawn realized that she had spoken out loud. “What headaches?”
****
Chanting. The Followers were chanting. He had gathered them from alleys and underpasses, a surviving handful of hangers-on. But they were enough. And with his energy focused on the ritual at hand, he was able to calm them from the muddle of mice and insects and dark spaces in which they seemed trapped and to focus them on chanting. It was sensational, really, that these muddied minds could concentrate so completely on the necessary words. But the Followers’ minds had been made for chanting such as this. Literally. And it was music to his ears.
His own personal cabaret.
Doc smiled.
He had found the ritual almost by accident, after months of poring through the most ancient of Hell God worship texts. It was so short that he had nearly missed it, a few words scrawled in pale ink on the margin of a closely printed page.
And the concept was fairly simple, too. To make her essence incarnate at the point of its disappearance from this world. It required so little: attendants who had been near at the time her essence departed. Twelve hours of chanting. A bowl of milk. A circle of knots. A door. Oh, and of course blood.
If it worked, it would bring her back in the body that had housed her essence before it departed.
And he would be waiting.
****
Breakfast was eggs and toast and, for Willow, a murky orangish drink in a tall glass. She looked at it, surprised, when she entered the kitchen late the next morning. Buffy followed her glance.
“Dawn brought me the recipe,” she said. “She said it’s the only way to get any calories in you. Does it taste awful?”
“It’s okay,” Willow shrugged. “I’ve gotten used to it.”
“Drink up, Will,” Buffy said. “And then, if you’re up for it, we’ll meet Xander and Giles at the Magic Box. Did you see the flier?”
Dawn came into the kitchen then, pulling her hair back into a long ponytail. “Hey, Willow, look!” She pointed to her pink t-shirt. “Color!” Dawn looked pointedly at Willow’s own clothes, the same murky blue of the day before. “Don’t you want to wear something different to the Magic Box? I mean, you have a whole closet full of clothes upstairs.”
Willow looked up from her drink. “Do you think I should?”
Buffy put down her coffee cup. “I’ll get you something, Will,” she said quickly.
“No. It’s okay.” Willow pushed back her chair. “I have to…I have to go in there sometime.” She should do it now, before she changed her mind.
“Want me to come with you?” Dawn asked.
Willow shook her head. “I can do this,” she said uncertainly.
Buffy frowned. “Willow, we’ll be right here.”
Willow gathered her strength as she walked up the stairs. She tried to relax into a focusing technique that the Guides at the coven had taught her, a way of seeing memories as a collection of images. Like watching a music video, only without the music. It had helped her to avoid drowning in the waves of Tara that broke over her upon waking every morning. She could play the images in her mind at a distance and then sink into one memory, calming herself.
At the door to the room she hadn’t entered since…that day…she paused. She took a breath and turned the doorknob.
Standing. She was at least still standing. The room was bright with sun, and it was dusty; Willow could see the particles floating. She let her gaze travel around the room…over the armoire, the star-shaped mirror, the box of clothes still sitting on the chair by the window…and the bed. Her eyes rested there for a moment, halfway closed, as if she could keep from seeing the worst part of it. Then the wave started to crash toward her from the horizon, and she forced herself to break it down into a series of discrete images.
Tara combing her long blonde hair by the window.
Tara eating ice cream when she thought Willow was asleep.
Tara tossing pillows off the bed.
Tara choosing from a tangle of necklaces and then fastening one around Willow’s neck. Fingers on her collarbone, trailing, trembling.
Tara talking. This is the room. Brave.
Tara running a cool hand down Willow’s back.
Tara running a hot hand up Willow’s thigh. Breathing in and out.
Breathe, Willow thought. In and out.
It was too much, though, thinking about Tara this way, here, and Willow stepped backward and changed her mental tape. Now, the room looked different, shadowed.
A whispered word in front of the mirror.
A dried flower under the pillow.
The sound of Tara packing.
An empty dress.
An empty bed at night. Every night.
Night sweats.
Nightmares.
Night.
That was better. Punishment. She deserved to feel that. That feeling sustained her as she pulled open a dresser drawer and grabbed at a tangle of shirts. She pulled out a handful of fabric without looking at it, and then backed out of the room.
She turned around and leaned against the closed door, safe from the flood for a moment. She clutched the shirt to her chest. But the flashes of those empty months, those harder than hard days after her last visit to Rack, stayed with her. And reminded her. She still had to talk to everyone. Apologize. Atone. And she had to do it alone.
“Tara,” she whispered into the empty hallway. “Tara, I miss you.”
****
It was time.
The twelfth hour approached, the blood beaded, and the Followers chanted. The red rope that connected the Followers to one another was pulled taut as the Followers moved back, enlarging the circle. Doc inhaled. He felt the pressure building, the climax of all his preparations. He closed his eyes.
A shiver moved around the circle, a tremor passing through the rope from hand to hand. There was in the air a current, a portent. Time seemed to level, to spread thick around the Followers.
In the center of the circle, the bowl of milk fizzed and frothed, as if it were being whipped. As the ropes pulled tighter, as the chanting voices grew louder, the milk in the bowl spiraled. And then, as the Followers reached the stroke of the twelfth hour of their chanting, the milk churned and spewed out, splashing the wooden doorframe in the middle of the circle. The Followers all pulled back, dropping the rope. In a series of quick bursts around the circle, the knots released. There was a great gust of wind. Doc squeezed his eyes shut.
There was a wrinkle.
And then nothing.
Doc felt the surge of anticipation rush through him. He savored the moment. He was ready to welcome Glory through the doorway and back to this dimension. To witness her rejoining the earth at the very spot where she had left it. To see her essence embodied. To begin the second phase of his preparations.
A greeting ready on his lips, Doc opened his eyes.
But the circle was empty.
****
Across town, in the newly opened Magic Box, from the quiet corner into which she had sunk for a moment of peace from the swell of customers and the constant, unspoken comfort of her friends, Willow heard the sound of shattering glass. She turned in time to see Dawn drop to the ground, her hands over her ears, her eyes screwed shut.
Buffy turned, too, but Willow got to her first, gathered Dawn in her arms, smoothed her forehead. “Come on Dawnie,” she whispered. “Come on out.” Buffy knelt next to them. Willow could see Buffy’s fear and the alarm of the customers who hung back, watching. “It’s okay,” she said, to Buffy as much as to Dawn. “It’ll be over in a minute.”
And it was. With the touch of Willow’s hand on her forehead, Dawn began to calm. Her hands relaxed, and she opened her eyes. She was panting, but her face was no longer contorted in pain, and her eyes were alert and clear.
Buffy touched Dawn’s arm. “Dawn?” she said tentatively.
Dawn, still lying in Willow’s arms, turned her head to Buffy. “I think she’s here,” she said.
****
There was a wrinkle, a kind of sigh, and Tara opened her eyes.
She stood by the window, looking at the dim bedroom. That was strange; it had been so light just a few minutes ago…she must have lost track of time again. The hours since she had returned to Willow had blurred together nicely. She smiled.
Tara turned her head, expecting to see Willow, but the room was empty. She shivered and crossed her arms over her chest. She should be dressed, shouldn’t she?
But, of course, she was. Tara caught sight of herself in the mirror; she looked at the blue t-shirt she wore, the sleeves covering her arms, the hem resting an inch above the waistband of her cotton pants.
“Your shirt,” she said.
Why had she said that? And with the question, a tremor passed through her mind, a white-green flash. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it made her feel a little dizzy. Tara touched a hand to her temple. “My head,” she said.
To be continued in Chapter 4, “In the Flesh.”
Edited by: Tulipp at: 8/5/02 5:47:15 am
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Can't wait to see what happens next, and to learn more about these 'little headaches.' 
Loved it!