Hello, my beloved Kittens. I have been lurking for a few months now, but haven’t put in an appearance. Just as things were coming together on the physical front, my partner dumped me. Let us pause for a moment to consider the concept of suckage as it applies to this event. OK--moving on. I’m finally feeling the urge to write something besides bad poetry; I’m hoping that upon reading this (if you’re kind enough to do so), you don’t decide that while the object may have changed, the adjective still applies. I’d very much appreciate any feedback you are generous enough to leave.
PS: It’s good to be back.
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AS TIME GOES BY
Sett Spring, 2003. This picks up 2 years after "Gods Served and Abandoned," but I don't think it's necessary to have read that in order to understand this story.
Rating: PG for now; probably R in a bit
Disclaimers: The very fact that there are any women alive, anywhere, in this story is enough to prove that I don’t own the originals.
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“No…No, don’t. Get away from me!” She fought, tried to push away, but the other one was relentless. “Stop it!”
“Willow…Will, Sweetie--wake up. Willow, you’re dreaming.”
Follow Tara’s voice…That’s all she had to do; she just had to follow Tara’s voice and everything would be OK…
Lurching toward wakefulness, Willow reached out and grabbed onto Tara’s hand as if to pull herself out of the nightmare.
“Oh God, Baby--I was having the worst dream.”
“Yeah, I kinda picked up on that,” came the droll reply. “Must’ve been the yelling and kicking.” Leaning back onto her pillow, she pulled Willow’s head down to her breast and gently rubbed her lover’s back. “So what happened?”
“It was so bizarre, Tara…We had just fought some really epic battle--it seems like it was some kind of uber-apocalypse--and the whole town was just sorta sinking into this big…pit. And not because we’d lost, but because we’d won. I think we must have closed the Hellmouth or something, and it pretty much wiped out everything. It seemed like most people were already gone, though--like they’d headed outta Dodge before the big showdown, you know?”
Tara’s voice was quizzical. “But if we’d won, why were you so upset? You were yelling for something or someone to get away from you.”
Willow shook her head in distress. “Oh, that part was just so bizarre. Some total skank-bot with a pierced tongue kept trying to lick me.”
She felt Tara pull back just slightly in order to look at her. “Some woman was trying to lick you?”
“Yeah. It was so gross.”
“And where was I during all of this?”
“You were just sorta standing off to the side laughing at me. I wanted you to go all large with the butch, but you couldn’t seem to take her seriously.”
Tara’s laughter was deep and full in the dark of the room. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” After a moment, she asked, “So what was it like--closing the Hellmouth, ending all that evil?”
Willow thought for a long moment. “It felt extremely…anticlimactic.”
Nuzzling into the warmth of Tara’s body, she thought about how different their lives looked from the one she’d just left behind in her dream. It had been two years since they’d defeated Glory; one since besting their would-be arch nemeses, the Nerd Trio.
Now
that had been anticlimactic, she mused to herself. Warren had shown up in their backyard the day after his humiliation at the park, waving a gun and bellowing his outrage. In this midst of his threats that Buffy wouldn’t get away with it, Buffy had done just that in the form of grabbing one of the garden gnomes and winging it off of his head. The gun had fluttered harmlessly to the ground, Willow had called the police, and that had pretty much been that. Andrew had served less than two years for his part in the only-marginally Evil Plan, Jonathon had received a suspended sentence, and Warren was now firmly ensconced as someone’s bitch, courtesy of the California State Correctional System.
Tara’s soft voice pulled her out of her reverie. “Well, I’m not surprised the Ultimate Victory felt so hollow. I mean, we need evil.”
Willow was silent for a moment. “Yeah, that makes sense…Or at least, it would make sense in some bizarre parallel universe that bears no resemblance to our own.”
“No, really…Think about it, Sweetie. How do you define good if you don’t have its antonym? I mean, could you really understand the concept of big if you had no concept of small?”
Willow pulled back and propped herself up on her elbow. “But Tara, aren’t we fighting to eradicate evil? Like, if someone gave us the option of doing so, of wiping it out completely, do you really think we wouldn’t take it?”
“Yeah, but the question’s entirely rhetorical, Will. We keep fighting because it’s the right thing to do, but we’ll never really have to make the decision you’re talking about. I mean, don’t get me wrong--I’m not saying I want to invite evil over for supper sometime, or join an evil-intensive bowling league. I’m just saying that having such clear examples of bad makes us understand good more completely.”
“Yeah, I guess I can understand that.” Willow snuggled back into Tara’s warmth. “Just as long as we keep averting the biggest of the bads.”
“Agreed.” After a few moments, Tara asked, “So--anything else in that dream?”
Willow struggled to remember more of that alien landscape that had just occupied her mind. “Oh, yeah--Schwartznegger was running for Governor.”
“The Terminator?” Tara’s voice was incredulous.
“Hey--it was a dream. It’s not supposed to make sense.”
Other things, however, made considerably more sense. After their disastrous initial attempt, Xander and Anya had made it more or less successfully down the aisle. More, in that they had actually emerged from the event legally married, and to each other; less, in that the reception had devolved into free-for-all when a G’hornash demon tried to hit on Xander’s father. The ensuing melee had left Xander with a broken nose, Giles with spinach dip on his head, and Hallifrek--of all things--pregnant.
“That drama queen gets herself knocked down at my wedding reception,” Anya had fumed for days afterward.
“I think the term is ‘knocked up,” Xander pointed out gently and nasally.
“And now Xander can’t be on top because he might mash his nose into something so I have to do all the work,” Anya continued as if her husband hadn’t spoken.
“Must. Gouge. Holes. In. Eardrums,” Willow muttered, trying to exit the conversation.
Giles had gone back to England once more, but returned again after an even briefer stay than his first.
“You missed us,” Willow had chortled gleefully.
“I did no such thing,” the librarian retorted. “I’m simply afraid that Anya will not have the necessary focus for The Magic Box, now that she’s settling into married life.”
“Right…Because no other married woman in America works outside the home,” Dawn pointed out.
Dawn was handling post-Keydom with surprising equanimity. She was also finding her way through the social maze of Sunnydale High, which--not unlike her sister--intimidated her far more than did creatures that wanted to eviscerate her.
“At least demons are up-front about their evil schemes,” she pointed out after being snubbed by someone who had pledged best-friendship the week before. Dawn had finally stopped blushing whenever Tara appeared, although Willow suspected that hero-worship was still in the picture. And she couldn’t fault her for that…
Buffy had ended…whatever it was that she had shared with Spike, who had left town after his pleas had failed to move her. She was trying the single life for awhile. “My decisions on that front haven’t always been the best,” she had observed when informing the group of her decision. Willow thought that the resounding silence which followed held more tact than reproach. The Slayer seemed to be trying to figure things out, which was good, but Willow and Tara couldn’t help noticing that for someone who was always complaining about money, Buffy spent a fortune on batteries.
Willow grew drowsy, thinking about their lives and the lives of their friends over these past two years. The movie playing in her mind began to dip and slide with the force of her fatigue. She gave Tara a quick kiss and turned over so that Tara was cradling her from behind. “Night, Baby,” she murmured, and began to drift back to sleep.
How did I ever sleep before Tara? Nothing can feel this good…
Suddenly, a piercing scream ripped through the night. She sat bolt upright in bed, and turned to face Tara, who was staring at her in the night. They waited, seemingly afraid to breathe, wondering if perhaps they’d imagined it. But then another shriek followed the first, and was followed by yet another.
Willow squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath.
“I’ll take care of her,” she sighed. “You were up with her last night.”
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To Be Continued [i]Edited by: [url=http://b16.ezboard.com/bthekittenthewitchesandthebadwardrobe36671.showUserPublicProfile?gmaudmac[/url]
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I'm looking forward to reading about what else has changed in the last 2 years, although the important fact that Willow and Tara are still together remains. 
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Hey there!! So glad to see you have finally found your way back to us, and with another great fic!
Her loss, and hopefully you will gain strength from it.
I don't think I have ever laughed so much reading a fic...