Title: Bread.
Author: Tulipp.
E-mail:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Yes, please, especially if it’s constructive.
Spoilers: Through BTVS season 5, “The Gift.”
Disclaimer: All characters and an occasional bit of dialogue are borrowed from Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: Willow, Tara, and Dawn struggle to come to terms with the events of season 5, Buffy’s death, and an uncertain future. (Three parts.)
Acknowledgments: I am addicted to beta readers. It makes any story better, and I can’t imagine writing without them. Ruth helped me see stylistic tics I didn’t even realize I had; darkmagicwillow asked the right questions and helped me see Tara more clearly; and Ruby challenged some assumptions, even though I decided to keep them in the end. Finally, J. convinced me that it’s okay to try something new, even if the final product doesn’t turn out to be perfect. Thanks to you all. And one last thank-you to TromDeGrey, who hasn't seen this fic yet but is responsible for me not throwing it away many weeks ago.
Note: This is a three-part story, and the first part is pretty angsty, but things lighten up after that.
Prologue.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone;
it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time,
made new.
—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven
Months later, on a hot September day, Willow would let her fingers rest lightly on the steering wheel and look ahead at the yellow center line of highway disappearing under the hood of the car.
It would be strange to be driving after years of walking through Sunnydale. Walking the streets at night. Haunting the cemeteries waiting for newly turned vampires. Patrolling with Buffy.
Sunnydale would seem already to be far away, a dream she’d had once. Sometimes a nightmare with monsters and demons and pain and fear, but sometimes the kind of dream you don’t want to wake up from because the people that you love are in it, and they smile at you, and they touch your arm, and when you make a joke, they laugh, even though it’s not that funny.
She would think back on the summer, and she would let herself—just for a little while—forget the nights of not sleeping. Holding Dawn while she cried for Buffy. Holding Tara while she cried about Glory. Those things were important, and they were real, and she wouldn’t want to forget them for long. But with the window rolled down, the wind lifting her hair off her neck, she would let the summer breeze past her and hold onto only a handful of moments when things had changed: A June night. A July morning. An August afternoon. Moments when hope had come back when she had almost stopped looking for it.
The way the best things always happened when you weren’t looking for them.
Sometimes, she would think, the world went up in flames; your best friend flew into the fire like a bird, fell into the flames like a feather, and was burned up. And you knew everything was different—you knew—because the flames reached your own ankles and scorched you. Because all that was left of a hero was ashes. Because your heart wouldn’t spark, and you couldn’t find the match that would make it blaze again.
But sometimes…sometimes the world changed so slowly you almost missed it. As if someone had turned the oven up a little bit, and the kitchen was just slightly warmer than it had been. And then suddenly everything was different, and you couldn’t put your finger on what had happened to make it that way.
Then Willow would shake her head a little. She would turn to look at Tara, who would be shredding the last loaf of bread and tossing the crumbs out the open window. And Tara would smile sheepishly at her, as if she’d been caught doing something strange, and make a joke that wasn’t very funny.
Willow would reach over and touch Tara’s arm, and she would laugh at her joke, and in that quiet moment, something unspoken would rise warm and soft between them: a quiet heat.
And Willow would drive.
Part I: June.
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs …
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.
—Gwendolyn Brooks, “My dreams, my works, must wait till after hell”
Willow almost forgot.
A soft sound had tugged her out of not-quite-asleep, and blinking in the dark of Joyce’s bedroom, she almost scooted across the bed to fold her fingers into the hollow of Tara’s hip bone. Almost nuzzled Tara’s neck with her nose. Almost slowed her breathing down so that they were inhaling and exhaling together. But then she remembered, and …with Tara only inches away…Willow was alone again.
She wished she had forgotten. She wished she could forget Buffy’s death. Anya’s wheelchair. Giles’ absence. Dawn’s shuttered look. Tara’s quiet ache—all of it.
Hugging her hands to her sides, Willow wished she could forget what it had felt like to slice into Tara’s head. To rend. Sure, in the end it had worked, but her fingers had scraped the inside of Tara’s mind, the inside of Tara, and that wasn’t hers to touch. It wasn’t hers to feel shards of memories, sharp and glassy, that Tara had never shared. It had been a violation. She had violated.
Willow couldn’t forget that, and she wouldn’t let her fingers hurt Tara that way again, so she had been keeping them to herself. Tara didn’t need more touching right now; she needed someone to be strong, to take care of things. She needed someone to be brave.
But it was getting harder. Her mind wouldn’t let her forget how much it had hurt to touch Tara, but her body remembered how much she needed Tara’s touch.
She heard the sound again—it was a knock—and she closed her eyes for a second, in disappointment or relief, she wasn’t sure which.
“Come in,” she called out, seeing Tara shift and sit up as a thin hand appeared around the edge of the door. Dawn shifted from one foot to the other in the doorway, her hair long and loose around her shoulders. She looked very young.
“Bad dream, Dawnie?” Willow asked softly. It wouldn’t be the first time, not for any of them.
Dawn edged into the room. “I….” She bit her lip. “Could I…sleep with you, just this once?” The words came out in a rush, and Dawn took a breath. “Sometimes….when Mom was sick, Buffy would let me sleep with her, you know, when she wasn’t patrolling, so really…well, it was just the one time since she was usually patrolling, and….” She broke off suddenly, smiling weakly, and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m starting to sound like you.”
Propping herself up on her elbow, Willow patted the sheet beside her. “Hop in, Dawnie,” she said. “We can be a Wiccan sandwich. With…with Summers sausage.” She glanced at Tara for confirmation, but Tara was already reaching to the floor for an extra pillow.
“Jeez,” Dawn said, crawling over Tara and settling between them, “more like Summers squash. How do you guys sleep in the same bed?” Willow heard Buffy’s tones in her voice.
“Thinking about Buffy?” Tara said softly, slipping an arm around Dawn’s shoulders. Willow wondered how she did it, set aside her own pain so easily to comfort someone else. It seemed so effortless. So impossible.
But Dawn leaned back against the headboard, sighing. “I miss Buffy,” she whispered. “Everything seems wrong, like…like….” She faltered, drawing in her breath sharply, on the verge of tears, and Tara looked helplessly at Willow. Maybe it wasn’t so effortless, Willow thought suddenly, sitting up a little higher on her elbow and taking charge.
“I know, Dawnie,” she said lightly, using her little girl’s voice, and she felt Dawn exhale with relief. She saw Tara’s tense shoulders relax. “It feels like…like a bike shop without a Huffy.”
Tara smiled at her then, and Willow went on, heartened. “A cat without the fluffy,” she added, giving Dawn a little poke and watching her squirm. They needed this, all of them.
“Like…billy goats without the gruffy,” Tara jumped in. “Come on, Dawn, you do one.”
Dawn thought for a minute, biting her lip. “Like a library without the stuffy?” she asked finally, and Tara hugged her arm a little closer around Dawn’s shoulder.
Tara paused, tilting her head to one side so her hair fell over her cheek. “A bruise without the puffy,” she said finally, and the mood shifted again, the sigh seeming to come from all of them and hover over the bed. No one spoke for a moment, and Willow searched her mind for a sentence, some string of words, to blow that sigh away again. Words, she just needed words.
“Ooh, Macbeth without Macduffy,” she said suddenly, and this time, Dawn giggled. Willow felt a little better hearing it.
“No fair,” Dawn said. “That’s college. We haven’t gotten there yet.” Willow caught Tara’s eye and was rewarded with the relief she saw there.
“Oh, sure, literature,” Tara said, squeezing Dawn’s hand playfully but looking gratefully at Willow. “Willow wins again.”
Dawn rolled her eyes. “Willow always wins,” she yawned, and Willow knew there would be no crisis that night. She watched Dawn settle against the pillow and curl against Tara, who smoothed her long, sleek hair. Willow reached out and rubbed Dawn’s back lightly; for a moment they were the same, she and Tara, offering the only comfort they had to give.
Dawn’s breathing slowed into sleep after a minute, but Tara kept stroking her hair, and Willow kept rubbing her back. Listening to Dawn’s quiet breath, Willow inhaled that sweet nighttime teenage scent—antiseptic and baby powder, and then, as she brushed her hand lightly up Dawn’s back, and Tara brushed her own hand down smoothly over Dawn’s hair, their fingers touched, and they both paused.
Willow held her breath for a moment at the contact. She wanted Tara to wrap a hand around her fingers, to hold onto her and not let go. She wanted Tara to make some move that said it was okay to touch her again. She couldn’t do it herself.
In that moment before the rescue and the reunion, before Willow had seen Tara come home to herself, she had felt something true: she and Glory were the same. They could stick their fingers in people’s brains and twist their memories and perceptions around. They could find pain, but they could also make it.
So she waited. But after a few seconds Tara started to stroke Dawn’s hair again, and Willow reluctantly pulled her hand away before it remembered and reached for Tara itself. She saw Tara not looking at her. She saw another month of near misses ahead.
And she saw something else. Across Dawn’s shadowed body and Tara’s remote face, if she squinted in the dark, she saw a bowl of dried herbs on Joyce’s dresser. At the bottom of that bowl was a last resort. A just in case. Something for a rainy day, when the not talking and the not touching became too much to bear.
But for now, she closed her eyes against the image of the dried herbs, and she turned away from Tara and Dawn, and she tried…alone…to forget.
* * * * *
Tara exhaled silently when she felt Willow turn away from her. They had been so close for a second, so near, and Willow had still not touched her. Had not made the gesture that Tara had been wanting for weeks. She swallowed against the disappointment in her throat.
She repeated to herself, silently, the only words of comfort she could find: Time will help. Time heals all wounds. Give it time. Take your time. Time is a bandage, a giant tissue. Saying these things to Dawn in the daytime made sense. But here, in the dark, she knew they were running out of time; it was slipping away.
She couldn’t blame Willow for not wanting to touch her. She was sickened herself when she remembered the way she’d felt, the way she’d been. Maybe being fed wasn’t so bad, but to have your girlfriend bathe you, dress you, clean you after you used the bathroom…it made her shudder. It made her feel like a baby. It made her want to pull back, to wrap her arms around herself and shut down, like she used to do. Like she did with Glory. Like she had always done before Willow.
Something had happened between them in that moment…among all of them, really: Willow and Glory and herself. One moment, her mind had been smudgy, inky with confusion; the next moment, fingers like blades had sliced into her head, and everything had gone sharp. They were together inside that sharpness, each feeling the others as herself: Three gods. Three witches. Three girls.
And then from within the triangle—that brief union—a separation had grown and exploded, sending them all flying. A moment later, Tara had been panting and aware, and Willow had been crawling toward her through the rubble, and they had been themselves again. But this time…they weren’t two anymore. They were one and one.
They were alone, together.
Closing her eyes now, Tara knew that they would go to sleep, separately and silently. In the morning Willow would retreat into the basement and work on the Buffybot, and in the afternoon Tara would take Dawn to a movie to escape the oppressive silence of the house, and the next night they would go to bed again, each alone. She had hoped, when Dawn slid into bed between them, that it was a chance. She had hoped that Dawn would be a conduit, a lightning rod, a key; that her very presence would somehow magically unlock the door between them so they could reach for one another again.
But Dawn was just a girl now, not a key.
Stroking Dawn’s hair, Tara watched the sharp line of Willow’s shoulder until she could see it relax, finally, into the slow rise and fall of sleep, and only then, pulling the sheet up to her neck, did she close her own eyes and dream.
In the dream, all things happened at once, each moment taut and pitched low and held out, overlapping and simultaneous: Bird. Mirror. Kitchen. Bread.
A bright-hot blue day outside the Summers house. Through the kitchen window, Tara could see Willow, red-ponytailed and aproned, moving from sink to stove. She was singing to herself, a tuneless, longing hum; she was making bread.
Above, a small, iron-colored bird flew in lazy circles around the house, encircling. Protecting. Tara shielded her eyes with one hand to squint up at it, trying to spot the feathers clearly for a moment, to see the soft downy gray of its belly, but only the fine hairs of her own arm came into view. The bird was supposed to rest. She had to feed it. She had the food right here in her hand.
Except…she didn’t. She turned her empty palm over and felt anxious; the bird couldn’t eat nothing. She would have to go into the house. Glancing down, she saw the empty wicker basket by her feet and then the shrubs, covered with freshly washed white sheets drying in the sun. Shimmering like silver.
Reaching down to pick up the basket, her arm was long and pale and slender, almost as if it were someone else’s arm. An arm she knew but not her arm.
Around her, the air trembled and changed: the shrubs became a chair and a coat rack, the white sheets morphed into walls and windows.
How had she gotten into the hallway? The high singing murmur of Willow’s little-girl voice drifted out from the kitchen, and Tara wanted to go to it, to go to her, but the white-silver wall shimmered on her left and caught her eye like a magnet, pulling. Compelling. She turned to see…
Her reflection in the mirror on the wall. Tilting her head, Tara looked at her own blue eyes. She watched her right arm lifting up to touch the finger in the mirror; she watched the reflected finger come closer and closer. That slender arm in the mirror…not her arm. The light in the hallway flickered, casting a shadow across her face in the mirror: her long, pale face. Her sharply defined nose. Her curly hair. Her…curly…hair? No, it was Joyce’s curly hair, Joyce’s slender arm, Joyce’s face starting back at her.
Tara snatched her arm back from the mirror, but it was too late.
“We’re the same,” Joyce whispered, and Tara felt her own lips form the words.
Then the hallway changed and trembled, the mirror flickering and becoming a refrigerator that took shape as she approached slowly, slowly.
The kitchen came closer—Willow came closer—so she knew she must be walking forward. Willow’s hair was black, her fingers crackling red, but Tara knew it was Willow because she was talking about buns. “Buns in the oven,” she was giggling. “The fruit frogs put their buns in the oven.”
Saying “Willow.” Swallowing and saying “Willow?”
Willow started to turn, and Tara’s head swam on a wave of relief. She raised her eyes to take Willow in and saw…
The long and wavy blonde hair, the wide lipstick smile, the black tank top clinging to her round breasts. “Tara!” Buffy said, putting her hands on her hips. “You shouldn’t be here.” Tara recognized that familiar wide and not-quite-friendly smile.
“I’m supposed to feel safe h…here,” Tara said. “I think I should s…stay.” Over Buffy’s shoulder, she saw the counter, dusted with flour and cluttered with white-silver tins.
“Little girls belong with their daddies,” Buffy said firmly. “Go ahead and take her, Mr. Maclay.” Tara’s eyes snapped to the kitchen door, but the man standing at the threshold and reaching a hand out to her was a stranger.
Tara stared at him for a moment, and then her eyes tracked back to Buffy, who smiled and clapped her hands together. “I almost forgot!” Buffy said. “I have a present for you!” Buffy’s hands were full of stakes, and the blonde of her hair bled into red again, the red ponytail.
Tara shook her head slightly at Buffy…at Willow? “For…me?” she asked. She didn’t want them. She wanted to back away.
“No, baby,” Willow’s voice scolded her gently. “That’s not what I do. That’s not what I’m for. Now close your eyes.”
It was better with her eyes closed because the sound of Willow’s voice was clear, so it had to be Willow approaching; it had to be Willow telling her, in that sing-song voice, to keep her eyes closed and hold out her hand; it had to be Willow’s thin hand on her head, caressing her hair. Tara leaned into that hand and inhaled, trying to catch the scent.
“You must be tired of applesauce,” Willow was crooning at her now, “so I made you a sandwich. Now open up.”
Then Tara’s hands were filling up with the sandwich, warm and soft and…squirming… and her eyes were flying open and wide at the moldy bread crawling and green. She was shoving her arms away from her and wiping her hands on her jeans and backing away, unable to take her eyes off the lump of bread and tuna on the floor.
“It’s perfectly natural,” Willow was saying, but when Tara dragged her eyes upward to look at her, it was Glory, big-haired and red-lipped, who was grinning in Tara’s face.
“If you leave nummy treats where they don’t belong, they go bad,” Glory laughed. “That always happens.” And then fingers—whose fingers were they now?— piercing, and Tara going cold and metallic.
But the kitchen was already dissolving around them, the butcher block counter top flickering into the wooden bench in the backyard, the tins on the counter now a row of shiny bird feeders.
Tara sat in the backyard and watched the bird fly in circles that were smaller, and closer, and nearer until it alighted on the bench next to her. She blinked, and it was Buffy, calm and not smiling now, her silvery blonde hair spilling over the white sheet wrapped around her.
She swallowed, shivered. “This is set down,” she said to Buffy. “Our edges are blurring; it’s all set down.”
“No,” Buffy said quietly, with her calm, sad face and her calm, peaceful eyes. “Only some of this is true. Why can’t you see what you’re holding?”
Slowly, Tara looked down at her clenched fist, turning it over and unfurling her fingers. But she saw nothing there except air. And the criss-crossed lines of her own palm.
Waking with a start, Tara squinted in the dark at her empty hand. Who are we? she thought, and then wondered where the question had come from. Aren’t we ourselves anymore?
Dawn was there, curled against her, and Tara could see that on the other side of Dawn, Willow slept, hunched on her side and turned away from both of them. The dream was already blurring, its tumble of images fading and leaving her with only an empty hand, so empty it ached.
She saw Buffy's face again, clear against that graying, shaded dreamworld. “Why can’t you see what you’re holding?” Buffy had said, and Tara wanted to see.
She wanted to be holding Willow. She wanted it more than she wanted to protect herself, more than she wanted to hide away that lingering skim of shame. More than she wanted to stay awake and puzzle over a dream that returned to her most nights.
Taking a breath, Tara carefully, carefully reached across Dawn until she could feel Willow’s pajama top in her fingers, and she clutched at it.
The flannel was warm where it had touched Willow’s back, and Tara closed her eyes and pretended that it was Willow’s hair she was touching, or Willow’s skin, soft apricot fuzz on the back of her neck and her arm. Holding the fabric between her fingers and trying to conjure up Willow in her touch, she felt her heart slow down again, and eventually she fell back asleep.
* * * * *
Dawn woke in the early morning from a dream of trickles and rivers and knew she couldn’t put off going to the bathroom any longer. She sat up slowly, reluctantly peeling herself from the cocoon that Willow and Tara’s bodies seemed to make around her, and scooted to the end of the bed.
When she came back out, tugging at the drawstring in her cotton pants and yawning, she noticed that something was different. Stepping back, more fully awake, she realized that in the two minutes she had been gone, Willow and Tara had curled into one another, clinging to one another in their sleep the way they never did now in the daytime.
Dawn had never seen them so unguarded together, had never been free to look at them so openly, and at first, she took in the sight of them with hunger. Tara’s front pressed against Willow’s back, an arm draped over Willow’s stomach. Dawn could see that, underneath the thin blanket, their hips were matched, their knees lined up. Even their feet seemed to be intertwined: a little pile of feet.
She couldn’t stop looking at them; it was as if she was seeing them—really seeing them—for the first time.
It seemed like her vision of Willow and Tara was always shifting. She was never sure in the morning who was going to be who that day. After Buffy died, Tara had been timid like a little girl, and Willow had seemed like her mother, fussing over her and making her eat and go to bed early. But only a few days ago, when Willow had mentioned casually at dinner that she was thinking of fixing the Buffybot and taking her out on patrol, Tara’s eyes had flashed dangerously, and suddenly Willow was a petulant child and Tara was an angry mom.
But now…they didn’t look like mother and child now. They looked like.... Dawn’s mind stopped making words and understood that Tara’s arm was too high to be holding Willow’s stomach. She realized that not only Tara’s hips but also other things were pressed against Willow.
Dawn’s cheeks went hot, and she took a step backward. Part of her was curious, intrigued, and in her toes she felt a flush of something warm that wasn’t comfort.
She’d seen Willow and Tara together lots of times, of course she had; she’d seen them sleeping in the same bed. But somehow…somehow she hadn’t thought of them as separate, as their own thing. They were just…Buffy’s friends. Like, when Buffy and Willow and Tara had taken her out to the movies, she’d thought of it as one big girls’ night out. Now, she realized Tara and Willow had kind of been on a date, too. She’d just…never really thought about it that way before.
Her mind flashed her a memory, a twilight glimpse past the half-closed door of a van parked on the street: Oz and Willow necking, and Oz squeezing Willow through the fabric of her jeans, and Willow making the softest sound and reaching down…Buffy had yanked her away then, and later, Willow was red all over and wouldn’t meet Dawn’s eye. Now, Dawn’s mind flashed her a replacement image, one she had never actually seen and never really imagined: Tara and Willow necking, and Tara squeezing Willow through the fabric of her jeans, and Willow making an even softer sound and reaching down….
Part of her was curious, but another part blinked rapidly at this thing that was so private and so grown-up and so…sexual…and she edged toward the door and away from these two girls who were suddenly not just her sisters’ friends who held hands sometimes while they were taking care of her but…girlfriends, actually. Lovers.
The word tested itself in her mind, and she found nothing there to dislike. But also nothing she was quite ready to see. Not like this, in the dark. In a bed.
She closed the door softly behind her and let her breath out in the darkened hallway.
Back in her room, she hugged Buffy’s old teddy bear to her chest and drifted over to her dresser, where she had tucked photos of her family into the edges of her mirror. There was Buffy at 15, shrieking as Dawn threw a bucket of cold water at her on the beach. And there was her mother, glancing back over her shoulder at an art gallery opening, her curly hair and gentle face framed by splashes of bright color. There was herself, her mouth stuffed full of sandwich and laughing. And there was her father, smiling and slicing tomatoes in the kitchen of their old house in L.A.
Dawn had taken that photo herself; she remembered. She tugged it out of the mirror frame and studied it.
She had been sullen and tearful when Buffy and her mother had gone off for a grown-up lunch and shopping without her, and she had sulked around the house for awhile until she found her father in the kitchen, making soup and listening to old man music.
He had made her chocolate milk and coaxed an explanation out of her, something about still being treated like a baby when she was really almost nine, and he had smiled and then pretended he wasn’t smiling.
“What’s so great about growing up?” he had asked her. “More homework and wearing high heels to the mall and eating…what…quiche?” Dawn had made a face at the thought of that, and they had both laughed, and then she had watched as her father sliced tomatoes and bread and cheese and made them both gigantic sandwiches.
“There’s enough demons when you grow up, Dawno,” he had said then, seriously. “You don’t need to invite them in so early.”
She had nodded solemnly, wanting him to think she understood, but things had gotten hard after that. Her mom and dad had started fighting, and then they had moved to Sunnydale, and then they didn’t really see him anymore.
But…touching the shiny paper of the photographs with her fingers….Dawn knew that none of it had happened. Not really. She was an invention. She was new. And although she could remember growing up—her tongue could recall the taste of that sandwich, and her eyes could recall her mother’s face, and her arms could recall lifting the bucket—even though she could remember it…it hadn’t happened. Sometimes she wanted to do all those things now so that they really would happen. To be a little girl still, and to not grow up. To find out for herself what her father was like, what it was like to have a father again.
She’d tried, eyes squeezed shut, to convince herself that Willow was Buffy and Tara was her mom, to pretend just for a second that nothing had changed and the three of them were piled in bed together after watching movies, but it hadn’t worked. Buffy was gone, and her mom was gone, and she loved Willow and Tara a lot, but it wasn’t the same. No matter how hard any of them tried, they could never be people they weren’t, and they could never change the past….the real one or the made-up one.
Dawn wiped the paw of Buffy’s bear across her eyes, a little dizzy from thinking. Chocolate milk would help, maybe. But tiptoeing down the stairs, she realized that her fingers still clutched the photo of her father, and she felt how real it was. It was paper and ink, and those things were real. As real as any memory. Realer.
In the kitchen, calculating the time difference in her head , Dawn decided it was late enough to call, and she picked up the phone. In the early-morning pause she could hear the birds waking up outside, chattering sleepily at each other, and she knew that after this phone call everything would be different.
She punched in the numbers, and she waited for the click and the ring as the call went through, and then the fuzzy male voice answering on the other end. She took a breath, and she glanced around at the kitchen as if it were the last time she would see it, as if she had to memorize the unwashed glasses and the Xena magnet on the fridge and the half-melted candles Tara had been burning the evening before and Willow’s laptop and a dove-gray jacket of Buffy’s that was still hanging on a hook by the back door because no one had been brave enough to take it down yet. And she took a breath.
“Dad?” she said, not recognizing the little girl squeak of her voice. “Daddy?”
To be continued in Part II: July.
"And I'm eating this banana. Lunchtime be damned!" -- Willow in "Doppelgangland
Edited by: Tulipp at: 1/11/03 8:45:01 am