Lost

by FaithC

Copyright © 2003

faithcorvid@yahoo.com

Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters. They belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. Written and read for enjoyment not for money.
Distribution: The Mystic Muse http://mysticmuse.net
Please email me first.
Feedback: Yes, please!
Spoilers: A few days after (and spoilers up to) Same Time, Same Place.
Pairing: Willow/Tara

When Buffy came back from the dead I was hurt and a little angrier than I let on at the time that she wasn't happier to be here. Even after I learned where she'd been, I didn't understand why being with Dawnie and Xander and me (especially me) wasn't enough for her. When I got back from England I finally understood, but by that time it was too late for either of us to talk about it. I didn't care that Buffy had missed me; I hadn't missed her. There wasn't room in my soul to recognize the absence of anyone except Tara. Everyone else – Giles, the coven of witches who'd given me back my sanity, Dawn, Xander, and even Buffy – were all just shadows. I went through my day, attending classes, researching, helping Dawn with her homework, but I was never more than half there. I was always listening, waiting, watching for her, trapped in some twilight country where Tara was always in the next room.

I knew if I waiting long enough, she'd come to me. I'd had enough experience by then to know more about the other dimensions, the places we go to when we sleep and die, and at other times too. The other realms – calling it heaven or hell just shows how little comprehension most people have of it (of course I never told Buffy that) – were always just in the next room, and Tara always was just behind some door or curtain. She'd step through eventually. She was far too unselfish a person in life to leave us when she should have run as far and as fast from my world as she could get, for me to believe she wouldn't be pulled back in death. Patience was another thing I'd learned in England.

Or, maybe not so much.

Because when I look back on it, the time between the time I came back and the time she came back was really just a few days (not counting those first few days when I wasn't really anywhere, or any when). The newly grown skin on my belly and ribs was still a little itchy that night, and even the soft worn material of my favorite T-shirt was too much against it, so in frustration I'd pulled it off and flung it against the mirror on the other end of the room. I was uncomfortable and miserable and lonely. More so, if it was possible, than usual. It seemed I could almost feel how Tara's cool, long fingernails would have run up and down my stomach and between my breasts, light and cool, delicious enough to relieve the burning torment but not to break the skin. Had she gotten lost again? Where was she? Why wasn't she here, comforting me?

And then, she was there, the way it happens sometimes in dreams, and at other times too, where something just is, and always has been, and her fingers were running up and down the length of my body, rubbing my tummy, and the scent of lavender was all around, a part of my own breathing and pain was a memory of a memory, pain was something that had happened once, to someone else, a long time ago. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her long hair shining silver in the dark, like snow in moonlight. Tara had always been beautiful to me, but now it was if all that pent up beauty had flowed outward. She wasn't glowing, not quite, there weren't any halos or little sparkles or fireflies like you see in the movies. She was just more there than she had ever been. She wasn't a ghost, a shadow, or a shade – I've seen those too in my time, and they're like bad photo copies of faded prints. The way Tara looked now was more like seeing for the first time the original of a painting you've always loved, hung on your bedroom wall, say, or always looked at first in a coffee table book.

I don't know how long she'd been there or how long I lay still, crying and breathing and letting myself feel the comfort of her touch before I whispered "Baby, I got so lost."

She smiled then, reached over and wordlessly brushed my lips with hers. They were the same and just knowing she was that close to me, her physical presence was real, not imagined or dreamed, made my body flush hot again, but not with anything resembling torment. "I found you, love. I will always find you."

"You won't leave me again? Tara, please," I could hear the hysteria in my voice and it scared me – I knew where this kind of pain had led me before but somehow the fear of her being gone again in the morning scared me even more.

"Shhhhh. Sweetie. Darling. Love." Which, of course, was not an answer. And then before I could speak again her mouth was on mine and I forgot everything but the now, and just as it had been before when I first saw her and smelled her and heard her soft breathing filling the room it was now for every time. They were all with me, with us, in this bed we'd never shared in life in Buffy's old room which had been a place of grief for all those long months she was gone from us.

The nights I took Tara's wrists in my hands and lifted them up above her head, fanning her long hair against the pillow. Her hair was like silk. I could spend hours just burying my lips in her hair. I loved to watch her, watch her mouth change from poised serenity to childish delight as I explored and rediscovered every curve of her soft skin. And I could never resist those full flushed lips for long, opening her mouth beneath mine, giving me the chance to torment the lines that pressed up against her teeth and jaws, the smooth curved roof of her mouth, so much like that other curved opening I could feel pressed up against my thigh, already desperate for the touch I wasn't quite ready to give her.

The nights my breasts pressed into her breasts, ravishing her mouth so slowly that the music of her whimpers trilled like 16th notes up and down some ancient, unwritten scale. Lips on throat, and whimpers turning to moans as I scraped my teeth along the soft curve her jaw, whispering, "Darling … whose are you?"

"Yours."

Hot breath against her nipples hearing her whimpers turn to gasps as I bend to taste them. My lips' soft kisses are soothing, and the cool breath I blow gently across each stiffened pink peak makes her arch further up off the bed and into my waiting mouth, my cupping palm. She's sighing, my name falling from her breath like prayer. I never liked my name till I heard it from her. I run my tongue over and over a single spot on her nipple, then spiral slowly outwards, while my fingernails, cool as pearls, circle its sister.

The nights when she came, just like this, stretched out beneath me with her hair spilling over her shoulders like angel wings, her belly dipping and swaying like the deck of a ship and my mouth on her breasts, suckling and biting and this is one of those times like sleeping or death, when you step between time.

And the nights when I didn't want her to come like this, the nights when I feel her body begin to shake and I switch my attention to soft swell of her ribcage. Or to the delicate peaks of her hipbones. Or dip my tongue into her navel to hear her gasp. When I'm satisfied her tremors will not shake her loose from me, not yet, I lick, taste, bite, my way back up to her other breast and give it the same torment, the same pleasure as before.

The nights when it seems her entirely vocabulary has reduced itself to two words "Willow" and "Yours" and I crouch between her thighs, in the archetypal pose of serenity and worship, and part her with my tongue. The taste of her is never the same twice: sometimes spring honey sometimes autumn earth, but always something rich and life-giving. Barely musky, barely sweet. She'll cry for me, then, my sweet, quiet Tara, screaming like a banshee. My tongue and teeth will pull every drop from her body, from her soul, spilling against my lips and into my mouth, down my throat. I can't stop, can't stop tasting her, feeling the contrasts against my tongue: the impossibly satin smoothness of each delicate stroke, the tickling course golden curls on my lips, and the hardened bundle of blood rich nerves rolling between my front teeth, as delicate and sweet as spun sugar candy.

And the other nights are here too. The nights when she pulled me into her arms, kissing my shoulder blades, each impression of my spine. Those nights that she said without words that I was hers, too. That I lay there with her my hands languidly seeking every surface of her skin, pliant as a rag doll as she parted my legs, finding every surface of my skin with her mouth and tongue, sending sparks into nerves no one else could ever find or even look for, not even me. The nights she proved once again, how well she knew my body, raising me to a fever pitch so slowly, so beautifully slowly that I forget where my body ends and hers begins. The nights where I am so lost in her that I do not want to be found, although she finds me. She always finds me. With her tongue, her breath, the strength of her fingers. She finds me and I fall back into my body as if into a ocean wave as it crashed into shore. How can those hands that run across my breasts so delicately that I'm not even sure I'm feeling anything suddenly be so strong inside me as I come? And I do come for her, crash for her, become found again. Sometimes I cry out her name, but usually I come for her into that precious silence that she taught me can be so powerful. Wave after wave in blinding light and colors so bright I can taste them. Rocking against her, almost inside her even as she is inside me. I've always been a babbler but in these moments, with Tara, at night, in our bed words fall away from me, washed away by the power of her love and this pleasure, this unknown, unknowing joy that is warmth and silence and eternal twilight sky. This must have been something close to what Buffy felt, when she was gone. No wonder she hated me for taking it away from her.

And the nights when we lay in each others arms, spent, sleepily caressing soft limbs and softer hair.

And then it was this night again and here we are and there we were. She had her arms around me, crossing one hand across my small breasts, the other so gently against my belly. So gently, but maybe not quite enough because the pain was back. Pain was no longer a memory and it pulled my breath up sharply and I realized I was crying again. Maybe I'd been crying for hours.

"You're gonna leave me." It wasn't a question this time, but it echoed some other, trivial pain from a long time ago. How stupid a girl I'd been then. I didn't know how happy I was, even then, because her light was still in the world.

"Shhhh. Willow."

"Don't leave me."

I heard her sigh, her breath catching and I knew she was crying too. Somehow I couldn't bear to look at her in pain, so I made no move to turn around. I'm weak. I know this, of course I know this. She whispers against my ear, "I can't."

It took me a breath or two, during which I sputtered something out that sounded like a cross between "What?" "But" and "I don't understand."

"Shhh. Just listen." And so for once in my life I shut up and listened. But I still couldn't look at her. "I can't leave. You won't let me." That was true. I couldn't let her go. "But, Willow, don't you see, I'm not supposed to be here. They'll be nothing left of me after a while. Just a shadow. A haunting. I waited and I looked until I found you. But now I need to move on."

I ran my fingers along her arm and wrists. "Tara, don't ask me to do this. Please, baby. I can't."

"Willow. You are the only one who can. You have to let me go. Please. Know enough … love me enough to let me go."

And I did turn then, and put my hands on either side of her face. She wasn't crying like I thought. Her eyes looked sad, but peaceful. I leaned towards her and brushed my lips to hers, a gesture that was beyond love, as if I could pull her soul into me. And I realized then I had the power I'd gone looking for that day, without even consciously knowing it. The power to keep her, to get her back. I couldn't say it. I'm weak, and I've been evil and I couldn't say it.

But as much as I've fucked up in the past, I did the right thing for the first time in a long time, because for the first time in more years than I wanted to admit, I realized it wasn't about what I wanted. My throat was so closed up that I'm not sure I could have spoken if I wanted to, but I nodded. And I think I mouthed the words, forcing breath out between my lips that was too hoarse even to qualify as a whisper. I like to think I did at least that much for her.

"Go. Wait for me. In case I get lost."

The End

Send Feedback to Author