What the Dead Do by Lanie

Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Joss owns Tara, Willow and Mr. Maclay.
Distribution: The Mystic Muse: h ttp://mysticmuse.net
The Eastern Gate: http://naturalblues.org/fic/
Feedback: Oh god yes!
Spoilers: Season six and a smidgen of season seven.
Author's Notes: The general idea comes from the brilliant novel The Lovely Bones. Many thanks to Juno and Susan for the beta. Siddalee and Lake Ochahobee don't exist, I made them up.
Pairing: Just Tara

Summary: The journey doesn't stop just because life among the living does.

"People can start out one way and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different." -The Secret Lives Of Bees

Buffy only talked about it once. She said it was quiet and that she was alone but she knew everyone she loved was safe. Buffy's destiny only allowed her to touch the surface of heaven. She had no idea that heaven gives no guarantees or that sometimes it can sting and bite. Buffy could never have known that the journey doesn't stop just because life among the living does.

The first thing you learn about heaven is that it's not what you thought it would be. In vacation Bible school they told us heaven would be full angels playing harps and that there would be pearly gates. Heaven was supposed to be iridescent and totally foreign, of sites never seen.

Mostly it looked like the place where I'd spent the first eighteen years of my life. Siddalee, Mississippi.

I saw was Lake Ochahobee and the field of wildflowers I'd hidden in every afternoon that first summer after Mamma had died.

It was the Siddalee I liked to remember and not the one I'd left in the dark of night on my eighteenth birthday.

The house I visited was the one I'd loved before Mamma died. The flowerbeds were vibrant and perfectly unruly with exotic vines and herbs growing will-nilly between delicate lilies. The tire swing that had been rigged from the old Oak in the front yard still stood. Dad's Ford was parked beneath the carport next to my bike. And sometimes? Sometimes the smells of fried okra and cooking sifted through the window screens. But every now and then, when I felt lucky and happy, I'd catch a whiff of sandalwood and magic coming from that old house.

I never tried to go inside the house, to touch it would shatter it. Or so I liked to think in those very early days of heaven when everything and nothing seemed real at all. Sometimes though I could hear the chatter of people inside, of happy times I still clung to but I never saw anyone come or go.

And when I'd see Mamma and I saw her often and it felt like she'd never left me at all, I'd ask her about that. I'd ask her why I never saw her on the porch with a book in her hand or tending the flowerbeds she'd loved so much.

She'd smile at me in that way that could light up even the surliest persons face and said, "This is your Siddalee, only a part of it is mine."

I hadn't understood in those first miraculous months because we'd walk hand and hand around the lake and window shop on Main Street and talk about getting Coke's at Smythe's Drugs.

"Mamma, you're Siddalee, you're home." I'd told her but she was already gone. Which never left me frightened or scared because Buffy was right about one thing, in heaven you're never alone.

Tara Child," Gram's voice called out next to me, her hand against my arm and her skin thin and fine as paper, "You haven't let the living go. This is your Siddalee."

Again I didn't understand and I felt an ache and emptiness and a tinge of rage and sorrow that wasn't at all entirely a part of me. Some of it was mine and some of it caught in my hair like leaves carried by the wind from the world below.

"Gram?" I looked down at her though she gave me nothing but a smile. A smile that mimicked the one my dad had given me all those years before he'd grown to hate me. A smile that softened me and stilled me and made me feel brave again as much as it saddened me. A smile that reminded me of fireworks I'd watched perched high upon my fathers shoulder on the Fourth of July.

"One day," She told me, "One day we'll walk through the streets of Athens. When you're ready."

The answers I knew were mine to find alone, but the questions hadn't yet surfaced.

I began to know the differences between my heaven and that of Mamma's and Gram's. It happened the day I'd rounded Bakers Street and found myself on Boca Avenue. Boca Avenue was light years away from Siddalee. The air was different, crisp and dry, not heavy and wet. It didn't smell like wildflowers and freshly cut grass. It smelt like Patchouli and sunshine and when it rained it tasted, it tasted like something I wouldn't let myself remember right then but it was sweet on my tongue and sour all the same. It was sorrow and happiness.

I didn't wander Boca often for all that I wanted to. When the sun went down the street was crowded. People weren't afraid of the things that went boo in the night. That's when I understood who they were, all these people. They were like me, dead and sharing incomplete street in transit. Mostly we passed each other and said nothing at all but there were times that we'd share cappuccinos at the Expresso Pump. Cappuccinos that never burned our tongues like they had when we were alive.

No matter how I wandered that one street I always ended my stay in front of the Magic Box. My fingers would press against the storefront window and ache against the dullness I found there. The lights were never on and the sign always said closed. It'd been deserted but I wasn't ready to know why. Not then.

The first time I'd come back from my stroll down Boca Gram had been waiting. I told her about Sunnydale then. About demons and monsters, about Slayers and Hell Gods but most importantly I told her about Willow. The ache that had been growing grew even more and I asked Gram why it was that I could only walk Boca, why the Magic Box was always locked up tight and darkened. I wanted to know where Willow was. I hadn't yet grown to miss her. Not like I would later because when I closed my eyes I could still feel her lips against mine and they tasted like the rain that fell on Boca Avenue. Bittersweet. That's the first time I ever felt afraid in heaven.

Gram had only put her arm around my waist and led me towards the lake, "You'll know when you're ready but until then there's a party at the lake. It's the Fourth of July and I hear there may be fireworks."

For a long time it was more of the same an eternal summer full of fireflies at night and dragonflies during the day. And I began to notice that there were other people in our communal Siddalee. Sometimes I recognized these people. I saw Deacon Thompson who walked without the cane he'd suffered with in life. Mrs. Peyton, my fourth grade teacher, passed by me once in her two piece blue suit and I remembered exactly why she was the first woman I'd ever had a crush on. Once I even saw Jessica Pickeney who mocked my stutter and pulled my pigtails in first grade. She'd died of leukemia that same year and I had stopped hating her. You weren't supposed to hate the dead.

I was still sorting out whether the dead were supposed to hold onto their dislike for the living when I made my first break into the world I'd left behind.

It came quickly and unexpectedly as I swung lazily in the tire swing that in life would have been an impossible fit. My eyes were closed and my fingers danced with smooth rhythm of the creek-creek of the swing's rope against the bark of the Oak. At first I hadn't even heard the hum of a motor engine trailing up behind me from far away. Even now I'm not sure if I would have kept my eyes closed to all of if I hadn't felt the velvety soft touch of my mother's hand against my shoulder.

"Tara." She called to me and I knew then that the Siddalee in front of me wasn't the one I roamed in heaven. The front door of the house that had gone rickety with out love opened and a figure darkened the porch.

It was my father whose last words to me were tinted in lies and disgust, "Evil is evil", he told me on my twentieth birthday.

"Evil is evil." I muttered under my breath as he stepped further out towards the light of the afternoon, his eyes squinting into the distance towards something I had yet to see.

"Tara," Mom started and for the first time ever in life or death I held my hand up towards her and silenced her. I didn't want her gentle words to soften my heart.

"No Mamma, just no." I felt her drift away from me further back towards the trees that had always lined the property, towards the places she celebrated Summer Solstice all those years ago.

Dad then moved down the steps of the porch and out into the sun in slow almost pained steps. His face had grown older, his skin lined from years of hardness. And even through my anger my heart broke away and allowed a quiet kind of pity at what he'd become. A part of me hadn't abolished the father that would whistle as he read the newspaper and would spin Mamma in a waltz when their favorite song played on the radio.

Still he squinted towards the clay path that saw little traffic anymore and that's when I noticed the car that approached us both.

Something in me changed, like snow melting on a hot midsummer day that dreamed the impossible. At that moment I knew and if you asked me now I still couldn't tell you how but that I just knew. Maybe it was because the air had changed and she, oh she, was all around me. Patchouli and sorrow.

Fear is a palpable thing, even in death. This was nothing but a truth I'd only just discovered when the car stopped and Willow unfolded herself from the passenger seat. So small and lost, skin sallow and eyes rimmed red. She smelt of Sunnydale and something older like fog and rain that drifted in from another continent.

I felt her as I had all this time in my arms. I reached out for her in warning and in want. Didn't she know where she was? Know thy enemy Will, I wanted to tell her but the words wouldn't come and even if they had she would never had heard them.

But the thought was barely that at all before I doubled over in pain when she passed me. The knees of my jeans scraped against the hard earth and I gulped and gasped as everything Willow had become shot through me. The blood on her hands, all the blood. Willow, how could you?

Oh Willow, I thought and bit back a cry after she pulled her hand from the pocket of her coat and awkwardly took the one my Father had offered her.

There was blood everywhere and I left the world again exactly as I'd revisited it, quickly and unexpectedly.

Had I stayed I would have seen Xander join Willow and my father in their awkward silence. I may have noticed the manila envelopes Xander held pressed in his hands. One that Willow would hand my father before in strained civility, the one he would thank her for and open long after the darkness of night had settled in. I missed Willow's long and solitary walk towards the plot of land embraced between brick walls, where she kneeled on knees that weeks before had dug into the wet grass in Devon. Her fingers traced the headstone I wouldn't see for a year to come, until finally she stretched rice paper across the granite and dragged a charcoaled pencil across it, a memory of the place that held my bones.

After that I learned to look down upon the earth that I'd finally allowed myself to see. I hated the way it fragmented into cold biting pieces parts of it covered away from my eyes. Sunnydale still a memory a place whose streets I could only see in heaven as I walked among others like me, Sunnydale's dead. Life and death and back again, far away from those that I'd loved.

Not for the first time I envied the heaven Buffy had only touched, the one that told her that those she loved were safe. I had no promises, I knew there were no guarantees.

Eventually I made my way back towards the Siddalee where my father lived. The leaves had fallen from the trees and sprouted again since last I'd visited. The shutters had opened, as they hadn't since before Mamma died but everything else was the same, barren and dead except for the trees, the trees would never die.

When Dad stepped away from the house out into the day, his face wasn't the hard rough leather I'd grown to expect, it softened some. It was the first time in a very long while that I almost recognized him as the father who'd pieced together my Barbie Dream House on Christmas Eve. The one I spied him laboring on long after I'd been tucked into bed.

I wouldn't have known it then, I couldn't have but my heart was beginning to thaw to his.

The phone never rang in the house my father kept and I heard it one night even in heaven. I tried not to follow its rings. Days and weeks grew longer and I stayed away from all the life below me. I swam in Lake Ochahobee, I wandered Boca with the hopes that the window's of the Magic Box would cut my fingers with life. I sat in silence with Gram as she fed pigeons and I laid against a bed of grass and let my mother braid my hair.

I tried to ignore the sounds and life that tangled up into me until I couldn't anymore. Life is always compelling to the dead in the way that death fascinates the living.

Against the weak light of the reading lamp my father kept at his side, I followed the movement of his lips and caught a smile that felt as foreign to him as it looked to me.

I wanted to brush my fingers against the plastic of the phone wishing I could hold it in this world. I want to trace back wires across the distance and see who'd interrupted the long sorrow of this house.

The dead feel pain as intently as the living do. I felt the special pain of the dead when I stood in the house that I'd loved as a child, the very one that had grieved me so as a woman. But even in grief I saw the changes, small and subtle and unnoticeable to the untrained eye, monstrous and overwhelming to mine.

Mamma and Dad on their wedding day, three years before I was born and five before Donnie came along. Youth and happiness crowded the photo. They didn't know then, they didn't know what cancer could do to happiness and youth.

The next one was the last family portrait we'd had made when we learned how sick Mamma really was. I didn't recognize myself behind my curtain of hair. That was the year I'd started hiding and the year Dad began to grow tougher.

Another was of Donnie, a woman and a baby, a family. It was easy in that moment to forgive Donnie, he'd lost Mamma and Dad too. The lines of hardness in his face that I'd spied in the Magic Box had softened. He didn't look as tough or mean. He'd found his own Willow, someone who loved him. She was pretty with gorgeous chestnut colored hair. The baby was fair, like us, like the Maclays. I was an aunt and wasn't that something sort of pretty? I reached out to touch the picture and knew I'd feel nothing short of air but it was easy to pretend that my fingers could be warmed by the smooth glass.

The next picture weakened me. It was the one I hadn't seen passed from Willow's hand to my fathers. That was night I learned then that the dead could cry. The Magic Box on Halloween night, the night Willow had hurt me, really hurt for the first time. But this picture was taken before that happened. I couldn't remember when it was snapped but I recalled the moment that the camera had caught. We'd leaned against each other, smiles on our faces that didn't betray the tremble in Willow's hands after Anya showed us her ring. Still we laughed, both Willow and I even though I knew she was mourning a stage of life that had been passed with out her permission.

Tears can spring to anger so quickly, and it wasn't fair that my father had this picture when he'd rejected everything in it. I never pondered how it found its place to Siddallee and my father's mantle. All I knew was that I wanted it off that mantle.

Just as I'd entered the world I left behind, I made my presence felt with a speed just as intense but with a purpose full of intent. I wanted that photo off the mantle. I did it. It fell to the ground, the glass shattering and photograph drifting towards a fire that had not been lit until I needed it. I stood among shards of glass that wouldn't cut my feet in this world and I watched the picture curl and twist into itself until it fell to ashes that extinguished the blaze.

I left my father's house that night and forced my way out of world and back into my heaven, the one far away from make believe boxed houses and lakes that always glittered blue. I walked the streets of Boca and rested my palms against the darkened window of the Magic Box.

My exile still stood. It stung as I missed Willow as I hadn't before. I still felt her in my arms and could breathe the scent of her in and taste her on my lips. For all of this and all of her I forgave her the blood on her hands. I washed it away with rainwater and tears.

A month after my mother's funeral and five months after my seventeenth birthday, I'd taken to hiding in the field of wild flowers. One day Sophie found me.

Years before she sat next to me in Mrs. Peyton's fourth grade class and we were friends then.

The next year I became the first in our class to have breasts and by the time I began hiding them in over sized sweaters Sophie and I were no longer friends. I didn't hate her, I didn't begrudge her because I wouldn't have been friends with me either full of stammers and an awkward body that didn't match those of the girls around me.

That summer she spread out underneath the Mississippi sun and drowned in wildflowers next to me. The summers passed as all summers do and it was spent in long lazy conversations, and comfortable silences that led to shy sweet kisses. Kisses that moved in the days of an Indian summer until I stopped wearing baggy shirts after Sophie's hands found the breasts I'd been hiding.

She was my first and back then I was young enough to think she'd be my only until summer turned to fall and we'd made love for the first and only time. We hadn't seen my Cousin Beth among the wildflowers that afternoon, wrapped up as we were hands and lips and bodies so entangled in a nakedness that felt just so right. The wildflowers were ours and we'd never guessed that someone else would walk them.

For a long time I wished that I had not let Sophie stay with me that first afternoon and not because she'd break my heart because she would but because that last day of Sophie also signaled first time my father had hit me in anger.

Cold and hard his palm stung against my face but the pile of books in the fireplace, the bottles broken in the sink and the crystals stored away in boxes stung more. Dad tried to take my mother away and fitted magic in as a substitute to hate the daughter that had lain naked and in love with a woman in a field of wild flowers.

Now he thought he could have me and Willow on his mantle. If I hadn't cried in anger and raged in the way that I could on shards of pained memories, I may have seen the letters that rested on the coffee table. The envelopes and sheets upon sheets penned in Willow's precise hand. The oldest stamped and dated a month after my death, the latest one just shy of a week old and baring an Arizona address.

I leaned against the window of the Smythe's Drugs in heaven and I waited. I waited for Mamma to show and when she did we walked the town silently. She let me cry the tears I'd never had the chance to when I died.

The sorrow of losing the world and all it held, Willow and chance, weighed upon me as it never had before.

The sun may have passed and the moon may have risen, I wouldn't have noticed. Not then. Not between the sounds of crickets and birds and my own grief, my hands awash my breast trying to wipe the blood a bullet left away.

Pain, hurt is very real in heaven and I'd been murdered in life, the worst kind of pain, without the hope of resolution. When finally I'd stopped crying I looked up and tried to reach for the comfort of Mamma's hand but found myself instead in a grassy field unlike any other I'd ever seen. Next to me stood a girl. I recognized her in that fuzzy way where names and places and dates didn't stand.

"At least there was only the two of us...." She smiled sadly and I saw that she was meant to be beautiful in a life that had been ripped away from her.

I knew then exactly who she was and this stranger's hand, which had found mine, offered me a comfort in that moment greater than Mamma or Gram ever could. The comfort of a life dealt the blow of murder.

I hadn't realized that my death and its violence was one of the things tethering me in place. I wouldn't until after I'd been set free to wander the expanse of the real heaven, the one I'd yet to really touch.

I left Katrina in that field, her hand in mine I felt her promise cut short. I hoped she saw the same in me. We'd never meet again, our deaths weren't enough to bind us but I would never forget her.

A force pulled me back to Siddalee. The mystery was short lived when I caught familiar shapes on the darkened porch. My father stood further in the shadows while my lover, my beloved, moved across the fields of our property. I followed her into the walled off cemetery, the one filled with graves as old as a hundred and as young as a year.

You can watch the world turn from heaven, if you're lucky. You'll see friends and lovers grow and age into a peaceful natural death but none of that eases the human hurt of seeing the place that cements you into the earth.

But happiness and joy aren't foreign to the plots dirt that hold the bones of the dead, not when graves are tended so lovingly as Willow tended mine. This eased the pain as I began to whisper goodbye to the life I once I had.

"I'd wanted you in Sunnydale," I heard her whisper, "But they, they wouldn't let me. And baby, oh baby I'm so happy about that now. I don't think I could have lost you twice."

Then she opened a small satchel that she'd clung to her chest and slowly she set upon my grave, stone after stone. She stayed silent and sad until the taste of rain in the air turned her on her heels back towards the living.

In was in that moment, that tiny sliver of time I made myself real to the world again. My fingers reached out and brushed across the soft flesh of her arm. Warm and real and I knew she felt me too when she stopped and reached for the space that the living couldn't really know the dead occupied. I wanted to think she saw me. I wanted her to know that one day I would sing for her. And maybe, just maybe she did because she smiled, her voice perfect and strong she told me that she loved me.

I saw the light in Willow as she moved through the twilight cloaked fields towards my childhood home. The darkness that had scarred her the year before was nothing now but the faintest of scratches. The world she tried to destroy was the same one she'd saved. She was beautiful and she was strong.

That's when I knew the window of the Magic Box would always remain darkened even here in heaven. The light had never come from walls and tiles but from the people who shared their lives within its frames. That light still shown and it always would in some way.

The dead never entirely let go of the living. We lay purchase in that world the same way we do ours. We watch those that we love and we cry when they do, we feel their pain and we bask in their happiness. We follow them through their lives.

But we separate ourselves just enough so that they can go on living. And it's through their lives that we begin to heal. The dead feel pain, the dead can cry but the dead can also forgive.

I would find Willow again and again through the years and always on the plot of land in Siddalee, Mississippi. Her years and presence softened him. His hurt and hate aged itself away from him.

I visited my father one final time before he died. He sat on the porch, his pipe in its place in his mouth. His hands wrinkled with age shook when he poured over the letters that Willow sent through the years. The letters gave me back to my father. He'd learned about me through Willow and in those years the heart that hardened after Mamma's death became human again.

When Dad finally died, Mamma told me he left with the light that she'd seen and fallen in love with those years before I was born. My forgiveness gave my father back to my mother.

My forgiveness set me free. Free to travel the streets of Athens with Gram, to touch life in the way that only the dead can.

Forgiveness gave me the expanse of heaven, which stretches to infinity. Heaven gave me the knowledge that death is not the eternal rest that the living think it is. Death is an adventure only unequaled to life.

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What the Dead Do

By Lanie

Copyright © 2003

lalana24@hotmail.com