Terra Firma by Tulipp

Disclaimer: All characters and an occasional bit of dialogue are borrowed from Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. No copyright infringement intended.

Summary: When Tara returns three months after Grave, Willow and the Scoobies must learn how she came back...and why.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,
So ope the doors, O Soul!
Tenderly! be not impatient!
(Strong is your hold, O mortal flesh!
Strong is your hold, O love!)
—Walt Whitman, "Last Invocation"

"Are you tired?" Willow unfastened Tara's shirt slowly, one button at a time. Tara was watching her, the blue eyes never leaving her face. They warmed Willow. It felt like every hour that passed took some of the chill away.

"Tara, we cast a spell," Willow said, her eyebrows lifting. She eased the shirt off Tara's shoulders. It felt heavy in her hands. Fatigue was pulling at her fingers, echoing through her chest.

"We did," Tara agreed. Willow reached behind Tara's back and unclasped her bra. Tara held her arms out from her sides, and Willow pulled the bra off and let it drop to the floor. "Did it remind you?"

Willow thought about that as she unzipped Tara's pants and bent to slide them and the underwear beneath over her hips. Tara put a hand on her shoulder to steady herself as she lifted first one foot and then the other; Willow could feel the fingers wrapping over her shoulder bone.

"It reminded me of everything," she said, finally. She tossed the clothes aside and stood. "It reminded me of how it used to be, in the beginning. Before Rack and Osiris and Glory and…before everything but you."

Willow undressed in silence, feeling Tara's eyes on her skin, on her nakedness. Those eyes were enough to raise a breath of arousal in her, to make her feel hot with wanting. She had been wanting always, but now she had what she wanted. It stood in front of her. It lingered in her blood. It was magick. It was Tara. It was….

"Glory," she said finally. "Did she do this to us?" She meant more; she meant everything, but she saw that Tara understood.

"I think she married us," Tara smiled, and Willow's breath came out in a half-giggle before she could stop it, and then she stiffened.

"Willow," Tara said softly, reaching for her arms, searching her eyes. "It's okay to laugh. We used to joke about things, even the scary things, remember? Don't you remember how it used to be? We used to joke, and laugh, and sometimes, even when things were very dark, it made it better."

"I remember it used to be easier for us," Willow said. Her hands clutched at Tara's shoulder blades, pulled her in.

Tara smiled into the dark. "It really wasn't, you know," she said quietly. "It was always hard. Oz and Adam and my family and Joyce dying and Buffy and Glory and," she rubbed her hands over Willow's back. "And the problems with the magick were always there, Willow."

"Well, it was easier. Not easy street maybe, but easier. I understood the rules." Willow pressed her face against Tara's shoulder and inhaled the faint and milky scent of sweat. "But it doesn't matter, anyway," she murmured. "We don't get easy anymore."

Tara gripped the back of Willow's neck, pressing down so that Willow had to look at her, had to lift her face to her. "You get that, Willow," she said, and her voice was fierce, almost angry. "We get that. We live on the edge of dark things, on the Hellmouth, and we choose that, and bad things happen. But we get to be alive, and we get to love each other, and I think sometimes," Tara's voice shook, "sometimes we get easy."

"I feel like…." Willow sighed, and Tara looked at the space between her slightly open lips; when Willow spoke again, she heard her voice come out tiny and far away. "I feel like…like I slammed the door on the easy stuff a long time ago, on all of it, and we can never get it open again."

Willow shook her head, but Tara's hands moved up to her face, and her thumbs brushed Willow's ears, and she leaned in to kiss her. Willow felt the impression of Tara's soft lips against eyelids and cheeks and lips.

"That door might have been shut, sweetheart, but it isn't locked. It's never locked. We'll get it open again. But first," hands slid down to grasp Willow's bare hips, "first, we need to sleep."

"Two sacked out and only slightly Glorified witches," Buffy announced, coming back into the dining room, where Giles had carried the tea tray.

"Is that like 'doing spells'?" Dawn asked brightly. She liked hearing Buffy say "witches" again. It felt so normal. Like before. Well, no one had ever really said "witch" that much, but she was pretty sure they'd all thought it a lot. She knew she had.

"Dawn!" Buffy didn't try to hide her smile. "They're sleeping. At least, I think they're sleeping." She glanced at Giles. "I listened at the door," she admitted. Giles' lips turned up slightly as he poured out the tea, adding a splash of whiskey to one of the cups. Buffy just looked at him, and he dribbled a little whiskey into a second cup.

"Giles," Buffy said soberly. Dawn sat down and pulled the cup of just tea toward her.

"I know, Buffy," he said, sighing. "I should have said something sooner, but I, I had hoped to have something more, more definitive before I told you…."

He sighed, frowned into his cup. He sipped at the hot, laced tea, and his face relaxed a little bit. "In the winter, I did some research at Council Headquarters. Now, there wasn't a great deal of information," he added hurriedly, holding up a hand as if to ward off questions. "But I did find one text, a very old Tnatum manuscript, that mentioned the key." He sipped his tea again.

"Giles, I'm about up to here with the cryptic," Buffy said, and her voice held a note of warning.

"Professor Berlin was right," Giles said. "Glory…wherever she is…can no longer use the key. No one can, really, except the Key itself. Herself," he said apologetically, nodding at Dawn. "But the Key, well, if certain conditions are met, if certain events take place in a particular order—and the manuscript did not actually say what those events were—then the Key comes of age, if you will. She becomes a power in her own right."

Dawn glanced at Buffy, whose brow furrowed. "What kind of power?" Dawn realized that her pulse was racing.

"Well, it's rather simple, I suppose," Giles answered, but his brow furrowed. "The power to…to open doors."

"Okay," Buffy said, "but what does that mean? What does it mean for Dawn? What kind of doors are we talking about here?"

Dawn looked at Giles with wide eyes. She had been about to ask the same question. "Car doors, maybe?" she asked hopefully. "Cause, like, Janice and I could really use some wheels, you know?" She raised her eyebrows at Buffy, who glared back.

"Dimensional portals?" Buffy continued, pushing her teacup away. "Opening the doors between realities?"

"Well, you see," Giles said slowly. "The manuscript was rather unclear on that point. No one ever expected the Key to become human. If she had been a ball of energy, then we might have understood more, but what it means for the key to be human, human and in this reality….well, we simply don't have any road maps for this."

They sat in silence for a moment. Dawn felt the hum in the back of her mind again, the hum she had felt when Doc had spoken to her. A thief, he'd called her, and she didn't think he'd been talking about shoplifting.

"That man," Dawn said slowly. "He said something to me. He said…he said I hijacked his resurrection."

Giles pulled off his glasses. "Dawn, I'm not sure we can trust everything the Professor said. I know that better than anyone. However, it might be useful to start with the conditions. Did anyone…."

"And to think they wouldn't let me go back to college," Buffy said dryly. "Okay, listen: 'In killing with no weapon, in seeing a wish undone, in forgiving its greatest threat, the key is met.' And they have to happen in that order?" Giles tilted his head in a nod.

Dawn thought. "Well," she said doubtfully, "I killed those weird zombie things in that cave."

"Oh, yeah." Dawn frowned. She tried to remember. She'd squashed a lot of bugs, but that probably didn't count. "Wait," she said suddenly. "Halloween. I had a…a pencil in my pocket, and Tad…." Her voice trailed off, but Buffy reached over and squeezed her hand.

"That's one," Buffy said matter-of-factly. "Oh, and my birthday party. You wished, and Anya got Halfrek to undo it. That's two. Hey, this is easy."

"Long story," Buffy said under her breath. She smiled. "Okay, just one left, right? 'In forgiving its greatest threat,'" she read again. She pursed her lips.

"Well, it can't be Glory," Giles said. "That happened too early. Greatest threat." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"Maybe it's…." Dawn started to say, but then she heard the front door open, and she heard two pairs of footsteps in the hall—one light and quick, the other heavier—and she turned her head to see Xander and Anya, both breathing hard. Anya dropped a paper shopping bag to the floor and put a hand to her chest, panting.

"Clothes," Anya wheezed. "For Tara. But wait, wait, we went back to the Magic Box," she started to explain, but Xander's voice overlapped hers, urgent and anxious. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He touched the scars on his face.

"Are they okay?" he asked, and to Dawn his eyes looked haunted. Wild with regret. The scars stood out bright red against his sallow skin; Xander touched them again. "Is Willow okay?"

It was one of the first gifts Willow had ever given her, the peace of a restful night. Tara hadn't often slept deeply in her life before Willow. At home, even before her mother had died, she had often woken up at night, startled into wakefulness by the creak of a foot on the floorboards outside her room, by the violent sweaty smells of men. And her first year at college, she had been watchful still, afraid always that they would come find her, that they would burst in at night to take her home. Tara had always rested with one ear open. Just in case.

Sleep in a lover's arms, sleep that lasted all night and ended with another woman's warm breath on your face in the morning—Willow had given her that. And she wanted it right now, wanted it desperately, to rest and be enfolded and see the end of this long, long day.

But she wanted it for Willow more. The previous night, in some gray hour before dawn, Willow had jerked upright in bed, clawing at the covers and keening, and Tara had held her tight and tried to smooth away the nightmares with her touch. It had terrified her, broken her heart, to see the naked pain that attacked before Willow realized that Tara was there.

Tonight Tara was keeping a vigil. Tonight, she would watch over Willow, hold her in her arms, and at the first sign of a tremble or a twitch, she would wake Willow up. She could see that her lover had closed down over the past months—months that to Tara felt like little more than days—and she had a vision of opening her again. Tonight, Tara would smooth Willow back against the pillows, would press her knees apart and open her with her fingers and her damp skin. Tara's tongue would be the key that unlocked her, and it would turn on the lights in all of Willow's dark rooms.

She was holding Willow, who slept. And she was thinking. About Willow. About wanting. About Glory. Had Glory married them? Tara had only meant it as a joke, wanting to see a smile on Willow's lips, wanting to see something other than the abject relief that had adorned Willow's face all day. But she wondered now. Would it be more true to say that Glory had divorced them? Glory was selfish; Glory was self, and if she had been in them all this time, if she had enhanced them as the professor had said, then had she enhanced their separateness? Had she teased at the parts of them that wanted distance, that wanted to fight against dependence and stand alone?

Tara didn't know how to think about Glory. She had been right to leave Willow when she did, she knew that, but was it Glory who had given her the strength to pack that box and walk away? Was it Glory who had given her the resolve to stay away for so long? Those months alone had been brutal and lonely, harder than hard, but she had grown stronger during them; she knew that. She had become more confident. She felt taller. She rarely stuttered anymore. Was that Glory?

And if Glory had, in some small way, done this to her—done this for her—then what about Willow? Was it Glory who had tickled Willow's magickal bones, who had encouraged her to become more and more dependent on the magick? Was it Glory's influence that had compelled Willow to cast the tabula rasa spell on her?

Tara sighed and wrapped an arm more tightly around Willow's back, pressed her fingers more firmly on the back of Willow's head, which was folded into her chest. She wanted so much to blame it all on Glory, to absolve Willow for violating her and to absolve herself for leaving. But it couldn't be that easy. Could it?

She had been afraid of Willow. And she had been afraid of Willow's wanting. And maybe…it didn't change Willow's choices…but maybe she had confused the wanting with the magick.

Maybe, in that cloud that had settled on them after Buffy died, that cloud that had lingered after Buffy's resurrection, she had forgotten to see Willow, her Willow. Maybe she had let her vision of a dark and terrible Willow haunt her, and she hadn't seen that it wasn't true yet, that vision. She hadn't seen that the Willow who tried so hard to be strong, to risk herself with dark magicks in order to protect them all, was still the same Willow. The Willow who needed. The Willow who wanted.

That wanting had scared her, at times, and it had seemed easier to call the wanting "magick." To fear that the magick might consume her, might consume Willow, might consume them both. Burn them alive.

But they were alive. She was alive. And maybe it was the wanting, the endless emerald fire of Willow's wanting, that had brought her back to life. She couldn't fear that anymore. She couldn't fear Willow anymore. Dark magicks had burned Willow to the ground, but the wanting was still there, smoldering.

It had always been there between them, a wanting that was breathless and deep. It hadn't stopped. Magick couldn't stop it. Death couldn't stop it. And Tara didn't want to stop it. Not anymore. She kissed Willow's hair fiercely. Not ever again.

Willow, curled into Tara's body like an infant, curved against her like a lover, slept.

Tara felt the nightmare coming. She felt Willow's breathing change, felt Willow's calves tense, sensed the small sound that started in Willow's stomach and threatened to rise. She eased Willow onto her back and leaned over her, ran a hand through the fine red hair and down the pale shoulder.

"Willow," she whispered, pressing the shoulder with her hand. She tensed, ready to chase the ghost of herself from Willow's dreams. And then, a little louder: "Willow, love, wake up."

It was easy, after all; Willow inhaled once, opened her eyes, and looked directly into Tara's face, and there wasn't time for fear or confusion. Willow met Tara's gaze with her eyes, met Tara's grazing fingers with the skin of her shoulder.

"You know me so deep," she murmured, her voice thick with sleep. The words took Tara back.

Her first vision of Willow. The first spell. Magick had, for them, always been erotic. But it was more than that. It had always let them know each other, let them open up doors in each other. The first time, the very first time, she had looked at Willow's hand, palm tight against hers, and she had looked at Willow's face, bewildered and winded. And she had heard, or felt, or imagined the words echoing in her mind. You know me. She had said them, or Willow had said them. It didn't matter. They had been said; they crackled in the skin between them.

Tara looked into those green eyes, and she felt Willow's breath quicken, and she felt Willow's skin heat beneath hers, and she couldn't believe that three months had passed without this. She wanted to fill that white fissure in her mind, that empty pocket outside of time and space, to fill it with Willow. She longed for Willow to fill it with her fingers and her knowing and the great thrust of her wanting.

She knew Willow wanted that, too. She knew it as Willow leaned up and kissed her. The kiss was greedy; it chewed at her lips and pressed into her mouth. It lapped at her teeth and circled her tongue and made her hungry. It swallowed her throat and slid down, down. It consumed her.

Had Tara ever felt, had she ever been so wanted? Had Willow's hands ever clutched her hips so cravenly, slid up her sides so insistently? Had Willow ever licked at the sweat between her breasts with such craving? Had they ever inked fingerprints of such deep lust onto Tara's skin?

Now, Willow's ravenous hands trailed down, and Tara bent one knee and pulled her leg up toward her shoulder. She wanted to expose herself to Willow, to open herself. Willow twisted around, then, flipping Tara onto her back, pressing against the back of Tara's thigh, pressing the knee up.

Tara felt the drum of her own pulse in her neck and the drum of Willow's pulse on her thighs, and when Willow's fingers curled into her, knowing and hungry, she gasped wetly. Willow's skin stuck to hers, Willow's red hair fell over her face, and as Tara's vision blurred with need, Willow's fingers pressed and pulsed deep. And when Tara lost her breath, Willow gave it back to her with her lips and her tongue, and it tasted hot, like wanting. She lay rigid for a moment, feeling the sweat on the back of her thigh with one hand and the damp of Willow's neck with the other, and Willow's name rose up through her nerves and onto her tongue. And Willow's lips held it there.

They lay quietly for a moment, both panting. Willow trailed her wet fingers across Tara's lips and then her own. Tara watched Willow press her fingers into her mouth, tasting her, and desire shuddered through her. She wanted to open all the doors between them.

Tara pushed Willow up onto her knees and slid down. She lifted her face for a moment to the hollow of Willow's hip, where she breathed deeply in, breathed in the angle of the bone and the white of the skin and the last clinging shred of sleep and the sharp scent of want. Willow's hands grasped at her shoulders and then twisted into her hair.

She lifted her head to the flaming place between Willow's thighs and tasted the salt of shell-pink, the rose-smooth of wet, the pulse of red under her tongue. She knew that her lips were touching real body parts, that her fingers were gripping real skin, and she knew somewhere that these parts had names, and she wanted to think them as she touched them, to name them, but she only felt them now, felt them translated into color and sense: Hot. Thirst. Red. Swell.

And she felt Willow's thighs tauten on either side of her face, and she pulled down on Willow's hip with one hand and pressed up with her other, until her fingers were surrounded by Willow, until she was inside Willow. And she felt the ravenous yawn that roared up through Willow's legs and trembled her own cheeks and shook them both so deeply that Willow could only whisper her name: Tara.

Feeling Willow's head rising and falling on her heaving chest, feeling the gasp of Willow's breath under her own hands, Tara felt that she could never get enough of this woman: her lover, her witch, her Willow. She felt the wanting that breezed up again in Willow and ended in herself. A gust of wanting that reached inside her like fingers, that lived on her tongue, that beat back all the last closed doors between them.

Willow watched Tara sleep in the weak morning sunlight that filtered through the curtains. She knew that Tara had stayed awake to hold her, to keep watch, and she wanted to feel guilty about that…but she didn't. Instead, she felt loved and protected, and she had missed that feeling so much. And Tara could sleep now that it was light outside, and their nightmares were safely tucked away. For a little while, anyway.

She leaned against the headboard, Tara's head in her lap, and thought again that it had all happened so fast. She could hardly believe it still, but she did believe it. She believed in this miracle, Tara's bare skin pressed against hers under the sheet, Tara's tousled blonde hair falling over her legs and stomach. It was everything else that she didn't believe: death and killing and pain. But it had happened; it had all happened.

She shook her head, buried a hand in Tara's hair, feeling the warmth of Tara's scalp against her fingers. Her other hand trailed down Tara's bare arm, feeling the shoulder and the elbow and wrapping her fingers possessively around the wrist until she could feel the pulse beating under the skin.

Under her fingers, the arm stirred, and Tara's head moved, and Tara opened her eyes and looked up at her. Willow felt a rush of love so powerful she thought for a moment it would knock her out. She gripped Tara's shoulder to ground herself.

"Morning, sleepyhead," Willow murmured. Tara smiled lazily and started to lift her head but stopped, grabbing her neck with her hand.

"Ouch," she said, wincing. She rubbed her neck with her hand, moved her jaw, shifted her legs. "Oh, God."

Willow felt the blood rush into her cheeks. "Did I hurt you?" she whispered. It was the thing she was most afraid of now, the thing she thought she might be most afraid of always.

Tara rolled onto her back and looked at Willow with eyes so deeply loving that Willow almost felt she'd been kissed. "Never," Tara said seriously. "I'm just kind of…sore. Um, everywhere. Aren't you?" Willow just blushed, suddenly feeling very shy.

The sheet had pulled back when Tara had rolled over, exposing Willow's lower body. Tara's eyes narrowed with concern at the dark purple bruise that spread over her hip, the skin almost black with broken capillaries. From her fall, Willow realized now, when Tara had first appeared.

Tara ran a finger over the skin. "That looks painful," she murmured. "Poor thing."

"I didn't even feel it," Willow said honestly. She touched Tara's cheek with her palm. "I don't feel anything but you." It was true; her heart pounded with Tara; her skin hummed with Tara. She felt the heat from Tara's cheek seep into her palm, warming its way up her arm and into her chest and down, and she felt her lust return. Again.

"I want to feel you again." She grinned to take the edge off her need, to make it playful. She wanted to be playful.

Tara closed her eyes, her head dropping back onto Willow's stomach. "Willow, darling," she said, a laugh in her voice. "I don't think I can. Four nights in a row…."

Willow blinked. "It's only been…" she started to say, then stopped. Of course for Tara it had been four nights. They had talked about this in the dark, about the fact that Tara felt the passage of three months as only a wrinkle in her mind, a little empty place. But really, the time hadn't passed for Tara, not like it had for her. Willow kept forgetting that. It was hard to grasp.

"Four nights," she said, trying to make her brain understand it. "I know." Tara did look exhausted, bluish smudges under her eyes. "I know," she said again, grinning again as her fingers traced their way down Tara's neck, pausing to tickle the hollow of Tara's throat. "And you should definitely rest…after." Her fingers paused again on the top swell of Tara's breast. Tara shivered, and Willow giggled a little bit as Tara's eyes darkened.

She started to let her fingers circle, but Tara reached for her wrist and held it tight. Willow stopped, surprised, and glanced uncertainly at Tara's eyes, the smile fading from her lips.

"Willow," Tara said softly, and she reached her other hand to Willow's chin, rubbed her thumb on the soft skin underneath her jaw. "Willow, I love you." Willow's eyes fluttered at the words; they caressed her.

She felt dizzy; for a moment she couldn't speak, couldn't find any words that would give shape to her love for Tara. It was a forest fire, it was an ocean, it was a planet. It was everything.

"I love you so much," she murmured finally, knowing how inadequate the words were as she leaned down to brush Tara's forehead with her lips. But Tara pushed down on her chin, and Willow's lips ended up on Tara's mouth instead, and she felt Tara's hot breath. After a moment, she pulled away, breathless.

"I thought you needed to sleep," Willow teased, feeling the blood rush down her neck and up her thighs. Tara's breath came out in a gentle laugh.

Buffy looked up from the stack of Magic Box invoices she was double-checking when Willow entered the kitchen early the next afternoon, damp-haired and loose-limbed. "How's Tara?" she asked coyly.

Willow glanced at the wall clock and looked away quickly, biting her lip. Buffy hid a smile as she watched Willow cross and uncross her arms. Finally, she just let her arms drop and folded her hands in front of her. "She's still pretty tired," Willow said. "You know, with…being alive and…everything. She's asleep."

"Yeah, it sounded like you were both getting lots of…sleep," Buffy said lightly, smiling as Willow's face flushed deep pink.

"But we were really quiet," Willow protested, crossing her arms over her chest again. Buffy thought how good—how really, really good—it was to hear the rise in Willow's voice, to see her embarrassed. To see her any other way but ashamed or empty.

"Slayer hearing," Buffy reminded her. And she'd heard an earful. She slid off her stool and went to Willow, squeezing her shoulder. "You look good with the blushing, Will. I've missed that." Willow smiled at that and sank down onto the closest stool. "Let me make you one of your drinks, okay? I want you to eat something, so don't say no." Buffy pulled a glass from the dish rack.

"Um, Buffy?" She turned to see Willow eyeing the toaster thoughtfully as Dawn entered the kitchen with a stack of comic books. "I think maybe I could eat something else today."

"Ooh, ooh, let me make it for you," Dawn gave a little hop. "Please, Willow, let me make you something. I can make quesadillas—the real kind, not the peanut butter kind."

Buffy paused, glass in hand. She knew that Dawn and Willow had gotten closer over the summer; she knew from phone calls and postcards that as much as Willow had tried to hold her grief in, to keep it behind closed doors, she had sobbed in Dawn's arms more than once. And she knew that Dawn had cried for Tara on Willow's shoulder. She hadn't been there to see it, to see the trust that they had re-established between them, but she saw it now in Dawn's shining eyes and in the acceptance of Willow's smile.

"Sure, Dawnie," Willow said, reaching out to tousle Dawn's hair playfully. "A quesadilla sounds good."

In the end, Willow ate three while Buffy and Dawn fussed over her, and Dawn would have slid a fourth onto her plate if she hadn't refused, covering her plate with her hands and moaning that she couldn't possibly.

"You have an appetite again!" Dawn squealed happily, and then went off to answer the phone. "Hey, Janice," she said into the receiver, disappearing around the corner to the hallway.

"Yeah, Will," Buffy teased, "any more appetite and I'm going to have to separate you and Tara so that poor girl can get some rest." Willow blushed again and giggled, and although Buffy noticed that she looked around almost guiltily after she laughed, she had laughed. She even stuck her tongue out the way she used to do, just the tip. Buffy hadn't seen Willow do that in months.

It struck Buffy, suddenly, a little sadly, that no one had started laughing again like that after she had come back from the dead, but she pushed that thought away quickly, tucked it under the protective layer of Slayer that she wore like sunscreen over a burned and peeling heart.

"I'm just going to go check on her, Buffy, okay?" Willow slid off her stool, but she waited. Her laugh had faded as quickly as it had bubbled up, leaving her brow wrinkled and her hands clenched to her chest. "I'll just peek in, I promise, and come right back, but I just want to make sure…."

"Absolutely," Buffy said, understanding Willow's need to see Tara for a moment, to reassure herself that she was still there, sleeping safely. "I'll be here." And Willow smiled again.

Buffy watched her go, noticing again the way Willow's arms and hips swayed freely as she walked, and she felt a lump form in her throat. She had dreamed of this moment, not a Slayer's dream of portent and prophecy but a girl's dream of seeing her friends happy. Including Willow. God, who was she kidding, especially Willow.

And she was happy for Tara and Willow, so happy it hurt. But it reminded her, too, how much she missed that kind of love. The kind that swept you off your feet at night and wrapped around you like an extra-large oxford-cloth shirt in the morning, scented with after-shave and coffee. The kind that she'd only had with…with Riley. Maybe by the end it had become hard and hurtful, been infused with pain and anger, but in the beginning, it had been lighter. It had felt good. It had been a bandage, a salve.

Buffy thought now that she hadn't recognized it as love soon enough for that very reason, because it hadn't hurt. And when, before—or after—those early days with Riley, had love not hurt? At least with Riley, before he'd pimped his blood out, before he'd left, love hadn't left her wanting and him cursed. It hadn't left her sick at heart and him violent. It hadn't left him evil and herself sore.

Tara pushed away the remains of the dinner Dawn and Buffy had left her and tugged again at her shirt. Willow had heard the shower running when Tara had finally, finally dragged herself out of bed in the late afternoon and brought her a shopping bag full of clothes.

"Anya got them," Willow had said with a grateful tremor in her voice, but Tara had only been relieved to see the jeans and the skirt, the shirt and thin sweater, a pair of sandals. "She even got you underwear." Tara had wondered, in the shower, what she would do when she ran out of the few articles of her clothing that had remained in Willow's closet and bureau drawers, and so the bag of clothes had been a relief.

It would be ungracious, surely, to notice that the outfits Anya had chosen for her were…well, more Anya than Tara. And so she tugged at the tight shirt and realized with a sigh that there were all kinds of practical matters she was going to have to figure out. School, for instance. She didn't think that her scholarship had a resurrection clause.

She hadn't mentioned this to Willow yet; it was too soon, and Willow was still so raw, still an open wound. It had been all she could do to convince Willow to go for a walk with Buffy and Dawn, to get some fresh air while Tara woke up and ate dinner. She knew that Willow was afraid to leave her, afraid even to stop touching her, but Tara thought that Buffy was right to say it was necessary. Baby steps, Buffy had told Tara, squeezing her hand sympathetically. Just an hour or two.

Tara had expected that it would be hard for Willow, that brief separation. What she hadn't expected was the void she would feel the minute Willow left, turning her pale face to look at Tara one more time as Buffy and Dawn tugged her out the front door. It was different, somehow, from sleeping and knowing that Willow was in the shower or the kitchen, different from her solitary walk of the day before, when she had desperately needed time just to think.

This time, she had bit her lip, crossed her hands behind her to avoid reaching for Willow as the door closed. And it had been, already, a painfully long, endlessly stretching hour when she couldn't see Willow, couldn't make sure that she was all right. An hour when she had to trust that someone else was taking care of Willow.

But it was more than that. If she was honest, it was an hour when she was alone, and that frightened her. It was like…before, in the white place. She had been alone before, and being alone now, in the dining room of a house she had once lived in, with her plate of salad and re-heated quesadillas and the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall, she felt dizzily surreal.

What if she had dreamed the last two days? What if all this were just a trick of her mind? What if this were just her own cozy heaven, but really she was still dead and in the ground, and Willow was still….

"Stop it," she said out loud and pressed her hand against the small and greenish fingerprint bruises that Willow's grip had left on her arm the evening before. That helped, feeling the bruises. Willow had left an impression on her. She was here.

"Stop what?" She glanced up, startled, to see Xander leaning in the kitchen doorway, shoulders slumped and looking as tired as she still felt. His feet dragged across the floor, and he sank into a chair and set a bottle of beer on the table.

Tara half-smiled and nodded. "And about me, too, a little bit," she confessed. "It's strange, you know? I mean, Buffy used to talk to me a little bit about what it was like for her, but…I don't think it's the same." She pushed her fork around her plate again for something to do, for somewhere to look.

"Anya told me to tell you that we saved some of your stuff," he said quietly. "I know Buffy's got a lot on her mind right now, so maybe she didn't mention it, but she and Anya went to your dorm room after…and got some books and magick stuff and…well, I don't know. There was some jewelry, I think. A blue rock. Photographs. Some stuff Buffy said Willow gave you." He picked at the edges of the beer label. Tara thought he seemed nervous, thought he was talking to avoid some other conversation.

"They had to hurry because your father was coming to get your things, and they wanted to ask Willow what to get—what was important—but that was before she started talking again, so…." Tara's stomach lurched at that, and her fork scraped against the plate. They both winced at the noise. "So…."

"Xander," she interrupted. "What do you really want to talk about?" He set down his beer bottle and met her gaze for the first time. He smiled a little.

"I forgot that you could do that," he said. "You always could do that." He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his words came out in a rush. "Listen, Tara, I know it must be kind of confusing right now, but we have to talk about this. Someone has to talk about this. Buffy and Giles told me about the spell in the Magic Box, and they both said it was fine, but I have to ask. What exactly do you think you're doing with Willow and the magicks?" Tara waited for more, but he didn't say anything.

"Xander, it was okay last night. She was okay. She didn't go over the edge. It was fine. I could feel it…I could feel her, and she was okay. " Tara's brow furrowed. She didn't know how to explain it so that he would understand.

"Yeah, that's what Buff said, too," he said slowly. "And it's a step; I get that. But what about when you're not around, Tara? What happens if Willow gets tempted to go Wicked Witch of the West again…maybe for a good reason…and you're not there? You can't be with her 24 hours a day, not forever." He leaned forward.

Tara's mouth felt suddenly dry. She licked her lips and wondered where Willow was right then. Her hand shook slightly as she lifted her water glass and sipped.

"You don't know what it was like," Xander continued before she could speak, his voice quiet. Tara steeled herself against what she knew was coming, some description of Willow's brutality, but Xander surprised her. "Tara, she woke up at night screaming. She wanted to die. You just don't know."

"You think that was my choice?" Tara asked, hearing her voice grow louder. "You think this is easy for me? You think I want to know that she suffered so much and was alone?" Tara heard her voice trembling and pressed her lips together. Her stomach churned.

Xander shook his head in. "Tara, she wasn't alone. That's just it. You weren't here, but she had the rest of us." He took another swig of beer.

"Is that what this is about?" Tara asked, confused. She wasn't sure exactly what they were talking about, and that was oddly familiar. There was always a subtext with the Scoobies, always something lurking underneath the still waters of conversation. "Xander, I don't want to get in between you and Willow. I swear I don't."

"Tara," he went on as if she hadn't spoken, gripping his beer bottle with both hands. "You went away and left her, and the rest of us had to pick up the pieces, and now you want to come back and change all the rules." His voice was even and taut.

"I didn't just 'go away,' Xander," she said tightly. "I was dead, remember? I was dead. I didn't choose to leave." Anger was an unfamiliar emotion to Tara, but she felt it rising in her chest now, squeezing her vocal cords, choking her words.

Xander let out a puff of breath. "Yeah, well you may have died three months ago, but you left Willow a long time before that." Tara felt his words as a slap.

"Don't you talk to me about leaving," she said, and her voice shook with anger. "Don't you dare. You were too busy leaving Anya at the altar to notice that Willow needed help. If she'd really had the support she needed when she quit the magicks, then maybe she wouldn't have lashed out like that after I died." She narrowed her eyes at Xander. "So where were you then?"

"I think that's a case of the pot calling the kettle black, don't you, Tara?" he said coldly.

"You don't know how it was between us," she said heatedly. Some corner of her mind realized that she was still gripping her fork, pointing it at him. "I did what I thought I had to do. I did what I thought was right for me and right for Willow."

Xander looked at her for a long moment. "That's what I thought I was doing now," he said tightly, and his fingers clenched into a fist, the knuckles whitening as Tara watched. It was familiar, that fist. That rage. Xander had made that fist after Joyce died, and the same memory that had flashed into Tara's mind then waved over her now.

Her mother had died, and grief had clawed at Tara like an animal, ripping her from throat to stomach, leaving her exposed to an emptiness that yawned and screamed to be filled. For a long time, she couldn't even cry.

The emptiness seemed to grow larger all the time—at home, where she couldn't fill it with laundry or cooking or secret casting in the closet of her bedroom, and at school, where she couldn't fill it with studying.

She found one thing to fill that emptiness, finally, in the shape of a dark girl with short, spiky hair and a nose ring. Tara hadn't actually liked Luz that much, hadn't liked the way she cut class to smoke clove cigarettes, hadn't liked the way she sometimes mocked Tara's stutter, hadn't liked the way she had no time for Tara except the time that they could grab, after school but before Tara was expected home to make dinner, for the awkward kissing and groping in Luz's car that formed their entire relationship.

That, at least, she had liked. It had felt…almost good, almost like living, having someone's hot lips press against hers, having someone's arms holding her. It wasn't much, but it took the edge off the emptiness for a little while.

Until they were caught half-dressed, as they should have known they would be, by some kids out looking for a lost dog. Friends of Tara's brother. And Donny was waiting when she got home. "Just wait until Dad finds out," he'd sneered at her. "Just wait until he gets home, you little witch."

"It's none of your business," she had said weakly, although she knew it wouldn't matter, but Donny had laughed in her face.

"You sick demon dyke," he spat out, and he had raised his hand. "You're a shame to your Mama's memory."

Without thinking, without making a conscious decision, without filtering the urge the way she always had done before, almost always would do after, Tara had made a fist, had murmured a couple of words, and her brother had doubled over in pain, clenching at his stomach and falling to his knees. She had squeezed her fingers tight, and that fist of her own rage and grief had caused Donny to scream with the pain. And for a second, just for one second, the hurt was gone. The emptiness was filled.

"Don't ever touch me again," she said, her voice tight with anger. And she had left him on the kitchen floor, contorted and writhing, while she went out to the barn and cried, sobbed because her mother was dead and she had let her down. Not by kissing Luz—her mother would have accepted that, Tara knew—but by using the magick to hurt.

Donny had left her alone after that, at least physically. But Tara had felt sick anyway. She had cast on purpose, cast in order to hurt someone, cast because she could. And it had felt so, so wrong. She would almost have preferred a beating to that knowledge, that she could be violent and cruel to protect herself, that she could lash out with magick like that. She would have slept easier at night if she had actually used her first, smacked Donny or the table or the screen door.

So she had known, instinctively, when she saw Xander pull his fist from the cheap plaster of Willow's dorm room and clench it, looking with something like satisfaction at the blood on his knuckles, what he felt, how that contact of his fingers with the hard wall had seemed, for just one second, like relief.

And she had known, because she remembered, that it faded quickly, so quickly. She had caught Xander's eye and smiled at him, a little, through the grief of her own remembering, and she had spoken the only words of comfort she knew. "It hurts," she had said.

Now, Tara's unfamiliar anger fizzled as suddenly as it had flared up, draining away from her chest and leaving only that same sick feeling in her gut.

"Xander," she pushed back her chair and walked around the table to where Xander was sitting. She sank into the chair next to him, perched on the edge of the seat, facing him. "I know you want to take care of her, I know you do, but you've got to trust me to do that now. She'll always need you, but right now," a wrinkle creased Tara's forehead as she said words she knew it would hurt Xander to hear, "she needs me more."

He looked at her for a long moment, and then the taut line of his jaw loosened, and his fingers unclenched. "You know, Anya was right about one thing," he said finally. "I have these two women, and they're the loves of my life. One of them doesn't need me because she's the Slayer. And the other one doesn't need me because she has you. I don't have anyone who really needs me." He smiled, and there was pain in his smile. But there was also, finally, acceptance.

Tara reached out tentatively and touched the scars on his face, as she'd wanted to do since she'd first seen them, and Xander did not flinch. "Anya needed you," she said quietly. "She still does."

The evening air was warm and dry; it was still a relief to Dawn after a summer of damp. She felt good, great even. So maybe they didn't have the Key business figured out yet, but Tara was alive and eating her quesadillas right now, and Buffy was smiling and swinging Willow's hand in hers.

Dawn thought that Buffy had been extra touchy with Willow all day, and that made sense to her. She had felt Willow's whole arm shaking when they had pulled her through the front door of the house to take this walk. knew that Willow just wanted to be around Tara. Dawn thought that she would be the same way; she kind of felt that way now. She wanted to see Tara all the time, to remind herself. Like a bruise. You knew it was there, but you wanted to keep pressing it anyway, to remind yourself that it hurt. Only that was stupid, she thought now. Tara wasn't a bruise. Bruises were bad. Bruises hurt.

"Still do what?" Dawn asked, confused. Buffy had thought they might run into the Poet while they were out, but after an uneventful walk, they had been talking about ice cream, about whether they should pick up milkshakes to take home.

"Still think we should stop at a pay phone," Willow said, biting her lip. "We should call the house. Make sure Tara is okay." She was breathing fast, and in the light of the street lamp, her face looked pale. She shifted nervously from one foot to the other.

"Will," Buffy said gently. "You can do this. We'll be home in twenty minutes. Just hang on, okay? Nothing's going to happen in twenty minutes, right?"

"Well, maybe you could tell me something to get my mind off it, then," Willow said finally, giving in. "You should tell me the riddle. I didn't hear it the first time."

"Please," Willow said quietly, almost desperately. "I'm not going to break if you tell me something hard, I promise. Even if it's something bad. I'll try not to fall apart. I know Tara's not here to hold my hand," her voice caught, "but I want to help. I can handle it."

Buffy didn't answer at first, and Dawn could see her thinking, deciding. They had worked out their ideas about the riddle and the Key with Giles the night before, but it all seemed kind of unimportant right now. And there was no reason in making anyone feel bad. If she was the Key, she was the Key, right? Okay Sarah Sarah, or something like that.

What mattered, Dawn and Buffy and Giles had decided, was that clearly all three conditions had been met before she'd left for England. And that meant that her powers had been unlocked for months. Although if that was true, Dawn thought now, scuffing her shoe along the pavement, then being the Key totally sucked. Forget a car; being the Key couldn't even get her extra allowance. Or, apparently, a milkshake.

"Can we at least talk about the headaches," Willow asked, pleading, but the clanging noise of a metal trash can rolling out of an alley ahead stopped her.

"I thought it was too quiet," Buffy said with a sigh. "You two stay back." She stalked ahead, but in spite of her warning, Dawn gripped Willow's arm and followed her sister.

Dawn could hear the voice as they approached the alley, a voice that, as they approached, became familiar. Peering around the corner of the alley as Buffy marched ahead, she could see two shapes wrestling in the street. It was dark, and Dawn couldn't see more than dim outlines, but the shape on top had horns coming out from either side of its head, and…yuck, were those more horns sticking out from its hips?

Beneath the horned shape was something else, and that, Dawn realized, was where the voice was coming from. "My name is Ozymandias," the voice was shouting, "king of kings." Weird, Dawn thought. Talking about some over-the-hill rock star and his stupid reality show.

"The poet," Willow murmured. Dawn frowned; she hadn't paid that much attention in English lit last year.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" The shape on the bottom shouted and kicked out, and the monster flew back, sliding along the pavement to end in a heap at Buffy's feet.

For a moment, it didn't move, but then Buffy cleared her throat. It looked up at her, and even in the shadows, Dawn could see the leer.

"Well, someone's feeling horny," Buffy said, and she lifted her booted foot, brushed against it with her hand, and shot it out at the monster's chest, pushing down with her boot as the creature slumped to the pavement, a trickle of something dark oozing from its chest and its mouth. When Buffy pulled her foot away, wiping it on the pavement, Dawn caught a flash of metal on the sole of her shoe.

But Buffy wasn't finished. She stood, hands on her hips, and called out to the other shape, who had stood up and was limping forward, toward the circle of yellowish lamp light at the end of the alley.

"So I hear you do a mean limerick," Buffy was saying, but Dawn thought there was something familiar about the slim sway of hips, the slope of the shoulders.

"You know, 'there once was a vigilante,'" Buffy continued, standing still. "Why don't you tell me the next line? Because I haven't had much time for reading lately." Her voice was light, but as the shape took another step forward, Buffy stopped, suddenly, and Dawn saw who it was.

The hair was different, longer and almost brown, and the face was hard to make out under the bruises and the blood, but it was definitely him. Beaten within an inch of his life, it looked like, and probably sore all over, judging from the limp and the way he held an arm close to his side, but him. Dawn's stomach clenched with disgust.

He took another step, and then sunk onto his knees in front of Buffy, pulling his shirt apart at the neck and lifting his bloodied face to her. "I've been waiting for you, Slayer" he said, and there was no poetry at all in his voice now.

In that moment, Dawn was struck dumb with dread. She looked at Buffy, whose lips tightened and who seemed not to realize that she held her stake up, poised and ready to strike. And Giles was not there to stop her.

Then Dawn looked at Willow, whose eyes flashed dark and who seemed unaware that she had raised a hand, the fingers stretching toward the figure on the ground and quivering slightly. And Tara was not there to stop her.

And Dawn reflected, in that surreal way that allows a person to be completely within a moment and completely detached from it at the same time, that this would probably be a good time to be the Key. If only she knew how.

It seems I am still waiting
for them to make some clear demand
some articulate sound or gesture,
for release to come from anywhere
but from inside myself.
—Adrienne Rich, "Toward the Solstice"

Tara could see them, two thin figures clutching one another in a shadowed corner of the alley. One holding the other up. And two others, standing back, watching. Fear hit her: a fist in the stomach. Willow was hurt. Willow couldn't stand up straight. Willow had cast, and without her, it had gone wrong . She stopped still for a second, paralyzed, as Xander ran ahead.

She had grown uneasy in the Summers house, alone with Xander and his scars, alone without Willow. Too much time had passed. Something was wrong. She shouldn't have let Willow go out without her; it was too soon. She had tried to focus her mind, to find Willow in their old way, but she had felt too anxious to cast a finding spell, too distracted, and so they had set out on foot, toward the Magick Box.

And she had been right, it seemed. Willow was in trouble. Willow couldn't stand alone. Willow needed help. And Tara felt afraid.

But when Xander reached the huddled figures ahead of her, and they looked up, she realized she'd had it all wrong. It was Buffy who was limp. And it was Willow who was holding her up. Tara closed the remaining distance between them on a wave of relief, reaching her arms around both girls in a brief, hard hug.

Tara caught Willow's eye, and the look she saw there was calm enough, peaceful enough, to let her breathe again. It was okay. Over Willow's shoulder, she saw Anya reach for Xander's hand but then curl her fingers into a fist and let her arm drop.

"Dawnie," Willow said, nodding her head toward the alley wall, and Tara turned to see Dawn, standing rigid against a brick wall, staring into space. Tara went to her, touched her, and Dawn seemed to shake herself.

Tara frowned and glanced uncertainly at Buffy. Xander had taken her other arm, but she seemed calmer already, standing up straight. Willow had an arm around Buffy's shoulders and was talking softly to her, but she was watching Tara.

"Did you have a headache? What do you remember?" she asked Dawn softly, touching her arm.

Dawn bit her lip. "Spike was here," she said finally. "And he…I think he wanted Buffy to kill him, but she wouldn't, and Willow's eyes were all dark, and then…." Tara's throat tightened at that, but she kept her voice calm.

"Then what, sweetie?" she asked softly. "You can tell me; it's okay. Whatever it is, we'll figure it out."

But Dawn shook her head. "That's all I remember," she said. "And now you're here."

"I want to know what happened," Dawn said again, more insistently this time. "Buffy, please. Where did Spike go?"

Tara had fussed over Buffy when they'd arrived home, running her a hot bath and insisting that she eat a piece of toast and drink hot tea. She didn't ask any questions, just seemed to know that Buffy wanted to feel quiet and clean and warm and full. Buffy had missed being cared for like that. It felt good.

Now—Buffy thought it was only right—Tara's attention had turned back to Willow; she had settled into the corner of the sofa and pulled Willow to her, wrapped her arms around her, and Buffy watched both girls' eyes close for a moment as their bodies touched. She could almost feel the sigh that passed through them both, that drew Willow's back to Tara's chest. At the contact.

It had never been like that, with Spike. It had been contact, and she had wanted it for awhile, but it hadn't been a sigh. More of a gasp. Like seeing him again had been a gasp. She wanted to explain it, to tell the others what had happened, but she couldn't find the words. She was still, a little, in the gasp.

Buffy had thought first of powerlessness. It felt like the white of enamel bathtub in the small of her back. It felt like the black of slick leather pulled like a blanket over her nakedness. It felt like the cold gray of a crypt. Or the final gray of the tombstone over your head. Or the paralyzing gray of not knowing what to do.

The weak lamp light had flattened the alley into grays, blurred the flat edges of black and white like an old movie. That was unusual; Buffy usually found that her Slayer vision was 20/20, clear and focused and seeing right through to the sharp heart of a situation. But at the moment, the only thing that looked sharp was Mr. Pointy.

She was aware of Willow and Dawn, standing back and to her left. She heard one of them gasp and knew that they had seen what she had just seen: Spike, kneeling in front of her, holding his shirt open over his bare chest, blurred with blood and bruises.

It came back, all of it, a movie seen long ago and played now on rewind. The great empty hole of her life and the way that she'd used Spike to fill it. Sex that left her splintered. Rage and wanting; lust and anger. The aching relief of telling him no. The surprise—and how much had she had to will herself to forget in order to feel that shocking, cold surprise?—when he wouldn't listen.

"He wouldn't listen," Willow was saying, and Buffy jerked herself back to the present. "He said horrible things. He was taunting her. He was…God, he was lewd. It made me so…."

Xander shook his head. He flexed a wrist against the mantle. "Why didn't you just beat the crap out of him? He deserved it after what he did to you."

Buffy glanced at Willow, who smiled at her gently, and Tara, who looked keenly at her but said nothing. "Xander," she said. She didn't know how to explain. "That's what he wanted. That's why he came." She swallowed against the memory of his eyes, blackened by torment. Against his cheekbones, angled with shame.

"Sorry, Buff, I don't get it," Xander went on. "Spike's back in town, only instead of banging heads, he's doing poetry slams? And by the way, does anyone else think it's strange that we had two showdowns in two days, and I missed them both?"

Buffy sighed, remembering. "He wanted me to kill him," she said. "He was trying to provoke me…to make me mad enough to stake him. Only…."

"Only he's human," Anya said from the doorway. She smiled broadly, and it occurred to Buffy that she liked poofing in and out of rooms.

"Jesus, Anya," Xander said tiredly. "Can't you just use the door like everyone else?"

She glanced at him. "He's human," she said again, patiently. "He made a deal to be restored to how he was before. He was trying to get rid of the chip, but what he was before was human. But he remembers everything. And now he's crazy with guilt, insane. D'Hoffryn's theory is that Spike was reciting poetry to try to block his vampire life from his mind."

Buffy saw Xander roll his eyes. "D'Hoffryn says," he muttered quietly. Anya just looked at him, impassive.

"He used to write poetry," Buffy said quietly. "Before he was turned. He told me about it once. Love poems." When he was human. When he was William. When he was a….

"… coward," she had called him, her voice full of contempt. "After everything, after what you tried to do to me, I still trusted you with Dawn. I still thought there was some hope for you. And you ran."

Why was it that she remembered only what she had said? Why was it that even now, Spike was fading, fading like the lines of a poem she'd once had memorized but now could barely remember? He had spoken, she knew he had spoken to her, but the words were gone.

She'd laughed at him, incredulous. "But you didn't destroy me," she'd said. "You didn't destroy anything. Spike, look around. You have no victims here." She had gestured at Willow, standing next to her, at Anya and Dawn, a few paces off. Survivors. Women unbroken, in the end, by men. Or vampires. Or gods. Or grief.

"You have no victims here ," she'd said again, and she'd known as she heard the words that it was true. "Save your atonement for the people you really hurt."

She had reached down then and grabbed his shirt, pulled him easily to his feet. She'd looked past the bruises to his eyes, past Spike to William, and she remembered, deep in her bones, looking past Angelus to Angel, when he'd come back, in that painful moment before she'd killed him. She knew that suffering. And then she had pulled him down and kissed him—lightly, so lightly—on the forehead. And then she let go.

"Get out of Sunnydale, Spike," she had said. "Go to L.A. Go back to England. Go somewhere, anywhere. Go spend your life doing something good. Atoning. But not here. Not with me."

She thought he'd lifted his chin then, thought that his eyes sparked finally with understanding. He had looked at her for a long moment, looked past her to Dawn with something like longing.

And then he turned. And he walked away, out of the alley and into the night. And Buffy had watched him go, watched the sloping back of the vampire who had never known how to love her straighten into the back of the man who would spend a lifetime regretting it.

The others were quiet when Buffy stopped talking, reflective. For a moment, no one said a word, not even Xander. But Buffy glanced over at the sofa to Willow and Tara, and she saw two sets of eyes wet with understanding. They understood different things, perhaps, but they understood.

Buffy lifted her hands and let them fall back into her lap. She looked at Willow for help.

"Something changed," Willow said slowly. "I don't know…I walked over, and then Anya showed up, and she and Buffy were talking, and then we looked over and Spike was…different. Like the fire had gone out. He listened. It was kind of weird, I guess. Now that you mention it." Buffy nodded. That was how she remembered it, too.

"And that's it?" Xander asked finally. "We've been hearing about the poet for days, and he turns out to be Spike, and that's all we get?" He looked at Buffy helplessly, his eyes red with wanting to help. "No ass-kicking, no yelling, Jesus…. What kind of…what kind of closure is that?"

Buffy shrugged and opened her mouth, but it was Anya who spoke, touching Xander's arm and speaking quietly and evenly, with what Buffy knew was the wisdom of a thousand years of vengeance, a thousand years of love, a thousand years of good-byes to people you thought you'd known, once.

"I get it," Tara said slowly, and Willow leaned back into her, let her head fall against the curve of Tara's neck, felt the warmth of Tara's arms around her waist. "But Will…were you tempted? Dawn said your eyes were dark."

The others had drifted off to the kitchen, but Tara and Willow remained on the sofa, each unwilling to let the other go. And here, safely encircled, Willow remembered, and she told Tara.

Willow had thought first of powerlessness. It was the white fingers of Glory like lightning in her brain. It was the black itch of temptation and the cold black of grief. It was the damp gray of night sweats in a lonely bed. And the ashen gray of skin. And the endless gray of not knowing what to do.

Willow felt the rush. The blood in her head, the tensing of her arm, the narrowing of her eyes. She felt it all, sudden and complete. And for a moment—for one terrifying moment—she thought she was powerless against it, that the magicks would take her over. She saw it happen, a movie played on fast-forward. She would cast against Spike, and she would kill him for what he'd tried to do to Buffy. And she wouldn't be able to stop, and Buffy and Dawn would turn on her, and she would be alone. She would be punished. Tara would die again. And it would all begin again.

But a recollection pushed its way through the haze of fear and inevitability. She remembered the evening Dawn had told her about Spike.

They had been walking, and she had been half-listening as Dawn told her the news from Sunnydale, about Buffy and Xander and Giles and Anya and Janice.

Willow had hardly noticed the omission. They had walked on, with just the tickle of something missing, and then she had turned to Dawn suddenly. "What about Spike?" she had asked.

Willow had felt it then, the hot, wet boiling up of emotion through the flat and dusty prairie of her grief. She didn't even recognize it at first, could only see it as the magicks, could only understand it as a return to darkness and evil and pain.

She had gone stumbling to find one of the Guides, crying so violently she could hardly see, terrified of the magicks that had become her enemies. She'd once thought that dying would only keep her from Tara temporarily, but now she knew that their separation was utterly final. Tara was somewhere peaceful and light, with her mother maybe, but Willow would only pass out of this world into a hell dimension of endless torment, some dark city of fire and suffering where she would be forever alone.

"It's back," she had screamed at the Guide, clawing at her chest and arms, sobbing. She'd been unable to breathe, unable to stand, images of Tara and Spike and a bruised Buffy crowding her mind. She had felt wild. Uncontrollable. It had scared the hell out of her. And out of Dawn, who had followed her and was weeping softly in the doorway.

"Willow," the Guide had said quietly, her voice wrapping calmly around Willow, a blanket around a shock victim, "that's not the magicks you're feeling. Listen. Take a breath and listen to your body and your mind. Come."

She had put a hand on each of Willow's shoulders and had breathed, and eventually Willow had breathed with her, and she had tried to listen, tried to see through that haze of pain and blackness. And she had, in the end, heard it.

It was anger. That Buffy had been hurt. That Tara had been ripped away from her. That she would be alone in life and alone after death.

And it was anger that Willow had felt tonight, anger at Spike for hurting Buffy. Anger at him for daring to show his face in Sunnydale after what he'd done. And maybe…maybe somewhere buried deep…anger with herself that she hadn't been a good enough friend to earn Buffy's confidence all those months ago.

And realizing it, she had dropped her hand, and shook her head until she could feel her vision clear, and she had walked up to Buffy and stood next to her friend.

Tara had started to cry into Willow's hair, but Willow pressed on. "It's a good thing," she said, although her throat caught on the words. "I looked at Spike, and I felt all that anger boiling up, but…I don't know…it was like I understood the difference. Finally. Between the anger and the magick. I would have used a spell to separate Spike and Buffy if I'd had to, you know, but…but it was okay. Buffy handled it."

"Willow," Tara whispered. "I'm proud of you." Willow felt Tara's arms tighten around her, and she closed her eyes with relief. It was a step. It was a tiny step, but it was a step. And she had done it. With no help from anyone, with no spells and nobody holding her hand. All by herself. Just for a moment, that felt good.

At the sound of footsteps, she opened her eyes again to see Dawn standing just inside the living room, looking uncomfortable.

"Dawnie, are you okay?" she asked, sitting up and glancing at Tara, who wiped at her eyes.

"I remembered something," Dawn said, biting her lip. "Something else. It was…it was just the last thing I saw. Before I kind of blacked out or whatever. Your necklace…."

Willow touched the pendulum around her neck and felt Tara stiffen next to her. She glanced over, but Tara looked away, wouldn't meet her eye.

"It changed color," Dawn said quietly. "When you pointed at Spike, your necklace changed color."

For a moment, the words sat in the air, innocent. Harmless. But then they sank in, and the world seemed to fade to gray again as Willow felt the relief seep away, felt Tara's pride in her—that rare, wonderful, warming thing—seep away. Felt her strength, her self, seep away.

Life to life—
I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,
And feel as safe as guarded by a charm
Against the stab of worldlings, who if rife
Are weak to injure.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Sonnets from the Portugese"

Tara was dreaming, and the dream was white on white. She was in a white place without landscape. A white moment without time. There was no shape, no form, no dimension. She was simply embossed on the surface of a wrinkle.

She had come to this place—the part of herself that stood apart and observed the dream knew this—on a tide of red. Crimson sheets on a bed. And the feather touch of red hair. A splash of scarlet on a white blouse.

In this place, she just…was. Like paper, she was blank and unwritten. Like ash in a cold fireplace, she was a collection of remnants without shape or temperature. Like snow after it forms into crystals from rain but before it hits the ground, she was always whole and always separate and always falling and always still.

And the white went on and on. It was all colors. It was complete. But something was missing here, something important, something red, like a heart. And some of the time…or in some of the places…there was something else. A pull, but without gravity. A call, but without voice.

There was a kind of desire to respond, to say "I'm coming." But there were no sentences here. There were no words to form. There were no questions to answer. There was no place to go to and no place to leave from.

And then….something changed. It was almost white; it was ivory or vanilla. It was a doorway in the middle of the white. She felt…did she feel now? were there feelings here?…that the door was to be gone through, that she should go through it. On the other side of the door there was more white…white in a bowl. White in the air. But there was also…

Red. A pinprick of color on the horizon that was the doorway. A point of focus. Something to move toward. And somewhere else…there was a voice.

Tara woke with a start into the absence of color. Black. It chilled her, for a moment. She lay still, breathing deeply, and gradually, the room adjusted itself back to the gray of night, curtained against the weak moonlight. She glanced beside her and was disconcerted to find herself alone in a bed that wasn't hers. It was obvious that only half the bed had been slept in. That only one pillow bore the impression of a sleeping head. Was she alone after all? Had she gone from that neutral white to something else, to another place without Willow?

Where was Willow? And what was that dream? Tara had a sudden uneasy, overwhelming sense of déjà vu. What if she had fallen asleep and missed three more months? What if she had somehow died again? What if she had never gone back to life but was instead passing through one doorway after another? Versions of a life with Willow. Visions of a life without her. No kind of life at all.

But no. Of course not. She remembered, almost as quickly as she had forgotten, that the bed looked half empty because it had been half empty, because she and Willow had slept so close, pressed so tightly against one another that they had needed only half. Only one pillow. They would have crawled inside each other if they could.

She heard the voice again; she had forgotten it already in the darkness. The door stood half-open, and Tara could see Dawn in the hallway, her long hair falling onto the shoulders of her pajamas.

Tara slid out of bed and padded softly to the doorway. Dawn didn't move. This, too, seemed familiar. "Sweetie?" she asked. She touched Dawn's arm gently, and Dawn blinked and turned her head. Her stiff arm softened at Tara's touch.

Tara tilted her head, confused. "You called me," she said. "I was sleeping, and you woke me up. Just…just now. Didn't you?"

Dawn glanced past Tara at the darkened bedroom, then looked back over her shoulder at the door to her own room, which was shut. She frowned. "That's weird," she said. "I don't remember closing that door."

Tara opened her mouth to speak, but then she heard another sound, a soft and desperate weeping from the bathroom. She would recognize that sound anywhere, and her first thought was immense relief, immense gratitude. Willow was all right. And that meant that she, herself, was really alive.

Almost reluctantly, she turned back to Dawn, who was still looking at her closed door as if she couldn't quite place it. "Dawnie," Tara said, squeezing her shoulder. "Go back to bed." Dawn nodded and turned and wandered back down the hallway without speaking.

Tara knocked softly on the bathroom door and turned the knob without waiting for an answer. The room was dim; only the night light burned. Willow was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bathtub, her knees pulled up to her chest, her fingers clutching at the sides of her face, handfuls of hair caught up in them.

Tara felt sorrow rise from her stomach to choke at her throat. Maybe Willow had been right. Maybe they didn't get easy. Maybe Tara would dream of white and wake into confusion every night forever. Maybe Willow would cry every night forever. For what she had lost. For what they had lost.

But that was forever. Right now, Willow needed her, and she would make it better.

She closed the door behind her, and at the soft click, Willow looked up, her face shimmering wet in the weak glow of the night light. "I didn't want to wake you," her breath came in gasps between the words. "You were so tired." She wiped the red sleeve of her bathrobe across her nose and eyes.

"Willow," Tara murmured, sinking to her knees and sliding her arms around the tensed shoulders, pulling the red head against her chest with a gentle pressure of fingers. "I'm sorry, honey. I should have said something about the necklace. I just…I thought if it was a protection charm, a little extra help, it couldn't hurt. I should have said…."

"No," Willow sobbed helplessly. "I don't care about that. It's just…I thought it was me. I thought I…I finally did something right, something worthy of you," her breath came out in a soft, high moan, "and it was that necklace." Tara tightened her grasp on Willow, felt the shoulder trembling with disappointment and the face wet with self-loathing beneath her fingers, saw the white of her own knuckles gripping Willow.

"My poor baby," Tara whispered. "I remember…I remember when you could lift us both right off the dance floor. You were so strong, so sure." Tara could feel Willow recoiling at her words, pulling herself away. She tried to touch the red, but Willow's hair slipped through her fingers. Just out of reach.

"That wasn't me," Willow choked out. "That was the magick; it was always the magick. I'm weak." She lifted her face, and Tara's heart constricted at the pain she saw in her lover's eyes. It was naked. "I'll never be more than that, Tara," Willow cried. "I can't ever be more than that, not again."

"Willow, how can you say that?" Tara felt Willow's disgust with herself as a fist in her own stomach. "Look what we've," Tara used the word instinctively, but it rang false in her ears, "look what you've been through. You had to do it all alone. No one's had to be stronger than you." She reached for Willow's hand, but it pulled out of her grasp, and Tara bit her lip.

"That wasn't strength," Willow said thickly. "That was just waiting. And I…." She stopped abruptly, folding herself against the tub, shrinking from Tara.

"Willow, what is it?" Tara's voice came out a whisper. There was something else; she could feel it, and she didn't like it. She wanted to be able to take away Willow's shame, to comfort her, but…there was something else. "Willow, please talk to me. Please," she heard the desperation in her own voice.

Willow looked up at her through her tears, through a strand of red hair that fell across her face. "Tara," she wept. "Tara, don't you see?" She pushed at her hair impatiently, pressing her lips together against the tears. "When I'm strong, you get hurt. When I'm strong, you die.…."

Tara didn't hear the end of the sentence. She sat back on her heels, lightheaded and breathless. She squeezed her eyes shut, and for a moment, she saw white. Paper. Snow. Ash. She gripped Willow's hand to remind herself where she was, and she opened her eyes. The bathroom. She breathed.

"Is that what you think?" she asked finally, and her voice sounded distant, tiny. "You think I died because you did something wrong?" She concentrated on feeling the backs of her heels pressing into her thighs. Heels had a shape, so if she could feel them, then she was really here. And Willow's hair had color, so if she could see it, then she was really here. She reached out a trembling hand and touched Willow's hair.

"Am I just an accessory?" she asked quietly, but she felt panic rising in her throat. "Am I just a prop in your life? My death was just to punish you, and my life is some…some way to keep you weak? To keep you safe?"

For a moment, Tara felt terrified and empty. Was that true? Was that what she was to Willow? Was that what she was in death and in life? Was that what she was for? To be a charm?

And then Willow's fingers closed around her hand, and she looked through the white haze of her confusion and her shock to see fear in her lover's eyes. And worry. She saw Willow's other hand reach toward her, and when the fingers touched her cheek, she realized that her face was wet, that she was crying.

"Is that all I am, Willow?" she asked through her tears. "Am I inside your head? Am I alive? Am I even here now? Am I just extra?"

"Baby, no, no" Willow said fiercely, and Tara felt herself gathered up by the strong arms she remembered. She let her head fall against Willow's neck, let herself be cradled, let Willow whisper soft words into her hair and onto her cheeks. She let Willow's fingers press reassurance and safety into her back.

And in a moment, the terrified feeling passed, and Tara was just herself again, crying against Willow's neck. The panic, the emptiness that had felt so real only a moment before seemed ridiculous to her compared to Willow's solid arms, Willow's soothing fingers.

Of course she didn't exist to make Willow behave one way or another. Of course she was herself, a separate person. She half-laughed through her tears. It was just…sometimes she felt so close to Willow it scared her. And these last few days…it was like they were connected. Braided.

"I can be comforty, too" Willow murmured, her voice hoarse. She sighed, and Tara leaned into her. The tile was cold under her hip, but Willow's bathrobe was warm. "I think you just reminded me."

For a moment, they sat in silence, exhausted. Tara closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against Willow's skin. This was real. They were real. After awhile, Willow spoke, and her voice was calmer than it had been.

"Tara, I'm sorry," she said. "I've been so selfish," Tara heard the words catch in Willow's throat. She felt Willow's hand in her hair.

"I feel so strange," Tara whispered finally. "I don't know where I was. I don't know how I came back. I don't…I don't really know who I am anymore. I only know that I need to be with you." Saying it out loud helped.

Willow's fingers sifted through her hair, and Tara was again relieved that she could feel the pull of the fingers. She could feel the weight of Willow's hand on her back. She could see the bone of Willow's wrist in the dim light. She could feel the cold tile against the bare skin of her thigh. She could hear the drip in the faucet.

"I know who you are," Willow murmured. Tara tilted her head back so she could look up at her lover, so that she could see the tear-streaked face and the eyes shimmering in the dark. "You're everything. You're part of us, and us is everything."

The words sank into Tara's skin like memory. Like truth. But not the whole truth.

"The magick is us, too, Willow," she said softly. "That's who we are. You can't fight that to protect us."

Willow met her gaze at that, and as Tara felt the green of her eyes chase away the last haunting tendrils of white, she realized they had both stopped crying. She tucked her head back into the crook of Willow's neck and felt the familiar face press into her hair. They held onto each other until the tile became too cold, the enamel of the bathtub too hard, the sheer effort of sitting up too exhausting.

And then they went back to bed, wrapping their arms tightly around one another, their heads curled together on one pillow. The room was black, and the sheets were white, and Tara knew somewhere in the back of her mind, as they drifted into sleep, that it was the sleep of lovers who have shared their deepest secrets.

"Charming," Buffy sighed into the phone. "Well, Xander, you're just going to have to watch the shop until one of us can get there. It shouldn't be long; I think we're nearly finished here."

Willow sipped at her coffee as Buffy finished her phone call. It tasted odd, smoky. She'd forgotten how things tasted over the last few months: sweet or bitter or sour or salty. But it was a cool morning, and the coffee warmed her. Or maybe it was Tara's watchful gaze that did that. Or her hand on Willow's knee.

"So?" Dawn said as Buffy hung up the phone and leaned against the kitchen wall, her hands on her hips. She nodded at the pendulum; it glinted silver on the table. "It's what, some kind of magickal mood ring?"

Giles sighed and rubbed his forehead with one hand. "That's one way to put it, I suppose," he said. He had explained that the pendulum was a relatively simple charm, one which changed color in response to the emotions of its wearer. Its color changed if the wearer felt anger, or pain, or sorrow, anything that might—Giles had said it proudly—trigger the use of magicks.

"You see," he had said excitedly, gesturing at the pendulum that Willow had held out to him, her eyes asking the question. "It doesn't influence your behavior in any way; it doesn't change your choices whatsoever. It merely reflects your emotional state."

"You mean," Willow had said slowly, trying to understand. "You mean it didn't stop me from casting?" The relief had been immense. Consuming. She had done one thing after all. That one thing.

"No," Giles had said, glancing at her with surprise. "No, you did that. But, you see, this could help you if you're tempted to cast again. It can help you, or others, to know how you're feeling. So that you can control situations."

"But Giles," Buffy said now, and Willow thought she sounded tired. "Why didn't you just tell Willow it was a charm? Why the big secret?"

"I….I don't know, really," he said, glancing at her. "I suppose I thought that it would be a useful training tool. I didn't think you would run into a tempting situation quite so soon….I…."

"You didn't think she'd be able to see it," Tara interrupted flatly. "If she wears it around her neck, then she wouldn't know. The rest of us could see it. You could see it. But not Willow." Tara's hand had stiffened against Willow's knee.

Willow closed her eyes against the disappointment. It was always the same. Giles might love her, but in the end, he didn't trust her. He had never trusted her. It had been that way since the beginning. He talked about balance, and pendulums, and walking the line, but in the end…he didn't trust her.

But when she opened her eyes again, Giles was looking at her, and his eyes were soft and regretful, and Willow instantly felt sorry. It only made sense that he would want to protect her from herself. He was only trying to protect them all. That was all he had ever tried to do.

Tara was watching her, too. Everyone was watching her. Like everyone would always be watching her if she wore the pendant. Like she would always be watching herself. Always aware of every emotion, always second-guessing, always wondering what would be the next trigger. Just thinking about it, Willow shrank back in her chair. Away from the collective gaze, the endless scrutiny of her friends. And of herself.

"Tara, I…I really don't think you've thought this through properly," Giles said. "It's a simple precaution, a way for us to monitor…."

"Giles," Tara said again, calmly, and Willow blinked. She had never heard Tara call him just Giles before, never. Tara spoke slowly, firmly, and she looked straight at him. "Willow is not going to wear that pendulum any more."

Giles pulled his glass off and turned to Buffy. "Surely," he said, and Willow wondered when she'd ever heard that tone in his voice before. Beseeching. Almost pleading. "Surely we should make it easier for Willow if we can. I of all people know how hard this can be."

The room crackled with tension, and Willow shifted uncomfortably. She felt Buffy's eyes on her and looked up to meet her friend's gaze. Buffy studied her for a moment, tilting her head and really looking at her. Perhaps Buffy would decide, would take the weight of this decision from her.

But Buffy, finally, shook her head slightly, so slightly. "Giles, I think that Willow gets to choose," she said gently. "I know this is hard; I know that, but…but you don't get to choose for her." She crossed the room to look up at him.

"Giles, we've talked about this," Buffy said quietly. "Being my Watcher…being our Watcher…it doesn't mean you get to decide for us. You said it yourself; you said I had to grow up. Well, Willow has to grow up, too, and you have to let her. You have to let this be her choice."

After what seemed like a long time, Giles nodded, and he touched Buffy's shoulder. "I forget sometimes," he said, and Willow thought how like a father he looked at that moment. When he looked at her again—his eyes wary but knowing, uncertain but hopeful—she realized with a start that there was no one left but herself. She was going to have to decide. She was going to have to choose.

Swallowing against her instinctive panic, she looked to Tara, who was watching her with a firm face and soft, soft eyes.

"I trust you," Tara said again, and Willow remembered with a start. She remembered everything. She remembered when Tara was new, and love was new, and magick was new, when she felt new. Before confusion and death and killing. When trusting people…when trusting herself…was easier.

The others were watching her. They were waiting for her to say something, to make a decision. Willow glanced at the pendulum, and she glanced around the room at their faces and she looked at Tara.

"I…" she began, "I want to try. I want to try it without any charms. I want to try." And as she said it, she realized it was true.

"But Willow," Dawn burst out, excited. She'd been so quiet, tucked into the corner by the refrigerator, that Willow had almost forgotten she was there. "Of course you do." Willow looked at her, confused.

And Willow froze. For a moment, her vision blurred, and she gripped the countertop so hard that her knuckles turned white.

"No, before that," Willow said. She'd heard those words before. Those very words. Exactly like that.

"Um, I don't know," Dawn said, glancing at Tara quizzically. She bit her lip and shifted her weight to her other hip, crossing her arms over her chest.

"You said 'it's in your nature.'" Willow said slowly. "Where did you hear that?"

Willow remembered getting out of bed at the coven…only she wasn't sure she'd actually gotten out of bed. She remembered the hum of the voice, the white shimmer of a woman's face. She remembered that the woman had woken her up.

"You have your friends," the hum grew a little, purred, deep and rhythmic. It surrounded Willow. It licked at her. "They need you, Willow. We need you. You must rebuild." Willow tried to shake her head. She still sat, calmly.

The voice grew louder. The wind blew Willow's hair back, away from her face. It glinted red. The tops of the heather quivered. "You can't help it," the voice purred. "You can't stop it. It's in your nature."

No, Willow thought. She'd meant it to be desperate, but it seeped out of her as calmly as before. No.

"Look at your hands." The hum was back, lessening, low musical notes fading away at the end of a song. "You're already doing it."

The memory played in her mind like a video in black and white. The moment when she had forced herself to live. The moment afterward when she had gotten out of bed—eaten—for the first time in days. Before that moment, she had wanted only to die. And after that moment…well, she had still wanted to die, but she had known that she would live.

Willow stared at Dawn, her mouth slightly open, her throat dry. Tara put a hand around her shoulder.

Willow shook her head slowly. "Dawnie, how…how did you know about that?" she asked. Her voice shook. She remembered the woman in her…had it been a vision? a dream?…whose face she had never seen. She remembered peeling herself out of bed afterward and finding Dawn standing right outside the door to her room. She remembered the headaches that had started immediately afterward.

Dawn looked back at her, and a current of understanding passed between them. "I know because…" Dawn's face twisted, and she touched her head with one hand. "I know because…I was there."

Willow saw it happen. And she knew, with a shock, what it meant. With a stab of headache, with a wrinkle on the smooth landscape of her forehead, Dawn remembered.

And I knew
That this was the hour of knowing,
And the night and the woods and you
Were one together, and I should find
Soon in the silence the hidden key
Of all that had hurt and puzzled me—
Why you were you, and the night was kind,
And the woods were part of the heart of me.
—Rupert Brooke, "The Voice"

Dawn flinched with the stab of a headache, and Willow understood. "It was you," she breathed out, her computer brain kicking in to make connections. She squinted and tried to see in the outline of the hair framing Dawn's face a trace of the figure in her vision. She'd always assumed the woman was one of the Guides, but as she searched through the databases of her memory, she could come up with no details to contradict what she suddenly knew to be true.

"I always forget," Dawn murmured, the groove in her forehead deepening as pain settled in. "I start to remember, but I always forget." She looked up, and Willow saw a question in Dawn's pleading eyes. She wanted to remember.

It could only have been a moment that Willow paused, her hands wrapped around her cooling coffee cup, her eyes locked with Dawn's, Tara's tense fingers stretched across the denim-covered bone of her knee. It could only have been a few seconds—just long enough to think, to remember, to know.

Long enough to fill in the white-blurred face of the woman who had gotten her out of bed and forced her to start living again. To remember that Dawn had been standing right outside when she'd opened the door to see where the woman had gone. To remember that Dawn had had her first headache only hours later. To remember that Dawn had emerged from every headache at the touch of Willow's hands with phrases on the tip of her tongue, phrases like "she's coming."

To remember—and surely she had only missed this before because she had spent the summer clawing her way through a swamp of grief—that after Dawn's headaches, she had always, always felt a little bit better…not less sad, never that, but a little less suicidal. She'd assumed at the time that it was the simple relief of distraction.

And that moment was long enough to realize three things. Dawn needed to know what she had done. Tara needed to know how she had come back. And Willow knew how to help them answer their questions with magick. She had to help Dawn see inside that headache. That was where the answers were. That was the key.

She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed in and found that white spot of calm and held on to it, the way the Guides had taught her. She could do this for Dawn. She would do this for Tara.

Lacing her fingers through Tara's on her knee and squeezing gently, Willow spoke to Dawn, whose hand was still curved but stiffening around her fork, whose mouth was twisting. To Willow, it was a familiar sight, Dawn's eyebrows knitting with pain, her left cheek twitching just under her eye, her lips curling back over her small and even teeth. Instinctively, she leaned toward Dawn, ready to press a palm against her forehead, to make the pain stop….

And she realized, abruptly, that she had always made the pain stop before. And Dawn had always forgotten before. Willow sat back.

"I can help you remember, Dawnie," she said. "But you have to trust me. Can you do that?" Dawn nodded, her eyes widening at Willow for just a moment, but her neck was already tensing, her body already going rigid.

"Buffy, it's okay," Willow said calmly, her voice sing-song and lulling. "Dawn's having a headache, and I want us to let her, but it won't last long, and when it's over, she'll be fine. Is that okay?" She knew, even with the pressure of time, that she needed to do this right this time. To ask permission. Not to violate. This was important.

She was aware of Tara and Buffy exchanging a reassuring look, aware of Giles in the background glancing involuntarily at the pendulum, neglected now on the countertop. But she was concentrating on Dawn, focusing on the crease in her forehead, the wrinkle in her mind where memories and answers were folded away.

She felt rather than saw Buffy crossing the room, coming out from behind the counter to stand by Dawn. "Tell me what you need, Will," Buffy said, her voice was calm and firm. Willow resisted the urge to throw her arms around her friend in gratitude, in simple thanks for that warm support. She needed to concentrate on Dawn right now.

"Just stay close," she said. "Don't touch her, but stay close. I think that touching is what stops the headaches, but we need the headache to happen so Dawn can remember."

Buffy nodded. Tara squeezed her knee again and let go. Dawn made a small whimpering noise as she clutched at her head. Willow closed her eyes and focused on slowing down the images that rushed through Dawn's brain, images that clashed against one another, that screeched and railed into a piercing noise.

Spike on his knees. Hurting with death and life. Hurting with the memory of centuries' worth of pain inflicted, centuries' worth of harm done. Hurting with having to live again, having to feel again, having to try to stand up under the bloody and heavy weight of the past. He wouldn't stand. He couldn't stand. He grabbed at Buffy's arm, trying to press the point of her stake against his heart, and Dawn's eyes fluttered, Dawn's head wrinkled with pain.

She saw then that there was another her floating in the air: a projection, an image, a Key. And that self was talking to Spike. Well, not talking exactly, but thinking words that Spike seemed to understand. Just as she had first projected herself into Willow's grief, she now projected herself into Spike's anguish. "You still have your humanity," her Key self was saying. "You always did. You must reach into yourself for that life and leave the dust behind."

Dawn knew that it hurt, it always hurt, but…it hurt less this time. That was distance, maybe, or practice. And after a little while, Spike stopped trying to grab Buffy's arm. And then he looked up at her.

And before that…the Magick Box. Someone nearby had created a doorway, and they were trying to open it, and Dawn felt the chance. She had been calling Tara all summer, calling the name with her mind, sending out signals into the white void and getting no response. No response but Willow's pain. No response but Willow's wounds.

Until today. Today there was…a door. Today there was a way. It was white on white…a bowl of milk by the chalk outlines of a doorway, and there was a pinprick of red…the red of bloodied rope, the red of a birthing chant, the red of sheets on a bed. Dawn had felt it, and she reached out with her mind and she opened the door. "Tara," she called, and she opened the door. And then her mind went black, and she fell back, and when she opened her eyes, she had felt calmer. "She's here," she had said.

Tara watched as Willow, without opening her eyes, rested her hands on Dawn's shoulders and murmured a few words. Both sets of eyes then blinked open, and Tara smiled as Willow leaned forward and rested her forehead against Dawn's. She stayed that way for a moment, hands on Dawn's shoulders, but she was smiling, the corners of her mouth turning up with relief, the pink of success flushing her cheeks.

"I opened the door," Dawn said, her voice tinged with wonder. "I opened the door for Tara. I called her, and she came through the door."

For a moment, no one spoke. Tara had felt her pulse quickening as she listened to Dawn talk, had felt her skin warm as she watched Willow focusing on Dawn, her eyes closed, her face serene, her lips slightly open and hinting at a smile. She was never more beautiful, never more luminous, than when suffused by magicks this way; Tara had always thought so. Seeing Willow that way again—how long had it been?—reminded Tara of their first spells, of clasped hands and candles and fingers trailing circles of white. Of the way Willow's eyes flashed open with one kind of magick and fluttered closed with another.

For Tara, it had been an odd few moments, listening to Dawn's quiet narration. She was, in a way, hearing the story of her life, how she had come to be…again. She had recognized in Dawn's words her own dream, or her own memory. That almost-white doorway in the midst of the white. Hearing her name called. Moving toward the door—if it could be called "moving," that floating and bodiless process of traveling through a series of not-places to a place, a door. Seeing on the other side of the doorway a something…a color…a pinprick of red. The red hair of her only love. The red sheets of their bed.

She had moved through the doorway toward that red and found herself in her body. In her bedroom. In the Summers' house. Feeling new. And feeling loved. Delivered from white into the red and beating heart of her family.

Buffy had inched over to Tara while Dawn was talking, while Willow was focusing, and now the two stood close, shoulders touching, as they watched Willow smooth her hands down Dawn's hair and over her cheeks. Dawn seemed a little stunned, but at Willow's touch she relaxed, her lips softening and her eyes widening as she realized what she had described. Tara watched Willow's fingers calm Dawn and smiled. She knew what that felt like.

Tara had come full circle, she thought now; they all had. She had seen Willow lose herself in the magick of forgetting, and just now she had seen Willow find herself again in the magick of remembering. She had seen Dawn motherless and hating death, and now she saw her mothering and giving life. And she saw herself, she who had tried to be a mother to Dawn the best she could, now cradled in life by the love of a young girl.

Willow and Dawn still sat quietly, head to head, but Tara realized that both Buffy and Giles were looking at her, asking a silent question. She could only nod mutely. How could she find the words to acknowledge her own rebirth? What sentence could even begin to thank the teenager who had just unlocked her death and opened the door back to her life with Willow? What could she possibly say?

The others seemed to feel the same; Buffy moved silently to put an arm around Dawn's shoulders, and Willow pulled her head back from Dawn's; she opened her mouth but did not speak. She seemed as unable as Tara to find words. She looked simply…overcome. Tara moved to touch her. To steady her. To take Willow's trembling hands in hers.

Giles was less…speechless. He had been watching thoughtfully, one hand rubbing his chin, but he stirred now and leaned forward on the counter, pulling his glasses off and reaching toward Dawn. His eyes glinted with excitement, his lips parted slightly. Tara had rarely seen him respond that way to anything outside of a book. She liked it.

"Synchronicity," he said again. "The confluence of events that appear to be linked but in fact have no discernible causal relationship. You see…" he took a breath, but Dawn interrupted him.

"Um, Giles? Some of us are still in high school?" Dawn raised her eyebrows, and Giles smiled ruefully.

"I suppose you could call it a happy coincidence," he said. "Your mind, Dawn…the Key part of your mind…was reaching out again and again, looking for a doorway to open, but with no luck. But when it reached out at the same time that the Professor was casting his resurrection spell…synchronicity." He nodded to himself, looking pleased.

"As for the headaches…well," Giles' brow furrowed with thought, and he settled his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. "They would seem to represent moments of intense mental strain as well as a kind of, ah, channeling."

"Channeling pain," Giles said gently. "Obviously, we don't have all the answers right now, but from what you've described, it sounds as if your headache was a direct response to Spike's pain. And Willow's. And, of course, Tara's."

"I get it," Dawn said excitedly. "I took the pain away, I made it into a headache." The corners of Giles' mouth turned up slightly, and he nodded.

"But Dawn," he said, tilting his head at her. I can't help but wonder how you knew what to do. On some level….that is, somewhere deep down…you had to know that you wanted to do this. But how? How did you know to try and get Tara back?"

Dawn bit her lip, and twisted her beaded necklace, and thought. And Tara watched Dawn remember.

The house had been empty and still, and the bedroom had been quiet. Dawn wasn't sure she had ever been anywhere so quiet. No clock. No water dripping in the bathroom. No birds outside the window. Just…quiet.

When she had first come into the room, she had sunk down along the wall by the door, too shocked by the sight of Tara lying twisted on the floor to do more. She had sunk down and pulled her knees to her chest and stared, unable to move or make a sound or even blink. She had simply stared, and her mind seemed full of the word "no."

But at some point later, she had found herself sitting next to Tara on the floor by the bed. Had she crawled there? Had she stood and walked? She had put her hands on Tara's body, had felt the soft cotton of the blue shirt and the rougher cotton of the pants and the silk of the hair and the cool and springy skin.

She had come back to herself with a start, realizing that she was touching Tara everywhere, laying her hands on her. It was to comfort…Tara or herself…but some other part of her, she knew now, had been paying attention.

Memorizing. As if it might be important later on. As if there might be something to know about the shape and the size and the contours of Tara's body. As if it might be something that later, much later, she would be able to heal.

"You memorized me," Tara said now, and Dawn nodded. It was true. Buffy could see that it was true, and she felt a rush of relief. They knew now. They didn't have to worry about fallout. About Glory, or something worse.

"But that means that Dawn's Keyness would already have started," Willow said, her lips pursing in confusion. "Didn't you say that the events had to happen before the Key powers kicked in?" Giles nodded. "So, that would be…first killing without a weapon, and then seeing a wish undone, and then forgiving her greatest threat?"

Willow bit her lip and glanced at Tara, her face paling. "Well, that doesn't work then," she said. "I didn't threaten to kill Dawn until after she sat with Tara's…." Buffy could hardly hear the last word. But Willow seemed to shake herself, then, and she looked at Giles with a firmer face.

"She couldn't have acted as the Key until after that, Giles," she said. "Because I was the greatest threat. You know that. We all know that." Buffy kept her grip on Dawn's shoulder but she reached forward and touched Willow's face with her fingers.

"No, Will," she said softly, smiling at the incomprehension on her friend's face. Willow was so used to thinking of herself as the wicked witch that she couldn't even see when someone else was to blame. "Willow, no, it wasn't you. I knew you'd find a way to blame yourself, so I didn't want to tell you until you could see…until we had proof. And now we do."

Willow looked at Buffy searchingly, her mouth slightly open, and then she glanced at Giles. "I don't understand," she said slowly. "I told Dawn I wanted to kill her. What could be a greater threat than that?"

Dawn shook her head. "No, Willow, that's not what you said." Buffy watched her sister's face soften. "You said you would turn me back into the key. Back into a ball of pure green energy."

Willow shrugged her shoulders. "And?" she said. "What difference does it make? I was still totally evil. I was still threatening Dawnie. I mean, I know that everyone has…forgiven me"—she seemed to choke on the words—"but you can't pretend it didn't happen. I did that. You can all pretend to forget that, but I remember." Buffy watched Willow's eyes flash dark with pain. "I remember."

Giles stepped forward, moving past Buffy to put a hand on Willow's arm. "My dear girl," he said, wrapping his fingers gently around her elbow. "You are always so intelligent, so brilliantly smart…when it comes to everything and everyone but yourself."

Willow frowned. "But Giles," she started to say, but he held up a finger to shush her.

"Willow, if you had turned Dawn back into a ball of green energy, then she would still be the Key, don't you see?" She looked at him blankly. "You would only have been returning her to her essential nature. She would still be the Key." Giles spoke slowly, kindly, as if he understood that Willow would resist his words, refuse the balm that he was offering her. "You may have been a threat to Dawn's human self, Willow, but you were never a threat to the Key."

Willow blinked and stepped back. "But…but I was," she said, her eyes shifting, glancing at Tara, and then Buffy and Dawn, and finally settling back on Giles. "Who else was there?"

Buffy watched her carefully and saw that, as had so constantly been the case since the night of the car accident when Dawn's arm had been broken, Willow could not see past her own guilt. Her own shame. But that had to change; it had to change right now because Willow wasn't alone in her mistakes. She never had been.

"Will, there was me," Buffy said gently, smiling a little in Dawn's direction. She had made her apologies already, and she had never believed in dragging things out. What was done was done. "I tried to kill Dawn. And the Key is part of Dawn. Willow, I tried to kill all of you. And you forgave me, didn't you?"

"So did I," Buffy's voice was firm, holding Willow's gaze until her eyes flickered a little with recognition. "So did I. Don't fight me on this one, Will. It was me. This time, the greatest threat was me, and Dawn had to forgive her greatest threat, so she had to forgive…me."

Dawn remembered breakfast. Stacks of pancakes, boxes of cereal, piles of toast. Starchfest. Dawn had wondered if Buffy had been talking to Tara; she always believed in feeding people to make them feel better.

But she had seen Buffy watching her across the counter, practically smelled the guilt wafting through the kitchen. But then, pancakes always smelled like guilt to Dawn when someone besides Tara was making them.

And, yeah, Dawn still felt like there was something to be guilty about. Buffy had tried to kill her, tried to kill them all, tried to end their whole world. Had tried to deny her family. And Dawn hated that, hated how everyone kept breaking her family up. She was tired of that.

"I didn't know if , you know, if you had plans this weekend," Buffy had said with her arms full of cereal boxes, "but I thought, maybe we could…."

"Hey Buffy?" Dawn had said. Buffy had looked at her, and Dawn had felt a need well up. A need to forgive. Not just to feel it but to say it. To show Buffy and to have Buffy feel it. She spoke quietly "I'm gonna be okay with the basement thing. Really. You weren't you."

"This isn't guilt," Buffy said, "I want us to spend time." But a current of understanding sparked between them. They spoke about hanging out, about pizza and movies, but under the conversation, Dawn felt something growing. She felt awake, she felt energetic, she felt animated. More alive than ever before.

It was alive inside her, that energy. Like grass, shooting from the ground, like photosynthesis, this growing thing. It tickled at her, like new blades of grass growing up the inside of her arms, through her veins. She felt alert; she felt strong. She felt like she could do anything, like she could….

"Why don't I come patrolling with you tonight?" she'd asked Buffy. She hadn't thought of patrolling right away, but she wanted to do something, and what Buffy did with her energy was patrol. That was what Buffy always did when she had extra energy. All those late nights. She patrolled.

But Buffy was not pleased. "Oh," she said. "And then? Maybe we can invite over some strangers and ask them to feed you candy."

"Well, you guys went out patrolling every night when you were my age" Dawn had tried another tactic. She wanted to jump and down, to hop, to run, something, to fix things, to do good, to do something.

Buffy had smiled. "True, but technically, you're one and a half." Some corner of Dawn's mind had protested that in a whisper, had reminded Dawn that in fact she was ancient. She was older than any of them, older than Sunnydale, older than California. Older than people. She was the key. She was…

She was late for school . And after school…after math and gym class and boys and phone calls, she had just…forgotten.

But Dawn remembered it all now. It was like waking up in the middle of a dream, in that moment when it was still possible to remember every detail with utter clarity: color and texture and the sharp, sharp edges of objects and events. Usually, a dream like that faded quickly; by the time you went to the bathroom or turned on the light, the edges blurred, the colors faded, and by the time you woke up the next morning it was gone.

But this time, the dream was still with her. And it wasn't a dream, not really. These were things she had done that she simply hadn't been aware of. But now, remembering, she could feel that green energy inside her again, that green that was always there at the edge of the white noise of her headaches. The green of not being ready. The green of growing.

She was the Key. She wasn't one and a half; she was ancient. She could open doors and make people feel better. Look at Spike. Look at Willow. Omigod, look at Tara. She had brought her back. She had somehow used her Key power without realizing it, and she had brought Tara back from the dead. Wow. Wait until Janice heard about this.

But it was kind of confusing. She didn't really understand it: how it had happened, what exactly she had done. And everyone was looking at her. Tara looked overwhelmed. Willow looked grateful. Giles looked intrigued…and pleased. And Buffy…Buffy looked proud.

Buffy slid her arms around Dawn know, hugging her tightly "Mom told me once that she knew you were precious," Buffy whispered. "Important to the world. And you are."

Dawn leaned into her sister's arms. It felt good, that hug. It felt like family. Out of all of this, that was the one thing that made sense to Dawn. That she had fixed her family. Found a bandage to put over the wound that death had made. That made sense. But the rest…the how….

Dawn squeezed Buffy hard and then pulled back, crossing her arms over her chest, shifting her weight to one hip. She wanted to know. "Hello, still a teenager with a teenager brain here. It's not like we get Key Studies in school. What does this mean? Who am I? What do I do?"

"It's simple," Giles said, smiling at Dawn, and it was a real smile, one that curled up into Giles' cheeks. "You are the Key, Dawn, and what you do…well, what you do is you heal. You're a healer." He beamed at her and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to dab at his eye, and Dawn blinked. Was he crying because of her? Was he so happy because of what she had done? Not Buffy or Willow or Tara but her?

A healer. She turned the word over in her mouth; it sounded strange, kind of old fashioned. She was a healer, and she was standing in the kitchen with a Watcher and a Slayer and two witches. It was weird. But at the same time, it felt…normal. It was something that was hers, something that she could do. And that felt good. She wasn't just the little sister anymore. She was a healer. She was the Key.

The kitchen door opened, then, and Xander walked in, speaking to Anya over his shoulder. "So maybe tomorrow?" he was saying. " I mean, I know it's not much, but we could…."

Xander stopped mid-sentence, and Anya stopped next to him, put her hands on her hips and surveyed the others. "Everyone except Dawn is crying," she said. "And everyone looks so…happy. Why does everyone look so happy?" She tilted her head and looked at Dawn, critically at first, but then she smiled slowly. "And why weren't Xander and I involved in whatever event has led you all to share this obviously wonderful moment?" Xander reached for her hand, and she squeezed it and moved a bit closer to him without seeming to notice that she'd done it.

Then Buffy was throwing her arms around Xander, and Tara was hugging Anya, and Giles was hugging Tara, and everyone was talking at once, and the room—the very air—felt lighter and cleaner and fresher than it had in a long time.

And then Willow was standing in front of Dawn, beaming and tearful, and Dawn looked at her and saw love she thought she might drown in. "Dawnie," she said, and she clasped Dawn to her tightly. "Thank you, Dawnie. Thank you."

Dawn just laughed with delight, and she felt it again, that energy, that breath of life coursing through her, making her feel vigorous and spirited. She was growing. She was a life force, a healer.

As the light in the east steadily increased,
it revealed to me more clearly the new world
into which I had risen in the night,
the terra firma perchance of my future life….
It was such a country as we might see in
dreams, with all the delights of paradise.
—Henry David Thoreau

She sat on the front porch with her open journal on her knees and watched the quiet sprinkling, the mist of rain, all that was left of the storm that had raged through Sunnydale that afternoon. And she was thinking.

It was hard to believe it had only been a week since she had remembered everything, only a week since she had discovered that she had brought Tara back, had healed her and healed Willow. It was still pretty mind-boggly; it made her head spin.

The past months—all the months since Buffy had died—had been like…like a tornado, or maybe a hurricane: strong winds blowing them all down over and over again, flattening them against walls and knocking over houses and ripping up trees. To Dawn, life had felt like that for so long. Like every time they had all started to stand up again, a new gust of wind knocked them all flat. Blew away hope and life and everything that was normal.

But now, the storm was over; the winds had calmed. Dawn nodded; that sounded good. She picked up her pen again and wrote it down. She was still writing when a high-pitched yelp caught her ear, and she looked up to see Willow and Tara running down the street toward the house. They were both drenched, their hair plastered to their heads, their skirts sticking to their legs, and Willow's furry backpack hanging limply from one hand. Her other hand clasped Tara's tightly.

They were both shrieking with laughter, their hands swinging, heads thrown back, faces lifted to the rain. Dawn couldn't help smiling as she watched them run. She hoped they wouldn't trip.

When they reached the Summers' driveway, they stopped running, and, still laughing, Tara caught Willow around the waist with her free arm and kissed her, and Willow's hands and furry backpack slid around Tara's back. It was a pretty long kiss, Dawn thought, right there on the street, in front of…Janice's house and everybody. She giggled. She hoped Janice was watching. If she only saw how much they loved each other, she might get over her heebie jeebies about two girls kissing.

Watching Willow and Tara kiss….well, it made Dawn feel shivery. It made her hold her breath. She wondered if she would ever meet someone who would make her feel like that. Did healers get true love, she wondered? Did Keys?

Janice was kind of funny about stuff like that, though. Dawn had wanted to talk to her about being the Key, but in the end, she couldn't decide what to say. Or when. Or how. She had a feeling that maybe she and Janice weren't such good friends anymore, that maybe things between them had changed. Buffy had said more than once that she should probably have more friends her own age, but…but it was just easier to talk to Tara and Willow and Buffy about things. They understood.

And maybe that was okay. Janice could be kind of…stormy. And right now Dawn felt more like being calm. Like thinking. There was so much to learn, after all; Giles had already started giving her books to read and talking to her in that earnest and excited way she'd heard him use when he talked to Buffy about training. His Watcher voice. Only now he was going to Watch all of them, not just Buffy. He hadn't said that, not exactly, but Dawn could see that it was true.

"We still don't know much, Dawn," he had said, looking at her seriously over the tops of the glasses that had slipped down his nose. "You brought Tara back, but we have no way of knowing if that was, ah, if that was something specific to Tara herself, or to your connection to her and to Willow, or if…."

"Connection? What do you mean, connection?" Dawn asked, not understanding, her mouth slightly open. She shook her head slightly, but then she understood. "Oh," she said then. "You mean Glory."

"But I thought that she couldn't use me anymore," Dawn felt a momentary panic, a rush of air in her throat. Giles was quick to reassure her, touching her elbow.

"And she cannot," he said reassuringly. "The Professor…he was right about that. But there is a kind of connection among the three of you now, Dawn. That trace of Glory in Willow and Tara…in some sense, it's in you, too. And maybe that was what enabled you to bring Tara back. I'm just not sure. But," he had looked at her steadily then, "but it might have made a difference. It might not work the same with…anyone else."

Giles watched her, his eyes narrowing with concern. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, and Dawn thought she knew what that was. The thought had occurred to her: if she could bring Tara back, could she heal anyone? Could she resurrect anyone? Could she bring back…? But no. She sighed.

"I know I can't bring back my mom," she murmured, looking down so that her hair fell over her face. She had known that somehow, known that it was too late to save her mother. Too late to save so many people. She'd had a feeling. She had lots of feelings these days that she didn't really understand, white-green flashes that might be memories or emotions or...Keyness.

Giles said that perhaps, with the right training, she could learn to see those flashes more clearly, begin to understand herself. Her power. Dawn thought she could hold onto that. She thought it was something she could do for her mother, for her memory. And then Giles had hugged her.

Dawn hugged herself now as she watched Willow and Tara giggling their way up to the front porch, holding hands and calling out to her. Tara put a hand on Dawn's shoulder as she passed and squeezed gently.

"I hope you're feeling new wardrobey for tomorrow," Tara said, and Dawn nodded eagerly: milkshakes and a movie and buying new clothes for Tara. Unlike so many of the days of the past months, tomorrow had a shape she could recognize.

So often since first learning that she was the Key, Dawn had felt insubstantial, bodiless, without form. As if the slightest breeze could knock her down or carry her away. As if she was the breeze, drifting unseen around the people she most desperately wanted to notice her. To pay attention.

That was what had always attracted her to objects, to the small weight of bracelets or necklaces or key chains or lipsticks. It wasn't just that she could take them without people seeing, although that had been kind of fun, too. In a super evil way, she quickly corrected herself, ducking her head so that Willow and Tara wouldn't see the way her cheeks flushed with shame. But those trinkets… they had shape. She could put her hands in her pockets and feel them there, and they weighed her down. They kept her from blowing away.

But she didn't have to worry about that anymore. The wind was no longer a threat. She practiced breathing every day with Willow now, the way they'd been taught at the Coven, and she found that it held her, it made her feel solid. And it made her aware in a way she'd never been before. Sometimes, meditating with Willow, Dawn thought she could see the air inside her mind, see it green and growing. And she knew that everything was going to be okay.

Because she had family. She had her whole life ahead of her. And she had a gift after all: something that was just hers.

She had, for so long, hated the earth. Hated the way it crumbled for the clawing fists of the endless line of new vampires who rose up through it. Hated the way it teemed with crawling things who eventually ate away at the flesh of the people you loved who had died. Hated the way it had suffocated her when she had awakened in her coffin, choked her dry and pressed against her nostrils and her eyelids and her tightly closed lips. Hated the way the grass had seemed to spin as she lay on it, shot and bleeding and fading, and then shaken and cracked and seemed to spit out monsters when Willow's grief had threatened to swallow them all up.

But now…it was different now. Everything was different now. Even the backyard….in the places where the grass had grown sparse over a dry summer, it was muddy. She thought of Tara alive again. Willow casting. Giles home and staying. Dawn writing in her journal. And Xander and Anya…maybe dating.

Buffy had been thinking about Anya all day. In some ways, Anya had seemed like a minor presence all summer; she was often gone, off venging, doing God only knows what kind of evil. And yet…it was hard to reconcile the vengeance demon with the girl who had checked in on her almost every day all summer. The girl who had asked about Willow each time she and Buffy spoke and who had researched the best grief books to send to England. The girl who seemed to be letting Xander back in despite herself.

"You could have made it happen," Buffy had said quietly to Anya the next day, after she and Xander had arrived at the house and the others had drifted into the dining room to talk. "A wish. You could have, but you didn't."

Anya had matched her even gaze, her eyes smiling but her lips firm. "I don't know what you mean," she'd said.

"Come on, Anya," Buffy had crossed her arms over her chest. "My anger called you there…you said so yourself…but you didn't encourage me. You could have made it worse, but you didn't. You only showed up to tell me Spike was human, didn't you?" Buffy had raised an eyebrow.

Anya had held her gaze for a long moment, and then sighed and looked away. "It's not the same as it used to be," she'd said sadly. "Vengeance. My heart's just not in it, you know?"

Buffy had looked at Anya incredulously, and then she had just laughed and laughed. And after a moment, Anya had joined in. When Xander had come into the kitchen to see what was going on, Anya had swung herself down off the counter and kissed him. It was only a peck, but it seemed to ground them all.

Buffy heard laughing in the hallway now, and then Willow and Tara burst into the kitchen, giggling and soaking wet. "I got all my classes," Willow said happily, dropping her wet backpack on the floor. "I mean, I have to retake a couple of classes from the spring quarter, but my other professors gave me Incompletes instead of failing me, so I can just take the finals now and move on!" She bounced toward Buffy and threw her arms around her, and Buffy felt the cold wet seep through her t-shirt.

"Will," she complained, pushing back gently, "you're getting my clothes all wet!" But she smiled in spite of herself, and Willow giggled and kissed the tip of her nose before spiraling back over to throw her arms around Tara again. Tara grinned at Buffy over Willow's shoulder. Buffy didn't think she'd ever seen either of them so openly, so spontaneously happy. They'd been acting like little kids all day, except for the kissing and the…oh, well, and the tongues. They were joyous and innocent and in love…and normal.

It was all Buffy had ever wanted for any of her friends, to have a little bit of normal. It was all she had wanted for herself, but she'd known for some time, deep down, that she would never get it. And she had worried that Willow might never get it, either, but…she had more hope now. With Tara back, she had more hope for all of them. Even…she could almost admit it …even herself.

As for Dawn…well, she wasn't sure. She had wanted, at least since she had known the truth about Dawn, for her sister to have a normal life. She wanted to see her, someday, as just a normal girl, in the arms of a normal boyfriend or—she glanced at Tara, who was patting Willow's face and hair dry with a kitchen towel—girlfriend. That was all she wanted.

Willow spoke, but the words were muffled, and Tara laughed and pulled the towel away. "So tomorrow then, okay?" Willow said, "just you and me and a couple of mochas?" Buffy nodded. She was looking forward to spending time with Willow, just the two of them, like they used to do before life became so…hard. It had been a long time. Too long.

"Go dry off, you two," she said lightly, watching Tara put her hands on Willow's hips and push her towards the door. She heard their laughter echoing down the hall, and she felt again—as she had felt so often over the past week—grounded. Willow and Tara touching and laughing…Buffy didn't remember laughing much with any of her boyfriends. Not that kind of laughter, anyway: the easy, bubbly, generous laughter of people who have what they want. She sighed, just a little.

"Buffy?" Willow had poked her head back into the kitchen, her green eyes shining. "I promise we'll be back down before everybody else gets here. And we'll clean up. And I'll help get dinner ready." She raised her eyebrows at Buffy and smiled impishly.

"Okay," Buffy said wryly. "You can hold the phone while I tell them which toppings we want."

"You know," Willow said before disappearing again. "I kind of love you." Buffy felt the warmth of her words and the warmth of her eyes from across the room, warmth like the late afternoon sun that had finally made an appearance, starting to dry the rain-streaked windows.

Buffy glanced out at the backyard again. It was such a relief to see Willow smiling, such a relief to see her more…rooted than she had been in so long. Full of life on. They were all so much more rooted and full of life.

Like the earth. Buffy realized it with clarity that had been a long time coming. Earth had been only death to her for so long. Death and dust and decay. But now, through the drying streaks of rain on the kitchen window, she could see that the earth was living. It soaked in water and damp and reflected sunlight, and it grew things. It yielded. You could plant things in the earth and watch them mature.

And the earth was solid. You could stand on it and fight the evil that crawled out of it and embrace the friends who stood next to you on it. She might not ever have a normal life, Buffy knew. And she might not have a long life.

But she had family. And she had a purpose. And she had a good fight left in her.

Tara sank back against the bathtub and let the water lap gently over her breasts and stomach.

More and more, as the days passed, she could feel the distance of the time she had missed, see the ripples it had caused, although she saw them in her friends more than she felt them in herself. Xander and Anya…they were still struggling, obviously, but the venom she could remember flaring up in Anya only days before she had died was gone, replaced by a sadness and hope that could only have come about with time. Xander seemed…taller, stronger, more resolved, and she thought that, too, had come about with a summer of throwing himself into work. Into creating something after so much destruction.

He had crooked a finger at her when Giles and Dawn were clearing away the pizza boxes and loading the dishwasher, and she'd gone out on the porch with him, a little wary even though she knew that he had finally accepted that Willow would be casting again.

"Listen, Tara, I want to tell you something, and I don't want you to say no, so just hear me out, okay?" He spoke quickly, his eyes darting around, and Tara realized he was nervous. She couldn't imagine what he was going to say. She just nodded and leaned against the house, pressing her palms back against the solid wall.

"I know things are kind of up in the air for you right now, what with no scholarship and no money and…well…the whole coming back to life thing," he had said, shrugging his shoulders and sticking his hands deep into his pockets. Tara noticed for the first time that he seemed slimmer than he had before, more muscled.

"Yeah," she'd said, sighing a little at the memory. Willow could easily hack into the university's computers and reinstate Tara as a student, maybe adding a note about mistaken identity or something, but the fact remained that Tara's scholarship had been given to someone else, someone who needed the money as much as she did. Tara had refused even to consider taking it away from her.

"Tara, listen. I've saved a lot this summer, enough to help with your tuition and clothes, whatever, until you're, you know, back on your feet. I have enough for you to replace all the stuff you lost and for tuition next quarter and some extra for…well, for whatever you want. I'm just going to give it to you…."

"Xander, no," she had said. "I can't take your money. I'll get a job and save up until I can afford to go back. Maybe I can get a loan." She had bit her lip at that, though, knowing that it would be difficult. Who would give a loan to a recently not-dead college student? But Xander had made it easy for her.

"There's not that much I can do," Xander had said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and tilting his head at her. In the dim yellow of the porch light, the scars on his face gleamed. "I can't do spells, I can't Watch, I can't Slay, I can't unlock anything," he went on, and Tara realized with a start that he wasn't envious of the others' abilities. He was proud.

"But I can build things. And I can make some money doing it." He lifted his chin then, and, looking at him closely, Tara saw how much he wanted to give this to her. For Willow. For herself. And she had been overwhelmed. And she had accepted.

And so those practical worries that had begun to trouble her were receding, like Xander's fears were receding, like Willow's desperation and sadness were receding. Like waves. She moved her hand in the water and made a little wave, feeling the wet wash over the knee that jutted out of the water.

In the outer reaches of Tara's awareness, she heard the drip of the tap, and the quiet sloshing as she moved the sponge back and forth over her legs, and a soft click.

She thought of the familiar terrain of Willow, the pale, freckled landscape of her back. The safe shores of her face. The solid comfort of her hands. Tara lifted her ankle out of the water and imagined Willow looking at it, caressing the curve with only her eyes. She imagined Willow's narrow fingers closing around it, imagined the gentle pressure and then the soft trailing up, up her leg, the bare touch on the outside of her thigh.

She imagined Willow's fingers gripping her hipbone for a moment, squeezing slightly, and then moving again, trailing their feather-weight up her ribcage and whispering at the underside of her breast. She arched her back at the thought, and the tips of her breasts rose out of the water and hardened in the cooler air.

"Oh, see, now you're just showing off." Willow's quiet laugh reached through Tara's daydream, and she smiled but did not open her eyes. She arched again, and then let her breasts sink back under the water, and tilted her head so that Willow could see the way damp tendrils of her upturned hair clung to her neck. She ran the sponge over her arm and then under the water, touching herself with it.

After a moment, she opened her eyes and looked directly at Willow, who leaned against the doorframe, towel in hand, her head resting against the wall. Standing there in her pink leopard-print pajamas, her hair still damp from her own shower, quietly watching and waiting, she melted Tara.

Tara pulled the plug out with her toes and stood, feeling the trickle of water down her legs and hearing only the sucking of the water down the drain and the sea rush in her ears. Willow was waiting with the towel, and Tara allowed herself to be dried off, to be turned and patted down and lingered over. The towel was warm and dry, and Willow's breath on her skin was hot like fire.

Willow took the towel away and held out her robe, and Tara slipped her arms through the sleeves and laced her fingers through Willow's. She studied their entwined hands for a moment, and then she lifted Willow's hand and pressed her lips against it.

"You know what I love about you, well, one thing I love?" she asked suddenly, lifting her head and looking Willow in the eye. She felt, for a moment, the fire that flickered out at her from the green, twin licks of flame that warmed her outside in.

"No," Willow whispered, and for just a second, her eyes flashed hungry and chilled behind the fire. "Tell me. Tell me one thing." So familiar. So Willow.

"You steady me," she said softly, and she saw the warmth flush Willow's cheeks as she smiled. Tara reached up and touched Willow's cheek with the tips of her fingers. She had come back from the dead to see that flush, to feel that warmth. She cherished it.

A little later, in their room…their room that used to be Buffy's but was now theirs…Tara tossed aside the pink pajamas and stretched her fingers out across Willow's collarbone, feeling the still-damp ends of red hair brush against her fingers and tilting her head as she watched Willow's lips part at the contact.

"I think you're teasing me," Willow said softly as Tara's palms smoothed their way down her chest, barely touching the sides of her breasts before feathering against her stomach and stopping to brush the hollow of her hips until Willow's eyes fluttered closed. She laughed, a light, breathless laugh, as Tara's fingers moved around her hips to her back, one finger tickling the dip at the base of her spine.

Tara pushed Willow back gently until the backs of her legs bumped up against the bed, and as Willow laid back, she shrugged off her robe and crawled up over her. She just looked at her for a moment, looked at her open eyes and her open mouth. Poised above Willow, their breasts near but not quite touching, their breaths matched but not yet mingling, in that long, silent moment of just-before, Tara knew that in her life before returning to Willow, she had felt like a boat on the ocean. Sometimes she had drifted along on the surface of calm, and sometimes she had been tossed about on waves that threatened to capsize her at any moment, but always she had been drifting. In those long months after she had left Willow, she had at least learned to swim better, but still, she had drifted. But now….

Now, she only knew that something had happened to them, something profound and overwhelming, and they had almost drowned in it, she and Willow. But here they were, whole and complete and together.

Slowly, slowly, she lowered herself down onto Willow, who was smiling at her; she lowered her lips onto Willow's lips, and she felt herself buoyed by that solid and familiar landscape, welcomed onto the shores of her homeland.

Tara had made it through the waves to the shore. And she was standing on firm ground.

She dreamed of the flames of dark magicks shooting out from her own palms. She dreamed of the inferno in her mind when she had drained Rack, of the firestorm it had taken to kill Warren. She dreamed of the scorching empty ache of losing Tara, and the constant, endless blaze of guilt and shame that she had taken life. It burned like the eternal blue fire of an inner ring of Hell.

She dreamed of the red fire of blood and rage. And she woke suddenly, gasping from the heat, desperately thirsty and craving water.

Tara was there, as she always was now, with a cool hand on her hot skin and a glass from the bedside table. Willow sipped it gratefully, and she leaned back against the headboard and closed her eyes, letting Tara's fingers in her hair and on her skin soothe her blistered mind.

"I wish I could forget that it happened, all of it," she whispered, opening her eyes but not looking at Tara. She felt her pulse calming a little with Tara's touch, and she relaxed.

Tara propped herself up on her elbow and reached out to tuck a strand of Willow's hair behind her ear. She let her hand fall onto Willow's shoulder and rest there.

"Sweetheart, you can't," she said softly, and Willow heard the solace in her voice like a salve on a burn. "Willow, I don't know why it all happened, but you can't forget it. We can't forget it. There's something in it that we have to remember, something important."

"I know," Willow sighed, falling back onto her pillow and staring up at the ceiling. "I know. But it just feels so strange, so surreal, like it happened to someone else. Like…like I watched it on TV, you know?"

"Like a bad after-school special," Tara said quietly, but there was a laugh in her voice. "What, I'm dead, and you're evil?"

In spite of herself, Willow laughed. "I know, I know," she said. "It's ridiculous. But it just seems…sometimes….like it couldn't have been real." She turned her head to look at Tara again, to remind herself—the way she reminded herself a hundred times a day—that Tara was there.

She relaxed a little and focused on Tara's hand trailing lightly over her skin. She thought of the night before, of Tara's damp back pressed against her chest, of her own lips burning kisses onto Tara's neck, of her fingers sliding around Tara's hips and meeting between her thighs, of Tara's wet gasping. She felt her stomach flutter.

"Maybe," she said, rolling onto her side to face Tara, "we could take our minds off it for a little while." She raised her eyebrows and hoped that Tara could see the suggestion in the dim room. It was early still, and the pre-dawn light had only just begun to filter into the room.

Tara squeezed her fingers, and Willow saw her half-smile. "I have a better idea," she said, dropping Willow's hand and sitting up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, reaching for her robe. "Put on your pjs."

Willow sat up reluctantly. She found her discarded pajamas on the floor and slid into the pink legs, fumbled with the buttons on the shirt. Then she looked up at Tara, who was waiting by the door, holding out her hand.

They tiptoed down the stairs hand in hand, not wanting to disturb Buffy or Dawn, and Tara silently led Willow through the house to the back door. "Remember this?" Tara asked softly, and her lips twitched in a smile. The sleepless nights after Buffy's death had often ended with a sunrise. Dawn always made things better.

In their old way, Willow sank down onto the bottom step, and Tara sat on the step behind her, her legs hugging Willow's hips. Willow leaned back and felt Tara's arms wrap around her from behind. The sun would be coming up soon, and it was nice to be outside in the dark with Tara. It was familiar and quiet and cool and damp. It felt like Tara surrounded her.

"Will we always wake up with bad dreams?" Willow let her head fall back against Tara's chest. She felt Tara's lips in her hair and then her chin resting on the top of her head.

"For awhile, maybe," Tara said, pulling her closer. "But I guess if we didn't wake up from bad dreams, we wouldn't be up now. We wouldn't see the sun rise." Willow didn't have to look to see Tara's hopeful half-smile.

"We could try just setting an alarm," she said dryly, and Tara laughed softly. Willow hugged Tara's arms to her chest and sighed. "Will I always feel like I can't breathe when you're not around?" Tara's sigh matched her own. "Like none of this is real if I can't feel you touching me?"

"Willow, baby," Tara murmured, hugging her a little more tightly. "I'll always be touching you."

Willow thought about that for a moment. So much was uncertain. So much was indefinite, still. They both had some of Glory left in their minds; they both had magicks in them like blood or breath. The past held death and grief and mistakes and wrong, and the future was unknown.

"Just…just stay with me," she whispered. "Will you stay with me, Tara?" It was the one question she'd never been able to ask before, the one question she'd never felt she deserved to ask.

And now…she knew the answer. Everything had changed. Everything except loving Tara. And Tara loving her; that was the same as ever. Willow felt the answer in the whisper of lips on her hair, in the clasping of arms around her shoulders, in Tara's knees gently squeezing her from either side as she leaned back.

Willow lifted her face to Tara, her gaze flitting from Tara's eyes to her lips and back again. She thought Tara had never looked lovelier than she did at that moment, with her tousled hair and her sleepy eyes, wearing one of Buffy's old and tattered bathrobes. Her throat tightened with want, and she watched Tara blink slowly and lean down to kiss her. At the first soft touch of their lips, she felt a sigh run up Tara's body and down hers.

It was just one kiss, one soft and cool and chaste kiss, but for that moment, it was enough, and Willow turned her face to the sky again. The sun was starting to rise, the beginnings of morning red against the receding night.

Willow had felt for so long that she was on fire, that she was being consumed by flames of fear and anger and, in the end, grief. She'd felt that she was a volcano, always threatening to erupt, always about to consume everyone around her in a river of flame. She had been as scared of herself as others had seemed to be; she had known herself to be a raging force, violent and disruptive. She knew she still felt hot and thirsty. She couldn't promise that she would never erupt again, never make the earth tremble or the air grow hot or the water dry up.

But she knew now…she was learning now…that magick wasn't a flame that burned you from the inside out. It wasn't a flood of lava that burned everything she touched. It—she—wasn't a volcano, raging and out of control. She wasn't about to erupt. She did have fire in her; she always would, and fires sometimes flared out of control. But maybe her fire could be more like a candle, she thought. A candle to celebrate her friends. A candle to help light the way for Dawn. An extra-flamey candle to love Tara.

She relaxed against Tara, who was holding her; she felt the familiar arms wrap around her, and she felt herself soothed by Tara surrounding her, the flames dying down a little as she leaned into the cool blue of her beloved.

She had family, and she had magick, and she had Tara. She had love that was solid enough to stand on.

For once, Willow let the fire inside her warm instead of burn. And she knew she was, at last, on firm ground.

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Terra Firma

By Tulipp

tulipp30@yahoo.com