Well, I have an unusual advantage. I didn't touch (or even see) this for 5-6 years, so I am able to edit (and thus improve) this with almost an entirely impartial eye...

I'm digging it

Thanks, I am going to post around one POV a day, until I catch up until I had previously written, probably then as I write new material drop back to once or twice a week.

Fortunately for Tara's arms and other major muscle groups, the time allotted for their ‘training' session was just about over, so after a few passes last Buffy suggested they stretch out to finish, something she was more than happy to agree with.

Tara only had some half remembered some basic stretches from high school gym class, but Buffy revealed being a cheerleader before Sunnydale and becoming a Slayer, where being flexible was a must. She knew dozens of stretching exercises, almost as sword forms. Tara couldn't remember if anyone had ever mentioned that to her before, but it made sense in a way that things only have in hindsight. The sort of wistfulness and weary acceptance that Buffy had with being the Slayer, even before dying, only came from someone who was in the spotlight and had to give it up. Not because she wasn't good enough to stay there, but because she was given no choice. And Spike...

They were facing each other on the mats, stretching their quads (it was all sore leg muscles to Tara) when Tara asked the question whose answer Buffy’s silence on spoke volumes.

"Do you like spending time with him?"

"He's evil! I can't... like him."

"That's not what I asked.” Buffy bleak look changed to guarded confusion. "Do you just like talking or spending time with him?" Tara was hoping that Buffy wouldn't lie, because if she did, there was nothing anyone could do to help her.

"Stretch the other leg, this way." Tara maintained her even gaze on Buffy, to keep the pressure while Buffy used the stretch to buy her time to think.

Eventually Buffy deflated, "Maybe I did at first. It was just, after I came back, I couldn't talk about with the Gang all about what happened since you all had worked so hard to bring me back. Dawn couldn't know, it would kill her to think I didn’t want to be alive. Giles was at first gone and then I needed to prove that I could get a handle things without him. That didn't work out as well as I hoped."

A quick verbal prod before the thought fled "But Spike..."

"But he wasn't anybody." A look that begged forgiveness crossed Buffy's face and Tara at once granted it with a softened set of eyes and a nod that Buffy accepted. "I could talk to him because it didn't matter. I didn't care what he thought."

With a pause and off Tara's implacable look she pressed on. "Then there was Sweet and the singing and dancing. Talking wasn't enough anymore."

"Did it help?"

"Yes... no. For a bit, maybe? At least while we are... occupied."

Tara tried to fill in blanks. Buffy hadn't found someone to help her because her friends, the only ones she could talk about her secret-filled life, were responsible for her confusion. Spike treated her as the center of his world, probably something Buffy hadn’t felt since she became the Slayer. What would make sense to her...

"When I first saw her, I wanted to know more about her." Tara bowed her head, her hair shielding her face, her eyes, her vulnerabilities. "And when I knew more about her, I knew that I wanted her. In every way. But then she told me about her missing boyfriend and her high school crush and I knew, knew that the world was teaching me another one of its hard lessons."

Tara forced her eyes up to face Buffy, her stretch forgotten. "But I still wanted to be near her, even if she didn’t want what I wanted, even just to listen to her breathing as she tortured me by sleeping in my room rather than risking the walk across campus at night."

Remembering that first kiss, the fumbling of clothes, the exploring of Willow's every taste, the desire on her face to touch Tara in turn, Tara had forbidden herself that moment that memory for so long. "I was willing to be her secret, you know. No one else had to know. Never to deny what we felt for each other, but if that alone was what she gave, it would have been enough for me."

Was that her mistake? To have been so blinded by the fact that her fate was no longer pre-ordained to be imprisoned by her (continued...)

( continues...) family, that she threw herself onto the new one that unfolded in front of her without ever realizing that she should have guided and shaped it also?

"But wasn't the way it turned out. She wanted more for me, things that I never dared to want for myself." Tara felt herself ease out of her reverie, the reality of it having been a true memory better than any dream. Buffy was paying attention. She needed to pay attention. Tara wasn't sure she could say this again.

"Are you saying I should want things for..."

"No," a needed interruption. "I'm just sharing what we wanted and how we got it, for a time. You are you. Spike is Spike. Discovering what you want and what you need from going to him, that will tell you what you should do." I hope it does, I hope so much for you, Tara silently added.

erikaj, Laga, in retrospect I think I may have come off a little brusquely yesterday in my responses. I don't know how I can feel so needful for feedback but yet be unappreciative when I receive it.

I hope that you both can continue to help give me direction to improve this story.

I didn't get brusqueness at all, CaBil. I really am enjoying the story. In my head it's real (or, a real episode).

It's okay...I'd have been discomfited by squealing from you.

Heh, not really my style, is it? Perhaps I should try it on for fit?

They finished out the remainder of the stretches, with Buffy being silent as she thought but then slowly opening up. Buffy wanted to hear about Tara’s classes and for advice on the readmittance forms. They shared their concerns about Dawn, with Tara trying to direct Buffy's attention to the concerns Dawn spoke of during their latest outing without betraying Dawn's confidences. Buffy tried to subtly (Tara understood that subtlety was not something that came easily to her) convey that someone had stayed on the wagon, without any straying or close calls except for some twitches earlier in the week when Spike brought by something he had killed. Willow had explained in a strained voice that was really a magical construct, a familiar to increase one’s might, probably empowered by some long dead crazed wizard heedless of its dangers. Anya had put it into locked storage until they disposed of it, still intact (except for the pieces Spike had yanked off.) After the… confusion at Buffy’s birthday, Anya and Buffy had gone over the house with a cursed glowstick that brightened in the presence of magic, just coincidentally when someone was in class, and found nothing in the house that was magical in nature. Even the herbs in the kitchen were too debased to be of any use in casting.

Was Buffy being kind or was Tara so attuned to it, so desperate for any news at all, that she could sense water and hope across miles of desert?

Should she even care at all?

They didn’t know. No one knew what Willow had done. To her.

Every day she debated telling them. She had to, there was a half dozen notes scattered through her belongings, all reminders of what Willow did, in case she needed the reminder. It was by purpose Tara could not go a full day without seeing one.

In retrospect, she figured that the memory wipe was made in haste, to give Willow time to fix things without pressure, which was why it went wrong. That was something that she adored about Willow, even as Tara tried to teach her that casting in haste had consequences, her willingness to throw herself into action, to act for what she cared about rather than just accepting. So different from Tara, what had made them possible and now so threatening to her.

Once a week, Tara painstakingly redrew the delicate henna design on her wrist and released just a touch of her own essence into it, bonding it to her so it would disappear into her skin. But the design was so delicate, so fragile, that if the merest hint of magic touched it, touched her, it would destroy the pattern, releasing the essence and revealing the design to warn her.

In a dark mood two weeks after she left Willow, she begun but never finished drawing the design as a stylized A for Adultress. Betrayer.

When she first moved out she didn’t tell anyone why. They had thought it was over the barely heard fights and the miscast spell, she never told them the target of Willow’s memory spell was her alone. She was just Tara again, after all. What had she had done for things to go so wrong? It took a week to re-center herself, to let the doubt and despair leach away so she could think clearly again.

She talked to Xander then, obliquely, about the worry she had over Willow because they had broken up so abruptly. Xander wanted to know more, but she deflected him and he let her, just knowing that something more was going on was enough for him to try to keep an eye on his best friend, unlike Buffy or Dawn who would have wanted to know everything. Tara needed more time to decide, decide what, if anything, she would or even could be able to do.

After she went back to her dorm after watching Willow and her... friend come back after a long night magicking, she was alternately filled with despair and rage. She was nothing, so easily substituted with a conjured replacement, just a piece of Willow’s life that was improved upon. Rage at being supplanted in Willow’s life so easily, that she was nothing special. She wanted to burn the message of what Willow had done to her (continued...)