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...)

( continues...) into the sky above her house. Tara wanted to disappear back to the town she fled from, to return to the anonymity that she now knew she could never escape.

Before she could decide which, reality crashed in. Literally.

No...

Willow knew that her thoughts jumbled, twisted, looped within themselves and never quite walked the straight line between A to B. She didn't understand how thoughts could work otherwise, but she had since accepted other’s confusion when she tried to explain.

...Better...

But she had discovered a non-magical mantra that could bring the relentless stream to a dam it couldn’t breach. A discovery that Tara had forced upon her.

...Than...

It was something that she repeated to herself late at night in bed, alone and unable to sleep, when the dark voices whispered and insinuated. This is what drove them away back to the unexplored corners of her mind.

...Glory

It was that look of pure betrayal on Tara's face, the nebulous of her willingness to forgive, Tara, of all people, unsure whether she could forgive Willow.

That is what scared her, what made her forget (ironically) every warning Tara gave her over hasty casting. At the time, Willow was certain that once she had smoothed things over, lessened Tara’s pain and hurt, she would have gone the month without magic. Now, she wasn't sure what she was really thinking.

But still, every time she was tempted, that things could be what they were with a wave of her hand, she remembered what she felt when she threw herself against Glory, the pure incoherent rage she focused on that blonde bitch. It was so deep that the earth had blistered and wept underneath her feet as she approached Glory’s apartment, so that she had floated to it, to save all of her hate to be poured into Glory’s shell.

Seeing that look on Tara would destroy her without Tara even raising a hand, for it would mean that she had already been killed by Willow. Only if Tara’s soul was dead could she ever hold onto that kind of hate.

Life as programming had been an approach that had generated nothing but near fatal errors. Recompiling to troubleshoot had only expanded them.

She had only wanted to improve things, because she had learned so much more and wanted to apply it all.

How crashing a car followed logically from that desire was still hard to figure out. Willow’s attempts to replicate her decision tree up to that point had never succeeded.

But her relationship with Tara could be fixed, it almost was…

NO! no no no no no no

Tara wasn't broken one, Tara hadn’t broken her relationship, she had.

Tara was the one Willow grew strong for. The one that needed her. No one else did. They all could do without her.

…Tara doesn't seem to need her any longer…

Willow pushed that panic down and concentrated on the problem she supposedly been working on for the last ten minutes…

…Oz hadn't stayed.

Buffy was the Slayer and probably still resented Willow for bringing her back.

Xander, well Xander had grown up when she was distracted, now with a job and a looming marriage.

Giles didn't even stay for Buffy, what chance did she have?

She was just Willow. ole' willow. dependable willow. geek willow. willow that was left behind. willow that no one noticed.

Tara noticed her.

If Tara needed her, she would be that Willow, the one that was needed.

And without that need, she was left with the other willow. The willow she didn't want to be anymore yet couldn’t avoid.

Still no noise from the training room. Would asking as compared to commanding a spirit to bring the words spoken from that room to her ears break faith with her rejection of magic? Willow knew the answer but let the thought play in her mind until it needed to be diverted before she started working out the phrasing the request.

She glanced at the clock. It was around the time that Buffy started her patrol, beginning in the sewers, with Spike tagging along, going aboveground when night fell. Before she left she would try to have a conversation with Dawn, then secure the Magic Shop as Willow would leave with Dawn walking home in silence. Each time she had hoped for a word about Tara, whom Willow knew Dawn saw regularly but who she hadn't been mentioned to Willow since the accident, until today at least.

Maybe Tara would come out. What would Willow say? She had spent hours preparing for Buffy’s birthday, and after all preparation her words fled the moment she saw Tara. Looking so good in her new clothes. She hadn't known what she should say.

It wasn't until later, when they were alone in the kitchen, with the smell of burnt spell components in the air and Tara cleaning the residue, that the smells reminded Willow of an evening a month before Oz returned. She had known by then something was happening between her and Tara but hadn’t ferreted out what it was yet. It was then she had watched Tara clean after one of their joint lessons and was seized with the sudden desire to discover how Tara’s lips tasted (would it be different from Oz or Xander?) In that moment in the now, it was only with that feeling of safety and wonder that Willow could relax and confess to her.

Tara forgave her

Something that Willow feared would never happen.

A moment of chance. Of opportunity. But one that she had no idea how to follow up on. What to say next?

Well, hello maybe.

Maybe Tara would go out the back of the Magic Shop. Maybe Willow wouldn't have to think because Tara wouldn’t give her a chance.

She couldn't believe that she was afraid to speak with Tara.

But maybe she would only make it worse. Maybe Tara needed more time. Maybe Willow needed to atone more. Maybe...

Willow was so enraptured with all the maybes and excuses that she almost missed the fact that the door was opening.

No, that was a lie. She couldn’t afford the luxury of lying to herself about Tara. Willow could never overlook any of her own desires.