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.

Despite knowing how much it had cost Buffy, Tara also knew she was still just a touch envious. Even after stretching, Tara felt stiff with her entire body still feeling damp from the exertion despite already having toweled off, the sweat still pooling at the edges of her clothes. Buffy, on the other hand, just splashed some water on her face and retied her hair and was ready to start patrolling. Despite Buffy’s urge to escape Tara’s uncomfortable questions she still sat and talked. In an attempt to avoid talking about Spike or mentioning Willow, Buffy kept bringing up Dawn, and Tara realized that was the only other thing that Buffy knew that Tara was interested in and understood herself. How they could be this connected through friendship and found family but still know so little about each other? It was partially Tara’s her own fault for until the revelation that she wasn’t a demon, she had tried to only interact with Willow. The others needed to not know too much about her, in case...

There were two letters Tara kept in her room as a different kind of reminder. One letter that she had composed again and again all during that first summer Tara and Willow were a couple, secretly rewriting and crying over it ever time it needed to be updated. She had to prepare for what was coming, for her inevitable change.

In the letter Tara told Willow that she never really cared for her, it was all an experiment and that Tara was going home to her family.

The other letter paired with it had been all too easy to write, succinct and to the point.

A letter to Buffy and Xander telling them all she knew about the demon she would become and all the folklore and legend her family had ‘known.’ With a request that they would give the other letter to Willow.

After they destroyed her, of course.

It would be easier for everyone but Willow if she was a stranger, just a demon masquerading as a human to deceive their friend. Better for Willow, also, thinking Tara had left rather having to destroy the demon herself.

Tara was fooling herself, of course. If Tara had been truly honest, she would have never let herself walk down the primrose path towards Willow.

But that look in Willow’s eyes when she got distracted, unfocused, where they suddenly seemed so deep, they had pulled her in and drowned all of her sense.

It was the most selfish thing Tara had ever done.

As the summer wore on, Willow dragged her more often to ‘Scooby Gang’ activities, Tara felt… complete so she let herself forget about the letters, the last versions crumpled up in an old notebook.

When Tara’s family arrived, the lies she had told herself were broken in a panic. She thought of leaving the letter with Buffy and running, running from both of her families.

She did something worse instead.

She knows she was lucky beyond all imagining in keeping the family that accepted her.

But between that and what shortly happened with Glory....

...crawling insects under the skin eating the eyeballs puking in the mouth endless and refreshing with every chitter bad and alone and deservedly...

...afterwards. Well, Buffy dying did make it hard to find out where she fell on the great funny shaped versus round pancake debate.

That is why Tara allowed herself to debate over whether or not to tell the others. Despite everything, she still didn’t believe absent any immediate sign of danger from Willow, she had the right to speak to the others, to challenge Willow to her best friends. This luxury of indecisiveness was one that Tara permitted herself.

Until the call came from Buffy one night, voiced her now normal scary sense of detachment that Dawn was in the ER. Karen, from a few dorm rooms down, gave her ride. As Tara stroked Dawn's hair as she whimpered quietly, so not to further upset the pacing Buffy, Tara got in pieces what happened. That Dawn had gotten hurt when Willow lost all control in a magic surge. Tara had suffered one while she was still young, but her Mother was there to help her balance between the conflicting energies until Tara learned how to control the flow of her own power.

Tara berated herself for each unpleasant noise that Dawn made because she should have spoken up and prevented this. When Xander picked them up at the hospital, she was already planning her response. If she was going to confront Willow, she needed to be prepared. Tara let herself be dropped off first, too wrapped in her own plans to notice that everyone else was silently making their own. When she got back to the dorm, she pulled out the satchel she had prepared the night she had left Willow.

Tara wasn't sure that Willow could be made to see by her but she had to try. Herbs, essences and a spirit she had apologetically bound, everything was ready as she could make it. She debated a spell to cut off her emotions, isolating herself so she could do what she had to. Then she realized if her worst case happened, she would never want to remove it.

Prepared, shielded, she followed Willow’s red string of fate (all the while trying not to think why it was so easy for Tara find it) to the house the next morning, only to be nearly run over by an exiting and frustrated Dawn. Upon seeing Tara she immediately unloaded how unreasonable it was, that Willow admitted she had a problem, agreed to renounce magic but still every single magic item had to be taken out of the house and how fair was that to her?

At the time Tara should have realized that Dawn’s concern was odd, that it was really over having her stash of pickpocketed items found, but instead Tara just listened, nodded and made encouraging noises. As soon Dawn was out of sight Tara threw up behind the bushes.

She went back to her dorm and remained numb for a while.

Later she apologetically released the bound spirit with her thanks and paid it no mind as it still returned a petty vengeance on her by melting all of her candles into a single puddle of wax.

If Willow was really trying to get better, if she was going to stay away from magic, she needed everyone's support. They were all suspicious enough, their auras screaming it anytime they got close to Willow the next time Tara saw them, that mentioning what happened to her, what had started it all, didn't seem to help anyone.

Tara thought she would then just fade away, that without the shared connection through Willow they would just forget her. But even without Willow, they still wanted to include her and then Buffy needed someone to confess to. To help her deal with the problem that was...

"Spike."

Before Willow had even had a chance to process that it was Buffy in the doorway and register the mild disappointment that she wasn't going to see Tara, Spike had bounced out of his chair.

"Ready for a bit of the rough and tumble, Slayer?

Willow was actually surprised to see Buffy's discomforted. Spike had made worse innuendo last year to Buffy last year while patrolling but Buffy always put him nastily back into his place.

"You want to patrol today…?"

"Why not? We should every day, you know. Work out the kinks and all that."

"But... "

“Jeesh, Buffy, just go out and patrol with Spike already. You'll feel better once beat something up." Dawn butted in with an exasperated voice as she packed her stuff.

"Yep, she always seems so relaxed after we’re done."

Willow had already begun grabbing her own material to walk Dawn home when she got that twitchiness under her skin that she was missing something. She had been getting that a lot lately since without magic everything seemed like a secret where it once was an open book.

Willow was sure that this paranoid feeling would go away soon enough.

Tara was still out of sight and far more important to Willow. She doesn't want to see me, Willow wailed inside her mind. She's right, I don't deserve to even be seen....

But I need her to see me so badly...

So she missed the look that Buffy shot back into the rear room.

I'm going to NYComicCon, so I have skip posting for a few days. I will be back posting by Tuesday latest...