Willow came up carefully, not wanting to interrupt but carefully reaching out anyway to touch Buffy's arm. Buffy looked up and blinked away tears. "Hey, Will," she whispered, taking her hand.
"Hey, Buffy. How was your trip?"
"Kind of dull, actually. How was your night?" Willow stuttered then went silent, but Buffy had already looked beyond Willow to Tara. "Hi. I got your call. I'm glad you're OK."
Tara smiled. "I'm glad it worked. We should pack your nose before it swells too much more."
Buffy almost reached for her nose, but it hurt too much to touch. "Is it broken? Am I going to look like a field hockey player?" Dawn giggled from where she was tucked in tight between her mother and her sister.
Spike stepped forward a little from the shadows, but not too far. "Nah, should be fine, but you'll bruise up impressively. It'll look like you went a few rounds with a god."
Buffy nearly smiled at him, then frowned at the bandage around his neck. "What happened to you?" She looked around the chapel. Xander was sitting in a front pew, staring at the floor in front of his feet and not paying attention to anyone else. She checked everyone again, worried now. "Where's Anya?"
Everyone went very still, then Spike took a slow, reluctant breath. Something outside caught his attention before he could speak, and his eyes went very wide. "What the hell?"
Giles glanced at the encroaching sunlight, gauging the time, then he went over and picked up his sword. He brushed the dirt off the grip, then cleaned the blade with a corner of his shirt. Holding it loosely, he walked back to Ben, who had managed to raise himself a few inches and was pausing to catch his breath.
"A noble soul, Buffy," Giles said. "She sincerely believes in the curative powers of hope. She will offer help to anyone, all they need to do is ask." He shifted out of game face as he gazed down at the battered human. "But sometimes there is no help, no hope. I think you know that."
Ben managed to look up at him. "I can try . . ."
"You can't control her, we've only driven her back. I have no idea how long it will take her to fade away. As you recover, so she will recover. And so she will be back. And she will try to kill my Slayer again, in revenge for everything that was taken away. No."
Ben barely had time to blink before Giles raised his sword and swung down.
"Giles!" Buffy shrieked from the chapel door, but the head was already on the ground, rocking slightly. Blood gushed out of the body as it convulsed and transformed one more time, leaving Glory's corpse laying in the dirt.
"Requiescat in pace," Giles said softly.
Buffy ran up and gasped in horror before she turned away with her hands over her mouth. "Oh, god, how could you? How could you?" The others were approaching, though more hesitantly.
"This doesn't require an audience," Giles called, cleaning his sword again.
Spike came up, looked at the pieces and shook his head. "You had to do this in front of everybody, Ripper? Come on, love," he said, putting his hands on Buffy's shoulders and urging her away. "None of your concern anymore, go on back in."
She pulled away and turned, tears on her face. "You had no right," she whispered. "We could have--"
Giles sighed and resheathed his sword. "Buffy, you are a hero. Your job is to save the world. And congratulations are in order, because, yet again, you've done just that. Well done." His tired smile was sincere. "But every hero needs a cleanup crew, people who will do the jobs the hero can't but which need to be done to make sure the hero's job stays done. I have always been a part of your cleanup crew, and as long as I walk this earth, I shall continue to be so. Whether you want me to or not."
She shook her head. "This was wrong. We might have been able to save him . . ."
"No. If there was enough Ben left to save, it wouldn't be Glory lying here now." He glanced up at the sky again. "I do apologize for leaving this mess for others to deal with, but time is against me." He looked at Spike and frowned. "What happened to you?"
Spike grabbed his arm to pull him towards the bus. "Long night, long story." He hesitated and turned back to Buffy. "I'd take care of this for you if I could, but . . ."
She shook her head without looking at him. After a moment he continued to the bus with Giles. Buffy kept her eyes away from Glory's body, but she couldn't avoid any of the other bodies lying around the courtyard. "It was supposed to be over," she whispered. "Now what do we do?"
Anya/Tara for the femmeficathon.
Glass House
(Bargaining, Season Six)
Tara walked Anya home after dinner. It was one of their little rituals, like Buffy, Willow, and Xander's Oreo-and-popcorn movie night, or Dawn reshelving books every Saturday from the unsteady towering piles they ended up in throughout the week. Unspoken, but necessary for the stability of their world. Tara and Anya began it shortly after they'd both been left to twiddle their thumbs for the umpteenth time while the others took care of some crazy thing.
They'd spent the evening eating bruchetta and delicate clam linguini, talking about the summer and how things had changed the past three months. More and more they found themselves talking about Willow and Xander, how invested they were in this plan and the possibility of ruining the delicate balance they'd all achieved over the summer.
As they walked, they overheard a loud couple talking about their sex life, and the irate boyfriend yelling, "Sex is like Chinese food! An hour later you can always do with more!" They both burst into giggles and had to sit down to hold their sides.
Later Tara would think about how great it was that Anya finally got the jokes, was beginning to understand humanity again after being so detached from it for thousands of years, but at the time they just leaned against each other to hold up their weight and looked out on the peaceful Sunnydale night.
For some reason Sunnydale was always easy in the summer, less strained with the burden of its destiny. It was as though it knew, come fall there would be an overflow of craziness and evil, and took some measure to just calm down.
The result was that people were friendly and open, willing to share hellos and help strangers on the street. Even those lucky few in ever-constant denial seemed touched by the feeling as well, and smiles were brighter and shoe sales more frequent.
The heat was clear and dry, and their fingers brushed as they ambled home. They were unlikely friends, made less so by the positions they were put into by their lovers. Bonds were easily formed and strengthened in Sunnydale, where the collective terror of just living hung over the town like a shroud, and they both knew what they had, even if they never spoke of it.
When they walked past the Espresso Pump the smell was too tempting to avoid, so they slipped onto the high stools in a corner of the open area and listened to the live musicians weave violin and guitar together, perfectly complementing the night. They ordered frosted mochas and talked about the small things that had happened throughout the week: a new shipment of books from England, a guy slipping while playing hackysack at the college, the new secular bookstore that opened down the street.
Tara saw a guy from her women's studies class and spent a few minutes talking to him while Anya watched on, sipping her mocha and tracing the pattern of the tile on the table. He made some joke about the Lord of the Rings movie, and Tara laughed, high and sweet, when Anya's head shot up at the mention of Legolas.
The guy left, and they finished their mochas in companionable silence, listening to the music and commenting lowly on occasion about passerbys or the new movie at the theater.
When they left, it was late, and Anya offered to walk Tara back to Revello first, taking a cab home, but Tara declined, saying she wanted to enjoy the evening before they all disappeared.
The walk was easy--Xander's apartment building was close to town, and the subdivisions not much further from it.
They got to the door and hugged warmly, Tara pressing a soft kiss to Anya's lips. She waited on the stairs until Anya was safely inside, turning to go back down.
Loose thoughts flowed through Tara's head as she walked home. Three months made such a difference. How strange was it that she could not pinpoint a happier time in her life than after the loss of Buffy? It was almost macabre, she knew, but she saw more and more how her death had served to pull the rest of them together, move past their annoyances and troubled relationships to be a family.
Tara felt that, now, she had a family--though she'd considered the Summers and Xander so for a long time. She had Willow, too, the love of her life. What they had was forever, she knew it in her bones. But even more than that, she had a friend. Anya filled that last part of her dream, and there were times when she felt so overcome with joy she would sit curled in a chair for hours, staring at nothing but reveling at the amazing turn her life had taken.
Where she was now was because of Buffy, in more ways than one, and every day she thought of her and wished her peace--she found it hard to believe that Buffy's sacrifice would be rewarded with torment, despite Willow's insistence and Xander's blind belief.
The whole plan disturbed Tara more and more, and though she knew it was deeply selfish, she feared that any attempts at changing the outcome of the events of last May would destroy them all, destroy what she had so stumblingly acquired.
When she came home, she found Willow's things strewn across the kitchen table in a quiet house. Her computer was still on, parts of the translated spell littering the screen. Tara's fingers danced across the screen, following the words, and her hand fell to lie on the keyboard.
Before she quite realized what she was doing, she felt heat on her hand and a crackling strength pulling through her body from her toes to her forehead. A quiet, powerful ball of energy hit the computer, shorting it out.
She stepped back, looking at her hand with surprise. Then she carefully stepped over the cords on the floor to reach into the kitchen and turn off the light, going up the stairs to sleep at Willow's side.
Nice, SA. I really like that. It makes Tara less the perfect victim. I always disliked that Tara never seemed to make a mistake, didn't seem to have human impulses.
One thing:
lowly on occasion about passerbys
Lowly made me think of low company rather than quiet conversation and the last word should be passersby.
