Part Thirty-three: There’s a thousand things I want to say to you…
In a temple housing slivers of the souls of dead gods, Amy finds herself shedding much of who she once was. The spells are difficult—big magic, bigger than she’s accustomed to. She watches Willow across from her, watches how easily she adjusts to the lines of energy crisscrossing the room. Amy is struggling to keep up, pushing her mind and spirit further than she’s ever gone. She dare not move, but out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ethan, Giles and Wesley, and for a moment, she wonders how they can possibly pull this off. Sometimes, when she looks the right way at people, she can see their auras—she imagines Willow can do this, too—and she can see the taint of enmity and distrust that radiates from these men. Giles is leaning against the wall, arms folded. Once in awhile, Amy sees him look over at Wesley, and she can’t tell what’s in that look—Contempt? Regret? Giles is a cipher to her, Wesley more so. Only Ethan makes sense—his petulant reluctance, his open disdain for all of them. That she understands. That makes sense.
Amy takes a breath and returns her attention to the spell. She should clear her mind, concentrate on the invocations slipping past her lip. These aren’t words she was ever taught, she realized. They just seem to come to her unbidden.
Willow is beautiful. Amy can’t help but notice the way the energy pulses through her, the way the current seems drawn to her. The two of them are now a circuit, bound, and if only for this one moment, Amy can see why everyone loves her so much. In this one instant, Amy loves her herself, and she wants to cry, to hold her and take back every shred of harm she’s done to this woman. Instead, she clenches her teeth, and extends her mind into the ether.
Justine marvels at how quickly Faith seems to have taken charge of their small party, and envies the confidence the woman exerts, the sheer overwhelming power of her. Doc and the boy, Xander, are still out there somewhere—still powerful despite the loss of his pawns. Wesley is out there, too—his ghost, anyway. She knows now she didn’t kill him, that he somehow survived and died later, but still … She did what she did from what she thought was love, but now she wasn’t certain. She didn’t know if she’d do it again. She wasn’t certain if she wanted to be forgiven, and the lingering question—why is she here—chills her to the bone. Is this his forgiveness? Or his revenge?
She looks at Connor, this boy whose life she stole wholesale, and knows that her crimes are something that can’t be redeemed. Some things taken can’t be given back. Not this boy’s life; or her twin sister, now dead for years at a vampire’s hand; or Holtz’s family, dead at Angel’s. She looks at Faith, and sees something she could become, but how can she get there when she’s surrounded by ghosts?
Oz waits patiently and silently. Outside the field Illyria has erected, a mob of monsters waits to destroy them. Everyone is pensive. Spike keeps saying things, but Oz isn’t really listening. Angel is silent and grim—and until this moment, Oz has never really taken stock of his odd relationship with Angel. They’d never been tight—he was more of a friend of a friend, and then he was an enemy, and then a friend again. It amazed Oz how quickly those roles could shift, but then, he had a monster inside him, too, so who was he to judge? Spike was much the same, he figured, although he’d never really known Spike as anything but an enemy. All three of them, thought Oz, driven by love to tame their inner beasts, and all three of them losing out on love despite it all.
Willow was out there, somewhere—he didn’t know if Wesley had managed to free her and the others yet. But Oz knew Willow was his past, and that’s not a place you can live. Ironic, he thought, considering the circumstances—here, in a place where time was lopped eternally, until it eventually broke. Oz had learned to love watching the moon rise—he looked forward to seeing it again.
And Wesley (continued...)