Okay, we've got grip, we've got cheerleader, we've got wardrobe. That's it, right? I'm pretty sure it won't be a problem to pull off a multi-million dollar television production with the four of us on board. *g*
Ruby: Beta Baby! Wow, people have a lot of free time to make all those hits, hmm? But you should get chapters extra-early; I know I really don't give you enough time to read them. But I'm turning over a new leaf. Really. I think. Thanks! And eccentrictulip is right; you have a cool avatar.
And now, please note, Kittens, that there is a CLIFFHANGER ahead.
Title: Terra Firma Chapter 11: Cabaret.
Author: Tulipp. Email:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Yes, please. Distribution: Please let me know.
Spoilers: Everything.
Rating: PG-13 in this part.
Pairing: W/T.
Summary: A confrontation.
Disclaimer: All characters and various plot events that set up this story were created to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, etc, but they belong to the fans. No money changing hands here.
Acknowledgments: Thanks always to Ruby, my lovely beta who reads things under pressure and short notice. And to J, who knows when to say “No Tulipp, that’s stupid.” And this time to Ruth, who reminded me of something important about writing. Not smut, just writing.
Terra Firma
Chapter 11: Cabaret
Something’s bound to begin.
It’s going to happen,
Happen sometime,
Maybe this time….
--Kander and Ebb, “Maybe This Time,” Cabaret
It all happened so fast. That’s what Willow would remember later, when she was alone with Tara in the darkness, with Tara’s sleeping head in her lap, Tara’s sweat drying on her skin, Tara’s arms just holding on. There was no time for fear, or panic, or suspense.
When she thought back, she would wonder if there had been a sense of it all coming, the featherweight noise of a drum roll heard from the very last row of the second balcony, a tension building out of nothing into a slow thunder. But no, that was just her mind inventing drama. There had been the moment of knowing what to do and the moment of doing it. And then everything changed again.
It had been like watching a floor show, only she was supposed to sing, and she didn’t know any of her lines, didn’t even know the plot or the kind of music that would be played or the theme. That seemed familiar, somehow, but she couldn’t think about why.
She had waited for Xander to come back. Or Anya, who had gone after him. She was sure he would come back, and she was equally sure he wouldn’t. She didn’t blame him, after all, for being angry. He had been a friend when she had least deserved one. Would it make a difference if she told Xander that she was terrified? If she told him that she knew she deserved punishment for the destruction that she had caused, for the scars that she had left? And she could handle punishment; she could handle anything now.
But was there a choice here? With the books spread in front of them, with Tara’s hand warm on her knee, with the screaming awareness of Tara that stood between her and logical thinking, she knew there was no choice. She would do whatever it took to keep Tara alive, and if that meant that someone got destroyed in the process, well, she’d just make sure that she was the first in line.
Willow was dimly aware of Buffy and Dawn leaving; they were going back to the house to get some book Giles had left there. Buffy talked with Tara in a low voice, she squeezed Willow’s shoulder.
Willow felt overheated with thought; she couldn’t soothe the burn of excess in her mind. Giles’ talk and his pendulum, now cool against the hollow of her throat. Xander. Dawn’s headaches. She had hardly talked to Buffy yet; they had hugged before lunch, a long, hard hug that anchored them to each other and to the kitchen floor, but they hadn’t really talked. And Glory might be in Tara.
Tara who was alive. Tara who was flesh and blood and not a memory. Tara whose fingers had touched her almost constantly today, who had, with the exceptions of her own necessary walk alone and that necessary talk with Giles, kept her hands on Willow. Tara who seemed to understand her, to understand everything. Willow didn’t know what she had done to deserve that, to deserve a love so powerful it came back to forgive and enfold her.
She only knew that there was always a price, always a trade. She had saved Tara and lost Buffy. Brought Buffy back and lost Tara. With Tara back, someone else would leave. Someone always did. This time…this time it was Xander.
Into these thoughts came the ping of the bell, and the door to the shop swung open, and things started to happen.
****
The Slayer had gone. Wasn’t that lucky? It just made everything so much simpler.
The lights of the magic shop burned, and the door handle turned easily. Doc paused anyway, reflecting that this was a moment when everything might change. A threshold moment. He was about to open a door. He might find his Glory here, the Glory who had once been a kind of mother to him and whom he now had tried to midwife back into this reality.
He stepped into the shop and carefully pulled the door shut behind him. He had never been in the Magic Box; by the time he’d come to Sunnydale, Rupert had already taken it over, and Doc had thought it best to stay out of the way. And it had become a habit, solitude. Receding into the shadows.
But now…what good was sitting alone in his room?
Standing at the top of the few steps leading into the shop, Doc smiled at the two girls who looked up at him from their seats at a table across the room. The two faces rested on his. One face—the redhead’s—fell. The other—the blonde—looked quickly at her.
“Can I help you?” the blonde girl asked him. She looked familiar.
Doc allowed a pleasant smile to lift the corners of his lips, stilled his tail. “I think you can,” he said. “I’m looking for someone.” Rupert would be able to help him; he knew things about Sunnydale, about the pulse of its non-human life. He would have felt the new energy, too. He would be able to identify it. He might not want to, but with the Slayer gone, there were ways of compelling him to talk. “Rupert Giles. I understand you may….”
And then it hit him. The reason the girl looked so familiar to him. The same thing that must have drawn him to Rupert now, after nearly two years of being practically neighbors, if only one of them had known it. Oh, but he was good. He was better than he knew.
“You,” he said aloud, delighted. “You died.” He could have sung. He wanted to dance. He’d been looking for a resurrection. And it looked like he had just found one.
Was this his Glory? Was the essence he had worked so hard to restore right in front of him? He wanted to sense the energy, to taste the essence. He wanted to catch its scent on the air. He lifted his nose and sniffed, but…nothing.
The other girl stood up quickly, grabbing her lover’s arm and pulling her, not too gently, backward, stepping in front of her. “Will,” he heard the blonde say.
“Get Giles,” the redhead spoke quietly, but her voice was urgent, and her eyes sparked with protection. And menace. He glanced from the one to the other; their connection was palpable, a current that flickered between them. He could feel it from where he stood. Ah. So that’s how it was with them.
As for Glory, there was only one way to find out. He flexed his fingers and without taking those last steps, without touching ground with one stride and then the next, was simply upon them.
It was his big number.
****
Willow was trying to protect her; Tara saw that. She felt it. When Willow stood up and yanked her back, she gripped so hard that Tara knew her arm would bruise, would be marked with all the panic and resolve, all the fear and…and longing that pulsed in those gripping fingers.
The longing was the problem. In that half-second, Tara saw that this could go two ways. One way led to dark magicks and old habits and struggle. They would go the other way. Willow wanted to push her back, to keep her safe, but she had to take charge of this situation.
Tara didn’t have time to think as the man glided toward them. Space seemed to contract; one moment, he was standing across the room; the next, he was directly in front of them, in front of Willow, who had pushed her back. Had he glided or somehow folded back the space and walked through it with one step? She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t have time to think about it.
He was next to them; he had moved past Willow and stood to the side, and as Willow turned back and Tara opened her mouth to call Giles, to force some word out of her suddenly dry mouth, she saw the arms coming, and she felt fingers push through her hair, and she saw fingers part Willow’s hair. She sensed it coming, remembered the prick of fingertip touching scalp, that particular pain she had felt twice before, and she acted. This wouldn’t happen. This would not happen. Not to her, not to Willow.
She reached for Willow’s hand.
She needed no words. They had done this before; they could do it again. They only needed to be in the same place, to know the same thing, to think one thought. She closed her eyes for a brief second, drawing a blanket of calm over her roiling brain, and she reached for Willow’s hand, and she pressed into her urgent finger-touch the knowledge of what to do and the memory of how to do it.
Willow’s fingers closed over hers just at the moment the man’s fingers pressed against scalp. Their fingers laced, from pinkie to thumb, and then they flattened their palms together, the force pushing out the space between their hands with a little “pfft” until there no distance left between hand and hand, between skin and skin.
Their eyes met for the briefest of brief moments, and then, with one movement, their heads both snapped to face the man. They had done this before, and it came back. A sudden puff of power, an exhalation of energy, a Siamese twin of breath and force.
And the man flew back across the room, hurled straight into the bookcase opposite. His back struck the edge of one shelf, and a bit of greenish skin showed—what on earth was that?—and he fell to the floor. A shower of books rained down on him.
Tara stared at their clasped hands, rigid with connection, white with power. The aftershocks traveled up the inside of her arms, of their arms. It was all so familiar. But there wasn’t time to think; there was still work to do. Raising their hands to shoulder level, they flexed their joined hands back.
“We bind you,” Tara said. Her own lips moved, but it was Willow’s voice that echoed into the room, accompanied only by the soft shuffling of pages turning as the spell blew around the man and took hold.
****
Willow concentrated on the solid floor beneath her feet and the cool metal of the pendulum against her throat and the hot, damp skin of Tara’s palm. She felt the press of Tara’s fingers and understood—as if Tara had spoken the words into her mind—that Tara was bringing her down, was holding her. Willow took a deep shuddering breath, and she let it out slowly, slowly through her pursed lips.
For a moment, all was silent, and then Giles was there, bursting in from the training room. Willow stared at the man on the floor, bound to the wall with magick. It had worked, and she felt…okay. She breathed in, and the magicks hummed in her head and coursed through her fingers and stood the hairs on her arms on end, but she focused on remaining calm.
“I don’t believe it,” the man on the floor panted. He was held rigid against the bookcase, his left leg twisted under him and his scaly greenish tail pinned to the wall behind him. “All that work.”
“What is go….” Giles stopped short, fixing first on Tara and Willow’s joined hands and their blown-back hair and then seeing the man on the floor. “My God,” he murmured, whipping off his glasses with one hand to stare.
“No, Rupert” the man said, smiling his thin smile as the binding spell settled in and held him without pain. “Your professor.”
Willow shook her head to clear it. What was happening? What had just happened?
“Giles?” She heard her voice shaking when she spoke. “You know him? He…he wants Glory. Tara…he thought she was….”
“She’s in there, all right,” the man said now. “But….”
“You’re wrong,” Willow spat out. She knew he couldn’t move as long as her fingers twined with Tara’s. He would stay bound. “There’s no Glory in her…you couldn’t do the spell.”
Narrow lips stretched over pointed teeth in a delighted laugh. “In her? Gosh, for a powerful witch, you’re a little slow. I guess you had kind of a rough summer, but still…have you really not figured it out by now?”
Willow glanced in confusion at Tara.
“Can’t you tell?” The man said. “Glorificus is in you, too.”
For a second, Willow’s world fell away.
Tara’s head snapped toward her, her hand clenching so hard that Willow thought a finger might snap, but that kept her from falling, kept her from staggering backward and severing their connection as a memory she had pushed down into the base of her skill flared up, flashed whole and complete into her mind. The night she had taken Glory into her mind for what she’d thought was only a moment.
Tara had walked ahead, plucking at the bandage on her arm, shuffling her feet as she walked, lifting her head to the night. Willow had trailed behind. She had been wearing ridiculously high-heeled boots, and her feet had ached, but it hadn’t mattered. Already, by then, the pain that would keep her company for over a year—in one form or another—had settled in, taken root. Aching feet were nothing.
She followed Tara to the base of the tower, winced as Tara yanked the bandage from her wounded hand and hurled it off, hung back as Tara grew suddenly taller with purpose and wrapped her fingers around a brick. Willow had felt acid rage eating away at the lining of her stomach and her throat when she saw Glory approach, and from that moment on it had all been so easy.
Easy to glide soundlessly up behind Glory, her feet skimming the floor. Easy to come face to face with a Hell God. Easy to claim Tara as her own with three small words. The easiest thing in the world to send that rage down her arms and into her hands, to liquefy her fingers and melt through two heads of hair and two skulls, to feel the flesh of her fingers touch memory and thought and mind.
She had let herself—her mind, her thoughts, her self—recede, and she gripped Tara’s mind with one set of fingers and Glory’s presence with the other, and she reversed them through the empty channel of her arms and her black, black brain.
It should have hurt like hell. Her head should have split with pain. Her nose should have bled; her legs should have buckled.
But it had been so easy. And as two essences seeped through her and back into their own bodies, Glory to Glory and Tara to Tara, she had felt something—later she would decide it had been the magicks. There was discomfort at first, but then a fist of pleasure spread, hot and restless, through her mind. That was Glory.
She would forget, in the tornado of emotion that touched down after that, finding Tara and losing Buffy. She would forget that in that moment of uncertainty, after those days of fear and loneliness, that essence that coated her insides like sex. It was the first thing that had felt good in days. It wasn’t the first time she had felt darkness pulsing through her, but it was the first time she had felt the black skin-itch of magick that had stayed with her ever since.
Now, Tara was holding her up with only her fingers, with only her hand.
Had it been Glory? All this time…Glory? She couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes from the face of this stranger.
The Professor…was that what Giles had called him?…laughed again. “Well, gosh,” he said. “I guess that threw you for a loop, didn’t it? But relax; it’s not even enough to extract. It’s just a trace, like a smudge. You both have it. Frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t feel it before now.”
Willow stared. Her mouth was dry. She couldn’t think. She saw Giles glance at her and Tara, who was also to stunned to speak. He peered at the Professor, and then he took over.
“It was you,” he said slowly, evenly. “You did the spell. You opened the door to resurrect Glory, but Tara came back. Tara’s connection to Glory,” he paused, “and perhaps Willow’s…responded to your spell.”
The Professor winked. “You always were one of the brightest of watchers, Rupert.” To Willow, he seemed strangely calm, unperturbed. Why was that?
“How could you do something so utterly stupid?” Giles bit out. “Do you have any idea of what could have happened to these girls if something went wrong?” Willow saw that Giles was shaking. She had only heard that fear in his voice when he spoke about Buffy.
“You have to understand the way I am, mein Herr,” the Professor said. It had the ring of an old joke. “But, as much as I hate to disillusion you, it didn’t work that way. Resurrections are a tricky business; they don’t always turn out the way we want them to. I know that better than anyone.”
Willow was having trouble following the conversation. She heard all the words, but she heard them through a cloud. Was it a cloud of Glory?
“Believe me,” Doc continued. “I’m disappointed, but I’m a realist. There’s only enough Glory in these girls to be a little bit interesting. A kind of thumbprint, if you like. An enhancement.”
He deflated suddenly. “It’s really too bad.”
Giles looked at Willow and Tara again. He pulled his glasses off with one hand. “And why should I believe you?” he asked. “What reason have you ever given me to trust you?”
“No reason at all,” the Professor said lightly. “Except that you know it’s true. You know how extraction spells work. If Glory’s essence were in there, I could have gotten it out. Once I had my fingers on their heads, if she were really in there, no little girl witch spell in the world could have stopped me.”
Giles frowned. He thought for a moment, and then he nodded. “Willow, Tara, he’s right.”
“But, well, if his attempt to raise Glory didn’t bring Tara back…” He raised his face to them. “What did?”
The bell to the shop jangled then.
“Hey,” Dawn bounced through the door, Buffy close behind. They were laughing at something, and in the moment that it took for them to burst into the shop, they didn’t have time to notice the broken bookshelf, the figure magickally bound against the wall, Giles standing tall without his glasses, or Willow and Tara, side by side, hands clasped and arms rigid.
In that moment of not noticing, Dawn spoke. “We couldn’t get into the house,” she said. “We forgot the key.”
To be continued in Chapter 12, “Clouds of Glory.”
Edited by: Tulipp at: 8/9/02 8:35:46 am
by Ghostwriter » Mon Aug 05, 2002 6:31 am 
it's great you found Tulipp's fic, it's truly one of the most complex and addictive pieces on the board at this moment *thumbs up to Tulipp for the great work she's doing here*
today?
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at: 8/7/02 8:13:21 pm
