Couples: W/T natch.
Spoilers: It’s set in its own separate little W/T universe, but references to Season 6.
Archiving: Course… just let me know, K?
Feedback: Yes please… self-confessed feedback whore here.
Disclaimer: Joss is God, Amber and Alyson are Goddesses, Mutant Enemy and UPN own all. I just play.
Notes: There is no plot to really speak of. I’m going down the Jossian road of ‘character development’ and seeing what happens. All set in Tara’s head.
The Dreamer – Part 1
‘Love is not a goal; it is only a travelling… There is a goal, but the goal is neither love nor death. It is a goal neither infinite nor eternal. It is the realm of calm delight, it is the other-kingdom of bliss. We are like a rose, which is a miracle of pure centrality pure absolved equilibrium.’
-D.H.Lawrence
My dream is about her. I’ve had it before, but she plays the starring role in most of my dreams. I feel sometimes that she is so much a part of me that I couldn’t subtract myself from her if I wanted to. She is in me, singing her songs in my head, the stream of Willowbabble running through me and in me and out of me. She holds part of me now and I hold part of her, and I do not know if those parts are retrievable, should I ever want it back. But I know that I never, ever will. Willow is my always, you see.
So my dream… She is walking towards me, and her eyes hold mine hypnotically. It’s like that. When she looks, I cannot look away. If she wants my attention she can hold it and I’m powerless in a way that I love. There are tears swimming in the green pools that I love to dive into, never reaching a bottom, playing in the flashes of gold that flicker there. My arm reaches out to touch her, wanting to stop the tears from falling before they even spill over her eyelashes. But my arm isn’t long enough; she’s beyond my reach, too far away and I cannot get to her. She cannot come to me and I cannot, or am not allowed, to get to her. As I watch helpless, she is pulled back from me, taken further away by forces I cannot see.
The separation and the tearing at my heart it causes send tears flooding down my cheeks. I cry silently, watching her drift further and further away. But her face is changing. Her face is calm and deadened now, the emotion gone, and all that is left is a shell. A thing that looks like Willow but that I know isn’t at all. There is nothing of my Willow left. The tears are gone from her eyes and she stares at me impassively as I cry and weep helplessly, and she fades into the mist, leaving me alone.
I wake slowly, feeling lost and emptied of everything in me. As my mind clears a little and I realise it was just the dream and that my Willow is not gone, some of the fog lifts. The light and the morning pull me towards consciousness. I lie drifting for a while, refusing to open my eyes, as my body becomes aware of its surroundings. Willow is still here. Of course she’s still here. It was only a dream. She is lying in her usual position. I have been rolled back towards the edge of the bed and am lying on my side facing her, whilst she is curled into the curve of my body, nestled in as close as she can get. Her face is buried in my neck and her breath eddies and flows across the downy skin behind my head. One of her arms is up on the pillow curled round my head, and the other hand is spread on the small of my back, pulling me closer to her. Her left leg is lying parallel to mine, touching all along the length, and her right leg is pulled up, resting on my thigh.
Her penchant for stealing all of the bed is not for the usual reason of wanting space. She’s not greedy. With Willow, it is simply that she wants to be as close to me as possible in sleep, and so I get pushed further and further towards my side and she creeps with me, like a tiny animal searching out warmth. But it is really she who is my warmth. She radiates heat, and her hot tight little body often feels like its burning up in my arms.
My closed eyes sense the light in the room, flooding in through the window that we never close at night so that we can see the stars as we explore and enter each other, or as we drift asleep and our whispered conversations trail off into soft breathing. It is light but it is not light enough to make me think the dawn is old yet. I know the morning is only just beginning. I know I am awake early as usual. Force of habit left over from a life spent getting up before the rest of the house woke to do my chores and cook breakfast. I always wake before Willow. This is my time, my silent time when nothing invades or interrupts my peace or my thoughts. The noises from outside are soft; there are one or two birds singing to each other a little way off and, in the distance, the faint sounds of a town waking up.
I open my eyes. A strand of Willow’s hair is lying across my cheek, tickling a little, and I move a hand to brush it away. I tuck it back behind her ear softly, revelling in the feeling of her hair as always. It’s silky soft and heavy and it always smells faintly of cinnamon. The first time I ever hugged Willow, saying goodnight after one of our first spell sessions, before she began staying over, I turned my face into her hair and breathed her in. The feel and smell of her hair steadied my heart and seemed to calm me, and balance out the head spinning dizziness I was feeling at being that close to her. I can lie for hours playing with her hair, running my fingers through it and kissing it. She loves brushing my hair in the mornings and when I return the favour, she sits very quietly on the bed and closes her eyes, loving the sensation of my careful fingers stroking and pulling.
I lie, stroking her hair, and stare at the ceiling. She smells of the lemon soap that I bought her, and of her shampoo and a faint trace of fresh perfume, and of sweat and the smell of our bedclothes… or maybe that’s just the smell of our bedclothes. She smells of Willow, and I lie and drink her in.
Miss Kitty is moving in the corner. She’s left her basket and I can hear her padding slowly across the carpet. She always slinks in the morning, her stomach stroking the floor, as she creeps like a predator towards her goal. Her goal is usually our bed, and she climbs up the duvet right about now. Her head appears by my foot and I smile at her. She always looks so proud of her achievement. She’s still only little and climbing the bed still seems to give her an enormous sense of achievement. Her claws are out, like mini crampons, and the duvet has suffered as a result of her morning expeditions. Willow tuts but I just smile. She’s only little and when you’re little the small things are still very big. Her pride always reminds me of climbing the elm. The first time I climbed the elm was one of the proudest days of my life. Is that sad? I don’t think so. Donnie had been swinging himself up it for years, and I’d always stood at the bottom and wished I could be up there, and be seeing what he was seeing. But Donnie’s reasons for climbing it were simply to show that he could. I climbed it to conquer my fears, and to look out over the place I grew up. When you were up the elm, you could see it all from a distance. And from a distance it didn’t look so bad. In fact, it even looked beautiful at times. And yes, a small part of me wanted to climb because Donnie had done it, and I wanted to too. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to do what others have done. You just have to do it for the right reasons.
Miss Kitty suddenly launches herself onto Willow, like a big cat attacking it’s prey. She lands on her thigh, the one that is pulled up over mine, and Willow flinches silently at the sudden weight. I brush Miss Kitty off gently and she gives me a baleful look and hops off the bed to go give herself her morning bath. Willow is stirring though, and my moments of silence are over. I watch her face as she wakes. She is always so peaceful and childlike in sleep, but when she wakes, her face scrunches up into a comical protesting moan, and she always opens her eyes in the same way. With a very similar baleful look to the one Miss Kitty just gave me. I just smile and kiss her scrunched up nose. Her face relaxes and when she finally opens her eyes, there is a smile in them, as always.
Am posting this in the hope it will spur me on to get my ass in gear and get writing. I promise I won't be too long in posting, but I'm not sure if you're gonna like this as it really is plotless! Anyways, let me know...
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"Appalling. Almost as if they no longer believe money can buy happiness..."
[This message has been edited by Charlie (edited December 28, 2001).]
