by AntigoneUnbound » Thu May 20, 2004 8:13 pm
Don'cha hate people who don't deliver on time? All I can say is that I used to be one of the luckier people I know and in the past two years that has changed dramatically. So--now I'm back in the saddle. I'll also say that this chapter, more than anything I've ever written for Pens before, absolutely kicked my ass, and I'm not even sure why. Huh...Anyway, I very much apologize for the delay. Hope this is worth your continued reading...
~~~~
AS TIME GOES BY
Summary: Hey--what’s up with this baby?
Disclaimer: I own everything in every dimension except Willow, Tara, and the rest of the Buffy canon. But Donald Trump? That Snoopy lunchbox in your uncle’s closet? Every packet of Chiclets gum in Des Moines, Iowa? Yeah…I own ’em all.
Part 3
Willow frequently indulged in a kind of retrospective imagining. She imagined that someone from the future (her actual present) had visited her when she was thirteen, fourteen years old. And she imagined that visitor showing her what her life would soon look like. How would she have reacted? When her biggest concerns were figuring out how to work tampons and avoid social embarrassments, what would she have said to a glimpse of herself staking a vampire? Conjuring transmutation spells? And of course, going down on a woman?
She had been heavy into such mental meanderings a few months earlier, as she took in the scene before her: a physician, wearing a stethoscope that twinkled brightly against her metallic blue skin as she tugged absently on one of her four ears.
Giles had arranged for this particular health care provider to give Kyra her six-week check-up. “I don’t know that you want to risk going through your managed care provider,” he noted when he made the suggestion. “I think it would be wise to make use of someone a bit less…mainstream.”
“I agree,” Tara said promptly, “as long as this doctor knows her stuff.”
“Oh yes,” Giles assured her. “Darnuth was near the top of her graduating class.”
“In another dimension,” Willow pointed out. “I mean, did she have to take MCAT’s? Who supplied the cadavers? It feels a little sketchy to me.”
“Her particular home dimension is actually quite advanced,” Giles replied somewhat stiffly, as if Willow were implying that he was handing little Kyra over to some drooling imbecile.
Actually, she was drooling a little bit, but that was apparently beyond her volition and she did manage to wipe it discreetly periodically. Giles had been right, though: Darnuth was extremely bright and this was clearly not the first human infant she had attended.
“This child is in perfect health,” she reported after examining Kyra for almost an hour, her voice thick with an accent Willow had never heard before. “Her lungs and heart are well-developed; her responses to noise and light are normal; she has good strength for her age. I would consider her to be in excellent condition.”
“Don’t you need to take any blood?” Willow asked, dreading the thought even as she voiced it.
“Such things are archaic,” Darnuth replied dismissively. “I can gather all the information I need through her eyes, a tiny cutting of fingernail, and the touch of her skin.”
Willow thought that it would be extremely bad form to question the doctor further on the point, but it was also difficult to imagine the check-up being so non-invasive.
“So, um…no risk of any infection or diseases?” she asked hesitantly.
“None,” Darnuth answered promptly. “Of course, you should bring her back for regular check-ups.”
“What about vaccinations?” Tara asked.
Darnuth handed her a small vial of purplish liquid. “Just mix this in with your breast milk and give it to her by bottle. If she has any reaction to it, just have Giles contact me.” She gave Kyra one last look, and this time a tiny smile creased her blue face. “She’s a beauty,” she told Willow and Tara.
“Yeah, we think so,” Willow said, grinning. “Hey--what do we owe you?”
“Oh, Giles has taken care of my fee,” Darnuth replied with a wave of her hand. “He even got extra-crispy, my favorite,” she added appreciatively.
Willow thought it best that they not explore this fee business too closely, even as she spotted another little trickle of drool emerging from the left side of the doctor’s mouth.
Darnuth had been their physician ever since. Willow and Tara had both been extremely pleased with her, although they chose never to learn the noun that followed the adjective in the doctor’s fee. Kyra was, to every appearance, an extremely healthy baby. In the nine months of her life, she’d never even had a sniffle. Some part of Willow found this just a little bit troubling, although she tried to put the thought out of her mind. It turns out, though, that Tara was struggling with similar fears.
“Willow, every baby catches something,” she said quietly one night as they prepared for bed. Kyra had been with them for eight months. “Don’t you think it’s unusual?”
“I don’t know,” Willow replied with a shrug. “I don’t have any point of reference. This whole baby deal is a mystery to me.” She turned from the bathroom mirror to face Tara. “But yeah--I think about it.”
Tara’s face was troubled, her fathomless blue eyes laced with fear. “Willow, sometimes I get so scared. I mean, I love her so much, and it feels so right to have her. But…” Here she trailed off.
“But there’s so much we don’t know,” Willow finished, as Tara nodded.
“Like--how did this happen?” Tara asked, her brow creased with anxiety.
They had researched the protection spell from every imaginable angle, and had yet to find any explanation for either Kyra’s appearance or the disappearance of the Ba’jeel.
“Do you think we made a mistake?” Willow asked. After a moment, she added quietly, “Do you think I made a mistake?”
Tara looked at her, love flooding into her eyes. “Baby--that’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it? That you somehow did something wrong; with the magic.”
It was a conversation they’d had so many times before: Willow’s brief but wrenching misuse of witchcraft right after Glory’s defeat.
Unlike the others, she’d found herself unable to relax and enjoy their good fortune. Everyone else had the sense of having dodged their largest bullet to date; after all, they’d defeated a god. Willow, though, couldn’t stop thinking of all the close calls, all the near misses when she could have so easily lost someone she loved…Tara, at the multicultural fair; Dawn, up on the scaffold; Beverly, being shot with a crossbow. How many more escapes before their luck ran out? Because there had to be some element of luck, Willow decided. Too many good people, smart people had died in the fight against evil for her to believe that their continued survival was purely a function of their collective intelligence and courage.
She knew that witchcraft was her most powerful weapon, and she began to search for more powerful protection spells. She had to learn more; had to be able to cast spells for anything that might come their way. She couldn’t shake the feeling of vulnerability, the fear that unless she grew stronger, something would come and take away some part of the life she loved so fiercely.
“Willow, sweetie--you have to let go a little bit,” Tara had urged her one night after discovering Willow asleep over a new book of spells. She had grown more concerned as one week turned into two, and then three. But Willow always insisted that it was imperative for her to study more, and she grew impatient when Tara didn’t want to study with her.
One day, she stumbled upon one of the few remaining copies of Lynaeum’s Aegis. It held the most powerful protection spells she had ever encountered, and she felt her face grow hot with anticipation as she read the first enchantment. With these spells, she would protect her family with greater surety than she ever had. She began to cast almost reflexively, sometimes chanting a quick spell even when the danger seemed minimal.
On a warm June evening, Tara and Dawn had decided to check out an art exhibit on campus. Willow had passed on the event, choosing instead to pore over the Aegis yet again. She could see the irritation and disappointment in Tara’s eyes as she declined. Although Willow hadn’t said why she was staying home, she knew that Tara knew.
She also knew that it was a full moon; a wolf moon. There hadn’t been a werewolf attack in almost nine months, but Willow found herself on guard now against every imaginable danger. And so, as Tara and Dawn started out the door, Willow began to murmur a quick protection spell.
Tara turned slowly, her eyes narrowing. “Willow--did you just cast a spell on us?” she asked. Her voice was different in a way that Willow couldn’t identify; but it scared her.
“No.” The lie was out before she’d even thought about it. “I was just running over my to-do list for tonight.” She forced a laugh. “Now I’m talking to myself--first sign you’re going crazy, they say.” Her own voice sounded alien to her ears: high-pitched, and hollow.
Tara just looked at her for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Dawn stood awkwardly in the door, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Finally Tara shrugged slightly. “OK. Well, we’ll be back in a little bit.”
As they left, Willow realized they had never parted without a good-bye kiss before. She tried to ignore how bad that felt, much as she tried to ignore how bad it felt to lie to Tara.
But it’s just a little spell; something to keep them both safe…
Then why didn’t you admit it? This second thought sliced through her, cold and objective and all the more unsettling for its truthfulness. For a moment, she considered running after Tara and telling her the truth; making everything right.
And then a fluke streak of rebellion and righteous indignation overtook her. She’d only been trying to protect them, and Tara had acted as if she were selling crack to preschoolers. Tara hadn’t been fighting evil as long as she had. Maybe she hadn’t realized just how precarious everything really was. So yes--she’d used a protection spell.
And then the phone had rung, two hours later, and Tara was saying that Dawn was in the emergency room, getting her broken arm set in a cast. Listening to her partner’s shaken voice, Willow remembered the spell she had cast…Or rather, the spell she had been in the process of casting when Tara had turned to question her.
Had she chanted correctly? She quickly ran the mental tape in her mind, and felt herself go cold with the recollection. It was a Sumerian protection spell: Protect these whom I love most dear. Except, in her surprise--guilt?--at being overheard, she had failed to enunciate the plural; and so, she had asked for protection for the one she loved most dear…And that had been Tara. Dawn had been left vulnerable.
Later, as she sobbed her confession to Tara, Willow had felt as if she might choke on her desperation and her guilt.
“I just wanted to protect you both. It was a wolf moon, Tara, and…and I thought it couldn’t hurt to…to cover you somehow; just to be safe.”
“But you lied about it, Willow; you lied to me. I never thought I’d see the day when magic came between us.”
“I know, Baby; and I’m so sorry. God, I’m sorrier than I can tell you. And now Dawn’s been hurt because of me.”
Tara had turned to face her, her eyes blazing. “That wasn’t your fault, Willow. It wasn’t even a wolf that attacked us; it was your garden-variety vamp, and I was slow with the holy water. If I’d been quicker, it never could have grabbed Dawnie.” Tara’s voice was filled with pain and her own demons of regret. Finally, she took Willow’s hand and sighed. “Sweetie, I’m so tired, and I have an art history exam in the morning. Can we just go to sleep? We can talk about it tomorrow.”
But when the next day came, and Willow found Dawn huddled in her room crying, she felt the pull once more to take the pain away, to spare the teenager the trauma of that experience. And so she tried just once more--a quick spell to erase the memory of the night before, and replace it with the less terrifying “recollection” of breaking her arm in a freak tumble down the steps.
But she was casting from someplace far from centered. She had certainly cast under stressful conditions before, but she had never done so with guilt, sending her energy off in such unfocused fashion. She had never cast in this skulking, deceitful way, and the effects were almost predictable.
She had wanted to target only Dawn, figuring that she would explain her decision to Tara later that day. Tara might be a little upset, but surely she would understand that this was just to spare the teenager, who had already been through so much. But she was off-balance, and her energy flew out in too many directions, and when Tara called in a panic a few minutes later to say that she couldn’t remember the night before, Willow knew that she had grievously compounded her mistake.
She gathered all her energy, focused on her breathing, and managed to reverse the spell within a matter of moments. She didn’t allow herself the luxury of finding whether Tara would have recalled this second duplicity; she drove to campus and found her partner and told her the truth.
That night, for only the second time in their relationship, they slept apart. Tara had been so hurt and so stunned that she had stayed with a friend. Willow felt as if her heart had died, except that if it were dead, it wouldn’t ache so.
“Are you leaving me?” she whispered, each word carving its way out of her throat.
Tara looked at her, the blue eyes filled with tears. “Will, if you’re telling me that you will stop this, that you’ll let me in on the struggle, then no--I will never leave you. But the past 36 hours have been a nightmare, and if I stay here we'll talk all night and I’ll be an even bigger wreck in the morning. We will work this out; I promise you. But tonight--tonight I am exhausted and shaken and I don’t trust myself to talk without being harsh. And I don’t want to be harsh with you.” Her voice dropped to an exhausted whisper. "Please, Willow--just give me this night."
Sometime after midnight, Willow abandoned hope of sleep. She had apologized to Dawn, apologized to Anya who--for some reason--had also been affected by the memory spell, apologized to Tara’s pillow.
They spent the bulk of the next day talking. Willow finally let Tara in on the full extent of her fear that she would lose someone she loved; the thought that it might be Tara herself left her near panic.
“Baby, it just seems like we’ve been so lucky for so long. Look at the violence and destruction around us--how have we made it for five years without losing one of the group? I mean, we lost Ms. Calendar, and I know that tore Giles apart; it was hard enough for the rest of us. But we’ve never lost one of the Scoobies, not to a demon; and Tara, that just seems impossible! After everything we’ve done, all the creatures we’ve fought…I’m just so scared of losing someone, and I’m so afraid that our luck’s gonna run out.”
“But Sweetie, you can’t do it like this. You can’t control everything. Life has too many unknowns to it; I don’t think we’re supposed to have that much control over it.” Tara’s eyes were soft with love and understanding.
“OK, could you say anything more terrifying?” Willow said, biting her lip. “We’re fighting every kind of bad there is, and you want me to go Zen?”
Tara laughed--a low, delightful sound that let Willow breathe normally for the first time in days. “Willow, honey, I can’t really see you going Zen…Maybe you could just visit Zen from time to time.”
That episode had been the darkest point, and it had brought Willow back from her obsession with protecting everyone with the most powerful magicks known. She still worried, but she forced herself to talk to Tara about it. She also spent no small amount of time contemplating the fact that she had an ally now; a partner in every sense of the word. She had seen Tara as her mate for over a year, and certainly the magic had brought them together; they knew how powerfully they could cast together. But Willow thought more, now, about just how joined they were; how much she could depend on Tara.
I don’t have to be the smart one all the time. I don’t have to have everything figured out ahead of time. Tara can help me. I can help her. It seemed so simple, but it tilted something in Willow that let her sleep more easily than she had in months.
Now, all this time later, Tara was looking at her with those incredible eyes, eyes that told Willow she knew what she was afraid of.
“You think you did this?” she asked. “You think you messed up the protection spell somehow? Willow, we cast it together. We would have known if something had gone wrong.”
“I know,” Willow murmured. “It’s just that--Honey, Kyra’s such a gift and I love her so much and I wanna believe she was sent to us for some good reason. I don’t want to think that maybe she’s here because I messed up.”
Tara reached out and stroked her face, soft fingers warm against her skin. “Sweetie, you didn’t mess up. I’m scared too, Willow. I don’t know how she ended up here and why she’s ours and worst of all I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “That part scares me more than anything.” Then she swallowed, and lifted her head almost defiantly. “But I know that she is ours. And I say we keep researching and asking questions but most of all--we love her.”
Willow managed a grin as she offered herself up to Tara’s warm embrace. “That’s the easy part, Baby.”
*****
“She fears that she cast in error; that her desire to protect her loved ones, and the mistakes it wrought, has brought this about.” The voice was deep and resonant, and utterly feminine.
There was a brief pause, and then a near-identical voice commented, “Humans are bizarre creatures. Their mating alone perplexes me.”
A third voice, akin to the others but more authoritative, joined in. “Comprehension is not necessary. These humans are the ideal choice.” And then, in a somewhat lighter tone, she added, “But they are curious little things, are they not?”
*****
TO BE CONTINUED
With greater dispatch, I promise.
*****
Alcy 
Hey just finished reading 'Gods Served and Abandoned' and wanted to read this fic straight after so i could let you know how much of an amazing writer you are. There i finally get to say it after a couple of days of reading! That feels better
The sequel has gotten off to an interesting start, which by the way i had no doubts about, it leaves me on the edge of my seat every time. I can't wait to see what happens next.
! In Part 2 when the scoobies were discussing the possible reasons for the baby to be there, Xander and Anya cracked me up:
