More...here it is. Thanks for the reminder, singgirl and WiccansIllusion, and thanks for reading, Rally!
Title: Terra Firma Chapter 13: The Opener of Doors.
Author: Tulipp. Email:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Yes, please. Distribution: Please let me know.
Spoilers: Everything.
Rating: R.
Pairing: W/T.
Summary: Finally, finally, the end of a very long day.
Disclaimer: All characters and various plot events that set up this story were created by Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, etc, but they belong to the fans. No money changing hands here.
Acknowledgments: Thanks, Ruby: your really insightful ideas will show up in the next chapter. And to Ruth, who read so well and helped so much. And to J: Vermont, here we come!
Terra Firma
Chapter 13: The Opener of Doors
Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks—with a whisper,
So ope the doors, O Soul!
Tenderly! be not impatient!
(Strong is your hold, O mortal flesh!
Strong is your hold, O love!)
--Walt Whitman, “Last Invocation”
“Are you tired?” Willow unfastened Tara’s shirt slowly, one button at a time. Tara was watching her, the blue eyes never leaving her face. They warmed Willow. It felt like every hour that passed took some of the chill away.
“Tara, we cast a spell,” Willow said, her eyebrows lifting. She eased the shirt off Tara’s shoulders. It felt heavy in her hands. Fatigue was pulling at her fingers, echoing through her chest.
“We did,” Tara agreed. Willow reached behind Tara’s back and unclasped her bra. Tara held her arms out from her sides, and Willow pulled the bra off and let it drop to the floor. “Did it remind you?”
Willow thought about that as she unzipped Tara’s pants and bent to slide them and the underwear beneath over her hips. Tara put a hand on her shoulder to steady herself as she lifted first one foot and then the other; Willow could feel the fingers wrapping over her shoulder bone.
“It reminded me of everything,” she said, finally. She tossed the clothes aside and stood. “It reminded me of how it used to be, in the beginning. Before Rack and Osiris and Glory and…before everything but you.”
“Me, too,” Tara said softly.
Willow undressed in silence, feeling Tara’s eyes on her skin, on her nakedness. Those eyes were enough to raise a breath of arousal in her, to make her feel hot with wanting. She had been wanting always, but now she had what she wanted. It stood in front of her. It lingered in her blood. It was magick. It was Tara. It was….
“Glory,” she said finally. “Did she do this to us?” She meant more; she meant everything, but she saw that Tara understood.
“I think she married us,” Tara smiled, and Willow’s breath came out in a half-giggle before she could stop it, and then she stiffened.
“Willow,” Tara said softly, reaching for her arms, searching her eyes. “It’s okay to laugh. We used to joke about things, even the scary things, remember? Don’t you remember how it used to be? We used to joke, and laugh, and sometimes, even when things were very dark, it made it better.”
“I remember it used to be easier for us,” Willow said. Her hands clutched at Tara’s shoulder blades, pulled her in.
Tara smiled into the dark. “It really wasn’t, you know,” she said quietly. “It was always hard. Oz and Adam and my family and Joyce dying and Buffy and Glory and,” she rubbed her hands over Willow’s back. “And the problems with the magick were always there, Willow.”
“Well, it was easier. Not easy street maybe, but easier. I understood the rules.” Willow pressed her face against Tara’s shoulder and inhaled the faint and milky scent of sweat. “But it doesn’t matter, anyway,” she murmured. “We don’t get easy anymore.”
Tara gripped the back of Willow’s neck, pressing down so that Willow had to look at her, had to lift her face to her. “You get that, Willow,” she said, and her voice was fierce, almost angry. “ We get that. We live on the edge of dark things, on the Hellmouth, and we choose that, and bad things happen. But we get to be alive, and we get to love each other, and I think sometimes,” Tara’s voice shook, “ sometimes we get easy.”
“I feel like….” Willow sighed, and Tara looked at the space between her slightly open lips; when Willow spoke again, she heard her voice come out tiny and far away. “I feel like…like I slammed the door on the easy stuff a long time ago, on all of it, and we can never get it open again.”
Willow shook her head, but Tara’s hands moved up to her face, and her thumbs brushed Willow’s ears, and she leaned in to kiss her. Willow felt the impression of Tara’s soft lips against eyelids and cheeks and lips.
“That door might have been shut, sweetheart, but it isn’t locked. It’s never locked. We’ll get it open again. But first,” hands slid down to grasp Willow’s bare hips, “first, we need to sleep.”
****
“Two sacked out and only slightly Glorified witches,” Buffy announced, coming back into the dining room, where Giles had carried the tea tray.
“Is that like ‘doing spells’?” Dawn asked brightly. She liked hearing Buffy say “witches” again. It felt so normal. Like before. Well, no one had ever really said “witch” that much, but she was pretty sure they’d all thought it a lot. She knew she had.
“Dawn!” Buffy didn’t try to hide her smile. “They’re sleeping. At least, I think they’re sleeping.” She glanced at Giles. “I listened at the door,” she admitted. Giles’ lips turned up slightly as he poured out the tea, adding a splash of whiskey to one of the cups. Buffy just looked at him, and he dribbled a little whiskey into a second cup.
“Giles,” Buffy said soberly. Dawn sat down and pulled the cup of just tea toward her.
“I know, Buffy,” he said, sighing. “I should have said something sooner, but I, I had hoped to have something more, more definitive before I told you….”
“And me,” Dawn interrupted, scowling. “Hello? I’m the one who’s the key.”
Giles reached out and touched her wrist. “Of course. And you, Dawn.”
“So spill,” Buffy said, sinking into a chair. She looked at Giles expectantly.
He sighed, frowned into his cup. He sipped at the hot, laced tea, and his face relaxed a little bit. “In the winter, I did some research at Council Headquarters. Now, there wasn’t a great deal of information,” he added hurriedly, holding up a hand as if to ward off questions. “But I did find one text, a very old Tnatum manuscript, that mentioned the key.” He sipped his tea again.
“Giles, I’m about up to here with the cryptic,” Buffy said, and her voice held a note of warning.
“Professor Berlin was right,” Giles said. “Glory…wherever she is…can no longer use the key. No one can, really, except the Key itself. Herself,” he said apologetically, nodding at Dawn. “But the Key, well, if certain conditions are met, if certain events take place in a particular order—and the manuscript did not actually say what those events were—then the Key comes of age, if you will. She becomes a power in her own right.”
Dawn glanced at Buffy, whose brow furrowed. “What kind of power?” Dawn realized that her pulse was racing.
“Well, it’s rather simple, I suppose,” Giles answered, but his brow furrowed. “The power to…to open doors.”
“Okay,” Buffy said, “but what does that mean? What does it mean for Dawn? What kind of doors are we talking about here?”
Dawn looked at Giles with wide eyes. She had been about to ask the same question. “Car doors, maybe?” she asked hopefully. “Cause, like, Janice and I could really use some wheels, you know?” She raised her eyebrows at Buffy, who glared back.
“Dimensional portals?” Buffy continued, pushing her teacup away. “Opening the doors between realities?”
“Well, you see,” Giles said slowly. “The manuscript was rather unclear on that point. No one ever expected the Key to become human. If she had been a ball of energy, then we might have understood more, but what it means for the key to be human, human and in this reality….well, we simply don’t have any road maps for this.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Dawn felt the hum in the back of her mind again, the hum she had felt when Doc had spoken to her. A thief, he’d called her, and she didn’t think he’d been talking about shoplifting.
“That man,” Dawn said slowly. “He said something to me. He said…he said I hijacked his resurrection.”
Giles pulled off his glasses. “Dawn, I’m not sure we can trust everything the Professor said. I know that better than anyone. However, it might be useful to start with the conditions. Did anyone….”
Buffy pulled a folded piece of paper from her back pocket. “I wrote it down.”
“Buffy,” Giles beamed. “How very resourceful. I’m proud of you.”
“And to think they wouldn’t let me go back to college,” Buffy said dryly. “Okay, listen: ‘In killing with no weapon, in seeing a wish undone, in forgiving its greatest threat, the key is met.’ And they have to happen in that order?” Giles tilted his head in a nod.
Dawn thought. “Well,” she said doubtfully, “I killed those weird zombie things in that cave.”
“Yeah, but you had a sword,” Buffy pointed out. “Weapon?”
“Oh, yeah.” Dawn frowned. She tried to remember. She’d squashed a lot of bugs, but that probably didn’t count. “Wait,” she said suddenly. “Halloween. I had a…a pencil in my pocket, and Tad….” Her voice trailed off, but Buffy reached over and squeezed her hand.
“That’s one,” Buffy said matter-of-factly. “Oh, and my birthday party. You wished, and Anya got Halfrek to undo it. That’s two. Hey, this is easy.”
Giles looked from one sister to the other. “What….”
“Long story,” Buffy said under her breath. She smiled. “Okay, just one left, right? ‘In forgiving its greatest threat,’” she read again. She pursed her lips.
“Well, it can’t be Glory,” Giles said. “That happened too early. Greatest threat.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“Should we be worried?” Buffy asked quietly.
“Maybe it’s….” Dawn started to say, but then she heard the front door open, and she heard two pairs of footsteps in the hall—one light and quick, the other heavier—and she turned her head to see Xander and Anya, both breathing hard. Anya dropped a paper shopping bag to the floor and put a hand to her chest, panting.
Dawn stared at the bag, incredulous. “You went shopping?”
“Clothes,” Anya wheezed. “For Tara. But wait, wait, we went back to the Magic Box,” she started to explain, but Xander’s voice overlapped hers, urgent and anxious. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He touched the scars on his face.
“Are they okay?” he asked, and to Dawn his eyes looked haunted. Wild with regret. The scars stood out bright red against his sallow skin; Xander touched them again. “Is Willow okay?”
****
Tara wanted to sleep.
It was one of the first gifts Willow had ever given her, the peace of a restful night. Tara hadn’t often slept deeply in her life before Willow. At home, even before her mother had died, she had often woken up at night, startled into wakefulness by the creak of a foot on the floorboards outside her room, by the violent sweaty smells of men. And her first year at college, she had been watchful still, afraid always that they would come find her, that they would burst in at night to take her home. Tara had always rested with one ear open. Just in case.
Sleep in a lover’s arms, sleep that lasted all night and ended with another woman’s warm breath on your face in the morning—Willow had given her that. And she wanted it right now, wanted it desperately, to rest and be enfolded and see the end of this long, long day.
But she wanted it for Willow more. The previous night, in some gray hour before dawn, Willow had jerked upright in bed, clawing at the covers and keening, and Tara had held her tight and tried to smooth away the nightmares with her touch. It had terrified her, broken her heart, to see the naked pain that attacked before Willow realized that Tara was there.
Tonight there would be no nightmares.
Tonight Tara was keeping a vigil. Tonight, she would watch over Willow, hold her in her arms, and at the first sign of a tremble or a twitch, she would wake Willow up. She could see that her lover had closed down over the past months—months that to Tara felt like little more than days—and she had a vision of opening her again. Tonight, Tara would smooth Willow back against the pillows, would press her knees apart and open her with her fingers and her damp skin. Tara’s tongue would be the key that unlocked her, and it would turn on the lights in all of Willow’s dark rooms.
And so Tara was awake, waiting.
She was holding Willow, who slept. And she was thinking. About Willow. About wanting. About Glory. Had Glory married them? Tara had only meant it as a joke, wanting to see a smile on Willow’s lips, wanting to see something other than the abject relief that had adorned Willow’s face all day. But she wondered now. Would it be more true to say that Glory had divorced them? Glory was selfish; Glory was self, and if she had been in them all this time, if she had enhanced them as the professor had said, then had she enhanced their separateness? Had she teased at the parts of them that wanted distance, that wanted to fight against dependence and stand alone?
Tara didn’t know how to think about Glory. She had been right to leave Willow when she did, she knew that, but was it Glory who had given her the strength to pack that box and walk away? Was it Glory who had given her the resolve to stay away for so long? Those months alone had been brutal and lonely, harder than hard, but she had grown stronger during them; she knew that. She had become more confident. She felt taller. She rarely stuttered anymore. Was that Glory?
And if Glory had, in some small way, done this to her—done this for her—then what about Willow? Was it Glory who had tickled Willow’s magickal bones, who had encouraged her to become more and more dependent on the magick? Was it Glory’s influence that had compelled Willow to cast the tabula rasa spell on her?
Tara sighed and wrapped an arm more tightly around Willow’s back, pressed her fingers more firmly on the back of Willow’s head, which was folded into her chest. She wanted so much to blame it all on Glory, to absolve Willow for violating her and to absolve herself for leaving. But it couldn’t be that easy. Could it?
No. It had never been that easy.
She had been afraid of Willow. And she had been afraid of Willow’s wanting. And maybe…it didn’t change Willow’s choices…but maybe she had confused the wanting with the magick.
Maybe, in that cloud that had settled on them after Buffy died, that cloud that had lingered after Buffy’s resurrection, she had forgotten to see Willow, her Willow. Maybe she had let her vision of a dark and terrible Willow haunt her, and she hadn’t seen that it wasn’t true yet, that vision. She hadn’t seen that the Willow who tried so hard to be strong, to risk herself with dark magicks in order to protect them all, was still the same Willow. The Willow who needed. The Willow who wanted.
That wanting had scared her, at times, and it had seemed easier to call the wanting “magick.” To fear that the magick might consume her, might consume Willow, might consume them both. Burn them alive.
But they were alive. She was alive. And maybe it was the wanting, the endless emerald fire of Willow’s wanting, that had brought her back to life. She couldn’t fear that anymore. She couldn’t fear Willow anymore. Dark magicks had burned Willow to the ground, but the wanting was still there, smoldering.
It had always been there between them, a wanting that was breathless and deep. It hadn’t stopped. Magick couldn’t stop it. Death couldn’t stop it. And Tara didn’t want to stop it. Not anymore. She kissed Willow’s hair fiercely. Not ever again.
Willow, curled into Tara’s body like an infant, curved against her like a lover, slept.
****
Tara felt the nightmare coming. She felt Willow’s breathing change, felt Willow’s calves tense, sensed the small sound that started in Willow’s stomach and threatened to rise. She eased Willow onto her back and leaned over her, ran a hand through the fine red hair and down the pale shoulder.
“Willow,” she whispered, pressing the shoulder with her hand. She tensed, ready to chase the ghost of herself from Willow’s dreams. And then, a little louder: “Willow, love, wake up.”
It was easy, after all; Willow inhaled once, opened her eyes, and looked directly into Tara’s face, and there wasn’t time for fear or confusion. Willow met Tara’s gaze with her eyes, met Tara’s grazing fingers with the skin of her shoulder.
“You know me so deep,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep. The words took Tara back.
Her first vision of Willow. The first spell. Magick had, for them, always been erotic. But it was more than that. It had always let them know each other, let them open up doors in each other. The first time, the very first time, she had looked at Willow’s hand, palm tight against hers, and she had looked at Willow’s face, bewildered and winded. And she had heard, or felt, or imagined the words echoing in her mind. You know me. She had said them, or Willow had said them. It didn’t matter. They had been said; they crackled in the skin between them.
Like they crackled now.
Tara looked into those green eyes, and she felt Willow’s breath quicken, and she felt Willow’s skin heat beneath hers, and she couldn’t believe that three months had passed without this. She wanted to fill that white fissure in her mind, that empty pocket outside of time and space, to fill it with Willow. She longed for Willow to fill it with her fingers and her knowing and the great thrust of her wanting.
She knew Willow wanted that, too. She knew it as Willow leaned up and kissed her. The kiss was greedy; it chewed at her lips and pressed into her mouth. It lapped at her teeth and circled her tongue and made her hungry. It swallowed her throat and slid down, down. It consumed her.
Had Tara ever felt, had she ever been so wanted? Had Willow’s hands ever clutched her hips so cravenly, slid up her sides so insistently? Had Willow ever licked at the sweat between her breasts with such craving? Had they ever inked fingerprints of such deep lust onto Tara’s skin?
Now, Willow’s ravenous hands trailed down, and Tara bent one knee and pulled her leg up toward her shoulder. She wanted to expose herself to Willow, to open herself. Willow twisted around, then, flipping Tara onto her back, pressing against the back of Tara’s thigh, pressing the knee up.
Tara felt the drum of her own pulse in her neck and the drum of Willow’s pulse on her thighs, and when Willow’s fingers curled into her, knowing and hungry, she gasped wetly. Willow’s skin stuck to hers, Willow’s red hair fell over her face, and as Tara’s vision blurred with need, Willow’s fingers pressed and pulsed deep. And when Tara lost her breath, Willow gave it back to her with her lips and her tongue, and it tasted hot, like wanting. She lay rigid for a moment, feeling the sweat on the back of her thigh with one hand and the damp of Willow’s neck with the other, and Willow’s name rose up through her nerves and onto her tongue. And Willow’s lips held it there.
They lay quietly for a moment, both panting. Willow trailed her wet fingers across Tara’s lips and then her own. Tara watched Willow press her fingers into her mouth, tasting her, and desire shuddered through her. She wanted to open all the doors between them.
Tara pushed Willow up onto her knees and slid down. She lifted her face for a moment to the hollow of Willow’s hip, where she breathed deeply in, breathed in the angle of the bone and the white of the skin and the last clinging shred of sleep and the sharp scent of want. Willow’s hands grasped at her shoulders and then twisted into her hair.
She lifted her head to the flaming place between Willow’s thighs and tasted the salt of shell-pink, the rose-smooth of wet, the pulse of red under her tongue. She knew that her lips were touching real body parts, that her fingers were gripping real skin, and she knew somewhere that these parts had names, and she wanted to think them as she touched them, to name them, but she only felt them now, felt them translated into color and sense: Hot. Thirst. Red. Swell.
Willow.
And she felt Willow’s thighs tauten on either side of her face, and she pulled down on Willow’s hip with one hand and pressed up with her other, until her fingers were surrounded by Willow, until she was inside Willow. And she felt the ravenous yawn that roared up through Willow’s legs and trembled her own cheeks and shook them both so deeply that Willow could only whisper her name: Tara.
It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough.
Feeling Willow’s head rising and falling on her heaving chest, feeling the gasp of Willow’s breath under her own hands, Tara felt that she could never get enough of this woman: her lover, her witch, her Willow. She felt the wanting that breezed up again in Willow and ended in herself. A gust of wanting that reached inside her like fingers, that lived on her tongue, that beat back all the last closed doors between them.
“You open me, Willow,” she said thickly. And she reached for her again.
To be continued in Chapter 14, “Sore.”
Edited by: Tulipp at: 10/12/02 12:28:48 pm
- just kidding. well i love Willow and Tara, isn't that enough?
, you know? and ... i could go on 
but then you'd just hate me more and maybe forbid me to read your fic or to harass you or to let B stalk you ...
not even you, what did i do not to deserve it? was it the heavy harassing, the stalking, me? 
or are you just scared of what B might do to you if you actually did?
why didn't you say so? i'll be even more straightforward or explicit (forget the straight..thing) in the future 
