AUTHORinfaery
DISTRIBUTION: Sure. Ask.
SUMMARY: A Tara-centric romp through the past, and future.
RATING: PG, So far >evil wiggling of eyebrows<.
SPOILERS: Anything is fair game.
DISCLAIMER: Absolutely nothing belongs to me, and the music bounces all over from The Cure, Tori, and SLeater-Kinney
Part 1
The dreamy guitars and swirling melody filled the room as Tara stared at the ceiling. “If only I’d found the right word, I wouldn’t be breaking apart all my pictures of you,” Robert Smith crooned. Sighing, Tara blinked away the tears hanging on the edge of her eyes. This little ritual of filling the emptiness of her room with music and living out of her mind, through memories and daydreams, was consuming more and more of her free time lately.
A habit developing during the awkward years of high school, she would forever associate it with her fumbling journey into adulthood. It gave her space, from the world and even to some extent her own thoughts. The constant internal questioning and analyzing took a toll on her emotions until all she could do was lie back and let the music wash over her, awaiting the calming of her head when images and reminiscences emerged.
In the semi-darkness of the room, the CD player clicked and spun. A new song, this one presenting a rhythmic piano melody, pushed new images forward. “Thought that was a good solution: Hanging with the raisin girls.” Flashes of high school came. Perfect girls with dagger eyes gossiping around every corner. An awkward teenaged self trying to slip past as inconspicuously as possible.
Tara rolled over onto her side, glancing at the stereo. “They must have paid her a nice price. She’s putting on her string bean love.” Will loves this song. Loved this song. Loves. “This is not real, this is not really happening. You bet your life it is! You bet your li-” She punched the fast forward button on the remote and rolled back to her previous position, fixing her eyes on the ceiling again as the sinister bluesy guitar riffs chased the silence away.
The visions of a certain red head recede into the background slightly as Tara concentrated on the song. She wanted desperately to think of anything other than Willow. Now she’s invaded this too, Tara grimaced internally. This is mine. This is me. Just me. “Yours.” The familiar feelings of regret, sadness, and anger with a splash of disgust permeated her.
Since leaving the Summers’ house, Tara had grown accustomed to this reoccurring bundle of emotions. The break-up cocktail she tried to joke with herself. Out of all of the emotions though it was the anger that Tara dwelt on. She was still angry at Willow, still angry at herself, still angry at the whole situations. She had thought she was fine, having moved past the rage that had swept through her when Xander accidentally broke Willow’s disastrous forget spell. The idea of her lover, the one person who lived and breathed the closest to her heart and mind would continue to disregard her wishes, her trust, because it was easier. Easier to fix me. Easier to put everyone in danger. Tara remember the fury and heartbreak swirling inside of her so violently that burning tears teemed in her eyes, mercifully unfocusing the world.
But she had thought, later as she moved silently around their room filling boxes, that her anger had evaporated, that the sadness rooting at the base of her spine, making her back ache, was all that was left. She thought her rage drowned in the bile that rose in her throat from the disgust for herself at the remembrance of the intoxicating lust pumping through her body as Willow’s warm form pressed her down into the rough ground in the sewer moments before the spell’s veil on her mind was lifted.
Now however Tara realized that is wasn’t the self-loathing that had given her the strength to carry box after box down to the Summers’ porch. Tara recognized that it wasn’t her sadness that made her deaf and dumb to Willow’s teary pleas as she separated and packed her possessions. No, in plain and simple true it was her anger, her rage, her fury.
It was her anger that had frozen her heart, numbing her as a sobbing Willow disappeared into another part of the house; her anger that didn’t let her chase the wounded Dawn to try and explain. Tara continued to breathe and move, to exist due to her anger, the feared unfamiliar emotion.
But the time away was good,…Until…Tara’s eyes narrowed as she remember the morning. Seeing Willow, so beautiful, so simply Willow, had make Tara nervous, about fifty different emotions ready to jump the gun, causing her speech to dissolve into a stutter.
Then the heartbreak began as she focused on the girl standing next to Willow. “Amy! Amy the rat?” Relief and confusion! Crushing devastation and heartbreak back in line, please.
“And Willow! She's a freaking amazing witch now. I couldn't even keep up with her last night.” Just like that, a simple statement, and Tara felt her rage returning with homicidal velocity. Two choices: walk away or explode. And I walked away, she mused, vaguely recalling without a word stomping past a confused-looking Buffy.
Her anger kept resurfacing and it worried her. Tara could count the times she had been truly, blindly, passionately angry before all of this on one hand. How can I feel so damned empty and sad and angry and confused all at once? It didn’t make sense. But then again when does anything make sense?
“I won’t have it in my house!”
“She deserves to know her heritage!”
“Heritage?!? The same ‘heritage’ that’s brought nothing but trouble and chaos under our roof,…” The irate sounds of her parents’ argument drifted up the stairs. Tara cringed inside. The same fight as always escalated with the passage of each day. It didn’t make sense. Tara has never seen her mother use magic for anything other than helping others. But the sight of any magical accouterments would send her father into a rage.
Trying to drown out the arguing, she looked back down at her math homework. The numbers faded before her eyes as her attention strayed to the commotion downstairs.
“No more magic. I forbid it! And I forbid you to teach Tara anymore of that nonsense!”
“Nonsense!!! That same ‘nonsense’ has been in my family since before,…” her mother’s words became unintelligible as Tara, giving up on her homework, pushed her hands through her long blonde hair, pressing her palms momentarily to the sides of her head. Her eyes darted around her room. Ah, man, she mentally kicked herself for leaving her schoolbag downstairs.
Quickly weighing the value of retrieving her bag containing her precious walkman versus braving the minefield of familial strife, Tara rose quietly from her desk and crept out of her room. Stopping at the top of the stairs to judge the situation again, Tara bent and craned her neck, finally catching an oblique view of her parents.
“It’s not a healthy influence for the girl!”
“It was a perfectly healthy influence for me as a child,” her mother retorted taking a shaky step forward.
“Think about her future! Where this could lead her! How can you call yourself a loving mother!” Tara slowly inched down the stairs.
“I am thinking about her future, you pompous bastard! And if you can’t see that, then,…well,” her mother flustered, turned and grabbed her purse. Tara froze as her mother attempted to push past her father.
Swiftly reaching out, he grabbed her mother’s wrist and roughly yanked her back to him. “Don’t dare walk away from me!” From her perch Tara could feel the anger vibrating in her father’s voice.
Her mother paused taking a deep calming breath. “I need to go to the market before dinner,” she said through a clenched jaw. After a long moment, he released her. Tara watched her father stand there a moment the slamming of the front door finally bring him back to life as he sank onto the sofa, resting his head in his hands.
Taking a shallow breath, Tara slowly slid on the stairs. Reaching the final stair, she misstepped and the baseboard let out a stifled moan. She froze as her father’s head snapped up, her own blue eyes reflected back at her with a whirlwind of emotions as he focused on her.
“Tara!” he roared, standing up.
“Y-y-yes, sir?”
“Have you finished your homework yet?” the question was laced with barbed wire.
“N-n-no, sir. I n-n-need a book from, from my bag.”
He eyed her, his face a ruddy unreadable mask, and stood. Rooted to her stop, Tara watched as her father grabbed her schoolbag, walked over, and presented it to her. Her eyes quickly darted between his ominous enigmatic face and her schoolbag. She carefully reached out and grabbed it. His blue eyes burning into her as his fist remained clenched over the material. Tara felt fear and intimidation drying up her throat as she stood perfectly still, too petrified of the possibility of the next few moments.
“Be a good girl and finish by the time your mother gets back so you can help her with dinner,” her father sighed finally, releasing the bag, the flush fading from his face.
“Y-y-yes, sir,” she uttered quietly and quickly retreated up the stairs to the haven of homework and the solace of her walkman.
“It’s fine, when it’s all mine. It’s on my wall, it’s in my head. Memorize it ‘till I’m dead. It’s yours, now I’m so bored,” the stereo whispered into the mid morning light before bursting into a flurry of refined female rock fury.
Tara jolted awake at the sound of crashing cymbals and sonic guitars. Rubbing her eyes and glancing at the clock, she sighed to discover not only was it nearly 10:45 but that she had fallen asleep fully clothed, again. Rolling out of bed, Tara shut off the stereo and sought out the comforting warmth of a shower.
Just then the phone erupted in a high pitched electronic ring, further grinding Tara’s nerves. Pausing, she answered.
“Uh, Tara?”
“Hey, Buffy,” her voice warmed. “How are you?”
“Fine, fine. Um, listen, some,…stuff happened last night,…”