By January
-- It's in the trees!
It's coming! --Willow thrashed and wound about the music pulsing through the camp. She was never one to dance -- without Buffy's finesse, without Xander's irreverence -- but as the school ended, as they reflected on the mayor's ascension, as another hard earned victory became just another notch on her bed post, her hips and her shoulders and her burnt hair and her calloused fingers chased every which way after these siren songs somebody kept slipping into the stereo.
"Babe," He kissed her ear, and she tucked herself back into his embrace, letting her amazon snarl dissolve. "Kitten, salve, pulcherimma puella mei." She whimpered slightly and started to cave into his arms, when his fingers tickled against her damp stomach. She couldn't help it; she surged up to meet his touch, to drive it down. She was daring and hungry in the firelight, impulsive and heedless prancing around in the flotsam and the jetsam on the spidery June night under the spidery June half- moon with her spidery June mate with all of her spidery June friends. There were about fifty of them, too scared to stop and fully realize what had just happened. Even how they had all gotten outside, when they had tossed sleeping bags in the trunk and squirmed through a forty five minute car ride, why she and Oz with Giles and Buffy and Devon and Xander and Larry and anonymous, ashy faces were out in the wood like angry dryads, she didn't know. Only one thing she did know: it was all over. Now, they were safe. Even outside, they were safe. Nothing supernatural would touch the plump young things redolent with violent mystical death. It smelled sort of like honey or shoe polish to Willow, and it scared the hell out of a gang of eight vampires they had met stumbling away from school. So they were all safe, safe as houses, dancing hot, fast, and out of their minds under the stars.
Mmm... Catharsis?
No, not really.
The music pulsed through her, and her thoughts hammered along to the beat. All the spiders and the fire are theirs now; it's over, it's over, it's over. Whoever had to die, died. The Big Old EvilBad was dead, dead, dead. A good chunk of her senior class, dead. Dead, dead, dead -- if she said it over and over again 'dead' started to lose its meaning. Then she'd look around and see some sad kid who didn't understand what the fuck had happened and would give her a look of comfort like she, Willow, were that poor victim and then she'd have to throw herself back at her mindless, exhausting dancing. But this time, she let Oz lead her away. She wondered how he could stand the smell: he was one of those grade-A wierdos, too. Those fresh vamps had been moaning and spasming and didn't seem to have any idea what was going on. Angel'd jetted. Oz'd been sort of twitchy all night, but he'd hung around.
Ah yes, gee fucking whiz. He loves me. Love, love, love. Dead, dead, dead.
In his arms, her emotions out of habit though they were safe, and she sobbed as it all came rolling back. Enter the beloved boy, exit the dike, and fuck yeah, here it comes. Gods, no, not again; if she hadn't gotten caught, the real magic wouldn't have been squandered and all these kids wouldn't be here half dead or all dead or wishing they were dead or wishing she were dead for making them have to go through all this stupid stuff.
Oh, she wished it had been different. She bit down on her lip but couldn't break the skin, though she felt blood coming up through her grip on his shoulders. Nonetheless he caressed her hair, and she tried to melt into him -- yeah, Buffy'd told her how he'd smashed the kettle they'd needed to bibbity bobbity boop the spiders. Thanks to him, they couldn't destroy the mayor's spiders -- but he wouldn't have done that if she hadn't been distracted by the books, so used to it always turning out all right. As they lurch out of the clearing, she ground her teeth and buried her face into his shoulder -- she just couldn't look back to the camp and say that this was all right.
Her thoughts started to fade into milky-white pastels as she curled up like a snail in the strange wolfish rumble from under the thin marble of his chest. But the salt of their tears stung, and as they nestled down into a bed of moss and flower petals graciously disintegrating from this world, inside and out all Willow could do was collapse into Oz's arms.
-- When I was a child:
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be
Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street,
And of what was following me... --In lands far away and close away, black lambs admire them coats, and mother cobras sing lullabies to their thousand filmy babies.
-- Now hounds of love are hunting --
Willow Anne Rosenburg is very small, and the world is very dark, wet, and smells like bits of dead thing too young to be sad about their whole state of affairs. It's very soft, and Willow is very happy.
As happy as she is, a feeling is swelling up inside her. It's uninvited, exciting, and a little frightening. She is smiles all over, even though it hurts.
Roots flap out, and a stem twists out of the seedling in due time. Not much notices another green stalk slips into the landscape, but she feels self righteous, like a self-righteous mermaid defiantly breaking through the salty waves to steal in the sun.
Out there, the wind stings color into her petals; often she lets the rain cloak her own tears. Much time goes by. The sun is a friend, and the moon is a mentor. Scientists disagree; they have decided the sun gives food the tree and the moon does little more than cast pretty shadows. That's on the authority of a man who doesn't even know his polite fifteen year old got to third base in a Camaro last Tuesday and a woman whose straight-A student who has enough pot to feed Somalia for a year in the left sock drawer.
Everyone here shimmers with magic and ends up living and loving frantically. Who knows when the world could be blinked away? There are no scientists here.
Willow feels herself growing into a strange, stalwart form. She has a strong trunk, browned flowers, and a wide view. It's a little distant and a little fuzzy, but ach, she is now part of this land.
She hears a horse galloping and when it gets close, she sees it is red. It has red fur, red shoes, and red roses woven into its tail and mane. It's name is Heart. Willow just knows this. The baying of the hounds flushes the rider's face, and small, auburn mammal circling behind her neck hums with excitement. They are a little sad, the Willow-tree can feel, but still exalted and breathless. The horse has stopped to drink from a river that ends the forest. The two creatures slide down its back. The little one, the little amber fox, brushes his downy tale along her chin coyly and skips up on to her shoulders as she giggles. She smiles to the sun, and they lean against the torso of their horse, who has joined them sitting in the grass. The horse and the girl look at the clouds, and Willow sees brambles are stuck in the flanks of the mare and the arms of the girl. The fox drapes across them. He is quietly pawing through the mine fields, picking off the tiny thorns and licking clean and closing the wounds. Soft, healthy-white flesh peeks through the scars and scabs fresh and old on the girl's skin. Even the horse looks radiant, though it has suffered beneath the rider, some eighteen years of her whims, her obsessions, and her dependencies. Now the horse purrs under the ministrations of the little fox, nuzzling it. The hounds have encircled them. It's a not-small bit of ineffable luck the girl, her Heart, and the little red headed stranger are banded into fulfillment, happiness, and hope. Yes, the hounds have trapped them -- they can't escape, and they don't want to.
Willow sees the rider is herself, possibly.
There is another tree in the forest (ha! there is always another tree in the forest, another fish in the sea, and another cheap way to hurt an aching heart), and it is very beautiful and old. That tree has been there for as long as the rider could remember. Once, when the rider was little, she climbed up in the branches. She fancied she could see far away lands that couldn't hurt her because she was with this tree. She imagining she was most becoming with the light dappling through the emerald leaves. She was light headed and cloyingly ecstatic. But in a huff she had skipped down off the tree when a playful branch had caught her skirt and torn it.
She scampered away that day, but as years went by, she crackled with a fear of all the many creatures in this forest in which she lived and many in lands over the hilltops and beyond lazy river. She stayed away from them, mostly. The birds loved to swoop down and muss her hair; the shadowed mammals creeped. She never really saw them clearly; would they claw her to pieces, eat through her, and leave her as nothing? She locked hands with the sun and the moon, but nonetheless she felt she needed the perpetual milling of a hapless, illusioned romance with her tree. They had a back handed friendship that was genuine, in all of its positive and negative nuances, but the girl wove herself into a trance of only the best of it. Neither the tree nor the girl had much of anyone else, so they lived cog to cog, through occasional new friends to their lonely bevy and occasional other crushes that would tightly ricochet between then. The sun brought them a new season, especially for the girl. The sun showed her new faces of her familiar world; they had a more relentless relationship. Neither felt the need to deny the full frequency of how they felt; in her friendship with the sun the girl got angry, jealous, scared and accepting those feelings she found ambitions, pride, and happiness. There were change in the air and how she wore her hair. The heat and light of the sun stirred the forest and all its occupants.
Her horse was fond of the sun's warmth, and the dogs that roam glistened classically as they pounded down after the great, old owl and pinned it down until the sun rose. The girl felt the vicarious thrill as her friend and the decadent, dangerous bird were pushed wildly into love. With her tree, it was more of an underlying nausea as she spiralled into him, spinning and speeding with little control. There were no dogs -- she was just stuck in the mad, ineffable orbit.
The iron obsession with the tree had long ago encircled around the girl like ivy and blossomed inside the girl like poison-tipped chrysanthemums. She took her picnics to the snug roots that she would pretend were hugging her as she nestled in with her meals of big books the wise moon lent her. She wouldn't admit that she hoped the tree would be looking over her shoulder and be struck by her intelligence, her kindness, and her profile and pluck her from this world and let her live forever in his beautiful, beautiful branches. She diligently collected the windfall of his sea of branches; she didn't think he ever noticed. She hoarded the juicy fruit he lazily dropped and ate it laboriously, squatting out of his line of vision. Certain seeds she had kept close to her heart; seeds she admired when the storms were too violent to go see him, seeds she sucked on when she tossed in her bed alone, seeds whose weight she could not imagine traveling without. She craved the fairy tale of consuming love and frantic romance that ate at the dogs like fleas. There was so much inside her she wanted validated. She wanted to be worthy of the world. She wanted nothing more than to climb up into his limbs and be good enough and loved enough, but somehow the branches were too high and she was too scared to ask him to lower them for her. In the recesses of her mind, she wondered if he even could.
Continues