Barren Ground

They've cleared all her things out of our room. Tara's things, I mean. The ones she brought back here when nothing was going to keep us apart ever, ever again.

I guess they did it because they didn't want me to hurt anymore. They're thoughtful that way, all of them. Half of me wishes they hadn't bothered. Or do I mean, hadn't presumed?

Actually, let's make that more than half. They should have damn well left her stuff alone. With all my other options cut off so completely, don't they see how comforting it might be to just lie here and pretend? To surround myself with these soft red sheets that still, faintly, carry the scent of her and, without turning the lights on, just look around me at the pictures she brought here, at her earrings and lipsticks and bottles of moisturizer spread out across the dresser, at her clothes hanging side-by-side with mine behind the open closet doors?

If I still had her belongings around me, then I could pretend that she's just...well, let's say just downstairs making some pancakes, or studying at the dining room table, or maybe even out of the house for a little bit, attending an early class or picking up a few supplies from The Magic Box. She could be doing any of those things, couldn't she? I mean, it's not impossible.

What's impossible is the big, bad reality of life: to know that Tara, my Tara, is really lying alone in some cold metal drawer, all torn up inside and with nothing but one of those flimsy papery sheets to cover her sweet, soft, vulnerable body. She was always so warm, that's what I can't make myself forget. So warm, but not anymore. Now she's just lying there waiting. Not for me, all-powerful mega-witch Willow, to come rescue her, bring her back from the grave, hugs and kisses all around. No, she's waiting to be planted under a pile of Sunnydale's sandy, rocky soil, a poor little seed that's never, never, never gonna grow. That will never be alive again, never dance in the wind, never raise her face to the sun.

See, this is really all I wanted: to join her. Just to join her. Knowing the whole time that wherever the real her has gone to, it's a good place, the kind of place someone like Tara belongs. The place you go to when you're kind, and forgiving and you don't cheat or compromise on the things you believe in. What I ended up with, though...

Don't think I can't see it: every step I took; every act I committed, every word of magic that came out of my mouth... those things carried me farther and farther away, until I can't even see the path. Something inside me drew me to her goodness, and something in me--hard as it is to believe--drew Tara to me, too. I'm not sure what it was, and I know I can't find it. Not now.

More than that, I'm not sure that I ever will. Whatever Tara loved in me, I did my best to claw it out of my heart. Now I can't even imagine what will take its place. The magic couldn't, that's for sure. The magic couldn't fix anything, only break what was left of my life up into smaller and smaller pieces, like Humpty Dumpty, shattered and unfixable. Buffy says I have to start with the simple things, piling one little bit on top of another until they stack up into something like a life. But how can I do that? When I'm playing "Let's Pretend," I can imagine Tara living a life, even one independent from mine, but how am I ever going to be able to eat pancakes again, or study, or go to class? And it's not all that likely that anyone will pick up stuff from The Magic Box again, not after I got done with it.

I'd really just like to pull up all the covers over my head, then lie underneath in a safe little burrow, the way I did when I was small. Only I can't even do that. I can't stand to be confined that way. I can't stand the darkness. Ironic, really, for someone who, for a while at least, let herself be all darkness.

There's someone moving up the stairs, taking them slowly. Not Dawn, I know, because I heard her get off to school hours ago. Besides, Dawn is a kid--she doesn't climb stairs, she clatters them, the same way I did when I was her age. The same way every kid does, probably.

Buffy told me she'd stay home from work today, just to be with me, and Xander said the same, but what good would that do? Right now, what could we possibly say to each other? Those long, long silences hold too much. They build up until they have to break open, like clouds dropping rain, and right now I'd just as soon stay in out of the weather.

I was evil. I killed a man, in cold blood, for vengeance, pure and simple--if you can apply those words to something so twisted and knotted and thorny. Sure, Warren was a creep, and plenty evil in his own right, but where did I get off thinking I had the right to say who dies? Or who lives, if it comes to that. Grief and pain aren't enough to excuse it. Grief and pain are just that--emotions. Feelings that rip at us, and wound us, the way I ripped at poor Xander, up on Kingman's Bluff. Intellectually, I know what happens with emotions: just when you think they're impossible, unbearable, they'll sneakily start to fade, until all that bitterness converts by some strange alchemy into bittersweetness, a series of little moments captured in your head that will jump out at you when you least expect them, brought back to brief life by a scent, a touch, a word. The sadness and the loss finally shrink small enough to be held inside you, and you're left maybe not the same, maybe with some scar tissue to show for it, but not actively wounded anymore.

That's the theory anyway. Maybe it's even true. Maybe if I stick around long enough, I'll get to test the hypothesis.

The steps I heard before are coming down the hall now. Quiet. Very quiet, even, but with a heaviness underneath. I know what that means--who that means, I should say and, believe me, that knowledge really makes me want to go to ground in my little blanket burrow.

Giles. I know it's Giles, and I see just as clearly that, in a second, I'll hear him give a soft rap on my door, and I won't be able to get away with hiding, or faking sleep. I won't be able to get away with anything. He knows me too well, a hundred times better than I know him. Recent events proved that well enough. I still remember each and every one of the things I said to him.

I know just as well that every single one of them was wrong.

Giles, jealous of me? Of my stupid, soul-destroying, body-destroying--hey, let's not stop there, let's go straight on to earth-destroying--power? That's not even the right word for it. Something you can't even control isn't power, it's... well, I can't even say what it is. I only know that I turned into exactly the thing we've fought against all these years, and in the process hurt everyone I loved. Once upon a time, I might even have been the one who could fix the hurt. Some of it, anyway. I was that kind of person.

Make that a big "was." Now, I don't know what I am.

Giles knocks. I hardly needed the power of precognition to predict that would happen. What I don't get is my own voice, saying, "Come in."

He opens the door, but doesn't enter, not right away. Instead, he looks almost the way he looked when he first came back from England, half-shadowed, the light coming in from the hallway behind him. I can see his eyes, though, and they look different: serious and kind and warm. Lots kinder and warmer than I deserve these days, but that's Giles for you.

Giles, I have to admit, is normally a handsome man--even playing for the other team the way I do, or did--no, make that do--I can recognize that. At the moment, though...not so much. I messed him up. I really messed him up. Going through some walls and bouncing off the ceiling and floor a few times will do that to you. Having magic sucked out of you by force doesn't help. The power he brought back with him might have been borrowed, but I pulled out a lot of Giles with it, too.

"May I?" he says softly. Indicating, I guess, the light switch--it's hard to make out in the shadows.

I don't mean to, but I nod. The lights in Joyce Summers's former bedroom--in our former bedroom--aren't that bright. Not bright enough to hurt my eyes, anyway, even after all this time lying alone in the dark.

Giles comes right into the room and sits on the edge of the bed. Not perching there, not nervous, just quiet and determined. He's changed; I can see that. The tweedy Giles of the past seems a long way away. He was always kind and stubborn and brave, none of that's changed, but there's something else. Maybe a willingness to go farther, to see things through all the way to the end--though now that I come to think of it, maybe that was always part of his nature.

He would have died. I know that from one or two things Buffy's let drop. For me. He would have died for me. And no matter how much I tell myself he was doing it to save the world, I know better, really. He wouldn't have let that happen, not if he could help it, but the truth is, he loves me. Worthless, loser Willow. He loves me.

All of a sudden I'm crying, the way I cried with Xander up on top of Kingman's Bluff, cold and lost and impotent under the shadow of that tacky-looking temple. Sobbing and sobbing until it feels like my guts are tearing loose, like everything's just ripping free of whatever holds it in place. Without any hesitation at all, Giles's arms go around me, and I'm folded up inside the warmth of him, my head tucked under his chin, my tears soaking through his soft Henley shirt. He smells very clean, and at the same time like old books, and something else, something uniquely Giles-y.

To be held like that is... indescribable. A hundred times better than curling up in sheets haunted by memories of love that's lost and can't ever be recovered, and a hundred times worse, too. I don't deserve it. In a way, I'd rather be shouted at, ridiculed, rejected, because then I could get angry, or defensive. I could lash out again, raising up my fury as a shield to hide all the vulnerable parts of myself. I could stop myself from being touched.

I do what I can, anyway, pulling away from him, all the way back against the headboard. I'm wearing a pair of Buffy's old pajamas, the blue ones with the little dancing sheep, because I can't stand to have on anything I wore when Tara was here, in this bed, with me. Maybe it's those pajamas that make me feel... I don't know... so small and so lost. So young, and like I don't have any right to feel that way anymore, because all the brightness of being young is behind me, leaving only a flat, gray wasteland ahead.

Giles raises his hands, and with his thumbs wipes the tears from my cheeks. His hands stay there at the sides of my head, holding my face between them while his eyes search my eyes. I see pain there, and tiredness--pretty much a given, really. I don't need to look at the horrible dark bruises to give myself a clue.

I wonder if he sees the same in me.

"Willow," Giles says quietly.

I don't say anything. Instead, I hear the bratty echoes of my own voice, "Ooh, daddy's home. I'm in wicked trouble now." Truer words were never spoken: I'd already gotten myself in too deep when he showed up, and I knew I'd be going deeper and deeper still, into that black place where nothing matters anymore, where no one matters. Where the pain and the magic devour everything in their path.

"Better now?" Giles asks, in that soft, perfectly English voice of his.

There's still enough of Wicked Witch of the West Willow left that a teeny part of me wants to come out with a smart reply. Then the shame bubbles up and I can't even look at him anymore. All I can do is fling myself sideways, my face grinding into the pillow on what was always my side of the bed, my back turned to him.

Giles's hand rests a little while, warmly, between my shoulder-blades, then he starts rubbing my back, gently of course, talking to me all the time. I don't hear a word, and maybe Giles doesn't even intend me to, but it feels... I don't know... comforting maybe isn't the right word. Maybe it's more like the things Xander said to me, about loving breaky crayon Willow and evil hardly-Willow-at-all equally. Only I don't know how Giles could love the Willow who'd spoken to him the way I had. All the time I was mouthing off. All the time I was hurting him, he never lost it, never gave in to emotion, held his love and his courage firm and unwavering. There are probably old-fashioned terms to describe people like that--"stalwart," maybe, but that's a funny word, and never sounds like what it's supposed to mean. I thought I'd get to him, meant to get to him, but that was one power the magicks couldn't give me.

"You tricked me!" I say suddenly, no idea at all that those words would come out of my mouth.

Giles laughs a little, with sound and everything, though the end his laughter kind of trails off into something suspiciously like an "ow." "I did. I tricked you, Willow," he admits, and he isn't laughing anymore. "Can you forgive me?"

"Can I...?" For a minute, I think he's being snide, but then I don't know. Or maybe I do. He's serious. He means it. Being serious back just hurts too much, so I tell him. "Gee, Giles, I dunno. Deceiving somebody, that's not a little thing. Not like, say, trying to destroy the world."

He bows his head, the way I've seen him do a thousand times. "I... That is, if Xander had not been able to reach you, the power I brought here..." Giles glances up.

I'm not used to his face without the glasses, not used to seeing him reveal that much of himself. For a minute, I can't breathe. I'd tried to hurt him. God, I'd tried to hurt him. And I'd succeeded on levels I'd never even hoped for. Even if he took the other things I said for what they were worth, which was exactly nothing, Giles believes, honestly believes, that I hate him.

"That power would have killed you," he concludes quietly.

"And that's a bad thing why?" I answer, but that's not what I mean to say at all. Giles reaches out to me again, brushing the hair back from my face, wounding me with that little gesture of tenderness.

"Well, it most certainly would have killed me too," he says, smiling, those his eyes are still serious, watchful, reading me every minute. "And, on the whole, I prefer both of us to remain alive."

My own eyes are brimming. I feel weak, confused, like an animal caught in a trap that can't struggle its way loose. Maybe like an animal smart enough to make its own trap, but way, way too dumb to get out again. Maybe that's my problem now, I'm waiting for the consequences of my actions to catch up with me. For retribution to be handed down. To actually have hell to pay.

"Ah, Willow," Giles murmurs. "You don't know how to get out from beneath it. You want punishment, and atonement, but there's none to be had, only an inescapable maze of guilt and shame, circling round and round inside you. I know--believe me, I know--how painful that can be."

"You don't know," I answer, sitting up. "It's not the same thing at all. You could give the magic up. You could stop. The guy who died... you tried to save him. You didn't stand there, making jokes, while you ripped his skin off, then caught him on fire."

Giles is still watching me. He's good at that, paying attention. Maybe it's something the Council trained him to do, but probably not. I think it comes from inside him, that he learned the hard way how to be careful, and now that's second nature for him. Or maybe first nature. "That's true," he says at last. "But perhaps I hadn't your incentive."

"You can't make excuses for me," I tell him.

"No," he answers. "That I cannot."

"So, why are you here?"

Giles spreads his hands over his knees and sits there looking down at them. "Did you know, Willow..." He looks up suddenly, and the intensity of his green eyes throws off what little bit of balance I have left. "That doctor fellow, last year. Ben, I believe..."

"Glory's body-buddy."

A little flicker of humorless smile goes across Giles's mouth. "Yes. Quite. He wasn't dead, you know. Gravely injured, naturally, but not dead."

"Yes, he was," I answer, wondering where all this is taking us. Because he was. They took Ben out of there in a body bag, and nobody asked any questions.

"I knew that we could not fight the Glorificus again," Giles says. "And I knew the single area in which she was vulnerable. Perhaps, if I'd stopped to study the situation, there might have been another option. I didn't, however. I didn't stop."

The big old lightbulb finally goes off over my head, and I get what he's trying to tell me. "It's still not the same," I answer him, but he's rattled me again. My heart's beating too fast, and my breath goes in and out in jerky little gasps.

"Perhaps not." Giles sighs. "Or perhaps..." The silence stretches out between us, dark and dangerous territory. "Willow, the consequences you want so badly--those aren't anything I, or anyone, can mete out to you." Again, Giles raises his hand to brush my cheek, his sleeve pulling back a little with the gesture, revealing the terrible reddish-purple bruises hidden underneath. Probably, his whole body looks like that right now.

Which reminds me, like a slap across the face, of Warren, in the forest, with his skin...

My stomach lurches sideways, and fireworks of color go off behind my eyes. I'm panting, retching, only there's nothing inside me, only a thin drool of water. I can't get anything to go back down where it belongs, and if this keeps up, I swear I'm gonna turn inside out--which makes the same image flash again, even stronger, this time filling my head with all the special effects: the screaming and the pleading--and the smells: blood; pee; stinking, sour sweat. Oh, and magicks. We can't forget the magicks, because they don't smell cleanly of sage or herbs or beeswax anymore. They smell like something polluted, repellent, like plastic burning, a toxic fire that needs to feed and feed and feed in order to keep itself alive.

My stomach inverts itself again, and this time I taste blood. I'm blind. Everything hurts. Icy sweat pops out all over my body and my eyes stream. Maybe this is what if feels like to die after all. Maybe the dying just got postponed so that I'd know, really know, exactly what I'd done, and understand every last little nuance of my actions.

Maybe this is hell.

I should be so lucky. After a while it stops, of course, and I'm left feeling stupid, wiping my face with Giles's clean white handkerchief and not meeting his eyes. The only place I can think to beat my escape to is the shower, and once I manage to haul my shaky self in there, I can't get clean. I'm scrubbing and scrubbing, wishing the nice pale-green scrunchy thing was something lots tougher instead. Something along the lines of sandpaper or steel wool. Maybe a nice wire brush to really get the job done.

When I finally get out again, wrapped up this time in Buffy's fluffy pink bathrobe, the bed's been stripped and Giles isn't there. I miss him, the same way I miss little puppy-dog Willow who'd look up at him with bright eyes and know that everything would be all right, just fine, that she--I--had someone to take care of her, to explain things so that they all made sense.

A few seconds later Giles comes back with an armload of sheets and pillowcases.

Not looking at me, he sets the stack on the end of the bed, smoothing the topmost pillowslip with one hand, probably so that he can continue not looking at me. I know there's something I should say to him. Lots of somethings I should say, but they stick in my throat--while another part of me screams out, Don't let it end like this. Don't let it go.

"Sometimes, Willow..." Giles begins, now very interested in the wallpaper pattern. "Often, actually, I miss the days when all that concerned us was the new demon of the day or the apocalypse of the week."

"Yeah, " I answer. "When we didn't have to make our own fun."

"Was it...?" he starts, then gives me one of those completely Giles looks, as if he can look right through and see my bones inside me. "Was it fun, Willow? Was any of it fun?"

Fun? That's the thing, isn't it? I'd kept up the jokes and the sarcasm and the smirky looks, telling myself all along that, finally, I was completely free, that only my own pleasure mattered. As if I'd felt any pleasure, or lightness, anything but the aching hole inside me where all my happiness used to live, once upon a time.

Giles shakes out the bottom sheet, still watching me, and answers himself, "No, I didn't imagine you found any joy in it whatsoever."

I take hold of the sheet's opposite corner, pulling it down around the mattress. We work in silence for a little while: bottom sheet, top sheet, pillowcases, comforter, until everything's tucked in clean and flat and tidy. No room for hiding there. I'd done this same chore a thousand times with Tara, the two of us grinning at each other from across the bed. Giles and I don't smile, but after we're finished we end up sitting side by side, not quite touching, but close.

"The human heart can be dangerous and barren ground," he says at last, "Or the most fertile of territories. So often one can hardly predict, at any given season, which it will be."

I think about the way Giles was after Jenny: lost, sad, wounded, a little dazed. Not at first, though. At first he'd burned white-hot. Buffy had told me what happened at the Factory, the way he'd blown in there, wanting to hurt, wanting to die. Granted, Angelus was an undead evil vampire, not a guy, but...

Giles is looking at me, reading my mind, I think. Almost like the way I felt him in me, watching me, when I was getting ready to end the world.

"We're more alike than I thought, I guess," I tell him. My voice sounds funny: too soft, too flat, too controlled.

"Yes, Willow, I'm afraid we are," Giles answers. He pauses just a minute, then his hand reaches out, closing gently around mine. This time I don't pull away from him. "You will come back," he says at last. "I know, just now, that seems impossible. But you will, I promise you."

Giles is right about that: it does seem impossible. But maybe, just maybe, he's right about the other thing as well.

If somewhere, from whatever distance, Tara's watching me, I hope she sees that, and can believe it too.