Fic: On Different Sides
I wrote this for the first challenge of jossverse_las, which had the prompt "Life is life, fight for it" (Mother Teresa). The results are through so I'm officially allowed to post it! It's my first Buffy fic and I'd love some constructive feedback. Any suggestions of how I can improve my Whedon-related stories in future would be much appreciated!
Title: On Different Sides
Author: cookielaura
Characters: Buffy, Willow
Wordcount: 655
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some violent imagery. Spoilers for the first three episodes of Buffy Season 6.
Disclaimer: Buffy is not mine, and I'm not making money from this. The dialogue quoted in the fic is taken from the show and I do not own it.
On Different Sides
It’s so warm. Lovely to be so warm. Warm and comfortable and floaty light.
It’s pretty here. Pretty swirls, blue and green and pink. Swirls are good. No darkness, no shadows.
Willow is calm, and composed, and utterly terrified. But she can do this. She has to do this. Inside she’s shaking, but outside, she is in perfect control. It’s not as if she has a choice. How can she give up on Buffy, who has fought for their lives so many times, when there’s a chance she can bring her back? Back to the world, to Dawn, to all of them. Back from whatever dark, hellish place she’s in now. Willow can almost see her, alone in a fiery landscape, screaming. She can’t abandon her there. It has to be done, and she is the only one who can do it.
‘Osiris, keeper of the gate, master of all fate, hear us.’
It’s so easy. It used to be hard, somewhere else, some other time. Hard and painful. Not anymore. Nothing left to do. Just be.
Willow dips her fingers into the urn, daubs the blood on her face. She forces down the bile that rises in her throat as she remembers plunging the dagger into the deer, feeling the animal’s essence ebb away, feeling her own control over another life. Experiencing a rush that she never expected. Touching a level of power that she’s frightened of and drawn to, that could overtake her if she let it.
She swallows, and keeps going.
‘Accept our offering. Know our prayer.’
There’s a word she’s searching for idly, amidst the calm and the quiet. A word to describe everything she feels, sees, is. She finds it. ‘Happy’.
Something inside Willow wrenches her backwards, pulling her insides apart. Her stomach twists, rolls and then seems to splinter into pieces. Her arms are yanked out, the skin slashed, the blood frozen below the surface. And then there are creatures, inside her, crawling through her veins, stretching the seams beyond any natural endurance. Making their way upwards until she’s certain they’re aiming for her brain and they’re going to kill her and she’s going to die here in the dark in a graveyard with blood on her face and it’s worth it, it’s worth it because Buffy is worth fighting for.
She senses, rather than sees, her mother. They are together, and there is no more grief, no more fear.
Time might have passed. It might not have. She doesn’t care. It’s just so peaceful and -
What? What’s happening? Why does it hurt?
She’s suffocating. Oh goddess, she can’t breathe, and something foul and thick and hard is pulling itself out of her body and forcing itself through her throat. She convulses, choking, as the snake winds out of her mouth. She didn’t think the test would be this harsh. She didn’t think she’d have to give her own life, but she will, without regret, because it’s Buffy.
Shards of darkness are piercing the light, reaching out for her. Darkness so harsh and so black, darkness that cuts into her, stabs at her. She’s being torn apart, ripped away, and she’s clinging with every particle of her mind and soul, fighting to stay here. Fighting to remain in this place she loves.
Willow is jerked back up onto her knees. There’s light everywhere, spiralling around her, burning her from within. There’s some sort of noise she doesn’t recognise, getting louder around her, pounding in her head until she thinks she’ll explode.
‘Osiris, release her!’
And then the noise is too loud, and the urn is crushed, and the light is gone, and Willow can only scream out her despair.
She can’t do it. She’s not strong enough. The darkness is everywhere, around her and inside her, and it’s absolute. And then there’s only confusion, and terror, and she is lost. She’s failed.
And she doesn’t know, but she’s succeeded.