FIC: In Another Life (21/22) - BtVS/Numb3rs
Title: In Another Life (21/22+Epilogue)
Author: lyl_devil
Rating: PG-15
Fandom: BtVS, Numb3rs
Pairing: Willow/Don
Beta: strangevisitor7 & kallie_kat
Words: ~49,000
Disclaimer: I don’t own either show. I just like to play in their sandboxes.
Summary: Every action has a consequence and every deal comes with a price. Willow’s life is wiped clean, so she makes a new one for herself in LA.
Master Post
Note: I don’t claim to know anything about magic, medicine or the FBI - what I didn’t pick up from tv and books, I made up.
~!~
Part 21
The engine of the SUV went silent, ticking as it cooled down in the lazy afternoon sun. Don got out, ready to cross the street to the Java Bean, when he realized Willow wasn’t beside him.
“You still want to do this?” he asked her, seeing her frozen by the passenger side door. When a grimace and a bitten lip were his only response, Don moved in front of her, pulling her restless hands away from where they were compulsively playing with the hem of her blouse.
“We can do this another time,” Don reminded her. He’d been cursing himself all day for setting this meeting so late in the afternoon. It left Willow almost an entire day to worry and fret over everything that could possibly go wrong in the first meeting with her old friends.
After spending two full hours on her hair alone, and looking at nearly twice that in a skirt vs pants debate, Don had called over Amita.
The rest of the morning devolved into girl talk on subjects he absolutely refused to think about, leaving Don time to go over the information he’d managed to gather on the people they would be meeting. He wasn’t going into this meeting blind and without backup. Willow’s past was already 2-0 against them, and he had been willing to do whatever it took to minimize any damage that might result from another disaster.
“No, I want-I need to talk to them,” Willow whispered, her eyes finally moving to meet his. “I need to know about who I was.”
“It’s not going to change who you are now,” Don told her, a phrase he’d repeated a dozen times already.
His father had put it more bluntly when he’d said, “What, you think if they say you didn’t like strawberries or were a chain smoker, you’ll suddenly start shunning strawberries and lighting up all the time?”
Remembering the look of surprise/shock/disbelief on Willow’s face made Don smile even now. His father had a way of getting to the heart of the matter that was distinctly unique.
“I know,” agreed Willow.
With a decisive nod, Willow headed for the coffee shop she’d already spent so much time in as an employee, leaving Don to follow in her wake. Though she didn’t make it too far in before an unnaturally red head leapt from behind the counter to wrap Willow in a hug. Cherry had worked at the Java Bean longer than Willow had been in LA, and Don had no doubt that she’d still be there for years to come. She’d been a good friend to Willow over the years, keeping in touch even after Willow had moved on.
Don smiled at Cherry’s antics, knowing from experience that it was mostly an act. It was a good one, too, as most people didn’t bother to look beyond the overly exuberant attitude to the woman underneath. It was good camouflage, and Don didn’t begrudge her an inch of the protection it gave her.
Moving around Willow and Cherry, Don went to the counter, deliberately ignoring the foursome on the nearby couches watching the hugging duo with varying degrees of amusement, shock and hope. Don nodded a greeting to the manager, Pete, as he stepped up to the counter. He ordered tea and coffee for him and Willow, watching the group behind him in the reflection of the glass pastry case.
Willow had finished her ritual hugging meet-n-greet with Cherry, making her way over to him. She reached his side at the same time Pete had the overly large mugs ready on the counter.
“You ready?” he whispered as he turned to grab the mugs. Her shaky nod and whispered ‘yes’ were her only responses, so he started moving towards where Faith and the others were not-so-patiently waiting.
Both of them knew who each of these people were, because one of Don’s requests to Faith had been names and photos of the people they would be meeting, as well as some general information. It had helped distract Willow somewhat, and gave Don some much needed information to start looking into their backgrounds. Nothing about these people had come up from Willow’s background check years ago, but that was understandable given that almost everything Sunnydale-related had sunk with the town.
That they had supposedly been Willow’s best friends and family, yet hadn’t found her - if they’d even gone looking - for five years, raised some red flags in Don’s mind. In fact, they wouldn’t even be here if it hadn’t been for a chance sighting in a crowded park in the middle of LA.
The first thing Don noticed was that they’d arranged themselves in such a way that Willow would be separated from him. A single seat on the couch and another on the two person sofa were free, and Don managed to keep from rolling his eyes at the blatantly obvious ploy. Instead, he put the mugs down on the nearest table, and reached behind him for the closest armchair, pulling it towards the circle of couches and chairs.
Willow smiled at his antics; her first true smile since they’d left the apartment, and sat down in the chair with her mug of tea. Don grabbed his coffee and sat on the arm of the chair, daring any of them to say anything.
Faith, at least, seemed amused by the whole thing.
“So, umm - Hi,” Willow said after introductions had been made, breaking the strained silence with an awkward wave. Don didn’t need to see her face to know she was wearing a forced, hesitant smile.
“You’ll have to excuse them, Red,” Faith said into the ensuing silence. “They’re just a little stunned to see you all alive-like.”
“Yes, sorry. Apologies,” said the older man, the one Don knew was Rupert Giles. He was a British national that had lived in Sunnydale for nearly six years, but had returned to England permanently over a year before Sunnydale sunk. That didn’t stop him from visiting a few times, the most interesting one being the months before the Sunnydale disaster.
Custom records also said that he had been on the same flight as Willow when she’d gone to England for several months.
“It’s simply that after five years, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that you were dead.”
“So, you didn’t think I was dead?” Willow asked. Don could hear the frown in her voice, and knew it matched the one on his face. They had obviously been confident enough in her supposed death to tell Willow’s parents of their daughter’s death, and there’d been no search or other inquiries about some missing person with Willow’s characteristics.
“We were aware that there was a high probability that you’d died when Sunnydale collapsed, but even the smallest chance of survival, no matter how miniscule, left us some hope,” replied Giles. He had a smile on his face that Don had seen on many of the people he interviewed; that mix of desperate belief and hope, with a hint of lies beneath.
“But you decided to tell everyone else she was dead?” asked Don.
“We never really gave up,” the blonde - Buffy - chimed in, “We’ve been looking for you ever since-“
A huff of disbelief interrupted Buffy, this time coming from Willow. Don was glad that he wasn’t the only person not buying the ‘we’ve been looking for you, promise’ story.
“You’ve been looking for me? For five years?” asked Willow, barely giving any of them time to do more than nod, “And you couldn’t find me?”
Don could feel the stillness of Willow’s body; that, coupled with the precision of her words, told Don that out of all the emotions she’d been dealing with lately, anger was about to win out.
Shifting his position slightly, Don moved his body until his thigh was touching her arm, a signal he hoped she picked up on.
“You obviously weren’t looking very hard,” Willow finished with barely a stutter, her body relaxing slightly as she subtly leaned in to him.
“No, Willow - we did everything, we looked everywhere,” exclaimed Buffy, shifting forward in her seat, her face pleading Willow - and even Don - to believe her.
“Thirty seconds on Google would have found me.”
Don knew Willow well enough to know that the flat, even tone she used meant she was nearing the breaking point. Ever since the conversation with Faith in the police station, Willow had been cycling through different emotions and moods with startling frequency, most of which Don was fairly certain couldn’t be attributed to pregnancy hormones. Not yet, anyway. Still, the emotional rollercoaster of the past few days was catching up with her; with both of them, really.
The Google thing was completely true - Willow found far too much enjoyment in Googling the names of people she knew - but beyond that, her parents had managed to find her while looking for Willow’s supposed dead body. Technically, it had been the private investigator they’d hired, but the principle was still the same. Several months worth of careful digging had reunited Willow with her parents, yet five years of intensive searching by her friends, and nothing.
“Willow - I - we-“ Buffy looked surprised and lost, like the meeting wasn’t following whatever scene she’d planned out in her head. Don found he wasn’t too upset about that, if it were true.
“Guess we just didn’t look in the right place. Or use the right tools,” announced Xander, a sad smile directed at Willow. Don gave the man a few points in his favour. Xander Harris was apparently the peacekeeper in their group, stepping in to diffuse tense situations the same way Megan often did.
This guy wasn’t so bad. And Faith said Xander and Willow had been best friends since kindergarten. Willow may still have amnesia, but her ability to find loyal and caring friends was apparently hard wired into her very being.
“Let’s just skip past this whole topic, ok?” asked Willow, some of the strain leaving her voice. Willow might think they were lying about looking for her, but Don didn’t think so. He’d interviewed enough people in his career to get a feel for when someone was lying, and this group was not lying. Not about the searching, anyway. They really had been looking for Willow to some extent, but for whatever reason hadn’t used any of the standard channels available to them, and that had Don curious.
Silence fell over the group, an unspoken acceptance plain to see on their faces.
“So, um, Sunnydale,” began Willow, “What happened there?”
“It sunk,” announced Faith with a smirk. Don sent her a brief glare for being completely unhelpful.
“We got that,” he said. “What about before? Why did you think Willow was dead?”
Don watched as Buffy and Xander shifted in their seats. They obviously didn’t want to talk about the incident, but Don knew that Willow did. Here were people who could answer questions they both had about Sunnydale, and Don was determined to get some answers out of them.
“Well,” said Buffy, taking a deep breath. “You know how everyone in the town just got up and left days before Sunnydale was destroyed?”
Willow and Don both nodded. It was just one of the many mysteries surrounding that town - the mass evacuation that no one had announced or talked about, but had saved the lives of everyone who lived there.
“Well, not everyone left. Some people stayed behind for whatever reason, refusing to abandon their home and town.” This was something Don was familiar with, knowing of hundreds of cases where people in the paths of wild fires, hurricanes or floods refused to leave their homes. “Some of us stayed behind to try and evacuate as many people as possible.”
Don knew from reports that fire and police had been some of the first to leave. The town had been abandoned by everyone in authority. He was just amazed that some people had stayed behind to help.
“You’d been paired up with Kennedy, doing a room to room search in the high school,” Xander picked up the story. “The two of you split up when another team needed help. Kennedy didn’t get back to your last known location until the ground was literally shaking. You weren’t there. We didn’t have time to do any kind of search before the ground was falling away beneath our feet and we had to evac.”
The cadence and sentence structure had a more military feel to it than anyone not in some kind of law enforcement or with military training would normally have. Xander’s record had shown neither.
“We had to drag Kennedy out of the school, kicking and screaming,” Buffy added, as if trying to explain Kennedy’s attachment and actions from a few days ago. Don wasn’t willing to let the unstable woman off the hook, and didn’t think Willow was, either. No past relationship - even if Willow did remember it - excused Kennedy.
“How about we not talk about Kennedy,” Don suggested, pinning Buffy with a look. Despite what these people might think, Don wasn’t threatened by Kennedy - not by her presence, or by her apparent romantic relationship with his girlfriend, especially one that Willow couldn’t even remember. No, Don wanted the topic of Kennedy off the table because it brought up too many unpleasant memories and feelings in both himself and Willow.
“You didn’t look for me after the town collapsed?” asked Willow. “Didn’t try to contact anyone to file a missing person’s report to see if I’d been found?”
“Try to understand, Willow. The high school was the epicentre of the collapse,” explained Giles, speaking up. “If you had survived the collapse, we were confident you would contact us as soon as you were able. And the news channels had no reports of any survivors, or even any bodies pulled from the rubble.”
“But still-“
“I thought we weren’t talking about this,” interrupted Don with a hand on Willow’s shoulder. He could feel her trembling slightly beneath his hand, and squeezed her shoulder in reassurance. Don wasn’t going anywhere.
“Yes. Right.” Don felt her take in a deep breath before drinking some of her tea.
“So, you work with computers?” asked Giles, making an attempt to break the uncomfortable silence that had settled around them.
“Um, yes,” nodded Willow. Don watched as she was pulled into a conversation with Giles, and then Xander, about her job and what her life was like, which detoured into anecdotes from her life Before (courtesy of Buffy and Xander) and now. And throughout it all, Don attempted to remain a calm presence by Willow’s side, which only sort of worked.
He was trying really hard not to see this as a contest between Willow’s new life and her old one, with the winner getting Willow in their lives, but he was failing spectacularly. Every time Willow stiffened up or shifted in her seat, every time her voice wobbled when asking a question or she stuttered over an answer, Don mentally added another point in the column against these people.
They might know Willow from childhood onwards - know every scar and story from her past, every experience that made her the person they had loved, but that wasn’t the same Willow he saw now. Some of the stories Buffy and Xander - and even Giles, occasionally - painted a vastly different picture of who Willow was. Don could pick out shared characteristics and even some similar behaviour patterns (the frog thing made so much more sense now) between their Willow and his Willow, but in his mind, they were two very different people.
Nearly an hour later, Don felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket, and almost breathed a sigh of relief at the interruption.
Don looked at the caller ID before answering, “Hey, Dad.”
“Donny, good. What time are you and Willow coming over for dinner?” Don wasn’t fooled for an instant. His father was fully aware of where they were and who they were meeting. That he’d called during the time frame that they would most likely still be meeting with these people meant he was worried about how Willow was dealing with everything.
Because Alan knew full well that Don and Willow would be heading over to the house immediately after this get-together was over.
“We’re kind of in the middle of something. Is it important?” replied Don, catching Willow’s eyes as she looked at him.
“What?” asked a confused sounding Alan. “Are they still there? Is this code? Are you talking in some secret FBI code, Don?”
“She’s right here,” Don said, handing the phone over to Willow as if he’d been having a completely coherent conversation with his father.
Willow gratefully took the phone and soon left to find slightly more privacy in the back room Pete opened for her.
As the ‘Employees Only’ door closed behind her, Don suddenly realized he was alone with these four strangers who comprised a large chunk of Willow’s past. Four strangers who were all staring intently at the door hiding Willow from them.
He should probably have felt more nervous than he really did, but that hadn’t stopped him before.
“So, how long have you known Willow?” asked Giles, leaning forward in his chair slightly.
Don waited a breath before replying, “Three years.”
“And you’re close?”
“We’ve been living together for over six months,” Don told him, keeping as close to the truth as possible. He wasn’t about to say they’d only been a couple for just over a year - these people might see that as a relatively short relationship that wasn’t of much concern in the grand scheme of getting Willow back. Don also wasn’t about to explain the years of friendship before that; years he’d spent building up a closeness and trust that wasn’t easy for him to find outside of work and family.
“You work for the FBI?” asked Xander, seeming to become interested in the conversation. “How long?”
“Nearly fifteen years,” Don told them.
“Did you meet Willow through a case?” asked Buffy, finally pulling her attention away from the door Willow had gone through.
“No,” said Don, taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
“Through a friend, then?” continued Buffy, sounding annoyed.
“Not really.” He remembered how frustrated he got when a suspect gave minimal answers in an interrogation, and the enjoyment he was feeling right now helped him understand those suspects a little better. Wouldn’t stop him from getting as annoyed as these people seemed to be, though.
“Willow was a part-time data analyst at the FBI when I first met her,” he offered, feeling only mildly guilty for playing games with them. He had to remind himself that they were just as excited at finally finding Willow as Willow had been, though for different reasons.
“I thought she worked at that computer company?” Buffy asked, confused.
“She does. The full-time position came after years of contract work for them, and only in the last year,” Don explained. “Before that she worked a variety of part-time positions and contract work.”
Don didn’t really want to explain how stressed out Willow had been when he’d first met her. She’d been working three jobs to pay the bills and keep up with everything, and Don had never been so happy for her as when Arctic Morgan had taken her on full-time.
Deciding that there had been enough Willow and Don talk for this meeting, Don deliberately changed the subject to something that had been percolating in the back of his mind ever since he’d run their names through the FBI’s system.
“So, you all knew each other in Sunnydale? At the high school?” he asked, waiting until they’d all nodded.
“And now you all work for the same international company that’s based in London? How did that happen?”
The quick, darting glances between them didn’t leave him feeling relieved.
End Part 21
Part 22
~!~
Dialogue I really wanted to add: “You break her heart and I’ll beat you to death with a shovel.”
“I know one of the top snipers in the country, who just happens to have a soft spot for Willow. You make her cry - you wouldn’t feel it coming until you were face down on the pavement.”
Author: lyl_devil
Rating: PG-15
Fandom: BtVS, Numb3rs
Pairing: Willow/Don
Beta: strangevisitor7 & kallie_kat
Words: ~49,000
Disclaimer: I don’t own either show. I just like to play in their sandboxes.
Summary: Every action has a consequence and every deal comes with a price. Willow’s life is wiped clean, so she makes a new one for herself in LA.
Master Post
Note: I don’t claim to know anything about magic, medicine or the FBI - what I didn’t pick up from tv and books, I made up.
~!~
Part 21
The engine of the SUV went silent, ticking as it cooled down in the lazy afternoon sun. Don got out, ready to cross the street to the Java Bean, when he realized Willow wasn’t beside him.
“You still want to do this?” he asked her, seeing her frozen by the passenger side door. When a grimace and a bitten lip were his only response, Don moved in front of her, pulling her restless hands away from where they were compulsively playing with the hem of her blouse.
“We can do this another time,” Don reminded her. He’d been cursing himself all day for setting this meeting so late in the afternoon. It left Willow almost an entire day to worry and fret over everything that could possibly go wrong in the first meeting with her old friends.
After spending two full hours on her hair alone, and looking at nearly twice that in a skirt vs pants debate, Don had called over Amita.
The rest of the morning devolved into girl talk on subjects he absolutely refused to think about, leaving Don time to go over the information he’d managed to gather on the people they would be meeting. He wasn’t going into this meeting blind and without backup. Willow’s past was already 2-0 against them, and he had been willing to do whatever it took to minimize any damage that might result from another disaster.
“No, I want-I need to talk to them,” Willow whispered, her eyes finally moving to meet his. “I need to know about who I was.”
“It’s not going to change who you are now,” Don told her, a phrase he’d repeated a dozen times already.
His father had put it more bluntly when he’d said, “What, you think if they say you didn’t like strawberries or were a chain smoker, you’ll suddenly start shunning strawberries and lighting up all the time?”
Remembering the look of surprise/shock/disbelief on Willow’s face made Don smile even now. His father had a way of getting to the heart of the matter that was distinctly unique.
“I know,” agreed Willow.
With a decisive nod, Willow headed for the coffee shop she’d already spent so much time in as an employee, leaving Don to follow in her wake. Though she didn’t make it too far in before an unnaturally red head leapt from behind the counter to wrap Willow in a hug. Cherry had worked at the Java Bean longer than Willow had been in LA, and Don had no doubt that she’d still be there for years to come. She’d been a good friend to Willow over the years, keeping in touch even after Willow had moved on.
Don smiled at Cherry’s antics, knowing from experience that it was mostly an act. It was a good one, too, as most people didn’t bother to look beyond the overly exuberant attitude to the woman underneath. It was good camouflage, and Don didn’t begrudge her an inch of the protection it gave her.
Moving around Willow and Cherry, Don went to the counter, deliberately ignoring the foursome on the nearby couches watching the hugging duo with varying degrees of amusement, shock and hope. Don nodded a greeting to the manager, Pete, as he stepped up to the counter. He ordered tea and coffee for him and Willow, watching the group behind him in the reflection of the glass pastry case.
Willow had finished her ritual hugging meet-n-greet with Cherry, making her way over to him. She reached his side at the same time Pete had the overly large mugs ready on the counter.
“You ready?” he whispered as he turned to grab the mugs. Her shaky nod and whispered ‘yes’ were her only responses, so he started moving towards where Faith and the others were not-so-patiently waiting.
Both of them knew who each of these people were, because one of Don’s requests to Faith had been names and photos of the people they would be meeting, as well as some general information. It had helped distract Willow somewhat, and gave Don some much needed information to start looking into their backgrounds. Nothing about these people had come up from Willow’s background check years ago, but that was understandable given that almost everything Sunnydale-related had sunk with the town.
That they had supposedly been Willow’s best friends and family, yet hadn’t found her - if they’d even gone looking - for five years, raised some red flags in Don’s mind. In fact, they wouldn’t even be here if it hadn’t been for a chance sighting in a crowded park in the middle of LA.
The first thing Don noticed was that they’d arranged themselves in such a way that Willow would be separated from him. A single seat on the couch and another on the two person sofa were free, and Don managed to keep from rolling his eyes at the blatantly obvious ploy. Instead, he put the mugs down on the nearest table, and reached behind him for the closest armchair, pulling it towards the circle of couches and chairs.
Willow smiled at his antics; her first true smile since they’d left the apartment, and sat down in the chair with her mug of tea. Don grabbed his coffee and sat on the arm of the chair, daring any of them to say anything.
Faith, at least, seemed amused by the whole thing.
“So, umm - Hi,” Willow said after introductions had been made, breaking the strained silence with an awkward wave. Don didn’t need to see her face to know she was wearing a forced, hesitant smile.
“You’ll have to excuse them, Red,” Faith said into the ensuing silence. “They’re just a little stunned to see you all alive-like.”
“Yes, sorry. Apologies,” said the older man, the one Don knew was Rupert Giles. He was a British national that had lived in Sunnydale for nearly six years, but had returned to England permanently over a year before Sunnydale sunk. That didn’t stop him from visiting a few times, the most interesting one being the months before the Sunnydale disaster.
Custom records also said that he had been on the same flight as Willow when she’d gone to England for several months.
“It’s simply that after five years, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that you were dead.”
“So, you didn’t think I was dead?” Willow asked. Don could hear the frown in her voice, and knew it matched the one on his face. They had obviously been confident enough in her supposed death to tell Willow’s parents of their daughter’s death, and there’d been no search or other inquiries about some missing person with Willow’s characteristics.
“We were aware that there was a high probability that you’d died when Sunnydale collapsed, but even the smallest chance of survival, no matter how miniscule, left us some hope,” replied Giles. He had a smile on his face that Don had seen on many of the people he interviewed; that mix of desperate belief and hope, with a hint of lies beneath.
“But you decided to tell everyone else she was dead?” asked Don.
“We never really gave up,” the blonde - Buffy - chimed in, “We’ve been looking for you ever since-“
A huff of disbelief interrupted Buffy, this time coming from Willow. Don was glad that he wasn’t the only person not buying the ‘we’ve been looking for you, promise’ story.
“You’ve been looking for me? For five years?” asked Willow, barely giving any of them time to do more than nod, “And you couldn’t find me?”
Don could feel the stillness of Willow’s body; that, coupled with the precision of her words, told Don that out of all the emotions she’d been dealing with lately, anger was about to win out.
Shifting his position slightly, Don moved his body until his thigh was touching her arm, a signal he hoped she picked up on.
“You obviously weren’t looking very hard,” Willow finished with barely a stutter, her body relaxing slightly as she subtly leaned in to him.
“No, Willow - we did everything, we looked everywhere,” exclaimed Buffy, shifting forward in her seat, her face pleading Willow - and even Don - to believe her.
“Thirty seconds on Google would have found me.”
Don knew Willow well enough to know that the flat, even tone she used meant she was nearing the breaking point. Ever since the conversation with Faith in the police station, Willow had been cycling through different emotions and moods with startling frequency, most of which Don was fairly certain couldn’t be attributed to pregnancy hormones. Not yet, anyway. Still, the emotional rollercoaster of the past few days was catching up with her; with both of them, really.
The Google thing was completely true - Willow found far too much enjoyment in Googling the names of people she knew - but beyond that, her parents had managed to find her while looking for Willow’s supposed dead body. Technically, it had been the private investigator they’d hired, but the principle was still the same. Several months worth of careful digging had reunited Willow with her parents, yet five years of intensive searching by her friends, and nothing.
“Willow - I - we-“ Buffy looked surprised and lost, like the meeting wasn’t following whatever scene she’d planned out in her head. Don found he wasn’t too upset about that, if it were true.
“Guess we just didn’t look in the right place. Or use the right tools,” announced Xander, a sad smile directed at Willow. Don gave the man a few points in his favour. Xander Harris was apparently the peacekeeper in their group, stepping in to diffuse tense situations the same way Megan often did.
This guy wasn’t so bad. And Faith said Xander and Willow had been best friends since kindergarten. Willow may still have amnesia, but her ability to find loyal and caring friends was apparently hard wired into her very being.
“Let’s just skip past this whole topic, ok?” asked Willow, some of the strain leaving her voice. Willow might think they were lying about looking for her, but Don didn’t think so. He’d interviewed enough people in his career to get a feel for when someone was lying, and this group was not lying. Not about the searching, anyway. They really had been looking for Willow to some extent, but for whatever reason hadn’t used any of the standard channels available to them, and that had Don curious.
Silence fell over the group, an unspoken acceptance plain to see on their faces.
“So, um, Sunnydale,” began Willow, “What happened there?”
“It sunk,” announced Faith with a smirk. Don sent her a brief glare for being completely unhelpful.
“We got that,” he said. “What about before? Why did you think Willow was dead?”
Don watched as Buffy and Xander shifted in their seats. They obviously didn’t want to talk about the incident, but Don knew that Willow did. Here were people who could answer questions they both had about Sunnydale, and Don was determined to get some answers out of them.
“Well,” said Buffy, taking a deep breath. “You know how everyone in the town just got up and left days before Sunnydale was destroyed?”
Willow and Don both nodded. It was just one of the many mysteries surrounding that town - the mass evacuation that no one had announced or talked about, but had saved the lives of everyone who lived there.
“Well, not everyone left. Some people stayed behind for whatever reason, refusing to abandon their home and town.” This was something Don was familiar with, knowing of hundreds of cases where people in the paths of wild fires, hurricanes or floods refused to leave their homes. “Some of us stayed behind to try and evacuate as many people as possible.”
Don knew from reports that fire and police had been some of the first to leave. The town had been abandoned by everyone in authority. He was just amazed that some people had stayed behind to help.
“You’d been paired up with Kennedy, doing a room to room search in the high school,” Xander picked up the story. “The two of you split up when another team needed help. Kennedy didn’t get back to your last known location until the ground was literally shaking. You weren’t there. We didn’t have time to do any kind of search before the ground was falling away beneath our feet and we had to evac.”
The cadence and sentence structure had a more military feel to it than anyone not in some kind of law enforcement or with military training would normally have. Xander’s record had shown neither.
“We had to drag Kennedy out of the school, kicking and screaming,” Buffy added, as if trying to explain Kennedy’s attachment and actions from a few days ago. Don wasn’t willing to let the unstable woman off the hook, and didn’t think Willow was, either. No past relationship - even if Willow did remember it - excused Kennedy.
“How about we not talk about Kennedy,” Don suggested, pinning Buffy with a look. Despite what these people might think, Don wasn’t threatened by Kennedy - not by her presence, or by her apparent romantic relationship with his girlfriend, especially one that Willow couldn’t even remember. No, Don wanted the topic of Kennedy off the table because it brought up too many unpleasant memories and feelings in both himself and Willow.
“You didn’t look for me after the town collapsed?” asked Willow. “Didn’t try to contact anyone to file a missing person’s report to see if I’d been found?”
“Try to understand, Willow. The high school was the epicentre of the collapse,” explained Giles, speaking up. “If you had survived the collapse, we were confident you would contact us as soon as you were able. And the news channels had no reports of any survivors, or even any bodies pulled from the rubble.”
“But still-“
“I thought we weren’t talking about this,” interrupted Don with a hand on Willow’s shoulder. He could feel her trembling slightly beneath his hand, and squeezed her shoulder in reassurance. Don wasn’t going anywhere.
“Yes. Right.” Don felt her take in a deep breath before drinking some of her tea.
“So, you work with computers?” asked Giles, making an attempt to break the uncomfortable silence that had settled around them.
“Um, yes,” nodded Willow. Don watched as she was pulled into a conversation with Giles, and then Xander, about her job and what her life was like, which detoured into anecdotes from her life Before (courtesy of Buffy and Xander) and now. And throughout it all, Don attempted to remain a calm presence by Willow’s side, which only sort of worked.
He was trying really hard not to see this as a contest between Willow’s new life and her old one, with the winner getting Willow in their lives, but he was failing spectacularly. Every time Willow stiffened up or shifted in her seat, every time her voice wobbled when asking a question or she stuttered over an answer, Don mentally added another point in the column against these people.
They might know Willow from childhood onwards - know every scar and story from her past, every experience that made her the person they had loved, but that wasn’t the same Willow he saw now. Some of the stories Buffy and Xander - and even Giles, occasionally - painted a vastly different picture of who Willow was. Don could pick out shared characteristics and even some similar behaviour patterns (the frog thing made so much more sense now) between their Willow and his Willow, but in his mind, they were two very different people.
Nearly an hour later, Don felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket, and almost breathed a sigh of relief at the interruption.
Don looked at the caller ID before answering, “Hey, Dad.”
“Donny, good. What time are you and Willow coming over for dinner?” Don wasn’t fooled for an instant. His father was fully aware of where they were and who they were meeting. That he’d called during the time frame that they would most likely still be meeting with these people meant he was worried about how Willow was dealing with everything.
Because Alan knew full well that Don and Willow would be heading over to the house immediately after this get-together was over.
“We’re kind of in the middle of something. Is it important?” replied Don, catching Willow’s eyes as she looked at him.
“What?” asked a confused sounding Alan. “Are they still there? Is this code? Are you talking in some secret FBI code, Don?”
“She’s right here,” Don said, handing the phone over to Willow as if he’d been having a completely coherent conversation with his father.
Willow gratefully took the phone and soon left to find slightly more privacy in the back room Pete opened for her.
As the ‘Employees Only’ door closed behind her, Don suddenly realized he was alone with these four strangers who comprised a large chunk of Willow’s past. Four strangers who were all staring intently at the door hiding Willow from them.
He should probably have felt more nervous than he really did, but that hadn’t stopped him before.
“So, how long have you known Willow?” asked Giles, leaning forward in his chair slightly.
Don waited a breath before replying, “Three years.”
“And you’re close?”
“We’ve been living together for over six months,” Don told him, keeping as close to the truth as possible. He wasn’t about to say they’d only been a couple for just over a year - these people might see that as a relatively short relationship that wasn’t of much concern in the grand scheme of getting Willow back. Don also wasn’t about to explain the years of friendship before that; years he’d spent building up a closeness and trust that wasn’t easy for him to find outside of work and family.
“You work for the FBI?” asked Xander, seeming to become interested in the conversation. “How long?”
“Nearly fifteen years,” Don told them.
“Did you meet Willow through a case?” asked Buffy, finally pulling her attention away from the door Willow had gone through.
“No,” said Don, taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
“Through a friend, then?” continued Buffy, sounding annoyed.
“Not really.” He remembered how frustrated he got when a suspect gave minimal answers in an interrogation, and the enjoyment he was feeling right now helped him understand those suspects a little better. Wouldn’t stop him from getting as annoyed as these people seemed to be, though.
“Willow was a part-time data analyst at the FBI when I first met her,” he offered, feeling only mildly guilty for playing games with them. He had to remind himself that they were just as excited at finally finding Willow as Willow had been, though for different reasons.
“I thought she worked at that computer company?” Buffy asked, confused.
“She does. The full-time position came after years of contract work for them, and only in the last year,” Don explained. “Before that she worked a variety of part-time positions and contract work.”
Don didn’t really want to explain how stressed out Willow had been when he’d first met her. She’d been working three jobs to pay the bills and keep up with everything, and Don had never been so happy for her as when Arctic Morgan had taken her on full-time.
Deciding that there had been enough Willow and Don talk for this meeting, Don deliberately changed the subject to something that had been percolating in the back of his mind ever since he’d run their names through the FBI’s system.
“So, you all knew each other in Sunnydale? At the high school?” he asked, waiting until they’d all nodded.
“And now you all work for the same international company that’s based in London? How did that happen?”
The quick, darting glances between them didn’t leave him feeling relieved.
End Part 21
Part 22
~!~
Dialogue I really wanted to add: “You break her heart and I’ll beat you to death with a shovel.”
“I know one of the top snipers in the country, who just happens to have a soft spot for Willow. You make her cry - you wouldn’t feel it coming until you were face down on the pavement.”