"The Power and the Other Thing," part 1 of 3
Four days late, but the monster Willowficathon story is done. I'm posting it in three parts, so LJ doesn't get cranky about the length.
Title: The Power and the Other Thing
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Pairings: Willow/Glory, Willow/Tara
Rating: NC-17
Summary: In the Wishverse, all the destinies are different, and Willow's still got one.
Disclaimers: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are the intellectual property of Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, and Fox Television. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2004 Mosca and no profit is being made, so this story is protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. Captain, we're receiving 285,000 hails.
Notes: Written for the Willowficathon, for cdybedahl, who requested Willow/Glory, which was definitely a challenge. Much gratitude for the beta reading efforts of callmesandy, vassilissa, and distraction77.
*
Willow came back in a candle-filled room that smelled like sage, incense, and basement. She remembered dying: she'd done it twice. Once in Jesse's arms, his teeth tearing her neck, the sweet oblivion of oxygen deprivation. The second time with her back against the cage in the school library, at the business end of a stake. She'd felt her fingers turn to dust and assumed that would be the last of her.
She came back naked, but somebody draped a blanket over her immediately and told her not to be afraid. She hadn't been afraid, only confused. Confused and hungry. Not for blood, either, but in the good old-fashioned "I could use a cheeseburger" way. She checked for her own pulse and found it.
A man in a suit came over to her and placed a pile of clothes at her side. Underwear, a dress, sandals. And modesty, all of a sudden, like he'd put that on top of the pile. Clutching the blanket around her, she pulled the clothes underneath and tried to remember how to get dressed summer-camp style, in a room full of people. "Put those on," the man said, "and we'll go upstairs."
"I'm alive," she said. She wriggled into the dress and shrugged away the blanket. The man in the suit was waiting by a door at the other end of the room.
"And I'm Lindsey," he said.
"Willow," she said. She brushed a lock of hair back from her face; it was long, the way it had been before she got vamped. Frumpy little girl hair. Was she going to have to be that again? The funny thing was, she wasn't sure she didn't want to be.
She followed Lindsey into an elevator, and then into another elevator, and then down a long beige hallway into a conference room. There was nobody in the room except a leggy woman with impeccable makeup, who leaned back in the chair at the head of the table. "Willow," the woman said, like she was a long-lost friend. "So glad you could join us."
"*You*" brought me here," Willow said. "On purpose."
"Yes, we did," the woman said. "You're very powerful."
"Not like *this*," I'm not."
"We brought you back exactly how we wanted you," the woman said. "Besides, bringing a human back, soul intact? A little chanting, a little blood sacrifice, no big deal. Summoning back the demon side of a vampire is a lot trickier."
"So if I went out tonight and got myself bitten, you wouldn't try to stop me?"
"We'd stop you," the woman said.
Willow decided not to press the issue. She had no teeth and no cash, and whatever this place was, it looked like it had plenty of both. "I'm more useful to you alive," she said.
"If you were useful to us dead, you would have stayed that way," the woman said. "Come on, let's get you something to eat."
The woman didn't tell Willow her name until Willow was most of the way through a cheeseburger and fries. Her name was Lilah, and she was a lawyer. Because officially, a law firm was responsible for this whole thing with the not being dead anymore.
"Technically, you're still sixteen," Lilah said, "so you'll be staying in my spare bedroom until we can find a more permanent arrangement."
*
She woke up two days later. That's what Lilah told her when she shuffled into the kitchen seeking cereal: it was three in the afternoon on a Thursday, and she'd gone to bed at around nine on a Tuesday evening. There was a whole Wednesday of her life that was gone forever, and life was way too short to lose entire weekdays.
"Pretty impressive, actually," Lilah said, not offering to pour corn flakes. "The texts all said you'd be out of it for a few *weeks*. And look at you. Two days."
"I killed people," Willow said. She'd spent all of Wednesday dreaming about them: their terrified eyes, the way their blood tasted. How many she'd snapped the necks of and left to rot, for the thrill of watching their souls fade and escape.
She couldn't remember most of the faces, which was scary, but the scariest were the ones she'd known first. She'd left her mom in a pool of blood in the upstairs bathroom and torn up one of those stupid feminist pairing manuals on top of her. She'd kicked Percy from the basketball team in the face twenty-seven times before she'd drained him, so he wouldn't be cute when she killed him. And Xander, the worst: he'd begged her to let him die, but she'd shoved his face into her open vein. She'd made him love her, but it hadn't counted.
It might have made her feel better if those memories nauseated her, but they just seemed far away. That was a whole different girl. There was no blood lust left in her, just a grumbly stomach.
Willow had a bowl of cornflakes, but there was no milk in the fridge. She grimaced. There was orange juice, with a sell-by date of sometime in the next millennium. Or possibly not. "What year is it?" Willow said.
"2000," Lilah said.
"I woke up in the year 2000," Willow said. "That's kind of-- did I miss a lot?"
"Nothing big," Lilah said.
"Good," Willow said.
"Two days," Lilah said. "You know what that means?"
"I'm powerful?" Willow said dryly. She was contemplating whether dry cornflakes were more disgusting than orange-juice-soaked cornflakes. And then marveling at how long it had been since she'd eaten cereal at all.
"It means you're the right girl, and we can go shopping on the firm's tab."
"Do they pay for milk?" she muttered.
All afternoon, until the mall closed, it was as much as she wanted of whatever she wanted. Willow felt like she was disappointing Lilah somehow, not being all that enthusiastic, but she wasn't good at malls: all those choices that trapped people into a specific personality. Willow'd had two that she remembered, and she had the feeling that she wasn't either of those people anymore. Bustiers and black lace would just make her look like the little poseurs who hung out at Hot Topic, and the prospect of jumpers and Mary Janes, or that mirror self with the fuzzy pink sweaters, made her want to vomit. She bought a lot of black, because it seemed noncommittal. She'd look like a rain cloud skulking through pastel California, but she'd always match.
She tried on every shade of lipstick at The Body Shop, and none of them made sense anymore. She settled on dark red, telling herself that it would stupid to leave empty-handed after all that work. She fingered her long, boring hair and asked Lilah, "Can I get it cut?" Ten minutes later, she was in an adjustable chair, asking the scissors-wielding aspiring actress for short, no bangs, extremely red.
On the way home, they stopped at Ralph's. Choosing a carton from the dairy case, she caught her reflection in the glass door. That was her, the girl with the 2%.
*
She was ready for whatever she was supposed to be developing powers for, but every day when Lilah came home from work, it was blah blah, lasting effects of the resuscitation spell, anything interesting happening on General Hospital? She had a key to the apartment and could come and go as she pleased, but there was nowhere to go. No public transportation, and nothing in walking distance, just apartment complexes and townhouses. She could just make it to Ralph's without exhausting herself, and that involved dashing across an eight-lane street while flipping off drivers who acted like they'd never seen a pedestrian before. Still, there was some novelty in walking in the sunshine, so she mapped out Lilah's neighborhood with her feet.
There were a few weeks of this, maybe a month. It was hard to follow the rhythm of days and nights when her body didn't care whether the sun was out. And then, when she'd begun to adopt the resigned pacing of a zoo tiger, Lilah announced that she would start school the next day. Private tutors. Anything Willow wanted to learn, plus a few things Wolfram & Hart wanted to teach her. "Can I have driving lessons?" Willow said.
She got those, first thing every morning. Her parents had insisted she wait for summer vacation to get her driver's license, but she hadn't made it through sophomore year. She knew almost instantly that she'd be a terrible driver, but that didn't matter-- she liked controlling such a powerful thing, being able to fly when traffic permitted.
Her other tutors were worth getting up for in the morning, too. They taught her school subjects, but at the level she was actually at. She had a whole class in advanced physics, and another one where she was doing trigonometry now but was promised differential equations by February. Her programming tutor was teaching her to hack using Javascript, and her English tutor pretty much gave her books to read and then made her discuss them for an hour. She remembered wishing, when she'd been alive for the first time, that school could just be eight hours of learning, without the pep rallies and the cliques and the humiliation of lunch period. A tiny part of her wondered if that wish had come true because she'd wished it.
And in the afternoon, she did magic. These tutors were all permanent employees of Wolfram & Hart, not grad students they'd contracted out. They offered no explanation of her lofty mission, but she knew as soon as she was told to turn to page four of Elementary Spells and Charms that this was how she was going to be powerful. If her powers only extended to levitating pencils, it would be pretty pathetic, but it didn't seem likely that Wolfram & Hart would revive her just to have someone to perform party tricks.
She learned to take integrals, and make little balls of light, and say things about F. Scott Fitzgerald that made her English tutor steeple his fingers and smile. She passed her driving test on the second try, and she was almost surprised to see that the picture on her license wasn't of an empty chair where a girl used to be. She'd written down her old birthdate, not thinking about it, but she realized that it was a good thing, being nineteen on paper. Even if she wished she could wash those years out of her mind, be that invisible, innocent girl.
Lilah's parenting philosophy ran mostly to paying Willow's credit card bills and bringing home enough takeout for both of them on the days when she didn't work past dinnertime. It was more quality time than Willow had spent with her real family. Even when Lindsey gave her a car of her own, as a reward for passing the tests, Willow tried to be home for dinner. Lilah only gave a shit because she was paid to, but any reason was better than not giving a shit at all. Besides, she was more intelligent than most people, and she didn't insist on talking when there was nothing to say. Willow could appreciate her, if not quite admit to liking her.
With the car, there were more places to go, although most of them were boring. She went out to a few nightclubs, the kind that had excited her when she was a vampire, but the humans were just stupid, self-centered people, not food. She hated most of the music, and she was a terrible dancer.
So she found a coffee shop that made good lattes and ice cream sundaes, where they were open late and left her alone to read about string theory or binding spells. There were other regulars, mostly pleasant and unobtrusive: Steve with the Converse high-tops and the headphones; Laurie with the multicolored hair and the feminist flyers; Tara with the long skirts and the thick books about Native American spirituality. She liked being able to smile at them when she saw them and then ignore them completely.
There was another regular who she enjoyed less. His name was Ben, and he was way too friendly. At first, she thought he was coming by to tell the sullen girl the good news about Jesus, but no, he was just really nice. And thought, apparently, that if he was persistent enough, she would stop blowing him off and love him forever.
She saw him as she came in and brought her coffee and backpack over to Tara's table. "Do you mind if I sit?" she said. "There's this guy I'm trying to avoid."
"Um, uh, sure," Tara said. She'd parted her hair in zigzags, and it made her look less granola-by-numbers. Pretty, even, maybe, with those huge baby-deer eyes.
Willow sat for a while, sipping coffee and pretending to read sample Perl programs, mostly thinking about the flyaway topology of Tara's hair.
"So, um, you... do magic?" Tara said. "Because I-- um-- I noticed you reading a book about it. A-- a real one, not like you'd get in the New Age section at Barnes & Noble. And I-- I-- I guess you didn't-- didn't actually want to talk to me, so, um..."
"I do magic," Willow said. "And sometimes computers." And sometimes girls, she added in her mind. Tara didn't seem like the kind who would take to the offer of a one-night stand. But that was good, because Willow thought she might not be that kind of girl anymore.
"Me-- me too," Tara said. "Magic. Since I was little, with my mom. Computers... uh, the guy in the UCLA tech support center showed me how to use my e-mail, and-- and that's all-- all I know."
"They're not all that different," Willow said. "If you're really specific about what you want, you pretty much get it, and if not-- well, kaboom."
"Do you-- do you-- I'm, um, looking for a coven. I-- I-- I tried the college Wiccan group, but they're mostly into bake sales and ar-arguing over what kind of drinks to serve at the Samhain mixer."
Willow laughed. "I'm mostly a solo practitioner. I've got someone teaching me."
"M-- maybe we could do a spell together sometime," Tara said. "L-- like something that's-- that's easier with two people."
"Maybe," Willow said, but she tore a sheet of paper out of her notebook, and they traded phone numbers. That was the kind of girl she was now.
*
The only unusual thing about the day they assigned Willow a bodyguard was that it was cold out. Not just cold for California, but teeth-chattering cold, like the Snow Queen had decided she'd had enough of Narnia and hopped through the wardrobe to try and break into movies. Willow bought a black leather jacket and a scarf, wine-colored with flecks of white, that kept unwinding itself from her neck and trailing towards the floor.
Lindsey was there to meet her after History of Magic, and he brought her upstairs to his office. Sitting on Lindsey's sofa was a big black guy, so immersed in the cleaning of a long knife that he didn't look up when they walked in. "Willow Rosenberg, meet Charles Gunn," Lindsey said.
Charles didn't get up, but he met Willow's eyes. There was something dead and yellowish in his. "Vampire?" she said.
"Reformed," he said. "As long as they pay me, I'm off the human blood."
"How do you stand it?" she said. "I mean, the taste alone."
"I moved out of the sewer, bought myself a new ride, and got the hell over it," he said. "Anything I need to know about?"
"Other than the creepy guy at the coffeehouse?" she said.
"There have been some... close calls," Lindsey said. "Things we didn't want to frighten you with."
"Close calls?" she said. "You don't want me to be *frightened*, so you don't tell me anything, except that maybe somebody might want to kill me? Again? No. I want to know why I'm here, and I'm-- I'm not leaving until somebody tells me. Okay, no, actually, if you don't tell me, I'm going to Lilah's and going to bed, and I'm not getting out to study any more magic until I know why I'm learning it in the first place."
"Gunn," Lindsey said affectlessly, "step out."
She stood there with her arms folded and waited for Lindsey to start talking.
"There's a very powerful goddess," he said. "Called Glorificus. She's loose, and she's destructive. There's been an epidemic of sudden-onset paranoid schizophrenia that we can link to her. Fortunately, we know what she's after, and she'll never get to it."
"Let me guess," Willow said. "I'm supposed to stop her somehow."
"You're going to figure out how to destroy her," Lindsey said.
"Well, I'll do my best," she said snidely, "but--"
"You're going to," he said. "There's a prophecy. One so clear that when our experts read it, they right away set about finding the way to bring you back to life."
"And how am I supposed to destroy this... god?" Willow said.
"Not a clue," Lindsey said.
Continued in part 2.
Title: The Power and the Other Thing
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Pairings: Willow/Glory, Willow/Tara
Rating: NC-17
Summary: In the Wishverse, all the destinies are different, and Willow's still got one.
Disclaimers: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are the intellectual property of Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, and Fox Television. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2004 Mosca and no profit is being made, so this story is protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. Captain, we're receiving 285,000 hails.
Notes: Written for the Willowficathon, for cdybedahl, who requested Willow/Glory, which was definitely a challenge. Much gratitude for the beta reading efforts of callmesandy, vassilissa, and distraction77.
*
Willow came back in a candle-filled room that smelled like sage, incense, and basement. She remembered dying: she'd done it twice. Once in Jesse's arms, his teeth tearing her neck, the sweet oblivion of oxygen deprivation. The second time with her back against the cage in the school library, at the business end of a stake. She'd felt her fingers turn to dust and assumed that would be the last of her.
She came back naked, but somebody draped a blanket over her immediately and told her not to be afraid. She hadn't been afraid, only confused. Confused and hungry. Not for blood, either, but in the good old-fashioned "I could use a cheeseburger" way. She checked for her own pulse and found it.
A man in a suit came over to her and placed a pile of clothes at her side. Underwear, a dress, sandals. And modesty, all of a sudden, like he'd put that on top of the pile. Clutching the blanket around her, she pulled the clothes underneath and tried to remember how to get dressed summer-camp style, in a room full of people. "Put those on," the man said, "and we'll go upstairs."
"I'm alive," she said. She wriggled into the dress and shrugged away the blanket. The man in the suit was waiting by a door at the other end of the room.
"And I'm Lindsey," he said.
"Willow," she said. She brushed a lock of hair back from her face; it was long, the way it had been before she got vamped. Frumpy little girl hair. Was she going to have to be that again? The funny thing was, she wasn't sure she didn't want to be.
She followed Lindsey into an elevator, and then into another elevator, and then down a long beige hallway into a conference room. There was nobody in the room except a leggy woman with impeccable makeup, who leaned back in the chair at the head of the table. "Willow," the woman said, like she was a long-lost friend. "So glad you could join us."
"*You*" brought me here," Willow said. "On purpose."
"Yes, we did," the woman said. "You're very powerful."
"Not like *this*," I'm not."
"We brought you back exactly how we wanted you," the woman said. "Besides, bringing a human back, soul intact? A little chanting, a little blood sacrifice, no big deal. Summoning back the demon side of a vampire is a lot trickier."
"So if I went out tonight and got myself bitten, you wouldn't try to stop me?"
"We'd stop you," the woman said.
Willow decided not to press the issue. She had no teeth and no cash, and whatever this place was, it looked like it had plenty of both. "I'm more useful to you alive," she said.
"If you were useful to us dead, you would have stayed that way," the woman said. "Come on, let's get you something to eat."
The woman didn't tell Willow her name until Willow was most of the way through a cheeseburger and fries. Her name was Lilah, and she was a lawyer. Because officially, a law firm was responsible for this whole thing with the not being dead anymore.
"Technically, you're still sixteen," Lilah said, "so you'll be staying in my spare bedroom until we can find a more permanent arrangement."
*
She woke up two days later. That's what Lilah told her when she shuffled into the kitchen seeking cereal: it was three in the afternoon on a Thursday, and she'd gone to bed at around nine on a Tuesday evening. There was a whole Wednesday of her life that was gone forever, and life was way too short to lose entire weekdays.
"Pretty impressive, actually," Lilah said, not offering to pour corn flakes. "The texts all said you'd be out of it for a few *weeks*. And look at you. Two days."
"I killed people," Willow said. She'd spent all of Wednesday dreaming about them: their terrified eyes, the way their blood tasted. How many she'd snapped the necks of and left to rot, for the thrill of watching their souls fade and escape.
She couldn't remember most of the faces, which was scary, but the scariest were the ones she'd known first. She'd left her mom in a pool of blood in the upstairs bathroom and torn up one of those stupid feminist pairing manuals on top of her. She'd kicked Percy from the basketball team in the face twenty-seven times before she'd drained him, so he wouldn't be cute when she killed him. And Xander, the worst: he'd begged her to let him die, but she'd shoved his face into her open vein. She'd made him love her, but it hadn't counted.
It might have made her feel better if those memories nauseated her, but they just seemed far away. That was a whole different girl. There was no blood lust left in her, just a grumbly stomach.
Willow had a bowl of cornflakes, but there was no milk in the fridge. She grimaced. There was orange juice, with a sell-by date of sometime in the next millennium. Or possibly not. "What year is it?" Willow said.
"2000," Lilah said.
"I woke up in the year 2000," Willow said. "That's kind of-- did I miss a lot?"
"Nothing big," Lilah said.
"Good," Willow said.
"Two days," Lilah said. "You know what that means?"
"I'm powerful?" Willow said dryly. She was contemplating whether dry cornflakes were more disgusting than orange-juice-soaked cornflakes. And then marveling at how long it had been since she'd eaten cereal at all.
"It means you're the right girl, and we can go shopping on the firm's tab."
"Do they pay for milk?" she muttered.
All afternoon, until the mall closed, it was as much as she wanted of whatever she wanted. Willow felt like she was disappointing Lilah somehow, not being all that enthusiastic, but she wasn't good at malls: all those choices that trapped people into a specific personality. Willow'd had two that she remembered, and she had the feeling that she wasn't either of those people anymore. Bustiers and black lace would just make her look like the little poseurs who hung out at Hot Topic, and the prospect of jumpers and Mary Janes, or that mirror self with the fuzzy pink sweaters, made her want to vomit. She bought a lot of black, because it seemed noncommittal. She'd look like a rain cloud skulking through pastel California, but she'd always match.
She tried on every shade of lipstick at The Body Shop, and none of them made sense anymore. She settled on dark red, telling herself that it would stupid to leave empty-handed after all that work. She fingered her long, boring hair and asked Lilah, "Can I get it cut?" Ten minutes later, she was in an adjustable chair, asking the scissors-wielding aspiring actress for short, no bangs, extremely red.
On the way home, they stopped at Ralph's. Choosing a carton from the dairy case, she caught her reflection in the glass door. That was her, the girl with the 2%.
*
She was ready for whatever she was supposed to be developing powers for, but every day when Lilah came home from work, it was blah blah, lasting effects of the resuscitation spell, anything interesting happening on General Hospital? She had a key to the apartment and could come and go as she pleased, but there was nowhere to go. No public transportation, and nothing in walking distance, just apartment complexes and townhouses. She could just make it to Ralph's without exhausting herself, and that involved dashing across an eight-lane street while flipping off drivers who acted like they'd never seen a pedestrian before. Still, there was some novelty in walking in the sunshine, so she mapped out Lilah's neighborhood with her feet.
There were a few weeks of this, maybe a month. It was hard to follow the rhythm of days and nights when her body didn't care whether the sun was out. And then, when she'd begun to adopt the resigned pacing of a zoo tiger, Lilah announced that she would start school the next day. Private tutors. Anything Willow wanted to learn, plus a few things Wolfram & Hart wanted to teach her. "Can I have driving lessons?" Willow said.
She got those, first thing every morning. Her parents had insisted she wait for summer vacation to get her driver's license, but she hadn't made it through sophomore year. She knew almost instantly that she'd be a terrible driver, but that didn't matter-- she liked controlling such a powerful thing, being able to fly when traffic permitted.
Her other tutors were worth getting up for in the morning, too. They taught her school subjects, but at the level she was actually at. She had a whole class in advanced physics, and another one where she was doing trigonometry now but was promised differential equations by February. Her programming tutor was teaching her to hack using Javascript, and her English tutor pretty much gave her books to read and then made her discuss them for an hour. She remembered wishing, when she'd been alive for the first time, that school could just be eight hours of learning, without the pep rallies and the cliques and the humiliation of lunch period. A tiny part of her wondered if that wish had come true because she'd wished it.
And in the afternoon, she did magic. These tutors were all permanent employees of Wolfram & Hart, not grad students they'd contracted out. They offered no explanation of her lofty mission, but she knew as soon as she was told to turn to page four of Elementary Spells and Charms that this was how she was going to be powerful. If her powers only extended to levitating pencils, it would be pretty pathetic, but it didn't seem likely that Wolfram & Hart would revive her just to have someone to perform party tricks.
She learned to take integrals, and make little balls of light, and say things about F. Scott Fitzgerald that made her English tutor steeple his fingers and smile. She passed her driving test on the second try, and she was almost surprised to see that the picture on her license wasn't of an empty chair where a girl used to be. She'd written down her old birthdate, not thinking about it, but she realized that it was a good thing, being nineteen on paper. Even if she wished she could wash those years out of her mind, be that invisible, innocent girl.
Lilah's parenting philosophy ran mostly to paying Willow's credit card bills and bringing home enough takeout for both of them on the days when she didn't work past dinnertime. It was more quality time than Willow had spent with her real family. Even when Lindsey gave her a car of her own, as a reward for passing the tests, Willow tried to be home for dinner. Lilah only gave a shit because she was paid to, but any reason was better than not giving a shit at all. Besides, she was more intelligent than most people, and she didn't insist on talking when there was nothing to say. Willow could appreciate her, if not quite admit to liking her.
With the car, there were more places to go, although most of them were boring. She went out to a few nightclubs, the kind that had excited her when she was a vampire, but the humans were just stupid, self-centered people, not food. She hated most of the music, and she was a terrible dancer.
So she found a coffee shop that made good lattes and ice cream sundaes, where they were open late and left her alone to read about string theory or binding spells. There were other regulars, mostly pleasant and unobtrusive: Steve with the Converse high-tops and the headphones; Laurie with the multicolored hair and the feminist flyers; Tara with the long skirts and the thick books about Native American spirituality. She liked being able to smile at them when she saw them and then ignore them completely.
There was another regular who she enjoyed less. His name was Ben, and he was way too friendly. At first, she thought he was coming by to tell the sullen girl the good news about Jesus, but no, he was just really nice. And thought, apparently, that if he was persistent enough, she would stop blowing him off and love him forever.
She saw him as she came in and brought her coffee and backpack over to Tara's table. "Do you mind if I sit?" she said. "There's this guy I'm trying to avoid."
"Um, uh, sure," Tara said. She'd parted her hair in zigzags, and it made her look less granola-by-numbers. Pretty, even, maybe, with those huge baby-deer eyes.
Willow sat for a while, sipping coffee and pretending to read sample Perl programs, mostly thinking about the flyaway topology of Tara's hair.
"So, um, you... do magic?" Tara said. "Because I-- um-- I noticed you reading a book about it. A-- a real one, not like you'd get in the New Age section at Barnes & Noble. And I-- I-- I guess you didn't-- didn't actually want to talk to me, so, um..."
"I do magic," Willow said. "And sometimes computers." And sometimes girls, she added in her mind. Tara didn't seem like the kind who would take to the offer of a one-night stand. But that was good, because Willow thought she might not be that kind of girl anymore.
"Me-- me too," Tara said. "Magic. Since I was little, with my mom. Computers... uh, the guy in the UCLA tech support center showed me how to use my e-mail, and-- and that's all-- all I know."
"They're not all that different," Willow said. "If you're really specific about what you want, you pretty much get it, and if not-- well, kaboom."
"Do you-- do you-- I'm, um, looking for a coven. I-- I-- I tried the college Wiccan group, but they're mostly into bake sales and ar-arguing over what kind of drinks to serve at the Samhain mixer."
Willow laughed. "I'm mostly a solo practitioner. I've got someone teaching me."
"M-- maybe we could do a spell together sometime," Tara said. "L-- like something that's-- that's easier with two people."
"Maybe," Willow said, but she tore a sheet of paper out of her notebook, and they traded phone numbers. That was the kind of girl she was now.
*
The only unusual thing about the day they assigned Willow a bodyguard was that it was cold out. Not just cold for California, but teeth-chattering cold, like the Snow Queen had decided she'd had enough of Narnia and hopped through the wardrobe to try and break into movies. Willow bought a black leather jacket and a scarf, wine-colored with flecks of white, that kept unwinding itself from her neck and trailing towards the floor.
Lindsey was there to meet her after History of Magic, and he brought her upstairs to his office. Sitting on Lindsey's sofa was a big black guy, so immersed in the cleaning of a long knife that he didn't look up when they walked in. "Willow Rosenberg, meet Charles Gunn," Lindsey said.
Charles didn't get up, but he met Willow's eyes. There was something dead and yellowish in his. "Vampire?" she said.
"Reformed," he said. "As long as they pay me, I'm off the human blood."
"How do you stand it?" she said. "I mean, the taste alone."
"I moved out of the sewer, bought myself a new ride, and got the hell over it," he said. "Anything I need to know about?"
"Other than the creepy guy at the coffeehouse?" she said.
"There have been some... close calls," Lindsey said. "Things we didn't want to frighten you with."
"Close calls?" she said. "You don't want me to be *frightened*, so you don't tell me anything, except that maybe somebody might want to kill me? Again? No. I want to know why I'm here, and I'm-- I'm not leaving until somebody tells me. Okay, no, actually, if you don't tell me, I'm going to Lilah's and going to bed, and I'm not getting out to study any more magic until I know why I'm learning it in the first place."
"Gunn," Lindsey said affectlessly, "step out."
She stood there with her arms folded and waited for Lindsey to start talking.
"There's a very powerful goddess," he said. "Called Glorificus. She's loose, and she's destructive. There's been an epidemic of sudden-onset paranoid schizophrenia that we can link to her. Fortunately, we know what she's after, and she'll never get to it."
"Let me guess," Willow said. "I'm supposed to stop her somehow."
"You're going to figure out how to destroy her," Lindsey said.
"Well, I'll do my best," she said snidely, "but--"
"You're going to," he said. "There's a prophecy. One so clear that when our experts read it, they right away set about finding the way to bring you back to life."
"And how am I supposed to destroy this... god?" Willow said.
"Not a clue," Lindsey said.
Continued in part 2.