Fic: The Soul Lies Down [12/?]
Title: The Soul Lies Down (12/?)
Pairing(s): Buffy/Spike, (Anya/Xander, Willow/Tara)
Rating: NC-17
Length: ~2,700 (~54,900 total)
Timeline: AU S5, S6, S7 and post-series
Warnings: character death, violence and gore
Summary: As a child, I used to dream of a man in black and white, spinning in the desert like a dervish, sword flashing in the moonlight as he danced with death. (A sequel/companion to angearia's Fin Amour).
Notes: I snuck chapter 11 in last month at the start of seasonal_spuffy, so here is the next of my new chapters. Many thanks for Bewilde and rahirah for beta services extraordinaire. Chapter contains quotes from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Constructive crit is, as ever, welcome.
12
Continuum of Complexities
I thought I was ready for this moment, but I never could have been. The reality of Spike is always more complex, more vibrant, more painful than the idea of him. The way he’s looking at me now…
I can’t tell if he’s glad to see me or not. I can’t tell if I’m glad to see him, either. But in his eyes there’s such love, such desperation, I feel it like a handprint on my heart.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I’m here to save the day, as usual,” I tell him. I hear the way my voice falters, winded.
“It’s been a long bloody time,” he says. “Why now?”
The question is almost pleading, the light in his eyes like a furnace.
Dazzled, I find myself looking at my mother.
“If she leaves like this, I can’t say what’ll happen. It could be very bad.”
“Christ,” he mutters, swiping a hand down his face. He’s so physical, every action, every emotion, I envy him this… this anchoredness. When he looks at me again, his expression is awful. Not as it had been in the cave, from emptiness, but from instead being too full. But he’s always been a study in contrasts. (Isn’t that’s half the reason I’m here?) “I did this. Didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I say. And sigh. “And no.”
“Never a straight bloody answer,” he complains.
I almost laugh, but it would be cruel, and besides, once I start I might not stop. Instead, all I can do is tell him, “That’s life? I don’t know what you were expecting. It’s not like there’s a manual.”
“Forgot what a cheeky little bint you are,” he says stepping closer, and before I know what’s happening, he’s gathered me into his arms. “Missed you, platelet.”
I can’t say how long it’s been since someone touched me. Held me. Of all the parental figures in my life, he’s the one I have least knowledge of, and yet… I don’t have to force myself to relax, it just happens. Love and forgiveness are two different things, after all.
“I have to take her away,” I murmur into his t-shirt. “Just for a while. I’ll bring her back at a better time.”
“You know what you’re doing,” he replies, and there’s no hint of a question in his tone.
It’s strangely hard to let go.
*
“This is so weird,” Buffy says, after she’s come out of her defensive stance, the introductions made. “Somehow… I didn’t think you were really real.”
It doesn’t surprise me, this revelation. It’s not a lack of faith, not really. She may be a mystical warrior, but the emphasis has always fallen on the latter. She understands what she can lay her hands on; what she can fight. Feelings, promises, time travelling daughters - none of these are tangible in the same way.
Until they are.
“Sometimes I don’t think I’m really real, either,” I reassure her, though she ends up frowning at me in a way that makes me rush to explain. “It’s weird for me, too. I don’t have any new memories yet, from the things that I’ve changed. I don’t know when those will come. I don’t even know if I truly exist right now. We’re outside of time, here, and in my proper timeline everyone else is dead…”
The thought clangs inside me like a bell. Everyone else is dead. I… had known that. But until now, I had assumed it was a state of affairs within my power to reverse. It turns out, it’s not. Not entirely.
I don’t realize how lost I’ve become until Buffy’s small hand on my arm brings me back. Our eyes meet, and something seems to pass between us, some recognition of duty and battles fought.
“You don’t really see me as your mom,” she says quietly, astutely - I didn’t realize it was true until she said it, but she looks the same as I remember her, as the photos I have of her, fifteen years out of date. An insect frozen in amber. A fantasy. A heroic figure in my own creation myth, not the woman who raised me.
I look at her, take her in. Small woman, big eyes, immense strength and peculiar vulnerability. So very easy to love, and so hard. “Not exactly. But you don’t really see me as your daughter, either.”
“Dawn-”
“No, it’s okay. It’s probably easier this way. Maybe we should treat each other more like friends or, or sisters, just for now. Cut down on the weirdness factor.”
“Cutting down the weirdness factor still leaves us at ‘extremely weird’, but okay,” she says. “So… not that I’m not pleased to see you, but why am I here?”
I shift my weight from one foot to the other, like a stalk of field grass in the breeze. It all seemed so straightforward in the desert.
“There’s something I have to show you,” I say.
*
My mother wrote me a letter before she died. I guess she knew how the battle would go, or at least suspected. It’s the only thing I have of her in her own words. My aunts and uncles gave it to me on my twelfth birthday, and on the way to my own final battle, I put it in my pocket. I don’t know why. It’s still there now. (Young lady, you haven’t changed your clothes since you left home?)
(Seriously, Anya? That’s what you’re worried about?)
I stand in front of her and try to imagine how this will go. I have wanted this meeting all of my life, but now my task is to fight against her most basic instincts. And there’s a strange lack of clarity in my mind.
*
It’s surprisingly hard to slide with her into the moment I want. I’ve never had any trouble before, and yet amid the rushing, tumbling exhilaration, there’s a strange resistance, an abrupt moment of stomach-dropping lack of control, before we step out into the tableau. I glance up at the star-spattered sky almost reflexively, but this is not the field and there is no void tinting the horizon. Still, the strange chill that has come over me is hard to shake.
“Dawn, are you…?” Buffy starts to ask, but like any warrior she’s already scanning her surroundings and what she sees overtakes her concern for me.
I can’t really blame her.
It’s pretty weird, seeing yourself for the first time.
“What…?” she tries, but doesn’t finish, simply looking to me for explanation, although I think it’s clear enough.
We’re on a rise, amid a patch of scrub and sand, the desert sky vast overhead and fading with the coming day. On the ground, not far from where we stand, a woman lies on a bed of black leather, new life between her legs still anchored to her body by the umbilical cord.
“Is this real?” Buffy asks, eyes glued to herself.
“Yes. This is what happened.”
I allow time to trickle back in, and we watch as the woman on the ground, exhausted, reaches futilely for her baby, watch as the man who houses the god crests the dune, watch as he ties and cuts the cord and passes me to my mother. And I see it, the way her hands clench into white-knuckled fists at the sight of him even now, the surge to action when he puts his hands on me.
“There’s nothing you can do,” I tell her, catching her arm in that tense moment before movement. “We’re just watching, here.”
The sound she makes is frustrated - plaintive and guttural - because she doesn’t like him that close to me with a knife in his hand any more than she did the first time. And then comes the struggle. And then comes the death.
Buffy stands and stares, eyes huge, at the corpse of the man, the god’s only vulnerability, as his blood sinks into the sand. Without looking, she reaches out to clasp my wrist, as though seeking reassurance. She’s holding on so hard that it hurts, but I understand - this is how she loves.
“It’s not the same,” she says, voice thick, eyes glimmering. “It’s not.”
“But a man’s dead, nonetheless,” I tell her. “A human man, who didn’t ask for any of this.”
“Take me back,” she says harshly. “I’ve seen enough.”
She hasn’t. But it’s enough for now.
On a neighboring dune, I see my shadow self in passing. I wonder if I will ever fully leave this moment.
*
Sitting in my deckchair, I watch Buffy pace, unwrapping her hands from their fight-ready bindings in jerky movements. Somehow - in her fashionable workout clothes, immaculately coiffed and made-up - she looks entirely out of place here. I made this field, this world, for Spike, but didn’t realize until I brought him here how uncomfortably it fit him, too. He wasn’t made for the sunshine; she wasn’t made for the great outdoors. Different routes, same location.
“I didn’t have a choice,” she says eventually, and she’s angry, but not at me. (Does she know that?)
“There’s always a choice.” With worlds and worlds and worlds in my mind, I know this better than any other person.
“Uh huh, right, I could’ve just let the knife-wielding, god-possessed maniac decide what he wanted to do with you.”
“I didn’t say it was a good choice.”
She comes to a stop in front of me, holding herself still so forcibly she’s shaking with it. “Are you actually trying to tell me that Spike and I are the same? Are you actually gonna do that?”
“No,” I say. “Because you’re not. He’s a demon.”
She stills further, looks stricken. “Are you… are you saying what I did was worse?”
Oh, god. How do these things get so tangled so quickly?
I get up, and go to her, hands on her shoulders. (How can she be so small and… human?)
“No. No. Listen. He’s a demon, and that means he’ll never be good, not like you. He’s not able.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she grates, kneejerk, twisting away from my hands. “He’s…”
I give the thought time to work its way down.
“He knows the difference between right and wrong. He’s just…”
I see it, sinking through her like a stone.
“What about his soul?” she asks, voice little-girl plaintive.
“That’s a choice, too.”
*
We watch Spike and Joyce sitting together in the kitchen of Revello Drive. It’s not long after he came back, a few months at most, and he has just been reaccepted into the Summers home after the chip debacle. His face still bears the fading marks of his ill-advised mission to prove himself. There’s two mugs of hot chocolate on the counter, half-drunk, mostly forgotten.
“Now, Spike,” Grandma Joyce is saying, smiling but not entirely at ease. “There’s no need for such tall tales.”
He gives her a look of exaggerated offense, something sly creeping in as he talks. “What? You expect an upstanding creature of the night like myself to tell it true? Not likely.”
“Well, I suppose that’s fair. I just wish I knew which part was the exaggeration - the violence or the heroics.” She thinks about that a moment, then holds up a hand to prevent him from answering. “On second thought, I think I’m happy staying in the dark.”
Spike grins almost boyishly, something uncertain skirting the edges.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, Joyce. I’m here to do good. Made a promise to Buffy.”
She sits back, considering him, and makes a soft mmm of agreement. “I think you mean that.” For a moment, her look is piercing, and then she comes over self-conscious and glances away, smiling a small smile and shaking her head to herself. “Sometimes I forget you don’t have a soul.”
For a moment, Spike’s face is a flip-book of emotions, indignant to panicked to furious to thoughtful.
“Now, now,” he says, with the care of a ballet dancer en pointe in a minefield. “No need to go getting personal.”
But it’s clear from his expression that the idea has found purchase and is slowly putting down roots.
*
“I don’t…” Buffy shakes her head in confusion once we return, again, to the field. “Are you saying he has a soul because he wants one?”
“No,” I say, and try not to sigh. This is harder than I expected, and somehow that last slide has made me very tired. “Can you remember what he told you? That night on the back porch?”
“You were watching?”
I don’t answer. Of course I was watching.
She sits down in the empty deckchair besides mine and lets her head fall momentarily into her hands, clenching her hair before letting it slide through her fingers as she straightens her spine.
“He said he felt a spark, when he was with you. That everything felt brighter, more real. And he said that it was growing.” I nod; she frowns. “So it’s true?”
“Perhaps,” I say. “But not in the way you’re thinking. I was born because he loved me enough to die for me. I was born out of his love - not in the traditional sense, but in the only way that counted. So I got some physical characteristics from him, as any child would, and it’s possible he got some metaphysical characteristics from me.”
“A soul.”
“A spark,” I correct. “It’s just potential, but that’s how it starts. A fire that splits the nut and lets the seedling out; it can grow into a mighty redwood, or perish on the forest floor.”
“But he has to choose it,” she murmurs. Relief begins to creep in; she is finally starting to get it.
“Let me tell you something about Warren Mears,” I say to her gently. “In my timeline, he murdered Tara, shot her with a handgun. He shot you, too, but you survived.”
She looks up, white-faced. “He killed Tara?” Her exhale is shaky. “God.”
“And Willow killed him,” I add. “Out of grief, and vengeance.” Not good motivations, but human. “He wasn’t the only one.”
She scrunches her hands through her hair again, knuckles white. “Why are you telling me this? He didn’t do any of that in my world. Maybe he never would have, if I could have just… You can’t sentence a person to death for might-have-beens!”
“Listen to me,” I tell her, and I remember suddenly that I’m older than she is. Only by a year or so in physical time - somewhat more if we’re counting my time travelling adventure - but I feel every one of those additional months (years). “You were not responsible for Willow. You were not responsible for Warren. And you are not responsible for Spike. He isn’t… isn’t another one of your children that you have to teach right from wrong. He will falter, and follow his instincts when he shouldn’t, but he is also capable of reasoning things through. The fault of the murder is not on you, and not feeling bad about Warren’s death doesn’t make you complicit.”
Everything in her seems to draw in, recoil. She says, “But he won’t feel sorry for it, so I have to.”
(My wrongs are not yours to right, padawan.)
“Otherwise, next time it might be you bathing in the blood of the innocent?”
The uncoiling comes with the suddenness of a spring. She rises and throws her hand-wraps viciously to the ground as she storms away across the field. I let her go. She can’t go far, after all.
*
Andrew said something, before I left him. He said a lot of things, being who he is (was, god) but this one didn’t really strike me as important until later - now - when it rises to the surface like a piece of debris, shaken free as I bludgeon myself against my mother’s hard-headedness.
I am the daughter of a great romance.
It’s a terrible realization that I am satisfied to trade this for his life. Because suddenly I see the pulsing heart at the center of this nexus of fear and confusion, and recognize it for what it is.
(I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper.)
(Right, like either of those was ever truly likely. But god, I want it.)
Chapter Index | Next
Pairing(s): Buffy/Spike, (Anya/Xander, Willow/Tara)
Rating: NC-17
Length: ~2,700 (~54,900 total)
Timeline: AU S5, S6, S7 and post-series
Warnings: character death, violence and gore
Summary: As a child, I used to dream of a man in black and white, spinning in the desert like a dervish, sword flashing in the moonlight as he danced with death. (A sequel/companion to angearia's Fin Amour).
Notes: I snuck chapter 11 in last month at the start of seasonal_spuffy, so here is the next of my new chapters. Many thanks for Bewilde and rahirah for beta services extraordinaire. Chapter contains quotes from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Constructive crit is, as ever, welcome.
12
Continuum of Complexities
I thought I was ready for this moment, but I never could have been. The reality of Spike is always more complex, more vibrant, more painful than the idea of him. The way he’s looking at me now…
I can’t tell if he’s glad to see me or not. I can’t tell if I’m glad to see him, either. But in his eyes there’s such love, such desperation, I feel it like a handprint on my heart.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I’m here to save the day, as usual,” I tell him. I hear the way my voice falters, winded.
“It’s been a long bloody time,” he says. “Why now?”
The question is almost pleading, the light in his eyes like a furnace.
Dazzled, I find myself looking at my mother.
“If she leaves like this, I can’t say what’ll happen. It could be very bad.”
“Christ,” he mutters, swiping a hand down his face. He’s so physical, every action, every emotion, I envy him this… this anchoredness. When he looks at me again, his expression is awful. Not as it had been in the cave, from emptiness, but from instead being too full. But he’s always been a study in contrasts. (Isn’t that’s half the reason I’m here?) “I did this. Didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I say. And sigh. “And no.”
“Never a straight bloody answer,” he complains.
I almost laugh, but it would be cruel, and besides, once I start I might not stop. Instead, all I can do is tell him, “That’s life? I don’t know what you were expecting. It’s not like there’s a manual.”
“Forgot what a cheeky little bint you are,” he says stepping closer, and before I know what’s happening, he’s gathered me into his arms. “Missed you, platelet.”
I can’t say how long it’s been since someone touched me. Held me. Of all the parental figures in my life, he’s the one I have least knowledge of, and yet… I don’t have to force myself to relax, it just happens. Love and forgiveness are two different things, after all.
“I have to take her away,” I murmur into his t-shirt. “Just for a while. I’ll bring her back at a better time.”
“You know what you’re doing,” he replies, and there’s no hint of a question in his tone.
It’s strangely hard to let go.
*
“This is so weird,” Buffy says, after she’s come out of her defensive stance, the introductions made. “Somehow… I didn’t think you were really real.”
It doesn’t surprise me, this revelation. It’s not a lack of faith, not really. She may be a mystical warrior, but the emphasis has always fallen on the latter. She understands what she can lay her hands on; what she can fight. Feelings, promises, time travelling daughters - none of these are tangible in the same way.
Until they are.
“Sometimes I don’t think I’m really real, either,” I reassure her, though she ends up frowning at me in a way that makes me rush to explain. “It’s weird for me, too. I don’t have any new memories yet, from the things that I’ve changed. I don’t know when those will come. I don’t even know if I truly exist right now. We’re outside of time, here, and in my proper timeline everyone else is dead…”
The thought clangs inside me like a bell. Everyone else is dead. I… had known that. But until now, I had assumed it was a state of affairs within my power to reverse. It turns out, it’s not. Not entirely.
I don’t realize how lost I’ve become until Buffy’s small hand on my arm brings me back. Our eyes meet, and something seems to pass between us, some recognition of duty and battles fought.
“You don’t really see me as your mom,” she says quietly, astutely - I didn’t realize it was true until she said it, but she looks the same as I remember her, as the photos I have of her, fifteen years out of date. An insect frozen in amber. A fantasy. A heroic figure in my own creation myth, not the woman who raised me.
I look at her, take her in. Small woman, big eyes, immense strength and peculiar vulnerability. So very easy to love, and so hard. “Not exactly. But you don’t really see me as your daughter, either.”
“Dawn-”
“No, it’s okay. It’s probably easier this way. Maybe we should treat each other more like friends or, or sisters, just for now. Cut down on the weirdness factor.”
“Cutting down the weirdness factor still leaves us at ‘extremely weird’, but okay,” she says. “So… not that I’m not pleased to see you, but why am I here?”
I shift my weight from one foot to the other, like a stalk of field grass in the breeze. It all seemed so straightforward in the desert.
“There’s something I have to show you,” I say.
*
My mother wrote me a letter before she died. I guess she knew how the battle would go, or at least suspected. It’s the only thing I have of her in her own words. My aunts and uncles gave it to me on my twelfth birthday, and on the way to my own final battle, I put it in my pocket. I don’t know why. It’s still there now. (Young lady, you haven’t changed your clothes since you left home?)
(Seriously, Anya? That’s what you’re worried about?)
I stand in front of her and try to imagine how this will go. I have wanted this meeting all of my life, but now my task is to fight against her most basic instincts. And there’s a strange lack of clarity in my mind.
*
It’s surprisingly hard to slide with her into the moment I want. I’ve never had any trouble before, and yet amid the rushing, tumbling exhilaration, there’s a strange resistance, an abrupt moment of stomach-dropping lack of control, before we step out into the tableau. I glance up at the star-spattered sky almost reflexively, but this is not the field and there is no void tinting the horizon. Still, the strange chill that has come over me is hard to shake.
“Dawn, are you…?” Buffy starts to ask, but like any warrior she’s already scanning her surroundings and what she sees overtakes her concern for me.
I can’t really blame her.
It’s pretty weird, seeing yourself for the first time.
“What…?” she tries, but doesn’t finish, simply looking to me for explanation, although I think it’s clear enough.
We’re on a rise, amid a patch of scrub and sand, the desert sky vast overhead and fading with the coming day. On the ground, not far from where we stand, a woman lies on a bed of black leather, new life between her legs still anchored to her body by the umbilical cord.
“Is this real?” Buffy asks, eyes glued to herself.
“Yes. This is what happened.”
I allow time to trickle back in, and we watch as the woman on the ground, exhausted, reaches futilely for her baby, watch as the man who houses the god crests the dune, watch as he ties and cuts the cord and passes me to my mother. And I see it, the way her hands clench into white-knuckled fists at the sight of him even now, the surge to action when he puts his hands on me.
“There’s nothing you can do,” I tell her, catching her arm in that tense moment before movement. “We’re just watching, here.”
The sound she makes is frustrated - plaintive and guttural - because she doesn’t like him that close to me with a knife in his hand any more than she did the first time. And then comes the struggle. And then comes the death.
Buffy stands and stares, eyes huge, at the corpse of the man, the god’s only vulnerability, as his blood sinks into the sand. Without looking, she reaches out to clasp my wrist, as though seeking reassurance. She’s holding on so hard that it hurts, but I understand - this is how she loves.
“It’s not the same,” she says, voice thick, eyes glimmering. “It’s not.”
“But a man’s dead, nonetheless,” I tell her. “A human man, who didn’t ask for any of this.”
“Take me back,” she says harshly. “I’ve seen enough.”
She hasn’t. But it’s enough for now.
On a neighboring dune, I see my shadow self in passing. I wonder if I will ever fully leave this moment.
*
Sitting in my deckchair, I watch Buffy pace, unwrapping her hands from their fight-ready bindings in jerky movements. Somehow - in her fashionable workout clothes, immaculately coiffed and made-up - she looks entirely out of place here. I made this field, this world, for Spike, but didn’t realize until I brought him here how uncomfortably it fit him, too. He wasn’t made for the sunshine; she wasn’t made for the great outdoors. Different routes, same location.
“I didn’t have a choice,” she says eventually, and she’s angry, but not at me. (Does she know that?)
“There’s always a choice.” With worlds and worlds and worlds in my mind, I know this better than any other person.
“Uh huh, right, I could’ve just let the knife-wielding, god-possessed maniac decide what he wanted to do with you.”
“I didn’t say it was a good choice.”
She comes to a stop in front of me, holding herself still so forcibly she’s shaking with it. “Are you actually trying to tell me that Spike and I are the same? Are you actually gonna do that?”
“No,” I say. “Because you’re not. He’s a demon.”
She stills further, looks stricken. “Are you… are you saying what I did was worse?”
Oh, god. How do these things get so tangled so quickly?
I get up, and go to her, hands on her shoulders. (How can she be so small and… human?)
“No. No. Listen. He’s a demon, and that means he’ll never be good, not like you. He’s not able.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she grates, kneejerk, twisting away from my hands. “He’s…”
I give the thought time to work its way down.
“He knows the difference between right and wrong. He’s just…”
I see it, sinking through her like a stone.
“What about his soul?” she asks, voice little-girl plaintive.
“That’s a choice, too.”
*
We watch Spike and Joyce sitting together in the kitchen of Revello Drive. It’s not long after he came back, a few months at most, and he has just been reaccepted into the Summers home after the chip debacle. His face still bears the fading marks of his ill-advised mission to prove himself. There’s two mugs of hot chocolate on the counter, half-drunk, mostly forgotten.
“Now, Spike,” Grandma Joyce is saying, smiling but not entirely at ease. “There’s no need for such tall tales.”
He gives her a look of exaggerated offense, something sly creeping in as he talks. “What? You expect an upstanding creature of the night like myself to tell it true? Not likely.”
“Well, I suppose that’s fair. I just wish I knew which part was the exaggeration - the violence or the heroics.” She thinks about that a moment, then holds up a hand to prevent him from answering. “On second thought, I think I’m happy staying in the dark.”
Spike grins almost boyishly, something uncertain skirting the edges.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, Joyce. I’m here to do good. Made a promise to Buffy.”
She sits back, considering him, and makes a soft mmm of agreement. “I think you mean that.” For a moment, her look is piercing, and then she comes over self-conscious and glances away, smiling a small smile and shaking her head to herself. “Sometimes I forget you don’t have a soul.”
For a moment, Spike’s face is a flip-book of emotions, indignant to panicked to furious to thoughtful.
“Now, now,” he says, with the care of a ballet dancer en pointe in a minefield. “No need to go getting personal.”
But it’s clear from his expression that the idea has found purchase and is slowly putting down roots.
*
“I don’t…” Buffy shakes her head in confusion once we return, again, to the field. “Are you saying he has a soul because he wants one?”
“No,” I say, and try not to sigh. This is harder than I expected, and somehow that last slide has made me very tired. “Can you remember what he told you? That night on the back porch?”
“You were watching?”
I don’t answer. Of course I was watching.
She sits down in the empty deckchair besides mine and lets her head fall momentarily into her hands, clenching her hair before letting it slide through her fingers as she straightens her spine.
“He said he felt a spark, when he was with you. That everything felt brighter, more real. And he said that it was growing.” I nod; she frowns. “So it’s true?”
“Perhaps,” I say. “But not in the way you’re thinking. I was born because he loved me enough to die for me. I was born out of his love - not in the traditional sense, but in the only way that counted. So I got some physical characteristics from him, as any child would, and it’s possible he got some metaphysical characteristics from me.”
“A soul.”
“A spark,” I correct. “It’s just potential, but that’s how it starts. A fire that splits the nut and lets the seedling out; it can grow into a mighty redwood, or perish on the forest floor.”
“But he has to choose it,” she murmurs. Relief begins to creep in; she is finally starting to get it.
“Let me tell you something about Warren Mears,” I say to her gently. “In my timeline, he murdered Tara, shot her with a handgun. He shot you, too, but you survived.”
She looks up, white-faced. “He killed Tara?” Her exhale is shaky. “God.”
“And Willow killed him,” I add. “Out of grief, and vengeance.” Not good motivations, but human. “He wasn’t the only one.”
She scrunches her hands through her hair again, knuckles white. “Why are you telling me this? He didn’t do any of that in my world. Maybe he never would have, if I could have just… You can’t sentence a person to death for might-have-beens!”
“Listen to me,” I tell her, and I remember suddenly that I’m older than she is. Only by a year or so in physical time - somewhat more if we’re counting my time travelling adventure - but I feel every one of those additional months (years). “You were not responsible for Willow. You were not responsible for Warren. And you are not responsible for Spike. He isn’t… isn’t another one of your children that you have to teach right from wrong. He will falter, and follow his instincts when he shouldn’t, but he is also capable of reasoning things through. The fault of the murder is not on you, and not feeling bad about Warren’s death doesn’t make you complicit.”
Everything in her seems to draw in, recoil. She says, “But he won’t feel sorry for it, so I have to.”
(My wrongs are not yours to right, padawan.)
“Otherwise, next time it might be you bathing in the blood of the innocent?”
The uncoiling comes with the suddenness of a spring. She rises and throws her hand-wraps viciously to the ground as she storms away across the field. I let her go. She can’t go far, after all.
*
Andrew said something, before I left him. He said a lot of things, being who he is (was, god) but this one didn’t really strike me as important until later - now - when it rises to the surface like a piece of debris, shaken free as I bludgeon myself against my mother’s hard-headedness.
I am the daughter of a great romance.
It’s a terrible realization that I am satisfied to trade this for his life. Because suddenly I see the pulsing heart at the center of this nexus of fear and confusion, and recognize it for what it is.
(I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper.)
(Right, like either of those was ever truly likely. But god, I want it.)
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