Soul Of An Angel
by Anne-Lise
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Nothing made sense. The words of the spell... she didn't really understand them. They'd been left for her, a tragic legacy of Miss Calendar's. God, how she missed Miss Calendar. The words spewed from her as if she were possessed. She tried not to think about what she was doing although she couldn't forget for one moment the being she was trying to save had murdered the woman she'd most admired and respected.
But she was doing this for Buffy, and she loved Buffy.
"Lasa orbita sa fie vasul care-i va transporta, sufletul la el."
Shadows crept menacingly at the periphery of her vision as the litany spewed onward, gathering momentum. Last page now. Willow closed her eyes. She didn't need to see the words anymore. They were indelibly written in searing letters of fire across the tableaux of her mind.
*
There were no regrets. Only sorrow. Buffy stared at the empty space where Angel had been standing. Only moments before, she'd killed him. Took the sword and run him through. Sent him back to hell. She'd wished Willow could have brought Angel's soul back from the wastelands of the damned; but it had been a selfish wish and she knew it for what it was.
Buffy shivered. Nothing left for her here now. Nothing but lost hopes, shattered dreams; Maybe a once-happy memory. But she still had her friends. Wonderful friends. She ought to get back to them. Maybe her mom could sort out Snyder. She hoped so. She had to go and find Willow. She needed her best friend. Now, more than ever.
She turned and left. Miserable, but with no regrets.
*
"Oh god!" Willow screamed in agony as energy rippled over her.
"What's happening?" Giles cried out over the whistling of preturnatural wind. Rapidly fluctuating weather patterns were something you least expected to come across inside a hospital ward.
"The spell went wrong... I guess I failed to summon Angel's soul!" Willow bit her lip, then screamed again, helplessly, as once more irridescent energy washed over her. Then all the lights went out.
Except it wasn't dark. The room was lit by the bright light emanating from the Orb of Thesulah. It was beautiful and mesmerising. It exploded.
*
Giles sat beside Buffy's hospital bed and cried. Here, alone and helpless, he could finally allow himself to cry. Stiff upper-lip be bolloxed. Buffy wasn't physically injured. What physical bruising she'd received fighting Angeles had faded before she'd even arrived at the hospital; But she'd had to be sedated when she'd lost all control at the news of Willow's death. Or possible death. Xander was in a critical condition and being looked after in Intensive Care. Shards of metal from Willow's bed had punctured a lung in the explosion. He was in bad shape, but under observation and stable. For whatever that meant.
Joyce and Sheila were both on their way, although Xander's white-trash parents didn't really give a damn. Bastards.
Willow. Oh god, Willow. Giles broke down once more and grieved for a young woman who'd become almost like a daughter to him. Gone, erased in a moment of dark magic and fire. Vanished without a trace.
*
She awoke to the warmth of the dawn. Almost by instinct the air-sac at the base of her syrinx contracted and she joined the dawn chorus. The breeze picked up, riffling the smallest, most delicate feathers that cloaked her elongated fingers. She lifted her stubby arms to the open skies, revelling in the joy that suffused her when the breeze caught her blue-tipped wings. She launched herself into flight.
Sounds rushed unfiltered through her mind. The rustle of leaves, the rush of a creek over three miles away. The steady roar of her heart which pumped highly oxygenated blood to her extremities and feather-stems as it managed over one hundred and eighty beats per minute.
She tried to laugh, to cry, to scream, but to no avail. Flickers of memory came to her in meaningless collage. She couldn't seem to think properly. Her overly-rounded eyes narrowed as she caught sight of a road maybe twelve miles away across the forest. She slowly banked and headed in that direction.
Cars! She remembered cars. Cars used roads. Why couldn't she think properly? What was she doing here? Her wings beat faster as she hovered. Soon she would need to hunt, to find food. But she felt there was a journey for her to begin. She could see the path in her mind as clearly as if it were really there. She could sense it, feel it. So she began to follow it.
Willow began to *home*.
*
Terry Jennsen swallowed a mouthful of beer as he drove his pickup along I-90. A real 'good old boy', he'd just finished a drinking session with some drinking buddies over at Arthur's bar, and now he was just a-followin' the road back home. One hand gripped the wheel, the other nursed a Bud.
Not completely drunk, he kept a periodic check on the rear-view. You never knew when some State trooper might take it into his head to creep up on you; hammer you with the tea-total fist of Justice. And that's how he became the first person to witness the breath-takingly wondrous angel; the naked red-head with gossamer-white wings flying carefree in parallel to the Interstate. It might have made him famous, if he hadn't doubted his own eyes and continued home to sleep it off.
*
Buffy considered leaving Sunnydale. It wasn't the first time the thought had occurred to her. The same thoughts had flitted through her mind that time she'd learned the Master was going to kill her. She'd had a sudden nearly-irresistable urge to flee. But she hadn't the strength to leave her mother all alone. Not like that. So she found the strength to fight the impulse and do her duty.
Could she now?
"Oh Willow, where are you? Are you still alive?"
*
Giles sank into his rather uncomfortable wicker reading-chair, and rubbed ineffectively at his eyes. For company, he turned on the TV and saw Willow. At first he didn't understand, or believe, what it was he was seeing. Flicking channels, every channel showed the same image. An Angel in the skies.
With trembling fingers, he phoned Buffy.
*
"...is KTTS coming to you live..."
"...unable to believe..."
"...sign from Heaven, praise..."
"...appears to be a young woman, maybe in her late 'teens or early twenties with red hair and white wings. And boy, can she fly! The pilot informs me the helicopter is travelling at its maximum speed of just over one hundred forty miles per hour, and even so we're beginning to lose ground..."
"... hasn't deviated from her course since she was first spotted..."
Buffy stopped channel hopping at the first channel with a close-up of the angel's face. Tears blurred her eyes, and faintly she recognised Giles voice coming from the receiver which still lay on the floor where she'd dropped it.
"Its really her," she said.
*
Could anything feel more wonderful than this? Sun coated her whole body like a glove, yet the frigid air made her skin tingle as she increased her speed once more. She was going home, home to where she belonged, to where she was loved.
She was going home to Buffy.
*
Xander caught a glimpse of her her before I did which annoyed the hell out of me. I couldn't see her clearly through my tears. How could I possibly describe how I felt? Only a few days ago we'd buried her, or rather an empty cascet representing her, yet now here she came held aloft on impossible white wings that glowed in the noonday sun. I was breathless and a little in awe. And she was moving so *fast*.
I ran a few yards forward then stopped. Did she know how I felt? Could she? Was she still the same Willow despite this miraculous alteration? Would she still know me? Or was this some sick joked visited upon me by the Powers That Be?
Whatever jumble of thoughts were in my mind, whatever madness lay upon me, everything dissolved away in a moment of sheer panic as she dove straight down towards me, arms extended, and quite literally swept me off my feet.
Somewhere down below, Xander shouted after us, but I couldn't hear his words. The rush of wind as we spiralled into the air prevented me from hearing anything at all and I couldn't care less.
"Willow?" My voice startled her and she dropped momentarily groundwards causing me to scream in terror. She gripped tighter, and slowed herself so that she landed nimbly within Sunnydale's Parkside cemetery; one of the smaller graveyards on my patrol.
She looked at me quizzically, and for a moment she seemed to be *my* Willow once more, but everything about her was wrong. She cocked her head and let out a cry. A bird's cry.
"Oh Willow, what happened to you?" I put a hand to her cheek and it was warm. Very warm, as though she were fevered. She leaned into the caress and kissed my hand. Startled, I pulled my hand back and Willow stepped forward so that our noses were almost touching. And then she kissed me.
How stupid I must have looked, standing there with my mouth open to her invading tongue, eyes widening in shock. I pulled back again, and she continued to watch me.
"Willow? Are you..."
Again the avian screech, but with it was a smile and she nodded. I hugged her. Hugged her, and felt my world collapse around me. That, and the feathers lining her fingers tickling my cheek, drove me to hysterics.
"Oh Willow."
*
Helicopters hovered over Sunnydale as I sat with Willow in my room. I'd taken my mother's less-valued dressing-gown and slit the back with a handy axe. I helped Willow to dress although she didn't seem to care much for clothes; The cold held no meaning for her anymore. But the feelings that ran through me from seeing Willow unclothed, an *angel* unclothed... I felt the flush creep past my neckline and I had to turn my head away to hide my embarrassment.
Willow still hadn't spoken since our reunion. I figured that whatever transformation had changed her body had also stolen her ability to speak. I knew she could understand what I was saying though, because she obeyed my few commands without pause. She looked beautiful, and I cried for her.
My tears confused her, as if she'd never seen tears before. She came closer to stare at them, watching as they ran down my cheeks. She licked at them dartingly, and my gasp of surprise made her jet backwards and extend her wings for balance. Wings that beat powerfully a few times before stopping. My bedroom was now a windblown mess. A noisy, windblown mess.
My mother ran in to find us like that. Me, standing in the corner sobbing away, and an angelic Willow with her eyes clamped shut, clad in the ruins of a dressing gown, standing in the centre of a maelstrom.
Her reaction was not what I predicted. She laughed; an unexpected bark of laughter that made Willow open one eye comically. I couldn't help but join in the laughter. I was again hysterical; The world had just become crazier. My world had changed forever.
*
"Do you want more milk, Willow?" My mother, always the level-headed one in times of stress, had figured that Willow might be hungry after her long flight. So she'd led us both down to the kitchen where she fixed a 'snack'. For the uninitiated, my mother's snacks are legendary. They tend not to fit on a table, but instead orbit on various counters and worktops and work their way inwards as though those who eat here were gastronomic black holes.
Willow seemed to want only two things; milk and cucumber. She was on her second carton of milk by now and had an amusing dab of white on the end of her nose. I giggled, and tears once more cascaded down my cheeks.
Summers' women can be hard as nails when circumstances require. I rarely cry at death. Hell, as the Slayer, I'd never stop. But shove us in front of a weepy movie and you'd better ensure the Kleenex container are well-stocked.
Once again Willow stopped what she was doing to stare at my tears. And once again she came over to lick at them, which both mortified me and amused my mother.
"Er, Willow?" I tried to gently push her away, but instead ended up in a hug.
"She really likes you," came my mother's dry comment. "Or maybe, its the salt?"
I didn't answer. My mouth had Willow's tongue in it.
"No, I think its just that she likes you."
"Mmmph!"
*
Mom came to the rescue by taking Willow's hand and leading her back up the stairs to the shower. I followed her, my thoughts a whirlwind in my head. At the top of the stairs, my mother stood guard outside the bathroom with her arms crossed. She firmly pointed me in the direction of my bedroom, so I reluctantly went and sat down at the end of my bed. Then it occurred to me that Giles and Xander were still waiting to hear from me. No doubt Xander would have told Giles about my rapid departure. Gods, he must be worried sick!
"Hello?" Giles answered halfway through the first ring.
"Hi Giles." I answered, unsure of what to say.
"She's with you? Now? At home?" He sounded excited, not worried.
"Oh yeah, she's here."
"Shall I come over?" I could just feel him champing at the bit.
"Not a good idea." Especially not while she's naked in the shower. "I'll smuggle her over to the library after school tomorrow."
"Oh." I could just see him cleaning his glasses in a disappointed way. "Sure. After school, then."
He hung up, and as I turned around, I saw my mother creasing up in laughter again in the hallway. So I went to take a peek.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"Take a look and see."
I stared around the bathroom door and watched Willow playing with the shower. The shower head was dangling from its cord, spraying the whole bathroom in lukewarm water as Willow danced about.
"Um?" I asked.
"I don't think she's seen a shower before." my mother said.
How much of *my* Willow was still in there?
*
"Are you two okay to sleep like that?" My mother's frown didn't pass unnoticed. Willow, it seemed, would only settle down to sleep if she could lie supine on her front with her wings slightly unfurled. So I let her have my bed, and I lay on the floor.
"We'll be fine, mum." I replied, feeling the uncomfortable bumpy carpet under my back. My mother nodded and closed the door behind her. I stared at the ceiling and concentrated on my breathing, trying to let my mind empty. This proved to be rather difficult, as Willow chose that moment to land on top of me.
"Willow!" I whispered loudly. I could well imagine what would happen if my mother saw us like this together, especially after the kissing earlier.
Willow trilled, lightly, and laid her head next to mine. And once again I felt her curious warmth as her hands explored my body, squeezing my breasts...
"Willow!" I gasped, I couldn't help it. Her touch felt so good, too good. Willow's mouth found mine once more, and suddenly I had no resistance left to give. I succumbed to the pleasure she gave.
*
When I awoke, Willow was gone. I panicked and rushed madly through the house; no sign of her. My mother had already left for work. I wondered vaguely whether she'd have taken Willow with her, but wrote that off as an insane thought. I was just about to give up and call Giles when I heard a noise coming from my bedroom. I rushed in.
The noise, I discovered, had come from my wardrobe. My wardrobe which now, as well as my clothes, contained a crouching Willow and two, small, baby-sized eggs. I think that's when I fainted.
*
Giles arrived with remarkable alacrity. He seemed excited and worried at the same time, which manifested itself in manic eyebrow movement.
"She's oviparous!" he explained without actually being meaningful. "That's why she has no breasts!"
"In English?" I asked, bemused.
"She has no breasts because she raises her young from an egg," Giles elaborated.
"Oh." There was that thought again. "Baby Willows?" I asked.
Giles nodded. "Baby angels," he confirmed.
"Oh." Words failed me. "I'm going to be a mother?"
*
END.