Afterlife Happens
by Exiled-Too
Ending
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Part Ten
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Without my body holding me together, I feel myself drifting off into the ether—the true definition of damned—in a few minutes I will cease to exist. And it's right, it's justified that I should die a true death, a soul death. I hate myself, I deserve this for pulling Buffy out of heaven, for lying to my friends, for putting a stain on their souls.
I'm vaguely aware of Osiris as he stands there in front of my friends; he, she? I don't know . . . It doesn't matter, nothing will matter to me in just a few moments. I watch as he looks down at his new body. He lifts his hands, wondering at them, the flesh that he had been denied for so long . . . everything he has wanted for thousands of years made manifest and real.
I feel my soul begin to lose its form, I'm falling apart. My friends are still embraced, unaware of my fate, until Buffy's Slayer sense goes off. I always know when she senses something because she gets really still, like she is now, and she cocks her head to one side as if she's listening.
When she sees him, his black hair shining in the late morning light as it comes through the window, she pushes the others out of the way and steps forward ready to meet the challenge. Or so I thought . . .
"Willow?" She questions slowly, her tear-stained face a mask of confusion. "No, you aren't Will; I can't feel her in you." Then her eyes desperately search the room . . . I'm falling apart. I'm leaving; something is pulling on the bits and pieces of my soul, I'm being pulled away from Buffy, away from my family. I'm being swallowed into the cold darkness; my hearing goes, my sight . . .
"Don't leave me alone!" The guttural scream reaches into the empty night that's absorbing me. I can't hear the words so much as see them as sparkling streaks of white light. They reach out to me; they encompass me in their terrible beauty. She's terrified, beyond words, and as always, I must answer her command, comfort her fears, I must go to the one that I love.
I don't want to, I don't want to go back, I don't want to fight, I don't want to have to deal with the pain I caused. The cold, the vacuum of nothingness is better than facing the crime of what I did to her. Anything is better than facing that, than standing before her and asking for forgiveness.
"Good God Will, come back to me!" The light from her anguish pierces the night and I know I must try to return, I have to go back and accept whatever punishment awaits.
I focus all that I am, all that I could ever be into one tiny point. Some of the emptiness surrounding me retreats and I am back in the bedroom. What I see horrifies me; my friends are huddled into a corner, far away from Osiris. My love, though, is oblivious to the threat, she's on her knees before him, and her face is stretched in a grotesque mask of insanity. My Athame clutched in both hands before her as her wild eyes stare unseeingly towards me. The real me, not Osiris.
I can see with overlaying patterns, her tears are bright blue lines of light drifting up, trapping me in their net of grief, and then she feeds me strength, with the red of her anger. I am growing stronger with each passing moment . . . and I can tell that the Dead God knows this . . . he has yet to reach his full power, so he can't just strike her dead with a thought, he has do it physically. He lifts his arms to kill her.
She is unknowing, unseeing, so caught up in her agony that she is completely unaware of the danger she's in at the moment.
In a desperate bid to stop the God's killing blow I reach out my insubstantial hand to grab his arm . . . and I am slammed back into my body. I see through my eyes, I hear Buffy's wailing through my ears . . . I stop the killing blow from descending.
Osiris tries to shove me out again, but now that I am aware of his tactic I hang on with all my might and his attempt fails. I don't understand what has just happened or how disaster was averted. Suddenly I flash on the vague memory from last night and Giles' words echo in my mind: "He can't control you, it's your vessel, your body, and he can't control you without your permission."
Osiris has been the strongest when I have been at my weakest. It's not the magic that's the trigger, it's the pain. He has no claim over me except for what I gave him in the ritual, and what I give him now, through my need to escape, to hide from . . . myself.
He can only win if I give up.
He shoves again, he pushes at me with claws made of words—she doesn't love you—you are damned . . . and they are . . . just words. They no longer can wound me, I no longer believe them. I'm not absolutely sure of what the truth is, but one thing I am sure of, is that my love is not only for Buffy, it's for my entire family and it's for me.
I slam the lid viciously down on Osiris. I have no more patience for his games or for close calls; I'll go to England and learn what I must from the Witches that Giles knows, and then he will be gone.
I will be strong. I am strong, and soon Buffy will be strong, too.
The self revelation is all well and good but I have a best friend kneeling before me on the verge of complete collapse, and speaking of collapse . . . 'was my body always this clumsy and heavy?' I think--folding to my knees in front of Buffy.
I reach out to touch her cold, rigid arm. Sometime during the battle with Osiris she had closed her eyes. I slowly run my hand down her arm to where she has the Athame clutched—it's like her hands have been frozen to it—I have pry her fingers off of the knife. I do it carefully, it would be bad if she suddenly thought I was a threat and plunged the 10 inches of steel into my belly.
After I have the knife I feel the others come around us, I put the knife on the floor and see someone, I don't know who, pick it up. My attention is focused on Buffy; her hands are still so cold that I sandwich them between mine to rub some warmth into them. Her face is so pale it looks like all the blood has drained from her body.
The word shock comes into my fogged mind. My own thoughts are beginning to slow down and I recognize the now familiar feeling of total exhaustion. I know I don't have long before I pass out, so I drop her cold hands and reach out to take her thin shoulders in my grasp.
"Buffy, I'm here!" I tell her strongly while shaking her. "Come back to me!" I muster the energy to shout and I'm rewarded with her beautiful hazel eyes blinking open. It takes just a second for her to recognize me and then I'm tackled to floor. I can feel the love pouring out of her, as the color returns to her cheeks, along with her tears.
"Don't leave me again!" She's mumbling over and over into my chest. Normally, I would love to be holding her; but the exhaustion is overwhelming me.
I try to stroke her hair, I can't lift my arm and it falls to the floor. "I love you." I tell her right before the darkness takes me . . . again.
I wake to the wonderful feeling of soft fingers stroking my face. As I come up further I realize that I'm lying on a bed embraced by someone. It's not Tara, because well, whoever it is, is smaller and has more muscle.
"Will?" Buffy asks quietly. She moves her hand away from my face and then a warm cloth is placed over my eyes. "Giles said that when you woke up your head would hurt," she tells me, pressing down on the cloth with a slight pressure. "When you're ready he left some tea to settle your stomach."
"Thunks" I whisper and then realize that my mouth isn't quite working. And with the speaking comes the headache. "Agh." Well that was clear at least.
"I know Will, remember I'm concussion girl?" she says quietly. The bed moves as she shifts, picking up my wrist and rubbing the pressure point that Tara taught us. And my tummy instantly begins to settle.
"I have the curtains closed so the light shouldn't be too awful, do you want to risk a look?" She takes the cloth off my face, and I open my eyes slowly; she's right, the light doesn't seem too awful. I realize that we are in her room, in her bed. Buffy is sitting on the edge. She reaches over to the table and gets a cup, I smell it and it's the same thing as last night.
She watches me quietly while I drink it, just as last night I immediately feel better.
"Giles told me what has been going on." Buffy takes the cup back and places it gently on the table. Her actions are slow and deliberate; which means she's very upset and trying not to show it. "You've been asleep for hours, so I've had time to do some thinking," she tells me, putting her hands together in her lap. Most of the time Buffy can handle her supernatural strength with the grace of someone born to it. But every once in while it gets the best of her and she has pulled doors off their hinges or crushed a drinking glass without meaning to.
Xander and I would use that as sort of Buff-O-Meter to gauge her emotions. The way she placed the cup back on the dish and then put her hands in her lap tells me that she's spiking in the red.
Buffy won't look at me, she's looking everywhere in the room except at me. It also seems that she's not going to elaborate on what Giles told her.
"Where are the others?" My mouth is finally working as I sit up against the headboard of the bed. I'm happy that they felt comfortable enough to leave Buffy alone, but I'm worried about it too. Buffy is going to need help, support and love; just because the first crisis is over doesn't mean there won't be another one. My head pounds in time with my thoughts so I rub it to try calm it down a bit.
"I promised them that if I decided to . . . leave . . . I would do it in front of them." My mouth drops open; it has so long since that Slayer insight of hers had kicked in that I had forgotten about it. Of course if she promised, then they would feel safe in leaving her alone—Buffy doesn't lie—except about heaven. The nagging little inner voice pops up to remind me that it wasn't a lie—if I hadn't been so full of myself I might have seen through the act.
"Will?' She touches me to get me back from where I had floated off too. This last Osiris bid has worn me down worse than I thought. I can barely concentrate . . . the others.
"Where are the others?" I repeat. She's worried about me, I can tell from her look.
"Giles and Xander went to pick some council people and someone from a Coven in Devon's Sire." I chuckle at her pronunciation. "Dawn is napping; she was pretty worn out."
"We have to talk Will," she tells me and stands up to start pacing. I hide the smile because it's been a while since I'd seen Buffy pace and I just love her all the more for it.
"I know, Buffy." And then that's not enough, the words just shoot out of mouth. "I'm so sorry Buffy, I'm so sorry I yanked you out of heaven!" I rise up to my knees on the bed. A sick dizziness grabs me for a moment at the sudden movement, but I am able to breathe through it without Buffy noticing.
After a few seconds, and a lap around the room, she stops. "I know you are Will, and I really want to . . . I really do want to . . . " Her words trail off and I know that I am not yet forgiven, nor do I deserve to be. She tries to start again, "Will I want . . . " I cut her off.
"I know you do Buffy, you just can't right now, and that's ok." I reassure her. "You may never be able to forgive me." I tell her earnestly. I want her to understand that if she can never do it, it will be all right.
"But I want to, Will!" She starts the pacing again. "I want to because I love you, but I'm so angry at you too." She stops facing the closet door, her shoulders taut, the muscles in her arms are cords. I push down the hope that surged up at her confession of love. For some reason I can tell that when she said the word this time, she didn't mean it as a friend. She meant it as a lover. The only problem is I know that there are more words coming, and I'm not going to like a lot of them.
"I don't understand how I can love you so much that it hurts," she turns toward me. "How can I love you like that?" She pauses, her expression one of beauty. And again I have to push down the hope that she could love me; that all my dreams for the past six years could be realized.
Then her face shifts, and I feel a sudden dark tension fills the room. This is it, this is the other shoe. She was always good at projecting her emotions, and that's what she's doing now. "And I hate you, too."
When she says the word hate I'm crushed; I knew it was coming; I had no hope and yet I did, I did hope that she could one day forgive me. This is normally the place that Osiris would rise and let himself be known, but since I was expecting him, he stays still, quiet. I've figured out one of his games and I need to get rid of him before he thinks of another.
I shake the thoughts of the Dead God out of my head; this is Buffy's time. If the Witches from England are already in Sunnydale then this may well be the last time Buffy and I get to talk. I know they will want to return as soon as we can because the tentative control I have over Osiris is such a danger.
"Buffy I understand," I start, false 'Best Friend' platitudes on my lips, she's so frail . . .
"No you don't!" she shouts and then she takes a deep breath. Her hands clenching at her sides as she tries to regain control of her wild emotions. "You don't understand because you can't. I don't hate you so much . . . as I hate me!" I wasn't prepared that revelation.
"I hate how you see me, what you think I am, I'm not Willow!" She turns and begins the wild pacing, trying to calm some of the turmoil in her heart. "And I hate me, for always trying to live up to it!"
"But I don't . . . " I try to get out only to be interrupted yet again.
"Yes you do." She stops, looking at me, her eyes burning with their intensity. She has all this rage built up and she needs to give it voice. And I need to . . . just stay quiet and listen. She nods, and starts moving again. "I've lived my life trying to be 'the best friend,' or Xander's hero, or Giles' Slayer, and Mom's perfect normal daughter . . . I tried and tried . . . and it exhausted me."
"I've always tried to believe in the reflection of other people's wants and desires for me, and never what I wanted or desired . . . except when I died." Buffy stops talking, stops moving, she's perfectly still, lost in her thoughts.
"But, Buffy . . . " I start trying to nudge her out of the daydream.
"Quiet, I'm talking now!" She whips around as the anger touches the surface, then she gives me a small smile in apology.
After taking a deep breath she continues: "Now it's time for me to figure out who I am, what my new place in this world is, besides taking care of Dawn, where do I belong, what do I do with the rest of my life?" She walks over to me; she lifts her hand and gently traces my lips with her fingers. I close my eyes and lean into the touch. It's heavenly to be caressed in that way. She lifts my chin and I slowly open my eyes. She looks down at me, her face is so full of love it takes my breath away.
"But, Willow, I have to find who I am without . . . without you here." Crushed. I feel like I'm falling . . . Osiris tries the lid and having to fight him seems to steady me.
"I understand, I'll have Xander pack my things . . . " I'm proud that my voice only cracks a little. I start to stand up . . . Only to be roughly pushed back down to the bed, by two strong hands on my shoulders.
"You still aren't listening to me!" Buffy shouts, frustrated. Her hands on my shoulders force me to sit still as she continues. "I said I love you, and you told me you loved me, was that a lie?"
"No, I . . . " I mumble, totally confused, and yet unable to stop the hope that is budding once more in my chest.
"Giles tells me that you have to go to England?" I nod, I'm afraid to say anything, afraid to breathe until I hear all that she has to say. "He wanted me go too, but my place is here, with Dawn." She must sense my understanding because she releases me to start her moving, her pacing. She's like a caged tiger or a sleek black panther. "Giles said that Witches' school normally takes 13 moons?" She stops, turning to me, questioning.
"I don't know . . . it makes sense . . ." And it does, one full year. "At least to become a novice." I tell her, thinking out loud.
"Then I want this year, I want to find out who I am, what I'm doing back here, and you need to do the same." She comes back toward me. "One year for us to become . . . novice's at living." She stands before me, in her full Slayer glory. The hope that had been crushed just moments ago rising up again, against my will.
"But one year from tomorrow, when you are finished healing from this God thing, or becoming, or whatever you have to do . . . " Buffy says, looking down at me without the pain that I've become accustomed to seeing. "And in one year when I'm healed and know me, not the Slayer, I want you to come back here . . . "
I can feel it; I can feel the hope, the love, rising up through me, burning a path, creating a new Willow . . . Please say it Buffy! I'm begging, every bit as much as I wanted my life over, I now want it to go on . . .
"I want you to come back here and let's see if we can . . . " She runs out of words. She opens her mouth but nothing comes out. She sits down next to me. She gives me that shy half-smile of hers and she very slowly and carefully leans over to give me a small chaste kiss on my cheek. A small kiss that curls my toes and sends sparks through my body.
Buffy stares down at the floor. "I love you Willow . . . and I think I want to spend my life with you. But I have to heal; I have to be whole when I love you." She glances up to me and I give her the biggest smile I have. It seems to encourage her. "Will you try to love me, I mean Buffy? Whoever she may be?"
"Yes!" I tell her! "Yes, yes, yes!" I take her into my arms and we fall over onto the bed. I kiss her face, I kiss her strong hands, and I can't stop whispering yes, over and over into her ear.
"Cough!" The word echoes loudly from the doorway. And we both jump up off the bed together ready for a fight, only to see Xander standing there. He has the happiest smile on his face I have ever seen, his eyes are so bright that they seem to be glowing.
"About damn time." He tells us, as Giles and Dawn join him in the doorway.
"About what time?" Dawn asks, confused.
"I caught them necking," he tells her, triumphant. And Dawn squeals like a baby seal as she rushes into the room to give us a hug. The release, the permission to be happy is needed; Buffy and I can't help but get caught up in Dawn's sweet reaction. We hug her back . . . Until Giles breaks the mood.
"I ah, hate to break this up . . . " He starts taking off his glasses to clean them. "Ah, Miss Hartness is downstairs, the Council has leant us their private plane, it's refueling as we speak." he tells me, tells Buffy. "Willow, we, I think it best if you leave now, before Osiris can . . . "
"I understand Giles." I look down at Buffy. She bites her bottom lip to keep from saying something. I think I know what it is, it just can't happen, not now, not yet.
"A year then?" I question, and at her nod I turn towards the door, to my family.
"I want to say good-bye now," and I in turn hug each of them. I can't look back at either Buffy or Dawn or I won't have the strength to walk out the door.
"The Coven asks that you bring nothing . . . it's their way, you enter the world with nothing . . . " Giles babbles, following me.
"It's fine Giles," I tell him. It doesn't matter what I take to England in a pack or suitcase, it only matters what I carry inside of me. I turn back to him, to my father. And I realize that I am no longer a child and I need to go from this point forward alone.
He seems to understand without words; he stops, and lets me see the pride he has in me for the first time. It shines through him, lifting his shoulders, making him straighter, and if I'm not mistaken he appears to be years younger.
As I walk down the stairs I think about the last day and a half and while I'm glad it's over, I can't help dreaming of the future. As I said earlier in the day, I will go to England, I will rid myself of this God, I will learn my lessons—then I will come back to Sunnydale and claim my lover—my future.
The End