Author: Restive Nature (aka Bavite)
Disclaimer: The characters and fictional placings of either of these shows do not belong to me. They belong to Cameron/ Eglee (Dark Angel), Joss Whedon (BtVS) and Whedon/ Greenwalt (AtS). Only the story belongs to me.
Rating: 13 (for now)
Genre: Crossover of DA/ BtVS
Type: WiP
Time line/ Spoilers: Post Season 5 for Buffy. Up to LAtR for DA. Story set in DA time.
Summary: BtVS/ DA crossover. Life brings about so many changes. Especially when one has just risen from the dead.
Distribution: Is under the discretion of the author, so please ask instead of taking please.
Reviews: While I may not always respond to reviews, they are always welcome!
Darkening Of The Light
Chapter Twenty-two
May 31st, 2021
9:16 p.m.
Seattle, WA
Fogle Towers, penthouse suite
“Okay,” Buffy muttered as she and Tara had returned to her bedroom in her cousin's well appointed penthouse suite apartment. Upon shutting the door, she felt a little tingle going through her, which she quickly assumed was Tara's anti-eavesdropping spell kicking back in. “You aren't worried about them trying to do magic, here in the apartment?”
Tara settled the two glasses of fruit juice she was carrying on the table with the earlier glass of water, while Buffy added two bottled waters, in case they needed them. She shrugged one shoulder.
“We've ascertained that the information on the web page isn't complete,” Tara explained. “It's more of a guideline to weed out who is truly interested and who might just be dabbling.” Buffy nodded thoughtfully and Tara was happy to see her friend's hand stray towards one of the juices. Buffy looked so much more thin than Tara remembered her being. “Also, I didn't really sense much latent skills in any of them. If they manage to float a pencil? It'd be pure luck more than anything.”
“Okay,” Buffy sighed and then quirked an eyebrow at her friend. “Just as long as nothing goes kablooey. I don't think my head can handle that right now.”
Tara nodded to that and retrieved her own juice for a sip. It was a peach concoction and very tasty and refreshing. Buffy mimicked her movement and after a relieved sigh at the moisture, they both replaced their glasses on the table.
“So,” Buffy mused, picking up the thread of their previous conversation, “you've explained how Dawn was taken, why, but what happened after?”
Tara fidgeted for just a moment before straightening herself to answer. “We were devastated and things continued to spiral out of control,” she admitted, the weight of the guilt that had bogged her down in the past, resurfacing. Before Buffy could respond to that, she held up a hand. “I say continue, because even before your... death, well, Willow was growing in her powers so quickly.” Buffy nodded and Tara was relieved to know that, like her, Buffy had seen that and like her, had not said anything in the early days. It told her that the reservations that she had had upon realizing that Willow was growing dependent on the magics were not just her own, as was her reasoning perhaps behind not saying so at the time. Of course Xander had had no compunctions.
He had seen the problem, had commented on it, often. The worry stemming from his love for his best friend. Tara just wished that she had listened to him earlier. Squaring her shoulders, she continued. “Willow was growing dependent on her magic. Not just to use when we were fighting demons, but for every little thing.”
“Everything?” Buffy asked, leaning forward a little. Tara grimaced, remembering how bad things could get.
“She was using it for every day living,” Tara explained slowly. “She wouldn't bother to do things for herself, if there was a way that magic could get it for her.”
“Was that really bad?” Buffy asked, seeming mystified and then hastened to clarify herself. “I mean, I know that magic doesn't just happen. There's like... rituals or, well you can't get something for nothing, right?”
“Exactly,” Tara nodded quickly, seizing upon Buffy's thoughts. “There are rules for everything, especially magic. But it didn't seem to matter to Willow. When she recovered from her... testing, sh-she seemed determined to prove that sh-she wasn't a failure. For example, when Xander and Anya announced their engagement, she magicked up a party for them.”
“They got engaged?” Buffy asked with a small trace of a smile. Tara nodded, but didn't copy the gesture, as she knew what had happened later. “Okay,” Buffy sighed and motioned for Tara to go on.
“They actually got engaged quite a bit before,” Tara informed her gently, “but were waiting for a good time to announce it. I think Xander was hoping to wait until you were back. But that didn't happen, then, of course...”
She screwed up her face for a moment, not stating the obvious. “Anyway, Anya convinced Xander to announce the engagement, hoping that it would cheer everyone up, and it worked, a little.”
“But Willow was messing with the magics?” Buffy surmised with a note of finality. Tara could only agree.
“I tried to point it out to her,” Tara was only slightly defensive of her own actions in those days. “That for every use of magic, there was an exchange, a balance to be made, a price to pay. We... argued over it.”
There was silence for a moment and Buffy finally reached out this time, to Tara and the older woman was not unaware that it was more a move of what you would expect of sympathy from another person. Not that Buffy was overly motivated, she seemed to be going through the motions. But perhaps that was all she could give right now. Tara had other nuances through the night that something of the old Buffy had lingered. She excused the differences now because there was no way that something like what had happened to Buffy and trying to reacclimate to her life, was going to leave her the same.
“The worst part,” she continued softly, “was that after the fight, she used a memory spell to make me forget the fight and why I was upset with her.” She hadn't been expecting the reaction she got to that.
“Willow did that?” Buffy asked, a small surge of anger through her giving her voice a higher volume and Tara startled just slightly. “After what Glory did to you?”
Tara nodded tiredly. Perhaps this wasn't a good idea, trying to get all through it that night. For Buffy or for her. “Yes and when I realized what she had done, I told her that she needed to stop using magic for everything. She agreed to stop using it for every little thing, but with the situation in town, she needed to be able to defend herself or others. I could understand that, even as worried as I was about her magic use.”
“But it was still there,” Buffy murmured. “That was just an excuse.”
“It was,” Tara agreed. “And then, when Dawn was taken, since your father showed up when the CPS officer took her into protective custody, I was helping Dawn pack a bag when he got there,” Tara lifted her eyes to the ceiling, trying to blink back tears at the memory, “Willow pretty much lost it.”
“How so?” Buffy asked quietly.
“We, meaning Xander and I, since he was in full agreement with me,” Tara noted, “were limiting the one thing that Willow thought she could use without consequence to order things to the way she wanted it. When we didn't get you back, when Dawn was taken, Willow kind of lost it. She went off the deep end, Buffy.”
“And you knew this?” Buffy's mouth was trembling. “Because when it's people Willow loved...” She did remember when Tara had been attacked by Glory and Willow trying to retaliate.
“We had to talk her down from going after Mr. Summers and the social worker and 'taking care of them',” Tara recalled. “But then we had to do it again when Spike got back and he lost it. But of course, he went after them on his own. It was getting bad enough that I threatened to leave her if she couldn't control herself.” Buffy gasp told Tara that the girl realized just how serious the situation with Willow was. She frowned. “It seemed to work. Faith, seemed to help.”
“What do you mean seem?” Buffy demanded suspiciously. Given their mutual histories, Tara couldn't blame her but she hastened to make her understand.
“Faith was trying to help Willow come down from being dependent on magic, to understand that the power could not be in control of her,” Tara explained. “She did learn in prison and Faith was different in ways, from what everyone said. But from what we were able to understand later, Faith was trying to show Willow that she and we, there was no one to really blame for the bad things that were happening. They just happened. People didn't make the best choices and we had to live with what we did and the things we will do.”
“That makes sense,” Buffy murmured in reply. “So how was that bad?”
“Because Willow started to stop blaming herself and others,” Tara announced. “She started blaming the Hellmouth instead. For being, for the evil, for taking you and Dawn and Jesse and the people she cared about, away from her. I think, I m-mean, I don't know for sure, but I think that W-willow thought that if she... got rid of the Hellmouth, there was a chance that we could get Dawn back. That was one of the things that both the social worker and Mr. Summers were upset about. That things weren't safe in the house.”
Buffy opened her mouth to protest but seemed to think better of it. Dawn shooting off crossbows in the house didn't bring the words, safe as houses to mind.
“So did she... what did she do?” she finally asked.
Tara took another, longer sip of juice and then held the glass in her hands, her fingers playing with the condensation on the sides. Finally she had ordered her thoughts enough. “She took to going out with Faith, we thought to patrol, but only later discovered that she was researching. She probably told Faith something else to get her to cover in case we talked. We weren't... doing a lot of that. We should have. Eventually, Willow must have found something. She had a plan and she had Faith to back her up. But what none of us realized, was that Faith had been hurt during a patrol, the night before they....”
“How did you know that?” Buffy asked, confusion marring her expression.
“When we couldn't find Willow,” Tara went on slowly, “we searched for her, never imagining that she would be at the old high school. Anyhow, we ended up at Faith's, just in case and we found bloody towels, bandages, supplies that she hadn't put away and it was fairly fresh. We were getting worried enough that I did a locator spell. We... got to the high school just as it happened.”
“What happened?” Buffy asked breathlessly.
“She closed the hellmouth,” Tara announced, there still being a kind of awe present in her, at what the unpredictable, precariously emotioned redhead had done with her power. “We had a coven of witches from Devon, through Giles, come and investigate and what they found, was that using a combination of magic and emotion, Willow was able to bar both sides of the Hellmouth. It was still present, but it was inaccessible. And I don't know how,” she offered slowly, shaking her head slightly, “because when a magic user dies, usually their spells, their actve spells, well stop, or eventually fade. Hers didn't. The coven, they figured that until a demon came up with a way to emulate the spells she used and the emotions, more importantly, they would be unable to open it again, from either side.”
“They can't love,” Buffy reaffirmed and Tara smiled.
“I think they can,” Tara contradicted, “but it's more selfish in nature. And also, the demons that do love, have no cause to want the hellmouth erupting around them.” Buffy pursed her lips as she thought her way through that one and then shrugged it off.
“So what happened to Faith and Willow?” she asked instead and Tara could see the girl preparing herself. There was no way to sugar coat it and Tara knew that.
“They died,” she offered softly. “Faith, defending Willow, with her injuries, from creatures that apparently were squatting in the school and Willow from the powers of the spell. Or, perhaps, that was the sacrifice demanded for the consequences of the spell. We're... not entirely sure.”
“It wouldn't be the first time,” Buffy spoke softly, her emotions more precarious than they'd been the whole time Tara had been present that evening. And she knew that the Slayer was not speaking of the unsurity, but of the sacrifice.
“We were devastated once more,” Tara continued, talking just to give Buffy time to recover herself if she could. She would be more than willing to go through this again later if she needed to. “We grieved for them, of course. And when the Council found out that Faith had died, they sent the new Slayer to us, not knowing yet of course the effects of Willow's spell. Kennedy didn't last long,” Tara mused. “She was... headstrong and didn't take well to others 'interfering in her domain' and her watcher wasn't much better. She was only there a couple weeks...” Buffy still didn't seem to be paying attention and she went on.
“It was very surprising to find that the town of Sunnydale was actually fueled by the demon population to some extent. We never realized that all the devastation that the demon populace caused was what actually kept the influx of people coming to the town. The low tax and property rates, of course, the constant demand for employees to replace those that died, or the property destruction that kept construction companies going. With the cessation of activity from the hellmouth, the demons eventually stopped coming and started flocking to Cleveland, as we found out from Giles, that there was another hellmouth, a smaller one there.”
Buffy nodded at that but stayed quiet.
“People started to move away,” Tara informed her. “And the construction company that Xander worked for? It went under, but he found a new job in Los Angeles. Giles made the decision to sell the magic shop and split the proceeds with Anya. He returned to England and Xander and Anya moved to Los Angeles.” This got a wary, almost chuckle, from the girl, though it was small and she looked apologetic as Tara tilted her head to understand.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “Just didn't ever really see Xander as a big city boy.”
Tara shrugged one shoulder. “He managed well enough. Anya took to it like a duck to water, finding employment at a demon karaoke bar.” Buffy's eyes went up at that and Tara giggled. Perhaps Buffy would enjoy meeting Lorne one day. The girl had always like Clem and the two were old friends.
“Things were going well for them,” Tara's voice lowered again, not missing Buffy's sudden sharp glance. “But as the wedding drew closer, well, Xander wasn't...”
“Cold feet?” she asked, her sharpness of the mind betraying the air headed blond look that she'd cultivated over her early years as a Slayer.
“Yes,” she simply stated. “He had trouble telling Anya about this and it wasn't until the actual day of the wedding that things came to a head. A demon came and pretended to be Xander from the future.”
Buffy's eyes widened momentarily in surprise, but then narrowed once more. “Demon?” she repeated.
“A demon that had been the victim of Anya's days as a vengeance demon,” the witch confirmed. “He showed Xander a vision of their future and how bleak and dismal it all supposedly was. Xander called off the wedding, but the demon was revealed and Xander was nearly killed.”
“Nearly!” Buffy choked out. Tara quickly laid a reassuringly hand on the girl's arm.
“We stopped it,” she stressed. “But even with the demon revealed, Xander still wanted to put off the wedding.”
“Put it off?”
“Xander felt that he couldn't marry Anya with all these fears and worries he had. Not just about himself and Anya and the demon background she had, but his own demons. His family. It was all brought home to him when his family arrived and what he'd lived with when he was younger...”
“The drinking and abuse,” Buffy surmised. Tara nodded, surprised that Buffy knew and obviously the girl realized that. “We could all see it, but since Xander wasn't being hurt... physically, I guess... Well, we just sort of ignored the embarrassing behavior and hoped he'd get things together and get out of there. Which, he did, so...” Tara smiled softly, remembering the motivation that Xander'd finally had to make the leap forward into independence.
“Anya of course, had so much trouble understanding his decision,” Tara told her. “Xander wanted some time to figure out how to deal with his past, but Any was hurt. She went back to D'Hoffryn.”
Buffy's looked confused for a moment and then it cleared and she became angry.
“She became a demon again?” she asked, looking for clarification that Tara gave immediately.
“She did,” Tara nodded. “D'Hoffryn used her pain and fear against her and she went back to what she knew.”
Buffy stared at her for long moments and then suddenly her shoulders slumped. “I always worried about that,” she finally admitted in a small voice. And then with a tremulous smile, continued explaining. “Anya always had so much trouble with being human and whenever she talked about being a demon, she made it sound like it was the best time in her life.”
Tara grimaced at that statement, but more because it was true than anything.
“And becoming human, that wasn't Anya's choice,” Buffy recalled. “It happened because of a spell or something going wrong in one of her wishes, I think. I was always worried that she would somehow figure out how to do it again.” Neither needed to point out that Buffy's fears were very real and very accurate.
“I'm not so sure that it was entirely the good life that she remembered though,” Tara went on quietly. “It became... apparent after a while, that Anya had re-entered the demon fold to wreak punishment on Xander.” Buffy's eyes went wide and Tara shook her head. “She couldn't do it for herself of course,” and Buffy nodded slowly. “So she came to those of us left that knew Xander and tried to get us to make a wish about him.”
“Those of you left?” Buffy caught on. “Who all was that?”
“Well, there was me, of course,” Tara smiled, “apparently she found Dawn, but Dawn had already talked through the whole situation with Xander on the phone and she was firmly on his side.”
Buffy blinked rapidly as she assessed that. And then her face softened. “You guys didn't lose complete contact with her?”
“Oh no,” Tara grinned, remembering long telephone conversations with a cup of hot chocolate on both ends and Dawn rambling on about her days abroad. “After Mr. Summers, well, after he felt that enough time had passed to calm everyone down, he had no problem with Dawn writing us or calling every few weeks. Or we could call her. It wasn't fair to always make him foot the bill.” Buffy looked like, had she more energy, she would have argued that point. “Anyway, there was also Cordelia and another girl who worked with Angel, Winifred, but everyone called her Fred.”
“She knew Xander?”
“Not as well as the rest of us,” Tara declined, shrugging. “Xander didn't associate much with Angel, of course. And Los Angeles was big enough that they didn't really run into each other, just occasionally when Xander went to pick Anya up from work maybe.”
“At a demon karaoke bar,” Buffy repeated slowly. Tara shook her head, her face beaming.
“It's not as bad as it sounds,” she offered, almost cheekily. “The demon, who wasn't so much of a demon as he was a displaced intra-species anomaly,” she checked her grin and the tilted her head. “Sorry, Fred was very... smart and she made a whole classification system for the demons they dealt with. Also, she had been kidnapped to the world that Lorne was from, Pylea. So she knew quite a bit about them. Lorne was listed as an anomaly, because the Pyleans had a warrior race and Lorne was strange because he loved music. So when he ended up in Los Angeles, he opened his karaoke bar. He's a bit of an empath, and can read a being's future when they sing.”
“That's... not too weird on the weird-o-rama meter,” Buffy admitted and then shook her head as well.
“For us, no,” Tara concurred. “After, well, after Xander and Anya broke up, Xander slowly drifted out of the group. Not that it was really... a... a group. I stayed behind in Sunnydale, for a while, continuing my education. But then, I was offered the chance to study with the Devon Coven witches, in England. Since there was... nothing left for me in Sunnydale, I went.” Buffy offered no censure on that and Tara smiled.
“I stayed in contact with everyone, of course,” she inhaled deeply. “I saw Giles most of all, because he worked with the coven as well. I think... I leaned on him a lot. Trying to understand where things went wrong with W-willow. And I finally started to understand, that she had an addiction and it wasn't my fault, nor anyone else's. Of course, we recognized signs, but not putting things in the proper context, we didn't know how to prevent things, or help her to see why what she was doing was wrong.”
“Okay,” Buffy accepted. “So what else?” They both knew she was asking, not for the intermediary, but the end results.
“Xander, like I said, was working for a new construction company,” Tara swallowed heavily, because after the loss of the Summers women in their lives, they had grown so much closer for a time. But in the end, it hadn't been enough. They had drifted into their new lives until their closeness was only through happy, both real and forced, telephone calls. So Tara knew enough. “He was very wary of getting involved with anyone else. But he eventually started dating again. He had some disaster's. I mean, it wouldn't be Xander if he hadn't.” A brief look flashed across her friend's face and Tara chuckled silently. “That's where Angel came back in. He would always rescue Xander from whatever mess he was in. Anyway, just before the pulse happened, he was working at a site and there was, th-there was an accident. Xander was hurt, very badly.” She paused as Buffy winced and then seemed to brace herself. She took a moment to assure that both of them were ready for her next words. “Xander suffered a blow to his head among other things. The doctors at the hospital put him in an artificial coma to try and give his brain time to get the swelling to go down.”
“What happened?” Buffy choked out, no doubt memories of her mother flying through her mind, Tara mused. And indeed they were.
“He didn't come out of the coma,” Tara whispered. She swallowed again, thought about reaching for her juice, but kept her hands still, in her lap. “He wasn't exactly brain dead, or anything, but the swelling wasn't going down as quickly as the doctor's liked and they worried that he would be... mentally impaired. Because of the sporadic nature in which his body was working.”
Buffy squeezed her eyes shut, flinching and Tara sighed. She hated this. She knew it was wrong, to put this all on her friend, all at once, but it was necessary. It would be a cruelty to allow Buffy to look for and hope that the tattered bits of her old life would be there for her. All they could do was get through it and try to help the girl build something new.
“The doctors told us that he wasn't registering any pain,” Tara offered, trying to soothe the hurts. “That he could hear us, talking to him was good, give him a reason to come back to us.”
“They have to lie,” Buffy mumbled and Tara leaned forward to hear her. “They have to tell you that.” It took Tara a moment to understand what she was saying and though her gut twisted a little, she suddenly understood.
“Maybe they do,” she offered. “But I think in those cases, it was the truth. These things happen so quickly. With the medication that they were giving Xander intravenously, he wouldn't have been in pain.”
“You said it was right before the pulse,” Buffy whispered then, obviously forcing herself to move past that remembered and still very real and much felt pain. “The pulse was some sort of bomb? It wrecked the computer systems?”
Tara could see that Buffy was putting the sequence of events together herself and she waited, to let Buffy come to the realization on her own, rather than having it forced on her.
“And they had Xander on... machines?”
Tara nodded.
“And when the pulse happened, the computers and machines stopped working?”
Another nod.
“And Xander died.”
It was no question but Tara nodded regardless, fighting back tears once more. Silence pervaded the room again and neither spoke for the longest time. Finally, raising her tear streaked face, Buffy had one more question.
“Was he alone? When it happened, I mean. Was he alone?”
*****
“So what do you think they're talking about now?” Alec murmured, as he leaned once more of his earlier post, against the wall leading to Buffy's bedroom. Somehow, as they had read Tara's website, fooled around with the information they'd found and passed the time in general, things had changed. They had all, to some point within themselves, started to allow the veil of disbelief they had about magic to be lifted somewhat. Logan could allow that there was more to it than he understood, given the givens, meaning, what he had seen with his own eyes. Though he still thought there was quite a bit of trickery.
Alec was open to it all, since perhaps it offered an explanation for the things that the scientific, logical bent Manticore upper echelon had no answers for and therefore disregarded as important. It didn't affect him adversely and so was nothing for him to fear per se.
Max on the other hand, having lived through, dealt with, put away from her mind, her part in the spell that had resurrected Logan's cousin, was scared. She had been able to disregard it for so long after it had happened. It was almost like there was a natural block that kept her from thinking on it, kept her from going mad with what had happened to her. But now that she had touched upon it again, the magic, it was like a dam in her mind, cracking, leaking, little drops of memory or thought or something falling through. It was a sensation she most definitely did not like. And true to form, when confronted with things that Max did not like, she was ready to bolt. Only her knowing that the person that might have those answers for her, was down the hall, kept her precariously in her seat.
“I think Ms. Maclay is probably telling Buffy about the people that were in her life,” Logan sighed as he readjusted his glasses once again. For once, instead of busying himself with paperwork or telephone calls or the world at large, he was almost as focused as Alec was, on that hallway. He glanced momentarily at the two transgenics. “If you lost so much time, wouldn't you want to know what happened to the people in your life?”
Alec and Max had glanced at one another. For Max, even losing a few months back to Manticore after they had blown up the DNA database at the Wyoming facility, it had been her deepest desire, right after escaping. The desire to get back to the people she cared about. For Alec on the other hand, there had been no such desire ever. When he had lost time, it had been at the behest of the Manticore scientists.
Part of their scientific simplification of all the remaining twins of those that had escaped in '09, was ensuring the ability to mess with their minds more easily. It made the twins more amenable to their suggestions. They had thought that it was a method to ensure their obedience and loyalty to Manticore. What they hadn't realized was that it worked in just the opposite way. The twins developed new methods of dealing and compartmentalizing. And their only real loyalty was to themselves in the face of survival in that place. A fact that was very evident in Alec. And when his memories started coming back, Alec had searched more to quell the craziness in his mind, than a desire to find a loved one. That he had found one in the end and lost her again was the result, not the catalyst.
“Yeah,” he quietly agreed as Max swallowed heavily and glanced away. She had a pretty good idea what he was thinking about.
“I think,” Logan began... and then removed his glasses to rub at his eyes before replacing them and continued in a stronger voice. “I don't think either of them are going to be up for more conversation when they're done. We might have to wait, the questions we have?”
He held his breath as the two transgenics glanced at one another once more. They slowly nodded and he let out his sigh of relief. They would get the answers, he was sure. But patience, as it had ever been when dealing with his returned from the dead family, was the name of the game.
Chapter Twenty-three
No comments:
Post a Comment