Visions of White: the day's going to go on bleeding
Once, before, when she was little but still big enough to be into elementary school, Willow got to sit on her mother's lap: forehead pressed to the curve where the length of her shoulder stretched into her neck, her mothers hands resting on her own bare wrists. Two teenage boys and a woman she suspects she should recognise, but doesn't, usher softly twittering women and slightly bored looking men to their seats and children fidget with palms itchy for mischief.
There's an organ song and a white dress. A stocky man in a small hat that brings together, sings praise in a tongue she doesn't know for a religion that she does, but doesn't really feel. Peek-a-boo behind a veil slides into Sealed with a kiss, and a broken glass speaks forever into the ether like it means something. Her mother held her hand when they walked to the car afterward, and Willow didn't put on her formal winter gloves even though she had them in her coat pocket.
Between the wedding and the reception she asked why brides always wore white, and her mother had replied that white meant purity.
"Pure" meant "clean," Willow knew that much. (White was the color of the pristine bathtub in her adjoining bathroom, of the hand wash next to the taps at her sink, a piece of paper waiting to be drawn on. It made sense.) Then, a little older, she would come to think that perhaps it was better than clean, that pure meant it had never been dirty at all.
That's just like her: never been dirty. Marks on a piece of paper can be erased, but it's really clean only if it's never been touched. If it's never going to be touched.
Several odd years and one Willownapping later, she's splitting herself into empathy and rationality, how things are processed, and what is ignored for the sake of keeping herself together. Nowadays, if days mean anything at all, she really doesn't pay much attention to her sense of detachment to the world around her. Routine keeps your mind from wondering, you begin to accept things as they are, and her stability is too dependant on her precarious detachment to really dive that far into the perils of reminiscing.
The only unions she witnesses now are the fervid, violent couplings of Angelus and (enter random vampire, but usually Spike or Drusilla, here.) There is no Rabi for these processions and whatever room they happen to occupy when the need arises seems to suit as well as any for a sanctuary. The only praise is their bodies melding together, and the litany is comprised of their slapping flesh, words and phrases that had made her blush in the beginning, and her own small whisperings, because Angelus loves secrets and she has too many.
The ceremony really begins once Angelus and (whoever) are pressed together, pushing and pulling with their tongues and fingers. Willow presses her back to the headboard, the wall, crosses her legs on the floor, whatever, and holds a trembling wrist into the fray because she has her role in all of this too. Watches their hands push, pull, rip clothing out of the way to expose even more skin. So much skin, so much touching all at once. She loves trying to imagine how many touches are going on all at the same time.
It's more than just a counting game, she can't help but be a little more fascinated than that. They get so caught up in their unshielded bodies, so knotted around each other. It shocked her at first, how similar the want for sex and want for blood seems to be in their species, but how different is one kind of wanting from another, really? And how much sex is used as a means of communication within a 'family'. It's so important, to them and by association to her; the dominance of one being by another, the exchange of affection, displeasure, the enforcement of hierarchy and punishment. The give and take of blood throughout. They glow with lust and sex and that friction, like happiness and magic. And that part's just like the wedding had been, just like the bride and groom half walking, half sprinting back down the isle as man and wife, eyes shining like heaven.
The other will rarely lay their eyes on her during the act, for fear of a very violent and not at all pleasurable reprisal. It is not for their pleasure that she is there and it is forbidden for anyone to look upon her without permission. But occasionally, too caught up in the secret language of skin against skin, she will receive a furtive glance, filled with poorly-concealed want or resentment; resentment that they can't be her, or that they can't have her, as Angelus sinks his teeth into her skin, eyes scrunched up tight as he cums. I wish I could drink from you, too.
It's never going to happen.
Her blood, deemed so completely without flaw in Angelus' particular tastes, ranks her as his most prized possession, and she has not been touched, in any capacity, by anyone but him in just under seven years. Not since the night Buffy inadvertently released him and, without the cage of guilt and morals the soul usually provided, had left Willow as fair game.
Though her life as Angelus' companion is not that bad, all things considered; the protection it provides her in the supernatural world is almost unparalleled, unwillingness to risk any change to the taste of her blood saves her from the usual treatment most humans endure at the hands of such as they, and despite her place at his side twenty-four hours a day, so that he may feed from her as he pleases, she is well fed and very healthy.
She sits for him often and he has filled sketch book after sketch book of her. Albums house photos of her in various poses, dresses and skirts of times present and passed and, as with his sketches, sometimes in nothing at all. She has played for him since the day he found out she'd learned the piano and danced for him since the day he found out she'd taken ballet, and will redecorate a room for these purposes especially in every long term domicile they come to haunt, though he is the only person to ever witness her utilise it. As he does so love to remind her, and has her repeat back to him often: she is his now, and for his pleasure alone.
She is also kept a virgin.
And for all that she may be resented within the ranks or for all that she may be coveted, sometimes behind the quick, fearful flickers of want or disdain during the brief, inattentive moments of Angelus' little death, sometimes she thinks she may see pity.
She doesn't think they'd understand if she told them she likes it better this way.
She feels sought of clever about it actually, despite the knowledge that what she wants or might have chosen for herself has never factored into anything. They smear all over each other, smudging lines and colors. Filthy. Ruined. This is wrong, wrong, wrong and she gets away without a mark, even though she thinks she may be just as guilty as they are. That's just how things are, just her part of the ceremony. They might shine when they're moaning and sweating and moving like they're just one person, but she's clean. She's going to shine forever, and they never get to be pure.
That's her own little secret. They can have their language, but she's always going to be white.