Written for14 Valentines Day 10 – Peace Movement
Title: Expanding Skies.
Disclaimer:I have no connection with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is a not-for-profit fanwork.
Concrit:Yes please!
Warnings: None. Set at the beginning of season 7, Willow-centric. I've not read the comics so this doesn't take them into account.
English weather wasn't the same as the weather in California. Willow had known this, of course. She could probably have written essays about the exact nature of the differences and what, exactly, was the reason for them, but that wasn't the same as experiencing it. The weather here was a constant presence, settling in sullen and grey for days at a time without producing much in the way of rain, then coming out into a burst of sun that raised the temperature dramatically for two or three days before shifting temperamentally into days where it just couldn't make up its mind. Willow found herself getting more and more focused on it, following the changes with as much attention as she'd ever followed anything else.
Willow loved the retreat, and not just because it was a haven, a place where she could assess her life without actually having to live it. She loved it for the quiet, the space, the privacy, but she also loved it for the spirit of curiosity that surrounded everything. Everyone wanted to learn, everyone wanted to grow, no one was content to stay still, and it had been a long time since Willow had been with people who really wanted to learn.
It was hard, almost impossible, to study witchcraft and not think of Tara. At first she pushed the thoughts away because thinking of Tara meant thinking of Warren and of blood and screaming and darkness. But gradually, as she went back to first principles and read the books again, and again, she could see Tara sitting next to her, blond head bent over a book, biting her lip in the way she does whenever she's concentrating. The way she did, before Warren killed her. Willow began to force her thoughts away, but this time the rage against Warren that she always felt when she remembered the way Tara died didn't come. Instead she felt a deep, bone-crushing tiredness, a hollow, exhausted blankness that she couldn't push away. Despite it being only three in the afternoon, Willow got changed and went to bed. She fell asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, but not before she thought of the way Tara looked when she was sleeping.
For a little while, she buried herself in books, not thinking of Tara, of Warren, of driving trucks with the power of her mind. She treated it like math – when she had read the books, she made her own notes and tested herself on her knowledge, and when she was sure that she had a clear picture in her head of how things were meant to go, she began putting her knowledge into practice.
Life is energy. All energy is connected. Willow had to concentrate on keeping a straight face the first time she was told that. All she could see in her head was a twelve-year-old Xander whacking Jesse over the head with a toy light sabre. She remembered the way that Jesse had ducked, laughed, and demanded his turn with the light sabre.
"I am your father!" Jesse had yelled, his just-turning-adolescent voice cracking a little at the end of the sentence. Xander had yelled back,
"No, no, that's not true, that's impossible!" and fallen dramatically to the ground., and Jesse had burst out laughing. Willow remembered Jesse's mother calling them all inside for juice at that point, and then, without willing it, she remembered Xander with the stake against Jesse's chest and Jesse becoming a cloud of ash.
Something must have shown on her face then, because her instructor stopped talking and said:
"Perhaps it would be better to sit and feel."
Willow thought about Jesse, alive and dead, and about Tara, and about Warren. She couldn't see the connection between Jesse and Warren, but she stayed quiet.
When she didn't hear the voice of James Earl Jones intoning "I am your father," Willow tried to think about connections. She didn't write things down, resisted the habit of a lifetime, to turn everything into words on a page, characters on a screen, but she did. Instead she allowed herself to sit and think, to really do nothing at all but look up at the sky and let her mind wander.
Willow thought of Tara in the rain. She thought of Tara lit up and smiling in the sunshine. She looked up what the weather had been like in London the day that Tara had died, the weather in Paris, in Berlin, in Moscow. She surprised herself by doing the same for Jesse, and for Warren. She looked up the films that would have been on the television, the flowers that would have been in bloom and, finally, the names of other people who had died on the same day.
When Giles came to talk to her about her return to Sunnydale and the resumption of her old life, Willow was not ready to go. She was, however, resigned. She knew what the weather had been like in Rome when Tara died and which way the wind had been blowing. She wondered what the weather would be like in Sunnydale when she got off the plane.