Title: Kamikaze
Rating: PG-13
Set: Shortly after Grave.
Challenge: Sky, glass, thousand. Set by the lovely She's a Star.
Summary: There are a thousand ways to die in Giles's house and Willow has counted most of them.
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There are a thousand ways to kill yourself in this house. Willow has counted most of them. Baby-sized white pills, shiny gray knives, drowning in the bathtub, hanging yourself with the skinny nylon pantyhose Buffy packed in your suitcase. Willow could go crazy and make Giles have to kill her; that would be a form of suicide. She could sprinkle rat poison over her garden salad, or take valium with a glass of wine. She could steal the Chardonnay out of the cupboard. There are a thousand ways to die in Giles's house and Willow has counted most of them.
The worst is when she gets the cold sweat and the shaking and the fever from the magic withdrawal, and she crawls to the toilet on her hands and knees. She tosses cookies, trembling and shaking on the floor as she vomits, as she watches it all come up, the dark red spot on Tara's blue shirt, the thick black thread on Warren's mouth, the curve of Tara's shoulder, the way Giles pins her down when she thrashes on the bed or tries to run her head into the wall. Giles is gentle in the middle of the night, runs her a bath, tucks her in. In the day, he blocks out her time with different colored pens, and that's insane-- Willow said quirky-- and there's another one, she could crush glass and drink it in orange juice. Ouch.
Giles says one night when she's so cold, she's so shaky and trembly and freezing that she hugs her legs to her chest. He makes her stand up, sighs when he sees she's wearing just a white t-shirt and a pair of thin red shorts to bed. Pulls her arms up, the skin and muscle and bone hanging limply-- obediently-- and buttons up her thick knitted cardigan, blue like the sky. He brushes her hair and brings her another blanket.
Does it ever get better? she asks him as he fiddles with the lamp.
In some ways, he says after a moment of thinking, and then tells her to go to sleep. She lies there and counts sheep.
One, turning the gas on and sitting in the kitchen.
Two, shaky bottles of sleeping pills.
She usually falls asleep around forty-five.
