A word from Sunny D: Please don't take this piece seriously, at all. It was an idea I came up with while in a minivan full of people coming back home from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, if that gives you any indication of what kind of state of mind I was in when I formulated this. This is also my first (and probably only) crack at humor, so don't be disappointed if I'm not actually funny. Anyway, I actually find Tara's death to be incredibly tragic, and felt kind of guilty writing this. I'm pretty sure that shrimp allergies do not work as I have portrayed them here. Also, I don't own anything in the Buffyverse, although I did make someone a replica of the Buffy graveyards with moveable headstones once as a gift.
Quotes from Superstar, Seeing Red, lots of dialogue from Villains, and some stuff from Grave.
"A world without shrimp? I'm allergic…"
Flash forward two years.
Willow and Tara stood in the bedroom, both of them finally happy and fully clothed. Not that they were particularly happy about being fully clothed, but Willow supposed that one had to leave the bedroom at some point. Outside, Xander and Buffy were making up from their Spike fight, and Willow just knew that everything was going to be right again. She could feel it. Things were getting back to the way they should be: she recovering from that pesky magic addiction, she and Tara were together again, the most annoying villains ever had been defeated, and now Xander and Buffy were going to be back where they should be. Willow looked at Tara's face again. Gods and goddesses, with all that had happened, Willow had nearly forgotten how beautiful she was when she smiled. Willow was considering walking over and kissing her again when there was shouting outside. Suddenly, and without warning, a huge, cooked shrimp shattered through the window at top speed, hitting Tara in the back and splattering shrimp juice everywhere.
"Your shirt," started Tara, noticing the spray of shrimp juice dotting Willow's once-clean white shirt. Her face began to swell, impeding her speech. "It's covewwed ih shwi juuuuu…" Struggling for air through her swollen throat, Tara's beautiful face turned a blotchy shade of red, and she stumbled to the floor. Terrified, Willow dropped to her knees beside Tara and frantically searched her pockets.
"Epipen!" she shouted hysterically. "Don't you have an Epipen?" But Tara didn't usually have to deal with her shrimp allergy when she came to visit the Summers household. They all knew that she couldn't eat shrimp, and Buffy also had a very minor reaction to shellfish. Tara's pockets held no Epipen, and her allergic reaction was progressing faster than it usually would have. The oversized shrimp still lay in the corner it had fallen to once it had bounced off of Tara, aromatic and pink and hateful.
Willow watched through eyes blurry with tears as Tara's eyes closed and her chest stopped moving.
"No," she sobbed. "No! Come on, Tara! Please, come on, baby!" But Tara's swollen face was nonresponsive, her body already limp. Willow could feel the gates she had built up, the ones she had used to hold back the magic, flying open. Dark magic coursed through her veins, through her brain, through the hands that still cradled her girlfriend's head. A storm began to brew in the ceiling, and she stared up at it with dark eyes.
"By Osiris!" she shouted. "I command you, bring her back! Hear me, keeper of darkness!"
"Witch!" called the darkness. "How dare you invoke Osiris in this task!" But Willow had nothing left to lose. If there was any chance, any chance at all that she could restore Tara to life, she would do whatever it took. And if there wasn't, there was nothing the darkness could do to her that was worse than what had already happened.
"Please," she begged. "Please, bring her back."
"You may not violate the laws of natural passing!" Willow looked down at Tara's lifeless, puffy face.
"How, how is this natural?"
"She died of anaphylactic shock due to a shrimp allergy!"rumbled the darkness. "It was human death, by a human immune system." But Tara was dead, killed in a freak shrimp accident. There was no way that Willow could go on without her. She had raised the dead once; she could do it again.
"You raised one killed by mystical forces. This is not the same. She is taken by natural order. It is done."
"No, there has to be a way!" A way to bring the swelling down. A way to make her breathe again. A way to make her Tara again. There had to be something that could fix this, some magical Epipen that could bring her back to life.
"It is done!"
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" screamed Willow. Her scream shook the house and made the darkness scream in pain. She was something stronger than it now, something more terrifying, but all that she felt was emptiness. She stood, abandoning her Epipen-less girlfriend and the huge shrimp in the corner. It was going to start to rot soon, with the late afternoon heat, but Willow didn't care. She walked out the front door with all the mental power of a zombie. Xander, who had a fair amount of shrimp juice on his own shirt, caught sight of her once she was outside. He was standing near a hospital stretcher where they were carrying away a rather blotchy Buffy.
"Willow, thank God, are you okay?" asked Xander, at the same time as Buffy said, "You guys, seriously, I'm fine. It's just a minor allergic reaction, really."
"How did this happen?" asked Willow flatly.
"Warren," said Xander. "He just came into the back yard and started flinging giant shrimp, and then Buffy started turning all these funny shades of red…"
"Warren," snarled Willow. He was her mark. She would find him and kill him for what he had done. She would make him die a slow, gasping, choking death by anaphylactic shock, just like her Tara had.
"I guess that maybe he overestimated Buffy's shellfish allergy…" But Willow was already gone. She walked to the Magic Box, possessed by some strong form of magical rage that directed her feet and took over her shocked and empty mind. The door flew open, and light bulbs cracked and burst in her wake.
"Hello," said Anya, sounding frightened and uncertain of what to do.
"Where do you keep the black arts books?" asked Willow.
"You don't have to do this," said Anya. "I know that it looks terrible right now, but I'm sure that Buffy's reaction will go down. As I recall, she's only mildly allergic to shrimp anyway…"
"I need power," growled Willow.
"Not with those books, I can't let you," said Anya advancing towards Willow, but Willow stopped her with a single burst of magic. The books flew off the shelves to do her bidding, and Willow sank her hands into them. Words flowed through her, but not in the book nerd way they had when she was in high school. This was something much more sinister, something that turned her veins visible and her hair black. Even her roots were dark. Having sapped the books dry, she removed her hands from the pages.
"That's better," she said, her voice low with the forces of vengeance. She strode out the shop, past Anya, and to the hospital. The second she entered Buffy's room, the machines went haywire and the lights flickered (because when faced with such great evil, all that lights can do is flicker in fear. It's their version of shivering).
"You guys, it's not a serious reaction at all!" Buffy was telling the doctors and nurses who were busily attending to her. "A nerd just slapped me in the face with a giant shrimp. Sure, my skin doesn't look great right now, but…" She looked up and saw Willow, lurking by the doorway. "Oh, hi, Willow. Wasn't your hair a different color last time I saw you?"
"Now," said Willow, and all the people attending to Buffy's superficial allergic reaction cleared out of the room.
"What are you doing?" asked Xander. "Do you have a cream or something?"
Willow walked over to Buffy, who looked rather confused about the entire situation, and stared at her for a moment. The blotchy patches on her skin shrank smaller and smaller until she was once again even-complexioned and smooth.
"Hey, thanks, Wil!" said Buffy. "That would have taken some time to clear up on its own. But really, the makeover thing, you might have wanted to think it through before you went nutso with the dye."
"We have to go," said Willow, ignoring Buffy's words.
"Why?" asked Buffy, who seemed to be perfectly content. Willow resented her for that; how could she be so content when the shrimp attack that she had survived had killed Tara in mere minutes?
"It's time to find Warren," said Willow, dramatically exiting the room. Buffy and Xander followed her to Xander's car, where she commanded that Xander drive them to the nearest patch of desert. Xander didn't quite seem to understand the magnitude of the situation, and kept cracking jokes about how Sunnydale had everything – deserts, military bases, and even massive, Transylvanian-style castles – but something about Willow's tone of voice compelled him to obey her.
"Faster," she told him.
"I'm going as fast as I can," said Xander, who was now becoming more than a little nervous about Willow's sudden change in attitude.
"Faster!" yelled Willow. Xander's foot flew aside from the gas pedal, which pressed itself down to the floor.
"Wil, would you cut that out?" asked Xander. "If you wanted to drive…" But Willow couldn't drive. She was far too full of vengeance to drive.
"We need to stop, I don't like this," said Buffy, who was also growing nervous.
"We're close, I can feel it," said Willow.
"And we'll catch him, and he'll go to jail," said Buffy. "Or… wherever people who use massive shrimp as projectile weapons go. Which is probably some sort of mental institution. But, Willow, you're using magic."
"If I wasn't using magic, you'd still have a skin rash," said Willow menacingly. She had gotten rid of that skin rash, and she could put it right back, too. That was one of the many powers dark magic imbued in its users.
"Yeah, and I'm grateful," said Buffy. "But this isn't right. This isn't how I want it." Willow hadn't wanted to be holding her swollen, lifeless girlfriend to her chest after a rogue shrimp had burst through the window, but apparently what she wanted didn't have much to do with what she got.
"Sometimes you don't have a choice," she said.
"I think Buffy gets the tie-breaker on this one," said Xander. "She was the one on the receiving end of that humongous shrimp. Where do you think he got shrimp that big, anyway? I mean, they were easily the size of my head!"
"Wil, you do have a choice," said Buffy, interrupting Xander's ramblings on giant shrimp. "This isn't good for you."
"You made the decision to stop for a reason," said Xander. "You promised us." Xander and Buffy didn't matter anymore, and her promises mattered even less. The only one that mattered in the world was Warren. Willow wouldn't let him live. He would feel what it was like for his face to balloon up to twice its normal size. He would know the frustration of trying to yell for help, but having it come out "Hehwp!" every time. And he would feel the terror of trying to reach for a shot of epinephrine in from his jeans pockets, only to find that they held nothing but lint and quarters.
Or, in the case that he didn't have an allergy, he would know some other pain. Willow could be flexible on that.
When Willow came out of her revenge-daydream, Xander was asking some inane question about her hair. Didn't he know that evil turned your hair blacker than the five-dollar dye all the high school emo kids picked up at the drug store? Then, Willow's revenge sense started tingling.
"Turn right!" she shouted. "Go!"
"Go where?" asked Xander, startled by her sudden command.
"Over there, now!" ordered Willow. "Turn!" Xander didn't turn quickly enough, so she magically spun the wheel so that the car skidded into an empty patch of desert dirt. Xander said something again about Willow's literal backseat driving, but Willow didn't listen to him. They tore through the patch of tumbleweeds and dust until they came to another road. Willow got out of the car and walked into the center of the street, in front of a bus. Buffy and Xander tried to follow her, to pull her back, but she stopped them in their tracks with another burst of magic. Oh, how they underestimated Dark Willow? Didn't they know that when caught in a battle of the wills with a bus, she would always win? She halted the bus in the middle of the road and demanded that Warren get out.
As he stepped off the stairs and instantly began to beg for his life, all of Willow's fantastic plans for artful revenge flew out the window. She wrapped a hand around his neck and squeezed. She wanted to feel the collapse of his trachea, the pounding of his frightened pulse. But there was no pulse. One of his eyes popped out, revealing metal and wires behind it. The robot fell to the ground.
"It's a robot," she blankly informed Xander and Buffy as they ran to her side. "I could feel his essence. He tricked me. We'll find him another way."
"And then what?" asked Buffy,
"And then we'll kill him," said Willow, although she found it to be terribly obvious.
"You need to calm down!" Buffy told her. Darkness percolated in Willow like the blackest and most unsweetened coffee.
"Calm down?" she asked, enraged.
"Look, you're angry," said Buffy. "I am, too. Well, actually, I'm more confused than angry. I'm not going to defend what Warren did, but–"
"One of the shrimp hit Tara," said Willow flatly. "When he threw those shrimp at you, one of them missed and broke through the window, upstairs, in my room. She died of anaphylactic shock a few minutes later. I guess the last shrimp was the charm."
"She's dead?" asked Xander.
"She's dead," said Willow. "Now he's dead, too."
"Oh my God," said Buffy. "Tara. She was so much more allergic than I am…"
"Christ, Wil, how come you didn't say anything?" asked Xander.
"I'm busy," said Willow.
"Please, just stop!" said Buffy, grabbing Willow by the arm. "We love you. And Tara. And this was a horrible, horrible shrimp-related tragedy, but we don't kill humans; it's not the way."
"How can you say that?" asked Willow. "Tara is dead!"
"I know," said Buffy. "And I don't understand how this happened, or why Warren used shrimp, or what you're going through, but Willow, if you do this, you let Warren destroy you, too."
That didn't mean anything. Willow had been gone since the second that shrimp came crashing through the window, the second that Willow realized that there was nothing she could do to make Tara's throat reopen and her tongue shrink down to a size where she could say "I love you," again. Willow walked away from them as Xander yelled after her that there was no coming back from this kind of magic. Willow wasn't planning on coming back. She couldn't live in a world where things like shellfish calamities happened for no reason. Willow was gone.
She found Warren that night, trying to escape through some forest. He tried to bury a hatchet in her back, and when she fell to the ground, he thought that he had won. But she got back up. Warren had not yet suffered as Tara had. None of his silly little nerd boy tricks could bring her down, not while Willow was still so full of revenge waiting to be exacted.
"It was an accident, you know," said Warren, backing away from her. "I thought that Buffy was the one who was really allergic to shrimp. I had no way of knowing, I swear."
That didn't cut it. This was personal now, and she had the strongest, darkest power in the universe to bring him down. She caught him with vines as he tried to run, and he stood, wide open and trembling with fear, before her. Willow held out her palm, and in it materialized the giant shrimp from the corner of her room. It was beginning to smell a little rank, but Willow wasn't trying to make Warren comfortable. She stepped closer to Warren, bearing the shrimp in one hand like a club.
"What are you doing?" He laughed nervously. "I'm… I'm not even allergic to shrimp."
"Oh," said Willow. "You don't have to be." She dropped the shrimp on the ground before him, and Warren watched in worry and mild confusion as it replicated itself, turning into two giant shrimp. Then those turned into four, and those into sixteen, and so on, until the shrimp were piled around Warren like a tomb. At first, he thrashed and fought against his restraints, and some of the shrimp fell away from him, but they continued to divide until there was no more movement from inside the coffin-like mound of crustaceans. It wasn't as artful or poignant as, say, driving a bullet into his chest in slow motion or flaying him with a flick of her wrist, but now Warren had died a terrible, horrifying death by shrimp.
The fragrance of shellfish was beginning to overwhelm Willow, whose mind was already so far past lost that she'd actually killed a man by burying him in shrimp. Even knowing that the man who had killed her girlfriend was dead beneath that mound of pink and white, the sight of all that shrimp was still traumatizing. The longer she looked at it, the more she realized that getting rid of Warren was not enough for her. She needed to do something far more drastic. It wasn't just Warren that had killed Tara; it was also shrimp. Every time Willow saw a shrimp, she knew that she would be reminded of Tara's death. In her mind, she would see Tara's swollen face, hear her struggle for breath.
The thought of having to go through that much pain every time she caught a whiff of someone's shrimp cocktail was too much for her to bear. Shrimp had to go. All of the shrimp. Brine shrimp, eating shrimp, sea monkeys, even those little crayfish things that lived in streams and rivers. They were all abominable, and they all needed to pay for Tara's death. But Willow needed a conduit of some kind, some place linked with shrimp that she could use to rid the world of the delicious little monsters. Willow knew just the place.
Using her evil powers of levitation, Willow floated through the forest and into town. There wasn't a Long John Silver's in Sunnydale, which meant that there was one, and only one, seafood chain that sacrificed enough shrimp to serve her well. As she approached the restaurant, she bathed in the sign's glow, a crimson of pure fury. This is where it would all end.
The Red Lobster. Patrons flooded in there to enjoy their various seafood dinners and accursed endless shrimp, oblivious to Willow's pain and anger. Well, maybe they weren't completely oblivious. Several people gazed up in mild concern at the witch's dark figure hovering just above the rooftop as they approached the entrance, but decided after a few seconds that whatever was going on was less important than their night at Red Lobster and proceeded with smiles on their faces. This may sound unlikely, but do remember that this was Sunnydale, and that most residents of Sunnydale are famous for their ability to hand-wave away supernatural phenomena. They probably assumed that Willow was a gang member on PCP.
But Willow wasn't high on anything but the prospect of revenge. These people didn't understand her pain. They took eating shrimp for granted, partook in this culinary delight without realizing that that same meal had killed people before. Had killed Tara. The rage flared up in Willow's soul and she turned her eyes towards the sky.
"By the gods of Red Lobster!" she shouted, attracting only minimal attention from the Red Lobster patrons below. "I use your Sunnydale-location temple as a conduit for my revenge! Let my fury be unleashed over the mighty oceans and roiling seas! May my suffering cleanse this world of these unholy crustaceans, purging every last shrimp from the darkest depths and the shallowest tidal pools! Let these loathsome creatures vanish from this universe, leaving only their path of destruction to remember them by! By the name of—"
"Willow!" yelled a voice from the street below her. Willow turned her cold, dark eyes down towards its source. "Willow, I know that you're hurting right now, but you can't do this! You can still come back, Wil! If you get rid of all the shrimp, just think of what it'll do to the world! No more shrimp poppers, shrimp cocktail, no jumbo shrimp? Who wants to live in that world? And, you know, it would probably screw up our ecosystem, too. The Willow I know wouldn't do this. Willow, this isn't you!" Xander. Foolish Xander. He had never felt pain this great before. He had never wanted to rid the universe of an entire species. Except possibly mosquitoes – his complaints about them during the summer were nearly incessant. Still, had his girlfriend been killed by a mosquito? No. He didn't understand.
"Stay out of this, Xander," said Willow flatly from her post. "I have matters to attend to." the determination in her voice must have shocked Xander, because it seemed that he didn't know how to react for a second. That moment of silence was enough time for Willow to begin her invocation again.
"By the name of Red Lobster founder—"
"First day of kindergarten—" Xander shouted below. Willow furrowed her brow in annoyance. Was he going to insist upon chattering through her curse on all shrimp? But her voice was more powerful than his.
"Bill Darden, I command you, free this world from all—"
"You cried because you broke the yellow crayon, and you were too afraid to tell anyone! You've come pretty far and, getting rid of all the shrimp, not a terrific notion—"
"Foul pink crustaceans, and small decapods, and—"
"But the thing is? Yeah. I love you. I loved crayon-breaky Willow and I love scary veiny Willow—" Willow raised her voice, hoping to drown out Xander's. The guy was really starting to kill the oblivion-to-all-shrimp mood.
"End my suffering under the ten legs of these putrid creatures—" Below the Red Lobster, Xander began to panic. Willow's voice was growing louder, and dark clouds surging with electricity were gathering around, which meant that he was going to have to cut to the chase at the expense of his heartwarming speech.
"For the love of GOD, Willow!" he shouted in terror. "Please, kill me, but LEAVE THE SHRIMP ALONE!"
Willow raised her arms above her head, taking in the great clouds of darkness, readying herself for this blow against crustacean-kind. She could hear Xander screaming below, telling her that there was no coming back from this. She knew that. This was just something she had to do. For her, for Tara, and for the tens of people in history who had died from freak shrimp accidents. She closed her eyes and prepared to change the world.
Will Willow Rosenberg succeed in wiping all shrimp from the face of the Earth? Or will some mysterious force stop her just in time? The latter seems highly unlikely, considering that Xander's failsafe yellow crayon story has somehow failed, but it's all up to you, the reader! And you know why? Because I'm too lazy to figure it out! Mwahahahaha, you don't get a resolution!
Anyway, I hope that you've enjoyed "A World Without Shrimp", although I'm fairly certain that I can understand if you didn't like it at all. Feel free to criticize or flame if you want to – my feelings won't be hurt – but I can't imagine why you'd care enough to do so.
~Sunny D.