Author's Notes:
1.) I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer nor the various incarnations of Read or Die. I merely twist the characters to my will, like any evil author would do.
2.) If you are unfamiliar with Read or Die, please read at your own risk because there will be some spoilers.
3.) Thank you for reading!
Chapter First: Destined (But Definitely Planned) Meetings
The apartment was, to put it simply and to avoid unnecessary pleasantries, a dump. There seemed to be no signs of recent human habitation, and a fine layer of dust covered quite a bit of the inanimate inhabitants of the apartment. Speaking of whom, the books covered every surface of the space, filling the bookcases that leaned against most of the walls and then stacking up to the wall against the remaining walls. Every available flat space was also stacked high with books, from kitchen counters to tables and couches. Even the bed was conspicuously covered in a messy table of pages.
Suddenly, a phone was ringing somewhere, sounding muffled. It rang in the silence of the apartment four times before a loud click signaled the engagement of the answering machine. "Hi! You have reached Tara Maclay. I'm not able to come to the phone right now, so please leave a message and I'll get right back to you." A beep, and a monotone female voice began speaking.
"Hello, Miss Maclay. This is Sunnydale Independent School District. We were wondering if you could substitute an English class today for the whole day. It'll be a 12th grade advanced class at Wilkins High…"
Upon these words, the pile of books on the bed suddenly shifted. An arm reached out for something, and found a pair of glasses at the bedside stand, on top of a pile of books. A blonde woman emerged from her cocoon, long enough to hear, "… so please call us back within the next five minutes to confirm. Thank you." Click.
Tara looked blearily at the clock, which read 6:07 am. She pushed a lock of hair out of her face with one hand and covered up a yawn with the other. Her mind slowly but surely began to process faster, and the day began to come into focus. Her quick brain drew up her plans for the day as delineated some time last night before she has begun her nightly reading and been so absorbed as to only by long habit randomly fallen asleep at some point.
First, she had to get more books. This was definitely not abnormal; buying more books was always the first item on her daily checklist, but today she felt an extra need, as she only had about three unopened ones left, which could scarcely get her to lunch. Second… well, there actually wasn't a second on the list as of yet. She went over in her mind whether she wanted to spend the day lounging with some new books or working. Certainly teaching wasn't Tara's forte: she found kids to be loud, distracting, and generally very lacking in the care of their textbooks. But she had to make money to feed her "habit", as her kinder friends called it, so she went through her extensive memory banks to see whether this opportunity would lead to her crying in front of a class again when a student openly made fun of the poetry of Alexander Pope. Boy, I'm never working at that Sunnydale High again, she had avowed.
But Wilkins High had not only less of a stigma (the students usually managed to merely nod off in class) attached to it, but was also the school that one of Tara's current favorite authors went. And if she remembered correctly, that writer was in the 12th grade and no doubt taking advanced English…
Tara suddenly dove out of bed, managed to trip and catch herself from falling three times, and finally reached the phone. She pulled several books from a pile in the living room to reveal the phone, and dialed the number to Sunnydale School District offices from memory. Willow Rosenberg went to Wilkins High!
Tara took jobs at Wilkins more often than at other schools because she was always trying to catch a glimpse of the young writer. But having a random substitute teacher walking around and being snoopy was awfully suspicious to most folks and Tara hadn't had any success in seeing Ms. Rosenberg. But now, since she knew she was a senior and thus must be taking that class, Tara only had to wait for her to show up! Her excitement over the phone seemed to have no effect on the secretary that confirmed her position, but that didn't matter. Tara hastily hung up the phone and began her morning ritual, which in her state of mind—boy, a good book would calm her down right now but she hadn't the time—took much longer than it should have and she forgot to brush her hair. She was out of the door in ten minutes and beginning her walk to Wilkins High. She'd had her driver's license revoked long ago and thus biked or walked wherever she needed to, so she needed a little extra time to get there. She hardly noticed the time, however, as she blissfully meandered to her destination, somehow wending her way to the high school despite her nose being buried deep in a book.
Such was the morning of Tara Maclay, aka The Paper.
Willow looked out of the window of her math classroom. She was the type to read ahead in her lessons, so the droning of her bespectacled Calculus teacher was mere review to her. Hence she tended to be a bit of a space cadet in class, mind drifting off to a different universe of her own making. Space travel… Willow mulled the thought over. A story involving her and some space travel might make some interesting fiction. She filed the thought away for later as she was currently involved in too many projects.
Willow frowned. She didn't like that rationality. Her first two novels had sprung from random snippets of thought, and in flurries of creative nirvana she had produced works that had made her the darling of the publishing industry. After her initial success, writing had become progressively more difficult. First of all, her time was cut into by occasional interviews and meetings with her editor, as well as the increasingly difficult course load associated with going through high school at an accelerated rate as she was. Then, to her consternation, she constantly battled writer's block. Hearing stories about this nefarious agent of evil and methods of battling it did little to prepare her for the awful truth of it as it did its level best to confound her efforts. With deadlines looming, it grew louder, nipping at her concentration and lapping up her creative stores.
But this was the life Willow had chosen. Of all of the professions she could have chosen, she had chosen this fickle field that had high risk and generally had little yield. There was no guarantee that hard work will generate money, fame, or gay love. Her parents didn't like the idea, either. Her mother was a researching and practicing psychologist, and had hoped her daughter would follow her into a more science-oriented career. Her father was a staunch academic; while he could appreciate her efforts with language, since he was an expert in translating and analyzing medieval literature, he preferred the musty dungeons of his ancient libraries to the perplexing and volatile public arena.
It made Willow's forehead crinkle, the thought of being someone whose name was known. She was so popular in California that her hometown had devoted a day to her; Sunnydale must have really needed something to celebrate. She had won awards but none more prestigious than the American Novel Youth Award, and she had been so full of light and juvenile optimism. Now she felt bogged down and taunted by her blank word processing documents as she stared for hours at them without a single word being written. Sometimes she would doze off and wake up deliriously happy because she saw that the document from 8 pages long; then she would realize that it was all the letter "t" and her nose had been pushing down on the keyboard while napping.
Shaking her head, Willow returned from space to her classroom, noting that the teacher hadn't written anything new to her on the board. A quick glance at the decrepit clock on the wall revealed that it was one minute before class let out, and she could hear the restless rustling of the other students as they began to put some of their things back into their book bags. Taking her cue from them, Willow did the same and the teacher looked up from the chalkboard and made some announcements about homework and upcoming quizzes. Willow listened with half a mind and stood up from her seat immediately upon hearing the bell ring, joining the march of her fellow students.
It wasn't that she was in a hurry to leave or in a hurry to get where she was going. Her English class was in the next building and she didn't have to stop at her locker. Making her way through the busy halls, she felt a push from behind and whirled around to confront her assailant.
Jesse held up his hands in mock surrender. "Don't hurt me!" he exclaimed, posing as if frightened, but his smile was disarming and meant no harm. Willow smiled back and punched him lightly in the arm.
"Don't scare me like that, jerk!" she said teasingly, turning to continue walking down the hall.
Jesse moved in step with her. "It's always interesting to disturb you from LaLa Writer's Land. I'm still hoping you'll outdo the one time you said, 'Forsooth the frogs cometh!'"
Willow blushed deeply. She tended to be a little absorbed when plotting her next story. That particular one had been set in medieval times—her father's research always made her want to take advantage of his genius and craft a story around that time period—and she had been contemplating a villain. Frogs are very villainous creatures and she was just attempting to explicate exactly how, in period language, when Jesse had done his usual jumping out of nowhere shtick. Ah well, best that it was embarrassed out of her. Nobody said "forsooth" in medieval times. Did they?
"Sorry to disappoint," Willow said wryly, "I was actually thinking no thoughts in particular."
Jesse made an exaggerated motion that Willow, with her limited knowledge of men's body language, assumed meant he was aghast. "Willow without thoughts!" he said, gasping, as they stopped at the door of her classroom. "Why, that's like a tree without flowers!"
Willow never could quite understand Jesse's attempts at similes and metaphors, so she noncommittally gave a pseudo-smile and waved goodbye and entered her English classroom. She headed to her usual seat near the front—not the front row, because she didn't want to seem like a teacher's pet, though she was—and plopped down ungracefully in it.
Nobody else was in the room, since there was a full three minutes before class started. Looking to the front of the classroom, Willow noticed that Mrs. Sanchez was not at her desk, but instead there sat a younger woman with long blonde hair. She seemed wholly immersed in the book she held in her hands, and her eyes behind her glasses quickly skimmed back and forth over the pages. Her head was somewhat bowed, but Willow thought she looked pretty. Willow concluded that she must be the substitute teacher, and a young one, at that. Fresh out of college, Willow inquired to herself. The relaxed set of the woman's shoulders as she read, her even breathing, and the small smile on her lips quietly inspired Willow, and the redhead wished she could write a vignette right then to capture the moment.
The shrill ringing of the two-minute warning bell, however, broke her and the teacher out of their respective reveries, and students began to enter. The substitute looked up from her book, looking startled, as if she didn't remember how she got there. Her eyes traveled over the new information of students entering, until they fell on Willow. Bored, Willow had been observing her in return and when the teacher's blue eyes fell on her, the orbs widened.
The teacher suddenly stood up from her seat, making an unpleasant grating sound as the chair scraped away from her, and cried, "Willow Rosenberg!"
The entire class, with the exception of a few stragglers still coming in immediately turned to the teacher, silent and bewildered. Then the titters started, and soon the class was giggling. The teacher blushed furiously, hiding behind her hair.
The students then glanced at Willow, who maintained a nonchalant look on her face. Bored, they returned to their conversations. Willow thought this might be an interesting class.