Title: Beer Very Bad
Author: Golden Waffles
Rating: T. For minor language (I guess?) and mentions of sex.
Description: It's kind of an alternate ending to "Something Blue." That night Willow gets drunk at the Bronze, something a little different happens, involving a certain blonde girl.
Disclaimer: Of course I don't own the characters or settings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just the situations I put them in here.
A/N: This isn't exactly essential to the plot or anything. I just got the idea in my head and kind of wanted to write it. I also found out that if I just let my imagination wander, everything gets waaaaaaay too cryptic and metaphorical. This was supposed to be funnier, but maybe I just felt that way because of the premise. Anyway, here it is. I kind of like it. Because this is making me late, the next chapter will be posted on Sunday, not Saturday.
A/N2: Sorry I keep falling through with my (admittedly self-imposed) deadlines. I have fewer things to do these days, but they keep taking a lot longer than I expect. I'll try to get more of a rhythm going. It's easier to make time to write when I have a stable schedule.

Bonus Chapter:
Chemistry

Willow blinked at the starry ceiling of the dark room. She sat up, and mattress springs groaned underneath her. She was on a bed. Tara's bed, she noted. She didn't remember being in Tara's bed. In fact, she was pretty sure they had just been in the rec room. But they weren't. Willow was in Tara's room. On her bed. Tara wasn't in the bed, though. She was at her desk, hunched over, scribbling furiously by the light of scattered candles and Christmas lights. Willow yawned widely. Tara hadn't looked up from her writing yet. Whatever she's doing must be important.

"What are you writing?" Willow asked, maintaining her seat on the comfy bed. Tara glanced back over her shoulder, and Willow saw that she was wearing a huge pair of glasses. And also a lab coat. She was pretty sure that those were both unusual things. She had never seen Tara wear glasses, or even contacts. She had certainly looked at her eyes enough to have noticed if she had. And while Tara's wardrobe was hardly that of a typical college student, she was pretty sure she would have noticed a big white lab coat.

"Working on an equation. It's very important to my research," the blonde explained impatiently. Her voice was unusually terse. Willow sat up a little straighter. Equation? Research?

"I didn't know you were doing research," she commented, her forehead creasing in confusion. Her companion gave her a long look.

"Everyone is doing research. Obviously," she stated simply. She blinked once, then returned to her scribbling. Willow wanted to go look at her work, but her legs were unwilling to leave the safety of the bed. Who knows what might be lurking on the floor. This is Sunnydale. Anything could be under the bed, hiding in the carpet. Best to stay on higher ground. She couldn't even see the carpet from where she currently sat.

"What's the equation for?" she asked curiously. "I didn't think you liked math." Tara had never explicitly said so, but in their conversations about academics, Willow had always picked up on her subtle distaste for the subject. Tara didn't skip a beat.

"Not math; Chemistry. Ours," she explained. "It's very important."

"Oh." Our chemistry? She's writing equations for our chemistry? "Can I see it?" She tried to creep closer to the edge of the bed, but cold fear began to spread in her stomach, and she found herself freezing, although she wasn't sure why.

"It's not done yet." Tara grumbled. She seemed frustrated by this fact. She hadn't seemed to have noticed Willow's plight. "The reactants are still unstable. The results of my experiments are inconsistent. The reaction is incomplete."

Willow swallowed nervously. She thought their "experiments" had been going okay, for the most part.

"Really?" She wasn't sure where to go from there. "What are you going to do about it?"

Tara shot her a strange look, like she had said something unexpectedly foolish.

"Me? Nothing. What can I do? You're the limiting factor," she informed the frozen redhead. Willow frowned.

"I'm the limiting factor?"

"Yep. Most definitely. Our Willow compound has limited quantities of Lesbium. It's a problem. We can't form a sustainable reaction without it. There would be too much Tara unaccounted for."

Willow felt herself blush deeply. She hadn't really worked out the logistics of her orientation yet. This Tara seemed to know that.

"Are you sure? I mean… maybe we just need something else. Like a catalyst or something."

Tara frowned again, giving her an odd look.

"A catalyst for what?"

"The… reaction." She wasn't positive she was following the metaphor, but she was pretty sure reaction was code for relationship. Tara removed her glasses and looked at her seriously.

"Do you really want a reaction? Are you even ready for a reaction?"

Willow flashed back to the conversation they had just had, about her relationship with Oz.

"I… I think so. I'm getting there."

"Hmph." Tara replaced her glasses. "We're going to need more than that." She pointed an accusing finger at Willow. "Limiting factor."

"But… it's hard."

"Chemistry can be hard. That's why we wear the lab coats. They're very empowering." She tugged at her collar briefly in demonstration. "Regardless, if you really want to help, you're going to have to get a lot closer than that."

"Okay. I can do that. I think." Against all the instincts in her head screaming at her to retreat to the safety of the headboard, she crawled cautiously towards the foot of the bed. As she reached the edge, she looked down at the carpet, only to discover that there was no carpet. The floor was made of water, and the bed was floating on the surface. She gulped. The water was dark and murky– shadowy, almost sinister. Tara's chair and desk were seated safely on an anchored lily pad. If this bothered her, she didn't show it. "Tara… I don't think I can. There's nothing to stand on. It's all water."

"So go through the water," Tara said in a voice so obvious, it was almost patronizing.

"But… it's all dark. It could be super deep, and then I'd be sucked down to the bottom. Or there could be monsters in it. This is the Hellmouth. There can be some scary stuff in the water. Remind me to tell you about the swim team sometime. It's not pretty."

"Or it could just be a big, splashy puddle." Tara set her pen down and sat back in her chair. "Why are you so scared?"

"Because… I don't know what's down there." She stared nervously into the depths.

"Well… you're not going to find out by just looking at it," Tara advised.

"I know…" Willow sighed, trying to will herself to reach down and test the waters. Dread halted her hand before it came close. "But it could all go so wrong…"

Tara nodded knowingly, finally looking sympathetic towards her predicament.

"That's why it's hard. We have to do it anyway. That's life, isn't it? That's the limiting factor."

"But… the equations… we can fix them, can't we? We can… react better?"

"It's not hopeless. Things have been stabilizing lately, at least a little bit. Magic makes for a nice co-reactant. It helps stabilize things." Tara sighed, suddenly looking tired. "It's hard, though. The first experiment went beautifully, but it burned itself out so fast, so violently…" She gave Willow a serious look. "The samples are all so contaminated now."

"But… can't we fix them?" Willow asked meekly.

"How?" The blonde scientist looked lost. Willow didn't have an answer. "Everything's so unclear at this point. My hypotheses fall through as soon as I come up with them." A resolute expression settled over her face. "We need to do more experiments."

"I wouldn't mind that," Willow admitted softly. "Didn't any of them work out?"

The chemist smiled faintly and held up a sheet of paper. Willow recognized it as a combustion reaction, but there was something off about the chemical symbols.

"Our first experiment. Wildly successful, at least as far as reactions go. But alcohol is such an unstable reactant, and the sex needed something to bond to. It shouldn't have been thrown in there on its own. That's why it was so…" She removed her glasses for effect. "Explosive." She replaced them. "It was a bad equation. The reactants need to work together without the 'bad' catalysts. We need the good ones."

"Like what?"

"Ideally? Attraction. Friendship. Love. But that takes time to form, and I'm not sure all the ingredients are even present."

"I need more Lesbium?" Willow guessed wryly.

"Ideally," Tara agreed. "Friendship compounds could still stabilize the reaction. They've been playing a role in recent experiments. We'll have to see how they progress, though. How they hold up when everything else enters the mix." She cast her gaze over the murky water that still lay between them. "And you'll need to splash through that H2O and come over here."

"I want to. Really. But I'm still scared."

"It's okay. We'll just have to get you a lab coat."