Willow Rosenberg was angry. She was angry and frustrated and confused and dreadfully unhappy, and each feeling seemed ready to take her over entirely in their turn with every step coming down the Hyperion's stairs and into the lobby. By the time she reached the marble-floored foyer she thought she might scream, but instead she pulled back and kicked the first chair she saw. She kicked it hard, and in retrospect. inexpertly. She didn't get a second kick in, the immediate physical pain from the first mis-placed boot to the solid wooden form of the chairs leg had broken it--snapped it nearly into two pieces. That was what it had done to the chair. What it had done to the instep of her foot remained to be seen. She slumped onto a nearby couch--the chair was no good for sitting in now, it would tilt off balance without that leg to support the weight. There was pain, but it felt good in a way. She did not take her shoe off to inspect its origins.
It was only when the pain began to recede a minute or two later that she lost what the pain had given her--a momentary relief from her thoughts. Now they fell on her with a disturbing, diamond-sharp clarity. No one was coming back, she was sure. Angel had left. Just as Buffy had left. Just as Buffy had run away to this city the first time. Without a word. Willow was so tired of being left behind, uninformed, alone. Xander had hooked up with Cordelia behind her back--she knew that was small, knew that was in the past, so far in the past, but there it was, top of the list, number one in a series of betrayals. The first step of many. And Oz, would he have told her he was leaving if she hadn't walked in on him packing? Or would he have left without a word as well? What was it about her that inspired such reactions from people? Had she ever judged them? No. Well, sometimes. Had she cut them out of her life? Her decisions? No. Never.
She had never done anything to rate abandonment. Of that she was sure.
Tears were being pressed out of her eyes with each blink, and she let them continue. There was no one here beyond herself and her despair, and slowly she thought her despair would swallow her spirit and then she would be gone, too. She let her head slip into her hands, stared at the tips of her shoes, her eyesight blurred by tears.
And a girl laughed. Far away, Willow thought, down the street under the night sky--at least she was pretty sure it was still night, not yet dawn, anyway. That girl didn't know--that's why she could laugh, could still find things funny, or amusing, or ironic--because she was ignorant of what sort of place the world had become, or else she was in denial of it. Willow thought no one could know what she knew, feel what she felt and still laugh--not like that anyway, free, unfettered, bubbly.
And she heard a door open--far away, she thought. Someone spoke, "...place like," the man said, very distant--across the street, in the neighboring building, she thought.
But she was wrong.
The French doors right here at the Hyperion had been thrown open, as though the guards in a palace were ready to announce the arrival of the princess, and standing at the head of a group of people was Angel, and next to him Cordelia wearing--Princess Leia's Return of the Jedi dancer costume. And something of the ebullience of their entry nearly surprised the tears out of Willow, and her slow reaction seemed to give the passage of time its cue and it halted as well.
Cordelia half-said something--Willow's ears didn't seem to be working, couldn't form words out of the sounds she uttered.
She thought maybe they were returning from a party--which seemed grotesque when she imagined it: off on a bacchanal while Buffy--while the world--while she...
Willow made eye contact with Angel against her own better judgement and he cut Cordelia off.
"It's Buffy," he said.
And Willow knew in that moment that she had been wasting valuable time since her arrival, doing anything but practicing how she would tell Angel about what had happened. She had avoided using the words, visualizing speaking to him, organizing the story. She had been in denial of why she was here and now it was too late. It was time.
...to be continued...
.
Disclaimer: Willow and the others, Buffy, Angel, Giles, Spike, etc. are not my property, and as a rule I don't condone the ownership of humans by other humans. That said, I am not getting paid for their work here, but then neither are they. It's more like a charity benefit, a gala even.
Other fic o'mine can be (to a limited extent) found here, or (in full) at my own site, The OutBack Fiction Shack. Thanks...Neftzer.