Title: Silent Remembrances
Author: Enchanted
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I don't own Buffy or any of its characters.
A/N: I'm so sorry it took me this long to update...I was grounded off the internet and then I had school to deal with and stuff! Thank you guys for being so damn patient!! I love you!

Silent Remembrances Pt. 3

~*~
"Willow," I heard a slightly muted voice repeat my name over and over. The slightest hint of light was streaking my unnatural darkness.

"Willow," I hear again. Wow. Whoever's trying to wake me up from my nap must be very persistent. I can sleep through anything...even a pack of demons...well, maybe not a pack of demons, but something like that.

"WILLOW!" I feel someone shaking my shoulder roughly and I open my eyes reluctantly. Instantly, I wish I hadn't. The light almost blinds me, and in the fading sun, I can make out two figures, outline by shadows, like a smudged sketch. Blinking once or twice, I finally recognized Buffy and Xander. My two closest friends in the world.

Funny. Right now, I really didn't feel like talking to them.

"Hey," I groggily mumble. Glancing over to my right hand, I see what looks like a crumbled animal cracker, gripped in between my fingers like a death vise. "Whoa. Was I eating animal crackers in my sleep?"

"Uh, Willow, you weren't asleep," Xander tells me matter-of-factly. Of course, that isn't true. I know that I was fast asleep because I was dreaming. Of him. Oz.

"Yeah. And you weren't just eating those," Buffy points to the open bag of tawny animal crackers, which spilled over my bedspread in a neat little mound. Shouldn't be that hard to clean up later. "You were talking to them."

My mind snaps from cleaning up the animal crackers straight to what Buffy just stated.

"I...I was talking to them?"

Xander nods. "You called one of them Oz."

Uh-oh. That's not fair! They weren't supposed to ever learn about him! Stammering a little, I try to frame a denial, "Oz...now why would I go and talk about a...silly thing like that? I mean, I'm way over him..."

"Stop it," Buffy orders in that terse voice that means business.

"Ok," I comply immediately, casting my eyes down upon the floor.

"Why didn't you tell us, Willow? We could have helped you---" an elbow in Xander's ribs stops him from whatever he's going to say. As if I couldn't see that!

"But I can't," I say in response. "I love him."

Silence greets this declaration.

Without saying anything else, I raise the monkey up to my lips. For a second, I could really believe the monkey was Oz, and that I could taste his lips, the taste of salt, spice and incense, which probably rubbed off from me. For a second, I could sense him there, happily resting his lips against mine. For a second, the world froze and let me kiss him after so many months...the world froze and just let Oz and Willow be.

...Freeze frame...willowkissage...

But the sugary sweet flavor ruins it all so I open my lips, chew up the monkey, and swallow.

I glance up at my two closest friends in the entire world and grin. "This is something I have to face on my own. You get that, don't you? I mean, Buffy, I didn't exactly barge in when you were getting over Angel, did you? And, Xander, when you and Cordy broke up, you refused to talk to anyone about it. This is exactly like it. Only, I won't move on, because...because it's fate. It's destiny." I don't look up throughout it all, hoping they'll understand what I am saying. "The moon brought him to me," I whisper, not knowing why I had said it. I finally glanced up, and instead of seeing belligerence, like I thought I would see, there were flashes of consideration that alternated with sympathy. As if they understood. Did they?

"Ironic, isn't it?" Buffy muttered after a while.

"What is?" I question, a little bit confused. That came out of nowhere.

"That the moon took him away," Xander answered for her.

I smile wryly. What would Oz say?

... definitely falls underneath the heading of ironic ...

"...in my book..." I finish.

The looks on Buffy's and Xander's faces prove that they think I'm losing my last grip on sanity. Scary thing? I think I am too.

~*~

Buffy hastily closed the door behind her. "O...k..." she whispered as she exhaled. "I think..."

Xander held his hand up. "Stop. We said we'd let Willow work it out on her own. Therefore, we should let her work it out on her own," so saying, he opened the front door and then graciously extended his hand, a signal that meant, 'Ladies First.'

Buffy flashed him a quick smile. "But...don't you remember when we let Willow work it out on her own? She cast that will be done spell, and I was frenching Spike for four hours! Four hours, Xander!" Her facial emotions, however, didn't exactly match the disgust in her voice.

Xander tried in vain to stop his face from contorting in abhorrence. "Yeah, that was gross," he admitted, "but I think Willow's smarter now. She wouldn't dare do that again. Are you going to leave her here?"

"Yeah, but not for long," Buffy reassured the concerned Xander. "Just to talk to Giles and Anya."

"She might do something drastic..."

"Like talk to animal crackers?" she retorted sharply before storming off down the street.

They both didn't notice the flutter of the curtains in the front window, a signal that someone in the house had been spying on them.

Willow stepped away from the lacy curtains. She was beginning to think that they would never leave.

Brushing back her hair from her gem-like eyes, she swiftly came to a decision. She was going crazy. Going slowly insane because his voice would pop up in her head, seemingly out of nowhere, and then disappear to whatever unknown land that voices like that reside. Willow was convinced that there was a place somewhere, maybe on a different plane, where bodiless voices resided, and they lived to plague suffering people like her.

Well, she wouldn't have it. She would put a stop to it now.

Striding confidently to the chest at the end of her bed, she knew without opening and rifling through it that most of the components she needed for the spell would be in it. On top of the warped wood was a large, old book, the title chipped away from age.

It was stupid. Just a few minutes ago, she had been talking about destiny, and how she would brave everything to find him again. Now, she would give it all back just to have him disappear from her life, without a sound. Just have the thought of him evaporate into the sky.

"Love Spell," she snapped out suddenly, and the book's pages flapped in an unknown wind, in the fingers of an invisible hand, until it stopped abruptly at a page marked Love Magick.

She had tried to do this spell once, on Xander. The de-lusting spell. She had wanted to get rid of the feelings that were wrong, because she didn't want to hurt Oz. Oz had turned out to hurt her in the end.

'So what does it matter?' she asked herself. 'The point of this spell is to make your heart forget.'

To forget the memories and the kisses, to erase them from her heart. She would still remember them, but they wouldn't make her all mushy and sad like they were doing now. It was her heart that needed to be brainwashed.

Mixing the ingredients went by fast as Willow's practiced fingers sped into the art of magick, so fast that the mixing only seemed to take a second.

Finally, she held the vial in the grip of her pointer finger and her thumb. The moment of truth...was she strong enough to do it?

She was.

Willow upended the vial of dank black liquid into her mouth and let its sliminess roll down her throat, grimacing. It felt like swallowing a frog. Had it been a love spell, and not a de-lusting one, it would have turned out scarlet red, and had gone down easy. But now...
She nearly choked, but quickly collected her thoughts and croaked out the words she had made up for the spell.

"Aphrodite, I call on you now in mercy, in hopelessness. I implore you, pull back the touch of love you have descended on my part, and erase the memories that he has made in my heart...."

"Erase every smile..."

...You have the sweetest smile I have ever seen...

"Erase every smile!" Willow shouted over the voice in her head, and there was a bright red flash in the room. "Erase every kiss," the same bright red flash.

"Erase every memory and delete every piece of me that he has made his. Aphrodite, I call on you in mercy to take my heart and make it loveless. So mote it be."

The words recited, Willow dropped her hands and lowered her head, briefly wondering if it had worked. In the midst of waiting, there was another bright flash in the room, and Willow felt herself swaying. Blackness plunged upon her, like that of the dark night, and she couldn't move, couldn't speak. There was nothing but the perfect ebony, without the slightest touch of light to mar it.

She felt the potion run ice-cold through her veins, and throughout her body. With each second, the cold became almost painful, like holding a bottle of cold soda against your cheek.

With a great shudder, the ice reached her heart. Willow let out a bloodcurdling scream.
She could feel the coldness pass through the four chambers of her heart with aching awareness, and it was like it was being ripped from her body and shredded into little pieces.

Finally, her shivering body relaxed against the carpeted floor, still twitching once or twice from the frost that had paraded through her system.

Did it work? Willow asked in the silence of the blackness.

An hour passed as she lay there, frozen and unable to move, struggling to lift a finger, to move her toe, to flick an eyelid, anything.

But the potion had to wear off. And it finally did as Buffy, Xander, and Anya came in through her front door.

'Ah, hell,' Willow thought vehemently, since she couldn't move her lips or her tongue to say the words.

"Willow!" Buffy called. "We brought you some ice..." there was a deadly silence as she pushed the door open and took the room in at a glance.

A chaotic mess of ingredients was strewn along the floor that bordered the chest, and there was broken glass everywhere. Willow was on the floor, in her red flannel pajamas, her eyes closed and her body slightly twitching.

"Oh my God," Anya said as she looked over Buffy 's shoulder and pushed her out of the way.

"What is it?" Xander asked, "What did she do?"

"It looks like...like a love spell, only the complete opposite."

"Did it work?" Buffy questioned her.

"It usually does. There's one exception, though..."

Before Anya could finish, Willow's eyes flew open. She drew in a staggering breath, and then another.

And then, without meaning to, she opened her mouth and released a high-pitched scream.
~*~