Willow and Tara returned to Buffy's house with Buffy-bot. It was late and the house was dark. They were certain that Dawn was asleep. The two witches started to make their way up the stairs when they realized Buffy-bot was just standing in the foyer, watching them. She was waiting for some kind of instruction. Willow sighed. They were both so tired sometimes they forgot the specific things they needed to do to deal with Buffy-bot.

"It's time for bed, Buffy," Willow said. The robot smiled at her in her usual perky way.

"Okay," she said cheerfully. "Goodnight, Willow. Goodnight, Tara."

"Goodnight," Tara said quietly, still a little disturbed that she was saying goodnight to a robot.

"Sleep tight. Don't let the bed bugs bite," Buffy-bot said. She walked up the stairs past them and turned at the top. "Early to bed and early to rise…"

"Okay, Buffy, we get it," Willow interrupted. The robot had a long spiel she always said before bed each night. They had been putting up with it until Willow got a chance to work out some kinks in the programming. But tonight Willow couldn't deal with it. They had just finished a long and tiring patrol with the robot and the rest of the gang. No time for platitudes. The robot that looked like her best friend seemed confused for a moment. Then she smiled.

"Goodnight," she said again. Then she turned and went to her bedroom. She sat on the bed and looked straight ahead.

When they got to the bedroom that used to belong to Joyce Summers, Willow and Tara began to change for bed.

"Are you going to be able to work on her tomorrow?" Tara asked as she slipped on her nightgown. "That goodnight speech she makes every night is getting old. And the stuff she said on patrol tonight…"

"I know," Willow said in frustration. "And I don't know. Classes start tomorrow. I'll try to squeeze it in somewhere I guess."

"Good," Tara replied. She got under the covers and Willow joined her shortly. She was about to switch off the bedside lamp when she noticed how tired Tara really was. It wasn't from that night. It was from everything.

Tara was the only blonde in the group, and they had found the one feature about the slayer that most vampires knew even if they didn't specifically know it was Buffy was that the slayer was a blonde. They had been wary about Buffy-bot at first, mostly because she tended to act nothing like the real Buffy. So with a lot of protest from Willow and some doubts from the rest of the group, Tara had volunteered herself as a decoy. It also gave Willow more time to get the robot's head re-attached from when Glory had knocked it off. Pretending to be the slayer, Tara lured the vampires into carefully planned traps. Once they had more confidence in Buffy-bot, her decoy duties had tapered off some, but she still served that purpose on occasion, including this night.

Willow never understood why Tara had volunteered for such a dangerous task as playing decoy, and she had never asked Tara for a reason. She knew that Tara had tended to feel like an outsider at times, even after the others had accepted her. She felt like an outsider and sometimes useless. The decoy idea, she assumed, stemmed from that. She wanted to feel useful.

Tara noticed Willow staring at her and looked confused. "What?"

That shook Willow out of her daze and she decided it was time to ask a question she had avoided for a while.

"Why did you volunteer to be the decoy?"

Tara looked down and shrugged her shoulders. "I'm the only blonde."

"Yeah, but it was your idea. We were all ready to use Buffy-bot right away no matter how weird she acted," Willow said. "We didn't think of the decoy thing."

"I wanted to do my part," Tara said. "If the vamps find out the slayer's dead, they'll turn Sunnydale into Undead Disneyland, remember?"

"There's more than that," Willow said. She could see in Tara's eyes that she was concealing something. "I can tell there's more. Please talk to me. I feel like we haven't taken the time to really talk to each other at all. It's all about patrol and taking care of Dawn and fixing Buffy-bot. We don't just talk to each other."

They looked each other in the eyes and Tara hesitated. When she finally spoke she looked away. "Ever since…I mean, when Glory…did what she did to me, everything fell apart in my head. It all scattered and broke. When you brought me back, you picked up the pieces and put them together. But it's all still cracked, still a little broken."

Willow just waited silently for her to explain. Tara sat up and looked down at her hands.

"Sometimes I don't know who I am or why I'm here. I don't know why I keep living life like nothing happened. I tried to turn around and be who I was before when that's impossible. So I needed to do something different, to prove that there's a reason I'm still here, why I'm here even if I'm kind of cracked inside." She saw the sympathetic and worried look on Willow's face and she chuckled lightly. "And that makes absolutely no sense."

"It does," Willow said quietly. She reached over and gently caressed Tara's face. "What happened to you was horrible and of course it's going to change some things. Traumatic events do that to people. It doesn't mean you have to put yourself in danger. You shouldn't feel bad about trying to live a normal life."

"That's just it," Tara said. "I don't feel normal. Nothing feels normal. I keep thinking that this is all just an illusion, part of me being crazy from the brain sucking. The only thing that feels normal is you."

"I promised I would bring you back, and I did," Willow said. "This is normal. Scary as it is, this is life."

They sat in silence, simply looking into each other. Tears were welling in Tara's eyes. The experience with Glory haunted her more than she would let Willow know. As irrational as it sounded, she feared that it would happen again.

"Don't lose me again," she said in a trembling whisper. Willow brushed Tara's hair away from her face and watched as a few tears spilled down her cheeks. She leaned forward and took Tara in her arms, doing anything she could to comfort her.

"Never," she whispered. "I promise."