Chapter III Soap Box of Pain

First there was darkness... then slowly ever so slowly, there was more darkness... then just when the darkness seemed to consume everything, as though there were no light anywhere in the universe, and a void had settled in it's place devouring everything around it, there was more darkness...

... Until Willow Rosenberg opened her eyes and the light hit her pupils.

It was a muggy summers day... there was stagnation in the air and the smell of pollution that she was not used to... where was she?

She heard a moan as she tried to lift herself off of the cold pavement where she lay, sprawled as though she had been tossed against it. There were sounds she was still trying to make out... all metallic, cars driving, and construction work... there were voices too...

The world came into focus as she stood up, her head rushing from the shift in blood pressure... she looked around...

She was in a city, a big city. Skyscrapers stretched as far as the eye could see; there was a street crammed full of cars and the sounds of horns going off randomly in all directions.

Where the hell was she!

The sidewalk she had been lying upon was a dingy gray, pieces of newspaper clippings and magazine pages drifted lazily on the wind, or rested near lampposts, fire hydrants, and full-to-the-brim trash cans. Most of the windows were broken in the buildings beside her, some boarded up, others looked like their vandalism had been recent, and were surrounded in shards of broken glass. Most of the vertical surfaces on the street were covered in graffiti...

Willow noted that there must be some weird gang or religious group calling themselves "The Mutants", wherever she was, because there were a lot of people who seemed to dislike them.

Willow began to walk, slowly down the road, not sure where she was going, looking for some sign of where she was. She had not walked very far when she heard loud, angry voices coming from a side street to her right... With nothing better to do, and the promise of people she could get information from as to her whereabouts (despite their apparent bad moods) she fallowed the growing chorus of shouts and jeers...

"Lousy mutant!"

"Get out of our city!"

"Stay away from our children you pervert!"

"You should all be neutered!"

"Fucking Mutie!"

"We don't want you here!"

"Who said you could come to our neighborhood!"

"Go back to hell where you came from you freaks!"

Willow walked a little faster once she could make out what the voices were yelling...

A large crowd had gathered on the sidewalk outside what appeared to be an old run-down apartment building, the people were all yelling, some standing on cars parked along the side of the street. Obscenities flew like mosquitoes in Florida. Fists bearing clubs, signs, baseball-bats, and just about every object that could be fit into a hand and used for bashing someone's skull in, were raised in anger.

Willow pushed herself to the side of the crowd trying to get a better look at what they were protesting so adamantly.

Unable to see through the montage of people, she asked the nearest anger-filled pedestrian (who happened to be an old woman in a shawl and large overcoat brandishing a pair of reading glasses in their case like a deadly weapon).

"Excuse me?" questioned Willow tentatively trying to get the woman's attention... "I'm sorry, I didn't get here till just now, what are we protesting?"

The elderly woman eyed Willow suspiciously for a moment before seeming to decide that she was deserving of an explanation and then said in a still angry and rather unhushed voice "They found one of them mutant hooligans here in our very own neighborhood! Honestly, the nerve of those creatures! They should all be locked up safely away from good, honest, god-fearing Americans like us! Really, the police should be doing more to keep them away from normal people."

Willow pondered this for a moment and realized that for such a large mob there really wasn't a siren to be heard. Even in sunydale this sort of thing would have attracted more attention from the local authorities.

Again she tapped the old woman on the shoulder who had resumed waving her spectacles around madly and swearing at the top of her lungs.

"Excuse me, again, sorry... but could you just tell me, I'm afraid I've been out of the loop for a while, don't watch TV much anymore, not since... but anyway, what is a mutant?"

The woman looked rather bewildered and annoyed for a moment but was saved from having to answer the apparently disconcerting question when another angry mob attendee to willows right spoke up in her stead.

"Mutants are genetic trash, people born with defective genes that make them different and dangerous. It's a disease really, people born with it become monsters, and horrible freaks... they should all be put away, or out of their own misery so that we can sleep peacefully again!"

The man who had spoken was young, had dark brown hair, and intense green eyes... he was wearing a very flattering casual suit and had a briefcase in one hand (which he had been waving around threateningly only a moment before). Willow noted that, had she not been a lesbian, she would have found him very attractive and charismatic, even the anger in his voice was coated with a thick endearing quality that bespoke of years of practice, swaying large groups of people to believe one thing or another.

"That's horrible." she said, looking a little shocked.

She was in advanced genetic theory this semester; she would have thought she'd have heard of something as severe as a genetic plague of this magnitude and severity by now.

"But if it's a genetic disease, why is everyone so angry? Why don't they just take whoever it is to a hospital or something?"

The young man looked at Willow with the same scrutinizing expression the old woman had given her when Willow had asked her initial question, but even this came across as a charming appraisal. After a moment (in which Willow started to feel uncomfortable and looked away from his gaze to inspect the average shoe size of the crowd) he smiled a small yet reassuring smile and said "If we could fix what was happening to them we would, but there's no cure, and right now we need to make sure to get them away from this neighborhood and to somewhere they can't hurt anyone, but they wont go willingly."

Willow gave the young man an equally analytical optical inspection, and then turned to push her way through to the front of the crowd. Something about this didn't add up, in fact it sounded down right familiar.

By the time she reached the front of the crowd she would not have been even slightly surprised to have seen two dead children lying on the ground with small Wiccan symbols on their hands or foreheads, but instead all she saw was a myriad of random, heavy-to-light blunt objects being thrown by on-lookers towards the center of the circle.

There, a man, in what was once probably a white t-shirt, cowboy hat, and blue jeans; stood bent over a young girl in a small yellow jacket, khakis, and tennis shoes. It took Willow a moment to take this all in. This wasn't a peaceful protest; this was a modern stoning, and not of the four-twenty variety! AND WHERE WERE THE POLICE? How could they not have heard about this? Willow had the sinking suspicion that the police knew exactly what was going on here. Her blood began to boil, and her mind began to race for options on how to diffuse this situation... but then she saw something that took her breath away... a large broken bottle, once full to the brim with alcohol, now being used as a projectile, flew towards the man in the center of the crowd from one of the angry mob goers near her... before she had time to react it had already made contact with the mans body and ripped a gash in his side showing through the shirt... he flinched... Willow stood, horror struck... this had to stop...

But as she stood there, eyes wide, anger heating to a temperature she could only remember feeling once before in her life (when an annoying Goddess had feasted on her lovers brain), something amazing happened... the blood barely had any time to flow out of the wound... Willow's jaw dropped. The gash seemed to be healing itself, and fast, faster than anything even she had seen before. Within seconds it had closed up and appeared to be normal, healthy, scar free epidermis once more. Willow noticed that there were rips all over the mans shirt, and little bloodstains on him and the girl, but no wounds.

She could see the man and the girl wince with pain as more projectiles found their way to his torso, and more and more tiny little wounds opened and then vanished just as quickly without a trace. Then from behind her and to the left she heard it.

"Filthy mutant FAGGOTS!"

"... Yeah! You queer little mutant freaks, why don't you just die!"

There was a snap... a crackle of energy... a pop of a street lamp bulb overhead. The whole crowd felt it, the protesting died down almost immediately, the man and the girl looked up cautiously. The world seemed to have gotten a little more vivid, and yet it was though a cloud had descended upon the group of pedestrians, mid-violence, and everything was covered in an almost tangible feeling of foreboding.

There was a small spark of electricity and the people standing around Willow Rosenberg jumped back with a gasp of astonishment.

The two in the center of the crowd saw her standing there... eyes dark as obsidian hair flowing back in a wind that seemed to be blowing solely on her... hands down at her sides, fingers outstretched as small tendrils of electricity danced about them dangerously. Then she spoke.

"Mutants? Faggots? Queers?... do you know what it's like to be any of those? Do you know what it's like to be afraid every day that everyone's going to find out your' big secret? That you love someone that you shouldn't, that you weren't born the way everyone else was? To know that if people found out, that you could loose everything? You could wind up in an ally like this with people screaming at you and throwing glass just for being alive?"

The crowd around Willow fell back as if they had just been hit with an invisible wave of force strong enough to knock a small elephant off it's feet... Willows personal windstorm seemed to pick up, her feet left the ground and she began to float about six inches above it.

There was a gasp as the young witch floated forward (the air around her visibly pulsating with power) towards the two people in the center. Both of them were still bent over in a protective stance, staring at her with a mixture of awe, fear, and curiosity in their eyes.

"Well guess what..." said Willow in a voice filled with righteous rage "... you can feel that fear, and that pain. I can make you feel it."

"No wait, don't..." Said the man in the now tattered white shirt and cowboy hat, standing up a little...

But Willow wasn't listening, she was beyond angry, years of hatred flashed before her eyes, from the look on her mothers face when she tried to burn Willow at the stake, to the looks from Tara's family that had injured the woman that she loved so much... to the look of fear and pain she had seen over and over again on television from victims of hatred and bigotry all over the world... she hated mobs.

"I think I've had enough of your yelling, being scared, and brandishing heavy objects. "Like ooo look at me I'm an angry mob and have the right to be violent cause your on my planet." I think it's about time someone really showed you what you are doing, what it does to people... I think it's about time you feel a little bit of what it's like to be us."

"Wait..."

"We..."

"Stupid mutie Dyke! Someone do something!"

"...owe..."

"No don't..."

"...you..."

"Hit her with it! Hit her with it!"

"...PAIN!"