Worth It

Chapter 9

Willow's lessons passed in a blur the following day. Teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts was one thing, but saving two boys from the dark side; that was what Willow was about. Her focus paid off in class as well, for when the year three Slytherins started messing around she found that she had no time for their nonsense and soon let them know exactly who was in charge in her classroom.

She was intent on being a friend to the children, but they needed a teacher as well, and Willow was not about to let her lessons descend into chaos just because the Slytherins resented her being placed in their house. By the end of the day her mind was buzzing with all the things that she could say to Draco and Blaise to encourage them to open up to her.

She managed to catch them as they were leaving the Great Hall after dinner that night, and asked them to come to her rooms with her. Neither boy was really thrilled with the idea of have a heart to heart with their newest Slytherin professor, but they could hardly refuse. Draco was berating himself for ever talking to Ginny Weasley, guessing that Ginny had run straight to Willow to tell her everything.

Blaise himself expected the talk to be about the incidents of the summer, though he couldn't fathom why the new professor had taken it upon herself to have the talk that Dumbledore and Snape had already had with him. He'd denied all knowledge of his parents attack on Luna, and was slightly insulted that neither teacher seemed to believe he was actually telling the truth.

As they got inside Willow's rooms she bustled about, tidying up the cushions on the couch, and straightening the paperwork on the desk up. The boys stood next to each other just inside the doorway, looking around, but feeling too awkward to move. They were both tense, and as a result were caught rather off guard when Willow bounced up and asked if they wanted marshmallows in their hot chocolate.

Confused, they both declined, and she shrugged and wandered into the kitchen area to make the drinks.

"Just sit down on the couch, it's not gonna hurt you," she called over her shoulder, and smiled encouragingly at the two bewildered Slytherins.

Draco came to his senses first, and scowled at the floor as though it were responsible for his unease before starting towards the couch, reaching back to grab Blaise and dragging him along determinedly. As Willow hummed to herself, with her back to them, the boys looked at each other, shrugged and began examining the room they were in.

It was clearly a Slytherin room, although Willow had been trying to brighten it up, with red cushions, and some flowers in a vase on the desk. On the whole it looked as though the black and green décor was being treated as a background nuisance, and Willow had been trying to cover it up with a few small items of colour.

As she presented them with their hot chocolates, causing more bemused glances, Willow said brightly, "You're probably wondering what I want to talk to you about."

Both boys nodded cautiously and she continued in an off-hand fashion, "I don't think you wanna be the bad guys any more."

Draco and Blaise froze staring down into their hot chocolates, and Willow sighed. She hadn't expected the direct approach to work, but she couldn't think of any way to casually drop it into conversation.

So, how are you enjoying your lessons, and by the way, do you want to become Death Eaters? It didn't really seem like an option.

"I don't know what you mean." Draco said evenly, looking up at her.

"Oh come on! Quit the you-know-what, guys!"

Blaise was still studiously observing his hot chocolate, which, he noticed, had little melting marshmallows bobbing around the top. He was trying to figure out why Willow would think they didn't want to be Death Eaters. The marshmallows suggested it was because she liked hot chocolate. On the whole he was mystified.

Draco was planning the different and interesting ways in which he could hex Ginny Weasley. He could make her burp slugs, like her brother had been. That seemed a little bit too tame though. Maybe he could give her the bat bogey hex, and then the jelly legs one. That would be good, especially if he could do it in the Great Hall, in front of everyone.

That sodding Griffindor! he raged to himself.

"I get that you don't know who to trust, you know," said Willow in a conversational tone. "It seems like your problems are so huge that if you even let one person share them it could all blow up in your face."

Draco carefully put his mug down on the table, and stared at her. A small part of him felt as though a huge weight had been lifted. The rest of him was clamping down on that feeling as hard as it could. He couldn't let himself trust anyone; the risk was far too great. It would be so nice to be able to talk to someone else about what was happening and the fact that he knew he couldn't, made it almost too much to bear. He felt his chest tighten and swallowed down a lump that had suddenly risen in his throat.

"I still don't know what you mean," he said, and as Willow started to protest he continued, "and even if I did, how would I know I could trust you? You're the same as Snape."

"I am not!" Willow objected, a bit more forcefully than she had intended. To be compared to Snape, even if he had apologised to her, was rather insulting, and depressing as well. She had so hoped to be thought of as a friend, not an uptight, stuffy teacher.

"You don't know me Draco. All you think you know is that I'm the new DADA professor, and I'm in Slytherin, right? Don't you want to know who I really am?"

That caught Draco's attention all right. Ever since the night of the welcoming feast he had been puzzling about the dream team's reaction to Willow's arrival and now he might just find out.

"I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."

Of course, there was always a catch.

"Hang on, why do you think we're not interested in being the bad guys?"

The interruption came from Blaise, who had finally found inspiration in his hot chocolate.

Willow shrugged. "I over heard some people talking."

"She didn't actually tell you then?" Draco asked before he could stop himself, leaving Blaise looking all the more confused.

"No, Draco," said Willow wryly, "she didn't tell me. The people in question were out of bed and talking in a classroom late at night. I over heard them, and thought their conversation was too important to be interrupted with the loss of house points."

Willow looked over at Blaise, who had sunk back against the cushions on the couch, still clutching the hot chocolate. His hair was falling down across his face, almost hiding his sulky expression. She couldn't help laughing; he looked just like a little kid that's being left out of his friends' secret.

As he looked up indignantly she said, "Don't worry, I'll tell my story, and then you'll understand what we're on about, mmkay? Now, are we all sitting comfortably?"

Willow perched herself on the edge of the coffee table, and took a deep breath. No big deal, just telling your deepest darkest secret to a couple of Slytherin boys. She had to though. If she wanted to earn their trust, she had to prove that she trusted them in return.

Draco and Blaise were both looking intently at her, wondering what her story could possibly be. At least Draco had the advantage of knowing how the whole affair had started - with Ginny Weasley in a cupboard. He was the one who would have to admit to wanting to switch sides though. Merlin help him! It was the first time he had thought of it like that – wanting to switch sides. It sounded so much easier when it was just doing what his mother wanted. At least Blaise had never really picked a side to begin with.

"So, we start off in Sunnydale. Believe me when I say that's not a nice place to live. Its other names include the Hellmouth, or Boca Del Inferno. I always called it home, at least until Buffy arrived. Buffy Summers is a vampire slayer. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. There's this whole speech that normally goes with that announcement, but I can't quite remember it. You gotta have Giles say it anyway, he's her watcher."

Draco and Blaise had forgotten their hot chocolates, and were staring wide eyed as Willow continued.

"Well, a vampire slayer is this girl who has super powers. Powers given to her so she can kill demons. She does what Dumbledore does; she fights the forces of darkness. Just she kinda likes to hit things rather than cast a spell. Giles was her watcher. He trained her to be the best slayer ever. And she's died twice, but she's still fighting, so I guess that means he did a good job."

"Died?"

"Twice?"

"Yeah, one time she drowned, but Xander got to her just in time and gave her the kiss of life. It's a muggle life saving technique. Anyhow, she came back. That's where stuff started getting weird, see when a slayer dies, another one's supposed to be called."

"Called?" Blaise asked quietly, trying not to interrupt, but still curious enough to ask.

"Yeah, like they get their powers activated and they have to take up the fight. Thing is another one got called when she died, but when she was brought back they didn't get un-called. We had two slayers."

"Isn't that a good thing?"

"Yeah, doesn't that mean you've got two people fighting?"

"Well yeah, the first slayer was Kendra. She was killed by a vampire. Then Faith was called. Faith is still alive and fighting for us, after spending a few years trying to kill us, then in a coma and then in jail. She got confused. That's not an excuse for killing people, but it shows that you can change if you really want to."

The boys shuffled uncomfortably. That point was hitting far too close to home for either's comfort.

"You said Buffy died twice," Draco pointed out.

"Yeah, the second time was really spectacular. Um, in a bad way." Willow frowned at her choice of words. "Well, it really was spectacular. We were fighting a hell god. She was trying to use Buffy's sister Dawn, who I will tell you all about later, to open a portal to her own dimension. She just wanted to go home I guess, but to open the portal she needed Dawnie's blood. Then it was open and there were monsters coming through. Buffy beat Glory in the end, but the portal wouldn't close until Dawn's blood stopped running."

Willow stopped talking, and took a deep breath. The two Slytherin boys were waiting expectantly to hear what happened, although they were trying valiantly to temper their expressions with concern, it couldn't hide the curiosity.

It was strange to be thinking back on what had happened to the Scooby gang. Willow felt a sudden pang of homesickness hit her. Suddenly she wanted to see Buffy and Dawn and Xander again. They had been through so much together. Heck, she would even have been happy to see Faith.

"Buffy climbed onto the tower where Dawn was, and untied her. She dragged Dawn back to the stairs and then…" Willow found that she was starting to get tearful remembering what had happened, "then she just ran and jumped off the platform. She did this really beautiful swan dive and landed in the middle of the portal. The portal closed, and she was dead."

"What happened then? Did you do that kiss of life thing again?" Draco asked eagerly.

"The kiss of life can save people who've drowned, but death by mystical portal is a bit harder to fix," said Willow wryly.

"So how come she's still fighting then?" Blaise ventured. "I get the kiss of life thing, it's like saving someone before they're really dead, right?"

"Mmm, I guess that's about it."

"But bringing someone back from the dead," Draco followed Blaise's line of thought, "I don't know if even Voldemort can do that."

Willow found to her disgust that she was blushing. She shouldn't be proud of herself, she had torn Buffy out of heaven. The slayer had finally found peace, and she had been so selfish, kidding herself that Buffy was in hell. They brought her back because they needed her, regardless of what Buffy needed.

"We brought her back."

"How?" asked both boys in unison.

"I did a spell. Put her back in her body. She woke up in her coffin." Willow fought back a shudder, "It was horrible. She was in heaven and we pulled her out. –I- pulled her out because I thought we needed her."

"You pulled…" Blaise broke off, trying to contemplate how this young woman could have done a spell that powerful.

"I've never even seen you do magic!" Draco interjected. "You don't even have a wand!"

"I don't need one."

No one spoke for a few minutes. Willow stared self-consciously down at her cuffs, while the boys just gazed in blank silence at her. She still had the biggest confession yet to make, and had no idea how she was going to go about it. The boys had barely moved since her last admission, and she could feel their eyes burning into her.

Oh well, just go for it I suppose.

"After that we had the slayer back and everything was going fine for a while. I started playing about with my magicks some more. Experimenting, you know. Maybe I shouldn't have been using them quite as much as I was. My girlfriend broke up with me because of it."

Time heals all wounds, but it takes a while to do so, and talking about what had happened to Tara still brought tears to Willow's eyes.

"I loved her so much. It was killing me to be apart from her, so I stopped using magick. We got back together and started to mend our relationship when… There were these three guys that had been trying to get at Buffy for a while. One of them had a gun and he shot Buffy."

She knew she was speaking slowly, the words were coming out in short fractured sentences. It was so hard to actually say the words; Willow had to force them out. Talking about it stirred up all of the old feelings of loss. Kennedy had eased them for a while, but after being activated the girl had freaked out. Willow hadn't seen her since they had stopped driving on the last day Sunnydale had existed.

"He fired another bullet. It missed Buffy. He killed Tara. She died in my arms."

Tears were rolling down Willow's face now, and the boys were mute with shock. Both of them felt so much for the professor they barely knew, and yet neither felt as though they could say anything or comfort her. What could you say to someone who had their love killed in front of their eyes? Slytherins weren't known for their compassionate nature. So they just sat still and waited for Willow to continue her story. It was so quiet in the room, all they could hear was the occasional sniffle from Willow and their own breathing, coming in long drawn out sighs.

"The Gods wouldn't bring her back. I charged up on dark magick. All of the dark arts books I could find, I sucked dry. I killed the guy that did it. No," she snuffled, "I tortured the guy who did it. I skinned him alive. It didn't even make it better. I was so charged up, I couldn't think any more, I was just running on dark magicks. Giles came and tried to stop me, dosed me up on good magicks, but it didn't stop me. Everything hurt so much. I had so much magick running through me, I could feel everything. I could feel the whole world, and it was in pain."

Willow choked back a sob, and looked up at her audience. Blaise's usual tan skin was paler than normal, and Draco was staring at her, mouth open.

"You're her," he breathed.

"The whole world was hurting, and I had to do something about it. I tried to end it. If everything was dead, then there wouldn't be any pain any more. I'd have managed it if it weren't for Xander. He kept telling me that he loved me. Despite everything he loved me."

"You're the witch that tried to end the world," Draco said in amazement.

Willow buried her face in her hands, trying to shut out the memories. The boys looked at each other in shock. Suddenly Blaise leant forwards and gently brushed the back of Willow's hand. He could feel her tears leaking through between her fingers. She slowly and shakily raised her head, revealing red eyes and a quivering bottom lip.

"I'm sorry, I'm meant to be telling you a story, aren't I?" she said, with false bravado.

"It's okay, it's evidently not a fun story to tell." Blaise reassured her.

After a few more deep breaths Willow managed to regain control of her emotions. She was so good at bottling them up, but that was what had led to the whole world-ending saga. Now her floodgates were slightly weakened.

"Okay, so after that was," she paused, searching for the right word, "finished. I went to study with a coven here in Britain. I learnt to control my magicks a bit better. Thank the Goddess I went because trouble was coming. The First was back."

"The first?"

"The first what?"

"The first evil."

"Hang on, I've read about that. The first evil is supposed to be raw power," said Draco, looking a bit sheepish, "it was in one of my father's books."

He cast a sly glance at Willow, to see whether she knew what it meant, that he had been reading his father's books. Evidently it either hadn't come up in conversation, or the young professor was too caught up in her past to notice it.

"The first evil started killing off all the slayers in waiting. All the young girls who stood a chance of becoming slayers if the current slayer, Faith, died. Well, we realised this and started gathering the girls ourselves. We trained them up as slayers and finally faced the first evil. It had created an army of super vampires. You know normal vampires die through sunlight, staking, beheading, right?"

"Yeah, just about." The look on Blaise's face was evidence of how well his DADA classes had been going for the past few years.

"These guys were tough. There was no way we could fight them, even with all the girls we'd trained up, because trained though they were they didn't have slayer strength or reflexes. That's where I came in again. I changed the slayer magick. I activated all of the slayers. Now every girl who can be a slayer, will be a slayer."

"So you won."

"Well obviously we won, or else you'd have heard about a plague of uber vampires sweeping through America!" Willow smiled, "We managed it with Spike's sacrifice. More on that some other time."

She held up a hand to silence any further questions.

"Now it's your turn." She looked at the boys expectantly, and they both looked at each other, neither wanting to be the one to go first.

"Hang on," Blaise piped up, "what was all that at the start, about you eaves dropping on someone?"

Willow glanced over at Draco. He looked as though he had been hoping Blaise would forget about that little part of the story. At Willow's questioning glance he shrugged and nodded.

"Right. I overheard Ginny talking to Luna. She had wanted to know whether you were upset about Luna, and managed to corner Draco in a supply closet, was it? Anyhow, she told Luna that you –were- upset." Willow paused to catch her breath, "Why are you upset?"

"I didn't know!" Blaise cried out. "I never knew what my parents were going to do. That's all I've been telling you people and no one fucking believes me. Why are you any different?"

He had sat up as he was shouting and was almost in Willow's face by the end of his rant, as it was she only just caught his last question as his voice trailed away to less than a whisper, and he sank back down into the couch.

"Why am I different? I guess I don't know you. I don't know what you've been like for the past years Blaise. I don't know what your parents are like, or what Voldemort's like."

Both Slytherins stiffened at the mention of the Dark Lord's name, and Willow winced to herself.

Oops, not meant to say 'Voldemort'!

"Why do you care about her, Blaise?" Willow asked softly.

"She's a nice girl," he said while shrugging. "I don't know why I like her, I just do. I swear, I never knew what my parents were going to do."

"It's okay, I believe that. I just want to know why two of the Dark Lord's supporters are getting involved with one little Ravenclaw girl."

"Hey!" Draco snapped. "I am not –involved- with anyone."

"You talked to Ginny Weasley about it, didn't you? That's shocking enough from what I've seen of Griffindor and Slytherin interaction."

"Okay, so I talked to the damn girl, that doesn't mean I'm going to come over all goody two shoes. His love life isn't exactly worth dying for."

Draco folded his arms across his chest and stared defiantly at Willow. She looked him up and down from his teenage slouch to the pout that seemed to be appearing on his face. She couldn't help herself – she started to giggle.

"What's so bloody funny?" asked Draco, scowling at the evident mocking of his resolve.

"Nothing!" gulped Willow. "You just look kinda snooty."

This time when she dissolved into giggles Draco had to suffer the added humiliation of Blaise chuckling along with her.

"It's not like you're going to risk your neck!" Draco pointed out.

"Nah," Blaise replied, "but at least I'm not pouting."

"Piss off."

"So!" Willow chipped in, before the conversation could go further downhill. "I really do think that someone needs to explain things to Luna. She's been hurting very badly since the summer, and you need to fix what your parents have done. Maybe Draco could talk to Ginny, ya know, start things off."

As she ushered them out of her rooms, prying the hot chocolate mug from Blaise's fingers, Willow was smiling to herself. That evening she had really accomplished something. The Slytherin boys weren't the junior Death Eaters everyone thought them to be, Blaise really did care for Luna, and Draco might just wind up having to talk to Ginny Weasley again.

.o0o.o0o.o0o.o0o.

That night Luna woke up with a jump. She had been dreaming about hairy toed knoffles, when the dreamscape had seemed to melt away, leaving her watching Blaise. He was laying in bed, and staring up at the ceiling. The look on his face was calm if you were just glancing, but Luna knew Blaise. She could see from his face that inside his head a storm was raging, and his dark brown eyes seemed to be melting with sorrow and anger.

As the hairy toed knoffles started clawing their way back into her dream, Luna thought she heard Blaise say something. Over the squealing of the knoffles she fancied that she could just about make out one word.

"Luna."

.o0o.o0o.o0o.o0o.