Chapter 9: The Saw Is Family

Tara wasn't sure how long she'd been kneeling over her father when Dawn joined her. For several minutes the two girls just held each other, shaking. Then Tara remembered.

"Willow...?"

She let go of Dawn and rushed to her girlfriend's side, terrified that she would be too late. Willow showed no reaction when she knelt down beside her, but whatever protection spell Tara had managed to cast yesterday had worked; she was still breathing, if only very slowly. Tara lifted the bandage and gasped at the damage; spell or not, Willow would need help very soon if she was going to make it. She racked her brain for healing spells, coming up with one her mother had used on her when she was little and had been badly beaten by her father. It sounded childish, but it worked. The damage was too severe for her to heal – Willow would need surgery – but she could at least kill some of the pain and give her enough strength to hold on for a few more hours.

Tara rubbed her palms together and placed them on the bloody gash in Willow's stomach. "Panacea, Panacea, Take away the pain, As it was, so shall it be-a, Help my girl to smile again." She felt the power passing between them, she herself growing weaker as Willow grew stronger, though not as much as she'd expected – as if there was some other power helping out. She could have sworn she saw something small glowing in Willow's fist, but when it uncurled there was nothing there. The gash didn't close but the bleeding seemed to stop and some color returned to Willow's cheeks.

Then Willow's eyes fluttered open. "Hey." Her voice was weak, barely audible, but there was a hint of a smile on her face.

"Hey sweetie." Tara smiled and ran her finger down Willow's cheek. "Don't try to move, we're going to get you to a hospital. You need some needlework. I'm going to let you sleep now, OK?"

"OK. Tara?"

"Yeah?"

"Happy birthday."

Tara kissed her forehead. "See you in a few hours." She called down Morpheus' blessing on Willow, who was soon out of it again – but this time sleeping soundly, not leaning on death's door.

And then the doorway darkened. Tara and Dawn both spun around to see Leatherface standing there, staring at the scene before him. Whimpering, he walked up to his father's corpse and bent down to pick up the severed head. He poked it gently, as if to make it talk.

"It's OK, Robert." Tara spoke as softly as she could. "You're free now. He can't hurt you anymore."

Leatherface looked up from the head to Tara, absently fingering the hideous mask on his face and saying something unintelligible.

Tara smiled at him. "That's right, you won't have to wear that anymore. You don't have to hide." When he responded by bending over the body of their father and picking up the bloodied chainsaw, looking at it curiously, she felt for him. "Yes, I did that. I had to. Everything's going to be fine now, you're going to get the help you need and..." She trailed off as he gently pulled the strap on the chainsaw, petting the growling machine as if it were a small, deadly animal. Tara raised her voice. "Robert, no! You don't have to... we're free now! He can't -"

They say if you keep a bird in a cage for long enough, it will return to it even if you set it free. And when Leatherface turned away from the corpse of the man who'd decided everything for him his entire life he looked at his sister. His sister who had gone away and left him here, and then come back only to take away everything he had ever known.

With a howl of grief and confusion, Leatherface revved the saw and charged the three women. Tara was still yelling, desperately pleading with him and between that and the scream of the chainsaw filling her ears, everything else seemed to fade out. So when blood suddenly spurted out his belly and he stopped dead in his tracks, she was puzzled as she watched her brother teeter briefly before toppling over onto the saw and uttering a bubbling scream as it dug into his body. Then the saw stalled and Tara turned her head towards Dawn who was gripping the shotgun tight, still pulling the trigger over and over again even though she had already emptied both barrels at him.

Slowly, Tara put her hand out and took the gun away from Dawn. Then she got up on shaky legs and walked over to where Leatherface was lying. A large pool of blood was forming around him and smoke rose from the busted chainsaw, yet somehow he was still breathing.

From behind her, she heard Dawn's tiny, shivering voice. "No, get away from him, he killed Buffy, and–"

"I know." Tara cut her off. "And he's paying for it. But he's my... my brother." She sank down beside him, gently removed the horrific mask and for the first time in years looked at his face. She wished she had any tears left, but she just felt empty.

"Are you going to..." Dawn was surprised to see that under the mask, Leatherface's own face was… normal. Not good-looking, but not exactly ugly, either. "Are you going to h-heal him?"

But Tara just slowly shook her head. "Some things can't be healed, Dawn. I thought I could reach him, but... If people keep telling you you're a monster, treating you like one, sooner or later you believe them. He never knew anything else. He put on the mask to hide what he really was and he became the monster."

Leatherface's left eye opened and for a second he seemed to try to get up, but the high-pitched groan of pain that escaped his lips made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere. With a last effort he managed to put his hand on Tara's shoulder, and she responded by putting her arms around him. "Shhh, Robert... just be still. It won't hurt much longer." For a few minutes, Dawn watched in awkward silence as the two siblings held each other and Leatherface's breathing grew ever more labored.

And then it stopped.

Epilogue: two and a half years later

Riley edged the SUV onto the dirt road, hearing the gravel rattle under its wheels. He hadn't been out here since he helped them move, after Joyce's death left them only pain and a fight that was no longer theirs in Sunnydale, and so he had had to ask directions from a neighbor. Fortunately, that hadn't been a problem at all.

"Sawyer farm? Sure, I know it. Just go on ahead about three miles, and there's a li'l dirt road on your right. Follow that for a mile or so and you can't miss it. Say hi to the girls for me."

When he reached the house, he noticed how different it looked. The courtyard was cleared of all the wrecks and junk, the house had a fresh coat of paint and the surrounding fields weren't growing wild anymore. He got out. "Anybody home?"

A woman in a wide-brimmed hat came out of a newly built greenhouse, and when she looked up and smiled he recognized Tara. Except she was different; not just the tan and the work clothes, but something about the way she carried herself, confident, secure – and strong, he noted when they hugged. There were the obligatory "so good to see you" variations that tend to pass between two people who have a history together and like each other yet never really knew each other all that well. He asked about the others.

"Dawn's out working somewhere, but Will is –"

"Hey there, mister!" Willow poked her head out the door with a big grin on her face and was jogging up to him within seconds.

Riley hugged her. "Great to see you again, Will." It really was; last time he'd seen her she had still been recovering from intestinal surgery and had seemed merely a ghost of herself; now she had a few more lines around her eyes, but she had put on some weight (it suited her), she was freckled from the sun and looked as full of life as he remembered her from the summer they'd all spent together a long time ago.

They sat down on the porch with a big pitcher of lemonade that Willow brought. "So, what's the big news that got the supersoldier defender of Sunnydale all the way out here?"

Riley knew Willow was kidding, but still felt a pang of guilt at having been such a stranger. It had just been hard, with Buffy gone and with everything going on back in Sunnydale... which of course was what brought him here. He took a deep breath. "It's Faith."

"What about her?" Willow immediately went on the defensive, then saw the look on his face. "Oh. I'm sorry. I mean... oh. You mean she's... isn't she?"

Riley nodded. "There was another apocalypse, some hellgod wannabe tried to open the hellmouth. Faith stopped it and as far as we can tell she closed it for good, she just... didn't make it out again. She did good work these last two years, I think you would have... She never did get along with the troops, though", he smiled. They sat in silence for a while before Riley decided to change the subject. "So how are things here?"

"Oh, we're doing pretty good." Tara took a sip of lemonade. "It's hard work, but the neighbors help out sometimes. Of course none of them would ever say it, but they're all pretty relieved about... you know. And Dawn's going off to college next fall, at least we hope so..."

"Oh, she'd better," Willow grinned, putting her hand on Tara's and squeezing it warmly. "I could definitely go a few more years without another teenager in the house."

"How is Dawn anyway? I mean, last time I saw her..."

Tara and Willow shared a look, as if deciding who was going to go first. "Well, she's..." Willow started and then hesitated, and Tara continued. "She's had it rough. The first few months... well, you know what she was like. She thought she'd lost everyone. Everything that happened here, and then being the one to find Joyce... it took her a lot of time to learn to live again. But I think this place has been good to her, all the work has helped take her mind off things, and she's really taken to it..."

"Plus, y'know..." Willow sighed sadly. "She's Buffy's little sister, and Summers women – tough. I'm not saying she's all yay-me-my-life-rocks every single day, but she's a trooper. She's going to be fine."

For a while, they talked about other stuff – farming, mostly – but eventually Willow leaned forward and gave him a mock-stern look. "OK, Riley. We all know there's something you wanna say, and you may as well say it."

"That obvious, huh?" He smiled sheepishly. "OK, well... I guess I just don't see how you can live here, after all that's happened. I mean, you've done great things with this place, but..."

Tara looked out over the field for a long time before answering. "There's nothing wrong with this place, Riley. The evil was what my family did. There's been so much blood spilt here, all we can do is to try and restore some balance, try and cleanse the earth. We grow responsibly, we don't use pesticide, we don't eat meat..." (Riley blushed a little; he couldn't help it, he was a guy.)

"Also, being on first-name basis with a coupla fertility goddesses doesn't exactly hurt the crops... not that we'd use that for personal gain or anything, of course", Willow quickly added when Tara shot her an amused glance. "Say, big fella, we're going to be starting dinner – you are staying for dinner, aren't you?"

"Wouldn't miss it. Do you need any help?"

"Nah. You just take a walk, get a feel for the place. Tell you what, if you want... I mean, of course they're not actually buried there, but we..." Willow took a deep breath and then pointed. "Over under the big elm. We just needed someplace to... y'know. Remember."

A few minutes later Riley sat down on the bench under the elm, looking at the nine plain crosses planted there. Anya, Xander, Giles, Buffy and, somewhat apart from them, the Maclay family. For a while, he just sat there, thinking back on how good life had been for a short while. He was deep in thought when suddenly the relative silence was ripped apart by the howl of a small two-stroke engine. Riley looked up in surprise and thought the sound must be coming from the back of the house. A farmboy himself, he knew what it was: a chainsaw cutting something up. He got up to investigate.

At first he didn't recognize her. His mental image of Dawn was still the lanky young teenager who he'd first ran in to at Buffy's dorm right around the time they started dating, but that was almost four years ago and that girl was long gone. In her place was a tall, slim but well-muscled young woman in a work shirt and dungarees, her hair hanging in her face as she worked. She was cutting up firewood with a shiny new chainsaw, a small but powerful tool that seemed to cut through even the toughest branches with no trouble at all. Riley watched her admiringly; she was pretty handy with that thing, he wasn't sure he would have gotten through the pile of wood half as fast as she did.

When she turned the saw off and put it down, he cleared his throat. She spun around, and for a second something about the expression on her face scared him. Before he could quite put his finger on it, though, she put on a big smile that seemed perfectly normal.

THE END

Author's note: Huge thanks to everyone who put up with, read, and reviewed this story. There was originally going to be a lot more cannibalism in it, but... let's face it, I chickened out. I mean look at this, I even let Willow live, I know there was a draft somewhere where she gets killed and then... Oh well. If this were a movie I'd end it by blasting "Chainsaw" by The Ramones, so go put that on now.

Texas chain saw massacre
They took my baby away from me
But she'll never get out of there
She'll never get out of there...