Hi everyone, I'm back. Just a short bit this time, because I wanted to keep my promise of updating at the start of October, but I'll be back with more after the weekend. probably Wednesday. Thanks for the reviews for the last chapter, hope you like this one too.
Paddy was cornered, trapped; there was nowhere left to run.
His legs were tired, his drunken good cheer had long since been on the wane and he'd eaten his glow worm hours ago… It hadn't tasted as good as it looked.
He'd been racing around these dark, dusty house innards ever since disappointingly realising he wasn't tall enough to reach the handle lever to the wine cellar door, and then more alarmingly realising he couldn't reach the handle lever to any of the bleedin' doors!
It had been scary enough to think that he was going to have to wander these lonely passageways alone all night; but nowhere near as scary as finding he wasn't so alone after all.
There were kids in here with him. Kids! The cruellest creatures known to earth. And they'd been hunting him all night long. Sometimes stalking him, sometimes trying to run him down. He didn't know how many, but if had to guess, he'd say at least a dozen were in the walls with him. They were everywhere. It didn't matter how fast he scurried, or how many turns he made, there was always one there, either in front or behind, watching, waiting, ready to get him.
And now he was done for, they'd got him, sandwiched him between them and there was no lucky side corridor to dash down this time. Trembling with fright, he held his long carving knife out in front of him again.
"Let dem try an' use me for a football dis time. Clap if they can toss me aboyt wi' only wan 'and!" Paddy muttered under his breath, tensed and ready for a scuffle.
Hearing what sounded like a muttered threat, Rona leapt in from one side and Reece from the other, both figuring they should end it before the other could start it.
Reece's coin-filled fist sailed high over Paddy's head and landed hard on Rona's cheek. She yelped in pain, but it didn't stop her wooden spoon's harmless trajectory over Paddy's head from slapping with a sharp sting against Reece's nose.
Paddy looked up fearfully at the commotion above him and realised they seemed strangely intent on beating the blazes out of each other. Was he supposed to join in? If he could knock one of the silly beggers over, he could stand on them to reach a door handle
"Nah. Feck dis 'assle!" he decided and, pushing his way through Rona's legs, he ran for it again.
"What the hell…?" Rona stopped trying to push her spoon up Reece's nose when she felt something go roughly between her legs, nearly making her lose her balance.
"Rona?" Reece let go of her shirt and lowered his fist.
"Reece?" Rona sounded even more surprised than he did. "Is that you? Why are you attacking me?"
Reece relaxed his grip on the coins. His hand hurt from punching with them. "I thought you were something else. Why are you trying to stir my nostril?"
Rona pulled the wooden implement away from his face. "Me too. I was following a something else, but somehow they ended up following me."
"So if we were both following it, where is it?" Reece turned to look around him but it was impossible to make out anything more than faint outlines in the dark.
Rona looked behind her, remembering the sensation of something pushing between her knees. "Shush!"
Reece obeyed automatically and instantly they could both pick out the sound of scampering feet echoing away from them.
"After you," Reece gestured courteously.
Rona rolled her eyes. "Try and keep up."
"I'll do my best," Reece muttered to himself as Rona raced off ahead of him.
"It doesn't matter that I told her now, right?" Dawn asked again, partly for something to say and partly because the intricacies of social etiquette were still eating at the back of her brain. "I mean the party's over. It's not really like I snitched or anything, right?"
Kennedy walked indifferently beside her, hands in her pockets, eyes on the trees as they loomed out of the mist towards them. "Well, you told Buffy where it was, when it was, who some of the guests were and some of the stuff that happened."
Dawn frowned pitifully at her, not liking her chances now the charges against her were being read aloud. "It's not like I had any choice! And I didn't rat out any of my friends, well, except you and Reece. Sorry." Dawn tried an ingratiating smile now, but was surprised Kennedy even flicked her eyes around to receive it. "The only other guests I mentioned were the alternative ones."
Kennedy shrugged off her apology. "I don't answer to Buffy. Not when it comes to my personal life anyway."
"I think she's madder that you took me with you to an unsupervised party in an abandoned house."
"I took you?" Kennedy asked. "You told her I dragged your protesting, innocent butt to the Halloween party you didn't even bother inviting me to?"
"Not exactly," Dawn hedged. "That was just the conclusion she leapt to; and I swear she had to make a real big leap from what I said to… to there."
Kennedy rolled her eyes and actually grinned a little bit. "I'm gonna tell her I only found out at the last minute and insisted on coming so I could keep an eye on you. That should cover me if Willow asks why I went without saying anything too." Adding in a lower voice, "Though that's a pretty big 'If'."
"Maybe not," Dawn said, grinning optimistically. "I mean she must have missed you by now."
"If she has, it's not bothering her too much. I've been checking my phone every half hour since we left home and I haven't had any 'Where the hell are you?' texts yet. She's obviously too tired out from her day to care where I am."
Dawn wasn't sure what to say. She wanted to contest Kennedy's assumptions, if only on the basis that she knew Willow better than the new Slayer, but that was just the thing, she did know Willow better and it made the assumptions kind of hard to contest. She would have texted or called if she was worried, surely, so the lack of contact had to mean she was distracted by something else, something the Witch felt was more important. Not exactly an ego-booster; Dawn winced on Kennedy's behalf.
Kennedy looked over after the long silence, obviously expecting some response.
Dawn shrugged. "At least you care again. That's a start, right?" In the dim light of the moon, she saw Kennedy's features harden, and realised she may have been a little blunter than she had meant to be. "Oh, I didn't mean that… that…"
Kennedy let her off the hook with a little shrug of her shoulders. "Don't bother, you have a point. I know I haven't been much with the caring and sharing recently. Sorry."
Dawn chuckled nervously. "Why are you apologising to me for?"
"I'm not sure," Kennedy admitted. "But I know I've been pissing you off, and I'm not quite sure how, but I figure it's a side affect of my terminal black cloud."
"What makes you say that?"
"Because apparently I'm pissing a lot of people off," Kennedy muttered, adding sarcastically, "Just by being myself; quite the achievement."
"That's just it, Kennedy. You haven't been yourself."
"That's what your boyfriend said. All of a sudden everyone knows me better than I do."
"Maybe you knew, you just didn't want to admit it."
"Maybe I was just burying my head in the sand, you mean? Waiting for my problems to solve themselves? Pretending I don't care so that when Willow dumps me for Osborne nobody will guess how much it bothers me?"
"Well, it was just a theory." Dawn said uncomfortably.
The woods were quiet apart from the cry of some night bird warning his friends of their approach.
"So it would bother you?"
"Of course it would bother me," Kennedy muttered.
"Only, that's kinda news to me, which means it's probably news to Willow too."
"Yeah, well I don't do things by halves."
"Except love Willow."
Kennedy didn't shrug off Dawn's bluntness this time; she stopped walking and levelled her with a fierce glare. Dawn didn't back down either, or apologise. If Kennedy was ready to talk about this now, she was gonna talk, and shying away from the more dangerous comments wouldn't do her any favours. Of course, it might not do Dawn any either, but she was trying to be a friend here! Plus there was the fact that Kennedy had pissed her off tonight, even before she'd caught her on the bed with Reece.
"Well?" she asked, when Kennedy just kept glaring. "Do you love her or not? Because it seems like you don't give a crap one minute, and then are all worried she's gonna leave you the next."
"I give a crap!" Kennedy said slowly, but angrily. "I give a big freaking crap. It's her that doesn't."
"So you do love her?"
Kennedy finally looked away and Dawn breathed a silent sigh of relief. Not that she'd really been worried… but Kennedy had one hell of glare on her. Kinda like Buffy's.
"Yeah, I'm in love with her. Really, really in love with her," Kennedy said softly. "And I don't wanna lose her."
Even more relieved, Dawn smiled. "Thank goodness for that. For a while there I thought I was going to have to find a way to kill you in your sleep."
Kennedy looked back at her in surprise. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Dawn frowned as she tried to find the best way to explain. "I love Willow. Ever since Mom died, she's sort of filled that role in a way. Don't get me wrong, I know Buffy tries hard, and she's good with the strict, but it's always been Willow that really got me, you know? It was always her that, her little dark patch aside, made sure I was… nurtured…"
Kennedy smiled and frowned at that at the same time. "Come again?"
Dawn rolled her eyes. "I don't know how else to explain it. Sure, Buffy cared for me, and put a roof over my head and food in my tummy and made sure I went to school and made sure I was safe from evil creatures and stuff, but it was Willow and Tara that made time for me and listened to me when I was upset, even if it was about stupid stuff, and… and when they split up it was awful… almost like my dad leaving all over again."
Confused, Kennedy stepped closer. "I don't get what that has to do with…"
"When Tara died it was even worse than when Buffy did!" Dawn knew she wasn't explaining this well – hello, there had been reasons why she'd shied away from having this conversation with Kennedy, the 'near tears' feeling she was having right now at merely the memory of last year being just one of them. "I don't mean just for me. I was devastated when Buffy died, but she came back! I knew Tara never would… she never will… and it nearly killed Willow, literally! It ripped out her heart."
Kennedy stepped back again, throwing up her arms. "If it's not Oz, it's Tara! I am so sick of hearing those names! Can you see why I've been acting so crazy lately? I love Will and I'm trying to be with her, but I'm constantly getting her ex's shoved down my throat; and now my supposed best friend is threatening to kill me in my sleep because I'm not Tara-the-freakin'-wonder-Goddess!"
Dawn slapped Kennedy's face hard, surprising them both.
Kennedy swiftly raised her hand to retaliate and Dawn flinched back. Sighing angrily, she rubbed her stinging cheek instead as she bit off, "You get a free one because I was being stupidly insensitive. Now get to your point."
"It's simple," Dawn said, her voice trembling a little. "I don't ever want to see Willow hurt like that again. Especially not if it can be avoided."
"I think you're over-estimating my ability to hurt Willow," Kennedy said more casually than she felt, and started walking along the rabbit track they'd found again.
Dawn walked right behind her. "Of course you can hurt her, you are hurting her! That's my point! After Tara, none of us ever thought she'd love again, seriously, she was that screwed up. But then she met you."
"She doesn't love me."
"Maybe, maybe not, I don't really know," Dawn admitted. "But I do know she's been happier in the last six months than she was for the six months before that. Maybe it's too soon for her to be in love again, I'm not an expert, but you are making her happy. Or you were, until you started acting like a dick!"
Kennedy turned and smacked Dawn on the back of the head.
She shied away from the stinging blow. "Hey, I thought I got a free one?"
"You already used that up and I'm pretty sure neither Willow or Buffy or Tara would like you using that language." Kennedy smirked.
Dawn rolled her eyes again and upped her pace so that she could walk next to Kennedy. "So does this mean we're friends again?"
Kennedy shrugged. "Can't speak for you, but I never stopped."
"Cool, so what are you going to do to get Willow back?"
Kennedy paused again, looking worried. "Do I have to do anything? I mean, do you really think I lost her already?"
Stumped, Dawn gave her a regretful look. "I don't know, maybe?"
"Damn!"
