…"I am, you know?" Tara said softly with a smile that was just a hair's breadth away from coy. Seductive in a gorgeously shy way, the candle trembling as her words caressed the flame. "Yours."...

Willow's breath catches in her throat, her eyes watery and unseeing.

Mine.

She was mine…

She was mine.

Cold air leeches off the stone walls of her room, sucking what little heat there is in her body out until she's shivering underneath the scratchy wool blanket.

She doesn't feel it. Can feel nothing but the warmth of Tara's body pressed against hers. Of Tara's hands working their way up to cup her face, a flutter of Tara's fingertips brushing away the hair from her face as she widens their kiss.

The vision deepens, and winds on into more heat and more love and more Tara, so much Tara. Tears slip from underneath Willow's half-shut eyes, as she shivers pathetically on the bed—though that seems too generous a description of the camping bunk pushed against the wall of the coven's infirmary. The bed is small, narrow, and stiff. All the luxury of sleeping on old camping equipment.

I fucked up. She chokes on her misery, and it tastes like bile.

She twists the knife in harder because she deserves it. She deserves the pain. Memories of happier times burn her eyes. Memories of making waffles in the kitchen together, Tara spooning the batter into the waffle iron as Willow's hands wind around her middle and her chin rests on her shoulder, breathing in the scent of her, still warm from their bed—

Oh God, I can't I can't it hurts it hurts too much it hurts—

And quieter, but with more weight than her own, a second voice says, but you deserve it.

The domesticity of certain memories aches even deeper than the ones of Tara pressed against her. Watching the TV together, curled up like two halves of a whole. Willow's lips burn at the thought of just laying a soft kiss on Tara's cheek, winding an arm around her shoulders as Tara's head leans against her chest. The weight against her side is the anchor tethering her to happiness. And now she's lost, adrift.

Please I can't—

Magic crackles like static electricity trapped in the shell of her body, and she feels the burn it causes as black lines snake out of her eyes. Her brow dampens with sweat as her eyes turn black. The memories are suffocating her, fitting to bursting and seeping out of her where her resolve is weakest. They sit hard on her chest and trap her like a monster of her own making. A darkness that's running its fingers around her throat and threatening to steal the breath from her lungs unless she listens.

We could fix it, it says.

Willow sobs. Sobs and sobs until the tears dry on her cheeks. Until there's nothing but salt left in her, leaving her shivering and cold.

"Tara," she sighs, no other words to her plea, unaware she's speaking her name aloud in an endless babble—Tarataratara-Taratara—blind to the Coven's High Priestess, Elaine, and Giles watching her in the doorway.

"We moved her in here to counteract the fever," Elaine mutters, indicating the cold brick walls lit by arched windows, the moonlight flooding in and casting everything in a silvery hue. In any other situation, it would be peaceful. Would feel archaically holy. "It doesn't seem to be helping," she sighs as she cards her hands through her hair. "Whatever is working its way through her seems to be shredding her immune system too."

Giles tightens his lips, casting his eyes over Willow's prostrate form.

"Should we call a doctor?" he asks, his glasses held limply in his hands, polished so often it's a miracle they haven't been worn down like sea glass.

"We did. They prescribed antibiotics," Elaine huffs as though the very notion is absurd, leaning against the room's doorway. "The visions are worsening."

"Anything new?" Giles presses.

Elaine worries her lip as she considers the question, tucking her hands into the deep pockets of her coat. The room steals warmth and gooseflesh is starting to pimple on her forearms. "Still just conversations with Tara. Some nightmares too, perhaps? It's hard to get clear sentences," she adds. She'd only met Willow once before the shock of withdrawal seemed to spiral out of control. How on earth is she supposed to decipher what's memory and what's vision? What's prophetic and what's mental self-harm?

"The nightmares are about Tara?" Giles prompts, taking out a small notebook and flipping to a blank page to take notes.

"Not all of them…" Elaine hesitates. "Something about being devoured? Is that a memory?"

Giles cants his head. That could be so many memories. He writes "Devoured?"on the new page anyway. "Unfortunately, it would be entirely too hard to pin down a specific memory with just that to go on," he says, putting his glasses back on and sliding them up his nose.

"It's common, is it?" Elaine asks with an ironic raise of her eyebrow.

"Indeed," Giles huffs mirthlessly. "In Sunnydale anyway."

Elaine blinks, a little taken aback by his flippant answer. "Oh." She levels herself off the doorway. "Why do people keep on living there?"

Giles shrugs and mumbles, "It hardly ever rains."

Buffy, Dawn, Tara, Xander, and Anya stand expectantly in the crypt, awaiting Spike's arrival from through the sewers linking Revello Drive to his lower level.

Buffy swallows, reliving the memory of the way his hands had smoked as the light singed his skin—the only piece of him exposed as he held his coat over his head—before he'd managed to wrestle off the manhole cover and dive down into the darkness.

Maybe they could do a Shawshank Redemption and tunnel through to that complicated underground network from her basement once they fix this whole Tara-pocalypse. Bypass the need for him to set himself on fire if he needs to get into his crypt during the day.

Or maybe he should just move in, says an intrusive voice at the back of her mind and she jumps at the thought.

No, I can't ask him to do that! That's a lot. That's like… that's like a huge whole lot of a lot.

Dawn has already turned the TV on, unconcerned and happy enough to lounge in the only armchair as the rest of the group shuffle awkwardly against sarcophagi and stone walls.

Tara clears her throat first as she sits down on the concrete step by the door. "I-it's not as bad as I was picturing," she says quietly, gesturing around the crypt. "Not as creepy."

Buffy smiles and bobs her head in acknowledgment. "The TV and fridge really detract from the whole evil-lair-ness," she says as she rests on the arm of the chair next to Dawn's shoulder.

The group nods in agreement.

"It's homey now that he has some furniture," Anya agrees, crossing her arms to ward off the chill permeating the air. "And it's bigger than your old basement anyway," she adds to Xander.

He snorts but wraps an arm around her, rubbing her arm as she swaddles her in the sweater's baggy sleeve. "At least the basement had central heating."

"But it also had your parents upstairs," she retorts.

"True," Xander replies with a never-again shiver.

The gang watches the grainy TV with Dawn—a re-run of Passions in which Timmy finally proposes to Sarah only to be hit by a truck seconds after—and after a few more minutes the faintest scuffle from below indicates Spike's arrival. His boots thunk on the ladder and as he climbs up through the hole in the floor he smiles at the group, lingering on Buffy, and then Tara who smiles sadly back.

"Made yourselves comfortable, have you?" he says to the room at large.

"Yes, very homey!" Anya says, a shade too loudly. Xander eyes her with bewilderment. "What?" she asks. "I'm being a good guest."

"So, what's the plan?" Spike asks as he fishes out a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket and lights one.

"I think we need to find the rest of the Taras," Buffy says. "Maybe, Xander, you can go to the college and close off the dorm room somehow? It's probably more explicit than the magic box-...um," she winces, casting a guilty look at Tara, whose gaze is firmly on her knees.

Jeez, this foot just really wants to be in my mouth today, Buffy scolds herself.

"You got it," Xander nods. "Safety vest and a roll of yellow tape and no one will even bat an eye. Carry a clipboard too and it's like a magic all-access pass."

"A High Viz of Invisibility," Dawn chuckles, and then rolls her eyes when it doesn't get a laugh, and mutters 'illiterates,' under her breath.

Buffy clips her shoulder before turning back to Xander. "Do you think Dawn could stay with you guys?" she asks. "I think the house might need some of that yellow tape treatment too until we can figure this out."

"No problem," Xander replies—casting an 'okay?' look at Anya, and relaxing slightly when she nods in enthusiastic agreement.

"Sure," Anya beams. "Babysitting. Can do. I'm told babysitters are often paid for their services."

"I don't need babysitting," Dawn says with a scowl at the same time Buffy rolls her eyes.

"I'll have to write you an IOU," she says dryly, and Anya smiles that charmingly innocent smile that only seems to surface when she gets her way and there's a potential exchange of money or vengeance.

"We should check Willow's old dorm room too," Buffy adds to Xander. "Yellow tape the whole place. Make it Construction Site Mardi Gras."

"I reckon those memory things'll probably be popping up all through the college," Spike mutters, taking a drag of his cigarette, scratching his nails down his jaw in thought as he holds in the smoke. "Could phone in a gas leak?" he suggests. "Or a bomb threat..." He smiles a little at the idea of causing a mass panic. Getting a little hit of chaos and social disruption. It's good for the soulless.

He cracks a closed-mouth grin when he notices Buffy raising an amused eyebrow at him, obviously reading the gleeful anticipation on his face.

"What about the Magic Box?" Anya asks. "I don't have to close, do I? I mean… the money?"

"But also the unpleasant tactile sensations," Xander says, squeezing her shoulder. "What if a Tara walks through your customers and they don't buy anything because they're getting their floor writhing on."

Anya sighs deeply, her happy-money smile vanishing under a world-weary exasperation of the incredibly put-upon. "This is all so unfair. My poor store…" she grumbles, hunching further into Xander for comfort. "I hate being the victim."

A slight squeak of the door's rusted hinges announces Tara's departure out into the sunlight.