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Willow can't sleep.
She never can, really, in times of impending apocalypse. She'd have thought that by the third or fourth one her nervous system would acclimate, but then, she's never been great at adjusting to change in her life, nice as it sounds in the abstract.
In her freshman psychology class, Professor Walsh explained that the physiological response to stressful stimuli has little to do with the reality of the threat, be it a nearby predator or simple stage fright. Willow never knows anymore if her fear, always a fleeting movement from some dark corner or an uneasy fluttering in her stomach, is physical or psychological. She thinks it probably doesn't matter.
Everything is connected. If she lets anything slip, black magic from her fingertips or sanity from the old noggin, the outcome will be the same. It's funny, how the only world-ending event that didn't made her feel like this - like she's caught in a hot, cavernous mouth, between jaws that could snap shut at the slightest provocation - was the one she caused.
Willow creeps past rooms of Potentials pretending to sleep, the hallway dead silent apart from her groaning footfalls. A sudden, gasping fear fills her throat as a sharp pain hits her stomach, like the panic that precedes throwing up in a public place. But it isn't that specific fear that's making her hurt this way. She's not sure it's the fear at all, since these days she's always afraid of something. Maybe the air in this house is suffocating her.
Every living being has an aura. That's another thing Willow learned her freshman year, when she pressed Tara for more information about aura reading after the Buffy-Faith body swap fiasco.
"And when enough beings are in a space, they can infuse it with this, like, secondhand aura," Tara told her then, mouth twitching like a scratched record and tone flat except for the ends of her sentences, which rose in pitch like questions even when they weren't. (It shocked Willow hearing her sing solo on the bridge much later on, during a different fiasco of the musical-combustion variety: how clear and effortless Tara sounded when she couldn’t get in her own way.)
In truth, Willow was never nearly as skilled at sensing auras and all that. She prefers to see concrete results from her magic, less tarot spreads and hokey crystal balls and guided meditations that counterproductively make her more antsy. She's always lacked the seemingly bottomless pool of patience from which Tara’s intuition stemmed. Still, the aura of this house clearly gives off adolescence and impending doom. Willow is unnerved but unsurprised at the nostalgic pang it gives her.
She starts down the stairs, cringing at the cry of a loose board beneath her. It feels uncomfortably like being in high school again and sneaking out of the house - though really, that was always more Buffy’s thing than hers, since back then Willow was still the responsible friend between them.
Besides, even when her high school self dared to live a little, it consisted less of sneaking out and more of murmuring a vague excuse (usually studying, though she probably could have said “fighting demons” and garnered a similar reaction) to her mom while halfway out the door. She still needs to call her parents: tell them she loves them, strongly suggest they take a much-deserved vacation somewhere with salty air and touristy stuff, anywhere but here.
The stairwell is pitch dark, the kind that makes innocent daytime shapes seem alive and sinister. An image comes to her unbidden of a tall figure looming above her, impossibly wide smile revealing rows of pointy fangs, eager to peel away her wicked flesh.
Willow tries to remember that nothing in this house can hurt her, for now. But this doesn't remedy the tautness of her jaw or the foreboding heft in her chest, and despite herself she takes the remaining steps two at a time.
She wanders toward the Summers kitchen. This room is like a sanctuary of sorts, a reprieve from the oppressive atmosphere of a house which, like Willow, has taken human life yet somehow still stands.
Willow slumps into a stool at the island, where she often sat the summer after Buffy’s death, translating old tomes or checking her email or whatever she did when life itself hadn't yet begun to exhaust her. She glances at the window above the sink and sees only black.
She remembers lazy summer mornings when the BuffyBot was upstairs charging, and Dawn was still sulking in her room: how Tara’s hair flickered gold-white in the sunlight, falling slow like syrup as she hunched over to flip a pancake, and how her leaden demeanor lit up upon seeing Willow. She recalls sitting here on Halloween as Tara scolded her for using magic, a fight that only Willow remembered come November - or rather, she and Dawn.
For weeks after, Willow’s mind returned to Dawn’s face as she materialized in the doorway, unwittingly seeing the first threads of her makeshift family come undone. How different things might have been, if she fixed Dawn’s memory too.
Willow shakes her head as if to loosen the thought. Her mouth is dry and tastes of things best left unsaid, and she needs a drink. Not wanting to turn on a light and wake any cranky houseguests, she fishes blindly through the cabinet for a clean glass, a priceless commodity in their current living situation. She pours herself some orange juice, thinking longingly of the alcohol Buffy purged from the house upon catching some Potentials attempting to make scotch-and-sodas with tap water.
She resists the twitching urge to transfigure her juice into something better. That's the kind of careless magic use of which Tara would’ve disapproved, which now induces in her a guilt-and-fear cocktail (sans the good stuff). Plus, the whole water-to-wine parallel doesn't really jive with a surname like Rosenberg.
Addictive personality, she thinks distantly, and drinks the juice in a few harsh gulps.
She approaches the window, close enough now to see her milky reflection in the blackness. It looks like a ghost, white features jutting like bones and eyes indistinct; she worries if she keeps looking, it'll turn into something worse.
“No rest for the wicked, huh?”
Her breath catches. The glass slips from her fingers, and on naked instinct she suspends it in mid-air, so as not to wake everyone with a crash. As she turns, her initial fear is quickly replaced by irritation.
“Get it?” says Faith, standing in the doorway, her pale figure intrusive and almost otherworldly against the darkness. “Wicked? As in, of the West, comma, Witch? Shit, Red, I thought a book reference would fly with a brainy type like you.”
As her eyes adjust, Willow detects that Faith's outfit is the same from the last time she saw her, a terse, perfunctory acknowledgement as they crossed paths in the living room yesterday afternoon. She's wearing a battered, red tank top that hugs her frame and work jeans cinched with a studded belt. Willow suddenly feels self-conscious in her men's tee-shirt and fuzzy pajama pants. This hot, itchy feeling of not quite belonging in her own skin always seems to emerge when Faith does.
“What are you still doing up?” says Willow, annoyance evident in her voice. Not that she's trying very hard to sound any other way.
Faith shrugs, unfairly drawing the eye, and although it could be a trick of the light - or the lack thereof - Willow swears she can see movement beneath the slender width of Faith’s shoulders, muscles expanding and contracting like sentient things. Willow knows what it looks like, too: a blueprint of the body, grossly human, tendons and ligaments sprawling like the root system beneath a deceptively fragile flower, pink as raw meat.
The jolt of warmth below her stomach (which, did these months of self-flagellation really get her worked up enough to be turned on just by arms? Those of Faith, no less?) flees as rapidly as it came, soured by the mental image of Warren's freshly flayed body.
As much time as she's spent recently imagining death - Warren’s, Tara’s, and perhaps imminently her own - the days following the events of last year still don't sit quite right in her memory. They come flat and muffled, like the old movie she half-watched on the connecting flight to Westbury to avoid talking to Giles.
She can't remember how she let go of Xander, boarded a plane, and spent a week outside the compound watching the white, blank sky above. What she remembers too vividly is the feeling right before all that, on the sunny hilltop as her oldest friend cradled her in clumsy arms: the singular, desperate wish to be dead.
It's not like that now. Hasn't been for a good long while. But Willow's a Hellmouth native, and she knows how it operates, how it brings a person’s fears and failings to the surface - reducing them to a child terrified of the dark. She doesn't know if this near-falling sensation is the work of the bad, brewing evil or something else, a convenient excuse to lapse into old habits. She thinks maybe she doesn't want to know.
“Don’t know,” says Faith. “Couldn’t sleep, I guess.”
“Yeah, something about the whole impending doom makes sleep seem kind of petty.”
“Puts things in perspective.” Faith yawns, stretching like a big, black cat. “Man, when this thing is over, I’m going to sleep for, like, a week. You know, if I’m not dead.”
“Big ‘if.’”
“But either way I’ll get some fucking shuteye.”
Faith pauses as if waiting for a laugh, but Willow doesn't give it to her. She doesn't think she can. She thinks of opening her mouth to laugh only for a scream to rip itself from her throat and puncture this ever-shrinking bubble of calm, like when the First briefly overtook her body and branded her essence with evil.
Willow just looks at her and says nothing. Faith looks away. “You know,” says Faith after a moment, “this will be my first time pulling for the good guys in a big, world-on-the-line battle."
“Okay?” Willow manages, lips pressed tightly together to ensure that only words escape. Like her body can only be a vessel for darkness.
“I’m just saying, when the Mayor was still a big deal around here, I loved the guy, or I thought I did, but I knew that what he was trying to do wasn’t good, you know? Hell, that was the initial draw. Stick it to B any way I could, right?”
Faith sounds rueful, and Willow feels red-hot energy surge in her fingertips. She white-knuckles the countertop behind her as Faith casually hoists herself up on the island.
“So in a way, it was like, I couldn’t really lose. Either the Mayor lost, I died, and this shitty town lived to torture its citizens another day, or we won and I got to play number one bodyguard to a huge snake.” Faith spreads her arms out wide as if to emphasize the hugeness of the snake, which is a little funny given that Willow was actually there to see it and Faith wasn't.
Willow tries to remember her senior year of high school the way Faith seems to: Faith as the lost soul who just needed a kiss on the cheek and a mug of cocoa to set her right. But all she feels is anger, the vindictive tug of Faith's knife against her throat, her helpless fury as Faith effortlessly seduced all her loved ones away and exposed her many shortcomings as if she wasn't well aware of them already.
A hard flash of Faith's bare, bloodied body, bent at odd angles like an impotent scarecrow, too wretched even to be beautiful. Willow catches herself and shuts her eyes against the darkness. She opens them to see Faith looking at her. Her body is intact and still beautiful, her eyes black like empty sockets, her smile quick and knowing.
This time, Willow looks away first.
“But now," Faith continues, "my moral compass is a little closer to the skin, and my do-gooder convictions are all air-tight. And that’s scarier, you know, when there’s no upside to losing.” She drops her arms plainly. “This is it.”
Willow's skin feels too tight on her body. She realizes that her hands really hurt from gripping the counter, and as an afterthought, hey, maybe she should stop doing that. She imagines her veins spread out on both wrists like branches of ancient trees, each constricting and then relaxing, letting blood flow freely.
"I don't know." Faith swings her legs absently, angular features crinkled in concentration. "It's hard. Being on the right side when you've gotten a taste of wrong. Because now you know rightness isn't a given, not like it is for the golden, golly-gee types like B. And you get that burning feeling in your face like someone's always watching you, expecting you to fuck it up, even you. Sometimes makes you wonder if it's always going to be this damn hard. What you're even doing it all for." Faith's eyes flick back to Willow. "You know?"
Willow's still struggling to overlook the bitter-herb taste of envy on her tongue re: Faith - which, what with high school seeming like a million years ago, now feels innate and immutable. But really, in retrospect, she doesn't know why she was so shocked and hurt when Buffy and Faith bonded easily.
It makes sense, from a psychological standpoint, that Buffy would be drawn to her own kind: someone built to fuck, kill, die young and begrudgingly return. And she can't dispute that Faith has a sort of inexplicable, animal magnetism.
For that reason alone, Xander’s little night of passion with her shouldn't have surprised Willow either. Still, it hurt her feelings, probably a hell of a lot at the time. But she knew he was a teenage boy and had always been loyal to her insofar as there wasn’t another, hotter, better alternative (see: Cordelia).
And yet Willow naively expected Buffy to always choose her, the way she chose her over Cordelia when they first met. She let herself forget that she and Buffy weren't cut from the same low-cut cloth, not really.
It doesn't matter much anymore, but there are always little reminders here and there, like a charmingly tacky scrapbook she and Tara unearthed from beneath Joyce's bed last year. It was filled with pictures of a young Buffy, with her teen-magazine tan and hair flowing honey-golden, dressed as a cheerleader, a Spring Fling queen, or simply a sweet girl without a care in the world. (These pictures, incidentally, became few and far between after the move to Sunnydale.)
Willow's little grudge against Faith similarly doesn't matter much anymore, because eventually everything worked out. Faith showed her true colors, which matched her bruise-chic lipstick and faux leather wardrobe, and the gang banded together to defeat the bad guy and save the day, like always. Always, up until now.
Now Willow is a senior again, though realistically she still needs another semester to fill the hole left by her spiral last year. She thinks sometimes that she should’ve taken a gap year, instead of devoting herself to bringing Buffy back just to be rendered obsolete by her return.
She could’ve stayed in San Francisco on a coding internship, maybe found some community in the gay scene. Or she could've gotten out of the industrial oven of California altogether, to her heritage in Jerusalem, or to a witch-burning site turned coven in Devon, or to Tibet to tell her high school boyfriend how totally great she's doing.
Until her stay in England this past summer, she never realized how much everywhere that isn't on a Hellmouth feels comparatively lighter, clearer, as if long-term exposure to Sunnydale air slowly eats away at a person's sanity - a badly folded prion of a town chalked over with cheery yellows and blues. And by then, the damage was long done.
Then again, Xander has also lived in this town his whole life, and Willow guesses he hasn't gotten any less bright over time, per se. He hasn't intentionally killed anyone, so he's got most of their circle beat. Still, she swears things feel fuzzier and further away being back home.
Her senior year of high school, for instance. Her memory of it now is like one of those shapeless, pom-pom and patchwork sweaters she wore back then (despite the year-round heat): consisting of so many parts that they were near impossible to discern, and hard to look at without wincing.
She remembers wearing her insecurity like a second skin (or an ugly sweater), crying a lot over boys (when it was never really about the boys), and spending so much time comparing herself to Faith only to realize with perfect clarity how little people like Faith mattered in the grand scheme of it all.
One of Willow's few proud moments from her senior year was telling that to Faith's face in the Mayor's office. "You were a Slayer, and now you're nothing." (She had practiced this speech many times in her bedroom mirror, but it still surprised her in the moment how coolly she delivered it.) “Just a big, selfish, worthless waste.”
The frantic look in Faith's eyes hearing that activated some latent fear in her. To an eighteen-year-old Willow, that look screamed, crazy person. And this was pretty well confirmed when her body hit carpet a moment later, cheek stinging. But thinking back on it now, that look seems a whole lot closer to fear.
So fine, maybe things with Faith aren't as clear-cut as she thought back then. Life has a way of grinding down those steadfast convictions she once held, even as the knowledge strikes terror in her quick-beating, studious heart. Even so, it was worth filing away that epiphany in the back of her brain as she entered college. A little pick-me-up reminder for when she felt too much like her plain, old self: girls like Cordelia got cheated on, and girls like Faith got stabbed.
But this isn't high school or even college anymore. She doesn't regard Faith much at all these days, good or bad. Faith isn't either of those things. She isn't necessarily anything. At one time, Faith's ability to move like a woman and speak like a man, to unthinkingly fill any space she was put in like a liquid (despite never having taken a chemistry class), made Willow feel awestruck, envious, and a little warm between her stockinged legs.
Now, however, she can see Faith's professed hubris and whips-and-chains sex appeal for what they are: a costume, concealing the same squishy innards and tangled-up neuroses that everyone has below the surface. Faith is just like anyone. And maybe that is her point here. Maybe the barely-there glimmer in Faith’s eyes now reflects the very human desire to relate. To get some assurance that she isn't alone.
Willow feels compelled to give her that. But she doesn't think she can, because that would be dishonest, in a sense. They are not the same. Faith is a killer.
Willow killed people, and this past year she's nearly been swallowed whole by the sheer volume of her guilt. But outlier behavior doesn't constitute an identity, like how sleeping with Oz didn't make her not a lesbian. She's slept with two people now, but that doesn't make her a slut. By that logic, killing two people didn't make her a killer. It still isn't good, obviously, but not like Faith. Nothing like her, no, sir.
"No," Willow says. "Not really."
Faith’s expression flickers. Then the something smooths over and is gone, like magic, so quickly Willow wonders if there was really anything at all. The dark makes it easy to make things up.
Faith lifts herself off the island, gaze fixed on a vague elsewhere. “I'm so tense."
"Try yoga?"
"Nah, that's Angel's bag."
Faith stretches out her impressive limbs, and Willow thinks she seems a little leaner than before, drawn with harsher lines. She wonders if her prison diet forcibly chiseled her down. Faith pins an arm behind her head and twists, frowning not unpleasantly as she leans into the stretch. Willow likes that look on Faith's face. She wonders if she can make it appear again.
"I don't know how you do it, Red. I always get like this when I'm squatting on the Hellmouth, 'specially when there's something bad coming." Faith is moving towards her, now close enough that Willow can smell cigarette-stink and a faint perfume like grapes and tobacco. "My fists get all clenched, skin's a-buzzing, just itching for something to do."
Before Willow can respond with something deliberately dense like Art therapy?, Faith closes the gap and smacks her hands on the counter on either side of Willow, pinning her in place. The fluidity of her movements makes Willow flinch, just a little, and that makes Faith grin.
"This alright?" says Faith, barely audible. A hand leaves the counter to pry at the hem of Willow's nightshirt.
Willow nods. She cups a hand to Faith's flushed cheek, a little surprised at how soft and cool it feels, like the underside of a pillow on a hot night. She lets her thumb graze Faith's mouth, which is no longer stained black or red, just a bare pink with a chapstick sheen. Everything about Faith seems more stripped-back and touchable now.
Faith's lips part, and Willow takes the cue to let Faith suck on her fingers. Faith bites down, not enough to hurt but enough to shock. Willow slaps her in retaliation. Again, not enough to hurt (a normal person, let alone a Slayer), and not even entirely on purpose. Faith just makes a guttural noise, like a curse if she forgot to say the actual word, but doesn't pull away. Experimentally, Willow's hand moves to the back of Faith's head, finds a fistful of dark roots, and tugs.
"Ah, shit, okay." Faith throws her head back, baring her apple-core throat. It reads to Willow as fake, like theatre, like porn. But maybe that's just Faith. "Here I had you pegged as the sex-is-sexist kind of dyke. Shows what I know. Can you believe B spent the last year getting her freak on with the basement dweller, another fucking vampire with bad hair?"
Yes, because I haven't spent the last three years locked away, and I know Buffy, she doesn't say. The thought makes her want to cry a little. "Why, you jealous?" she says instead.
Willow expected Faith to refute that. Instead, she just says, "Could you blame an ex-con?" Faith's hand moves to cup her breast. Willow can feel little serrations like rugged mountains on Faith's palm where she holds her stake. "I hear you're getting a type for Slayers yourself."
Kennedy, one of the older Potentials, started aggressively flirting with Willow soon after her arrival. Willow still isn't sure how everyone in this incestuous house already knows about it. Even Buffy knows, and she isn't exactly Miss Perceptive. And okay, yeah, Kennedy is cute with her plump lips and puppy-dog eyes, and Willow is available, and she isn't exactly doing anything to deter Kennedy from pursuing her.
But she doesn't like how much she likes Kennedy. Every time they talk, Willow gets all red and flustered, and she loathes always being one step behind like that, subject to someone else's advances. And every time she lies on her back, hand between her legs, and pretends it's Kennedy's quick, pierced tongue, she thinks of her lover lying flat in the dirt.
"Which, hey, I get it. We're hot," Faith is saying, "but personally, I don't think it's worth cradle-robbing for—"
"Shut up," Willow says, intellectually. Her nipples feel stiff under her shirt, where Faith's thumb is circling as if stalking before the kill. Faith complies and kisses her.
The first time Tara kissed her, she said Is this okay? or possibly Are you okay?. Willow can't remember which, but she recalls thinking that Tara said one but meant the other. She can remember the dark dorm room, enclosing her like a womb; the mingled smells of sage and weed; the giddy feeling of abandoning her mind, letting her body act as a conduit of power rather than a sweaty extension of herself.
Whenever she and Tara did a spell together, no matter how businesslike it started out, the energy they produced would flow like sugar-water, spiked punch, pure electricity, to every dusty corner of its receptacle. Willow's chest would heave with exertion, her nipples pointed skyward. By the end, her head got all heavy, like drunkenness without the blurry edges, and her clit got hard. They would look at each other after, skin glistening and pupils dilated, and it was all over.
Faith's a good kisser. Passionate but practiced, a quick brush of tongue now and again but not overdoing it. Willow realizes in an achey sort of way how much she missed this, the whole intimate human contact. Touch is harder now, just like everything else. It was never all that easy to start with.
She feels sometimes like a giant, lumbering around all oblivious as it nearly crushes people to death under its big boots. But other times she feels more like a mouse (or the kind of pet rat that would turn majorly evil given the chance to be human again), scurrying underfoot and trying not to get smushed. All the fairytale characters that aren't the princess.
Willow can see her reflection just fine (how do all the vampires she knows dress so well?), but trying to picture herself in the third-person feels like looking in a funhouse mirror: either the pinchy part or the bulgy part, but never the fully rendered Willow everybody else sees. Even when she saw herself in the flesh, her vampire double didn't really register to her as her. Actually, she kind of reminded her of Faith: all cleavage and leather, a blood-clot color palette, and a flashy smile that didn't crinkle the eyes or color the face.
Besides, Willow can gauge others' responses to her as a reflection of sorts, and her friends' varying wide-eyed reactions to vampire Willow looked completely different from their reactions to Willow Willow, which were really just non-reactions in the form of pliant smiles and verbal head-pats.
She thinks in her guiltier moments that even though her brief tenure on the dark side irreparably damaged her closest friendships, it may have been the first time her friends really saw her as a person, not just Willow. Not a nifty gadget that would always be tucked away ready when they needed her.
Willow buries a hand in Faith's hair, tugging again and eliciting choked-out noises. She feels a familiar pulse between her legs. When she gets this way, her instinct is to find a private place and satisfy herself.
Tara went down on her sometimes, but without the aid of a pre-coital spell, Willow always struggled to stop thinking and truly relax. And Tara, being all intuitive, could always tell and would get all insecure that she was doing something wrong, and Willow would have to tell her, Baby, no, like she wasn’t dealing with her own bad thoughts wriggling like worms in the wet soil of her brain.
Then Tara would start a dialogue, saying that she felt guilty for always receiving, because all she had to do was lie back and enjoy herself while Willow did the hard part. The dialogue usually took an abrupt turn there, because Willow didn't know how to explain that lying back and enjoying herself was the hard part.
And really, she likes giving, feeling useful. She remembers sucking on Tara’s clit and crooking a finger inside her, how Tara gasped, then screamed, her sweet, pink mouth open wide like her trembling legs: the thrill of watching her quiet exterior crumble under Willow’s hand.
Willow feels a pleasant, tipsy kind of warmth, in her face, her fingers, pooling below her stomach. She curls a hand in hair, imagining Tara’s mousy roots and flaxen ends, her red face and blue eyes dressing her in primary colors, aching for more.
Tara, lying on her back, parting her dimpled thighs and looking up at Willow like she's the only person in the world. Tara, lying on her back, feeding the worms and the soil. Forever.
"The hell?” Faith says when Willow shoves her away.
Willow blinks. “I’m sorry.”
“No, look, uh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to…" Faith looks past Willow like an actor calling for their line. "We don’t have to do anything, if you aren’t into it.”
Willow's tempted to tell her that duh, she isn't into it, she's a little preoccupied with the whole world-ending, Willow-ending notion. Then again, her first time was founded on pre-apocalypse nerves, right around when Faith was busy experimenting with the comatose lifestyle.
That time with Oz wasn't half-bad; she lay back and stared at the stubborn residue of a “Well-behaved women seldom make history” sticker (courtesy of her mother) before remembering she could close her eyes. She didn't touch him much, probably on account of the whole not liking men, but he was skilled at touching her. And damn it, he made her feel wanted.
She and Tara never had a chance to fuck before an apocalypse. Willow was still coming to terms with the gay of it all when fighting Adam, Tara was brain-sucked for most of the Glory ordeal, and the one after that, well. If they'd had the chance, it wouldn't have happened.
Willow admires the swell of Faith's breasts under her thin top. Her nerves are singing, like they would if she were still riding the dark magic high in the belly of Rack's den, a stuffy place smelling like dust and crackling with close-quarters energy - like her high school library but stripped of any innocence, when it hadn't yet burnt to the ground or begun to look small. Everything in this town eventually did one or the other.
Every part of her feels sensitive, and she isn't sure if it's arousal, nerves, or the overpriced Starbucks latte she grabbed yesterday as an excuse to get out of the house. She normally doesn't do caffeine, precisely because it makes her jittery. But she normally doesn't seriously contemplate the merits of indulging a serial murderer's sexual advances.
Coffee and casual sex, whoop-de-doo. It's funny, how even something grand like fear of death looks dull on Willow. After all these supposed apocalypses, years of teasing and circling, driving her so close to the edge of that fat crater called hell, the idea of death sounds abstract and like a long-awaited punchline. She would laugh if her throat weren't so sticky, and everything wasn't so sad.
"No, just." She hooks a finger in Faith's belt loop and tugs her close. "Just let me do it."
Faith puts up her hands in mock-surrender. "You got it, boss."
They kiss again, and Willow can taste menthol and minty toothpaste. She backs Faith against the island, hands on either side of her before settling on her lower back. She tugs at the place where leather meets cotton. Faith understands, shucking her top in one serpentine motion.
"So, I gotta ask," Faith says while they're apart, "is this just your kink, where your ideal fuck-buddy is, like, a blank slate? Or that candy that changes color when you lick it. Fuck, what's it called?"
Willow bends to kiss Faith's breasts. They're sun-speckled and sweat-sheened, and Willow sucks little bruises into the soft skin, marring it just below the tan line. She pulls back to appreciate her handiwork: a neat little secret for Faith to keep when they're done here. Faith's nipples are pink and peaked. Willow takes one into her mouth, teasing the other with her thumb and forefinger.
"Fuck," Faith says. "You know your way around a woman, don't you?"
Willow's free hand finds Faith's throat, pressing down not hard enough to restrict airflow - even two minutes can cause brain damage, she remembers reading, though she guesses the rules might be different for Slayers - but hopefully enough to shut Faith up.
"I knew it, too," Faith continues, undeterred. "Before your Scooby friends, even. I took one look at you and your little girlfriend together, at the Bronze, you know, and I knew you were together. I even guessed you liked to be on top, 'cause, like, based on our little girls' chat, her mouth was more of a decorative piece, yeah?"
Willow stands to full height. Her grip on Faith's throat tightens. She feels red and black like an infected pustule in her chest and a distant concern that it might burst, spilling blood and ink, profane Latin and pure hate, into this already vulnerable world.
Faith's grinning face is inches from her own. "It's okay, Red. You can play rough with me. Just don't wake the brats, unless you've got an exhibitionist streak."
"Shut your mouth."
Faith does. Her eyes flash, like she's eighteen again and flaunting her rebellion for scraps of attention.
"Open your mouth."
Faith looks like she wants to make a crack but does as told. Willow's hand on her throat travels to her lips, prying them further apart.
She spits in Faith's mouth. Faith’s eyes widen, but she swallows automatically. Which is nice, because Willow might’ve felt icky instructing her to swallow it - like when she morphed into Warren not long ago, except then there would’ve been a “bitch” tacked on.
Instead she says sternly, "Don't talk about her again."
Faith’s gaze is trained on the floor now, like an ashamed teenager enduring a lecture in front of the class. "Yeah."
The view is gratifyingly pathetic, but Willow wastes little time scrambling to her knees. Faith unbuckles her belt, and Willow unbuttons her jeans, tugging them down to mid-thigh. Willow notices little pink scars, round like pencil nubs, on Faith's thighs. She admires the dark curls and slickness between her legs.
She kisses Faith's inner thighs. Faith swears and tugs on her hair. Willow waits a little longer, watching Faith's powerful muscles quake, before she brushes the flat of her tongue against Faith's swollen clit. Faith gasps and clenches around Willow, who's only suffocating a little and too engrossed in the task before her to care. For all her many faults, Faith wasn't wrong that Willow knows her way around a woman.
"It started before the college phase, though, didn't it?" Faith grits out, seemingly recovered from her brief bout of shame.
Willow's positive now that Faith is goading her, trying to get it harder and rougher without the humiliation of asking for it. Unfortunately, it's working. Willow slides a finger, then two, inside Faith, curling and flexing while her mouth makes a hot portal on Faith's clit.
"I'm sure your werewolf boy-toy was good and all, but too much man, not enough animal, right? I bet even back then, you'd see me and B in the library, all sweaty from a night's work, and you'd rub yourself off on the chair under those good-little-girl skirts, yeah? Wishing I'd let you touch me like this."
Willow retracts her fingers and pulls away, drawing a furious growl from Faith.
"I prefer blondes," Willow says, bluntly. "And, you know, non-murderers."
Faith's hand in her hair yanks at the root, hard enough to hurt. But she's still grinning down at her, like it's all gravy, baby, just a funny game, five-by-fucking-five. "Yeah? Me too."
Willow places two fingers on Faith's clit and lets a white spark emerge from them. Nothing major, and not without a legitimate reason: to remind the deadly Slayer above her that this isn't like high school, and she's capable of fighting back if she really needs to. Just enough to stay in control.
Faith shudders and writhes away from Willow's fingers, then bucks her hips against them. There's something perversely satisfying about having this powerful woman, whose body was forged to kill, panting and jerking beneath her touch.
Willow lets her lifeblood flow from her fingers to Faith's swollen clit, steady now like a vibrator, channeling the forces of nature and the gods above to get Faith off. Not one to rely solely on magic anymore, she uses her free hand to finger Faith, this time more roughly, pumping in and out of her and being fed dirty, desperate sounds in return.
Her mouth now available, Willow says, "Goddess, be quiet. Do you want to wake the whole damn house?"
The current rushing through her intensifies at a dizzying rate. Willow feels a distinct, terrifying loss of awareness, but the sensation of forgetting, flowing like a brook for once instead of swimming upstream, is a visceral ecstasy against which Willow doesn't feel the need to fight. It gathers in her hands and pleasures Faith, in her throat and begins talking.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" she says, aware secondhand of the words leaving her mouth. "You're such a shameless slut, you'd probably like it if everyone came down here and saw you like this."
This kind of talk is strange, entirely new yet strangely familiar, like Willow's babbling tendency but born of filth, not freneticism. Faith doesn't seem to mind; her skin glistens and her eyelids flutter, the occasional Yeah or Fuck escaping her wide mouth.
"Everyone already knows you'll fuck anything that moves, any place you can. They’d see you rutting on my fingers like an animal, and they’d just think, oh, typical Faith. The guys and little Kennedy would love watching your tits bounce while I fuck you dumb. Or, you know, dumber."
She's too lost in the rhythm of her magic, her thrusts, her words to even think about stopping. Faith's shaking violently and seemingly just as lost.
"But even they would have the self-control to go back to their rooms and touch themselves, not strip half-naked right here in Buffy's kitchen. You’re such a scared, worthless nothing: can't have what you really want, so you make it everyone else's problem. What a waste of this beautiful body, on such a desperate—"
The word Loser gets lost on her tongue as Faith spasms and clenches around Willow's fingers. The magic flow breaks free of the controlled rhythm, water bursting from a dam, and Willow feels euphoric. Her eyes are white and shimmery; the world looks bright and expansive.
When she reenters reality, she sees Faith pulling on her top - wobbling a little, she notes with dizzy satisfaction. She stands just as the come-down begins to hit her. Everything in this kitchen, the window and island and a torn-open cereal box, looks dark and drab. So achingly familiar it settles like heartbreak in Willow's chest.
"Gobstoppers!" Faith says a little too loudly.
"What?"
"That's the candy, the one that changes colors. I used to get all sticky and sugar-hyped on those when I went trick-or-treating as a kid."
"The last time I trick-or-treated, I died," Willow says in exactly the manner she would've that Halloween, all chirpy and dopey to undercut the grave sentiment of her words.
"Huh, shit." Faith isn't looking at her anymore, already buttoning her jeans and retrieving a red cigarette carton from her back pocket. "Well, uh, hey, try not to do that this time, okay?" She disappears the same way she came in, and Willow hears the front door wearily open and shut.
The lost figure of her in the darkness momentarily assumes the features of a weeping woman: Tara, her intact body radiating light, her fairytale dress from that day on the bridge giving shape to her impossible image. She sang like a small bird then, and she looks now like a bird on a wire against a fiery sunset, nursing its broken wing.
Willow's mouth isn't dry anymore; it tastes salty. Her throat feels all lumpy. "I'm so sorry," she says, because it's all she can say.
Tara nods. Then she smiles: at first, the lovely, half-lidded smile Willow remembers from the summertime. But it keeps growing. Wider, splitting Tara's poor, pretty face apart. Like the figure in the stairwell; the First in the library. The Tara-mask fades away, and the make-believe smile dances cruelly, tauntingly from the infinite blackness.
Willow feels her heart, that fat, mushy strawberry in the pit of her chest, pounding against the confines of her ribcage. Such a stupid thing, so desperate to escape, it doesn't even realize there's nowhere else for it to go.
She darts out the opposite doorway and up the stairs two at a time. She still has an ache between her legs that needs soothed, and she doesn't want to see more faces in the dark.