Author: Regina
E-mail: brainysmurf16@hotmail.com
'Everything is quiet, since you're not around,
And I live in the numbness now.
In the background.'
It had been a year now. A year since his world had fallen apart. Some days he woke up and wondered how he was going to make it. The pain was still as fresh as it had been that day, as he watched her fall under the wave of demons that took her life. Saving the world, again, she gave her life for him. For all of them. She had known. Known it was a suicide mission and not told one of them.
'Cause I don't see you anymore,
Since the hospital,
But the plans I make still have you in them.'
She had hung on for almost a week after that, but it got harder and harder to see her like that. Helpless, small, and so still. She never moved, not even once. Not when he talked to her. Not when he cried. Not even all the times he lay with her, her body cradled in his arms. He didn’t leave the hospital the whole time. He was terrified that if he did, and that time came . . . she didn’t deserve this. He took it the hardest of all of them, and still did. Not a moment went by when she didn’t invade his thoughts.
'Then you come swimming into view,
And I'm hanging on your words like I always used to do,
The words they use so lightly, I only feel for you,
I only know this cause I am, Way back down,
In the background.'
He lived her now. Ate her, slept her, she was his life. He was giving her the kind of devotion he should have in life. He hadn’t left his apartment in months. Anya had tried, she really had, but she got tired of trying. She had been gone for about three months now. The last straw was when she found the shawl. It was Willow’s, her favorite, and it still smelt of her. Like lilac and sunshine, and her own unique Willow smell. The silk was as soft as her skin had been, and holding it made him feel closer to her. He slept with it now, wrapped around his hands. It was the only way he could sleep anymore. The dreams of her left him crazy. She would float into his mind like a wisp of smoke, so suddenly that he didn’t even notice until he saw her before him. All emerald eyes and ruby lips, looking vibrant and real and alive. Then he would reach for her, and she would disappear. Like so many times before.
'Words they come and memories all repeat,
I lift your head while, They change the hospital sheets,
I would never lie to you, No
I would never lie to you, No
I felt you long after we were through.'
He was going crazy, he knew he was. He had known when they had come in to check on her for the last time. When they told him they were sorry. When her parents and Buffy and Giles and Tara all left the room. When Anya tried to make him leave too. But he had stayed. He couldn’t just leave her there. She couldn’t be alone. She had still looked so beautiful. So alive. Her cheeks were still slightly rosy, her lips still warm. So he had stayed with her, and held her, long after that warmth faded. Trying desperately to give her some of his warmth. It wasn’t fair that she was so cold. He had stayed until they’d come to take the body, until the gave him the tranquilizer shot when he’d tried to fight off Giles and the orderlies who tried to make him leave her. Then he had just collapsed. And woken up to a world without Willow. All because of this fruitless fight she fought. The same fight they all fought, the fight that Buffy and Giles still fought. They tried so hard after the funeral to get him out. To get him involved. They still did sometimes. But he couldn’t. The rest of them had slowly fell apart, drifting away. Willow had been the glue that held them all together, and he couldn’t handle being with them anymore. Feeling like he was in a jigsaw puzzle with the most important piece missing. All because she had cared too much. She had known the spell would make her fall, make her weak. Make her helpless. But she knew we needed it, and she did it even after she promised Giles she wouldn’t. She saved a world of people who would never know it.
'And the plans I make still have you in them,
Cause you come swimming into view,
And I'm hanging on your words like I always used to do,
The words they use so lightly, I only feel for you,
I only know this cause I am, Way back down,
In the background.'
He couldn’t go on like this. Couldn’t keep living in her shadow. Living with her memory, her ghost. Everything around him reminded him of her. He was obsessed. But it made the pain feel less than it was sometimes. When he pretended she was still there. When he talked to her, and looked at her things, and held her clothes. He was pushing himself farther and farther into the darkness. Into the void, the background of life, until he himself was nothing more than a shadow. A shadow of who he used to be. He would never be Xander again. He was only Xander when Willow was there with him. She was his reason for being, and for so long he never told her. He told her everyday now. He loved a memory, but that memory was the only reason he was still here.
'Everything is quiet, Since you're not around,
And I live in the numbness now.
In the background.'
Xander Harris lay down in his darkened room, on a bed covered in the clothes and objects of a dead women, and slept. And as he slept, he saw her, his one true love. And for just a moment, in his mind, his reality now, he was complete.