ItHurtsP12

It Hurts (So Bad) - 12

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When Dawn undressed and crawled into her sleeping bag at midnight she was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Willow was still reading, marking up her text book and taking notes. Buffy was still talking quietly to Spike. When she woke up sometime in the middle of the night, all the lights were out, Willow was wrapped up in a blanket sleeping, and as she fell back to sleep she could hear Buffy still talking to Spike.

When her little alarm clock woke her at 7:30, Dawn got up and made her way quietly to the bathroom. After taking care of her needs and washing up, she came back out to the living room and taking fresh cloths from one of her bags she got dressed. Still feeling dopey she decided that she had to have some coffee or she would never make it to school and through the morning. Still being very quiet she started a pot of coffee and prepared the ingredients, (sugar, creamer and vanilla) in a mug. While the coffee was still brewing Dawn decided to see if Giles had made any response to her e-mail yet.

Opening up the laptop and starting it took several minutes, being a Windows machine it always took awhile to boot up. By the time the computer was ready to be used, the coffee had finished, Dawn had poured herself a mug full and had already seated herself comfortably on the floor in front of it. She established a connection through the wi-fi modem and launched her e-mail program. As soon as the program opened there was a flashing icon indicating that she had mail. Clicking on the ‘In Box’ button, Dawn soon found herself looking at a list of fourteen messages, all from Giles. Opening the first message, Dawn read:

….
My Dearest Dawn,

Thank You for this opportunity. Although I do not understand the nature of this test at this point, rest assured that I do not hesitate to fulfill your requirements. I shall start immediately and work diligently to complete the assigned task.

There is one minor problem that I hope is not too inconvenient. The mail program that I use on my home computer limit’s the number of lines of text it will allow. As you may remember, my knowledge of computers is limited, therefore I do not know how to circumvent this problem. My solution to the problem is to send you packets containing fifty repetitions of the required text in each packet. Hopefully this will meet with your approval.

Most Sincerely Yours,

R. Giles
….
Following the message was fifty lines of the required text.

Buffy loves Spike! Buffy will always love Spike! Buffy will love Spike until the end of the world!

The time stamp on the e-mail showed that it was sent at 7:44AM, London time.

Thinking about the time that she had sent the original e-mail to Giles the night before, Dawn figured that Giles must have read it somewhere around 7:00 - 7:15AM, his time, and had started immediately. A small smile touched her lips. Dawn was pleased that Giles hadn’t spent hours trying to decipher the nature of the test, but had started it without question.

Dawn opened the next message and found fifty lines of the required text. The next two messages were the same. By checking the time stamps on each message Dawn found that it was taking Giles approximately fifteen minutes to complete each message. When she opened the fifth message she saw that it had taken a little longer, twenty minutes. The sixth message took twenty-eight minutes, the seventh took thirty-six minutes, the eighth took forty-seven minutes, the tenth took fifty-six minutes.

The smile on Dawns face had broadened widely and if anyone had been awake to see the glint in her eyes they would have called it ‘wicked’. There were a number of obvious reasons that could account for the time between the messages taking longer and longer, boredom, tired hands and fingers, the need for bathroom breaks, phone calls, and any number of other mundane reasons. But, if what was happening was what Dawn wanted to happen, then the test was working. Only time would tell.

When Dawn opened the eleventh message the time stamp said 12:04PM. She could see immediately that instead of a continuation of the requires text there was a message at the top of the page, which she read immediately.
….
Dearest Dawn,

As you can see I have reached the halfway mark. But, unfortunately, I must take a slight pause to mend fences. My secretary, Ms. Robinson, called to remind me that I had a 1PM meeting scheduled for today and I fear that I was churlishly rude to her for no other reason than doing her job. I must now call her back and apologize to her, ask her to extend my apologies to the Council staff, and for a rescheduling of the meeting on Friday or the following Monday. I will return to the task at hand as soon as possible.

P.S. - As a note, I find myself in a highly agitated state. I will not question you as too the intention of this test at this time, but I must confess that it is having a disturbing effect.

Giles
….

Dawn found herself feeling so pleased with the note from Giles that she felt she deserved another cup of coffee. Looking at her watch she realized that she was already late leaving for school and could not possibly make it there on time. Shrugging her shoulders, she told herself that some thing’s are more important than going to school. After fixing herself another mug of coffee she returned to the computer and opened the next message. The time stamp of the twelfth message was 1:24PM and contained fifty repetitions of the required text. The thirteenth message was the same, with a time stamp of 2:04PM. The fourteenth and final message was time stamped 3:26PM and also contained nothing but the required text. But looking at the time difference between the messages sent a message to Dawn all of their own. From the other side of the world Dawn could hear in her mind the wall of denial that Giles surrounded himself with cracking.

Thinking about the effect the test was having on Giles made Dawn think about the effect it had on Willow over the past week. Granted, that first time that Willow had written on the wall had been motivated by threats and emotional trauma, but still she had completed the task in four and a half hours. Which in itself was pretty amazing. Also granted was the fact that Willows initial insight had been limited to finally understanding the depth of Buffys love for Spike and that it wasn’t something that would ever go away because of the disapproval or wishful thinking of others.

But over the past week as Willow made her own self-imposed trips out into the hallway to write more repetitions of the statement of Buffys love for Spike, she had seemed to be gaining a deeper, wider, understanding of Buffys love and her reasons for feeling that Willow and the others had betrayed her at such a deep and fundamental level. The last time that Willow had gone out into the hallway to write was Monday night. She had only been out there for over an hour and had only added a hundred new repetitions. But when she came back into the apartment it had been easy to see that she had been crying and that she was deeply affected by it.

Dawn reluctantly admitted to herself that when she wasn’t mad at Willow, she loved her deeply. But she also admitted that Willow had faults as big as canyons. One of her biggest being her need to fix other peoples lives so that they could ‘be happy’. How many times had Willow tried to fix things through magic, manipulation and lies that had ended up as a disaster? The only way that Willow ever seemed to see that what she was doing was wrong was when someone beat her over the head with it. Fortunately, she hadn’t used magic to try to fix someone else’s life for a long time. But she was still guilty of using manipulation and lies when she’d tried to control Buffys life. Again, just thinking about it made Dawn angry and she had to force her thoughts away from it.

“Willow has changed. Willow is trying. Willow is making progress. Willow wants to understand.” Dawn tried to tell herself. Then in a wave of anger another thought popped to the front of Dawns thoughts, “God damn it! Willow needs a tattoo on the back of her hand that say’s “Don’t Fuck With Other Peoples Lives!!!”

Dawn found herself breathing heavily and glaring over at Willow sleeping on the couch. Taking deep breaths and clearing her mind she calmed herself down. “God, I’m so tired of being angry!” Dawn told herself. Taking more deep breaths to calm herself, another thought came to mind. With Willow moving toward ‘enlightenment’ and hopefully Giles too, Dawn wondered if she should try to put all her thoughts in order. Maybe type them up so Willow and Giles could read them. Stay away from the anger and stick to the facts and the consequences of what had happened. Dawn knew that Willow was nearly there because of what had happened during the past week. But Giles, without the knowledge of Buffys injury, or of invisible Spike and his affect on Buffy, he might be harder to convince.

Dawn had tried to make all of them understand what they had done and why it had been so wrong in the past, but it had always turned into an angry rant and had never pierced their walls of denial. Living with Willow, out of necessity, they had reached a silent agreement to not discuss it at all. At least until this past week. With Giles, Dawn had given up trying to communicate with him that summer. With Xander, Dawn had given up on him that night in this apartment when he had said such horrible things to Buffy about Spike. Not once since she had sent him away had Dawn had any form of communication with Xander. Not by phone, e-mail, letter or smoke signal. Dawns last and final words to Xander were just before Willow took him to the airport. Xander had stood there in the hotel suite they had all been sharing, opening his arms to Dawn as if he expected her to come to him and give him a good-by hug. Instead, Dawn had looked him in the eyes and told him coldly, “You’re a wanker, Xander” and had turned her back on him and gone to her room.

Pushing thoughts of Xander away, Dawn thoughts turned next to Andrew. Andrew was a mystery that Dawn couldn’t figure out. She knew Andrew, or had thought she did, and for the life of her she couldn’t understand how he had kept the secret of Spike returning to life, or unlife, from her. She knew that Andrew nearly worshiped Spike and thought he was the coolest, most exciting, handsomest, greatest vampire/hero/Champion in the world. When Spike had died at the Hellmouth, Andrew had openly cried over his loss. She knew that somehow Giles must have threatened or intimidated Andrew into not telling Dawn and Buffy. Whatever Giles had done or said it must have been very serious to keep Andrew quiet. Dawn wondered if she should give Andrew a break and contact him. She had seen the letter that Andrew had sent to Buffy when he apologized to her for not telling her about Spikes return. She had seen the tear marks on the paper that had smeared some of the words he had written. Dawn let herself admit that she had missed the little nerd.

With her mind paying a visit to all of the people that had been involved in the ‘great cover-up’, Angel came to Dawns mind last. Dawn knew how she felt about Angel. Hating Angel was the one place her anger felt a hundred percent justified. Dawn knew in her heart, without a doubt, that Angel was the reason why Spike had never contacted her or Buffy. Dawn didn’t know what Angel had said or done to stop Spike from contacting them, but she knew it was something bad, something evil.

With her mind roaming about, Dawn hadn’t noticed the passage of time. When she heard a ‘ping’ sound come from the computer she looked down and could see that a new e-mail had just arrived. Opening the e-mail she saw that it was from Giles and that the time stamp was 4:51PM. Looking down at her watch the time read 8:52AM. It had taken Giles over nine hours to type and send seven hundred lines of the ‘Buffy loves Spike’ message. The smile that spread across Dawns face showed pure satisfaction.

Dawn knew that it wasn’t the words of the ‘Buffy loves Spike’ message themselves that had taken Giles so long to type. She’d seen him at both a typewriter and a computer keyboard and knew that his typing skills were excellent. He could type page after page of a report with ease and without error. It was the subliminal message within the text that had caused the long delays between packets. Having to type the words of the message and say them out loud as he typed had forced his mind, his heart and his soul, to admit to the truth of the words. Admitting to the truth of the words had forced him to admit to himself that he had been wrong when he withheld from Buffy the knowledge that Spike had returned after the Hellmouth. Giles hated to be wrong. Giles hated to admit he was wrong. But more importantly, Giles would have hated to admit to himself that it was because of his own actions and behavior that he had broken the trust between himself and Buffy. Giles would have hated to have to admit to himself that all of the reasons and excuses regarding Spike that he had used as justifications for his action were just that, selfish reasons and insupportable excuses. But Dawn also knew that Giles must have been at least part of the way toward these realizations for the test to have effected him so strongly, so quickly.

Urged on by her perceived success with Giles, Dawn minimized the e-mail program, but left the connection open so that she would be aware of any incoming messages. She then opened up her word processing program and started typing out her thoughts. At first the going was a little slow, trying to keep the anger out of her message was difficult. She finally got past that and it was as if her thoughts were flowing from her mind to her finger tips to the keyboard. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph appeared on the computer screen. Dawn was in the middle of her fourth page of typing before she was brought out of her thoughts and back to reality by the ‘ping’ sound of an incoming e-mail message.

The sound of Dawn typing on the keyboard was actually a soothing sound to Willow and had pushed her deeper into sleep than before. I was the ‘ping’ of the incoming e-mail and the sudden stop in typing that brought her out of her sleep. Opening her eyes and seeing Dawn sitting in front of her computer didn’t surprise her, Willows unconscious mind had told her someone was typing at the computer. What surprised her was seeing Dawn dressed for school, and not being at school. Sitting up quickly, glancing over at Buffy and then back at Dawn, Willow asked with a tone of urgency in her voice, “Is something wrong?”

Dawn looked over at Willow and gave her a smile before telling her, “Nothings wrong, in fact things are really good.” Seeing the puzzled look on Willows face, Dawn clarified, “Giles just sent another e-mail. It’s taken him over ten hours to send me seven hundred and fifty copies of the ‘Buffy loves Spike’ message.”

Willow wasn’t sure why Dawn was smiling, because she thought Dawn must be disappointed in the slow response from Giles. Wanting to make Dawn feel better, Willow told her “You know, I’m sure Giles meant to do better Dawnie. It’s just that with being at the Council all day, and working, he probably couldn’t spend a lot of time on it. I’m sure that when he gets home he’ll finish it up in no time.” Willow gave Dawn an encouraging smile to try to cheer her up, just in case she was disappointed.

Dawn started laughing, but seeing the puzzled look return to Willows face she choked off the laughter so that she could explain. “Giles didn’t go to the Council today. He stayed home all day to work on the test. See Will, the longer it takes him the more effect the test has on him.”

The puzzlement that Willow had been feeling before changed to total confusion. Voicing her confusion, she said “I don’t understand?”

“See Will, the whole point of the test is to drum a subliminal message into someone’s brain. The message itself isn’t as important as the subliminal message, because the subliminal message works on a person at an subconscious level” Dawn explained.

Willow knew about subliminal messages, she did a report on them in the seventh grade. But what she remembered about them was how movie theaters flashed pictures of popcorn and soda and candy at a really high speed so that a person barely knew they were seeing them, but seeing them made them hungry and thirsty and they’d go buy stuff to eat and drink. But that couldn’t be what Dawn was talking about, could it?

Dawn had continued talking while Willows mind chased down what she remembered about subliminal messages. When she tuned back in, Dawn was saying “… so the longer it takes Giles to write out the messages the stronger the subliminal message he gets from the message.”

Willow knew that she had missed something, but didn’t know what. Still trying to understand, she said again “I don’t understand?”

Dawn could see it clearly that Willow didn’t understand what she was saying about Giles and how the subliminal message had been working on him all day as he typed out the “Buffy loves Spike” message. How it had been breaking through at a subconscious level and making him understand something he had refused to accept previously. But if she didn’t understand how it was working on Giles, then how did she understand how the message had worked on her? Or did she understand? Dawn had thought, based on what Willow had said and her behavior the past week that she did, but now she wasn’t sure.

Dawn got up from the floor and walked into the kitchen where she filled a mug full of coffee and brought it back to Willow. While Willow was taking a few sips of the coffee to wake herself up, Dawn sat back down on the floor in front of the computer. Giving Willow another minute to wake up, Dawn used the time to think about what she wanted to ask her. “Will, last week when I asked you to write on the wall” Dawn asked cautiously “how did you do that? Cause I’ve been thinking about it and I wondered how you could write all that out, a thousand lines, in a little less than four and a half hours, plus go out and get us some coffee. I mean, Giles has been working on it for ten hours and hasn’t finished yet.”

Willow didn’t even hesitate with her answer. “Oh, the writing part was easy. See, there were only eighteen words in the message, and if you count out the letters plus spaces and punctuation, there were only ninety-nine of them to remember. So once I had all of them memorized, it was like writing just one long word, and I can write really fast when I want too. It was the saying the sentences out loud that slowed me down.”

Dawn digested that for a few moments, then asked “When you were writing the sentences out, what were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t really thinking about anything while I was doing it Dawnie“ Willow explained. “I only thought about it after I was done. You know, while I went to get the coffee.”

“What were you thinking, when you were thinking about it” Dawn asked? “I remember asking you if you now knew what love was and you told me you did.”

“I was thinking that Buffy loves Spike and that she will always love Spike, and even though he’s dead now she will continue to love him forever. It’s how I feel about Tara, because I’ll always love Tara.” Willow told her.

“Okay, what about the second time you went out and wrote on the wall? I didn’t tell you to do it that time, but you went out and did it anyway, and that second time it took you five hours to write it a thousand times” Dawn commented casually. “I’d think that the second time you’d have been even faster. And the third time you were out there for three hours, but you only wrote five hundred lines. What happened?”

“Well the second time I went out” Willow told Dawn, “I was feeling kind of guilty. Buffy had been drinking a lot that day and was talking to Spike, and I was just sort of feeling bad for her, like it was partly my fault that she wasn’t talking to him for real, you know what I mean. When I went out there I’d really only intended to write a few hundred lines, but I kept feeling guilty about everything, so I just kept writing until I felt better. I guess that’s what made me slower that time, thinking about feeling guilty.”

It was then that a light seemed to light up in Willows mind and a look of sudden comprehension spread across her face. Looking over at Dawn she suddenly seemed excited. “Oh, I get it. That’s what you meant by subliminal message. Because see, after that I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d written and I kept feeling guilty. On Saturday when Buffy was feeling better and was eating and talking to us and even laughed a little a couple of times, it made me feel really good. But then she started drinking again and talking to Spike again, and I started feeling bad again. That’s when I went out the third time. I started writing thinking that it would make me feel better, sort of like saying ‘I’m sorry’, but it didn’t. The more I wrote the worse I felt. That’s why I stopped at five hundred.”

Dawn was watching Willow closely and could see that she had tears starting to form in her eyes. “Will, you keep telling me that writing on the wall was making you feel bad, and I can understand that alright. But what were you thinking?”

“You know Dawnie” Willow said as a tear escaped her eye and ran down her cheek, “you told us that what we did, not telling Buffy about Spike, was a bad thing. But I couldn’t understand that, because we weren’t trying to hurt Buffy, none of us were. All any of us wanted was for her to be happy. When Giles told us that Angel had apparently gone evil when he took over Wolfram and Hart, we all went along with that, even Buffy didn’t argue about it. So when we found out that Spike was back and working with Angel, we all thought that he had to be evil too. That’s why we didn’t tell Buffy, because we thought it would have hurt her to know that Spike was back and he was evil again. But when I started writing that stuff on the wall I kept thinking about how much Buffy loved Spike. I started thinking that we hadn’t really know for sure that Spike was evil again or not. It was only because he was with Angel that we thought so, well at least that’s why I thought so anyway. Then I started thinking about Tara, and I kept wondering what I would have thought if I’d found out that she’d come back to life and was with Angel for some reason. I mean I knew that Tara was in Heaven, but what if she did come back and for some reason was with Angel. I know that I would never have thought that she came back evil, no matter what. So that made me think that maybe Spike wasn’t evil too, but for some reason had to stay with Angel. Or maybe even Angel wasn’t really evil and Spike had to stay with him because he was needed to do something important. I mean I realize that we know all of that is true now, about Spike and Angel not being evil. But we didn’t know that then. But I kept thinking about Tara and knowing that I would never have thought she was evil, so why did I think that Spike was evil. Especially after he’d died to save the world. So I started thinking that we really had been wrong to not tell Buffy that Spike was back and alive again, and the more I thought about it the more guilty I felt about not telling Buffy the truth.”

Tears were now running down Willows face freely, her voice was choked with emotion but she continued to talk to Dawn. “It was Monday, the last time I went out to write on the wall, that everything sort of hit me real hard. Buffy had been pretty happy all day and she was in a really good mood after you brought those cheeseburgers and fries home. Even when she started drinking, she didn’t seem to be drinking as much as before, and when she started talking to Spike she seemed happy about that too. I’d been watching her and it sort of hit me that the only times I could really remember Buffy being happy in the past couple of years were the past few days when she was talking to an imaginary Spike. That’s when I went out to write on the wall again. But the whole time I was out there I kept thinking that we had kept the truth about Spike away from Buffy because we wanted her to ‘be happy’, but the only way she could have been happy was with Spike, and we took that away from her, the chance to be happy. I was standing out there thinking about that and I started to cry and couldn’t write anymore.” Willow wiped at the tears running from her eyes. Looking over at Dawn she asked in a voice that carried the pain she was feeling, “Is that what I was suppose to learn Dawnie? That we really were wrong in what we did? That we really did hurt Buffy and that she’ll never forgive us?” Willow bowed her head and buried her face in her hands as she started to cry harder.

Dawn had been affected by Willows emotional speech, but kept her own emotions under control. Dawn had something important to say to Willow and she didn’t want her own emotions to get in the way. Pulling herself together and clearing her throat, Dawn started talking to Willow with a firm and steady voice. “Willow, I don’t know if Buffy is ever going to forgive you or not. But I do know this much. Buffy won’t even think about forgiving you until she knows in her heart that you truly understand how badly you hurt her. What you did was wrong. But you didn’t just hurt Buffy, you betrayed her trust in you. Buffy loved you Willow and you broke her heart. Maybe, when Buffy knows you understand that, maybe when her heart heals, maybe then she’ll forgive you.”

Dawns words did little to sooth Willows pain as she sat there crying. But the truth of what Dawn had said to her registered loud and clear. Willow had to understand and except fully that what she and the others did to Buffy was a betrayal of her trust in them. That maybe, someday, Buffy might forgive Willow for what she had done, but not without a cost. To gain Buffys forgiveness Willow would first have to earn it by proving that she could be trusted with Buffys friendship, and love, again.

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(09/05)