Take To The Sky
By
Sister Cassie
Feedback: Praaaaise me, for I am back in the fic world. And stuff.
Summary: Post season seven. Willow did powerful magic. Why didn’t we see the repercussions of it?
Rating: Rish I guess.
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Joss and Noxious. I own nothing. Title is a Tori Amos song, which all should look up because she’s a genius and a goddess and all that lovely stuff.
Dedication: LJ, for all the sappy reasons in the world. And to Kat, for giving me some of the best praise ever in IM. And to Alex, for being a lovely breast. Yes, it’s a compliment that few will understand…
Everyone drifted.
Drifted, gravitated away from her. Physically, emotionally, it didn’t matter. They slowly exited Willow’s life like the varied six months to seven years that they had spent together meant nothing, was nothing to them. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was nothing to them.
All the power she possessed couldn’t strip away the bare essentials of Willow, the Warren beneath the surface.
They had saved the world. She had given them all the ability to do so. Plunged into magicks that far exceeded even her own comprehension of everything she understood magic to be, solely to help Buffy. Gone back to a place she never wanted to be again, and had in essence given the recovering crack addict within a large overdose of the purest, strongest cocaine in existence.
And no one cared enough to look, to see her, to see that she didn’t fall off the wagon completely.
They had all temporarily stopped in the nearest no name town, to rest and recuperate. To grieve over the friends they had lost. To try and figure out exactly what to do next, exactly what the word “freedom” meant.
But there was really no such thing as freedom.
Everyone that survived the battle had the knowledge, the skill, and the ability to fight, protect and save the world. Evil never dies, never goes away, will always be trying to tip the proverbial scale into its favor, to overrun the world with creatures from hell. The First was corporal, was indestructible and they all had to know that.
They had won the battle. But they could never win the war.
They’d all become as jaded as Willow one day, when they had seven years of fighting with nothing to show for it but dead friends, a dead lover, darkness rooted in her very being and scars she never wanted anyone to be able to see.
She had watched them leave. Andrew went first, had taken with him a few of the girls, now slayers, who all wanted to go to the remotest possible place in the world where they could sit on a beach and sip fruity tropical drinks. A vacation. Where they thought they could escape everything that had happened to them, everything that they now were. Where they would desperately grasp on to the tiny bit of normalcy that came right after an averted apocalypse, the calm before the next impending storm.
But Hell would follow them to the ends of the earth, and the cycle would begin again.
It always did.
Xander hadn’t left her, not in the strictest sense. The physical sense, he was still there, with her, with all of them, carrying on living but never really living at all. She knew about going through the motions of life, knew what it felt like to lose someone that you cared for more than you could explain. She had lost Tara, and he had lost Anya, much in the same way. Fast, brutal, horrifying and real.
But she had lost Anya too. She often wondered if when he looked at her, if he knew that, if he knew how much she’d really cared.
And then she wondered if he cared anymore.
The other girls, new slayers, went to the various parts of the world that they called home. Went back to their families, or to the people that they loved. To protect them, to keep them safe from what they now knew was really lurking in the dark, what was everywhere and could be fought, but never beaten. They would return to the places, cities or towns just like Sunnydale that they came from, be the sole protector, guardian of the night. And slowly, slowly but surely they would gain an air of superiority, would take the power that they were given and build an altar on which those they loved would be required to worship them at.
They would become Buffy.
Giles and Dawn, Watcher and his protégé, planned to start, rebuild a new Watcher’s council, stateside. To bring those few watchers who survived Caleb’s attack on the council into it. To train new watchers, to seek out all the slayers and help them in their duties, not in the overbearing, domineering way the previous council had run, but in the way Giles had helped Buffy, before Buffy became who she was today.
Or before whom Buffy had always been really came to the surface.
They, the Scoobies, despite their better judgement, moved, together, to Cleveland, to the other Hellmouth. Dawn had had an idea of a slayer school of sorts, of combining the Watcher’s Council with a training center for slayers, a place for them to go to harness and master all the powers that they had. And who better to teach them the skills they need than Buffy?
If Willow had a list of names, Buffy’s would be at the bottom.
The school and council was in the process of being made, being planned, molded down to the very last detail by everyone around her. It gave them something to do. Because there was nothing left. Nothing but sitting, remembering, recovering. Grieving. Feeling lost.
Drifting.
She didn’t know if she imagined it or not, if she was really losing all those she loved and cherished. If the fear she had managed to have since Buffy entered her life, the fear of losing their friendship, of losing her was really coming to pass. It didn’t really matter, though. Because she felt it, felt her and everyone else slipping away, and it was real to her.
And it didn’t matter because she never had her to begin with.
But she had Kennedy, Kennedy who had encouraged her magic use, who had believed she was strong enough to manage the magic she had needed to use on several occasions. Her kite string, the woman, slayer who had promised her she’d tether her and never let her fly away.
Kite strings weren’t the strongest tether in the world.
Willow loved her because she was different from what she had known. Different from Xander because she saw, noticed, and had from the beginning wanted Willow, and only Willow. Different from Tara in the way that she was outspoken, confident, supportive, even though she shouldn’t have been. Different from Buffy because she wasn’t a slayer, wasn’t but had the potential to be. The closest to Buffy she would ever be able to have.
But now she was.
Willow knew that was the problem, knew that because Kennedy had been called she couldn’t be with her, be what Kennedy needed and wanted, because Kennedy was no longer what she wanted.
She was a slayer. But she wasn’t Buffy, was nothing like her, the element of Buffy gone, morphed into something else entirely. Something Kennedy.
Something no longer Buffy at all.
She found herself laughing, a laugh that bordered on hysterically bursting into tears as she eased past an invisible barrier into a nameless building, feeling a delicious tingle of magic course through her.
It never felt the same as the first from a place like this.
Places like Rack’s, places that she once again frequented, that she now found herself standing in, were everywhere. Places where people who were as close to being like her as possible went to. Strung out magic addicts. Desperate despair, utter hopelessness was always blanketing the air, suffocating her, and she felt as if she breathed it in, each and every hard, painful time that she inhaled. She knew that they felt it too, knew that they were there to be free, to be something that can never exist in reality, but were willing to settle for altered consciousness, if only for a moment.
Why else would anyone go there?
She never had to wait, always able to go back, to see a nameless, faceless man that in her mind was always replaced with Rack. A man who had an fraction of the power she had, a man who she wanted to laugh at, hysterical, manic laughter because they both new he was nothing in comparison to her, knew that he’d never be able to give her what she wanted, needed, craved.
She let him touch her anyway.
Magic, darkness coursed through her body, elevated every sense she had, gave her a high that paled in comparison to the high she felt when she made the potentials slayers. Paled so considerably that she knew it wasn’t worth the time, the cost, that it wouldn’t come close to what she had felt, wanted to feel forever but would never feel again. The moment was gone, the memory fading and the craving turning into desperate need.
So desperate that she would tap into every magical source in every dimension she knew of to feel it. Would destroy everything that she was to gain the unattainable.
It was her fastest ticket out of here, out of one hell and into the next.
She couldn’t be saved. Not again. The slayers she created would be the ones to destroy her.
She was the next apocalypse.