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A Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes
by Kyra Cullinan
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: All of season six.
Summary: This is not a story about Tara.
Disclaimer: Willow, et al. belong to Joss/ME. The title is taken from
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by John Lennon.
Notes: Many thank yous to Ames, Scynneh and Julie for beta
wonderfulness. Also to Henry James for "The Turn of the Screw" and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman for "The Yellow Wallpaper," both of which are
simply superb and should be read as soon as possible.
*
"And should she survive, you ought to know. There's no guarantee she'll be
as she was. Willow killed a human being, Buffy. How will she be able to
live with herself?" -- Giles, 'Grave'
*
Tara comes most often at dusk. She slips in as the light leaves and
gathers in the corners with the long evening shadows. The colors of her
eyes and mouth are bright smudges against the white curve of her face,
indistinct. Her hair when she moves is a sweep of light which flutters at
the edges of Willow's sight.
Tara likes to sit very still and let the shadows drip through her fingers
and she won't answer when Willow tries to talk to her. She looks instead
at the wallpaper and the floor and the darkening sky through the
window. Sometimes she looks sad, but sometimes she bites her lips to hide
her smiles.
If Willow tries to touch her she vanishes silently, leaving behind no flash
of light or rush of disturbed air, only a sudden coldness which pools
darkly in Willow's stomach.
At night, sometimes, she'll wake to the sound of quiet crying and sit up to
see the dim outline of Tara sitting hunched on the floor in the exact spot
where the dark pool of her blood had stained the carpet. She is always
facing away, her shoulders bent and Willow calls her Tara and baby and
sweetheart until her own voice is breaking, unable to fill the spaces
between low sobs. The first time, she switched on the light, and Tara's
head whipped around before she was suddenly gone, leaving the image of her
near-featureless face burned in Willow's mind.
*
During the day, Willow sits and reads Tara's textbooks, left in her
backpack by the door. Carefully traces her fingers over the highlighted
sentences, the bright notes of color amid the black and white lines of
text. She likes when Tara comes then, because she's warm and hovers
close. If Willow's very still, she'll sit at the other end of the bed and
hum until the sunlight filling the room seems almost too intense to
bear. Willow's almost memorized the contents of the faded blue notebook
from the same bag. She reads over and over the hastily scrawled pages of
notes taken in class and neater outlines for untaken finals. Drinks in the
soft curves of Tara's handwriting. Looks at the doodled runes and designs
in the margins, the calendar with jotted notes about Dawn and
movies. Buffy's birthday party. Thinks about the sweet give of paper
beneath her fingertips, the rush of ink across her skin.
*
Willow doesn't know how long it is before Tara starts talking to her.
"We need more milk," she says one day, standing beside the window and
looking out into the yard. "My mother always loved the name Tara," she
tells the curtains when Willow asks her what she said. It's a little like
after Glory hurt her, but everything she says makes sense, just for the
wrong time. It takes Willow a while to work it out, but when she does it
makes her scalp prickle. No matter how carefully she listens, Tara never
says anything she didn't say when she was alive.
"This would be a sneaky cat," she laughs when Willow's waking up. "Funny
shapes or rounds?" she says when Willow comes back from the shower in the
evening.
*
The evenings are when Xander comes. Not always, but she can't seem to keep
track of patterns lately. Weeks slowly bleeding together.
"Hey, Will," he says, with his tentative smile, and sits in a chair across
from her. He talks about work, what the foreman said and how they've just
moved to a new site, and the movie he took Dawn to see last week. "You
should go with us, sometime," he says hesitantly and Willow smiles and says
she'll think about it while Tara sits behind him on the desk.
"No, Xander's a sweetie," she says, smiling into Willow's eyes like she
knows what she's saying. Xander says they're going to be reopening
Sunnydale High and Willow can't stop looking at Tara's translucent fingers
twirling her hair.
*
In the middle of the night she wakes from a dream about Warren to see
Tara's eyes widened in terror, her lips sewed unevenly shut by heavy, black
thread. It takes her a moment to realize she's the one screaming, and Tara
is gone by the time Buffy bursts into the room.
*
Willow still remembers things she's read about hauntings during research
sessions in the library or the Magic Box. Facts are all she has left in
the strangely empty void where her power used to lie curled and glittering,
and even those don't always make sense. She feels like an engine with a
few missing parts, broken somehow. Even when she can draw to her tongue
the words of power which used to dance through her mind, they fall flat and
lifeless from her mouth, sluggish and unmagical. Sometimes magic itself
seems like a pretty dream she once made up. She does remember how to
exorcise a ghost, with clarity bred by years of studiousness. The number
of candles needed, which herbs to use, the volume with the most easily
adaptable spells. She turns to look at Tara sitting beside the bookshelf
and knows she would never, never, never.
*
Dawn comes in some afternoons with the same hopeful smile Xander
wears. Chatters away. Janice broke up with her boyfriend. The CDs she
got for her birthday.
"Maybe we can go to the mall sometime," she says. "It'd be nice to get
out, don't you think?" Willow watches the way her eyes carefully glance
away from corners of the room, dart away from where Tara's standing and
thinks 'She *knows*.' She wants to shake Dawn until she admits she can see
Tara too, can feel the soft, almost not there brush of her skirt when she
walks past.
"I do worry about her sometimes," Tara says from beside the wardrobe and
did Dawn's lips tighten? Soon she leaves and Tara laughs and talks about
hoppy toads and Willow feels her skin tingling when Tara moves close.
*
There are things Willow should be keeping track of, she thinks. Days, and
how many of them are going by. The voices which talk low in the hall
outside her door. Tara giggles close beside her.
She dreams about the sound of skin ripping from flesh, the instantaneous
severing of a million infintessimal sinews she knows about in infinite
detail from years of honors science classes. She wakes to a familiar,
nauseating smell, a pressure on the bed beside her, the low, drawn-out moan
of female agony. Her skin prickles and terror freezes her in place until
she can't even open her eyes and gradually, mercifully it fades away.
*
"Fall is my favorite season," says Tara from near the window. She flickers
and is beside the bed, talking to the air, to a past Willow. "No, I like
your hair like that, sweetie," she smiles.
Willow sits in the bottom of the wardrobe with the doors open, curling her
fingers inside the cuffs of Tara's sweater, her bare toes on the
carpet. Tara's clothes are softer than hers, which scratch and bind her
skin. Tara's clothes smell like she did and hang loose and soft on
Willow's body. ("You're getting all skinny," Dawn said with a nervous
little smile and Willow almost jumped when she touched her wrist. "Strong
like an Amazon," nodded Tara at the kitty picture on the wall.)
"-- unexpected repercussions," says Giles in the hall.
"This is the room where you don't have to be brave," Tara says, and she's
sitting cross-legged on the floor almost directly across from
Willow. Tara's favorite skirt is soft around Willow's legs. It brushes
against her ankles like a kiss.
*
She hates when people come in, passing between her and Tara, always
talking. She tries to listen, but their voices are murky and it's hard to
pay attention when Tara is laughing like clear water.
"Willowhand," says Tara in her ear, and Buffy frowns and goes away again.
Outside her door, Giles is talking and talking. Voices humming low and
somber. Tara flits around the room, a sparkling pinprick of light and
Willow smiles and follows her with her eyes.
If she tells, they'll make Tara go away, with all their spells and
chanting. Giles and his books, Anya always ready with supplies.
"I'll never tell them, baby," she swears. "Never, ever."
*
All the colors of sunset stream and catch in Tara's eyelashes, which blink
down and then up languidly, transfixing Willow with their delicacy and
detail.
Giles looks different, faded, like soon she'll be able to see the furniture
through him. Worn. He tries to touch her face but no, no, no, it's a
trick, they want to make Tara go away.
She loves the sound of the door clicking shut behind him more than
anything, because it makes the walls whole again, no great, gaping darkness
of the hallway outside.
Tara is beaming as she sings about being bathed in light, clear notes
sparkling toward the ceiling. In the middle of the room, Willow dances
with her, twirling and twirling and twirling.
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