#anyone: even breathes the word della and lesbian in the same sentence

[ducktales--uwu]

For anyone not on twitter, I’m having a grand old time rn

[dykexanderharris]

heartache, i’ve heard, is part of life

(kennedy/willow, heavy mention of tara/willow)

Post-Chosen

It’s May and it’s only been a couple weeks since you watched her hair turn white with magic and felt centuries of the slayer line run through you. It’s May and she hasn’t said it but you think it’s been one year since the last woman she loved died. You have a few reasons for thinking that.

One of the big ones is that it’s May and You’ve learned that May being Apocalypse Month is one of the Scoobies’ favourite jokes. Since Willow was the cause of the last Apocalypse, you figure Tara probably died almost exactly a year ago. There’s also the thing where Xander and Buffy have both been big with the hovering for the last few days. You get wanting to be with friends after a near-apocalypse, you’ve spent a lot of time with Rona and Vi since Sunnydale turned into a crater, but Xander and Buffy have nearly attached themselves to Willow.

But the biggest hint is the way Willow is quiet. In the few months that you have gotten to know her, Willow has been a lot of things, most of them amazing, a few of them kind of terrifying. None of them is quiet. She can be shy occasionally and she can overthink which can look like quiet, but you can always tell that it’s not actually quiet since her eyes do this really cute and expressive thing where it kind of looks like she’s trying to figure out the worlds secrets.

Right now she looks quiet. She talks with same vernacular that you’ve grown so fond of and she smiles at you every time she catches you staring. But she looks quiet and her eyes don’t look complicated at all and there’s sadness there, more than usual. You’re not worried in the stressed and panicking sense, you’re just worried in the concerned that she isn’t talking to anyone about her dead girlfriend.

You recognize that you are definitely someone she can come to, but that she probably wouldn’t be big for conversing with her girlfriend that she accused of making her forget about her dead girlfriend - turning into the man she killed or not -about said dead girlfriend. So, you hope that Willow’s talking to someone but you have an inkling that she’s not going to talk to Buffy or Xander since they both have more recent dead loved ones. You doubt she’d talk to Daw, especially since Dawn has been kind of an asshole to both of you since she realized that the two of you aren’t just screwing because of your common experience of pre-apocalypse lesbianism. You wish you had her confidence, because even you aren’t convinced of that fact.

Th point is, you care, a lot, about Willow. And whether it’s been a year since Tara died or if the grief is just heavier now that there isn’t magic recovery or a First Evil to fight, you want to be there for her. So, when she comes out of the bathroom and into your room, towelling her hair, you just smile at her and invite her to come sit with you.

You listen to her breathe for a while as she flips through a handwritten journal, leaning your head on her shoulder you recognize most of the handwriting as Willow’s but there a more hurried and loopy script running through the pages along her steady and colourful words. You feel when her cheeks life with her smiles as she reads and thanks to your newly enhanced slayer hearing, you can hear the frequency with which she starts swallowing when she comes across full pages of the blue and loopy words.

Feeling her shift as she runs her finger along the edge of the page you shift with her, looking up to her. Softly, you ask, “Tell me about her?”

When Willow looks down, the same quiet in her face as the last few days but a small confusion, you clarify. “Tara. And only if you want to. I know you say you two were private and I respect that, but grief is hard and it’s harder when you don’t talk about it. So, if it’s okay with you, you can tell me about her. Or I can get Xander or Buffy and you can talk to them.”

Willow smiles at you and you really wish this warm feeling in your chest would stop popping up every time she looks at you because you don’t want to be the stereotypical lesbian who says I love you on the third date but she makes it easy. And she pauses and swallows again, and then she closes the journal and looks at you. And she says, “Are you sure?”

And you’re not, because you have this tendency to get jealous about stupid things and you don’t want to put yourself in a place where you might end up jealous of a dead girl and that would be stupid. But you say yes anyway because the hope in her eyes makes it clear she needs this. And Tara sounds like a good person from every account you’ve ever heard about her, plus you’ve got that whole loving Willow thing in common, so she seems like the kind of person you would’ve wanted to know if you could’ve.

With your confirmation, Willow tells you about her. She tells you about her as in the way that she loved horror movies even though she basically lived in one. You learn that Tara used to always get on both Willow and Dawn’s backs about eating healthy but she always kept gummy bears in her backpack in case it turned into a bad day. You listen when Willow admits that Tara thought the two of them were dating weeks before Willow realized she was gay and she laughs with you when you tease her.

And then she tells you about the journal on her lap. It started as just a catalogue of demons and meals and spells and little anecdotes from her daily life but eventually became the story of her and Tara, written out in their own handwriting. Willow mostly tells you about Tara teasing her about how she writes like she talks - in circles until someone tells her it’s okay to stop. You smile into Willow’s shoulder when she points to a period after a run on sentence that lasted over two pages long that is a different colour that the rest of the pages.

She goes through each page and tells you some of the stories and keeps some to herself, and from Willow’s account you can see how everyone views Tara as a perfect person because she seems pretty amazing. But then, a couple months into the journal, Willow starts flipping through pages written in black ink - an odd occurrence when previous pages were pinks or sparkly blues or lime green - with incantations and spells and ingredients and frustrated scribbles. You feel the way she tenses and she tells you about Glory who had made Tara go literally crazy and how she spent days pouring over texts just trying to find something to bring her back and how because of that Buffy died. You don’t correct her, it’s a different battle for a different day, but you do relish in her smile when the loopy writing is back.

There’s a page with some stranger ingredients and Willow tells you it’s the spell that brought Buffy back. You note the different coloured question mark next to the ingredient “vino della madre”. Now Tara’s notes are smaller than before, things like ‘dork’ when Willow pours over how much she loves Tara in the pages. you laugh are surprised that you have felt no jealousy, just sadness that Willow, and everyone, lost her. But you watch as Tara disappears from the margins, not abrupt like last time, but slower, until her only input are small drawings. And eventually she’s gone, and there’s a page that’s been scratched out but you see the way it bleeds onto the next page and figure it wasn’t the prettiest breakup. Willow confirms to you that it wasn’t, she tells you every step she took that ended up with her turning into a terrible and abusive person.

That’s one of the things about her that scares you sometimes, but you don’t need to think about that now. Willow flips through more pages, some of them black, some with colourful writing and fewer and fewer with spells, some with small self-affirmations. And you tease her for it and she blushes and you love her, in all your own stereotypical lesbian glory. She gets to the last page of the journal. Not the last page in the physical journal but you can tell it’s the last one in the way she looks at it.

And the last pages are all Willow, one is about a serum to help Buffy and the other two are about Tara. And then, proving your theory about the day she died, on a page dated May 7th, 2002, in purple ink is one sentence. ‘I love you, always, even when I’m not around.’

Willow gasps as she reads it, and you watch her gasp turn into a sob and she starts crying. You didn’t expect this conversation to end anywhere else, so you hold her and tell her it’s okay until she calms down. She shakes her head, as if to deny what just happened. Then she shrugs, “I’m sorry. It’s just, this,” She points at the journal, “and a couple pictures are the only proof that she was ever...”

She trails off and you get it. You don’t get it, but you think of Amanda who was younger then you but who reminded you of your sister so much and now she’s just a body in a hole that the government plans to fill with cement with no proof that you ever even knew her. You know, somewhere with her is Anya and Spike and Tara.

But Willow’s wrong, because Amanda is the one who encouraged you to forgive Willow, and wherever this goes, Amanda is part of the choices you make. So you kiss her cheek and place you hand on her other one, wiping away the tears there with your thumb. And you nod, “You’re right, she was a whole person and now all that’s left is notes in a journal and a couple pictures. But you forgot something.”

At Willow’s confusion, you continue. “You’re still here, and Dawn’s still here pissed off on Tara’s behalf. She’s gone but she’s still here. So, yeah, it is unequivocally shitty that she doesn’t get to be here so that the world gets to know her. But the world gets to know you and Dawn and Buffy and everyone else that got to know Tara. And I think, that’s plenty since she’s supposed to be my competition or whatever and I think I might like her more than I like you.”

Your last words are teasing and Willow smiles at you, though her eyes are serious. She leans her forehead against yours, running her hand through your hair and sighs wetly. “You’re kind of amazing, you know that?”

And you smirk at her. “I did actually, but thanks for the ego boost.”

It’s easier like this, when you can say serious things but end the conversations lightly and don’t have to sit with the discomfort. Willow shifts to kiss you and is crying when she pulls away. “Thank you.”

And you could say it now, that you love her. That you’ll follow her wherever she wants to go once the apocalypse hangover is gone. But as much as you’re comfortable being a stereotype, you’re not an idiot. You’ve been given what you consider to be the extraordinary gift of getting to date Willow Rosenberg, most powerful witch in this hemisphere. You’re not going to mess that up with as something as stupid as saying you love her off the hinges of a conversation about the dead love of her life. So, you just smile.