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Author's Chapter Notes:
Angel and Tara talk

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Tara again woke with a start. For three days now, every time she meditated she fell asleep. She stretched and rolled her neck and shoulders, working the kinks out. A glance outside told her that daylight was waning. ‘Just enough time to not eat,' she thought wryly. It had been several days since she’d had anything substantial to eat and she was almost out of bottled water. ‘Why did I ever come back to Sunnydale?’ she wondered for what was probably the hundredth time since the First had slaughtered all of her friends - her chosen family; the one Willow had given her. Tara hung her head, her hair falling into her face. A tear trickled down her cheek. “No,” she said, the loudness of her voice in the quiet house startling her. She sighed as she walked into the kitchen. She remembered happier times with Dawn and Willow, hanging in the kitchen, eating dry cereal, burning pancakes in funny shapes and talking about whatever they were each reading at the time. Willow. She leaned against the sink and stared out at the waning daylight. She had placed a light catcher in the window and, as the last rays of the day hit it, the light fractured and created a myriad of mini-rainbows dancing over the counter. She smiled, she had always loved rainbows. As she watched the rainbow ballet her mind drifted of its own accord, trying to puzzle out why Willow was showing up in her meditation induced dreams now.

Tara grabbed a bottle of water from the coldest kitchen cabinet “ refrigeration was a thing of the past. Like real meals, hot showers, indoor plumbing and light switches that actually did something. She sighed and headed down to the basement. She cast the fairy light spell and locked the basement door, murmuring the incantations to seal the door and hide her presence from the demons that still hunted Sunnydale after dark. ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ she thought, ‘I should just let them kill me.’ She sighed again, knowing that she couldn’t do that; she had survived for a reason. She had invoked Juno’s protection and, so far, it was working. She was trying to invoke Iris to carry her message to someone . . . anyone . . . anyone who was alive - and not evil - in this wasteland that could help.

Anyone other than who she really wanted “ Willow. Willow; whose life was cut short by a stray bullet more than two years ago. Willow; who could never rescue her. Willow; who she’d never hold, nor be held by again. Willow, who she’d never be able to completely trust or forgive for betraying her with majick “ no matter how much she wanted to. She could understand dreaming about Willow; she did that often, wonderful dreams of making love and laughing and holding hands. Dreams that left her aching when she woke. What she didn’t understand was Willow looking scared and asking what she could do in these strange dreams of the last three days. Her dream self kept telling Willow, “Find me. Keep your promise.” Tara didn’t even know what her dream self was talking about, but something about the dreams was strange. She thought about it for a moment and realized they just felt so . . . real.

She pulled one of the precious few spell books that she’d found in the house toward her and began her nightly ritual of studying majick until exhaustion forced her to sleep. Nightly study had been the only way to avoid reliving that last day in her nightmares. That was another puzzling thing about the . . . dreams? visions? . . . she was getting during her daylight meditations, she wasn’t reliving that nightmarish last day; she was sitting in Buffy’s living room and Willow was just all of a sudden there, rousing Tara from her meditations but not. Tara shook her head. Of all the people she thought could or might hear her pleas, Willow wasn’t one of them. Yet Willow was the one person she most wanted to see. Maybe that’s why her meditation-mares featured Willow. She missed Will . . . every day. She was also angry. Intellectually, she knew it wasn’t Willow’s fault but she was angry. She was angry at Willow for leaving her. She was angry because she knew, without a doubt, had Willow been alive Buffy and the others would have survived, even if Willow had been so out of control with her magic that Tara half distrusted her. ‘Stop,’ she thought, ‘nothing good can come from thinking like that. I have to deal with what is . . . not what if.’

Tara closed the book with a sigh. She wasn’t really reading it, just staring at it. Too lost in her thoughts of Willow to really concentrate. “Goddess, I miss her,” she whispered to no one, finally giving in to her mental wanderings, too tired to fight for focus.

She thought about her life with Willow; from their first encounter at the WannaBlessedBe group, to their blossoming relationship, to the day Oz came back and Tara thought she’d lost Will forever. Then there was Dawnie, who had been so accepting of her. She’d have done anything for Dawn, and had done by refusing to tell Glory about her. She had understood Dawn; living in the shadow of the Slayer, part of her inner circle yet not. When Buffy died after the battle with Glory, it had seemed only natural that she and Willow move in to raise Dawn so the Department of Social Services wouldn’t find out Dawn was an orphan. They also kept the Buffybot running so the bad guys wouldn’t know The Slayer was gone. Tara felt tears well up in her eyes; they’d been a family. Even after they brought Buffy back, she and Willow had stayed. Tara smiled as she remembered how hard Dawn had taken her breakup with Willow; and how elated she'd been when they’d reconciled. Dawn, who never saw them as anything but two people she loved who loved her; no judgments, no disapproval. Tara sighed. She often thought about her reunion with Willow; she relived those last four days over and over wondering . . . what if? ‘What if’ I hadn’t told Willow that Sarah was just a friend? I hadn’t agreed to coffee? I hadn’t gone to the house that night, hoping to reconcile? “Stop this,” she said out loud, “‘what if’ leads to madness. So what if none of that happened and Willow still got killed? Then I’d be sitting somewhere berating myself for not reconciling with her when I had the chance.” She sighed again. “What’s done, is done. What is, not what if,” she reminded herself for the millionth time.

A noise upstairs roused Tara from her musings. Mentally checking the seal on the door, she repeated the incantation that hid her presence. She heard the doorknob rattle, then a soft knock. A knock? Since when did demons knock?

“Tara?” came a quiet inquiry.

“Angel?” she asked, quietly moving up the stairs.

“Yeah, it’s me. I’ve got food and water . . . and a cow.”

“A cow?”

“You know . . . for me.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“Um, you gonna unward the door?”

“What’s the password?”

“Fantastico. Unless you changed it. Then it’s hippopotamus.”

Tara opened the door and let Angel in. She then re-sealed the door and the two of them walked downstairs.

“Here,” he said, smiling as he handed her a can of tuna and a package of crackers from the bags he was holding.

“Thanks. Where did you hide the cow?” she asked, opening the tuna’s flip top and the crackers.

“Out back in the greenhouse,” he answered as he began putting the rest of the supplies away. “There are more upstairs but we can get those in the morning. Oh. Here,” he said, handing her a bag of dry cat food.

“Oh. Cool. Thanks.” She opened the bag and smiled as Miss Kitty came running to her bowl. She looked back at Angel. “You were gone a lot longer this time. Is everything . . . well, not okay but . . . okay?”

“Yeah, I just took some time to try and get info from some of my old friends. Not much new. The First’s minions are still running rampant. There are pockets of resistance but it’s mostly hopeless. Those that aren’t killed outright are being warehoused as food for the uber-vamps. I took out one of the warehouses, freed the people. I was on my way back in a, uh, borrowed car and came upon an old man struggling with a Turok-han.” He filled Tara in on his encounter with the Kalderash family. Then he looked at her. “I don’t know where we can go. For now, this is as safe as anywhere else is. Maybe safer, since this town has pretty much been a ghost town since even before the big battle. How are your invocations going?”

Tara looked at Angel for a long moment. She still couldn’t believe he had shown up a week after the big battle and pulled her from the rubble of the new high school. He said he’d come to see if there were any survivors in Sunnydale after The First's uber-vamps had shown up in Los Angeles. Tara had cried when they’d discovered that she was the only survivor. She had wept for her lost family . . . and for failing them. Angel had helped her throug, bringing her food and water. The two of them had originally left Sunnydale, hoping to find someplace not overrun with the First’s hoards. Something drew her back to Sunnydale; maybe the mystical pull of the Hellmouth, maybe just the memories of the only real home she’d ever known. Once they got back, Angel had helped her build a greenhouse to grow the herbs she’d need for her spells and potions. It was during the slow construction process, built in the two hours before dawn and the the two hours after sunset, that they had become more than companions-out-of-necessity. They’d become a kind of a team.

She still wasn’t sure why he had helped her or why he continued helping her. They had only met briefly, at Willow’s funeral, before this. She knew who he was, and he had obviously known who she was, but they hadn’t been friends. Even now, they were allies but were they really friends? How much should she tell him? She sighed and decided to trust him; if they weren't friends, they were damn close and he was all she had. “Well I’m still safe so that invocation is working . . . ”

“And the other one? The messenger?”

“Here’s the thing . . . every t-t-time I-I start the chant . . . I s-s-seem to fall asleep and then . . . W-W-Willow is there asking how she can help.” Tara looked at Angel, expecting him either to tell her she was crazy or to start laughing at her.

He did neither. Looking thoughtful he asked, “How many times is every time? When did this start?”

“A-about three days ago. And I’ve tried three or f-four times each day. And every time, it’s the same.” Tara’s stutter lessened as she began to feel more comfortable confiding in Angel. “I’m chanting, invoking Juno and Iris. Then, i-it’s like I fall asleep, you know? And then Willow is just, like, there. And I wake up, but not. And she’s asking what she can do to, you know, help.” Tara told Angel everything she could remember. She told him that each time their interactions were essentially the same but the last couple of times the contact was more sustained. “Then I wake up but it all feels so, you know, real.” Tara yawned.

“Ok. Let’s get some rest and talk more in the morning. You look exhausted.”

Tara nodded and lay down on her bed; Miss Kitty curled up behind her knees. Her last conscious thought was of Willow.
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Chapter End Notes:
Next Week: Willow's Bogeymen
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