ethrosdemon ||| Buffy & Angel

Willowness
by ethrosdemon

Email: naturallycalm@yahoo.com
Distribution: You don't want this
Disclaimer: Joss made it up, too bad he is an incompetent ninny.
Rating: PG-13
Dedication: To Criss who babied me through an fricking Improv. To Lar who is absent. To Fiona who is asleep.
Improv: moving -- boxed -- wistful - wine
Spoilers: Tabula Rasa

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Little people moving through little lives. Nothing beyond eat, sleep, work, play impacting them, nothing registering in their daily lives. Another night walking down the sidewalk wondering which person will be a meal before they step too far out of the haze of a street light, Willow picks her feet up off the pavement, right foot, left foot, repeat, repeat. Lives in squares, boxed existence, and she can vaguely remember that. Ephemeral recall of her life before. Mainly, the pictures she can draw up are of sheet forts in her living room and feeling wrong, out of place, unimportant, scared. Not so different from the life after. Now, her fears are concrete, they have names and markers, and she can count them off one by one, her own little Indians.

Taking up and using space now, just mass, weight and height and density. What and who she is called into question now, and she can't escape that. Nothing at her core. Just like the people on the street corner waiting for the light to change, but she knows her insubstance, feels it as an absence of meaning and purpose. Craving all the time for what no one can give her. What she can't find in herself. What only comes from outside, from the reflection of herself in others and from the magic.

She flutters in and out of the crowds in a looping circuit. Past the Bronze, back towards the Espresso Pump and the more livid lights of downtown. She watches for nothing in particular, so many things at once: Tara to come running, Buffy killing something, Giles with his guitar case, Xander and Anya arm in arm, Oz incongruously meandering. Sees none of those, but feels the tingling in her fingertips and keeps on walking walking walking, on the street where there are no bundles of sage, no rosemary bouquets or tacky lumps of myrrh. Just her body pushing itself forward and her mind falling through the avoidance levels. Level four is wistful remembrances of times past, and that's where she's been since she saw Mark from her chem. class in 11th grade. Mark and his girlfriend, human enough looking she thinks they escaped graduation, and that thought takes her to the grey/green scales on the Mayor after he changed; the Mayor always makes her think of Faith these days, Faith and the apricot lip gloss she borrowed once; thoughts of apricot segue to the faint flavor of mangoes on the back of her tongue, and that's her porch with Jesse in the summer, sticky and laughing; Jesse is always paired with Xander, and she completes the triangle, later in the summer, the three of them on the floor of the Harris' kitchen as Mrs. Harris slops wine into her hair from above.

The smell of alcohol as she passes the only homeless person she's seen in town this year might have brought out that last memory. She considers hexing the bearded, bedraggled man into possessing a sudden desire to go to Phoenix, but she doesn't. Just places her feet one in front of the other, burning off the need to change the world with her own hand, bend the will of others to her own desires. But it's such a beautiful world she longs to make. No pain, no death, no grieving, just pleasant nights in front of the t.v. with old movies and the day always saved. She doesn't think that's such a bad way to reorder things.

She walks and wonders why no one sees how good she could make life, if they let her. She doesn't get why it's all good to use magic when it's about killing and not when it's about easing. Why others get to make the rules, others who don't live with magic inside them, crackling in their synapses and burning through their skin. Just prosaic minds stuck in rigid patterns of right and wrong, and she knows what social norms can do to a person, how they can subvert someone's true nature. Even when there's love and well-meaning behind an act or words, it doesn't make it right in the bigger picture. She had her run in with that truth, and she figures that she might not be the only one who's wrong, who's just trying to be right and helpful and just ends up being plain misguided. Magic is who she is, and who's to say that what she is wrong?



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