It clearly didn’t mind if she was tired or not, for it kept pulling at her, tugging insistently, demandingly, and, more than anything else, uncaringly. She was lying on the bed, knees bunched up against her breast and arms tucked in between, waiting for sleep. In a way, it was a protective pose, a “guarding-my-own-heart” kind of thing; even if she knew it was all quite useless, for her heart had already suffered its share.
It didn’t care about that either… because it wasn’t rational at all. It was a force, a pulling and pushing force and one couldn’t argue against it. One could either follow its urges or refrain from doing it, and both had ugly consequences. Now she was discovering the consequences of the latter, which chose pain as a way of expression.
Pain was a funny thing. One usually feared pain, but it had become a kind of companion to her lately. It’s not the only thing I have, she chastised herself; there was no need to be that auto-compassionate. But pain was one thing that made her feel. If it hurts, I’m still alive, she told herself constantly, like a scratched record. It wasn’t the only thing that made her feel, though, but it was the only one she deserved. So she held on to it.
It was demanding again, like a hungry, big mouth. “Let me out”, it would say, even if it possessed no voice - what it wanted was to speak through her, but she wasn’t going to give up her voice again. Never again she would surrender her will, her feelings… her hands. Those hands were still drenched in blood - metaphorically speaking, but that was just as bad. As bad as it could get in karmic terms, wasn’t it? She had done enough already; she had hurt everyone she loved, everyone that loved her.
But who did they love? Geeky, inadequate, spazzy Willow? Xander loved her no matter what, no matter how scary, dark or veiny she got, meaning that under all that “makeup” there was still lots of geeky Willow to be found. Was that what it meant? After all that time, after all she’d done to herself and others… she was still that Willow. There were no disguises left for her to use. She was Willow, just Willow, sleeping in Buffy’s bed, like a coward child snuggling in Mommy’s bed. Still, to be Willow, “just Willow”… she didn’t know the meaning of that, and couldn’t figure it out either.
She was this body in pain, all huddled up and confused. She tried to be just that, her body, only her body, because what confused her was her mind. However, it wanted everything, the whole package: her body and mind, all her cells and every one of the hairs on her head. It wanted Willow whole, to make a vessel out of her and be free again. But that’s not what I am. That’s just making a dark, scary thing out of me.
Oh yeah, she’d thought about it a lot, and she would never surrender again. They were old friends alright. It was not just the power, but the power: pure, dark, overwhelming. She knew how it lured, how it promised and even how it tasted. They say alcohol lubricates the brain, but that was nothing - nothing compared to what that kind of power did.
Finally, she was allowed a break, and fell asleep.
“This is so unsystematic,” Willow said, shaking her head and clucking her tongue dismissively.
“What does that mean?” Buffy asked, placing a hand on her shoulder to make her crouch lower.
“You know, when systems go ‘poof’,” Willow drew little semi-circles with her hands to explain the metaphorical explosion.
“I don’t know what that means either.”
“It means that there’s no order, that this is messy,” Willow answered, tiredly. Not only were they stealthily moving on all fours, getting their hands and knees all muddy so that the demon wouldn’t spot them, but Buffy was being a dummy language-wise - and a stubborn dummy at that.
They continued dragging themselves along the sloppy ground for a while, and all Willow could think about was the wrongness of the whole situation. Why had the cemetery turned into a pit of mud? Where were all the tombstones?
“Plus there’s a serious lack of grass here,” Willow grumbled. “There should be grass.”
“What does the demon look like?” Buffy squinted and scanned their surroundings. “Is it ugly?”
“God, no! Buffy, how can you say that? It’s beautiful, and I wish you wouldn’t hunt her with that.” She pointed at an enormous sword that had appeared out of nowhere in Buffy’s ready hand.
The Slayer jumped to a standing position and grabbed the sword with both hands - much like a baseball bat- and tensed her arms, ready for action. “I’m sorry, Will,” she said, “but this is what I do. If I see it, I’ll have to kill it.”
Willow scrambled to her feet as fast as she could and laid a hand on Buffy’s arm. “But she didn’t hurt me or anything, why do you have to kill her?”
“Because the means always justify the ends. And how did we go from ‘it’ to ‘she’, Will?”
“Because she’s a girl-demon. And shouldn’t it be ‘because the ends always justify the means’?”
“You’re still not seeing the big picture. You got to step back a little,” she began pushing Willow. “Go on, step back.”
Willow stumbled several steps backwards until her feet settled. She shook her head and saw that she had been inserted inside a radically different scenery, and Buffy had vanished. It was a dark room, a crypt, full of dust - no, not dust...
Ashes. She was ankle-deep in ashes.
How could this be the big picture?
“Could you clean up this room?” a voice asked, filling up the whole crypt. She knew the voice, however, at the same time, it was different.
“Well, it’s not my job,” Willow answered, glancing down at the dark-grey, floaty piles.
“I’m not talking about jobs. I’m talking about duty,” the voice said. “Will you? When the time comes, will you clean up the ashes?”
Willow blinked her eyes several times and then kept them open. Taking into account the strangeness of the dream, she wasn’t sure of where she would wake up. Not that her dreams would ever enter the normalcy scale, but this one seemed like it could fit in quite nicely along with Buffy’s dreams. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t prophetic, but what about symbolic? What could it mean?
Her alarm-clock started blaring in its accustomed skull-drilling way, interrupting her musings, pushing her into real life, and she blindly searched for it and turned it off. As every morning, she didn’t feel like opening her eyes. It was so much better to keep them closed so that she could pretend. There were so many things to relive in a different way...
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