FIC: Of Human Bonding [4/5] - Bound

[HD Genscher <HD.Genscher@xxxxxx>]

TITLE: Of Human Bonding [4/5] - Bound
AUTHOR: HD_Genscher (hd.genscher@xxxxxx)
RATING: R
PAIRING: B/W
SPOILERS: none
DISCLAIMER: All characters and places belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, 
et al.
ARCHIVE: HD's Fan Fiction Archive, http://www.wiffy.de/hdffa/
FEEDBACK: If you liked it, I'll appreciate your feedback. And if you didn't 
like it, it'll help me a lot if you point out what I did wrong.
---


OF HUMAN BONDING


Part 4.  BOUND



It was always the same.

After the blinding flash of light, Buffy was in the library of her former 
high school. The place was deserted, however, so she would go out into the 
hallway, only to be greeted by Cordelia. The conversation that followed 
could only be called shallow if you tried to be polite.

They'd approach Willow who was standing at a fountain in the hallway, and 
the moment Buffy saw her during the first iteration, she immediately knew 
where and when this was: This was her first day at Sunnydale High, the day 
she'd first met Willow! After Cordy chased Willow away from the fountain, 
Buffy would look after her, not because that was what she did when they 
laid eyes on each other for the first time. No, she'd do it because her 
girlfriend really was a dish with that longer hair.

She'd go after her, out into the sunlit fountain quad. They'd have their 
first conversation, interrupted by Xander and Jesse. Finally, Cordy would 
come onto the scene again to tell her about the dead boy found in the 
locker room.

She'd walk away to examine the body, and end up in a hallway she didn't 
remember from real Sunnydale High. To make things worse, it would suddenly 
be evening somehow. Eventually she'd find a classroom door labeled 'Willow 
101,' but the door would be locked, so she'd kick it in, only to find 
herself not a classroom but in another hallway.

Turning around a corner, she'd see herself and Willow being attacked by 
strange hooded monks. She'd fight well, but in the end the monks would kill 
her. Willow, her hair turning jet-black, would scream, and she'd burn all 
of them alive. She'd storm past Buffy, into the library. And then...

Then the Hellmouth would open, and with a blinding flash of light, the 
world would end.

And Buffy would find herself in the library again.

It was always the same.


**


But it wouldn't be the same this time. After watching the same sequence of 
events repeat itself twice, Buffy decided it was time to make a difference. 
If she just kept watching, she wouldn't be able to find out what happened 
to Willow and, even more important, fix it. This time she'd try to change 
something.

"Uh, hi! Willow, right?" Buffy asked nervously and gave sophomore Willow a 
kind of embarrassed wave.

They were in the fountain quad, where Willow was sitting on a bench in the 
center, while Buffy was approaching her.

Willow looked up from the bag containing her lunch. "Why?" she asked, her 
look one of confusion at why the blonde was talking to her. "I-I mean, hi! 
Did you want me to move?"

Buffy smiled warmly at the redhead.

"Why don't we start with 'Hi, I'm Buffy.'" she answered and sat down on the 
bench next to the witch. "And then let's segue directly into me telling you 
that I believe in love at first sight. I saw you at that fountain and knew 
I was in love," she continued. "Do you wanna be my girlfriend? And do you 
wanna go out with me tonight?"

"Sure," Willow replied with a loving smile, then frowned with a 'This is 
not how it's supposed to be' expression on her face.

"Now that we sorted that out, shouldn't Xander and Jesse be here?" Buffy 
asked with a 'This is exactly how it's supposed to be' look, one that 
indicated that she wouldn't have any argument about this.

"They'll be at any minute. Will you please kiss me now?"

Buffy's heart leaped. 'Maybe when we kiss, she'll be normal again...' she 
thought. She leaned towards Willow to kiss her and closed her eyes just 
before her lips touched Willow's, but nothing happened. When she opened her 
eyes again, the witch was gone.

'Oh no...' Buffy thought. 'Not again!'

The blonde quickly got up, grabbed her bag and ran after the redhead who 
was just disappearing into the building at the opposite side of the quad.

"What?!" she snapped at Cordelia, who'd just arrived to tell her about the 
extremely dead boy in the locker, and ran straight past her towards the 
door that Willow had disappeared through.

"Gee, what's her problem?" Cordelia asked no one in particular and shook 
her head.


**


As she'd experienced before, the light changed as Buffy entered the 
building. A moment ago it had still been around noon, but the sun had 
covered the rest of her path over the sky in an instant, and the sunlight 
had taken on the color of the early evening sun now, bathing everything in 
a reddish glow.

Buffy walked through the hallways to the classroom door labeled 'Willow 
101.' With a single motion, she kicked it in and ran into the adjacent hallway.

The grunts and cries of pain she could hear told her that the fight was in 
full swing already. She rounded another corner, and knew immediately that 
she was too late. She saw her own dead body falling to the ground, pierced 
by the hooded monks' stilettos. She saw them hurry towards Willow, who'd 
been standing some feet away, too shocked at the sudden attack to be able 
to move. An unearthly cry escaped the witch's lips as she realized what had 
just happened.

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

Then everything went so fast again that Buffy hardly could see it in the 
rapidly dying light. Willow's hair turned black just as the monks had 
almost reached her, she made a motion with her hand, and then they were 
screaming and burning and dying. Their ashes sank to the floor, whirled up 
again by Willow who moved towards Buffy after the last monk fell.

"Willow, wait!"

But Willow didn't listen. She ran straight past Buffy, and turned round a 
corner in the hallway.

The Slayer hurriedly followed her, but when she reached the corner, the 
redhead was gone.

'Sure. I know where to find you anyway,' she thought, remembering where the 
witch had gone last time, and quickly ran off.

Buffy caught her breath in front of the library, then entered through the 
swinging doors. Willow was just where she expected her to be: sitting 
inside the pentagram on the floor, right above the Hellmouth, holding a lit 
candle in her hand.

"Willow... don't!" Buffy shouted.

"Don't you see what I've become? I allowed you to be killed... and where 
you once were in my heart, there's just a searing hole now..." Willow said 
with a quiet, sad voice. "So that's what I am now: I'm just that searing 
hole, just black emptiness, darkness."

Buffy looked at Willow as she slowly walked towards where the witch was 
sitting, and by the light of the candle, the black veins in her face, her 
black eyes and the jet-black hair (that was much shorter now, like Willow 
had worn it during their senior year) looked even more scary than before in 
the dusky hallway. But this was Willow anyway, she reminded herself, her 
Willow, her love...

"Willow, listen to me... This is just happening in your mind! I didn't die..."

"Yes, you did..."

"...and you're certainly not responsible for it!"

"I'm so sorry. For everything..."

Willow blew out the candle she was holding. The ground below them shook in 
protest, and large cracks appeared in the library floor. With a blinding 
flash of light from the resulting opening the world ended, again.


**


Buffy practically ran out of the library and stormed past the students in 
the hallway.

"Why can't you just leave her alone?" a well-known voice stopped her. 
Willow had been standing at a bulletin board with her back towards the 
hallway and turned around just as Buffy approached her. This time it was 
present-time Willow, not the one belonging to this past. Buffy stopped 
mid-motion.

"Because I love her, and I need her, and I don't wanna lose her," Buffy 
simply stated. "And because I wanna know what happened, what caused..." She 
pointed at the ceiling with her eyes, "...this."

"You wanna know why it happened?" Willow asked, joining Buffy as the Slayer 
resumed her walk through the hallway.

"Yes."

"It felt good, the power streaming through me. I felt so strong, so 
invincible," Willow explained.
"But as the fight went on, the power started to hurt. It burnt, as if acid 
was flowing through my veins... And the harder I tried to end the fight as 
quickly as possible by putting just a little more power into a spell, the 
stronger the burning became."
They stepped out into the sunlit schoolyard.
"Suddenly I knew that, if I'd go on just a moment, I wouldn't be able to 
stop ever again. I would kill her eventually, but the costs... they'd be 
terribly high. And I decided I didn't want to pay that price."

"That's why you put yourself into this stupor, as Giles called it..." Buffy 
said and bent down to pick a flower from one of the beds in the quad.

"Yes." The older Willow pointed at her younger self sitting on the bench in 
the center of the fountain quad.

"Look at her. She's sitting there, not caring about what others think about 
her. She built an invisible shell around herself, almost impossible to 
break," she told Buffy as they slowly approached the younger redhead.

"She needed it to protect herself from those countless taunts and attacks 
in school, and she didn't let anyone come near her, for a long time. You 
were the first to break through that shell, and with that, she allowed 
others to be able to hurt her again, through you."

"I wouldn't be able to stand the pain of losing you," younger Willow 
suddenly said and looked up at them, straight into Buffy's eyes.
"I felt that from now on, you'd be the first thing on my mind when the sun 
would rise in the morning and I'd wake up... and when the sun would set in 
the evening and I'd fall asleep, my last thought would be your name: Bu-ffy."
She pronounced the name slowly, closing her eyes in delight as she did.
"You really got under my skin, Buffy Summers..."

"And I was right," added the older Willow.

"So this is where I lost my innocence, because this is where I decided I'd 
do ANYTHING to protect you," the younger witch continued.

"If you're right, you mightn't be innocent anymore, but neither am I. We're 
both having gifts that can be used for good, or be abused," Buffy answered. 
"But it's us who choose what we do. You're afraid to lose control if 
something bad happens, and so am I. But together, we can be more than that, 
more than the sum of our fears--together, we'll be able to overcome them. I 
don't think that you're right, though. Innocent until proven guilty. That's 
what I believe in."

Willow forcefully shook her head. "That's not true. The...the you being 
able to abuse your gift thing, that is," she said, and Buffy could see her 
girlfriend's faith in her eyes. The words "...because it's wrong" echoed in 
her head, and although she couldn't place them, they seemed right.

Buffy swallowed hard, then knelt down in front of the redhead. What the 
witch had said about her being able to good only still lingered on in her 
head, and an idea had formed in her mind. Buffy offered the rose she'd been 
hiding behind her back to Willow.

"And if I take good care of you... and you take good care of me... we... 
together, we can go through whatever may come." Buffy's eyes filled with 
tears as she said that, and she could see a conspicuous glimmer in the 
redhead's as well. "And this isn't a choice we make, it happened already. 
It happened exactly here, five years ago. This is where we met, this is 
where we bonded," she continued with a gesture that included the whole 
fountain quad.

"Oh, Buffy..." Willow said and accepted the rose with a teary smile. 
'That's almost like she's...proposing to me... Is Buffy proposing to me?' 
Buffy heard her wonder. 'This is good,' the blonde thought. 'If I can hear 
what she's thinking, I finally got through to her.'

"What the hell..." Cordelia's voice could be heard behind Buffy. The blonde 
turned around and noticed that older Willow was gone. Xander and Jesse, and 
a couple of other students, were staring at them, and Cordelia was there, 
too. She'd just arrived to tell her about the dead student in the locker, 
like she was supposed to do, but Buffy didn't have time for that right now.

"...is this supposed to be?" the cheerleader asked. "Are you a dyke," she 
almost spat out the last word, "...proposing to her, or what?"

Willow's eyes widened at Cordelia's harsh words.

"Cordy, piss off!" Buffy calmly said instead of a reply. Cordelia opened 
her mouth as if to answer, but much to Buffy's surprise, none came. Instead 
the brunette left as she was told, obviously too shocked to come up with 
any more taunts.

"And this is where we'll be bound," she added, continuing where she left 
off before Cordelia interrupted her.

Buffy cleared her throat, took Willow's hand into hers, and spoke solemnly:
"Goddess, you can see right into my heart. My love for Willow is pure and 
strong. I step before You today and ask for us to be bound. From now on, we 
will be together as one, through joy and sorrow, through good times and bad 
ones, whatever may come." When she'd finished her vow, Buffy looked at her 
girlfriend expectantly. At the same time her heart pounded in her chest. 
Would the witch be willing to go the path she'd chosen with her?

Willow gulped. Again, Buffy could hear her thoughts. 'This is incredibly 
sweet of Buffy... She isn't proposing to me--she wants to go the whole way, 
right now! But I don't know the rite she's using... What am I supposed to 
answer now? Oh, I know...'

"Goddess, you can see right into my heart," Willow began, and gave the 
blonde a reassuring smile. "My love for Buffy is... is genuine und 
passionate. I step before You today and ask for us to be bound. From now 
on, we will be together as one, through pleasure and pain, through good 
times and bad ones, whatever may come."

Joy filled every fiber of her body, and in relief Buffy continued: "You 
created each of us with... with our own strengths and weaknesses."

After these words, Buffy could see in Willow's eyes that the witch finally 
understood. 'This isn't a rite I'm supposed to know, Buffy's making this up 
as we are going!' she heard her think.

"Together, we will be more than the sum of those," Willow responded with a 
tremble in her voice.

Buffy contemplated the choice she had to make for a moment, then said: "I 
will choose these: Willow's unconditional faith in her friends as her 
strength, and the darkness inside of her as her weakness."

Willow equally pondered her choice, took a breath and finally continued: "I 
will choose these: Buffy's goodness as her strength, and her inability to 
let someone in into the Slaying part of her life as her weakness."

"My strength shall complement her weakness, making us complete, making us 
one," Buffy vowed and wiped away her tears.

"And my strength shall complement her weakness, making us complete, making 
us one," Willow agreed.

Buffy and Willow were still holding hands, and now the witch took the 
thornless rose into her other hand and placed it above their wrists. For a 
seemingly endless moment nothing happened, but then the rose's stalk 
magically wrapped itself around their wrists, bonding them together.

"Goddess, You gave Your blessing to our bond and all these people were our 
witnesses. Thus, our hands are fasted and we'll be one, the work of joy is 
done, and yet just begun," Willow finished.

Silence fell. To Buffy, what had just happened seemed almost unreal. And it 
didn't matter that it only had taken place in her and Willow's linked 
minds. For her, it was real, as real as anything could be. And when she 
looked into Willow's tear-filled eyes, it obviously was just as real for 
her. Buffy leaned towards Willow and the two girls' lips finally met.

Xander was the first to break out of the rigidity that seemed to have 
seized everyone on the quad. He began to applaud, and one after the other 
joined in, some of the students more reluctant than others. But in the end, 
all people present had to admit that they witnessed something 
extraordinary, not only in the lives of the two girls in front of them, but 
in general.

"Will you come with me, the whole way?" Buffy asked her wife when she 
finally broke the kiss.

"Yes, I will," Willow replied.

With a flash of light, they left the fountain quad and Willow's mindscape.


**


Dazed, the two girls just sat in their bedroom for a moment, waiting for 
the world to gather itself around them again. Buffy noticed that Giles was 
gone. Once she had established contact with Willow, he must've left them 
alone. She looked at her friend, who was sitting a few feet away from her. 
The witch was looking as confused and dazed as she assumed she did. Then 
the full impact of what had just happened hit them and with a sob, Willow 
threw herself into Buffy's open arms, almost knocking them over.

"I'm so sorry..." she muttered between sobs.

"Shh..."

"I love you," Willow whispered.

"I love you," was Buffy's equally whispered reply.

For a long while, the girls' world consisted of kisses and holding each 
other close, only interrupted by a whispered "I love you" every now and then.


**


"Ready?" Buffy asked.

"Indeed," Giles replied, and put on his glasses, his injury long forgotten.

"Glory, watch out! Here come the Scoobies!" Xander quipped, and Anya just 
nodded, agreeing with everything her boyfriend would say.

"Hell yeah," Willow confirmed and smiled at her wife.

"Then let's go," the Slayer commanded.


Glory didn't have the slightest chance.


**


Many years later...


"Buffy..." Dawn was crying now, tears flowing freely down her checks, 
ruining her mascara.

"Dawn, please... be rational. I really want this...we want this. It's a 
unique chance..." Buffy spoke with a soothing voice. The two Summers were 
sitting opposite of each other in one of the Johnson Space Center's many 
conference rooms.

"I know...and I understand, too. But my heart...it just doesn't want to 
hear any of that rational stuff..."
"Okay Dawn, you convinced me. Willow and I will stay here, and Dr. Bertrand 
and this idiot McFarlane will be the first human beings on Mars."

"Nooo, not McFarlane."
Dawn remembered how the astronaut had flirted with Buffy during the whole 
evening during one of the 'Mission Preparation Parties,' although he 
must've sensed that she wouldn't be interested, just because she wasn't 
interested in, well, men.

After Buffy finally had rebuffed him, he'd tried the same with her, 
obviously thinking something like, 'If I can't get into her pants, maybe 
I'm successful with her sister.' Buffy was right: What an idiot!

"Do you see why we have to go now?" Buffy said, knowing that she had her 
little sis with that argument, and offered her a tissue.

Dawn nodded, reluctantly first, but then with enthusiasm.

"And I promise to send you a bunch of picture postcards," Buffy added with 
her old wit.

"Me and eight billion other earthlings." Dawn said, smiled a teary smile 
and took the tissue out of her sister's hand.


**


"The Wizard of Oz left Earth's orbit today to begin her long voyage towards 
mankind's destiny. Mission Commander Willow Rosenberg said in an exclusive 
interview right before the spaceship's departure, 'We're very excited, this 
is a unique opportunity to broaden our knowledge about what's beyond the 
boundaries of our home world, for the good of all mankind. May your prayers 
and wishes be with us on our journey.'"



To be continued in:

Part 5, "A Long Way To Mars"


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"It's a good fight, Buffy, and I want in."
"I kinda love you."
Buffy & Willow, 'Choices'

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