FIC: Darkness Variation

[fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Darkness Variation.

Starting from the same point as Anne-Lise's story In The Darkness, 
but going a different way.
--


Buffy shut the door as quietly as she could, so as not to wake Willow.

"You don't need to to creep about," Said Willow quietly from the 
darkness, "I wasn't asleep."

Buffy walked over to where her friend sat huddled on the bed. She 
sat down beside her. The moonlight softened everything to simple 
shapes of grey-blue, but it could not disguise the obvious misery in 
Willow's drawn face.

"Oh, Willow..." Said Buffy, unable to find words to comfort her 
friend. Willow's pain tore at her heart in a way that she couldn't 
express. She leaned forward to brush the hair from Willow's eyes, to 
give a touch that might say what her words could not. At the touch, 
Willow crumpled, her head falling on Buffy's shoulder. Buffy put her 
arm around her and held her while she cried softly in the darkness.

What could she say? "At least you didn't have to kill him when you 
said goodbye"? Her own experience of love hardly left her with any 
words of reassurance to share. As she stroked Willow's hair, she 
found her own eyes welling up with tears as she looked back through 
her own experience of torn and broken love for something to say. 
Some fragment of hope to pass along.

They held each other, clinging together in the darkness. After all 
this time, all the death and really scary things of the last few 
years, it seemed like the only person she loved who had stuck by her 
was right here. Right now. In her arms. She looked down at 
Willow's beautiful face, eyes puffy and red from crying. Willow, 
quiet now, looked up at her. Their lips were inches apart.

Buffy kissed Willow.

For a second, it seemed like everything was falling into place, but 
then Willow stiffened and pushed her away so violently that she was 
caught off balance and fell off to the floor.

"What the HELL??" Cried Willow, her face a mask of shock.

"I'm sorry, Willow. I..." Buffy scrabbled for words to explain 
something that she didn't understand herself.

She stumbled to her feet and backed towards the door. The look of 
shock - and could that be fear? - in Willow's eyes said everything 
that needed to be said. Buffy fled.

Buffy ran blindly out into the dark. Now she really had screwed 
everything up. Instead of comforting Willow when she needed it, 
giving her a friendship she could lean on in her crisis, she had just 
made the whole thing ten times, a hundred times worse. And wrapped 
inside the pain of hurting a friend was the realisation that she 
loved Willow, and that this love would never, ever be returned. That 
it would do nothing but hurt the one she cared for, and might destroy 
the friendship they did have. She could feel the world shattering 
around her, slashing her with broken dreams.

She was the slayer. The destroyer of evil, instrument of death. A 
weapon honed to damage and kill. And that's *all* she was.

She ran on, looking for something to slay.