Title: The Fall of Night Author: seraC Email: seraphcelene[at]yahoo.com Spoilers: A Hole in the World Rating: PG-13 for a little language Archiving: House of Leaves. Everyone else please ask. Summary: That’s the shape of the world that you’re thinking of there. Notes: Set in the alternate universe created by Kyra Cullinan in The Sky Has Claws. Originally written for the willowficathon. I choked and pulled it at the last minute, submitting Have You See the Wind? instead. Feedback: and Constructive Criticism. Is like air and highly addictive. In other words, yes please! Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series and all related characters belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, UPN, WB, et al. I’m just taking them out for a little exercise. "I'll miss the winter, a world of fragile things. Look for me in the white forest, hiding in a hollow tree." -- Evanescence, My Last Breath The Fall of Night This world is ash-black. Inky darkness consumes the landscape punctuated by violent battles of red and blue that bleed into haze near the ground. Willow looks up and almost expects to see souls writhing in tormented columns -- the living image of Dante’s Inferno branded across the sky. This world is the sad, forsaken remnant of an Apocalypse dressed in the finest dust and crowned with broken rock. Willow sprawls, heart aching, beneath a fractured sky. A crumpled rag doll abandoned at the end of the world and surrounded by vaguely recognizable debris -- rebar reaching twisted, skeletal arms towards the sky, tree roots stretching exposed and obscene to shelter the half consumed bodies of the dead. Hell heaves itself out of a chasm in the middle of the earth at her feet because she couldn’t understand the shape of endings. Willow swallows bile the acid flavor of regret. Remorse burns in her throat and swells in her chest thick enough to choke on. Thoughts circle in Willow's head, images that tell a story too painful for words. Too sharp and bright to be repeated in this world of perpetual night. Kneeling, symbols written in the sand, a circle of blood -- and Willow tries to blink away the memory like so much grit. Wishes that her dry eyes would cry tears to wash away this vision of the world torn asunder and an apocalypse they had fought so hard to prevent spreading outward. All to save a girl she barely knew and, before now, had never loved. Was very unsure that she had the right to love. A shaky, quivering thought. Love like a curling ribbon that binds people to her heart. Buffy and Xander wrapped in blue. Oz and Tara in red. Her parents are bound with the palest of pinks. And now Fred, trailing inky black ribbons that brand her with the things that make Willow who she is: her soft, dreamy smile and her brow wrinkled with the intricate pattern of her thoughts. Willow, locked for days and days in a motel room writing and re-writing the definition of life for another one of the beautifully innocent and dying; a sweet girl with skin a sometimes dusty blue and an aimless, angry presence that lurks behind her eyes. Fred sleeps like the dead and Willow sits beside the bed and watches her breathe. Counts the, mostly, steady inhale and exhale. There is concentration in the distraction and Willow picks at the problem that the world has become. In this version of the future Wesley hunts and Willow spends days laying beside Fred stroking her cool forehead and watching the rise and fall of her narrow chest. Moving away when Wesley returns to spill night terrors into the small, closed room. Later, staring at the same four walls and ignoring Wesley curled tightly around naked Fred without her. Willow’s skin threatened to split itself in two. She is stunned by her own irrelevance. Wesley could make do without her and Fred showed no singular attachment to either of her two lovers. They are warm bodies to chase the chill. Companions. Beating hearts. Reminders of what it is like to be alive. In her own way, Willow is just another casualty to the Apocalypse. Now she stares, propped against a piece of the crumbling world, entranced by the jagged streaks disrupting the multi-hued dark. And it is quiet. A pre-dawn hush that lasts through the undifferentiated day and night. Unrelenting dark making time an irrelevant concept. They sleep when they are tired; eat when they are hungry. They fuck and piss and shit as necessary; the world continues to end. Laying for hours, collapsed against a corner of what's left of the world, Willow is unsure about beginnings and ending. How to express hello or goodbye without it meaning beautiful girls dying, sometimes to save the world, or lovers that leave and the shattering ring that breaking hearts make. There is desperate Wesley and memories of blood on her hands; the intractability of gods and how this time it isn’t meant to be. Because despite a headstone that faces the rising sun, living on a Hellmouth somehow still means that nothing is permanent. Buffy is proof of that. Willow is sure that she can fix it. She can save Fred like she didn't save Tara. Save her before she falls away completely, consumed by the clawing, hungry thing that still hovers beneath her skin. But somehow, as these things go, everything went wrong. Has remained wrong. The lies that Willow told herself to make things better crumble beneath the heaviness of sky. Even though she is no longer, and hasn’t been, her own black-eyed Doppelganger. But the fear is that that is who she really is. She recognizes it as something like greed and loathing shimmering behind her eyes. Like guilt. But regardless, fearful or not, lonely or not, deserving or not, Willow understands that this, too, is a beginning. Sprawled in the face of the apocalypse with a thick, leather bound book balanced on her knees, Willow can admit that. Stroking chilly fingers along the gilt edges and yellowing pages she stares at the words as they begin to shift and curl into a blur of nonsense. The bough did bend The bough did break I saw the hole The fox did make Violently inevitable change. It is the sudden, startling flash of lightening over the ocean. Magic to punch a hole in the world. Rooms full of the familiar dead and the brilliance of souls trapped in glass jars. The rattle of thunder that cracks delicate spider webs across a windowpane. An intricate tracery of veins across her face. Who she once was. Who she still could be. Unlike Fred, Willow cannot be re-built. Re-created from her loved one’s memories. Imagination filling in the cracks where she has begun to forget and bleeds blue. Willow cannot be re-imagined. There are no hands to wipe the slate clean for her. In the face of the end, as she waits to die, Willow welcomes the newness of death. It isn’t something that she has done before. She waits for the creeping horror huddled in the near dark to work up enough nerve to finish her off; or for the wound curling around her ribs, spine to navel, to do it instead. In the mostly dark, pretending to read the book on her lap and ignoring the scratch of claws and shuffle of feet, Willow worries about the spell surrounding the motel room. How long will it last after she is gone? How long before someone or something slinks up the hall and rattles the doorknob? How long before Wesley and Fred will forgive her? If they forgive her. How many ways to measure the time until they forget her altogether. Willow pants around the panic and the pain and comforts herself with hallucinations of the dear and dearly departed. Fred as she was, brilliant and shy. Tragic Wesley. Tara with her sad, knowing smile. Buffy and Xander. In the corner of her eye she sees Kennedy - surly and disapproving, “This is what magic gets you.” And then there is Oz. Dark haired and pale, kneeling beside her. Speaking low, too low for her to hear over the buzzing in her ears. “I miss you,” she chokes on her tears, her voice raspy and loud in the always unexpected quiet. And then he touches her hand and the world sharpens. “Hey, you don’t look so good.” His voice is terribly gentle. “Oz?” is the name for her disbelief. Her sudden conviction that her mind has broken and this is truly, truly, really the end of the world. Oz smiles, the slightest curl of his lip and the briefest flash of teeth. “I came up from Mexico just before everything went down. Followed you but kept losing the scent. Took forever.” Gently he touches her cheek. “Will. What happened?” Willow closes her eyes briefly against the pain in her side and the questions in his eyes. That glint that seems to ask if she is responsible. For this. For the nightmare sky and she wonders if he can smell her in the magic that hangs heavy in the air. In the spell that left a crack in the world. “Oz,” there are no words to say and his eyes fall away. “This doesn’t look good,” he gently touches the angry red slash curling across her abdomen. "We got to get you inside.” “Wesley,” she breathes. “At the motel.” Oz nods once and tucks his shoulder beneath Willow’s arm, tugging her to her feet. The sky overhead continues to crack and thunder shatters the heavy silence. The distant rustle of dark things doesn’t bother her so much. Oz, warm at her side, is comforting and she’d rather die with someone holding her hand. end