Hey all... now this is the way that the internet is supposed to work.*S*
A few replies and Part 37...
Zahir - Could you put your archiving on hold until this is complete? Thanks.
Rane - Rhetorical feedback... wassat?
Anyway... Willow knows that she is the boss and Tara knows that she allows that.
Vamp No 12 - As usual what you said.
Passionate love? - I sort of explained my theory on that above, but I will add this. If the "love" alternative is true love that I am not sure that Tara feels that for this (Vamp) Willow at all. If she did... would she let herself? I would say no. But then you feel what you feel.
Willow is definitely action gal as you say... and Tara knows that now. She knows how Willow expresses whatever it is that she is feeling. I looked at this from the PoV of how much must Willow feel for Tara to pull her away from what she was/is? In a human... how far would taht feeling have taken them? I am not sure you can say emotion works like that... but it is an interesting rationalisation.
Mollyig - Delusions... Twice Please!
Mariacomet - I think you mentioned the inspiration thing a few times.
Disturbed? You know a part that is to come though the reaction of my beta reader is leading to rfrantic scrabbling to get that part just right.
Does Willow see herself as the ultimate hunter? Is she arrogant? Well I think tht nearly all vampires have an extra confidence. I am not certain I would call Willow arrogant about being a hunter. About her Kitten maybe. Her comments about the "growing up" come from the fact that she knows what Tara has to do. She knows how hard that will be and that if Tara survives that she will be a different person.
Laurel - Thanks for the bump... I will get to your modifications soon!
Xita - Thanks for passing on the note.
Well hear you go Kittens... Part 37. Just a walk in the park.
Katharyn
---------------------------
Title:
The Sidestep Chronicle – Just a Walk in the Park (Part 37)
Author: Katharyn Rosser
Feedback: Constructive criticism always welcome.
katharynrosser@hotmail.comSpoiler Warning: Pretty limited. The story occurs in an alternate universe though reference is made to events that occur in both realities.
Summary: What the title says.
Disclaimer: I still don’t own any of the copyrights or anything else associated with BTVS. All rights lie with the production company, writers etc, etc. I am making zilch from this series of stories.
Rating: 15
Couples: Zippo…
Notes: It shouldn’t need saying… but there are opinions in here that do not necessarily reflect reality… and there are opinions that do. You choose.
Thanks To: Jo who urged blatancy. Kerry who I missed chatting to the night I prepared this as I got caught up in a burst of redraft inspiration – it was in a good cause. Louise… knackered and watching me from the bed… again when this was prepared. Coming!
The Sidestep Chronicle
Just a Walk in the Park
By
Katharyn Rosser
“Why don’t you hunt in the graveyards Tara?” Lilah asked her as they strolled together in the sunshine that the town had been named for. Around them children played. Balls bounced across their path. In the middle distance there were toy boats on the pond.
Tara liked the sunshine… and yet she rarely chose to go out in it. Not alone at least – just to be out. Lilah supposed it was not being able to take Willow with her that did that. Sometimes Lilah thought about having Willow taken out in the sunshine…
The vampire had threatened her enough to Tara. And not subtly.
Anyone else. Anything else. In the entire world. But not Willow. Willow and Tara were Players. Never them.
With every single child there was a parent. Never the freedom to grow by yourself and explore in Sunnydale. Never the chance to have an adventure. The first adventure would probably be the last. Too many people had that sort of adventure in this town. The adrenaline must really be pumping at the end though… if that was what one were looking for. It was probably what excited the vampires.
The matter of hunting patterns had come up over lunch with the Mayor, when he had waxed lyrical about Tara’s success… and Tara, characteristically played that down, before finally conceding that she had just used common sense… not realising how rare that was in Lilah’s experience. But surely common sense though would lead Tara to hunt in the cemeteries? It seemed so obvious to Lilah.
“They are new. Hungry.” Tara replied as if that explained everything and directed them from the route they were taking that she knew would shortly head into soft ground where Lilah’s heels would quickly get stuck.
“So they go and make kills straight away?” Lilah asked, and if they did didn’t Tara have a duty to save those victims? she wondered. At least in Tara’s own mind and her own definition of her duty.
“Often,” Tara admitted, understanding Lilah’s meaning. There was no way that she could cover every cemetery in a town or a city that was as infested with vampires as Sunnydale. There was also the mortuary – and the funeral parlour – where bodies awaited cremation. And where vampires still rose. It was tough enough in a place with very few vampires…. But here? Impossible - and there were other reasons.
“But you don’t hunt them there.” It seemed a contradiction to Lilah to shun those very vampires that were going to kill shortly and still proclaim oneself some sort of champion. But then Tara never had called herself a champion. It was a label that others had thrust upon her. She could have been one, that was one of the things that Wolfram and Hart actually feared was possible, but Lilah was pleased to report that there was no sign of ‘champion like behaviour.’ At least no sign beyond the general smiting of evil things. And Lilah had never really cared much for vampires anyway. Nor had much use for them – even less when she considered Willow outside of her role in Project Two Roses.
“No. I could…” Tara had pretty much made a thing of it when she had first started to actively hunt those creatures. Racking up impressive numbers – if there had been anyone to actually impress, which there wasn’t – not even herself. If anything, Tara tended to count backwards, there were an infinite number of monsters and she had removed just a few of them from the world. It would never end. There were still that infinite host out there. “I did.”
“But you stopped?”
“Yes.” Tara waited, looking for the condemnation in her friend’s face. Disappointment that she would knowingly abandon people to their fate when she could save them with relative ease. But that was just it. It was easy. She told Lilah so and still the look didn’t appear. Instead Lilah was curious. Rather like a predator watching its prey… A friend Lilah might have become, that didn’t stop her from being disturbing to Tara.
“You want a challenge then?” Lilah asked, not doubting that could be true. That Tara in her quest for justice might feel the need to know that justice was truly done and that could only happen when she was challenged? Lilah could understand that… no one liked to deal with the boring cases at her firm either. And the ones that weren’t boring were a bigger challenge. Naturally. Knowing that you had been in the fight – and won – was the reward.
Tara gave her a strange smile and Lilah had no idea what to make of it, realising that she didn’t know this woman as well as she thought she did. It seemed so clear. Tara seemed so clear. Only one thing had interested her – justice, or one might call it vengeance.
Before Lilah had met her, Tara’s quest for justice made her appear predictable, the reports seemed to confirm that – but that had been underestimating the young witch. Dramatically… and Lilah knew now that she hadn’t even seen it when she got here. It wasn't Willow, or the Mayor, the Slayer, Sunnydale or even Lilah that had changed Tara… she had always been a mystery that no one had bothered to solve.
And now Lilah wanted to and needed to. It was essential.
“Of course killing them must always be a challenge…” Lilah added quickly not wanting to downgrade Tara’s accomplishments at all. For they were exceptional – perhaps unique.
“N-not always,” Tara conceded in her explanation, “It isn’t the challenge as such. It’s that the new ones are, well…
new to it – the vampire thing I mean. They are inexperienced and most of them will weed themselves out just by being stupid or greedy within a year or so. I’ve seen vampires, new ones I mean, step out into sunlight because they forgot what it did to them. I’ve seen them step in raging fires because they think their strength makes them invulnerable. When they rise… they don’t really
know anything. The demon, or whatever they are, isn’t some expert on being a vampire. They… they have to learn I guess.” That hypothetical year, unfortunately, was a time in which they might kill every night. That was a lot of hypothetical deaths. And she’d had to learn herself to be willing to let those people be sacrificed to achieve more important ends. But it still tore her up… Even though she couldn’t be everywhere at once – she wanted to be. She continued. “A Watcher told me-”
“You knew a Watcher?”’ Lilah asked, interrupting. “From the Watchers Council?” That was an unexpected complication. There was a local Watcher, she knew. Any hypothetical contact with him must surely be counterbalanced by Willow, the Mayor and Lilah herself in Tara’s life…. But if that old Watcher had actually imparted
values to Tara, on the definition of good and evil beyond her innate morality... If Tara had taken those to heart…
The Mayor had told her, back when she had been about to meet Tara for the first time, that the young woman had a moral centre… but if she had set, unchangeable, values too… That might be a disaster.
Lilah wondered when that had been. There had been periods, long periods, when her monitors had lost Tara’s trail. It must have been then, when the younger woman had ditched the demons Lilah had assigned to watch her. But now here she was anyway.
With me, Lilah thought, knowing for whom I work and what we do. For people like her boss… people who aren’t people. She must like me anyway… and she can maintain some sort of distance… there was Willow too. There was still hope for the corruption of the young woman – Lilah so wanted Tara to be brought into Wolfram and Hart’s fold when this project was complete… preferably in Special Projects, where she could guide her development and help her to be all that she could be.
It was the best thing for her.
“And his Slayer yes. Until they were killed. She, the Slayer, was first,” Tara said quietly. Another pair who deserved her justice. Or maybe an apology that she hadn’t been there at the end. She had been looking at the bigger picture… and if she had been there with them, Tara wondered? Would Kendra still be the Slayer now? Maybe not… and Kendra and Mr Zabuto would not have been here, in Sunnydale either. Tara needed to be in Sunnydale to deliver justice.
Lilah had known that Tara was driven and that she had the skills and power necessary to fulfil the role she had set her life path on, but she had not fully appreciated just what the younger woman had been through in her life. She had already heard about the time, with her family, on the farm. Tara described it as if she was nostalgic… as if she missed her family – and perhaps even now she still did. But her words had betrayed a different message.
But to co-exist with a Slayer… in the sort of places Slayers were assigned and to outlive her… Lilah had had no idea – her own monitors had missed that entirely. She would have to have words. A member of the Council of Watchers? He could have contaminated her with dreams of the noble quest. No. He might have tried, but she couldn’t believe that Tara was any more noble than she was. How could she be when she was
with a vampire. She nodded to Tara to continue what she was saying.
“H-he told me, and I think he was right, that most new vampires are destroyed within a year, say ninety-five out of every hundred. Of those that live only one in ten will make it to a decade. And of those, perhaps one in a hundred will see fifty years.” Tara trailed off, her attention caught for a moment by the sight of a little girl with blonde hair playing with her red haired friend and their dolls. “You see Lilah, those that live that long. They are the really dangerous ones. They have killed many… but when they last that long they start to get organised. They form well-defended nests and terrorise whole towns. Some of them even try to end the world…”
That was more than the truth Lilah knew. Wolfram and Hart was aware of most of the prophesied apocalypses… maybe it was apocali… and in its history had worked to encourage or halt many of them according to their own brief from the Senior Partners. But there were others. The wild cards that were stopped by the Watchers’ Council and their Slayers. Stopped by the heroes and heroines. By the agents of the Powers That Be. The Champions. And perhaps by Tara it now seemed. “You decided to stop those that would endanger the many rather than the one?” Lilah asked, not quite believing that such a young woman would deliberately take that responsibility upon herself – but that was Tara… Miss Responsibility.
She needed to snap out of that… at least for a little while.
Tara, after a moment’s silence, answered the question. “Y-yes. I tried to do both for a time… but… Lilah,” Tara stopped and looked right at the lawyer, “what if I killed ten new vampires, a hundred… but I missed the one that would, out of all of them, have survived to slaughter thousands? Millions? End the world?”
That admission took Lilah’s breath away again. She had known that Tara wanted justice for her family. She’d suspected that, like nearly everyone else who talked of justice, Tara had really wanted revenge. But she had never dreamed that this woman was actually determined to try and save as many as she could and took it upon herself to see that the evil was stopped. Oh what a tool she would be for Wolfram and Hart… that level of dedication, coupled with the power. And the absolute sense of self-sacrifice of which Tara reeked. Fatalism was valuable to a point… Lilah could go far in the firm with a tool like that… and it just might save Tara from this life she was leading.
And from Willow. Lilah knew that she had to stop thinking like that. She needed the Two Roses to be together. Everything hinged on that. Everything…
Looking at Tara’s sad face, it wasn’t a desire for vengeance that Lilah saw there. It was pure justice to Tara – no matter what Lilah might call it or how much Tara herself might doubt it. Justice was of course, simple acceptable vengeance, that was rule one at Wolfram and Hart – at least when prosecuting. But to Tara it was taking the troubles of the whole world on her shoulders. Knowing that, Lilah just wanted to sit Tara on a bench and put an arm around her. They might often be on opposite sides of the fight… but what the younger woman was doing was…
It was scary… and Lilah hadn’t been scared like that in a long time.
Lilah also knew that Tara had long since accepted the likelihood of her own death. She hadn’t sought it and wanted to avoid it as long as possible so that she could deliver her justice – or as Lilah would have put it before - have her revenge. But she had accepted that one day something would kill her. And she just hadn’t cared… because she had nothing much to live for. She’d had nothing that tied her into this world.
Nor was Lilah sure that Willow had in any way changed that. Tara might think that she had… she might think that vampire was changing her. But looking into her eyes now Lilah couldn’t believe that. The moral centre was still there…
Tara had an attachment to the vampire, that much was obvious to anyone who cared to look. Tara knew that she knew. Tara knew that it was more than likely Lilah who had told the Mayor… yet she still kept Willow cloistered. When Lilah was staying there the vampire never went beyond than the bedroom – seemingly entering through a window. Lilah had never caught more than a fleeting glimpse of Willow. She had to believe that it was Tara that was enforcing that. After all she had heard the vampire’s threats… taunts to Tara. Willow wouldn’t have held off… not Willow. Tara was keeping them apart.
Either Tara believed that Willow was a threat to Lilah… which was probably very true, or else…
Tara was ashamed… or perhaps even afraid that
it was not everything that it should be – the relationship – if it were to survive. That it would not stand up to the scrutiny of others. But that relationship was all that she had to hold on to… it was all that she had beyond her quest for justice.
Except for Lilah herself and the Mayor.
Lilah could sort of relate to that feeling. She had her pleasures certainly but no relationship that linked her to the world in any other way than work. The career that she had chosen made it difficult. Certainly until she reached partnership there was no security at all and the hours… The time she spent intermittently in Sunnydale, overseeing this project, was the closest that she had come to a vacation since joining Wolfram and Hart straight out of college, recruited by Holland himself and now walking in his shadow. But what did she have besides that? A company car, a great apartment, full health plan at Fairfield and a six-figure salary as a senior associate. Enough for her. For now. More would follow.
But Tara’s ‘career’ was one that would inevitably lead to death. Power, skill, perhaps some luck had brought Tara this far and might see the young woman achieve her ambition of killing the Master. What then? A life of slaying vampires? Was that all there was for her?
Tara certainly seemed to think so… Staying with the Mayor was not really an option, all three of them knew that Tara was with him only to destroy the Master. All three of them accepted it – though she guessed that the Mayor and Tara would both be disappointed in a strange way when they dissolved their relationship. He was simply too evil for Tara to remain with. Which was a shame.
Willow… was she Tara’s future? Could she be? Lilah couldn’t know – she didn’t have the details even to speculate – so she’d say no for now.
That would seem to leave Tara with nothing but an empty space where her desire for justice had been… unless she kept killing vampires and eventually that would kill her. Either her targets would… or she would be forced to use powers that would ultimately consume her…
No, not if Lilah had anything to do with it… if Tara could be brought into the Wolfram and Hart fold then she would have a chance at life. By working with the Mayor of Sunnydale Tara had more than demonstrated that she would compromise her innate goodness in pursuit of a greater goal. She was good, Lilah was sure of that, but she was equally sure that she herself had been good too. And as such she had proven to herself it was only the tiniest step from being good to what Wolfram and Hart required of her. Grey… Walking the thin line between good and evil. Stepping over it on occasions maybe, but always coming back to the line. It was the nature of her profession… she simply represented the interests of her client. If her clients told her to do pro bono charity work for no gain at all then she would give her all for that too. Just as much as she would in ensuring murderers got off scot-free.
As much as she was willing to risk for this project.
Lilah suspected that Tara had only two options if she wanted to live… she either stopped what it was that she was doing entirely or she joined Wolfram and Hart. And Lilah did want her to live. Why couldn’t that be married to the success that the witch would bring to her own career with the firm? No reason at all.
She could be Tara’s salvation… if the younger woman would allow her to do that. That idea had an appeal on many levels. Because what choice was there otherwise… Willow? By definition there was no such thing as a life with a vampire. Stopping what she did? Tara couldn’t. It was all she’d had in the world and the only thing that linked her now to her long dead family. Tara couldn’t stop hunting them, and Lilah couldn’t let her think that she could give and expect love from a vampire. Not real love and from what Tara told her Willow wasn’t telling her that either.
Not the word. They avoided the word.
Tara deserved to be loved. It was something that rang out like a bell inside her. Tara deserved to be loved. Suffering didn’t usually bother Lilah at all, she’d inflicted more than her share, but she didn’t want Tara to suffer anymore. And she couldn’t believe that Willow was the answer for the young Wiccan. There had to be another answer somewhere… but wasn’t it fated? Lilah knew it was fated…
Couldn’t fate be wrong? She sort of hoped that it was… No. There were those thoughts that she couldn’t allow again. The fate was essential. She knew that.
They had lapsed into silence, still walking through the park, which was filled with life. Both of them knew that by night it had been a slaughter ground for years. It was a place of contrasts. They sat on the bench that Lilah had spied and the lawyer turned to the witch.
“You’re doing a great thing Tara,” Lilah told her.
Tara said nothing, seeming to look off into the distance but her focus was in nothingness.
Lilah, hesitantly as she wasn't sure it was the thing to do, put her arm around Tara’s shoulder and felt the young woman stiffen briefly… before allowing her head to rest upon Lilah’s padded shoulder and they just sat there for a long time before Tara finally admitted “I-I just d-don’t know if I can stop.”
Lilah didn’t ask what she meant… possibly Tara meant all of it, the hunting, the justice, the magic… Willow. She was sort of caught up in the idea of giving comfort… general comfort rather than specific.
Willow who wasn't here, Lilah thought, out here in the sunlight. Willow who might not even care how this woman felt anyway.
Willow the vampire.
Vampires. She hated them and what they did.
Even if she needed them too.
***************
You hear that baby? I am going nowhere.
by Blue77 » Sun May 12, 2002 5:49 pm 
at: 5/13/02 11:32:16 am
