Tara · Maclay

There's a click when the door shuts, and another when it opens again. She starts to count days by the number of times it happens. Twice a day, generally, which means she's been here...she can't remember. Somewhere in it all the days got lost and the numbers she was counting became meaningless.

More than a day. A month? A year? More?

She knows who she is. She's aware of things. They don't treat her badly and that alone confuses her, because they don't treat her any way at all, and if they have no care for her, then why is she here? There is food. There are books on magic. Ingredients for spells, though nothing to make those doors open. A garden off of her room where she can grow things, or sit in the sun, but the walls are high and there aren't doors there.

The bed is soft and the food is filling, but no one talks to her and she fights the urge to scream at them just to make them respond. Why her? Why now? She was happy where she was, and now they've taken her from there and put her here, to what?

Wait?

She can feel and she can breathe and she takes that to mean that somehow she is alive. She doesn't feel wrong. Did they bring her back wrong? There's an ache inside and all she can think is that she wants Willow. Willow would be able to figure out what was happening. She was smart like that. They had just been getting things back to good when it all fell apart again, and if she's here...

She wants Willow. But more than that, she wants the eyes she feels watching her to go away and the sick sense of foreboding to ease. She tries to work with the cards in the room, but no reading she lays out comes back with anything she wants to see. They'll do what they will with her and then they'll cast her out again. She should hope to go back where she was, but the alive part of her, the craving part, that only has one wish. She wants to be with Willow again.

Heaven can wait.

Muse: Tara Maclay
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Exertion is the easy part. It takes endurance. You have to work up to it. It will take you in and use you up, but it's the easy part. Eventually the work becomes easy until you push yourself harder and exert more energy to hit your goal.

Control is the hard part. Days when you're trying to press forward and you feel it slipping away when you ride the wave. How do you pull that back in? How do you fight the elation and the power? Without control, you can't. You go wild. And eventually...

I've seen it happen. Not just to Willow. There were others, reasons the rumors started beyond just their desire for control. It scared me to see the signs again. Scared me to think of losing her to the magic.

"Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it." When you lose control it takes another's exertion to stop you. It has to change your direction. I tried to be that for her, tried to change the state of things by walking away, but it took something else. She had to hit something, literally and psychically, before she could stop. Maybe losing me was part of that. Maybe it wasn't.

The second time I wasn't there either. But she got hit with what I would have used. I mean, he used all I would have known to use. And it makes me wonder if...if maybe I did it all wrong. Exerted the wrong force to change things. If I'd stayed...maybe it would all have been different. But I was force enough to set her in motion, but not to stop her.

Maybe...There are too many maybes.