DISCLAIMER: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all the slayerettes belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. This story deals with the love between two women and the pain of loss and guilt, kind of, it's only very short...Special thanks as always to my beta Rebs.
SPOILERS: Don't read if you don't want to know something of what happened during the last few episodes of season 6, from Seeing Red onward. Personally I'm still in denial but am writing nonsense to deal with it.
PAIRING: Willow/Tara

You Made me Believe

By ralst

The blonde witch looked on as those around her began to dissolve into tears and stoic misery. She knew the display of pain and heartbreak was due to her but she couldn't work up the energy to feel sorry for them. Any of them.

They had been her friends, her family. Yet as she watched them she just wished they'd leave her alone to face her eternity of solitude and emptiness. She couldn't talk with them, touch them, love them. She was gone. She realised it but for all her desire to be rid of them, she didn't want to be parted from them either. She didn't want to lose her again.

Looking towards the secluded figure of the once magnificent redheaded witch, Tara saw a woman cowed by loss and her own guilt and confusion. Willow, her Willow.

How could things have gone so wrong?

As if the mere thought of her lost love had beckoned the other woman, Willow moved closer to where she stood, cloaked in the mist of the netherworld. Green eyes once bright with love, laughter and happiness were now suffused in red and vacant, as if the life force had been drained from them entirely. Looking at her lover, Tara wasn't too sure which of them had actually died. Willow might be the one with the pulse but in all ways that mattered, she was dead.

An ethereal tear rolled down her cheek and she let her hand rest lightly against Willow's hunched shoulders. It was strange. She could feel the material of the coat beneath her fingertips but it was different, somehow less tangible than before but still solid. Lifting hesitant fingers, she let them trail along the skin of her lover's fevered cheek, the moisture of despair coating her finger. In that one moment she felt alive again. Alive and heartbroken.

"Oh Willow."

The redhead's eyes left the ground on which they'd been focused and appeared to stare off into nothingness. The green depths showed their first sign of life as they searched out the air around her for something. Something precious but forever out of her reach.

"Tara?"

The blonde saw the fleeting look of hope fall beneath a cloud of doubt as a fresh set of tears stained the once beautiful face. It was like watching someone die a slow and painful death, one memory or glimmer of hope at a time. Soon there would be nothing left, of either of them.

"I'm sorry baby."

Tara watched as the coffin was lowered into the ground and her former friends filed past, words of bereavement on their lips. In the end there was only Willow, alone in person as well as in her soul. She hadn't only lost her lover; she'd also lost her friends and worst of all, her self. Tara's whole being ached with the need to be there for her, to be the one to hold her through the night as she cried out her pain and loneliness. But she couldn't. She could never be there for her again.

As the slight redhead fell to her knees before the open grave, the lingering remnants of her lover dissipated into forever. Her last words lingering in the air for only the other dead to discern.

"I love you."

The End

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