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The spark comes when they touch each other to perform the ritual.
It surges through Willow, making all the hairs on her body stand on end.
It is unmistakable.
Is this what it’s like to be struck by lightning? she wonders and she’s not sure if she’s talking about the physical sensation, or the psychological dilemma—because she feels like her world has been split in two, rent asunder. Every nerve in her body is alive, and every brain cell burst to life as she works to get her head around this new information.
Her soulmate is another girl.
This is never what she had expected. Not that she’d ever really thought about her sexuality. It had always been simple. It had always been Xander, her best friend, and he so easily fit into the fantasies she’d been peddled by rom-coms and Disney movies and her family and society since before she could remember, the boy who knew her inside and out and was just right for her and who didn’t require any effort on her part, he was just there, made for her, the other half of her soul…
And then he wasn’t, and then there was Oz, and that was so simple, too. He liked her, he made it easy for her. She liked him. Did it have to be more complicated than that? And then he went away, and…nothing was easy anymore.
Soulbonds are supposed to make things easy. She never had thought much about the fact that they hadn’t formed with either Xander or Oz. She figured the universe had made a mistake. Or it was the wrong moment, or…
But here she is. She looks at Tara, and…Tara knows, and this should be as easy as sliding into Xander’s or Oz’s arms was.
Yet Willow knows, in that moment, that nothing about this is going to be easy.
She wonders what Tara is thinking. Did she somehow see it in Willow, before…? She doesn’t like that, that unease prickling up her back at the thought of someone else seeing something in her before she knew herself. Even her soulmate.
Tara looks like she wants to say something, but of course, she can’t. None of them can. The Gentlemen stole their voices away from them and…for once, Willow is glad.
“I am, you know. Yours.”
She supposes this might be Tara’s way of acknowledging it. It sends another kind of trembling up Willow’s spine. The good kind. The warm kind. It feels so right, to have something that is just hers, and to have this girl, this gorgeous, sweet, devoted girl… It’s more than she deserves.
Still, she can’t find the words. There’s no curse now, no excuse, but it’s a feeling so new that Willow does not know how to shape it into a sentence.
She simply walks to Tara and kisses her. This is not the first time they’ve done this, but it’s the first time Willow has initiated. Tara presses into her, bringing her arms around her, running her fingers through Willow’s hair and oh… how did she live before this? None of the boys, no one else had been as good as this.
Tara tugs at her clothes, but Willow isn’t sure she’s ready for…that, not yet. But she wants to do something. She backs up toward the bed. She doesn’t want Tara to think she’s unwilling.
She presses Tara’s hand to her front, lowers it, and Tara understands.
She opens Willow’s jeans, and… okay, this is a lot, but she can do this. She wants this. Tara watches her face every step of the way, knowing Willow is new to this, making sure this is right, this is okay. She smiles. She nods. She uses her own hands to urge her on.
When Tara’s fingertips first brush Willow’s clit she cries out, and Tara looks up in concern. She stops. No! “No, this is good… keep going,” she says in a half-whisper, smiling, and Tara smiles and rubs her finger in a circle around it and oh God. Willow finds her head lolling back against the pillows, gasping, as Tara keeps pressing, pushing, adding more fingers.
They don’t go much further than that. They don’t need to. Willow already feels as though she’s come undone, under her soulmate’s careful hands. Like a surgeon’s hands, taking her apart, but only to make her feel better and rebuild her into something new, something improved.
A witch’s hands, casting a magic spell on Willow, transforming her.
It’s not much, but it’s Tara, it’s them, and it’s so right.
It’s a good start.
The demon had knives for fingers. Knives she could also pull off, and throw. Willow sees one soaring toward Tara and… sometimes, in moments of crisis, your brain flashes as fast as lightning, too, and thank goodness this is one such moment. The magic fills her fingers as she mumbles the incantation, and she sends it roaring at the demon. The knife pauses, disintegrates in mid-air, inches from Tara’s chest.
Willow goes to her, kisses her hair, her throat, her jaw. She doesn’t care if her friends are watching. They understand. Xander and Anya would do the same for each other, wouldn’t they? Buffy would do the same for…well, she’s between boyfriends right now, but she’s been there in the past. She knows what this is like.
When they come together later it’s with the euphoria of still being alive, in one piece, of relishing every crumb of time together they get, not taking them for granted. Yet it’s also with the familiarity of long-time lovers. Willow and Tara know each other now. Willow has learned her girlfriend’s, her soulmate’s body as carefully as she’s studied and practiced her magic, as closely and resolutely as she reviews her textbooks for her classes. Tara is no textbook. Their love is living, and breathing, and Willow so adores filling each new page with another story, with more knowledge of what makes Tara tick. What makes her moan, what makes her scream.
In the privacy of their bedroom she kisses down Tara’s stomach, taking extra care with her breasts, licking round circles around her nipples and blowing into the gap between her mounds. Tara does love it, and she gasps with delight at every touch of Willow’s mouth. Of course, it is only the appetizer, as Willow bites and licks further down her stomach until she reaches the main course below.
Tara’s little rumbles turn into full moans as Willow kisses her clit, circles her tongue around it. Eventually she takes it into her mouth, sucking on it, with just the amount of pressure that she has come to know her girlfriend loves. At the same time, she presses her fingers into Tara’s entrance, to rub against the spot where the member wraps around, pleasuring her mate from every angle. Tara is quaking. She cries out. These sounds and vibrations are a familiar symphony, but one that Willow is always happy to hear.
They sound—she sounds—like coming home.
Tara’s fingers feel different in her now, months later. Rough, unpracticed. Maybe on purpose. Their mutual desire is undeniable, but Willow knows that rationally, Tara doesn’t want to be here. Tara is still angry at her, for what she did. Playing with her memory, letting her magic get the best of her—as in, take away the best of her.
She wonders where she went wrong. How could she have done something like this to her soulmate? How could she have trusted the magicks more than the woman who is one half of her own heart, the woman the universe had promised to her?
Willow thinks of Buffy, and Angel. She’d always thought they were soulmates, but then Angel left… Maybe the marks aren’t foolproof. Maybe they don’t mean what everyone thinks they mean. They’re no protection against hurt. They’re no protection against leaving.
Maybe they just mean this… this magnetic desire that two people have toward each other. Maybe it’s Spike for Buffy, coming together in what they think is a secret but everyone around them (or at least Willow) knows, no matter how much Buffy says she knows better. Tara says the same thing, and yet keeps coming to Willow..and even if her fingers shout her fury, her frustration, scraping as they do against Willow’s walls, in a way they never did before, Tara keeps coming back.
Willow believes she will win her back yet, but for now, she will take this. It’s not like she doesn’t deserve it. She lost her right to Tara’s sweet loving, her gentle kisses and caresses. Sex with Tara that hurts, that scrapes, that chafes, is still better than no sex with Tara at all.
Tara is bleeding out on the ground. It’s not fair. It’s not right. They’re finally back together, had the best sex of Willow’s life, and yet the universe is going to take Tara from her again.
No. She won’t allow this. She doesn’t care if she has to violate her promise not to use magic. Tara wouldn’t deny her this, would she?
Willow honestly doesn’t care. Tara can hate her for it later. It’s still better than letting her die. A living Tara who hates her is better than no Tara at all.
She lets the magic flow through her, dances to the beats of this familiar melody, and lets the life flow out of her and into her mate.
She regains consciousness several hours later, and finds that she’s propped up on fluffy pillows, under a warm blanket, sweet, soft hands smoothing through her hair. Willow looks up upon the face she loves the most.
“You fool,” Tara says as Willow opens her eyes. Her face is twisted in frustration, but there’s no malice in her voice. “You beautiful fool.” Willow feels before she sees Tara lowering her face, pressing her lips to Willow’s forehead, nose, mouth. “My beautiful fool.”
Willow kisses back, and soon they are pressed against each other again, reenacting the steps of their favorite dance. Willow is still weak from the spell, so Tara does most of the work, but she finds that in Tara’s arms, with Tara’s mouth on her breasts, Tara’s opening rubbing up against her own…she finds her strength returning.
The things she does to me, Willow thinks. How could she have ever doubted that the universe was right? That they are soulmates after all?
Perhaps it was all meant to build up to this: Willow saving Tara’s life. After Tara spent a year saving her own, saving her from the destructive power of too much magic.
She wants them to keep saving each other, replenishing each other like this, forever. Willow doesn’t have the words for it yet. But one day, she knows she will.
“Tara, you're my soulmate. Of course I love you.”
“You... wait. Willow! You finally said it!”
“What?”
“We’ve been together for 3 years, and you’ve only just acknowledged that I’m your soulmate.”
“Well, I guess, well…You never said anything, either.”
“I did too! Never directly. In other words, in other ways…”
“And I didn’t?”
“I…I guess you did.”
“I don’t just love you because you’re my soulmate, by the way.”
“I know.”
“I—I’ve never felt for anyone the way I feel for you.”
“Me neither. Toward you, I mean.”
“And I guess…I guess I’d like to make it official? In a way the rest of the world can see, too?”
“Willow, are you saying…”
“Tara Maclay, will you marry me?”