AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is my first fanfic, and as the title might suggest, it focuses mainly on Xander. Please let me know what you think of it, else my poor, battered ego might just give up the ghost. RATING: Mostly PG-13 for language and adult themes. A couple of parts will be R.DISCLAIMER: I don't own jack. Correction--jack's probably the only thing I do own. The rest belongs to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and the Frog Network. SPOILERS: Everything up to "Becoming".
Chapter Five A: First Interlude
*...In which Giles is rebuked by his Superior, Willow faces her Fears, Buffy runs from hers, Oz overcomes his Weakness, and two mysterious Strangers appear...*
Part Two: Willow *...In which Willow faces her Fears...*
It was out there, Willow knew, out there in the darkness, waiting for her. In her fear-heightened state, she could hear the creature's rustling movements. From time to time, she would catch a glimpse of it, a dark shape discernible from the darkness around it only by the fact of its motion. From time to time, she would even catch a brief sound that she was sure was the creature's raspy breathing.
Willow tried to slow her own breathing by telling herself that it could hear her, but that only made her hitching breaths come faster and shallower. She realized that she couldn't keep this up much longer; another couple of minutes and she'd begin to hyperventilate. She briefly considered calling for help, but then she remembered that she was alone in the house. Her parents had gone off to some town meeting or another, leaving their daughter at home alone only after her stringent protestations that she would be perfectly fine had won them over.
Now, however, she was beginning to regret her brash statements. Her head had begun to throb painfully only a few minutes after the elder Rosenbergs had departed and Willow opted to turn in early. She took half of a painkiller tablet the doctors had given her--some sort of codeine derivative, she thought--and promptly went under. When she woke up an indeterminate time later, it was fully dark, no light at all coming through her curtained windows, marking it as being well past nine PM.
Laying in bed, lounging in the drowsy after-effects of the sedative, that was when she first knew that she was not alone in her room. At first, she had chalked up her feelings to drugged paranoia--lord knows, she wasn't used to this sort of thing--but had quickly come to realize that she wasn't just having an anxiety attack. The thing in the room with her was *real*, it was out there, and it was going to come for her eventually.
Her opponent was real--as real as her fear for Buffy, as real as her worry for Xander. But try as she might, Willow found that she could not prevent her thoughts from wandering. Focusing on the threat to her life was hard; her sleep- and medication-addled mind, normally so keen, was floating. If she didn't stay focused, there was a significantly real possibility that she could die. Despite all of the fear flowing through her, she found herself thinking about Buffy and Xander, or counting ceiling tiles, or watching the flickering shadows at her window, or playing "Anywhere But Here" against herself.
Finally, her thoughts cleared, almost as though someone had flipped a switch. One moment, she had been confused and half-asleep; the next, her terror was so sharp that she could cut leather with it, but at least she was thinking straight. Why hadn't it attacked yet? Deciding that it didn't matter, her left hand quietly crept under the mattress, seeking out the stake she had kept there since the night Angel had mailed her fish to her. Her right groped as softly as possible for the lamp beside her bed, grasping its pull-chain firmly.
In the interminably long moments before the light came on, she considered her options. Simply springing out of bed at leaping at her attacker didn't sound good, so she picked plan B: keep as much distance between it and herself as possible. At last, the chain reached the end of its pull, and the light came on, throwing the room into sharp contrast, the sparse furniture casting eerie shadows on the wall hangings.
Nothing. She looked again, trying to discern if there was anything she had missed. Still nothing. Had she been wrong? Were her reactions those of a frightened, injured teenage girl, jumping at shadows? She frowned; after all that she had been through, Willow could not accept that she was so easily cowed, that all it took to shatter her nerve was a strange noise and an odd shadow.
Movement--to her right! Willow pivoted off the bed, her long nightshirt tangling in the blankets and impairing her motion. By the time she had gotten free of the sheets and stood up, there was nothing there. Willow starting walking backwards, a terrible notion in her mind; there had been something familiar about that shadow, something that she couldn't quite place. And had it crawled under her bed?
Willow continued toward the door at a steady pace, not wanting to startle whatever it was with a sudden movement. After what seemed an eternity of slow walking, Willow reached the door, her path into the safety of the hallway. She paused, consumed suddenly by a morbid curiosity to look on the face of her stalker.
*No, darn it*, Willow thought to herself, struggling to conquer her treacherous body, *this is like a scene from a second-rate horror movie! I refuse to fall to the cliché that the "helpless, young girl" has to explore the dark, scary room alone. I'm going to go downstairs, call Oz, then call Giles, maybe even call my parents and the police, and to Hell with doing this myself!* But despite being a liberated nineties woman unwilling to succumb to the done-to-death routine of slasher films, succumb she did, moving away from the door and crouching to look under the bed.
As she lifted the edge of the comforter which had been pulled off in her struggles, Willow hefted the stake in her right hand, ready to impale whatever Hell-spawned monster might be lurking under there. Gradually, the space beneath her bed became visible, inspiring a burst of self-conscious laughing when Willow saw that the most dangerous creature under there were dust-bunnies. Relieved and somewhat chagrined, Willow made to stand up.
When her eyes came level with the bed's surface, the laugh died in her throat with a sound akin to strangling. Willow began to turn slightly red, both with renewed terror and increased blood pressure. Her legs quaked, and she tumbled backwards away from the bed, skittering on all fours like a crab running from lemon and hot butter. Once her back was against the far wall, she put the stake between herself and the creature on the bed, hoping to intimidate it, but knowing it was useless. Her opponent would never be afraid of something as pitiful as a wooden stake.
Willow stared across the room at the motionless creature, watching it watch her. She took note of its horrible features, so familiar and so frightening; saw its hideous mandibles and multi-faceted eyes; saw the fangs glistening with their poison; saw the black, red, and yellow sheen of its body. Willow had seen this kind before, but never one so grotesquely large, never this close, and not for a very long time. Willow faced her nightmare, here in her very room, a place that was supposed to be her sanctuary from the creatures of the night.
In short, Willow was looking at a black widow spider as big as her head.
Her fear of all spiders had stemmed from this very breed. Bitten in a city park as a child, Willow had nearly died from the widow's bite before she received the antivenin that negated its poison. Though only seven years old, she remembered the doctor's admonition not to get bitten by one again--the antidote could only be given to a person once in their life. In retrospect, she supposed that the doctor hadn't meant to frighten her so badly with this warning, but it had led to years of nightmares and any number of worries to her over-protective parents. And until now, she had never laid eyes on another black widow.
Until now, when she was seeing what had to be the largest black widow in the world.
To calm herself down, she began to recite number theories in her mind, counting binary number clusters for her programming class. It helped greatly, both in terms of slowing her breathing and in calming her tremors. She stood slowly, so as not to disturb the widow, and began to edge sideways toward the door again. Willow kept her eyes on the spider the whole time, looking at it analytically, doing her best to keep her emotions (namely, mind-numbing fear) out of the assessment. Finally, Willow reached the door, and let herself out as easily as possible.
Once in the hall, Willow dropped the stake and made for the stairs, wondering the whole time how it had entered her room, where it came from, and how it had managed to grow to that size. In the end tally, she supposed that it didn't matter, only getting rid of the thing mattered now. Consumed in a red haze of anger, Willow went over her options, calculating the risks. There was only one course of action available to her, or at least only one that appealed to her.
She made her way to the kitchen, reached under the sink, and pulled out the object she had been looking for. Smiling a grim, deadly smile, Willow returned to the door to her room. She pulled the tab on the canister, pushed in the button on top of it, and covered her mouth with her shirt as the first of the mist began to leak from the object. She opened her door,chucked in the bug bomb as though it were a grenade, and slammed the door shut again before the spider could escape. Listening to the hissing sound of the bug bomb through the door, Willow couldn't help wondering if she had perhaps gone a bit overboard, maybe used a level of force that could be considered excessive.
*Nah.*
Willow fell asleep on the living room couch. When her parents came home, they found her dozing there so contentedly that they didn't have the heart to move her. The smile didn't leave Willow's face the whole night.