Author: docvergil
Pairing: Willow/Xander, PG13
Timeline: S3, somewhere between 'Homecoming' and 'Lover's Walk'
Summary: written initially as a response to a 'patterns' challenge over at open_on_sunday it became waay too long. After 'the fluke', Willow muses on the patterns in her relationship with Xander.
There had always been a pattern in all this for Willow: she wants Xander, Xander lusts after someone else, he tells her all about it, she goes to cry in the girls' restroom.
A terrible cycle of silent hope and rejection which kept her close in its grip and, it seemed, would not let her go. Or at least not until she wanted to be let go.
But recently there had been different patterns: the swirl of paisley on Xander's cumberbund, the little circles his fingers made in her palm, the symmetrical impress of her lips on his, which she felt like she could still see, seared into him, if she dared to look.
It was all getting pretty abstract though: not just a pattern with two elements, black and white, stars and stripes, Bert and Ernie...? No...but complicated, like Kandinsky maybe. Cordelia's risky investment in Xander, Oz's trust in her...Buffy and Giles...disappointment and disgust.
So now there was another pattern emerging, another destructive cycle: temptation, resistance, repentance, fear and lies.
And yeah, ok, the secrecy seemed to make everything sexier - the kisses and touches were just theirs because there could be no witnesses, any witnessing of any kind being a bad and all. Which meant that the connection really only existed for them, which seemed, to Willow at least, to make everyhing more intense, more meaningful. After all, wasn't this everything she had ever wanted?
Xander's hands...warm fingertips on the back of her neck...hot and shivery all at once...swirlyness in the pit of her stomach..heat coming off both of them...gathering them up and wrapping around them...suddenly the world seems to be swimming in candlelight...and now he's kissing her...
The pattern has reached it's centre and there is nothing in the air but love.
As they pull away, the last strands of her hair still caught in his (red and black, two lines from one centre) Willow knows, knows in her heart, that the truth she seems to see in this pattern is mis-placed and it will end in the old cycle recurring again: heartbreak, and tears in the ladies room. She sighs and rests her head on Xander's chest.
Listening to the rhythm of his breathing, trying to fend off the knowledge of what will come, there rises in her another, different, certainty: that she will always have him, and he, her.