Some days, Willow looks at Kennedy and sees Cordelia.
They are standing on the cliffs overlooking Rio, watching the shadow of Cristo Redentor slowly swallow the favelas and the hotel districts into darkness. Small pebbles tumble down the mountainside when Kennedy walks to the edge, restlessly tossing and catching her stake as she repeats to Willow the latest gossip about the other three slayers assigned to Rio. Her hair billows in the wind, swarming around her hear like Medusa's coil, but it's the casual cruelty of her words that turns Willow into stone.
Some days, Willow looks at Kennedy and sees Cordy and Harmony and Veruca and Aphrodesia and all the other girls she knows she should feel sorry for now that they're dead, but doesn't. And Willow doesn't say it aloud, doesn't really even think it, but when Kennedy tosses her head back and laughs, there is that fraction of a second when Willow imagines her dead. Fluttering heart stilling like a butterfly in her fist, cold eyes growing glassy and pale until all that is left in them is the reflected moonlight.
And Willow screams.
(She sits and waits, quiet and still, until it comes to her. The fawn trembles under her touch, but she wraps her arms around it, runs her hand across the soft flank and whispers sweet nothings into its ear until it calms down. A wet nose nuzzles against her neck, trusting and curious, and Willow brings the knife down, the crimson arc of hot blood splattering her face with red.)
Afterwards, she finds herself sitting on the bedroom floor, staring at the empty wardrobe left behind by Kennedy. There is a torn slip of paper taped to the frame of the mirror above the side table, a few words hastily scribbled on it with a blue ball-point pen:
Need to take a break. Staying with the girls. Don't call me.
K
Kennedy's eyes when she rose back to her feet and walked away said: "Murderer."
Some days, Willow finds herself missing the Hellmouth.
She picks up the receiver and for a moment her fingers hover on the pad before she changes her mind and selects Buffy's number instead. Buffy's mobile connects to her answering service, and when Willow tries her home number, it's Dawn who answers the phone. They exchange pleasantries, empty words that mean nothing and say even less, and when Dawn tells her that Buffy is out with her boyfriend, she doesn't even ask her if she wants to leave a message.
Willow tries Xander next, but his phone just rings and rings and rings until the call disconnects.
She puts down the receiver, tears down Kennedy's note and scrunches it up. Walks to the bookshelf and pulls out the book she always meant to throw away.
(This time, she remembers to add the lethe's bramble. She stirs the dry leaves into the still-warm blood, then whispers the words she now knows by heart, and the magic flows into her veins like liquid snakes.)
Even magic has its limits, she now understands. A limit to how far she can reach, how much she can change. As she tests it, she touches something warm, something gentle and forgiving, and for a moment she hesitates. The moment passes, and she lets go, lets old loves rest and concentrates on what she can fix.
There is a memory, from the summer when Buffy was gone, of how they used to sit on the living room floor, she and Tara and Dawn, with Willow braiding Dawn's hair while Tara read stories to them to make them forget. There is a memory of Buffy and Xander, laughing, dancing and trying to catch the cockroaches that scuttling across the floor of the Bronze. There is a memory, old and almost forgotten, of everyone being happy.
(She pricks her finger and uses the blood to close the circle on the floor, feels the darkness fill the emptiness behind her eyes.)
And Willow smiles.
She starts small: atoms knitting together into strands of flesh and bone and sinew, a pulse of energy that breathes life into the shrivelled heart, skin crawling across the bloody muscles-
She stops, pulls back, tears off the latest layer of her masterpiece and then watches Warren writhe and scream in her mind. He deserves to suffer, after all.
When she is finished, she closes her eyes, feeling the world take shape around her. Not perfect, but better - set on a course that she knows she can control. As the players take their places she takes a deep breath, lets her hair set from black to white to red.
Stay in character, remember your lines, and energy energy energy.
The phone rings, and as she picks the receiver, Willow looks at her reflection in the mirror and smiles. She always did want to have blue eyes.