Willow has lost everything she loved. She lost her magic and she lost her home -- and she lost her friends. She lost Oz and Tara. She lost Xander. She lost Buffy, who is a cold, hard, mean -- mean something. Something that kills automatically, something that has no fire. She lost Dawn, who left after the end of Sunnydale, gone to find out what the Key really is. She lost her fish, the ones Angel killed when he was evil, and she lost her parents, and she even lost Giles, who she can't trust anymore.

She's lost everything.

She has Kennedy -- who doesn't count.

She goes with Giles and the Potentials -- the Slayers -- because someone has to. She helps train them because someone has to. She's not allowed to use any magic at all, ever, and people walk around her like she's the only one who's ever lost something.

**

When Andrew comes to the compound with the psychotic slayer, Willow can feel the magic Giles's coven uses to keep her impounded. It tingles against her skin and it calls to her. She fucks Kennedy hard, with her whole fist, the night they erect the shielding, and the next day Kennedy avoids looking at her.

Tara would have understood, Willow thought. Tara would have --

Oz would have.

Xander would have.

That night Willow sleeps in a different room and dreams about touching Xander's sneaker with her sneaker under the desk during class. She can't remember which class, only that Spike came and Cordelia fell and Oz didn't want to touch her.

She wakes up sweating.

**

Kennedy is killed trying to teach the psychotic Potential how to spar. Willow thinks: one more down. Her fingers don't tingle with the need to do magic to avenge Kennedy's death. She's actually kind of relieved.

Does that make her a bad person?

**

In Willow's dreams, Oz has blue hair and he's not a werewolf, and Xander has two eyes.

**

The world is growing darker by the day. The sun doesn't stay up as long every day. It's almost summertime and the sun is almost missing.

Willow feels it when Buffy dies, like a shiver in the universe, like a starfish regrowing a limb, like somewhere the world has shaken itself back into place, back into balance.

Buffy was supposed to have died so many years ago, Willow lost track. None of this was supposed to happen, because Buffy should have died when she was sixteen, and Xander brought her back to life.

Xander always was the most human of all of them.

**

Angel doesn't come to Buffy's funeral. Neither does Dawn -- no one can find her and Willow isn't going to push. Giles doesn't wear black.

Willow stops cutting her hair, stops dying it, and stops trying not to use magic. The first time, it's to open a bottle of beer, and it hurts, like pushing through a brick wall. It scratches her face and makes her eyes bleed.

It's easier the second time, when she reaches out to find Xander, who isn't answering her pages. He's in Glasgow. She can feel him on the other side of the world. Suddenly the phone rings:

"Hey, Will, it's me."

She feels foggy from the magics. He tells her about zombies and she doesn't talk again except to say, "Where are you now?" and then he keeps going. He tells her that they closed a Hellmouth with a tribal dance. Instead of telling him that Buffy is dead, she tells him that Spike is still alive, that they found a psychotic Potential, that no one has told Buffy Spike is alive yet, because no one ever did. No one wanted her to know.

Willow doesn't want Xander to know anything either. She wants to protect him, wants him to keep traveling around the world, finding Potentials and closing Hellmouths and -- she pushes again with the magic, feels her fingers wet, it's blood, out of her fingernails, and Xander is having sex.

**

Xander comes back sick. There's something wrong with him, a disease, something, no one knows.

Willow stays away from him -- avoids him like they're back in high school, right after Oz and Cordelia caught them kissing. She's careful to never touch him, careful to not hold his gaze for too long.

Sometimes he stares at her.

**

The coven does spell after spell and they even take him to a regular doctor. The doctor looks at his scars with raised eyebrows, but she doesn't say anything. When Xander leaves, Willow is in the waiting room.

He shakes his head. "She doesn't know. She took some blood."

He steps toward Willow, and she steps away.

"I've got the car," she says, and jingles the keys. Xander follows her silently.

**

There is a shiver in the universe when Angel dies, and Willow is glad. She's glad. She's glad Angel is gone, glad Los Angeles is gone, glad Wolfram & Hart is gone, glad they're all dead. She's glad Buffy died before Angel, and she's glad she's in England, protected.

The world shakes itself back into place, and Powers rise again, and it becomes easier for Willow to do magic, because the coven is too distracted by trying to keep the sun from growing dark to bother with her.

**

"I know you're doing magic again," he whispers into the air. It's three a.m., but there's no sun anyway, and time is meaningless. Willow hovers above Xander's bed, staring down at him.

"I can feel your magic," he whispers. "I can feel you. I know you're here."

His eye is closed. She floats down until she's right above him, stretched out above him. Xander is the only person alive right now who has ever seen her with brown hair.

She settles, settles, settles, slowly, until she's laying inside him. She pushes his blood through his veins and makes his heart pump. She holds his heart in her hand and lets it beat, lets it squish blood through her fingers.

"I can feel you," he whispers again.

**

He watches her, but he never says anything. He doesn't tell Giles and he doesn't tell the coven. The shields that held Willow's magic back fall away. The Potentials don't want to train with her, and even Giles can tell that something is different, but she knows that he doesn't know what it is.

Every night Xander whispers, "I can feel you."

**

Willow lays over him and feels him get hard underneath her. He tilts his head up and closes his eye and she puts her fingers in the empty socket of his other eye and feels the scars from Caleb, and Xander gets hard.

She hasn't felt that since Oz, since -- a long time.

She hovers over him, moving against him. He'd said he could feel her, he'd said he knew she was there.

He lies still underneath her as she moves, and when he comes, all over himself, through her hand, she flees, back to her body.

She touches herself with the hand he came on -- through -- but she can't come, she can only shake.

**

The next day, Willow looks at Xander from across the room while they're training Potentials -- by candlelight, because the electricity stopped working a week before -- and Xander looks at her at the same time.

Willow looks away first, and her stomach hurts.

**

Xander is still sick and no one knows what's wrong with him. Giles says to her, in a low voice that doesn't carry, "Can you fix him?" and Willow says, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Giles looks at her disapprovingly, then stares down at her pink-stained fingernails. "Every time you do magic, you bleed from your eyes and fingers," he says to her. "Did you think I hadn't been noticing?" Then he pauses, and says reproachfully, "The world will always be ending, Willow."

**

Willow puts her hand into Xander's brain, and feels where all the pieces are broken.

She can fix him, if she could put her hand into his brain while they're both awake.

She mutters this to herself, and Xander says, "I'm not asleep, Will," and she's startled back into her body.

Willow stays on her bed, her heart racing, staring at the ceiling. She thinks about Oz and Tara, and even Kennedy, and about love, and about how small her heart feels.

"Willow," says Xander from the doorway, and when she sits up in bed, he comes in, and closes the door, and locks it. "Willow," he says again, and she holds out her arms and he touches her, and his skin is dry and cold, and he doesn't smell the way he used to, and his arms are too strong, but she lets him hold her anyway.

**