
Drawn Together
Dawn lay in bed, eyes open wide, the satisfying weight of Andrew’s head on her shoulder. She raked her fingers through his
honey-colored curls, smoothing them over her fingers while he slept, utterly spent, a dolphin’s smile curved upon his lips.
She breathed deeply and stretched. The box springs of the bed sighed a rusty groan and Andrew stirred. Behind his eyelids,
his eyes darted back and forth like a typewriter’s carriage. She combed his hair back from his forehead, delighting in the
damp cornsilk feel of it in her fingers. Her lover was dreaming.
Lover. Dawn bit her lip to suppress a smile. She twirled a curl over the tip of her index finger and studied the shadows and
patterns of the light as it fell over his hair, her palm, his face, the creased sheet and rumpled blanket, and her fingers began
to itch. She thought, though it was only a half-thought, that if she could draw this moment…
Dawn blinked at the spark of thought that flared in her brain. She pressed her hand to her cool forehead. Nothing was that
simple. Nothing was ever that simple, but if she could draw...
Suddenly she craved her pencils. What would it hurt to just try, she wondered? In the past, her drawing had been
unfocused, like doors opened into random rooms and repulsive places full of formidable, frightening things, but the spark
that inspired her then had been freaky at best, and at worst, well, she didn’t like to think of it at worst.
Now, though, things felt safe. She felt calm, and certain, and sure.
The idea blossomed in her like an underwater flower, full of glistening bubbles and light. She thought, If I could draw
something like what I have here with Andrew, but for someone else…
But her thoughts felt blurry without the focus of her pencils.
A fist of anticipation closed around Dawn’s heart and squeezed once as the bubbles of her thoughts broke free, flooding her
with schemes and images and ideas, more than she could contain.
She edged gently from the bed, filled with a thrumming exhilaration, but moving as carefully as possible, sliding Andrew into
the bosom of his pillows. Quietly, stealthily, Dawn slipped her arms into Buffy’s threadbare bathrobe, tiptoed down the hall,
and took her sketchbook from its place of abandon on the table in the sitting room.
Past midnight on the first night of December, Dawn opened the door onto the rooftop. She dragged a tottery striped lawn
chair to the roof’s edge so that she could see the serene street three stories below glistening under a fresh layer of frost,
laid out before her like a scene out of a Dickens tale. Winter pinched crimson into her cheeks and chafed her throat, but
she felt invigorated, like her whole body was aflame.
Dawn, naked save for Buffy’s robe, damp hair swept into a knot, drank in the night, savoring every heartbeat, every
breath. She sat for a moment, feeling the thrill of night air with every breath, her pale pink toes nipped by cold, her pencil
poised above the page, waiting, waiting...
How long had she been running? Dawn wondered idly, while she waited for the spark to catch in her and burn through to the
page and into whatever world beyond. Now that she was calm, what would she do? What couldn’t she do?
She thought, if only a person had a place, a sanctuary like this, and a new love, or an old one, the world could be saved.
Under these auspices, with great hope in her heart, Dawn began to draw….
The path, crafted of cobblestones from the time of his boyhood, were the same stones that paved the street where he had
hidden while the building in which his father held his practice had burned. It curved and wound beneath the stalks of
dandelions and sunflowers and sweet peas that rivaled in height the Sears Tower and the Chrysler Building. The wan light
faded, turning the blooms to colorless fans, but the path shone like silver, guiding him forward, step by step, until he
reached a garden gate.
William paused, not certain he could trust this dream from the last. The gate, a towering filigree wrought on scale with the
flowers, pushed open with the barest nudge. He drew a breath, and stepped inside.
Beyond the gate lay a silent churchyard full of willowy trees, great graceful things they were, their branches swaying lithely
in an almost imperceptible breeze. The path continued to weave between them, and he followed it, entranced by the night’s
ethereal splendor. The sloping path that looped like a silver chain among moonlit hills stood a chapel made of something like
crystal or glass. Its facets and buttresses and arched windows twinkled in the starlight like the faces of a sapphire on a
velvet cloth.
William, for reasons he could not quite grapple, thought that the air here felt different, fresher somehow. The breeze that
brushed his hair back from his forehead held the mingled smoky scents of black pepper and rose petals, but somehow that
didn’t seem odd to him at all.
Before he had known it, William had arrived at the chapel, and had wandered beneath the vaulted starlit ceiling for time
untold, his feet bare on a lush carpet of peat moss, when he saw her.
She wore a gown of green velvet brocade, tied at the waist to reveal a V of pale skin and the cleft of her breasts. Her hair,
now ash blonde, had grown wild and spilled over her shoulders and her face, so familiar with its strange mix of strength and
inquisitiveness.
But it couldn’t be her.
He remained rooted to the spot as she turned, tilted her head, and fixed him with a canny expression. Then her eyes
softened as she walked forward, crossing beneath a bowery of shadow, her long white fingers splayed on her hips.
“William?” she asked.
His breath caught. “Buffy,” he whispered. He closed the distance between them, praying, praying that she would not
evaporate beneath his touch, or worse.
Face to face they stood, and she held up a trembling hand, and William, mirroring her, pressed his palm to hers. He could
smell her. He could taste her, the heathery scent of her – his Buffy.
“It’s you…” he muttered, lacing his fingers in hers.
“Oh, thank God,” Buffy breathed.
And then she jumped into his arms.
William tumbled with her, falling back in the cool green grass, bathed both in starlight and in the honeygold of her. Her
mouth found his, and he felt her smiling as she kissed him. He squeezed his eyes closed and melted into it, body and soul.
Buffy sat astride him and smiled down into his upturned face.
“It’s you,” he said again, his voice tinged with sadness.
She smoothed her palms over his chest, up each side of his neck to cup his face in her hands. “Didn’t expect to find you here
either,” she said, dipping to kiss him again.
He stopped her. “But how? What is this place?”
Buffy gazed up into the starlit chamber, so breathtaking in its unearthly beauty. “I don’t know,” she marveled.
The green robe parted over her body and pooled over their entwined legs. Her skin had blushed to the color of a sun-ripened
pear. He slipped his hands under the hemmed borders of the robe and pushed them back to reveal the swell of her belly…
William shook his head. “Good God, Buffy… You’re huge,” he said.
She boxed his shoulder, a playful grin curving her lips. “I know,” she admitted. “I’m like a Buddha. You can rub me for luck.”
His half-smile drained to empty. He placed his open palms on her belly, remembering how once, not long ago, before they
went to the Circle and took Thellian down, he’d wondered if he would last long enough to see this. He spread both hands and
found that they didn’t begin to cover it.
“How far long?” he asked.
Buffy leaned back against the tent of his legs. “Months,” she said plainly.
Tears welled and sparkled in the corners of his eyes. His let his head fall back on the soft shoulder of the ground. “How?” he
asked. “And where?”
She stared at him for a long moment. She raked her fingers through his hair. “Hey,” she said. “I’m safe, okay. I’m working
on a way to get back. And I even know how I got where I am, so there’s half the mystery solved…”
William closed his eyes, wringing out a single tear. He caressed her stomach, gently, then grimaced.
“I could use some luck, luv,” he said quietly.
Buffy took his hands in hers. He shifted his weight to sit forward, pulling her into his lap. She gave him that quizzical half-
smile, like she knew what he was about to say, and it was something sentimental and silly that he was taking too seriously
and she was gonna rib him for it later.
“What is it?”
“Made a mess of things, I have,” he said. “You were gone, and…” he glanced at her, then closed his eyes. “There was a…
Beastie. Got the best of me, and I flat out abandoned Dawn and Andrew. Right git of a dad-type I’ve been, and now…” he
sighed. He looked at her. “Months?”
She nodded. “It’s this whole time thing.”
William set her down on the grass and put his head into his hands. “I can’t… I can’t do this alone. They… We need you.”
Buffy pulled his hand into both of hers and squeezed. “William,” she said. “There’s something coming. Here, where I am, and
there, with you. And they’re gonna need you.”
William laughed a deep, low, bitter sound. “No no no… I’m down for this count, Buffy. It’s you they need. Always you.”
Austerity creased a line between her brows. “You are not down,” she told him. “You are the strongest man I have ever
known, and they are gonna need you if they’re gonna make it through this alive. You have to lead them.”
William gaped blankly at her face before breaking into sobs of bitter laughter. He got to his feet and stalked a tight circle in
the grass. “I’m no leader, Buffy. I’m a lackey at best, and you know it.” He stabbed an accusatory finger at her. “You’ve
seen my best laid plans. Hell, you’ve thwarted them. Besides, none of it matters. Beast Bitch bit me, and I been wanderin’
’round in the Between-lands since, no soddin’ clue...”
“Spike!” Buffy snapped, all irritated. But immediately she amended her tone, and said, “William. Listen to me.”
The self-possession in Buffy’s tone stilled his pacing. The calmness in her composure shut him up.
She raised her eyes to his. “You have to lead them,” she repeated. “Until I get back - and just know that I am doing
everything humanly and demonly possible to do that, and I will be there. Soon. But until then... Lead them.”
William bowed his head. His heart trumped his head, as it always did, and he found himself nodding. “For you, pet. Anything.”
He dropped to Buffy’s side, placing his hands on her belly again. “And for you, little bit. Just so you know.”
“It’s a girl, William.”
He snapped his gaze to hers. “Wha?”
“Tara Joyce Summers Pratt,” Buffy said, smiling. “Whaddya think?”
A swirl of dizzy joy dazzled and dazed him, left him a stammering, stuttering mess, but he managed, finally, to say, “I love it.
Her. Yeah.”
Buffy kissed him hard on the mouth. William knew a challenge when he saw it. He pulled her down to the ground and rose to
meet it.
Hours passed into what may have been days before Buffy and William resurfaced long enough to notice that the scenery had
changed. In the east, the sky gleamed pale like the luminescence of a pearl, and the multitudes of glass facets caught and
scattered the light in a thousand prismatic gleams and shimmers.
Buffy stretched her arms over her head, delighting in the familiar weight of his body against hers. She kissed him, knowing
that their time was, for now, near an end.
“What is this place?” she asked again.
He craned his neck to peer out of the mullioned windows. “I have no idea,” he said, truthfully.
She looped her arms around his neck. “The air feels good here,” she said. “Feels…”
“Safe,” he finished. He nuzzled her neck. He could feel his eyelids growing heavy, and even though he fought to keep them
open, he felt like a child on Christmas Eve trying to wait up for Santa Claus.
“It is safe,” she whispered. “And if we found it once, we should be able to find it again. Right?”
“What are you sayin?” he slurred, sleepily.
“Come back to me, my William,” she whispered into his ear as he drifted, blown like a snowflake into the pristine whiteness
of sleep. “Come back to me, and I’ll come back to you.”
William opened his eyes. His vision blurred, refocused, blurred again, and he saw that the two white peaks that loomed
before him were not mountains but his own two feet.
Took him a moment to realize this, but once his equilibrium settled, he understood.
He was in Dawn’s room, in Dawn’s bed.
Dawn’s room? he thought. How the hell’d he get here?
He sat up, much too quickly, and stars exploded behind his eyes. After much blinking and swearing, he swung his legs, which
were stiff as stilts, over the bed’s edge. He felt a numbing ache in his left arm and an icy tension in the back of his neck, but
after running a quick tally, everything else seemed right as rain.
William was just about to try his hand at standing when he heard a piercing shriek of a timbre and pitch that could only
come from Andrew.
Some things, it seemed, never changed.
Tonight
I sink soft and low
Just like the moon
Over the snow
I hear icicles falling in the dark
We're just like anyone else
We just want a little bit
Of sun for ourselves
And a little bit of rain
To make it all grow
Maybe a minute or two
To get lost in the glow of love
There's always someone throwing
matches around
Waving the shiny new knife
The first to run when the house burns
down
I've seen it everyday of my life
I must confess there appears to be
Way more darkness than light
I want to fall like a pearl
To the bottom of the sea
There no one will find us tonight
Tonight
It might look pretty bad
We might lose everything
We thought that we had
But shadows will pass
Smoke, it will clear
If something survives of us around here
I'll be glad 'cause I know
I was lost in the glow
Of love
Icicles, by Patty Griffin