Ashamnu (The Bagadnu Remix)
The rest of the year, Willow drank six glasses of water a day, her Snoopy water bottle part of the self-consciously youthful California college girl kit she always carried. The Snoopy flask was regular water, the Muppets one was holy water. Which sometimes she drank, when she'd run out of the other. Hello, still Jewish? A tiny, occasional assertion.
And so, at eleven am on the morning of Yom Kippur, her mouth was sticky with abstention, and she'd ordered a Pepsi before she remembered why she was out of class and alone in a shiny vinyl booth on a weekday morning.
Early last year, she and Buffy and Tara and Riley would come here and be collegiate, spread their books open on the table in this same booth, and then use them as crumb-catching plates while they talked and joked and enjoyed the sun, in which they were college kids.
Pepsi from the can, water from the melting ice in the glass. Her tongue unstuck itself, and she licked her lips.
She was wearing Buffy's shirt, which she'd put on that morning in Joyce 's bedroom. It wasn't as bad as it sounded, really. The Buffybot - they were allowing her to dress herself, because Willow was experimenting to see how heuristic her programming was - had reached for it, but she'd taken it from her hand. Its hand. Some things- were just too much.
That shirt, a tight brown T, was too much. Sometimes, every excuse they made for the Buffybot - oh, she's so wacky! Buffy's always like that! - was too much. In Willow's dreams now, Buffy would sometimes stop mid-fight and she would be scrambling to reprogram her, but couldn't quite remember the code.
The rhythm of the fight was different without Buffy. To start with, standing on one of her vantage points, Willow had felt loaded with the weight of deciding whether to risk Tara's life today, or Xander's. Directing her lover to send a vamp towards her best friend, she'd thought: today, I'll kill Xander. No, to be honest, she'd more often thought: today, I'll kill Anya.
But really, nobody was in as good a position as her to see how pointless it was. So, she deployed them in the way that would buy the town on the Hellmouth one day more, rather than one fewer. After all, it was only a matter of time. Condensation from the ice glass, condensation from the Pepsi can, cool on her palms. She laid them along her cheeks, hot despite the rain spluttering on the window beside her.
The black dress came from Joyce's closet. It looked like it had been bought for a funeral, and never worn again. Dressing Buffy in it, Willow had felt detached. This wasn't her first body, after all, not her first secret burial. Not the first time she'd turned to Buffy with a spark of black humor about the ugliness of corpse clothes. Just the first time she hadn't been there.
Willow put down the glass, and tucked two dollar bills under its edge. The can, she held on to as she walked out onto the wet campus sidewalk, where she carefully dropped it on the ground right next to the recycling collection.