
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/26945.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      Multi
  Fandom:
      Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer
  Character:
      Willow_Rosenberg, Cordelia_Chase, Xander_Harris
  Additional Tags:
      Threesome, Alternate_Timeline, High_School
  Stats:
      Published: 2009-12-07 Words: 7982
****** Loveslut ******
by Hth
Summary
     When she said I think I know how to bring Cordelia back, Xander had
     been like, if I knew how to do that, I'd tell Mrs. Lovett to take her
     chem midterm and shove it up her ass. Not surprised that Willow could
     bring somebody back from the dead, just surprised that she could go
     about her life being so basically normal, the whole world looking
     right at her and not getting the whole direct hit of Willow's
     knowledge.
Sucker love is heaven-sent
You pucker up, our passion’s spent
My heart’s a tart, your body’s rent
My body’s broken, yours is bent
–Placebo, "Every Me, Every You"
 
I: XANDER
She laid one leg across his, crept it slowly over him like she was doing
something sneaky. Will was like that – always with those big, uber-innocent
eyes looking somewhere above the level of his gaze, pretending she hardly
noticed he was there. Don’t mind me, hell no – just slithering across the bed
naked – hey, how long have you been there?
She knew, though. She knew just what it did to him, the ripple of her small,
squirming body as it pressed against him, the bone of her hip in the soft part
of his thigh, her belly stroking light then heavy against his hard cock, her
small breasts rolling this way and that way across the broader surface of his
chest. Aw, baby. Willow, what you do....
First Xander’s hand, then his lips glided up her shoulder. Will’s skin, just as
soft and sinfully comfortable as the warm satiny sheets of his parents’ king-
sized bed under his back. Soft and soft, sin and sin, and holy shit, the touch
and the taste of Will, his girl, his brainy, crazy, loving goddess girlfriend,
his wacked and wonderful other half.
Bright eyes, finally right on him, in through Xander’s sex-clouded eyes and
into his perpetually sex-with-Willow clouded brain. Her lips parted in one of
those smiles, that was so unbearably sweet, and yet wicked in ways that no all-
American high school sweetheart should know enough to be, and it knifed through
Xander again, how bad he wanted her, how she was his first, his best, his
witchy Willow Rosenberg....
The first time they made love was in Xander’s back yard, inside his battered,
army-green Boy Scout tent that was so full of worn holes that the porch light
shone in through them and cast planetarium-like speckles all over the tarp.
There was nothing there, nothing but Willow and a bedspread and a little
transistor radio – he remembered that the Spice Girls were involved in there
somewhere.
They’d known since the funeral that afternoon. It was too awful, too cruel and
nasty and wrong to talk about – what they were doing to faithful, soft-eyed Oz,
what they were feeling right there in front of Cordy who’d died from the shock,
practically. So they didn’t say anything to each other at the funeral, but it
was in the way Xander couldn’t hold her tight enough and the way Will fit so
perfectly into his arms, her back pressed against his chest and hitching with
the force of her silent tears. But that night he waited for her in the tent,
too scared to do anything that might make it look like he expected – but
knowing anyway, why Willow would be there.
It was always perfect like that between him and Will. Made in heaven, like his
mom always said – only she said it like it was the punchline to some
particularly devious Penn-and-Telleresque joke, and Xander could really feel
it, believe it all the way down to the heart. Not his heart, and not Willow’s,
but some phantom heart that wasthem, the two of them taken whole.
He had been so unbelievably awkward, and Will too shy to speak a single word,
just looking at him with trusting eyes like two full moons and her face flaming
to the touch with her nervous embarrassment. God, he’d been inept, he could
tell from the way she flinched when he tried to push into her, and even after
she helped it had been all wrong for a minute, or two, or what felt like forty
years in hell, but after that–
After that he found his angle, and Willow found their rhythm, and it got easier
and easier until they weren’t just two teenagers screwing in the backyard, but
skin and bone stretched tight over fiery souls, together in the way they’d been
stumbling blindly toward for all their lives. Xander knew he didn’t have the
same kind of destiny that Buffy did, the kind stamped on his birth certificate
right next to his little inky footprints, but he was seventeen and narcissistic
and it was easy to believe that he was born to wind up here tonight, in a moth-
eaten tent flooded by starlight and porchlight and Willowlight.
At the end, when they laid side by side under the blanket, nose brushing nose,
and Willow smiled that sly, kittenish smile at him, Xander began to suspect
that he’d been duped. She’d known all along that they were looking at the big
picture here, all her talk of accidents aside. Willow had known from the
beginning of time that she was for Xander and him for her, and he was finally
catching up to her, late like always. Slow on the uptake, one more time.
Willow’s perfect knowledge, knowing him and his slowness and his strength and
the rage and confusion that could smoke and stutter inside him, and knowing the
way he had been looking all his life for someone to need him, someone he could
shock by being more than he seemed. How dumb could you get, making it all
complicated by wanting someone who thought nothing of you, just so you could go
surprise!I’m a real-live person, not some cartoon doof who can’t spell
‘obnoxious,’ ironic, huh? When really it was as easy as holding as tight as
humanly possible to the one person who could see, spell, and get him, right
from the beginning.
Nothing about her surprised him, either. When she saidI think I know how to
bring Cordelia back, Xander had been like, if I knew how to do that, I’d tell
Mrs. Lovett to take her chem midterm and shove it up her ass. Not surprised
that Willow could bring somebody back from the dead, just surprised that she
could go about her life being so basically normal, the whole world looking
right at her and not getting the whole direct hit of Willow’sknowledge. The
power bundled inside that floaty, skinny little body was way past what anyone
but Xander had a fucking clue about. Even Willow passed it off, said it was the
Wicca, said Giles was teaching her. Managed to screw it up, somehow, when she
thought too hard about it. But when it was just Willow and the need, the
knowledge raised its head up and breathed fire, and it never surprised Xander
even the littlest bit.
Maybe once. Maybe just that one time, when he saw Cordelia’s eyes open, and
sawCordeliain there. Not that he hadn’t thought Willow could do it, if Willow
said she could do it, but—
It gave him the wig. A little bit.
Because what was he, Xander L. Harris, average American adolescent male, doing
in bed with Glinda, the Good Witch of Southern California and the – undead?
Once-dead? Pre-dead? Ex-dead body and soul of Cordelia Chase –
Cordelia’s heat was pressed against one side of him, making the other side seem
about thirty degrees colder and more naked by comparison. The hot ocean of her
hair didn’t help things – it was like when you got out of the water at sunset,
cold in a way you never were until after you were out of the cold water and
burning your feet on the sand.
Xander’s logic, crooked at the best of times, was spiraling around on itself in
a mad, Eschery frenzy, like a trapped animal chewing its own leg off. Cordy was
a heat like a brand, or a cold vacuum sucking him towards her like in Black
Hole which was the only movie his dad ever took him to at the Ski-Hi Drive-In
Theater back before it closed. She was the sand on his feet after he’d come up
for air – no, she was the chill in the air, and Willow was the red sunset.
It didn’t make any sense, but none of this did. Xander only knew that Will was
sinking slowly down over him, balancing herself with her hands heel-to-heel
across his stomach, and that being buried inside Willow was a privilege he
never earned, he was just born to the purple, born to doofishly and
unintentionally be the one who made Willow sing from the inside.
He threw his head back, and there was vast, wide knowledge of Willow, and a
sharp punch of madness – Cordelia’s arm pressing across his chest, her
fingernails digging into his shoulder. The thing that made it all sick and
freaky was...
The way he knew that Cordelia was clinging to him. The way he could feel her
fear, her lingering doubt that this was all real.
Because Willow was scary – Cordelia was scared – and Xander could feel just the
first, rippling echo of that thing he felt once before. The thing where he was
meant to be right where he was.
 
II: CORDELIA
She nestled up against him, long since used to the weirdness of finding Xander
Harris big and handsome and comfortable – no, comforting. There had been so
much weirdness for Cordelia lately that some of it just had to get chucked by
the wayside, and so she hadn’t thought much lately about how she shouldn’t get
this fluttery, keep-me feeling in her stomach when she was crushed warmly under
Xander’s arm.
The sounds and the scent of him, and she’d always loved the weirdness of Xander
– how he could be dumb as meatloaf sometimes and still always be the first one
to spike any snarky comment she made back at her, how he had the body of an
athlete and a smile that was like warm butter pouring all down your back but
still think that he was the most ordinary person in the world and never display
a flash of arrogance or attitude, the way she’d wanted him to want her from the
beginning because he seemed like the only person who didn’t, and the way she
wouldn’t have felt so real in his arms if she hadn’t known she wasn’t Cordelia
Chase, Center of the Universe, but just a little corner of Xander’s broad,
colorful life.
Xander was just the right level of weirdness.
She drew her leg up along his, which used to make Xander go crazy – leg man –
but this time he hardly seemed to notice. Cordelia’s knee bumped Willow’s leg,
making her jump a little at the sudden feel of soft, shaved skin. By touch
alone, there was nothing much to tell Willow’s leg from Cordelia’s. Maybe that
was why the whole idea of lesbians had always given Cordy the wig, kind of:
could anyone ever find anyone else attractive without the allure of mystery?
Wouldn’t another woman know all the tricks, all her secrets, and wouldn’t it be
like it was with all Cordelia’s chick friends, where no flattering
unknowableness softened the cold facts of your imperfect beauty, your imperfect
grace, your imperfect confidence?
The sounds and the scent of Xander and Willow, and she’d always envied their
history together, they way they spoke eye-to-eye in a way that shut everyone
else out at a glance. They even breathed together as they fucked, long rasping
ins and outs, the rhythm jerky and velvety at the same time. Without realizing
it, without being able to escape it, Cordelia found her own breathing keeping
time perfectly.
She didn’t want to breathe this way, coiled around the outside of the tight
clasp of Xander-to-Willow-to-Xander. The desire to sob and scream was more
pressing, and yet something all too familiar took control inside her,
prohibiting it. Stronger by far than the need to run and hide from this new and
prize-winning level of weird was the pressure to conform. This wasn’t the first
thing Cordelia had done because Cordelia Chase couldn’t be the only one not
doing it.
Xander’s skin was becoming slippery with sweat, and as his shoulders flexed
without warning, Cordelia lost her grip, her hand skidding along his chest.
Dark panic threatened to claim her – crack of wood giving way, nothing holding
her, falling through emptiness....
Back in the day, Willow didn’t have the strength to look Cordelia Chase in the
eye, but ever since she brought Cordelia back from the dead, all the fear was
gone. She walked right up to Cordelia by the soda machines, and only a little
subconscious fluffing of her coppery hair betrayed any self-consciousness on
Willow’s part.
On her side, Cordelia didn’t have the strength to rebuff her. Pathetic, how
Cordelia was so desperate to havesomebodynot afraid of her that she didn’t even
care anymore that it was just Willow. Everybody else – even Xander, even Buffy
– was still a little tripped by the fact that Cordelia showed up for class two
weeks after she was buried. Some of them actually seemed a little pissed off,
like Cordelia was inconsiderate for coming along and negating all those hours
of primo mourning they’d done. Flowers, assemblies, little street-corner altars
with her picture on them – it had been pretty choice, from the videotapes and
newspaper clippings Cordelia had seen. Even Cordelia had kind of felt like her
existence was an anti-climax.
Which explained why she was okay with Willow walking right up to her and
talking, even though when she was home alone and thinking about the last two
weeks, she hated Willow with a fervor that only barely stretched to cover the
bottomless terror Cordelia had of her.
Nothing,nothingexplained why Cordelia hadlistenedto her, and let herself be
talked into this.
Gratitude? The thoughts made Cordelia itch just under her skin, but she had to
admit that there was a – a debt there. Willow may have been the cause of
Cordelia’s death, but it still couldn’t have been easy to resurrect her, and
nothing hadmadeWillow do it. She’d just done it. Brought Cordelia back from the
dead, given her back all the chances Cordelia had not yet found peace for
having missed – for Xander? To ease Willow’s own guilt? Because she was just
that kind of soft-hearted witch? Surely not for Cordelia Chase, who had been
nothing but a problem for Willow since they were six years old. Ten years of
mocking Willow, shaming her, excluding her, stealing the only guy Willow ever
cared about, and then forcing her to act like Cordelia was a friend – and still
she brought Cordelia back.
Cordy doubted she would have done the same thing, if their positions had been
reversed.
And maybe that was why she’d agreed. Because it closed the gap between them,
made Willow slightly less the better person. Sure, she was the big hero, the
big savior, giving Cordelia her life back. But she was also asking for
something pretty twisted, and Cordelia could tell that she wanted it. Really
wanted it, even if it was just on Xander’s behalf. So Cordelia said yes, and it
wasn’t exactly like saving Willow’s life, but it opened Willow up to her, made
her less the diva of magic and more just one more person hoping Cordelia
wouldn’t reject them.
There was a deal struck there by the vending machines, and a little of the
power passed back into Cordelia’s hands. Cordelia had trained herself to
recognize the signs of power, and she could see it in way Willow turned and
walked off, a little more jittery, her head and shoulders ducked a little more
than when she’d walked up. The flush of excitement that had stayed with
Cordelia for the next day and a half had nothing to do with the exact nature of
the bargain, and everything to do with the fact that she was on her way back
up, and Willow on her way back down.
The thing that Cordelia didn’t really know, the thing that might or might not
change things, was whyWillowhad agreed to this. Didn’t she know that she was
the one losing, here? Not only was Xander slipping through her fingers, still
part Cordelia’s even though he swore he was Willow’s man through and through,
but he’d gotten Willow to help him do it. She’d mis-stepped badly, going in two
months from the girl who could steal Cordelia Chase’s boyfriend to the witch
who got to decide all by herself if Cordelia would live or stay dead to the
fake-brave little girl who had toed the edge of the tile and said "if you want
to – you and Xander – and – and me–"
Was she too stupid to realize that Cordelia was the one granting a favor now,
and Xander was the one living out every guy’s fantasy, and Willow was getting
taken for everything she was worth? Jesus, Cordelia should feelsorryfor the
girl. Willow had never been any good at the politics of relationships.
So why didn’t she feel sorry for Willow? Why didn’t she feel stronger, better
than before? Cordelia was taking back control, proving that Xander would still
do the unthinkable to have her, that Willow was still too weak to keep Cordelia
from making her look like a loser.
Because it felt good. Because it feltso much betterthan all the nights alone in
her room, not knowing how it was supposed to feel or who she was supposed to be
now, jealous of everyone, missing Xander, so bitterly alone that she almost
missed the bleak silence of death. Cordelia had been the one granting the
favor, but she needed it. More than Willow, more than Xander. She needed it
because no one else had offered her any alternative to the loneliness. Which
meant that all Cordelia’s power was a trick, only existing until someone saw
through it. Nothing to rely on – especially when Xander was involved, because
Xander had seen right through her before, and never left her with anything that
wasn’ther. That was the good thing about Xander, but also the danger.
Willow – who knew what Willow could do? That was a bottomless pit.
Sooner or later, unless Cordelia found someplace to go to ground, something
that she could put up to protect herself, they would know the truth. They would
know that Cordelia Chase had whored herself out to them, naked and lonely, not
the one they loved or needed, but still giving them what they asked for.
Back in the day, Cordelia chose her companions – pseudo-friends and
practically-lovers alike – by how badly they wanted her, how ready they were to
lay aside all false idols and swear that Cordelia was everything and forever.
Somehow, Cordelia knew it would never be that way again.
It would be good to close her eyes, to block out the sight of Xander and Willow
gazing raptly into each other’s eyes. That way, Cordelia could put herself back
in the middle of it instead of on the fringes. In the middle, in the spotlight,
Queen and superstar – the Cordelia that she always wanted to be, the one she
believed she was, deep inside. If she could close her eyes, blur this bed down
to heavy breathing and warm skin against her, she could be all of that for the
first time since her fall.
But she couldn’t. Her eyelids didn’t answer when she spoke to them, ordered
them to shut. There was just no response, and she could still see Xander’s
hands splayed across Willow’s curved spine, Willow’s slickened and shiny lips
parting as she leaned down over him.
Those lips were somehow entrancing. She could see Xander’s tongue press up
between them for a fleeting moment, before Willow leaned further down and
consumed his mouth whole. For the first time since Cordelia had gotten here,
there was a moment when she didn’t think about herself, her own strange role in
all this. She thought about Willow’s mouth, how warm and lusciously wet it
would be on Xander’s tongue as she took it in.
It would feel around Xander’s tongue a lot like Cordelia’s cunt felt as her
first fingertip, then a second, slipped inside it, disappearing into heat and
slippery flesh. Cordelia’s breath fell out of sequence for a moment as she
swirled her fingers in a slow circle, but then she licked up the side of
Xander’s jaw, and that close to his mouth, she couldn’t help but pick up the
rhythm again, and join in.
 
III: XANDER
His orgasm was incredibly wet – not just on and around his dick, which was wet
for the obvious reasons, but wet all over him, like he was being licked by
dozens of giant, invisible tongues. Of course, on the Hellmouth those kind of
thoughts had weirdly plausible dimensions, but always better not to think about
things like that.
Just Willow, and they way they were locked together, the perfect latchkey fit,
the perfect connection.
In the rush of pride and triumph that muddled up Xander’s brain even as it made
him feel invincible, he rolled toward Cordelia, only to be brought back to his
senses by a yiping little shriek, and Cordelia’s sharp fingernails gouging his
back. "Get off my hair, you big loser," she said, and somehow her voice was as
expressive as always, roaming up and down through the full range of an octave
or two for maximum effect, even though she was speaking through gritted teeth.
"Sorry," Xander managed thickly, and he tried to get his elbow off her hair
immediately, though it ended up taking longer than a person might think, what
with Cordelia having a lot of hair and Willow’s arms still around him, weighing
him down a little. He could still feel the sting of torn skin warming his
shoulder blade.
It ticked him off a little, and it turned him on a little, too. Maximum
Cordelia.
The balance of emotions, neither able completely to swamp the other, hit a
general midpoint that made Xander not exactly rough and not exactly passionate,
but mostly just clumsy. He reached out without much precision, and his hand
found Cordelia’s face, her lower lip under his thumb, the convex slope of the
ball of his hand knocking softly against the mirroring curve of her cheekbone,
his fingers vaulted like a high ceiling over the hollow of her eye socket. The
touch was awkward, but light – his kiss was not. Xander forced her lips open
with his tongue, determined to stick with the things that had always worked on
Cordelia before: kissing her until she forgot to be better than him.
Xander and Cordelia were the worst fit ever, a permanently severed connection
practically since the second they met.
Kissing her until Cordy kissed him back even harder, his equal here and nowhere
else....
The debate about what Xander saw in Cordelia had been completely monopolized by
the Status Symbol faction and the Pure Sex faction. Like a national election,
there were only the two choices, unless you wanted to throw your vote away on a
third-party candidate. Love, the Ross Perot of Xander’s social life.
Xander himself had never really taken sides. He knew it wasn’t just the thrill
of the class clown being picked by Queen C – it wasn’t thrilling enough to make
him put up with Cordelia’s leonine ego, by a long shot – and it wasn’t just
that she was hot enough to melt formica. There was something about Cordelia,
all spikes and spines and spats aside, that was good to be with, that was
just...good.
Although maybe only a class clown could take Cordelia Chase’s good and find a
place for it. The Zen of comedy, the way Xander saw it, was to take something
completely normal and turn it all – funny. Into what it wasn’t, or what didn’t
fit, or something that was a little too much or a little too far afield for
ordinary thinking. And when you were the comedian, you were the one everyone
wanted to be with. Not a witch like Willow, but a kind of wizard anyway, one
who could turn everything crazy. Presto, change-o, watch the puff of smoke
disguise the Hellmouth and pretend that the rabbit hiding in the hat was more
real than the things no one wanted to watch with eyes wide open.
And then there was Cordelia, who was like comedy anti-matter, because for
Cordy, things were only one way. Reality, in all its brutal, competitive,
mortal glory. She could see through Xander’s tricks like Superman through
cotton candy, and what Cordelia saw was the unvarnished truth.
She had her hands up to the elbows in Xander’s fear that, deep down, things
really were...just what they were. It had to either scare the shit out of him,
or make him love her. There was no middle ground with someone who was that
immune to Xander’s powers of illusion.
So, yeah, Xander had loved her, there at the end. Not enough, he guessed. If
he’d loved her enough, he wouldn’t have hurt her – at least, that was what Will
always said about her and Oz, and it sounded so sensible when Willow said it.
But when you left sensible back in the dark and quiet place where Xander
usually liked to keep it, you kept coming back to this weird feeling Xander had
been misdirecting himself away from for quite a while now. Like there was two
of him, and one was Willow’s from the beginning of time to the end, and the
other had never met anyone who could love him as purely and truthfully as
Cordelia could.
One of him was twelve years old forever, and Willow was the girl in his
treehouse. All-American though it seemed, Xander actually did have a treehouse
when he was a kid, and he and Willow did hang out there when they were twelve.
It faced east, and Xander remembered watching out the window, watching the
advancing grey of twilight, the first visible stars, the lights coming on in
the kitchen as his parents came home from work. He remembered how much better
it was playing Crazy 8s and drawing cartoons of their teachers to impress
Willow, how unwelcoming the greyness and the shadows falling across his house
had seemed in comparison. He’d never heard of the Hellmouth back then, but he
knew that the world on the ground didn’t care ten cents for Alexander Harris,
and Willow did. She was Door Number Two, what Xander could get and keep if he
didn’t go home, didn’t go back to his life, didn’t give in to the inevitable
pull of curfew and bedtime and reality.
The other Xander had never been that young, and his universe had certainly
never been that small. He was too busy watching the shadows and waiting for the
other shoe to fall to make wishes or wonder if there wasn’t any more to life
than Sunnydale, California. He just took his comfort where he found it, letting
himself ease into the little things in life. Good cheesecake, the green-y smell
of Cordelia’s hand lotion, how his dad let him play poker with his buddies now
sometimes and how he’d figured out the suave way to open a car door and help
Cordelia in without hitting her head. Little, isolated pockets of normal being
alive and even growing more or less on schedule into a man. Real life, which
could sometimes seem unspeakably valuable in the face of Bezoar eggs and wife-
beating androids and vampires with multiple personality disorder.
Willow was the girl in his treehouse, now more than ever. Cordelia was the girl
he’d held in his arms while she bled all over him, the girl who was still alive
and staring at him with lost, lonely eyes when the EMTs pried her out of his
grasp and lifted her off the stake.
If he’d loved her, he wouldn’t have hurt her. If he’d loved her, he wouldn’t
have driven her away. If he’d loved her, he wouldn’t have broken her heart. If
he’d loved Cordelia. If he’d loved himself the way he was, instead of himself
the self he wanted to be.
Her hand was so much smaller, more graceful than his, and it seemed like he
could fold it up completely inside the hollow of his palm. It stopped moving
when Xander cupped it, stroked the backs of her fingers and then nudged them
gently aside, just enough to replace them with his own fingers. For once he
wasn’t clumsy. He stroked a soft, crescent curve along the outside of her clit,
back and forth and back and forth with a touch that came -- for once -- as
light and easy as words came for Xander.
They were eye to eye, and trying to connect that way, trying one more time and
one more time almost figuring out how. It didn’t come naturally – nothing
seemed to come naturally for Cordelia and Xander, but at least they didn’t seem
to be losing any ground. He still saw her desire for him in her eyes, saw that
she was looking for the way in. There was so much that Cordelia only gave away
with her eyes, and only when he was holding her like this.
Even though he was only holding himself up by the strength of one arm, Xander
found a way to work it out from underneath him, and better yet without undue
interference on the part of Cordelia’s hair. He stretched his arm up over his
head so that he was still leaning on it, but not on top of it, and his fingers
were freed to play with the waves of her hair. It was always so warm, like it
was actually alive in and of itself – but the one time he’d tried to tell her
that, Cordelia hadn’t taken it as a compliment.
Still, Xander wound his fingers into the threads of her hair, and it was almost
like making a connection. It almost stood in for knowing what the hell to say
to Cordelia, and her eyes softened on his face while he did it, like she knew
that he, too, was looking for the way in, and at least they were united in
wanting each other and never knowing which way to turn.
 
IV: WILLOW
Pressed up flush against Xander’s warm back, Willow could feel every twitch of
movement. Everything, arms and legs and the slow twitching that defied being
pinned down to one location, had to pass through the complicated net of muscles
through Xander’s back, and the rippling massaged its way deep into Willow, who
was still quivery and vulnerable in the aftermath of fucking him until she was
smothered in blind, impenetrable pleasure.
Xander was trembling. Not just general eagerness, a regathering of his energies
as he turned his attention on Cordelia, but scary-trembling.
Willow ran her foot over Xander’s calf, hoping that it would calm him a little,
and settled her arms more securely around him. She overbalanced a little,
though, and her foot slid off the far side of his leg, kicking squarely with
the arch into Cordelia’s perfect, sleek shin.
She didn’t think Xander even noticed. She felt the muscles jump a little in
Cordelia’s leg, and then quiet, and it was almost possible to believe that
Cordelia had forgotten she was there. That would be typical, Cordelia
forgetting that Willow was even alive, unless something brought her to
Cordelia’s attention with a sharp, though light, blow to the shins.
Some things never changed. At least, Willow kind of wanted to think so.
She let her leg stretch out, and pointed her toe so that the back of her foot
nestled into the soft blankets on the other side of Cordelia. Cordelia’s leg
brushed softly against Willow’s heel, silk across her calluses, so perfect that
Willow knew her cheeks would blossom out in bright, poppy red if Cordelia
hadn’t forgotten about her in the face of gorgeous Xander’s perfect kisses,
forgotten Willow was even still there....
Perfect. Still.
Cordelia had even been perfect in her coffin, rich red velvet dress covering up
the wound through her stomach. Having very little fear of dead bodies anymore,
Willow had gone right up to the edge of the casket at the funeral home, looked
right over the side and down on Cordelia Chase, whom she had practically
murdered. She’d been perfect, frozen eternally, her eyelids shadowed in the
softest silvers and golds imaginable, her hair swept back from her forehead and
forming patterns on the white satin pillow like plants bent into curves by
steady winter rains. Once Willow had sprinkled a little potpourri around her,
along the outline of the casket, masking the chemical scent with a little
violet and wisteria, everything about Cordelia’s final public appearance had
been just as perfect as Cordelia herself could have demanded.
Thanks to those unromantic chemicals, however, Cordelia was still surprisingly
perfect when Willow – herself soaked with sweat and dirt that was turning to
mud, or at least to filth, on her body – had finished digging, pried up the lid
of her coffin, and helped Buffy drag her out of her grave. Sure, she hadn’t
looked exactly...alive by that time, but she’d still looked recognizably
Cordelia, and as perfect as you could imagine anyone who’d been dead for eleven
days looking. More so than you’d imagine, actually.
Raising the dead, as Willow had realized in a flash of intuition after six
straight days of research, was mostly a matter of avoiding the easy out. A soul
was a snap to lure back into its body; souls gravitated back toward earth, if
they saw the chance, and all the sorceress had to do was open a door. That was
how people raised zombies, and when your correspondences were sound and your
timing was solid – timing was the hardest part of magic, the make-or-break part
– then it was like falling off a log.
But zombies were dead things, with no vitality, no ability to grow, or really
toliveat all. They were just personalities rattling around in the fishbowl of
their old bodies. What you needed, to turn back time and correct your terrible
mistakes, was something to gum the soul back to the body, something to make it
fit backexactlywhere it had been before. You couldn’t just dump a soul back
into a dead body. You had to restore it, which took patience, attention, and at
least a modicum of magical dexterity, but it was a job you could apply yourself
to. It was more craftsmanship than genius, and actually not all that different
from altering the circuitry on a computer’s motherboard. Just know what it
should look like, then touch it up, tease it into shape. Willow could work the
invisible stuff of souls and sorcery just like she could the fine hairs of
resistors, capacitors, and conductors.
By the time she was done, Willow had spent about half an hour catching hold of
Cordelia’s strayed soul, and about three days cultivating it, helping it to
root its way back into Cordelia where it could stimulate her from the inside
out, waking dead tissue and making cells want to reproduce themselves again.
And once the process started, the act of living took on its own momentum,
making it so that Cordelia would go through the world alive and growing again,
animated by a soul that was at home inside her, instead of just inhabiting her
body.
And it wasn’t unnatural, not at all, no matter how Giles stared her down over
the top of his glasses and warned at her in his most stentorian and most
English voice. No matter how strangely Buffy looked at her, and then away. No
matter how sad Oz’s eyes had been, and how it cut her down to the center and
twisted her open in half to hear him say, "Don’t you think it’s time you left
Cordelia in peace?" They didn’t understand. Until Willow haddoneit, even she
hadn’t understood how dazzlingly natural it all was. It was just making
something grow, the way everything wanted to.
Even if the process itself had been more invasive, more Mary Shelley-esque than
it really had been, it still would have been natural, just because...Cordelia.
There was nothing in the world more natural than Cordelia making noise,
Cordelia striding through the halls of Sunnydale High, Cordelia tossing her
hair back without even checking to see if it would lash someone behind her
across the face, Cordelia arching her eyebrows and pursing her perfect, bowed
lips in a thoughtful gesture that was half mocking and half shrewd. Cordelia
was born to be alive and awesome and beautiful, and the unnatural thing would
have been – well, anything else.
The other unnatural thing was Willow surrendering her beloved, her Xander whom
she loved more than anything and so much that it took her breath and squeezed
it dry. Her fear of this threesome was overwhelming, towering so high in her
heart and mind that it had shadowed out everything for the last week, since she
and Xander had first discussed it. It was thoroughly unnatural, and Willow had
almost made herself sick with dreading it – because how could he ever forget
what Cordelia was like if Cordelia herself, graceful and perfect and desirable,
was there to remind him? Sometimes she was so sure that she would lose Xander
this way, it almost seemed like it had already happened. Now that she had her
heart’s desire, it was nothing if not unnatural to risk it of her own free
will.
But Willow had been loving Xander most of her life, and she knew better than
anyone – certainly better than Cordelia Chase – exactly what the job entailed.
It wasn’t complex, really. It just mattered that you stay strong, because
invariably Xander would lose his nerve at the last minute, try with all that
rapid-fire, twisting-turning eloquence of his to talk you back into what was
safe and familiar, even if you and he both knew he hated it before and would
keep right on hating it. Xander lost his nerve all the time, and if you were
Xander’s love, Xander’s lover, it was all on you to keep him from bolting, to
lead him where he wanted and needed to go.
Because what Willow knew about Xander, the secret that the two of them shared,
was that he wasn’t as straightforward and simple as he seemed. In fact, there
was something inside Xander that seemed to delight in tangling up everything
that came his way and prevented even Xander from knowing his own opinion on
things most of the time.
No matter how easy Xander was to get along with, how stable and predictable his
responses to certain basic stimuli were, at heart Xander was trapped in the
mazes of his own brilliant, sparkling illogic. He was too sweet, and too
intuitive when it came to seeing the virtue buried in everybody. How could
Willow, or anybody else, expect him to choose, to rank people against each
other when Xander was so good at sinking himself into whoever needed him most?
It wasn’t infatuation, not with Xander. It was just an inability to stop loving
people when it wasn’t convenient anymore, which was the best of Xander, the
bright heart of his Xanderness. He was a lover, everyone’s love, a veritable
slut for it. And love made him better, made him more the hero that she knew
Xander would never be whole until he could see in himself as clearly as she
could.
She wouldn’t take it away from him. She would hold strong, for Xander, like she
always had, and however it scared him, however it scared her, she wasn’t giving
up on Xander until she lured him out of his doubt and gave him the best thing
she had: certain faith in Xander, pure and genuine confidence that there was
nothing wrong and everything right with the way he fell in love and couldn’t
pull back out of it again. It was just natural, just how Xander was.
The only other thing that Willow kind of worried might not be exactly natural
was something that seemed to be starting in her, not in Xander at all. It was
forgiveness, and Willow rarely forgave and never forgot, but somehow this time
forgiveness had just shown up without warning, sitting comfortably and
immovably inside her. There was a lot of Cordelia to forgive, but even though a
few anger shadows lurked around in the corners of her memory, Willow felt
better near the center, where there was a flickering but clear little light
that made her glow, put a fond and sweet dessert-like warmth at the back of her
throat at the taste of Cordelia Chase’s name. Cordelia that she’d wanted to be
like, Cordelia that she’d wanted to notice her, Cordelia that she’d wanted to
be and then wanted with all her might to save from....
From being forgotten. Willow was used to that, but Cordelia wasn’t. Willow
didn’t want her to get used to fading from the fickle memories of secret-heavy
Sunnydale. It was unnatural.
The way Xander kissed down the gentle swells and curves of Cordelia’s body was
so beautiful that for a minute it was almost like he was touching Willow in
that slow, reverent way. When she came back to her senses, there was one little
pang of loss, and then just the warm friction of Xander squirming against her,
lowering down toward the foot of the bed..
She brought her leg back up, first over Cordelia’s hip, and then Xander’s. As
he moved, Willow kept her leg still, until her thigh rested against the side of
his chest, along his ribs. Automatically, Xander moved his arm, lifting it to
drape across Cordelia and make room for Willow’s leg, and for a brief, timeless
period, it seemed like all three of them forgot that they were having kinky
three-way sex, totally caught up in little shifts and wiggling and making
adjustments to fit against each other, locking against and around each other in
an odd, rounded, breathing and stretching glyph, some symbol that Willow could
probably find in a book somewhere, that maybe meant "whole" or "with" or even
"intimate," in an obscure magical language.
And there was nothing Willow did better than translating obscure magics into
miracles during the darkest hours of the night.
 
V: CORDELIA, XANDER, AND WILLOW
There was no difference in the shape or texture of Xander’s thick fingers and
his tongue – or at least not one that Cordelia was alert enough to notice.
Everything down there was soaking wet, too, so that was no help. She was pretty
sure that the more mobile, elegant thing working her into spasm after spasm of
intense feeling was Xander’s tongue, just because, well, Xander. But basically
it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except that she didn’t feel freakish or
alone or – falling – for the first time since she came back to life.
As her sense of direction flicked out like a burnt lightbulb, the walls seemed
to be turning at a nice, stately pace around her, making her disoriented but
not dizzy. She could see where she was, could tell walls from windows and up
from down, but there was no reason behind it – the same feeling Cordelia had
felt when she’d first opened her eyes on a table in the school’s boiler room,
realizing that she was in a real place, a living place, but not yet able to ask
herself how it should make her feel or why it should surprise her to be alive.
On the edge of her orgasm, Cordelia did the very same thing that she’d done on
the border between life and death. She reached out, slowly but without any
conscious purpose, and only stopped when her fingers found and dug tightly into
Willow Rosenberg’s sunrise hair.
He was at least nine million times as happy as you were ever supposed to be in
high school; if suffering as a teenager built character, like Xander’s mother
said, then he had just virtually guaranteed that he would grow up to be a
televangelist or a used-car salesman. And it would be worth it, completely,
even down to the bad suits.
Maybe it was a little bad, something he should feel guilty about, that he was
just doing to Cordelia what Willow had taught him, with such Willowy patience
and good humor, to do for her. Maybe he should be taking more time, figuring
out how they were different, what Cordelia needed.
But then, slowing down had always been the one thing he and Cordelia never
could do. And she didn’t seem to be complaining. Maybe it wasn’t rocket
science, anyway, and he could just shut up and enjoy the taste of her and the
quick, high, repetitive sound of her whimpering, which, unless she was *real*
different from Will, meant that everything was cool.
She even screamed a little bit like Willow when she came, only her voice
slipped and slid up and down – maximum Cordelia again – so that she sounded
even more agonized. Why did extreme sexual pleasure always sound suspiciously
like torture by the Spanish Inquisition?
Xander found himself laughing low and quiet inside his chest, almost smacked
breathless by the absolute, incredible goodness of Cordy’s legs and Willow’s
legs and the two of them holding close to him like they’d just fallen in love.
Willow pulled him a little closer, settling his weight back against her so that
the surface of his chest was free for Cordelia to drop over against. He was
midway back up to pillow level now, having sort of gotten sidetracked by
Cordelia’s dark nipples, and when Willow drew him tight against her, the soft
thickness of his hair rested warmly in the gentle hollow between her small
breasts.
She arched around him, drawing her legs up so that top one was across his
waist, her toes coming awkwardly close to poking Cordelia someplace that felt
awfully warm and soft, though Willow wasn’t trying very hard to figure out
exactly where. Cordelia’s legs, she could tell, were burrowed between Xander’s,
changing the angle of Xander’s leg and his hip.
At the same time that she was stretching her ribcage upward, working long days
and hours and weeks of tension out of her spine and shoulders, Cordelia was
arching her back and stretching too. It put them both well over Xander’s head,
locking him in close with their legs but with nothing at all to block the sight
of each other, eyes meeting eyes as though they were strangers. They were,
somehow – or at least, they’d never looked at each other before and slowed down
long enough to wonder what they were seeing.
Willow reached out, stretching the tendons in her arm and twisting her wrist to
crack the joint comfortably, but instead of pulling back into her own space,
she laid her open palm against Cordelia’s luxurious hair, and felt the sudden
strength of Cordelia’s aura engulf her hand – privilege, nobility, pride, but
also a taint of uncertainty, even frustration, as though everyone else in the
world understood some basic thing about people that Cordelia suspected might be
completely outside her grasp.
Maybe it was magic, or maybe Willow just knew Cordelia better than she thought
she did. Maybe all those years of envy and longing and bitter resentment had
forged a bond – a twisted but strong bond that let her see into Cordelia as
though they were networked together, sharing everything effortlessly.
Magic or miracle, the cold fusion of mutual jealousy or the sudden spark of
genuine trust pulled Willow in, and Cordelia let her eyes fall closed and did
not move away as Willow pressed her mouth to Cordelia’s, letting connection
speak for itself.
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