She woke slowly, as though she were pushing through layers of heavy, must-filled, fur coats, reaching for the back of a wardrobe and touching it finally--solid and unmagical. And with that discovery, knowing it was not how she needed it to be. Willow's eyes opened of their own accord--surely she hadn't asked them to, there was not much in this life--this day she cared to see any longer. Recent events came to her slowly, and as each once broke over her for a moment she experienced them again, moving past them like the coats, their pockets of mothballs, their hangers sturdy in the darkness, creaking against the rods that bore their weight.

Little Dawnnie was a key?--Glory's own lost housekey to be exact.

Mrs. Summers was dead.

Tara was--had been--made mad.

Sometimes Willow would dial back the chain of her life's events--the layers she had to peel past to arrive at the train station that was today--even farther, beginning with; "I am in high school," and progressing on to, "Jesse is a vampire," or "Xander likes Cordelia." But it didn't matter where she started, when she got to the dead-end back wall of the wardrobe it held--refused to give way, to melt into unreality as she needed it to. Buffy, was dead. End of journey, end of bad metaphor, extended simile: poorly followed-through conceit. Happily ever not.

It proved no task getting up, really, she hadn't technically gone to bed for days since she had arrived, alone, in LA. She'd found the occasional mattress inside the hotel and sat or laid across it for a few hours. She was still in the same clothes she had arrived in. They were now somewhat rumpled.

Waiting.

How long? She did not know. She had something to tell, and until another being presented itself to be told, as far as she was concerned she could be found here, a wandering guest without a room number. Send all future correspondence to: Willow Rosenberg, Practicing Wiccan, c/o The Hyperion Hotel, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

...

"Yes, Angel. Well, yes, I should have thought of that, shouldn't I have?" Giles' glasses seemed to be more of a bother to him lately than Willow could recall in the past--it seemed he was always removing them now, twirling the frames nervously in his fingers, polishing off some imaginary smudge on the lenses. "Thank you for reminding me, Willow. I should call, I suppose..." his voice trailed off.

"Don't be daft," Spike broke in, from where he had been gazing out Giles' picture window at the night sky--his presence at this time (as always of late) un-explained as well as illogical. "Can't just ring a bloke and tell him his best girl's gone the way. Heartless, that. Bloody heartless." He turned from the window, seeming to get an idea. "Tell him myself, I will. Yes. Now that I think of it I quite fancy holiday--leaving the old Hellmouth for a jaunt to LA."

But his banter to Willow's ear seemed to have lost something, and now lacked a sort of kick or energy--the rise he used to get out of disagreeing with all of them--any of them. Like the husk of a human he was, Spike himself was beginning to sound hollow.

She felt too tired to remind him out loud of The Ring of Amarra and the torture he had enacted on Angel the last time the two had met--or the fact that she didn't imagine Angel's memory would have to be goaded to recall the incident. Instead, she simply announced that she would be the one to go. No one tried to change her mind.

As the bus was pulling out of the station she found herself in a strange moment of deja-vu; this was the very way Buffy had taken out of town the spring she had sent Angel to hell to prevent that year's apocalypse. In that moment Willow learned that when you cry to yourself on the bus the other passengers don't ask questions, they just assume you're sad to be leaving Sunnydale behind.

"Can I get you a tissue?" a kind-looking elderly lady had asked, and her words had run together so it sounded like, "caneyegedjewatishew?"

...to be continued...

Disclaimer: Willow and the others, Buffy, Angel, Giles, Spike, etc. are neither mine, nor, it would seem, the WB's [anymore].

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