Here's the Thing

Here's the thing: it doesn't matter. He knows she's some ancient indescribable Thing that's so old it doesn't even have a concept of good or evil, and he knows she's drying away in the body of a girl Willow used to trade digital snapshots and recipes for dimensional armageddon with over g-mail because of the huge filesize limits on attachments, and he knows it's awful and horrible for everybody who ever knew the girl, and somewhere inside that branch-thin, brittle eggshell of a body, it's awful and horrible for the ancient indescribable Thing that stares out at him from ice-blue eyes that don't reflect at all, and he shouldn't want to touch it with a ten foot pole, let alone his roughened hands.

And he doesn't care.

He doesn't care because she's not a hundred girls in a rainbow of skins, all too young to know they're going to die trying to save the world, and she's not one single golden one who knows and knows and knows and never stops because she can't. She's not his tart, dead almost future, already bloody before the rubble smashed in on her and she disappeared into the hole, and she's not Willow, his green and living almost past, who shudders when she passes them in the hallways of Council HQ, and doesn't know what to say to him when she catches him alone, without Illyria pressed against his mouth to steal his words away.

She's nothing of anything that he's ever seen or known before, and for that-- not even for the ratchety tilt of her head or the moments when he can almost read laughter in the corners of her pale blue mouth as she stares at him-- just for being not, he would be here now, in her bed, letting her touch him with small, cold fingers, curious and hungry, taking what she can, what she wants, because...

And here's the thing - he doesn't even know why. She's white and blue and naked in his arms, and he doesn't know why she's here, and it doesn't matter. He doesn't care, because the thing is.... It's....

He doesn't know what the thing is, and that's maybe, after all these years, the best thing of all.

the end