1Summary: Willow's nightmare was something far more frightening than a simple play... one-sided WX, both imaginary and implied C/X.
Disclaimer: "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and all associated characters and situations are the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, used for entertainment purposes without permission or intent to profit.
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"The Worst Nightmare"
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'
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"The worst nightmare is the one that is not a dream, but waking life."
- anon.
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Sunnydale in the sunlight was almost creepier than at night, Buffy Summers decided, because it hid what the town really was like so well. It was like a horror movie with a creme-colored house, white picket fence and shutters, a garden along the front walk and inside lived a family of serial-killer cannibals. It was enough to give a person who knew the truth nightmares, as if she needed any more, especially after what had happened the week before. She'd never be able to look at nightmares the same way again, especially now that she'd lived a few of her own while she was still awake. The only saving grace - kind of - was that she hadn't been the only one who'd gotten that so not-fun experience; people throughout Sunnydale, especially at the high school, had gotten their nightmares in the middle of the day too.
It was still a little weird, even for her; vampires, demons and other gribblies that went bump in the night, yeah; witches, magic and souls being trapped in puppets or vampires, no problem. But she was having a hard time believing that whole mess had been because a kid had some kind of ESP start up after he'd been beaten into a coma by his little league coach. It just sounded so Jerry Springer when she thought about it.
She'd welcomed the weekend with her dad in L.A.; beautiful, honest, dark, dangerous Los Angeles, where you knew it wasn't a good idea to go outside after dark anyway, even without knowing about vampires. It'd been like coming home; okay, it really was coming home since she'd grown up there, but it still felt great to be in L.A. again. For two wonderful days, she could forget everything that had happened in the last two years and stand in the middle of some of her old favorite stores, imagining nothing had changed from her Freshman year at Hemery High. The problem was that good fantasies, just like bad nightmares, came to an end, along with the weekend, bringing Buffy back to Sunnydale. Now she was knocking on the door of the Rosenberg house, planning to check in with Willow and get the latest word on the less-lively side of Sunnydale's nightlife over the weekend.
Said Willow-shaped friend opened the door and smiled when she saw Buffy, "Hey, you're back! Have you been home yet? Obviously you've been home, you don't have your bags or anything; not that I saw you with bags when your dad picked you up from the school, but they could have already been in his car and... I'm rambling again, aren't I?"
"Just a little," Buffy answered. "Not even half of Giles about a book on all things creepy and disgusting."
"Oh, great," Willow sighed with relief. "Um, that's good, right?"
"Depends on if I get to come inside or if we're going to take up the doorway all day," Buffy replied.
Willow blushed and took a step back to clear the doorway, "Come on in, my parents aren't home yet, so we don't have to worry."
-o0o-
A few minutes later, the two girls were in Willow's room; one sitting cross-legged on the bed while the other was seated backwards in a straightback chair from Willow's desk.
"So..." Buffy started after a moment, "What happened while I was L.A. girl over the weekend? I mean, we obviously didn't have an apocalypse or anything, but still, anything interesting?
"Um... bad news, some of our classmates went insane. You remember... uh, it seems... well..." Willow stammered.
"Wills...?" Buffy asked cautiously.
Willow grimaced, "Okay, right, Heidi, Tor and the others from the Hyena incident, that was their nightmare, okay? I heard my parents talking over the weekend that they've been committed, all four of them, after having breakdowns that I'm going to guess were related to experiencing the hyena thing again."
Buffy tried her best to hide the shudder that went through her at her own memories related to that crazy zookeeper and the mess he'd caused with Xander and the 'bad crowd'. Trying to cover her revulsion with poorly attempted humor, she asked, "Did we get lucky and one of them eat Snyder first?"
"Bad memories, okay, I get that. I'll let that go, as sick as it was, because I know you didn't really mean it besides being a coping mechanism like my parents are always talking about," the other girl answered.
"I'll guess that's 'no'," Buffy sighed. "Whoever said every cloud has a silver lining, huh?"
"Yep, yet another cliche goes down in flames. 'Oh, the humanity'," the red-head agreed.
The blonde gave her a sideways look, "So, what was it your nightmare was; that whole 'Gang of Seven' demon from the Talent Show, right?"
"I told you and Xander both, Buffy, my nightmare was a case of stage fright during a play of 'Madam Butterfly'," Willow reiterated.
"Okay, you fooled Xander - not hard, he's just a guy, after all - but I don't think a school play's really what you had to deal with, Willow. I mean, that's a 'wake-up gasping' nightmare, not a 'screaming in horror' nightmare."
The other girl huffed at the Slayer's refusal to back down, "I don't want to talk about it."
"Come on, Willow; I talked about my parents' divorce nightmare and my vampy-me nightmare, I don't think it can get more personal. I'm not asking you to share with the class, just the Slayer."
"Don't wanna," Willow repeated firmly, almost childishly.
"They say sharing problems helps."
"Do you really believe that?"
"No, but that's what they say, anyway."
"I really don't want to talk about it. Think about it; prophecies, legends, magic spells... words have power, Buffy. What if by talking about it, I make it happen?"
"It wouldn't cause the end of the world, would it?"
"..Just my world..." Willow muttered.
"Really, Wills?" Buffy frowned, exaggeration like that was so unlike her friend.
"Yes, really!" She snapped, hurt that it seemed like the other girl was refusing to believe her.
"I... I didn't mean it like that, Willow," Buffy verbally backpedaled. "It's just... whatever it is, it's got you acting so not-Willow-like that it's hard to believe..."
"I don't want to believe," Willow softly paraphrased the tagline of a popular television show.
"Huh?"
"Do you think what we saw was only the worst things we could think of or were they something we're actually afraid could happen?" Willow asked.
"Again I say, 'huh'?"
"I mean... oh, um..." Willow stumbled over the words as she tried to figure out what she wanted to say. "Like you, are you just scared of the idea of being a vampire or scared that you might really get Turned if things go bad some day?"
"Uh... do I have to answer that?"
"Give an answer, get an answer."
"Oh, cra... uh..." Buffy grimaced, curiosity warring with privacy in her mind over the ultimatum she'd just been given. It was something she tried not to think about considering how close it had came to actually happening. All it would have taken was Merrick deciding to just kill her himself or stake her if she was turned instead of sacrificing himself so that she could escape back in Los Angeles... Her parents would certainly never have known the truth - not that they had even believed it the one time she'd tried to tell them - they probably would have been made to think she'd died because of gangs or something instead. Just like so many other families, she realised, even those of some of Willow's own friends.
Finally, the L.A. transplant sighed, "Yeah, okay... It's not a 'what might happen' fear, it's a 'what could've happened' fear. First Master vampire I ever had to deal with had the whole 'look into my eyes' thing going on and they would have had me for dinner if my Watcher hadn't sacrificed himself to save me. Another moment and it would have been 'bye-bye Buffy' and hello 'vampired Slayer' and it still give me nightmares sometimes."
"I think you got the better side of it," Willow muttered, somewhat bitterly.
Buffy's eyes shot wide before narrowing in annoyed anger, "Think you need to be making with the 'splainy on that, Wills..."
"I didn't tell a complete untruth," Willow admitted. "My nightmare really was being somewhere and not being able to say anything."
"Uh-huh, so the where and the what you couldn't say was...?"
"Well, it was a big... public... thing with an audience," the redhead offered.
"Willow..." Buffy sighed, "Come on..."
"It was a wedding."
"That doesn't sound so bad..."
Willow gave her a flat, unamused look, "It was Xander's wedding... to Cordelia."
Buffy grimaced, "...That does."
"Can you think of anything more frightening than your best friend leaving you and marrying your worst enemy?" Willow asked.
"Yeah, every time Giles starts talking about how Slayers are supposed to act. You know, like mindless, emotionless, lifeless drones existing solely for the slayage," Buffy answered. "Besides that, I guess not."
"Trust me, this was worse," Willow insisted. "It's not like I was claiming that I was on stage and forgetting what to say. I was sitting there having to watch the girl that makes my life miserable walk down an aisle to my best friend and crush, sit there in a front row seat while they exchanged vows and kissed - he dipped her, too - and I couldn't say anything, any time I tried to 'speak now', nothing came out, not even a squeak or anything!"
"Like... nothing? Your mouth was moving and nothing, no one even noticed?" Buffy asked.
"I don't even know if anyone was seeing me," the other girl answered in a small-sounding voice. "I may even have been invisible as well as silent. It was like something out of a horror movie; one of those 'psychological thrillers', not the slasher-horror ones."
"This is where as a good friend and supportive fellow girl, I'm supposed to say something to make you feel better... but all I can think about is how our lives are horror movies, complete with vampires, demons and everything," the blonde sighed.
-o0o-
That conversation eventually faded away into the murky depths of memory, overwhelmed by things like fighting a 'Master Vampire' who called himself, ironically enough, 'The Master'; a disasterous Parent-Teacher Night at Sunnydale High complete with vampiric party-crashers; and a demon-worshipping fraternity. It might have become completely forgotten had it not been for a Chaos-worshipping magic-user deciding that Sunnydale was the place and Halloween was the time to invoke the power of his patron god Janus and turn everyone that had bought so much as one article of clothing or piece of accessory from his store into their costumes for the night.
Willow almost considered herself lucky; she didn't know what had happened and she wouldn't until much later, but she had dressed up as a ghost and while she'd been turned into a ghost, it was still her, complete with all her memories and her personality, just as a ghost. Her two best friends had also been turned into their costumes and they hadn't been as fortunate; their personalities had been taken over by their costumes and their memories altered to fit. Never before in her life had Willow been so glad for the women's rights movement if women had acted in previous centuries like Buffy was since she'd been turned into 'Lady Elizabeth', a seventeenth century noblewoman who was everything that her Slayer friend just normally was not. Xander had only been a little better; only a few decades out of date instead of a couple of hundred years; the biggest concern that 'Private Alex Harris' had was how 'Absent With Out Leave' he was by being back in 'The World' - the U.S. - instead of somewhere in Viet Nam. It had taken Willow almost the entire time since she'd found him to convince Harris that what was going on wasn't a bad trip caused by one of his squad-mates slipping LSD into his food or anything else along similar lines.
At least they had been human in mind, though. Even if they hadn't necessarily believed her about what was going on, 'Lady Elizabeth' and 'Private Harris' had been able to listen to and understand her. Willow wasn't entirely sure that the latest member of their misfit band - albeit a reluctant and fringe one - that they'd found would be in any condition to do that thanks to their particular costume choice.
"Okay, your name's Cordelia, you're not a cat, you're a girl, can you understand me?"
"Yeah, see-through-girl, I'm not stupid. Did you lose your mind along with your..." Cordelia looked Willow's intangible form up and down, taking in the 'party girl' costume that Buffy had picked out for the girl at Ethan's which had been under her ghost-sheet-costume when everything had happened, "Body and what little taste in clothes you had? Seriously, Sears to skanky is so not a step up in the world."
Willow blinked in confusion, "You're... you? But why you? I mean, everyone else isn't them... well, I'm me, but I'm ghost-me. But how are you - you - when Buffy's not her and Xander's not Xander?"
Willow's eyes darting to the man beside her caused Cordelia to pay attention to them. It actually took the dark-haired girl a moment to recognise the man in uniform as the fashion-senseless dweeb with whom she so frequently found herself verbally sparring. Now she understood from where that cliche about 'women love a man in uniform' had come. A small part of her had always suspected that if anything ever managed to get him out of the Hawai'ian shirts that looked like a Crayola factory had exploded on them he might clean up half-decent, but this was beyond 'half-decent'; this was almost hot.
"Xander?" Honestly, Cordelia was half-surprised she didn't squeak when she said his name.
Harris did a double-take, this time looking past the cat costume at the young woman wearing it, "Cordelia?"
"Wait, you recognised her but not me?" Willow would have huffed if she hadn't been a ghost at the time.
"I'd hope so, ghost-girl; after all, I did marry her. We had to move up the date when I was drafted, so we could have the ceremony before I went through Basic and was shipped out, but she's still my wife."
Hearing that statement was bad enough, but then Willow noticed the way that the cheerleader-slash-head of the popular crowd actually seemed to blush at it and it became too much. Her eyes widened and the very lack of oxygen that had kept her from huffing in frustration now allowed her to scream in horror without worrying about running out of air.
