taxonomites | [Location: Café] Happy Birthday (open)

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[Location: Café] Happy Birthday (open)

Tara sat at a café in Wilde, not far from Tamper and Trick, warming her hands with a chai latte. There was a bit of a chill in the air, but the sun was peeking through the clouds, and with a jacket, being out was nice enough.

She thought about the sun. With the influx of new visitors recently, she'd been thinking more about how Taxon worked, about how this strange half-life could be settled into. How easy it as for her to slip into work at Tamper and Trick, which wasn't quite the Magic Box, dates with Willow, who was a few months away from being her Willow, and living in Castle Summers, which was familiar to her friends, but not to her. How easy it became to ignore the Extras, to weather a glitch, to take it for granted.

She thought about people who'd gone and come back. The Doctor. Stefan. The Master. She wondered if she'd been before, and just forgotten. If Xander might come back, slate wiped clean. It didn't fit, exactly, with the zoo theory, but it didn't fit with the little glimpses they'd had of the 'real Taxon' either. Then again, if it was a glitch as she'd suspected, their captors had just turned Piper into a monster, so none of her working theories were right just yet.

She thought about the people she missed. Hercules. Rose. Sam. Giles. Ethan. Tara had to believe that the were home. Safe. Happy. She wanted to believe that so very badly.

It was her birthday. The first one she shouldn't have been alive to have. And that knowledge made it a little bittersweet.

She sipped her latte, and took a few moments. Then she'd head to the shop. Happy birthday to her.

[Open to new friends as well as old. Come say hi.]

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Tara read the card and, despite everything, there was no sadness in her smile. She leaned over to kiss Willow across the table. "Thank you. You didn't have to get me anything, you know. 'Being kidnapped by aliens' is a reasonable excuse."

Still, with a grin, she asked, "Can I go ahead and open it?"

Willow returned the kiss with a warm smile, happy that her idea had gone over well so far. Hopefully, what was inside the package would work just as well. "But I wanted to. I mean, it's your birthday and we can't go around forgetting those special days, kidnapped by aliens or not."

She settled into her seat across the table and nodded eagerly at Tara's question. "Absolutely! What's the fun of a present that never gets opened?" she teased.

Tara just smiled in reply and opened the package, enthusiastically, but neatly. Lifting out the clothes, she smiled. "Oh, Willow - these are lovely." She was sure they'd fit perfectly too - the advantage of hatches. "Thank you so much."

Willow couldn't help being at least a little bit worried about how these things would work for Tara, but the reaction was definitely worth the trouble. "I-I wasn't sure if your style had changed in the future. I mean, it's been over a month that I've been here, but I still feel a little behind." But that wasn't the important thing. The important thing was that Tara liked them. "Totally mundane, but straight from the heart. I figured maybe doing it the old fashioned way would make it, y'know, better."

And now she was rambling nervously. Really, Will, calm down. This was Tara.

"It's perfect. And honestly, I'm not from that far ahead of you. A few months, really. I promise."

She knew why Willow felt that gap was there, of course - it had been quite a few months, and then Taxon on top of it. But Tara resolved to make Willow feel surer that everything between them was fine.

"We should do dinner again. Without the Sunnydale-style running for our lives, this time."

Willow just gave an uncertain smile, dropping her head for a moment before looking back up at her girlfriend again. "Definitely dinner without the Sunnydale flashbacks. Totally not what I had in mind for a first real date here." Far from it, in fact.

"We should check out the zoo o-or the waterfall next time. I still haven't looked at either of them and I bet they're nice."

"I'm sure they are. We'll try again soon, then. Oh - I hope you don't mind, but I told Piper we'd look in the Sunnydale library, to see if we can find out anything about her... her condition." Tara realized she should have asked Willow first, but Piper had been in such pain, she couldn't not offer to help.

"Totally fine," Willow agreed with a smile. Actually, that worked out pleasantly to her advantage. "I was going to ask if you wanted to go look in the library later tonight. Maybe we could start then?"

Totally sneaky. Maybe.

"I know a couple of books on werewolves a-and others like them." Mostly because of Oz, but she'd kind of really needed to back then. Maybe Piper's wasn't exactly the same, but she'd be more than willing to help in any way she could.

Tara smiled, relieved. "That sounds good. I don't think I've been back to the library since you came - only when it was here with Giles. And then before that at home, but it was kind of, um, not so library-ish anymore by then." More "rubble-ish," really.

"All the more reason for me to properly introduce you to it as I know it," Willow told Tara. "I mean, Giles probably gave you the grand tour, but it's different when you're a student, you know? Points of reference change."

Which was totally fine. Probably the way it should be anyway.

"Maybe I should rearrange the shelves sometime. Give it a new look. What do you think?"

"I think it's a good idea. Make it more your own." Tara smiled a bit mischievously. "And then if Giles comes back, he can look horrified."

Willow grinned in response. "Exactly! Giles won't know what hit him." She laughed a little at the thought. He'd be more than horrified. Until she told him that she'd at least kept everything. "I'll keep some sort of system to it or else we won't be able to find anything and Giles would kill me otherwise." But the initial reaction would be totally worth it.

"So, what plans do you have for today?"

"Oh, um, not much. I thought I'd pop my head in at the shop, and then maybe you and I could have dinner? Well, and you mentioned the library, so we could do that." Tara smiled. "But really, I don't have anything specific."

"I'd love any or all of the above," Willow answered with a warm smile. "Dinner of the not-getting-chased variety sounds nice. And then a library trip? Would that be a good enough birthday excursion?"

"It sounds like plenty." And it really did. Then again, before Sunnydale, she'd had a lot of fairly poor birthdays. She wasn't sure Willow realized how much of a gift it still felt like, spending time with someone who wanted to be with her.

"I'm just glad I get to spend it with you."

Truth be told, Willow probably didn't understand exactly how much it all meant to Tara, but she was happy and felt blessed herself to have someone as amazing as Tara. She wasn't sure what she would do without her girlfriend with her and couldn't imagine a time where they were separated.

So, she smiled warmly in response. "You didn't think I'd let you spend a birthday alone, did you? 'Cause that would be just silly."

Willow reached up to brush her knuckles against Tara's hair for a moment, lovingly, before she leaned in for a kiss. "And later on, you get me all to yourself." For whatever the night hours would bring.

"Tease," she laughed a little, as the kiss broke. "I have to wait?"

Willow gave a mischievous smirk. "Well, you've got me now, but we've got dinner and the library still to come. And I'd say we could skip them, but I at least need to grab something out of the library first. A-after that..." She trailed off meaningfully.

"Okay," Tara said, with a grin. "Dinner, library and you. Sounds like a good birthday to me."

"I-if there's anything else you want, speak now or forever hold your peace."

Willow just loved days like this, time spent with Tara, teasing each other and just enjoying being with each other. There were perks, of course, but Willow loved Tara so completely that just being near the other girl was enough to make her really happy. It was even better if she could make Tara happy in return.

Tara couldn't help like feeling it was a gift - maybe the aliens had done it on purpose, maybe it was just chance, but reuniting her with Willow was more than she could have hoped for. And beyond that, a Willow who remembered the good parts of them, without most of the bad ones... it might be a little complicated, but she wasn't going to complain.

"Just you."

With a grin, she added, "I had someone offer to get me a pony, awhile ago. I always wondered how he'd manage to hatch that."

Willow smiled and reached over to rest one hand over Tara's on the table. She couldn't possibly know what Tara was thinking, but for herself, she was just pleased to know that everything was going to be okay, that it was okay for the moment. Aliens involved or not, Willow was just happy to be with Tara here.

However, the pony comment made her snort with laughter. "A pony? I don't think one would fit in the machines! U-unless it was like, a miniture or something."

[ooc: as soon as I hit post comment on my last reply, my shuffle started playing Here In Your Arms by hellogoodbye. IT KNOOOOOWS.]

"I don't think hatches make living things anyway," she said, fondly, "but it was a well-meant offer."

...from Ethan Rayne. But that was incidental.

"Awww, I would have asked for Miss Kitty Fantastico if it did!" Willow's lips turned down in a mock pout for a very short moment before she was grinning again. "I don't think she'd like it here, anyway, so maybe it's best that she's, y'know, at home."

"Maybe," she said, though she wished she could tell Willow about her odd visit with a man (alien) in a phone both a few days prior. She had no idea how she would explain the sudden appearance of their cat if the prohibition didn't lift, but hopefully Willow would be glad to see her regardless.

Hey, it was Taxon. Strange things happened all the time.

"It'd probably be a bad precedent. If you could pull people or pets here by hatch." She had a sudden vision of them hauling Xander out of a hatch by the shoulders.

[Location: Café] Happy Birthday (open)

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