Pairing: Willow/Angel/Drusilla
Summary: Willow longs to go home. A companion piece to Knew Too Late and Maybe, In Time
The Other Two Stories In The Trilogy Can Be Found Here: http://magical-worlds.us/gabrielle/viewstory.php?sid=87
Feedback: Please!
Distribution: Soulmates, UCSL, wacky witch, Bite Me.Please, my site, all the usual suspects. Anyone else, please ask first.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. It all belongs to Joss and a bunch of other people who are not now and have never been me.
Author's Notes: To aaronlisa, who inspired this fic to begin with. And to Em North, Elisabeth, Kat, Emmy, Missy, Lisa Kelley, Inell, midnight, Danielle, Tonya, Nix, Lil Gray, Alice, and everyone else I have ever thanked before!
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One day, Willow even clicked her heels together three times and repeated "There's no place like home.there's no place like home."
She hadn't really believed it would work. But after all those years on the Hellmouth, believing six impossible things before breakfast, she had felt compelled to try it. And a part of her had clung to the hope that when she opened her eyes she would be in her own room in Sunnydale, surrounded by her stuffed animals, her computer, and her own safe, mousy clothes.
Her clothes. She missed her tights, her baggy jeans, and her fuzzy sweaters. Now she had to dress as Angel wanted her to. He had even taken away the outfit she'd been wearing when Dru had kidnapped her, saying that now she would never have to dress like that again. 'Hiding her beauty,' he called it. 'Being herself' was what Willow called it. But no matter how much she pleaded with him, Angel refused to allow even one comfortably fluffy garment into the bags they brought home from the shopping trips he regularly took her on. The trips to stores whose clerks never spoke English and never seemed to understand a word she said in *any* language. The trips that were intended to give the illusion of being a foray into the outside world, but which in fact only further reinforced the truth.that she was a prisoner. A prisoner of Angel's twisted idea of love.
Willow knew that there was no hope that Buffy or Giles would come to her rescue. She knew that she and her captors were far, far away from Sunnydale. She could hardly expect her friends to abandon the Hellmouth and roam the world looking for her. Though she sometimes dreamed that they did.
Those weren't her favorite dreams, though. No, her favorite dreams were the ones where she was back in Sunnydale and none of this had ever happened. Angel was still with Buffy, Dru was still in Brazil, and Willow was still basking in the glow of Oz' love. Those were wonderful dreams. Willow hated waking up from those dreams. But she always did. And Angel was always there, oppressive in his devotion.
He was usually in her room when she awakened, gazing at her with a longing that Willow hated with every part of her being. A longing for her matched only by her own longing to be *away* from him. She had even come to prefer Drusilla's presence to that of the dark-haired vampire whose soul she had returned. And she prayed for the day when the fey vampiress was able to win over her Sire and take back his affections from the one to whom they were so undesirable. But Drusilla seemed to accept, or at least tolerate, her Daddy's undisguised preference for the mortal she had kidnapped only in order to lure him back for her very own. Sharing Angel's bed, it seemed, was enough to keep Dru happy and content to allow Willow to remain as their 'guest.'
So nothing ever got in the way of Angel's spending most of his time with Willow. Trying to get her to talk to him, taking her on carefully supervised nighttime sightseeing and shopping trips, lavishing her with gifts she didn't want, proclaiming a love she found loathsome.
And at the close of another endless day of Angel's attempts to woo her or at least wear her down, the words were always the same.
"I don't love you. I'll never love you."
"It doesn't matter."
"How can it not matter?"
"Because I love *you*."
And Willow knew that no matter how often she clicked her heels together, when she opened her eyes, she would never be home.
The End