Level Up! (Willow/Tara, PG-13)

[punch_kicker15]

Title: Level Up!
Author: punch_kicker15
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: BtVS
Characters/Relationships: Willow/Tara
Summary: AU Summer between Season 6 and 7, in which Tara didn't die and Willow didn't break her magic sobriety: Tara and Willow must solve a video game come to life to save Miss Kitty Fantastico.
Author Notes: Written for the Fandom Tropes and Cliches round of femslash_minis, for brutti_ma_buoni who wanted the pairing, Sudden Game Interface, little green lights (not Dawn), Tara knowing more than Willow about something geeky, and cherries.
Word count: 1773

“I think it’s time for a locator spell,” Willow said.

Tara sighed. “I don’t want to have to do this every time Miss Kitty wanders off.”

“It’s been a day and a half! And she didn’t wander off. She ran away after Dawn shot at her with a crossbow! She’s probably spooked and hiding somewhere. What if she’s too scared to find food?”

Willow could see the war between caution and compassion in her girlfriend’s eyes. Then Tara reached for Miss Kitty’s brush and Foster’s Guide to Locator Spells. Compassion won, once again.

Tara lit some sandalwood incense, and held the brush over the incense.

“Do you need a map?” Willow hated feeling so useless at times like these.

“Nope. The Lost Animal spell’s a little different,” Tara said, in a sharp tone of voice that suggested this conversation was over. Willow bit back the hurt feelings over the tone, and reminded herself that Tara had good reasons to be nervous.

The air grew charged, and Willow’s magic swarmed to the tips of her fingers, begging to be let out. She curled her hands into fists until and thought, No. Would staying off magic would ever get easier, or if it would mean constant vigilance forever? Tara would probably say that it had only been a few months of magic sobriety, way too early for “forever” talk. But right now, one-day-at-a-time platitudes didn’t help.

Tiny green lights shot out from Tara’s hands, surrounded the brush, and plucked out a white-tipped hair from it. The lights darted down to about a foot off the floor, and sprinted down the hallway.

The lights are tracing Miss Kitty’s exact path; that’s why they’re so low to the ground and scampery. But she couldn’t say anything about how cool it was, because magic couldn’t be cool anymore, at least not for Willow.

They followed the lights down the stairs, out the front door, and down Revello Drive.

Talking about the pull of magic against her skin felt wrong. It would give that desire even more power. So Willow found herself narrating the utterly non-magical surroundings. “Oh, now we’re on Roosevelt Street, and that’s where Mr. Yee lived. He was this crazy old guy who kept trying to grow cherries, except I looked it up once and it doesn’t get cold enough here for cherries. We get freak snowstorms sometimes, and a hail of frozen frogs once, but that’s not the kind of cold . . .”

She trailed off, utterly disgusted with herself. Cherries? Why the heck would Tara care about some dead guy’s gardening practices? Without magic, Willow was as boring now as she had been when she was fifteen. What did Tara see in her, anyway?

The lights led them down Madison Street, to an abandoned farmhouse. The walls of pulsed with unfamiliar magic.

The farmhouse doors swung open for them. As Willow stepped forward, Tara grabbed her shoulder. “Wait!” She gave a long searching look at the farmhouse, and finally shrugged. “I don’t see any obviously dark energy. But please be careful.”

“I’ll be ok,” Willow said, and it wasn’t just soothing Tara’s worries. She could feel the farmhouse’s magic vibrating in the air, but it didn’t tempt her. It was just something she noticed, like the light sweet scent of hay, or the sound of crickets chirping outside.

The lights illuminated the farmhouse, revealing some convoluted mess of pulleys, short sections of walls, a treadmill with a slender teenage girl standing on it, a toaster, and a baseball hovering in mid-air. At the end of the lights, there was a cage with Miss Kitty inside.

Willow rushed over and tried to open the cage, but some invisible force pushed her hands back. “There’s a forcefieldy thing on the cage. Can you undo it?”

Tara put a hand out to the cage, murmured something Latin under her breath, then drew her hand back quickly. “I don’t know what that is, but it wouldn’t budge.” She turned to the girl on the treadmill, “Hi, do you know what’s going on here?”

The girl blinked, but didn’t speak or give any other sign she’d heard Tara.

Maybe they needed a different approach. “Could you try teleportation?” Willow asked. She caught Tara’s disapproving stare, and added, “I guess not, because we still were working out all the kinks of that spell. Just brainstorming: how do we get Miss Kitty out?”

A bright red button appeared before then, and a calm, cheerful voice rang out from somewhere above them. “GET THE BALL TO THE TEETER TOTTER TO OPEN MISS KITTY’S CAGE!”

Yet another disembodied voice. Maybe it’s an angry ghost. Only it doesn’t sound angry, so maybe it’s another unstable invisible person —

Tara walked in a circle around the baseball and exclaimed, “I know this! It’s The Incredible Machine!”

“What kind of name is that for a spell?”

“It’s not a spell. It’s a video game I used to play.”

Willow could only stare mutely in response. Video games coming to life was just another Tuesday. But gentle, earth-goddess-y Tara recognizing one of them on sight—that was gape-worthy. “Can you reverse whatever spell brought it to life?”

Tara shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. I can’t undo something that I don’t understand.”

The bright red button blinked, and the calm, cheerful voice repeated, “GET THE BALL TO THE TEETER TOTTER TO OPEN MISS KITTY’S CAGE!”

An orange light flashed from a wooden crate. Willow peered into the crate. It was full of metal gears, brightly colored bands, some copper pipes, and some small metal devices that she didn’t recognize.

Willow said, “I think it really wants us to play. What are the rules?”

“It’s kind of open-ended. It’s a problem-solving game. You solve it by using the parts to build a machine.”

“Is there a walkthrough?” Willow asked. “That could save us a lot of time.”

“I don’t know,” Tara said. “There wasn’t just one answer, so I just kept trying until something worked. I don’t know if this is an actual level in the game, or a special one just for us. I think we should try playing and see if we can figure it out for ourselves.”

“Okay.” Willow rummaged through the crate and picked up a one of the metallic devices. It was heavier than it looked, and gave off a soft humming noise. “What’s this?”

Tara closed her eyes for a second, as if consulting some long-ago memory of the game. “Anti-gravity pad. It’ll lift anything in the space right above it.”

Willow ran her hands over the pad, looking for an opening. She found one, and the device popped open.

“Willow—” Tara chided.

“I’m just looking at the circuit board! If they didn’t want us to be able to look at it, they wouldn’t have designed them to open.” She glanced at the circuit board. The design was a bit convoluted. But it didn’t seem that much more complicated than the Buffy-bot, or Ted’s hand. With some work and a bit of research, she could make her own anti-grav pad and fly without a levitation spell.

She closed the anti-grav pad and set it on the floor underneath the baseball. The word START and a red button appeared in front of her. She pushed the button.

The ball shot up about three feet, and hovered there. The girl ran on the treadmill, but still seemed oblivious to their presence.

“It needs something to send it off in the teeter-totter’s direction,” Tara said. She hit the STOP button flashing in front of them, dug into the crate, and pulled out a pinball flipper. She reached above the hovering baseball, and placed the pinball flipper in midair.

This time when they hit START, the baseball lifted up, hit the pinball flipper with a satisfying thwack, went over the first wall, and hit the ground.

Willow grabbed a bunch of anti-grav pads and flippers and handed some to Tara. They set up the pads and flippers to send the ball over the walls.

“Ok, we’re out of flippers.” Willow said. “But if we scooch the last anti-grav pad just to the left, then it’s just a matter of finding the right object to bounce the ball over the last wall—why are you grinning at me like that?”

“Sorry, sweetie. I can’t help it. You’re really hot when you’re focused on a problem.”

Willow flushed. It seemed ridiculous. If anyone else had said it, it would have been a joke. But Tara didn’t tell mean jokes, just somewhat obscure and meticulously set-up jokes about ancient goddesses. However unlikely the sentiment, Tara must truly believe it.

Tara said, “We haven’t done anything with this treadmill. Maybe it’s part of the solution.” The girl continued to run on the treadmill. Tara attached one of the bands to a generator, which started to hum with activity.

Willow had a flash of inspiration, and grabbed the toaster out of the crate. She placed the toaster on the shelf, plugged it in, and started the machine again.

The ball hovered over the walls, ricocheted off the toast as it shot up from the toaster, and hit the teeter totter. The rope attached to the teeter totter pulled open Miss Kitty’s cage.

With an indignant meow, Miss Kitty jumped out and ran to them. Willow scooped her up and took a look. No cuts, so Dawn’s crossbow bolt hadn’t even grazed her.

Orange light flashed, and the entire puzzle, including the girl, was gone. That was too bad; it would have been helpful to take a couple of the anti-grav pads home. Still, she’d seen enough of the circuitry to get a good start on making her own once they got home.

“Hope the girl’s ok,” Tara said.

“Maybe she wasn’t even real, just a part of the puzzle,” Willow said.

Miss Kitty was safe. Willow had a new science project to focus on. And maybe she could be enough for Tara, even without magic.

Why ruin a perfectly happy moment by worrying about someone who might not exist?

***

After the blinding flash of orange light, the treadmill and machinery disappeared, and  Amanda materialized back in her bedroom. “Hey!” she shouted, relieved that her voice was working. She grabbed the magic lamp, and summoned the genie again. “When I wished I could be in a real-life video game with some hot lesbians, that wasn’t what I meant!”

The genie rolled all six of her eyes. “Cry me a river, hon. The way that ambiguous wishes work around here, you’re lucky you still have your entrails in all the right places.”