Pressed up flush against Xander's warm back, Willow could feel every twitch of movement. Everything, arms and legs and the slow twitching that defied being pinned down to one location, had to pass through the complicated net of muscles through Xander's back, and the rippling massaged its way deep into Willow, who was still quivery and vulnerable in the aftermath of fucking him until she was smothered in blind, impenetrable pleasure.

Xander was trembling. Not just general eagerness, a regathering of his energies as he turned his attention on Cordelia, but scary-trembling.

Willow ran her foot over Xander's calf, hoping that it would calm him a little, and settled her arms more securely around him. She overbalanced a little, though, and her foot slid off the far side of his leg, kicking squarely with the arch into Cordelia's perfect, sleek shin.

She didn't think Xander even noticed. She felt the muscles jump a little in Cordelia's leg, and then quiet, and it was almost possible to believe that Cordelia had forgotten she was there. That would be typical, Cordelia forgetting that Willow was even alive, unless something brought her to Cordelia's attention with a sharp, though light, blow to the shins.

Some things never changed. At least, Willow kind of wanted to think so.

She let her leg stretch out, and pointed her toe so that the back of her foot nestled into the soft blankets on the other side of Cordelia. Cordelia's leg brushed softly against Willow's heel, silk across her calluses, so perfect that Willow knew her cheeks would blossom out in bright, poppy red if Cordelia hadn't forgotten about her in the face of gorgeous Xander's perfect kisses, forgotten Willow was even still there....

***Perfect. Still.

Cordelia had even been perfect in her coffin, rich red velvet dress covering up the wound through her stomach. Having very little fear of dead bodies anymore, Willow had gone right up to the edge of the casket at the funeral home, looked right over the side and down on Cordelia Chase, whom she had practically murdered. She'd been perfect, frozen eternally, her eyelids shadowed in the softest silvers and golds imaginable, her hair swept back from her forehead and forming patterns on the white satin pillow like plants bent into curves by steady winter rains. Once Willow had sprinkled a little potpourri around her, along the outline of the casket, masking the chemical scent with a little violet and wisteria, everything about Cordelia's final public appearance had been just as perfect as Cordelia herself could have demanded.

Thanks to those unromantic chemicals, however, Cordelia was still surprisingly perfect when Willow - herself soaked with sweat and dirt that was turning to mud, or at least to filth, on her body - had finished digging, pried up the lid of her coffin, and helped Buffy drag her out of her grave. Sure, she hadn't looked exactly...alive by that time, but she'd still looked recognizably Cordelia, and as perfect as you could imagine anyone who'd been dead for eleven days looking. More so than you'd imagine, actually.

Raising the dead, as Willow had realized in a flash of intuition after six straight days of research, was mostly a matter of avoiding the easy out. A soul was a snap to lure back into its body; souls gravitated back toward earth, if they saw the chance, and all the sorceress had to do was open a door. That was how people raised zombies, and when your correspondences were sound and your timing was solid - timing was the hardest part of magic, the make-or-break part - then it was like falling off a log.

But zombies were dead things, with no vitality, no ability to grow, or really to *live* at all. They were just personalities rattling around in the fishbowl of their old bodies. What you needed, to turn back time and correct your terrible mistakes, was something to gum the soul back to the body, something to make it fit back *exactly* where it had been before. You couldn't just dump a soul back into a dead body. You had to restore it, which took patience, attention, and at least a modicum of magical dexterity, but it was a job you could apply yourself to. It was more craftsmanship than genius, and actually not all that different from altering the circuitry on a computer's motherboard. Just know what it should look like, then touch it up, tease it into shape. Willow could work the invisible stuff of souls and sorcery just like she could the fine hairs of resistors, capacitors, and conductors.

By the time she was done, Willow had spent about half an hour catching hold of Cordelia's strayed soul, and about three days cultivating it, helping it to root its way back into Cordelia where it could stimulate her from the inside out, waking dead tissue and making cells want to reproduce themselves again. And once the process started, the act of living took on its own momentum, making it so that Cordelia would go through the world alive and growing again, animated by a soul that was at home inside her, instead of just inhabiting her body.

And it wasn't unnatural, not at all, no matter how Giles stared her down over the top of his glasses and warned at her in his most stentorian and most English voice. No matter how strangely Buffy looked at her, and then away. No matter how sad Oz's eyes had been, and how it cut her down to the center and twisted her open in half to hear him say, "Don't you think it's time you left Cordelia in peace?" They didn't understand. Until Willow had *done* it, even she hadn't understood how dazzlingly natural it all was. It was just making something grow, the way everything wanted to.

Even if the process itself had been more invasive, more Mary Shelley-esque than it really had been, it still would have been natural, just because...Cordelia. There was nothing in the world more natural than Cordelia making noise, Cordelia striding through the halls of Sunnydale High, Cordelia tossing her hair back without even checking to see if it would lash someone behind her across the face, Cordelia arching her eyebrows and pursing her perfect, bowed lips in a thoughtful gesture that was half mocking and half shrewd. Cordelia was born to be alive and awesome and beautiful, and the unnatural thing would have been - well, anything else.

The other unnatural thing was Willow surrendering her beloved, her Xander whom she loved more than anything and so much that it took her breath and squeezed it dry. Her fear of this threesome was overwhelming, towering so high in her heart and mind that it had shadowed out everything for the last week, since she and Xander had first discussed it. It was thoroughly unnatural, and Willow had almost made herself sick with dreading it - because how could he ever forget what Cordelia was like if Cordelia herself, graceful and perfect and desirable, was there to remind him? Sometimes she was so sure that she would lose Xander this way, it almost seemed like it had already happened. Now that she had her heart's desire, it was nothing if not unnatural to risk it of her own free will.

But Willow had been loving Xander most of her life, and she knew better than anyone - certainly better than Cordelia Chase - exactly what the job entailed. It wasn't complex, really. It just mattered that you stay strong, because invariably Xander would lose his nerve at the last minute, try with all that rapid-fire, twisting-turning eloquence of his to talk you back into what was safe and familiar, even if you and he both knew he hated it before and would keep right on hating it. Xander lost his nerve all the time, and if you were Xander's love, Xander's lover, it was all on you to keep him from bolting, to lead him where he wanted and needed to go.

Because what Willow knew about Xander, the secret that the two of them shared, was that he wasn't as straightforward and simple as he seemed. In fact, there was something inside Xander that seemed to delight in tangling up everything that came his way and prevented even Xander from knowing his own opinion on things most of the time.

No matter how easy Xander was to get along with, how stable and predictable his responses to certain basic stimuli were, at heart Xander was trapped in the mazes of his own brilliant, sparkling illogic. He was too sweet, and too intuitive when it came to seeing the virtue buried in everybody. How could Willow, or anybody else, expect him to choose, to rank people against each other when Xander was so good at sinking himself into whoever needed him most? It wasn't infatuation, not with Xander. It was just an inability to stop loving people when it wasn't convenient anymore, which was the best of Xander, the bright heart of his Xanderness. He was a lover, everyone's love, a veritable slut for it. And love made him better, made him more the hero that she knew Xander would never be whole until he could see in himself as clearly as she could.

She wouldn't take it away from him. She would hold strong, for Xander, like she always had, and however it scared him, however it scared her, she wasn't giving up on Xander until she lured him out of his doubt and gave him the best thing she had: certain faith in Xander, pure and genuine confidence that there was nothing wrong and everything right with the way he fell in love and couldn't pull back out of it again. It was just natural, just how Xander was.

The only other thing that Willow kind of worried might not be exactly natural was something that seemed to be starting in her, not in Xander at all. It was forgiveness, and Willow rarely forgave and never forgot, but somehow this time forgiveness had just shown up without warning, sitting comfortably and immovably inside her. There was a lot of Cordelia to forgive, but even though a few anger shadows lurked around in the corners of her memory, Willow felt better near the center, where there was a flickering but clear little light that made her glow, put a fond and sweet dessert-like warmth at the back of her throat at the taste of Cordelia Chase's name. Cordelia that she'd wanted to be like, Cordelia that she'd wanted to notice her, Cordelia that she'd wanted to be and then wanted with all her might to save from....

From being forgotten. Willow was used to that, but Cordelia wasn't. Willow didn't want her to get used to fading from the fickle memories of secret-heavy Sunnydale. It was unnatural.***

The way Xander kissed down the gentle swells and curves of Cordelia's body was so beautiful that for a minute it was almost like he was touching Willow in that slow, reverent way. When she came back to her senses, there was one little pang of loss, and then just the warm friction of Xander squirming against her, lowering down toward the foot of the bed..

She brought her leg back up, first over Cordelia's hip, and then Xander's. As he moved, Willow kept her leg still, until her thigh rested against the side of his chest, along his ribs. Automatically, Xander moved his arm, lifting it to drape across Cordelia and make room for Willow's leg, and for a brief, timeless period, it seemed like all three of them forgot that they were having kinky three-way sex, totally caught up in little shifts and wiggling and making adjustments to fit against each other, locking against and around each other in an odd, rounded, breathing and stretching glyph, some symbol that Willow could probably find in a book somewhere, that maybe meant "whole" or "with" or even "intimate," in an obscure magical language.

And there was nothing Willow did better than translating obscure magics into miracles during the darkest hours of the night.

*****
V: CORDELIA, XANDER, AND WILLOW

There was no difference in the shape or texture of Xander's thick fingers and his tongue - or at least not one that Cordelia was alert enough to notice. Everything down there was soaking wet, too, so that was no help. She was pretty sure that the more mobile, elegant thing working her into spasm after spasm of intense feeling was Xander's tongue, just because, well, *Xander.* But basically it didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except that she didn't feel freakish or alone or - falling - for the first time since she came back to life.

As her sense of direction flicked out like a burnt lightbulb, the walls seemed to be turning at a nice, stately pace around her, making her disoriented but not dizzy. She could see where she was, could tell walls from windows and up from down, but there was no reason behind it - the same feeling Cordelia had felt when she'd first opened her eyes on a table in the school's boiler room, realizing that she was in a real place, a living place, but not yet able to ask herself how it should make her feel or why it should surprise her to be alive.

On the edge of her orgasm, Cordelia did the very same thing that she'd done on the border between life and death. She reached out, slowly but without any conscious purpose, and only stopped when her fingers found and dug tightly into Willow Rosenberg's sunrise hair.

He was at least nine million times as happy as you were ever supposed to be in high school; if suffering as a teenager built character, like Xander's mother said, then he had just virtually guaranteed that he would grow up to be a televangelist or a used-car salesman. And it would be worth it, completely, even down to the bad suits.

Maybe it was a little bad, something he should feel guilty about, that he was just doing to Cordelia what Willow had taught him, with such Willowy patience and good humor, to do for her. Maybe he should be taking more time, figuring out how they were different, what Cordelia needed.

But then, slowing down had always been the one thing he and Cordelia never could do. And she didn't seem to be complaining. Maybe it wasn't rocket science, anyway, and he could just shut up and enjoy the taste of her and the quick, high, repetitive sound of her whimpering, which, unless she was *real* different from Will, meant that everything was cool.

She even screamed a little bit like Willow when she came, only her voice slipped and slid up and down - maximum Cordelia again - so that she sounded even more agonized. Why did extreme sexual pleasure always sound suspiciously like torture by the Spanish Inquisition?

Xander found himself laughing low and quiet inside his chest, almost smacked breathless by the absolute, incredible goodness of Cordy's legs and Willow's legs and the two of them holding close to him like they'd just fallen in love.

Willow pulled him a little closer, settling his weight back against her so that the surface of his chest was free for Cordelia to drop over against. He was midway back up to pillow level now, having sort of gotten sidetracked by Cordelia's dark nipples, and when Willow drew him tight against her, the soft thickness of his hair rested warmly in the gentle hollow between her small breasts.

She arched around him, drawing her legs up so that top one was across his waist, her toes coming awkwardly close to poking Cordelia someplace that felt awfully warm and soft, though Willow wasn't trying very hard to figure out exactly where. Cordelia's legs, she could tell, were burrowed between Xander's, changing the angle of Xander's leg and his hip.

At the same time that she was stretching her ribcage upward, working long days and hours and weeks of tension out of her spine and shoulders, Cordelia was arching her back and stretching too. It put them both well over Xander's head, locking him in close with their legs but with nothing at all to block the sight of each other, eyes meeting eyes as though they were strangers. They were, somehow - or at least, they'd never looked at each other before and slowed down long enough to wonder what they were seeing.

Willow reached out, stretching the tendons in her arm and twisting her wrist to crack the joint comfortably, but instead of pulling back into her own space, she laid her open palm against Cordelia's luxurious hair, and felt the sudden strength of Cordelia's aura engulf her hand - privilege, nobility, pride, but also a taint of uncertainty, even frustration, as though everyone else in the world understood some basic thing about people that Cordelia suspected might be completely outside her grasp.

Maybe it was magic, or maybe Willow just knew Cordelia better than she thought she did. Maybe all those years of envy and longing and bitter resentment had forged a bond - a twisted but strong bond that let her see into Cordelia as though they were networked together, sharing everything effortlessly.

Magic or miracle, the cold fusion of mutual jealousy or the sudden spark of genuine trust pulled Willow in, and Cordelia let her eyes fall closed and did not move away as Willow pressed her mouth to Cordelia's, letting connection speak for itself.

~end~