Fred/Willow (BtVS/AtS)

[wisdomeagle]

Title: "Magic's In The Learning"
Author: Ari
Pairing: Willow/Fred
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel: the Series
Spoilers: All of Buffy, through mid-S5 Angel
Notes: Essay title from the Dar Williams song "The Christians and The Pagans". Section headers are mostly quotes from Buffy and Angel episodes

Magic's In The Learning

Nerds Are Still In, Right?
Willow grew up in Sunnydale, and if you're from Sunnydale, that means quite a lot. It means that, without really knowing it, she grew up with mystical forces building and dissipating all around her, that disappearances and deaths were commonplace among her friends, that life wasn't something to be taken for granted. Willow was bathed in magic from her childhood, though she didn't realize it, or even know about the supernatural forces that permeated her existence, until she was sixteen years old and met Buffy Summers. Her life would never be the same.

Yet in many ways, it continued just as it always had. Her unrequited crush on Xander Harris continued to be unrequited for another two years. She maintained massive mental resources, her skills with computers, her love of reading, her comfort with authority figures, and, of course, that old crush on Xander that rendered her babbly and sweaty-palmed.

Her junior year in high school, two things happened to Willow from which there would be no turning back. A boy named Oz fell in love with her for her offbeat sense of humor, her adorable shyness, and her not inconsiderable brain power. And Jenny Calendar died, giving Willow the first real power she'd ever tasted. I refer, of course, to her job as substitute teacher, which she would retain for the rest of the school year. There was also, of course, the small matter of the spells.

When she was seventeen, Willow discovered that the magic that had permeated her environment for her entire life could be focused and controlled - that she could use this power to make the world a better place. She started small, with protective charms and amulets, but even in high school, she channeled occasional bursts of incredible power through her self, starting with the spell to reensoul Angel, the moment she would later recall as the first spell she ever performed.

Willow devoted her life to fighting evil when she chose to reject numerous offers from prestigious colleges to attend plain old Sunnydale U, where she would be in touch with the powers she was learning to control, and where she would still be part of her circle of high school friends. During her freshman year of college, though, Willow's heart was broken, and she began to suspect that quirky offbeat coolness and a massive IQ just weren't enough. She set about burying her high school persona as deep as she could.

At the same time, she discovered something about herself: she was capable of falling in love with Tara - a woman. Eager to throw off her old, geeky self as much as possible, with its trappings of unrequited crushes on Xander and Giles, her love of reading, her long hair and her outfits from Sears, Willow fell head over heels with a new lifestyle, one that combined the softness and sensuality of lesbian love and Sappho's poetry with powerful, earthy magics, ending her freshman year with a series of defining actions: rejecting her high school lover, signing up for drama class, something she never would have done before, summoning the power of the First Slayer, and learning how to wear the costume that would prevent anyone from seeing that she was still plain old Willow who couldn't get the guy, was mocked by the cheerleaders, did well in school and didn't have a life.

Magic loved Willow, filled her and embraced her, and she embraced it right back, realizing that she had come a long way from floating pencils and was capable of harnessing strange and dangerous powers, powers that allowed her to do what she had never been able to do in high school: make the world the way it was supposed to be. She could protect her lover, she could help Buffy, she could save the world, she could even raise the dead. Willow became addicted to her own power to change things, and she lost sight of those boundaries she simply shouldn't cross: she started toying with Tara's mind.

Willow had discovered the limits of power: she could raise the dead, but she couldn't make Buffy happy again. She could lead the Scoobies for an entire summer, but she couldn't make Giles stay. She could play with memory - but she couldn't make Tara stay. Willow spent the year that Buffy came back discovering the limits of her power, and she ended the year with the realization that while she had the power to kill all her friends, that she had the power to destroy the world, she still couldn't bring Tara back. Not even Willow could control the forces of life and death.

With this profound and humbling lesson in mind, Willow went to England to learn about magic and about herself, to discover whether she could control her own power, whether she would let chaos win or if she could learn to ground herself, to integrate magic use into her life, neither, to paraphrase Giles, a hobby or an addiction, but a part of her. She returned to Sunnydale, the place she had sworn to defend so many years ago, and to her friends, as uncertain of her welcome as she had been five and a half years earlier when Buffy first sat down beside her.

As her last year in Sunnydale began, Willow was struggling to find herself. She had just lost her lover, she suspected that she would never be able to fully control magic, which had been her lifeline since the beginning of college, and she was beginning to wonder if perhaps she'd thrown out the baby with the bathwater when she'd rejected her computer nerd persona. She remembered being a high schooler, writing fanfic and bad love poetry. She went back to college, remembering that there was a time when school was the most important thing in her life. In the meantime, she met a girl barely out of high school herself, discovering her own power as a potential slayer, a girl who, contrary to all Willow's beliefs about herself, loved her. Not for her magic, not for her power, not because of a lifetime of history, but for her, Willow as she had come to be after so many life-changing events. In spite of herself, Willow came to like Kennedy, perhaps even to love her. Then the phone rang.

Andrew picked it up. "Uh, Willow," he said. "Call for you from L. A. Somebody named Fred. The guy sounds kind of effeminate."

The Girl From Cordy's Vision
Winifred Burkle left Texas with a song in her heart. Sure, high school and college had been great, hanging out with the guys, getting stoned and discussing the latest episode of X-Files. And she would miss her parents. But she was ready for bigger and better things, and she would find all that in L. A. She was one of the brightest young physicists of her age, and she was off to prove that to the world.

The world believed in Fred's abilities, all right, but it was threatened by her talents. While Fred was building a life for herself - excelling at her classes, working at the library, endearing herself to her co-workers - Professor Sidell was plotting to get rid of her for good. After perhaps only a year in LA, Fred opened a book, uttered some syllables, and got very, very lost.

She learned to survive in her new world, learned the rules. Fred had always understood the rules that governed the universe, the ones and zeroes that made it tick. Now, she had to learn more basic rules: removal of her collar would make her head explode. The priests were in charge. She was a cow. Fred learned to survive, but she had to make immense sacrifices to do it. Good food wasn't important anymore. Baths were out of the question. Sanity was expendable. She had to focus on what was important, and that was survival. Her memories of LA became distant dreams.

Then one day, a handsome man on horseback rescued her from Pylea. Fred fell instantly, immediately in love with him. She hooked herself to Angel, trusted him instinctively, learned the new rules that he brought with him about beasts and blood, and hitched her salvation to a star. From here on out, Fred was going to be okay, and it was all because of Angel. Fred fell in love.

Fred would fall in love with many saviors that year and the next. On a primal level, she knew that she had to escape from Pylea and her cave. But she was tempted to remain hidden, locked away from human contact and from the possibility of getting lost again. She wrote everything down so she wouldn't forget. She wrote to her parents because she loved them, but ran away because she feared herself, the woman she'd become. She wanted to stay in her cave. She wanted to escape from her cave. Angel became the first door out of that cave. Charles Gunn became the second. Suddenly Fred was someone she had never been before. She was fighting side by side with champions, with heroes. She was desirable. Her world was a good place to be in.

She didn't like parts of it. She didn't like having to mother Charles, didn't like having to keep everyone together when the world was falling apart. She wanted to be able to luxuriate in pancake breakfasts and let Wesley take care of the research, let Angel take care of the baby. But that one summer, Fred made a family and she made it well, binding the three of them, Connor and Charles and she, together with the only tools she had, with her own version of "resolve face."

Somehow they made it through the summer. None of them died. They found their friends again, were going to be family again. Just when things were getting better again, everything went wrong. Fred discovered something horrific about her past, and something even more horrific about herself: she was capable of vengeance. She was a murderer at heart. After trying to hard to keep her family together all summer, Fred was forced to realize that she was capable of blood vengeance against the man who robbed her of her dignity, her sanity, her humanity.

She was darker than she'd dreamed possible, too dark to be innocent, too dark for Charles, who was simultaneously the champion she'd always wanted and a frightening example of someone who would do anything for love, who would kill for love. Fred had always kind of wanted someone who'd kill for her, until she got one and realized just what it means to snap a man's neck.

As if that weren't enough, everything else was crumbling too. The sun was blotted out, Cordelia wasn't herself, then they released Angelus, Charles broke up with her, she struggled with her conflicted feelings for Wesley, then discovered he wasn't the man she thought he was, either, Angelus taunted them, Lilah died and Wesley had loved her, had loved Lilah, and then

the sun returned, and Fred, doing the kind of work she hated, the research that Wesley was so much better suited for, stumbled across a name and a promise, and together they equaled hope.

She reached for the phone.

The Call of Fred
For Willow, it was like stepping through a time machine. Here she was with Angel and Cordelia, two people she hadn't seen in years, and here she was performing the very first spell she'd done all by herself, before things had started to go so horribly wrong. This was something she knew how to do, people who were relying on her and who trusted her, and that made Willow trust herself. And there was Fred, acting and talking exactly like she herself had six years earlier in the midst of her stuttery Xander-crush.

She still wasn't quite sure why Kennedy liked her, but she knew why Fred did: all the right reasons. Fred loved her for her magic and for her brain, for her problem solving skills, loved her because she could be the big damn hero and save Angel. It hadn't won Buffy, but maybe it could win Fred. She was older now, and darker, and God knew she'd changed a lot, but if someone as good and wholesome as Fred loved her, maybe there was hope.

I'd Love To Bend Your Ear Sometime
Willow was their savior. When no one else could save them, when Angel was evil and Wesley had done all he could and Charles seemed impotent, Willow saved them. She saved them using magic, something Fred had never been entirely comfortable with, but when Willow did magic, the universe bent to her control. This was magic the way it was supposed to be, in the hands of a skilled witch, and Fred found that she could be useful, that she could recite the words and ring the bell and be part of something dark and powerful and useful.

Willow was someone Fred saw as just like her, an academic like Wesley, but without his darkness. Someone who probably read the same magazines she did, someone who looked at the same websites, who liked physics and magic, someone who was strong and powerful and could fight demons and win battles when it was all she and her friends could do to stay afloat.

That Last Spell We Did
In Willow's hands, magic had always been powerful, personal, and intense. She used spells to protect those she loved from the very first charms she did, and with Tara, she discovered that doing spells together was physical and sensual, that magic was like sex. The first time she performed the spell to restore Angel's soul, her boyfriend and her friends helped; the second time she did the spell, Fred and Wesley were there. A few weeks later, she would do the most powerful spell of her life while her lover watched.

Doing magic with Willow was Fred's first real experience of this kind of spell, powerful and personal and physical, and it keyed her in that magic in the right hands could be more than a tool: it could be like sex. She'd never done magic like that before or had sex like that, but she was intrigued and excited, by the magic and especially by Willow. She wanted more. For the first time in months, she was happy and excited to have a crush.

I'm Seeing Someone
Willow was intrigued by Fred, and Fred was definitely interested in Willow, but real life intervened. Willow was dating Kennedy, and besides, Sunnydale and Buffy needed her. Much as she liked LA, she was needed elsewhere. She tried to let Fred down as gently as possible, but let down Fred had to be. It was the first time she'd ever had to let someone down gently; she'd never before resisted the temptation of infidelity. But duty and honor and Kennedy won out, and a few weeks later, Fred as Willow had known her would vanish forever when Angel had her memory erased. Willow would go back to Sunnydale where she'd continue her relationship with Kennedy, make all the Potentials in the world into Slayers, and eventually go to Cleveland, England, Brazil, Tibet, and end up on the astral plane. She never saw Fred again.

We Need The Big Guns
When Fred died, her friends immediately thought to call Willow to help bring her back. Willow had only tried two resurrection spells: to raise her best friend and then her lover. It's because of her powers that Wesley and Angel though to contact her, but the connection between Fred and Willow was still present. Giles probably refused to pass the news of Fred's death on to Willow, possibly in part because he realized that there were feelings of closeness between the two women and he didn't want to send one of his people into what he considered enemy territory.

Meta
In the DVD commentary on "Orpheus," director Terrence O'Hara and exec producer Jeff Bell mention that they were playing the chemistry between Willow and Fred intentionally: Willow was played as having a crush on Fred through the episode, and the payoff for the subtext was the final "I'm seeing someone." Because we all know that episode commentaries are canon. Still, worthy of a mention that they were doing it intentionally.

Loved You Since Before I Knew You
Before I'd even seen an episode of Angel (I got into the show late, through DVDs, and didn't even start watching until after "NFA" had aired) , I read on a bulletin board somewhere that Fred was "just like Willow - they'd make a great couple." So my introduction to the pairing came early. Once I actually saw episodes with Fred, I was afraid I had to concede the point - they would make a great couple. And then we got to "Orpheus" and I was overcome with the UST. Fred and Willow fit together so naturally, and they made each other so happy. They were more comfortable with each other than they had been with anyone for ages.

For me, Fred and Willow are a balancing act. Willow is a witch with a strong background in the physical sciences; Fred is a physicist with some training in magic. Both women are struggling to create adult identities, yet are trapped by the assumptions of their girlhoods. Both women have darker impulses that the struggle to suppress. Fred wants to be able to take care of her family of choice; Willow wants to be able to use her magic for good. Both have things in their past that they're trying hard to forget: Fred's time in Pylea, Willow's stint as a super villain. They're both sweet and stammery and shy, but both of them are capable of murder.

On another level, Fred is exactly Willow's type, and Willow is Fred's. Fred is adoring and trusting, flirty and sweet, and she puts Willow at the center of her universe as soon as she steps over the threshold. Willow has always loved being loved, and Fred is someone who both understands her magical side and respects it, but is not afraid of it the way Willow's Sunnydale friends are. And Willow plays the hero, coming onto the scene and saving the day. Fred has always had a thing for heroes, for saviors. She loves people who are willing and able to protect her, and Willow is strong and sweet and smart and funny.

They fit together perfectly.

Links
Meta:
The Inherent Zen Rightness of Fred/Willow by jennyo
The When's and Where's of Willow/Fred by Angel Jade
Funnier In Latin: Willow/Fred fansite
Spellbound: another fansite

Fic:
"Basic Chemistry" by dee
"California Stars" by jennyo
"Pseudoscience" by jennyo
"Smoke" by jennyo
"Third Time's the Charm" by jennyo
"Afresh" by Scy
"Not Funnier In Latin by glimmergirl
"Holiday" by shadowlongknife
"Bells" by cdydedahl (with Illyria)
"Not A Date" by cdydedahl
"Cooking Up a Storm" by naughtyelf
"Hunger" by bigdirty
"And Honey Wild" by voleuse
"The First Time" by vampedvixen
"Willow and Fred Go Wild in Torquay" by keswindhover
"Fractal" by minim_calibre
"In The Rain" by Amanda (with Illyria)

Drabbles and Other Short Fics
"Forgotten Mistletoe" by viciouswishes
"Pancakes and Diners" by viciouswishes
"Someday Not Today" by mydeira
"Give Fate A Hand" by maechi

Comments

[cynical-siren.livejournal.com]

Very well put. I thought I was the only one who saw they these two would click. Nice job! I think I'll read those fics now. I never could find any good ones. Hopefully, this will break that cycle.

[wisdomeagle]

Thanks, glad you liked! Hope you enjoy some of the fics. :)