📓
Omg thank you for the ask and the opportunity to rant about my all time favorite daydream fic!
I have been daydreaming about this one forever, it's gone through so many iterations and morphed so much since the first time the idea "omg but what if Willow and Tara had a gay little farm" popped into my head, but it still is The Gay Little Farm fic in my mind until I hopefully come up with a better title lol.
The Gay Little Farm is a gothic horror-y story set in a canon-divergent AU where Willow doesn't go back to Sunnydale after season 6. The fic itself is set several years down the line, after Sunnydale has been destroyed, when-- after spending some time learning more about herself through traveling, living with various covens, going to community college in San Francisco, and eventually getting a degree in computer science and working for a robotics lab-- Willow has recently bought a small farm in New England (I was missing Massachusetts when the idea was first conceived, don't judge lmao. Plus you can't really beat the ambient horror vibes of rural New England).
By the time the fic starts, Giles is the only one of the group that still talks to her. Buffy and Xander were pretty pissed about her decision to not come back, but Giles supported it ultimately because he felt all her emotions in Grave, so he understands the depths of her anguish and understands that she really doesn't know herself anymore, and supports her trying to figure out who she is on her own terms. (Also, he supports her because I asked the very essential question: "what if the btvs writers had decided to leverage how similar Willow's trajectory is to Giles's backstory even the teeniest tiniest bit?" lmao).
Throughout this time, they've emailed each other extensively, like nearly every day, but when Willow's emails start to become less and less frequent after buying the farm, Giles doesn't really think much of it; he knows she's busy trying to get everything set up to be an operational growing season, and that she doesn't have an internet connection at her new house yet so she has to go into town to email him.
It's explicable, so he doesn't worry about it until one day he gets several increasingly bizarre, almost unintelligible, concerning emails in very quick succession.
(lol I'm gonna put a read more because this got long lol. But if anyone else wants to send me one of these ask games : Put “📓” or some other version of a book emoji into my inbox and I’ll explain the plot of a fanfiction that I haven’t written but daydream about.)
She doesn't reply to any of his emails, doesn't answer the phone so he gets on the first flight across the Atlantic to go check on her (it's partly panic, but partly because he's not really pleased with where his life is at the moment anyway, but I won't get into that, this is already getting too long lol, just let it suffice to say he's glad for the excuse to just pack off to somewhere else suddenly). But when Giles gets there, Willow seems perfectly fine. She says she doesn't even have any clue what he's talking about when he tries to bring up the emails, and he figures she must just be embarrassed or something and not want to talk about it, so he drops it.
He decides to stay at the farm for a bit to keep an eye on her and make sure she's okay, but the longer he's there, the more and more weird things start happening. Even as he falls into the rhythms of life on her little farm and gets comfortable there, he can't shake the feeling that something is very wrong. He's having bizarre dreams that are becoming increasingly prophetic, even though there's absolutely no way he should be having prophetic dreams. He starts remembering things-- or at least they feel like memories, but they're certainly not things that ever happened to him. One night, he catches Willow in the middle of what looks like a blood magic ritual, but when he stops her, it's like she wakes up from sleepwalking and has absolutely no recollection of what happened. He's suspicious of Willow and what she might be doing, but also increasingly convinced the house is working some kind of dark magic on them both, so he sets out to research the place. But the nearby town clerk's office, the town's historical society, everywhere he can think to check has absolutely no record of this house existing.
Anyway, I won't spoil what is actually going on with the house because I am for real going to write this (I sort of started a while ago, but as I watched more of the show, my plot and ideas changed SO much). But really, at its core, everything that's going on with the house is about processing their grief, about building a life, about them repairing their relationships, and about the two of them having to come together to do all that by working together to figure out what's going on (although, Willow already suspects what's going on long before Giles even arrives, she just doesn't want to accept it...). The whole story is just like, what if Willow and Giles reconnected in adulthood and finally worked through some of their immense baggage about each other but also just their baggage in general? :) And also there was a farm. :)
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