1: Numb

Arranging the candles into a circle on the floor, she takes her place at the center point and sits. Crossing her legs loosely and breathing deeply, she places the focal object in front of her. Deep breaths.

Okay. Ready.

No – wait. Not so much.

She rolls her shoulders a little and cracks her knuckles. Bad habit. She's been doing it too much lately. Whenever Giles is around he cringes noticeably at the sound of it. Snap, crackle, pop. She can't help it though. It seems that every moment of every day has been reduced to a pattern: tension/release, tension/release. Repeat ad infinitum.

Okay. Release time, right? No distractions. She starts again with the deep breaths. The comfort-smell of fire and wax. The underlying constant of sage. She can do this. She is in control. She is centered. She is strong.

She stares at the focal object in front of her until her eyes blur, focusing on nothing. She can feel it – the energy humming around her. The tingling of it in the air of the room. The vibrations of it in the floor beneath her, the earth beneath that – all the way to the center. Everywhere and in everything. She pulls it into her through her skin. She parts her lips, inhaling it, feeling it entering her body, filling her lungs, dissipating into her bloodstream and circulating throughout every vein, every capillary. Entering every cell, every atom and particle. And even deeper – she pulls it into herself on a level that she has no words for. Sub-sub-atomic. And sub- that, probably. She has tried contemplating it before, naming it. She tried explaining it to Giles once, but language just hasn't caught up to what it is she experiences when she opens herself up like this. She almost described it as the whole “oneness with the universe” thing, but that just brought to mind those guys who do a bunch of psychedelic drugs and then start talking about spaceships and stuff when you have to sit next to them at the bus stop. That or the clueless little Wicca Scouts back home. Not sure which is worse, but she really doesn't want to sound like either group. This is more real than any of them could ever know.

Now comes the hard part. The part that hasn't worked since earlier in the summer when she had tried to fix some of the damage she had done back in May. Pulling people out of dimensions. Concentrating all kinds of big, mega-healing energy over such a distance. She'd overdone it. Ended up in bed with a fever for over a week, with Giles and various members of the coven hovering and nursing and tut-tutting all around her. Giles told her later that she had been delirious. Ranting crazy stuff in a bunch of different languages, only a few of which he could understand. He'd taken some notes, in case it was something more than just crazy talk. She'd tried reading it afterward, but it hadn't made any sense. Jibberish. Fever talk. Nothing more.

She concentrates, gathering the mystical energies coursing through her and channeling them toward the focal object. It should be simple. Once upon a time, an exercise like this would have been as simple as raising an arm; wiggling a finger. For awhile there, around the time of all the badness, the magic had simply been an extension of her, like a limb. The brain would send its signal and the energy would respond, acting on the impulse and affecting her surroundings according to her intent.

And okay, so maybe she had ended up using that power to flay people or pull a soul out of the aether and put it back where it came from. For instance. But that didn't mean it was bad. That's one thing the coven has been helping her to kinda sort out in her head. Like… a person could use their hand to kill people or do bad stuff. But that doesn't mean that the hand is evil. The person might be, sure. But who ever heard of an evil hand? That's just silly. So the magic isn't the problem. She is. She'd misused it. And now she can't seem to use it at all. Oh, it's there, just like her arms and legs are still there. But somehow, it doesn't seem to get those signals from the brain anymore. Or if it does, it goes all haywire and causes the occasional freak accident. Like kinda, inadvertently causing Giles' car to levitate three feet off the ground for an hour and a half. For instance.

That's why she's doing these exercises. When Tara died, she lost control of herself. Then she lost control of the magic. She's slowly coming back to herself – thanks to Giles and all the cool people at the coven. But for some reason, she can't seem to come back to the magic. Now it's just there, a paralyzed limb. Except one that twitches from time to time and usually ends up kicking something over.

The focal object – a white rose from one of the bushes down the lane – begins to quiver the tiniest bit. Then it starts to rise, tediously slow and kinda jerky. But it's rising. She's doing it! She continues to stare at it with eyes still unfocused. She's not actually seeing the rose levitate, but she's seeing it. She's reaching out with the energy from within her, using that energy to influence the energy held within the flower. She's not levitating the actual flower, but the essence of the flower, and with it every atom that makes up the flower, and therefore, the flower itself. And now the hard part. She plucks at one of the petals – or, the essence of one of the petals. This magic stuff can be kinda complicated to explain. Anyway, she mentally plucks at a petal, to gently pull it from the rose. Control. Focus.

Which is when the magic decides to kick again and go all wacky. She gasps as the rose begins to close in on itself, withering and dying before her. She tries to pull the energy back, regain control of it, but she isn't strong enough. She comes out of the trance hard and fast, which feels like being punched in the belly and having the wind knocked out of you. The rose blackens and dries out as she watches helplessly. The energy she had drawn in scatters and she has to put her hands out to keep from slumping to the floor. And then it's gone. Well, not gone. She knows it's still there, all around her. But once again, she's lost the connection to it. She can't see it or feel it anymore. Everything around her just looks normal. Normal and non-magical. And even though she knows what the things in her room – the bed, the little table with its little lamp, her books, the candles which must have gone out sometime during the spell – even though she knows what they really look like, underneath what everyone else sees, she can't see it. The sudden surge of loneliness this causes her to feel is overwhelming. Frustrated, she stands up, picking up the dead flower. This time with her actual hand.

“This is what you do,” she mutters to herself. “This is what you do – destroy things. Everything you touch, you screw up.”

She crushes the dried petals over the trash can and watches the dust fall in amongst the crumpled papers and pencil shavings. She has failed. Again. No oneness with the universe for her. Nope. Just dead flowers and big nasty buckets of guilt. And, oh yeah, the dizziness. Feeling weak, her energy sapped, she flops onto the bed and stares up at the ceiling for who knows how long. Lets the self-pity and the self-loathing have their usual little wrestling match in her head.

She'll try again tomorrow.