She drifts over to where Buffy stands with a guard who's pointing at the floor plan, giving directions in vastly slowed-down Italian. "Scuzi," she says, not quite certain if what's called for is really permeso. "Buffy, have you seen Xander?"

"Not for a while. It's my turn to look, isn't it?"

"I'll go. I need a little space."

The Uffizi is kind of a nightmare for searching for a stray, sprawling, with so many rooms. At least most of the rooms are aligned along the two main galleries and Xander tends to install himself in one spot once he's found one he likes.

She knows what he's going through, yet she doesn't. After Tara -- after the dark, crazy period after Tara, that is -- she had all the time and space to grieve that she needed. The coven members were gentle, sensitive to her worst days. Once she came back to Sunnydale, her friends were beginning to deal with the gathering darkness there. Xander, on the other hand, is surrounded by a pack of girls prone to uncontrolled giggling fits, and even she and Buffy and Dawn are feeling a lightness they haven't known in years. It surely makes him feel more isolated, though he denied that when she asked.

Where the floor plan gets complicated is the small wing just off the South Gallery, ten rooms that make kind of an appendix to the long west corridor. The setup doesn't allow an easy search, forcing her to walk through each room in succession, rather than glance inside and move on. The first of the rooms, just off the corridor, is jammed with gawkers at Michaelangelo's "Holy Family." Willow gets only a glimpse at the sculptural quality of the painted figures, the brightness of the colors, before she's jostled by a loud man declaiming to his unfortunate teenagers in some language she can't identify. In self-defense she pushes into the room beyond, but it's crowded and chaotic too.

She wonders if there's any space here peaceful enough for Xander to settle himself. This had seemed like a good idea when they'd thought of it. A side trip to Florence, all that Renaissance art and inspiring beauty. Easy to forget that art museums have people in them, let alone this many of them.

She pushes into the next room -- no big names here, so there's a little more space to breathe. Pausing for a moment, she readjusts her arm within the sling, then moves on to the next room.

Suddenly she hears a knowing voice behind her. "Check this out, Red."

Wouldn't you know Faith would pick the nude out of all the Titians. Pearls before swine. A very small twinge of guilt follows on the heels of that fleeting thought. "Give her a chance," Buffy has said more than once, but Willow's tended to avoid occasions which would necessitate that.

"This Tiziano guy, look at the attitude he gives this chick. Check out the hand, the curve of her fingers. Is she covering herself, or playin' with herself? And the way she gazes straight at you with that secret little smile. Makes you part of it." She leans in to peer at the placard. "1538. That is wicked bold. You wonder how he got away with it. I mean, that crazy-ass monk was chippin' the dicks off all the statues not that many years before."

This takes Willow aback some, and she studies the painting for a moment. "Wicked bold" isn't exactly how an art historian would put it, but it's an accurate statement. "It's a change from all the Virgins in the place, for sure" Willow responds.

"Oh, I like the Virgins too," Faith says. She casts a glance at Willow's arm cradled in the sling. "That hurting you a lot?"

And why, exactly, would Faith care? "I came in here looking for Xander. I'd better keep searching."

"I saw him with Giles. They were heading for a coffee bar. They said they'll catch up with us at the hotel before dinner."

"How'd he look?"

"Tweedy," Faith says.

She suppresses a flash of irritation. That's what Faith wants, to get a rise out of her. "How'd Xander look?"

"Like he's been looking."

This time she doesn't bite back her annoyance. "It was a simple question."

"It's a simple answer. He's going to be feeling rough for a while. It doesn't do him any good to have people taking his pulse all the time. The only way out is through, so let him do what he needs to."

This is just too weird. Faith spouting support-group truisms. As if she's ever --

Faith sees the realization hit, offers her a smile that's halfway to mockery, as knowing in its own way as Titian's Venus.

"That's right," Willow stammers. "You lost your Watcher."

"I lost everyone who ever acted like they gave a shit about me. Sometimes while I watched." She digs in her jacket pocket and produces a stick of gum, which she shucks and stuffs in her mouth. "Lucky for Angel he's already dead, or my King Midas in reverse mojo would probably have taken care of him, too." She wheels away from the painting and heads for the next room without a backward glance, leaving Willow to follow or not.

She does.

She still halfway looks for Xander as they pass through the next several rooms. Not because she thinks Faith is lying, but because she's always keeping an eye out for him. Taking his pulse, as Faith called it. Can she really be putting pressure on him?

When she catches up with Faith in the west gallery, Faith says, "They should call this the Hall of the Stone Dicks." She jabs her finger at statues on the left, the right, left, right. "Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. They're almost like knickknacks out here. None of 'em particularly interesting, but they need something for this long hallway."

People are looking at them. Great. Willow's a crass American now, for locals to tsk over. She rushes to say something, anything. "I never saw that you were grieving back then. I was so intimidated by you. You just seemed cool and wild and free, all the things I wasn't."

She laughs. "Free. Right. I don't show myself to people that way. It just lays your vulnerabilities wide open." She heads into a sun-flooded room filled with sculptures. "I thought I brought death to everyone around me. My first Watcher. Crazy Gwendolyn Post -- she let me think she cared about me at first, just enough to sucker me in. That poor fucker I staked. Just a case of wrong place, wrong time. I got to feeling that anywhere near me was the wrong place, you know? That the only thing I could give anyone was a nasty end."

Willow finally registers her surroundings, realizing the marble figures sprawled on their pedestals are young men and women, all dying. With them stands the statue of a woman, crazed with grief, clutching a young girl to her. Even with all the sunlight in the room, it gives her the shivers.

"Then I came out of that coma and found out Mayor Wilkins was dead. Thought I'd picked a winner with him, you know? The guy was fuckin' invincible. But Faith and her magic mojo ..." She gazes up at the figure of the woman, pity etched on her face.

"You lost your bearings," Willow says softly.

"Lost my marbles." Willow sees her pull her armor in around her. "So who is this chick?"

"Niobe, the sign says. She's a mythical character, but I don't know what her story is."

"I'm bettin' it's sad," she says. When she turns back to Willow, she's on her way back to tough-girl Faith. "So does that hurt you? You never did say."

Willow realizes she's unconsciously cradling her right arm in her good hand. She does that a lot. "Not at all. I kind of wish it did. I can't feel anything in that hand."

"Ever since this Slayer spell."

Willow nods. "I just use the sling when I'm expecting to be out in a lot of people. It's really unpleasant when it gets jostled."

Faith seems reluctant to speak, but she finally does. "Was it worth it?"

"My friends -- most of them -- are alive. The world's still here, and the hellmouth is closed. I lost the place where I grew up, and the use of my hand, though Giles is still trying to find a cure for that. I've got it better than Xander."

"He's doing all right. I don't know if you can see that, because you're so close. But he's doing this the way he should. And he's got all of you."

"So he'll be fine as long as we back off a little?"

Faith doesn't miss the tartness Willow puts into the question, offering another knowing smile. "Even if you don't, I'm thinking." She casts a glance out the windows of the West Gallery, at the changing afternoon light. "There's a few paintings I want to go back to before we get pitched out of here. Come if you want, but it's going to be Virgin-palooza."

Willow suspects there's a window here, that Faith will reveal herself for only so long, and then her chance to move beyond their careful detente will be gone.

"Well, you know, the Virgin was a nice Jewish girl too." She falls into step beside Faith. "You've really gotten into the whole art thing since we've been here."

"Believe me, it was completely accidental."

She cringes inwardly. "I didn't mean it to sound that way. I'd be just as surprised if it was Buffy or Xander. All of us, really, we're just decompressing on a massive scale. Xander's dealing with his losses, and Buffy's trying to balance out how she feels about this sudden freedom, along with Spike's death. Right now I could more easily tell you the five best places to get gelato in Rome than describe my five favorite pieces of art. This is all just ... kind of a dazzling movie set. Except for you. You've been taking this all in."

The sound of Faith's boots rings along this long corridor, cutting through the undifferentiated murmur of all the tourists. "Stone walls," she finally says, and lets that hang there for a moment, unexplained.

"I'm not sure I get you."

"The streets are so narrow, and these massive stone walls -- they make me want to claw my skin off. I'd never have imagined this when I was in the joint, but it's easier to be inside 'em than out. Like somehow there's more space. So I get antsy, I dodge into a church or a museum. That's the thing here, the churches might as well be museums, and the museums might as well be churches."

"They're like windows."

"What?"

"The paintings. Maybe that's why it's not so claustrophobic inside."

"Yeah, that's exactly it." They round the corner from the short South Gallery to the East. "On up here."

Willow's strangely content to follow her lead. Their first stop is in front of a Leonardo, The Annunciation.

"There's a whole code to these paintings that he doesn't even bother with," Faith says. "The olive branch, the lily, the dove -- like subtitles saying, 'Hey, dumbo, it's Mary and the Archangel Gabriel.' I guess he figured the guy with wings kneeling in front of the virginal-looking chick might be a tip-off if you've got half a brain." She circles around, looking at the painting from another angle. "I started hunting paintings of the Annunciation, I dunno why. I guess it gives me a focus for looking at everything. I like this one." Faith indicates Mary's right hand, marking her place in the book before her. "He's interrupting her. She had a life before he swooped down. Not that Leonardo's the only guy who shows her with a book, but the others usually are tiny prayer books. I see this big-ass book, and it seems like there's more to her. There's a world outside, too, a city off in the distance. Listen to me, yakking on and on." She puts on a self-important voice. "Observe the brushstrokes, the delineation of blah blah blah."

"That's not what you're doing, though," Willow blurts. "You're telling me why this painting speaks to you." You're telling me that there's more to you, too. More than I ever bothered to guess.

A tone sounds through the museum, and a guard says something in Italian.

"Shit. The twenty-minute warning. There's one more I really want to see again."

"How far is it?"

"Room 3."

"That's near the entrance. We've got time." They dart through the slow-moving crowds in the East Gallery, evading a guard who tries to sheepdog them back out of Room 2. Faith pulls Willow to a stop before a large gilded altarpiece, as ornate as Leonardo's was subdued, dripping with the symbols he'd left out. Gabriel's wings take up one of the three big arches of the painting, as Mary draws herself back into the opposite one, giving a literal cold shoulder to the angel.

"Wow," Willow murmurs. "She looks pissed off."

"Imagine that. She had plans. A fiance and a life she thought would go a certain way. Then she gets the word some higher power needs to hijack her body as part of its plan to save the world." Faith lets that hang there between them.

All those years Willow couldn't understand Buffy's anger. To her it had seemed like wanting to turn your back on being special. The drive to find something special about herself, to be equal somehow to Buffy, had consumed her for years. Yet it took this Virgin, her body turned away from the heavenly messenger, her expression closed off and angry, to show her what Buffy had been saying. It took Faith, showing her the paintings that ease her post-prison claustrophobia.

"Out of all of 'em," Faith says now, "this is the Mary I'd most like to meet."

The guard finishes chasing off some other patrons and returns to Room 3, more insistent this time that they have to go.

The mood broken, Faith turns to her with a smirk. "You know what they say. You can take the girl out of Catholic school..."

Willow's determined not to let Faith joke this off. "Thanks for the tour," she says. "I would never have looked at these paintings in that way."

"Your turn, then," Faith says. "Do you know any of the five best gelato places in Florence?"

"Hey, it's just been two days. I can only name three decent ones."

Faith laughs. "We'll muddle through somehow," she says, quoting Giles. "Pick one of 'em. I'll even buy."

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