World at Her Fingertips

[sroni]

Title: World at Her Fingertips
Fandom: BTVS
Characters: Willow, Jenny Calendar
Rating: G/FRC
Word count: 1,365
Recipient/Prompt: aaronlisa, Magic vs. Technology: Technology
Three elements you’d like included: Season One or Two Setting, chat rooms, Willow figuring out what’s going on before the others
Two things you don’t want: Dawn, major character death
Range of ratings you’d like to read: any
Setting: Season 2, before “Surprise”.
Summary: Things can be a slippery slope, especially if you convince yourself you’re doing it for the greater good.

World at Her Fingertips

Maybe this was bad. Willow wasn’t used to being bad, really, she wasn’t. The worst she did was lie to Mrs. Summers about Buffy spending the night with her, and, really, she felt worse about lying to Mrs. Summers than she did about lying to her own parents, because Mrs. Summers was just so sweet and nice and motherly and tried to take care of their little group like Jesse’s mom used to, and Willow felt really bad that she hadn’t seen Jesse’s mom since … Well, since. She’d tried, once, but both of them had cried all the way through it and Willow just couldn’t go back there, not again, and besides, what was she supposed to say? Mrs. McNally hadn’t believed that Jesse had just run away, after all, Willow and Xander were still there, and he had the best home life out of the three of them; it was an accepted fact without any of them ever stopping to think about it that if any of the three of them would run away, it would be Xander. (Of course, they also knew that if Xander did run away, it would be to Willow’s house.)

And yes, Willow was babbling inside her mind, mostly to take said mind off of what she was doing, because she just couldn’t get past “this is bad” and Willow was a good girl, she always had been, that was as much a defining characteristic of her as her brain!

But what she was doing now was very much not good. It was, in fact, the opposite of good, no matter how much she tried to convince herself it was necessary. She was hacking a teacher. A teacher she liked! Sure, she wasn’t doing anything bad with it, but the fact she was doing it at all …

But there were too many inconsistencies about Ms. Calendar, and Willow wanted to get to the bottom of them. Mostly because she was curious, but also because … She liked Ms. Calendar, really she did, Ms. Calendar let her do all kinds of stuff for extra credit and Willow loved extra credit, and Ms. Calendar knew about the things that went bump in the night and helped them out a lot and that was exactly Willow’s worry. She’d already learned that just because you liked someone didn’t mean you could trust them. Just look at Buffy and Billy. Or. Well. Buffy and most people. And as much as Willow liked Ms. Calendar, and she did, her loyalty was to Buffy first. She had to make sure that Ms. Calendar wasn’t going to double cross them! She just had to!

She’d first twigged onto the discrepancies when she’d gone looking for the chatrooms that she’d heard Ms. Calendar mention. They’d been a lot harder to find than she’d thought. Like, a lot harder. And Willow had been looking for information and hacking into it since she’d first heard about the internet, thanks to her dad deciding that with her aptitude with computers and as much as she liked learning, she should be able to have internet pretty much whenever she wanted it. It had meant getting a second phone line installed, so that Willow wasn’t constantly using the house line, but he said it was worth it.

That was actually one of Willow’s favorite memories of her dad, the way he’d smiled at her happiness and exuberance over the internet and all that information at her fingertips.

So, yeah, Willow was pretty used to being able to find things quickly and easily. It didn’t make sense that if these chatrooms were so hard to find, Ms. Calendar had been able to find them. Not that Ms. Calendar was bad with computers! Not at all! It was just … Willow had grown up during the dawn of the internet. The internet and computers were her playgrounds. Ms. Calendar was good with computers, and was really good at teaching them, but Willow had discovered fairly early on that she was leaps and bounds beyond what Ms. Calendar could do.

So Willow had had to do some digging, and finally she’d found the chatroom and had picked a handle that wouldn’t be linked back to her; that was always the problem with hackers, they picked names that corresponded to them in some way. She picked a random name out of the phonebook and made up a screen name for that person, usually consisting of the first initial and last name. The phonebook was from Denver, just to make it that less traceable to Sunnydale.

And then she paid attention to the things that Ms. Calendar was saying (it had been really easy to determine that “JDiary” was Ms. Calendar, because the British called a calendar a diary, but that did introduce the question of why Ms. Calendar was using a British term, unless it was a way to confuse her own identity a little more and also a nod to her relationship with Giles. That made sense, but it just didn’t feel right, and Willow trusted her instincts when it came to things feeling right. Usually. Most of the time.), and some things were just … odd. It wasn’t any particular things that Willow could put her finger on, but things didn’t seem to be stacking up right.

So to make sure that everything was on the up and up and most definitely not simply to assuage her own curiosity, Willow started digging into Ms. Calendar’s files.

And that was when the poo hit the fan.

Willow had gotten a little complacent in checking on things around Sunnydale. She’d left trap doors in things she used a lot, and yes, that did include the school files. She’d never had something notice her before, not in Sunnydale. She’d looked around Giles’s file a few times to make sure that everything checked out the way it was supposed to, and it had been fine. But when she opened Ms. Calendar’s file, there was a firewall there that hadn’t been there for the others. Willow could get through it no problem, but it didn’t make sense for there to be one there where it wasn’t for any of the other teachers!

The best that Willow could figure was that it was something Ms. Calendar had set up. And the way it was dodging her —

Wait a minute. This wasn’t a purely technological firewall. This was magic! Ms. Calendar had blended hacking and magic! Willow had to learn how to do that!

But first, she had to figure out what the magic firewall was hiding.

It took hours, which was hours longer than she’d expected it to take, but eventually, Willow had all the information in front of her, copied to her own computer, and it was just a matter of reading it.

When she was done, she really wished she hadn’t.

She’d been right, but Willow didn’t think she’d ever been so miserable to be right. Ms. Calendar was hiding something, and it was a big ol’ something. A huge something! Willow should tell Buffy, she really should. Except …

If she told Buffy, she wouldn’t be able to get Ms. Calendar to teach her how to combine magic and computers. And besides, what Ms. Calendar was hiding wasn’t hurting anyone. It wasn’t really Buffy’s business, was it?

No, Willow had to do this. If Ms. Calendar could use magic and computers, other people would be able to, too, and Willow had to be able to get information she wanted, when she wanted it, to help Buffy. What if Buffy needed something and Willow wasn’t able to get to it because she’d gotten blocked by some computer witch?

No, that wasn’t acceptable.

Half an hour later, Willow knocked on Ms. Calendar’s door, wearing her Resolve Face. Inside, her knees were shaking and she really wanted to go throw up. But this was too important, so she made herself stand firm and straight. When Ms. Calendar opened the door, surprised to see her, Willow stated firmly, her voice not shaking a bit, “You’re Janna of the Kalderash. I won’t tell Buffy. But you’re going to teach me how to use magic like you do.”

End