Transitions - Ch. 5

Wesley had fallen asleep after all, though he certainly hadn't intended to, and he awoke to the sight of his lovely Moira emerging from the bathroom--not naked this time, but clad in a silver-blue dressing gown. In many ways the gown made matters worse, for it made her look entirely enchanting. The color was his favourite, and the fabric such a fine silk that he nearly ached to touch it, especially as it curved and shimmered over the lines of Moira's body.

Worst of all, for him, was that the cut of the gown reminded Wesley of a style he'd seen Ginger Rogers wear in one of her films. Moira, he realized, had a dancer's grace, and a catlike quietness. The skirts of the gown floated open as she walked, granting him glimpses of his former Handler's shapely legs.

Oh, Lord, Wesley thought. Perhaps I'm yet dreaming.

He lay back on the pillows, pulling the covers all the way up to his chin, as Moira shed the gown to reveal a matching nightdress of such briefness he wondered why she bothered.

"Have I driven you into hiding, love?" Moira smiled at him, bending down to bestow upon his lips the most gentle of kisses. Wesley nearly melted with happiness, feeling the shape of her smile against his mouth, the brief caress of her breath. The shadowed quality of her eyes troubled him, but he'd bring her through that. He swore that he would.

Moira lay down beside him, touching his face with her fine, long hand. Her lips brushed his mouth again briefly, and then her cheek pressed against his. Wesley felt enfolded in her love, wonderfully enclosed, safer, here on the Hellmouth, than he'd ever felt in his life. He'd thought himself, once, terribly homesick for England, but all he wanted, really, was to live here forever in this snug little house. Put in a bit of a garden perhaps, grow roses of the fussier sort, come home every night to his strong, lovely, redheaded wife.

He nearly asked her right then if she'd have him, but didn't want to seem foolish--and besides, he wished to do things properly. Let enough months pass them by that his proposal wouldn't seem like a whim. Shower her with flowers. Get down on his knee before her. Slip his great-grandmother's betrothal ring--which he must have sized; the Victorian band would be far, far too small for Moira's hand--onto her finger. Say all the quaint, old-fashioned words, which would, no doubt, amuse Moira, who was in no way an old-fashioned woman. Despite that quality, her determined modernness, Wesley knew somehow that Moira would take his words as intended.

"Em," Wesley murmured into her ear. "Oh, my dearest."

Had Moira ever been married? he wondered. He thought not. She'd been quite young when she went for a Watcher, barely twenty-nine, by his calculations, and would have spent the previous three years, as he had, in training. Add to that the time spent to achieve her undergraduate and graduate degrees, and her Olympic adventures. No, she would not have had the time, nor would she have any children--and now, he supposed, judging by the path of that last, most dreadful wound, she could not.

She had been Rupert's once, Wesley supposed, and he found himself not wanting to think of that. He didn't like to think of how she might compare them--until he realized that Moira would not. His beloved would never be so ungracious.

Moira made him feel that every time they touched must be wondrous and new, a discovery.

She rose up a bit, laughing softly. "It's like magic," she said.

"What is, my dearest?"

Moira propped herself on an elbow, gazing down at him, still with that slight smile on her face. "The way you seem to go straight from a state of clean-shavenness to a bit of a beard, with no shadowy, bristly stage in between."

"Oh! Then I ought to--"

"Leave it." Moira's fingers traced the line of his jaw. "It's charming."

Wesley felt himself blush, "Rather scruffy, I'm afraid."

"Perhaps--but let's be daring, shall we?" She raked her fingers back through his ungroomed hair. Wesley could feel it becoming tousled, and tried not to let that distress him. "You've lovely brown hair," Moira said reflectively. "Not black after all. I never knew. That odd stuff you put in makes it appear darker, but there are little lights there, really, coloured like honey."

His blush deepened. As with Cordelia, it made Wesley feel prickly when Moira said kind things about his appearance. He wasn't vain, really--he'd never thought much about his looks one way or another, nor expected women to find him particulary attractive. He merely had been taught to dress and comport himself in a certain way, and he liked very much to be tidy. The touch of his beloved's fingertips against his scalp, however, made him tingle with pleasure.

"There's a lovely wave to it as well," Moira continued. "Were you an adorable child, Wesley?"

"Not noticeably," he answered. "I can't actually say that I suffered from a surfeit of adoration. Rather the contrary, really."

"But I expect that your nanny adored you." She was teasing him, he knew, a small feline smile on her beautiful mouth.

"How--how did you know?" he stammered, surprised by a wash of feeling he'd thought stifled many years before. Quite awful to think of, really, that the only person who honestly cared for one had received a wage to do so, and would have gone away had payment not been made.

"I never meant to make you sad, love," Moira told him. "Only, you've rather the look of someone who was loved and adored at one time, and has missed it since then." Moira gave him another of her tender kisses to take the sting out of her words. "I think I've always been drawn to that look," she said, then lay a bit in silence.

"When Rupert--" she said at last, quietly, a peculiar expression on her face that, try as he might, Wesley could not decipher. He waited for her to continue.

"When Rupert and I first met, he had much that same look--a great boy of fourteen, and he'd cry in the night, trying to hide it from me, of course. He missed his dad dreadfully, and his sisters too."

"Were you--er--at school together?" Coeducational schools were all right for Americans, Wesley supposed. But, despite himself, the thought of them for British people of their class alarmed him. He'd assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that Rupert attended exactly the same sort of school he himself had attended, hundreds of boys squeezed in together in a series of chilly medieval buildings, masters like dusty ravens in their black academic gowns--and that Moira had been taught at the girl's equivalent of the same, serving, perhaps, as Head Girl of her Hall, and captaining the field hockey team.

"Why are you smiling?" Moira asked him.

"I'd a sudden picture of you in your school uniform, a little girl with bruised knees, causing terror to the other little girls with your field hockey stick."

An even odder expression came into Moira's face. Her look hardened, though not against him. "I was never at school, love," she said.

Wesley gazed up at her, confused. "You'd a governess? You were taught at home, then, as a little girl?"

"Neither was I ever a little girl. Not ever. I began as an infant, and then I became a LeFaye."

Wesley sensed the beginning of something painful, and took her hand, holding it between the two of his own. "You needn't tell me, my dear."

"Let's lie quiet here, for a little. Perhaps I can tell you later, under cover of dark."

"Only if you wish." Wesley took her into his arms, until Moira lay with her head on his shoulder, her arm round his waist, turning him to her until their bodies fitted together more perfectly than he'd ever known two bodies could fit. Only this mattered, not the past, and not the future.

Once more, he was entirely content.

"Are you ever gonna be okay with this?" Buffy asked her mom.

Joyce still had that spooked-mare look, though her hands finally came down from her mouth. She didn't even seem to have heard the question, because she asked another one entirely, or tried to. "His--? How--?"

Buffy stared at her, not getting it.

Her mom tried again, snapping out the words one at a time. "On his back--how did that happen?"

That wasn't the question Buffy had expected, and she didn't know how to answer. But of course her mom had noticed--the whole scar-and-bruise display was pretty vivid after all. She'd forgotten, somehow, her mom's big thing--or her second big thing. The first big thing being how protective Joyce was of her, her only child. The second big thing was Joyce's niceness: she hated to think of anyone being hurt. That was how, really, the Hansel-and-Gretel demon got her--not because Joyce was a book-burning fruitcake, but because she was so kind. The thought of bad things happening to little kids caught her hook, line and sinker.

She'd even spoken sweet words over Patches the Zombie Cat.

"Angel," Giles answered for himself, then his eyes got that look. That bad look Buffy'd been ignoring for the past year. She saw it plainly now. "It was Angel, wasn't it? Or Angelus--that's what he calls himself, but they're the same, aren't they, only the one broods, and the other's cruel?"

"Oh, lots of words now," Buffy said, trying to make a joke of it.

"The demon's always there, you see, with the soul laid thinly atop it--only the demon can reach through, can't it? It can even tempt my sweet Buffy to do things that she oughtn't."

"Mom, if you're not too busy, I could use some help here. And Giles, you're gonna have to work a little too."

"Don't change the subject," Joyce told her.

"What subject? What are you asking? How I could know what Angel did to Giles and still take him back as my boyfriend? I didn't know. I didn't ask Giles what had happened. I was stupid. Crazy. Bad. I don't know."

"No," Giles said. "None of those things. You are my wonderful Buffy. It would not be possible for me to love you more."

"Angel did that to him?" Joyce asked.

"Let it go, mom."

"I can't, Buffy. I find you here in bed with Mr. Giles, acting as if...as if, I don't know. I can't put it into words. It's disturbing."

"Let's try to get you up off the floor, okay?" Buffy told Giles, not wanting to deal with her mother.

"I'm quite able to get up on my own," he answered. "I did it before."

"Yeah, and you fell on your butt. Hence, the floor-sitting. Let me help. Really."

Giles tried to give her a glare, but it lacked wattage. He proved her halfway wrong, though, by hauling himself up against the edge of the mattress. "There? You see?"

Buffy caught him before he could fall down again. "Yeah, Giles, and I'm sure my mom appreciated the free show." She sounded kind of mean, even to herself, and she knew Joyce wouldn't fail to notice.

"Buffy," her mother cautioned, in that I'm-so-disappointed-in-you mom-voice.

"The free--?" Giles began, a little slow on the uptake. "Oh, dear Lord!"

"Now you say that," Buffy answered, her voice slightly more under control, though her throat felt tight and she wanted to cry, the way it seemed like she'd been doing nearly nonstop for weeks. Why did her mom have to say this stuff? There'd been so much badness, and she'd dealt, and moved on--so why did Joyce have to drag it up all over again? Why, since she'd finally figured things out, couldn't she just be allowed to go with it?

She needed to focus. Carefully, tenderly as she could, she helped Giles ease back against the pillows. "Lie still, sweetie," she told him, "Rest a little. Moira's coming soon to give you your shot, and we'll get her to drive us to your place, okay?"

"Whatever you think is best," he answered.

"You hurting bad?"

"No, no, not at all. I'm fine." Giles smiled up at her as well as he could, and Buffy touched his damp forehead, noticing the gray tinge that had come in under his skin again.

"Are you lying to me?"

"I wouldn't," he told her. "I'm so sorry to have shamed you, Buffy. Have I some clothes anywhere?"

"I'll bring them in a minute." Buffy glanced at her mom. "I guess we should have gone to your place last night, after all."

"You've lost the handcuffs," Giles said. "I'm so glad. I never liked them."

Buffy almost laughed. Giles, Mark 2, certainly was the master of the incriminating remark.

"Let's not talk too much about those, huh?" Buffy wanted to make some glib comment about hiding the whips and chains under the bed, but decided that Joyce was mad enough--she didn't really want to completely trip her trigger. She forced herself to remain glib-free.

"They hated me, both of them," Giles said suddenly. "Only I didn't know. I thought Angel was my friend, you see."

"Giles, please," she said. "You're not helping."

"Only a little over a week ago," Joyce told her, "You let Angel nearly kill you, because he was the most important man in the entire world--and now you say you're in love with Mr. Giles? Buffy, what's going on in your head? What are you thinking? This is just...just too much. It's like that awful man and his stepdaughter."

Once upon a time, her mom had been a huge fan of Woody Allen movies. Now she wouldn't even say the guy's name.

"Okay, mom, for starters, it's nothing like that. Giles isn't my dad, or my stepdad, or anything. You guys...did what you did, and it was embarrassing for you, or nice, or whatever. Anyway, you were under the influence. You didn't mean it, any more than you meant to burn Will and me at the stake, right? Giles is just a guy who happens to be older. And I--" Buffy felt her shoulders slump. She really didn't want to deal any more. The good words just weren't coming to her.

"You've made an awful lot of mistakes," Joyce said.

"Like I'm the only one? What about you and dad?"

"Yes, that was a mistake, but we're trying to make it better. Maybe our mistake was that we didn't try sooner."

"Dad's gonna hurt you," Buffy said in a flat voice. "You'll just get it together, and away he'll slime. You know this, right?"

Joyce gave her stubborn look. Buffy knew that one well: she had her own version.

"If you're getting back together for me, because you think that'll make me a good kid again--please, spare yourself the grief. I love dad, sure, but you can't rely on him. He'll be irresponsible, and he'll turn on that ol' Hank Summers charm to weasel out of it. You'll nag and yell and start getting those headaches, and then you'll be cranky all the time." Buffy looked up, watching Joyce's face.

Her mom had beautiful skin, and usually you didn't see a wrinkle there--not that Joyce was really old enough to be into the seriously wrinkly zone. When she was really stressed or sad, though, the little lines showed.

Buffy had never seen as many lines as she saw that morning.

"You aren't gonna be okay, are you?" Buffy said to her mother, turning completely away, so that those lines and that look were out of her sight. Giles, helpful as ever, had slipped right off into dreamland. She took his good hand, feeling the slight pressure of his fingers against her own, as if a time never came when he wasn't at least partly aware of her.

"I don't always do stuff for the reasons you think," Buffy said. She could still feel her mother's presence behind her in the doorway, the pressure of Joyce's sad gaze on the back of her head.

"Then why do you do them, Buffy? Because I'm damned if I understand. I feel as if you're sliding further and further away from me, and nothing I can do or say will ever bring you back home."

They glared at each other, two stubborn Summers women, and into the cold silence came Moira's voice. "So sorry, am I interrupting?"

"No," Buffy said, aware that her teeth were clenched together, which make her voice sound funny. How come she could handle all this with her dad, but with Joyce she just fell apart?

Because her mom cared, and she cared about her mom, and all Joyce's doubts were justified, reasonable, understandable--okay, they were also wrong, but her mom had no way of knowing that, any more than Buffy had a way to explain. She felt horrible. Just horrible. A sick feeling crept into the pit of her stomach, but that stubbornness wouldn't go away.

"No," she told Moira. "Giles and I were just about to get ready to leave."