Transitions - Ch. 19

They tried being sensible and having Sebastian paged. He didn't answer, even though they waited and waited, and by that time they'd have been more surprised if they had heard from him. As Giles said, though, you needed to start with the simple things before you moved onto the complicated ones--that's what he meant, anyway. Giles actually used way more words: even partially brain-fried his vocabulary appeared to be three times the size of Buffy's.

When the page didn't work, Giles called his son at home--where he left a message on the machine--then at work, where Giles talked first to a secretary-type person, then to some guy that he apparently knew. Buffy found the British payphones scary and complicated--you dialed your number, and then the phone made this loud, frantic beeping noise like a car alarm going off in your ear, until you fed it the right amount of change. Then, if you talked too long, it started beeping at you again. Maybe it was her sleep-deprived state, but the whole thing made Buffy nervous.

During the second conversation, Giles shut his eyes and put his hand to his forehead, with the expression on his face that he got when he was concentrating really, really hard. All his answers were one or two words, none of them in English, and afterwards he looked completely wiped out.

"Tompkins," he said, in a heartfelt, semi-exasperated way after he hung up the phone. "What a load of cloak-and-dagger rubbish."

"But what did he say about Sebastian?" Buffy stroked her hand up and down his sleeve, but for once Giles didn't even seem to notice her touch.

"It was all Greek." Giles still sounded irritated. "Bloody ancient Greek. What a pillock--if one's allowed to say that about a priest."

Suddenly, Buffy realized exactly what he'd just told her. "Greek! He talked Greek to you, and you understood!" A wave of cheerfulness washed through her. "Giles, sweetie, that's such a good!"

Giles didn't lose his slightly sour expression. "It's given me a hell of a headache."

From the look on his face, Buffy could tell he wasn't joking about that, but she couldn't overcome her state of cheered-upness. Someone had talked Greek to him, and he'd understood. She wondered if she could sneakily have Sebastian try him on Latin, too.

If Sebastian ever showed up, that was.

"He's on leave, not assigned to anything just now," Giles told her. "They haven't heard from him since yesterday."

"But wouldn't he be at his church?" Buffy asked. "He has a church, right?"

"He's not a vicar, Buffy."

Giles shouldered one of his bags, and picked up the other. He really needed to get some rolling luggage like normal people. Buffy had offered to carry for him, but Giles wouldn't hear of it, which had nearly led to another argument--though she'd let it go with a muttered, "Stubborn guy."

He'd heard and muttered in return, "I believe someone said she liked me stubborn." After which they'd glared at each other for a few seconds before Giles made the phone calls.

"I'm supposed to know what a vicar is? For your information, I'm American," Buffy said.

Giles grumbled something about being painfully aware of the fact, but his words weren't exactly clear, so Buffy let it go. They headed down one escalator, then another, until they were in a long tunnel with shiny white-tile walls.

"We don't have a big nationwide religion the way you people do," she continued. "And I wasn't really raised anything. Just sort of vaguely Protestant, I guess. So don't get snippy with me about church stuff--'cause it's not like you go, either. To church, I mean." She thought about that, and realized she didn't actually know whether he did or not. Another of the million things she'd never asked him. She have bet money that Willow could have told her.

"Was I?" Giles asked.

"Were you what?"

"Getting 'snippy?' I never intended to do so." He started to draw a deep breath, then stopped, letting the luggage drop as he rubbed his side, just over the spot where she'd bruised him with one of her death-grip holds. "I'm sorry, Buffy. I am infernally tired, and in a bloody mood."

Wow. she thought. Giles didn't admit stuff like that very often. He was making an effort for her, obviously--and she wasn't helping. She needed to make an effort too.

"All I meant was," Giles continued, "That my son doesn't have a church of his own. He's a special assistant to the Archbishop." He picked up his bags again.

"Which means what? Sebastian writes the head honcho's thank you letters?"

"That he's in the same line of work we are."

"Oh." Buffy watched as Giles paid for their subway tickets, pulling out a wad of British money, which had pictures of the queen looking way younger than Buffy had ever seen her, and pictures of some other people she didn't recognize, not even their names--except for Charles Dickens, whose likeness showed him with a truly heinous beard. She tried to let what Giles had told her sink in.

"You mean he's like an...exorcist?" she finally asked, as they waited for their train.

"For want of a better word." Giles shifted his bags uncomfortably.

"I could--" Buffy began, then stopped. It was a guy thing. He'd let his arms drop off before he'd let her carry his luggage in public. "But he's not working today, you said." Okay, now she could kind of understand why Giles might be wigging: that was the type of thing fate did to him, brought him so close to seeing his son, then pulling out the rug. She knew, suddenly, that he was thinking about Jenny, about going to meet Jenny with all that love in his heart, and finding her still nearly warm in his bed.

Buffy wished she could assure him that everything would be all right, that his son was fine, but she couldn't, so she kept quiet.

She moved closer, touching Giles's arm. He was worried and exhausted, but he kept his dignity, and she loved him for that, among many things. Cranky as they were, Buffy guessed that both of them knew better than to say anything more to each other right then, so they stood there waiting until the train finally came.

"We'll be able to ride this line all the way to Russell Square," Giles told her, as they got themselves situated, along with all the other jet-lagged, luggage-carrying people. "No need to change trains, happily."

"Oh. Good," Buffy answered, with no idea whether that really was good or not, or why she should care about someplace called Russell Square. She'd come to the end of her Slayer strength, and her ears still refused to pop. She yawned, covering her mouth, and rested her head on Giles's shoulder. He was sitting up properly--not stiff like Wesley, but as if some of the sloppy American habits he'd picked up in California had fallen away now that he was home.

He was a different person here--not just her Watcher, but whoever he'd been before he'd ever heard of her.

"What was it like?" she asked, in what her mom would have recognized as a sleepy, tell-me-a-story voice.

"Hmn?" Giles shifted to put his arm around her, so that Buffy's cheek rested, now, against his chest. She tried not to lie against him too heavily, careful of his still-healing bruises, but she loved being close to the slow, steady beat of his heart.

"What was it like for you, leaving home?"

Giles shrugged.

"Do you remember?" Maybe not a tactful question, but Buffy wanted to know. She wanted to understand him better, and his life before he'd come to her.

She could hardly remember what he'd been like that first year, only that he'd seemed almost unbearably stuffy, and she'd been mad at him nearly all the time--except that one memory came back to her so clearly it was almost like being there again. She remembered the way Giles had carried her, scooping her up as if she didn't weigh anything, that time Amy's Wicked Witch mom had made her so sick. She remembered how strong and comforting his arms had felt around her, and the concern on his face as he'd folded his jacket as a pillow for her head. She'd known he wouldn't let her die. She'd known it for sure, and she'd stopped being afraid.

"Yes, I remember," Giles said quietly. "It snowed the night before, so much so that there was talk of closing Heathrow. Quite the deepest snowfall I remembered. The sky was like a darkened mirror."

Buffy shut her eyes, picturing.

"I sat at the little table by my kitchen window that night," Giles told her, "And watched it fall into the yard until there were pointed white caps atop all the dustbins, and on the fenceposts as well."

"Mmn." Buffy snuggled closer. "What were you thinking?"

"That I was homesick, even before I'd gone away. That I was frightened. That I didn't want to die in a foreign country. That I didn't expect, ever, to see home again--and that I was really rather curious to see all those dreadful things that I'd read of in books."

"Did you think I'd let you die, the way I did Mr. Merrick?"

"Buffy," Giles said gently, reassuringly, "I never once thought that of you, and I would not allow the others to say it, either. Rather, I feared that I should not take good enough care, that I would, through some lack of knowledge or skill, eventually fail you.

"At half-past two that morning," he continued, "I went to bed, and dreamed of you."

He was quiet for a little while, so quiet that his stillness seemed to take all the other noise out of the air. With his heartbeat in her ear and his warmth against her body, Buffy nearly fell asleep again.

"For that past fortnight," Giles went on at last, "My dreams had been troubled--visions of what had been in my life, and what might be. I saw your death every night, and accused myself. I saw you become like Helena, as Helena had been. What you saw last week..." His voice trailed off again, as if he couldn't find the energy to talk about what had happened.

"It's okay," Buffy told him. "I know she wasn't always bad, and I know you took care of her when she was alive."

She watched Giles's profile as he stared out the window, the light flashing off his glasses, the lines looking deeper than usual around his eyes. "That night I dreamed I sat on a bench," he told her. "That I sat in bright sunlight, and the air smelled sweet around me, perfumed with odors so far from my experience I couldn't give them names.

"You walked toward me out of the sunlight, all haloed in that brilliance, which was so intense I could hardly bear to watch you. You'd eyes like sapphires and hair of bright gold, and your face--" Giles turned to her again, and smiled down at her, with that tender, kind, loving expression that Buffy liked best. "Your face was sweet, affectionate--" He squeezed her lightly. "Impudent. I knew that you had the power in you to make me laugh, and to make me weep--to make me, willingly, turn my back on all I left behind.

"'C'mon, Giles,' you said to me."

Buffy grinned: he did "her" voice remarkably well.

"'C'mon, Giles,' you said, with impatience, amusement and--I almost thought--love. You reached your hand out to me, and I took it in my own. Yours was small and soft, I remember, and your nails were varnished pink, like little shells. I remember being amazed, the first time I took your hand in real life, that it felt exactly that same way.

"'Buffy?' I said to you, with absolute wonder, and you answered, smiling, 'What are you doing out here all by yourself, Book-man? Giles, don't you know you're supposed to be inside? You're supposed to be with me.'"

"So that was true what you told me, when you proposed," Buffy said. "You always loved me?"

Giles glanced out the window again. They'd come up above ground, but all she could see were tracks, and brick walls with graffiti, and the teeny back yards of stuck-together houses with laundry hung on lines. Buffy guessed that this must be the suburbs, but it didn't look like any suburbs she'd ever seen. It was depressing

"It gets better, doesn't it?" she asked Giles. "It isn't all like this, is it?"

"Hmn? Oh, yes, it gets better. The people who live here haven't much money. London proper can be quite interesting, and much of the countryside is lovely."

"What about where you grew up?"

"Salisbury?" He got quiet again, for a long time. "The skies are often low and gray," he said, "And there is hill after hill of dark grass. When the wind blows, the grass ripples like the sea."

Giles said a lot more, but Buffy didn't hear it. With the rocking motion of the train, his warm, heavy arm around her and his quiet voice in her ears, she drifted back into sleep, and didn't wake up again until he spoke to her much more sharply, telling her to wake up now, that it was time to get off the train.

She'd hardly gotten it together when the doors slid open and Giles was urging her off. Still discombobulated, she took escalators and stairs, until she stood on a sidewalk--what Giles would call a pavement--blinking in sunlight that she hadn't expected to see.

"All right now?" Giles asked her. "Nearly awake?"

"Nearly." Buffy gave a huge yawn. "I'm glad you stayed conscious. Otherwise we'd have ridden to the end of the line. Where is the end of the line?"

"Of the Piccadilly? Cockfosters, I believe."

"Cockfosters?" The name struck her as funny, and she put a hand over her mouth to stifle an attack of the giggles.

"Come along with you, Buffy," Giles said, shaking his head. "You'd best become accustomed to the names. Half are bound to strike you as ridiculous. It's an old country. Things had different meanings once."

"Sorry," she giggled. "Don't mind me."

"Come along," he repeated. "I believe I'd best get you to bed, my love."

"Oh, yes please," Buffy answered, laughing harder.

Giles gave her one of his looks.

The house Giles told her belonged to Sebastian was tall in a rectangular way, and pretty in a way that involved lots of white scalloped bits, so that it resembled a wedding cake set on one end, with a shiny red door toward the bottom. There was no front yard, only an iron fence painted shiny black. Lots of cheerful flowers bloomed in the window boxes.

"Round the back, I think," Giles said, opening a low gate in the fence, and Buffy followed him along a narrow cobbled path into the tidiest little backyard she'd ever seen. Then Giles led her down four ultra-clean white steps to the immaculate kitchen door. Buffy wondered if Sebastian and his wife had some sort of obsessive/compulsive disorder, and what would happen to you if you kicked the door shut when you took out the garbage, and got any of that white paint smudgy. She was afraid to touch anything.

Giles knocked on the door and, when he didn't get any answer, tried the knob. When that didn't work either, he reached up on top of the doorframe, running his fingers along the part that stuck out from the wall. "There ought to be a key here," he explained.

"Is there?"

"No, but there was at one time."

Buffy pulled one of the pins out of her hair. "Can you do it one-handed?"

"Buffy, I can't break in to my son's house."

"Giles, I'm really, really tired, and I need to pee. So please?"

He tried knocking on the door again, then stood looking into the lighted room beyond the lace curtain. It looked pretty and cozy, like a kitchen in a magazine, everything perfectly coordinated, everything in place, no half-full cereal boxes left on the counter.

Giles muttered something that might have been, "Sod it," and stuck the pin into the lock. His one-handedness didn't seem to be an issue after all.

"Where?" Buffy asked the minute the door swung open.

Giles pointed. "Down the corridor, second door to the left." He let his luggage hit the kitchen floor. Buffy had abandoned hers in the yard. If anyone wanted to steal a suitcase full of American teen clothes, size two, they were more than welcome. She hurried down the hall, hearing Giles's footsteps move away, and his voice calling, "Seb? Sebastian? Celeste? Is anyone home?"

A big tiger-striped cat pushed open the bathroom door and stalked back and forth, rubbing his furry sides against her ankles. "Nice kitty," Buffy told him. "What's your name?"

She flushed, washed and dried her hands and scooped the cat up in her arms. He wasn't shy, that was for sure--he purred louder than most lawnmowers and pushed his furry face up under her chin, tickling her with his whiskers. "You're someone's spoiled baby, aren't you?" she said to him, adding some babytalk that would have been sure to make Giles grimace. When they had their own place together, she wanted a kitty, Buffy decided.

Still carrying the cat, she left the bathroom and retraced her steps down the hall. The sound of a TV came from somewhere, and she followed the sound all the way to the front of the house, on the principle that where there was TV, there were people, probably napped out on their couch instead of picking their dads up at the airport the way they were supposed to.

"Giles?" she called, but not loudly. Somehow she felt weird, in this ultra-quiet house, about talking too loud. "Rupert? Sweetie?" Suddenly she was creeped out, and she didn't know why. She felt cold, and that was weird too.

She got all the way to the open door of the room with the TV sounds and, for some reason couldn't take a step further. All she'd seen, all she'd faced joking and punning, and she couldn't step inside. The fat cat let out a yowl and twisted in her arms, stripping off some stripes of skin as he escaped.

From the door she could see the TV screen. A pretty, maybe Caribbean lady was in a crisp white shirt and colorful apron was doing something complicated with an extremely sharp knife to a large roasting chicken. A guy sat on the couch watching her--or at least facing the screen--the light flickering grayness and little flashes of color across his pale skin. His eyes were rolled all the way back in his head, so that all Buffy could see was the smooth egg-like whiteness.

"Buffy?" Giles called from behind her.

"In here," she answered, surprising herself with her calm, quiet voice. She could feel him move up behind her, then past, not even hesitating before he entered the room.

"My God," Giles said, in a shocked voice. "My God. Sebastian."

Giles knelt down, taking his son's hand, holding it tight in his own. "Sebastian, can you hear me?" He touched the younger man's shoulder, then his cheek. "Sebastian. Son."

"Is he okay?" Buffy's voice quivered; the shakes went clear through her. "He isn't... Oh, God, Giles..."

"Can you hear my voice, Sebastian?"

The younger man's head moved, following the sound. Giles lurched to his feet and stepped backward, stopping just short of tripping over the coffeetable.

"How can you dare to bring her here?" a voice asked, that Buffy didn't think was really Sebastian's. It sounded younger and higher, somehow, than what she expected--and not like a real voice at all, more like something recorded on a tape that had been played over and over again until it was stretched-out and hissy-sounding, and just about ready to break. "How can you dare bring her, and flaunt her to me?"

"Now, you wait a minute!" Buffy stormed into the room, doing--as she was well aware--an almost perfect impression of her mom. "What gives you the right to talk--?"

Giles whirled toward her. "Buffy, get out!" he yelled. "Buffy, get out of here now."

"But--"

The voice that wasn't Sebastian's sounded more like Ethan's now. "Tu invitato--" it began, talking Latin. "I invite you." Willow had taught her that one.

"Now!" Giles yelled, even louder. "Buffy, go!"

He'd done something to her, Buffy realized. Something to make her go away. Without even meaning to, Buffy turned and ran, until she found herself sitting on the clean marble steps in front of the shiny red door, panting and shaking, crying as hard as she could cry. She didn't feel like the Slayer. She felt lost, alone, and afraid--and even though she tried the door, Giles wouldn't let her back inside.

She cried until a pretty woman, the one she'd seen with the chicken for just a minute on TV, came up the stairs toward her.

"Buffy?" the pretty woman said--she must have been Celeste, Sebastian's wife. "Buffy, my poor dear girl, whatever can be wrong?"

Buffy snuffled and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, until the woman gave her a handkerchief.

"There's something bad in there," she managed to say, finally. "There's something bad inside with Giles."