Transitions - Ch. 27

Buffy had wigged when Aunt Rose said the word "surgery," but it this case it turned out to be more of a noun than a verb. Doctor's offices weren't called doctor's offices in England, they were called surgeries, so it was all okay. Rose just wanted to have a look at Giles's head and his hand, maybe take his temperature, make sure he was all right, and so they drove to a nice modern building on the edge of town, horseshoe-shaped, with a little park-like garden out front.

Flora snapped on a very cool pair of shades, and said she was going to sit on the bench and update her stud book. Buffy hoped that had something to do with her horses. She didn't even like to ask.

After a brief argument with Flora over whether is was or was not a half-closing day--whatever that was--Violet said she was taking the car for a visit to the Shops, which Buffy at first assumed was the name of some friends of hers but, Giles told her later, just meant she was going to buy groceries.

Rose led them through the front door, smiled at the pretty Indian woman who was the receptionist, and walked briskly down a short hall, past her office and into one of the exam rooms, where Buffy got to witness Giles and his aunt being stubborn with each other. Giles started being obnoxiously stuffy, which in this case meant he was tired, didn't feel well, and wanted to be left alone. Rose and Buffy tag-team nagged him, until he sat, glaring, on the end of the examination table.

Rose made him do the rapid nose-touching thing, and asked him how many fingers, and told him to follow the moving light with his eyes, after which she told him, "That was abysmal, Rupert."

"I'm tired," Giles answered, sounding it, "And I rather wish you'd leave me alone." Buffy had known she'd called that one right.

"Take off your shirt," Aunt Rose said sternly. She was one of those doctors. Her word was law.

Reluctantly, Giles obeyed. Afterwards, he removed his glasses and put a hand over his eyes, and Buffy knew that was so he would not have to see his aunt's face as she caught sight of his back.

Rose's green eyes narrowed, and her expression did something complicated, but she didn't say anything, only warmed her stethoscope against one palm and began to listen to her nephew's heart and lungs--though her hand did rest very tenderly against Giles's shoulder.

"Clear as bells," she said quietly, with a little catch in her voice. "Lie back, would you, Rupert?"

"Gladly," he said.

Buffy moved up to the head of the table, feeling, suddenly, as if she was intruding.

Rose moved her small but obviously strong hands over Giles's ribs. The bruises had mostly faded to pinks and yellows and greens, except for the one dark band where Buffy had held him so tight to keep him from slipping away. That band was still dark, and Giles gasped when his aunt touched it. "How many cracked ribs under that, Rupert?" she asked.

"You tell me," he answered, still breathless.

Rose pressed again, with her fingertips. "Three to the right side, only two to the left. Someone squeezed you very tightly. Was that you, Buffy?"

She felt guilty. "He was slipping away. I...uh...had to hold him."

"It's all right, my love," Giles told her kindly, "Aunt Rose understands."

"It's very difficult, isn't it, my dear?" Rose said in a sad, quiet voice. "To hurt someone you love so badly, in order to keep him here?--and so worth all the pain when one succeeds."

Buffy sensed a lot of what Giles would call subtext. Aunt Rose wore a wedding ring on her left hand, but she lived with her sisters. She suspected that Rose, the doctor, had tried to do just that, but hadn't succeeded. There were other things that would take the man you loved away from you than vampires, or bad magic.

"Let's have a look at that hand, shall we?" Aunt Rose said briskly, shaking off her mood, and begin to cut through bandages. Buffy wanted to look away--Giles would never let her see before--but she didn't. She wished she had. She had to pull up a little rolling stool and sit down, because it hit her just like getting kicked in the pit of the stomach.

"Sweetie," she breathed.

"Buffy, look away," Giles commanded, but when she did, she could see Aunt Rose getting a shot ready.

"Ooh. Needle. Ick," Buffy muttered.

"But you are the Slayer," Aunt Rose said, sounding perplexed. "I hardly expected you to be squeamish about such a small thing as a syringe. There's a bit of redness, and this is only a dose of antibiotics."

"Stakes good, needles bad." Buffy peeked to see if the shot was all done at exactly the wrong time--just as Rose slid the point into the heel of Giles's hand. Buffy let out an, "Eep!" at about the same pitch as bat radar. When she dared to look again, Rose had the hand all splinted and bandaged.

She felt like the world biggest wimp. Like she'd achieved a pre-Helena-staking Wesley level of wussiness.

"I'm sorry," Buffy said, mad at herself, meaning the words more than she ever had in her life. Now Rose would tell the other aunts, and they'd all hate her--if Rose didn't already hate her after seeing Giles's back and hearing the story she'd told during tea that afternoon. They'd hate her, and they'd think she was bad for him. That she let him be hurt, or hurt him herself.

And the sad thing was, Buffy knew, they'd be right about that.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Giles," she mumbled, unable to do anything but stare really hard at the floor so that she wouldn't start crying for like the nine hundredth time since she got to England.

Giles sat up on the table. He caught her arm with his good hand, and brought her around to face him. "Buffy?" he said.

She couldn't face him. She'd been bad, for such a long time, and she couldn't face him.

"My dearest," he said tenderly. "You are brave, in so many ways, do you imagine you must be brave in everything? I know you don't care for things of a medical nature. You ought to have gone shopping with Aunt Violet--knowing your distaste for this as I do, I can only find it commendable that you chose to stay with me."

"I wimped," she mumbled, and leaned against his bare, slightly-too-warm chest. "I didn't mean to." Which wasn't even really what she meant she was sorry for. She couldn't put it into words just then: the way she'd ignored him for so many years, the way he'd let her get away with things that went against his better judgement, and then ended up bearing the consequences himself--the results of her bad judgement that meant he'd ended up being literally scarred for life.

"I love you," Giles whispered in her ear, then, "I didn't like to look either." He let go of her arm and raised his good hand to her cheek in one of his warm, tender touches. Buffy knew he forgave her everything. He had all his memory back now, and he didn't hold one single thing against her.

She couldn't hold back a little choked sob, and Giles brought his lips to her forehead, telling her, "Ssh, it's all right, my love."

Aunt Rose threw away the empty bandage wrappers and tidied up a little, shooting them looks all the time--but to Buffy's surprise they weren't mean looks. When she was finished, and Giles had gotten dressed again, she took his good hand in one of hers, and Buffy's hand in the other, and led them from the cool, windowless office out into the sun, just as Violet drove up in the Range Rover.

"He'll live," Rose told them, "Though if he were anyone less beastly stubborn than our Rupert, I'd order at least another full week of rest and quiet--much good that would do me."

"I'm not a bit stubborn," Giles answered, looking affronted. That was Buffy's Giles-word for the day.

As if by consensus--another Giles word--they had Violet keep driving, which made the trip out to the farm much more soothing than the trip from the train station. Violet was a careful driver, but not annoyingly so.

While they were still in town, Buffy kept seeing a big church in the distance, which Giles roused from his tiredness to tell her was Salisbury Cathedral. It was over 700 years old, and had the tallest steeple in Britain--only he called it a spire. He told her some more stuff about his hometown--that it was one of the few cities in England that hadn't been started by the Romans, and that it used to be called New Sarum, because there was an Old Sarum about a mile away where the long-time-ago people used to live, and that the story in the guidebooks about why they'd moved from Old to New wasn't right--that it actually had something to do with something called leylines, which were like magic power cables, and shot out into the town from Stonehenge, about eight miles away. The people had to move because of some sort of Hellmouthy-type activity, and the Gileses had been involved in the moving, in a way Buffy didn't exactly understand.

Giles said he could feel the leylines humming, with a noise like a radio left on in a room too far away to hear clearly. Sometimes he could kind of hear words, too, but they were in a language he didn't understand. Aunt Violet said she could see colors, or things out of the corners of her eyes--sometimes things from way back in the past. She put a lot of those things into her paintings. Aunt Flora told them that when she stood right over certain leylines she could hear peoples' thoughts much clearer than usual.

Interested, Buffy asked her how she stood that--didn't it drive her crazy?

Aunt Flora gave her a surprised look, and said, "Because I'm a Giles, my dear." Then explained that it was usually just like humming, like Giles's far-off radio, and that she didn't really hear unless she listened hard.

Buffy told her about the no-mouth demons she'd run into in Sunnydale, and how hearing people think had almost driven her nuts--but how, except for a couple random comments--she repeated the one about her wearing cats strapped to her feet if the fashion magazines told her to, which made the aunts laugh and Giles blush--she hadn't been able to hear Giles at all.

"Well, you wouldn't have done," Flora told her, but didn't explain.

Aunt Rose, it turned out, had become a doctor because she could feel when people were hurt, or sick.

They'd long since left town behind, and moved out into the low, rolling hills of the countryside. The sky looked dark out there, and more-than-usually close to the ground, and the wind seemed to blow all the time--at least, something made the long dark grass on the hills ripple all the time, so that it looked exactly like a dark-green ocean, full of tides and currents. Something about it scared Buffy a little, even though she couldn't actually see, or hear, or feel things the way Giles and his aunts could. It just felt old--and like it was waiting for something to happen. Like something was watching them.

Buffy shivered, and Giles pulled her closer.

"It's all right," he said. "One becomes accustomed."

They all started talking about some dead writer guy named Thomas Hardy, who wrote depressing books about bad things happening to people who lived around there. The aunts sounded enthusiastic, Giles tired but interested. Nothing they said made Buffy revise her opinion about literature.

Give her a juicy romance any day. She had enough badness in her life, what with being Miss Sunnydale, and all. She liked stories that worked out to be happy in the end.

They reached the farm a little bit before sunset, and Buffy couldn't stop an "Ooh!" from coming from her mouth. The farmhouse looked exactly like something from a fairytale. It had white walls, with dark wood beams across them--and it had a straw roof. A straw roof! She couldn't believe it.

"It keeps the house quite warm," Giles told her. "Good insulating properties."

Buffy felt completely charmed, and half-afraid to go inside. What if it was all tacky and modern? She wanted so much for it to be like the Seven Dwarves house from Snow White, or Beauty's house from Beauty and the Beast. She wanted the light to come in all wiggly through the windows with all their tiny, diamond-shaped panes, and for the kitchen to have stone floors and copper pots handing from the ceiling-beams, and for the fireplaces to be huge.

Giles took her hand, smiling down on her even in his tiredness. "I don't think you'll be too disappointed, my love," he said.

Buffy wasn't. The house was perfect, and it felt perfect around her, all warm and homey. She wanted to be like a little kid, running from room to room, poking into all the nooks and crannies, looking at all the interesting things--and she probably would have done it, if Giles hadn't look like he'd hit the end of his rope. Time for exploring later.

"It's so...perfect," she told the aunts. "It's beautiful."

They all laughed, as if they didn't think of it as beautiful as all, just as home. Aunt Violet took Buffy's hand and led the two of them upstairs, to the most perfect room of all, tucked under the eaves, with a huge four-poster bed with one of those lid-things on top--Giles said that was actually called a tester--and curtains hanging down. They had two windowseats--one under each of the big, many-paned windows, and a bunch of bookshelves filled with old books, and a fireplace all of their own.

Buffy squeezed Giles's hand so tight he made a little sound of protest, and all she could come up with to say was, "Oh! Oh!"

"Glad you approve." Aunt Violet smiled. "Through here is the bathroom, and across the hall the w.c. I'll have the girls bring up your bags, and start a fire."

"We can--" Giles began.

"Rupert," Violet said, accepting no arguments. "You've had a long journey. Have a lovely bath, and get some rest. We'll call you when it's time for supper." She left them alone.

Giles sat on the edge of the bed and smiled at Buffy, the warm, tired smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He took off his glasses and set them on the bedside table."

"Oh, sweetie," Buffy said. She could feel her eyes shining as she swung back and forth between extreme happiness and tears.

"You like it, do you?" he teased gently.

Buffy came close to him, standing between his knees, wrapping her arms around him, so that his head rested between her breasts. She stroked his soft hair and the back of his neck, down to his shoulders, feeling him just sort of melt against her. "You know what I like?"

"What's that?" he mumbled, his voice vibrating her skin through the thin fabric of her dress.

"I like the house--very, very, very much. But I kind of like you better. Nope, I guess 'like' isn't the right word. Now, what's the one I'm looking for?"

"Adore? Worship?" Giles's hand slipped beneath her skirt, and began to caress her bottom, up and down the back of her thigh, and then on the inside, until she shivered with pleasure.

"Hey, don't get a big head. I think 'love' will do."

"Yes," Giles told her, "I think 'love' will do very nicely." He pulled back from her a little, and brought her face down to his, exploring her mouth in one of those deep, warm kisses that he did so well.

"Damn!" Buffy pulled back. "The girls--"

"I know. They're bound to arrive at any moment. Did I mention that the bathroom on this floor has a perfectly enormous bath?"

"No," Buffy answered, "You didn't happen to mention that."

"Well, it does." Giles grinned at her, still looking tired--but okay. She still wanted him to rest, and for her to look after him, but when he gave her that look Buffy wasn't worried any more.

"Room for two?"

He rose, looking down on her. "I believe we ought to experiment."

The tub was claw-footed, and big enough to serve the tiny aunts as a lap-pool. As Giles slowly got undressed, Buffy dropped in the plug and started the hot water, pouring in a generous stream of a bath-oil that was fragrant but not flowery, Her own clothes came off fast, dress over head, bra off--her nylons were history. Back home she hardly ever wore them, and had almost forgotten how easily they ran. She threw them in the trash.

"So beautiful," Giles murmured.

Buffy didn't know what to say. His eyes had caught hers, that amazing, changeable green. Not even the color of the ocean, this time--more like new leaves. "Rupert--" she said, and stopped. She couldn't find words. Not even if she'd had a vocabulary like his would she have been able to find words. To feel so much love for someone, and have that person gaze back at you with exactly what you felt reflected in his eyes--no demon, no darkness, no hungry, selfish need. Just love.

Without looking, she stepped into the water, and Giles followed. They slipped down below the surface, fitting themselves perfectly to one another, his back against the end of the tub, hers against his chest, the warmth surrounding them. He wet the soft bath-sponge that sat on the edge of the soapdish, soaped it up and ran it slowly, caressingly, down her throat, over her breasts, taking his time, so that the pleasure sang through her body. The sponge traveled over stomach, her thighs, lightly between her legs.

In the next room, she could hear the sound of someone working, probably one of "the girls" building the fire. Giles continued to caress her, with those light, enticing touches until her breath came hard and fast and she could hardly stand it. Footsteps receded down the stairs, and he abandoned the sponge, touching her with his hand instead. His warm, damp, callused fingers teased her nipples into almost painful hardness, then traced a path, once more down her stomach, over her mound, in between her legs, rubbing her with a perfect, gentle, pressure that made her gasp and arch against him as he brought her to the edge and over, the water lapping, rhythmically, around her. She pressed hard against his hand as the tremors slowly subsided, as she sank back into the now-still warmth.

"What about you?" she asked softly.

"Mmn...sleepy," Giles responded, sounding exactly that. "It's lovely, just to touch you."

"Okay." She snuggled back against him, until she, too, was almost asleep--but after a while the water started getting a little chilly. Trying not to disturb him, she slipped over the side, found a big towel and dried herself off. Giles, looking peaceful, was out like a light.

Gently, Buffy touched his shoulder. "Sweetie..."

"Hmn?"

"Time to get out now. Come to bed with me."

"Mmn," he answered, but he did get out, not even really waking. Buffy dried him off and walked him back into their room, settling him beneath the covers. By instinct, he reached out for her, gathering her into his arms. Enclosed in that circle, she too fell asleep, lulled by the comfort of their closeness, and the warm, constant flicker of the fire.