Tribulations - Chapter 40

All around him lay fire and darkness, strange, shouting voices and the tang of blood in the air. In his heart Wesley knew he was dreaming, and yet everything felt so intensely real that he could not force his brain to truly recognize the fact. He felt afraid: desperately, desperately afraid, but the root of his fear lay not in the might of the enemy before him, but in a deeper and more terrifying place: it lay in his self-doubt, his utter conviction that he must succeed and yet, being who he was, could not ever hope to do so.

Everything appeared as through a treble mirror: past, present and future appearing as one moment, what would be quite as inescapable as what had been. The vampires would come upon him, wave upon wave of vampires, and untried children would rise to the occasion, their souls flooding with courage. They would lift their weapons, raise their battle-cry and, if only for this brief time, drink deep the bittersweet nectar of heroism.

He would not. Crippled by his own self-loathing and self-doubt, when the enemy struck, he would crumple. No matter how he longed to divert the stream of what-would-be, those waters would rush over him and he would drown in their depths.

His father's voice echoed in his mind, and his uncle's. Useless, bloody useless, he'd always be to them, his earliest memories of the two men never contained anything but the contempt in their faces and in the depths of their eyes. Shame clamped around his insides, until he felt that he could not breathe, would not ever breathe again. Shame brought a soundless rush of tears, and their very coldness disturbed his already troubled sleep.

Something was not right here. Something was, in fact, terribly wrong.

Wesley woke with a start, and the reality of his situation struck him once more with soul-destroying force.

That was a laugh, really: only pure joy could destroy his soul now, and where would he ever find that again?

He rubbed his cold face with his colder hands and looked up to see a small woman with a neat cap of salt-and-pepper hair moving around Moira's bed. With silent deftness she checked instruments, adjusting the flow of the drips and the oxygen by the dim light of the lamp. Wesley's sudden movement appeared to startle her, for the sureness of her movements faltered, and she darted him a briefly apprehensive look.

He made a show of yawning and stretching, though of course, not needing to breathe, he'd really no need to yawn, or stretch either, despite the awkwardness of his sleeping position, curled up in the bedside chair.

"Oh, hello," the nurse said, in a sweet, soft voice. Had she possessed a West Country accent, she'd have sounded very much like his childhood nanny. "Good heavens! Do you know that you were sleeping so soundly, I hardly thought you were breathing?"

"I'm quite a deep sleeper," Wesley answered in an undertone, not wanting to wake Moira, or to alarm this small, efficient woman. He hoped, dully, that nothing in his voice or manner would strike her as uncanny--not so much because he feared what she might say or do, but because he wished, desperately, just to be able to pass, if only for a little while, for human. He rose, smoothing down the creases in his trousers, yawning again in a way he hoped made him appear nothing more than the weary, worried loved one of a gravely injured patient, a type the nurse must surely have seen many, many times before.

"She's doing much better now, you know," the small woman assured him kindly. "If you want to step out, even go home for some sleep, I'm sure there wouldn't be any change for the worse."

"Thank you," Wesley said softly, gazing down at Moira's face. How beautiful she was, even battered and bruised: the alabaster perfection of her skin, the proud bones that would never, as long as she lived, show age. It struck him like a physical blow how much he'd wanted for the two of them to grow old together, to live together in comfort and mutual solicitude, leaning upon one another, knowing each and every one of the other's little ways, accepting those ways with tenderness and joy.

What a gift they'd been given, to find in one another a partner in whom familiarity would not breed contempt, to be able to love and care for the other, body and soul, without restraint, with nothing hidden or held back.

What a gift to have torn away from them. Wesley felt his eyes well, and pressed his fingertips hard into his lids to stop the tears. What use were tears, after all, now that his life had become an eternal burden, and his dearly beloved Moira would never grow old at all?

When he was able to control himself, Wesley saw that Moira's own eyes were open, and watching him. With a final small twist to one of her mysterious dials, the nurse left the two of them alone.

"Still grieving, love?" Moira asked him in the hoarse, torn remnants of her once rich and lovely voice.

"Is it so obvious?" Wesley attempted to smile at her, but his face would not seem to hold the expression.

"Rather," Moira told him drily. "But just now I've a mission for you." She reached for his hand, her gaze, holding his, suddenly fierce and intense. Oddly, the expression cheered him: his Moira, whatever had been done to her, would not go gentle into that good night. If she was not yet ready to wave the white flag of surrender, well, then, he must not either.

"Yes, my love?" Wesley said softly, wondering as he did so what she might possibly wish to ask of him.

"I..." Moira's voice drifted off, her look becoming faraway. Wesley expected that this signaled a drift, once more, into sleep, but instead she tightened her grip on his hand, a new firmness and precision coming into her voice. "I've had the oddest dream, Wesley. There's something very peculiar afoot here. A disturbance, a stirring...it's as if there's something alive at the back of my skull, and I just can't let it be."

"Peculiar?" Wesley asked, thinking the disturbance likely no more than some sort of electrical storm within the jangled synapses of her injured brain.

"Don't give me that look, Wesley." Moira shifted herself ever-so-slightly in the bed. "It's not madness, or imagination."

"My love, " he began, "Don't you think it likely that..."

"Wesley," she interrupted, smiling, but with some small measure of annoyance, "For how many years have I badgered you about honing your instincts? How can you ever expect to reach your peak as a Watcher if you ignore the worlds--natural and supernatural--around you?"

She sounded so much like the old Moira, his Handler and bane of his existence, that for a moment Wesley was torn between laughter and fresh tears. Then the absurdity of it all struck him, and laughter won out.

Moira watched him with amused impatience, and when he'd exhausted his mirth, continued. "It's all very well for you to laugh at me, but it's of vital importance that you leave now. Indeed, you most likely ought to have left a quarter of an hour past."

"Leave?" Wesley asked faintly.

"For the Hellmouth. At once." A pair of shallow furrows appeared between Moira's brows. "The disturbance is there, I'm certain of it. I rather wonder you don't feel the currents yourself."

When Wesley held himself quite still, not thinking, his own emotions at bay, the sensation did in fact come to him, just as Moira had described it: a prickling at the base of his skull, accompanied by a sense of dire urgency.

"There," Moira said approvingly. "Now you know."

Wesley found himself grinning at her, as he hadn't grinned for days. To actually have a mission, a sense of purpose--how long since he'd experienced those things? He bent to kiss Moira's lips tenderly, feeling her own slight smile beneath his own.

"Go," she said, when he straightened again, "And be careful, love."

"I will," Wesley promised. It occurred to him briefly that, if the Hellmouth called him, it might have called other, more unwholesome things as well. That hardly mattered now: Moira had sent him on a mission, and he was determined to complete his errantry.

He ought to remind himself to leave that sort of heroism to Buffy. She, at least, seemed to accomplish these things with far greater aplomb.

Now, despite his intent, the force of the dark wine flowed through Giles with a fury he'd never in all his life experienced, burning his mouth, burning his throat, burning, even, into the depths of his soul. The power of it drove him to his knees, seeming to blast apart bone and sinew and knit the fibers of his body up again in entirely strange new ways. His head throbbed with a fierce, unbearable pounding until he was blind, deaf and numb. Dimly, from terribly far away, he heard a voice call out to him--Buffy's, he suspected, though the ringing in his ears prevented any real identification. Something small and hard impacted with his body, hard arms wrapped around his chest--it hurt terribly, and he was reminded forcibly of the events of the start of the summer: Buffy's unyielding grip and the terrible overloading of his brain. That time, all had been loss: words, abilities, memories all stripped away until he felt helpless, weary, weak.

This time, though, under the influence of the goddess's wine, the process quite reversed itself. The blindness was replaced by a hyper-awareness of the world around him, every small noise and sensation magnified far beyond anything the human body was meant to experience. For a moment he thought it would drive him mad, but then a second flood crashed into him, obscuring the realm of the senses.

Suddenly, Buffy was nowhere near him, and the Hellmouth, too, felt far away.

Suddenly, in every fibre of his being, he KNEW. Suddenly, the world of gods, of demons, of the unseen world lay open to him, absolute sense in every strand of its intricate pattern. That was the design he'd watched the goddess weave before him: call her Athena, Ceridwen or a hundred other names, he recognized her as she was. Others might mistake her for a goddess of of wisdom, but in truth Giles believed she had little to do with that rather more ephemeral quality. Her true calling was more easily defined: this being, whatever she might truly be, was a goddess of knowledge. Hard, cold-eyed, emotionless knowledge.

Whether she intended him good or evil, Giles could not have said. He'd done what he could to resist her, but now he could only crave what she offered as he'd rarely craved anything before. Were he to retain only a fraction of the lore she'd shown to him, he would exist for the rest of his life as a changed man.

Giles found himself thinking of his father, and what Henry Giles would have done with this, with all this. He found himself climbing to his feet, looking up into the goddess's fiery eyes. As he'd suspected, they stood alone together in a place far from the Hellmouth, with no sign of Buffy or Sebastian anywhere near.

"So," the Avatar said, in a soft, dark voice. "You see it is useless to struggle against me. Now it remains to be seen: will the fruit of my vine kill or keep you?"

"Not kill," Giles said, wondering where he found the courage in himself to speak to her. She'd done him a rare favour with her gift, he knew that now, but Giles could not yet make up his mind as to whether what she'd offered him was to his, and Buffy's benefit, or in aid of some yet-unknown cause.

The green eyes narrowed. "No," the goddess said, regarding him in a way that made Giles feel he'd much rather die than be the subject of her scrutiny one instant more. "Not kill. Not in this time. There is more in you, mortal man, than it seems. You have known the touch of other gods--and other demons, too."

There was no use in lying. "Yes," Giles said. "That's true."

"And where it may bring you, I cannot say. Only that you will return to that place in another time, and there taste loss, pain and hope in equal measure." Her hands, smooth and cool as marble, cupped his face, turning Giles's gaze up to her, and for the first time the goddess's face showed some trace of warmth and kindness. "There was one," she murmured, "Who invoked me. One who loved you, or would have done, in time." A ghost of a human face hung for only an instant over the goddess's inhuman features, and in it Giles thought he spied some of Jenny's face, or at least of her expression, her laughter, her bright mockery.

The goddess's finger touched his forehead, drawing a sigil that burned into his skin. "For her sake, then, I bless you, Rupert Giles," she said. When her touch left him, he fell as if his legs had been cut from beneath him, plummeting back into that greyness, that evil place, that mouth of Hell.

Giles struck the ground painfully, gritty dust rising in a cloud around him, and found by some agency he now held a half-conscious Willow in the circle of his arms. The space where they lay resembled that they'd left behind--a phantom image of his ruined library--but he knew that was not actually the case. He still could see no sign of Buffy anywhere.

"Giles?" Willow said, her head lolling back against his shoulder, her face deadly pale and eyes dazed. "What was it?"

"Willow," he answered, trying to sound reassuring as he helped her to sit, steadying her as she nearly fell back again. "You might better ask, 'Who was I?'"

"Oh," Willow answered in a small voice. Her eyes widened as something of memory must have returned to her. "Oh, Giles, I was... And I... Oh, God!" She glanced up, seeing the horned Avatar above her, watching with hot crimson eyes. "Oh, GOD!"

"Yes, quite," Giles replied. For what felt like the thousandth time that night, he climbed to his feet, feeling weary, feeling--for all his new knowledge, that he'd no idea what to say in order to end this and bring back his son.

The Avatar of Pan--for of course it was he; what else would appear to a scion of the Giles blood--had diminished slightly, and as Giles watched the creature's eyes darkened, his face became more human. "She has left me, as she will always leave me," he said, addressing Willow, even as he reached his hands out to her. After a moment's hesitation, she took them, her childlike fingers curling round his powerful digits. Giles wanted to warn her not to touch him, to run from him: she was too innocent, too unspoiled--but even as the words rose in him, he knew that was not the case, not any longer. For better or worse, Willow was LeFaye, as Moira was LeFaye: her blood carried a power that must be answered.

"But you, child of water and fire," the god said to her, "You remain."

Willow blushed scarlet, though her soft, pink lips parted and a look came into her eyes that Giles had never seen before and hoped, to the depths of his British soul, never to see again.

"I..." she said shyly. "That is...umn..."

"In another time," the Avatar told her, and bent to whisper something into Willow's ear. What it was, Giles never discovered, and in his heart he didn't think he wished to know. Willow's lips parted further; her eyes shone.

"Willow," Giles said to her, trying not to sound stern. "It's time for us to leave here. Buffy's waiting."

"Oh!" Willow replied, in a soft, childlike voice, as the god smiled down upon her. After a moment, his dark inhuman eyes rose to meet Giles's gaze in a way that seemed half-threatening, half-mocking.

"Our time will also be another time, mortal man," he said, "And then we shall have our own reckoning. For now--" His powerful shoulders rose in a shrug, and as they did, the fabric of reality ripped open, spilling them out once more into another, more familiar world.