Buffy crawled over the sill, let her coat drop to the floor, and slowly slid the window shut. The room's air clung to her lungs, sticky, making every breath an effort.

Why make the effort? Why not just--stop?

Because stopping would bring Willow and the others down on her head. Being understanding. They all tiptoed around her as if a touch could break her, as if she was as brittle as glass. But that didn't stop their nervous questioning, and it exhausted Buffy just to think of their careful, worried interrogations. They picked at her constantly, and each answer she gave seemed to steal a piece of whatever was left of her, making it that much more difficult to pretend she was fine. The only words Buffy had left were lies, because even the truth took too much effort. None of them knew--none of them could ever know--and so she parroted what they wanted to hear. Yes, I'm fine. No, of course everything's all right.

Do I look all right? Do I look like someone who feels fine?

I don't even remember what fine means.

Buffy leaned her forehead against the smooth coolness of the glass and looked out at the setting moon. Her body ached from the long patrol. Every single night, walking, running, fighting, slaying. Death, death, and more death. She didn't even try to get out of it now, and perhaps that's what gave Giles the worried look he always wore when she reported the night's activities each morning. Buffy stretched, pulling at the bruises and strains, because at least for a moment they were something to feel. But already her injuries were passing away, fading into nothing.

Like me.

Either the world's not real, or I'm not.

But that wasn't news. Everything around her was empty, hollow. Like the night outside, cut off from her by the windowpane. She felt like a mime trapped in a glass box, the sound and color dulled by a thick clear barrier she could feel but couldn't pass through. And she was slowly running out of air. She wanted to escape--or maybe it was even more distant than that: she wanted to want to escape. She wanted to believe this so-called existence would improve, if only someone could shatter her prison.

Buffy pressed her palm against the glass, gradually increasing the force. The window frame creaked and strained, and cracks shot through the glass. It hurt. Buffy looked at her hand and saw the blood well up from a long, shallow slice across her first three fingers. A triangle of broken glass fell out of the window and clinked on the floor. Its razor edges tapered to a fine point that gleamed despite the darkness. Buffy knelt and picked it up, smearing bloody fingerprints over the clear glass. She cradled its sharpness in both hands, watching as her blood leaked out and covered it.

She imagined fisting her hands around the glass, falling to the floor, bleeding out. Finding her own end, before she suffocated. Dead again. Third time's the charm.

They hadn't let her go before. Nothing had changed.

And dying left such a mess.

Besides, Buffy knew it was futile. Nothing would make her better, or worse. There was only this indifferent numbness that went on and on and on. She couldn't break out of it and no one seemed able to break in. The one person who'd come closest was Giles...maybe because he had accepted her death in the first place. He'd moved on...gone back to England...and that hurt. That hurt, wildly, irrationally. What did she expect, that he'd hang around in a foreign country once his reason for being there was gone? Just so that he could take care of her grave, watch over it, as he had when she was alive? Did she really need him to hurt that much?

But when she'd clawed her way into the world he hadn't been there. Giles. Gone. She'd felt scared, then. Lost. Just breathing and moving hurt, hurt so badly, because she remembered what it was to be free of doubt and pain. She ran from that hurt, escaped the fear, only to find herself trapped in not caring. Better to be empty, maybe, than to lose him...

The blood on her hands clotted, and the white lips of the cuts drew together. Buffy waited until the blood had stopped completely, and then stood up. Her knees felt loose and hot and her thighs stiffened. Through the cracked window, the black sky had lightened to navy blue.

When Giles first walked into her kitchen, after the basement had flooded, just for an instant--she'd felt something again. Warm and safe and comfortable, all the things she'd always associated with Giles. The glass cage wasn't ready to let her go, though. She'd spent too long playing it safe. She stumbled back into indifference and watched her life go by from a distance. A million miles away. As far from Giles when he was right next to her as she had been when he was in England, and this time it was her fault. She was the one who couldn't break that glass wall.

Buffy walked into the bathroom and dropped the glass shard into the garbage can. She pulled handfuls of toilet paper off the roll and let it drift down it to cover the bottom of the waste basket. Hopefully whoever emptied the garbage wouldn't look too closely, or at all. Buffy twisted the cold tap and pushed her hands into the sink, scrubbing her new skin until the draining water lost its pink tinge.

And again, when Giles handed her the cheque that had rescued her. She scraped at the slippery smooth thing between them, battered at it, and still couldn't show him what she really felt. Dawn, school, social services, slaying, still none of it could touch her, but Giles saved her every day just by being there. She needed him so desperately, but she tried not to show it. There was so much inside her that she couldn’t deal with any one thing; she was holding onto a dozen cracks in the dam, juggling a dozen knives.

If she said one thing, she would have to say it all...

She stared at her feet as they carried her back to her room. Her hands as she changed into pyjamas. This body carried her through her life, and yet it didn't seem like hers. Even when it hurt, it was so far away. The only thing keeping it alive was the need to stay strong for the others. And the only way she could stay strong was to pretend away this numbness. Pretend that someone had reached through her shell and touched her, connected her mind firmly to the world again, pretend that this time she didn't have to rescue herself. Pretend...

Buffy shoved under the covers and stared at the ceiling. Sleep wouldn't come. The room grew light. She could hear movement in Willow and Tara's room. Dawn's clock radio switched on, and a syrupy ballad by the hottest boyband of the moment breezed out. It stopped just as quickly--Dawn slapping the sleep button. But the music seemed to continue, echoing through the house. It wasn't Dawn's pop rock--it sounded like classical instruments, drums at first, and then a flute. Buffy didn't move, couldn't manage to wonder why there seemed to be an orchestra playing in the living room.

Maybe today she could do it, break out, free herself. She wouldn't let the day blur by like a montage of moments from a play she hadn't learned her lines for. Today she'd find a way to open up, to yell and scream and cry and finally live for real. She'd hug Dawn, and help Willow around the house, and exchange puns with Xander, and tell Giles--

Her alarm clock jangled to life. Buffy turned her head on the pillow, watching the thing dancing on the night table. Its clamor was an endless faraway buzz. For a long moment, she considered the ups and downs of smashing it into its component parts.

But in the end, what did it matter if the alarm clock just kept ringing for an eternity? Buffy looked back at the ceiling.

So much for pretending to care.

Giles checked the last lock on the door of the Magic Box before throwing his suit jacket over his shoulder and walking towards the waiting taxi. He felt wide awake, though he'd spent a long day cataloguing inventory and keeping Anya from using the Troll God's hammer on the customers who touched the salamander eyes and then decided they didn't really need them. It was still early, by a Watcher's standards--barely midnight, and vampires would be out hunting for hours yet.

He'd heard from one of Anya's demon friends that there was a human sacrifice set for that night in the Eternal Rest Cemetary. Normally, that meant research and helping Buffy to slay the creature. However, 'normally' had gotten off to a bad start from the moment he'd arrived off the plane from Heathrow.

He gave the cabbie his destination and sat back. Truly, after Buffy's death, he'd thought that he would never know 'normally' again. Returning to Bath had been the only way to escape what had been normal, and what had turned so obviously not. He'd thought nothing could be worse than Sunnydale without Buffy, holding only memories, but now he knew better: Sunnydale with Buffy, with a Buffy so painfully changed, was far worse. That was one reason he had chosen to check in at a hotel rather than seek out his old apartment, long since sold, or stay at the Summers house. To see Buffy at home made a mockery of the words. 'At home'. As though she ever could be, again.

Buffy belonged in Heaven, not in whatever hell dimension Willow had pulled her from...and not here, now. She still wasn't living; she was only continuing. It still rankled that Willow had tried such a dangerous puckish trick, and Giles frowned down at the fists he'd made at the thought.

The girl was so convinced she was a powerful witch that she couldn't even see that there was something terribly wrong with Buffy. No, she did see; she just couldn't deal with the fact that she had cast an imperfect spell.

Giles saw it, too; he hurt to see Buffy's suffering. She sleepwalked even when she was awake. Her movements and words were careful imitations of her old self. Whatever responsibility she'd gained in the last year of her life, she seemed to have lost: she was blowing from one job to the next, one day to the next. Giles could see past the facade to the frightened, hurting soul inside, but he could also see that coddling wasn't going to help her. She needed that fire, that spark, that had once made her the best Slayer in the annals of the Watcher's diaries. The fire that made him love her so fiercely.

If there was anything left of that fire, it was mere embers, slowly dying without fuel or air. Giles felt that death far more keenly than Buffy's fall from Glory's tower. He'd been prepared--or told himself that he was prepared--for Buffy's death. But to see Buffy's spirit falter was something he'd never thought to prepare himself for. And even if he had, he suspected, he wouldn't have been ready for it. He wanted to help, and yet at the same time, wanted to back off. It was his helpfulness, his compassion, his love, that was stopping her from taking charge as she once had.

How could he make her see beyond the next crisis, beyond the next patrol? How could he make her see that there was so much more in the world around her than she'd even bothered to discover when she was alive?

Earlier today, during training, Buffy had told him no uncertain terms that she would be able to find the demon performing the ritual sacrifice herself and dispatch it accordingly.

"Giles, it's not like a ram-horned demony thing with vampire minions and 'a lad of virtue true' as a hostage is gonna be inconspicuous," she said, not taking her eyes off the punching bag that she was slowly but surely demolishing with a series of right crosses.

Giles watched her from the training area's sidelines, a towel draped around his neck. There was no doubt in his mind that she was capable of dismembering the demon, if that was what was required, but he didn't like to hear her say so with such a flat tone of voice. Whatever traits Buffy had had before her death, monotone was not even remotely one of them.

"Buffy, I'm not certain..."

"Yeah, but I am. I'll take care of it. I always do." Buffy stopped her right crosses and Giles hoped she would look up, suggest a break, or even one of her skull-shattering CDs. Instead, she looked blankly at the punching bag for a moment and then started on a set of left uppercuts.

And so, now, presumably, Buffy was stalking her way through the Eternal Rest Cemetary. Which left him in the same position he'd been in since returning to dear old Sunnydale...alone, and nearly homeless. The hotel was the archetype of a four-star establishment: impersonal service, reasonable prices, and completely devoid of character, history, and beauty. Bath never looked so good as from an empty hotel room on a sweltering California night. Giles felt like a stranger just passing through.

He climbed out of the taxi to the sound of bold, brassy music. Three doormen were tap-dancing their way down to the sidewalk. In synchrony, they tipped their hats to him, heels and toes clicking out rapid, intertwining rhythms on the cement.

"Be our guest, be our guest, put our service to the test," one sang as he took Giles' arm and started leading him to the main doors.

"Excuse me?" Giles said, and pulled his arm back.

The other two chorused, "It's a guest, it's a guest. Wine's been poured and thank the Lord we've had the linens freshly pressed."

Giles hurried up the stairs and then turned to watch. The doormen seemed content to let him enter the hotel, continuing their dancing routine down on the street, now linking arms and kicking up their heels. Their tap-shoes clacked in syncopation with the bright peal of trumpets and trombones. They pinwheeled around in formation and then one began an intricate solo. The other two paired up with valets and started spinning around cars parked in the driveway. Finally, with a burst of horns, all five of them threw out their arms and posed. Then, seemingly unconcerned, they returned to their posts.

"Good evening, sir," a doorman called to Giles. "Beautiful night, isn't it?"

"Yes," Giles answered faintly. Perhaps it was all some sort of publicity stunt for the hotel. Though these things often went on at a more seemly time than quarter to one, and with a visible source for the music. Bewildered, he shook his head and walked into the hotel, already returning to his thoughts about Buffy. How could he help her without helping her? How could he show her that she had everything she'd had before she died...that all she needed was the will to use it? Giles felt the deep ache in his chest that told him this lonely night would be as bad as the others, tearing at himself not for failing Buffy, but for failing to even know what she needed. Failing to feel the bond that had once tied them so closely to one another.

As he entered the lobby, he heard the soft strumming of a guitar. It was deep-toned and mellow, and sounded almost exactly like the one he'd once used when he sang at the Expresso Pump. The minor, haunting tune mirrored his ambivalent feelings. He looked up, but he couldn't see the guitarist, though several room service attendants were standing around with their covered carts, talking quietly to one another. Still, the lobby had several alcoves veiled with ferns: the musician might be sitting in one of these. The room service boys at the clerk's desk didn't seem to notice the song, even when a piano's gentle notes chimed in. The duet welled up around him, as if it was growing out of his own feelings.

Giles stopped in the center of the lobby, a small raised area between the elevators and the closed restaurant. The dim lights brightened around him, and the room service carts lined up behind him. The sweet, sad music of guitar and piano rushed up to a point that seemed to demand a singer's entrance, and suddenly Giles felt his mouth open and a song he'd never heard rose out of his throat.

"She's like the wind through the trees," he sang, softly at first. "She hunts the night next to me. She leads me to moonlight, only to burn me with the sun." Seeing that no one was looking at him oddly, Giles let the next line come out with all the emotion in his soul behind it. "She's taken my heart, and she doesn't know what she's done."

Behind him, the room service chaps danced, their slow steps muffled on the plush carpet. Giles stared at them for a moment, before the song claimed him again, and then he, too, was moving in time.

"I feel her moves and her breath." Giles remembered Buffy's deft movements in the training room. He matched his steps to the room service boys', showing them how it was to train with Buffy, to be with her when all her energies were focused, intense. "Her body close to me," he sang, closing his eyes, seeing Buffy, all the times he had been within touching distance of her, and had refrained.

"Can't look in her eyes," he continued, thinking now of the empty blue gaze that had once been so excited and direct. "She's out of my league." Giles stepped up onto the clerk's desk. He couldn't help Buffy any longer. He had played the adult role for too long, thinking it would help her. He realised now how useless that was. "I'm just a fool to believe I have anything she needs. She's like the wind."

The unseen orchestra came in strongly and Giles jumped down to become part of the wild pattern the room service attendants were weaving on the lobby floor with their carts. "I look in the mirror and all I see is a young old man with only a dream," he sang. That was how Buffy saw him--old and gross. And he hadn't gotten any younger since she'd made that pronouncement. "Am I just fooling myself that she'll heal her pain?" he wondered. Should he go back to Bath, let her fend for herself? "Living without her, I'd go insane," he answered that thought.

"Feel her breath on my face, her body close to mine," he sang, and this time it wasn't training with Buffy that he was imagining. The room service boys chimed in with a background hum, adding depth to the song. "I can't look in her eyes," Giles told them, knowing he could never speak to Buffy about what was truly in his heart. "She's out of my league. I'm just a fool to believe I have anything she needs." If Buffy was beyond Angel and Riley, then she was surely too much for an old Watcher. She was elusive...

"She's like the wind," Giles ended, bowing his head. The orchestra faded out slowly, until only the piano and the guitar was left, and then they too were silent. The lobby dimmed, and Giles made his way to the elevator, leaving the squeak of room service carts behind.

Tonight he'd crack open the minibar.

Feedback
Back to WIP stories
Back to The Written Realm
2004?