Home-->Mom, Don't Go Here
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XANDER
The bus wasn’t stopping. Wounds had been tended to on the go, food consumed, drinks passed around, tears shed. During the journey, Andrew sat away from the main group, still bloody but not in any mortal way. Every now and then he’d mutter something nobody could hear, and give Xander a teary look. He was ignored and happy to be that way. Buffy slept sitting up across the bench seat at the back of the bus. Her scythe lay at her feet like an obedient guide dog. She had one arm around Dawn, who was also asleep, leaning on her big sister’s shoulder, and her favorite stake was clutched loosely in her other hand. Between her, and Faith at the front of the bus, new Slayers nursed aches and pains with bandages and ice packs and quiet intense conversation; battles relived, scary parts edited for younger viewers and heroic moments softly celebrated. Some slept, some cried, some stared out the window at a view that was sometimes brilliant with optimism, sometimes dead and desert-like. Nobody asked where they were going. Kennedy was afraid to touch Willow, who was among the scenery viewers. The smile on Willow’s face was kind and ethereal and just a little bit frightening to Kennedy. Leaving her girlfriend, the goddess, to join the heat of battle, she thought she knew exactly where she stood with the Wicca-love-of-her-life. Now she wasn’t so sure. Faith was afraid to let Wood go. Once Vi had dressed his wounds, she’d lobbied hard for a hospital for him. Intense debate followed, even as Giles had taken over the driver’s seat and put the bus in an eastern gear. It was Robin himself who vetoed the entire thing, his soft “no” cutting off any arguments Faith might have had in her; she was as surprised as she was pissed about that. But as stoic as Wood had decided to be, he didn’t hesitate to slump into Faith’s arms as soon as she sat down next to him in the seat directly behind Giles. The two of them held each other’s gaze and held their silence. FAITH
Xander had done his best to patch up the girls, make patented Xanderish comments about the shoe sale they were going to miss and the way you haven’t seen America until you’ve seen it by bus, and ignore the blush he could feel burning his cheeks as they drove through Oxnard. Feeling that he’d done as much as he could without the use of depth perception, he was moving down the aisle to check on Buffy when the bus lurched unexpectedly and he was hard pressed to keep his footing. He turned and saw that Giles was badly slumped in the driver’s seat, and seemed to be having more issues with steering than he ought to be. He was up the aisle in a handful of heartbeats, just in time to nearly trip over Faith, who was standing up even as Robin said, “I wasn’t the only one in that room; help him.” Giles shook his head, forced himself to focus, and brushed away Faith’s hand. He had helped Xander during the first mad flight from Sunnydale, waxed poetic over the Hellmouth still waiting for them in Cleveland at the end, and now, by God, he was going to get them there, no matter that his arms felt like they were encased in lead while he tried to push the gas pedal with leg muscles now comprised of spaghetti. The headache was just something he’d been nursing since around 1997, and he chose to ignore it. “C’mon, G. Let me take a turn. Been ages since I got to drive,” Faith told him. He turned to argue with her, and caught Xander’s one-eyed though no less pointed look instead. Faith helped him steer the bus onto the shoulder of the road and Xander got another first aid kit out from under the seat closest to the front door. Moments later, Giles shuffled into an empty seat and Faith put the bus back on the road. Even with limited vision, it didn’t take long for Xander to discover that not all the blood on Giles’ sweater was of the Slayer variety, and although he had suffered mostly superficial cuts, what looked like a short sword wound had split the tattoo on his forearm, and it was bleeding pretty badly. “Hey, if you wanted to forget your misspent youth, there are easier ways,” Xander said, wiping away the blood and applying a compress, and then wrapping the whole thing in bandages. If he applied more care to Giles than he had to any of the Slayers, neither of them commented on it. Giles slid over in the seat to make room for Xander and rested his head against the window. “Anya?” he asked quietly. “No.” Xander’s reply was just as soft. Giles put his stiff bandaged arm around him, and they watched the miles go by. XANDER
They finally came to a lurching, grinding stop at a Super 8 somewhere between Prescott and Sedona, having bypassed Nevada completely with only the briefest of stops to clean up a little and refuel the bus somewhere around Lake Havasu. Feeling almost as ancient as The First itself, Giles heaved himself out of his seat, giving Xander a smile mostly to bolster his own spirits. He did a quick head count of the heads that were waking up now and the heads still slumped and sleeping, did some basic math along with some random pairings and came up with a number that was going to make his credit card hurt worse than his arm. “Can’t be helped, I suppose,” he muttered. Then louder “Wait here,” he told them. Faith opened the door for him, and then moved back to where Robin was waking up. She slid into his arms with something like a sigh. Giles subtracted one room from his original figure and stumbled out into the parking lot. Several minutes and one long ‘school field trip ran late terrible inconvenience yes we have a permit’ obfuscation later, Giles emerged from the motel office with several keys in his hand. For a moment he simply watched them as they emerged from the bus: Slayers, witches, demon-summoners, boys, girls, men, women. Whatever name he chose for them, they were his family now. His children, even if some of them—hell, most of them—weren’t so childlike anymore. He saw both Buffy and Faith give the parking lot and surrounding area a practiced look, one of surveillance, and for one moment he thought about the Watcher that he had once been. He decided he hadn’t mucked it up too badly after all, and then Buffy was giving Dawn a pat and approaching him. “Do you think it’s safe to stop? I mean, I know we took out the First, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a Second, or even a Third around here,” Buffy said. Giles handed her a key. “For you and Dawn. The war’s over, Buffy. The troops need to stand down. If only for one night. We’ll be safe enough.” He smiled warmly at her. “We have you…and Faith…and, well, all of them now.” “You’re right.” “Aren’t I always?” They shared a smile then, the one that was theirs alone, no matter how many Slayers were populating the universe at just that moment, and then Buffy turned back to collect her sister and Giles moved forward to distribute the rest of the room keys. XANDER
Giles sat himself down on the chair in front of the plain utilitarian dresser with only a small groan of complaint. Many of his aches and pains had been washed down the drain after a long hot bath, and although he wasn’t happy to be back in his pants and the slightly worse for wear t-shirt he’d worn under his sweater during the campaign, overall he was feeling cleaner and a little less “where do I lie down to die”-like. His arm gave a nasty throb, and he reached for the first aid kit again. He’d used the gauze inside the kit to re-wrap the cut on his arm after his bath, and now he dug around in the friendly white plastic box to find a little bubble pack of aspirin. He took two and reached for the plastic coffee cup the room had come furnished with. The tea he’d made earlier by running water through the two cup coffee maker was luke-warm now, and had picked up the Lego taste of the cup to go with the blandness that could only be generic orange pekoe, but at least it took the chalky taste out of his mouth. Dreams of tea diffusers full of Summer Pudding danced in his head as he drained his cup and set it aside. Picking up the Super 8 pen and Super 8 notepad, he wondered where he should start. “It’s about power: who’s got it, who knows how to use it…” he wrote.
GILES:
He had just written up some information about the Turok-Han and was considering adding some illustrations when there was a knock at the door. “Who is it?” he thought he sounded brave enough to scare off any nasties that had fled the destruction of Sunnydale with them, or at least brave enough to send anyone else back to their room to use their own artificial sweetener, or Super 8 pen. “It’s the plumber; I’ve come to fix the sink.” Xander’s voice, sounding clever and not tired at all. Giles got up and opened the door. Xander was standing there in a grey t-shirt and Charlie Brown boxer shorts. His hair was sleep-mussed, his eye patch jarring against pale skin; he didn’t look clever or wide-awake. “Xander, what is it?” Giles found himself looking past the younger man for any sign of an apocalypse they might have missed. Xander grinned sheepishly. “Thought I’d see if everything was all right. You know, sort of a patrol. Let the Slayers get some rest.” “You decided to patrol a motel parking lot at—“ Giles glanced at the clock radio beside the bed. “—two in the morning, in your underwear?” “My pants—there was blood—I—can I come in?” Another look around the parking lot, this time to make sure nobody at all saw him inviting the man with the Snoopy-clad bum into his room. He wasn’t about to become fodder for the Slayer gossip brigade, thank you very much. “Yes, come in.” He moved aside to let Xander into the room. “Can I get you anything? There’s coffee, something that’s nothing at all like tea, or—“ “Oh, no. All that caffeine? Bad for you, you know. Could lead to jitters, anxiety, mood swings, gastrointestinal distress…” his voice trailed off uncertainly and he sat down on the bed. “Got any soda?” he asked, looking up hopefully. “Can’t sleep?” Giles cut to the heart of the matter. Xander shrugged. Giles needed more. “Still fighting?” he asked, knowing he would be replaying his own part in the epic battle in his dreams for many nights to come. “Still losing,” came the quiet reply. Giles sat down next to Xander on the bed and looked at him. Really looked at him. Seven years, it had been, watching a gawky, socially inept teenager turn into this man. A man who, in the course of those seven years had by turns irritated him, baffled him, annoyed him, surprised him, impressed him, pleased him and aroused him. He startled a bit at that last one, but knew it to be true. A dim memory of girly drinks at the Bronze flitted briefly through his mind, and then was gone, leaving something warm and caring but not paternal in its wake. “Anya?” The same question he’d asked on the bus. “Yes.” Not the same answer, but telling for all that. Giles didn’t think too much about what he was doing. He let the pain in Xander’s voice guide him. He watched Xander watch him with one dark eye as he walked around the bed to find the television remote. He saw the urge in Xander to babble, to laugh, to make a joke, and knew that wasn’t what was going to make either one of them feel better. He found an old sitcom on one of the few working channels on the TV and flicked off the desk lamp. He returned to the bed and tucked a pillow between himself and the headboard. And then he locked his gaze on the younger man, found what he was looking for and stretched out an arm. Xander didn’t think too much about what he was doing. He was tucked up against Giles in less time than it took for the advertisement for the Tater Mitt to end and the rerun of Will and Grace to start up again. The irony was not lost on either man. “She died saving Andrew.” Xander told Giles a few minutes later, and a tear slipped down his cheek. “She was very brave.” “She dated me.” Another tear. “Extraordinarily brave.” Xander snorted a little at that and they watched more TV. GILES:
Giles held Xander through an episode of Friends and an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond and an infomercial for the Sham-Wow! And when that was over and he turned to face the younger man, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to drop a soft kiss onto his tousled dark hair. And it seemed completely right that he should kiss the tear track down Xander’s right cheek. And neither of them was surprised when the press of lips on lips that was intended for comfort became something a little more… They kissed their way to a prone position and then Giles pulled away. “Um, wow?” asked Xander. Giles smiled, realized his glasses were now hopelessly smudged and removed them. Then he frowned, saw that Xander’s eye patch was hopelessly skewed, and removed that too. Xander immediately covered the scarred remains. Giles pulled Xander’s hand away and found one more kiss for the ridge of scar tissue where an eyelid should have been. “Yuck, huh?” Xander tried to make light of it, and didn’t give up trying to cover up even when Giles tightened his grip on his hands. “I like ‘wow’ better,” Giles replied. “Xander, I won’t tell you I know exactly what’s going on here, but I will tell you that nothing I see here makes me think any less of you.” Xander’s good eye got tear-bright and shiny again. “But I will also say that between the two of us, it’s rather difficult to determine who is the more exhausted right now. If you choose to stay here tonight, I’ll welcome you, but I won’t make any decisions based on anything that has happened today. Tomorrow may even be too soon.” “I shouldn’t have—“ “We both have our demons, Xander. And we will face them. Just not now.” “I guess there’s always Cleveland, huh?” They both laughed a little, and Xander nipped at Giles’ ear, making him shiver. This seemed to satisfy something in him, as Giles felt him relax more in his embrace. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.” They fell asleep at the same time.
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