Transitions - Chapter 3

Wesley lay in bed between crisp linen sheets, with a proper china teapot on the table beside him, and a proper teacup filled with lovely strong tea, which Moira had brewed for him with her own hands. She had found for him, on the television, a channel that played only the old American films that he so dearly loved, and just now, on the screen, Gene Kelly danced through a downpour much like the one they'd experienced last night, grinning as he leaped and spun through the rain.

Wesley rather wished that he might do the same, that something in his soul would unlock and allow him to do any sort of dance but a stiff, formal waltz. He felt closer to heaven at the present moment than he ever had in his life. Everything he wanted. Everything. From the small creature comforts that surrounded him now, to friends, to the affection of an amazing woman, to his own self-respect. All this, when only a week ago, he'd been sunk into the depths of despair.

"Moira," Wesley had said the night before--or was it earlier in the morning? he couldn't be sure--"Moira, let's get all your things. Come stay with me, please do. I've a little house, as you know, and it's so entirely empty."

She'd stretched to give him the most tender and delicious of kisses, saying, "Be careful what you wish for, my love."

"Honestly, Moira, you mustn't remain here, in this hotel. You must come home with me. I absolutely forbid you to stay in this place a moment longer."

Sitting back on her heels, Moira extended the first two fingers on each hand, crossing one over another on her bosom in a sly mockery of a Watchers' sign--a sign he'd tried using himself, once, with dismal results. Like children they were, really, using their little secret tokens and mysterious words.

Wesley'd felt himself blush at the mere thought: no wonder Buffy and her friends hadn't respected him. Had he really been so entirely pompous? By the authority vested in him by the Watchers' Council, indeed! As if the kids could possibly care about that.

"Please, Moira," he'd said, stroking her damp hair again. "I should so like you with me."

In an instant she'd been gone, racing away from the van, and from him, returning only a few minutes later with a suitcase of rather considerable size, which she heaved into the back.

"Wesley," she'd told him, smiling, "Come out to me."

Wesley had hesitated a moment: it was really most frightfully wet out, and a little cold, but at last the light in Moira's eyes enticed him. He slid down carefully to the rain-pooled tarmac, feeling the fat drops through his shirt, until the fabric was entirely soaked and clung to his skin. His hair melted and waved and dripped into his eyes, and Moira laughed.

"I wanted to see if that would happen," she told him, speaking loudly with the noise of the downpour. "Though I half expected that, like Moses and the Red Sea, the waters would part before you. Perhaps you're human after all, my dearest."

"Human enough!" he'd answered, catching her round the waist, pulling her close, into a deep kiss, in which her mouth tasted warm, spicy and complicated, like Moira herself, and also very cool and clean, like the rain. Her hands rubbed his back and shoulders through the sopping cloth, until he'd become excited for her all over again, and then they'd climbed back inside the vehicle.

Moira had driven him home, the two of them dripping and steaming, flooding the seats with the water that streamed from their clothes. Wesley hadn't even cared, though he feared he might, later in the day.

Inside his empty house, they'd dried each other, laughing, flinging their wet things onto the floor--though afterward, while Moira took a shower, Wesley hadn't been able to resist the urge to pick them up and hang them neatly in the laundry room. Moira twitted him gently about that, once she emerged.

She smiled a bit, too, at his pajamas--rather nice ones, Wesley thought, given him by his paternal grandmother at Christmas. They'd his family crest stitched onto the pocket.

Moira herself emerged nude from the shower, drying her hair with a large towel. She seemed to walk about that way with the most amazing lack of concern, and Wesley rather wished she'd stop--it was lovely, true, but somewhat distracting. He seemed to lose his ability to speak every time she entered the room.

Outside the windows, the rain appeared to have let up, and Moira had begun to put on her tracksuit when her digital telephone rang.

"Get that, will you, love?" she said, sitting on the end of the bed to lace up her trainer, bits of reflective tape on the side of the shoe flashing light into his eyes.

"Good God, its half-past-four! Who could possibly be calling?" he'd said. But the moment the words left his mouth, he'd known. It would be Buffy, of course, poor child. He felt great charity, that day--even for disobedient young Slayers. They really oughtn't to have left her alone.

Buffy it was, her girlish voice trembling, so distraught she didn't seem to recognize him. Wesley spoke to her as soothingly as he could. Moira did the same, and promised to come to the young woman's aid before she rang off.

"Ought I to come along?" Wesley asked her. Truth be told, he felt tapped out, and even with his leg and neck-braces restored, he was sore. His entire body seemed more than somewhat achy, in fact--rather as if he'd caught a bit of the flu, although otherwise he felt well, only a little lightheaded. Perhaps he missed the blood Maria Del Ciello had drunk from him; perhaps he was only slightly overwhelmed by the night's events.

"No, no, that's not needed," Moira answered. Before she went out the door, she brought him the tea and switched on the telly, finding the channel he liked as if by instinct. Wesley couldn't escape the feeling that she meant it all as an act of atonement--or, possibly, of gratitude.

"Will you be long?" he asked her. "You shan't really go for a run, shall you? It's awfully wet."

He didn't like to mention the other reason.

"We shall see." Moira kissed him in parting. "You ought to try for a bit of sleep. We'd rather a big night, after all."

"Only after you're beside me," he answered, wondering how she could keep such poise. Her night had, perhaps, been larger than anyone's--except for Rupert's. Helena had taken far more blood from her than Maria took from him, and there had been a tremendous emotional drain for Moira, as well. He meant to say more, words of caution and encouragement, but his love had already gone.

On the screen, Gene Kelly completed his dance. Songs and plots and more dances passed by--all terribly silly, really, but they made him happy. Wesley thought of sweet little Willow, and of Xander, who mocked and confused him, but had saved his life. He must remember to ring them both, later in the day, to make sure that they'd come through this with minimal distress.

Poor Willow. Her lovely hair seemed quite spoilt, though perhaps something might yet be done. She ought to ring up Cordelia. Cordelia would know, if anyone did.

Wesley thought, too, of the attractive Miss Chase, now at home in Los Angeles. He hadn't loved her, certainly, but he wished her only good. He wished, too, that he'd made less of a fool of himself over her--and that, at least for the sake of his pride, he'd kissed her with something better approaching grace.

One ought to look upon the bright side, however. Had he been more successful with Cordelia, this night with Moira might, perhaps, never have been, and in kissing Moira he felt no awkwardness whatsoever.

Sinking warmly into his pillows, Wesley listened to Debbie Reynolds sing, "You are my lucky star...I've loved you from afar."

So true, he thought. So true.

It occurred to Wesley that he really ought to ring Buffy's mother immediately: Joyce Summers's daughter was clearly her brightest star, and she must be dreadfully worried. He reached for the telephone.

"Can't you use magic?" Buffy gasped. She and Moira had been fighting with the cuffs for half an hour, and the damn things still refused to give. The Watcher had started with the subtle "pick the lock" approach and had now escalated to the screwdriver-hammer-bludgeoning method. Buffy was picking up an interesting selection of British swearwords, which she fully intended to use on Giles once he felt a little more together.

"Cold. Iron." Moira muttered. She seemed to have gone nearly as pre-verbal as her best friend.

Thinking that made Buffy sad. She made herself concentrate on the problem at hand. On her hands to be specific.

"Your mother has--" Moira hissed. "The most useless sodding lot of tools I've heretofore encountered."

It took a Watcher, Buffy considered, to be so completely p.o.'d and still use a word like 'heretofore' in a complete sentence. "They're not all that cold," Buffy told her. "Not the way you've been hitting them."

Moira glared at her--just about Giles's equal in the glaring department, in fact--and pushed a couple streamers of sweat-soaked auburn hair out of her eyes. "Magic doesn't work well on iron, hot or cold," she said, trying to sound patient and pretty much failing. "Not my magic, at least. What I wouldn't give for a--what do they call them here? A Dremel tool. One of those rotary things..." She waved her hands vaguely, probably too tired to translate her thoughts into American. "They buzz, and have any number of quite small attachments."

Buffy got up and went down to the basement, returning with a shoebox. "Like this?" she asked.

Moira averted her gaze, obviously trying to avoid giving Buffy another, even more ferocious, glare.

"Yes. Quite. Lovely." She plugged the tool into a kitchen socket, and snapped the safety goggles down over her eyes. "Lovely," she repeated, in what didn't exactly sound like an appreciative tone--more like the kind of "lovely" Buffy usually got from Giles when she'd discovered the demon of the day in one of his musty books half an hour before, but forgotten to mention it because she was chatting with Willow about boys or clothes.

In something like under a minute, the first handcuff fell free. Okay, Buffy could see Moira's point, especially since the older woman had hit her thumb really hard on about the fourth try with the hammer and screwdriver, and now had one of those icky blood-blisters under the nail, which was probably going to drop off. Moira gave her a heartfelt look as the second cuff fell free, and dropped them both, from a height of about six inches, onto the kitchen counter.

"Sorry," Buffy said. "I didn't think."

"Quite all right," Moira answered, finally getting her voice under control. Maybe she was just glad to have it all over with.

Being Moira, she walked Buffy upstairs again, made her wash her skinned wrists really well with soap and water, dried them off carefully and bandaged them up, saying that she thought the left might be a little bit sprained, and that Buffy probably shouldn't patrol for the next couple nights.

"You don't have to tell me twice," Buffy answered, then said. "Not like there's gonna be anything to patrol for."

"They'll be back." The troubled look, that had vanished temporarily during their handcuff battle, returned to Moira's eyes.

"Even if Giles isn't baity anymore?"

"There's always the Hellmouth." Moira tugged the scrunchy out of her hair, pulled the whole mass back again and put the band on tighter. She had hair like a lady in a old painting, so much, when she let it down, that it didn't seem quite realistic. "And there's also Maria," she added.

Buffy frowned. She'd forgotten that. Forgotten Maria, who'd sometimes seemed almost like a person, even though she wasn't anymore. Buffy had kept wanting to trust the vampire, and been wrong every time. "I'm sorry," she said. "I could kinda tell what she was like, maybe. Before."

"She was my student, and my friend," Moira said in a quiet voice. "I shall miss her--but I shan't make the same mistake twice."

"I didn't think so." This stuff made Buffy uncomfortable. She wanted to look anywhere but at Moira's face. "The way that you...uh...you felt tonight? I never felt that way," she said. "I felt like I wanted to hide, though, lots of times. Do you know about Angel?"

"You told me," Moira said. "That night we patrolled together."

"Oh. Yeah." Buffy found herself staring upward into the older woman's huge, green, shadowy eyes. "Well, Angel made me feel that way. Wanting to hide with him, or from him, but always the big hiding thing. Can I tell you a secret?"

The Watcher nodded.

"I can't really tell the others--'cause there are so many issues, and I was just so...goofy for him, for so long. But I'm glad. That he's gone, I mean." Buffy took a step backward, almost blown away by the sudden awareness of how much she meant that. "I'm glad."

"I'd imagine that you are," Moira answered, her tone saying that she understood perfectly. She put her hand on Buffy's shoulder, walking her back toward the bedroom. "Buffy, the words I spoke to Rupert, in the kitchen, a few days ago..."

"I know it's probably not the best idea," Buffy told her. "I know there's weirdness involved."

"All that matters, in the end, are the Watcher and the Slayer," Moira said. "There can be no stronger bond, and anything that tries to come between them--other friends, other loves, the Council itself--is bound to fail. We are called, one to one, life to life."

"Whoa," Buffy said. "No heaviness there, Em."

"That's a direct quote from the first Watcher Journal, Buffy--the first we have recorded, at any rate." Moira tipped Buffy's head upward with a hand beneath her chin, looking down into her face a minute before she bent to kiss Buffy's forehead. "Take care of my poor Rupert, won't you?"

"You don't even have to ask."

"No, I don't, do I?" Moira smiled a little. "And now I'd best go see how my Wesley's getting on."

"Speaking of weird," Buffy said.

"He isn't, you know," Moira answered. "He's really rather lovely."

Buffy knew that word meant something different to English people--or several different somethings--so she gave Moira's arm a quick squeeze and let it slide. The Watcher promised to come back in a few hours to check on Giles and give him another shot. She said she'd let herself out--Buffy let her do that.

Giles lay still and quiet in Buffy's bed, looking very big and dark and masculine against all the pink, peach and white in her room. His eyes were half-open and kind of glazed, though they followed Buffy when she moved. She sat in the chair Moira'd brought to the bedside and gazed down at him, reaching out to lightly rub her thumb against his temple. His eyes closed, making him looked almost relaxed, or maybe just monumentally stoned. Moira said he probably felt like he'd been beaten with chains, and there were a couple deep cuts that it was too late to stitch, but she hadn't been able to find any broken bones--except, of course, for his hand, and possibly some ribs that Buffy herself had cracked by holding him so tight.

Moira didn't say, but although the soreness might last for days, and the hand would probably take all summer to heal, it was the magic burn-out that really worried her--and since Moira seemed to know more about magic than just about anyone else, that scared Buffy more than any other thing could.

"It's too soon to tell," the Watcher told her--which either meant exactly that--that it really was too soon--or else that Moira didn't want to drop the bomb on her all at once.

"Hope for the best, expect the worst," her mom sometimes said. Whatever that meant.

Buffy realized that Giles had taken hold of her hand, and given it a gentle little tug, probably all that he could manage at that point.

"What?" she said to him. "You want me to join you?"

Another tug, his reddened eyes gazing up into hers.

"What, I'm not s'posed to go away this time?" She couldn't help but tease him a little, so relieved that he wanted her--that he felt well enough to want her. When Giles released her hand, Buffy shed her robe and slid in beside him, moving as carefully as she could, afraid that she might jostle or hurt him. Slowly, his head moved to her shoulder, and he curled up against her, his good hand resting lightly at her waist.

Buffy shifted to kiss his mouth with the same care--just a whisper of a kiss, but he smiled against her lips. "Goodnight," she said, even though it was morning. "Sleep tight."

They drifted off together, and stayed down for hours, not waking until footsteps sounded on the stairs, and the bedroom door swung open, and her mom's voice said, "Oh, Buffy, honey, I was so... I was... Buffy? Buffy, oh my God!"