Transitions - Ch. 10

The memories had been gone from his mind. Blessedly gone, except for those occasional vivid flashes--and then, at Sebastian's words, the flood overwhelmed him with such violence it was like a virulent sickness, or the sudden onset of madness.

Giles sat within the comfortable confines of his flat and was instantly transported, to a place in which he experienced every moment, every wretched, brutal moment as if it was new: rage, shame, fear, betrayal, love and loss pouring into him in one torrent. He felt his eyes roll backward, and his skin burn. He occupied at once all the days and years during which Ripper had lived and--he thought--died.

Dimly, he felt words pour from his lips, unrestrained, uncontrollable. He knew they made no sense; they were not meant to. Dimly he felt Buffy's presence--she sat quite near to him on the sofa, but he could not reach out to her. His hand blocked the light from his eyes, and his body shook in brutal spasms.

Into this came the vision of his mother. His mother, Clara Dorothy Margaret Giles Stanley, nee Hewlitt. Clara Giles, with her tender kisses, and her soft little hands. Clara, who always smelt like clear, light flowers, and wore pretty frocks, and smiled. Clara, who never did anything more useful than arrange flowers into vases, and lie on the Victorian fainting couch in the morning room, reading paperbacked romances of the most frivolous kind. Clara, around whom one must always be so quiet and gentle, lest one make her cry--yet who never cared a jot for another's tears. Clara, who refused to ever bloody well grow up and take any sort of responsibility for her life. Eternally, for seventy years, the same fragile, beautiful, spoilt child.

Every moment with her, and with Mr. Stanley, her husband, compacted into Giles's brain in seconds, so that he felt his head must split apart, or he must vomit, anything to drive the contagion of them from underneath his skin. Over time, spread out, he had been able to bear these events of his life, to experience them in this manner felt nearly fatal.

Into all this came Buffy, his lifeline out of the flood. He felt her hands on his arms, forcing him to lie flat and quiet She smoothed coolness across his brow, and her sweet voice reached him so soothingly that he could hear and follow it back to sanity again. He felt himself speak words to her, and heard Buffy's voice answer, promising that where he led, she would follow.

A stern warning, this, of how very close he might come, still, to losing himself again.

For the longest time he lay motionless on the sofa with his eyes shut tight, trying to calm his breathing, to concentrate on Buffy's voice and on the firm pressure of her small yet anything-but-fragile hands. At last the maelstrom of his emotions subsided, and he began to feel rather ashamed of himself.

Buffy, he recalled, had been weeping, and he hadn't discovered why. Beyond that, Giles was not sure exactly what, in his temporary madness, he had said to her. Something, when he considered the frame of mind he'd been in after Sebastian rang off, that had no doubt caused her great distress.

Just as he expected, when he opened his eyes, Buffy's troubled face hung over his. Giles reached up to stroke her soft, tear-moist cheek.

"I am so very sorry, my dear," he told her, attempting to keep his voice light. Buffy's face brightened a little at his words. "You must have thought me nearly deranged."

"You did give me a pretty major wiggins," she admitted, as she helped him to sit. Giles leaned back into the sofa cushions, drawing her into his lap, an activity that pained him far less than it had a week before. He felt so very glad for the presence of her, the touch of her.

"If I'm hurting you," Buffy told him, "I'm getting off now."

"The comfort, at this point, far outweighs the pain," he assured her, pulling her body close, breathing in the summer-blossom scent of her golden hair. "Oh, my dearest," he murmured.

"You wanna tell me what that was about, Giles? I mean, I can understand being upset about your mom--but that was pretty freaky-deaky. Your temperature shot up like five degrees."

"I just had quite a few memories return to me, rather abruptly."

"So, that's a good, right?" She blotted his skin with the cool cloth. "You're still sweating."

"Fairly unsettling, I'd say."

"No kidding." She gazed into his eyes, tracing the lines of his face with her fingertips. "Do you have a lot of good memories, Giles?"

"I've some lovely ones, recently." He changed the subject. "Why were you weeping, Buffy?" he asked.

"It's a pretty dumb, girly reason, Giles. I'll tell you that right up front."

"And that 'dumb, girly reason' would be?"

"I wanted my babies to be your first. I wanted you to look down at them when they were born, and have it be the first time. Just my little fantasy. Dumb, huh? Like I could just wish Sebastian away."

"I don't think you should actually want to wish Sebastian away," he told her. "He's rather a nice fellow--very much like me, only immensely better tempered." Giles kissed her mouth softly, savouring the flavour of her, salted now, a little, with her tears.

"A good tempered Giles? Too weird." Buffy returned the kiss.

"As for the other--our presumed future children would be the first I'd see born, so that part of your dream can remain quite intact. Ours will be conceived in deepest love, and I will remain with you from hour to hour, and when I see them it will be among the most spectacularly special moments of my life."

"You big mush-head." Buffy kissed him again. "Somehow I believe you."

Giles tried to extract a compliment from the epithet, "big mush-head," and found that though he'd no doubt it was there, he could not find, exactly, where it lay.

"You didn't see Sebastian born?" she asked, a little later.

Giles shook his head, instantly regretting the act. Buffy rubbed his temples gently, easing the ever-present headache. "I was such a young fool, I scarcely even knew he'd been conceived."

"How young a fool are we talking, Giles?"

"Fourteen."

Buffy looked aghast. "What did your mom say?"

"I wasn't living at home. I'd run away. Moira and I lived in London. We did a great many things of which I'm not proud, Buffy, and of which I'd rather not speak."

"Did they involve picking locks and hot-wiring cars? 'Cause I've seen you do both." As a balm to ease the sting of her words, she gently pulled his head onto her shoulder, running her fingers soothingly up and down the back of his neck.

"At times," he admitted.

"Maria the vamp-girl told me about your dad and your sisters. Why didn't your mom help you?"

"She wasn't that sort of person. Please, Buffy." Giles wrapped both arms around her, pulling her closer, burying his face in the crook of her shoulder.

"I'm sorry," she murmured into his ear. "Sometimes you love people even when you hate them--or hate them even when you love them. I guess we both know enough about that. If I called your doctor, would he tell me it's okay for you to fly?"

"Most likely not. Over-cautious fool."

"But you're going to do this?"

"I feel that I must."

"It's closure, I guess," she said. "I'm just scared about you hurting yourself."

"I'll be all right," he said, "With you by my side."

"See? Mush-head. Actually, I'm kinda surprised I get to come along." Buffy jumped up off his lap, nearly daunting in her energy. "I'll tell you what: let me do the stuff, the packing, and the flight and things. You go take a nice hot bath and have a rest. This isn't good for you, and I want you to be in the best shape you can be. Then I'll make some soup, and we'll both go to bed early. How's that?"

"I can't let you do it, Buffy."

"And why not? Because you're the big strong guy? Believe me, I can use the phone, and I can put things in suitcases. If I were the one with the concussion and little broken things in my hand, you'd do it for me, right? Right?"

"Very likely."

"So go. Bath. Bed. I'll let you know if I get stuck on anything."

Giles rose wearily, looking down on her, so alight with the warmth of her love. The very sight made him pray, vaguely but fervently, Let her be spared. Let her never suffer the fate so many have suffered.

Buffy squeezed his good hand lightly in parting, before ordering him, "Go."

"Seb?" Celeste Delacoeur called out to her husband in that throaty voice that meant she hadn't truly awakened at all--she'd only missed him in her dreams.

"Hush, my love." Sebastian gazed down upon the long, low curves of her body stretched across their bed, at her dark hair fanned out across her pillow. So rare to see Celeste still, who was usually such a whirlwind, juggling blueprints and briefcase and digital telephone. She'd a tendency to stride, even in the confines of their home, and the air crackled with the energy of her presence.

Sebastian bent to kiss her temple before he withdrew from the room. Unlike Celeste, he himself moved soundlessly--a quality, he supposed, that he got from his dad. His natural father, that was, not Clive Delacoeur, who'd raised him. That amazing quietness had been the first thing that impressed him about Rupert, once he'd gotten over the similarity of their voices and their looks.

Sebastian had been just past seventeen when they met, Clive only three months dead, and he'd quite prepared himself to be hateful--not one of his usual tendencies, by any means--toward this man who had sired him, then vanished from his life.

The event had been his own school-leaving, and after the parchment scrolls had been delivered, and the honours bestowed, Sebastian had looked out beneath the trees and seen an oddly familiar face. Extricating himself from the photographers and well-wishers and his mum's excited kisses, he'd followed the familiar stranger out into the park.

"Stop!" he'd called. "Wait. I must speak with you."

The man--Rupert--had turned, watching him warily with eyes that were exactly the clear, light green of his own.

This is your father, Sebastian's inner voice, that always spoke so clearly, informed him.

Rupert hadn't been at all what he expected--for one thing, he seemed terribly young, scarcely more than thirty-one or two, though his eyes appeared far older--kind eyes, but immensely sad, as if they'd looked upon and survived any number of dreadful things. He was tall, an inch or so above Sebastian's own height, and dressed in a decent dark suit, white shirt, and sober tie. His hair appeared ruffled, as if he'd an absent-minded tendency to run a hand back through it when absorbed in thought. He appeared far fitter, also, than one would expect, given his otherwise scholarly appearance.

"H-hullo, Sebastian," Rupert had said to him, in a quiet, pleasant tone.

Sebastian hadn't known what to answer, though he rarely found himself at a loss for words. The two of them walked in silence beneath the overspreading branches of the oaks and chestnuts.

"Do you ever see my mum at all?" Sebastian had asked at last.

Rupert looked surprised. "Yes, actually. At one time I saw her rather frequently."

"Are you married?"

Rupert shook his head. "She lives in America now."

"I'd a silly fantasy, when I was a boy, that I'd seen her on the telly--ten years ago this would have been. I thought I'd seen her win a gold medal in the Olympic games, and that she was young and fierce and terribly strong."

"Not a silly fantasy by any means," Rupert had said to him, shutting his eyes.

"You're like us then, are you?" he'd added cryptically, looking out at his son again with a strange, sad, bright, hopefulness.

Sebastian had understood exactly what his father meant.

The longcase clock in his study struck one. Just an hour, then, since he'd called his father's home in America.

Even before he'd received the news of Clara Giles Stanley's death, Rupert hadn't sounded well, Sebastian thought--perhaps less well, were such a thing possible, than he'd sounded during another call, made a little over a year before.

When she'd lived in America, Moira--Sebastian's natural mother, whom he never called "mum," although he'd come, quite naturally, to call Rupert "dad"--had looked after an odd, fierce young woman named Helena Penglis. Rupert looked after another, called Buffy Summers. Both Moira and Rupert had told him they did nothing more than train these girls in fighting skills, and perform volumes of esoteric research--and yet Sebastian had seen two or three of the dreadful scars that marked his mother's body, and heard his father nearly speechless with pain.

Watchers, they called themselves: but Watching--whatever, exactly, it entailed--did not appear to be quite so passive an act as they claimed.

On the telephone, Buffy Summers had sounded so lively and bright Sebastian had been instantly charmed--and yet he'd heard her sob in the background as he and his father spoke. What had she meant by that? And what, too, had she meant when she'd answered the telephone "Summers-Giles residence?" Did the two of them live together now?

If so, in what capacity?

Buffy had sounded extremely American, and young--astonishingly young. Sebastian suspected that he knew, exactly, what she and his father had become to one another, and he tried not to be shocked by the knowledge.

Sebastian sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose and rubbing at his eyes. His Grace the Archbishop had sent on a dossier concerning his latest assignment, which Sebastian knew he ought to read. Baring that, he ought to return to bed, and make some attempt to sleep. His work required him to be rested and centered--any weakness, spiritual, mental or physical would be exploited instantly by the Adversary.

Instead, Sebastian wandered into the kitchen to brew tea, carried the warm pot back into his study and took a packet of letters from the lower drawer of his desk. Setting the teapot on a little table, he loosed the ribbon that bound the packet together, shook open the first letter and began to read, as he'd read so many times before.

"Today I learned of your existence," the letter began--words now better than twenty years old.

His father was, at all times, a quiet man, not given, apparently, to hyperbole or flights of passion. Not an easy man to know, by any means. The letters, however, told another story. Rupert wrote beautifully, amazingly, and through the letters Sebastian had learned to know and love the man who gave him life.

Slowly he leafed down through the stack, paging his way through his father's history. Buffy was there, in those epistles, and a sweet little girl named Willow, and an intense yet oddly hapless boy called by the unlikely name of Xander. For the past three years the letters had related the tale of a place in which all the brightness and the darkness of the world resided: laughter and grief, bravery and fear, love and betrayal, put down in his father's flowing script, dark brown words on eggshell paper, all the words that, otherwise, Rupert could not have shared.

When I spoke to her, Sebastian wondered, Why did Buffy cry?