Transitions - Ch. 47

The tower shivered with such violence around them that Giles received an immediate premonition of what must surely follow. "Willow," he shouted--the first time, that he could recall, that he'd ever shouted at her. "Willow, you must wake up at once!"

The girl in his arms gave a faint moan, but showed no other sign of regaining consciousness. Giles laid her gently on the unsteady floor and, reminding himself that desperate times called for desperate measures, dug his thumbnail as hard as he could into the lobe of her right ear--a technique nearly certain to wake all but the comatose.

Willow's eyes flew open at once, turning upon him a look of heartfelt reproach. She raised a hand to touch her ear, which must certainly have been throbbing. "Ouch," she said, in a small affronted voice, "Giles, you hurt me."

"Sorry," he told her. "I'd no time to be gentle. We must leave at once, before the roof comes down upon our heads."

Willow glanced upward as the tower, again, shuddered around them. "Whoa, Giles, I..."

"No time, we must..." But even as he began to speak, Giles knew it was too late. The image of Buffy's face as he'd last seen her, separated from him as the barrier blacked out, burned in his mind. A bare second before the roof collapsed her flung himself down over Willow's body, her face tucked into his chest, hoping that he might somehow shield her from the fury of falling slates and rafters to come.

His companion stiffened beneath him, and her silent scream vibrated against his ribs. Rubble rained down, first small, stinging shards, then entire sheets of slate that missed them only by chance. Giles tended to be, in most things, a practical man, and he'd never been one to anthropomorphize inanimate objects--but he could have sworn the house sounded angry, as if they'd invoked Mermorgan's anger by using its own native magic against it. The noise was appalling, a rending, shrieking cacophony that entirely blocked the sound of whatever Willow meant to tell him. Briefly, he felt her lips move, then something struck him, heavily, across the back, and the world went grey.

Giles became dimly aware of Willow shouting, but could not make out her words. He wished she'd stop. The cries hurt his head, and he felt as if the entire contents of a gravel quarry had been dropped upon him piece by piece.

"Giles, you have to get off! You're squishing me!" Willow pleaded, then burst into a fit of painful coughing.

Giles cracked open an eye, and at once wished he hadn't. The air was laden with stinging dust, the same dust that made poor Willow cough and--the moment he drew a real breath--made him cough as well, then groan, then cough again. His half-healed ribs seemed far from ready for such exercise.

The discomfort brought him fully back to consciousness. He became aware of the small female body crushed beneath his, and tried to lift himself away from her, only to find that there was no room to do so. The almost-nonexistent light allowed him no clear impression of the space around them.

Giles had no love of confined spaces, and he had to force himself to remain calm. He muttered the words of a spell, in Old English, that would hopefully have a soothing effect on both of them.

"I--er--I'm afraid there isn't room, Willow." To speak aloud brought on another round of coughing, but Giles was far more worried that the harsh quality of Willow's breathing, had remained so even after his incantation. She'd been in tight places before and come through laughing--why had this particular danger caused such a drastic response?

"You have to! You have to!" Her small hands pushed frantically at his chest. "I can't stand it! I'm getting squashed!." She trembled violently, and Giles could feel what he hoped were only tears soak through the flimsy fabric of Xander's shirt.

"Willow" he said, in as soothing a voice as he could muster. The debris packed above them groaned and shifted, increasing his own apprehension.

"I don't feel good, and you're hurting me!" she screamed. Giles had never heard her so utterly beside herself. This hysteria was quite unlike her usual plucky demeanor.

"I--just give me a moment." Fear for her well-being vied with irritation in his mind. What did she expect of him? Did she think he lay in that position for his own pleasure?

Good God, what a notion, he chastised himself, ashamed that he'd given way to even that small burst of ill-temper. Clearly, she'd begun to panic, and who could blame her? Trapped in the dark, under a pile of rubble that left them only the tiniest of burrows, his weight pressing down upon her fragile body--she'd every right to feel terrified. That the two of them hadn't been killed outright could only be considered miraculous--or magical. There wasn't an inch to spare, unless...

"Willow," he said, attempting to keep his voice comforting, "There's no room for me to raise off you, but perhaps we might turn, and exchange positions?"

She'd begun to cough again, and her tears continued. Holding her tightly in his arms, he began, slowly, painfully, to turn them within the unforgiving confines of their hollow, until at last he lay on his back with the floor's sharp ridges pressing into his bruised shoulders. The effort had made him breath in an overabundance of the dust, and he spent long moments coughing afterward, Willow's body draped limply over his chest.

"Willow," Giles said, when at last he could speak again, "Willow, can you hear me?" If she hadn't still been weeping, he'd have worried that she'd slipped into unconsciousness. He rubbed her back gently, hoping to soothe her, as any loving father might do, "Poor little one, it's all right, it's all right," he crooned, then repeated his spell, and in time her fear seemed to fade slightly.

"You're much comfier to lie on top of ," she told him, in the choked voice that remained after her bouts of unrestrained coughing and crying. "Pretty dumb, huh? Wigging like that."

"Perfectly understandable," Giles assured her.

"I used my pencil spell," she confided, "To slow the stuff down. Only bigger. And I thought it killed you anyway. You were out forever and ever."

"Ah--er--you know me." Giles squirmed. The floor was beastly uncomfortable.

"Giles," she said lovingly, her soft cheek brushing his. "My dad wouldn't have done that. I don't think. Thrown himself down, and let stuff hit him. Instead of me. Dad wouldn't notice. Though he might say, 'Willow, don't let stuff hit you.' Or--" An entirely different notion seemed to occur to her. "Was that a 'where am I? hit on the head and lost my memory' kind of 'you know me? You know me?--question. Instead of you know me--statement of fact, little self-deprecating shrug."

"Ah--" Giles said again, seeking to follow this dizzying train of thought. "No, I've kept my memory this time, I believe."

Willow laid her head on his shoulder. "I'm so tired, Giles. Can I sleep a little? Maybe we can do some magic later."

Again, this worried him. He reached for her hand, trying to gauge its temperature, fearful that she might be injured and edging into shock, but her skin seemed warm enough. Who could blame her for being exhausted? It had been a trying time for both of them, and their situation could not be considered anything but precarious. Let her sleep--perhaps as she did so, he'd find his way to a solution.

The moment she shut her eyes, however, the dangerous mass atop them began to shift again, more precipitously this time, and Giles had a brief, alarmed thought of Pencil spell? Which pencil spell would this be, Willow? before a comparable incantation leapt into his mind. He whispered the words, taking the burden from the sleeping girl, understanding, as he did so, why she'd been so tired. To hold such a weight put an incredible drain on one's strength.

By dint of profound concentration, he managed to enlarge their burrow slightly, enough that Willow could lie beside him. She rolled to her side, curling to an almost fetal position, and Giles lay on his own side, watching the shadowy outlines of her familiar face in the near-total dark.

Willow whimpered in her dreams. A few words of English, then a stream of Cornish escaped her lips. At first they were the merest murmurs, but soon the words began to sound alarmingly like pleas for mercy, and Willow's body jerked frantically, her arms and legs thrashing as if she struggled for her life against some brutal unseen assailant.

"Willow," Giles called to her, catching hold of one flailing hand before it struck his face. "Willow, you're safe, there's no need to fight."

Willow's eyes flew open, revealing not a shadowy version of their usual green, but an intense, fiery red that cast a flickering light into the darkness of their burrow.

"Willow?" Giles said again, alarmed.

"I will have them," she said, in a low, cold male voice that contained no vestige of her usual speech. "I will have them give me red flowers. Red flowers until they are cold."

A bolt of abject horror flashed through him, and Giles nearly lost control of his spell. The timbers pressed low again, wedging his shoulders, painfully, between their weight and the floor. He recovered himself barely in time to prevent the two of them from being crushed, but he could not seem to find the focus to raise the load again.

"Willow!" he shouted, now thoroughly afraid for his young companion's safety. "Willow, wake up! Answer me!"

Willow's eyes had rolled back, her body stiffened to utter rigidity, then all at once her muscles lost their tension, leaving her limp and apparently lifeless--only the too-slight motion of her chest revealing that she breathed at all.

Red flowers until they're cold? Giles wondered.

In an instant, he knew where Ripper had gone. Somehow he'd made his way inside Mermorgan Hall, where the red-haired women, unsuspecting, slept.

Now, Giles knew, the demon's work would have begun.

Buffy wanted to pummel something, and would have, if there was anything to be pummeled. Which there wasn't. And what good would pummeling have done anyway, in this situation? Maybe if she'd been able to pummel the LeFaye bitches without getting herself and her friends stuck more full of crossbow bolts than--well, than a bunch of people stuck full of crossbow bolts--she might have felt better.

But she hadn't, and now her way with words was definitely starting to fail her too. She wished she knew how to fight things that couldn't be punched or kicked into submission. In fact, between the three of them--herself, Celeste and Xander, their skills portfolio was a little heavy in the fisticuffs department, a little light on the finagling-and-magic side of things.

Which left Sebastian, and what could he do--besides get possessed every time he turned around, flake out on providing transportation, and nearly get his dad killed as often as possible?

Unless it was that usual guilt-thing on Giles's part, she was beginning to wonder why her guy was so crazy about his son.

Buffy peeked around the edge of the doorway that led from the main house back into the tower--where she, Celeste and Xander had withdrawn to, as relatively safer ground--and watched Sebastian.

Seb still stood at the foot of the stairs, his shoulders all slumped and his hands shoved deep into his pockets, exactly like Giles at his most discouraged. Despite herself, Buffy felt bad for him. Poor Seb had been having a run of truly crappy luck, and she could tell he was one of those guys who was used not so much to getting his own way, but to having everything go his way naturally, just because.

"Hey," Buffy said, heading back into the tower. If he could be brave--or whatever it was he was being--she could too. She had to fight the urge, though, not to duck as little pieces of debris dropped down from the ceiling, and she definitely had to work hard to ignore the weird shifts and groans from the ancient foundations.

"Seb?" she said again.

"Oh--er--yes?" He sounded so much like his dad it made Buffy's heart hurt, and his expressions was so extremely Gilesean she could hardly stand it--that look of worried confusion that Giles got at his most stressed. "How are you, Buffy?" he asked.

She wanted to yell at him to stop, that it wasn't fair for him to sound so much like his father, because he wasn't his father, he was only Sebastian and, really, what good was he?

"Jealous much?" Cordy's voice said clearly in her head, and Buffy felt a little ashamed. She wasn't being fair.

Sebastian had been really nice to her, he and Celeste both, after the roof came down. Buffy was ashamed to think how badly she'd wigged out. They'd all wigged some--Xander too--but she'd completely lost it, yelling and screaming like a crazy person, and she'd made Celeste start bleeding again, a little, because Celeste had tried to hold onto her, while Sebastian kept telling her, over and over, "They're alive, Buffy. They're alive."

"Why are your so sure they're alive?" she asked him now. "Guessing, or what?"

"I can feel their magic," Sebastian answered, waving a hand toward the half-buried stairs.

It made Buffy mad, really, how piles of dust and bird bones, huge chunks of wood and rocky-looking tiles, could pour through that door, but the people she loved best in the world couldn't get out. Provided Sebastian was right in what he told her.

"Willow must be scared," Buffy whispered.

Seb gave her a look. A serious-but-kind Giles look.

"I hate it that you're so much like him," Buffy said.

"I'd imagine that you do," Sebastian answered. "I'd imagine you think me worthless by comparison."

"Giles has those self-esteem issues too," Buffy told him, not wanting to admit what she'd been thinking.

"To me, he's always seemed so amazingly calm," Sebastian said, "As if I could depend upon him for anything."

"I've seen him freak a couple times." Buffy couldn't believe she was having this conversation. It felt weird, and she felt weird, all slowed down, like someone in a dream, like she was having one of her prophecy-dreams, and when she woke up none of it would be real yet. She could find that one thing that would keep it all from coming true.

Except, Buffy knew in her aching heart, it was too late. This was real, and she'd just reached the end of her ability to take any more.

Sebastian climbed the stairs as far as he could, picking his way over the chunks of roof stuff that blocked his way.

"Bastian," Celeste said in a warning voice.

He shot her a look over his shoulder.

"I mean it," Celeste told him.

"I can't," he answered, in a voice so low that probably no one but Buffy heard him. He bent to grab hold of a big, splintered piece of wood, and threw the ruined beam off one side of the stairs, then grabbed another, doing the same with it, then a third one, and a fourth, not stopping even for a second.

What else can we do? Buffy thought, and joined Giles's son on the stairs. The two of them dug into the rubble like they were insane, sending a steady rain of junk crashing to the floor below. Dust coated Sebastian's face, and Buffy knew she didn't look any better. He fingers were bleeding, and her manicure was trashed, but it didn't matter, none of it mattered except finding Willow and Giles.

Buffy tried not to think what would happen if they pulled out the wrong beam. That wouldn't happen. It wouldn't. And if it did, Seb would have it covered. She had to believe that.

Hard as she was working, Buffy had half forgotten about the magic barrier. She hit it suddenly, and so hard that it bounced her halfway down the stairs. She barely managed to roll in time not to knock herself out on the edge of a stone step.

"Buffy?" Sebastian gazed down at her, worried.

"This can't be!" she cried. "We HAVE to get in."

Seb didn't answer, but he turned away again, moving until he could press his hands to the barrier. Pools of color spread out around his fingers; little sparks jumped off his fingertips.

"Bastian Delacoeur!" Celeste said in her sharpest voice ever, and that time her husband didn't even glance at her.

The colors and sparks turned into out-and-out fire, and then the fire spread all over Sebastian's body, until he looked like the Human Torch guy in the Fantastic Four comic books. Xander must have had the same thought, because she could hear his muttered, "Flame on?" behind her.

The black barrier got red, then white--and then it wasn't there at all. Sebastian started breathing hard, like he'd been running, and in between it talking really fast, words that really sounded like they could have been a spell. Either that, or he knew some really unusual swear-words.

Buffy darted past him, this time meeting only a little pushing feeling, like someone really wimpy was trying to stop her from entering the room. She started flinging stuff like there was no tomorrow, right down to a beam so huge she could have sworn it would be too heavy even for her to lift--but she picked up the giant piece of wood like it was a toothpick. In the space beneath it she caught a glimpse of something that, even in Sebastian's fiery light, had to be red hair. Willow's red hair.

She dug even harder, not caring if she tore her nails off completely, as long as she got Giles and Willow out alive.

"Buffy?" Giles asked. He sounded groggy, his voice rough with all the dust he must have been breathing.

"It's me! It's me!" she yelled, laughing and sobbing at the same time. "Oh, sweetie, I never wanted to kiss anyone so much in my entire life!"

"Take--" Giles stopped to cough. "This damned dust!"

"Yeah," Buffy giggled hysterically, "Those LeFayes are just the worst housekeepers. I'll get you out, just hang in there."

"Take Willow first," Giles commanded.

"I think the one not lying under rubble gives the orders here," Buffy answered, sounding so cheerful that she was even scaring herself--but she did grab hold of Willow and pull her free. Will was so covered with white dust she looked like a skinny version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and she was completely out cold. Buffy made herself drag her friend out to the stairs before coming back for Giles. That was hard, one of the hardest things, maybe, she'd ever had to do, even though Giles wanted it that way. She kept being afraid that, somehow, the doorway would close up again, or the pile o' junk would collapse once and for all. That he'd get squashed flat.

But when she came back to him, and raised another of the big beams, Giles crawled out from underneath and got shakily to his feet, looking like he really wanted to fall down again.

He didn't, though. He just stood gazing down at her, so much love in his eyes that she knew that if she'd lost him, she never would have survived. She would have been stuck in this place for ever and ever, mourning him.

Once more, Giles was a mess, and Xander's violently green shirt did nothing for him, but Buffy had never seen him look more perfect. When he put his arms around her and pulled her close, she felt comforted and warm and alive. When he stooped to kiss her, his hand on her cheek, his lips soft but firm against hers, she knew she'd be all right. She was home, safe at home, wherever he was. Whatever the LeFayes, or anyone, threw at her now, she wouldn't be afraid as long as he was with her.

Then, over the top of her head, he caught sight of the flames. Buffy couldn't even see a person now, only a pulsating pillar of fire.

"What's that, Buffy?" Giles asked her quietly.

"Um..." she said. "Sebastian?"