Transitions - Chapter 55

For two days, Sebastian had felt like a ghost, rattling around the huge old house where he belonged and did not belong. Everything had been tidied away, as if death and demons and gateways to hell had never been, the silent red-haired women scrubbing and carrying, nothing whatsoever revealed on their strong-boned, impassive faces. By night, fires burned, the forest and grounds reverberating with the women's chants, and the sound of their uncanny, oddly-pitched singing.

It gave Sebastian a sense of being lost in the past, and made the hair at the nape of his neck stand perpetually on end. He found it hard to think of the LeFayes as entirely human--but, like it or not, they were his family. What, he could not help but ponder, did such a blood-relation make him? What did it mean for his unborn child?

Sebastian couldn't sleep. His skin prickled constantly with the magic in the air, and beside him now, in the borrowed bed they shared in the largest of Moira's suite of rooms, Celeste moved restlessly. "Love," he whispered, not wanting to rouse her if she actually slept, "Love, can you hear me?"

His wife made one of her half-awake sounds, but he could see her eyes open, shining in the dark. "Bastian? Are you up?"

"Not very tired, I'm afraid." he told her, which was a bloody lie. Sebastian was as tired as he'd ever been in his life, so tired he kept seeing random flashes--terrifying, brief images that moved at the edges of his vision, causing a series of violent startle-responses. Lord, how he wished the LeFayes would stop their noise, if only for a few moments.

"Are you uncomfortable?" he said to his wife, stroking her satin cheek with his thumb. "Is it your injury?"

She pulled closer, and took his hand, placing it flat against her abdomen. The edge of the heavy bandage on her side felt rough against his fingers. "Can you feel her?" Celeste asked. "She's moving inside me."

"She?" Sebastian smiled slightly. "Love, it's far too early. She--or he--is only small yet." He slid lower in the bed, to kiss his wife just below her navel--and against his cheek he felt the trembling. Oh, God, he thought. Oh, God, it's true.

What he meant by that, he wasn't precisely sure--or even sure that he wanted to know his own meaning. Above him, Celeste had begun to weep, and he returned to kiss her, to stroke her hair and whisper endearments, until sleep claimed her again, even though it continued to elude him.

At length, Sebastian rose from the bed, making sure his wife was covered snugly, and begin his usual restless peregrinations, his circuit of the smaller house-within-a-house that was Moira's particular territory. He felt a peculiar need to make sure everyone remained safe, including the children with whom he might never, perhaps, be entirely at ease.

Even in his mother's quarters, the modern world had touched only lightly, not enough to make any of them feel comfortable, least of all safe. They lived in Mermorgan as survivors lost in enemy territory, unsure of their welcome, unsure when they would ever see England, their England, again.

Sebastian opened the door to the first of the rooms, where Xander slept, muttering, sprawled out across the top of the sheet, the cover kicked to the floor. The room felt chilly, nearly cold enough to see one's breath in the air. Sebastian picked up the duvet and spread it over the sleeping boy's body, an act of kindness of the sort his father might have performed. Sebastian felt a great need to pick up the slack in Rupert's absence.

In the next room, Willow suffered equally restless slumbers, curled up beneath the blankets like a nervous small animal within its burrow. Mermorgan seemed to affect her more than any of them, and there were times Sebastian nearly feared for her sanity, as the house, and its inhabitants, called upon parts of her psyche perhaps best left buried. She blamed herself bitterly for Rupert's descent into hell, and could hardly be persuaded to rest so much as a moment, in her resolve to watch over him, and over Buffy.

When Sebastian touched her shoulder, Willow quieted for a moment, but seemed to take no lasting comfort.

Last of all he went to Rupert and Buffy's room, sitting beside the bed where his father and the golden-haired girl had been placed, just over forty-eight hours past. Buffy appeared fragile, but nonetheless warm and living, as if she might be a princess in a fairy tale, requiring only a kiss to awaken her. Rupert, on the other hand, remained corpse-like in his coldness, and at times Sebastian could not stop himself from laying a hand over his father's heart, merely to assure himself of that organ's slow, unsteady beating.

He did so now, whispering, "Come back, Dad. Come back to us. We need you." He could not imagine the place his father had been to, the things he had seen. He knew, technically, that the demon dimension was a different place than Hell, as spelt with a capital letter--and perhaps, to that extent, was somewhat less fearsome. Yet that place remained one of unending pain and torment, and if the physical injuries a man received there did not necessarily carry through into the human world, the same could not be said for the psychological. Rupert slept as if some essential part of himself had been abandoned in the netherworld.

Sebastian truly wanted his father to wake, and had tried everything he could think of to accomplish that end--but except for brief instants during which he'd roused Rupert enough to force him to swallow a mouthful of water, his father remained lost, his dreams obviously bitter.

For all that bitterness, it seemed Rupert didn't want to wake. Neither did he appear to feel thirst, nor hunger. Sebastian could see for himself that Rupert's injuries weren't severe, no more than the sort of cuts and bruises that would, ordinarily, have made his father shrug, give his faint, ironic smile, and perhaps accept a pair of aspirins, were they offered.

Sebastian took his father's strong, scarred hand in his own, shut his eyes, and prayed, with a fervour he had not known since boyhood. He longed to hear Rupert's quiet voice explain the world until it made sense again.

He'd drifted into sleep himself, Sebastian realized. A thin, grey light now shone around the curtains, and an inconsequential weight pressed against his shoulder. He recognized the weight as that of Willow's slight body. She'd wakened from her restless sleep and come to watch over her friends.

"Hullo, Willow," Sebastian murmured.

"Hi," she answered, with the ghost of a smile. "You been here all night?"

"Not for the entire night, no."

"I keep thinking there's something we should do for them." Willow's small hands straightened the covers. Her teeth caught her lower lip--a habitual gesture, he'd noticed.

"I've been praying," Sebastian confessed.

"That's nice," Willow told him, then frowned. "Rabbi Cohen says sometimes God has to tell us 'no.'" Her face took on the stricken look that had begun to appear with too great a regularity. With a fingertip, she touched a tendril of Buffy's golden hair.

"I'm Jewish," she added, as if perhaps Sebastian had not understood the gist of her previous comment.

"Yes," Sebastian answered, unsure of what else he might tell her.

"I've been going through the library, as much as I could. I need to learn more languages."

Sebastian imagined the girl's "to do" list: finish laundry; return books to library; learn more languages. "A bit of additional learning never goes amiss," he told her.

"I keep finding things that look promising, and thinking, 'I should ask Giles,' or 'Giles can tell me what this means'--and then I remember." She touched Rupert's arm. "And I start worrying, 'what if they never wake up?' See, I love them more than anyone, 'cept maybe Xander and Oz."

"I know that," Sebastian answered, and though it hurt him to say the words, added, "You've been my father's family."

Willow gave him a look: surprised, tender, understanding. She was indeed, as his father had said, a remarkable young woman. "It's good," she told him, in her soft, slightly-breathless voice. "The praying, I mean. I've tried everything else I can think of. And maybe the answer's 'yes,' after all, and we just have to be patient."

"That's my Will," Xander said.

Sebastian started--so intent had he been, he hadn't even heard the boy enter. He glanced to see Xander stretch his angular body out across the foot of the bed, and drop into sleep again. Buffy murmured a few words and turned, pressing her face more firmly into Rupert's shoulder.

In a little while, as if drawn to them from her slumbers, Celeste wandered into the room as well, yawning, her thick, dark hair wild about her face. "Morning," she said, yawning again. "I wondered where you'd all got to."

At the sound of her voice, Xander awoke with a start, and sat, rubbing his eyes like a much younger child. "'lo. It's morning?"

Celeste moved to the end of the bed and stroked his hair. "Yes, Xander dear. So the light tells me."

The boy glanced up with her, his face tight with misery. "What if everything's the same again today? I can't take it."

"Buffy looks like Sleeping Beauty," Celeste said quietly, resting her hand on his shoulder. "Perhaps she'll waken any moment. Most likely she'd just needed the extra rest, poor dear."

"Okay, I know." Willow perched on the edge of the bed, running her fingertips lightly down Rupert's arm. "But it's so un-Buff. It's anti-Buff even." She glanced back over her shoulder at Xander.

"Well, they did kinda go to hell," Xander told her, his dark eyes sympathetic, yet haunted. "Even Moira's still freaked about that one." He rubbed his face roughly, with both hands, leaning back against Celeste and the footboard. "God, I hate this place."

Sebastian watched their faces, as they, in the absence of their natural leaders, looked to him for guidance--not for any qualities of his own, he knew, but because of his resemblance to, and their respect for, his father. For that reason, as a token of honor for the man he so strongly resembled, Sebastian resolved not to disappoint them

He thought of his mother, drifting, pale and disconnected, room to room, not even speaking when spoken to, except to give her LeFaye cousins the most perfunctory of orders. They, in turn, seemed to require only her presence to go about their work.

In truth, Sebastian didn't care what the LeFayes required. This place wasn't healthy for any of them. They needed to act. They needed motion.

"Maybe that's it," he said, utterly convinced that they must, to recover, go elsewhere. All of them, Moira included. He watched two tears stream down Buffy's smooth golden cheeks as she slept, and wondered if she heard them. His heart sang when Willow said the magic word: Appleyard. They would rise and go to Appleyard.

The mere fact of the decision was like a horrid weight lifted from his heart. Yes, that was it. They must leave Mermorgan within the hour, and set forth at once, for what could be their only destination.

Sebastian went in search of his mother.

Drawn to the library by some sort of instinct, he found her at one of the long windows, the cold grey light spilling over her strangely-unlined face. She was, Sebastian had always thought, a very beautiful woman, tall and upright, with those stern, strong, regular features one imagined belonging to the Celtic queens of old. He could quite imagine Queen Boadicea with just such a look, and such an expression, as she swept down upon the hapless Romans in her chariot, savagely intent on driving them from her homeland. Yet, under normal circumstances, Moira was not a woman without humour, and her smiles, her laughter, transformed her sternness. No trace of that humour remained now, and Sebastian worried for her nearly as much as he worried for his father.

"Moira," he said quietly.

His mother did not respond, did not so much as blink.

"Moira?" Sebastian repeated, then, as her pale face remained expressionless, he put an arm round her shoulders. She tensed a little at the touch--her natural, immediate response to any such contact. She'd lived on her nerves too many years to have any other reaction, but Sebastian knew his embrace was not unwelcome. Eventually, Moira's muscles loosened.

"Mum?" he said to her, finally, pulling her close. Her head fell against Sebastian's chest, and suddenly he realized she'd begun to weep, something he'd never seen, or thought to see, from her. It--as the children would say--gave him quite the wiggins.

Smiling a little at the odd term, Sebastian drew his mother entirely into his arms, murmuring small sounds of comfort and encouragement against the bitter tide of her grief. Why shouldn't she grieve? She'd lost as much, or more, than any of them.

Gently, he moved her to a large chair, perching himself on its accompanying ottoman, holding her hands tightly in his own. Like his father's, they were strong hands, and one could see, close-to, lightly scarred, their palms callused. The hands of someone who'd spent her entire life fighting. He could not comprehend the hardness of that life, or why Moira had not long since surrendered to bleakest despair.

As he listened, his mother choked out a confession, one entirely unexpected: sixteen men lay dead in the forest by her will, the greater part of the Watchers' Council, and the men who'd stood above the Watchers' Council. Sixteen men dead, and a journey into hell--no wonder, really, that she was distraught.

Sebastian felt distraught himself, at what she told him. How on earth could he respond? What was right to say to her?

"If one truly repents, Mum," he told her, rubbing the backs of her hands with his thumbs, "There's always forgiveness."

"But that's more or less the point, Seb," Moira answered sadly. "I repent the violence. I repent the necessity--but not the act itself. I would do the same again, as many times as needed."

Sebastian met her eyes, reading the truth in them--feeling that same truth reflected in his own heart. As a priest, he ought, perhaps, to have been appalled. As a LeFaye, or whatever he was, he could not be: he could not help but feel that his mother had done what was necessary.

"Mum," he said, looking down again at her hands. "Had it had been left to me, I'd can't honestly say that I'd have acted differently."

She freed one hand to raise his chin, until the two of them looked face-to-face. Moira's eyes still shone hard and bright with sorrow, but the greater part of her focus seemed to have returned to her. "Perhaps that's true," she said. "And I'm sorry." After a pause, she added, "You've never called me 'Mum' before today, Sebastian."

"That's true," he answered. "Perhaps it's never entirely sunk in before."

For a moment, great sadness shadowed her eyes, and then she regained a touch of that Mona Lisa smile. "I must say, Seb," Moira told him, "I rather like it."

She rose, suddenly brisk. "God, this place, Sebastian! Let's get out of here, shall we?"

"I'd come to see you for that very reason," he told her. "We were thinking Buffy and Dad might do better at Appleyard."

"Appleyard..." Moira repeated the name as if it belonged to a heaven denied her. "Yes, Appleyard. Yes, Seb, that would be lovely."

Buffy woke up all at once, feeling spongy, like she'd been sleeping for days and days--which, for all she knew, she had. She was moving, or something around her was moving, and once she'd rubbed the sleep from her eyes, she realized that she'd been asleep inside a big, old fashioned car--no, a huge car, and that Sebastian was driving, while Celeste gave him a hard time about asking for directions.

Dimly, she remembered Seb carrying her from the house, and being tucked into the back seat. The car had a name, she remembered. It was called a Bentley, and it had a shiny letter "B" for a hood ornament.

"Whom," Sebastian said, at his stuffy British best, "Am I meant to be asking our way from, dearest? A passing sheep?"

Buffy felt sad, like something was pulling on her heart, but that made her smile a little. Any minute now, Seb was going to be making the cluck-cluck sound. She smiled a little more, thinking how embarrassed Willow had been, when Giles caught the two of them talking about that--the cluck-cluck sound of anger.

The back of the old car had seats that faced each other, like the inside of a limo, and on the seat across from her, Moira was reading from a small, crumbly-looking book, while Xander, asleep, leaned up against her shoulder, and Willow leaned against his, like a series of dominoes. She herself had been kind of propped up in a corner, with a blanket over her, while Giles was wedged into the opposite corner.

Buffy stopped smiling. He looked...

He looked like he was dead, pale and waxy, and when she touched his hand, cold. Only when she put her ear against his chest and listened really hard could she tell any different. She looked at Moira in horror.

"Em--" she said, then, louder, "Moira!"

"Hmn?" the older woman glanced up, then marked her place in the book and put it aside. "We're on our way to Appleyard, Buffy," she said kindly.

"Yeah, I remember that part," Buffy answered, "But, Moira..."

"How are you feeling, dear? Any headaches? Depression?"

"I'm fine," Buffy told her impatiently, which was pretty much true. She did feel fine. Just zooming by sheep, and farms, and powerlines, down roads with actual signs made her feel better. "No offense, but I am so, so glad to get away from your place, I can't even tell you."

"No offense taken," Moira said. "I was quite glad to get away from there myself."

"Bad frog!" Willow said, jerking upright. "Whoa!"

"Hey, Will," Buffy told her, watching her friend's eyes slowly come into focus. "Nightmare?"

Willow shrugged, sniffed, yawned, in that order. The look on her face said that whatever she'd dreamed about was better than reality. She looked bruised, and sore, and tired. They all looked tired.

"You're awake," Willow said finally, after she'd gazed at Buffy for a long time. "That's good. Awake is good."

"It's good," Buffy agreed, yawning again.

Willow's eyes flickered to Giles. "He's gonna be all right," she said, sounding more like she was getting ready to cry than she did hopeful.

"Go back to sleep, loves," Moira commanded. "We've still a long journey."

Buffy couldn't sleep, though. She lay in her corner, watching Giles's face, until at last his eyes opened--wide, tired, and a very pale green in color. His hand strayed to the spot over his stomach where the magic sword had impaled him, and then those eyes sought Buffy's face, growing even wider.

It scared her.

Buffy had never seen him look so vulnerable, as if all the armor he'd ever possessed had been torn away, leaving him naked, wounded, defenseless. She read clearly, in his face, who'd driven the blade through--that it hadn't been Angelus, though maybe Angelus had been present.

Buffy knew that she herself had done it, or something that looked like her--and that touched on the place where all their fears came together: if she'd hurt Angel, the one she'd loved so desperately, in exactly that way, what would she do to Giles? And, added to that, even in real life, she was the only person he loved who had ever, deliberately, hurt him--those were the kinds of things hell liked to remind you of, and Buffy knew it hadn't missed the opportunity.

"There! There! There!" Celeste yelled in the front seat, distracting Buffy from her worries.

"I've seen it," Sebastian answered, in his mildly p.o.'d Giles-voice. "There's no need to shout, love."

"Moira's my witness--he always misses the turn-off," Celeste said, twisting in her seat to face them, "And then we go miles before there's a place to get turned round again."

"Well, I haven't missed it this time," Sebastian informed her--which was true.

The big car bumped along the graveled driveway that led to Appleyard, through a forest so different from the one at Mermorgan that Buffy could hardly believe the two were on the same planet, much less in the same country. Light shone through the windows, all kinds of gold and a million shades of green, until the colors made her feel like she was underwater.

"No, you haven't missed anything, Bastian." Celeste smiled and reached to ruffle her husband's hair. Suddenly the happiness just seemed to pour out of her, until it filled up the whole gloomy inside of the Bentley. Sebastian turned his face into his wife's hand, and kissed her palm, saying something to her softly--whatever he'd told her made Celeste give a happy sigh, and smile even more.

"It's heaven," she said, to all of them.

Buffy rested her hand over Giles's, searching his eyes with her own. They'd be all right now, she tried to tell herself, but she still couldn't help being scared. She needed so badly for them to talk, to be able to talk, but at the same time, she was afraid to rush things. She needed to remind him that what he'd seen in that terrible hell-place wasn't real, wasn't her.

Sebastian took the Bentley around a curve, and all at once they were out in the middle of the dark-green, rolling fields, with the sun so bright in Buffy's eyes she couldn't see.

In this temporary blindness, Giles's arms reached out, gathering Buffy close, and if there was desperation in the way he held her, still, there was tenderness too, more tenderness than she'd known in her entire life.