Tribulations - Chapter 8

Buffy had remained unusually silent during the short walk to Folger Hall, a building which contained, for the most part, only the Council Chamber, a Common Room, and accommodations for the senior Councilors.

Although Giles knew his way to the building well enough, a first year Candidate with her left arm in a sling had been assigned to lead the way--an assignment that made him more than a little uncomfortable. The poor girl had a shocky look: her face was unnaturally white and her hands trembled. Nearly the first thing she'd said, upon being introduced, was that she'd lost not only her Handler, but the other two members of her Pod, and the fact that she conveyed this information in Latin did very little to dispel Giles's concern. She'd scarcely responded when he thanked her, in the same language, for her pains.

Once inside their borrowed chamber, Buffy disappeared into the bathroom, leaving Giles alone and uncomfortable in some anonymous Councilor's bedroom--a chamber luxurious by Watcher-standards, especially compared to the chilly cells occupied by most Candidates. All traces of the previous owner had been removed, and the room reminded Giles of something from a Gentlemen's club, all dark wood and darker upholstery. Buffy would most likely find it oppressive; he might have considered it, under different circumstances, rather cozy.

He only hoped the room's former tenant had not been Horace Stanley.

Giles found himself pacing, like an animal in a too-small cage. When he paused outside the bathroom door, he heard the shower running, but not the loud, cheerful, generally off-key singing that most often accompanied his love's ablutions. He sighed, wondering if Buffy had still felt unclean in the aftermath of their admittedly revolting ordeal, or if the shower might, in fact, be an attempt to avoid him.

Giles sighed again, and crossed to the window, wishing that at least a bit of the sunshine's warmth might penetrate the thick reinforced glass. He shivered, feeling cold again, as he had so many times that Summer. Dear God, how many near brushes with death could one man have? Given his preferences, he'd have preferred, by far, a return to his usual run of frequent-but-minor head injuries.

He leaned his cheek against the windowpane. At least they'd killed the monster, that much was certain--he with his magic, Buffy with her strength and her sword, Seb...well, that had been unexpected. In what Giles guessed was likely a bit of a panic, his son had blown the demon to kingdom come, showering them all with its noxious blood.

Giles smiled faintly, torn between concern and amusement. Sebastian's use of the Wild Magic might have been more controlled than his own, but the results still tended toward the spectacular and the unpredictable. Ironically, it had been Sebastian's heroics that nearly killed him, the sudden gout of demon blood flooding his open wounds, invading his lungs.

Or perhaps...

Giles didn't want to give form to his imaginings, but the thought persisted. He could think of no other explanation. Perhaps that blood, immortal and self-protecting, was the agent of his healing. Perhaps he was, even now, changing, becoming other, becoming something evil...

Giles shook his head violently. No, it would not be. It could not. But a thought, a memory, returned to him--he'd been there, wherever there might be. He'd seen the light, heard the voices call to him, felt the absolute peace and the utter certainty...and afterward, when the stony walls of the world built themselves back up around him, he'd felt the sorrow and the bitter regret for what he'd almost touched, almost seen. He'd sunk back into his weary, aching body.

Sebastian, weeping, sure that he was dying, had held Giles whilst he coughed, painfully, the demonic foulness from his lungs.

And now...

Now Giles stared down into the ravaged Compound grounds, seeing nothing. He groaned, even as he flexed his unmarked hands.

The right hand bore not the smallest scar from the dreadful injury inflicted by the vampire Helena. He hadn't liked to dwell upon it, certainly hadn't wanted a word mentioned to Buffy, but his doctors had told him he ought to count himself lucky not to lose the hand altogether, that he'd most likely never regain full use of his fingers--yet, at the moment, the appendage felt supple and strong. He'd become quite accustomed to the stiffness and the dull, lingering ache of the fingers Angelus so cruelly splintered just over a year before, but those, too, seemed entirely healed. He could have played the guitar with all the fire of his Ripper days, had he so desired.

Yes, those aches were gone, and along with them the never-quite-extinguished pains in his ribs and head. He might never have taken part in the recent battle, so entirely unmarked was he.

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, old man, Giles told himself--but when had that ever been good advice? The original gift horse, that of Troy, had been filled to the brim with angry Greeks, quite prepared to murder all and sundry. Far better to have looked, really.

Giles sighed yet again. Slowly, he began to unbutton his borrowed shirt, his fingers clumsy for no other reason than that they were no longer accustomed to working as they were meant to work.

The room contained an old-fashioned mirror on a stand, the sort that could be tilted to whatever angle one pleased. Giles eased the shirt back from his shoulders, half fearing what the glass might reveal to him.

He studied himself in the glass--not out of vanity, but because he knew the unpleasant truth, if there was one, must be faced. Thank God, no scales or thorns or strange corrugations as yet marred his flesh. Except for the light mat of hair on his chest, that trailed in a narrower line to disappear beneath the waistband of his trousers, the mirror showed him only smooth, unmarked skin.

Holding his breath, Giles turned, craning his neck to look over his shoulder at the reflection of his back in the glass.

The mirror showed him nothing. A particular nothing--not the absence of a reflection, as one might find with a vampire, but the image of a body he no longer recognized as his own. He'd lost a great deal of weight in the past weeks, so much, in fact, that he may well have--temporarily, no doubt--weighed less than Sebastian. It seemed strange to him to see such sharp definition to his muscles, to see the little crescents of shadow beneath the knobs of his spine.

There had been times, especially at first, when the scars were barely healed, that he'd often stood in just such a position, staring at the ruined landscape of his skin. Those scars had gone now: the ugly puckered one from where Jenny shot him with a crossbow; the marks of his night with Angelus, the scars of being burned and gouged and beaten. All had gone as if they'd never been. As if those endless, terrible, unforgettable hours had never been endured.

Once Giles might have said he'd do anything--nearly anything--to be free from those marks. Now he reached out, furiously, and spun the mirror on its gimbals. The wooden framed squeaked and rocked in protest, and the alternating flash of silver and darkness disturbed his sight. Giles put a hand up to cover his mouth, stifling the gasp of some emotion he could not even give a name.

He'd been afraid, deathly afraid, many times in his life, but never so afraid of the unknown--always, his job, his calling, had been to give the unknown a name, to bring it into the realm of that which could be defined, that which could be fought.

A further thought occurred to him--what was he to tell Buffy? How was he to explain? Had her Slayer senses already detected the taint within him, causing her silence, causing her withdrawal to a place where she could scrub the pollution of his touch from her body?

But she never withdrew from Angel, supplied his traitorous mind. Giles made a second sound deep in his throat, of disgust with himself. How dare he doubt her? The woman who occupied an ever-increasing portion of his heart was not the callow girl who'd pined after a vampire, any more than he was the stuffy, tweed-clad bumbler who'd owed his entire allegiance to the Council of Watchers.

Go to her, you idiot, Giles commanded himself. Whatever has happened...whatever will happen, you owe her that, at the very least.

The water still ran when he returned to the bathroom door--had been running, Giles realized, for an alarmingly long time. He knocked sharply on the door. "Buffy? All right in there, are you?"

She didn't answer, though Giles thought perhaps he heard a bit of a sob over the rush of the shower.

"Buffy, my love, can you hear me?" Still no response. Giles tried the knob and found the door locked--odd, that. She'd never locked him out before.

"Dearest, I'm worried for you. Don't be alarmed, but I intend to come in." The lock was nothing. He tripped its mechanism with an unbent paperclip in less than a minute.

The shower curtain was drawn, but through it he could plainly see the outline of Buffy's body. Like him, she'd gotten thinner, but she could scarcely spare the weight. He'd expected a gust of warm, steamy air to greet him when the door opened, but instead the room felt dank, chilly. Giles opened a cupboard, locating within its depths a large, thick towel.

"Buffy," he said softly, soothingly, reaching behind the curtain to twist off the taps. The water that flowed from them was icy, and when he opened the curtain entirely, he saw that his love had gone nearly blue with the cold. She stood hunched, arms wrapped around herself, teeth chattering.

Her face jerked away from him when Giles touched her back, and a low moan emerged from her throat. Hurriedly, he wrapped her in the towel, not even pausing before he lifted Buffy free from the tub. Her cold wetness seeped through his clothes, and Giles balanced her upper body against his shoulder as he stopped by the still-open cupboard to secure a second towel, and a third.

Buffy sobbed bitterly throughout, and continued to sob as he set her in the armchair by the fireplace. The coal for the fire had already been laid. Giles set it alight with a thought, thankful for the fingers of warmth the blaze sent out into the room. Concentrating once more on the matter at hand, he used one of the towels to briskly dry Buffy's hair, the other to stroke the chilly water from her skin. Her palms, and the soles of her feet had gotten quite wrinkled--what was it she called that? Pruning? Well, she had indeed most thoroughly pruned.

Giles stripped the wet covering away from her, leaving the towel to lie, for that moment, on the hearth. Absently, he ran his hands over the usually smooth perfection of her skin, feeling instead the damp cold, and the gooseflesh. It had been so long since he'd seen her so fragile, so desolate and desperate, he hardly remembered how to handle such occasions--all he could think to do was strip the duvet from the bed, tuck her securely within its warm folds and take her, once more, into his arms.

He sat with her in the chair opposite the now rather damp one she'd occupied, cradling her cold body against his warm chest, her damp head pillowed on his shoulder. Even now, Buffy no longer seemed childlike, only possessed by a sorrow so deep it could not be borne in any rational manner. Giles murmured to her, meaningless words he himself could not comprehend, and held her with increasing firmness as the violence of her shivers increased.

After a time, Buffy lay still against him, her eyes fixed upon the fire, what seemed a sorrowful resignation having replaced her earlier fear.

"Love," Giles said to her. "What was this? What's happened?"

Buffy reached out beneath the duvet and took his right hand, linking her fingers with his. "When I was little..." she said at last.

Giles waited for her to continue.

"Sometimes my mom and dad would fight."

"I know, dearest." Giles pushed the nearly-dry hair back from her face. Silken strands clung to his fingers, crackling with static. "I know," he repeated, unable to think of another word to say.

"When they did that, when it was bad, I'd sometimes take the quilt off my bed and kinda drape it over the play-table in my room, you know? And then I'd sit under there, in that dark safe cave-place, with my little flashlight, and I'd talk to my Barbies, telling them everything would be okay soon. And then I'd read them one of my Trixie Belden books, and everything really would be okay, because none of the badness could reach us there. We were in Quiltworld." Her lovely face turned up to his, such a weight of sorrow in her sapphire eyes Giles could scarcely bear to see it. "I loved Quiltworld. Sometimes I didn't want to come out. I just wanted to live there." She gave a slight, sad smile. "My mom would bring me soup. Chicken and stars."

"Your favourite," Giles said, not knowing another way to respond.

"My favorite," Buffy echoed, curling her body closer into his. "Do you know that you're like my Quiltworld now, Giles? I'd do anything to keep you safe. Do you know how much I love you?"

Giles touched her cheek, turning her face toward his. Softly, he kissed her brow, and then her soft, yielding lips. Buffy's warmth had returned to her, and despite her lingering sadness, the sense of desperation seemed to have departed with the cold. When he kissed her again, Buffy's lips parted. Her strong, slender arm slipped behind his shoulders, and she kissed him in return, with a fierceness, a passion, beyond any she'd previously shown.

Giles put his hands round her waist, lifting and turning her so that she knelt astride his thighs, and Buffy paused with her hands upon his shoulders, gazing down at him with a look more inscrutable than any Sphinx's. With his own two good hands, he traced over her shoulderblades, under her arms, down the slope of her waist and over the double curve of her bum, down her thighs and up again, rubbing her taut, delectable arse, spreading her thighs a bit wider.

Her body arched forward, and Giles stroked her right nipple, using just the tip of his tongue. She tasted of the cold water, a flavour oddly like snow. He licked down the curve of the underside, then back up again, circling the nipple until it hardened into a round little knot. Buffy shivered again--this time, not with the cold.

Giles kept his left hand on her bottom whilst the right rose to rub lightly over her nipple and aureole, then up to trace from her collarbone and down again, following the sweet upper slope of her breast with his fingertips, his palm rubbing up the lower slope and back to the nipple again.

Buffy moaned, sorrow and arousal at war in her eyes.

"Love me, love me," she murmured to him, with a feverish need, and Giles rose, holding her to him, her legs wrapped round his waist. He could think of nothing he wanted more--and then it struck him. He'd no protection, and he doubted Buffy had either.

"Damn!" he exclaimed. "Love, we haven't--"

"Love me," she commanded, holding him closer still. God, he wanted her! He wanted to damn love her, and to damn the consequences.

And yet, he turned, setting Buffy back in the chair, hearing her moan of frustration, which changed to a murmur of something else as ran his hand up her inner calves, up the insides of her thighs, parting them so wide she was forced to hook her knees over the chair's padded arms. She lay open before him, all those complicated folds of her womanhood within his reach, but he would not touch her there--not yet. He kissed her between her breasts, then down on the soft skin below her navel. Next he touched his tongue inside the navel itself--more coldness there, that warmed with his attentions. He rested a hand on each of her knees, rubbing slightly--a sensation he knew Buffy found mildly ticklish, yet entirely erotic, then drew his hands up and down the lengths of her thighs, stroking that velvet-soft skin, so sensitive, so arousing. He could feel her heat build, and he breathed the warm, clean, spicy scent of her, his own desire stirring, growing, until it was nearly painful.

"Giles, Giles," she breathed, and her hand moved downward, as if she meant to touch herself, if he would not touch her. Instead, he caught hold of her hand, linking his fingers with Buffy's, as she had linked hers with his. She moaned again as he bent lower, blowing softly against her, then touched his tongue-tip to her clitoris, teasing it out of hiding. Buffy was so sensitive, he knew, the secret was barely to touch her--just the slightest motion, the slightest hint of a caress could often bring her near the brink.

She surprised him, though, by sliding down from the chair, directly into his lap, rubbing herself against him, her arms circling his neck, her firm breasts pressing against his bare chest. She reached down between them to unzip his trousers, then to work the button that held them closed.

"I don't care," she murmured, pressing down against him. "I don't, Giles. I don't."

That confused him rather--did she not care that they take sufficient precautions, or did she mean to tell him something else entirely? Her hands traveled over his shoulders, feeling the impossible, and then she was gone from him, back into the bathroom, where Giles heard a variety of unidentifiable objects striking the tile floor. Seconds later Buffy returned, flushed, triumphant, waving a small foil packet.

"Yay, me!" she said softly.

Giles climbed somewhat unsteadily to his feet, and stood looking at her--though not for long. Buffy began to prowl around him, each circuit bringing her closer, until she stood just behind, her face pressed to his back, her hands pushing down his trousers, then his boxers, lifting the elastic waistband carefully over his erection. Giles stepped free of the double circle, wanting to turn back toward her, but Buffy stopped him with a hand on his hip. He shivered lightly as wisps of her silken hair brushed over his skin.

Still behind him, still preventing his turning, Buffy unrolled the luckily-located condom over his length, her slightest touch bringing Giles so close he wondered if he'd be able to contain himself.

Attuned to him, sensing that closeness, Buffy backed away again, leaving him alone at the center of the room whilst she stretched out on her side atop the fresh but disordered sheets. "Think of some Latin verbs, Giles," she commanded, soft-voiced, "Then love me."

"I could start with Amo, Amas, Amat," Giles answered, catching her eyes with his--and this time, Buffy seemed reluctant to glance away.

She smiled, a little of the shadow leaving her. "Hey, I actually know that one. I love, you love, etcetera."

"Truer words were never spoken," Giles said, and lay down beside her.

Buffy leaned forward a little to kiss him, one of those sweet kisses, a counterpart rather than a contrast to the fiery ones she'd given him before. Again her breasts brushed his chest, and her upper leg slid up his thigh, over his hip, then curled around him, drawing him closer, as she reached to guide him inside her. "We'll always be us, won't we?" she asked. "Nothing will ever change that?"

"Always," Giles answered, knowing how close he had been to making that a lie. He began to move in her, slowly at first, then harder, the two of them rolling until Buffy lay on her back and Giles over her. The bed rocked with the force of their joining and Buffy's thighs gripped him fiercely, holding him to her as if her physical strength alone could prevent them ever being parted.

Giles wanted exactly such an eternity: sorrow melting into love and pain into pleasure. It shamed him that he'd been tempted by the light, that he hadn't struggled harder against the force that tried to take him from her side. He wanted only her, his Buffy, the two of them as they were that day, growing and changing in some things perhaps, but forever side by side.

When they were both spent, Giles lay over her, struggling to catch his breath, his back stinging where Buffy's nails had scraped his skin.

"Did I hurt you?" she asked, her great eyes gazing up at him as if they could see into his soul.

"No, my love," Giles answered, twining his fingers into the spun gold of her hair. "I believe I shall live."

He'd meant it as a jest, but Buffy's eyes darkened again, tears shining in their blueness. "I think it was a dream," she murmured. "I think it was all a dream. I'm safe. You're safe. I'm safe here with you."