She was walking down a long hall with about a zillion doors, looking for something. The exact nature of the something, Buffy couldn't exactly remember, only that it was important and that she'd know it when she saw it.

If she saw it. So far, it seemed like she'd opened a million of the zillion doors only to find all the rooms exactly alike, even though she couldn't have described how that alikeness one second after she shut each door.

This is dumb, Buffy told herself. You're sleeping, this is a dream, and it doesn't even have the decency to be a prophetic dream. It's just one of those stupid frustration-thingies.

You might as well wake up, her unconscious mind added, and a minute later she did exactly that.

Buffy yawned, rolling over in Giles's big bed--their big bed, she reminded herself. Her eyes felt gritty, and she was just about as ready for a shower as she'd ever been in her life, with the possible exception of post- some of her less successful trips through Sunnydale's sewer system.

Somehow it had gotten to be daytime. Buffy could tell that by the amount of light that leaked in around the long green curtains. Not early daytime, either: she'd been sleeping for a while, and since she had no memory of going to bed under her own steam, Giles must have carried her up here. She had a momentary hope that he might have joined her, but his side of the bed was perfectly smooth, letting her know he hadn't been to bed at all.

Quietly, she slipped out from between the sheets and tip-toed to the rail. Below her, Willow was curled up on the couch with one of the spare blankets over her, and Xander sprawled in the recliner beneath another. Buffy half expected to see Giles asleep at the table with his head pillowed on a book, but he wasn't asleep. All she could see from her vantage-point was his bowed head and slumped shoulders, his left hand slowly turning the pages of a book about the size of a small suitcase.

The slowness of that motion and his slumpy posture made Buffy think that he must be completely exhausted, and her heart went out to him. How many times had he been that tired, and just kept going? A bolt of jumbled emotion flashed through her--anger and sadness and love. It wasn't fair that the two of them had to fight so hard, so often. It wasn't fair that they should have to loose so much, and just keep struggling on.

As she watched, Giles shut the book, propped his elbows on the table and bent his face into his hands. This whole situation had to be so hard on him--on levels Buffy didn't even pretend to understand. She wanted to help, but just didn't know how. She knew she had way more experience than most girls her age, but that wasn't saying much--that kind of experience didn't actually lend itself to unraveling the complex emotions of a forty-plus-year-old man.

For a minute she felt lost, unequal to the situation, unequal to anything--and then Giles turned, his eyes moving upward as if they'd been drawn to hers. Despite his tiredness, he smiled at her, and the light of that smile melted away all Buffy's misgivings: they had each other, they loved each other, and that was all she knew or needed to know.

"Rupert," she called down to him softly. "Come up to me?"

Giles got up from his chair, a little unsteadily, putting one hand on the table for balance. Buffy felt her own hand reach out to him, as if even from a distance she could help him, lend him her strength. She watched him pad barefoot around the furniture, to the foot of the stairs. From where she stood, Buffy couldn't see him as he climbed up to her, and his footsteps were completely soundless, but suddenly he was there, speaking her name in the soft, hushed way that made it sound almost like a prayer.

She moved to the side of the bed, stretching out on the uncreased sheets on his side as she patted, invitingly, the still-warm hollow left by her own body. "Join me?"

A faint smile flickered over Giles's face. "Gladly."

Buffy couldn't help but smile a little as, with unconscious modesty, he turned his back to get out of his khakis--as if there was anything left that she hadn't seen. Giles stepped out of the pants and left them lying, which told her how truly tired he must be, since most of the time he tended to be more than a little anal about matters of neatness. He reached up to pull the soft gray Henley over his head and dropped that too, before turning back to her, wearing only a pair of blue silk boxers.

"Any luck?" Buffy asked softly.

"Something. Perhaps." Giles stretched out on his side, facing her, his head propped up on one hand.

"Glad I could tempt you up here, then."

"The words had begun to swim round and round." He drew one finger down the curve of Buffy's cheek. "Besides which, love, you can always tempt me."

"Hmn...have to keep that in mind." Buffy touched his face in return, saddened by the lines of tiredness and sorrow she could read so clearly there. "You look beat."

"I'm..." His voice trailed off, and he moved closer to kiss her, his lips softly catching Buffy's upper lip as his hand stroked her back, her body shivering with the strength and gentleness of his touch, the slight roughness of his palm and fingertips against the smoothness of her own skin. A familiar electricity shot through her as Giles's tongue slipped into her mouth, exploring its interior with a delicacy that belied the firmness elsewhere as the strong hand began to knead her buttock.

Giles knew her so well, every hidden place and nerve ending of her, and a familiar heat began to build between her legs as that same hand moved slowly down her thigh, then up again, along the inside of her other leg. His fingers cupped her center and stopped, but Buffy, with a feeling like her heart beating against his hand, could not let it stop there--not even with her friends asleep downstairs, possibly ready to wake up at the most inconvenient time. She pressed herself against him, wanting the full intensity of his touch, encouraging those callused fingertips to explore her hidden folds and bring every last nerve-ending singing to life.

Giles's eyes half closed, and he smiled slightly, enigmatically. Somehow he always knew ways to do more for her than Buffy even realized she wanted. He stroked her slowly, lightly, keeping a gentle but almost maddening pressure against her opening, her labia, the nub of her clitoris. Buffy had to fight to keep herself silent, to stifle the sounds of her arousal against the warmth of her lover's mouth. A humming built and built inside her, but whether that was some sort of magic or Giles hushing the intensity of his own cries within her, Buffy couldn't tell. All she knew was that they communicated without words: in one instant she rolled to her back, opening herself to him, in the next he'd risen above her, filling her, moving in her, all of it done so silently that it was like lovemaking in a dream, noiseless and timeless.

She watched him the whole time, and Giles watched her, the two of them moving in perfect synchronization, as if they fought a choreographed battle that would never have a loser, and never result in any loss or any pain. Buffy's spine arched off the bed at the exact moment Giles sheathed himself to his absolute depth in her body. Desperately, Buffy clung to his back, her nails biting into his skin where the scars had once been, but even that didn't make him cry out. His eyes opened wider, catching hers, holding hers with an even greater intensity, until she had the sensation of falling out of herself and into him.

Buffy tried to make herself wait, to let Giles catch up to her, but she didn't need to wait, they were together, always together, spiraling into an eternity in which their bodies themselves had no meaning, and only the joyful joining of those bodies mattered.

In the aftermath, they lay together, Giles shielding her despite her strength--she'd never find a man who was physically stronger she was, but Buffy didn't need a man for that kind of strength. She wasn't weak, and she wasn't helpless in any respect, but what she wanted--what she'd always wanted--was someone with whom she felt secure. Even in the midst of all the pain with Angel, that's what her heart had cried out for: a man she could trust not only with her secrets, but with her whole self. A man who would give himself to her, with nothing held back. A man she could offer herself to and not be rejected.

"I've been wrong about many things in my life, under many circumstances," Giles said softly, his voice humming in her ear. "About one thing, though, I have absolutely no regrets, only an eternal thankfulness."

"Oh?" Buffy answered, "And what's that?"

"For the former, that I allowed myself to love you." Giles's fingertips traced the line of her temple and her cheekbone, his eyes still holding hers, their color a misty green, like a field of grass after rain. "For the latter--" He smiled slightly, the corners of those green eyes crinkling. "Ah, Buffy, even to myself I sound rather like a character in a certain sort of romance novel."

"That's okay." Buffy smiled in return, watching Giles's face light as he looked at her. "As you know, I like that kind of romance."

Giles chuckled. "So you do."

"So, why are you thankful?"

Giles lay quiet for a little while, so quiet Buffy thought she might just have to kick him if he'd fallen asleep.

He hadn't, though. "I'm thankful that you cared for me, and loved me," he answered at last, "Because there was a time..."

"When you didn't think I ever would?"

"Just so." Giles bent to kiss her, the lightest brush of a kiss, on her forehead. "And whatever else might happen, that is the greatest gift I could ever receive."

He left her speechless, but there wasn't really any need for more words between them. Buffy burrowed deeper against his broad chest, feeling, for that moment at least, utterly safe, secure not only in the knowledge that Giles would never let any harmful thing reach her, but that he would keep all her harmful thoughts and secret fears at bay. The two of them might not have forever, but the time they had was...well, even with all the threats and uncertainties that surrounded them, the time they had was still wonderful. No, not just wonderful--it was perfect, and lying beside him, Buffy could make herself believe that it would last forever.

Giles's warmth still filled her, and Buffy locked her legs around his hips, holding him to her, keeping him there, not quite able to bear, yet, the minute in which she'd have to let him go. Giles's arms were warm around her shoulders, his chest silkily rough against her breasts. He'd buried his face in her hair, his breath warm on her skin. The weathered softness of his cheek and jaw, and the slight prickliness of his overnight stubble brushing Buffy's forehead delighted her.

"My Giles," Buffy breathed into his ear. "My love."

She felt him smile against her.

hr

The blues seemed too blue, and the sun had an almost citrus quality, flowing over the lawn and the rosebushes--an odd enough colour that the very intensity of the yellows and oranges made Moira rather suspect all she saw. She stood on the white-painted porch, watching her fiancé at work amongst the plants, but Wesley's secatures snipped and snapped in a manner that was most alarming, and that too made her ill at ease.

This wasn't right. It was, in some indefinable way, rather threatening, and she didn't like it. She'd far preferred her early dreams, with their soft, timeless, floating quality--the pastel colours of that world, the passionate, yet somehow gentle and unhurried lovemaking.

She missed it. God, she missed it, and she wanted that time back.

What was that her grandmother--whom she'd always think of as the REAL Lady LeFaye--had said. "Kindness is fleeting, and it rarely returns."

Moira tried to tell the old woman, who now stood beside her on the wooden porch, a rook-like figure in her long black frock and pointed-toed, lace-up shoes, that she was wrong, eternally wrong, that she knew nothing of love or of human nature, but in her heart Moira could only suspect that she was fooling herself. Her grandmother knew everything, always had done, and in her own experience the tender moments of life had proved transitory indeed.

Lady LeFaye sang to her the words of an old song, "'Love grows old, and waxes cold, and fades away like morning dew."

"No!" Moira snapped. "You're wrong." Across the garden, Wesley straightened, turning in her direction. Unhurriedly, he began to cross the still-slightly-uneven grass. He'd cut a rose, and carried it in his right hand.

"Tell her, love," Moira pleaded, wishing that she could see his eyes. "Tell her she's wrong, that she doesn't know us at all."

"Isn't this what you wanted?" Wesley held out a bloom so very crimson, and so ragged, it appeared to be bleeding, and Moira found herself reluctant to touch it in the extreme.

Lady LeFaye cackled delightedly.

"'Tisn't," Moira answered sharply. "I don't care for that rose. It's unpleasant." A red dew fell in slow droplets from the tattered petals, steaming on the white boards beneath her feet.

"I should have thought you'd be accustomed to such things by now." Wesley gave her a look so hard and sharp it seemed his lovely, soulful eyes had turned to cold blue stones. Moira shuddered, and shuddering, remembered.

The false garden flew away, and with it the false inhabitants who were, she supposed, only the symbols provided by her unconscious mind. While she'd dreamed, she'd been scarcely aware of her own body, but now it closed in around her, weighty and painful. She lay, motionless but wanting to move, in a grey-tinged darkness that smelt of ice, antiseptic, and countless unnamed chemicals.

She would have done anything to escape from the memories that assaulted her in that moment, but the time for running away had passed. She'd run before, and that flight had only brought her here, to this place, which Moira supposed must be some hospital or another. She didn't care. Despair blanketed her entirely, a far more cumbersome cover than the light sheet spread over her physical body.

Wesley...oh, God, her poor sweet Wesley. Her lost Wesley, sweet no more.

He'd been standing in the shadowed garden, waiting to kiss her, to change her, to make her into a creature such as he was now. She'd run from him the way she'd never expected to run from anyone, much lest her well-loved, well-trusted Wesley.

But then, that was the point, wasn't it? That her Wesley existed no more. His eyes were no longer soulful because no soul lay behind them, only a dead, hungry, unfeeling monster, a monster that wanted nothing more than to drink her life away.

She'd run, she'd leaped and she'd fallen, as once before she'd leaped and fallen through a glass dome that exploded into thousand of shards around her, plummeting to the icy flagstone floor that shattered her leg.

This time there had been no dome, no glass like stars around her, only empty air and the distant rumble and whoosh of cars below. She'd struck one, must have done, because she could remember, now, the screams, the hollow reverberation as her body hit the bonnet, the windscreen buckling with the velocity and force of her impact. She'd lain there, helpless, hearing voices whilst above her swam the ravaged faces with their expressions of not yet believing that that they'd seen what they knew they had seen. The owners of those faces had expected a corpse, expected the blood that ran so freely to be her life's blood, the outflowing of her mortal wounds--but it hadn't been. It was only the blood of her almost-unendurable pain.

Moira wondered what it would take for that pain to become unbearable. She'd come near with Helena, so near that if Wesley had not interrupted that moment, she'd have easily allowed her once-Slayer to take what she would not give to Wesley himself. What did that say about the nature of her love? Perhaps only that her Wes, her real Wesley, had taught her during their short time together, and she could not betray him by disregarding his principles: what he'd loved in her, she could not throw away.

"But I wanted to die," she whispered into the semi-dark room, knowing that was true, but also that, as had often been the case, she wouldn't do what she wanted. Not this time. Perhaps never. That being true, she wanted and NEEDED to act.

In the past, a woman had kept her company, murmuring words that Moira could no longer remember, but this night, so far as she could tell, she lay alone. She had wanted to die, yet she had not died, and from the way her arms were trussed, and her body enwound with tubes and metres, she could not fight her way free enough to complete the job.

Her throat burned, and her mouth felt like a desert. Her head spun with what she could tell was quite an impressive number of drugs, and yet the pain beat underneath like tribal drums throbbing a message across the Amazon. None of it mattered, not the pain, not the discomfort--the only thing that mattered was that Wesley was gone, never to come back again.

Almost soundlessly, through cracked and bleeding lips, Moira spoke a prayer to a goddess so ancient that not even her family remembered the Old One's proper name. It was a prayer for enlightenment, for inspiration in the face of a lost cause, and as she spoke an idea came to her, perfect and jewel-like. Moira examined the idea in all its facets and could find no flaw--all it required was a spell, and an easy spell at that, so easy that it could be performed by a novice, provided the novice was one of her own blood.

Moira's eyes drifted shut, and a hint of a smile curved her torn lips. Willow knew the spell. Willow would help her. They were cousins, after all, LeFayes both, and in the end the girl would do what was asked of her--it wasn't in her nature to disobey.

Still smiling, Moira fell into a deep and restful sleep.