Tribulations - Chapter 38

Hours passed during which Wesley did nothing but watch Moira fall and rise, with a strangely wavelike regularity, from sleep into wakefulness and back again. In all that time he never released her hand, although he wondered what possible comfort she might derive from the pressure of his lifeless touch against her warm, living one. Perhaps, to some extent, he held her for his own solace: with that warmth beneath his fingers he could almost, almost pretend.

Now and then, too, when Moira's face shifted into lines of pain or trouble, he spoke softly to her, stroking her brow or her cheek until the sorrow smoothed itself away. Even in her periods of consciousness, she seldom spoke, although each time her eyes opened they held more of herself, more of his Moira, and less of the sharp-edged watchfulness he'd found when he'd first returned to her.

For himself, as Wesley waited--though for what, he could not have said--both his invading demon's mocking presence and the despairing voice of his own guilt and shame seemed to fade. His all-encompassing hunger for the heat and passion of human blood not longer consumed him, and for the first time since his terrible restoration, Wesley felt something akin to peace.

Some time past midnight, as Moira lay quiet, Wesley leaned close to her, laying his head beside hers on the pillow. When Moira did not stir, he moved a little closer, trying to breathe in her familiar, beloved scent, the essences of cinnamon, vanilla, fire, that always seemed to cling to her skin. Perhaps it was only imagination, a variety of wishful thinking, but Wesley imagined that he'd captured at least a ghost of that perfume. To gain no more from their closeness, though--the thought that he might, in fact, be forever incapable of more--nearly broke his heart.

The spare black hands of the clock on the wall crept from midnight toward one in the morning. Wesley wondered if this officially qualified as "the wee hours of the night."

Or, perhaps, to cite another cliche´, "the dark night of the soul."

"Do you blame me, Wesley?" Moira asked of him, suddenly and quite unexpectedly; Wesley had been absolutely certain that she slept. He startled violently.

"Er...that is, for what?"

"That I've changed you in this way." Moira's eyes, blurred and swollen, sought his with something near desperation.

Wesley had to look away. How could he, who'd done this unspeakable harm to a woman he so dearly loved, have blamed her for even an instant? And yet he had blamed her, in his heart, however briefly, and he could not bear for Em to read that in his eyes.

"Wesley?"

He wished with all his unbeating heart that he'd been able to answer quickly; he hated to hear the uncertainty in her voice.

Summoning all the caution he could muster, Wesley took her hand between both of his. "Moira, love, I have to confess to you...it was very painful. Terribly painful physically, and I felt such..." His voice broke; for a moment he could not continue.

Moira's hand moved slightly inside his hold, perhaps trying to withdraw from his touch, but Wesley forced himself to go on. "It's odd--I've lived more or less my entire life in a welter of shame, guilt, unworthiness...and yet, this..."

Moira's hand grew still. Her eyes gazed up at him with what he dared to hope might be some vestige of love, or sympathy.

Out of habit rather than need, Wesley paused again to catch his breath, beseeching her with his own eyes. "I might, now and then have acted in ways that could be construed as...well, questionable. My whole presence here in Sunnydale, the way I behaved... But, still, that I could remember, I'd never done anything willfully, unquestionably, wrong. I had never killed, or hurt anyone--or anything, for that matter-- for pleasure. I had never been...been a monster."

"It was never you," Moira answered, softly, reflectively. "There is nothing monstrous about you, my love." The moment the words left her lips, Wesley read in Moira's face her realization of the irony of what she'd said. "Oh, my poor Wesley," she murmured.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, a monster is what I've become, Em. Perhaps now even more so than before: neither one thing nor the other, the two parts of me warring against one another for as long as I live."

"It's said that we've all our share of angel and devil, intermixed." Moira's eyes left him, fixing upon the sickly-coloured tiles of the acoustical ceiling.

Wesley said nothing.

"In England," Moira told him, "I did a terrible thing, Wesley, with perhaps far less than your excuse. Yet, I could not see any other way out of the situation."

Wesley waited for her to continue, knowing that if Moira called an act "terrible," he could most likely expect to be deeply shocked. And yet, he could not find in himself any inclination to blame her. Neither for any act she meant to confess, nor for his own transmutation.

"In England," Moira said flatly, "I lured the old men of the Council into Mermorgan Wood, and there I killed them all. Not with my own hands, or course. That would have been too direct, and when were we LeFayes ever direct?" She drew in a shallow, shaky breath, ripples of pain passing over her smooth skin. "A great many things, though, live within that forest," she continued, "And when I am walk amongst them, they follow my will." A tear, which Wesley knew to be almost totally saltless, slipped down Moira's bruised cheek. "And so, unlike you, my dearest, I can hardly claim for myself innocence of acts that are willfully wrong."

Wesley rose, took Moira's face between his palms and, gently and sweetly as possible, kissed her torn mouth. "Oh, God, Moira," he said, sitting down again and resting his folded arms on the bed-rail. "We are quite a pair, aren't we?"

Moira made a sound that might have been laughter. "And neither or us will accept any release from our own ceaseless self-flagellations, shall we? What does it matter that you were made a vampire quite against your will, and without your misplaced soul could not hope to resist the demon that possessed your body? Or that I had little choice but to act as I did, if I hoped to save our friends lives, and the sad remnant of honest Watchers from their leaders' mechanations."

"Quite right," Wesley answered, giving a soft, dry laugh of his own. "If one is so careless as to misplace one's soul, one deserves to suffer. Besides which, if I'm to retain my present soul, I believe the requirement is that I never again know perfect happiness."

"That shouldn't be difficult, love," Moira said, with the slightest hint of a smile. "After all, we are Watchers. Buffy and her friends would most likely add to that, 'And British.'" She omitted any mention of what had become of her, or how whatever remained of her life must almost certainly be a struggle of the most wearying and painful sort.

"Our plans..." Wesley began, hesitantly. "That is, Em...I know our lives can't be, now, as we planned..."

"No old-fashioned church wedding, do you mean?" Moira said, with gentle irony.

"Well, it might be inconvenient, after all, in my current state." Wesley met Moira's eyes again, pleading with her to read his true meaning beneath the lightness of his words.

"Hmn, yes, a witch and a vampire might prove just a bit too outre´ for the average clergyman. Perhaps we ought to consider a civil ceremony?"

Wesley pressed a hand to his eyes, no longer able to bear this mutual bravery in the face of all they'd lost.

"Ah, Wesley, my love." Moira's fingertips brushed his arm, all she could manage, though Wesley knew she must long to draw him close, to hold him tightly in her once-strong arms. "It destroys me, to see you grieve so. Can't we find our courage in each other?"

"Our courage?" Wesley straightened, uncovering his eyes. "I'll never leave you, Emmy. Do you know that in your heart? Do you believe it?"

"Of course I do, my love," Moira answered gently, not speaking the other words Wesley read in her face, which had to be: And I will try not to leave you, either.

All evening Maria del Ciello had felt a restlessness that not even an evening's gluttonous feeding had been able to relieve. She'd drunk so much blood in so short a time that she figured her eyes must just about glow red instead of yellow when she put her game face on. The feeling disturbed her, mostly because, try as hard as she could, she couldn't seem to find its source.

Then again, maybe she was making mountains out of molehills. Maybe she just felt weird because she and the girls had decided to paint the town red in L.A., instead of back home in Sunnydale. Maybe she was just homesick for the Hellmouth.

They'd meant their night out as a celebration, of course. The king is dead, long live the queens. Bye-bye Wesley; Undead Grrls Rule.

The All You Can Eat Blood Buffet aside, though, things hadn't turned out the way they'd planned. Or at least not the way Maria had planned. For one thing, Lisa was getting on her nerves in a big way. Admittedly, her little Kansas cupcake was a cutie, but just how vapid could one bloodsucker be? Not that Lisa would have any idea as to what vapid meant, but you'd think, every now and then, that some sort of actual thought would actually pass through her pretty little head, even if it was just on its way to somewhere else.

As companions went, Lisa really was almost enough to make her miss Crazy Helena.

Problem number two was Wesley's last creation, Melissa. Not that she didn't like Melissa a whole lot. Not in that way, oddly enough--but, especially for a new vamp she was tough, smart, sassy and had heaps of the nerve and creativity that made her pretty interesting to be around. Unfortunately, although those qualities were ones Maria valued in herself, and that must have made a great impression on anyone who'd interviewed formerly-living-Melissa for a job, they also meant that Sunnydale was starting to feel just a little bit small for the two of them.

As in, although Maria enjoyed Melissa's company no end, she was also starting to get that prickly feeling at the nape of her neck, the one that told her to watch her back, that things were building toward a showdown. Maria preferred to avoid a showdown if at all possible: there was too great a possibility that she'd lose.

"Oh, look, Sunnydale!" Lisa trilled from the back seat of Spike's DeSoto. Maria gritted her teeth. Time for another round of "Let's State the Obvious."

Not for the first time in the past twenty-four hours, she wondered where Spike had gotten himself to. Not off drowning his sorrows, she hoped, or moaning about his poor little lost Princess Drusilla. Maria had actually started enjoying Spike's company once he'd gotten off that kick, and right now she wanted to feel him out about some sort of alliance between the two of them. That was, if he hadn't already worked something out with good ol' Mel. Damn, she hated this: the whole thing had started to feel like some twisted version of Survivor, only minus the rice, rats and less-than-attractive naked men.

Sure enough, though, Lisa was right. Maria had hardly noticed before, but they'd actually passed the outskirts and were heading into Sunnydale's industrial district on their way across town to their dockside home. The weird thing was, instead of dying down, the restless feeling she'd noticed before seemed to grow exponentially with every yard they traveled.

Maria shifted in her seat, lit up a cigarette one-handed, even rolled down the window an inch to let the fresh wind coming off the ocean blast over her skin.

"You feel it, don't you?" Melissa said from the seat beside her. She sat really quiet and still, her green eyes almost glowing in the neon lights of the storefronts around them.

Maria took a last long drag on her Camel--she'd smoked it in record time--and tossed the butt out her open window. "Yeah," she answered shortly. "What is it, do you think?"

Melissa's eyes turned to gaze out the windshield. "It's strange," she said eventually. "Like a vibration. Almost like a voice. I can nearly make out words, but not quite."

"I think I'm gonna throw up," Lisa announced.

"And we wonder why we can't hear," Maria answered drily.

"No, really," Lisa told her with sudden urgency. "I mean really, really. You gotta pull over."

Maria and Melissa exchanged a nod. Maria steered the DeSoto to the curb, noticing that they weren't far from the bombed-out ruin that had once been the local high school. She'd read about it a million years before, back at the Watchers' Compound.

Just before she'd died.

Lisa bolted out before the car even parked all the way, and apparently she hadn't been joking about needing the sudden stop.

"Waste of good blood," Maria muttered, making a point of not noticing her protege, or offering any sympathy. She buttoned up her leather coat, suddenly feeling the cold in a way she hadn't expected on a California summer night. She was getting goosebumps, all the tiny hairs on her skin standing on end. Something was definitely up with this place--she just hoped it would be something interesting.

Melissa stood still, staring up toward the ruins with her brow furrowed. "It's the Hellmouth," she said.

"Huh? How do you know?" Damn, Maria wished that icy, creepy feeling would go away. It wasn't right.

"You live here a few years, you get a feel for it. It's always in the background, like a heartbeat, even for the people who pretend not to know anything about this town." Melissa took a couple steps forward. "Hey, Maria, did you tell the minions to assemble here, without letting me know?"

"The minions?" Maria moved forward too. Lisa was still otherwise occupied.

"There. See? And there?" Melissa indicated about fifty other locations with her finger. "Promise me you had nothing to do with that?"

Maria shot her a look. Yup, Melissa was way too far from dumb to pull anything over on. "I swear. Honestly, I'm as out of the loop on this as you are."

"Maybe it's the Hellmouth." Lisa came up behind them, wiping her face. "Yuck. I feel gross. Maybe it's, you know, calling them."

"Calling them?" Maria and Melissa scowled down on her, both feeling kind of like cat owners whose fluffy pets had just spoken, and furthermore, said something intelligent.

"'Cause of the spell," Lisa continued. "Someone's doing magic, and the Hellmouth's getting all upset. It wants us all to help it."

Hmn, Maria thought, being careful not to let her face give anything away. Maybe we keep you around a little longer after all, sweetie pie.

All the world had gone red--no, not merely red, but a glorious, burning, all-powerful crimson that filled not merely his vision but, it seemed, every part of him, overtaking muscle, flesh and bone. When he raised his voice in a cry of sheer joy the stones shook, and when, like Samson in the temple, he pushed at a pair of the pillars that surrounded him, their solid stone crumbled like dust before his merest touch.

Some insignificant voice called to him, and in some now-far-buried part of himself he knew the voice as familiar, respected, even loved. Love, however, no longer had a place in his world.

Once, he recognized dimly, there had been a young man named Sebastian, who'd had a father named Rupert and a wife named Celeste. In truth, however, very little now remained within him of that weak, pathetic creature, that mild-mannered, Oxford-educated cleric Sebastian Delacouer. Only power mattered now: the power of his blood and of his own deep magic, the power of the crimson.

"Welcome, friend," a woman said to him, from quite close by--no, not a woman, but a goddess, or something like a goddess. She, too, burned, as he burned, with an eldritch light, her very being ablaze with the power of the earth, the sea, of wildness and of green, growing things. Slowly, she paced toward him, hands outstretched, and when she spoke again, her voice dropped low, summoning him out of his magnificent solitude.

"Welcome, lover," she called. With only a step, he joined her, the meeting of their two bodies like a collision of stars. Their mouths closed upon one another, tasting magic, tasting fire, abandoned to the unthinking passion of gods.

Far, far off he heard a voice raised in what might have been protest, and another voice, deeper, calmer, far more intrusive, chanting words that seemed intended to drag him back from the edge of this wondrous abyss.

He did not intend to be dragged.