Tribulations - Chapter 50

"It's not working," Sebastian snapped in frustration. The air had gotten so thick and weird-smelling from burning herbs they'd had to open all the windows and disable both smoke alarms, and Buffy imagined that the neighbors must be only seconds away from calling 911. If their phones weren't totally useless, that was.

"After all this time," Seb went on in a softer voice, "It hardly seems likely to work, either."

"The question is, why?" Wes had his pondering-face on. He peered at the nice, neat little diagram Sebastian had drawn up for them--as if reading the words and squiggles for the nine millionth time would somehow make a difference in their totally dismal results. "We've burned the herbs and read the ritual correctly. Chosen a prime number of participants, as specified..."

Seb gave Wesley a little look that wasn't a look, muttering something under his breath. Buffy gasped, jerking back a step, because there Wesley was, suddenly in game face, and Wes in game face wasn't anything she wanted to look at again. Ever.

Between the vamps she killed nightly and her...umn...close encounters with Angel, she'd have thought nothing would surprise her. But Wes...Wes looked different. Not that he made an especially ugly vampire. For one thing, he wasn't nearly as wrinkly as most, and his teeth weren't all crooked and rotten, the way she was used to. Maybe that was the worst thing about it, that he could look mostly human, and still have those vampy waves coming off of him so strongly. His teeth were white, and sharper than normal, but the thing that struck her as really dangerous and scary was his eyes.

Over the years, she'd looked into enough vampire eyes, and she'd gotten used to that certain look, even in the very old, very powerful vampires, of being...well, not quite there. Sure, they looked mean, they looked evil, but it was a kind of dull, not overly imaginative plotty kind of evilness. Most of the time it wasn't every scary, and it just made her want to mess with their undead little minds. Wesley's eyes, though... They looked evil with a capital E, in a way she hadn't seen since Angelus had made her life literally hell on earth--a bright, sharp yellow, filled with intelligence and this incredible... Buffy searched her high-scoring SAT vocabulary, but couldn't come up with anything quite bad enough to cover it.

She realized she was standing there with her mouth open, just staring.

Malice, that was the word she wanted. Vampire-Wesley's eyes were filled with an out-and-out malice that would have impressed even the Master.

"That," Wes said, in his normal, soft, slightly-prissy Wesley-voice, "Was entirely unnecessary, Delacoeur." He changed back into his human face, but wouldn't look at them.

"That's a hell of a demon you've got in there, Wes," Buffy said to him. Her own voice sounded shaky.

"Yes." He sat down at the table with his back to them, slumping over with his head in his hands. "Yes, I'm well aware of the fact."

Buffy scowled at Sebastian, who looked ashamed.

"I say..." he began. "That is, I didn't mean..."

"Just...put a lid on it, Seb," Buffy told him wearily. Fighting every Slayer-instinct she possessed, she moved over to the table, laying a hand on Wesley's back. "We're sorry, Wes," she said. "No one... Um, no one here is judging you. It's not your fault the spell messed up."

Wesley muttered something that sounded like, "bloody useless."

"You're not, you know," she answered. "You saved us. You really, really saved us. Xander and Celeste tried. I tried. But without you, we all would have been dead meat. You know that."

"None of which changes the fact that I am myself, as you say, 'dead meat,' and possessed of a demon." Wesley raised his head, but didn't turn around. "As well as the last person who can possibly help you in the present circumstances. At times..." His voice dropped lower. "At times, I make the mistake of considering myself a man."

Buffy gave his shoulder a little squeeze, but what could she say? All three of them knew why the ritual hadn't worked, and why it would never work, as long as Wesley was involved. It was a spell designed to build a connection between living people and Wesley wasn't. Living, that was. Not that he needed her to rub his face in it.

"Buffy--" Seb called to her in a tense, frightened voice.

She hurried back to the sofa, nudging Sebastian aside to get in closer. When she took Giles's hand, and immediately understood Seb's alarm: not only had Giles's temperature climbed to the point that it didn't seem possible, but thin trickles of blood had started from his ears, a thicker stream from the corner of his mouth.

"Not good. This isn't good." Buffy felt herself freeze, unable to act, barely able to think.

There was nothing they could do, not a thing they could do, and she was going to have to watch Giles die, right here in front of her. "Do something," she whispered, though whether she was talking to herself or to Sebastian she couldn't have said. She'd worried so much about what the little tea-drinking demon would do to her, and here... Well, there wasn't any need to have worried, was there? None at all.

Things could get royally screwed up even without his help.

The door opened and closed, but Buffy hardly noticed.

"Hey, guys," Xander said from across the room. "What's shakin'?"

"Not now, Xander," Buffy started to say--but then it hit her. "Xander! Here! Now!"

"Huh?" he yelled as Wesley hustled him forward, shoving him into position behind the couch. "What?"

"Delacoeur, I believe you may resume the ritual," Wes instructed, but Seb was way ahead of him. He lit the candles and remaining herbs by looking at them sternly. Smoke billowed, Xander gave a kind of strangled-chicken squawk and, suddenly, Buffy found herself falling into another, very different, place.

She felt hot, first off. Burning, burning hot, and kind of breathless--which would have been scary, except that she wasn't alone. The wherever she'd fallen into featured big piles of white clouds, and a shiny, mirrory path stretched beneath her.

Whoa! Buffy thought, feeling dizzy for a minute and fighting the urge to wave her arms around for balance. She wasn't falling. Whatever this place might be, she was there, standing on her own two feet.

Buffy couldn't see him, but somewhere not too far away, Sebastian continued his chanting, and his soft, deep, Giles-like voice comforted her. She felt aware of him too--the kind of awareness you get from being good friends with someone for a really, really long time, knowing all the stuff that person likes and hates, everything he hopes for and fears.

A lot of it Buffy wouldn't even have guessed--or maybe could have guessed, but either wouldn't have wanted to go there, or wouldn't have understood before this: how much their little adventure underground had freaked Seb out, and how much he hadn't wanted that other thing to come out of him, that it made him feel dirty and used and shut off from everything that really mattered to him. She saw the way he loved Celeste, which went so far beyond the surface of being in love, or what most people thought of as being in love--like he'd found a lost part of his soul, and having found it, knew that he could never, never be apart from it again. Not in a creepy, possessive way, either. He literally loved Celeste more than he loved himself, and that surprised her. She'd liked Seb, and known he was a good guy, but she hadn't known he had that deep of roots, that he was one of those people apparently born to love others. There were some pretty strong feelings there: about Moira, about the Delacoeurs, who'd raised him, for a bunch of other people Buffy didn't know--and, especially, for his dad, which moved and touched her.

For the first time in her life, too, Buffy got a glimpse of what if felt like to really have faith, to think of God not just as some old guy in a white nightgown who made up lots of rules, but as a real person, or more-than-person, who filled Seb with a sense of quietness, and peace, and at the same time, celebration.

She felt Sebastian grieving, afraid the things that had happened might have changed him so much that he'd never really be able to take part in that celebration again.

Don't be sad, she wanted to tell him. Don't be. You'll get back to that place, I know you will.

Sebastian was drifting away from her, though. She'd come to another place, where it was dark, scary and cold. Buffy felt the way she had on her eighteenth birthday, in that creepy, rotting boarding house: powerless, everything around her out of her control, everything against her, wanting to hurt her. So alone, so taunted, so...insufficient, with only her own shaky courage to lean on, and no one else to turn to.

But this wasn't the boarding house. This was another place, one Buffy thought she'd known pretty well. The truth of her ignorance horrified her.

"Xander?" she called out softly, but her friend didn't answer. She'd barely guessed any of this. No, be honest--she hadn't let herself know.

In Buffyworld, mothers loved you completely, even when you didn't get along. Even after Acathla, she'd known, really known, that her mom would be there, worried and waiting and reaching out to her with open arms. Feeling as bad as she did, she'd run from the threat of that unconditional love, but she'd never for an instant doubted its existence. Mothers were there, warm and reachable, not off in some other distant place even when they were in the same room with you. Mothers stood up for you, defended you, wanted every good thing in the world for you. They didn't hide like scared little bunnies, feeling thankful because, for a change, the big, bad bully had found someone else to stoke its anger.

In Buffyworld, too, fathers might be airheads, or get caught up in their businesses more than they should, but in their hearts, they still loved and cared. They didn't hurt you on purpose. Not with fists, or belts, and words that never, never stopped no matter how hard you tried to shut them out. Words that made you wish the fists would start up again, just so you wouldn't have to listen.

In Buffyworld, you never thought that it might be better, sometimes, if it all just...stopped. You didn't have to put up a fence so thick and high that no one would ever get past it. Even surrounded by monsters and demons, you didn't have to be afraid every single minute of every day.

Oh, Xander, Buffy thought. I guess I knew, but I never got, really, how bad it was.

In her heart, she wondered if that was true. How much had she chosen to overlook? How many times had she been otherwise occupied?

She wanted to turn back, to touch and comfort her friend, but the path forced her onward and would not let her stop.

Buffy walked a long way, moving along a spiral that led her continually downward. Like the path in the Wild Magic forest, she realized with a start. Oh. Great. Ahead of her lay a desert--not a rattlesnake and sagebrush kind of dry place, but a real desert, all rolling yellow sand and nothing else, as far as she could see.

All of which reminded her of the desert she'd gone into with Moira, when they'd rescued Giles from hell. Yet another cheery thought.

Buffy plowed onward, slipping and sliding, the hot sand puffing up around her feet and scorching her ankles. Weirdest of all, the sand seemed to be talking, whispering at her, though Buffy couldn't exactly make out the words. The sound seemed to get inside her head, making her crazy, the way all the thoughts she couldn't shut out had made her crazy that past spring. She couldn't concentrate, half the time couldn't see. It was getting dark, and she was going to lose her way. Even the ground had changed, angling into a steep slope again.

The sand skidded beneath her, and Buffy fell hard, landing flat on her butt, the sharp, scratchy current carrying her further and further, deeper and deeper, freefalling into a place where there was no sand, no path, nothing above or below her and nowhere to land.

Then she lay in a bright white room, tied to an iron bed, and Mr. Merrick, looking loads younger than when she'd known him, was saying to her, "This is where you learn patience."

She glared up at him, furious, even though her fury was tempered a little by guilt. Merrick had been a good guy, and she'd killed him. Not that she'd meant to, but she'd been cocky, spoiled, thoughtless--and she hadn't cared. Not enough. Not enough to do a good enough job to keep him alive.

Still, guilt was one thing, being tied down quite another. Buffy tugged hard on her restraints, but they didn't give at all. She felt weird, too, minus her quick Slayer-strength but at the same time feeling strong. Or as if she should have been strong, only something was holding her down, making her sick and weak and so depressed she could hardly stand it.

She'd done something so wrong, so horrible, that she'd never, ever get it out of her head as long as she lived, no matter how she tried to make up for it. And she was afraid--what if she kept on doing horrible things, making stupid choices, letting people down, no matter how hard she tried?

She was bad. Maybe she could hide it, but the fault would always be there, and it would always be hers. Whenever things went wrong, it would be because of something she ought to have done--or ought to have left undone. She was flawed...

Suddenly, she found herself at the big table, back in the old library at Sunnydale High. No, not at the table. By it. Standing beside it--and, jeepers, she was tall. There was that big blue crystal, the one she'd looked into before, with the fault in the heart of it that looked, strangely, like a stake. And there she was, a different Buffy in a purple sweater, looking supremely bored and mouthing off, as usual. Only it didn't seem that way, or she didn't see it that way. She didn't judge that Buffy, not at all. She just felt bad, sneaky and guilty and bad. Helpless, too, with all the horrible possibilities playing out in never-ending repeat mode in the back of her head, and the most terrible feeling of loneliness...

Oh, Buffy thought. Oh, that's where I am. Because, of course, it wasn't the library at all. Or at least not that library.

Buffy wasn't sure why, but she turned, walking away from the table and the self who wasn't her. She headed into the office, thinking, Two can play at this game, and it's not going be the office anymore. So there, Mr. Guilty-pants.

Somewhere, a faint ripple of humor touched her.

So, no office. Instead, when she shut the door behind her, it was the door to the loft, and their big bed lay before her, its fresh green sheets folded back, sunlight angling in through the Venetian blinds.

"So," Buffy called over her shoulder, "Are you going to stay out there exploring the dark side all day, or are you planning to join me?"

She stretched out on her side of the bed letting herself absorb every detail: the crisp smoothness of the sheets, the warm stripes of sunlight on her skin, the slight dip and sway of the mattress as Giles settled himself beind her. The warmth of his chest pressed against her back, the firmness of his hand curved over her hip, and Buffy sighed.

"I wondered when I'd find you," she said.

Giles didn't answer her, but Buffy turned to him, fitting her body against his. She encircled him with her arms, holding him with a gentled-down version of all her strength. "I'm with you," she whispered against his chest. "I'm here, and there's so much I can give you. Don't be afraid to take it from me." She raised her hand, pulling his head down against her shoulder, stroking his soft hair and letting the heat of his body soak into her. "Don't be afraid, Giles It isn't wrong, and nothing bad will come of it."

Buffy had a strange feeling, almost like something breaking--or maybe opening was a better word--and then it was as if they were still themselves, but shared one skin. No secrets, no fears, nothing shameful or hidden. He tasted her strength, and she tasted his brilliance, both the years and years of hard-won knowledge and the new flood that had come to him with the goddess's wine. She felt his mind opening up to all that, and to her, like door after door being flung wide open, sunlight and air pouring in everywhere. They clung to each other then, not with desperation, but with the same sense that had struck Buffy when they'd first made love: that this was right, that this was meant to be, and the only thing either of them had to fear any longer was losing each other. And that was something only death could do to them.

Buffy shut her eyes and, wearily, surrendered herself to absolute peace.

It seemed quite an unusual phenomena, and one Wesley most likely ought to have recorded in his Watcher-journal, but such impulses seemed increasingly distant. Instead, he merely watched as the opposite side of the room disappeared into a roiling mass of opalescent colour and the whispering voices increased until he could nearly understand their words. Nearly, but never completely.

He felt lonely, cast adrift, the tiny raft of his good intentions bobbing endlessly on the vast sea of his own strangeness. Or estrangedness. Perhaps that was the better term.

Wesley sighed. What a banal metaphor. And what use was such self-pity anyway? Would it bring back to him even one iota of his humanity? Not bloody likely.

To distract himself, he wandered aimlessly through the unobscured part of Giles's main room, wondering how the man endured such tiny living quarters. True, his own cottage was snug, but this...

Wesley shook his head, laughing at himself. How long had he resided in his cramped, chilly rooms at the Watchers' Compound, and before that, in equally constrained accommodations, first at school and then at University? Ironic, really, considering that his own ancestral home covered acreage that would readily have accommodated several good-sized football stadiums, with room for a handful of cricket pitches to spare. And never, in any moment he'd spent there, had he experienced anything but the quite inescapable feeling of being shut up tight inside his own coffin?

Distressed by the thought, still seeking to divert himself, Wesley opened the nearer of the glass-fronted bookcases, selecting volumes at random and leafing, without real direction, through their pages. Buffy had given him a phrase when she'd rung him earlier, a snippet of what appeared to be badly-mispronounced German. What was it she'd said? Der Zite? Wesley found himself smiling slightly. Obviously, she'd meant "Der Zeit." The Time? The Time what?

Roybear. He smiled again at the thought of Buffy's flat Californian pronunciation. Roy Bear. Paddington Bear. Rupert Bear. Most likely she'd meant...what? Räuber? Robber? Thief? The Time Robber? The Time Thief? From what Buffy related, Giles had meant to point him in some direction, but why? Had this some connection to the present difficulty, or had he meant something else entirely?

Wesley made his way to the kitchen, mechanically going through the motions of making tea: filling the kettle, warming the teapot, locating a cup. Giles, it appeared, used tea-bags, but then, didn't everyone, these days? Excepting, perhaps, some of the stuffier Watchers, the ones who also persisted in carrying pocket watches to tell the time, and in drinking only hot or room-temperature beverages. The tea-bags in question came from a nice, fresh box of Yorkshire Gold, too, rather than representing some tasteless American brand. Thank heaven for small mercies.

Except that you will not be able to tell the difference, Wesley reminded himself. A small wave of revulsion struck him, and not for the first time--truly, only one substance continued any taste for him, yet the thought of drinking it filled him with both disgust and a nearly-unbearable craving.

The warmth of the tea would be comforting. He should keep that in mind. Perhaps he could remember the flavour, and imagine...

The kettle boiled. He filled the teapot and left the tea to steep, knowing that, very likely, he would not return to drink it.

Something tickled in the back of his mind, something Wesley had known once, or heard once... The feeling irked him, because it didn't speak to him of knowledge, or of study...rather, it carried along the oddest association of milky tea, of a small, stuffy room with scratchy nets of antimacassars on every available surface. Of small, sweet biscuits that tasted, faintly, of rose petals.

Wesley squeezed shut his eyes, his warmthless hands pressed to the sides of the teapot, as if he could, somehow, soak up a portion of its heat. So close, the memory... So close... And carrying with it a sense of comfort, a sense of smallness...

God! Wesley bent his head, suddenly frustrated beyond words. Why wouldn't it come to him? Why must memory come so tauntingly close, yet never resolve itself?

And then, suddenly, it was there after all.

As a small boy he'd gone on an outing with his old nurse, traveling by train to visit her infinitely aged mother, a tiny, stooped woman with a face like a dried apple, wizened yet somehow sweet. He'd sat by an open window on that fine September day, watching a hedgehog root for insects in the garden as he nibbled the odd, rose-flavoured biscuits the old woman served him, listening to the last tardy bees of summer hum between the flowers...

Somewhere underneath that sound, he remembered the elderly countrywoman's voice, telling him a story, quite an odd story of--how had she put it?--the urchin with a man's face, who grants wishes to maidens.

What was it Buffy said? She'd met, in her words, "a little hedgehoggy demony guy." And what was "urchin" but an old country word for hedgehog? Buffy may not have been (Wesley was almost certain) exactly a maiden in the traditional sense, but she was young, idealistic...

Hopeful. She was hopeful, and she'd wished, believing fully that her wishes could, in fact, come magically true.

And her wish had been granted, hadn't it?

"Oh, Buffy," Wesley said softly, because now he remembered the rest of the sorry.

"And he robbed her, he robbed her. He robbed her of a summer's day," the old woman's cracked little voice said to him, so clearly that she might have spoken the words directly into his ear.

"What's so bad about that?" he'd answered, every inch the toffee-nosed brat.

The old woman had leaned closer, "Ah, but you see, the day he took from her was the day she knew her leman, her true love, and from that wound she never healed, but went down to her grave a maid evermore."

At the time, he'd thought it a stupid story, with an unsatisfactory ending. Where was the drama? Where was the retribution?

Now he was a man, or something like a man, and he knew better. He knew that some losses could never be recovered, some wounds never healed, and that one day lost...

Wesley knew very well what could happen in a single day. In a single hour. In a moment.

He himself was living proof: he knew that one could lose everything.

"Oh, Buffy," he breathed. "What have you done?"