Tribulations - Chapter 54

Willow stood on the beach and marveled at the way the world shone. Why hadn't she known this? Why had everyone tried so hard to keep it from her? She could see everything, hear everything, feel everything. The pounding of the surf lived inside her, even the touch of the wind was like a lover's hands on her body--and lots more talented hands, at that, than Oz's had ever been. Filled with the sheer amazement of it all, she threw back her head and cried out. Not squeaking with her old little mouse voice, no, not that voice ever again, but with one big enough to fill up the sky, to command the waves, to demand...well, to demand anything she wanted, really.

The thought of that filled her with a wonderful, shivery anticipation.

"How do you feel?" her guest asked, with her own voice full of amusement--not laughing at Willow, just taking part in the joy.

It felt good to have someone share the hugeness of the moment, and the voice held something else, too, though she hardly even dared think it. Love? Could it possibly be love?

"Oh, this is good." Willow raised her arms, as if she could embrace everything: the beach, the ocean, the rising sun. "This is too good. Why didn't anyone let me taste this before?"

"Jealousy. Small-mindedness. Perhaps even..." Her guest came to her, wrapping slender arms around Willow from behind, pulling her close, then closer still. It felt weird, a little bit, to feel a woman's body so near to hers, the soft, warm pressure of another woman's breasts against her back, a hand nearly as smooth as her own sliding up beneath her shirt, stroking her tummy. She shivered again, cuddling into that warm, strong softness. It felt so different from being with Oz, who was, she had to admit, kinda skinny, and whose fingers were all callused. He'd been gentle with her, taken care of her, and of course it was nice, she'd liked it, but...

But this made her head feel light, literally light, as if she was going all floaty.. And the hand had moved further down, underneath the waistband of her panties, exploring and opening her with feathery little touches that brought Willow into valleys and peaks of pleasure she could ride like a series of waves. Weird, maybe, but she could get used to this. She could more than get used to this.

"Perhaps, even, because they do not love you as I do," her guest's voice breathed in Willow's ear, even as her other hand turned Willow's face toward her own.

The kiss felt strange too: soft lips, smooth skin, a small, silken tongue probing her mouth so sweetly and thoroughly that Willow thought she could have come from that alone. Between the magic and the touching, her whole body hummed. It never occurred to her to protest. She didn't want to protest. All this--the beach, the magic, the sunrise, the loving--was part of her most perfect, private fantasies, ones that would never, no way, no how, make it in to any game of Anywhere But Here she played with Buffy. Right here, right now, she was flying.

Hey, Willow wondered, as her back arched and her center pressed down against the silken, skillful, loving hand, I wonder if I can fly?

"You can do anything," said the voice in her ear. "You can be anything. All this power and light and joy was wasted, entirely, on Moira. It's only right, Willow, that it should pass to you."

"Only right," Willow echoed, although somewhere, deep down inside her, a teeny hint of guilt-- sadness even--flared briefly.

"And I will return to you. Soon. Very soon now. You'll hardly know that the time has passed."

"But I'll miss you," Willow protested, even though they'd discussed this already. "When will you be back?" She kind of suspected that, to the casual listener, she'd sound like a whiny little kid, but her guest, behind her, only gave a soft laugh.

"Never fear, my impatient one. Our time has almost come."

With that, she was gone, and Willow fell to her knees, her fingers poking into the wet sand, everything inside her trembling in a way that felt so good, so perfect, it hardly seemed possible. She cried out again, in her powerful voice, and the white gulls bobbing on the surface of the water launched themselves skyward with shrieks of their own.

In a little while, the sunrise was only a sunrise again, but Willow still knew, and carried the secret inside her like a perfect little bubble of joy. Her guest was right, she could feel that. It wouldn't be long now.

Pretty soon, everything was going to change.

The clock said ten-thirty, and sunlight was streaming into the loft--as much as sunlight ever did stream there--when Buffy finally woke up from the best night's sleep she'd had in ages. Yawning until she thought her face would crack, she scooted over into the little hollow in the bed where Giles had been sleeping, and let herself stretch right down to her toes. If only he'd still been there with her, she would have woken him up properly--or, really, the opposite of properly--but she knew that Giles, allergic as he seemed to be to sleeping in, had probably been out of bed for hours. She wondered what he was up to, and then laughed at herself. He was Giles. She knew what he was up to. In some way, books would be involved.

After the Chinese food orgy of the night before, Buffy could have sworn that she wouldn't be hungry for days, but she was. Starving, in fact. Time to wander downstairs and cajole Giles into making her some breakfast. Buffy laughed. Maybe she could bribe him. The thought of a few potential bribes made her grin wider. Yup, he'd definitely be bribable.

Yawning again, she padded downstairs in her pj's. No visible sign of her honey, but Xander's snores were rising from a space between the couch and the coffee table. God only knew how he'd ended up there. When she peeked over the back of the couch, all she could make out were a few tufts of dark hair, one bare foot and an awful lot of tangled blanket.

"Xand?" she said, wondering if her voice was capable of penetrating the noise, more evilly pondering the effectiveness of tickle-torture. That bare foot was awfully tempting.

Silly Buffy, she told herself. But it felt good: to sleep late, to smile, to be silly. A few things on the list of stuff she'd seriously missed, and all of them of the good.

A series of muffled curses and scuffling noises came from down the hall, apparently from the big storage closet that now housed the lion's share of the library books. Uh-huh, score one for Buffy. Did she know Giles, or what?

Make that from the back of the closet, Buffy amended, when she'd gone along the hall to investigate. Somehow, Giles had worked his way in without taking every single carton out first, and seemed to be searching for something down toward floor level. The still stacked-up boxes swayed like trees in the wind, and Buffy wondered how long it would take before all of them toppled, squashing Giles flatter than a pancake underneath.

Mmm...pancakes. Now there was a tasty breakfast idea. And she needed to gain about five pounds before her jeans would fit again without threatening to fall down every time she tried to wear them.

Speaking of falling... Buffy cringed. A single big carton slid down off the stack Giles seemed to be working on, landing with a thud on something soft below. From the "Ow. Bloody hell!" that followed, she had a pretty good idea exactly what.

Buffy covered her mouth with her hands, trying to think of serious things so that she wouldn't laugh. Laughing wouldn't be nice. She shouldn't do it. And she didn't--although she couldn't quite manage to keep all the amusement out of her voice when she asked, "You okay back there, sweetie?"

Being Giles, he didn't actually kick the offending box and swear, but she would have bet he thought long and hard about it. His slightly cobwebby head popped up above the ranks of brown cardboard. "Buffy? Is that you? Would you...?"

A large but skinny book came sliding toward her over the tops of the cartons. Buffy caught it easily, examining the embossed blue cover. As usual with Giles's books, it bore a bunch of squiggly symbols and a title written in some weird, old-timey writing.

"What's this?" she asked, wishing she was more interested. Maybe if she worked really, really hard at... Nope, she had to admit, that wasn't happening. Giles would just have to remain the musty books side of their partnership.

"It may..." Somehow, Giles was managing to move between the stacks, but he still sounded breathless. "Pertain to the work Wesley was doing before he left us."

"The Time Robber guy?"

"Precisely." Giles finally managed to stagger out into the hall, slamming the door behind him as if the books might be staging a prison-break any second now. "I really..." He panted a couple more times. "Must find some way to get those organized."

"I'm just impressed that you could even get in there." Buffy reached up to pluck the cobweb out of his hair, liking the way he looked, all rumpled and dusty, with his hair spiking up every which way. "Is that one of your Librarian superpowers?"

"My...?" Giles began, then laughed. He was definitely getting quicker with the pop culture references. "Yes, I suppose it must be."

"One of them, anyway. That, and able to dodge falling boxes with a single ouch."

"If only that were true," Giles rubbed his shoulder ruefully.

"Look on the bright side. At least it didn't fall on your head." Buffy set the book on the floor by her foot and stretched up to give him her first kiss of the day. Giles returned it with interest, his hands slipping up beneath her top, stroking her skin until she purred like a kitten. His fingertips slipped beneath the waistband of her pajama bottoms, following the line of her backbone down, pulling her in closer to him. Really, really close. Deciding this was a good time to let herself get just a little bit wanton, Buffy bit down softly on his upper lip, rubbing her flannel-covered breasts against his chest.

"Oh, may I be struck mute and blind!!" Xander exclaimed from right behind them. "Don't you people ever stop?"

Giles jumped back like he'd been cattle-prodded--then laughed, pulling Buffy close to him again, one arm draped around her shoulders so that she fit perfectly against his side.. "Do I need to remind you, Xander, that we've a second bathroom upstairs?" His voice sounded snarky, but he grinned the whole time. Happy Giles. Her happy Giles.

Buffy gave him a playful little slap on the chest, taking care to make it actually playful. And little. Sometimes she tended to underestimate her own strength.

"Right," Xander answered. "After that, there'd better be breakfast. I deserve breakfast."

"Giles is making us pancakes," Buffy said, glancing up. "Aren't you?"

"It seems so," Giles answered drily. He bent to recover the discarded book, shooting Xander a pointed look at the same time. "Eventually."

"Right," their friend said again. "Going, not staying. Upstairs." He hurried, too--though whether that was out of consideration or wiggedness, she couldn't tell.

Giles set the big blue book on the table beside Wesley's notes, and for a second Buffy thought she was going to lose him, that he'd get sucked in by all that juicy research. His fingertips even touched the top of the stack, but then he turned, all of that forgotten. "Now, Buffy," he said, in his soft Giles voice but with that Ripper sparkle in his eyes. "Where exactly were we?"

Wishes, Wesley thought. Wishes could, at times, be quite different, even between people who loved one another with such completeness.

His own wishes, though it shamed him to admit them, even to himself, would have been to continue this: the tubes and the procedures and the heavily-sighing breathing machine. He would have kept on with it, hoping against hope. Hoping against reason.

Moira's wishes, of course, were something else entirely. He knew that, absolutely, as well as he knew her. This unlife that held her was as pointless as his. More so, because while he'd, at least, a consciousness, an awareness of himself, she'd been left with nothing, not even their child, conceived against all odds and just as miraculously contained within her broken body. When the thing the doctors called an "accident" occurred, even that small life had gone, too feeble to exist beyond the warmth of her womb. The body that lay in the white bed before him held no trace of his Moira, her strength and her vibrancy, her fears and her fierce intelligence. In truth, even physically, she no longer resembled herself.

Her brain had gone, they'd told him. This time she would not rally. Her heart beat, and she breathed, only because the machines forced her to do so. She lived at all only because, at the time of her death, he'd been elsewhere, and they hadn't known...

Hadn't known her wishes. Wesley bent down, kissing the engagement band he'd placed upon her finger. He'd no right to keep her here. She would not have thanked him.

Others ought to be told, Wesley supposed. Rupert, for one. Giles would not be unreasonable about this, or contradict him. He and Moira, Wesley suspected, kept few secrets from each another, and perhaps knew one another's natures on a level he himself had only begun to explore with her. Their son, Sebastian, must certainly be told, should very likely be consulted--and yet, he knew, Delacoeur was a priest. His views, on such matters, likely differed quite strongly from Moira's. Above that, he might, in fact, prefer not to be asked for such a decision.

"You can have more time," Moira's doctor, a young man by the name of Patel, said to him. "You don't need to decide right this moment."

"No." Wesley straightened, his countenance frozen into what he thought of as his Watcher's Face. "No, there's been enough time. In such a situation, if there was no hope..." His eyes locked upon Dr. Patel's, hoping to be contradicted, hoping to be offered some reprieve, some option unexplored. "If there was no hope, then her desires were quite clear." His voice, in his own ears, sounded very crisp, extremely cold. "She would want, as well, for any organs, any..." His throat tightened, until he could scarcely go on. "If anything remains that might be of use, then she would not want it wasted."

"Is..." The young man cleared his throat. "That is, it's good of you to respect her wishes in that. Your gift, honestly, will be appreciated."

From somewhere, Wesley found a ghost of a smile. "Moira was never a woman to be gainsaid. Now is hardly the time for me to begin."

"Take as long as you need," the doctor said.

"No, we're prepared." Wesley removed his glasses, slipping them into his pocket. "That is, I'm prepared. Only, if I might hold her as she...?"

"Certainly," Patel answered. He slipped from the cubicle, returning moments later with a handful of his colleagues. As Wesley gathered Moira in his arms, they began to move soundlessly around the tiny room. Switches clicked softly. The breathing machine ceased its dismal sigh. Yet another machine gave off a protracted wail, its screen registering nothing but a straight green line.

A hand touched Wesley's shoulder. Then another. He buried his face in her sadly-shorn hair, remembering its former glory, hoping that he might somehow, so close to her, detect a trace of her fragrance.

There was nothing. It was gone. She was gone. His Moira. Only seconds, now, and they'd be taking her, preparing to do what he had given his permission for them to do.

"Eleven-O-seven," a hushed voice said.

"Called," another murmured.

Gently, Wesley laid Moira's head upon the pillow. No magic here, at the end. No flourishes or sudden miracles. How he wished for a Time Robber of his own, to steal all of this away from him, to restore Moira, his radiant Moira, once again, to what she had been. To restore him too, if such a thing could be said to matter.

He touched his fingers softly to her parted lips. For all his innocence, he'd been offered no wishes of his own, and only one remained to him now.

Time for him to take a walk. To take a walk in the sun.