Trust - Chapter 15

Buffy peeked around the corner of the kitchen pass-through, trying not to be too obvious about the way she was spying on her guest. She knew she shouldn't make distinctions, but the woman sitting on her couch was, technically, dead. Okay, she knew she'd been dead once herself, no discrimination here against the previously life-challenged, but her death had been about as long in duration as a soup commercial, whereas Moira's...

She couldn't help but feel that dead, buried and with your very own special funeral put things in a whole new ballpark. A ballpark in another State, even.

A big warning bell went off in her head--or maybe it was an alarm clock bell, a wake-up call--but whichever it was, Buffy stopped for a minute, feeling halfway between frozen and excited. She remembered the fun wake. She remembered the funeral. She remembered lying on the couch in Winnie-the-Pooh's office, and she remembered Willow--literally--blowing the Rosenberg's house up, and being inside Giles's head, and the weird thing that had happened with the Hellmouth and the avatars. She remembered getting her ring, and being caught naked in her old bedroom with Giles by both her mom and dad, and how wigged she'd been by the Wild Magic, and how scared she'd been before that, when she was a prisoner of the fabulous vamp twins.

And she remembered the first time, their first time, that feeling of shyness and awkwardness and total, total rightness all mixed up together.

Buffy's eyes burned and her heart beat funny and for a minute she just couldn't comprehend it. Even with what Flora had given her, she'd missed so much, the absence of all those days and hours like a big hole drilled straight through her heart. Only now it was back. Her life. She'd gotten her life back.

"Oh," she breathed, because somehow she couldn't come up with anything else to say. It was too huge. It was too gigantic. Her brain could hardly even wrap around it.

And, the person in the living room drinking tea from Giles's "Kiss the Librarian" mug was Moira. No doubt of that. Not vampire Moira, not zombie Moira, but the hundred per cent real thing, albeit more than a trifle wigged herself at the moment.

Well, Buffy could relate to that.

She peeked again. Moira seemed to be staring blankly at the fireplace, and Buffy had a feeling she should probably talk to her, help her get anchored back to this reality, but everything that popped into her mind to say was totally inappropriate. She didn't think Moira really needed her to ask questions like, "Did you wake up in your grave and everything?" or "How did you get out?" Either of which would earn her a Cordelia-level rating at the very bottom of the tact-o-meter. Earlier she'd caught herself trying to check out Moira's fingernails, which hadn't looked great, admittedly, but weren't dirt-crusted and bloody either, the way Buffy might have expected.

So, most likely no with the digging action.

Was this what Giles referred to as morbid curiosity?

Buffy filled the teapot again from the electric kettle. Moira had said no to food--a good thing, since there really wasn't any--but she was sucking down tea like it was going out of style. Giles said he drank tea for the comfort, and it seemed perfectly reasonable that Moira should need a whole heaping lot of comfort at the moment. More than Buffy herself could provide, anyway.

Sebastian. She should call Sebastian. He was Moira's son after all, and he'd know what to do. Besides which, if Buffy had him there to Moira-sit, she'd be free to go out searching for Giles guilt-free.

It seemed really, really important that she get on with the business of finding him. Right then. She was so proud of Giles, and so furious at him all at the same time that she didn't know what she'd actually say when she saw him again. Probably nothing. Probably she'd just have to hold him so tight it hurt, for a really, really long time. And then, whether he liked it or not, she was going to sit on him until he got completely better again. And after that...

Buffy found herself smiling. Giles was going to like what came after that.

With that happy thought in mind, she dialed Sebastian's number, sneakily, while the tea was steeping, all the time wondering what in hell she was going to say. "Hi, Seb, your mom's alive and sitting in my living room" seemed to lack finesse somehow.

And anyway, it was Celeste who answered, sounding distracted. Buffy hoped she hadn't disturbed her at work or anything, because she certainly didn't get much of a response to her, "I think you two better get over here right away. It's important."

Nearly an hour, and two more pots of tea had gone by before the Delacoeurs actually showed, and then Seb's first words, with no introduction were, "Briony St. Ives has been killed. They've had us out to look at the body."

Celeste, a little more observant than her husband, exclaimed, "Good Lord, Bastian!

For nearly a full minute, Sebastian's face held a look of perfectly Giles-like bafflement, and then his head swivelled toward the couch like it was on ball bearings. "That can't..."

He looked like he was getting a little wobbly, so Buffy gripped his arm. Celeste got the other side. "Yup. Seems like. As far as I can tell anyway. She's not feeling very chatty right now. Not with me, anyway, but I thought that maybe if you..."

"Yes. Yes, of course." Seb sleepwalked closer to the couch, just kind of dropping down onto the cushions once he got there. He and Moira appeared to be engaged in a staring contest.

Buffy and Celeste traded glances of their own.

"So..." Buffy began.

Celeste went into the kitchen and helped herself to a cup of tea. Buffy could tell how upset her friend must be, because she just poured it into any old mug without even looking, which wasn't her normal style at all.

"What happened?" Buffy asked, in an undertone.

"It was dreadful." Celeste sipped. "Dreadful."

"Vampire?"

"Plant. Vine, to be precise." Celeste set her mug down carefully, running one fingertip over a teeny chip in its rim. "She was... Was..." She took a little gasping breath. "The bryony plant thrives by strangling its host. That's what Bastian said. That it was meant as a joke." Her hand left the mug, covering her eyes. "A joke."

Only if you had a beyond-sick sense of humor, Buffy thought, glancing out into the living room. Moira and Seb were talking now, but too low for even her Slayer hearing to pick up the words.

"Miss St. Ives--Briony--I found her graceless and humorless, and I resented very much what she'd done to us at Mermorgan Hall," Celeste went on. "Yet she'd remained here in America, I know, to do the right thing by Moira, to carry out her family's rituals when Bastian and I were being pig-headed about it all. She must have been so very, very frightened at the end, and in such pain. The plant..." She swallowed hard. "Buffy, it went inside her..."

Welcome to the Hellmouth, Buffy thought, getting that kind of flattened-out feeling she always got when the wonder that was Sunnydale threw up something new and horrible for her to deal with. She hadn't liked Briony St. Ives a whole lot either, and she pretty much agreed with Celeste about the sorceress's character flaws--but the poor woman hadn't wanted to be here, she was trying to do the right thing, and what had happened to her shouldn't happened to anyone. Buffy herself was attempting not to picture what it must have been like to die the way Celeste said Briony had. She couldn't. She didn't want to. And she was glad she hadn't had to see the end result.

"L Ron," Moira said, from the livingroom.

Buffy gave Celeste another look. Her brain really needed some downtime. "Huh? Like the Scientology guy? What are they talking about?"

"A-L-R-A-U-N," Moira spelled. "Or, alternatively, A-L-R-A-U-N-E. A Teutonic nature goddess. One invokes her by shaping an effigy from the root of an ash tree and performing a series of appropriate rituals. Alraune is, of course, also the German name for the bryony plant."

Of course, Buffy thought. Sometimes she tended to forget that Moira had been--was--a Watcher too. Just like Giles. Even without the books, his brain was full of exactly those same kind of little snippets of weirdness.

"You believe that's what killed her?" Sebastian asked. "An invocation of this...er...goddess? But wasn't Miss St. Ives a rather powerful sorceress in her own right? Oughtn't she to have been capable of defending herself?"

Moira didn't say anything. No one said anything. And into the silence fell a single dull, hard knock on the apartment door.

"Giles?" Buffy couldn't help but call out, and flew to answer, nearly ripping the door off its hinges in her excitement.

But it wasn't Giles on the doorstep. For a minute, Buffy thought it was a stranger. A grubby, smelly stranger who looked like he'd been very much on the wrong end of some serious pummeling. A stranger with a sword.

Giles's sword.

"Oh," she said.

Behind her, Moira said a word in what Buffy guessed was Cornish. The stranger's head turned, his swollen mouth dropping open.

That must have been what clued her in--the open mouth. "Wes?" Buffy said. "Wesley?"

Incredibly, as bad as he looked, Wesley was trying to smile. He lurched in through the door, the weapon falling out of his hand. He was even attempting to run across the room, although the most he could seem to manage was a kind of lopsided shuffle. He made it to the couch though, and dropped down to his knees, gazing up at Moira like he was seeing heaven, tears just streaming down out of his one unswollen eye.

For a minute, Moira's back stiffened, and her hands just kind of hovered in the air, but then they lowered, and she took Wesley's face gently, gently between them. "My love," she breathed.

Like a little kid who's been lost and found his way home, too tired to do anything else, Wesley laid his head down in her lap.

They'd taken off the restraints when Xander had finally managed to convince them he wasn't going to freak out any more. And he wasn't. He had himself under control. His brain, at least. Kind of. His body kept trying to drag him down into sleep, but he fought it every step of the way, forcing himself to hover in a kind of in-between place. He was glad someone came every four hours to make him breathe a bunch of cold, sour-tasting, steamy stuff, because not only did it keep him from sliding down into the dreams that kept trying to grab him, the medicine made his heart go jumpy and made him jittery enough, for half an hour or so afterwards, that he didn't have to struggle as hard to stay awake.

Whenever he closed his eyes, the pictures came, and he didn't ever, ever, ever want to have to see them again. Giles's blank eyes. Shaking him. The horrible papery eggs. The demon queen. Awake, he could just barely deal. Asleep...it was too much.

Xander didn't think he'd ever want to sleep again. He was glad it was noisy here: people coughing and yelling, carts creaking down the halls, a guy polishing the floors in the middle of the night, nurses chatting loudly right outside his door. That helped. Not just the sounds, for keeping-awake purposes, but the busyness of the little world around him.

He wondered if a person could really go crazy from guilt. It seemed possible. Xander's brain kept playing that last moment on continuous loop: the smooth roundness in his hand, and then the little pieces of shell, sharp enough to cut him.

He'd had the wish. He'd had the wish RIGHT THERE in his hand, and he could have used it to do Anything. Forget just doing something right for once in his pointless, stupid, miserable life--he could have done something amazing.

Giles could be alive now. Moira could be alive now.

Except, of course, for Xander Harris, King of Cretins.

Take that back. Cretin didn't even begin to cover what he was. Xander didn't think there was a word to describe the level of stupidity that was his.

He'd held that precious--no, miraculous--thing in his hand, and what was the best he could manage? To waste it on an idiotic "there's no place like home" wish. And here he was. Sure enough, it had worked. It had worked beautifully.

Here he was, home in Sunnydale.

Where he had no home. Not really. Okay, so he'd killed the demon queen. Big deal. He'd only tagged along in the first place to look after Giles. And see how well that turned out?

How could he ever face Buffy now? And without her, without Giles, who was left for him in Sunnydale? His mom and dad? Right. His dear friend Willow, who--let's be honest here, brutally honest, no matter how crushing it was to his male ego--had used him and left him to die in Giles's bed?

The phrase, "with friends like these, who needs enemies," sprang to mind.

Chances were, Will would be coming back for him, too, as soon as her little jolt wore off, or she wanted someone to play with. Nice thought--and, even nicer, Xander knew he wouldn't be able to resist her. He'd never been able to resist his Willow, not when she made it clear what it was she wanted.

He may have been dense, but he was also spineless. In fact, most amoebas had more spine than he did.

Xander found himself sitting on the edge of the bed in his hospital gown and those stupid gray socks with the rubber lines on the soles for traction. The kind Will--his old, sweet, goofy Willow--had always called "raccoon feet" for some reason he'd never understood. It was like the way she called the lint balls on sweaters "twillies." Maybe she'd gotten both terms from her dad, who for a smart guy was kind of a nut. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just Will.

And, great, he was crying now, his eyes stinging and his nose running, which just made his chest hurt more, like it had a huge, strong rubberband looped around it, and the inside was lined with more tight, rubbery stuff. Whatever had been wrong with the air back in DemonWorld, it had really done a job on him. His neck was really stiff, too, so much that he could hardly turn his head, and he was pretty sure he was running a fever.

Like any of that mattered. None of this was going to kill him. He didn't have that kind of luck.

Xander flashed back to that Angelus time, when Buffy had that bad flu and the whole Scooby Gang had come to see her, with balloons and finished homework and the grapes that Giles was absent-mindedly munching as they talked. He'd been so angry, and scared, and freaked, but now that all seemed like nothing, just a little speed bump in the road of experience. He would have given his immortal soul and forty years of his life just to see Giles walk in through his door, with or without grapes, and tell him, in his quiet, comforting, Giles voice, that everything was all right, that Xander hadn't really let him be killed by a vampire who was supposed to be their friend, in a place so far from home that the distance couldn't even be measured. Hell, he'd have been just as happy to have him walk in and say something snarky, with one of those irritated Giles-looks as a chaser.

But thanks to him, none of that was going to happen. Not ever, ever again.

In a moment of clarity, the answer to all his troubles came to him.

Leave. Vamoose. Get the hell out of Dodge. It was what his long-gone, hardly remembered brother had done, and it was how he'd originally said he was going to spend the summer anyway, right? Which made it not running away but merely following through on his temporarily-delayed plans.

And Xander knew he could tell himself that all he wanted, but not a thing would change. All the things his dad had said about him over the years--he'd always known those things were true, even as he hated his father for saying them. Why fight it anymore?

Why fight anything?

In the narrow little closet thing next to the sink, Xander found his torn but recently laundered clothes. He dressed himself, and went.

One of these days, he'd write Buffy a letter to explain.