Trust - Chapter 16

Wesley could do nothing but cling to his love in wonder and disbelief. So great was his joy--and his fear--he could scarcely even bear to look up at her face. What if he should find himself deceived, deluded? Would it not be better to hold fast onto this moment for as long as he could stretch out the time, in case all he'd longed for should vanish in an instant, never to reappear?

But there were her hands, stroking his hair, resting so gently and warmly on the nape of his neck. There was her scent, like sweet and exotic spices, and the firmness of her thigh beneath his cheek and across it the slightly harder line of her scar.

"Wesley," Moira said softly, and her voice was all the music he ever wanted to hear for the rest of his life. "Try to sit, my love. Let me look at you."

To please her, he did try, although his weariness had grown so great he could scarcely raise his head. Moira's strong hands supported him, holding him upright, her eyes gazing into his in all their deep greenness. He must have lost himself there, because the next thing Wesley knew he was sprawled in the back of someone's motor, the smell of new leather upholstery making him feel rather off-colour.

"He's come round," Moira said, somewhere over his head in the darkness, and as if her voice had turned the key to his full perceptions, a dreadful ripple of pain snaked up his arm and halfway across his chest, his body tensing in an instinctive--yet vain--attempt to guard itself from further agony.

"I know, love," she murmured, her cool palm resting on his brow. "Very soon now, this will end."

Her touch helped, and with effort, Wesley was able to control his breathing, though he could not entirely contain his gasps of pain at even the smallest jolt of tyres upon tarmac. He could have wept with relief when the car at last halted and the flourescent lights of Sunnydale General Hospital shone down into his eyes.

Then Moira and another...Delacoeur? Of course it was Delacoeur. Good old Delacoeur--how could he ever have imagined they were enemies?...were helping him inside, whilst another voice clamoured in his ears. "Ask him, now, or I will!"

"Soon enough, Buffy," Delacoeur responded, for which Wesley was boundlessly thankful--and yet the voice droned on, insistent as a mosquito.

He'd reason not to wish to respond to that voice, hadn't he? A wave of guilt washed in upon him, nearly overwhelming Wesley's fragile senses.

Yes, very good reason indeed.

So much so that he was grateful when darkness descended once more.

Buffy's feelings were mixed, to say the least, when the elevator doors closed behind Wesley's stretcher, presumably whisking him upward to surgery. Sure, she was worried about him.. His hand had looked...well, shudder, ick...and she knew even Dr. Reynolds's expertise wasn't going to be able to save that mess. She doubted very much that the doctor had bought their "horrible late-night welding accident" story, either. For one thing, it had sounded lame even when she was telling it. You'd think practice would make her a better liar, but it didn't. For another, even to someone who didn't know him, the two concepts of welding and Wesley were obviously what Giles would call mutually exclusive.

Poor Wes. She honestly did feel sorry about what had happened to him. Really sorry, even though she guessed going through the rest of his life one-handed beat going through life undead...forgive the pun...hands down. The thing was, though, that she'd caught, somewhere beneath Wesley's pain and wiggedness, a definite hint of "I'm not telling something." As in, a certain other Watcher's name had been conspicuously missing from all parts of the conversation, even when Buffy had asked him straight out to tell her the sitch. Moira had come out of her own state of "this is too much to deal with-ness" to run interference then, and Seb, obviously beyond confused by it all, was trying to be supportive of his recently undeceased mom. Buffy could even admit that Wesley wasn't firing on six cylinders at the moment, but she did think he might have said something.

Especially since he had managed to tell her the Time Robber was dead, and that Xander (Xander? What had Xander been doing there?) had made the wish that unvamped him and brought Moira back to life.

Here she had all her memories back, shiny and new, and she was even willing to forgive Giles for sneaking off the way he had--though Giles himself probably wouldn't have put what he'd done in exactly those words. Now she just needed to know where he was They'd left Celeste at the apartment in case he came there, and even if Giles himself was completely out of it, Buffy knew she could count on The Perfect Hostess to call her with any updates. Celeste understood how wigged she was, and she wasn't the type to balk at having Buffy paged or even tracked down in person if there was something to tell.

So, nothing to tell. No Giles. No Xander, either, and that worried her too. She'd even tried calling Wesley's place, just to see if by some chance he'd gone there, but nada. Nothing.

Buffy shivered, a cold, creepy feeling going up her spine. She knew that, mostly, she'd wanted Wes to tell her what was the what so she'd be spared having to hear the worst from some anonymous cop or ER doctor. She didn't think she could stand that.

Then there was the even more wigsome thought that, however Moira got back, however Wesley got back, maybe Giles and Xander had missed the magic bus, and Wesley's mutterings, disjointed as they'd been, had been enough to tell her the place the three of them had gone to was not a good place, or even merely a bad place.

They'd been, for an amount of time Wes hadn't been able to put into words, walking through Nightmare Central, and Buffy had a feeling Wes's advanced state of freaked-outness had less to do with Moira or his hand, and more with where he'd just come back from. And Wesley had been a vampire there. Basically immortal. Quick-healing. Not really needing to sleep or breathe. Not like her guys

Buffy felt very lonely, standing there by the busy elevators, and more than a little sorry for herself. Didn't she have enough to deal with? Why did fate, or whatever, keep having to slam her in new and interesting ways?

A couple minutes of that, though, and she'd had enough. She was here already, so why not go downstairs and check with her good friends in the ER? They knew her, they knew Giles. If he had come in, wasn't it better to find out than to keep on with the vague worries?

Still, Buffy had a hard time opening the door to the stairs. Not because it was so heavy, but because a big part of her was really, really afraid. Slayer strength, Slayer strength, she kept repeating, like a mantra, all the way down, and then, before she exactly knew what had happened, she found herself standing in front of the ER reception desk.

She hadn't realized how late it was--or how early, really. The clock behind the desk said seven-oh-five, which Buffy guessed was AM. Her time sense was totally screwed. The day shift nurse must have just come on duty, because she was still taking off her coat and chatting with another nurse, who was putting her coat on. Neither of them noticed her.

"Uh, excuse me," Buffy said, too impatient for polite waiting. The putting-her-coat-on-nurse turned, and she was relieved to see the broad, good-natured face of Doris McCray.

"Oh, hi, Buffy," she said. "You here for Xander, or for Mr. Giles?"

Her heart did a weird little square dance thing in her chest. "They're here? I mean, uh...are they still here? In the ER?"

Doris gave her co-worker a quick look. "I'm pretty sure they've been sent up already, but LaTanya can take a look for you. I'd stay, but I've gotta get my kids off to soccer camp." She laughed. "A whole week of quiet! What am I gonna do with myself?"

The other nurse, LaTanya laughed too. "Me? I'd like to think I'd have a week of wild romance, but the truth is, I'd probably sleep the whole time. Either that, or my big excitement would be getting the bathroom really clean for a change. I swear, it's like living with wolves. And the girls are just as bad as the boys."

Buffy shifted from foot to foot with impatience. This could go on forever.

"So much for my..." Doris began.

"Excuse me," Buffy said pointedly. "Xander and Giles?"

Doris finished up with her coat and gave a Buffy a little touch on the shoulder. "Good luck," was all she said, and then she was gone out the sliding doors. Her co-worker got busy with the computer.

"Okay, now, what were the names?"

"Uh...Xander Harris. Alexander Harris. And Rupert Giles."

The nurse's fingers flew. "Xander Harris. There we are. Room 312. And...I'm sorry...the other one...?"

"Giles. Rupert. Giles is the last name." Great. That sounded coherent. But she was scared. Really, really scared.

LaTanya was shaking her head. "No, everything I have here is old. A few days old, anyway. You're sure he was coming here?"

Buffy wasn't sure of anything, but she didn't want to give up so easily. "What if... Um, what if someone came in, say, unconscious, and didn't have any ID? Would you just list them as John Doe or something?"

The nurse gave her a look.

"It's really important. He's..." How to describe Giles to someone who didn't know him. "Umn, tall." Double great. Like the ER didn't see hundreds of tall guys every week. "British." Because they could tell if he was unconscious. "He has green eyes, and brown hair going a little gray. Kinda medium build, but strong." And when he smiles his eyes go all warm and crinkle a little at the corners, and when he holds me, inside his arms feels like the warmest, safest place in the world, and I love him so much I can't stand to hear if anything horrible's happened, but I also can't stand not to know. "Uh...mid-forties?" Buffy finished lamely.

LaTanya gave her a different look, kind and a little sad. "You know I just came on, hon," she said. "But I'll ask, okay? Wait here a sec?" She took a quick look to make sure there weren't any patients waiting, then headed down the hall, her crepe-soled shoes squeaking slightly on the tile.

Less than five minutes later, she was back. "Dr. Makepeace says they had someone--a mugging victim--who might match the description. They sent him up to the fourth floor. Respiratory."

"For a mugging?" Buffy wanted to ask, but she didn't. Instead, she nodded, said thank you, and sleepwalked back to the stairs. Fourth floor. But it might not even be Giles. It could be some other guy, and Giles could be at home, feeling fine--okay, relatively fine--and Celeste could be just about to call.

Buffy didn't believe a word of it. She took the stairs two or three at a time, running as if a whole nest of fire-demons was behind her, up all four flights and out into the fourth floor hall.

"No running," a security guy told her, and Buffy could only just manage to make herself slow down. By the time she reached the nurses' station, though, her feet were dragging as if her shoes had turned into big blocks of lead.

And there it was, on the whiteboard right behind the desk. John Doe, room 417. All the other patients had names, so if it was going to be him, that would be the one. Or else some other poor beaten-up guy in his mid-forties was going to get a surprise visit from a total stranger.

She still had on her lead shoes going down the hall in the other direction, and her heart still seemed to want to do that little do-si-do thing against her ribs, but Buffy wouldn't let herself stop. There was room 417, and there was a patient in the bed with a really, really tall woman looming over him and a hissing sound and a bunch of smoke in the air.

Buffy's body shifted instantly into attack mode, and her hands came up, her body tensed to fly and kick. And then it hit her. This was the respiratory wing. The scarily tall woman was probably some sort of therapist or technician, and the smoke wasn't smoke at all, it was some breathe-inable kind of medicine.

"Uh, hi," she said, in a little mouse-voice. "The...uh...ER sent me up here. Because maybe." She couldn't say anything else. The guy in the bed wasn't Giles. He was too thin, for one thing, and too old, and she'd thought Giles set records for being the palest person in California, but this guy looked so far beyond pale he was edging into the realm of chalk white. Of course, it was hard to tell exactly, with the plastic mask-thingy covering half his face...

Still, Buffy took another step into the room. Nope, definitely not Giles. Except that...

Except that she saw his hand lying on top of the covers. His left hand. And there were the splints on his fingers, just the same as there'd been when he left.

"Oh," Buffy breathed.

The very tall woman smiled at her kindly. "We've been hoping some family would show up. Are you his daughter?"

Buffy moved closer. "No," she said softly, then, even though it wasn't anyone's business, added, "Fiancee."

The woman blinked a couple times. She had cats on her uniform, Buffy noticed. Little cartoon cats chasing each other's tails. Lots of people were allergic to cats, and that could cause breathing problems, right? Only that was ridiculous. The cats weren't real. They couldn't hurt anything.

"He has about five more minutes of this," the therapist said, still sounding nice. "Then I can leave you alone together. His doctor should be by at, oh, about seven thirty or so."

"Thanks," Buffy murmured. "Is he... Uh, what's that you're giving him? It looks..." Scary, that's what it looked. Everything looked scary.

But the woman just smiled. "Don't worry, sweetie, this is no big deal. The doctors think your...um...fiancee's lungs are reacting to something toxic, maybe something he breathed in. He doesn't have a history of COPD, does he?"

Buffy shook her head. She had no idea what the woman meant, but Giles's lungs had always been fine. Except when she made him run to far or too fast, or worked the hell out of him during a training session, but anyone who wasn't a Slayer would have been panting then. That was normal.

This wasn't.

"So, that's good. They're giving him Solumedrol by IV to take down the inflamation, and this stuff I have going right now helps his breathing passages to open up nice and wide and not get clogged up with fluid. A day or two, and he'll be right as rain."

What was right about rain? Buffy had always wondered that. Giles would probably have answered, "everything." And maybe if you were a farmer or something, okay. But it was like that saying about the whole nine yards--though Giles had finally explained that one as meaning the nine yards of material that went into making rich people's clothes a long time ago. She couldn't imagine wearing anything that used up that much cloth. She doubted her entire wardrobe used up nine yards of material. And Giles would probably have had some kind of pointed comment to make about that, too.

right at the moment, she really, really wanted to be able to hear him making pointed comments. But he wasn't. He was quiet.

Buffy moved to the head of the bed, her hand shaking as she reached to touch Giles's forehead. His skin was hot, hotter even then it had been last time she'd touched him, and she'd thought he'd had a pretty good fever going then. His hair was wet with sweat, and his eyes were dark-circled and sunken. She hated seeing him so completely still, so used-up looking. It wasn't right.

She hardly even noticed when the therapist packed up her stuff and left, just stood there, stroking Giles's brow with her thumb, gazing down on his familiar but unfamiliar face. She tried to pay attention when the doctor came in, and thought she'd picked up little bits and pieces here and there. He'd lost a ton of blood, his lungs were screwed up, he had some kind of infection--probably from the animal bite in his arm--that they were fighting with antibiotics. He'd been badly dehydrated along with the blood loss, and his heart had stopped a couple times, but was okay now, they thought. Then there was the beating, the cuts and the ribs and his hand...

Boil it all down to this: he was messed up, and they were trying to help him, but they weren't sure his body could handle the strain of dealing with it all. The doctor was young, and had a lot of heinously frizzy red hair that she really should have done something with, but she seemed pleasant. She seemed sympathetic. Buffy just wished she'd been able to give better news.

Something along the lines of, "He's just sleeping, but when he wakes up, you can take him home." That would have been nice.

Right. Not in her world.