Trust - Chapter 17

It had been a long, long night, and after the doctor's visit and about half an hour of sitting by Giles's side with his hand held gently in her own, Buffy just couldn't sit up any more. She lay her head down on the edge of the bed, close to his, telling herself that she just needed to rest her eyes, that in a few minutes she'd be ActiveBuffy, ready to face the world again.

Only, when she finally woke up, the sun had reached an entirely different place in the sky and the clock said one forty-seven. Buffy couldn't believe it--and, if she hadn't been the Slayer, she wouldn't have been able to sit back up, either. As it was, she found herself groaning as she tried to work the kinks out of her shoulders and neck. She was starving, too, and she needed to pee in the worst possible way.

"Good sleep, love?" Celeste's voice said, from over by the window. Celeste was doing something complicated and lacy with a ball of thin white thread and a little silver thing that looked like it belonged in a fishing tackle box. Buffy watched the smooth, almost blurringly-fast motion of her fingers with a kind of confused fascination. She couldn't help but think of those women they'd learned about studying mythology in seventh grade Humanities. What were they called? Norns, that was it. Norns, spinning out people's lives in different colors, snipping them short or long.

Buffy wondered what her own thread would look like.

"What's that?" she asked, still feeling dim.

Celeste glanced at her hands as if she hadn't been aware of doing anything, though her fingers didn't stop moving. "This? Oh, tatting. It relaxes me."

"Oh," Buffy answered, deciding that she was ready to try standing up now. Her spine crackled when she straightened it all the way. "Would you mind...? While I...?"

"Never fear, I shan't leave him," her friend answered.

Buffy went, using the bathroom just off Giles's room, even though it was marked For Patient's Use Only. She wished she dared help herself to the shower, too, because she felt beyond gross--and then she figured, why not? Chances were, they'd never even know, and if they did, what were they going to say to her? She could always pretend not to have seen the sign.

She made it quick, still a little nervous about her rebellious, rule-breaking, shower-taking ways, but she felt better afterwards, more awake, a little more able to face the things she needed to face. Celeste greeted her with a smile, and better yet, a small cooler of food, passing her a thermos of icy-cold homemade lemonade, and a turkey breast sandwich on crusty roll.

"I hadn't time to make bread," Celeste said apologetically, "But I did manage to locate what seems a rather decent bakery."

Buffy was too busy stuffing her face to answer, or do much of anything but nod enthusiastically. Not only had she skipped way too many meals lately, and would probably have been enthused about peanut butter on Wonder bread, but she'd honestly never eaten a better sandwich in her life. In fact, she would have said it was impossible for a sandwich to taste as good as this one did. She didn't even begin to slow down until she'd gobbled up every last bite, plus a little container of fruit salad, plus two cookies--chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin. At the moment, she didn't even care if they contained mind control drugs, ala Robot Ted. She'd have been perfectly willing to be mind-controlled.

"Celeste," Buffy said. "You're evil. This is too good. I'm gonna weight 200 pounds by Christmas."

Her friend gave a little smile. "I doubt that very much. Better now?"

"Lots." And that was true. She did feel better. Clean, fed, finally able to deal.

Buffy touched Giles's forehead again, hoping he felt better too. He did seem a slightly less feverish, and though his breathing sounded raspy still, he appeared to be resting peacefully.

"I was scared," she admitted.

"As was I," Celeste said. "He looked so very...unlike himself." She moved closer, resting her hand on Buffy's shoulder, her fingers warm and strong and comforting.

"I'm glad you're here," Buffy told her. "I really, really am. And not just because you saved me from the horror that is hospital cafeteria food."

Her friend laughed. "Though one suspects there's an element of that in your thankfulness," she teased.

"Have you heard from Seb? About Wesley, I mean."

"Mmn." Celeste was quiet a minute, looking down at her. "They were forced to take the hand."

"Poor Wes." Buffy found herself shuddering. She couldn't imagine. Or, rather, she could, and that's what made it all cringeworthy.

"Indeed." Weirdly, Celeste's face didn't look overly sympathetic, which made the big warning bells start jangling in Buffy's head.

"What's up?"

"I suspect..." She frowned then. Actually frowned, and Buffy couldn't remember Celeste doing that before. "When Rupert was brought in, the doctor said, he'd so little blood left that they feared they'd not be able to save him. A moment more--half a moment more--and he would have died. Actually, he did die. His heart stopped and was restarted twice."

"Which makes Giles one up on me," Buffy joked feebly, even though even the thought of that made her feel cold.

"Quite." Celeste's frown deepened. "Obviously, some of that blood may well have been lost through his...wounds. But look--" Carefully, she peeled back a piece of tape that held a dressing over Giles's neck.

Buffy had to sit down again suddenly. There were two holes. Two deep, ragged holes spaced about two inches apart.

"You think...?" she began shakily. "But Wes..."

Celeste's eyes were cold, their normally soft brown gone hard and shiny, and in them Buffy got a hint of exactly what kind of Slayer her friend would have been. "Yes," she answered, in a sharp, clipped tone that held not a trace of her Caribbean childhood, "That is precisely what I think."

But Wesley wouldn't have done that, she wanted to protest. He was... That is, he had a soul. And we were friends. We helped him.

Instead, Buffy said, "Can you stay with Giles a little while? Have me paged if anything changes? I wanna go...that is, I think I'd better go ask Wesley some questions."

Wes had just been settled into his regular room on the fifth floor, the nurse at the desk told her, and all the way up Buffy gave herself a talking to, all of which could pretty much be summed up as: "Keep cool. Ask questions. But don't lose it." All of which was good advice. She hoped she'd be able to take it.

Moira was sitting beside Wesley's bed, in the same position she herself had occupied beside Giles's, and doing pretty much the same things she'd done--stroking his forehead, talking to him softly. Wes looked monumentally stoned, which Buffy guessed wasn't surprising. He'd also seemed to have recovered his superpower of ultimate neatness. Even the bandages that covered the rounded end of his left forearm were blindingly white.

Buffy stopped at the end of the bed. "Hi, Moira. Wes." Her voice sounded funny, even to her.

"Buffy," Moira answered. She had a guarded, watchful look. Or maybe Watchery was a better word.

Wesley gave her a slightly off-center grin.

"I... Um... I thought you'd like to know..." Buffy gasped in a breath and tried again. "I found Giles," she blurted. "He's..." How should she put this? "He's--that is--I think... I guess he's gonna be okay. I mean, he isn't great right now, but he'll get better. It was kind of a close thing, though."

"Buffy, Wesley needs his rest." Moira said in an irritating kind of a mom-voice, one that set Buffy's teeth on edge. She knew, suddenly, that whatever had happened, Moira'd figured it out and now had every intention of hiding it from her. In the past she herself hadn't always been entirely truthful, but it drove her crazy when people lied to her. Unreasonable, maybe, but there it was.

"Wes," Buffy said, keeping her own voice low, "Why did you drink from him?"

Wesley's eyes turned to hers, looking so completely...stricken that she had a hard time keeping her mad on for him.

"'Cause you did, didn't you? Drink from him?"

"I couldn't bear it," Wesley answered, his own voice so low that even with Slayer hearing Buffy had to strain to hear it. "I never meant... Honestly, I never meant... Yet it tore at me. The thirst. The terrible thirst. I could not have held out much longer, and then..." His one unswollen blue eye turned to hers, missing its focus then sliding back to where she actually was. "He told me... That is, ah, I believe he told me to drink from him, so that I would not harm Xander. He made me swear I would not hurt the boy." His eyelid drifted down, only a thin sliver of blueness showing beneath it. His voice got fainter. "I believed that I could take only a little, then stop, and yet I was powerless. The bloody story of my life. I was powerless. We didn't leave him. We carried his body all the way through to the end, though I suppose even that was Xander's doing, really. Really... I never meant to kill him."

And then he was out. Like the proverbial light. Leaving Buffy's heart booming in her chest. She wasn't sure if she was sad or horrified or mad. Okay, at the time Wesley had been a vampire, and that's what vampires did: they drank blood. Maybe they could control it some, maybe they couldn't, but they needed to drink the same way she needed food and sleep and water.

But he KILLED Giles! some other part of her brain screamed at her, and that she just couldn't get on board with. He'd taken Giles, and he drained him until he was dead. And all the stuff she'd told herself over the years about Angel and Angelus, soul versus no soul just went flying out the window.

"Satisfied, are you?" Moira asked, a touch of snark in her voice.

"Drop dead," Buffy told her, and then because to have said those words struck her as ridiculous under the circumstances, she realized that she'd started to laugh and cry at the same time. Maybe I should have added "again," she thought.

But it was all just too much, and so she ran out of there, away from Moira and Wes and all those weird conflicting feelings, back to where Celeste waited with her clever fingers and her sense of calm, back to where Giles slept, sick and out of it, but not dead.

This was definitely what he'd call a moral ambiguity, and Buffy's mind just kept spinning around it like a top, or a hamster on a wheel. She wished everything would stop, hold still, and all these hard questions and answers would belong to someone else.

She didn't want to deal any more.

His powers of sneakiness must have been on the fritz--or maybe they'd never worked in the first place, he'd just been deluded. Given his history, Xander thought the latter was probably the case. At any rate, he'd gotten caught before he even passed the nurse's station, and three separate nurses and a doctor had given him hell for trying to leave.

Except that he was leaving, and it was his choice, whether the doctor said yes or no, so in the end they'd just made him sign a paper that let them off the hook if he dropped dead suddenly, gave him a bag of medicines and told him not to drive.

Xander didn't intend to look at what was in the bag, and he had every intention of driving, but if it made them feel better to issue their orders, that was okay by him. No one could force him to obey.

Walking back to his parents' house, Xander kept getting dizzy and breathless and having to stop, sitting down on benches or curbs or people's lawns, whatever was handy, but that was okay too. What was the moral of the tortoise and the hare? Slow and steady wins the race? Something like that, anyway. He just needed to be slow and steady. He'd get where he was going.

He'd decided to take his mom's car. It was the worst kind of beater, and it hadn't had a oil change in something like 9000 miles--not since, in fact, he'd done the last change for her himself--but his dad's car had a flat tire, and besides, always carried unmistakable smell of recycled booze. Uncle Rory's cruisemobile was just too obvious.

Once he got there, to the place he refused to think of as home, the kitchen door wasn't locked, so Xander cautiously edged inside. The place was a mess, as usual, reeking of old food and, for some reason, of cat pee. Only they didn't have a cat. They'd never had a cat.

Someday, Xander told himself, he was gonna live in a nice little house, in a nice little town that wasn't anywhere near a Hellmouth. He was gonna wash his dishes after every meal and vacuum his carpets daily and actually have a cat, or maybe a dog. A manly kind of dog, like a Labrador retriever or an Irish setter. And he'd work a manly kind of job and have the guys he worked with over for beer and barbecue or to watch the game, and his wife would be nice and look cute in shorts when she was young, and when she wasn't young anymore, when neither of them was young anymore, that wouldn't matter because they'd have had twenty or thirty or forty years of laughing together and sharing stuff and just lying spooned up in bed on cold winter nights, listening to each other breathe but not saying anything, not because they were angry or hurt or resentful, but because they were comfortable, and they'd never stopped loving each other. They'd have kids who'd be kinda bratty, but good at heart, and they'd do stuff together like playing football or catch in the backyard.

And that kind of life was the real object of any game of Anywhere But Here Xander would ever play. That kind of normal life. A life where he didn't have to be scared all the time, or ashamed. A life where the things that happened were amazing just because they were so ordinary. A life where when his son got called out of class to go talk to the principal, it was because he'd been caught smoking in the boy's room or spray-painting "Class of 2026 Rules!" on the watertower, not because one of the teachers had noticed bruises and thought it would do some good to say something. Before he'd been eaten by Xander's hyena pals, Principal Flutie had called him down for a couple of those meetings. The one positive thing you could have said about Snyder was that you never had to worry about tripping over his good intentions.

For a minute, still, Xander struggled with an impulse to look for him mom. She'd be somewhere in the house, passed out in the little bedroom that once had been Sean's, the one she'd moved into about the time he'd graduated from elementary school, or maybe in the bathroom. Or maybe just sitting hazy-eyed on the couch, listening to the old records from when she was young and happy over and over and over again. If Xander hugged her, she might even recognize him, and call him by his own name, not his long-gone brother's.

Only he couldn't stand to take the chance. Instead, he took the little magnetic box with her spare car key off the fridge. His mom always kept her insurance card and registration in the glove compartment, so that was okay.

She wouldn't have known him. She wouldn't have. And besides, his head hurt and his chest hurt and he just wanted to get out of Sunnydale. No sense in putting it off any longer.

The old brown Aries K shook as he backed it out of the garage, and Xander thought he'd be lucky if he made it a hundred miles, but he wasn't going to worry about that. The car would take him as far as it took him, and after that he'd get a bus, or maybe just stay where he was, if the place he broke down in was too bad. Even if it was, it had to beat Sunnydale.

Anywhere but here, Xander told himself.

He had two more stops to make. One at Giles's place, one at Wesley's. Giles's was easy. He had a key, and he used it. The place was deserted, no sign of Buffy or anyone, except for a bunch of half-drunk and long-cold mugs of tea. Sebastian and Celeste, probably. Maybe Aunt Flora. A whole apartment full of English people, when Xander didn't think he'd ever be able to listen to an English voice again--at least not to the kind of English voice everyone in Giles's family had, with the many, many words and the oh-so-proper accent--without tearing up. He flashed back on Giles's large, capable, gentle hands lifting his head, stroking back his hair, and had to force himself to climb the stairs into the loft. He'd slept there often enough and never noticed anything in particular, but now it just seemed to scream GILES at him, and he didn't want to be reminded. Not yet. Later he'd do the grief thing, but not yet.

He knew Giles kept a decent amount of spare cash in the night stand drawer, and Giles's wallet was there too. Feeling bad, and guilty, Xander took what he found, all of it, except what was in the wallet itself, still in neat bands from the bank. He took Giles's VISA card too, and his ATM card, feeling like a dirty sneak thief even as he did it. Okay, it wasn't honest, but it wasn't as if Giles was going to say anything, was it? And Xander never would have taken anything from him when Giles was alive. Snooped through his personal stuff, maybe--but stealing from Giles would have been unthinkable.

It wasn't like Sebastian or Celeste needed the money, or Aunt Flora. And Buffy's mom would take care of her, she didn't have to worry.

Xander almost lost it again, though, when, tucked away in the back of the wallet, he found a picture of all of them--Buffy, Giles, Willow, him, Oz and Cordelia. They were smiling, even Giles himself, and it must have been at the prom, because there they were in their tuxedos and formals. Xander found himself touching the picture with shaking fingers, choking on the tears he wouldn't let out, no way, no how.

He knew the picture would hurt him, always, every time he looked at it, but Xander couldn't help himself. He took it too.

The stop at Wesley's was easier. His stuff was sitting there in the entry, still packed. Xander just grabbed the bags, and left.

Next stop, wherever.