Chapter Twelve

Buffy was fading in and out. Her mind was muzzy and hazy, and shadows were dark and filled with evil things, and the edges of the world were sharp, and at the same time, wavery to the point of unreality. When she was awake, she could feel the scratchy sheets on her cold, sweaty skin, hear the sounds of doctors being paged and nurses making their rounds.

When she was asleep, she was visited by ghosts... some old, some recent. Merrick, her first Watcher, had stood at her bedside at one point, his own stake through his heart. He was resting one hand on it. He looked distant and very sad.

Sometimes, it was a little girl, her cousin, who’d died in a hospital when Buffy was very young. She would look at her with wide, accusing eyes. Or sometimes, with mute panic.

There was a parade of others, the people she hadn’t quite been in time to save, the people who had been nothing to her but an enigma for Giles to puzzle out, whose bodies had been nothing but pieces of their puzzle, or obstacles in their path, or enemies to be slaughtered. Like fishes, they were the ones that got away, the ones that slipped through her fingers, maybe because she wanted a normal life, and had gone to the Bronze, or done her homework, or just flaked out one night, and laid in her bed listening to music. Or, they were the victims of her mistakes, or possibly, what she always considered acceptable losses in the overall battle.

One girl stood there longer than the others. She had shoulder length hair, mousy brown, unremarkable. She’d watched Buffy with quiet desperation, and then, all of a sudden, she’d just... fallen apart. Not emotionally. Physically. Her arms and legs and head had just fallen off her body. Buffy had jerked awake after that, her breath racing, found a nurse beside her bed, saying it was all right.

It wasn’t.

Then, there were the most recent and heartbreaking. There was a middle-aged man, whose picture she’d seen in the paper the morning after Giles had been turned. His name was John. He had two children. That night, he’d gone out to investigate a noise. He never came back. His wife had found him dead on their patio, and had said that a dignified-looking man and a younger, dark haired woman had laughed at her, and then vanished into the night.

And also, there was Angel. He was there almost constantly. He’d sit beside her, his hand holding hers, so blissfully cool against her fever-hot skin. He would whisper to her, softly, lovingly, telling her about all he had done, all the people he had killed, how Jenny’s blood had tasted on his lips, how he’d scented her fear. And he’d told her how Giles, how Ripper, had turned on him, killed him. He told her he’d created a monster even he hadn’t been able to handle. And then he would laugh, and stroke the hair back from her sweaty brow, and kiss her lips.

Now, she was somewhere between sleeping and waking. She looked out into the creeping shadows and the sharp edges of the hallway and she saw something pass by her door. Dark hat, dark coat, long, curved nose, the wrinkled face of an inhumanly ancient being. She jolted in shock. Real. It was real.

She grabbed the bar of her bed and felt its cold shock in her hand and knew for sure. She was awake. And that was a demon.

Trembling all over from fever and exhaustion, she sat up and dragged her legs over to the side of the bed, then let herself down to the floor as carefully as possible. The room still seemed to be moving around her as she carefully moved to her door and peered out into the hallway.

But the demon was gone.

“Buffy?”

She turned her head slowly, trying to not invoke the vertigo, and found Xander standing beside her.

“Xan?” she asked, and her voice sounded far away.

“Yeah, Buff. I don’t think you’re quite cleared for takeoff yet. Let me get you back into bed. Wow, I can’t believe I actually got to say that.”

She wasn’t in humor mode, so the comment drifted right over her head, like a leaf on a sluggish current.

“Xan, there was a demon.”

“What? Demon? I didn’t see any demon, Buffster. You could possibly be hallucinating, though, and if so, enjoy it while it lasts. Normally, that kind of experience requires controlled substances.”

He was guiding her back towards the bed, which, actually, seemed like a very good idea right now. She stared at the crumpled, tangled white sheets and felt a longing akin to the way a soldier in a distant land may feel while reading a letter from home.

“Hang on, lemme get this for ya,” Xander said, gently releasing her and grabbing the sheets, trying to wrestle them back into order one-handed. Buffy swayed back and forth and couldn’t find it in her to do anything but watch.

“All righty,” he said after a moment, though the bed really wasn’t in much better shape than it had been before. “Your chariot awaits, madam.”

He gestured expansively, then placed his hand back on the small of her back and gave a gentle push. She climbed back in, lying down on her back, and tugging at the covers.

Xander stepped up beside her and reached for the sheets, pulling them across her with his good arm and tucking them around her body.

“There you go. Nice and snug.”

Wait. Demon.

“Xander,” she said, as firmly and awakely as possible, “I saw a demon.”

“Ok, we had this conversation, remember?”

She reluctantly pulled a hand out of her cocoon and weakly grabbed his sleeve.

“I really did. I know when I’ve seen a demon, ok, Xander? Slayer here.”

That tirade left her practically panting for breath. She so hated being sick.

Xander stroked the hair off her brow, like dream-Angel, only warm.

“Hey, ok, ok, no offense intended, oh Chosen One. What kinda demon? I’ll get Will and the guys on it.”

“Um. It looked. Old. Kinda like, you know, that guy? From the movies? With the... fingernails...”

She waggled her fingers to demonstrate.

“Old guy from movies?”

“Yeah, scary... movies.”

Her energy reserves were fading rapidly. Xander was still petting her hair. It was nice.

“Um. Freddy Krueger?”

She smiled, as brightly as she could, given her condition, which meant it was kind of like one of those flickering letters in a liquor store sign rather than its usual thousand-watt brilliance, but, hey, extenuating circumstances for not-so-spriteliness.

“Yeh...” she said, not quite getting the entire word out before giving up. Xander looked down at her with loving brown eyes, and a soft smile on his own lips.

“Okee dokee, then. We’re on it. Freddy Krueger demon, stalking the hospital halls. One soon-to-be-toast Freddy Krueger demon, that is. Now, your mission, whether or not you choose to accept it, is to take a nice nap and feel better.”

She thought maybe she could handle that as she drifted off again.

This time, it was Giles standing in her doorway, one shoulder resting against the door jam. The corners of his eyes were crinkly and he was smiling, like he did sometimes, after she’d saved the world, or something else of note, or sometimes just for no reason at all. He saw her looking at him and pushed away from the door, strolling into the room with his arms laced loosely across his chest, the smile never leaving his face.

“Buffy,” he said, and his voice was filled with tender reverence.

“Giles,” she said, not sure if she was really speaking or not.

He sat down in the chair beside her bed and touched her, brushing her cheek gently with the backs of his knuckles. His skin was soft and oh-so-warm.

“Why, Buffy?” he asked, his voice still soft, still brimming with love.

She frowned a little, confused and tired, and just wanting him to be with her.

“Why’d you let him do it? If only you’d killed him... when I asked you to.”

His shoulders slumped a little, and his eyes darkened, regret written across his face.

“If only you’d stopped him then, when you had the chance. I’d still be alive. Jenny would be alive. You... oh, Buffy. How could you?”

Devastation. That was all she could feel. It was like dying. It washed through her, wrapped like a cold hand around her throat and her heart and her guts and squeezed. Those simple words, spoken in his soft, deep voice, flat and agonized. It was the same voice he’d used to confess that he didn’t know how to stop the demon Eyghon without killing his beloved Jenny.

“Giles,” she whispered again, and this time it came out strangled, desperate, the same way it had when he’d had her pinned to that pillar in the warehouse. He leaned closer, his green eyes suddenly intense.

“I trusted you. I *believed* in you, Buffy.”

Then, he pulled away, stood up and paced to the far side of the room, his back to her as he faced the window.

“Look where that lead me.”

He turned around and his shirt was unbuttoned to his chest, the collar soaked and brilliant red with his own blood. His face was twisted into the demonic visage of the vampire, except his eyes, which remained grey-green, and agonized.

“Look what you’ve done to me,” he whispered, and then the sunlight blazed around him, and he fell to dust.

Buffy woke again, finding herself propped up on her elbows, with her heart racing. A tear rolled down her cheek and into her hair, cool and tickling as it slowly curled around her ear.

“Oh, god,” she whispered, and then a deep and dreamless sleep claimed her.

previous | title page | next