4.
It was difficult to look at her now.
Willow's expression hurt her heart, made her eyes prickle with hot tears, thinking about how she must be feeling. That stone, it was like a direct link to Tara, a conduit between wherever she was now and here, this room, this place. Between her and her Willow, whose face was radiant now, awash with tears, as she silently said everything she'd held inside ever since they'd been parted. There was no need for words in that place. She remembered that much.
She felt a little uncomfortable, as if she walked in on her, on them, in a private moment. Maybe they should leave? She motioned to Xander with her head and they got slowly to their feet, moved quietly to the door.
"Will she be OK? What's it doing to her?"
His voice was just above a whisper, as full of emotion and wonder as she was. To see Willow this way, so luminous with hope and grief, was wonderfully terrifying. For months now, since her return to consciousness, she had been detached, dipping only very occasionally into the darkness they knew must still threaten to overwhelm her. The deep well of sadness growing ever deeper, ever more unfathomable within her and nothing either anyone could say or do to help ease it. No one except Tara herself.
She could come to terms with loss, eventually, but the guilt... In the aftermath of her complete meltdown it had come to her. Terrible, soul- destroying guilt that had overridden her raw anguish over Tara's death almost entirely. How could see have desecrated her memory so completely? By taking everything that she had despised, the black arts, magic for pure evil, for revenge and embracing it, drinking it into herself as if it were some kind of balm for what she had lost. The second that Tara's life had left her body. That was how she had remembered her, not with tears and beautiful memories, but with hate and blood and that was what she needed to be cured of. Not the addiction to magic or the suicidal impulses. She needed Tara's forgiveness. She needed absolution.
The stone glowed with a pure white heat and Buffy felt it. Tara was healing her, answering Willow, cleansing her, assuaging. She gently pushed Xander outside, closed the door.
"It's helping her. More than we ever could."
He nodded shakily. One touch of it had convinced him of it's power, it's ability to heal Willow, as it had Buffy. They crossed the hallway, leant on the sill to look outside.
Fall was almost over, the grounds of the clinic a carpet of russet and scarlet. They watched the birds for a while in silence, the to and fro of the hospital staff, patients and day visitors.
"So...where did you say he got it?"
Buffy opened her mouth to answer, stopped. One particular visitor had caught her eye. Scurrying across the front lawn, clutching a bunch of flowers, it was his halting, self-conscious manner that made her notice him, rather than the familiar forehead and greying hair. She grinned, banged on the glass with a little too much force.
"Buffy! Hey there!"
Xander was flushed with embarrassment, as every eye in the day room turned to them. She groaned, grabbed his arm, steered him towards the stairwell,
"Didn't you see him? Giles is downstairs!"
Their entrance into the foyer was less than dignified. Buffy forced to straddle Xander's back in her efforts to get past him, bringing him to his knees at the foot of the stairs, ending up in a tangle of arms and legs, slapping and shoving at each other as if they had never left the library.
"And the raising of your own children? When does this begin again?"
His voice was faintly imperious, tinged with humour as always, his question directed at Xander who was scrambling to his feet to embrace him in a bear hug. Buffy joined him, careful not to break any ribs, burying her face in the comfortingly familiar aroma of his tweed jacket.
"Yeah well, we're a few months off yet,"
Xander was grinning now, full of pride in his accomplishment, getting Anya pregnant.
"I'm gonna cram at the last minute. They do study guides for Dr. Spock?"
Buffy, too full of joy, continued to hug until the moment had long passed. Giles cleared his throat conspicuously and she opened her eyes, let him go.
"Oops, sorry!" she dusted him down, "Too much with the whole needy for affection thing."
They stood apart for a second, forming three corners of a familiar quadrangle. The forth member notably absent. Giles was the first to speak,
"How is she?"
Xander drew breath, looked at Buffy, held it.
"She's good. She's better."
There it was. The obligatory removal of the glasses, the slow polish which spoke of worries too many and varied to voice. Of his affection for Willow, his concern for them and, as always, the uneasiness, the guilt for having left them to deal with this alone. Buffy's hand went out, touched his,
"We're all good."
His head came up, met her eyes with gratitude. She saw Xander shift on one foot with anticipation, knew he was eager to share, could never keep a secret for long, especially from Giles. He gave a small cough, gesturing less subtly with his head to the coffee room.
"Why don't we have a...Giles you look as if you could do with a...?"
This was bad. He'd only been back in the country five minutes and already he was being confronted with stuff, asked to deal with stuff. It didn't seem fair. Just for once she wished he could find everything peachy, maybe come round for a nice dinner, enjoy a refreshing break from his duties in England, play a couple of hands of poker with her and Dawn. But always with the death and the portents and the horror, the horror. She sighed and felt his eyes go to her, wary.
"What is it? Is it money?"
What was this? Did everyone think they were on the verge of bankruptcy?
"No, really. We're fine. Money is fine."
She could see the disbelief being suppressed by them both and chose to ignore it.
"No, it's..."
Xander urged her on with a look and she went for it. Better out than in.
"Spike gave me this stone for Willow and it's Tara. It's not Tara..I mean I think it's a link to Tara or a message and we've given it to her and she's crying now, but good crying we think, but we don't really know what it is."
She sucked air, swallowed, bit her lip. Giles' face was a picture. Total confusion. You could almost hear the cogs, smell the oil as the motors whirred. She dreaded the look, the slow raise of the eyes, the clipped, hushed tone that let her know just how thoughtless, how stupid she had been, but it never came. Instead he cocked his head a little, frowned.
"A stone? What sort of stone?"
She breathed soft again, her mouth losing it's dryness.
"Shiny, green. Bit like kryptonite."
Xander supplied the details with his usual reference to pop culture, luckily one that Giles understood. He nodded, needing more though,
"When you say 'shiny', do you mean...?"
"It's all glowey-inside. Like that sphere thing we found to repel Glory was?"
His expression changed to one she couldn't entirely fathom. He didn't seem worried at all, just surprised.
"And where did you say...did you say Spike? Where did he find this?"
She rolled her eyes. So not ready for this one just yet.
"From an African demon, some big noise over there who's got a handle on the whole dimensional thing he said. Tall guy, glowing eyes, lives in a cave. Tardis...or something?"
That was better, she could read that look. Interest and a little pleasure.
"T'sarnis?"
She nodded once, relief.
"That's it. I couldn't do the whole tar-snar sound."
The glasses were off again. One day she'd start counting, see how many times he did that per hour. Make a graph or a pie chart or something.
"T'sarnis. He's a Graff'la demon. They have the ability to travel between dimensions, different planes. As easily as...er...we can travel to the next room."
"Handy! I mean if you've forgotten something, your boarding pass or your flight bag."
Xander's desire to inject humour always overruled his need to know,
"Spiritual planes. Demon dimensions and..." his eyes flicked to Buffy,"er...heavenly ones."
She knew he was trying to protect her she knew, but she let him know it wasn't needed any more with a slight raise of her eyebrows. She was an adult, things changed, she had dealt.
"So Spike got this...stone from T'sarnis? What business did he have with him?"
No need to mince words. She could tell him this, even though she could still hardly make sense of it herself. But she needed to keep it short, clear, so he didn't ask too many more questions, questions she didn't know the answers to yet.
"Spike's been humaned."
Damn Xander and his flair for the dramatic. Now the cat was well and truly out of the bag. More than that, the cat was up and dancing, waving flags. Giles' stared at him, at her, trying to glean something, before sputtering in a totally uncharacteristic manner,
"What on...earth are you talking about?"
"Spike's alive. He made him alive."
She gulped, her eyes wide, willing him to understand, so he could explain to her, but all she saw was more disbelief, confusion and more than a touch of alarm. Xander spread his hands wide on the table top, looked at the fingers, looked at them.
"So who's for coffee?"
and he was gone. Out of the blast radius. He'd thrown in the grenade and was now retreating to a bunker. She saw him steal a glance over his shoulder as he joined the line by the coffee machine and she froze him with a glare. Harris...you have a big mouth.
"So let me get this right? Spike turns up, gives you a glowing orb from a powerful inter-dimensional African demon to give to Willow...oh and by the way, he's now human?"
"Everything apart from the orb thing. It's more of a big rock."
She watched him shake his head, try to take it in, fail miserably, settle for a partial solution.
"Well, I'd have to see it of course but it sounds as if it might be something called a Seraph Stone. A very rare object. Demons use them to communicate, pass messages between dimensions. Saves all the messy porthole-ripping."
"Sort of like a demon-beeper?"
He rolled his eyes indulgently,
"No, not really." he paused, reconsidered, "More like a spiritual mobile phone."
"A-ha!"
Xander rejoined them with a beatific smile,
"So that's good, right? Willow can talk to Tara now?"
Giles pursed his lips,
"A Seraph Stone is er....a very powerful object. It links the spirit, the essence of one person with another. If Tara had simply wanted to give Willow a message I'm sure a good medium would have been a better method."
They looked at one another in silent understanding. A message wouldn't have been enough, she needed to see Tara, to be with her one last time. That was the purpose of the stone, why she had asked Spike to bring it all this way. Giles cleared his throat again, took a sip from his coffee.
"So...er...getting back to the other matter?"
Both pairs of eyes on her now and she still didn't know what to tell them.
"I know...I know...I didn't believe it either. But you should see him! With the pulse and the breathing and everything. It's eerie!"
"And this happened how exactly?"
Xander's in,
"Don't tell me. Was it bad shrimp?"
She eyed him with annoyance. Quit it, this is serious, I'm in deep here. Spend a year trying to come to terms for your feelings for a vampire, all the reasons you shouldn't be with him, want him, and then...to have it all turned upside down like this? How should she feel? Confused? Thrown? Try a double helping with cherries.
"Maybe you should ask him yourself, I probably wouldn't understand half of it all anyway. Why don't you give him a call?"
she took a crumpled card from the pocket of her leather jacket, handed it to him. Giles grimaced with revulsion,
"He's staying at The Ramada Inn?"
"Room 504!"
She looked at them both, a guilty start.
"What? He told me the number!"
It was difficult to look at her now.
Willow's expression hurt her heart, made her eyes prickle with hot tears, thinking about how she must be feeling. That stone, it was like a direct link to Tara, a conduit between wherever she was now and here, this room, this place. Between her and her Willow, whose face was radiant now, awash with tears, as she silently said everything she'd held inside ever since they'd been parted. There was no need for words in that place. She remembered that much.
She felt a little uncomfortable, as if she walked in on her, on them, in a private moment. Maybe they should leave? She motioned to Xander with her head and they got slowly to their feet, moved quietly to the door.
"Will she be OK? What's it doing to her?"
His voice was just above a whisper, as full of emotion and wonder as she was. To see Willow this way, so luminous with hope and grief, was wonderfully terrifying. For months now, since her return to consciousness, she had been detached, dipping only very occasionally into the darkness they knew must still threaten to overwhelm her. The deep well of sadness growing ever deeper, ever more unfathomable within her and nothing either anyone could say or do to help ease it. No one except Tara herself.
She could come to terms with loss, eventually, but the guilt... In the aftermath of her complete meltdown it had come to her. Terrible, soul- destroying guilt that had overridden her raw anguish over Tara's death almost entirely. How could see have desecrated her memory so completely? By taking everything that she had despised, the black arts, magic for pure evil, for revenge and embracing it, drinking it into herself as if it were some kind of balm for what she had lost. The second that Tara's life had left her body. That was how she had remembered her, not with tears and beautiful memories, but with hate and blood and that was what she needed to be cured of. Not the addiction to magic or the suicidal impulses. She needed Tara's forgiveness. She needed absolution.
The stone glowed with a pure white heat and Buffy felt it. Tara was healing her, answering Willow, cleansing her, assuaging. She gently pushed Xander outside, closed the door.
"It's helping her. More than we ever could."
He nodded shakily. One touch of it had convinced him of it's power, it's ability to heal Willow, as it had Buffy. They crossed the hallway, leant on the sill to look outside.
Fall was almost over, the grounds of the clinic a carpet of russet and scarlet. They watched the birds for a while in silence, the to and fro of the hospital staff, patients and day visitors.
"So...where did you say he got it?"
Buffy opened her mouth to answer, stopped. One particular visitor had caught her eye. Scurrying across the front lawn, clutching a bunch of flowers, it was his halting, self-conscious manner that made her notice him, rather than the familiar forehead and greying hair. She grinned, banged on the glass with a little too much force.
"Buffy! Hey there!"
Xander was flushed with embarrassment, as every eye in the day room turned to them. She groaned, grabbed his arm, steered him towards the stairwell,
"Didn't you see him? Giles is downstairs!"
Their entrance into the foyer was less than dignified. Buffy forced to straddle Xander's back in her efforts to get past him, bringing him to his knees at the foot of the stairs, ending up in a tangle of arms and legs, slapping and shoving at each other as if they had never left the library.
"And the raising of your own children? When does this begin again?"
His voice was faintly imperious, tinged with humour as always, his question directed at Xander who was scrambling to his feet to embrace him in a bear hug. Buffy joined him, careful not to break any ribs, burying her face in the comfortingly familiar aroma of his tweed jacket.
"Yeah well, we're a few months off yet,"
Xander was grinning now, full of pride in his accomplishment, getting Anya pregnant.
"I'm gonna cram at the last minute. They do study guides for Dr. Spock?"
Buffy, too full of joy, continued to hug until the moment had long passed. Giles cleared his throat conspicuously and she opened her eyes, let him go.
"Oops, sorry!" she dusted him down, "Too much with the whole needy for affection thing."
They stood apart for a second, forming three corners of a familiar quadrangle. The forth member notably absent. Giles was the first to speak,
"How is she?"
Xander drew breath, looked at Buffy, held it.
"She's good. She's better."
There it was. The obligatory removal of the glasses, the slow polish which spoke of worries too many and varied to voice. Of his affection for Willow, his concern for them and, as always, the uneasiness, the guilt for having left them to deal with this alone. Buffy's hand went out, touched his,
"We're all good."
His head came up, met her eyes with gratitude. She saw Xander shift on one foot with anticipation, knew he was eager to share, could never keep a secret for long, especially from Giles. He gave a small cough, gesturing less subtly with his head to the coffee room.
"Why don't we have a...Giles you look as if you could do with a...?"
This was bad. He'd only been back in the country five minutes and already he was being confronted with stuff, asked to deal with stuff. It didn't seem fair. Just for once she wished he could find everything peachy, maybe come round for a nice dinner, enjoy a refreshing break from his duties in England, play a couple of hands of poker with her and Dawn. But always with the death and the portents and the horror, the horror. She sighed and felt his eyes go to her, wary.
"What is it? Is it money?"
What was this? Did everyone think they were on the verge of bankruptcy?
"No, really. We're fine. Money is fine."
She could see the disbelief being suppressed by them both and chose to ignore it.
"No, it's..."
Xander urged her on with a look and she went for it. Better out than in.
"Spike gave me this stone for Willow and it's Tara. It's not Tara..I mean I think it's a link to Tara or a message and we've given it to her and she's crying now, but good crying we think, but we don't really know what it is."
She sucked air, swallowed, bit her lip. Giles' face was a picture. Total confusion. You could almost hear the cogs, smell the oil as the motors whirred. She dreaded the look, the slow raise of the eyes, the clipped, hushed tone that let her know just how thoughtless, how stupid she had been, but it never came. Instead he cocked his head a little, frowned.
"A stone? What sort of stone?"
She breathed soft again, her mouth losing it's dryness.
"Shiny, green. Bit like kryptonite."
Xander supplied the details with his usual reference to pop culture, luckily one that Giles understood. He nodded, needing more though,
"When you say 'shiny', do you mean...?"
"It's all glowey-inside. Like that sphere thing we found to repel Glory was?"
His expression changed to one she couldn't entirely fathom. He didn't seem worried at all, just surprised.
"And where did you say...did you say Spike? Where did he find this?"
She rolled her eyes. So not ready for this one just yet.
"From an African demon, some big noise over there who's got a handle on the whole dimensional thing he said. Tall guy, glowing eyes, lives in a cave. Tardis...or something?"
That was better, she could read that look. Interest and a little pleasure.
"T'sarnis?"
She nodded once, relief.
"That's it. I couldn't do the whole tar-snar sound."
The glasses were off again. One day she'd start counting, see how many times he did that per hour. Make a graph or a pie chart or something.
"T'sarnis. He's a Graff'la demon. They have the ability to travel between dimensions, different planes. As easily as...er...we can travel to the next room."
"Handy! I mean if you've forgotten something, your boarding pass or your flight bag."
Xander's desire to inject humour always overruled his need to know,
"Spiritual planes. Demon dimensions and..." his eyes flicked to Buffy,"er...heavenly ones."
She knew he was trying to protect her she knew, but she let him know it wasn't needed any more with a slight raise of her eyebrows. She was an adult, things changed, she had dealt.
"So Spike got this...stone from T'sarnis? What business did he have with him?"
No need to mince words. She could tell him this, even though she could still hardly make sense of it herself. But she needed to keep it short, clear, so he didn't ask too many more questions, questions she didn't know the answers to yet.
"Spike's been humaned."
Damn Xander and his flair for the dramatic. Now the cat was well and truly out of the bag. More than that, the cat was up and dancing, waving flags. Giles' stared at him, at her, trying to glean something, before sputtering in a totally uncharacteristic manner,
"What on...earth are you talking about?"
"Spike's alive. He made him alive."
She gulped, her eyes wide, willing him to understand, so he could explain to her, but all she saw was more disbelief, confusion and more than a touch of alarm. Xander spread his hands wide on the table top, looked at the fingers, looked at them.
"So who's for coffee?"
and he was gone. Out of the blast radius. He'd thrown in the grenade and was now retreating to a bunker. She saw him steal a glance over his shoulder as he joined the line by the coffee machine and she froze him with a glare. Harris...you have a big mouth.
"So let me get this right? Spike turns up, gives you a glowing orb from a powerful inter-dimensional African demon to give to Willow...oh and by the way, he's now human?"
"Everything apart from the orb thing. It's more of a big rock."
She watched him shake his head, try to take it in, fail miserably, settle for a partial solution.
"Well, I'd have to see it of course but it sounds as if it might be something called a Seraph Stone. A very rare object. Demons use them to communicate, pass messages between dimensions. Saves all the messy porthole-ripping."
"Sort of like a demon-beeper?"
He rolled his eyes indulgently,
"No, not really." he paused, reconsidered, "More like a spiritual mobile phone."
"A-ha!"
Xander rejoined them with a beatific smile,
"So that's good, right? Willow can talk to Tara now?"
Giles pursed his lips,
"A Seraph Stone is er....a very powerful object. It links the spirit, the essence of one person with another. If Tara had simply wanted to give Willow a message I'm sure a good medium would have been a better method."
They looked at one another in silent understanding. A message wouldn't have been enough, she needed to see Tara, to be with her one last time. That was the purpose of the stone, why she had asked Spike to bring it all this way. Giles cleared his throat again, took a sip from his coffee.
"So...er...getting back to the other matter?"
Both pairs of eyes on her now and she still didn't know what to tell them.
"I know...I know...I didn't believe it either. But you should see him! With the pulse and the breathing and everything. It's eerie!"
"And this happened how exactly?"
Xander's in,
"Don't tell me. Was it bad shrimp?"
She eyed him with annoyance. Quit it, this is serious, I'm in deep here. Spend a year trying to come to terms for your feelings for a vampire, all the reasons you shouldn't be with him, want him, and then...to have it all turned upside down like this? How should she feel? Confused? Thrown? Try a double helping with cherries.
"Maybe you should ask him yourself, I probably wouldn't understand half of it all anyway. Why don't you give him a call?"
she took a crumpled card from the pocket of her leather jacket, handed it to him. Giles grimaced with revulsion,
"He's staying at The Ramada Inn?"
"Room 504!"
She looked at them both, a guilty start.
"What? He told me the number!"
