THIRTY-EIGHT

* * *

She would walk when they led her now, just shuffling, looking beaten down. Her fingers were healing and they had removed the bandages; the new nails were growing in stubborn defiance of all else, but if she felt the pain of it, this never showed. When he asked her how her fingers felt, she simply shrugged.

"They're healing," he remarked. "I can see it."

"It doesn't matter," she said.

Garrett pulled up a chair and sat across from her. "Doesn't it?" he asked. "Fingernails are stubborn, you know. Even after death they keep growing for a while, like they don't know it's time to stop. I've always found that remarkable."

Death was a taboo subject with many patients; too many were trying to die and there was always a fear of implanting the idea of it. But Buffy lived death. As a vampire slayer she killed and saw killing. As a psychiatric patient she made regular company with people who had tried without success to kill themselves. As a daughter she had lost parents.

Which of these deaths were real?

Did it matter?

So they talked, openly, about death.

"Fingernails are stupid," Buffy said now. "If they had any sense they'd see it's all futile."

"Is it?" Garrett asked.

She watched him for a moment, as though trying to gauge him.

"Death is everywhere," she said.

She said this a lot, as they talked. It always came back to death.

"So is life," he answered.

"So?"

He sighed, sat back in his chair. "Listen," he said then. "I have a choice, Buffy. I wake up every morning because my heart and my lungs and my body decide I'm going to live for another day. I could die that day, or the next, or not. So while I'm alive I choose to be alive, for better or for worse. And when the day is over, I've lived it as well as I could, and nothing in the universe can take away that day. Not even death. Doesn't a good day make life worth living, Buffy?"

#

She felt the closeness of his words, rippling through the strange reality that was here, that was this office and that was him. He was the only reality now, she knew, and this terrified her. The slayer, the crazy girl, the pretty girl in her prom dress, these and more were gone, had been burned up and torn down and crushed under the unending weight of pain.

Pain. Pain was life. Life was pain.

It was the one constant. Mom, Dad, Willow. How many more? How many more deaths would she have to endure? Dawn, Xander, Cynthia, Giles, Tara? Garrett? And that's what Garrett didn't understand, even though because of his son he should. It was all pain, because in the end it was always death, always forever. You loved and you hurt because you loved.

She reminded him of this.

"What about your son?"

He got that look, that look she knew well. Even you, mighty Dr. Garrett who makes the world real now, even you are not above the pain. Remember that.

"My son," he said. "More than eight years. Day after day, I got to know him. Eight and a half years of that remarkable person who he was, sharing his life with me. Do you know what a blessing his life was to me, Buffy?"

The words sank deep and she trembled, looked around for an escape. But there was no escape, not from this one.

"Nothing can ever take away those eight and a half years, Buffy. Not even the pain."

The fear was building now, from deep within her, building and building and building. Terror at his words, his words becoming her own; Mom, Dad, Willow. Every day, every smile, every moment shared.

And in that sharing, a giving of oneself, a vulnerability, a small dying when they died. Unfair, wrong, evil, unjust!

"And the pain is good?" she snapped at him. "That makes the pain all right? That makes it all right that they all died?"

"No." Garrett shook his head. "No. But it is real. Buffy, I want you to listen to me now, and I want you to listen carefully. You have a disease called schizophrenia, and you need to take medication to control it, and that disease affects how you see the world. I believe also that you are fantasy prone, which means you can create realities. The schizophrenia is a sickness, which we now can treat, but being fantasy prone is not. Fine. But there is one other thing I am absolutely certain of, that I want you to know."

She watched him, saying nothing. He spoke again.

"You are not crazy, Buffy."