Delirium


As soon as I'm sure that Buffy is asleep and unlikely to wake up I slip out of the room, ask Spike to watch over her for a while and set out to make the necessary arrangements to keep Dawn out of the house for at least a couple of days. That turns out to be more complicated than I had originally anticipated simply because pretty much everyone I would normally have considered to look after her is living here now. Willow and Tara are down the hall and Spike is in the basement. That leaves Xander and Anya and while I'm desperate I'm not desperate enough to leave an impressionable fifteen year old girl under Anya's care. In the end Janice's mother agrees to allow her to stay with them until the weekend... now I just have to convince Dawn that it's necessary without going into details about what's going on and that's not likely to be easy. If nothing else experience has taught me that Dawn can be extremely perceptive whenever we are trying to keep something from her. Figuring that the one less likely to make a mistake and let something she shouldn't know slip out is someone who doesn't really know what's going on to begin with I decide to delegate that particular task to Xander. Once that is taken care of I return to Buffy's room and settle back in my place, by her side.

Right now she is my main concern. She is burning up as her body reacts to the stress she's been under ever since she came back but I know she would never forgive herself if Dawn were to overhear some of the things she's been screaming for the past couple of hours, especially those concerning Joyce. She was absolutely terrified and there was nothing I could do to help her, eventually she exhausted herself an drifted into an uneasy slumber.

I had been fearing that she would end up making herself sick for some time but I never expected it to happen so suddenly... of course I also failed to anticipate her reaction to my clumsy attempts to get her to open up. I got my answers but I'm regretting the price she had to pay for them. At least now I know what she went through... or at least I know enough not to want to know any more.

I now know she was forced to become an active participant in her own torture and humiliation, stripped of her dignity, pushed to the breaking point and then asked to make an impossible choice only to have the whole cycle begin anew in an even more vicious fashion. I already knew that she had been conditioned not to say 'no', I knew she was afraid of making choices and I think deep down I even knew that it was my own alter ego that was responsible for that but there's always that difference between knowing and understanding... or perhaps in this case it is merely a difference between suspecting it and having my worst fears confirmed. I know it wasn't really me but in a way it was. I may not have been the one to do those things to her, or her friends, or her mother, but still in her mind those memories remain and there's nothing I can do to change that.

I suspect there are other things that are still hidden in there. I am aware that my presence only triggered the memories of those incidents I was somehow involved with, and I know those represent only a tiny fraction of what she endured. I know Angel would have unleashed a totally different set of horrors and chances are that a number of the enemies she defeated over the years also had a role to play. Was she ever at the mercy of the Master and his minions? Of the Major, Adam and Glory? Of the countless demons she has defeated since she was called six years ago? And if she was, what did they do to her? Was there someone else there, someone I haven't even considered? I don't know, chances are I'll never know unless some of those memories ambush us in the future, but I am aware that the memories triggered by my presence were the most urgent ones, not because they were the worst, the most or the most important but simply because they were the ones most likely to be triggered, the ones that have been haunting her constantly since I came back.

I know that in a rather twisted way her current breakdown is a good thing, but I'm having trouble seeing it from that perspective right now as her temperature keeps rising steadily. I know it means that at some level she feels safe enough to let herself go, but I am also aware that in this instance her slayer healing is going to complicate matters. That system which is finely tuned to get rid of most illnesses in record time has now been turned against a non existent foe and her body is attacking itself, her fever is dangerously high and there's just one thing I can do to help her... the same thing the other me used in order to break her.

Trying not to disturb her I get up and I go to my room looking for the one thing that can neutralize her slayer powers, her slayer healing: the Cruciamentum serum.