Tribulations - Chapter 60

"Buffy, Willow, would you...?" Giles began, his eyes never leaving Joyce's. Angry as he was with Buffy's mother, it saddened him, as well, that she stared back with such defiance, such distrust. After all this time, one would have thought they might have come to a better understanding.

"Gotcha," Buffy replied. Giles heard a brief scrabbling of paper, then the opening and closing of the door as the two young women escaped into the outer world.

Giles made an effort to draw back his fury. He turned from Joyce, moving toward the kitchen. "Might I offer you something?" he asked. "Tea?"

"That's your answer to everything, isn't it," Joyce replied, venom in her tone.

"Coffee, then?"he suggested, perfectly aware that he was baiting her, but somehow powerless to restrain himself. "Oh, for God's sake, Joyce, sit down. We might as well be comfortable whilst we're having this row." The chair at the head of his table stood out a bit. Giles flung himself into it, only half noticing that all Wesley's research seemed to have gone. "That's what it's going to be, isn't it? You'll accuse, I'll attempt to defend. Or perhaps, for a change, I'll stoically say nothing, merely let you rant."

"Like the hysterical woman I am," Joyce muttered.

"I've never thought of you as hysterical," Giles replied, knowing he'd shortly be digging himself in deeper but unable--or perhaps merely unwilling--to stop. "A bit of a cow, at times."

"Cow?" Joyce looked perplexed.

"I believe you Americans would say 'bitch,'" he clarified. Oh, Lord, now he'd done it, hadn't he? For Buffy's sake, he ought to pull back, apologize, somehow make this right again--and yet a devil somehow seemed to have got into him, and he was, God help him, rather enjoying it all. "The fact remains, I shall be marrying your daughter quite soon now. Undoubtedly, Buffy would enjoy your support, or at least your presence, at that event. For myself, quite frankly, I don't give a rat's arse."

"You have a son almost twice Buffy's age."

Giles could feel one of Ripper's looks growing behind his eyes. "I have a son who was born when I was fourteen years of age. Sebastian's quite a nice bloke. You'd like him, were you ever to give up on all these endless judgements and accusations." Giles leaned forward, placing his hands flat on the table's surface. "I'd quite like to know, Joyce, what it actually is that frightens you so? I love Buffy. I will provide for her. I will be kind to her, encourage her, support her. Her friends are my friends, her duty is my duty. For God's sake, Joyce, what the hell else do you want from me?" He lowered his face, feeling suddenly weary, sick of all this. "I would be young again for her, if I could," he said quietly, more to himself than to anyone.

To his surprise, Joyce pulled out the chair beside his and sat. For a brief instant, her palm rested on the back of his hand. "Tell me," she said, in a soft, strained voice.

Giles glanced up at her, startled. "Pardon?"

"Tell me about your son. Tell me about his mother. Tell me everything. I want to understand."

He tried to read the expression in Joyce's wide blue eyes, and failed. But in the end he did tell her--the entire story, unsweetened, unabridged. Somehow, in the light of all that had happened, it felt good to say the words, if, at the same time, almost unbelievably painful. Joyce wept, as he'd know, somehow, she would. At the end, she squeezed his hand gently, much as Buffy might have done, but said nothing.

For a long time after, they sat together, silently, in the slowly darkening room.

"I can't believe you swiped all that stuff, right out from under Giles's nose," Willow said--and she did actually sound shocked, as if she really, truly couldn't believe.

"Well--" Buffy shrugged. "It's kinda Wesley's anyway, right? I mean, his notes. Not the book, of course, that's Giles's, but it's all in a good cause, don't you think?"

"I guess," Willow said doubtfully. "Only, is it really fair, right now, to ask Wes to help us? I mean, with everything...?"

"It'll be good for him," Buffy insisted. Which it probably would, only she had a sneaking feeling that this time, maybe, she was being a little too pushy, that maybe Wes just needed his down time, or his alone time, or whatever. The thing was, on the Hellmouth, that seldom got to be an option. She didn't want to get caught napping by any spiky-haired, tea-serving demons, and if that meant bugging Wes, so be it.

"Yes, but..." Willow tried again. "Why didn't you just ask...?

"Giles? He has enough to worry about. Besides--" Buffy stopped. She didn't really have a besides, only a lot of vague hopes that someway, somehow, she could weasel out of this. And if Giles couldn't find a way for her, she didn't want him to feel responsible. The other stuff he'd be feeling would be quite bad enough.

Buffy shifted the pile of papers to her other arm, hoping that the rain would hold off until they'd gotten safely inside. If the current trend in weather kept up, Sunnydale was going to have to be changing its name soon to something way stormier. Willow, in her shorts and t-shirt, had started to shiver, and Buffy herself could have done with a sweater. Or three.

Lucky for her, though, the first drops didn't fall until they'd safely reached the porch of Wesley's bungalow. Xander opened the door almost as soon as they knocked, and she and Willow scooted through the doorway with a quickness, just before the skies opened up. It was dark inside, with all the curtains drawn, and the low-wattage bulbs weren't doing a whole lot to cut the gloom.

Come to think of it, Xander looked gloomy too--more rumple-y than usual and needing a shave..

"Bad night?" Buffy said, sympathetically. Xander only grunted.

"We brought Wes a project to work on," she added.

"Buffy," Xander said, in his tired-voice. "Leave him alone."

But Willow had already made her way into the shadowy living room and was kneeling on the floor, talking earnestly. Now and then, Buffy heard a mumbled response, and with it the clink of ice cubes in a glass. Suddenly nervous, she tip-toed through the open door, setting her stack of papers down on a little table as she went.

"The problem with being a bloody vampire," Wes was saying. "One of the problems, anyway, is that one can't get properly drunk, no matter how one tries. I've been trying quite hard, actually."

"Hey, Wes." Buffy perched on the arm of his overstuffed chair, managing to tweak the glass out of his hand at the same time. She passed it to Xander, who carried it away to what she guessed had to be the kitchen. Wesley, his fingers still curled into a circle, blinked up at her in surprise. "Do you think this is what Moira would want you to be doing?"

Ooh, low blow, and she kind of felt guilty for saying it the minute the words left her mouth. Not that that stopped her.

"Heavens, no," Wesley answered. "Moira would absolutely require one to pull up one's socks and get on with life." His face blanked out for a minute, then just kind of crumpled from the inside. "A task that's much easier if one is, in fact, actually alive." His blue eyes looked strangely young and innocent, even red and bleary with tears. "I rather wish you hadn't stopped me after all, Buffy. I know you meant well, but..."

Buffy reached down to take his hand. "I did mean well, Wes."

"Maybe later, then." He sighed, sinking back in his chair. In one way, Buffy would have hardly recognized him if they'd met up on the street, because if Xander was rumpled, Wes looked like he'd been wearing the same clothes for about a week, sleeping and waking. His normally perfect hair had gone all spiky and messy, and he looked beyond pale, even for a vampire. In another way, though, she almost thought he looked more like Wesley than she'd ever seen him before, as if all the Watcherness had just drained out, and all the fussiness, leaving nothing but the real guy underneath.

"Look," Buffy said. "I know it's not the best time, but we brought your notes from Giles's, and I thought..."

"I can take a look," Wesley told her, with a strange, sharp-edged brightness. "Naturally, I can take a look. And that way, Buffy, if I muff it up--WHEN I muff it up--you can blame me instead of him. Isn't that how it works?"

Buffy choked, trying to cover it up by faking a cough. Was she really that transparent?

"But perhaps, if you asked him, it wouldn't be muffed up at all, and you'd gain an actual solution. Because, God knows, I couldn't find one." Wesley turned his head away, staring intently in the direction of the curtained window. "But, if we come to that, neither could Tremayne, and if there was ever a wiz for research, it's she."

Ridiculously, that line from The Wizard of Oz began to run through Buffy's head, "If ever oh ever a wiz there was..."

Stop it, she ordered her busy little brain. "Will you show me, though?" Gingerly, she touched Wesley's shoulder. "Just show me what you found."

"Buff--" Xander began, but Willow shook her head at him.

"Oh, by all means," Wesley said, in that same scary tone. "Xander, would you get the lights?"

"You don't have to do this," Xander told him.

"But I have all the time in the world," Wesley answered. "All the time in the world, and no way to fill it." His voice dropped, and all the fakeness went with it. "Don't you see, Xander? It doesn't matter. I might as well try to help, or at least attempt to explain. Over there, Buffy." He indicated a medium-sized table at the other end of the room. Once she'd deposited the papers and book there, Wesley took a seat, the three of them leaning over his shoulders.

"For the first part--" Wesley sorted out a small stack of papers from the others, spreading them out one by one on his makeshift desk. "The stone that Buffy gave the demon. Rather a useful thing, and one, had she held on to it, that might have brought an easy end to all these difficulties." Wesley pointed his index finger to a pair of small drawings. "Look familiar, Buffy?"

There was the little pair of wings in one picture, the hand in the other, all on a smooth, brown-speckled stone the size and shape of a robin's egg. The drawings had captions, but not in any language she could read--and when she glanced at Willow, her friend shook her head too. "That's it. Clarice's rock."

"It's very old, very valuable--and one, apparently, rarely finds such objects unused. Some have called it the lapis desiderium. The wishing stone."

"Desiderium?" Willow said, her forehead creasing just a little. "But that's not exactly 'wishing,' is it. More like..." Her lips moved. "More like longing, or desire. Same root word."

"Precisely." Wesley tapped his papers back together into a neat little stack. "Quite a powerful thing, too. It contains one wish, but that wish must be that thing which the wielder most desires, in the deepest part of his or her heart."

"Like the Mirror of Erised!" Willow exclaimed, then blushed. "Sorry. Don't mind me."

"I'm afraid I don't recognize..." Wesley began.

Willow blushed deeper. "You wouldn't. It's made up thing. From a book. A fiction book, I mean. A mirror that shows you the thing you want most in the world. 'Cause, see, Erised is Desire spelled backwards. Like in a mirror."

"Ah." Wesley's fingertip traced the picture. His eyes looked far away, and Buffy would have bet she could guess what he was thinking, and what he would have wished for. A few seconds later, though, he shook himself, saying, "As to the other part of your request..."

He picked up the thin, blue-covered book, leafing through its pages until he came to an colored engraving. "Though this, I imagine, looks less familiar, it is, I believe, the demon you encountered, Buffy."

Looking down on the picture, she shivered. It did, kinda, resemble a hedgehog, she guessed. Actually, more than anything, it looked like Sonic the Hedgehog from the video game--if Sonic had a long-term heroin habit, that was, and had been crossed, badly, with Gollum from The Hobbit. It was a dead bluish color, with spikes on its head, big bulgy eyes, blubbery lips and sharp teeth. It's skin was all bumpy and pustule-y, and its hands seemed designed for strangling something.

"Maxi--" Xander began.

"Wig," Buffy finished. Those hands would have fit perfectly for making the marks they'd found on poor Mr. Briggs's face. She didn't even want to speculate about what had happened to his eyes. "Only, it didn't look like that. It looked..."

"Like Briggs," Wesley concluded. "Along with it's other abilities, the Time Thief, or Zeit Räuber--also known as der Zeit Teufel..."

"Teufel means devil," Willow supplied helpfully.

"Yes," Wesley said in a dry voice. "As I was saying, the Time Thief possesses limited shape-changing abilities, or perhaps merely the ability to convince its potential victims of its harmlessness. Once ensnared, the victim is fed a venom secreted from its..."

"Not tea?" Buffy asked weakly.

"Uh--maybe we'd better skip the secreted from part, Wes," Xander said, looking a little green. Buffy could only nod. Her stomach seemed to want very badly to flip inside out.

"Ah. Yes. Well," Wes murmured, sounding, at that moment, very Giles-like. "At that moment, the bargain having been sealed, the victim is granted a wish. In return, the demon takes, from his or her life, a period of time, usually a quite momentous period of time, sucking it dry of all events, emotions, memories. The good news is that this is very rarely fatal, at least directly, and once the bargain has been fulfilled, the demon will not trouble you again."

"My summer. He wants my summer," Buffy said weakly, sinking down to the floor, her cheek resting against the hard table-leg.

"What do you mean, not directly fatal?" Xander asked.

"The process doesn't hurt one, not physically," Wes explained. "It's the emotional response that seems, in the past, to have done the damage. The victim, of course, remembers nothing. Even the memory of bargain itself is lost." Wesley glanced down, fidgeting with his papers. "It's the loss itself, the hole left in time, unaccounted for, that causes the harm. In your case, Buffy, considering that your smallest acts may well have import..."

"'Cause I'm the Slayer," she whimpered, hating herself for being so wussy, but somehow not able to snap out of it. "Where is he going to start? Will I have killed the mayor?" Finally, she climbed to her knees, looking up at Wesley and her friends over the top of the table. "Or will I just let Sunnydale get sucked into Hell?"

"Chronologically," Wesley told her, in a voice he probably meant to sound comforting, "Your graduation took place before the first day of summer, which I hope will mean that those events are safe."

"But right before," Buffy protested. "What if this Time Thief guy can't count? What if...?" She couldn't go on. And she knew very well what had happened right after the start of summer. Maybe it didn't have tons of significance to the rest of the world, but it meant everything to her. She knew what she'd seen: a future without Giles, hurting him, spinning her wheels in the most useless way possible. She'd said it before: she couldn't stand to live that life.

Wesley was looking at her sadly, probably following her thoughts--or maybe just his own. "Buffy, I wish I had words of comfort to give you."

"There has to be a way around it," she snapped, climbing to her feet, wanting to hurt something, break something, but knowing that would be worse than useless. "There has to."

"I found a number of recorded incidents," Wesley told her in the same gentle voice. "There's no record of anyone ever successfully breaking a pact made with a Time Thief. Buffy, I'm sorry. I know what this means to you, and I wish there was something--anything--I could do to stop the demon. God knows, I'd be more than glad to throw away my entire bloody summer."

"Uh..." Willow said softly. "Uh, guys, do you think...?" She glanced up, her eyes suddenly sharp and bright beneath her coppery bangs.

"What is it, Willow?" Wesley's voice was patient--he seemed to have shaken off at least a little of his funk.

"Just...maybe that's it. See, Buffy really, really wants her summer. Wes doesn't want his. So maybe--" She gestured, index fingers pointing in opposite direction. "We do a switch. Somehow, we fool the demon, and make him take Wesley's time instead of Buffy's. Which would maybe even..."

Buffy's eyes widened. She was getting it, she thought--and if what Willow said was right, if they could somehow pull it off, an awful lot of really wrong things might get made right again. The thought took her breath away.

"Not to be rain-on-the-parade-guy," Xander broke in, "But the big question right now seems to be 'how?'"

"Oh, leave that to me," Willow said, grinning.