Tribulations - Chapter 66

"Xander, what was that?" Willow asked in a small, trembling voice. She'd made herself into a little ball in the exact center of the big bed, knees pulled up to her chest and arms wrapped tightly around them.

"I dunno," Xander answered, rubbing his forehead. "I...just dunno."

"Xander?" Willow was secretly proud of herself: she'd perfected the looking-up-through-disheveled-hair expression to the point where it might even have worked on Giles, much less on Xander, King of Cretins. "Are you...um...okay?"

"God, Will...okay?" He sank down onto the edge of the bed. "I'm not okay on a cosmic scale. Wigged doesn't even start to cover it."

"I'm sorry." Willow made her voice tremble a little bit more, careful not to overdo things. Xander might, in the regular order of things, have the intelligence of a bowl of lime Jell-O, but every now and then he got flashes of insight too. Better not to accidentally trip over one of those, if she could help it. "I got all caught up in me-ness. Which I guess drops me down about a million points. On the nice-scale." She scooted over to him, making sure that her small, firm breasts brushed Xander's back as she put her arms around his neck. "Seeing... Ugh, I can't even say. What kind of thing would do that?"

"Demon, I guess. Like always." She felt rather than saw Xander shrug. "Hey, you're the smart one, what do you think?" He rubbed his head again.

"Poor Xander." Willow ran her fingertips lightly over the spot he'd been rubbing. "Your head's still bad?"

"It's okay," he answered, almost angrily.

"No." Willow turned his face gently, bringing her own face close to his. "It isn't. Everyone wants you to be all strong. I wanted you to be all strong, only that's not fair." She stroked back his hair, watching Xander's eyes go closed as he began to let go of the tension and surrendered himself into her hands. He was so susceptible to it all, so needy, she barely even had to use the LeFaye Glamour.

"That's it, that's it," Willow crooned, still stroking his hair. "You're safe now. It's quiet, and I won't leave you. Ssh. Ssh. So quiet."

Xander sagged sideways, until his body lay stretched out on the bed, his eyes half-open, his breathing slow but a little ragged. Scarcely touching him, Willow traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips, humming softly, then his throat, then down over his shoulders and his chest. She kept the Glamour to a slow, steady flame so as not to alarm him.

"Xander, I'm so confused," she breathed. "I feel...sometimes, that is, I feel so alone." Carefully, she ran her hands up under his t-shirt, rubbing softly on the smooth, still-boyish skin of his chest and abdomen. Once, she'd had a million fantasies about doing exactly these things, touching him this way, having him touch her in return, but she'd been too shy, too self-conscious, ever to follow through. Now she had no fantasies left at all, and her hands moved with a practiced sureness.

"Will," Xander said to her, barely conscious. "Willow..."

"It's okay," she told him. "We aren't alone. I have you, and you have me, right?" Deftly, she unbuckled his belt, then undid the snap and the zipper of his jeans. "I want this. I've always wanted this. You know that."

Once, those words had actually been true. Willow didn't mourn that time. Back then, it seemed like she'd always been hurting, always nervous and frightened and in pain, and that those things would follow her for the rest of her life. Now, she looked down on the former object of her affection with dispassionate eyes. Xander stirred beneath her touch, bigger than she'd expected, his own passion pathetically clear: he'd grown hard almost at once, and he moaned aloud as she skinned down his pants, leaving his boxers as they were for the moment.

"Xander, don't you want it too?" Willow rubbed him through his shorts with a gentle pressure, her other hand pushing up his shirt so that she could taste the saltiness of Xander's skin, her tongue trailing a slender line down his his stomach. Already, he'd begun to push against her hand. So impatient. Always so impatient.

Willow smiled to herself, glad that Xander's eyes remained closed and couldn't see her. He'd have been surprised, she imagined. Her own face felt cold, feline. Her skin tingled with magic.

With utmost care, she slipped her hand down the front of his boxers, cupping him as she slid the shorts down past his hips, the first moisture already seeping out of him against her palm. Xander moaned again as she ran her fingertips down to the root of his cock, which was dark red with arousal, hot and surely painfully hard. How easy he was to control, she considered. Almost too easy. The extreme lack of difficulty took most of the fun out of the game, and Willow knew he'd have bored her in no time. If tonight wasn't going to be a one-shot deal, that was.

Literally one-shot, Willow thought, laughing inwardly--and judging by the look of things, over pretty damn quickly, too. She rose up on her knees, swinging a leg across Xander's body until she straddled him, then, slowly, lowered herself over his shaft until he filled her. He was bigger than Oz, lots bigger, and it took Willow a moment to get used to the sensation--all the more so because she wasn't exactly sure that it was one she particularly liked anymore.

Suddenly, surprisingly, Xander's eyes opened. He stared up at her in hurt confusion.

"Ssh, baby," Willow said, laying her fingertips on his lips. "This is a dream. Only a dream. You've wanted this for a long time, haven't you?" She moved above him, slowly, rhythmically, holding him inside her. Tears began to course down Xander's cheeks even as his own body betrayed him, flowing harder as her own movements speeded up and she rode him until he came in one vast, painful crescendo.

Willow herself did not follow. She only slowed her motion again, her own mouth shaping the words of a spell, drinking in every little bit of what he'd given her, draining him dry.

When there was nothing more to be taken, Xander's eyes rolled back in his head. He lay still on the bed, limp and cold and white. Which was, exactly, as it should be.

Willow watched him for a moment, feeling the strength of life and blood course through her. She could see what vampires got out of it, honestly she could, greedy and single-minded though they might be. A hit of magic was nice, stolen or otherwise, but for a perfect rush you couldn't beat a nice infusion of life-force, freely given. Nearly virgin life-force, too.

In a little while, she began to move quietly around the room, cleaning Xander, and dressing him, arranging his motionless form just so.

When all was done, she stood back, admiring her own handiwork. Yes, it would do. It would, most definitely do. Only a touch or two remained to make things perfect.

Humming a little to herself, Willow descended the stairs. In her best penmanship, she wrote on a slip of paper the word, "upstairs." A bit of music followed: not La Boheme, that was for another time and place, but La Traviata would certainly do. That would ring enough emotional bells, without being too obvious.

Laughing, she left the apartment and went out into the night, where Morgana, and destiny, awaited.

The minute they'd followed Celeste back into the funeral chapel, Giles snapped, "Take Wesley out, and keep him out."

One glimpse of his eyes, gone gray like winter, and Buffy knew better than to object--only she'd be damned if she'd leave him alone to handle something that so obviously had him completely wigged.

That being the case, she delegated to Sebastian, who Buffy knew she could count on to get the job done with a minimum of fuss.

She only wished she had a weapon, any weapon. Not because that would do her any good--what was she going to do, anyway, behead poor Moira's reanimated corpse?--but because a piece of lethal hardware at least gave her something to do with her hands.

As it was, they both came in empty-handed, Giles chanting in a soft yet commanding tone, Buffy tagging along behind him, because she didn't know what else to do, and being with Giles felt safer than being anywhere else.

Someone had been doing magic, that much was clear. Nasty, bad magic. Buffy had no illusions that the thing lurching around the chapel was Moira, or anything to do with Moira, except that it had used her abandoned body as its own personal playground. Or...maybe not. Whatever had found itself inside Moira's corpse didn't seem any too happy with its new home, and its moans and wails struck her more as pitiful than anything else.

Giles's voice rose, sounding as powerful as she'd ever heard it, the words unfamiliar but nonetheless compelling. All at once, everything ended. A pinkish blue swirliness blew up out of the body, ruffling everyone's hair and knocking over flower arrangements, the next moment, Moira's empty body collapsed bonelessly on the thick, plushy rug.

Giles sank to his knees beside it, breathing hard.

A universal groan came from the crowd, but no one moved, either to see if Giles needed help, or to do something about...

Buffy swallowed, noticing that she hadn't exactly rushed to help herself, and if she didn't, who would? Her legs felt rusted into position, but she made them carry her forward until she could stoop to lift Moira's head and shoulders from the rug. Sebastian, returned from Wesley-duty, came up beside her then, lifting the rest of his mother's body, the two of them carrying her, with silent agreement, back to the overturned coffin.

Celeste joined them there, helping to rearrange the body, smoothing the dark silk suit Moira had been buried in, stroking down her recently-shorn hair

Actually, it impressed Buffy, how calm Celeste could be, when her own heart seemed to be racing at 200 beats per minute. Celeste worked carefully, gently, making sure everything was just so, as it should be, her pretty face showing not a trace of fear or disgust

The dead person, Buffy knew, was supposed to look just like she was sleeping, but Moira didn't. She looked shrunken, and aged and dead as dead could be. Still, what was there to fear in that? Even what they'd seen, wigsome as it had been, was nothing more than someone's unpleasant little prank, an act of cruelty against everyone who'd come there, out of love or respect, to grieve.

Buffy herself felt hurt and offended down to her soul. She couldn't imagine how the members of Moira's family must feel about what had just happened.

Side by side, she and Celeste shut the coffin lid and secured the latches.

For just a few seconds afterward, Celeste squeezed Buffy's hand, giving her one of those dark-eyed, sympathetic looks that let her know Celeste understood. Enough was enough. No more.

As the two of them climbed to their feet, a handful of Sunnydale Funeral Home guys bustled forward to raise the fallen trestle and hoist the box up onto it again. Most of the crowd, Buffy noticed, had already dispersed, leaving Wesley once more by the door, Celeste and Sebastian there with her, and Giles on his knees, exactly where he'd fallen.

Seb went to help his father up, and after a minute, Buffy came to help too, because Giles seemed completely wiped, as if he'd been running for miles and miles and no longer possessed the strength to move--which might well have been the case, considering how hard he leaned on her arm.

After a minute, though, he pulled himself upright, insisting he was fine, even though he sounded pretty much the opposite.

"What in hell WAS that?" Sebastian asked--the first time Buffy had heard him use even a little swear. But maybe he'd meant it literally.

Giles gave a pointed look toward the funeral guys, who'd now clustered around Celeste, falling all over themselves to apologize, as if any of it had been their fault. She, in turn, was acting the part of Gracious Queen Celeste, soothing their ruffled feathers. Chances were, this being Sunnydale, and working where they did, those guys had seen some pretty strange things in their time, but she still hoped, fervently, that they'd missed the main act. Nobody needed to have seen that, least of all a bunch of civilians. Bad enough for people who dealt with weirdness on a daily basis.

God, when would all this end?

At last, when Celeste had managed to charm herself loose, the five of them made their way out into the bland-colored hall. Only fifteen minutes 'til midnight--if the clock they passed on their way to the front was correct--and there had gone another evening with no patrolling done. The vamps must be getting cocky as hell, but Buffy just didn't have it in her to face one more thing that night.

At the moment, the only thing she wanted to do was get home, crawl into bed with Giles at her side, and sleep for what remained of the summer. Considering that getting out of bed never seemed to lead to anything but more trouble, maybe her first mistake had been to revise her original post-Graduation plans.

So, all she had to do was get Xander to drop them off on his way to Wesley's, and then...

"Uh, guys!" she exclaimed, suddenly realizing exactly who was missing from their number. "Where did Xander go?"

Celeste gave her a look. "I couldn't say, but he left here nearly half an hour past. With Willow. I thought it a bit odd at the time, but..."

Buffy and Giles traded glances that would have been horrified if they hadn't both felt so totally resigned.

"Ought I to have...?" Celeste's voice trailed away. "Yes, I see that I ought. It was witchcraft, wasn't it? That horrible business with Moira?"

"Not witchcraft," Giles said wearily. "Necromancy."

Buffy turned to him. "And that's bad, right?"

"The magic of the dead?" Wesley piped up, in his old Watcher-voice. "Yes, I'd say it's as bad as could possibly be."

"But Willow wouldn't hurt Xander," Buffy insisted. "She loves Xander." Annoyingly, her eyes had started stinging, but she wasn't going to cry. Not there. Not at that moment. "More than she loves us," she mumbled, knowing that all her resolutions were about to come to nothing. She moved away, putting her back to the group.

"How powerful was the magic, Dad?" Seb asked--at least, she guessed it was Sebastian: his deadly-serious Giles-voice sounded exactly like his father's.

Pretty damn strong, Buffy thought, The way it drove Giles to his knees like that. The way it had made her own Spidey-sense go nuts.

"She didn't take the trouble to summon a demon, at least," Giles answered wearily. "Merely an animal spirit. She expended the greater part of her power in binding that force inside the body. And in making it bloody difficult to get the poor creature out again." Giles sighed. Buffy didn't know when she'd heard him sounding so beaten, and considering the kind of stuff they went through on a regular basis, that was saying something. "I can tell you, with certainty, that Willow's become fairly adept at using LeFaye magic."

"Yes, I felt that, too," his son agreed. "She's even tapped into parts of it, I fear, that I've never been capable of accessing."

"But Willow hasn't the skill, yet--or perhaps merely doesn't possess the discipline--for really stable magicks," Giles continued. "She took shortcuts, of the sort that would, necessarily, drain off quite a bit of her natural energies." He paused to rub his eyes, and it occurred to Buffy that, without the glasses that he hadn't had time to replace, Giles must currently be pretty much blind as the proverbial bat. "If she continues so, she's likely to need infusions of either mystical energies or undiluted life-force to keep going."

"Life-force, given willingly..." Wesley began, still in his Watcher-voice.

Buffy decided she didn't need to hear any more fun facts.

"Willow wouldn't hurt Xander!" she yelled, as if, by sheer force of volume, she could make the words true.

The others all turned to look at her. Buffy felt herself blushing furiously.

"Please," she said to Giles. "Let me believe that. Just for now?"

His eyes, still a sad, wintery gray, caught and held hers. "If you must, my love," he said softly, "Believe that for all of us. I've never in my life been more willing to be proven wrong."