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"Nightmares," he says, his voice soft, and too soft. Hands pushing sweaty hair from her forehead. Her eyes stay shut.
"Listen to your breathing," he says, always so quiet. Don't need a father, but he's here.
"Let it go," he says, pulling the sheets up to her chin and settling on the bed, leaning on one elbow.
But they won't go, they never do, he knows that. She told him. Hears what he wants to hear. Doesn't see what she sees, blood and blood and dirt and fire and blood and eyes. She's burning it away and it hurts and the fire doesn't stop. More wood for the fire, endless blaze that never really warms her up.
"Breathe," he says, so soft and nice and hand on her forehead like she couldn't hurt him, like she wouldn't do it again, like she didn't smash him up and down and up and down and laugh. Like she's young, like she's herself, when she isn't anyone.
She breathes to make him shut up. His wrist is still wrapped with bandages.
"Do you want to tell me what you saw?" he asks, like last night, like two nights ago, like the very first night. Like he's strong enough to know.
"Tara," she whispers, lying. Tara she could manage. She always managed her before.
"Anything else?" he presses softly, the pity in his voice practiced and dull. His breath slides over her skin every now and then and it's the only thing alive about him.
"Um. Warren," she coughs, her throat dry with slow, deep breathing. "He put his skin back on and danced for me." That's true, or it used to be. Warren hasn't visited in a long time.
He nods, his stroking hand slowing, the metal clasps of the bandage gently scraping her forehead. Pain with his comfort, and he doesn't even notice.
You, she thinks.
"You," she says at last. His hand stops, then starts again, wheels working in his deep, scary mind.
"Yes?" he says without a bit of change, a drop of caring. "I was angry with you?"
"Yes," she lies. "No. No. You were...you were like you are. All nice and understanding and sorry for me, and damn it Giles, stop scratching me with your bandage!"
He pulls back hand and body, shocked in a way she can feel, and she sits up with her eyes open. It's lighter in the room than she thought.
"You're hurting me!" she cries, spoiled child, baby voice, and she doesn't mean her skin.
"I," he breathes, his other hand closing around his wrist, and she feels it in her again, the green light, the numbness, the words.
"You think you're going to fix me with kindness," she accuses. "You think if you're nice to me I'm going to realize that people love me and everything will be all right. You hope that little Willow's forgotten, what maybe it will all be like some bad dream and we can all pretend like we did before."
"I don't think that," he tells her, and she sees how he's trying to take control again. Follow the leader.
"You think that if I'm sorry then that's enough! You keep telling me that if my heart is pure everyone will forgive me. You don't say it but you tell me it anyhow, just because you forgive me. And Giles, that's the stupidest thing of all. Because you did nothing to deserve what I did to you."
"This is because I left, isn't it?" he asks quietly.
Her words pile up in her throat, stuttering. The light burns out. She's Willow, and she has nightmares, and she's been naughty and she's too old to sit in the corner and be forgiven for it.
"I told Buffy I was sorry I'd gone," he goes on, looking straight at her. "I never told you. And maybe you needed to hear it more than anyone else."
The tears are hot. She'd love to burn herself with them, but she can't feel a thing.
"You're doing it again," she whispers. "Telling me reasons. Making excuses. And I would have killed you, Giles. Don't think I wouldn't have."
"I know," he says.
"Then why did you bring me here? Why didn't you give me what I deserved?"
"Because..." he sighs. "Because it was the right thing to do. Because it's better than what you did to me. Because..."
"Because you love me," she chokes, the realization worse than anything else he could have said.
He smiles his funny English smile, that Hugh Grant smirk of knowing that one has lost everything but one's sense of humor.
"Yes," he says. "And isn't that worse than anything else I could have done?"
Love. And the piercing, thudding realization that he is in her bed, that he's grown comfortable here, and that underneath that dressing gown he may not be wearing anything but the plaid boxers he leaves hanging to dry in the blue-tiled bathroom she mistakenly wandered into one day.
Oh Giles, idol of her youth, always just a step away from too close. Always desired because of the thin curtain, the things he never let her see. Here, close, a man of flannel and stubble and morning breath and hair cut too short. A man who forgets to throw away old milk and watches Top of the Pops every week without fail. A man she could never touch, not really, not even if she crawled inside his skin.
Oh, fuck me, Giles, she thinks.
"Fuck," she says, her voice a growl.
"Pardon?" he asks.
"Fuck it. All of it. Fuck me," she whispers, before she descends on him.
She grabs a handful of his hair and pulls his head back, fitting her dry lips against his cool ones. It could have been tender and sweet, just a few moments ago, he with his hand on her forehead and she knowing through the darkness that he wanted her, but they've said words and that was one word too many.
The world is a river, a green dream. Power flows out of her once again, just enough to break his resistance. His lips finally kiss hers, and then his mouth does, and then his whole body kisses back with loveless passion. There's love and then there's love, and the love he spoke of is something solid and locked away, true but nothing to do with real life. In her bed everything changes.
She opens her eyes to watch him as he kisses down the neck of her pyjama top, almost to her breast, and the sick wrong strangeness of it sends shivers of delight through her. Giles, oh Giles, oh librarian and not-father and not-lover and teacher. Giles, whose heart was never hers.
He's getting hot and frenzied and sloppy now, warm enough to set fire to the cold inside her, and she doesn't even need to use the power anymore. He's doing this on his own. She pushes him on his back so she can pull open his dressing gown, and he was right about the boxers. They're straining and damp and covering something nice. He's a little smaller than she might have imagined, if she'd dared to go that far as a timid teenager, but it's any key in a storm and she thinks he just might have the master.
Anything to hear that sound again, that cry of pleasure and guilt, to see that lost look on his face, so blank without his glasses. Anything to hold him for the first time again, feel him twitch away in her hand like he's still trying to back out of this. Anything to stay here forever, straddling him on weak white legs and waiting for his bucking hips to stop so she can put him inside.
"Stay still," she hisses. "Stay still and let me do it."
He thrusts up once more and she takes advantage of the momentum and grabs his cock, sitting down fast. He gasps but doesn't look at her. She rocks on him slowly, because he's old and if he finishes first she's going to kill him after all.
"You'd never do this to Buffy," she whispers. He shakes his head.
"I've been bad," she says, on the knife edge of tears. "I had to be. You'd never have come back if I hadn't."
His mouth is just a tight line now, his lips gone white, and she leans down to kiss it. His hands slide up to rest on her thighs for just a moment, warm and sweaty on her cold skin, then flutter away to grip the square wooden bars of the headboard.
It's all up to her, then, and she straightens up and gets down to business, working her own hand between her legs. She rubs herself with hard, quick motions, the way she used to every goddamn night after Tara left, burning away her lover's gentle touch with soreness that lasted for days.
She used to think about this back in high school, sharing kisses and a bed with him in a soft, opaque haze of fantasy that never let the naughty parts show. And here they are now, mostly clothed, and far apart and eyes shut and it's nothing like she could ever have made up. She's riding him, him, and he's thrusting beneath her without rhythm and making these terrible pained moans and it's so far from what it should have been that she can't help imagining something, anything else to bring herself off to.
She used to do this too, with Oz, even from the very beginning. Sex was always just the thing that kept them close, because words didn't happen, didn't work with him. She remembers lying beneath him, letting faces wander through her mind -- Xander, Giles, Spike -- and imagining any one of them there instead, whispering the things she'd wanted to hear, the loving phrases and tender professions she'd always expected. She does it again now, the dream disconnection, but she thinks of the man beneath her and that may be the saddest thing she's ever done.
In her mind's eye he comes to her at night, not in that stupid black terrycloth robe but in the dark silk pyjamas she'd always vaguely thought he wore. He wakes her from the nightmare, terror to comfort, and instead of a bandaged hand caressing her it's his lips, soft and loving. Shh, he says. I know. I love you. He doesn't throw it at her like an insult, and love is not a punishment.
On the bed, his hands tighten on the bars and he arches his back, mouth open.
In her mind he unbuttons her shirt with clever fingers that slide down beneath the elastic of her underwear, rubbing her where he'd never dream of touching her now. My pretty Willow, he says. My love.
On the bed, he begins to pant and shiver and she slows down.
In her mind they're naked, lying close as lovers should. He kisses her hair and neck; she scratches his back and bucks her hips to rub against him. He settles down and slides in, whispering in her ear. Yes, Willow. I want you, my love.
On the bed, the cloth of his dressing gown begins to hurt her knees.
In her mind he's fucking her, sometimes slow and sometimes hard and sometimes both, and no one has to touch themselves. It's warm, and dark, and so good the tears begin again and burn her at last.
On the bed he's coming, and she might be too, but all she sees is him in her mind, loving and sheltering her the way he never will, never can. She clings to him, to the dream, while on the bed he shudders and moans for the last time. He drops his hands from the headboard at last, and gasps for air like he's won a race. If there are winners, there must be losers, and she's smart enough to figure out which one she is.
Hours later, a moment later, her small hand slides up his back.
"Don't," he says from the edge of the bed.
"Don't what?" she whispers.
"Don't be a fool," he tells her.
She'd rather be a fool than what she really is.
"And don't mistake this for forgiveness," he says, looking at her at last. His love for her burns in a locked corner of his heart, far away from here.
"I won't," she tells him. She makes different mistakes altogether.