by AntigoneUnbound » Thu May 01, 2003 3:57 pm
Gods Served and Abandoned
Disclaimers:
I got plenty o’ nothin’, and frankly, it’s just not enough.
Spoilers:
Up to season 5. I’ve played slightly with the timing of a certain Big Bad’s appearance, with some implications for Dawn’s entrance.
Rating:
R for now; if it changes, I’ll give heads-up.
Distribution:
Sure, with acknowledgement.
Feedback:
Without it, the air is a little staler, the beer a little flatter, the sex a little—well, actually, the sex is still pretty great. But feedback definitely enhances it.
This is another emotionally difficult scene. Thanks for giving it your time.
*****
Part 26
*****
"I’ve made up my mind. I want to go home."
"But what about your treatment? What about seeing the doctors?"
"That time is over, Honey. It’s been over for awhile now."
"Don’t say that, Mom. Maybe you just need more chemo."
"What I need is to be in my own home, in my own bed. The doctors have already said that any more treatment would only add two or three weeks, if that."
"But that’s better than nothing, Mom. That’s better than…" She wouldn’t say its name. She wouldn’t acknowledge its victory.
But now her mother had tears in her own eyes. "No, Tara, it’s not. I’m so tired, Honey, and I just can’t go through the hell of chemo again, not just for an extra few days of being sick. I can’t stand the smell of this place and I can’t see the trees or the flowers and I just want to go home. Please, Tara—I need to go home."
And then she understood, or rather, she let herself understand, and in her mind, she took yet another step on her own journey of realizing that she would lose her mother. Not next year, or even next month, but very soon. As she took that step, she gathered strength to her heart and then gave it to her mother.
"OK, Mom. I understand. We’ll take you home."
Her mother’s smile defied its own exhaustion and reached out to drape itself around her beloved daughter, who was now saying that the honeysuckle was just about to bloom and she would make sure that there were always fresh cuttings in her room.
*****
When Buffy walked into the kitchen after her meeting with Dr. Brunard, Willow knew the outcome of the meeting by virtue of having known Buffy for five years. Tara knew the outcome by virtue of her ability to read other people’s sadness, those emotions they tried so hard to keep tucked behind the more acceptable and convenient displays of lightness and optimism.
"What did he say?" Willow asked, even as she fought to keep her voice steady.
"What I thought he’d say," Buffy replied flatly. Her eyes told them that she had believed him, known what it meant.
"Does Dawn know?" Tara asked softly.
"Yeah. She came with me. I didn’t want her to, but I couldn’t see telling her she couldn’t. She’s her daughter too. I mean…" She trailed off, shaking her head.
"No, you’re right," Willow said with surety. "Dawn is your mom’s daughter. That’s what you all feel. That’s what’s real."
"Reality—now there’s a concept that’s lost most of its meaning for me lately," Buffy laughed hollowly.
Tara and Willow just looked at each other. There really wasn’t much that they could say to that.
After a moment, Buffy continued, "She had a melt-down in the car…Actually, I’m glad she’s letting it out. It’s scarier when she just locks her feelings away and closes herself off."
She has no idea how ironic those words are, coming from her. Tara just nodded.
"Buffy, I’m sorry, but we still haven’t been able to reach your dad," Willow broke in, her voice filled with regret and barely-disguised anger. "We’ve left a ton of messages, and each time we make it more explicit, but we can’t seem to find an actual person to talk to. It’s always his voice mail."
"Why should you be sorry?" Buffy replied, her own anger not disguised in the least. "And you know, I think I’m just about through using the term ‘Dad’ to refer to that bastard. He doesn’t deserve it." She grimaced bitterly, pushing her scarcely-touched glass of juice away from her. "I can’t remember the last thing he did right."
"It was probably a little over twenty years ago," Willow commented softly, drawing a small, grateful smile from her best friend.
"Sweetie, is there anything we can do?" Tara asked gently. "Is there anything you need? Errands, or details?"
Buffy just shook her head, finally looking up at them with eyes that seemed to have grown older in the space of a day. "Can you tell me this isn’t happening and not lie?"
Tara’s heart squeezed until she almost winced. "Maybe just a little more chemo, Mom…Maybe one more round would do it."
Finally Buffy stood up, squaring her shoulders in what Tara realized was becoming a habit with the Slayer. "I’m going to go talk to Dawn. I have to—we have to make a decision." As she reached the kitchen doorway, she turned, not quite facing them directly. "What you’re doing, for us…" Tara saw her fingers grip reflexively against the door post. "Mom would appreciate it more than she could say. I appreciate it more than I can say." And then she was striding down the hallway toward the stairs.
Tara realized that she was squeezing Willow’s hand so tightly that her partner’s fingers were reddening. "Sorry," she whispered, as Willow turned and enfolded her in an embrace of surpassing gentleness and sorrow.
*****
Over an hour later, Buffy emerged from Dawn’s bedroom and found Willow and Tara reading—or pretending to read—on the couch, propped up against opposite ends with their feet rubbing against one another in an unconscious habit. They looked up as she entered the room.
"Buffy?" Willow said softly. "Are you OK? Oh God, I’m sorry—what a stupid question…I mean, are you as OK as you can be?" Tara watched her lover’s face crease with sadness and anxiety, and her heart ached for the sincerity with which Willow so wanted to do the right thing for those she loved.
For a moment, Tara thought that Buffy hadn’t heard her. But then she shook her head, as if forcing her thoughts into some kind of order, and looked at them. "You know, I don’t think I could answer that question if you held a gun to my head—which I almost wish someone would, just to make this all go away." She walked slowly to the couch and stood above them, looking at Tara.
"She wants to talk to you," she said simply. Tara gave a small start of surprise, and she felt a momentary ripple of guilt as she saw the quick look of hurt that crossed Willow’s face before she could stop herself. Oh, Sweetie—this isn’t the kind of credibility you want to have.
She disentangled herself from Willow’s legs and rose from the couch. Within seconds, she was knocking on Dawn’s door. "Dawnie? It’s me."
Her first thought, upon entering the room, was that Dawn had shrunk somehow; that grief and rage had conspired to bend her little body further in on itself. Stepping closer, though, she could see that Dawn had huddled into a tiny ball, knees drawn tightly up to her chest, arms wrapped fiercely about her legs. As if she can make herself so small that reality doesn’t notice her.
She sat down gently on the bed, reaching out one hand tentatively to rest on Dawn’s arm. When the younger girl looked up, Tara was surprised to see that her eyes, though red, were now dry.
"You heard?" she asked quietly, gazing at Tara.
"Yeah, Sweetie. Buffy told us. I’m so sorry." How many times had she said that lately? To Dawn; to Buffy; to Donnie. The phrase seemed a fixture now, a staple of the language she used to make contact with others. Before her, Dawn stared almost vacantly.
"I don’t know what to do," she finally whispered. "I heard what that doctor said, and what the other one said, and I know they wouldn’t lie to us. But I still can’t believe it."
Precious one, if disbelief made any difference, my mother would visit Willow and me all the time, and she would teach our children how to make bread and grow herbs. But these were words that you simply didn’t say.
Instead, she asked, "You can’t believe it? Or you’re trying not to?"
But Dawn didn’t answer. "We went back to the hospital to see Mom after we talked to the second doctor. I kept thinking I was seeing her eyelids opening. I kept staring and staring, thinking, ‘Any minute now. She’ll wake up and she’ll be sorta groggy at first but then things will clear up and she’ll have to stay in the hospital for another day, just for some tests, but they’ll all come back OK and on the way home we’ll talk about Thanksgiving dinner. Any minute now.’ But she didn’t, and finally I had to stop looking because my eyes hurt. Then I felt guilty because I looked away and maybe that was the one moment when she could have opened her eyes, if I’d just been looking at her." Dawn was rocking slightly now, an almost imperceptible to-and-fro to some inner rhythm.
Tara just listened, and remembered standing at her mother’s casket at the visitation, watching her chest for any sign of movement. Several times, she was certain that she had detected a slight rising, but a prolonged gaze proved her false. She knew, though, that it was imperative that she keep looking because if her mother did gain breath once again, she would need Tara to see it and save her; prove all of this to be blasphemy. But the breathing never came, and Tara finally had to leave the funeral parlor with her father and brother. The next day, at the funeral, she did the same thing until they finally wheeled her mother’s casket to the back of the tiny church and sealed the coffin. The funeral director gave one of the keys to Donnie, and the other to her. She kept it in a velvet-lined box that was opened with a tiny hidden spring-latch.
Tara gently rubbed Dawn’s arm. "It’s so wrong, isn’t it? You know this shouldn’t be happening, but it is. Feeling helpless when someone you love is hurting—it has to be one of the worst things in the world."
When Dawn looked back at her this time, Tara could see that the tears were edging closer. "When your mom decided not to keep doing the chemo…Did you try to talk her out of it?"
The wrenching grief surged through her once more. When she trusted herself to speak, she answered slowly, "Yeah, Dawnie—I did. At first, anyway. I thought that if more treatment could give her more time, then of course she should do it." She drew a deep, shuddering breath and took both of Dawn’s hands in her own. "I’ve never told anyone this, Sweetie—I don’t like to think about it. But part of me was angry with her. Like, she had the chance to live longer and she decided not to. It felt like…like she had the chance to stay with me longer, and she decided not to. And I know that’s not how it was; I knew it intellectually even then. But I just wanted my mother to stay with me as long as she could and it was so hard not to feel like that wasn’t as important to her. Oh goddess," she whispered, sobs choking her voice, "it still hurts to remember that." She tried to gather herself together, remembering the aching girl who sat before her. She became dimly aware that Dawn was now rubbing her arms.
I’m supposed to be comforting her, she told herself desperately, fighting to still her own sobs.
But Dawn, she would later realize, was making one of those quiet leaps into her own looming adulthood. Maturity didn’t proceed in an orderly, uniform fashion. It crept and raced in turns. Dawn was older now than when she had first folded into herself on her bed two hours ago.
"I have to lether go, don’t I?" The words were so quiet that Tara first wondered if she had imagined them. Looking through her own blurred vision, she saw Dawn gazing at her with tears sliding heedlessly down her cheeks.
"If Mom can’t ever get better, I have to let her go. Don’t I?" She was looking at Tara so intently that the very air seemed to hang suspended, waiting.
Oh dear goddess…Does it fall to me to answer that; to confirm what she already knows? Do I have to be the verdict’s voice?
"Dawn, Sweetie…" She struggled to find words, to find her voice. "Dawn, you don’t have to do anything. That’s what makes this so hard, I think—when we have a choice, instead of having the hardest choices made for us." She bit her lip, and then took Dawn’s face in her hands. She’s so tiny… "But I think you know what your mother would ask you to do. And...and I think you have the courage to do it."
With the words, Dawn’s sobs wrenched out of her from some deep place that Tara recognized; and because she recognized it, she knew that the time of words was now over and so she pulled Dawn closer as love and grief washed through her and spilled out onto and all around the slight form within her arms.
*****
The next twenty-four hours passed with the blithe indifference of Death moving freely among them all.
Buffy and Dawn had talked until early evening. At their request, Giles, Xander, and Anya came over to the house a little after 8. Tara and Willow had already agreed to stay for at least two or three more days. Willow had tried Hank Summers once more, this time leaving the message that the mother of his children was dying and that she hoped his secretary was doing well.
"Very bitter," Tara commented, her tone holding no reproach at all.
"Very satisfying," Willow replied simply.
Anya sat in Xander’s lap, but there was nothing sexual in the act. To Tara, it appeared that she was clinging to her boyfriend as if needing constant proof that the anchor of her own life still breathed. Giles, she realized, had probably not slept at all the night before. He had also cut himself, more than once, while shaving. She had never seen him look so nakedly vulnerable before, and her heart ached for him.
Every day. I will tell Willow how much I love her every single day that I get to walk through life with her.
The two sisters sat together on the couch, holding hands. Though Buffy did most of the speaking, Tara noticed gratefully that she looked frequently to Dawn for support and verification.
"Dawn and I have been talking pretty much all day," she began. "From everything the doctors have said, there’s really no chance that Mom will come out of her coma. Right now, the machines are breathing for her and keeping her heart beating." She paused; Tara could see her hand shaking within Dawn’s grip. "Dawn and I both agree that Mom wouldn’t want to be kept alive like that."
Tara saw Giles start at the words. "What—what are you saying?" he asked hoarsely.
Buffy opened her mouth to speak, and couldn’t. Finally, she squeezed her eyes shut and whispered, "We’ve decided to take Mom off of the machines." Over the quick ripple of gasps and sighs, she continued, "The doctors say that she’ll probably die fairly soon after that." Tara saw her wince at the word, swallowing heavily. "But…but Dawn and I feel that her soul, her spirit are already gone. We believe this is what she would want." Then she sank back into the couch as if she had exhausted her last reserve of strength.
"But—are you sure?" Giles demanded, his eyes belying his desperation. "I mean, it’s been hardly a day. Perhaps you should give it more time."
"But maybe the chemo will work if you try it again, Mom. You should give it more time."
Buffy looked at her Watcher, sorrow dancing haltingly with anger in her expression. "Giles, do you think we haven’t thought this through completely? You think we didn’t talk that over with the doctors, down to every last possible scenario?" Dawn, Tara noticed, had lowered her head as if trying to drown out a Siren’s song, pleading with her to do what she most wanted to.
You forfeited the right to have a role in this decision by not saying anything. You know that now, and it’s killing you.
After a moment, he sagged against the back of his chair. "Yes—yes, of course. I’m sorry for questioning your decision." An uneasy silence sank over the group.
Finally, Xander asked, "What do you need from us, Buffy?" Seeing her quick glance at Dawn, he added, "And you, Dawn? Anything, either of you…" He trailed off, looking helplessly from one sister to another.
When Buffy spoke again, her voice was stronger. Because now it’s about doing something. Right now, it’s not about feelings.
"We’re going to do it tomorrow. She loved early evening; it was her favorite time of day. Years ago she used to say that that was when the flowers smelled sweetest. Over the last few years, she said it was the last time of the day that she could be outside and not look over her shoulder and wonder if she’d brought enough holy water." Buffy smiled, just for a moment, and then rocked forward slightly as if in pain. The motion, Tara knew, would become a habit before it finally waned and left. She watched as Dawn squeezed her sister’s hand, and then spoke up herself.
"So…we’re going to spend tomorrow with her, and then take the machines away as sunset begins." She said the words quickly, as if afraid that she wouldn’t be able to finish the sentence if she let herself hear what she was saying.
The silence returned, until Anya blurted, "I’m sorry Joyce can’t wake up." Buffy looked up at her as if registering her presence for the first time. Tara could see that Anya was terrified of having said the wrong thing.
Finally, Buffy gave her a gentle smile. "Me too, Anya. Thank you." Tara thought she could see tears forming in the ex-demon’s eyes.
The evening ended shortly after that. Hugs, more tears, condolences, promises…Words and gestures were offered, taken, acknowledged. And everyone was exquisitely aware that all of these words and gestures, while true and sacred in their own right, would not change reality. They would not make Joyce wake up.
A short time later, Tara offered herself up to Willow’s arms and loosed the sobs that had been pounding within her since she had talked to Dawn. She told Willow of her anger at her mother, and her rage at Death for taking so many of the very best, and her fear that she would never find peace with her mother’s life now, much less her death. Tears coursed down her cheeks, splashing onto Willow’s breasts as her beloved held her and without speaking, reminded her of the beauty that still graced her life.
*****
At 7:38 the next evening, when the sun offered its last shimmering reminder, Buffy nodded to Dr. Santiago, who quietly stilled the machines that had frustrated both Death and Life.
In the waiting room, Willow and Tara waited with the others, watching the final piercing splash of red and orange as the sun took its leave of them.
She could only guess what the others were feeling, but as she rested her head on Willow’s shoulder, Tara remembered great bunches of honeysuckle, gathered every day and placed in vases and glasses and Mason jars throughout her mother’s room.
And though they had all been prepared to stand vigil for hours and perhaps days, Joyce Summers, beloved daughter of Jack and Sharon McNamara, beloved mother of Buffy and Dawn Summers, seemed to know that she was being called elsewhere, and so she did not breathe and did not linger, but rather left as she had lived—quietly, with dignity and immense grace.
) !
at: 4/28/03 12:25:43 am
I'm raining!
*#)(# freakin' death!
I love her lol
at: 5/1/03 11:22:20 pm
)
for Joyce...