Prologue
“The final tests are back. They don’t know if she will ever walk again.” Joyce told everyone, then promptly fell into one of the lime green chairs of the hospital’s waiting room. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed; for her daughter, for the bruises that covered her and for the prognosis that would forever alter the course of her life. “And she still won’t eat. Until she does, she has to stay here.”
Giles would have moved to comfort her, but he was too busy trying to comprehend it all for himself. He walked away from the sobs and headed toward room four-eleven. Buffy’s room. The place where she was resting as comfortably as could be expected. It was never meant to happen this way. She was stronger than any other slayer he had read about and she was smart on her feet, not apt to make mistakes. Nevertheless, here she was, lying in a bed with an IV tube in her hand and an untouched meal on the tray in front of her. He sighed and lifted the lid on the tray. “Buffy, you need to eat.”
“I won’t walk again, will I?” She didn’t look away from the window. Outside, rain beat hard against the glass, making it impossible to see anything, but she stared at it. “I can tell by how the nurses look at me and whisper to one another. My hearing is still fine, you know? I hear what they say. It’s such a pity. She’s so young. She won’t have a life. They’re right.”
“You mustn’t think like that.” Giles told her, opening the carton of milk and sticking a straw into it. He held it out to her and slowly sat it back on the table when she made no move to take it. “You can’t go home until you start eating.”
“I don’t want to go home.” Buffy mumbled without inflection.
He lifted the plastic fork and knife and began sawing into the dried up piece of meat that the hospital liked to call pepper steak. “What would you like to do then? Stay here and be an invalid?”
“Why not? That’s what I am, isn’t it?”
“Certainly not. Think about your mother. She’s been worried sick about you and you can go home as soon as you show them that you’ll eat.”
She turned to face him and shook her head. “Home? There are stairs in my home, Giles. My room is at the top of those stairs. I’m not going to crawl around like some kind of slug to get there and I’m not going to let my mother try to carry me. I don’t want to go home.”
Giles slammed the fork down and shoved the table out of the way. Gripping her shoulders, he forced her to look at him. “You are not going to give up. Do you hear me? You are a Slayer and if they say you can’t walk again, then you show them that you will. You heal faster than anyone does, Buffy. A bone breaks and it’s fine within days. You get a cut and it closes within hours. This will not beat you.”
Buffy shoved him away angrily, ignoring the pain in her back. “You don’t know anything. You aren’t the one lying here telling your legs to move. You aren’t the one who was slammed over a headstone so hard that it ruined your back. This didn’t beat me, Giles. Those vampires that did this beat me.”
“You’re alive! They didn’t beat you.”
“I’m alive?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Where am I alive at, Giles? My spirit is dead, my soul is dead, my hope is dead and my legs are dead. Who cares if I can still breathe?”
“Buffy-.”
“Get out.”
“Buffy, please-.”
Buffy reached for the table, grabbed her tray and threw it across the room, barely missing his head. “I said get out.” She told him through clenched teeth as pain seared up her back. She only felt it from the waist up. From the waist down, there was nothing and she never wanted to feel pain more in her life.
Giles turned and walked out the door, bumping into a nurse who was rushing to see what the problem was. He heard the woman try to soothe Buffy, heard Buffy swear at her, and then he walked slowly down the hall. Nothing would be the same again.
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