Damage Control, Part Two

by L. Inman

 

Rupert Giles hurtled down the M4, swearing softly between his teeth every time he was forced to ease up on the accelerator to accommodate a slower vehicle.  If these gormless turkeys made him late for his phone call he’d...he wasn’t sure, but it would certainly be no White-Rabbit revenge.

            He screeched to a final stop in front of his flat, burst through the door over the rune he had not bothered to erase, and dove for the phone, which was already ringing.

            “Hello?” he gasped.

            “Hi, Giles,” Willow said.  “Anybody else on yet?  —Why are you out of breath?”

            “I—only just—got home,” he said, panting.

            “Where did you—oh.  You went to see Elisabeth.  How...did it go?”

            “I’m not sure yet,” Rupert said truthfully.

            “Well, you stayed the night, apparently,” Willow said.  “That’s...of the good, right?”

            “I’m not sure yet,” he repeated.  A slow weight, wholly unrelated to his race for the phone, had settled over his breathing.

            Mercifully, a new call sounded over the line, and Willow had to abandon her gentle inquisition to welcome Xander and Andrew to the conference call.

            More joined, person by person on every available extension, and the chattering went through Rupert’s head until Buffy called the “meeting” to order and briskly called on each to give his or her report.  Belatedly he snapped to attention just before it got round to him, and dug out his notebook to begin writing down the work he would need to do based on each report.

            When called on, he reported on his situation and enumerated the files he had created, verifying as he did so the three new Slayers’ names mentioned by the others, to add later.

            In what seemed a short time considering the effort he had made to get home, the meeting was adjourning, with everyone carrying off new assignments and signing off more or less cheerfully.  It reminded Rupert slightly (though he did not say so) of the discharge of Council business, only without the spirit of the British Empire to lend it grandeur.  Which was just as well: Rupert liked his duty unvarnished.

            “Hang on, Giles,” Buffy said.  “I need to talk to you after.”

            “Oh,” Willow said.  “Okay, well, I can ask you about that other thing later.”

            “Thank God,” Rupert said, and Willow laughed.

            “I won’t forget, you know.”

            “I know,” he sighed.

            “Later, Giles—Will—Dawn—Buffy,” Xander said.

            Within seconds Rupert and Buffy were left alone on the line.

            Buffy got right to the point.  “There’s a man floating around Europe who contacted me a few days ago.  Has some information.  Wants to give it to me, but he also wants to talk to you.”

            “Council?”

            “Dunno.  My spidey-sense didn’t pick that up.  I’m pretty sure he knows what the Council is—or was, anyway—but I can’t get anything more than that.  I’m supposed to call him tomorrow and set up a meeting between the three of us this week.  Where should I tell him to go?”

            Rupert thought.  “Well...it ought to be someplace easily reachable from our respective positions, and big enough for us not to attract notice.”  He hummed a moment, ignoring the apprehension threading through his nerves.  “Paris, perhaps?”

            Buffy snorted, but agreed.  “Paris it is.  Got a specific place in mind?”

            Rupert mentioned a Left Bank cafe that would answer the purpose, and made a note of it.  “I’ll call you later tonight or tomorrow with the new sitch,” Buffy said.

            “Right,” Rupert said, and they ended the call without ceremony.

            A meeting with a possible ex-Council member, a Paris cafe, his strung-out self, and Buffy, Rupert thought: what could possibly go wrong?

 

*

 

Elisabeth put her face into the hot shower spray and left it there for as long as her breath would hold.  There were any number of things she ought to get done today, not the least of which involved a research stint in the library; but there was one thing that would not keep: she had to go and see Brian.

            She looked forward to it as to an afternoon of tax audits.  Brian was angry with her, no doubt about that.  Elisabeth shut off the water and reached for the towel.  She shouldn’t have said that to him, about Austin Grey.  But he, she thought, towelling her hair roughly, shouldn’t have thrown a punch at Rupert in a bookstore.  Men!  Both of them had looked at her blankly when she incriminated them, as if (woman-like) she had hared off on an irrelevancy.

            “I’ll give him irrelevancy,” she muttered, buffing each leg dry before stepping out of the tub.  Whether she meant Brian or Rupert she did not bother to try and make clear.

            Still muttering, she slipped back into her kimono and went to find some clothes.  The irritation served its purpose as distraction until she was nearly fully dressed, and she looked up to catch her wet-haired, slightly bedraggled reflection in the small mirror over her dresser.

            The thing was, she was going to have to tell Brian that Rupert was still in her life: and he was going to take it hard.  Hence the little shake that was going in Elisabeth’s knees.

            “I shouldn’t have to feel like Judas about it,” she said savagely to her reflection, and laid the mirror flat on its face atop the dresser.

 

*

 

In the afternoon the phone rang, a welcome distraction from the unwholesome drifting around his flat that Rupert had been doing since lunch.  Work wasn’t holding his attention, and he had—to his own exasperation—developed another block about calling Elisabeth.  With nothing he wanted to do, no appetite for what he had to do, and blocked from what he needed to do, Rupert had wandered from room to room in his flat, tripping over the Guardian, who made no sound but glared at him from five feet below.

            “I can’t,” he protested, over the cat’s continued stern look.  “I can’t call her.”

            Voicing it had revealed it for the whine it was.  Rupert rolled his eyes at himself and looked toward the phone, sitting small, black, and malignant on his desk.

            That was when it rang.

            Rupert was relieved to go and pick up, but his relief got a puncture when he heard the voice at the other end.

            “So,” Willow said, “tell me what happened.”

            He froze a moment, then retorted, “And what if I say no?”

            “I’ll do a Vulcan mind-meld on you or something.  Or send Xander to Bath to beat you up.”

            She was only half-kidding, Rupert knew: he could hear Resolve Face in her voice, and decided to give in.

            “I went to see her,” he said.

            “And?”

            “It was…bad.”  He sighed, fingering his jawline.  “I met her best friend in an Oxford bookshop and he tried to beat me up.”

            “Oh,” Willow said.  “Is he okay?”

            “Of course he’s okay.”  Rupert glared at the prints on the wall.  “He’s fine, he’s jack-dandy.  That’s not my fault.  Some passersby stepped in.”

            “Are you okay?”

            “Bruise on my jaw.”

            “I’m betting Elisabeth wasn’t happy.”

            “Nobody’d give you good odds on that one,” Rupert said austerely.

            Willow snorted.  “You’re not being very cooperative, here.”

            Rupert tucked one hand under his phone-arm in a defensive gesture Willow couldn’t see.  “I don’t know what else you’d expect.”

            She sighed.  “Giles…you can come down outta the tree, okay?  There’s not a war on, not like before, and nobody wants to hurt you.  Well, except for Elisabeth’s best friend….”

            “And Buffy.”

            “Only occasionally.  And Xander didn’t mean half that stuff he said when we were drunk.  And—” she gave a diffident laugh— “there was that little time I tried to kill you, but, in the past, okay?”

            Things had to be bad if they were smiling over the time Willow tried to kill him.  “You’ve forgotten someone,” he said sadly.

            “Oh?  Who?”

            “Elisabeth.”

            “Oh.”

            There was a small silence, then Willow said:

            “Do you want to talk about it?”

            He didn’t.  But the longer he let the others figure it all out by themselves, the more egregious the rumors would grow.  More unbearable in the long run, and anyway Willow, who understood what it was to have done something unforgivable, was the best person to tell.  Rupert put his backside to the desk and crossed one toe over his planted foot.

            “I think,” he said cautiously, to start, “she’s taking me back.”

 

*

 

Numbly, as if every cell in her body had been magnetized, Elisabeth strode down St. Aldates with eyes blind to everything but the turn that would take her to St. John’s Church.  For the time it had taken to get out of Brian’s neighborhood, she had wandered in more or less a straight line, but once she reached the center of the city she had chosen a direction.

            Without pausing for hellos at the tiny receptionist office inside the parish-hall door, she climbed the stairs to Mother Anne’s office and knocked faintly at the frame of the open door.

            “Come in, I—” Anne swiveled in her chair.  “Elisabeth, how nice to—oh, dear—what’s wrong?”

            She jumped up and guided a pale and shaking Elisabeth to a seat next to her desk, got her a cup of water, and drew her own chair close.  “Tell me—what’s happened?”

            Elisabeth shook her head, unable to speak.  She took a few sips of water and at length began hardily:  “I thought I’d come here and get it all out of the way.  If I’m going to be disowned by all my friends I thought I’d better get it over with at once.”

            Anne remained unflustered.  “Why do you expect me to disown you?”

            “Why shouldn’t you?” Elisabeth was dimly aware that besides sounding hysterical, her voice had lost the support of her breath.  “Brian did.”

            “And what happened with Brian?”

            “He…I….”  Elisabeth stopped.  “He says he ‘can’t be my friend and watch me do what I’m doing,’” she quoted in a rush.  “I knew he’d be angry but I didn’t think he’d—”  Her eyes stung hot, and she took another sip of cold water.

            “Why is he angry?” Anne asked her quietly.

            Elisabeth kept her prickling eyes on the rim of her paper cup.  “Because I took Rupert back.”

            “Ah,” Anne said on an indrawn breath.

            There was a small silence.

            “Are you?” Elisabeth said finally.

            “Am I what?”

            “Going to disown me.”

            “For taking Rupert back?”  Elisabeth dared to look up; the priest’s eyes held a glint of grim humor.  “Of course not.  I rather expected it.  Tell me what happened.”

            Falteringly at first, then in a stronger voice, Elisabeth told Anne how Rupert had returned to Oxford; how the bookstore brawl happened; how both Rupert and Brian had appealed to her for clemency; how Rupert had, more importantly, shown his grief at what he had done to her; how he had then spent the night, and how they had re-consummated their relationship that morning.

            “And Brian,” Anne responded, “is angry because you did this.”

            “Well, I think he’s angry that I’m having any truck with him at all; but yes.”

             Anne sat back in her chair and reached out to uncap and recap a pen one-handed.  “I don’t think Brian is going to disown you,” she said finally.

            Elisabeth turned aching eyes to Anne’s face.  “You weren’t there.  You didn’t hear what he…the things he said.”

            “Oh, I have no doubt about the language he used,” Anne said gently.  “But I’ve got to know Brian a little in the past weeks.  I don’t think he has, in his heart, any serious intention of disowning you.”

            For the first time Elisabeth’s lip trembled hopefully; she firmed it.  “You think so?”

            “I do.  For one thing—” Anne sat up and tugged over a box of tissues in case Elisabeth should need them— “he knows perfectly well that if he forced you to really choose between him and Rupert, and you chose him, it would be a cheap victory that he couldn’t live with.”

            Elisabeth took a tissue, though she didn’t yet need it, and turned this new thought over.  “Maybe,” she said.  “But he really hates Rupert.  I didn’t realize it before.”

            Anne gave her a pursed smile.  “Well, that’s a problem that won’t be solved quickly, unfortunately.”

            Something in Anne’s tone made Elisabeth look up at her face.  “Do you? Hate him, I mean.”

            The priest let out a heavy sigh and sank back in her chair.  “No.”  She sighed again.  “No.  These things aren’t simple; and—” she cocked her head, staring into the middle distance— “even thoroughly knowing the situation and the people doesn’t make it easy….”  Her eyes focused again and returned to Elisabeth’s face.  “I haven’t met Rupert.  I have some knowledge of Watchers, but it’s painfully limited and I couldn’t use it to help make an evaluation of what he’s done.  But I do fancy I know what I see of him in you.  And yes…he has made me angry.”

            The fluttering in Elisabeth’s nerves fell still.  It seemed for a moment impossible to tell whether the certainty of shame had fallen upon her for what she had done, or for what Rupert had done.  She broke their gaze and looked into her lap, thinking hard; then with an effort raised her eyes to ask:

            “Do you think it was wrong, the choice I made?  To take him back—into—into my bed and all?”

            The priest was silent a moment, but did not look away.  “I’m not going to give you any false reassurances, Elisabeth,” she said finally.  “You know better than I.  What do you think of it?”

            Elisabeth dropped her eyes to her lap again.  “I…I don’t know.  I thought it would happen gradually, and it—didn’t.  I was always going to take him back, you know.  I told Brian that.  Of course, if I’d told him that sooner he might not have…but then he might have gone to Bath and tried to commit—  I don’t want to be protected from Rupert,” she said, suddenly fierce.  “If I can’t manage it myself, then I should be the one to send him away.”

            “If you can’t manage, what?” Anne probed, softly.

            “Being partnered with—” Elisabeth stopped, and this time the tears spilled over.  She drew a shuddering breath and went on, dabbing at them with the tissue.  “It isn’t the physical part of what he did that hurts me so much,” she said through the ache in her throat.  “Brian keeps going on about him terrorizing me.  That isn’t—that wasn’t the point, it never was the point.”

            “What was the point?” Anne asked in a near-whisper, as Elisabeth smudged at her face with the tissue.

            “He—willingly believed—that I was—that the evil in me was the strongest.  He set himself against me as if he had never known me—as if he had never said to me, ‘I know you are human’….”  She stopped to put down the water and take off her glasses so that she could weep silently into the tissue.  After a moment she drew a distressed breath and resumed.  “He didn’t know how much it meant to me that he—trusted me, when I couldn’t trust myself.  And then he took that away.”  Elisabeth plucked a new tissue from the box.  “I could die like that, I suppose—but I could never live like that.”

            “I don’t think you’ll have to,” Anne said.  Hearing the quiet strain in her voice, Elisabeth looked up.

            “You won’t need Rupert to maintain your trust in yourself.”  There was a hard shine in the priest’s eyes.  “You regained it already.”

            Elisabeth shook her head, almost frightened.  “But I didn’t,” she said.  “You saw what happened.  You saw me lose it all.”

            “You would not have come back if you had not found your foundation again.”

            Elisabeth shook her head more vigorously.  “That isn’t what happened.  All that happened was, I let go and…went through with the dying,” she finished, rather lamely.  “There wasn’t anything triumphant about it.”

            The shine in the priest’s eyes had not abated, but a little smile now played about her mouth.  “My dear,” she said, “you sit here in a Christian church, with a cross around your neck, with Sunday’s Eucharist prayers hardly cold on your lips—and you’re trying to tell me that nothing could have been born of the death you had?”

            For a fleeting moment, Elisabeth felt able to share Anne’s smile; but fear clamped in again.  “What if it’s not finished?  I don’t think it’s finished.  I haven’t got a boundless trust in myself—I don’t know if I’ve got any.  You don’t know—”  She broke off, and muttered, “I seem to keep having to die like this.”

            “Well—yes,” Anne said.  “We all do it more than once.”

            A long, soft silence descended upon the vicar’s office while Elisabeth thought this over.  At last she asked, tentatively, “So, are you saying that what Rupert did was—”

            “Oh, he betrayed you,” Anne said.  “You will both have to grieve for that.  I meant that—the damage he caused—might not be irredeemable.  Egypt and Israel were saved from a famine.”

            “But Joseph still had to forgive his brothers.”  Elisabeth completed the priest’s thought with a small, grim smile.

            “Yes,” Anne said.

 

*

 

Rupert idled outside the door of the café at which he had agreed to meet Buffy.  It looked like rain, and he would blend in much better if he went ahead inside and sat down; but restlessness kept him at a pause, unwilling to reach for the door handle.  Paris always made him restless—he had once glibly told a Watcher friend long ago that it made him over-attentive to too many sides of his own personality.  That friend was dead years ago, killed in the field long before the First Evil’s purge.  Rupert had felt a vague relief at the time that he had not troubled to deepen the friendship.  Remembering it now, he wondered how many times he had been cheated out of human spiritual touch—how many times he had cheated himself out of it, for the sake of the calling.  And had not Buffy proved over and over that the calling did not necessarily require such a sacrifice?

            “Giles?  Giles.”

            Rupert blinked: standing suddenly before him was his erstwhile Slayer, dressed modishly in a suit and long white leather coat.

            “You okay?” she asked, and though the tone was hardly tender, his spirits rose a little at her solicitude.  But then she continued.  “You look all zombie-like and sluggish.”  She turned away without waiting for his response and opened the door to the café.

            So much for restlessness, Rupert thought: and remembered dismally that Buffy had done her share of sacrificing connections.  “Nice to see you, too,” he muttered as he followed her inside.

            They chose a table by a window, through which they could observe the street outside and identify their contact, if and when he showed.  A waiter appeared; Rupert ordered a cheese-and-fruit plate and a glass of wine, in French.  The waiter gave him a small regal nod and turned to Buffy, who said, in English:  “Oh, I’m not really hungry.  Give me a—café au lait.”  Unprepared for the waiter’s response, she leaned involuntarily away as he scowled at her and uttered a few vehement words that, though in French, needed no interpretation.  “Giles,” she hissed across the table, “what did I do?  Did I order roast puppy or something?”

            Rupert turned to the waiter and placated him with, “Un café américain,” and a little shrug as if to say, “what can you do?”  The waiter sailed off, clearly still in high dudgeon.

            “What did I do?” Buffy repeated.

            “You ordered a café au lait,” Rupert said, with a sardonic smile, “which is exclusively a breakfast drink.  It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

            Buffy stared indignantly at him for a moment, then said, “I think you picked France on purpose.”

            “Well, you asked me,” Rupert said, swallowing a smirk, “and I picked a venue equidistant from Rome and Oxford.”

            “You call Paris equidistant?” Buffy began, but stopped.  “Oxford?  I thought you lived in Bath.”

            “I—” Rupert hung fire for a moment.  “I do live in Bath,” he answered her finally.

            “Then why—”

            “Elisabeth lives in Oxford.”  He confessed it quickly and sotto voce, keeping his eyes on his hands unfolding his napkin.  He kept his hands moving, draping the napkin neatly over his lap.

            “Oh,” Buffy said.  After a silence, she added:  “I thought Xander said you guys were…you know….”

            “What?”  Rupert looked up.

            “Broken up.”

            He dropped his gaze again.  “We were.  We—” Rupert cleared his throat— “have revisited the issue.”

            “Meaning?”  There was a note in her voice that could have been humor, could have been danger.  Rupert looked up to search her face, but could make nothing of her serious, raised-eyebrow expression.  How tired he was of this dance, of the eternal giving nothing away, the stiff-armed push-me-pull-you struggle.

            He said:  “Meaning I went to see her, and it turns out we may be able to repair our relationship.”

            “Is she the one who hit you?”

            Involuntarily Rupert’s fingers went to the fading bruise on his jawline.  “Her best friend did this.”

            Their order arrived before Buffy could question him further, and Rupert set to work on the cheese and fruit, in lieu of attempting to talk.

            Buffy stole a bit of his cheese while he was sipping his wine.  “So are you moving to Oxford then?” she asked, chewing.

            “I really haven’t thought that far,” Rupert said; and he hadn’t.  He submerged his startlement and concentrated on his plate.

            Buffy stole a slice of pear.  “You should,” she said.  “I worry about you.”

            “Get your own fruit and cheese!” Rupert said.

            “Giles, I think the waiter might try to hurt me if I order something else.  And don’t change the subject.  I worry about you.  Everybody else has a partner.”

            “So we’re switching to the buddy system?”  Rupert quickly took the strawberry Buffy’s eyes had lit on and took a generous bite.

            “Hardy har.  It’s not like that’s the worst idea ever.  And Elisabeth could look out for you in case something went wrong, so maybe you should think about teaming up with—”

            “Is that our contact?” Rupert said, staring out the window at the man who had sat down on a bench with a copy of Le Figaro and was attempting to read it nonchalantly despite the rain.  “Not very professional, is he.”

            Buffy snorted loudly, which caused the passing waiter to dart a glare at her.

            With rather more nonchalance than their contact was exhibiting, Buffy and Rupert paid their bill and mouched out the door.

            “I thought you didn’t like Elisabeth,” Rupert said, just before they reached earshot of the man.

            “I don’t have to,” Buffy said briskly.  “We’ve established she isn’t evil, and even if you can’t make it together she can at least be a contact.  Besides….”

            But the man stood up then, looking straight at them, and the argument was abandoned.

 

*

 

Elisabeth left Mother Anne’s office with a leaden calm settling over her spirits.  She finished the errands on her list almost placidly; ate a lonely supper of tuna salad; nailed down some research points in the library (feeling a small tremor of worry should Brian appear and either expostulate with her or ignore her); and went home to a sound sleep.

            She woke in the morning with a plan—or not so much a plan as a heavy certainty of what she would do.  She dressed with special care, making sure she was prepared for every eventuality of weather, packed her satchel with books, snacks, and bottled water, and set off, more or less calm but for the surface trembling that would only deepen if her plan worked.

            When she arrived at Brian’s flat, she checked to see if his car was in its place.  It was; but that didn’t mean he was at home.  Well, if he wasn’t he would find her waiting when he got back.

            She knocked at his door, deliberately:  Shave and a haircut, six bits.  Because she was listening carefully, she could hear his footsteps creeping to the door; there was a flicker at the peephole, and for a moment she thought perhaps he had not been as angry as she thought and would open the door.  But there was a silence that stretched past a minute, and Brian did not open the door.  It was what she had been afraid of.

            She knocked again, same rhythm, a little louder, and was convinced that despite the lack of response Brian was just inside the door, within full earshot.

            “I’m not going away until you let me in,” she said loudly.  “If you think I’m kidding, Brian, you’ve got another think coming.  You’re going to trip over me every time you cross this threshold until you let me in and talk to me.”  She stepped back and positioned a dusty milk crate for a strategic seat right next the door.  “I’ve got books,” she said, “and drinking water, and snacks, and something to wrap up in during the night.  And—” she glanced at her watch— “I’m going to knock on this door every hour on the hour.  So get ready for a siege.”

            Without any further ado Elisabeth suited the action to the word.  She set down her satchel next to her milk-crate seat and drew out a bottle of water and Busman’s Honeymoon, leaned back against the wall, and settled in to read.

            Half an hour later she paused in the slow savor of the Dowager Duchess’s diary to look up at the door.  It didn’t really surprise her that Brian was being this stubborn.  She submerged all disappointment and went back to reading, taking a sip of water.

            At the hour she knocked on the door again, to no avail, and repeated her challenge; then sat back down and returned to her book.

            The light changed to that of long afternoon, and a spat of rain began to fall outside the breezeway.  Elisabeth read on, stopping only to sip her water and to knock at the door.

            She sat down with a heavy sigh after the fourth fruitless knock, and for a moment had no heart to pick up her book again.  She had committed herself to staying the night if need be, but beyond that she wasn’t sure how well she could hold out.  Her bladder was beginning to hurt, and every minute that passed only made it worse.  With another sigh she picked up her book and tried to ignore the gathering urgency.

            Lord Peter was losing the fight for her attention when the locks began to snap impatiently.  Hurriedly Elisabeth stowed her water in her bag and tried to look casual as the door opened.  Brian stood, silent and sullen, looking at her.  She gave him a pointed questioning look:  with a deep dramatic sigh he stepped back holding the door and cast his gaze back inside, waiting.

            She swept up her things and brushed past him into the flat, but did not stop except to drop book and satchel on his loveseat.  She could veritably hear the question gathering as he shut the door and moved behind her, so she paused in the bathroom doorway and announced, “Excuse me.  I have to pee.”  And she shut the door with a sharp snap.

            When she came out she saw that he had drifted awkwardly across the room to fetch up against the little dining table he kept in the kitchen area, usually piled with papers and books and today also precariously holding the remains of his lunch.

            “So,” Elisabeth said.  She realized all at once that she had given more thought to gaining admittance to Brian’s flat than what she would say when she had it.

            “So,” he repeated glumly, then raised his head without looking at her.  “Elisabeth, what do you want?”

            “I want,” she said, slowly to give herself time, “to get you back.”

            He was partially turned away from her, and so it was all the more startling to see his eyes rise to her face in an expression naked with hope and remorse.  She went on before his hope could turn false.

            “But I’m not going to choose between you and him,” she said.  She thought a few seconds, ransacking her mind for more of the words that had ranted through her consciousness the past twenty-four hours, but she found in the event that all of them no longer served.  “And that’s…all, really,” she finished, lamely.

            He had lowered his face again, his expression obscured.  He muttered something.

            “What?”

            “I said,” he repeated, a little louder, “you didn’t lose me.”

            Against her will the tears rose in her eyes.  Her hand found the zipper of her of her windbreaker and toyed desperately with it.  “You said you didn’t want to see me again.”

            “I didn’t mean it.”  His voice was still soft, but then he raised his head and spoke stronger.  “But I think I was right in saying I can’t watch you try to be with him.”

            She drew a hardy breath.  “And I think I’m right in saying you’re going to have to suck up and deal.”  She met his eye with as much intrepidity as she could muster.  “I appreciate what you go through for me, but I’m the one suffering the hardship of putting the pieces back together.  And I’m the one who suffers when you attack him.”

            “I know that,” he admitted, dropping his gaze.

            “You can’t hurt him without hurting me more,” she insisted.

            “I know.”

            “Or is it—” her voice went unfortunately reedy, and she cleared it without success— “or is it me you want to hurt?”

            He looked straight up at her, stung.  “No!”

            She remained silent, and he repeated:  “No.”

            She couldn’t look at him any more without tears.  She looked away, breathing hard and even, clinging to her composure.

            There was a long silence, in which the currents of Elisabeth’s thought shifted and the air between them changed, so that she could no longer remember which of them was waiting for the other to speak.  At length, Brian’s voice startled her to attention.

            “I saw it.”  His voice was small and defeated.

            “What?”  She looked up.

            “I saw it,” he repeated, his shoulders bowed.  “That thing.  That thing that was pretending to be you.”

            Elisabeth half-shook her head, uncomprehending; then, as Brian’s meaning sank in, an echo of the old fear rose in her chest and she straightened to stare at him.  “You saw the First?” she whispered.  “When?”

            “While you were gone.”  His voice was very soft.

            “Oh, Brian....Why didn’t you tell me?”

            “I tried to,” he said, still not looking at her, “when you came back.  But it didn’t seem the thing to do somehow.  To remind you of all that.”  He drew a long breath and shivered.

            Elisabeth was silent a moment as new comprehension flooded in.  “No wonder you hate him so much,” she murmured.

            He opened his mouth suddenly, as if to protest; but shut it just as quickly and lowered his head again.  “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

            The unqualified note of apology in his voice moved Elisabeth instantly to go to him and put her arms around him.  He hugged her back, rocking gently; and Elisabeth’s restraint gave way, in one choking rush of tears and trembling.  Brian comforted her, one hand smoothing her spine, the other holding her close.

            At length she sniffled and breathed deep, turned her head to face the air a little, her cheek against his chest.  “Was it bad, while I was gone?” she asked him.

            She felt an involuntary shudder go through him, which was answer enough.  “I’m sorry,” she said.

            They stood together for a long moment, reclaiming their mutual equilibrium.  Finally Brian asked, tentatively:  “So...how is this going to work?”

            She leaned back her head to look at him, and gave a little sigh.  “Well, you don’t have to try to like him.  Just...don’t tear up any more bookstores, if you love me.”

            His face twisted in a wry little laugh.  “If it helps at all, I really didn’t plan that.  And...I promise not to—challenge him to a duel or anything overblown like that.”

            “That’s enough for me,” she said to his eyes.

            “Right,” he said, breathing out and relaxing under her touch.

            “Okay.”  She let go of him.  “Well...I’ve got some work to do, and I expect you do too.”

            He nodded ruefully.  “I’ve got a paper that won’t wait, unfortunately.  Perhaps we could go out and drink sometime this week.”

            “Sounds good,” Elisabeth said, masking her trembling with a brisk zip of her windbreaker.

            “I’ll call you,” he said, as she moved toward the door.

            She nodded, and reached for the door handle.

            “Elisabeth?” he said, and she paused to turn and look at him.

            He shifted his awkward stance.  “I just want you to know that...I did realize I can’t write your life for you.  Apart from its being—well, wrong—I suppose—I mean, I figure I’d probably make a right balls of it.”

            She gave him a small, grave smile.  “Like George Chapman finishing Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.  Only Chapman had no self-awareness.”

            A little smirk tugged at Brian’s mouth.  “How’s that?”

            Elisabeth trailed her hand along her forehead and declaimed:  “Oh! Hero!  I have found you at last!  Our love can never be denied! —Oh, Leander!” —she switched trailing hands— “I love you and nobody else but you!  And our love can only be the greater when we decide not to have premarital sex!  And I will now go on about the importance of abstinence at great length and you will listen to me because you love me so much!”

            Brian was laughing hard by the end of her recital; but he finished with a bittersweet smile.  “God, I hope you don’t think I’d write a paean to abstinence!” he said.

            “I have no fear of that,” Elisabeth said with a grin as she opened the door.  “I’ll see you later.”

            “Take care of yourself,” Brian said.  “I’ll call you.”

            She closed the door gently on their last understanding look, and went her trembly way back to the library.

 

*

 

“Giles...Giles.”

            Something was interrupting the dark heavy cloud of pain and sleep that lay over his consciousness—sharp little pat-slaps whose location he traced eventually to his face.  He tried to retreat back into the familiar painful sleep, but the voice wouldn’t let him.

            “Giles, come on.  I need you to wake up.  I don’t know how to call for an ambulance in French.”  The slaps came harder.

            Rupert groaned.

            “Oh, good.”  Instead of abating, Buffy’s slaps grew harder still.

            “Son of a bitch,” Rupert muttered, and dragged a hand up in an attempt to ward off Buffy’s medical attentions.  “Ouch.  Get off me.”

            Memory returned to him:  he was lying in a damp Paris alley, and Buffy was bending over him.  A great pain was gathering into a heated knot over his left eye.  “Motherbloodyfucking son of a bitch,” he said.

            “That’s it, Giles.  Tell me how you really feel.”

            “Fuck you.”

            Unwillingly, he opened his eyes fully to look at her, kneeling next to him in the shadows.

            “You know,” Buffy said, conversationally, “It strikes me as odd that you managed to fight a whole slew of uber-vamps with hardly a scratch, yet get knocked out by an incompetent rogue Watcher.”

            “Fuck you,” Rupert said again.  “Am I bleeding?”  He put a tentative hand up to his forehead.

            “A little, not too much.”

            “Where is the said incompetent rogue Watcher?”

            “Vamps got him at the other end of the alley.  Snapped his neck, didn’t even bite.  Guess they didn’t like him playing both sides against the middle.”  She grunted, helping to drag him into a sitting position.  “Not that the little bastard would have fared a whole lot better with me.  Well, at least those girls are safe.”

            “And the vamps?”  Rupert made a bid to get to his feet and had to sit down again briefly before trying again.

            “Dusted.”

            “Right.”

            Buffy hauled him gently to his feet, letting go of him only when she saw he had full balance.  “You know,” she said, casting a meditative glance down the alley, “I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of deal.  I mean, if we’re going to have to start keeping files on Watchers who’ve gone underground.  This can’t have been the only rogue one.”

            Pinching at the pain spot on his brow, Rupert glanced in the same direction and winced thoughtfully.  “Yes,” he said, “the scope of our endeavor is likely to grow beyond our expectations as time goes on.”

            “Meaning,” Buffy said, “that we’re in over our heads?”

            He gave her a sardonic smile.  “Way,” he said, and turned to stalk out of the alley.

            Buffy snorted and followed after.

            “Not,” he added, “that we had any choice.”

            She jumped a stride to get abreast of him.  “Yeah,” she said.  “Now let’s get to my hotel room so I can doctor you up.”

            “I don’t need doctoring up.”

            “Shyeah.  Right.”

 

*

 

The first day after her reconciliation with Brian wasn’t difficult:  Elisabeth spent the morning in the library and the afternoon hunched over her laptop at home, ate well, slept.  Her eyes troubled her a little, but she put it down to the fallout of passed stress and thought nothing more of it.

            Rupert hadn’t called, but that was nothing new.  On the other hand, the ribbon of her knowledge had pulled all the way through her hands and gone, so there was no telling where he was, or what he was doing, or whether he was safe.  Elisabeth told herself she liked it that way: far better to wonder about him like any other normal person than to suffer and know.  Once she went so far as to pick up the phone and dial his number in Bath.  She let it ring five times before giving up; she didn’t try again.

            The next day was unsettled, but she refused to pay it any mind.  Brian had apologized; there was no need to keep remembering the sudden dizzying precariousness induced by their quarrel.  That half-dream she had had in the morning was just that, a dream:  she had made love to Rupert tenderly, nourishingly, in her half-awake state, and it was only the aberration of her nerves that had turned it into a nightmare in which she reached behind his neck with her hands and snapped it.  She had come awake then, on a panicked gasp, and lain staring at the ceiling and breathing slowly until her heart rate went down.  Her drowsy brain was bound to play tricks on her, this close to the event.  It meant nothing.  Indeed, that day was as productive as any she’d had since her illness; she wrote five very good pages and cooked herself a supply of potato curry soup.

            The next morning’s prolonged qualm of nausea was a sign of dehydration.  Elisabeth drank two extra glasses of water, and it subsided.

            On the other hand, looking in the bathroom mirror was no easier than it had been.  The glaring evidence of blemishes aside, Elisabeth could find no shade of expression, no style of movement that did not mock her.  “Great,” she told her reflection that afternoon.  “If I’m not dangerous, I’m ignominious.”

            The sarcasm didn’t help.  That evening, she rummaged in her desk for some thumbtacks and tacked her two extra towels up over the bathroom mirror.  They did not quite meet over the center, giving her a flicker of reflection every time she passed.  After a few hours of her nerve-ends flinching, she dug out a flat sheet she wasn’t using and replaced one of the towels.  The end of the sheet draped into the sink; she tucked it back so that she could still wash her hands and brush her teeth.

            When Brian called later that evening she told him she was in the throes of a paper and couldn’t go out; which was true.  She was in the throes of her paper, alone at home, just her and the paper and her draped bathroom mirror.  Like a Victorian house of mourning, she thought with a little laugh, only the drapings weren’t black.

            That night she exhausted herself, jerking awake at the point of dropping off, over and over.  Over and over she told herself that it made no difference, that she would be safe, or not, even if she fell asleep.  I don’t think I have any trust in myself…I seem to keep having to die….

            We all do it more than once….

            Elisabeth choked on a dry sob, and a few minutes later dropped, spent, into a heavy sleep.

 

*

 

“Sit.”  Buffy pushed Rupert down onto the edge of her hotel bed.  She pulled a pencil-thin flashlight out of her jacket pocket, twisted it on, and held his chin so she could shine it in each of his eyes.  He winced.

            “Good.  No concussion.  That’s a plus.”  She dug in another pocket and pulled out a vinyl roll-bag that turned out to be a cunning first-aid kit.

            He snorted.  “Since when did you become Clara Barton?”

            “Shut up,” she said briskly, unrolling the bag over the bed with a sharp snap.  “Who’s got the antibiotic ointment, here, you or me?”

            Rupert heaved a deep sigh and more or less submissively let her swab at his throbbing brow with an alcohol wipe.  “Is it still bleeding?”

            “Stop moving your head.  Yes, it’s bleeding.  You keep moving around.”

            “I’m not moving around,” Rupert said, making it true.

            “—now,” Buffy said.

            She got out a small adhesive bandage shaped to grip the edges of cuts together.  “Now hold still,” she told him.  He raised his eyes in a vain attempt to watch her apply the bandage to his forehead.  “Stop raising your eyebrow, it interferes with the grip,” she said.  He blew out his cheeks and dropped his gaze to her shoes, which were lightly coated with dust.  “There,” Buffy said finally.  “You’ll have a nice purple goose-egg on your forehead.”

            “Good,” he said.  “It’ll match the one on my jaw.”

            “That one’s fading,” Buffy said, cocking her head to look at it judicially.  She went over to the table and began loading a hand-towel with ice cubes from the bucket.  “So why did Elisabeth’s best friend hit you?” she inquired, casually.

            “Because I caused Elisabeth a lot of pain one way and another, and he wanted to pay me out for it,” Rupert said shortly.  “What’s going to happen to our man in the alley?”

            “Nothing,” Buffy shrugged.  “He’s dead.  Those other two Watcher-types carried him off.”

            “They took him away?”

            “They muttered something about having to take care of their own, even if he crossed a line.”  Buffy grunted, giving the makeshift ice-pack a firm twist.  “Just as long as they don’t interfere with me taking care of my own.  Crossed a line,” she repeated darkly.  “If they pick up where he left off they’re gonna see some crossed lines.”  She came over to him with the ice-pack and put it into his hand.  “And you did it again. Changed the subject.”

            Rupert ignored that.  “So all of this took place while I was out?”

            “Yep.”

            He dropped back on the bed and wriggled up to put his head on the pillow, arranged the ice-pack on his brow and closed his eyes.  “If someone told me I’d have an encounter in an alley in Paris, I wouldn’t have thought it’d be with a flipping iron fire-escape ladder.”

            Buffy snickered.

            “It’s not funny.”

            “Well, you have to admit there was a certain kind of dorky elegance in the way he brought that thing swinging down into your face—okay.  I guess it’s not funny yet.  I’ll wait till the swelling goes down.”

            Rupert dropped his two-fingered salute back onto the bed at his side.  “Much obliged,” he said, eyes still closed.  He could veritably hear her still smiling.

            Unfortunately Buffy’s obnoxious mood had not worn off.  “So,” she said, “you gonna bring Elisabeth back a present from France?”

            “I hadn’t considered it,” Rupert said without opening his eyes.

            “Well, I’m not Elisabeth, but if it were me I’d be a little miffed that my boyfriend went to Paris and didn’t come back with so much as a T-shirt.”

            “Elisabeth doesn’t even know I went to Paris,” Rupert said.  Which was a mistake.  Buffy’s nibbling attempts at provocation flipped suddenly into outright indignation.

            “She doesn’t know you are in Paris?  She doesn’t know where you are?”

            “Well—”  The ice-pack slid off his forehead, and Rupert was forced to open his eyes to retrieve it.

            “Giles!”  Buffy was glaring at him.  “You mean to tell me you’ve been three days in France and your girlfriend has no clue where you are or what you’re doing?”

            Rupert tried glaring back at her but it hurt his forehead.  “We don’t keep each other on a leash.  She knows I’m working, I don’t have to call her.”

            “But she could be worried about your safety.  Didn’t you think of that?”

            “My safety isn’t an issue,” Rupert muttered, leaning his head back to position and re-position the ice-pack on his forehead.  “Besides,” he added, to forestall any remark on his current condition, “I haven’t had time to get to a phone.”

            It was a lame excuse and he knew it.

            “If you had a cell-phone,” Buffy said, “that wouldn’t be a problem.”

            “Oh for God’s sake:  do we have to go over all that again?  I don’t want one of those contraptions.  They cause brain tumors, you know.”

            Buffy came over to the bed and took away his ice-pack.  “Giles,” she said, “enough excuses.  Willow and Xander are purchasing cell-phones this week.  If everybody has one we can have a proper conference call.  And you can call Elisabeth so she doesn’t have to wonder if you’re dead.”  She dropped the ice-pack onto his solar plexus, making him grunt.

            Buffy swept to the door and opened it.  “I,” she said, “will be right back.”

            Rupert was left for the next twenty minutes wondering fretfully what Buffy was about to do.  Did she plan to go and purchase him a cell-phone right then and there?  But that would be infeasible—Buffy’s French was mangled at best, and if he had to get one of the damned things, he wanted to pick it out himself.  After all, his biggest objection to getting a mobile was the principle of the thing.  Or did Buffy plan to call Elisabeth and bear tales?  In that case, thank you very fucking much, Buffy, Rupert thought.  “Oh, hell,” he muttered aloud, “my head is splitting.”  In fact, his headache was an ironic sort of solace, considering how badly he knew he was behaving and how helpless he felt to stop it.

            What he wanted, Rupert thought, was to go home.

            Buffy returned with an air of quiet satisfaction shortly after that.  “What?” Rupert said.

            “I went down and made travel arrangements for tomorrow,” Buffy said.  “It wasn’t as hard as I thought.  Turns out you can get people to do almost anything for you if you are polite and ask nicely.  And also if you explain that you took French in high school, only the high school was directly over a Hellmouth and now doesn’t exist any more, not to mention that you somehow developed mom-hair after you left, and that probably accounts for the fact that you didn’t know café au lait was a breakfast drink.”  There was a very faint hint of a smile on Buffy’s lips.  “The clerk helped me reserve a train ticket, which you will use in the morning.  I will take you to catch the Chunnel train, and you will go to London and purchase a cell-phone.  Then you will go directly to Oxford, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, and reassure your girlfriend that you are not dead and do, in fact, love her.  Then you will call me on the cell-phone that you purchased earlier in the day so that I can put your new number in my speed-dial.”  She sat down on the edge of the bed next his side.  “There.”

            There was very little objection Rupert could make to this plan, even if he had wanted to.  “I thought you didn’t like Elisabeth,” was the only feeble thing he could say.

            “I’m warming up to her,” Buffy said, with a familiar broad wryness that Rupert found oddly comforting.  “Now get some rest.”

            For the rest of the night, Rupert drifted in and out of sleep, listening to Buffy pushing about papers and speaking softly on her own newly-purchased mobile, making arrangements for the Slayers they had found.  She would duplicate her notes, he knew, and give him the originals for his files when they left in the morning.

            “We’ll always have Paris,” he murmured at one point; and Buffy snorted.

 

*

 

Part 3

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