Home Repairs
Chapter Six: The Bone’s Prayer
by L. Inman
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is
fulfilled
If at all.
Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in
—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Elisabeth had the
window open, to listen to the quiet. It
had been a long time since she spent more than a few hours in the country—lifetimes
since she had lived there. She had never
thought of herself as primarily a city person or a country person; she figured
she was mostly an anyplace person, as long as she had some reasonable
elbow-room.
But she had forgotten about the
quiet. It was not so much an absence of
sound as a presence of silence, leavened by the occasional sounds of wind and
flora and fauna, pouring in through the open window. Elisabeth held her eyes in her book and let,
for once, the habitual knot untie itself within her.
She lay on the bed, the bed that had
been Rupert’s and was now theirs, wearing his robe, holding the book up on her
stomach. A faint breeze from the window
fingered her damp hair.
She knew he was there before she saw
him: he appeared in the doorway with the same silence as that coming in the
window from outdoors. His presence
lifted her heart, and her gaze went soft on the words she was reading.
He moved, unhurried, to the bedside,
and sat down to put her feet in his lap.
His hands were warm and long, caressing her, sole and instep, toes and
arch. She raised her eyes above the
level of her book: his gaze was cast down, the planes of his face gentle, as
in—not prayer exactly—Elisabeth’s experience of prayer was more strained effort
than blessed rapture. But something of
blessing reposed in Rupert’s face. There
was no need to speak, or even to meet eyes.
Presently he leaned over and slid
open the nightstand drawer; as she watched, he plucked out a nail file-orange
stick, a scissors, and lotion. Amusement
began to play about her lips, but she still said nothing as he began to work on
her feet, which were warming under his touch.
After a while she went back to reading, as relaxed as he while they each
amused themselves.
At the end of his impromptu
pedicure, he reached again to rummage in the drawer. “Damn,” he said. “I thought I had some varnish.”
“You’re in the habit of keeping nail
polish in your drawer?” Elisabeth teased him.
“I was,” he said, “when I had
lovers. Long enough ago now that any
varnish I had would be bound to have gone bad.
Well, your feet are quite lovely as they are.” He cupped them between his hands, and looked
up to find her gaze steady on his face.
“Does it bother you?” he said suddenly.
“Does what bother me?” Elisabeth
asked, though she already knew.
“That I’ve had lovers.”
Her mouth twitched. “Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that
men want to be a woman’s first lover, and women want to be a man’s last
romance.”
She watched him: his lips quirked,
and he gave her a level look.
“And if,” she went on, “we were to
adopt that set of goals, we’re fairly halfway there. But I don’t suppose it matters. We’re here now, aren’t we?”
Unbidden the memory came, of that
first night when he came back. They had
spent the night hours loving, and Elisabeth woke next morning to find him next
to her, the sheets twisted anyhow around him, his feet hanging off the end of
her bed, his face a study in perfect peace; and she marveled. And of
course then she thought; last night they had not bothered to do much
thinking. It was tempting—not fate, she supposed, but tempting something—to be happy like this. It was one thing to come together
frantically and desperately before, as he had said, he had another brush with
the end of the world; it was quite another to contemplate a whole vista of
loving, demarcated by she knew not what. Suppose he survived what was
coming next—what then? Theirs would be a life of endless dodging, and she
might as well accept that straight off.
“Rupert,” she had whispered, tracing
the edge of the sheet over his waist, “how long do I have you for?”
His eyes moved under their lids. “Today for certain; possibly tomorrow,”
he had murmured.
A grin slid over her face despite
herself. “That’s not what I meant,” she said, regretfully.
He left his eyes closed, covered her hand with his. “I know.”
Now, her eyes cleared to find his
gaze searching her face. “You are
right,” he said. “We are here now. Don’t look so troubled. We have this; it can’t be taken from us.”
“You’re going to start quoting
*
Rupert appeared in the doorway, his hand beating a tattoo on his leg. “Well?” he said peremptorily. “Aren’t you ready?”
Elisabeth looked up from her book. He had been pacing in and out of the bedroom all day, pausing to straighten a bookshelf or clean out a cupboard, and had changed his shirt twice. She had been looking forward to getting him out of the flat and having some peaceful time to herself.
“I didn’t know I was going,” she said, keeping her voice mild. “I thought I was going to stay here and fix dinner.”
“Oh—well—if you don’t want to go—” He disappeared again, just as abruptly.
She let out an aggrieved sigh and dropped the book. For a moment she sat formulating a riposte mainly centering on the notion that it could not possibly be as much trouble for him to ask her to go and give him moral support as he was currently making for himself by being all passive-aggressive about it. But she abandoned the mental rhetoric and got up to go into the bedroom, where he was fussily checking the contents of his pockets, twice looking at the screen of his mobile to make sure there were no messages.
“We can order a pizza,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. “And pick up a salad.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Rupert said, flipping through his pocketbook. “You don’t have to come, if you’d rather not.”
“I’d rather you were in your right mind, is what I’d rather,” Elisabeth retorted, drawing a hooded glare from him. “It won’t take me five minutes to put on my shoes and get my coat.” Without giving him any more opportunities to dither, she suited the action to the word.
When they were finally on the road, Elisabeth pulled down the passenger-seat visor to put up her hair in its little mirror, ignoring Rupert, who was wrapped in silence, his chin high.
“Would you like me to stay in the car while you fetch her at the gate?” she asked, once they’d reached the motorway.
“No,” Rupert said, briefly. “I’ll park; we’ll both go in.”
Elisabeth sat back with a little private sigh. She didn’t exactly fancy trotting along behind Rupert through a busy airport terminal. He knew perfectly well that crowds and disorganized noise made her anxious, and in his present mood he was bound to stride faster than she could keep up. Oh well, she thought; she’d let herself in for it; she could have taken his offer to go alone at face value and enjoyed the quiet. Best go through with it.
As they sped
toward
*
“Here,” Buffy said reluctantly. “Don’t go crazy with it.”
Dawn tucked
the credit card into her pocket. “Like
you did, in
“That was different.” Buffy didn’t bother to explain how. She unzipped her suitcase and flipped it open to re-inventory her shoes.
“Speaking
of quasi-parental psychoses, why does
“For the fifty-billionth time, she is not here to babysit you. She’s here to coordinate an exchange.”
“Yeah,
right, like she couldn’t do that from
Dawn
ignored this. “And then, just coincidentally, Andrew’s coming out
from
“You want to be alone at Christmas?”
“Ohhy vey,” Willow murmured, hiding an amused smile.
“You could have taken me to see Giles.”
“No,” Buffy said, exasperated, “I couldn’t. I told you. There’s not room in their little flat, and the house isn’t even ready for the three of us. Besides,” she added in a mutter, rearranging her black boots, “I doubt you’d have much fun.”
“Speaking
of Giles,”
“Well, what about Andrew?”
“What about
him? He’s staying in
“Preserving
Giles’s remaining sanity,”
“—And if anything, you’ll be babysitting Andrew, not the other way around.”
Dawn rolled her eyes.
“You can teach him some Italian.”
“Oh, yeah,
that’ll be a blast. While you get to
have fun in
Buffy gave Dawn a dry smile. “Nice try.”
“Points for
originality,”
“It’s going to be a working vacation for me,” Buffy said, “and for Giles and Elisabeth too. She’s working on her thesis, and he’s working on his house.”
“Uh, Buffy,”
“So?” Buffy said, unhooking a sweater from its hanger and folding it carefully. “I’ve stayed at close quarters with Giles before.”
“Not like I
have,”
Buffy gave her an arch look. “You think I don’t know Giles has sex?”
They seemed
to have arrived at the point Willow had been wanting to make all day, but she
seemed strangely loath to elaborate now that they had reached it. Buffy pursed a not-smile, searching for a
chink in her packing to stuff in her sweater.
But for a moment Buffy was jerked back to another hard, bright, and violent place—the desert, accompanied only by her Watcher, on a quest for Slayerly enlightenment. The experience had made her deeply uncomfortable, and not because she had spent it alone with an older man—Giles’s dignity and self-possession had been as arid as their surroundings—but because—
“She’s not
like his other girlfriends,”
“Well, she wouldn’t be,” Buffy said absently, “considering what she knows.”
It had taken Buffy a longer time than she liked to admit to get over her resentment at this fact. Everyone had looked blank at her surprise when she finally tumbled to it that Elisabeth had known their whole story—Buffy’s death and resurrection, Willow, the First, all of it. They had all realized, or been told, long before, even Andrew: and she could see even now the veiled accusing looks on their faces. It just goes to show, doesn’t it, how hard and blind Buffy is. They might just as well have said it.
“Also,” Dawn said around a cookie, “she was a virgin when she met him.”
Buffy and
“What?” Dawn said. “I’m sure it has to be a factor.”
“How did
you know that?”
“I heard Giles talking about it with Mom.”
Buffy had
shifted her startled gaze to
Dawn shrugged and popped the rest of her cookie into her mouth. “She found out somehow,” she said, wiping the crumbs off her hands on her jeans, “and teased him about it.”
This was exactly it. This was exactly the thing that bothered her. Everybody’s life passed right by under her nose, exactly like this.
Buffy said nothing more, but went back to her efforts to stuff her suitcase closed, pressing her lips tight close. She couldn’t even complain that nobody told her anything, because inevitably she’d get the answer: And you never did ask.
Which wasn’t her fault. What with all the world-saveage and the constant, precarious negotiation of cultural divides between humans and demons, how was she supposed to pay attention to every little thing? She was her job. Kendra had said that; Kendra, who had died because she had not been taught to be alive to her emotions and instincts, unlike Buffy, who…hadn’t felt anything for a long time.
She was
looking forward to having work under her hands.
Tools that weren’t for killing but building, a secret Xander knew and
had tried to impart to her, abortively.
Not talk. Talk was aimless,
helpless.
Besides, Giles sucked at talking even worse than she did.
With a
sharp whipping sound Buffy drew the zipper round—side, front, side—and lifted
the suitcase to set on the floor. She
looked up at
“Well,” Buffy said briskly, “I’m ready.”
“That’s
what you think,”
*
The postman was just locking up the box-face as she,
They were nearly late for the flight, and it wasn’t until Buffy tumbled into her seat and had begun nesting that she found the small sheaf of mail crammed in her pocket. Bill; bill; flyer; blank postcard from L.A. (her contact, keeping tabs on Angel—it was time to worry if she got no postcard); Christmas card. She flipped it over, and saw the name on the flap: Summers, with the return address in an unfamiliar hand.
With a sense of disgruntled misgiving, Buffy opened the envelope and drew out the card: a Rockwellian drawing of Santa with a child on his knee. As she opened it, a photo slid out into her lap. Before looking at the photo, Buffy read the card.
Hey girls, Hank’s writing said. Hope
you’re enjoying your time in
It was signed in her father’s hand, followed by a curly scrawl: Denise.
Her heart beating hard, Buffy lifted the photo to look closely. A blond young woman was squatting in a sunny backyard in front of a brightly-colored swing set. On one knee she supported a baby; at her other side a toddler swayed uncertainly, his fist gripping her shirt. On the back, Denise’s writing said: Ashton, 18 mos. Caleb, 6 mos.
Was this another thing she had failed to pay attention to? Had she just breezed by the info that her father had spawned two sons with his erstwhile secretary?
No,
somebody would have said something. Dawn
would have let Buffy catch her crying;
Giles would have turned away to hide a murderous look, letting her see just enough to know that he was on her side, not enough to remind her what surprisingly deep darkness he harbored. Though she already knew; who did Giles think he was fooling?
No, Hank had simply not bothered to consult his daughters about his new family, but blithely referred to them as if they already knew all about it. He probably thought they did know all about it, and were waiting on pins and needles to see Denise and the boys in living color.
Had she not been on a plane, wedged in between a proud-nosed businessman in Armani and a young mother jollying a toddler, Buffy would have ripped card and photo in dime-sized pieces and pitched them out the nearest window. As it was, she stuffed photo into card and card into envelope, crammed the whole thing into her handbag, and sat back to stare broodingly out the little porthole as the plane taxied down the runway.
*
Except for a very brief stop in
“There she is—”
She turned, and there was Giles coming toward her, with Elisabeth at his elbow.
At least
she was still glad to see him. Whatever
horrific things happened afterwards, she was always glad to see him. She went forward and into his awkward, tender
hug. His scent was the same, overlaid
with the new tang of sawdust, book dust, and something that Buffy thought of as
She pulled away to find Elisabeth waiting with a small, strained smile. She put out a firm hand and Buffy shook it; it was strong in the way that normal women’s hands were strong, and altogether she looked much healthier than when Buffy had seen her last. “Do you have luggage coming?” she asked, with a woman’s grasp of the essentials.
Buffy nodded.
“The carousel, I believe, is that way.” Giles’s voice and demeanor were cool and arid: it was impossible to tell whether he was masking a soft emotion or setting up to be difficult, and Buffy had a sinking feeling that it was the latter. Though there was no reason it couldn’t be both, she reminded herself—not that that would make him any easier to deal with.
It was, however, not difficult to let Giles and Elisabeth take over the agency of travelling. They paused at the restrooms; retrieved Buffy’s large suitcase without much difficulty (Elisabeth took over Buffy’s carryon so that she could pull the heavy suitcase); worked their way through milling British accents to the terminal door and out to Giles’s car.
Buffy’s suspicions about Giles’s state of mind were confirmed when they reached the road. A silence had settled over the three of them, and Buffy, in the back seat, wanted to pop it free, like a chiropractor adjusting a spine. Elisabeth, perhaps out of a similar desire, reached to the console and hit play on a CD.
“Could you turn that off, please,” Giles said.
“I thought you liked Sixpence,” Elisabeth said, mildly; then, in answer to his silence: “Well, it’s either this or the Awkward Silence of Death.”
“I prefer the Awkward Silence of Death while I’m trying to drive,” Giles said.
Elisabeth
made a noncommittal face and turned off the music, then twisted to look back at
Buffy in the back seat. “So, how’s
“Surprisingly
demony,” Buffy said. “How’s
“Surprisingly haunted.”
“Yeah,” Buffy said, “I heard about how you took out the spirit of your great-great-whatever grandfather. Nice.”
“It had its charms. What’s a universe without paternal angst?”
“Yeah, really,” Buffy said, half to herself.
*
Elisabeth was desperate for some sign that this wasn’t a
dreadful mistake. But despite Buffy’s
friendly coolness and her own forced nonchalance, Rupert’s mood permeated the
journey back to
But the real trouble didn’t start until after dinner.
It took some doing to clear the table of Elisabeth’s research materials and laptop for dinner, and the addition of Buffy’s luggage to the small bedroom (“Well, you see,” Elisabeth said in answer to Buffy’s protests that she should have the couch rather than the bed, “Rupert will be spending the night out at the house, and I’ll be up at odd hours working, so it’s a matter of convenience.”) made the flat seem even more cramped than usual. While Elisabeth and Buffy set the table for dinner and tossed the salad, Rupert put fresh sheets on the bed and packed himself a satchel to take to Pyke’s Lea (Buffy had opined that she would prefer to shower and go straight to bed that evening, as she had missed sleep several nights running).
Dinner was a stilted affair, with Elisabeth heroically attempting to make small talk. Buffy also made an effort, but she seemed increasingly subdued; her usual brisk manner was entirely absent, and she held her lips thin in a way that could be interpreted as either sullenness or sadness; Elisabeth didn’t know which.
Whatever it was, it seemed to be undoing Rupert’s native civility: once, Elisabeth had caught him sneaking a soft glance up from his plate at his erstwhile Slayer; when Buffy took no notice of it, he withdrew into himself again and became more magisterially silent than ever. When Buffy asked for the pepper he reached across and placed it before her, without words and without risking touch. Elisabeth stifled an aggravated sigh.
At length Buffy pushed her plate aside. “That was good; thank you,” she said.
“There’s ice cream for dessert in the freezer,” Elisabeth said. “I don’t know whether you like fudge ripple.”
“No thanks,” Buffy said, with a rueful smile at her. “I think I’ll take my shower now.”
Buffy got up. Rupert pushed his chair back and reached for the salad bowl.
“I can do the washing up,” Elisabeth said, “if you’d rather not.” She winced at the faint appeasing tone in her own voice.
“No, that’s all right,” Rupert said. “Though I don’t see why we bother; this place is a tip.”
Elisabeth did not look round to see if Buffy had heard. She sat, hot and cold to the fingertips, for a few stunned seconds; then she got up and collected their plates, being especially careful not to clatter them in her anger.
She was not going to say anything; she was not going to say anything: but as she put the plates in the sink after scraping them, she threw caution to the winds and said it.
“I’d appreciate it,” she told him in a low voice, “if you didn’t include me in your ritual self-torture.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rupert sniffed.
“‘This place is a tip’? ‘This place’ happens to be my home—the only one I’ve got, in case you’ve forgotten. So if you don’t mind—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Elisabeth,” he hissed, as the bathroom door closed down the hall, “I wasn’t trying to insult you.”
“No,” she retorted in a whisper, “just indulging a first-strike mentality, and I don’t want to be caught in—”
Rupert tossed his head. “Well, look who’s calling the kettle black.”
“Fuck you, Rupert.” Elisabeth turned away from him, breathing hard.
There was a long silence; they heard the shower start. Elisabeth reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose, and forced herself to draw slower breaths. Finally she turned around to look at him. For a moment he met her gaze, defiant; then he dropped his eyes and reached to fiddle with the cheese-caked spatula on the counter.
“I should go,” he said.
Elisabeth forced an even tone. “I think you probably should. Do you want some tea for the road?”
He made an irritated face, then smoothed out his expression with a visible effort. “No; thank you. You all right clearing this up yourself?”
“It’s no problem,” she said.
After a hesitation he went past her out of the kitchen; trembling, she followed him to the front room, where his satchel waited. Silently she watched him shrug into his leather jacket, lift his keys from their shelf, and shoulder the strap of his bag. He opened the door and paused to look at her, standing in the dim foyer hugging herself, her eyes mercifully shadowed.
“I am,” he said softly, shuffling backward over the threshold, “—I am trying to behave properly, you know.” He let out a deep sigh. “I know it’s not nearly good enough…but—”
She wished she could cut him off: his clumsy apology was bringing the tears hot and strong to her eyes, and she was desperate not to cry.
“Well, goodnight,” he finished lamely.
“Goodnight, Rupert,” she said, her voice constricted but gentle. She was beginning to repent having sworn at him. “Get some rest,” she added, more pointedly.
His shoulders hunched only a little. “I will. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She nodded, and closed the door quietly between them.
*
Buffy toweled her hair in front of the mirror, then twisted
it into a wet knot and pinned it into place, studying her own expression in the
glass.
And the evening had taught her something that numerous phone conversations could not: the amount of effort Elisabeth was putting into buffering Giles’s disintegrating self-possession. She had a feeling that Elisabeth was not fully aware of what she was doing, because as the incident with the music proved, she understood the necessity of standing back and letting him make an ass of himself if that’s what he really wanted. Giles being an ass bothered Buffy much less than it bothered Elisabeth; but she didn’t know if she could say that after living with him for six months.
What was unnerving to her was not Giles employing his trademark passive-aggressive austerity; that was annoying but normal. What was unnerving to Buffy was the clear strong undertow of emotion underneath it. She had spent a whole year getting used to his dark outlook and flat affect, and had prepared herself to meet cold anger gloved in calculating, sarcastic intellect. But what she read in the very lines of his movements was not calculation but chaos.
She had come ready for an antagonist, and had found something far more distressing.
Buffy
slipped into her pajamas, and for good measure shrugged into the robe and
slippers Elisabeth had offered her; this was another thing she had not
adequately prepared her mind for, that
Giles was nowhere to be seen when she emerged from the bathroom. In the kitchen she found Elisabeth scrubbing determinedly at dried cheese on a plate.
“Giles gone?” she inquired mildly.
“Yes.” Elisabeth did not lift her head, and her tone was brief.
Buffy sighed to herself. “Want help with that?” she asked finally, shifting awkwardly toward the counter.
At this Elisabeth did lift her head. “Oh, no,” she said, blowing a tendril of hair out of her eyes, “this is easy to do. And you’re my guest.”
Buffy was about to observe that the point of her coming had not been to be treated as a guest, but Elisabeth beat her to it. “Well,” she amended, “for tonight anyway. I reckon you’ll get into the rhythm of things here soon enough.” She bent again to scrubbing, and the tendril of hair drifted into her face once more.
Elisabeth had either been crying or had staved off tears by the skin of her teeth: Buffy could read all the signs. Feeling more and more uncomfortable, she sidled toward the kitchen door. “I think I’ll go to bed now,” she said. “If you don’t need me for anything….”
Elisabeth lifted her head once more and met Buffy’s eyes directly. “Thank you,” she said. The corner of her mouth quirked wryly. “It’s all right. Goodnight.” The tired humor of her voice and expression released Buffy, and with a faint relief she went back to the bedroom.
Thanks to
Dawn and
It was a comfortable bed, at least, and took on her warmth quickly. The sheets, though fresh, smelled of Giles—a scent that evoked a troubled safety. Enough to sleep in, anyway.
Buffy drifted off to the sound of Elisabeth’s laptop keyboard issuing, with a faint stream of light, through the chink of the unclosed door.
*
Buffy lay curled, warm in a womb of sleep, held close in by a resistance like water: a state so different from her chronic restlessness that it nearly woke her by itself. But a sound was disturbing the stillness, a sound of distress that plucked at her instincts—a prophetic dream? She hadn’t had one in ages; the weight of apocalyptic sorrow had been eased since the Choosing.
No, it was something else; something nearby. Buffy woke, in a single quiet second. The distressed sound came again; quickly, she swung her feet to the floor and padded to the door.
As her eyes adjusted from darkness to light, she understood what was happening, and moved swiftly to the couch where Elisabeth was sleeping.
A single lamp shone over her head; she was twitching helplessly and emitting stifled cries. Without stopping to think, Buffy began to unwrap the tangled quilt from round Elisabeth’s arms, with a gentle, soothing motion. But as soon as she touched her, Elisabeth cried, “No!”
“Shh,” Buffy said, “you’re—”
“No—Rupert—please—don’t do this—”
For a moment, Buffy was shocked into stillness; then she began to work more firmly to get Elisabeth free of the quilt.
“Can’t tell you, I can’t tell you. Don’t believe her, I can’t tell you—” Elisabeth arched her head back, as if trying to squirm away from a restraining grasp, and her words came in an urgent mumble. “Don’t…the darkness. Darkness will take me…you can’t…should have killed me…you should have….”
“Elisabeth,” Buffy said firmly, though her voice held a tremor. “You’re only dreaming. It’s time to wake up.”
“Oh, no—” Her voice petered out on a high moan, and she struggled in Buffy’s hands, and woke with a sob.
“You were dreaming,” Buffy repeated lamely.
Elisabeth rolled to the edge of the couch and choked; Buffy subsided to sit gingerly at her side. After a few moments swallowing back heaves with her fist to her mouth, she drew a long, shuddering breath and muttered: “Thanks.”
Buffy was ready with the glass of water Elisabeth had left on the coffee table. Elisabeth took it, fumbling, swallowed two small sips, and held the glass to her forehead: motions that had the air of ritual about them.
She confirmed Buffy’s speculations by saying at length, “Sorry. Damn dream. It could go away any time now.”
“Is that what happened?” Buffy couldn’t stop herself from asking it.
Elisabeth took away the glass to stare at her. “Is what what happened?”
“You were talking in your sleep—”
“Oh, no—no, I never talk in my sleep.” Elisabeth gave her head many small shakes, as if she could undo it by denying it.
“You were talking to Giles. You were…pleading.” The last word fell from Buffy’s lips like a book slapping to the floor: and Elisabeth flinched and looked away.
“Oh God,” she murmured. “Oh, that won’t do. Oh, that won’t do at all.”
Buffy asked tentatively: “Doesn’t…doesn’t Giles know?”
The look Elisabeth turned back to her was all the answer Buffy needed.
Elisabeth turned her gaze to the water glass and said with a sigh: “He knows I’m having nightmares. But he thinks they’re only about the First.”
Buffy frowned. “Did the First attack you?” It was news to her, though perhaps it was another of those things she ought to have known, or remembered.
She looked up to see Elisabeth staring at her again. “You don’t know….”
Buffy rolled her eyes. “I’ve been…really out of the loop.”
“I guess so,” Elisabeth said blankly. Buffy looked up defensively, but the other woman’s expression was flush with embarrassment, not accusation. “What you must think of me…,” she said.
“No, I—it’s been happening a lot lately. I’m finding out all kinds of things that everybody else knew already.” The memory of Hank’s Christmas card turned her tone bitter. “I’m wondering where the hell I was. I thought I was pretty caught up on things, but this trip….” She shook her head. “I should have figured out that Giles was losing it when he freaked out during that fight we had about his old Council buddy. And now I find out that the First got him to attack you.” Elisabeth flinched again, but Buffy went on. “I have—I have no idea where he is, mentally. It’s like—I asked him if he had gone back to the Council, and he just…Do you think he has?” she asked Elisabeth suddenly, turning in her seat.
But Elisabeth shook her head definitely. “He wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t let him—not after what they did to him and me.”
Buffy blinked. “…What they did to you and him?”
The surprise had gone out of Elisabeth’s face; she was staring at Buffy with a look as shrewd as any Giles could give.
“I think,” she said grimly, “I’d better get you caught up.”
*
They resettled themselves on the couch, Buffy with Elisabeth’s quilt around her shoulders and a bowl of fudge ripple ice cream, Elisabeth in her robe with a steaming cup of tea, and Elisabeth began.
“When I
left Sunnydale,” she said, eyes on the curls of steam rising from the mug she
held in her lap, “the plan was that I’d take what I needed to get started in a
new dimension, and drop contact once it was possible.
The cat (who had regarded Buffy with caution when she arrived, but reassuringly warmed to her presence during the evening) appeared silently, leapt up on the couch, and settled in the space between them on the middle cushion. He curled his tail around his feet and blinked magisterially at Buffy, who reached briefly to stroke his whiskers as Elisabeth went on.
“I sent him
my address in College when I came up to
“Friends with benefits?” Buffy said, lightly so as not to betray any misgivings.
“Past benefits. Present benefits, no.” Buffy had never noticed how like Giles’s her dry tone was; despite the difference in age and diction, they were much of a kind in humor. “Not at that time,” Elisabeth went on. “In fact, Rupert did his best to keep me at arm’s length then—understandable, considering that I had all this illicit knowledge of what he was going through. But he didn’t really get mad at me until he found out you’d been brought back.”
Buffy stirred the melted remains of her ice cream and spooned up some of the fudge, thinking. From all she’d seen, nobody else had ever questioned Elisabeth’s right to her knowledge, least of all Giles—but it was becoming clearer that the only person whom it hadn’t troubled was Andrew.
“We had a lunch date, just me and him that time—the only time I tried to have a lunch date with him and Brian it went spectacularly badly. They disliked one another on sight—and Rupert asked me afterward if I was sleeping with him, and I told him it was none of his business—though it would have been easy enough to tell him I wasn’t, and wasn’t going to be….Where was I?”
Buffy thought. “Giles found out I was back?”
Elisabeth cut short a sip of tea. “Oh, yeah. Right. He didn’t even call to cancel the lunch date, which didn’t surprise me, because I—well, he’d called to say he was back in England for good, and I was pretty sure I knew how that was going to turn out, and— Well, I got a call from him when he landed at LAX at some ungodly hour here, and he demanded coldly—without identifying himself—to know what to expect when he arrived in Sunnydale. I told him he’d find out better than I could tell him—and he hung up.
“I didn’t
hear from him after that, not till he came back here.” Elisabeth settled more comfortably against
the back of the couch and put her feet up on the coffee table. “He came back here and picked a fight with
every one of his friends; Olivia called to warn me, so I was all prepared not
to give him any satisfaction when he called up to say he had some business in
“Wait a minute.” Buffy put the ice-cream bowl down on the coffee table and frowned at Elisabeth. “What do you mean, ‘sell his books’? You mean, like, extra copies?”
“Nope,” Elisabeth said. She took one hand away from her tea mug to gesture expansively at the huddle of crates in the loft alcove, bursting with familiar-looking tomes. “Over the course of several months, Rupert wholesaled the heart out of his occult collection, refused to answer the Council’s calls and letters, and as far as I knew, did every possible mundane thing he could to forget what he’d left behind—speculating in real estate and raking in money from this investment and that…. It was a game—we all knew that, he most of all—but it was a painful game nonetheless.”
Elisabeth paused to take a sip of her tea, which had lost its steaming heat. “I remember one day in particular when I opened a box and found—but I didn’t tell you that part. I went round after him and bought up as many of the books he sold as I could. I used up every last shred of my credit as a bookscout and a large chunk of my meager savings to do it. Which was how the Council noticed me. Well, that and Robson tracked Rupert to my flat when he came to collapse at the end of the term before. Rupert selling his occult books, his ‘friend’ buying them, a very patchy paper trail and a visa suspiciously easily obtained…well.”
Buffy sat stunned. “But Giles loves his books.” It had never occurred to her that Giles might have wanted to leave her in order to conceal a crack-up of his own. And Elisabeth’s non-critical acceptance of her ignorance drove the wedge of shame in further.
“I think that’s why he did it,” Elisabeth said. “Having anything he loved about him was too painful. It was pretty obvious, but it wasn’t much comfort at the time. Like I said, one day I unpacked a box of books I’d bought by catalogue and there….” She stopped and gazed into her tea for a moment. “There was the book he’d used to save my life.” She stopped again and looked away, as if to weigh the emotions measure by measure in her next words. “I couldn’t expect him to remember that, about that book. For all I know he’s saved a dozen lives with it, besides mine. But it was a blow all the same. Well, Rupert gave up the game after a while, and repented of selling his books, but when he tried to buy them back he found out that someone had bought up most of them. He traced them back to me, and called me confidently expecting that I’d bought them to keep for him—what good luck! Well, I had bought them for him, but I didn’t like his taking it for granted, and I’d just come off of opening that box, so I told him the books were mine and I wasn’t selling.”
Buffy tried to turn a laugh into a cough, but Elisabeth noticed and started to laugh along with her.
“Yes,” she said, “it was kinda petty. But I felt he deserved it.”
“Good for you,” Buffy said boldly.
Elisabeth snorted. “Yeah. Well, what happened was I wound up with a huge albatross of an occult collection round my neck—and I’d had to throw a pretty wide loop to be sure of getting as many of Rupert’s books as I could. Anyway, Rupert had a deeper change of heart—I suspect it had something to do with his ignoring the invitation to Xander and Anya’s wedding till it was too late for him to go—and he called me again, in a much more penitent mood. I agreed to meet him to talk. But the Council got to me first.”
Buffy stifled a growl of apprehension. Her feeling about the Council had grown much more visceral than she liked to admit—certainly, to admit to Giles. Elisabeth, however, seemed to understand.
“One of their teams snatched me off the street one day and chloroformed me. I woke up in a white-paneled cell wearing nothing but a robe like a baptismal gown.” Elisabeth’s voice hardened. “I didn’t know where I was, and it was one of the scariest moments of my life—scarier than dying was, certainly. Some men came for me and without a word they hauled me out and up before a panel of men on a dais. They began questioning me about my history, my purchase of questionable books, my connection to Rupert. I was shaking on my bare feet at first; but then…I don’t know, I guess I just got too pissed to be afraid. I wish I could get that back….Well, I smarted off to them and told them exactly what I thought of Watchers, of the Council, and of them, whoever they were in the scheme of things. It didn’t have much effect. They told me that if I didn’t cooperate, they’d hurt Rupert. I almost believed this for a minute. But then it just came clear all at once. ‘You’re not using Rupert to get to me,’ I said, ‘you’re using me to get to Rupert. Rupert’s around here somewhere, isn’t he? You’ve got him watching and if he doesn’t dance to your tune, you’re gonna hurt me.’ The head guy on the dais—he’d have been handsome in other circumstances—didn’t deny it. He said, ‘Well, you’re fairly expendable, either way.’ And to prove it, he motioned this big lug over to point a gun at my eye.”
Elisabeth paused to clear her roughening voice and take a sip of tea, and Buffy gritted her teeth. What’s a universe without paternal angst? echoed in her mind.
“I said, with the gun pointed in my face, ‘You can’t make Rupert do what you want by hurting me. Piss him off, maybe.’ ‘I think we can bear the wrath of Rupert Giles,’ the guy said, in a very withering voice. I said, ‘No, I don’t think you can. It won’t work in any case. Rupert knows my life belongs to me to lose or keep, and he’ll let me choose, just as I’d let him choose.’ I didn’t know that, but I wanted him to hear it, if he was there, so he would understand he was free on my account to refuse them.”
“But what did they want from him?” Buffy asked, impatient.
“Oh, you know. The usual. They wanted him to go back to Sunnydale and give them a foothold in your life again. Hah,” Elisabeth said. “Like they knew the half of it.”
“You know, if Giles had told me this,” Buffy said, her voice taut, “it’d have saved us a couple of fights.”
Elisabeth gave her one sympathetic glance, and returned to her tale. “Well, anyway, I…I’m not sure how to explain this, but I had one of those moments of utter clarity. I knew for certain Rupert was in that building, and I knew for certain that he was trusting me—and I was trusting him—” she stopped a moment and swallowed hard, then forced her way on— “and I knew that it wasn’t—he wasn’t my friend, though he was my equal. I knew I loved him then, and I was so thankful I’d been able to lie about that ten minutes before. And I wasn’t afraid anymore—I wasn’t even that angry. Because they were just so clueless.”
Buffy remembered a time when she and Giles had known a similar tacit trust, and, reading the resigned grief on Elisabeth’s face, was startled to realize how long she too had been mourning it. For the first time it occurred to her, explicitly, that she and Elisabeth might have more in common than merely being women who cared about Giles: not everyone, she knew, valued that weightless balance of trust and autonomy so highly in matters of love.
“Well, long
story short,” Elisabeth was saying, “they let me go. Gave me my clothes back, blindfolded me, took
me back to
Buffy shook her head, in a disbelieving snort of laughter.
“I holed up in my flat for a couple of days, getting over the shock of it all. I have to admit, it had a negative effect on my weak nerves. I’m not a very strong person, you know. Rupert came over a few days after that, and I pointed my new crossbow at him and tried to make him believe I wanted no part of him. I couldn’t keep up that pose for ten seconds, even. He came in, and gently took the crossbow away, and made me some tea in my own kitchen. We talked for a long time, or maybe a short time, I’m not sure. But I remember how it ended. I told him I needed him to go away, and I couldn’t look at him when I told him—I told him I had feelings for him, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep my end of our silent bargain, so I needed him to go away. I could see him make a little movement, but all he said was, ‘Are you sure you want me to go? That’s what you want?’” Elisabeth’s eyes were fixed in a faraway gaze on the bookshelf-crates. “I said, ‘Yes.’ So he went away.” She sighed quietly. “Then I didn’t hear from him for a while. When he came back, he was all over fading bruises and looked like he hadn’t slept for years, and he came in, and he kissed me, and that was that.”
Elisabeth’s matter-of-fact tone was belied by her gaze, bright on the books. Buffy’s throat suddenly ached, from a number of pains that all came uppermost at once—the thought of Giles in love outside their interest or notice, the sympathetic weight of love’s consummation (and how long had it been since she had known that?), the losing of him, as if in a recurring dream of his leaving her again and again, in different times and different places, for different reasons. With an deep breath and an effort Buffy pulled herself together, in concert with Elisabeth, who was drawing breath to speak again.
“I’m not
very proud of what I did after that. I
gave in to Rupert, who wanted me to come and visit him and
“And the First used that against you both,” Buffy said, in a let-me-guess tone that made Elisabeth snort a mirthless laugh.
“The First had a number of weapons in its arsenal,” she said in a hard voice Buffy had never heard her use, “not the least of which was the fact that I’d died in the portal to this dimension.”
“Oh God,” Buffy breathed, suddenly understanding.
Elisabeth was silent for a long moment. Then: “I thought it was hallucinations at first. Then I knew it wasn’t. Then I was never alone. I had my own personal mirror, 24/7. I learned to hate my voice, my looks, my walk.”
“I know the feeling,” Buffy said, her own voice matching the hardness of Elisabeth’s.
“I know you
do,” Elisabeth said quietly. “God only
knows what it did to Rupert. He has a
lot of dead people in his life.”
Elisabeth broke into a sudden, brittle laugh. “A lot of dead people in his life. That sounds funny, now I think about it.” She took a long drink of tea and recovered
enough to go on. “I don’t need to tell
you what happened, really. You already
know. The First worked Rupert like a
pump handle, isolated him, showed him God knows what horrors, and finally
convinced him, I presume using my face, that I was not—not what I’d made myself
out to be. Or that I was withholding my
knowledge so that you would all fall flat on your faces in the battle. Or that I was evil at the bottom of
me….” Elisabeth’s voice trailed off, and
she lowered her chin, her mouth very small.
“Whatever it was, it made him come to my flat one night, hopped up on
Dutch courage and ready to torture my information out of me. He got pretty far with it before he
broke.” She lifted her chin and her next
words were brisk. “He left when the
attempt failed, and then I
broke. I had to take a medical leave and
stay with friends. When I was well
enough, I took off and went to hole up in Rupert’s flat in
Elisabeth’s voice was gruff and blasted from talking; she lifted the mug and drained the rest of the tea, then said, “Call of nature. I’ll be right back.” The cat jumped down to follow her.
While she was gone, Buffy sat staring at the bookcases, with a feeling as of shell-shock. They had just been “Giles’s books in Elisabeth’s apartment” when she arrived: now they represented a depth of history, a resonance of love and fear and deep anger. She had known for a long time that there were layers to peel in Giles’s past: what she hadn’t known about were the layers to peel in Giles’s present.
But how could I know these things if he doesn’t tell me? she asked herself, huddling in her quilt. I’m getting it from all sides. If it’s not Dad assuming I know all about his two sons, it’s Giles assuming I know all about his torture by the First. What the fuck was I supposed to have done different?
Elisabeth returned to the livingroom and took up her tea mug and Buffy’s ice-cream dish. Wrapping herself in the quilt as in a cloak, Buffy got up and followed her into the kitchen. But she couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead, she merely watched Elisabeth wash their dishes and put them in the drainer. At last Elisabeth dried her hands, straightened the slight disarray on the counter left over from tea-making, and turned to Buffy with the same matter-of-fact expression that had released her to go to bed hours earlier.
“Thanks,” Buffy pushed out, “for telling me all of that.”
“You’re welcome,” Elisabeth said.
“And…,” —this was an experiment— “I’m sorry I was so bitchy to you, you know, at the time.”
Elisabeth winced. “The only thing that bugged me about that was that I walked right into the First’s divide-and-conquer trap. I didn’t blame you. But—” and a mischievous smile twitched at her lips— “just for future reference: the Brits call an emergency room a casualty ward. Infinitely more apt, for our purposes, I think.”
The mischievous smile, as she turned it to Buffy, was softened by a touch of self-deprecation.
Buffy smiled back.
*
Morning came early in the Bowen/Giles household. Buffy woke to a clattering in the kitchen and the sound of Elisabeth’s voice. There was no other voice; she must be on the phone. Buffy turned over and regarded the dark blades of the ceiling fan with a blank calm. Finally she decided to get up without being called.
When she arrived in the kitchen ten minutes later, groomed and dressed, she found Elisabeth pacing back and forth with the cordless phone pinned to her cheek with one shoulder while dropping bread into the toaster with the other hand.
“Yeah…no, probably not in the afternoon, I’ve got some errands to run. Christmas presents to buy, you know…none of your business, nosey!...well, yeah, I emailed the edited review of literature to Biggs, but God knows if that’s the end of the story…Okay, I’ll see you later, then. Bye.” Her voice sounded too relaxed for her to be talking to Giles: Buffy decided that it must be her friend Brian on the other end. “There’s coffee if you want it,” she said to Buffy, thumbing the phone off and plucking the toast out of the toaster to a waiting plate. “If you don’t mind, I propose to drag you off with me to College this morning. I need to pick up some papers, and tie up some loose ends. Then I thought we’d grab some lunch and do some Christmas shopping.”
“Sounds good to me,” Buffy said, pouring coffee into a mug Elisabeth had left on the counter for her.
Elisabeth wandered off with her toast and coffee, and a few minutes later Buffy heard the shower start.
*
Half an hour later they were walking briskly down a road
Elisabeth identified as the
“…na na na na,” Elisabeth hummed, slapping at the flap of her leather satchel, which she wore across her far shoulder. “Oh, by the way, Rupert called this morning. He’s going to do some work on the house alone today, then he’s going to pick us up for dinner about six and show you the house afterward.”
“Okay,” Buffy said, and added cautiously, “How did he sound?”
“Groggy,” Elisabeth said. “Which means he slept in. All the better for him.”
Buffy had her own ideas about what that meant, and suspected Elisabeth did too, but she said nothing. She thought suddenly: She’s trying very hard not to need him to be different. Elisabeth, she realized, had a stubborn independence that went deeper than mere choice of action, and knew as intimately as Buffy did herself the difficulty of keeping one’s autonomy and not imposing on others without going all hard and brittle. Not a very strong person, she had said—and Buffy knew too the subtle temptation to claim that as a badge of honor, of proof that one was not a woman of stone.
It was proving more disturbing to like Elisabeth than to dislike her.
The walk to
“Hmm?” Elisabeth glanced up in the same direction
Buffy was looking, and down again in time to neatly dodge a bicyclist coming their
way. “Not for a while yet, I
reckon. I’ve got the ol’ bumbershoot
tucked in my bag. It’s like the American
Express card—never leave home without it.
This is the bridge. Off that way
is
Buffy smiled at the porter in Elisabeth’s wake, and followed her along a corridor and up a flight of stairs.
“So—what is your thesis about, exactly?”
Elisabeth chuckled. “Seriously? It’s about the metanarratives of fairytale, specifically focusing on the 19th century.”
Her mischievous glance met Buffy’s eye over her shoulder. Buffy broke into a grin. “More power to you,” she said.
“Thanks. Ah, here we are. This’ll be just a moment, then we’ll cross
the quad and visit Dr. Biggs.” Elisabeth
fell to humming “Hey Jude” again as she dug through a pile of files. Buffy drifted over to the window and looked
out on the cool stones and bare trees of the university. Giles had gone here, she thought
suddenly. He had hated it, he said, and
dropped out. But he must have come back,
Buffy thought pensively, in order to continue with his Watcher’s career. She knew something about coming back in shame
to start over in the same place, but not like this; it was so much easier just
to go on. She wondered if Giles coming back here again
had as much to do with
There was a hollow, flat knock on the doorframe behind. Buffy turned around to see a man about Elisabeth’s age—an age she was increasingly starting to think of as youngish—tall and lanky, with tousled sandy hair and a languid English face.
“Hallo, face,” Elisabeth said, pushing up her glasses on her nose.
“Cheerio, ugly,” he returned. “I come bearing news. Biggs has flown the coop. He has gone to Town, my own, my lovely, he has gone to Town. You won’t have to wrangle with him today about old Knoepflmacher.”
“Couldn’t resist a trip to the BM for those Romantic botanists, eh? I wondered if he’d crack under the strain when Selim showed up with those references.”
“Got it in one. So what about lunch?”
“What, already? Is the Mohel even serving it yet?” Elisabeth put down a book to dig out her cell phone and flip it open for the time.
“We could just dawdle comfortably down to St. Andrew’s to work up an appetite,” he suggested, with a furtive glance in Buffy’s direction.
Elisabeth looked up from under her brows. “Carnagey’s not gonna come down on that Gibbon, Brian. Give it up.”
“Well, I’m sure, with the charms of a lovely bookscout in the mix—”
“You’re lucky he’s not charging you extra interest for that display case.”
“How many times to I have to apologize for that bloody display case?”
“He’s never asked you to apologize, that I recall,” Elisabeth said mildly.
“Sly wench: I meant you.”
Elisabeth smiled; Buffy deduced that whatever had happened to the display case, it was fast becoming the kind of history they could make uncomfortable jokes about.
Elisabeth turned to her. “Feel like a tour of the sights?”
“Sure,” Buffy said. “If you don’t—”
“Who’s your friend?” Brian had found his opportunity to ask for an introduction. He was looking at her with civilized admiration; Buffy was privately amused.
“Oh, of course. How stupid of me. Buffy, this is Brian Whitaker. Brian, Buffy Summers.”
Understanding broke over the man’s face. “Oh, right! I’d forgotten you were coming to stay. Pleased to meet you.” He stretched out an eager hand to shake hers. “I’ve never met a Slayer before.” Buffy blinked, then remembered that Brian had cared for Elisabeth during the last apocalypse; of course he was in the know, now.
“Probably won’t be the last time,” Buffy assured him dryly. “Nice to meet you.”
“Well, let’s take a stroll up St. Aldates and let Buffy get the lay of the land, then come back round for lunch at the Mohel. And maybe,” she grinned, “we can spare the time to hector Carnagey about your precious Gibbon. You do realize he’s playing with you, don’t you? He could have sold that thing about fifty times the past six months.”
“Oh, leave me one of my pet delusions, sweetheart,” Brian said. “You’re about to get the Don’s Tour of Oxford, you know,” he said to Buffy. “I hope you can stand it.”
“I’m sure it’s not as harrowing as the Slayer’s Little Sister’s Tour of Rome,” Buffy said easily.
Elisabeth
snickered. “So Dawn’s got
“She’s got the best Italian of any of us by far,” Buffy said, rolling her eyes, “and takes care to say things under her breath that I’m sure aren’t very flattering to me.”
By this time they had reached the entrance, and pushed out into the grey English light of day, waving a final goodbye to Mr Sims the porter.
As they set off up the walk, three abreast, Buffy in the middle, Buffy observed, “Speaking of Dawn, she tried to wangle her way into this trip by claiming there was a special copy of Perot-something she could use for homework.”
“Brian’s
the man to ask about Perrault,” Elisabeth said, without batting an
eyelash. “Did Dawn really try to use
homework to take a vacation to
“Yes, she did. I’m thinking I’m going to have to send her up here sometime, if she’s that desperate.”
“No kidding,” Elisabeth answered, but the unspoken words hung between them: if this trip goes well.
Brian, unaware of the unspoken condition, launched into a peroration about Perrault spiced with wicked asides about dons they knew and the odd Member of Parliament, and thus they continued, harried by the occasional cold breeze, out and among the kingdoms of the city.
*