Home Repairs

Chapter Seven:  The Way Back

by L. Inman

 

And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,

That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

 

Though she had been dreading it, an afternoon came when Elisabeth found herself alone with Willow.

            “I’m sorry, I have to take this,” Rupert had said, with the phone to his ear; he had gone to the downstairs study and closed the door, leaving Elisabeth to wander about the rooms and explore.

            Willow found her in the drawing room, lifting dusty figurines and glancing out windows.  “It’s nicer outside,” she said, startling Elisabeth so that she almost dropped a china shepherdess.  “There’s a twisty little path through the pasture and a view from a hill.”

            It was an obvious invitation, but Elisabeth hesitated.

            “I won’t bite,” Willow said, with equal parts winsome wistfulness and irritation.

            At this, Elisabeth forced herself to relax.  “It’s not you I’m worried about,” she said.  “Let me get my shoes.”

            But if Willow had wanted to have the Big Talk, she showed no sign of it as they toiled across the pasture and up the hill.  At a distance they could see rain coming, and they had brought no slickers, though Elisabeth had taken her windbreaker.  She glanced at Willow, who was wearing a T-shirt and a drooping hoodie that looked like it had belonged to Tara.  She had a sudden piercing memory of Willow, standing on Rupert’s doorstep in Sunnydale, in a shiny raincoat, with Tara at her side.  And the words were no easier to say now than they had been when she arrived.  She could imagine, too, the feelings of guilt that could arise if someone offered condolences at a moment during which one was not feeling particularly bereaved; and when one was, one would have no ears to hear it.  It struck Elisabeth how odd it was for them to be here, Willow and Elisabeth, and Rupert, alone in quiet country.

            “A funny kind of shiva this is, I guess,” she said aloud, startling herself.

            “Time for shiva’s over,” Willow said flatly, picking up a stone and shying it over the waving grass.  “I missed it.”

            Elisabeth glanced at her, moved at the undertone of sorrow in the other’s voice; Willow caught her glance and looked away, drawing a long breath.

            “It’s a good thing that you’re here,” she said at last.  “I like that you make Giles happy.”

            This hurt worse than any recrimination Elisabeth could have imagined Willow to bring.  She said nothing, not even the thing she was thinking, which was that she had been deeply afraid of making Rupert precisely the opposite.

            “I didn’t want you to think I was jealous,” Willow went on.  “I mean—not jealous in the romantic way, because that would just—I mean, there’s crushes, and then there’s...other stuff.”  She broke off, frustrated.

            “You’re trying not to want to be a stockholder in your friends’ happiness?” Elisabeth guessed, awkwardly.

            Willow looked away and nodded.  “Something like that.  It doesn’t always work, though....He came back to England.  He came back to be with you.”

            Elisabeth stopped at the crest of the hill and gave a great snort.  “Hardly.”  Willow turned to look at her.  “He came back to fight with me, and everybody else.  Did you not get that out of him?”

            Willow shook her head mutely.

            Elisabeth sat down wearily on a pile of stones near the fence, and told Willow what had happened when Rupert had come back.  Her eyes went round when she heard about Rupert’s liquidating his books, but she relaxed when Elisabeth revealed that she now had them.  She rolled her eyes at the precis Elisabeth gave of her brush with the Council, and stared into the embracing clouds during the story of their un-courtship.  None of these expressions was alarming, and Elisabeth relaxed a very little.

            “I did my best to get over him, you know,” Elisabeth said, brushing at the first droplets of rain that had begun to spit down.  “I even succeeded.  Just in time....”  She stopped.

            “For me to try to end the world?” Willow finished, bitterly.

            “No.  For me to realize he was who I wanted.”

            There was a silence as the wind picked up to whistle sharply over the hill, skimming the grasses and hurling the small drops of rain harder against their faces.  The curve of green land below drew its mantle of rain against their gaze.

            “Well,” Willow said finally, with a matter-of-fact grimace, “looks like you’re one of us now.  Try not to die or anything, okay?  We keep losing lovers, and Giles has already had his turn.”

            Elisabeth burst out laughing, but sobered up quickly.  “I’ll try.”

            Willow gave a pursed smile at her own black humor and pushed her rain-wet hair out of her face.  “Guess we oughta get back.”

            They started back the way they had come, cheerfully bedraggled, shoes meeting dust turning to mud, unburdened of speech.  But when they reached the house again Willow said something that pressed the thorn home.

            “Thanks for telling me all that stuff.  I couldn’t read his mind, you know, without hurting us both.  And anyway, Giles says it’s good to be out from under all the secrets,” she added meditatively as she shucked her muddy shoes off in the doorway.  “I guess he’s right.  Secrets make it hurt worse when the shit hits the fan.  Not that that stops anybody from keeping them.  I don’t blame him for running away.”  She peeled off her socks after, and started down the hall in damp bare feet.  “But I’m going to give him a hard time about those books.”

            Elisabeth stood, one shoe off in her hand, staring pensively after her.  Secrets.  She had managed an entire walk alone with Willow without letting go of her secrets, and Willow was admiring her for her full disclosure?

            Worse, did Rupert really think they were in for smooth sailing?  The ordeal ahead grew now before her mind’s eye and would not be ignored.  She could not warn him; she could not let him suffer in ignorance.  Looks like you’re one of us now, Willow had said.  And a hundred thousand ways ahead of her that she could put a foot wrong and ruin it all.

            “Well, not if I can help it,” she muttered jerkily, pulling off her other shoe and digging at her socks with a shaking finger.  As she struggled with the sodden terrycloth, a scutter of images crossed her mind’s eye as wind shakes rain from a tree after the fact of the shower: Tara’s hands, holding a handleless mug of tea, Tara’s hands pressed together as if in prayer, a suspension bridge of strength over the chaos of broken crystal fragments:  hands; Buffy’s hands, guiding her through dark Sunnydale streets, strong as Spike’s hands, both knowing and patient in their own way.  Knowledge and patience, keystones of Rupert’s character.  And guilt: her own hand shaping the air outside the convertible and Rupert’s voice, breaking—“I’m sorry”—and kindness.  Too much kindness, kindness too costly.  And under the kindness, a whirling darkness and nothingness that no one could solve.

            Outside, the mantle of rain parted to let a spill of brilliant warm sunshine fall across the ancient doorstep; but Elisabeth shivered.

 

*

 

“And this is the study,” Rupert said, with a feeble gesture in the doorway.

            It was difficult to watch Buffy closely while pretending not to, but he couldn’t help making the effort.  Though he was beginning to have a sinking regret that he’d ever had the idea of showing her this house: he felt unexpectedly naked and defensive.

            Buffy, for her part, looked pensive, her lips held close together as she crossed the threshold and passed her slow gaze over the room.  “Nice,” she said.

            She wouldn’t have said “nice” on the night they’d banished Charles Bowen’s ghost; but it wasn’t such a misnomer now:  the rug he’d brought had been cleaned and retacked since the Plumbing Disaster, and though they had to do the walls yet before moving in the books, it already looked lived-in and inviting, the shadows benign.

            To him, it looked a hell of a lot better than “nice,” but he was determined not to be resentful of Buffy’s reticence.

            She had not said much since he’d arrived to take them to dinner, but the quality of the silence had changed from the night before.  Now, she looked faintly troubled, in that way that could lead either to passionate grief or cold fury.  Rupert wasn’t prepared to deal with either one in his current state, and Elisabeth had made no effort to clue him in on which to expect.

            For Buffy and Elisabeth had—what was the word?—clicked, that was for certain.  Even if he hadn’t caught them exchanging glances at his austere greeting, he’d have known it by the atmosphere.  And when Elisabeth mentioned casually over dinner that she and Buffy had lunched and toured Oxford in the company of Brian Whitaker, he had had to stifle a groan.  Buffy was already ill-disposed toward him; did Elisabeth have to introduce her to someone who barely managed to tolerate him?

            Not that Buffy could reasonably have spent a month in Oxford without meeting Brian, but Rupert felt nettled all the same.

            All in all, Rupert was glad to see Buffy and Elisabeth off from Pyke’s Lea.  It had been a disappointing consummation of four months’ planning.  As the sound of the car crunching away down the lane faded into silence, Rupert turned to survey his castle.

            The lights, newly rewired, were still dingy in some rooms, too bright in others, and naked altogether in the kitchen.  There was scarcely a wall that had been sanded, primed, and painted, and the bad light seemed to show up every pile of scraped paint and shaken dust.  The furnace had been replaced, but the ancient drafts of the house had commandeered the fresh heat and directed it to the least likely places anyone would want to linger.

            Flatfooted, Rupert went back to the study and opened the cabinet of the armoire he had recently moved into the one corner without bookshelves.  He reached past the jars of herbs and the bric-a-brac of spell paraphernalia, and took out a half-empty bottle of scotch and a tumbler sticky from last night’s use.  Without casting his glance any further round his home, he went to put his back against the wall and turn on the small portable TV he’d brought the day before.  He poured himself a glass of scotch and sat with it tucked in his arms crossed over his chest, watching the flickering screen between his feet.

 

*

 

Buffy lay awake and listened to the tck-a-tck of Elisabeth’s laptop keyboard out in the livingroom.  She had been glad to use Elisabeth’s work as an excuse to go to bed without checking her email or answering the text messages she knew she’d had from Willow and Dawn.  She wasn’t ready to tell them what she’d found here, wasn’t ready to say it out loud.  The world had ended like fifty times without stifling her words, and this hovering disaster was too much to tell, perhaps precisely because it was so prosaic.

            She knew Giles well enough to know that his austere posturing hid a wound of guilt—but what guilt, it was impossible to guess, and it didn’t matter anyway because getting a bone away from a growling dog would be easier by far than talking him down from his illusions of responsibility.  Buffy hissed a weary sigh and kneaded the pillow fretfully into a better shape. 

            In the morning, Buffy hustled out of the warm bed and huddled into cold clothes—jeans that wouldn’t be ruined by paint splatters, a T-shirt, and a paint-dabbled sweatshirt Elisabeth had offered her the night before.  She ventured out of the bedroom, shoes dangling from two fingers, to find Elisabeth squinting over a steaming cup of coffee, dressed in sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt that clearly belonged to Giles.  “Hey,” she offered tentatively.

            Elisabeth gave a wincing grunt.  “Get yourself some coffee, if you’d like,” she said, rusty-voiced.  “Rupert should be up by now, so I can drop you by the house any time you’re ready.”

            “Okay,” Buffy said, unsure whether she’d ever be “ready” to spend an entire day alone with Giles in his current state.

            But instead of voicing her misgivings, she filled the go-cup Elisabeth had put out for her with coffee, donned her shoes, and shrugged into her fleece jacket.

            In the car, Buffy filled the silence with a question:  “What are your plans for the day?”

            Elisabeth sighed.  “Well, they were to go to the library and work.  But my vitality is rather low today.  I may just stay home and do some light reading.”

            “I thought your term was over for Christmas.”

            “It is,” Elisabeth said grimly, “but I’ve still got a huge backlog of work to make up from the time I missed in the spring.”

            “Oh,” Buffy said, lamely, hugging her handbag closer to her and shivering.

            “I have an extra coat if you want it,” Elisabeth said as she made the turn out toward Headington.

            Buffy shook her head.  “I’m all right.  The vitality thing’s hitting me too.  Bet Giles makes three of us,” she added, blurting.

            Elisabeth grunted, her only answer.

 

*

 

In the drive at Pyke’s Lea, Elisabeth set the handbrake but did not turn off the car or make any move to get out.  “Best of luck,” she said dryly, as Buffy slung her handbag over her shoulder and wrestled open the door into the chill air.

            Giles appeared on the doorstep as she approached the house, his face impassive, the morning light glinting off his glasses.  She grunted at him as she reached the steps of the porch; for answer he blew the steam off his coffee as he stepped aside to let her in.

            In the morning light the house looked livelier, less acquiescent to Giles’s black mood of last night.  She could hear the heater going, though its primary effect seemed to be to create a draft of warm air that occasionally tickled her fingers as she made her way to the kitchen.

            “So what are we doing today?” she said finally, as she added to the coffee in her go-cup from the pot on the counter.  She turned to look at him.

            He had come in and hitched his shoulder on the doorway, his eyes heavy-lidded behind his glasses and his hair clean but uncombed.  The expression on his face seemed to be a residual wince, which could mean anything.

            “The main issue,” Giles said, “is to get your bedroom painted.  The floor’s sanded, and the trim’s been done.  Once the paint dries we can move the basic furnishings in, and then we can all move out here.”  She said nothing and he hesitated, then spoke again.  “I’d meant for us all to be staying here when you arrived; but there was a delay.”

            “I heard about the plumbing thing,” Buffy said.  “Sounds like it sucked.”

            Giles drew a long breath for a sigh.  “Yes,” was all he said.

            She sipped her coffee, determined to wait for him to break the inertia.  Finally he straightened up from the door, set his coffee on the counter, and tipped his head for her to follow him out into the hall.

            The house seemed to be an exercise in miniature grandeur, Buffy observed as they went up the main stair.  Everything had been carefully measured to take up an exact amount of space, and yet care had been taken that the lines of the stair risers and the timbers of the walls should be broad and sturdy to the eye.  The broadness and sturdiness were very Giles; the unassuming compactitude very Elisabeth.  Buffy suddenly understood why they’d both been working so hard on this house: it was pretty much the only part of them both that had much chance at harmony.

            The bedroom Giles had chosen for Buffy was two rooms away from the master bedroom in the front corner of the house, a friendly distance.  It had one window looking out on the front orchard and, further out, the countryside, a palette of browns and faded greens—but still more green than Buffy would have expected in this cold.

            That Buffy’s gaze had immediately been drawn to the landscape outside was a testament to the virtue of the room: its lines were as broadly compact as the rest of the house, and though small it was so matter-of-factly comfortable that it made looking out as if from home natural.  Glancing around the room, Buffy saw that Giles had indeed been working hard on it; despite its emptiness it was more complete than any other room in the house, even the master bedroom, which though painted and nominally furnished with bed and nightstands, was also serving as a temporary home to two cardboard cartons, an unruly set of folding rulers, three books of paint chips, and two white-painted boards leaning against the wall awaiting some purpose or other.  Giles had not made the bed, either, she had noted as they passed the door.

            Altogether, a terrible glut of emotions was fighting for uppermost expression in Buffy’s chest, but, “I like this,” she said lamely.  “What color are we painting it?”

            Giles had been looking intently at her; at her words he relaxed invisibly but his gaze did not leave her.  “I chose a soft green,” he said, “to absorb the grey light you get from a north-facing window.”

            Buffy nodded, looking round on the floor for paint cans.  “The paint’s downstairs,” Giles said.  “We need to mask the floor and trim first.”

            They got to work.  Giles had acquired a stack of old newspapers; he brought them in along with three rolls of blue masking tape, and they lined the floorboards with paper, then taped it down and started on the baseboards and trim.  Giles stretched to his full booted height to paper over the built-in bookshelf while Buffy crawled along the wall unrolling broad swathes of tape over the boards.  Then Giles brought in some steps and even masked the edges of the plaster ceiling.

            When at last everything in the room had been defined in blue tape, Giles said, “Come on.  The paint and things are in the back hall.”

            They went down and retrieved the paint, trays, rollerbrushes, and gloves.  When Giles opened the paint and poured the first splash into the tray, Buffy was startled; the color looked much less like a soft green and more like an aggressive sage.  But she had a feeling it would look better on the walls than smudging Giles’s hands.  She shrugged out of her fleece jacket (it was still chilly in the house, but she’d warmed up doing the work) and reached for a rollerbrush.

            “There’re gloves if you want them,” Giles said.

            “Nah,” Buffy said.  If Giles wasn’t going to wear gloves, she wasn’t going to either.

            Briefly, Giles showed her how to go about applying the paint to the wall, using motions that were practiced and economic, which was so totally like Giles, to develop a technique for painting a room.  Buffy swallowed a sad smile and got to work on her chosen wall.

            As she laid the paint on, Buffy found herself warming not only to the work, but to the house and its owner.  Giles had been such a problem child lately, which was unlike him; it had both worried and exasperated her, the more so because she didn’t really understand what was behind it.  Elisabeth’s explanations had served to lay a baseline understanding, but it was the house itself that was making things clear.  That Giles had worked harder on her bedroom than any other room in the house; that he had showed it to her with such silent anxiety; that all his movements, and the obvious friction between him and Elisabeth, spoke of a stilted despair—all these showed a man who was building everything on acceptance while expecting, and courting, rejection.  Which now that she was here with him, was so much more than exasperating.

            But how to shake him out of it?

            “Dawn wanted to come,” she said.

            Giles grunted in reply.

            “She even tried to use research for school as leverage.”

            “Well, I dare say Elisabeth would have something to tell her about fairy tales.”

            “Probably,” Buffy said, thinking that it was just as well Elisabeth was spared Dawn picking her brain.  “I had to give her the credit card to shut her up.”

            Buffy had a wicked impulse to mention what Dawn had told her about Elisabeth’s virginity, but decided to save that ammo for some other time.  Besides, Buffy was feeling increasingly less comfortable with a casual disregard for Giles’s partner, not since she’d found out about Elisabeth and the First.  Whatever Giles had suffered, she thought resentfully, at least he hadn’t had to look at his own face worn by the First Evil.

            It occurred to her suddenly that Giles had been sending her gold-edged invitations to his pity party, and pouting till she RSVP’d.

            The paint went on with a sound like tearing paper.

            Presently Giles said, “I’m going to have to get the other can of paint.”  He moved, with the same deliberate misery, out of the room, and Buffy followed.

            Really, between her father’s cheerful betrayal and Giles’s morbid loyalty, Buffy was going to go stark raving.  She thought of the Christmas card reposing malignantly in her handbag next to the blank postcard from L.A., and reflected blackly that tearing either or both into shreds would not relieve her feelings in the least.

            At least she could return Giles’s favor and send him an invitation to that party.

            “Got another postcard from my dude who’s keeping tabs on Angel,” she said, bracing a hand on the wall and watching Giles pick through the labels on the paint cans.

            “Oh yes?” Giles said with light disdain, not looking up.  “God only knows what he and Spike are up to now.”

            He went on searching among the paint cans, but Buffy went perfectly still.  After a moment he sensed it and looked up.  “What?”

            “What do you mean,” Buffy said slowly, her voice taut, “‘he and Spike’?”

            “I meant Angel and Spike,” Giles said impatiently, “at Wolfram & Hart.  You knew that, of course.  You knew it before I did.”

            “Spike’s dead,” Buffy heard herself say.

            Giles straightened slowly.  He had gone very pale.  “No; he isn’t.  You knew this.”

            “No,” Buffy said, “I didn’t.”

            “But—but I told you.  About the amulet and Spike winding up at Wolfram & Hart.  I told you that; we quarrelled about it, remember?”

            “We quarrelled,” Buffy said shakily, “about the fact that Elisabeth told you Angel was at Wolfram & Hart.”

            “Which wouldn’t have been such a shock if you’d bothered to tell me first,” he countered, as if they’d just had that fight five minutes ago.

            “How is Spike alive?  What did she tell you?”

            “But I told you this.  I mentioned that damned amulet fifty times.  It came from that place, and someone sent it back there, and Spike came out of it.”

            “Who?” Buffy demanded.

            “How should I know?” Giles said, his voice rising.  “I’m always the last to know these things—why are you asking me?”

            Buffy’s fists clenched despite herself.  “Don’t give me that bullshit.  And that ‘damned amulet,’ with Spike wearing it, saved the world, in case you don’t remember.  You didn’t want me to know he’s alive again.”

            “Oh, I love that,” Giles said bitterly.  “Thank you very much for that umpteenth accusation of duplicity.  I told you what I knew.  I told you Spike was back with Angel.  That was the point of calling you.”

            “No, you didn’t! You jumped down my throat about Angel and that evil law firm and how I never tell you anything, when all the time, when all the time, you knew that your own girlfriend had the goods on all of us.  And you hid that from me, so don’t tell me you’re so pure as the driven snow when it comes to perfect disclosure.”

            “You’re not saying anything new,” Giles said wearily, pushing his glasses up on his nose.  “You’ve accused me of this a hundred times before.”

            “Giles, it’s true!”  Buffy couldn’t stop her trembling.  “Why can’t you get a damn grip on this thing with Spike?  He saved the world—”

            “And I haven’t, of course,” Giles said, tossing his head.  “Which lets me out of the worthiness stakes for your respect.”

            Buffy talked over his words.  “You had no right to keep it from me.”

            “I didn’t!” he hissed, with sudden fury.  “I thought you didn’t need me to tell you.  What, do you think I’m going to walk right into a discussion of Spike’s corporeal status with you, knowing that you privilege him over me?  Knowing you’d speak to me exactly the way you’re doing now?  Knowing—” He paled even further and broke off.

            “Knowing what?”  She found herself planted face-to-face with him.  “What, Giles?  That as soon as I knew he was alive I’d run halfway around the world and throw myself into his arms?”

            “That’d tally with your usual disastrous sexual choices,” he said coolly, but his face changed as soon as he said it, as if he knew he’d gone too far.

            Buffy was too angry to care.  She leveled her deadliest voice straight at his eyes.  “You have no right to say that to me.”

            Suddenly he reddened and lifted his right hand to show her the back, the white scars and the trembling crooked fingers.  “Pardon me,” he said in a voice equally deadly, “but I think I do.”

            There was nowhere to go from here but violence.  They went perfectly still for an instant; then Giles broke the deadlock:  he turned to stalk into the conservatory and out of the house, visibly shaking.

            Buffy stood breathing hard and shaking as much as he had been.  Spike, alive.  And Giles had actually said she was a walking sexual disaster, actually said it.  That was the one thing she had counted on him never to say.  If he was that desperate—

            Suddenly she took off in a run, leaping the congregated paint cans and darting out the open conservatory door—and nearly cannoned right into him.  He was breathing long, hard breaths, fists clenched, staring sightlessly out at the wilderness beyond the back garden.

            “Giles,” she said, and he turned instantly to look at her.  Then went back into the house without a word.

            “Giles,” she repeated, following him.

            He picked up the other sage-green paint can, moving deliberately, and continued up the stairs.  She followed him.

            He went back into the bedroom and opened the paint can, with the same unhurried movements, and poured fresh paint into his tray.

            “So what happened to ‘You’ll never have anything from me but my support and respect’?” Buffy said bitterly.

            At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her.  Then he said, rolling his brush carefully in the paint, “That was back when you still respected me.”

            She opened her mouth, but then he added, “A small window of time, but a meaningful one nonetheless.”

            Her throat ached.  “That’s not fair.”

            “No?”  He turned to apply the brush to his wall.  “Considering the number of aspersions that have been cast on my character, I tend to disagree.”

            “That has nothing to do with— What makes you think I don’t respect you?”

            “How about consistently choosing a vampire’s well-being and good opinion over mine, for starters?”  Up and up rode Giles’s brush, in a calm rhythm.

            “It didn’t have to be like that,” Buffy said.  “I shouldn’t have had to choose.  I wasn’t the one who—”

            “You weren’t the one who sacrificed.  You took a swan-dive off a tower.  I gave up my conscience piece by piece.  I hung around that cursed town far past my welcome, outlived my dignity by five years, buried one lover and attempted to kill another—I wasn’t blessed with resurrections, by the way, except yours, and you managed to make it a pretty bitter miracle considering how much I disgust you—”

            Buffy was too horrified to respond to any but the last phrase:  “You don’t disgust me!  Giles, what—”

            “I’m sorry, I should have been more clear.  It’s my kind that disgusts you.  I’m still a Watcher, you know.  I always will be, even though they’re going the way of the dinosaur, and good riddance, as you say.  I take your part in repudiating them, knowing I’m only sawing off my own branch.  But what else can I do?  I haven’t got any choice.”

            “But why blame me for it?  We were—we were together on it, once.  What did I do?”

            He lowered his brush and stared quietly at the floor.  “You turned eighteen.”

            His figure, and the green paint, blurred uncontrollably.  Buffy swallowed, and swallowed again.

            “I should have known then, of course,” he said softly, turning the brush over in his hand and addressing it with a quiet despair that only choked her further.  “It took Willow going dark for someone to say what everybody knew—that I was increasingly irrelevant.  I tried not to be bitter about it.  I did try, you know.”

            For a moment Buffy wanted to grab and shake him, make him rail at her again, anything but this.  Instead, she whirled and flew down the stairs, then pounded back up again digging in her handbag.

            “I’ll show you irrelevant,” she said, with the tears on her face.  “I’ll show you—”

She found what she was looking for and dropped the purse to work the card out of its envelope and shove it into his hand.

            Slowly, his face closed, he put down the brush and shifted the card to his left hand.  She watched him look from the inscription in one hand to the photo in the other, still impassive.  Then he turned the photo over and read the back.

            There was a silence.  Then he said:  “Your father named his son Caleb?” as if hoping he was misreading the name.

            “Yeah,” Buffy said.

            “When did you find this out?” he asked her, now looking at the front of the photo again.

            “When I opened this card,” Buffy said, her voice flat.  “On the plane here.”

            He did look up at her then, and though his expression was unreadable, it was Giles looking at her, and not the bitter stranger she had been afraid of seeing.

            Gently he returned the photo to the card and gave it back to her.

            “Don’t show me the address,” he said briefly, and returned to painting.

            Buffy wiped her nose on her sleeve, put away the card, and followed suit.

 

*

 

Oddly enough, now that the worst had happened, Rupert found it easy to finish the first coat of paint in Buffy’s bedroom, as if it mattered, and stand back to view their finished work with something resembling satisfaction.  “It’s a fast-drying paint,” he told Buffy, “but still we won’t want to add another coat till tomorrow.”  He assembled the painting paraphernalia, without looking at her, and carried it downstairs to clean on the back patio.

            Buffy did not follow him; she went instead into the upstairs bathroom to scrub her hands.  She had called Elisabeth on her mobile to apprise her of their plans for the evening and ask if Elisabeth would kindly bring her a change of clothes so they could go straight out.  Apparently Elisabeth had agreed without any cavil at all, which was ominous in its very lack of complication.

            As he scrubbed at his hands and the brush handles, Rupert heard the slow crunch of tires in the drive.  Shameful though it was, he remained hidden there, waiting for and hearing the sound of Elisabeth coming in the front door, of Buffy shuffling quickly down the steps to meet her, of their feminine voices together.  No, they had definitely clicked, and it did not bode well for him at all.

            At last Rupert forced himself to shake his hands dry and venture into the house, where he found Elisabeth receiving back the sweatshirt she’d lent Buffy and Buffy tucking her change of clothes, a bag of toiletries, and a towel under one arm, two steps up from her.  Buffy looked up and saw him.  “It won’t take me long to get ready,” she said brightly, and turned at once to climb the stairs.

            Rupert glanced out the way he’d come:  the late-afternoon sunset was not far off.  He had actually missed the deep trough of night one got with an English winter, but at the moment it was not helping his mood.

            Uncannily, Elisabeth quoted:  “‘Let me call/This hour her vigil and her eve, since this/Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.’  Which it actually is.  St. Lucy’s day, I mean.  The shortest day in the year is St. Thomas’s day, now, though; the fruits of 1752.”  He shot a nettled look at her, and her face got that look of bland docility that so irked him.  She turned, without addressing his glare, and went into the kitchen.

            He followed her, to find her pouring out the cold coffee and rinsing out the pot.  “So you’re taking Buffy out tonight,” she said.

            “Yes,” he said, pressing his lips tight.  If she meant to make a fuss now of all times….

            Worse; she went on quoting Donne.  “‘Oft a flood have we two wept, and so/Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow/To be two Chaosses—’”

            “Elisabeth,” he said, “would you leave off?”

            Her lips twitched, and her expression sharpened, like the cat’s when it was planning to trip him.  “Speaking of drowning the world, I want to talk to you about this plan of yours.  A small warning.”

            “Keep it to yourself,” he said sharply.  “I’ve been keeping my head about drink since before you were born.”

            Elisabeth looked startled, but she gave a snort and kept on the offense.  “I doubt that.  But that’s not—”

            “In fact,” he said, talking over her, “I’d highly appreciate it if you’d refrain from any more critical remarks about my intake.”

            That got a reaction.  Elisabeth drew herself up, straight and indignant.

            “I haven’t said word one about your drinking,” she hissed, flushing.

            Rupert jumped into the quarrel with reckless relish.  “Oh, not verbally,” he said, in a disparaging snarl.  “As if I don’t feel you looking at me, when I go down the pub.”

            She stared at him, aghast for a split second; then she enunciated furiously:  “So I worry about you.  Mea freaking culpa!”

            “You should be sorry,” he snarled back.  “As if I haven’t got enough on my plate.  And why you’d choose now to twit me about it, I don’t know, unless you want to indulge a puritanical sadism—”

            “A—You don’t even know what I was going to say!”

            “I don’t need to,” he said, with energy.  “You’ve been thinking it at me for months.  And I’m telling you now, Elisabeth, to mind your own God-damned business, or—”  But he’d run out of words, and what happened then dropped the guillotine on his satisfying rage.

            Elisabeth had gone white, and at his last words she took an involuntary step out of his reach.  Which proved exactly what he’d feared.  Which proved—

            “Are you afraid of me?” he demanded.

            She didn’t answer.  She stood perfectly still, eyes wide and wet behind her glasses.

            “Are you?”

            A small silence; then instead of answering his question, Elisabeth said slowly, holding her voice to a trembling low tone:

            “If you’re done, maybe you’ll care to hear what I was going to warn you about.  What I was going to say, was that if you’re taking Buffy out to drink, you shouldn’t patronize her because she’s not good at holding her liquor.  Don’t lecture her about her ignorance of fine scotch; don’t make her drink something she doesn’t fancy; and don’t make fun of her if she orders a girly drink.  I rather think,” she said, holding back the tears by pure force, “that you can’t afford to patronize Buffy right now.  That’s what I was going to say.  But now all I have to say is, go to hell.”  She whirled on her heel and fled from the room.  He heard her steps pounding up the stairs, and a moment later a door slammed violently.

            He braced both hands on the counter, willing himself to breathe, willing the tremble in the pit of his stomach to calm itself.  Why he’d thought striking out at her and getting an actual response wouldn’t involve actually hurting her—or had he thought that?  Had he wanted to hurt her?  Was that what was behind his wild accusation of “puritanical sadism”?—which, good show, Giles, well done indeed, you’ve just succeeded in putting into her head the awareness of a prejudice you didn’t actually have.

            “When I read this card,” Buffy had said, “on the plane here,” and “I’m always the last to know,” he had said.  And, “I don’t want you in my sight till Elisabeth knows you’ve been coming to see me,” Anne had said.  And there were too many secrets and too much projection and too much chaos—

            “Giles.  Giles.”

            He shook himself to find Buffy at his shoulder, freshly washed and changed into dark jeans and a red turtleneck sweater, her fleece jacket over her arm.  “Earth to Giles,” she said.  “This is Houston.  What’s the problem?”

            “Not something NASA can fix,” Rupert said.  “You’re ready, then?”

            “Obviously,” Buffy said, lifting her arms to show her well-groomed state.  “Where’s Elisabeth?”

            “Er….”  He felt rather sick.  “She’s upstairs.  I need to….”  He went out of the kitchen without bothering to finish, and doggedly climbed the stairs.

            There was only one room whose door was shut, a room that they had not been working on but using for storage of materials instead.  He gave a tentative knock with one knuckle and then slowly opened it.

            Elisabeth had huddled with her knees drawn up in the farthest corner, shielded in by two cartons of books and the mattress for Buffy’s bed, upended against the wall.  She made no effort to pretend she was not still crying, but with an awkward dignity that made his heart hurt, she lifted her head, wiped her red nose on her hand, and stared into the middle distance to wait for him to speak.

            He cleared his throat.  “It’s nearly time for us to leave.  We can drop you home, or if you’d rather, you can catch a ride to the flat with—with Brian or somebody….”

            “No,” she sniffed, “I’ll ride back with you.”  She raised her arms and levered herself staggering to her feet.  He moved back from the door so she could get out, and trailed after her to the bathroom, where she turned on the cold tap and splashed her face over and over.  She reached for the hand towel, damp with Buffy’s use, and put her face into it, patting slowly dry and down.

            “Elisabeth,” he said, his voice scraping over emotion, “I—”

            Even before she spoke, she warned him off with a look in the mirror.  “Rupert.  Don’t.  Not right now.”

            He could not but respect that, but still he hesitated, meeting her gaze in the mirror for a miserable moment before wandering away to their bedroom, to change his shirt.

 

*

 

Rupert hung his leather jacket over the edge of the settle nearest the bar, and dropped wearily into the seat.  With a thoughtful glance round the small establishment, Buffy followed his example, sliding into the seat across the table.  “This isn’t the pub Elisabeth and I went to,” she observed.

            “No,” he said, leaving it at that.

            “She said that pub was where you guys all hang out.”

            “This one’s quieter,” Rupert said quellingly.

            Not that Buffy ever listened to his quelling tone of voice.  “What happened with her?” she asked, lifting her scotch for a sip.  Elisabeth’s fears to the contrary, Buffy had assured him in the car, without being asked, that she was going to match him drink for drink.  “Well, all right,” he had said, with a certain mirthless hilarity.

            “Nothing,” he said now, breathing in the bouquet of his own drink and taking a long sip.

            “Giles, that is such bullshit,” she said equably.

            “Well, what’d you expect?” he said, tilting his head with the sort of whimsical gesture that with Elisabeth often started a war of quotations and ended with a defused conflict.

            “I expect you to level with me,” Buffy said, setting her drink down firmly on the table.

            “Why?  Are we doing that now?”  Rupert said into his glass before another long sip.

            Not even that worked.  “You tell me.  You started it.”

            “Yes, and I’m having my regrets.”

            “Why was Elisabeth crying?  What’d you do to her?”

            “Of course.”  Rupert rolled his eyes.  “Of course I did something to her.”

            “Well?”

            “I don’t feel like discussing it.”  Rupert tried to lift his drink; but Buffy reached out swiftly and put her hand over the top of it.  “I thought we came here to drink,” he said, looking down at his imprisoned glass.  “This was your idea.”

            “Yes,” Buffy countered, “and I’m having my regrets.  Tell me about Elisabeth.”

            “Or what?” he said, glowering at her from under his brows.

            “Or I’ll go back to the flat and let you make a fool of yourself alone.”

            “Not the worst plan you’ve ever had.”

            But Buffy did not lift her hand from his drink.  She merely met his eyes, implacable.

            “I jumped down her throat on an ill-conceived pretext.  Happy?”

            “You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”  But she took her hand off his drink.  Rupert tossed back a generous sip before she could change her mind.  The scotch burnt a ragged path down his throat, and he coughed a little before smoothing it with another sip and putting the glass down to nurse.

            “And no,” Buffy said.

            “No, what?”

            “No, I’m not happy.”

            “Well, there’s a surprise.”  Rupert dug in quietly and prefaced his next words with another little sip.  “So does that constitute the agenda for the evening?”

            “That depends on you,” Buffy said.  “Also, for the record, scotch tastes like gasoline.”  She took a generous sip to match his, and her eyes watered.  “Or petrol, as you call it here.”

            Involuntarily, Rupert smiled.

 

*

 

Elisabeth wrapped herself in her robe and sat down to her laptop.  “So,” she said to the document file that was loading, “this, then, tonight.  This,” she sighed, “both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.”

            As she tabbed down through her own writing, she propped a feverish cheek on one hand.  Staring at a computer screen with a pressure headache from crying was not exactly optimum writing conditions, but what can you do?  Now that the worst had happened…well, no, not the worst.  The worst that could happen had either already happened, or wasn’t going to.  “I’m willing to give him a long anchor chain,” she had told Xander.  But now they were fishing in pretty deep waters.

            It was just as well she had no plans to sleep tonight.

            The phone rang.  Elisabeth shut her eyes and groaned.  If it was someone inconsequential, she didn’t want to talk to them, and if it was Brian, she really didn’t want to talk.

            Ring.  Ring.  Ring.  Click.  “Hi,” her voice on the answering machine said.  “You’re talking to a small recording device.  Leave a reason to call you back.”  She’d been meaning to change that; she’d recorded that announcement in the spring, and it sounded altogether flat and aggressive.

            “Uh…hi.  Xander here, checking in,” the small recording device said.  Elisabeth jumped and fumbled for the handset.  “I—”

            “Hey,” she said breathlessly.  “It’s me.  I was just thinking about you, oddly enough.”

            “Oh, Elisabeth, hey.  Good.  I was wondering if I’d hit the right time.  Giles and Buffy aren’t answering their cell-phones.”

            “They’ve gone to hash out their issues over scotch,” Elisabeth said.

            “Doesn’t that sound like fun!” Xander said.  “—You don’t sound good.  You okay?”

            “Sure.  How’s Africa?”

            “Big and continental.  What’s wrong?”

            “Nothing,” Elisabeth said, knowing at once that her tone was insufficiently convincing.

            “Tell me.”

            “Oh,” she groaned, “you don’t have time to hear all my shit.  I’ll tell Rupert you—”

            “I’ve got nothing but time,” Xander said.  “Lay it on me.”

 

*

 

“You still haven’t told me what it was you said to Elisabeth,” Buffy said.

            Rupert rubbed at his forehead.  “Buffy, can’t you leave it?  It’s not to do with you, if that’s what you want to know.”

            “Well, you were all jumping at the chance to talk to me over drinks, and now you’re all armadillo-y.  So my theory—it’s a wild one, get ready—is that you’re the one who can’t leave it.”

            He glared up at her from under his brows.

            “And furthermore,” Buffy said, “if you’ve been sending her the same invites to your pity party that you have to me, I have to tell you that you’re way off base.  You,” and her lips primmed at this fresh thought, “didn’t have the First Evil parading around wearing your face all day long.”

            A chill settled in Rupert’s stomach.  He drained the last of his glass of scotch (Buffy followed suit manfully) and set it aside.  “No,” he said, in a measured voice, “but I did have it parading around in yours.”

            Their eyes met.  Buffy looked away.  “So,” she said, “did you believe the stuff it said?  Or should I ask?”

            Rupert bought some time by going to get them more scotch.  He sat down with the drinks and took another strengthening sip before answering.  “Well,” he said, measuring his words carefully, “it was difficult to determine, after a while, which of you in the room was the real Buffy.  As to sorting out the wheat from the chaff, I was…increasingly less well-equipped to attempt it.”

            “Which is why you attacked her.”

            Rupert heaved a sigh and cast his gaze into the golden depths of his glass.  “She told you about it.”

            “I asked.”

            He felt suddenly weary and aged beyond repair.  “I…Elisabeth loves me very much,” he faltered softly to his glass.

            “Giles,” Buffy said, in a voice so gentle that he looked up to meet her eyes.  Which was when she let him have it between his.  “Duh!” she said.  “Are you still stuck on that?  Yes, she loves you, very much.  And this poses a problem exactly how?”

            “It doesn’t,” he said dully, “unless she’s wasting her time.”

            “That’s her problem,” Buffy said, taking an explosive sip of fine scotch.  “Your problem is that you’re stuck in this I’m-so-unworthy gear-grinding crap.”

            He gave her a catlike look as he lifted his glass.  “So what exactly are you proposing?”

            “I’m proposing,” Buffy retorted, “that you move the hell on.”  Defiantly, she upended the half-full glass of scotch and drained it without a wince.

 

*

 

Xander offered a small sympathetic groan.  Elisabeth reached for a tissue.  “Sorry,” she sniffed.  “I didn’t mean to go all wobbly.  I just—I had my suspicions, but I was just blindsided all the same.  And I never meant to make him think I was all puritanical about it—I just left it alone, like he wanted—what else should I have done?”

            “He thinks you’re a puritan, that’s his problem,” Xander said firmly.  “You didn’t make him think that.  Your only so-called sin was that you were a witness to his being miserable, and in that case, he should just suck it up and deal.  Or not be your boyfriend anymore.”

            But that sent Elisabeth into fresh tears.  “I don’t know,” she wept.  “What if that is what he wants?”

            “Aw, Elisabeth,” Xander said, and waited with almost audible concern for her to quieten before going on.  “I don’t think it is.  That’s not what it looks like to me.  But I’m not inside Giles’s head.  You ask me, I think he wants to have it out with Buffy, not break up with you.  But I can’t…you know.”

            “Well, that’s what I thought too,” Elisabeth said, regaining a more reasonable tone and wiping her face with the crumpled tissue.  “I thought maybe he’s been striking at me because he felt safe doing it—I mean, felt like it was safe for us.  But I’m starting to—oh, I’m just getting so tired.  It’s just a game, all this second-guessing and eggshell-walking, and I don’t have the energy to keep it up much longer.”

            “Well, if Buffy and Giles get some things straight while they’re getting their drink on, maybe you won’t have to.”

            “I hope so,” Elisabeth said, and was startled to hear the bitterness in her own voice.

            “Well, we all get kinda tired of the Buffy and Giles show now and then, you know.  It’s like, okay, you have Slayer-Watcher issues, we get it.”

            Elisabeth gave a watery chortle, and Xander went on.  Clearly she had touched a nerve.

            “I mean, really, sometimes I read their emails and think, God, just fuck already!”  He stopped suddenly.  “I mean—if you weren’t—that is, really—just a hypothetical-type fucking…And now I’ve just grossed myself right the hell out.  Just—forget I said….”

But Elisabeth was laughing: silently at first, then in a weary and unraveled chuckle.

            “Is that the laugh of ‘I think this is funny’ or the laugh of ‘I’m going to kill you’?” Xander said tentatively.

            “It’s funny,” she assured him.  “Also, in a few black moments I’ve almost wanted to say it myself.”

            Xander did laugh at this.

 

*

 

“Well, let’s see,” Rupert said, spreading out his fingers palm-up preparatory to counting, though the number in question was several hands’ worth.  “There was my parents.  My mother’s lullabies.  Quentin.  A Watcher you don’t know, who mentored me in my youth.  A couple other Watchers you don’t know, and some you do….All the girls I got there too late to save.”

            “How many was that?”

            He peered into the distance.  “Can’t remember.  Too many, anyway.  Had to kill one; mercy.  They more or less crucified her to the floor of her house in addition to the usual gut-spilling.”

            He was looking through his lashes at her, and saw that one go home, though she hid it well, tucking the corners of her mouth in firmly and lifting her glass.

            “Angel,” he said, and this time she did wince; but he was getting lost in the counting now.  “Joyce.  Jenny.  Some of the students—I’m losing their names, now.  The Mayor.  Spike.  A lot of Spike, actually, if that helps explain anything, though I doubt it does.  Randall.  Lot of him, too, but he never said anything.  Philip and Deirdre and Thomas.  Tara.”

            “You saw Tara?” Buffy said, blinking at him.  “I thought she was out of reach.”

            Rupert shook his head.  “I’m not sure Willow would have mentioned it if she did see her.”

            “No,” Buffy said, very softly.  She looked down at her glass, as if noticing for the first time that she had one.

            “How many are we on?” Rupert asked her.

            “I don’t know, I wasn’t counting.  The First was pretty busy, looks like.”

            “I meant drinks.”

            “Wasn’t counting those either,” Buffy said dryly.

            “You seem to be holding up,” he said, eyeing her closely.

            “Slayer metabolism.  I’m really not adept at the drinking.  Wow.  Adept.  I said the word ‘adept.’ D’ja notice that?”

            Rupert got up again, and Buffy took a long sip of the scotch that he put before her.  “This is starting to taste better.  You think my palate’s improving, or am I just drunk?”

            He snorted into a laugh.  “You really want me to answer that?” he said, languidly.

            “No,” she said.  “I can feel my liver pickling.”

            “I’ve got a head start on you with that.  Surprised Elisabeth didn’t use that as leverage.”

            “She got after you for drinking?” Buffy asked, peering at the grain of the table.

            “N-no…no, she pointedly didn’t.  But I called her on it.”

            “So that’s what you jumped down her throat about.”

            Rupert blinked, then cursed himself silently.  Damn his loose lips.  “She says she was worried about me.  She doesn’t…doesn’t need to worry about me.  I’m perfectly…but I shouldn’t have shouted at her.  Or… called her a puritan.”

            “You called her a puritan?  Giles, what the fuck?”

            “I don’t remember you swearing quite so much when you were younger,” he said, squinting at her in an effort to keep from giggling.

            “Yeah, well, that was then.”

            There was a small silence while Rupert finished off another glass and then sat hunched thoughtfully over the table, a bookend to Buffy with her hands curled round her glass, now cloudy with finger-marks.

            “And then there was the worst one.”

            “Yeah?”

            “There was Ben.”

            Buffy thought this over.  “Why’s he the worst?”

            “He’s the one I killed.  In cold blood, I mean.  To save the world and all that.”

            They were speaking quietly, drink clouding their eye contact.

            “I thought you said he died of his wounds,” Buffy said.  “I thought that’s what you said when….”

            “No.  I…” he dropped his voice to a murmur:  “I smothered him.  So you wouldn’t have to.  ‘Course, it ended up being moot anyway, didn’t it?  You not having to, I mean.  It was my job.”

            “Giles….”  She let go her glass and looked at him.

            “He was the one who finally broke me to go and kill Elisabeth.  I’m the one who does the dirty work, he said.  Well, of course he was right.”

            “Giles,” Buffy whispered, with intensity, “I didn’t ask you to kill for me.  I will never ask you to kill for me.”

            “That’s what you don’t understand,” he said dreamily, pushing at his glass with a forefinger and staring into the smoke-aged rafters of the pub.  “You don’t have to ask.  Quentin talked a good game about wielding you…like a-a weapon on a chessboard—” there was something wrong with that sentence but he didn’t trouble to go back and parse it— “but the truth is…the truth is, we Watchers get our hands dirty.  That’s what our job is.  The Council didn’t want you getting your hands dirty because they didn’t want you to take their power.  I didn’t want you getting your hands dirty because…because you’re more valuable than I am.”  He thought that in the cold light of day, that would be shown to be an obnoxious piece of sententious crap; but it felt right to say.  “Remember when the First Slayer…?”

            “Got mad at us in our sleep?  Yeah.  She wanted me to be alone.”

            “She’s not wrong.”

            “Giles, of course she was wrong!  She—”

            “I mean,” he said doggedly, “we were a threat to your power by—entering into it, sharing it.  And now we’ve shared it with all these others, and they’re going to get their hands dirty.  And…I don’t want you to carry that.  It’s my job.  I can’t stop being a Watcher, you know.”

            “You keep saying that,” Buffy said thickly.  “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

            “Inconceivable!” Rupert said, and giggled.

            Buffy frowned.  “Didn’t know you saw that movie.”

            “’Lis’beth made me watch it one night.”

            “Good for her.”

            “How you doing?” he asked, craning his head to look at her glass.

            “I need another one,” she said.  “And so do you.”

 

*

 

In the end Xander gave his report to Elisabeth instead of Rupert.  She asked him for it, reasoning that there was no telling when Rupert’d be in the proper state for dealing with the info.  Xander agreed, clearly wanting to talk more, perhaps to maintain contact till she was steadier.  This comforted and irritated Elisabeth at the same time:  it was nice to have someone paying attention to her and not the Buffy-and-Giles show, but she hated anything with the least hint of patronage, and Xander was nothing if not youthfully chivalrous.

            Once Xander had given her the specifics of his situation—fortunately, they did not require immediate action on their part—they went on talking, but without direction, about the changes that had come into the world along with the extra Slayers.

            “I don’t suppose the actual power is diluted at all,” Elisabeth was saying, “but there’s got to be a fair amount of chaos round its manifestations.  I hope you’re keeping—”

            But a chiming sound interrupted her.  “Oh, damn, that’s my cell,” she said.  “Hang on.”  She rummaged about in the pocket of her jacket draped over her chair, and her heart sank when she saw the ID on the screen.  “I’m going to have to let you go, Xander.  I need to take this.”

            “Sure thing.  I’ll call Giles back in a couple of days.  And, Elisabeth—hang in there.”

            “I will.”  She thumbed off the phone and opened her cell with a deep sigh.  “Hello?”

            “Ah—yes, ma’am, is that Miss Bowen?”

            “Yes, speaking.”

            “This is Anderson, at the Black Key.  You gave me your card a few weeks ago.”

            “Yes, I remember.”  Elisabeth did not sigh again, but she did not need to.

            “Well, I have a…well, a bit of an awkward situation.  Your—your man is here, and he’s had rather enough for the evening, and you mentioned I should put him in a taxi for you if it got to that point.  But, well, he...has someone with him.  Shall I—?”

            “Oh, that’s all right.  Blond girl, slight, red sweater?”

            “Aye,” he said, sounding obviously relieved.

            “What condition is she in?”

            “Much the same as he, really.”

            “And that is…?”

            “In a fair way to be unconscious, ma’am, soonish, if I’m any judge.”

            “Well, don’t give them any more, and if you put them in a taxi I’ll pay at the end and come get the car tomorrow.”

            But there was a small hesitant silence on the other end. 

            “Well?” she said.

            “Well, ma’am, I’m not sure they’re exactly fit to manage the taxi.”

            At this Elisabeth groaned aloud.  “God.  How much did they have?  And what time is it, anyway?...Oh my.  I didn’t realize it was so late.  What do you suggest?”

            “I think,” he said, sounding relieved that she had not taken him to task for serving them too much, “I might have my sons drive them home in your car, since we’re closing and they’re fairly strong chaps.”

            She drew a long breath.  “Okay.  Let’s do that.”

            “This address on your card still correct?”  He read it off to her.

            “Yes.  Just round off the Iffley Road.”

            “I know the street.  Right you are.”

            “Thank you.  Thanks very much.”

            “Not a problem, ma’am,” he said, and rang off.

            Elisabeth snapped her phone shut and sprang up to pace around the flat.  Of course, it seemed the obvious conclusion to an evening like this.  What was she going to do with them in a comatose state?

            She flipped the porch light on and went into the bedroom.  Buffy had made the bed neatly in the morning, and the only disarray was the slight disorder Elisabeth had made getting out a change of clothes for her.  Elisabeth turned on the nightstand lamp and smoothed her pillow unnecessarily.  Then she gave a wolfish grin.  “It’ll have to do,” she said to the room, “and I owe Rupert a moment of discomfort anyway.”

            She waited by the front door, pacing slowly, for several minutes; then she made an impatient gesture and pulled it open to stare out into the chilly December night.  When the cautious slow headlights of their own car appeared at the end of the street, Elisabeth shivered and shook off a sense of deja-vu which at the moment she could not trace to its source.

            Slowly the car nosed its way into a parking space a few yards down from her door.  It paused, running, for a moment; then the engine cut and the lights went out.  She waited.

            The front doors opened and two burly young men got out, one in a heavy sweater and one in a jacket.  The sweater approached her at the door and stopped halfway up the steps.  “You Miss Bowen, ma’am?”

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said, as if they were delivering catering for a posh meal.

            “Right then,” the lad said cheerfully.  “We’ll have ‘em inside in two ticks.”

            It took both of them to wrangle Rupert gently out of the car, his arms over their shoulders, and they walked him very slowly up the steps, more than half carrying him.  Elisabeth submerged the painful shock it gave her to see him, head hanging as if in defeat, eyes nearly shut, drooping between the two young men; she swallowed and directed them silently into the house and down the short corridor to the bedroom, where they let him down gently onto the bed and lifted his legs up after him with the air of having done this many times before.  With a sort of rueful cheer they trooped back out into the night.  When they returned, one of them was carrying Buffy in his arms, like a small child who had stayed up past her bedtime, her boots bobbing with each of his steps.  She, Elisabeth could see by her face, was completely out.

            “Didn’t want to go at first,” the other said to Elisabeth.  “We managed to coax her into the car with him.  Stronger than she looks.”

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said, folding her robed arms over her chest to control her shivering.

            “I’m sorry—we’re letting all the warm out.  Bob!”

            “Where shall I put her?” Bob asked, half-turning with Buffy in his arms.

            “Same place,” Elisabeth said, laconically.

            “Right,” he said, without batting an eyelid.

            “Here’s their things,” the sweater said, handing Elisabeth the two leather jackets he’d brought in over his arm, and following them with Rupert’s glasses.  Elisabeth accepted them with a magisterial nod, then went to put them down and get a ten out of her bag.  The cat brushed by her and flitted down the hall like a black shadow to look in on Bob, then darted back to sniff at the sweater’s boots.

            “Uh-oh.  I’ll shut the door if you like.”

            “It’s not necessary,” she said, “he won’t go out.  Here’s for your trouble.  Thank you very much.”

            The sweater accepted the ten graciously and gave her the car keys in return.  “No trouble at all, ma’am.  Let’s get off home, Bob.”  He and Bob gave her identical nods, as how one should tip a hat without actually wearing one, and trooped their broad-shouldered way out of the flat.  Before she shut the door, she saw Bob calling for a taxi on his mobile, his breath streaming out in the cold, his cheeks ruddy.

            With the door closed between her and the world, Elisabeth drew strength in one long breath and went down the hall to look at them.

            Buffy and Rupert rested on the bed in the positions they’d been laid in, faces calm and somber, asleep by inertia.  Before Elisabeth could move past the threshold, the cat leapt upon the bed and picked his way between them, sniffing.

            They couldn’t be left like this, much as she’d like to.  “You going to give me a hand?” she said, offering a mordant smile to the cat, who looked back at her and exhaled sharply for answer, then bounded off the bed and out of the room.

            “Thank you ever so,” she called sarcastically after him.

            Elisabeth tackled Buffy first, feeling obscurely that her smaller size would be easier to maneuver.  She dug afresh into Buffy’s bag and finally drew out a set of pajamas—well-worn, with pictures of sushi on them.  She gave a half-breath of a laugh and rose with them, dropping them beside Buffy on the bed.

            It was no easy matter to hoist Buffy up into a sitting position, but Elisabeth managed to get her leaning against her own front, and began to work her arms out of the sleeves of her sweater.  Buffy stirred and made a small sound, like the cat when he was dreaming, but did not resist as Elisabeth, struggling, got her arms out of the sleeves and the hem up to her neck.  Then gently she worked the sweater over her head and off.  Buffy dropped her head to rest on Elisabeth’s collar.  “That’s right,” Elisabeth said encouragingly, more to herself than to Buffy.  “Now here’s your pajama top.”  Swiftly, she draped the pajama shirt over Buffy’s shoulders, unclipped and drew away her bra, and worked her arms into the wide sleeves.  When she was covered, Elisabeth laid her back down and fastened the buttons quickly, one by one.

            “Mm-mm,” Buffy said, frowning slightly.

            “It’s all right,” Elisabeth told her, reaching to smooth aside her mussed hair.  “You’re home.”

            Buffy gave a sigh and her expression smoothed again.

            It was less of a task to remove her boots and jeans and get the pajama bottoms on, but still it was awkward and difficult, and though Buffy was offering no resistance, Elisabeth could feel the latent strength in her limbs as she moved them.  But at last her work was done—Buffy lay soundly asleep in her sushi pajamas, if slightly more rumpled than if she had put them on herself.  Elisabeth fetched the trash can and put it by the side of the bed, then tugged Buffy over gently onto her side, just in case.

            At last she stood up, sweating, and turned her attention to the other side of the bed, the side she usually occupied.  Rupert was going to be heavier and more awkward, but at least she didn’t have to dress him in pajamas. 

            She also didn’t have to be as gentle.  One by one his boots thunked to the floor, then his silent socks.  Then she unbuttoned his shirt and eased up his shoulder to work the sleeve down and off.  Then the other; then the shirt joined her discarded robe on the chair.  Rupert slept on, his breathing heavy in his nose.

            But as she reached for the buttons of his jeans, he stirred and drew himself into a faint gesture of resistance.  “It’s all right,” she told him, as she had told Buffy.  “You’re home.”

            “’Lis’beth,” he mumbled.

            “Yes,” she said, not quite graciously, and began to tug his jeans off him.  When she had wrangled them down to his knees, she paused, panting, and lifted briefly to look at his face.

            “’Lis’beth…loves me…ver’ much,” Rupert mumbled.

            For the space of five seconds she was paralyzed, bent over him and staring, in a moment of polarized sensation that she could hardly even identify as emotion.  Then time released her and she bent again to her task, swallowing and swallowing again.

            “Yes,” she said, working his jeans down to his ankles and pulling them off inside-out in three sharp but gentle jerks, “yes,” she said, “she does.”

            Rupert said no more, but subsided into full unconsciousness, peacefully sleeping in his T-shirt and boxers.

            Blinking away tears, Elisabeth hauled at him gently till he also was on his side, then worked the covers slowly out from beneath him and pulled them over him.  A curl of his hair, gold and grey in the lamplight, lay against her pillow like a living paintbrush.  Exhausted, Elisabeth could not face doing the same for Buffy as well, so she went and got her afghan from the livingroom and spread it over her.

            Then, shaking, she went to the bathroom and stood with arms braced at the sink, breathing down nausea.

            “Get it together, Elisabeth,” she said softly.  Then she dragged herself away, back to the bedroom for her robe, and padded into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, knotting the tie wearily round her middle.

            It was just as well she had no plans to sleep tonight.

 

*

 

She did, however, wind up dozing, curled up in a corner of the couch; Elisabeth had never been very successful at pulling a true all-nighter, and she was tired.  Warm with sleep, she drifted just under the surface of consciousness, with the words she had been working with skittering about her mind, half-threaded on a snarled line of anxiety.

            A sudden, hoarse cry broke the silence of the flat, and her eyes snapped open.  The cry was followed by another, and a slithering thump that shook the flat.

            Elisabeth bolted off the couch and toward the bedroom.

            Rupert was disentangling himself from the sheets and struggling to his feet, where he then backed into the chair and put a hand against the wall.  On the other side of the room, Buffy had vacated the bed more gracefully and now stood wide-eyed with the bed between her and Rupert.

            Swallowing a smile, Elisabeth folded her arms and lounged against the doorway.  She rather wished Xander were here for this.

            Buffy turned her head and gave him a wide, dubious look.  “What…exactly…did we…?”  Then she looked down.  “Hey.  I’m wearing my sushi pajamas.  I didn’t think I was coherent enough to….”  She stopped, seeing Elisabeth in the doorway.

            Rupert looked too, and visibly recoiled.  “Elisabeth—”

            But apparently her languid amusement was evident enough that he relaxed slightly.

            “You’re all right,” she said finally, relenting with a small smile.  “I put you to bed and made sure you didn’t pull a Jimi Hendrix.  You slept pretty peacefully.”

            “That was smart,” Buffy said, then turned to Rupert.  “Jimi Hendrix—”

            “I know what happened to Jimi Hendrix, Buffy.”  Rupert gave her the squinting glare he reserved only for her.

            “Oh.  Right.  I guess you do.”  Buffy actually smirked.

            “You weren’t even born then,” he added irritably.

            “Well,” Elisabeth said briskly, “if you two are done with the bed, I’d like to use it for a while.  I’ve been working all night.”

            Buffy blushed.  Rupert turned a remonstrative glare on Elisabeth, but met her eyes and shut his mouth.  “Should make some coffee,” he muttered, and eased past her out of the room.  Behind her, Elisabeth heard the bathroom door shut.

            “I think he beat you to the bathroom,” Elisabeth said to Buffy.

            Buffy didn’t move.  “Elisabeth…are you…are you okay?”

            Moving at last to the bed where Rupert had fallen out of it, Elisabeth offered her a wry, calm glance.  “Things are usually better in the morning.”  She picked up the tangled sheet and began to straighten it on the bed.  Buffy watched her turn over the pillows and beat them lightly.  Finally she shifted into movement, as if catching herself at a bad habit.  “I think…I think,” she said, yawning and putting her fingers to one temple, “I’m going to make that coffee.”  She gave Elisabeth a final sheepish glance and slipped out of the room, tugging at the skewed waistband of her pajamas.

            Elisabeth spared her only a glance as she went.  She was suddenly helplessly, terminally tired.  Without bothering to care about the logistics of Buffy and Rupert getting dressed while she slept, she shed her robe and crawled between the straightened sheets, which (thankfully) smelled primarily of Buffy and only a little of inebriated Rupert.  She pulled the ponytail holder out of the messy bun she’d made of her long hair, dropped it on the nightstand, and buried her face in her pillow.

            Things were usually better in the morning.  Especially if she was unconscious.

 

*

 

They were mostly silent on the way out to the house.  For one thing, the light hurt, the jolts of the car hurt, and in fact, Buffy reflected, taking stock, there were very few things that didn’t hurt.  Judging from his dogged grip on the steering wheel and his heavily-narrowed eyes behind his glasses, Giles felt much the same.

            “Are we going to be able to deal with the smell of paint?” Buffy said, as Giles pulled gingerly into the gravel lane.

            “Dunno,” he said.

            “Maybe we should do outdoor things for a little while,” she suggested.

            He grunted; but as she followed his movements getting out of the car and toward the back of the house, it seemed he was following her advice.

            Inside the barren conservatory, Giles became somewhat verbal.  “I’d like to clear out the stuff in the study; after your room, it’s the room I want to get livable soonest.”

            “What about your room?” Buffy asked.

            “What about my room?  It’s ready to live in.”

            “It’s a mess.  You going to clean it up before you both move in?”

            He turned to look at her briefly, an appraising look.  “Yes.  I imagine I will.”

            Buffy refused to drop her gaze, and after a moment he continued on his way through into the back hall of the house.

            The “stuff” in the study turned out to be an aggregation of paint cans, tarps, tools, and fresh boards.  There wasn’t room in the conservatory for the length of the boards, so after moving the other things into a corner, they went back into the study and opened the French doors to remove the boards.

            “Will these be okay outside?” Buffy asked.

            He swung round to look at her, but instead of the exasperation she was expecting, she saw that he was faintly amused.  “I’ve got a set of tarps waiting for them.  They’ll stay dry if they’re properly covered.”

            Sure enough, he took her to the spot he’d chosen and gave her an end of a tarp to spread over the dead grass.  Then they returned to the house to move the boards one by one.

            “What are these going to be?”  Buffy asked him as they maneuvered the first ones (heavier than they looked, though more unwieldy than difficult for Buffy to manage) into an organized pattern on the tarp.

            “Some of them are going in the attic, to fortify the bit I’m making up there,” Giles replied, grunting as he got up from his kneeling position on the cold turf.  “Some of them are shoring up the weak doorway in the kitchen.  And some…well, I imagine I’ll find a use for them.”  He dusted off his hands and started back down the slope of lawn to the house for more boards.

            It was as they were hoisting the last board to the pile that it happened:  Giles lost his grip on the smooth surface of the wood, and the board slid sideways out of his hands, cracking him on the head before skimbling heavily to the ground.  Giles stumbled backward and sat down hard on the cold grass with a pained grunt.

            “Giles!”  Buffy tossed away her end of the board and darted toward him.  “Are you all right?”

            His head was tucked down, his teeth bared in what she recognized as a silent laugh of misery.  “I—” he uttered— “you know, I rather think not.”

            “Oh, God.” She dropped to her knees next to him.  “A concussion, do you think?”

            “No, not my head,” he said, wagging it slowly and putting his hand to the place the board had struck.  It was starting to swell a little, but the skin wasn’t broken and it didn’t look worse than any of the other head injuries he’d ever had.  “Hardly noticeable what with the hangover and all,” Giles said lightly.  He was still giving that clenched, mirthless laugh.  “Wasn’t talking about that.”  He glanced up at her, and what she saw in his eyes made her reach without thinking and gather him awkwardly into a hug.

            His muscles were harboring a fine shiver, undetectable by sight; after a moment he gave in a little and lowered his head restively to her shoulder.  Buffy sucked her lips in and held onto him gently.

            After a long moment, when she judged her voice would be stable, she said:  “I haven’t forgotten the stuff you said.”

            She felt him sigh.  “Oh…damn.”

            “I’m gonna think about it.”

            “You don’t need to,” he said, half-despairingly; but his hand brushed her arm in a small but unmistakable gesture of gratitude, and she did not rebuke him for passive-aggressive maundering.

            “I’m not sure how it got like this,” she said at length.

            “I’m fairly sure it’s not just us,” he answered.

            “No.”  She pulled away and eased her legs to sit on the ground next to him.  Overhead the clouds were soft, grey, and fluid, and the occasional breeze sharply ruffled the grass at their feet.  The silence was as near complete as anything she had known outside of the desert.  In fact, it felt much the same: everything, voices, faces, relationships, stripped to their starkest simplicity.  She thought of Elisabeth, whom she’d last seen burrowed in the bed at the flat, long hair tangled on the pillow, face shut in sleep and poorly-hidden grief.

            “I think you owe Elisabeth the largest bunch of flowers you can buy,” she told him.

            He had relaxed somewhat and was sitting with his wrists resting on his knees, looking out at the grey quiet.  “She doesn’t like flowers,” he said.

            “Well:  what does she like?”

            He thought about it.  “Light,” he said finally.  “She likes light.”

            “Well then,” Buffy said.  She got slowly to her feet and stood before him.

            “Well, what?” Giles said, blinking up at her.

            She reached down a hand to help him up.

            “Then give her light,” she said.

 

*

 

It was late when Giles brought Buffy back to the flat.  He parked briefly on the street so that she could get out.

            “Aren’t you coming in?” Buffy asked him.

            He shook his head, looking ahead into the dark.  “Not yet,” he said, answering her thought rather than her words.  “Have some things to do,” he added.

            “Okay,” she said, after a pause.  “Good night then.  I’ll see you tomorrow when we start moving.”

            “Right,” he said; she shut the door, and he pulled away slowly.

            Buffy toiled wearily up the steps to the flat and unlocked the door with the key Giles had given her.  Inside, she was relieved to see Elisabeth awake and alert, leaning backward in her desk chair to look round and greet her.

            “Hey,” Buffy said.  “You get Giles’s message?”

            “Yeah,” she said.  “You must have got a lot done, if we’re set to move tomorrow.”

            “Yeah.  I’m beat.”

            “Well, there’s sandwich makings in the fridge, if you’re hungry.”

            Actually, despite the fact that they’d stopped for dinner an hour ago, Buffy was hungry.  She got up from where she’d flopped on the couch and wandered toward the kitchen.  “How’s the writing going?” she called back to Elisabeth.

            Elisabeth waved her hand in a see-saw gesture.  “Eh.”

            “Well, you look a little better.”

            Elisabeth turned around to smile at Buffy through the kitchen doorway.  “So do you, if it comes to that.  I got up and managed to make the late service this morning.”

            Buffy blinked at her uncomprehending.

            “Third Sunday in Advent,” Elisabeth explained.  “I’d have hated to miss it.”  She turned around again and put her hands to the keyboard of her laptop.

            “Oh,” Buffy said.  “Right.”  She hadn’t even noticed it was Sunday.  She also hadn’t thought of church as something someone might dislike missing.  She went frowning thoughtfully to the fridge and opened it to survey her options.

            When she came back into the livingroom with a large sandwich and a soda, she nested in the corner of the couch nearest to Elisabeth.  The cat jumped up and sniffed at the edge of her plate before settling down.

            “So how’s Rupert?” Elisabeth asked, casually, as she typed.

            “I think he’s gonna be okay,” Buffy answered.  “He perked up a bit after we got all that work done.”

            “Your room’s ready?”

            “Yep, all green and everything.  We’re letting it air out a bit before we put the furniture in tomorrow.  What church do you go to?”

            She hadn’t intended to ask that question, but curiosity, and discomfort about discussing Giles, had prompted her to blurt.

            Elisabeth shot a wry glance her way.  “A little church off St. Aldates.  St. John of Patmos.”  At Buffy’s look, she added, “The writer of Revelation.  Natch.  It’s actually a comparatively harmless place.  The biggest uproar it’s had in recent times was the Vestry Meeting of Great Acrimony in 1999.  According to Anne, who’s the vicar there.  She’s a friend of mine and Rupert’s.”

            It was hard to imagine Giles being friends with a priest, but then it was hard to imagine him calling in a favor from a demon, and he’d done that. 

            “It was she,” Elisabeth said, raveling the thread, “who teamed up with Brian to nurse me back on my feet.”

            There was a faint wistfulness in her tone, as if she would rather not have collapsed in the first place, but would not deny her friends their due.

            Buffy asked:  “So…uh…how exactly did Giles and I get home last night?  My memory is kinda dim on that point.”

            Elisabeth said simply, “The landlord of the Black Key called me, and offered to have his two sons drive you both home and get you in the door.  So they did, and I tipped them handsomely and put you to bed.”

            “Have they had to do that before?” Buffy asked, in a low voice.

            “No,” Elisabeth said.

            “But you were expecting it.”

            She drew an impatient breath, but let it out in a deep sigh.  “Eventually, yes.  I gave the man my card just in case.”

            “Does Giles know that?”

            “Probably not,” Elisabeth said dryly, “but apparently he suspects me of wishing to interfere.”

            “I don’t know what he said, but I think he’s really sorry about it,” Buffy said.

            Elisabeth turned to her an amused look.  “I know he is.  Else he would have come in with you tonight.”  She smiled at Buffy, then turned with an air of resolution to her laptop.

            Buffy looked down at her sandwich.  She had only taken a few bites, and now was not really hungry; but she ate it anyway, then got up and washed her dish.  By the time she went to bed, Elisabeth had regained the momentum of her typing and paused only to smile her a goodnight, her glasses low on her nose.

 

*

 

“All right, there?” Giles asked.

            “Yeah,” Buffy answered from the back seat.

            The three of them had spent the better part of the morning moving the things they would need from the flat to the house.  Giles had arrived about nine, with the air of one who has risen early, and they had brought their first carload to Pyke’s Lea, the coffee from their cups steaming in the chill.  As it fell out, it was Giles and Elisabeth who put together Buffy’s bed, as they were familiar with its workings; Buffy was pressed into service to hold up the frame while Elisabeth wriggled under it to tighten the bolts.  Secretly, Buffy watched them work together, and was pleased to see them treat one another with increasing gentleness.  When Elisabeth asked Giles for the Phillips-head screwdriver, her voice (muffled as it was under the bed) was nearly trouble-free; and Giles handed it to her without the restless trepidation he’d used to her when he first arrived.

            They broke for sandwiches at the flat after the second trip, and now, with the last carload carrying their own clothes and personal things, they were on their way to the house for good.  Buffy was carrying the cat, who was thin and alert in her arms.  When Giles started the car and pulled out into the street, the cat twisted in her grasp and looked round out the windows, his front paws pressed into her front, eyes wide and pupils small.  The sun, the first English sun Buffy had seen, cast a watery light over them and showed the dust on the cat’s black coat, turned his eyes to green gold.

            Now, halfway there, the cat’s paws were braced less urgently on her chest, and though his ears still swiveled sharply, pricked for danger, the expression on his face had taken on a hint of curiosity. 

“I think he’s calming down a little bit now,” Buffy said.

            “Good,” Elisabeth said from the front.  “Thanks for holding him.  When we brought him from Bath to my flat, we put him in a pet carrier, and oh, was he mad.  When we let him out he gave us the dirtiest look you ever saw and shot out to hide behind the toilet.  I was afraid to use the bathroom for a whole day—didn’t seem smart to expose my bare backside to those claws.”  She glanced back affectionately at the cat, who moved an ear to catch her voice.

            “He was madder at me,” Giles said.  “He likes you better.”

            “You’re his job,” Elisabeth said playfully.  “I’m his friend.”

            Giles snorted.

 

*

 

At the threshold of Pyke’s Lea, Buffy put the cat down to make his own entrance.  Elisabeth stood, hugging the bedding for Buffy’s bed to her chest, and watched him closely.  Whiskers and ears pricked, visibly sniffing the air beyond the open door, he picked his way a few steps inside; then all at once he broke into a light canter and disappeared down the hall.

            “That’s all right then,” she breathed.

            Buffy and Rupert nodded relieved assent and they all went inside.

            Elisabeth made it her first business to make up Buffy’s bed, so she went upstairs at once.  As she worked the bedskirt across the box-spring, she listened to the sound of Rupert’s and Buffy’s voices downstairs and the clatter of their efforts to straighten up the kitchen with all they had brought for it.  It seemed they were making a very good recovery from their night of debauchery, and from the reason for it.  And it seemed that this recovery had eased some of Rupert’s constrained behavior to herself.

            Steadily her hands smoothed the fitted sheet over the mattress.  Xander was right: this was what Rupert wanted, their four heads under the roof of his beloved house, and happy.

            On went the flat sheet, and the pillow into its case.  As she picked up the comforter to shake out onto the smooth bed, Rupert came in carrying a light nightstand and a lamp, and moved politely around her to set them up next the bed, under the window.

            “I haven’t seen that lamp,” she said.  “Where did you get it?”

            “I found it in an antique shop down the street from St. John’s,” he said.  “You know it?”

            “I’ve seen it,” she said, “but I haven’t been in.”

            “I was pleasantly surprised,” he said, his hands straightening the frosted glass shade and centering the wrought-iron base on the small table.  He plugged it in and turned it on, and the green room glowed.  Without discussing it, he moved to help her spread the comforter over the bed and pull it straight; while she arranged the sham over the pillow, he spread the small rug he’d brought on the floor next to the bed.

            “It looks good,” she said, stepping back to admire the total picture.

            “It does, doesn’t it?” he said shyly, next to her.

            She smiled at him; then went out and downstairs.

            In the kitchen she put on water for tea, and got the beef cuts out of the freezer for Rupert to make into stew for dinner.  When Rupert followed her in, she said, “I got out the—” but stopped at the look on his face.

            “I got something for you, too,” he said.  He drew his hand into the room from the hall.  Resting on his palm was a small candle-stand, with a candle burning in it.  The curved shield was made of a mosaic of stained glass so delicate that the white glass in it shone like diamond and the colored like a rose of aquamarine, peridot, and topaz.

            He held it forward to her, chin down, with an expression of grave anxiety in his eyes, and she knew what it meant.  She swallowed and slowly reached to cup his hand and shift his gift to hers.  “Thank you,” she whispered at last, with the candle burning now on her own palm.

            He stood silent, with an air of awaiting judgement, while she studied her gift.  Finally she said:  “It’s beautiful.  I….”  She stopped, for a moment paralyzed by the same polarity of feeling she had felt the night she had put him to bed.  Then she went on, looking up at him:  “I…I’m going to take this and find where it lives.  Thank you,” she said again, and moved gently round him to take the burning candle upstairs.

            In the bathroom the shower was going:  Buffy, removing the grime of the move.  She went into the master bedroom and slowly sank onto the made bed, laying the candle on her nightstand.

            The light flickered and winked brightly at her in many colors.  She sat, dry-eyed, looking at it and unable to understand why she had been seized by such fear and despair.  “I can do this,” she whispered to it almost inaudibly.  “Can’t I?”

            One candle is sufficient.

            With a sudden gesture of desperation, Elisabeth got up and blew the candle out, then grabbed her jacket.  Downstairs, she heard Rupert clattering in the kitchen; she went past without encountering him and slipped out the front door.  Down the lane and out to the road her steps drove her; she walked doggedly on the gravel verge, hands deep in her jacket pockets.  Overhead the late sun sparkled on damp leaves and cast a lengthening shadow ahead of her as she moved.  The air was fresh and cold, but it was not working to clear her mind.

            She walked until she grew tired, then crossed the road and turned into a cattle path that wound its way to a lonely stone wall overlooking a field.  There she sat, hands braced next to her, eyes devouring the tranquil scene as if it might hold some clue inscribed in the gentle wave of dry grasses, or the ridge of trees against the deepening sky.

            Oh God, she breathed, what is this?  What do I do?  How do I go on from here?  But instead of answer she found herself falling further into a dizzying doubt.  Her gorge rising, she rode the waves of horror, waiting for them to abate.

            She sat for a long time, shivering with both cold and fear, unable to form a thought-thread in the labyrinth, or even to quote herself a soothing line.

            “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered to the empty field.

            That in itself was no comfort, but saying it aloud leached her fear of some of its power.  As the sun lowered she sat and breathed her way back into a semblance of equilibrium.

            A step sounded to her left, and she turned to see Buffy, with her fleece jacket zipped to her chin, standing at the head of the path.  When she saw that Elisabeth found her welcome, she moved forward to meet her.

            “Giles sent me to tell you dinner’s about ready,” she said, her cheeks pink and filaments of her hair flipping in the breeze.  “Only he slipped and called it tea.”

            Elisabeth found she was able to smile.  “Yes.  I’m ready.”  She got off the wall: her backside was icy from her stone perch, and she massaged it gently.

            They walked back slowly, the setting sun in their faces, their silence tinged with sadness but comfortable.  At the head of the lane to Pyke’s Lea, Elisabeth paused to breathe in the vesper air, gazing with somber pleasure at the way the light hit the aged brick, the glimmer of glass in the dormer windows.

            “It’s a lovely light, isn’t it?” she said to Buffy, and went ahead to go in to the warmth of the house.

 

*

 

Buffy was worried.  It was plain to her that Elisabeth was suffering from a great weight of…something, and that Giles’s obvious efforts to win her forgiveness weren’t helping.  She had watched him prepare dinner with his usual quiet dexterity, but spotted the telling gestures in the careful way he set the table, in his long perusal of the wine rack, in the wiping of his faintly-trembling fingers on his apron.  The apron was amusing, but somehow made his air of anxious concentration and refusal to glance out the window more ominous.

            “Would you go find her?” he said to Buffy at last, without looking her way.  “It’s almost ready.”

            Buffy zipped up her jacket and went out, glad of the errand.

            It was not difficult to find Elisabeth; the road was really only walkable in a westerly direction, and Elisabeth’s footprints were easily visible in the damp mould of the verge.  The cattle path was an inviting place to turn, and she soon came within sight of Elisabeth, sitting very still on the wall.  When she turned her head, Buffy could see even at the slight distance that she had not been crying.  Buffy felt obscurely that it would have been better if she had.

            But as they returned to the house, she was oddly relieved when Elisabeth paused to look at the light of the sunset as it lay on the house, with an expression less masked than before.  She started again up the lane, and Buffy followed a few paces behind, breathing what was almost a wordless prayer.

            The light inside the house was as warm as the dying sun was cold.  Shivering, Buffy hung up her jacket on the new row of coat pegs and chafed her numbed, stinging hands together.  Elisabeth had gone ahead, and she heard her bump into Giles in the kitchen doorway.

            “Oh! sorry,” she heard him say, and “sorry!” she said almost at the same moment.  Then she said:  “Do you need help?”

            “No…wait, yes.  You can get that tureen of peas off the counter.”

            “Right.”

            Buffy went forward, through the mixed warmth of the hall, into the dining alcove off the kitchen, where Elisabeth was nudging aside the butter to make room for the peas and Giles was pouring red wine.  “Half? or full?” he said, moving from his glass to hers.

            “Three quarters,” Elisabeth said.

            “Buffy, would you care for some?” Giles asked, looking up belatedly.

            Buffy would have refused, thinking that the more space she put between herself and the alcohol of the other night, the better; but something in his look, and the inviting darkness of the wine, prompted her to say, “Half a glass.”

            He duly poured it for her, then put the bottle on the sideboard and took his seat.  Then he raised his glass as if to toast; Elisabeth picked up her glass and clinked his gently, then offered to clink Buffy’s.  They all sipped; the red wine was warming to the taste, as Buffy had hoped.

            Slowly, as they heaped their plates with Giles’s cooking and satisfied their well-earned hunger, they turned to light conversation.  Elisabeth detailed the section of the thesis she was working on (an expansion of a previous paper about George Macdonald and his layering of reality); and Giles offered a corollary example from a German fairy tale that was based on Undine.  Buffy watched Elisabeth covertly as he talked: she regarded him at first with the tilted frown of an academic; then her lips thinned pensively, and she looked through him rather than at him for a moment.  Then she turned her attention to her plate again, took a sip of wine, and took up his point about soul-ravished lovers with “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which Buffy actually remembered from her long-ago studies in school.

            “That’s the one where the guy kisses her eyes shut and then wanders around all emo, right?”

            Giles hid a smile in his glass of wine, but Elisabeth turned her smile openly to Buffy.  “Yeah, pretty much.  The interesting thing, though, when you compare it to the Macdonald, is the idea of liminal landscapes.  We only have liminal landscapes, pretty much, if we make them; but in faerie, they’re literalized.”

            “And on the Hellmouth,” Buffy said.

            Elisabeth gave her a knowing smile.  “And on the Hellmouth.”

            “Y’know, I almost miss it.”

            Giles put down his glass to stare at her.  “But not quite,” Buffy said hastily, raising her palms.  Elisabeth laughed.

            He relaxed, but stared into the distance for a moment.  Then he murmured:  “‘O how I long to travel back And tread again that ancient track!’”

            Buffy could not help but know what he meant; and looking at Elisabeth, she could see that the import was not lost on her either.  “Is that Keats?” Buffy asked him, tentatively.

            “Henry Vaughan,” Elisabeth answered, still looking at him.

            His only response was a blink of acknowledgement to both of them; then he bent to his plate again.

            They finished their meal in a more comfortable silence; moreover, Buffy could see Elisabeth stealing speculative glances at her partner’s profile.  She suddenly saw Rupert Giles as Elisabeth must see him: an appealing mixture of dignity and humility, a prophet’s gaze but a boy’s smile, an honest awareness of himself that Buffy had met in no other man.  Elisabeth turned her eyes back to her plate, and rearranged her napkin on her lap: but Buffy could see the faint warmth that had come into her eyes before she cast them down, and breathed suddenly in relief.

            Celebrating, Buffy lifted her glass of wine and drained it.

 

*

 

They all agreed that it was best to go to bed early.  So, after clearing up from supper and taking each to themselves the tasks of arranging the things they’d brought, they called goodnight to one another, and Buffy went upstairs.  They heard the door of her new bedroom close gently.

            To Rupert’s relief, the house had finally warmed up properly, and the drafts had thinned enough that he fancied he could find their source and stop them.  That, however, was a task for another day; right now, he was going to shower and make for bed.  He left Elisabeth making a last-minute notation on something on her laptop at the dining-table—“You’ll fasten up for the night?” he asked her; “Yes, I will”—and went upstairs himself.

            Elisabeth had left her candle on her nightstand.  He was reassured to see it there; to see that she had neither hidden it nor set it in some more public area of the house.  He changed into pajama bottoms and T-shirt, ran his fingers through his shower-damp hair, and hung up the robe he’d brought, to wear in the morning.  Then he sat down on the bed, on the side that was Elisabeth’s, and reached out a finger to touch his gift to her.

            She liked it, he hoped.

            He heard her come upstairs, and the bathroom door shut.  The shower started, and he sat quietly, listening to the hollow fall of water, a familiar sound in a new place.  He sat listening for the whole length of time it took her to bathe, imbibing the sensation of evening in his house; but when the water shut off, he roused himself and reached for the travel alarm he had brought some days before.

            When Elisabeth came in, robed and warm, he was setting it desultorily.  “What time do you want to get up?” he asked, without looking up.

            Instead of answering, she crossed to him and took the clock out of his hands to put back on the nightstand; then laid both hers along his face and lifted it to kiss him.

            He had been longing for her to do exactly this; but still he pulled away and uttered:  “What—what are you doing?”

            “I was,” she said softly, “making a tacit proposal to take all your clothes off and lay you down.”  He caught the briefest glimpse of her bright eyes before she kissed him again.  Warm, tremulous desire spread through his body; and her hands moving to stroke his damp hair up from the nape drew his exquisite attention.

            Still he broke the kiss again, with an effort, and said:  “Does that mean you forgive me?”

            “Oh, Rupert,” she whispered, with a note in her voice that caught at his breath.  She rocked him gently backward to fall upon the bed; his hands came to rest open at the level of his head either side, and he let her crawl astride of him and resume their kiss.

            But all the same he persisted.  “Is that a yes?” he murmured against her mouth.

            She rose up to look at him.  “Yes, it’s a yes,” she said.  Her hands stroked up the exposed inside of his wrists and pinioned him, her thumbs in the hollows of his palms.  “Now shh.  No more words.”

            This time, when she bent to him, he kissed her back, and with all the generosity she was showing to him.  She was close; she was close, and he wanted her closer.  Her thumbs pressed deeper into his palms, and he drew in a sharp gasp.

            Presently she rose again, breaking their kiss and straddling him more snugly.  His eyes dropped to her hands pulling at the belt-tie of her robe.

            “‘I am naked first, to teach thee,’” she said lightly, as faint of breath as he.  She shrugged out of her robe and shed it behind her, where it brushed his knees and fell to the floor.

            His hands lifted of their own accord to conform to her thighs.  “I thought you said no more words.”

            Her eyes were bright and warm with a mother-cat pleasure, and her soft, pretty mouth curved into a smile as arresting as the curves of her body.

            “I lied,” she said.

 

*

 

Buffy lay in the darkness of her new bedroom waiting drowsily for sleep.  The bed was very comfortable, and the paint smell had almost fully passed.  It was, altogether, an even more pleasing consummation than she had anticipated when this trip had been planned.

            But still she was restless, and sleep would not come.  It had been ages since she patrolled, ages since she had needed to; and she felt the hunting urge tickling at the edges of her consciousness.  Oxford wasn’t on a Hellmouth; that was clear enough; but the wild quiet of the English countryside called to her instincts.

            She gave in, and decided:  she would wait till the night was still enough, and then go down to reconnoiter.

 

*

 

“Took us long enough to get here,” Elisabeth said.

            “Yes,” he answered.  She had given his hands full license to rove, and she shut her eyes in pleasure at the swell of his caress.  “You did shut the door, right?” he murmured.

            She grinned, eyes still closed.  “Yes.”

            “Good,” he said, and rolled them over gently so that he rested upon her.

            Presently:  “Did you bring it?” he said on a breath.

            “You bet your sweet bippy,” she said, and he broke into laughter.

 

*

 

Quietly Buffy got up and dressed, opting for a long-sleeved T-shirt and her warmest exercise trousers.  Carrying her sneakers, she opened the door and crept out into the hall.

            At the bottom of Giles’s and Elisabeth’s door was a very faint light, tremulous and flickering, as of a candle; and she could hear them murmuring faintly on the other side.  It didn’t take a genius to suss what was going on, so Buffy made her way as quickly as possible to the head of the stairs, and down.  As she did so, she heard him laugh: a laugh unlike any she’d heard from him, without a trace of the rectitude that normally clung even to his sense of humor.  Then a soft, voiced gasp from Elisabeth, with a note of accomplishment in it.  She hurried her steps before she could hear any more.

            The front door creaked loudly as she opened it, and though she doubted that they were in a listening-to-noises place, she winced and waited a moment before stepping outside.  She pulled it shut behind her, but opened it again almost immediately when she heard a scratching down low.  The cat trotted out, a black shape against the far-off light at the head of the lane, and disappeared round the corner of the porch.

            It seemed she wasn’t the only one with the idea of a patrol.  Buffy descended the porch steps and settled into a comfortable stride in the direction the cat had gone, her grip sure on the stake in her pocket.

 

*

 

Resting together, they listened to one another’s breathing and watched the tea light sink and gutter in the stand he had given her.  Neither of them moved to put it out; it wasn’t yet clear whether they were finished and ready to go to sleep, and they were, for the moment, languorously comfortable where they lay.

            After a while he moved to nuzzle the nape of her drying hair.  “All right?” he murmured.

            “Mm.” She drew a long breath and turned onto her back; he shifted out of her way and resettled his arm across her.

            “You?” she asked.

            “Never better,” he said, smiling; and she gave a gentle snort.

            After a moment:  “…And you don’t think I’m a puritan?” she said, wistfully.

            He went still, then lifted his head.  “No,” he said.  “I was just—”

            “—Because I was going to say,” she went on quietly, “if you do there’s not much I can do about it.”

            “I don’t,” he said firmly.  “It was the nearest stupid weapon to hand.  It was nothing to do with…with reality.”

            In the faint light her eyes were closed, her face calm.  “I thought maybe so,” she said.  “But all the same, you’ll be honest with me, won’t you?  You know something about my family.  You know they’re…they have something to do with puritanical sadism.  I sometimes fear…they’ve passed it on to me.”

            He nestled his face below her ear.  “I know,” he said.  “I will.  I’m sorry.”

            She moved a hand to touch him.  “I know.”

            “I wish I could unsay it.”

            “Nah,” she said.  “It was in the air.  It needed exorcising.”

            Her words, and her tone, released his heart to a buoyant lightness.  “Still,” he said, with energy, “I want to make it up to you.  Put the penitence where it belongs…mea culpa—mea culpa—mea maxima culpa….”  He followed his confessions each with soft kisses down her arm.

            She laughed.  “Rupert, knock that off.”  But she did not resist his caresses, and a few moments later she arched to his touch, and lost her words again.

 

*

 

The wind had dropped, and the clouds scudded high in the sky, pearling where they touched the moon.  Buffy had walked the perimeter of the property, including the wood, and had met nothing wilder than the cat.

            Her thoughts, however, were a thicket of shadow-like worries, creeping without substance enough for her to dispatch them.  She had told him she would think about what he’d said, but the truth was she had been thinking about it long before he said it.  She had her hands full figuring out what a Slayer was, and then she’d gone and changed the definition, without considering what it would do to the definition of him, although she suspected that he had been trying to anticipate and facilitate that change outside her notice.  In all the charges he’d laid at her door he had not, she noticed, finally blamed her for his own bitterness; but she wished he had.  Maybe it would have gotten him over this…hump of self-accusation.

            But then again, maybe not.  This was Giles we were talking about.  Buffy kicked lightly at a tussock of grass, making the cat turn to look briefly at her, fifteen paces ahead.  Maybe Elisabeth was right, and they just had to let him work it out on his own, with as little interference as possible.  Elisabeth was smart; way smarter than she was.  Buffy glanced up at the quarter moon and half-consciously calculated the time between now and the new moon.  Round about Christmas it’d be much darker.  She’d patrol then, too.

            She made her way quietly around the house to the front.  The flickering light in the window of the master bedroom had gone, and the house was dark.  The cat was waiting for her on the doorstep.  She let them both in, shut the door as quietly as she could, peeled off her damp grass-coated sneakers, and crept upstairs.

            All was quiet.  Relaxing, Buffy returned on silent feet to her bedroom.  She stripped off her trousers and crawled into bed, where she fell asleep almost at once.  A few minutes later she was roused briefly by the cat nosing the door open and leaping up to curl warmly at her feet, but soon closed her eyes again; and the house slept.

 

*

 

Chapter 8

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