Home Repairs
Chapter Eight: Dead Secrets
by L. Inman
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, can no longer harm.
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Rupert put the kettle
on and stared hard into the marbled pattern of the countertop. It wasn’t a fluke, then. The first night, when she had startled him
awake by sitting bolt upright in bed, racked with dry sobs, he had decided that
the psychic wound, the old wound of being torn from her home, had come to
trouble her. He had comforted her with
his hands and his voice, and eased her back to sleep, curled into him and
nested in his arms. In the morning she
had waked first in the grey dawn light, and teased him out of sleep with a
light finger stroked down the bridge of his nose and over his morning stubble
and across the broad curves of his arm; and he had offered her every last ounce
of solace in his body, and she had accepted it with a gladness that felt to him
as though she’d released it from some inward tether.
But whatever had hold of her had not
let her go. She had been quiet and
distractable throughout the day, and the following night had slept badly, never
settling to one position, twitching, and at last, dreaming. His hands and voice were not enough, and she
had got up finally to open a window and draw in the night air with long gasps.
That morning she had sat cold and
numbly staring at her breakfast, and then got dressed and went out
walking. He had considered following
her, but decided against it: if it could be solved, she would solve it, and if
it couldn’t, she would bring it to him in her time.
He had been passing through the hall
when she came in from the back door, and her look was not of one who had solved
her trouble. If anything, she looked
worse: pale, and ill, and pinched under the eyes. She saw him, and cut her eyes away.
Now she was sitting in the drawing
room, staring sightlessly out the window with her knees drawn up, and he had
passed from perplexity to alarm to a quiet, curdling fear. He could no longer refrain from investigating:
tea seemed the obvious opening, so he waited, with the two cups ready on the
counter, for the water to come to the boil.
“It’s not for fixing,” he said
quietly, “it’s for investigating.
Has…has she told you anything?”
Willow cast her gaze upward,
thinking, but then shook her head.
“What do you…what are you—what are
you reading on her?” He pushed the
question out, ignoring the breach it had made in his efforts to insulate
himself and Willow from raw feeling.
She shut the fridge door and drew a
slow breath. Then: “She’s afraid.”
“Well, obviously,” Rupert said. “I mean—what—?”
“No; it goes deeper than the
obvious,”
“But…,” he cast caution to the
winds, “but—do you know why?”
“No,”
He put up placating palms. “I’m not asking. I’m not asking you to. I just wanted something to go on.”
“Your water’s boiling,”
He set the cup of tea
before Elisabeth on the end table, at enough of a distance that she could
refuse it, close enough to be a definite offer.
He took up a seat across from her, in a creaking wicker-backed chair,
and lifted his own cup for a patient sip, as much a statement as the original
gift.
His heart sank: instead of reaching
for the tea, she merely turned her miserable gaze upon it and mumbled a
protest.
“Sorry?” he said, turning an ear to
her. But his mind had caught up and
translated her mumble nevertheless. Don’t
be kind to me. I can’t bear it.
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.
“There’s nothing you have to do,” he
said softly.
She closed her eyes and
shuddered. “Yes there is,” she
said. “I have to go. I have to go home.”
She was supposed to have stayed two
more days. “Are you sure?” he said.
“I have to go,” she repeated,
doggedly. “I shouldn’t have come.”
He put his tea down in the saucer,
then after a hesitation set down the saucer on the coffee table. “Can’t you tell me?” He resisted the impulse to run his hands
nervously over his thighs, and made them rest upon his knees instead.
She shut her eyes again, tighter,
and shook her head.
“Elisabeth,” he said.
“I have to go away,” she said, and
this time looked at him. “I have to go
now, before it gets harder.”
“Before what gets harder?” But he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Leaving,” she said, very pale
now. But her expression, looking up at
him, was…immovable. It was the
expression that brought the full sense of the word home to him.
She let down her feet to the floor,
and sat with her small, boyish hands pressed down either side of her seat, as
if she had stopped in for an afternoon visit and was drawing the conversation
to a close.
He frowned, and blinked back up at
her face. “Are you—” He stopped,
unwilling to believe his own conclusion.
“Are you attempting to break up with me?”
If anything, her expression closed
tighter, but he could feel—he didn’t need to be
“Without even telling me why.” His gut clamped hard.
“You already know.”
“No,” he said, slowly, “I actually
don’t. Enlighten me.”
“It’s because it’s....” She broke
off and stirred restlessly to her feet.
“I’m not—I’m not safe.”
He found that he had risen too. “Of course it’s not safe,” he said. “I thought that was understood. I thought you’d accepted the risks. You of all people ought to understand—”
“No, it’s you who don’t
understand. I said I’m not safe.” She gestured desperately at her chest. “I’m not safe, I’m a danger to you.”
“You’ve said this before,” he said,
fixing her with a frown. “It doesn’t
seem relevant.”
“That’s why it’s dangerous. I can’t…,” she stopped to glance around the
room as if looking for a last-minute reprieve— “I can’t be with you and know
what I know.”
“Then why were you with me at all?”
he said, and was startled at the anger in his own voice.
For a moment her face lost its
resolve; but she recovered, drawing a breath and clasping her hands to her
mouth for a moment. “I’ve thought it all
over,” she said, her voice constricted, “and there isn’t any room for me any
more. There was a little room when you
came to me, after Buffy died—there was a little room for me then. I took you in, and got—involved. But if I wasn’t there—if I wasn’t there
somebody else would have saved you. But
you don’t see—with what’s coming—it won’t be like that anymore. I can’t afford to be important.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” Rupert
said, dryly.
“I can’t fix it,” she said, her
voice hard again, “but I can stop it. I
can go away, and I can stay away.”
“That seems in keeping with your
usual policy,” he said.
She reddened. “You don’t understand how bad it’s going to
be,” she said. “You don’t know—the scope
of it. It’s not just about Sunnydale
anymore.”
“No,” he said, “that is something I
do know—or why are we in
“No,” she whispered.
For a moment their triumph before
the Council, their buoyant trust in one another, the certainty of partnership
that had filled him with such delight and gratitude, lay open between them, in
all its wonder. With her, he would not
fear blindness.
“Then fight with me,” he said, with
a soft intensity he hadn’t felt since he couldn’t remember when. “Fight alongside me.”
She looked him dead in the eye and
said: “No.”
*
O Sapientia
A strong, chasing wind cleared the sky over Pyke’s Lea, then moved in fresh clouds to bank the horizons. Buffy and Giles moved in and out of the house, carrying tarps and sanding equipment and painting paraphernalia to various destinations; Elisabeth took up a position at the kitchen table with her laptop and gathered to herself a nest of books and papers nearly as impressive as the one at her desk in the Oxford flat. She sat, a close-eyed gaze on the screen whether her hands were moving or not, her legs tucked up under her tailor-fashion, a perennial cup of tea cooling at her elbow. It was she who jumped at opportunities to go out for groceries or retrieve the odd item from the flat; more than once Buffy saw her pause on the brick walk on the way out to the car, and draw in a long breath of the chill air. That her escape had to do with more than just her thesis, Buffy knew by the fact that the one time Giles was present at her departure, on his knees in the walk planting solar-powered foot-lights along the way, Elisabeth had been relentlessly cheerful and solicitous to inquire if he needed anything.
He didn’t.
That evening, while Giles was cooking and Elisabeth was in the bathroom, the shower a ghostly noise in the falling night, Buffy got up her nerve and called Dawn.
“Finally,” she said. “We were beginning to wonder if you’d died up there.”
“Not funny,” Buffy said. “Anyway, I’m fine. It just took a while to adjust.”
“Having fun?” Dawn inquired.
“Uh…I’m not sure ‘fun’ is the word I’d use—as I told you before.” Buffy pushed her bedroom door further closed and sat down on her bed. “It’s been kinda rough. But I’m hoping things are smoothing out now.”
“Did you and Giles fight?” Dawn asked, and Buffy rolled her eyes at her sister’s blunt inquisitory methods.
“What do you think?” she said. “We also got drunk and woke up in the same bed.”
“Not funny,” Dawn said.
“It’s true.” Having regained equal footing, Buffy gave Dawn an expurgated version of their burst of free speech and the scotchfest that followed (the latter had grown rather shadowy in her memory). She found herself, to her private disquiet, omitting the information of Spike’s mysterious resurrection—not that that was difficult, as Spike had seemed to serve merely as the spark to a keg of gasoline rather than forming much of the substance of their conflict itself. Dawn didn’t need to know Spike was back. It would only inspire needless freakage. And wasn’t that why Giles had kept his silence? Buffy sighed to herself. If she didn’t want to be a total hypocrite, she had to acknowledge that Dawn had a right to know.
But she couldn’t bring herself to say it.
It was with
relief that she welcomed Dawn’s offer to hand her off to
“Hey,”
“All right, all right. I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier, okay?”
“We figured it must mean really bad news or really good news.”
“Well…it’s kinda both. The good news is, Giles and I got drunk.”
“…Oh,”
“The bad news is, he’s not doing very well, and he actually admitted it.”
“No kidding. I can feel his vibes from here.”
“And…you were right about him and Elisabeth.”
“How are they doing?”
Buffy leaned back against her pillow and sighed. “I think they’re doing better than they were. And we’re all in the house now, so they’re not separated any more.”
“That…sounds monumentally not convincing, Buffy.”
“I know,” Buffy sighed again. “It’s just that she’s…haunted. And he’s—Will, he’s not just on a guilt trip, he’s on like a guilt quest.”
“That
sounds like Giles,”
“They do a lot of fighting without fighting,” Buffy said.
“Me too.”
“But I’m guessing that’s not the kind of fighting you’ve been doing with him.”
“No.” Buffy told
No, it just wasn’t something she wanted to discuss with anyone—or have flying around in discussion round her ears. She could imagine the stuff Xander would say not quite out of her electronic earshot; and Andrew. God. What kind of myth would he Joseph-Campbell this Spike thing into? She seemed to be quibbling less and less with Giles’s decision, if decision it was, which that was still kind of in doubt. Giles seemed constitutionally unable to make any decisions at all, except to keep doggedly working on his house.
When was silence the same thing as duplicity?
The
question niggled at her as she made plans with
“Buffy,” came Giles’s voice thinly from below. “Dinner.”
“I gotta go,” Buffy said. “I’ll call you later.”
“You
better,”
*
O Adonai
“I’ll see you later,” Giles said, straightening the lapels of his leather jacket and slinging a scarf round his neck. “Here’s hoping it won’t take all afternoon.”
“Drive safe,” Elisabeth said, kissing his cheek. Buffy waved.
Buffy didn’t really need confirmation of Elisabeth’s state of mind, but the moment Giles shut the front door and they heard his footsteps crunching down the front walk to the car, Buffy could see Elisabeth draw the first relaxed breath of the day.
“Well,” she said, with a wry glance in Buffy’s direction, “you’ll have to put up with my cooking today. I doubt he’ll get Andrew through Heathrow before dinnertime.” Cheerfully, she went into the kitchen and started opening cabinets, pushing out her lips and clucking to herself.
“Can I help?”
Elisabeth opened her mouth, a clear refusal on her lips, but apparently changed her mind. “Sure. What would you like to eat?”
Buffy joined her at the open cabinet and studied its contents dubiously. Their M.O. for the last few days had been to make small grocery trips for the main meals of the day; Giles and Elisabeth both had put off the task of laying in supplies for Christmas Day, and the cabinets were half-filled with random things—a packet of coffee here, a tin of hot cereal there, noodles, cans of tuna for the cat.
In the end they decided on tuna casserole, spiced with rosemary from the herb garden. The cat sat in the kitchen doorway and looked at them silently, twitching his tail curled around his feet. “We’re going shopping for Christmas stuff tomorrow; you won’t be out of tuna for long,” Elisabeth told him.
“What are we having for Christmas?” Buffy asked.
“Oh,” Elisabeth said, with an artless sigh, “I didn’t want to make Rupert cook a whole turkey, so I suggested we get a roast. Other than that, we haven’t really planned the menu. I want to get some wine for mulling, and some cider, and some oranges, and milk and cream to make eggnog. Not to mention the tea.” She opened the cupboard and pulled out two teacups with their saucers. “Remind me to bring the latte cups out from the flat; they’ll do well for the mulled wine.”
“You certainly aren’t lacking in teacups,” Buffy observed, looking at the congregation of mugs on the bottom shelf, and the matching service on the second shelf from which Elisabeth had drawn.
Elisabeth snorted. “I think the missing socks in the dryer transmogrify into mugs and reappear in cabinets.”
Buffy laughed.
*
Without Giles in the house, the day moved quietly, without a snag in the surface of the current of passing sunlight. Elisabeth, having laid out their two places for tea on the kitchen table, retired into the dining room and her nest of books, leaving Buffy to wander or work as she chose.
Buffy chose to wander. She had made patrols of the outside perimeter, but she had not yet explored the house without the weight of Giles’s anxious gaze upon her. She felt guilty of a vague treachery for being relieved at getting rid of him for a few hours, but guilt made the relief no less real. She was beginning to understand Elisabeth’s air of attempting to make amends for something; it must be wearing to love someone and be relieved whenever they went away.
But it was Giles’s own fault, dammit. Why couldn’t he do something straightforward about his crisis, like…get turned into a Fyarl demon? For the first time in her life Buffy wished for the convenient antagonism of Ethan Rayne. But no, she told herself, you do not want that.
Even though it meant Giles had nothing to fight but shadows.
Buffy found that her wandering steps had taken her to the study. Over lunch her first day here, Elisabeth had described their battle with her ancestor’s ghost, which had taken place in this room, with Brian eagerly putting in to describe his experience of being possessed. There had been flitting shadows, glamors of the house burning, defiling breezes. Glancing around the study, Buffy saw no trace of any of these things; the house had ceased to be malignant as completely as Giles had been consumed by his own haunting.
But the room still had an air of reticence, as if it had despaired of ever being heard and had now drawn into itself. Upon the ceiling were figures and designs obscured by years of dust and ash and grease; the old dim mirror over the fireplace reflected its surroundings with a faint reluctance, as if it would rather be looking inward.
Buffy shook her head. It was weird to use her peripheral senses for something other than danger.
Suddenly a shadow flickered among the bookshelves. Buffy jumped and stifled a yelp. “Oh—it’s you,” she said to the cat, who was uncurling himself from one of the shelves and jumping to the floor. “You getting used to this place?”
For answer the cat lifted his tail into a high curve and sauntered out of the room as if he had lived there for years.
Of them all, Buffy reflected as she left the room to wander elsewhere, the cat seemed least unnerved by the shadows of dead secrets.
*
It was while they were washing up all the dishes of the day, the sunset fast fading out the windows of the kitchen, that Buffy nerved herself up to ask.
“Rupert’s not back yet,” Elisabeth said, pausing with her hands in the soapy water to glance out the diamond panes at the deepening night.
Buffy looked in the same direction briefly, her hands in a dishtowel held out to receive the next dish. “No,” she said. “He—” She stopped.
Elisabeth glanced at her before reaching for another dish. “Yes?”
Buffy had been impatient with Giles’s attitude toward Elisabeth, one moment acting as if she could crush him if he didn’t act first, and the next treating her like eggshell porcelain. She didn’t look like either extreme to Buffy; but misgiving, like the misgiving that had seized her tongue on the phone with Dawn, choked her silent.
“What?” Elisabeth said. “Did he say something?”
“A lot of somethings,” Buffy said. “He—that one day—he said he’d made all these sacrifices and only had being irrelevant to show for it.”
Elisabeth sighed and handed the rinsed dish to Buffy, who dried it mechanically, then laid it on the towel on the counter with the others. “He must have been pretty embittered,” Elisabeth said, “to actually say that.”
“Well,” Buffy said uncomfortably, “it kinda started when I got mad at him for not telling me Spike was alive.”
“Ah,” Elisabeth breathed, and reached into the water again; but then she paused. “But I thought he had told you. Didn’t he, a few months ago?”
“He didn’t get coherent enough to actually get around to telling me, if he meant to,” Buffy said dryly.
Elisabeth gave another deep sigh and raised a pan from the water to scrub.
“He said he found it out from you,” Buffy said, her face heating. This was what she’d been aiming to ask, and she still didn’t know how Elisabeth would take it.
At first she gave no answer, scrubbing minutely at the pan’s surface. Then she said: “I take it you don’t have much of an inside track on what’s going on with Angel.”
“No,” Buffy said bluntly. “And I don’t like working blind.”
“No one does,” Elisabeth said, her voice almost lost in the sound of the running water.
“Giles says you don’t know anything after Spike showed up at Wolfram & Hart.”
“That was the last I saw,” Elisabeth said, shrugging as she dipped the pan in the water again. Then she glanced Buffy’s way. “And you really didn’t know?”
Buffy resisted the urge to cross her arms and settled for chafing one arm with an idle hand, the towel tucked over her wrist. She shook her head.
Elisabeth stopped and fixed Buffy with a steady gaze. “Well,” she said gravely, “are you okay?”
Nobody had asked her that in forever. Well, to be accurate, nobody had asked her that intending to trust her answer. Instead of taking refuge in meltdown (and the cry of pain did go up inside her before she could squelch it), she gave her answer a moment of serious thought.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “Yeah, I am.” She sighed. “It kinda wigs me a little.”
“I can imagine.” Elisabeth turned back to scrubbing, rinsed the pan in and out, and passed it to her.
“I think Giles was freaked that I might—I don’t know—drop everything and go find Spike. But—I—that’s not—” She stopped, at a loss for the right words. “It’s like, Giles and I can’t even say the word ‘Spike’ without it ending in mushroom clouds and nuclear winters.”
A faint smile touched Elisabeth’s lips as she ran the dishrag over a plate in a slow circle; then it dissolved into a sober look. “Maybe,” she said, “you guys fight about Spike because you can’t fight about Angel.”
Buffy had a brief vision of Giles’s eyes, dark with anger, and his trembling scarred fingers. “Yeah,” she heard herself say. The vision cleared, and she looked over at Elisabeth, who was giving the plate a serious going-over. “And you guys fight about housekeeping and scotch when you ought to be—” she took a breath and pushed it out— “when you ought to be fighting about what happened with the First.”
Elisabeth’s eyes shut for a brief moment; but she shook her head. “No; not about that. That’s not what’s on the table.”
“Well, of course it isn’t,” Buffy said. “You—”
But Elisabeth still shook her head. “My problem is the First. His problem is that I left him.”
“And so,” Buffy said slowly, trying to understand, “he doesn’t trust you?”
She raised her head and stared into the distance before her; and for a moment her face was taut with the same bleak, tearless expression Buffy had seen before. But she shook it off and rinsed the plate briskly. “It’ll solve itself—unless it doesn’t. It’s such a nuisance.” She handed Buffy the wet plate and plunged her hands back into the suds. “‘For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.’” Buffy recognized Elisabeth’s ironic style of quotation, but before she could respond, Elisabeth frowned down into the clearing layer of bubbles. “Looks like that’s all of them.” She drew the stopper and reached for the towel over her shoulder, leaving the water to suck noisily down. “I think I want a cup of tea. You?”
Buffy grimaced. “I’m not all that big on tea, to tell you the truth.”
“
“We have some?”
“Yeah—I think I—” She opened a cupboard. “Yes, I did bring it.”
As Elisabeth was setting the kettle to the stove, they heard the crunch of tires in the lane and saw the swift sparkle of the headlights in the diamond panes.
“Rupert’s home,” Elisabeth breathed. She looked relieved, and again Buffy reflected on what it would be like to be relieved both coming and going.
They heard his footsteps on the walk; presently the door opened and he set his keys with a small jingle on the little table in the foyer. A moment later he appeared in the kitchen doorway, unwinding the scarf from his neck.
“You’ve missed dinner,” Elisabeth said, pulling out a third cup to set alongside their two, “but there are leftovers in the fridge. Want some tea?”
“Oh, God,” was all Giles said. He pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and dropped slowly into it, reaching up hands to massage his temples.
“I’ve got a splitting headache,” he said after a moment. “Andrew asks more questions than I can keep up with, let alone answer. How many total Slayers we’ve found, what Xander said in his last report, whether he could make a form on the computer to organize the information in the files, the relative proportions of American and European cars, whether there’s a difference between fruitcake and Christmas cake—”
Buffy snorted a laugh.
“Did you answer him that you are what you eat?” Elisabeth grinned.
Giles merely grunted.
Quietly, Elisabeth plucked the kettle off the boil and poured his tea first. As Buffy watched, she set it before him with gentle eyes, and turned away to pour her own tea and Buffy’s instant cocoa. As she passed Buffy her mug and a spoon, Buffy could see the shadow of the bereaved look behind her soft gaze. But only because she was looking for it.
*
O radix Jesse
On Friday they all went into
“There you are.” Hands in pockets, Brian greeted them with a slouching sidelong smile.
“I was about to say the same thing,” Elisabeth said, grinning comfortably.
“Get your shopping done?”
“No, we just started. Get yours done?”
Brian snorted. “No.”
“You still coming out for Christmas?”
“I dunno, what kind of eats will there be? No, seriously, of course I’m coming out. But I don’t know when I’ll make it out there exactly; I’ve got to put in an appearance at my parents’ house Christmas Eve, or they’ll be moderately put out. I can only get away with staying away altogether once every two years or so.”
Elisabeth gave him a dry pointed look. “You’ll have to take me to meet them sometime.”
Brian groaned. “I know, but I just hate the image I’m getting of my mum saying, ‘And is this your young lady?’” He put all his fingers to his forehead, as if to push the image out of his brain. “She’s said that about every woman I even mention to her. ‘It’s about time you thought about settling down, Brian.’”
Elisabeth snorted into a laugh; Buffy felt her lips quirking into a smile.
“So: have you bought my present yet?”
“Ye-es,” Elisabeth said.
“Well, can’t I have a clue?”
“It’s about the size of a breadbox. Have you got mine?”
“No,” Brian said.
“Good.” Buffy cut briskly into their banter. “Then you can help me.” Impulsively, she hooked a hand through Brian’s arm and pulled him along the pavement. She glanced back to catch Elisabeth openly laughing at them, and Brian casting back at her a look of mock alarm.
“So,” she said, when she’d got him at a sufficient distance, “I don’t know what you’re planning to get Elisabeth, but I am going to hit the boutiques.”
“For what; d’you know?” She had let go of him and he settled into a comfortable stride next to her, hands back in his pockets.
“I’m thinking,” Buffy said, with a secret smile, “I want to get her a pair of nice pajamas.” She turned to him. “Do you happen to know what she likes?”
Brian thought. “Well, if you’re planning to give her something she’ll actually wear, don’t go for the glam. I mean, she complains about satin and sequins and elaborate stitching and stuff in her outdoor clothes. Get her something in natural fabric, but really well-made.”
“Cool,” Buffy said. This tallied with her own assessment of Elisabeth’s tastes. “What about you?”
Brian grimaced. “I dunno,” he said. “I’m not very good at choosing gifts. Maybe you can help me. Maybe you can help me choose something for Rupert. I suppose I’ll have to give the blighter a gift.”
“Elisabeth said you don’t like Giles.”
“I don’t,” Brian said bluntly. “But I suppose I’m getting used to him. He does have a way of—I don’t know—balance, competence—that has its own charm.”
Buffy was unused to hearing someone evaluate Giles without the intruding awareness of Giles as an alien or—a geek. Brian was a geek, and not all that removed from Watchery geekiness, either, as far as books went. Raveling the thread, she murmured aloud: “I used to think all geeks everywhere had a secret handshake, but it turns out they really don’t.” She felt Brian looking at her as he stopped, and it came over her what she’d just said. She grimaced at him, and tried to temporize: “I mean—you know, ‘geek’ is such a relative term—”
Brian snorted, but he looked amused. He stepped back and pulled open the door to a promising shop. “After you,” he said, with a very English gesture of the hand.
*
O clavis David
On Saturday Giles got up early and went out without saying where he was going. He returned a few hours later with a trunkful of greenery and a big roll of what looked like kite string. Buffy stood with Elisabeth out on the front walk, shivering in one of Elisabeth’s cardigan sweaters, and watched him load his arms piece by piece with rich greens. “There’s lots of it here,” he said with a faint smile. “You could bear a hand, you know.”
“But what is it?” Buffy asked, following Elisabeth willingly out onto the gravel of the drive.
“They’re greens,” Giles said, magnificently stating the obvious.
“For the hanging of the greens,” Elisabeth explained from behind him, reaching into the trunk for an armful.
“It’s called getting into the Christmas spirit,” Giles said, tossing the roll of string lightly in his hand and starting up the walk.
“It’s Advent,” Elisabeth called after him.
He turned to smirk back at her on his way in the door, where the cat stood peering out with inquisitive whiskers. “The Advent spirit, then,” he said, and disappeared.
She smirked back, briefly, and gathered together her load of fir and juniper.
*
The hanging of the greens turned out to involve tacking up a length of string along the main hall and over the study door, pulling it taut and securing it, and then tucking the branches Giles had brought behind it, pulling bits downward to conceal the string and the bare chopped ends. The result was quite artistic (Elisabeth dragged over the ladder to tie on blue ribbon at intervals), and they all stood back to admire it as the scent of evergreen woods began to tinge the air.
Giles had also brought home a number of strings of white Christmas lights—“fairy lights,” he called them, and Buffy thought They don’t look that gay to me, and would have said it if Giles hadn’t given her a narrow glare daring her to.
After dinner, with the larder full to bursting with all the groceries they’d bought yesterday, Elisabeth declared she was going to make cookies. Buffy, torn between the tempting delights of assisting in the kitchen with doughy goodness and Giles’s obvious need of her help putting up the lights, got Elisabeth to promise to call her when it was time to get out the cookie cutters and make the frosting. She left Elisabeth humming as she got out ingredients and flipped to the right page in the cookbook, a candle burning on the kitchen table.
Buffy and Giles did not speak much except to debate the logistics of stringing lights and the virtues of various windows, but unlike the silence of her first arrival, this was a peaceful reticence. Buffy convinced him that it would be a good idea to drape two strings crossing one another in the foyer and, when Christmas came, hang ornaments on them. “You get to climb the ladder then,” he said good-naturedly, handing her one roll of lights and the staple gun.
“You’ll see,” she said to him a few minutes later from atop the ladder. “It’ll be cheerful and welcoming for when we have guests.”
“What guests?”
She looked down at him where he held the ladder steady. “Well, Brian’s coming Christmas Day. You knew that, right?”
Giles rolled his eyes. “Oh right. I forgot. Actually, Elisabeth said she was going to invite Anne as well. The vicar of her church,” he explained.
“Yeah, Elisabeth mentioned her.” Buffy turned to inch the string of lights up the wall. “This a good angle?”
She glanced down to see him gazing past her at the lights above her head, his eyes behind his glasses wide and dark. She suddenly felt an upwelling of affection for him, for his untucked flannel shirt and jeans and slipper socks, for his competent male hands gripping the ladder, his incisive gaze and ineffable humor.
“Yes,” he said, “I think that will do.”
Buffy plied the staple gun (carefully, so as to trap the wires and not pierce them), and dismounted the ladder so they could move it across the foyer.
In the kitchen they heard the mixer going (Giles had purchased a stand mixer for the house yesterday, prompting Elisabeth to fling spontaneous arms around him and kiss him, which sparked a diffident smile to his face), the rhythm of the motor mixed with Elisabeth’s humming. Occasionally the motor stopped and the wandering tune she was humming was left alone for a snatch before the mixer started again.
As they were working on the second strand of lights, the mixer stopped for a protracted time, and Elisabeth’s humming gave way to outright song, a song Buffy recognized.
O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive
Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! rejoice, Emmanuel shall
come to thee, O
The words, and Elisabeth’s thin sweet voice, seemed to gather into themselves all the strayed feelings of wandering and longing, and some nameless ache, that Buffy had walked through and seen and felt since she had come here. For a moment a shadow of tears lodged itself under her tongue; but she swallowed it. After a moment she glanced at Giles to see if he’d noticed, and saw him gazing into the middle distance, preoccupied by his own thoughts. Feeling her eyes upon him, he stirred and helped her to move the ladder once more.
They did not pause in their peaceful effort to get the lights strung in the hall and in the study; and Elisabeth’s voice followed them as they went, happy and aching at the same time, singing the verses as prayers.
O come, thou Key of David, come and open
wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on
high, and close the path to misery.
Rejoice! rejoice, Emmanuel shall
come to thee, O
The cat came to watch them when they reached the study. The study, Buffy noted, appeared to be the cat’s favorite haunt in the house, save at night when he curled up at the foot of her bed.
As they strung lights over the French doors in the study, Buffy heard Giles absently harmonizing with the faint verses coming from the kitchen. When at last they stepped back from their handiwork, Buffy refrained from the inane sentence of satisfaction that rose to her lips, and let Giles keep his silence. Elisabeth had gone through all the verses of “O Come O Come Emmanuel” and was now singing broken snatches of it as she opened and shut cabinets. At last she called: “Buffy! I’m fixing to make the frosting now.”
“It looks good, doesn’t it?” Giles said, turning a shy smile to her at his side.
Buffy grinned gently at him and went off to help Elisabeth with the frosting.
*
O Oriens—Solstice
The morning sky over Pyke’s Lea was overcast, and the wind whipped impatiently through the barren orchard, when Elisabeth stepped out, dressed for church, the car keys in a gloved hand. The wind tore a tendril of hair from her bun as she was unlocking the door, and she shoved it back impatiently.
This was the drawback to living out at Pyke’s Lea, of course: that one couldn’t just pop out the door and walk a few blocks. On the other hand, if one wanted a nice space of decompression between one thing and the next, a short drive from house to flat, or flat to house, would answer pretty well.
Not that it was exactly working. Elisabeth parked across from her flat and got out to walk briskly down the street to the Bridge, smoothing the place on her hair where the tendril had escaped. The trouble was, there was nowhere for her to be that felt right, that felt safe. No safe places, she had said to Rupert, but she had lied: could there be no such thing as a safe place if every drive in her body was continually looking for one? Could there be such a thing as a place which wasn’t crawling with threat, both from outside—and, more imperatively—from within? If it existed, Elisabeth ached for it.
Even the church, Elisabeth reflected as she made the turn onto its street, was not the sanctuary of legend, in spite of—no, because of—the fact that the priest was her friend. How could she bear the shame of breaking down to admit that she was failing at—everything she was trying to do?
But although the church was not a complete sanctuary, it was a place of refreshing. Elisabeth closed her eyes and let the presence of candlelight and music and readings wash over her, wash her clean for a short while of worry.
You have fed them with the bread of tears; you have given them bowls of tears to drink. Elisabeth opened her eyes briefly. That was certainly true. She let them fall shut again, but opened them to rise for the Gospel.
It was the Visitation. Anne read the words in a ringing voice—Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!—and Elisabeth was snatched back to the memory of Anne’s fingers drawing the icon that became her birthday present: prophecy, and joy in this new thing—and it is marvelous in our eyes—
She hadn’t yet found a place to hang the icon. She and Rupert had talked of making the corner upstairs room an office for her, a room for her reading and working—and possibly praying; but what with the Plumbing Disaster and the upheavals of making ready for Buffy’s arrival, they had not talked of it in a long while. Meanwhile, the icon lay in the flat, rewrapped carefully in its brown paper and put away.
Elisabeth could feel Anne’s gaze on her: she was preaching now about the Gospel reading. “God says, ‘See, I am doing a new thing,’ and the prophet says, ‘his origin is from old, from ancient days.’ Salvation is always new, though it is as ancient as time itself. We long for it, yet it always takes us by surprise.” Elisabeth could not look up, but she carried the words within and let them comfort her. Just as quietly, she went forward for communion, and though her conscience had been stirred, she breathed easier as the service ended.
She would much rather have simply slipped out without greeting Anne, but she had not yet given her invitation. At the door Anne took her hand, which she gave readily. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.” Elisabeth hesitated, but then plunged on. “If you haven’t any plans for Christmas afternoon, we want to have you out to the house for dinner. I meant to call you earlier, but it got away from me.” This was a light fib, but unavoidable unless she wanted to blurt her shame out before God and everybody.
But Anne’s face brightened. “I’d love to come out to Pyke’s Lea for Christmas. What time is dinner?”
“Oh, I don’t know yet, but if you can make it out by one or one-thirty—”
“I’ll make a note of it. How are you doing? Are you all right?” They were casual words, but the priest’s gaze was more than usually focused on her face.
“Oh, I’m just fine,” Elisabeth heard herself say. “I’ll catch you later—” And she ducked away from Anne’s faint frown of concern and escaped down the steps and onto the street.
Her plan was to pick up the car and drive right back home. But when she reached her street, she found herself going up to the door of her flat and letting herself quietly inside.
Without the daily presence of anyone, the flat had a dark, hastily-abandoned look, like the erstwhile residence of refugees—which, Elisabeth reflected, they were, more or less. She moved slowly through the rooms till she came to her sock drawer in the bedroom. She drew it open: the icon in its wrappings was still there. Without taking it out of the drawer, she gently folded back the paper to look at her gift and trace its outlines.
“Oh, God…,” she whispered aloud. But she could think of nothing more to say. Gently she refolded the paper, shut the drawer, and went resolutely back to Pyke’s Lea.
*
“There’s going to be a Christmas Eve night service at
Buffy glanced dubiously at Rupert, but Rupert was looking at Elisabeth. Presently he smiled gently. “I think I’d like that. I’ll come.” He turned to Buffy. Buffy looked at Elisabeth.
“They won’t try to save my soul, will they?”
“No,” Elisabeth said, with a sympathetic smile.
“Buffy,” Rupert said at the same time, “it’s an Anglican church.”
Buffy twisted her mouth and thought it over. Finally: “Okay. I’ll come.”
Elisabeth relaxed. “Thank you. And then we can come back here and drink festive drinks.” Buffy gave her a dark look and Elisabeth elaborated, “Hot tea and cider and eggnog and mulled wine. Any or all of them.”
“I make a pretty wicked eggnog,” Rupert observed, giving his plate an arch little smile, “if I say it myself.”
“I’ll bet you do,” Buffy said dryly.
Elisabeth allowed herself a quiet snicker, and dinner continued in peace.
*
O rex gentium
Rupert sat down desultorily to his desk in the study, which
was bare and lonely except for the desktop computer
On the other hand, the names of these young women cut no closer to their actual identities than a description of their role in supernatural warfare. They were just names, conjuring nothing of their reality than a vague sense of possible skin color and a less vague sense of their language. They didn’t have the reality that Buffy, upstairs less than fifty feet away, cleaning up the back corner room with Elisabeth, had; they didn’t, to him, have a recognizable habitual expression, or a memorable style of gestures, or a solid but evolving philosophy of battle.
He didn’t love them.
It seemed to him that love had always been more important to him than stark responsibility. He had been taught to be ashamed of this, but the fact was that the Council had depended on his makeup being exactly the way it was. He had long since ceased to resent it, simply because he couldn’t spare the energy; but staring at his files now, he saw clearly what had happened over the centuries, and was filled with a revolted compassion.
He couldn’t do what they’d done. He couldn’t give himself up to cold strategy, couldn’t be a one-man Council wielding a knowledge far more egregiously phallic than the Slayer’s stake.
The trouble was, he couldn’t be who he used to be either.
He could walk away. But he’d tried that. Hell, Elisabeth had tried it, and she wasn’t even a Watcher. He remembered suddenly something that had lodged in his brain from Andrew’s natterings in the car: something about Frodo the Nine-Fingered and the ship West. He shook his head, to clear it. This kind of maundering was useless. He ought to get back to work.
Above him, he heard the scrapes and bumps of Buffy and Elisabeth’s progress on her chosen room upstairs. It ought to have been a reassuring sound, but Rupert found that it only depressed him further. He had passed up the opportunity to help them with the project, and he ought to have been there, taking part in Elisabeth’s nesting as she had taken part in his; but he felt disqualified out of hand from any role in creating comfort and security for her. And, to his disgust, he felt a faint and unreasonable resentment—at her? yes, shamefully, at her—for the fact. He had to get round that somehow; he had to, or all he’d worked for would slip through his fingers.
He got up restlessly, and went to raid the tin of Christmas cookies.
*
“Well,” Elisabeth said, “that looks good. I’m beat.”
She rested against the doorjamb of the room that used to be for random storage, and caught her breath. She was sweating and coated with dust, but Buffy was (of course) still quite fresh and unruffled, gazing at their handiwork with gentle fists on hips.
“So where do you think you’ll put your desk?” she said.
Elisabeth screwed up her lips and thought. “It’s hard to tell,” she said. “I’ve got this Wild Bill Hickok thing, and it’s virtually impossible to place a desk in here that won’t put me with my back to the door, or force me to face it too closely. What I think I’ll do is get a desk that is meant to face out from the wall, and put it across from the bookshelves here.” She gestured from the built-in bookshelves on the inner wall to what would have been the southern outer wall if the roof hadn’t sloped further to accommodate the single-story study below. One comfortably low window faced east, which would make for glorious light-filled mornings. Elisabeth had already chosen with her eyes a place on the western wall where the icon would greet the dawn.
“I’m with you on Wild Bill,” Buffy said. “It’s a good policy to have.”
Elisabeth nodded absently. It was going to be a good room, she thought. But the full aura of her claim hadn’t permeated it yet. It was hard not to be impatient: she had a—quite ridiculous—sense of the gangway lifting on a noble ship, and she had to hurry before it’d cast off without her.
“What I need,” she said aloud, “is a cold drink and a shower.”
*
“So what d’you think?” Buffy asked the cat as she combed out her wet hair in her room. “You think the coast is clear?”
It seemed to her that the house felt a little less lonely and neglected now that they were living in it; its creaks and ancient groans were slowly thawing into friendliness, and the greens and fairy lights looked like they belonged, like a new and flattering outfit. Buffy had spent the rest of the afternoon before dinner wrapping Christmas presents and listening to Giles’s and Elisabeth’s voices in the kitchen downstairs. When she had finished she went downstairs to find them kissing quietly in front of the stove, a very domestic scene indeed.
But by the same token, the house’s new responsiveness to its inhabitants had resulted in an uneasy peace: it suddenly mattered much more that they all ran the gauntlet of grief without crashing into disaster.
The cat said nothing, merely blinked at her, reclining on her bed with one forepaw tucked under, like a black lamb.
“Guess you’re not much on telling the future either,” she said, with a dry grin.
She twisted her wet hair into a knot and secured it, then pulled back the covers of her bed almost to where the cat lay. “No patrol tonight,” she yawned. “I’m exhausted.” She insinuated herself into the bed, and eventually the cat got the hint and got to his feet, stretching, so that she could get under the covers.
Buffy turned out the light and settled down to sleep.
*
O Emmanuel
The house was quiet; not the preternatural quiet that plucked at the suspicions of the experienced, but a quiet that was odd by its very normality. Rupert had gone to bed and to sleep gentle but silent; Elisabeth had wondered if it was worth trying to distract herself with teasing his thoughts out of him, whatever they were. But it had proved both too exhausting and too disingenuous for her to pursue, so she turned in, equally silent, reached to turn off her bedside lamp, and subsided into the cool quiet of the country dark.
Deep in the small hours, in the very womb of sleep, the dream came for her again; a double betrayal in the quiet, worse than ever, consuming all at once every hope of riding it out unshaken. It ate on her very spirit like acid, and she cried out, hating her image, hating that she inhabited it, hating Rupert for failing to save her—for, she realized afresh at the exquisite point of torture, not even wanting to save her. Inevitably, his grip upon her firmed, became more real than even the hateful pleading look on her own face as she watched from the First’s point of view; and she struggled and woke in the darkness, with the tears smutching her face.
He had waked her, as he had so many times before; but as she gathered back her senses, she realized that she could not feel him in the bed with her. Muzzily, she felt about, choking and sniffling back the residue of tears; but he had gone, leaving only his warmth in the covers behind him.
“Rupert?” she said.
No answer.
She fumbled her way across the bed and felt for the night-table lamp on his side. Light sprang up in the room to reveal him standing in his rumpled T-shirt and boxers, backed up against the windows: he was staring at her in the bed, his hands opening and closing, and he was trembling to the very muscles of his face.
“Rupert,” she said again. “What is it?”
He made no answer, but the expression on his face hardened into—it looked like stone fury. She shook her head in bewilderment. “What?” she said again.
He spoke in a husked voice she barely recognized: “You lied to me.”
Still she did not understand. “Wh-what—are you—?”
“You lied to me,” he repeated. “You told me—” his voice caught dryly— “you told me your dreams were about the First.”
The cold she felt was suddenly not from the night chill. “I didn’t,” she said at once, and at the furious movement of his face, “I didn’t lie. I wasn’t lying.”
“You bloody well weren’t telling the truth,” he said. His voice started out on the deadly quiet of anger, but slipped off the edge as he spoke.
Elisabeth drew herself up straight in the bed and met his eyes. “I told you what you needed to know.”
“What I—” He stopped, and his hands clenched white. “What I needed to know was that you were dreaming about me. About what happened.” He began to shake even harder. “And you knew it!”
“I—”
“And how that’s different from a lie, I can’t—”
“All right, I lied to you!” she burst out. “What else was I going to do? Hold it over your head? Put you to torture every other night?” She couldn’t hold it in anymore. “You think I haven’t thought about it? Look at you! You can hardly get through the day as it is. It’s my misery—” she gestured furiously at herself— “and my dream. So yes, I kept it to myself, and I lied to you. You would have done the same. You do do the same.”
Suddenly his face wilted, and any further words tumbled away from her grasp.
“I thought—” He swallowed, his eyes bright in an image that spoke to a nightmare deeper in her than the one she’d waked from. “I thought I was comforting you.”
“You were,” she said, and she covered her eyes, because the shame had come upon her. “You were, Rupert.” A new weeping fought its way out of her throat, into a horrible silence. “It was a comfort. I did need you,” she wept. “I needed you to hold me s-so—I could pretend—this was the only reality—that you only—ever—loved—that I was never your enemy,” and with that terrible confession she was lost completely. After a moment she couldn’t even weep quietly; sobs tore themselves out of her, dragging keening wails with them, as if in vengeance against her long silence.
When exhaustion made her quiet, she realized that she’d curled up in a sitting ball on the bed, and he had joined her there, clinging to her foot with his head resting against her worn pajama leg. She wiped uselessly at her wet face and snuffled, to get her breath back; but there was nothing to say. She could feel the tremor of him where he touched her, the desperate coldness of his hands on her foot.
After an interminable silence, in which the world stopped whirling and fell to a disastrous stillness, he said hollowly, without moving: “Are you going to leave me?”
Her heart stopped, then went again, painfully. She whispered, equally hollowly, “Do you think I should?”
At this he raised his head to sit up and look at her. He looked much as she felt. “I can’t argue against my own wishes,” he said. “But—but if you can’t—if you can’t—if we can’t recover….”
Elisabeth barked a mirthless laugh. “I told Buffy just the other day—I’ve fallen into that awful cliché—I’d rather be miserable with you than happy without you.”
“But I want you to be happy with me,” he said, in a small voice that undid her again, and drew the last shameful secret out of her in a wail.
“But what if I can’t?” And she brought up her arms to cradle her head. Her fears realized, she began to rock, keening as she had never done in her life, except perhaps that day in the training room, when the protection between her and her own darkness ended.
But even this had its end, and shame gave way to remorse. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, “oh, Rupert, I’m so sorry. I should have told you. I should have told you what I—how bad I—…I kept you out, and maybe if I—if I hadn’t….But I was such a damn coward. I couldn’t face it, and I should have—” she lifted her head— “and I’m sorry.”
He looked like a lost child. “It’s no worse than what I did,” he said. “I owed you—I needed to tell you I knew what I did to you—what the real sin was.” He glanced away from her face. “I believed the lie and made you an enemy, and I thought I could go without saying it if I proved to you that…that it wasn’t ever going to be true anymore….But I was a coward too.” He brought his eyes back to hers.
She swallowed. “So then…we won’t be cowards anymore?”
The last of the habitual shadow of fear went out of his face, leaving only the grief. “We won’t be cowards anymore,” he said. Tentatively he reached for her, and she met him with a trembling hug. They clung for a moment; then he pulled back.
“Can I bring you some tea?” he said.
She sniffled and reached to her side of the bed for a tissue. “Yes, please,” she said.
She watched him tie on his robe and work his feet into his slippers, in slow movements befitting a far older man. “I’ll be back up,” he said to her in the bed; and he opened the door and shuffled out.
As his footsteps died out down the stairs, she sat, shell-shocked, and cast her gaze over the room, staring numbly at the folds of the sheets and blankets at her feet, the yellow cast of the light over the bed and across the wall. She had chosen the pale periwinkle color of paint on the walls; the tools for building a new bookshelf in the corner lay under the chair they both used for a clotheshorse; every line of the living house had been lovingly planned by themselves. And could she tear this out of her and leave, even if it was right?
No; the question had now become not Could she leave? but Could she stay?
But she had stopped ducking and running; and so had he: that one glance had spoken it for them both. She could still crush him: but no longer with the truth.
Trembling, she gathered herself together and crawled out of the bed to find her robe and slippers.
Truth was more important than tea.
*
Buffy sat in her chair at the small kitchen table and warmed her hands with the cocoa mug, though it had lost its pricking heat. Despite her exhaustion and her resolve, she had waked deep in the night with an urge to go out; she had resisted it for as long as she could, but finally gave in and tossed the covers off.
It was as she was groping in the chill for something to change into that she heard the voices down the hall: not frustrated, or merely angry, but charged with a horrific grief.
It’s happened, then, she thought. And a rising wail—Elisabeth’s—confirmed it.
Instead of reaching for outdoor clothes, Buffy had pulled on the cardigan Elisabeth had lent her over her sushi-pajama shirt, and padded as quietly as she could to the door and out into the passage.
She almost drew back at the clearer sound of Elisabeth crying: nobody had the right to hear that kind of cry who wasn’t directly involved with it. She could not hear Giles at all, and that was even worse. Instead of drawing back, she hurried to the stairs and went down, stepping, though quickly, on the places that didn’t creak as she went.
Now, she sat uselessly in the kitchen as the faint sounds of weeping faded and stopped, sipped at her cooling cocoa, and waited, stomach jittering, for the inevitable. Presently it came: she heard the door open and footsteps shuffled to the steps and started heavily down, footsteps she knew as well as her own.
But she was unprepared for how he would look, and when he appeared in the doorway, she nearly cried out. But the urge passed, and she watched helplessly, mute, as Giles shuffled across the kitchen, with a brief glance at her, and reached slowly and shakily for the kettle. He filled it enough for two and set it on the stove, but did not turn and move to sit with her at the table. Buffy tried to get her throat working, to invite him over, but he spoke first, in a quiet voice she had never known.
“Did we wake you?” He turned his head a little, to catch her answer without quite looking at her.
“No, I was awake,” Buffy said. Then, hesitating: “Did she tell you? About the dreams?”
“I found out.” The bitterness in his voice was a bitterness turned inward. He said, “You knew?”
“I found out,” Buffy said, grimly.
Giles nodded and turned his face to the stove again.
After a moment, as the heat gathered, hissing, in the kettle, he reached for the tea tin and fished in it for two bags—camomile, Buffy knew, because she’d seen Elisabeth put them in. He paused, his shoulders rounded down in a gesture that made Buffy want to get up and go to hold him. But she still could not move, couldn’t even take her hands away from her cup. Instead, she blurted softly, “Are you guys going to break up?”
“That seems to be the question on the table,” Elisabeth said from the doorway.
Both of them turned sharply to look at her. Elisabeth carried as great a misery in her face as Giles did, with no less an air of repentant sorrow. She had answered Buffy, but she was looking directly at him. Buffy glanced to see Giles standing before the stove, with his hand on the oven door handle for vague support, his chin lifted bravely. Behind him the kettle quietly poured forth volleys of steam. She looked back at Elisabeth.
“It’s too soon to say what’ll happen for sure,” she said quietly to Buffy, her voice roughened from weeping and her eyes still fixed on Giles. “But from what I can see now, I think I will be able to stay.”
She heard him give a sudden gasp, and tore her gaze from Elisabeth’s face to look at him. He had turned and now stood straight and hard, facing the boiling kettle. The room was paralyzed as they watched him fight for control, and get it, with a long, shivering breath. After a moment, he reached with a badly shaking hand to open the nearby cupboard for teacups. The cup he chose rattled loudly in its saucer as he brought it down; too late he moved his other hand to assist, and the cup racketed off the saucer and fell to the stone-tiled floor with a crash.
The last musical rattle of the china shards quivered to silence. Giles stood there, staring blankly at it and clutching the saucer. “Oh dear,” he said softly. “Oh dear. Oh damn.” Belatedly he sank into a crouch and began reaching for the larger pieces.
Buffy felt she ought to help him, but Elisabeth acted first, lurching out of paralysis and gathering up the hand broom and tray from its hook on the wall on her way.
“No, don’t move. You’ll get shards through your slippers.” She started sweeping around them where they crouched.
Giles reached trembling to deposit his collection of shards in the tray and gathered more to put in the tray one by one. “So clumsy,” he said. “So sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said, soothingly, “it’s just a teacup.”
“But—it was one of the nice ones,” he said.
She lifted her head from her task to look him in the face. “We’ll get more nice ones,” she said, with a look that made Buffy suck her lips in and bite them hard, blinking fast to stay ahead of the tears.
“Let me,” Elisabeth said gently. “I’ll do this; you sit.” She put down the tray of shards, coaxed the saucer out of his hand, and assisted him to the table to sit at Buffy’s right. He sank down without looking at her and lowered his helpless gaze to his hands. He did not move until Elisabeth put his cup before him; then he lifted the small cup in both his hands and quaffed at it with his eyes tremblingly closed.
When Elisabeth sat down across from him with her own cup, only paralysis kept Buffy in her seat. “I should go,” she uttered.
“You don’t need to,” Elisabeth said, and Giles lifted his head to look at her, saying nothing, but clearly agreeing.
“Nah,” Buffy said. “It’s all right; I was just going to do a patrol. You know, for formality’s sake.” Released, she scooted her chair back and rose.
“I’ll wash your cup,” Elisabeth said; “you’re barefooted.”
With a small smile Buffy released the cup and pushed it forward an inch, then retreated quickly to change upstairs.
When she returned five minutes later, dressed and shod, she saw them still there in the kitchen as she passed: still sipping their tea, fragile and silent.
*
Buffy was still gone when they both reached the bottoms of their cups. Elisabeth made to rise, but Rupert stirred. “No,” he said softly, “I can.” He rose slowly and took both their cups and Buffy’s to the sink to rinse; they rattled as he carried them, but only a little.
Without discussing it, they turned out the kitchen light and padded single-file upstairs to bed. Together they straightened the blankets and then shed their robes and slippers to climb in. Rupert reached for his lamp; there was a click, then darkness returned.
With her terrible secret gone, Elisabeth lay quiet, feeling light and hollow. Her throat and her insides were raw from the ravages of grief and truth, but she was too exhausted even to register her own feeling. She lay, waiting for sleep to come.
The contours of the bedroom re-limned themselves in the darkness as her vision slowly adjusted; her warmth under the covers gathered; she could feel Rupert at her back, turned away from her and limply still.
But he was not, she realized slowly, asleep. And his grief was only begun, for he was weeping.
She knew it with a sudden certainty that only grew as the darkness settled. His body was not taut, and he made no noise; but she could feel the small catches in his breathing and the very subtle way he shifted himself so as not to disturb her.
For a moment she nearly turned over to reach for him; but the urge died and passed off leaving her still as before. It was not for her to comfort him; she had done this to him.
She could not cry herself; she was dry. So she lay, breathing slowly as if asleep, with all the energy of her listening focused on the other side of the bed.
After a while he seemed to think she had fallen asleep, for he trusted himself to let the sharp breaths of his sobs be heard. But only softly, and unvoiced; and nothing in him pulled taut. She knew what it meant. He was weeping without resistance because there was nothing to resist.
She lay staring with burning dry eyes into the darkness. For her penance she would listen to him till he fell asleep.
But her exhaustion took her over, and she held out only till an hour before the first hint of dawn before succumbing to unconsciousness, asleep—though she did not know it—long before he.
*