Passage

by L. Inman

 

Willow had been up here.

            He knew it not merely because of the disturbed dust on the landing, nor because the air was fresher than it ought to be, but by the faint not-quite-a-scent that marked the memory of her presence.  He was not surprised within himself, either, to find almost at once the spot behind two steamer trunks where she had come to hide herself: the prints of her backside and heels in the dust were recent.  She had come up barefoot, or with socks on.

            He glanced around in the dim, grey, mote-laden light: not a refuge for him, then.  He had rather suspected he would fail to find one here.  It was the sort of thing one could expect when one had nothing left to lose.

            Don’t be a fool, Rupert, a voice in his mind said.  There are always things you can lose.

            The attic, however, was not so much a place of loss as a place of useless accretion.  The contents of the attic in his parents’ house in London had been transferred here after his father died, and added to what was already here, it made navigating difficult.  Some of this bric-a-brac was his, though he recognized nothing that his eyes lit on, except as part of the meaningless landscape of his childhood.  He had once made himself hiding places in the attic:  that dresser boxed in by cartons had once formed a wall of one of his many forts, and lying across the top of three stacked trunks was a wicker dress form that had once stood sentinel at the entrance.  Attics were meant for children: safe from the outside world but quiet places of mystery, places that could yield treasure overlooked by dozens of eyes, for dozens of years.  They were rather like libraries in that respect, Rupert mused.

            But neither attic nor library was a refuge for Rupert anymore.

            And not for Willow either, he suspected.

            Rupert picked his way among the boxes.  Now that he was all the way up here he felt mildly obligated to wander about and look at things, and besides:  time he spent up here was time he was relieved from the awkward silent dance he and Willow did day in and day out.

            And if she got worried about him, she should have no trouble finding him.

            Wearily he sat down on a heavy-lidded trunk, without bothering to brush off the dust first.  It was only early afternoon, but he felt exhausted.  He went to bed early these days, and got up late.  He had not died, but a price had been exacted from his life force, and he was waiting with detached interest to see whether he would regenerate.  Of course, there was the psychospiritual drain of supporting Willow through her grief and remorse:  he had not known she had been in the attic, but he had known she had been hiding somewhere, riding out a wave of pain.

            He let his tired gaze sweep the dim room.  No; not a refuge.

            His eyes lit on the open carton next to him, and he recognized one of the boxes of memorabilia he had brought back from Sunnydale—greeting cards from students, programs from assemblies and concerts he’d chaperoned, gifts of knickknacks; all of them things he had no use for in his flat.  So he had brought them here to languish in the family attic.  Why he hadn’t simply thrown them out he had no idea.  He wasn’t really a sentimental person—he kept things, but rarely looked at them again or even thought about them—and his brief tenure as the school librarian in a California high school had meant little to him at the time, except as cover for his real vocation.

            Perhaps it was just the history of the thing.  The history of one life, however ephemeral.  His refuse; someone else’s bonanza.  If Watchers didn’t have that trait by nature, they soon acquired it.  Even rogue Watchers still felt the urge toward cooperative information-sharing; if a fellow Watcher phoned him today, he’d try to give them what they needed, though he might give them a hard time first, especially if they were asking in the name of the Council.

            He, however, had the trait by nature; even when he had repudiated his heritage he still kept the tickets to all the concerts he went to.  Rupert glanced up, looking for the rickety corkboard he had papered with memorabilia from his rebel years.  He knew it was here somewhere.  He got up, achingly, and went to rummage in a promising spot; but it was half an hour before he finally unearthed the thing from between a quilt-draped mirror and the wall.  He went back to his spot on the trunk and sat down with it, tracing the curled paper, his fingertips uncovering color dimmed by dust.

            Dust, of course, was not the only thing responsible for the fading of the words and images he had chosen.  The psychedelic colors of the poster in the center of the board now looked like the rainbow cover of a girl’s school notebook, thanks to some period during which the sun had done its damage.

            His battle-worn finger traveled down the board to a pair of torn ticket stubs secured by one thumbtack.  The Who, playing outside London in a ramshackle theatre that was perfect for sneaking drugs into.  He had both the ticket stubs because, as Ethan had chaffed him, he was the sentimental one.

 

“Aren’t you ready yet?  Your hair looks fine.  Worse than a bloody schoolgirl, you are.”

            “Watch who gets laid tonight,” Ripper said around his cigarette.

            “Yeah, me.  Because I haven’t got anything long and stiff up my arse.”

            Ripper cast a glance away from the mirror toward Ethan’s smirking face.  “Not at the moment, anyway.”

            Ethan burst into a crowing laugh.  “Oh, you bad, bad boy.”

            “You know it,” Ripper said, secretly pleased that this freakish young mage was willing to accept this account of him.  He had wondered if he could really pull off the sort of wild, exulting chaos he wanted.

            Except then Ethan said, drawing himself up into a lithe imitation of (Rupert supposed) himself, a collection of taut puckers:  “Oscar Wilde says: ‘It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.  People are either charming or tedious.’”

            “Oscar Wilde was a facile poof,” Ripper said dismissively, stubbing out his cigarette and giving his reflection a last once-over.

            “And you’re not?” Ethan said.  Then ducked out of the doorway, avoiding the heavy cuff Ripper aimed at him.

 

The smoky scent and dim red light of their old flat faded into the grey light and dust of the attic.  Rupert stirred and blinked at the corkboard sagging in his hand, and finally set it down to lean against another box with a long heavy sigh.

            He wondered if such passages made any sense outside of himself.  He had made hiding places for himself in the attic as a child; had made fresh ones in books as a boy; had thrown over the attempt toward sanctuary in his youth and sought refuge in aggression, in yang rather than yin.  Had lost his stomach for that and built new hiding places for himself among stacks of books.  Had taken his place as a Watcher in the field, with a Slayer.  Had had his refuges systematically dismantled thereafter.  The Council had probably not expected him to live long, Rupert had realized some time ago.  It was no less uncanny to him that his history had prolonged itself.

            He reached into the carton of Sunnydale memorabilia and came up with a smaller box filled with bits of paper.  He recognized some of the notes from students who had liked him, many of whom were probably dead now.  Beneath those, another pair of ticket stubs, these for a monster truck rally.  He frowned faintly, trying to remember why he had them; and then, with a shock of scent, he remembered.

 

“I take it the goal is to shock me,” he said over the din.

            “Is it working?” Jenny asked him, with a sidelong smile.

            “I don’t think we’re quite at shock yet,” Rupert said, in a low shout.  “I think bewilderment is the word for me at the moment.”

            “You gonna make a crack about American sports now?” she teased him.

            Rupert wanted to explain that there were plenty of things in England that were just as loud, violent, boisterous, and soaked in exhaust, but it was different in the way that eating dinner at your friend’s house was different:  even if the silverware was the same pattern, you could never pretend you were at home.  But just thinking about shouting all that made his throat hurt.

            “No,” he said, leaning away from the outflung arms of the large man with a fried blond beard next to them and closer to her shoulder.  She smelled like juniper, and something else musky and sweet.  Their eyes met, and one of her eyebrows went up, arch and soft.

            “I’m harder to shock than you think,” Rupert said.  “And—you smell very nice this evening.”

 

Rupert sat staring at the ticket stubs for a long time, the whisper of juniper scent trailing into nothing in his memory.  There was something he could tell Willow about losing someone you loved, how it got mixed in with subsequent joys and urgencies and was both harder and easier to deal with that way.  There was something he could tell her about self-fashioning, about dropping the pretense of safety for the wrong reasons, or at least the reasons that never led anywhere.  He could tell her about forgetting all about pretenses and masks when the present task was laid right into your palm, warm like a young bird, and restless to fly.

            If she came to find him, perhaps he could try.  Or perhaps this silly corkboard would tell her for him.

            He felt around the edge for an unoccupied thumbtack, and, finding it, pinned the history of his and Jenny’s date incongruously near the center.  He surveyed the result.

            Of course this would tell Willow nothing, unless she used it in some divination spell.  He shook his head, and shuffled his hand through the box of junk, preparatory to dropping it unceremoniously back into the carton.

            Another pair of tickets fell into view; but these were unused.  Rupert pulled them out.

            He understood what they meant sooner than he understood what they were for.  The IceCapades meant nothing to him, but the tickets did:  Buffy had left them behind after her fruitless attempt to get him to stand in for her father.  Even if he had not been busy officially betraying her, he could not have gone.  He wondered if she had ever understood that.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps this was another of those things he should have tried to make clear.  But how he was to have done that still escaped him.  Except for the tickets, the opportunity was a blank.

            It might have been fun, he thought.  It might have been something outside the realm of discovery of self and duty, one of those moments that mean nothing in themselves but convey a simple pleasure in living; in loving.

            He hesitated; then tucked the unused tickets at the back of the monster truck rally stubs and sat back to look at the whole.  It was all represented here, the passages of his history, intelligible only to himself; the debris of all the little deaths of his refuges.

            He could tell Willow something about that.

            In theory.

            Slowly Rupert returned the box of papers to the carton and heaved himself to his feet, looking down at his handiwork.  There was nothing he could tell Willow.  Nothing that she didn’t already begin to know on her own.  The meanings fell like husks, like bits of paper with times and dates long past, and were lost.

            And yet keeping these things had not been unworthwhile.

            He wasn’t sure how to say what this had given him, or whether he should try to understand.  But something had not been lost, even if it was a something he could never articulate.

            In that dusty silence, Rupert turned and made his way slowly across the passed slant of light, to the head of the stairs, and down to the light and broad space of the house below; where all the living was done.

            Willow would be looking for him soon.

 

*

 

Finis

 

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