Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 15
by L. Inman
“Where are you parked?”
Elisabeth asked Xander as they strode down the sidewalk.
“Just
around the corner there,” Xander replied, gesturing.
Behind
them, the door of the Magic Box jerked open and Anya’s voice called out: “Hey!”
They
stopped and looked back at her.
“He’s my
boyfriend, remember,” Anya told Elisabeth loudly, leaning out the door and not
closing any of the distance between them.
“Of
course,” Elisabeth reassured her, as Xander groaned, “An!”
“Just so
you remember,” Anya said firmly. She
made as if to retreat back into the shop, but added, “But you can have
Giles. I’m okay with you having Giles,”
with the air of a child offering her playmate the use of a toy she clearly
thought was second-rate.
“An!”
Xander said again, now blushing hard.
“Okay,”
Anya said, “bye!” She popped back inside
and shut the door.
Xander
groaned again and turned back toward his car.
“I’m really sorry about that,” he muttered to Elisabeth as she jumped to
fall back into step with him.
“That’s
okay,” Elisabeth said, pretending that her own blush did not exist. “Anya’s cool.”
Xander
glanced at her, and Elisabeth had a sense of his feathers going down in
relief. “I keep forgetting that you know
her,” he said.
Elisabeth
decided this was a point worth nailing home:
“I don’t,” she told him. “I just
know what she’s like. There’s a
difference.”
“Yeah,”
Xander said, thinking, “I guess you’re right….This is it.” He pointed to his car parked by the
sidewalk. Elisabeth waited while he
unlocked the door on her side and opened it for her, then got in and unlocked
his side for him. “Buckle up,” he told
her automatically as he got in and settled himself behind the wheel.
“Done,” she
said.
Xander’s
car smelled of peppermint and hot vinyl; the sun had warmed the seats and the
dash. Elisabeth wriggled out of her
jacket and laid it over her knees.
“Listen,”
Xander said, as he pulled out of his parking space and began to negotiate the
Sunnydale streets, “about Buffy…don’t—don’t worry too much about what happened
back there. It’s complicated…there’s a
lot going on, and—well—”
“It’s
okay,” Elisabeth said, for the second time.
“I know what Buffy’s like, too.
I’m not the kind of person she’d readily get along with. Add to that what you just said, and—”
“Well,
she’s kind of in hyper protection mode right now. I’d just—just kinda be careful.”
“I will.”
Elisabeth
was, in fact, beginning to feel a small upwelling of worry, coming uppermost of
a whole host of new feelings. See, this is what happens when you decide
not to be a shadow, she told her new improved self. Now, if she could just keep Xander from
saying anything about Giles….
To her
relief, Xander didn’t seem anxious to discuss Giles with her. Instead, he contented himself with
asking: “How much did he give you?”
“Fifty,”
she told him.
“Hey, you
could do some damage with that.”
“Thinking
about it,” Elisabeth said with a smile.
“He didn’t say I had to bring back any change.”
“He also
said you can get whatever you like,” Xander recalled. “This is your big opportunity. I mean, you’ve been eating his cooking all
week, and now it’s your chance to decide the meal.”
“Poor man,”
Elisabeth said, and Xander laughed.
“Yeah,
there was this one time where Giles and I were cooped up in his apartment
researching, and he made me cook when I complained one time too many. He’ll tell you we had to call the fire
department—” Xander looked over at her— “but don’t believe him. We did not
have to call the fire department, we just had to throw out his stupid toaster
oven and make popcorn.”
Elisabeth
chuckled. “Well, he hasn’t really cooked
very much this week. We’ve mostly been
living on takeout.”
Xander gave
her a brief smile and returned his attention to the road.
By the time
they reached the grocery store, however, Elisabeth had caught Xander studying
her surreptitiously as he drove, his expression unreadable. Elisabeth was pretty sure that his glances
weren’t hostile, but she had an idea that Xander was putting together a
thought-puzzle of his own, one that may not form an altogether positive picture
of her.
Once
through the door, Xander asked her, “Cart or basket?”
“Aah,
better make it a cart.”
Xander
wrangled a cart out of the bunch and wheeled it to her. “Here,” he said. “I guess you probably want to push.”
She smiled
at him: her first spontaneous smile since her hour of grief. “No—you push,” she said.
He grinned
back and began to drive the cart through the lobby. Xander Harris was a man of simple pleasures.
“Now, I
don’t know this place at all, so help me,” she said to him, skipping a little
to catch up to the side of the cart.
“Okay, what
do you need?”
Elisabeth
thought. “We should get a staple or two,
so, milk and eggs….”
“Okay,
dairy’s over that way.” Xander pointed,
ignoring the woman in a business suit who glared at him as she maneuvered her
cart awkwardly around them.
“And
where’s the deli?”
“Next to
the dairy.”
“Excellent.”
Elisabeth
found that she did not have to wait for Xander to catch up to her as she strode
down one aisle and across the back to find the dairy section, as he was quite
nimble with the cart. Counting pennies
in her head, Elisabeth chose a carton of milk and a box of eggs, then headed
over to the deli.
“So,”
Xander said as she stood finger to lips, examining the contents of the deli
case, “I’m curious. What are you going
to feed Giles?”
“I’m kinda
thinking an antipasto indoor picnic sorta thing,” Elisabeth said, without
taking her finger from her lips. “With
salami and various cheeses, and olives and stuff.”
“Huh,”
Xander said.
She ordered
a quantity of sliced salami from the deli attendant, then tossed it into the
cart and moved on toward the specialty cheese case. From this, she selected a wedge of Brie, a
small wedge of
“Of course
I do,” she said. “Well…I’m okay with
Stilton but I probably won’t eat very much of it. Giles’ll probably turn his nose up at it,”
she added, studying the label, “if he notices this ‘English Stilton’ is made in
“I promise
I won’t tell him,” Xander said, with his hand over his heart. “And anyway, if he doesn’t want it he can
always palm it off on Anya.”
Elisabeth
chuckled to herself as she counted up the prices in her head. “Okay,” she said finally, “we have enough
left to get some olives and crackers.
And tea. Don’t let me forget the
tea.”
“Tea,”
Xander repeated firmly.
It was as
Elisabeth was choosing a box of English cheese biscuits that Xander finally
said: “Can I ask you something?”
Elisabeth
looked up apprehensively, but Xander’s expression was too hopeful to be the
prelude to a catastrophic question. Then
again…. “Yes?”
“I
mean,…about the show.”
“Yes?” Elisabeth compared the prices of two boxes of
biscuits, glancing up at him occasionally, waiting for his answer.
“Is it…is
it cool?”
Elisabeth’s
lungs suddenly felt much less constricted.
“Oh, way. Completely cool. I watched it whenever I could, before
I—started traveling so much. I mean,
before I got here—I was doing the see-America thing.”
“You didn’t
wind up in a ladies’ strip bar in
“Haven’t
been to
“So, the
show’s cool,” he said casually, as she led the way toward the beverage
aisle.
“Yeah,”
Elisabeth said. “It’s certainly a
one-of-a-kind show; I mean, the critics really don’t know what to do with
it—but it’s got a huge cult following, though that took a while to build up, I
mean, because the movie sucked so bad.”
Xander ran
two steps and jumped onto the cart, to ride it a few strides ahead of her. “Cool.
I mean, your dimension sounds pretty crazy, but at least it has one good
TV show.” He grinned at her.
They turned
the corner into the beverage aisle, and Elisabeth stopped in front of the tea
selection to deliberate. “Yeah, it’s
been pretty successful…though I don’t think as many people have migrated to Angel as may have been hoped—”
Xander
halted. “Angel has a show?” he yelped loudly.
She looked
at him, startled. “Umm…yeah.”
But he
wasn’t even looking at her anymore; instead, he had turned to the aisle at
large and was appealing to the old lady buying Ovaltine for backup. “I don’t believe this! Angel has a show! What is the matter with these people? His own show!
That is just all kinds of wrong—”
Elisabeth
turned back to her tea decision, to hide her smile.
Xander was
still fuming by the time she had chosen two small packets of tea and turned to
add them to the cart. “Look at it this
way, Xander,” she said, dropping in the Earl Grey and the China Black, “all the
people you don’t like are on Angel,
instead of on the original show with you:
Wesley—Faith—Cordelia—”
“Oh—dear—God,”
Xander said, making an anguished face.
Elisabeth
could no longer hide her smile.
But Xander
recovered quickly from this reversal of fortune, and as they were waiting in
the checkout line, he said to her, “Can we send Spike to Angel’s show too?”
Elisabeth
laughed. “If you can make him go.”
Xander
sighed. “I doubt we could. Damn.”
Elisabeth
sighed too, thinking of her recent introduction to Spike and hoping her
bad-tempered taunting didn’t come back to bite her.
Xander’s
mind seemed to be similarly occupied.
“So,” he said, “was Spike
Giles’s source? I mean, if he was, we
might want to look elsewhere….”
“Yeah,”
Elisabeth said, drawing out the carton of milk and thumping it onto the
conveyor belt. “But he had others too,
apparently, so it’s not just his word we have to rely on. Not that the other—um, sources—are any more
reliable, but, you know….”
“Yeah….So
did you see Spike?”
“Yes,”
Elisabeth growled, before greeting the cashier and pulling the fifty out of her
pocket.
Xander
watched the side of her face for a minute or two, but she didn’t turn to look
at him. “I guess it didn’t go well…?”
“He kept
insinuating that I was jailbait for Giles,” Elisabeth said with a scowl,
holding out her hand for the change. “I
ask you. Do I look fifteen?”
“No,”
Xander said quickly. “No, not at
all. I mean, you look—very—” his face
took on the treading-quicksand look— “not jailbaity. At all.”
“I mean,
really,” Elisabeth said, hoisting the grocery bags and stalking toward the
exit, “asking me what grade I’m in,
for God’s sake.” She snorted
loudly. “It’s perfectly ridiculous, a)
to assume anything about Giles and me at all, and b) to further assume I’m some
kind of young bimbo. So I can pass for
an undergraduate. That doesn’t mean I’m
a kid, for God’s sake….Oh, who am I kidding,” she said suddenly, her shoulders
slumping with the combined weight of the grocery bags and the world. “I’m never going to look like an adult. Spike’s right, damn his hide.”
“Yeah,
well,” Xander muttered as they reached the car, “I can sympathize.”
Elisabeth
stopped and gave him a commiserating look.
“If it helps at all, you know,” she told him as he opened her door for her,
“you at least have some growing room. I,
on the other hand….” She set the grocery bags on the back seat and slumped into
her seat in front.
When Xander
got into the car and started the engine, she said glumly, “Hello, my name is
Elisabeth, and I’m a dignity addict.”
Xander
started laughing. “Hi, Elisabeth.” He gave another little giggle and said, “My
name is Xander, and I’m a dignity addict too.”
Elisabeth
was provoked to another smile. “Hi,
Xander.”
They rode
in an amicable near-silence to Giles’s place.
Xander
parked in front of Giles’s apartment house and turned to her: “Would you like help getting the stuff in?”
“Yeah,
thanks,” Elisabeth said.
They each
took a grocery bag and went up the walk and into the court, where Elisabeth dug
out the key Giles had given her. Once
inside, Elisabeth went straight into the kitchen with her purchases, while
Xander excused himself and, leaving his bag on the counter, went to visit the
bathroom.
By the time
he came back, Elisabeth had put away the milk and was filling a pan of water to
heat on the stove. “What’s that for?” he
asked her.
“For the
eggs,” Elisabeth said. “I’m hard-boiling
them.”
“Oh.”
She glanced
sharply at him, suddenly worried. “Does
he like hard-boiled eggs?”
“Who,
Giles? Listen: he pretends to be all finicky and English,
but the man’ll eat anything. I’ve seen
him. And anyway, I’m pretty sure he grew
up on hard-boiled eggs. Don’t they have
special little cups for breakfast eggs over there?”
“What, in
“I swear
it’s like a foreign country over there,” Xander said, hiding a small grin.
Elisabeth
chuckled as she carefully dropped three eggs into the water.
“Can I do anything
to help?” he asked, after a moment.
“You have
time?” Elisabeth raised her eyebrows at him, her hopes rising.
“Yeah,
sure. What do you need done?”
Elisabeth
put her finger to her lips. “Well,
there’s nothing to do with the eggs until the water boils…I know. You can help put the salami on the—platter…platter…where
did I see him put…?”
“I think it
lives here,” Xander said, opening one of the cabinets.
“Ah! Yes,
thank you. Here, let me show you what to
do. Take these salami cuts…roll them up one
by one like this…and lay them next to each other on this end of the
platter. The rest of the stuff will go
on the other end.” She dusted her hands
and stepped back to reach for the tea towel hanging on the oven door
handle. “There. That shouldn’t result in a call to the fire
department.”
“You don’t
know me,” Xander snorted, but he was smiling as he bent to take over the
salami-rolling task.
Elisabeth
meanwhile got out a cutting board and the cheeses and began to slice them. She studied the inside of Giles’s
refrigerator and discovered a hunk of dill Havarti which passed the olfactory
test, so she got it out as well.
She was
arranging the cheese slices on their own plate, quite happily adjusting each
piece for maximum tessellatory effect, when Xander said: “Your water’s boiling.”
“Oh!” She went over and checked the eggs, reduced
the heat, and glanced up at the clock to time them.
Meanwhile
Xander had stopped rolling salami to check out her handiwork. He gave a little laugh. “Cool cheese art,” he said.
She
snorted. “Thanks. How’s the salami coming along?”
“Pretty
good. I’m making a pyramid now.”
“Cool.” Xander’s work, she observed, was actually
quite neat and pleasant to look at despite his self-deprecation.
“Now for
the olives,” she said, reaching into the grocery bag for the tub of kalamata
olives. She drained the brine into a
bowl and put the olives into another bowl, then returned the brine to its
original container. Xander watched with
interest.
“Why’d you
do that?” he said.
“In case
there are any left over,” Elisabeth explained, sucking the brine delicately off
her fingers. She returned her attention
to the eggs, which were done; she fished them out with a colander ladle and put
them in a bowl of cold water she had waiting.
“I’m not so big on eggs myself,” she said, searching through Giles’s
implement drawer for an egg slicer, “but I reckon Giles can eat them with a
salad if there’s any left over. Oh!
which reminds me.” She went to the
fridge and plucked a few leaves of romaine lettuce from the bunch Giles was
keeping in the crisper; then came back and gently shifted Xander’s pyramid of
salami rolls so that she could rearrange them on top of the lettuce leaf.
“Wow,”
Xander said as she evened the rows of salami, “you’re really making with the
presentation here.”
Elisabeth
shrugged as she set the bowl of olives in the center of the platter. “I want to do something nice, you know?” she
said. “I mean, Giles has been really
good, letting me camp out on his couch all week and buying me meals and
suffering various and sundry griefs.
Best I can do, really, is to treat him with his own money.” She didn’t quite look at Xander as she said
this, which was just as well; a hint of mild skepticism had crept into his
thought-puzzling expression.
“Giles is a
good guy,” was all Xander said; “Yes,” Elisabeth answered, “he is,” as she
busily dumped the egg water into the sink.
Xander
helped Elisabeth slice the eggs and arrange them on the platter with the olives
and salami. “And now,” Elisabeth
muttered, dropping a cloth napkin over the platter and another over the cheese
plate, “for the pièce de resistance. I
believe he’s got a wine rack around here somewhere—ah!” She opened a lower cabinet and squatted to
examine the bottles one by one.
“Merlot—not an easily replaceable vintage, and possibly he’s saving it
for a special occasion—no—a Riesling—ah, that would be lovely—but maybe we’d
better go red—yes—cabernet—and a shiraz—hmmm…shiraz it is.” She rose with the bottle of
“Is this a
date?” Xander asked her.
Elisabeth
almost dropped the
His dark
eyes regarded hers steadily. “Well, I’m
not asking what it’s supposed to look like.
I’m asking if that’s what it is.”
She put up
a nervous hand to resettle her glasses on her nose. It was a moment before she could answer
him: “Honestly? I don’t know.”
“I know
it’s not my business,” he said gently, “but I think you’re running out of time
to figure that out.”
Elisabeth
raised her eyes and drew a breath; turned to take the tea towel off her
shoulder and wipe more dust from the bottle of wine. “You mean, I need to have it figured out
before he comes home?”
“Yeah…I
think you oughta be clear. I mean, not
because of Giles….” Xander sighed deeply.
“You know why Buffy’s on such a rampage, don’t you?”
Elisabeth’s
shoulders went down, and she stopped wiping the bottle. “Yes.
Yes, I do.” She turned her head
again, hands braced on the counter, to look Xander in the eye.
“I’m okay
with it,” Xander said, putting up his palms gently. “I even think it’s kinda cute—in a TMI sorta
way. But…I don’t think Buffy’s likely to
see it that way. There’s—this way she is
about Giles….”
“He’s her
Prime Mover,” Elisabeth said softly to the bar window. “The thing that makes the world go round in a
regular clockwork fashion. I know.”
“Yeah,”
Xander said, drawing a long breath.
Elisabeth
stood, hands braced, thinking. There
didn’t seem any way to explain herself without either stating the obvious or
sounding whiny; and in any case Xander appeared not to need any explanation
from her, because he said after a long moment:
“Look, I’m
not saying don’t do it. I’m just
saying—count the cost, you know?”
She
straightened and threw the tea towel back over her shoulder. “Yeah,” she said, meeting Xander’s eye
again. “I’ve been counting the cost all
day. As for how it adds up…I’ll let you
know.”
Xander gave
her a wry smile.
“Well,” he
said after a moment, “speaking of TMI….”
“You have
to go.”
“I have a
girlfriend too,” he said, looking at her cautiously, as if afraid of offending
her. He relaxed when she smiled. “And she’ll be wondering where the hell I
am.”
“That she
will,” Elisabeth said with a chuckle.
“You’d best get a move on.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for
helping me cook.”
“No
problem. I mean, hey,” Xander said,
stopping to lift his hands in a shrug on his way to the front door, “I have
something to brag about now. No 911
calls—and I even have an idea for a date.”
He pointed his finger at her like a gun and gave her a wink, making her
laugh.
“See ya,”
he said as he went out the door.
“Bye,
Xander,” she called, just before he pulled it to behind him.
When he was
gone she turned to put her back against the kitchen doorway and let out a hefty
sigh.
*