Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 20
by L. Inman
It took several blocks’ worth of road before Giles could
stop fuming so visibly, and a few more before his feathers went down enough to
ask Elisabeth calmly whether she wanted drive-thru hamburgers for lunch. Elisabeth had been watching the rain come
down in sheets, listening to it rattle violently on the ragtop over her head,
and reflecting on the way traffic signals sparkled in the rivulets of water
pouring down the windshield, so she almost didn’t hear him; but before he could
ask again, the sense of his question got through to her and she answered
noncommittally that she would like drive-thru hamburgers just fine. He grunted in response, and they were silent
again until they reached the
The
barely-intelligible voice crackled over the intercom, asking what they wanted,
and Elisabeth was forced to lean close to him to read the menu board. She caught the smell of him as she did so: the sage of his shop and dry-cleaned fabric,
both scents dampened by the rain they’d been forced to run through after
closing the shop. Elisabeth could still
feel the occasional droplet rolling ticklishly cold on her scalp under her
hair, and her glasses were smudged. She
took them off and squinted, unthinkingly leaning a little closer. It wasn’t till she heard him clear his throat
at close range that she startled inwardly and pulled back. She gave him her order and began tugging at
the hem of her T-shirt, trying to get enough slack to wipe her glasses on. With one fluid motion he pulled out his
handkerchief and held it out toward her between two fingers, as he leaned
toward the window and shouted their orders into the intercom over the rain.
With Giles
thus preoccupied, Elisabeth accepted the handkerchief and, using it to clean
her glasses, surreptitiously sniffed at the linen. She was startled to recognize the scent
of—not more sage, but lavender. Familiar
lavender. She searched her brain for the
connection, then lifted the collar of her cardigan and breathed in its
scent. Yes, Giles had applied lavender
water to her clothing when he’d ironed it; the scent was sharper and cleaner
than the usual sweet scent of her bath gels.
Elisabeth shook her head and tried to nip her little smile in the bud as
with a jolt Giles pulled forward to the cashier’s window.
She had to
stop cleaning her glasses to take the paper sacks of food he passed to her, and
it took some maneuvering to bolster the two large sodas between her shoes, as
the car’s cupholders were too small for them.
It was quite a bit awkward nevertheless, and in fact she had to keep a
hand on top of the cups to keep them from tumping over onto Giles’s clean
upholstery. In the end, Giles gave up
and parked in the Palace’s parking lot, where they divided their orders and ate
them on the spot, the rain drumming on the ragtop and the windows growing more
and more thickly obscured with sticky white fog. Elisabeth, munching her cheeseburger,
resisted the temptation to draw on her fogged window, as she was sure that was
the sort of thing that would put Giles over the edge. She reflected further that the fogged-up
windows were not likely to help him forget Anya’s parting words, shouted at them
over the rain and causing several hurrying passersby to glance up
startled: “And don’t forget what I said
about the condoms! Oh—and make sure when
you buy more that you get the right size.
You don’t want to make that mis—”
At that point Xander had stuffed her into the passenger side of his car
and cut off the tail end of her advice.
Now,
Elisabeth stole a glance at her companion as she dragged a fry through a watery
blob of mustard on her napkin. He was
chewing slowly and staring morosely at his burger. As she watched, he swallowed and, instead of
lifting the foil-wrapped burger for another bite, he lowered it, so that his
hand was resting against the steering wheel.
“I don’t know why I brought you to this place,” he said. “There’re a hundred better places I could
have taken you.”
Elisabeth
felt rather relieved that she didn’t have to pretend to like her cheeseburger
anymore. “Is there any cheese left over
from last night?” she asked him.
“I think
so.” He brightened, but only for a
second, and he made no move to turn the engine key.
Elisabeth
felt a smile creeping up her face, and she turned it to him, waiting for him to
look at her. He did finally, but instead
of smiling back the lines deepened in his face and he scowled back at the
burger in his hand. She was
disappointed, but at least she understood.
“Tired of
everything being so ridiculous?” she said.
His mouth
moved a little, acknowledging her point.
“Can’t even
laugh about it any more?” She smiled
sadly at him.
“No,” he
said, like a pouting child refusing a mother’s comfort.
The grin
started creeping back up her face again.
She reached out tentatively and stroked his temple, smoothing a tendril
of his hair that had been draggled by the rain.
“Rupert,” she said. He moved one
shoulder in a halfhearted attempt to shrug her off, but made no real effort to
stop her continued lazy movements, stroking his hair.
“Are you
going to tell me it isn’t so bad?” he grumbled.
“No,”
Elisabeth said, lengthening her stroke to include more of his damp hair.
“That it
could be worse?”
“Well,” she
said, “I suppose it could.”
For the
first time a hint of a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth.
There was a
little silence; then he rewrapped the foil of his burger and laid it
distastefully on the dash. He pulled off
his glasses and reached into his inner jacket pocket; Elisabeth took her hand
away, to pull his handkerchief out from under the paper bag in her lap. “Looking for this?”
The
movement in his mouth grew into something recognizable as a smile. “Yes,” he said, gently taking the linen
square from her hand.
She sat and
watched him clean his glasses: he took his time about it, wiping each lens
thoroughly and squinting through them to check for smears. By the time he’d finished and put them on,
Elisabeth had a message waiting for him, written in the steam on her
window: the words “Casanova Plan” with a
circle and cross drawn over them.
He leaned
forward to read the message, which was already filling with fresh steam, then
grimaced, gave a groaning laugh, and bent to thud his forehead against the
steering wheel. “I want to kill Anya,”
he moaned, without lifting his head.
Elisabeth
picked up the paper bag and began stuffing their burgers into it. “Yes,” she said, “I gave her an earful before
you came out, but it made very little difference.”
“Anya’s
problem,” he said definitively, raising his head, “is that she doesn’t
understand the virtue of a terminal snog.”
Elisabeth
could appreciate the virtue of a terminal snog, as it was pretty much all she’d
ever had; but she had a feeling that the man didst protest too much. But she knew better than to say so. She contented herself with a hearty laugh,
leaning comfortably back in her seat.
“Well,
let’s go home,” he said, reaching for his drink and taking a deep pull at the
straw. “Let’s go see if we can’t make an
omelet or something.”
“Oooh, that
sounds good,” Elisabeth said, rolling the top of the paper sack down and
stowing it at her feet.
“But first
I’m going to have to put on the air and de-fog these windows.”
“Yes, and a
good thing, too,” Elisabeth said. “I was
starting to feel opportunistic again.”
He paused
in reaching for the engine key. There
was a sudden stillness.
“What,” he
said casually at last, “Anya didn’t scare it out of you?”
His eyes
were fixed ahead on the dash; hers were on her finger-drawing on the
window. “No, funnily enough,” she said,
in a tone to match his.
He turned
to look at her. She kept her eyes
carefully on the window; then, abruptly, she reached out a hand and clawed a
swipe across the banned words. She
turned back to meet his eye at last.
“I’ve just put finger-marks all over your window,” she said gravely.
“Yes,” he
said, more gravely still. “It’s just
dreadful. I work so hard to keep this
car clean, you know.”
“Yes, I
know,” she said.
The rain
picked up again and drummed hard on the ragtop roof.
Elisabeth
and Giles stared at one another silently for a long moment.
Then:
“Do you
like omelets?” he said.
She raised
an eyebrow. “If they’re well made; yes.”
“Good,” he
said, and finished the motion of reaching for the ignition. The BMW roared to life; Giles put the A/C on
full blast, and with a violent throat-clearing, he put the car in reverse. Elisabeth drew a shaky breath and smoothed
her T-shirt over her belly.
It took
until they were nearly home for the fog to clear from the windows completely.
*
It was still raining torrentially when they pulled up at
Giles’s place; and again they had to run for it, Giles trotting, Elisabeth
following him in a bounced walk, her damp cumbersome skirt flapping at her
ankles. When they’d got the door open
and bundled inside, Giles’s first move was to go upstairs and change out of his
suit; Elisabeth, meanwhile, headed for the bathroom and spent several quiet
minutes sitting on the lid of the toilet, wiping her glasses free of the
rain. She was damp, and cold, and the
tickle of stray raindrops on her scalp made her feel as if there may be other
things crawling under the surface of her skin.
She sat there, holding her newly-mended glasses in her lap, and tried to
gather the threads of her thought into a clean, untangled bunch.
How many
times had she fled for refuge into Giles’s bathroom this week? A fair number, she thought, recounting recent
events in her mind. There was nothing
particularly appealing about his white-tiled bathroom, except that he kept nice
towels, and strong, soft lights, and a deep claw-footed tub—the ultimate
refuge. And he had shared all this with
her without cavil or even reluctance….
She was
going to have to find some way to repay him in kind, something that would give
him a reciprocal feeling of—safety—quiet—of refuge. Her mind flitted back to the kiss they’d
created last night, skimmed over the surface of that memory like a startled
waterbug…no, not something like that. That was different. That was something one did on equal ground,
like a chessboard, in which each player had the same pieces….
You take white. White goes first, and you need all the help
you can get.
—Egotistical much? she had said.
Or maybe,
she thought, she should just thank him.
But not in
idle words. It would have to be
something deliberate.
She let the
thought go, like Noah sending out the dove to find dry land, and got up to
follow the sound of clattering in the kitchen.
Giles had
changed into jeans and a moss-green sweater that was hardly less appealing than
his dark-blue oxford shirt. He had
pushed up the sleeves to cook, and was now cracking eggs into a large bowl. He eyed her as she came into the kitchen,
carrying her glasses in one hand and massaging her damp-sweater-clad arm with
the other.
“You know,”
he said, “if I thought any of my clothing would fit you, I’d insist you put on
something of mine.”
She smiled
at the thought of herself in one of his large sweaters. “Thanks anyway,” she said. She put her glasses down on the counter and
backed up against it, rubbing hard at her eyes.
“You all
right?”
“I’m
fine. Just tired. I slept badly last night.”
Giles made
no answer to this, but even with her fingers pressed to her oily, twitching
eyelids, she could feel him looking shrewdly at her.
She was
tired of people looking shrewdly at her.
When she
made no response to his look, she heard him move again; so she took her hands
away from her face to see him rubbing the rest of the
He added a
splash of milk and took a beater from the drawer. Elisabeth appreciated the swift motions of
his arm, beating the eggs, but at the same time the quickness of his movements
and the loud scrape and splash of egg in the bowl seemed suddenly overpowering
to her senses. She half-shut her eyes,
as if to block out the part of his motion that would overstimulate her.
“You know,”
he said casually, giving the bowl a few last scrapes before tapping the excess
drips off the beater wires, “as I recall you had a very similar look in your
eyes the first night you were here; which, you later told me, was when you
noticed the first signs of an impending attack.
Call me simple, but—”
“I’m not
having an attack,” Elisabeth said. “I’m
just tired.”
There was a
brief silence while he poured the egg mixture into the hot pan he had
waiting. “I wonder,” he said, “if that’s
strictly the truth.”
He made no
further effort to prove his point, instead turning his attention to the
omelet. Elisabeth watched him turn the
pan handily and prod here and there at the edges of the cooking egg with his
spatula.
“Dammit,”
she said finally.
She didn’t
say anything else, and he made no response except to tighten his lips
sympathetically, keeping his eyes on his task.
It wasn’t
until he’d turned the omelet that he spoke again: “Can I do anything?”
“You can
make me an omelet,” Elisabeth said dully.
“Then I think I’ll try to take a nap.”
“Okay,” he
said.
“Meanwhile,”
she sighed, “I’m going to go AWOL from my glasses and flop on the couch.”
“You do
that,” Giles said, with a gentle smile.
She nodded,
and, leaving her glasses on the counter, went into the livingroom to carry out
her plan. It was easy enough to strip
off the damp grey cardigan and pry her shoes off without untying them; easier
still to unfold her blanket and huddle it around her, little caring whether she
wrinkled her skirt by curling up on the couch.
Giles came
in a little later with a plate for each of them, and they sat companionably on
the couch and ate the omelet in a comfortable silence. When she had finished he took her plate along
with his and washed up. He came out
then, turning off the kitchen light behind him at her request, and settled
himself at his desk with a stack of books (“Let me know if you need anything,”
he said; and, “Okay,” she said).
To her own
mild surprise, she found herself dropping off within minutes, and in the few
moments before sleep took hold of her, the faint sound of the rain and the
scritch of Giles’s pencil gathered themselves to a fullness in her consciousness. This fullness morphed slowly into the raging
numbness she had learned to endure before sleep.
There was
darkness and quiet; and the darkness was the cold burnt aftermath of scalding
pain. There was a certain peace in
darkness like this, like Emily Dickinson’s lines about the calm blank eyes of
despair. There was a voice, muttering,
slightly querulous, and oddly familiar.
She searched her mind for the match, and drew blanks until she finally
recognized that the voice was her own.
She was asking someone for help; my
backpack, she said, I’m looking for
my backpack. She moved forward,
toward the place where the voice came from, but her voice seemed to oscillate
from one direction and then another, and she was blind. She moved aside and walked into a body, a
not-warm body, which grabbed her; she flailed to get away, but her arms were
pinioned. She tried to cry out, but her
voice got stuck in her throat, and she stretched out hands—
Someone was
saying her name—a voice she trusted, though it aroused a faint sadness in her.
“Elisabeth.”
The dream
changed, mainly by announcing itself as a dream. She saw her notebook had fallen down the
crack of the couch, and she reached to dig for it. Her hand met an obstruction, and she couldn’t
see it there anymore. Swallowing panic,
she lifted her head and attempted to get her eyes open.
“Elisabeth.”
Her eyes
were open, but she wasn’t waking up. She
hated when this happened. She was still
digging down the couch for her notebook, but realized suddenly that it wouldn’t
have any reason to be there, as she was pointed to her right, at the
meeting-place between cushion and settle-back, whereas her backpack and
notebook were lying under the coffee table to her left. She lifted her eyes and saw Giles leaning over
the back of the couch, looking intently at her but not as yet reaching toward
her.
“Are you
all right?” he asked her.
She still
wasn’t properly awake. She uttered,
“Still—dreaming—” and shook her head, hard, to clear it. When she was able to open her eyes and see
straight again, she found that she had twisted herself up in a half-sitting
position in her sleep, tangled in her own blanket.
Giles had
come to sit on the edge of the couch at her feet. She sat up and pushed the blanket off her
arms; took several breaths; and gradually reality stopped bearing that
distressing resemblance to shattered water.
“Well,” she
croaked out at last, “my nap-taking plan didn’t work so well.”
“You were
dreaming,” he said. “You were talking
about your backpack.”
“Was I?”
she said, startled. “I heard myself say
something like that, but I wasn’t feeling the voice.” She studied her hands for a moment,
reclaiming herself. “It was like I was
two people for a little while. I guess I
really am.” She gave a short laugh. “I’m not used to thinking of that as anything
but a—a metaphor to describe my odd psychology.”
She paused
to swallow and take a few more breaths.
Giles
said: “I had forgotten.”
“Forgotten
what?” She looked up at him.
“Forgotten
what position you were in. You seem to
be so—” He broke off.
“Stable?”
Elisabeth supplied, bitterly.
He lowered
his chin in a look of gentle reproach.
“I was going to say, so much a part of this world.”
She met his
eye miserably for a moment, then said, “D’you ever get tired of people
finishing your sentences?”
He smiled a
little, but she could tell she was not off the hook. Finally he spoke, and proved her right.
“Pride I
can understand,” he said.
“Self-flagellation I can understand too.
But put limits on it, Liz. And if
it comes to instability, you’re in good company.”
In another
lifetime, a speech like that would have made her cry with the relief of
gratitude. As it was, the flicker of
feeling turned over in her chest and quirked up her lips into a little
smile. The faint urge she had felt a
moment before, to challenge him, even to hurt him for knowing her, died
mercifully; and she let him read it in her face, finally unafraid.
“Now,”
Giles said, “would you like brandy or water?”
“Tea,” she
said.
His face
cleared. “Tea it is, then. An excellent idea. I think I’ll take a cup with you.”
*
They sat and sipped hot fragrant tea and listened to the
voice of the rain, whispering and plinking on the other side of the
window. Elisabeth’s eyes no longer felt
so oily, and she shut them gratefully to sip again at her steaming tea.
When she
looked up at Giles, she saw that he was frowning at the curtains. “I hope this doesn’t keep up. There’s nothing more unpleasant than a patrol
in the rain.”
She didn’t
answer him; he turned after a moment to glance at where she was curled, knees
up, on the other end of the couch.
She made
herself say the words. “Do I have to
go?”
“You don’t
want to?” His eyes searched her face,
gently.
She shook
her head.
“That’s rather
intelligent of you. Unfortunately, I’m
afraid you don’t have much of a choice.”
She had
known that would be the answer; she said dully, “Because I have to help find
the focus.”
“You have
to help draw the focus,” he amended, apology in his voice. “Since we don’t know the locus of the energy,
we need all the factors in one place if possible. Of course, it also helps Buffy to have a
group patrol once in a while, especially at times like this when there’s a lot of
vampire activity and she’s got pressing concerns elsewhere. But don’t,” he added, “tell Buffy that I said
that I was glad for an excuse to call a group patrol.”
In response
Elisabeth held up a silent right hand.
And because
she knew it was coming, she leaned her head down against the back of the couch
and waited for him to ask: “Can you tell
me what happened?”
“His name
was Tom,” she said, after a moment.
“The
vampire?
She nodded.
“He told
you his name?”
“No. His friend came up and addressed him.”
“How did
you meet him?”
A little snort
of a mirthless giggle escaped her throat; this was sounding like a dating quiz
game. “I was looking over my shoulder to
see if Buffy was following me, and I walked into him on the sidewalk.”
“Were you
armed?”
“I had a
cross.”
“Did you
use it?”
So she told
him how she’d twigged that he was a vampire; how she’d belatedly remembered to
use the cross in her hand; how the vamp had disarmed her and lifted her into
the air; how the cavalry had come in the form of the other vampire, bringing
news of Buffy’s fighting prowess. “So,
Mr. Watcher,” she said dryly at the end of this recital, “what should I have
done differently? Other than sticking
close to Buffy, of course.”
He did not
rise to the gibe, but instead answered, with equanimity: “There’s probably very little you could have
done, under the circumstances, unless you’d had some holy water to throw in his
face. But that would only distract one
vampire; it wouldn’t have protected you from any subsequent attacks.” He took another sip of tea and thought it
over. Elisabeth let him turn over the
matter without answering him; she returned her attention to her own tea and
breathed the relief of confession.
Without
warning, Giles put down his tea, got up from his seat, and crossed the room
behind her to a cabinet, where she heard him rummaging in a drawer. He came back holding a leather pouch whose
contents rattled familiarly. He sat down
and drew from it a long, finely-honed stake.
She shrank from it at first when he held it out to her, handle first. “‘Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle
toward my hand?’” she said.
“No,” he
replied with a smile. “Just a stake.”
Tentatively
she took the stake from him and turned it over in her palm. “Show me how you hold it,” he said.
Instinctively
she grasped it point down, with her thumb toward the top and her wrist cocked
outward. “How’s this?”
“Fairly
good. Does it feel right?”
She looked
a mute question at him and he answered her by pulling out two more stakes and
holding them toward her. She took each
of them in turn and weighed them lightly in her grip, finally deciding that the
first one was her favorite.
“I’m struck
how phallic these things are,” she said suddenly, holding the stake point up
before her nose.
“Well,
they’re weapons,” Giles said, diffidently.
“Yes. Wielded by a girl, the chosen one.” Elisabeth was sure the irony of that had
never been lost on the Watcher’s Council, but she refrained from saying so. “On the one side, darkness, perversion of
goodness, raw soulless power; on the other, the Slayer...and Mr. Pointy.” She wiggled the tip of her stake at him with
a little smile.
He gave her
a hooded glance and returned the other stakes to the bag. “Well, if you’re up for it, we may as well
give you some training now. Put down
your Mr. Pointy, and I’ll show you some escape moves.” He set down the bag and got to his feet,
draining the last of his cup of tea.
“Oh, my
stake’s not going to be called Mr. Pointy,” Elisabeth said, getting up and
following him into the kitchen with her cup.
“I’ll give it an auspicious name, like Macbeth.” She giggled.
Giles
snorted, and took her teacup from her outstretched hand, to rinse in the sink
with his.
“Or—I
know. Like my ancestor Robin the
Bold. That’s it. My stake’s name is Robin the Bold.” She giggled again.
“Well, the
next phase of your training won’t be involving Robin the Bold,” Giles said
repressively, though she was fairly sure she wasn’t imagining the twitch at the
fine corner of his mouth.
Elisabeth
grinned at him and followed him out of the kitchen and into the main room,
where he pulled the chairs out from the table and shoved it aside. Watching him, Elisabeth chafed her now-bare
arms nervously. “So what does this phase of my training involve?”
she said.
“Have you
ever wrestled?” he asked her.
She
shrugged. “I’ve roughhoused with
siblings and cousins, but otherwise, not really.”
“Taken any
self-defense courses?”
“A few
quick lessons from a friend.” She
shrugged again.
“Then
you’ll show me what you know. I, of course,
will play the vampire.” When she
cringed, he said, “Are you going to go squeamish on me?”
She
straightened her spine. “Of course not.”
“Very well
then.” Giles moved the last chair out of
the way, removed his glasses, and set them on the desk. “First, I will show you a few basic holds and
how to get out of them; then, we’ll move to defensive attack.”
She gave
him a terse nod. “Right.”
“Right.” He beckoned her forward, and she went toward
him and into his grasp. She found
herself quickly pinioned from behind, in a grip that masqueraded as
ungentle. His large hands held her
wrists crossed in front of her, and his arms had her corralled close. “Show me how you would get out of that,” he
said, his voice cool and impersonal.
She thought
about it for a moment. She knew fairly
well what she would do, but the problem was, he didn’t smell right—he didn’t
smell of stone, and his presence was warm.
This is important, Elisabeth
told herself sternly. This is training.
So she
dropped like a child squirming out of a parent’s grasp, threw the back of her
head into his thigh, and when he grunted and tipped forward involuntarily, she
wrenched her arms out of his grip and scrambled backward away from him.
She stood
up faster than he did, panting slightly; when he came up from rubbing his
thigh, he had a faint smile on his face.
“Your friend gives good lessons,” he said. “And you seem to know what you’re doing. The only problem is, you telegraphed what you
were going to do five seconds before you did it. If I’d been a real enemy, I’d have had a
countermeasure ready in the time it took for you to try to escape. Never hesitate,” he said.
“Right,”
she said, catching her breath.
“Never—hesitate,”
he repeated, looking her hard in the eye.
“I can’t possibly stress that enough.”
She nodded,
to show she understood.
They tried
several more holds, and with each successive lesson Elisabeth grew in
confidence, so that finally, in a close scuffle, she managed to place a foot
behind one of his and trip his knee from behind; he went backward and put a
hand down before regaining his balance.
“Very good,” he said, making her flush.
“Now let’s try a defensive attack.”
He brushed off his hands from the last one and then held them up, as if
preparing for a wrestling bout. “Assume
you’re unarmed,” he told her. “Assume
your escape route is behind me. What do
you go for?”
She looked
him over appraisingly. “I’d say the
eyes, the throat, or the groin.”
“Try one,”
he suggested.
So
(remembering his dictum never to hesitate) she made a fist and drove it at his
throat, but he caught it, deflected it, and used it to put another hold on
her. “You’re still telegraphing,” he
told her. “Try it again.”
She tried
it again, and again he read her, preempted her, trapped her in a hold; again he
let her go. “Try it again.”
This was
beginning to remind Elisabeth of their chess match, and she said so. “Little wonder,” he said; “chess is quite
applicable here. So is poker. You have
a poker face, I know; use it. Try
again.”
She glared
at him, tried again, was foiled again.
“You’re too
tentative,” Giles said flatly, letting her go for the third time. “You won’t succeed if you don’t put aside
your inhibitions.”
“I don’t
want to really hurt you,” she said angrily.
“And I told you to put that thought out of your head. You let me
worry about me.”
She stood,
fists clenched, breathing hard at him.
“This used
to be my job, remember,” he said testily.
“I’m not
the Slayer,” Elisabeth said, jaw taut.
“Evidently,”
he said.
She didn’t
know exactly what happened next, except that some synapse seemed to click in
her mind and she found that she’d already gone for him, had closed with him,
had caught him unguarded at the throat and tripped him from behind (it’d worked
before), and he went crashing down, rattling the dishes in the drainer with his
impact; she rolled out of the way, then returned savagely to the attack before
he could get up. By the time she
actually came to herself she found she was sitting on his chest with his left
elbow pinned under her skirt-clad knee, as Buffy had done to her; her left hand
gripped his hair and her right was drawn back to hit him. He saw it and made an involuntary resigned
wince; and the synapse unclicked. She
scrambled backward off him, shaking, and stood back against the wall to watch
him recover from a distance.
For a
moment all he did was wince and blink.
Then he dragged his head up and propped himself slowly on his
elbows. He smiled, still blinking
painfully. “Much better,” he said. He sat up and ran a hand through his hair;
looked up, and saw her face.
“That was
good,” he said again.
His words
did not have the desired effect; Elisabeth’s eyes filled, and she continued to
shake, her fists still clenched and held close together at her chest. She swallowed, and swallowed again, and began
to recover.
“I’m much
less worried about you now,” he said, frankly.
He was still sitting on the floor.
Her voice
trembled. “That wasn’t strategy,” she
said. “It was blind fury.”
“Better
blind fury than blind fear,” he said, meeting her eye. “Now you know you can do it; which was the
whole point of the exercise.”
He raised a
knee and began to push himself to his feet, grunting. Belatedly she jumped to help. “Thank you,” he said, his lips twitching into
a near-smile as he straightened his back with an audible crackle. “So, now what shall we do? Shall we play a game of chess?”
“I thought
we already were,” Elisabeth said. She
had recovered enough to fold her arms comfortably and regard him with a little
smile.
He smiled
back.
When he
actually spoke, his voice held the faint irony that made her heart beat
faster. “You’ll do,” he said.
She didn’t
know whether to exult or be terrified; so she wound up doing both, looking
straight back at him.
After a
long moment she said: “D’you think your
day’s taking a turn for the better?”
“Well,” he
said thoughtfully, “I have a new bruise on my backside.” He rubbed the offending part of his
anatomy. “But at least you didn’t knock
me unconscious…and on the whole—yes, yes I think so. You?”
She twisted
her mouth and raised her eyes, thinking.
“On the whole?...I think maybe.
Yeah.”
The shadow
of a speech crossed Giles’s face, and in its wake he blushed a little. Elisabeth said: “What?”
He
stammered a little, getting it out. “I—I
was going to say—to ask, I mean—if you’d stopped at all feeling opportunistic.”
Elisabeth
knew where the wind lay, now. She tried
to put a stop to the little smile that threatened to wring her mouth. “The question you should be asking,” she
said, with mock severity, “is, ‘Do I appreciate the value of a terminal snog?’”
He
sputtered and burst out laughing. “Very
well,” he said when he recovered. “Do
you?”
“I have a
great appreciation for the terminal snog,” she said gravely. “The terminal snog is my old friend. But I thought you wanted to play chess.”
“We can’t
do both?” he said, with a thin feral smile that made her stomach jolt.
“You mean,
both at once?” she said. She found that
at some point one of them had taken the other’s hand, and they had moved to
face one another closely.
“Yes, I
mean both at once,” he said, as if this were obvious. “That is, unless you’re still throwing the
game away.”
“Try me,”
she said quietly, and at her tone his expression elevated. He bent his face close to hers, and her eyes
fluttered shut.
The phone
rang, splitting the quiet of the flat.
Elisabeth’s
eyes sprang open, and Giles startled visibly.
“Shit!” he
said, and turned away. Elisabeth
grinned, but swallowed it when she saw that he was really perturbed. He kicked the back of the couch, kicked the
chair, and stormed into the kitchen, cursing all the while. The phone rang again, and a third time, and
Elisabeth realized that he was too startled and irritated to answer it; so she
went over and picked up the receiver herself.
“Hello?”
“Elisabeth?”
“Buffy?” (“Shit!” said Giles.)
“Yeah. Um, is that Giles swearing in the
background?”
“Ah…yeah,”
Elisabeth said, glancing back into the kitchen.
“He’s having a bit of a day.”
“You mean,
more of a day than when I saw him last?”
“Yeah. We had an unfortunate lunch at the
“Ew,” Buffy
said.
“Yeah—”
“I
seriously need to have another talk with Giles about his dating skills.”
Elisabeth
smothered a laugh, watching Giles fume in the kitchen out of the corner of her
eye. “And,” she added quietly, “I don’t
think he’s quite gotten over Anya’s parting words to us when we closed the
shop.”
“Oh
God. Yeah, Xander told me and Will that
she was going all TMI. Oh—TMI means—”
“I know
what TMI means,” Elisabeth said, amused, “and yes, that’s what she was doing.”
“Poor
Giles,” Buffy said.
“Yeah.” Elisabeth had almost forgotten to be nervous,
talking to Buffy. “On the bright side,
the training session went okay.”
“Good,” Buffy
said. “Listen, I only called to tell
Giles that we’re going to meet at the
“Right,
I’ll tell him.”
“Okay.”
“See you
later this evening.”
“Yeah.”
Elisabeth
put down the phone and turned to Giles, who had gone into the hallway between
kitchen and livingroom and put his forehead to his upraised arm against the
wall. “She says
He made no
sign that he’d heard her.
She went
closer to him. “Rupert, did you—”
“Yes, I
heard you.”
She
hesitated, then said, “Are you okay?”
A faint
groan was her only answer.
He didn’t
lift his head, but it seemed he could sense her sympathetic smile, for he gave
a small growl a few seconds later.
She smiled
wider, and reached for his free hand. “Come
here,” she said. He resisted, scowling,
at first, but eventually let her lead him into the room and toward one of the
chairs which she pulled toward him.
“Sit.”
“What?
why?”
“Sit,” she
ordered, pointing at the chair seat.
He glared
at her, then moved to put his backside in the chair, but she grabbed his arm
before he sank too far. “No, not that
way, the other way.” At her indication,
he turned and straddled the chair, grumbling.
“What are
you doing?” he said, as she laid her hands on his shoulders.
“I’m giving
you a chair massage.”
“Oh.” His voice sounded more puzzled than
acquiescent.
“Haven’t
you ever had a chair massage before?”
“I—I don’t
think so. How do you massage a chair?”
She
snorted. “Ha ha. I’m massaging you while you sit in a
chair. Now hush.”
He said
fretfully, “I don’t see how a massage is going to help anything.”
“Didn’t I
just tell you to hush?”
He made
another little growl, but otherwise went quiet.
She started
easy, letting her hands reclaim their muscle memory from the years past in
which she had done this for friends. “I
suspect knots,” she said softly, mostly to herself, as she probed the broad
muscles of his shoulders with careful fingertips. “And judging from your posture, I would put
them right about…here.” She dug gently
into the soft flesh under his left shoulder blade, and her fingers found what
they were looking for: a corded knot under the surface of the muscle that
shifted under her touch like a twanged guitar string. He flinched.
“Didn’t
know that was there?”
“No,” he
murmured.
“Thought
not,” she said. She worked lightly at it
with her thumb, then said, “Here—” and lifted the hem of his sweater. He helped her pull it over his head; she
smiled to herself and put the sweater on the desk in a heap next to his
glasses, then turned back to resume her ministrations over his T-shirt. She glanced around at the side of his face;
he had shut his eyes, but he had not at all melted into her touch. “Relax,” she said softly. “It helps.”
He drew a
breath, which he clearly thought constituted relaxing.
Elisabeth
bent her attention to her work. Clearly
this was not ten minutes’ work sitting in front of her. She decided to work slow, so as not to tire
her hands before she was finished. She
began with long, slow strokes along the furrow of his spine, followed by broad
circles moving outward, with the heels of her hands, followed once again by
smaller circles within them. She wrung
the muscles as best she could, to loosen them before she set to work on the
knots themselves; and although he had become more acquiescent since she began,
he was nowhere near pliable enough for her to continue on the broad scale.
Her fingers
sought out the knotted cords in the muscles between his shoulder blades: there were a lot of them, and they were all
connected to one another, a taut and unruly web beneath his flesh. She went after them with the angles of her
thumbs, and each time she pressed one of the nexus points she heard him stifle
a grunt of pain. “Well, now I believe
that you’ve never had a chair massage,” she said. “Or any kind of massage at all.”
“I wouldn’t
go that far,” Giles grunted.
She leaned
into his lumbar vertebrae with the heel of her hand, releasing a dull
snap. “Don’t they have chiropractors on
the Hellmouth?”
“Chiropractors,”
Giles snorted, “those quacks.”
“Said the
proprietor of a magic shop,” Elisabeth retorted with a grunt of her own, as she
worked her way up his spine.
“My
services are actually useful.” He was
gripping the back of the chair and wincing.
From the
top of his spine she radiated her pressure across his shoulders, without
answering him: Her own muscles were
beginning to protest, and she couldn’t quite spare the breath.
He went on,
punctuating his sentences with small grunts of pain. “And furthermore, how am I supposed to be
able to search for a proper massage therapist and keep up my shop at the same
time? And besides, in a country that
doesn’t know what a Turkish bath is—ow!”
For
Elisabeth, to save words, had smacked him lightly with the backs of her fingers
across the back of his head.
“What was
that for?”
“For not
relaxing when I told you.”
He growled
mutinously, but otherwise kept quiet.
Despite his
grumbling, however, Elisabeth found that he had become much more pliable than
before; he was moving both with and against her strokes, and it was giving her
a much easier resistance to work with.
Presently he made a little growl that could have been one of pleasure;
she worked up to his neck, and when he bowed his head and made the little growl
again, she knew she’d been right.
The skin of
his neck was seasoned and creased, not young.
Nevertheless she handled it gently, and was rewarded to feel him draw a
long, shuddering, childlike breath and give up the tension there. She smoothed his skin up through the base of
the skull, then bent a little to glance at what she could see of his face.
His eyes
were softly shut now. She smiled:
finally. This was what she had wanted;
an opportunity to give back to him out of what she had. She decided to keep that part of it her
secret, and make the gift as rich as she could.
She moved
the stroke of her hands again down his back and up to the knots at his shoulder
blades, which were considerably less rigid now; thinking encouragements at
him: You
get these from the way you hold yourself, ready for defense at all
moments. Just for a moment—let it
go. Just for the present let your eyes
go soft behind their lids, and be safe.
Be at home. Briefly she felt
an urge to say these things to him, but thinking them at him seemed to be
enough; as she worked he drew another long breath and let it out, and his
shoulders let out with it. Elisabeth’s
hands were on fire now, from unaccustomed effort and friction, but she kept up
her work, using her knuckles to rest her fingertips. When she moved for the first time to wring
and smooth the muscles of his arms down to his wrists, his fingers when she
reached them were like water. She
shouldered a straggling tendril of her hair out of her face, smiling to
herself.
She worked
on him until she could no longer feel any knots in his muscles, then smoothed
her hands down his back lightly and, to finish, laid her hands against the
sides of his head and massaged his temples, ever more lightly, then took her
hands away like a conductor guiding a last lingering note into silence.
For a long
moment his only movement was a soft little breath.
“Are you
asleep?” she asked him quietly at last.
A little
“mm” was his only answer.
“You have
time. Maybe a little nap is in
order.” She reached down and took his
limp hand; he rose obediently with her help and let her walk him to the couch,
where he flopped down with his face in the pillow he’d lent her and his sock
feet resting on the lamp table next to the couch arm. She tugged her blanket out from under him,
making him grunt, and draped it loosely over him. She watched him settle down; he seemed to
melt almost instantly into sleep, so that when she spoke his name a few moments
later, there was no response.
Satisfied,
Elisabeth went into the kitchen and made herself a second cup of tea; then took
it to the livingroom and sat down in the easy chair to relax, to rest her
aching hands, and to watch Rupert Giles sleep.
It was a good sleep, too, she could tell: not only were his eyes soft
(or at least the one eye she could see was), but his mouth was soft as well,
and half the creases in his face seemed to have vanished.
The rain
was letting up; but while the sound of it was still in her ears Elisabeth put
the tea down on the coffee table long enough to pull out her notebook and flip
through its pages to her notes for a sonnet, untouched since she’d abandoned it
on the bus to Sunnydale. She sat and
stared at the half-formed phrases for a long while, then put the book patiently
away—it would come—and got up to dig out her jeans and black shirt from last
night (for another night’s patrol it wouldn’t be too bad). In the bathroom, changing, she discovered as
she shook her creased black skirt that she’d popped a seam at the thigh,
probably straddling Giles’s chest during their infuriating training
session. Clucking her tongue at herself,
she carried the skirt back out to the livingroom, dug out her sewing kit, which
resided in an old cough-drop tin, and sat down to mend it.
When that
was done, she put kit and skirt away, rinsed out her tea cup, and puttered
around a little before going to check on Giles.
He was
still quite out. Not even her hand
smoothed along his back stirred him.
Elisabeth was pleased.
It was
getting close to dinner time. She
thought about what she might do, and finally decided that she’d look up pizza
delivery services. A delivered pizza
would save her and Giles eating omelets for the second time, and would also
give Giles more time to sleep. It was
while she was running her fingers down the column of numbers in the phone book
that she realized: she didn’t know the flat’s phone number. Damn.
And she wasn’t about to wake up Giles just to find it out. She stood, her face in a thoughtful scowl, turning
over the possibilities in her mind. Then
decided, finally, to let it ride till Giles woke up on his own. She went back to her seat in the easy chair
and breathed out, to relax.
A knock
sounded at the door.
Elisabeth
glanced sharply at Giles, but he didn’t even twitch. Swiftly, she got up and went to the door,
stood on tiptoe to look through the peephole, and then pulled it open.
Standing
before her, in a shiny red rain slicker and with
“Hey,” she
said.
*