Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 4
by L. Inman
“Talk,” Elisabeth repeated.
“You mean...oh—talk. As in, tell
you what I know. About the stories. About the future.”
“Are you
familiar with the phrase, No shit, Sherlock?”
Elisabeth
rolled her eyes. “All right, I deserved
that.” She reached for her whiskey,
trying to be nonchalant and not betray how much she was still shaking. She got it to her lips without the liquid
wobbling too badly, and took a longish sip.
The burning vapor of the drink billowed through her sinuses and warmed
her throat as the whiskey went down. By
the time she set the glass down and licked her lips, she felt steady enough to
look him in the eye again.
His
eyebrows were raised above his glasses. “I
thought you said you couldn’t take strong drink.”
“I didn’t
say that,” Elisabeth said. “I only said
I couldn’t take much of it. I can drink it just fine. Learned how once when I had a bad cold.”
Giles made
a little facial shrug and waited for her to begin.
She took
another small sip of dutch courage, then laid three fingertips down on the
table before her. “Okay, three ground
rules. Three reasons why I might
withhold something from you.”
He raised
an eyebrow but didn’t otherwise protest.
She went on, tapping the table for emphasis at each point.
“One. I haven’t seen all the episodes, so I don’t
know all the stories. Two. I might get on one thread of story and forget
something else. And three: If I foresee an Oedipus Rex type situation, I
won’t tell you about it.”
He pursed
his lips and thought about it. “Sounds
fair.”
“Okay,”
she said. She drew a breath: opened her
mouth: and nothing happened.
Giles was
giving her the smartass look, the one where he laughed at his opponent sardonically
from behind his glasses. “Stop it,”
Elisabeth said, reaching for her glass again.
“I’m going
to take that away from you if you don’t start talking.”
“This is difficult,”
she insisted. “I’m trying to think where
to start.”
He
resettled his glasses on his nose and waited, arms crossed on the table.
“It’s
hard,” she said, “because you’re all so...yourselves through the whole
thing. You expect dark things to happen,
and they do. And even if you expect
them, they hurt anyway. And you all
still grow and change through it all.
And—the one who’s always hurt the most is—”
“Buffy.”
“Yeah.” She dared a glance up at his face, then fixed
her eyes again on her glass. “I’m
trying,” she said again.
He
waited. The silence seemed to bend; and
then it snapped. Elisabeth looked up.
“I’m
sorry. Giles, I just can’t. I’m going to have to go unforgiven—it’s just
all Oedipus Rex. If I tell you—who knows
what you’ll all try to do to deal with it?
It might just make it all worse.
And there’s nothing in the stories about you being prescient about what
happens.”
His eyes
were hard. “You can’t tell me any of it.”
It was
difficult, but if she couldn’t meet his gaze now— “No.”
There was
an unpleasant silence as they stared at one another across the table.
She said
finally: “I can’t tell you any of it,
except in generalities—things any gypsy with a decent acting talent could
say. I can’t even pull a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I...I can’t meet my half of the deal.” It seemed futile to repeat that she was
sorry, so she ended it there.
Giles
scraped his chair back abruptly, tipped half his liquor down his throat, and
stood. Without another glance at her he
went upstairs; she heard the door shut firmly in the loft. Not knowing what would happen next, Elisabeth
took refuge in another long sip of whiskey.
Her body heat was redistributing itself, unevenly, between her core and
her extremities. Another bad sign.
The loft
door opened again, and Giles came down the stairs. Her hands went cold; perhaps he had armed
himself with a crossbow. Or something
worse.
Giles was
carrying a pillow. And as he reached the
base of the stairs, she saw that he was also carrying a blanket, neatly
folded. He crossed to the couch, where
he dropped his burdens gently and began to arrange them with an unhurried calm that
fooled Elisabeth not at all.
At last he
looked up at her, sitting stranded in her chair at the table.
“I’m
turning in,” he said. “I’ve brought you
some bedding; this couch may be a luxury on the continuum of sleeping quarters,
but it goes better with more than an airline pillow.” He paused, took off his glasses, polished
them on the tail of his sweater.
“But—” She couldn’t get any more out.
“If
anything happens, don’t hesitate to rouse me.”
She sat
there, helpless to say anything.
“Good night,”
Giles said, and moved back toward the stairs.
“Giles?” Elisabeth stood up, trembling.
He
turned. “Yes?”
“What
about the precautions—?”
“What
about them?”
“You
said....” Her voice trailed off again.
“Good
night,” he said again.
“But, you
should. You should take some
precautions.” Elisabeth suddenly found
herself babbling. “You could chain me up
in the bathtub, like you did with Spike.”
This
raised a smile from him. “I don’t think
that will be necessary,” he said.
“Darn,”
she said, in a vain attempt to sound jocular.
“And just when I thought I might get to have some fun.”
He smiled
again. “Good night,” he said, for the
third time, and mounted the stairs. She
stood, waiting, and heard the door to the loft click softly shut.
“Well,” she
murmured to herself, “I guess I’ll go to bed too.” She went to where her pack lay dumped on the
floor by the couch, dug slowly through it for her t-shirt and pajama
pants. She carried them and her pack of
toiletries to the bathroom, where she dressed for bed—washed her face—brushed her
teeth. Carried her pile of clothing back
to her pack and folded it into her dirty-clothes bag, which was already
beginning to bulge. Drew out her little
pillow and light down blanket, and arranged them along with Giles’s bedding to
make a nest for herself.
She turned
off all the lights except for three of the Tiffany lamps, and curled up in the
nest she’d made, hugging her little pillow.
Giles’s pillow smelled not of books but of clean human warmth.
So she’d
gotten what she wanted. She’d won a
little moral battle with Rupert Giles of all people.
It felt
awful.
She kept
as still as possible, curled half-hedgehog, moving only to wipe silently at the
tears that spilled one by one down her nose and cheek and rolled under her
temple. When she was reasonably sure
Giles couldn’t hear her, she allowed herself to release a few of the sounds
that were caught swollen in her throat.
A long
time later, she fell into a fitful sleep.
*