Endnotes for Chapters 14-21
Minutum cantorum, minutum balorum...I trust the English translation will occur to even those like myself who have no Latin; I can say truly with Elisabeth that the Internet is good for something.
We must do the thing we know in order to learn the thing we do not know...This is from a sermon of George Macdonald’s in which he reconciles faith and works, arguing that faith expresses itself in the work of trusting obedience—the main thrust being that we should do in the darkness what we would do if we had light.
the bottle of scotch he’d stashed under the counter...Presumably the same scotch Quentin Travers commandeers later in “Checkpoint”—though how they should have found Giles’s scotch and not the diaries in which he records Dawn as the Key, I don’t know. Even if nobody else thinks Giles an alcoholic, he must think himself in danger of being one if he hides his liquor and hastens to make defensive excuses for possessing and drinking it. It’s a tribute to the writers of the show in general that this undercurrent of his character is never made the subject of an afterschool-special-like plot (“alcohol is bad, mmmkay?”).
On the other side of the door he could hear music...It wasn’t till I’d actually gotten into writing this scene that it occurred to me that Giles would be very upset to come home to music playing. It’s fortunate for both of them that Elisabeth’s favorite is Bach and not La Boheme.
Drink five Bloody Marys and you won’t remember...The beginning of Rupert Giles’s enforced familiarity with Eddie Izzard.
“Yes, Brutus”...Xander may, like Brutus, be an honorable man, but he doubtless also has a lean and hungry look when left alone with two boxes of pizza.
“Where are you from, the South?”...I considered having one of them ask if Elisabeth was from the Oklahoma part of the San Joaquin Valley, but decided it was too snarky for the context—not to mention that it would preclude Elisabeth’s little grape flirtation with Giles. I’ll have to find someone else to say that to her in a future fic.
“Buffy,” Xander said, “you just killed an innocent spork.”...And thus is inaugurated one of the staples of Mary Sue writing—the conflict between the OFC and a major character that will result in Complete Justification of the OFC, OMG!!!!111!! I have attempted to be very careful to contextualize the conflict between Buffy and Elisabeth so that no one will think that Buffy is supposed to be the bitch and Elisabeth is supposed to be the innocent angel, but of course there’s a certain point after which internal apologetics get in the way of the narrative. Also, there’s no point writing Mary Sue fic if you can’t take full advantage of its conventions.
he can always palm it off on Anya...As far as I know, the only reference to Anya’s liking for strong cheeses is in “Once More With Feeling”; I couldn’t pass up the echo.
It’s certainly a one-of-a-kind show...Elisabeth doesn’t know that she’d have destroyed her credibility by mentioning Joss Whedon to Xander. In “Shadow”’s Buffyverse, Joss Whedon is a total hack who writes genre shows on the level of, say, “Charmed” and “Baywatch”; he’d certainly never be capable of a series like Buffy.
“Can we send Spike to Angel’s show too?”...This chapter was written before the rumors about James Marsters’s surfacing on Angel became fact. I find the exchange funnier after a year’s hindsight—which Elisabeth, unfortunately, does not have: she has only been able to watch Angel 5.01, “Conviction,” before crossing dimensional lines and therefore doesn’t have the benefit of knowing anything beyond Spike’s appearance on the show.
It’s like a British film...More Izzard, of course.
“No,” Buffy said, for all the world like Humphrey Bogart....Actually, I wonder if Buffy was Humphrey Bogart in a previous life. It would make a lot of sense.
The scream of the demon’s demise...Elisabeth smelled stone, and nothingness, and shuddered...I took the liberty of conceptualizing a vampire’s death in non-cinematic terms. For the scent of a vampire’s death I borrowed freely from Madeleine L’Engle’s description of the Echthroi in her Time Trilogy, who also smell of stone and deal in nothingness. For Elisabeth, that association can only make things worse.
She knocked sharply on Giles’s door...This is one of the first scenes I sketched for this story: it felt rather strange incorporating it into what the story had become. The long conversation between Elisabeth and Giles that follows this confrontation took forever to conceptualize and trim to a manageable length.
And a sword will pierce your own soul too...An echo of Simeon’s prophecy to Mary the mother of Jesus—a reference, as Giles realizes, to Buffy’s approaching sacrificial death.
Strengthen me with apples...from the Song of Songs, natch.
Thomas Wyatt...Particularly resonant in the poem they are quoting is the line, “It was no dream, I lay broad waking...”
As she watched he dropped the right [hand] to the automatic gearshift, light and restless...A homage to “Real Me,” in which Giles misuses his new automatic transmission—which is in itself a meta reference to Tony Head’s notorious lack of ability with cars, especially the Citroen he had to drive for the first four seasons of the series.
we could even get Spike to hit her like he did Tara...Here I deliberately placed the storyline just following the events of “Family,” in which Tara is disabused of her family’s story that she has demon blood by Spike hitting her so that his human-detecting chip would go off.
“‘And is not general incivility the very essence of love?’”...Elisabeth Bowen owes a bit to Elizabeth Bennet. Come to think of it, Elisabeth’s creator owes a bit to Elizabeth Bennet as well.
the kind of problem I usually solve with a bus ticket...Buffy hopped a bus after the battle in S2, only to catch hell from her family and friends for running away when she returned a few months later. Elisabeth makes reference to it to underline the intolerable weight of their mutual situation.
a sexually satisfied boss is a happy boss...One of the joys of telling my stories as I write them is getting lines like this handed to me by my friends. I don’t actually write alone.
Doublemeat Palace...How Buffy managed to work there as long as she did in S6 is less of a mystery than why Giles took Elisabeth there in the first place, but I enjoyed putting ironic scorn for his choice in Buffy’s mouth.
Liz...It took me a couple chapters to remember that Elisabeth needs to put a stop to Giles calling her this.
TMI means...Poor Elisabeth: Spike thinks she’s jailbait and Buffy thinks she’s hopelessly old, though the latter is probably the result of Elisabeth’s association with Giles.
Rupert’s bedtime books...I had fun choosing nightstand books for Giles. I decided he was rather like me and read himself to sleep not with boring prose but with comforting ideas—so I chose comforting (or at least amusingly piquant) ideas from science, religion, modern philosophy, history, sex, and ancient philosophy. Giles has a soft spot for the Orient, so I gave him The Art of War as a formative text.
the pawn...Naturally I owe much of this scene to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, though the direction Elisabeth and Giles take from their chess-as-metaphor session is different from that taken by Holmes and Russell.
“Was that an innuendo?”...Giles is mostly thinking of his run-in with the cops while under the magical influence in “Band Candy,” and considering that he knows Elisabeth finds this bit of his history funny, he is ready to be offended no matter what she happens to be thinking of.
Riley...I couldn’t think of a good way to introduce Riley this late in the game, so I decided to have him AWOL for this particular evening. He may—though the timing is iffy—have already begun to discover the dubious pleasures of fraternizing with vampires; he certainly is already feeling somewhat alienated from Buffy.