Inheritance
It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which seemed to sprout nothing but the stiff leaves of some unfamiliar plant, crowds of people were just waking. Creeping surreptitiously from the safe haven of their beds and treading resignedly to the shower to rinse the sleep from their eyes and wash midnight dreams down the drain. She'd been awake for hours now, long before any one could reasonably be expected to rise; jolted from sleep by a dream that had struck violently and slithered away before she could gather it close for scrutiny.
A long string of mornings had begun in the same way: awakened by some nebulous message from her subconscious. The urgency to understand the dreams pulsed in her brain but every attempt to assemble the vague, clouded images from the periphery of her mind had proven fruitless. The vaporous figures danced lithely away from her grasp, thwarting her every attempt to make any semblance of sense of her own mind. These dreams meant something, she knew it, and she just had to find out exactly what it was.
Buffy ignored the niggling of doubt in the back of her mind that whispered that her the dreams weren't a cryptic augury from her psyche, but only a product of her grief. The death of her father had left her reeling. She'd never realized how seriously she'd depended upon her father until he was gone and she felt the loss acutely. It was as if one of her own limbs had been swiftly torn away and she was now teetering dangerously attempting to keep her balance, to keep from hurtling to the ground.
Her body was stiff from lying curled up within the window seat for several hours, watching the sky slowly bleed from an unrelieved darkness to the dull gray that now lingered over the ground. The silence of the house was oppressive, only serving to impress upon her how utterly alone she was. The sudden eruption of discordant tones unabashedly chiming from the grandfather clock downstairs caused her to jolt in surprise.
Buffy'd never particularly cared for the old clock. 'Antique' she mentally heard her father's voice gently admonish her. Her father had found the clock in a small antique store in a sleepy little town in West Sussex. He'd been immediately taken with it; had said it reminded him of the clock his parents had when he was a young. The jarring strains of I Know That My Redeemer Liveth echoed throughout the house, the abridged permutation sounding somewhat unnatural to her ears as it languorously cut through the silence. The words whispered through her mind without prompting, the hymn well remembered from childhood but more recently remembered from her father's funeral.
O Lord our God
Be thou our guide
That by thy help
No foot may slide
She'd never been particularly religious but lately it felt as if she'd lost her way and she would take any help she could get. She was floundering, she knew, but she felt as if these dreams were the key to finding her way again. That if she could only focus on what they were telling her then she could start living once more.