Dust and Ashes, Part 3
by L. Inman
"Are you sure you don't need me to...?" Brian stood uneasily in the entryway, his overnight bag at his feet.
"I'm sure," Elisabeth said. "You can go home. I'll be all right."
He gave her a long look; but her gaze was steady, if hollow. Finally Brian nodded and picked up his bag.
On the threshold he paused to look round at her once more. He opened his mouth, shut it again.
Elisabeth answered the question he would not ask. "I'll explain to you some of what's happening," she said quietly, "after I get some more sleep."
Brian gave her a soft nod. "Right."
And then he was gone, off into the broad light of day.
"God," the First said. "I thought he'd never leave."
Elisabeth gave her reflection a slow, ironic look and shut the door. She went into the newly-cleaned kitchen and began to make herself a cup of tea.
The First followed her. "You're not really planning to tell him anything."
"Dunno," Elisabeth said. "Maybe I will."
"'Fraid it'll strain his credulity?"
"Not afraid of it," Elisabeth said. "I know it."
"And you're willing to take the risk."
"I am the risk," Elisabeth said.
"Well, at least I've taught you something."
In a rare moment when Rupert judged he might be alone, he crept to the phone, lifted the receiver, and dialed Elisabeth's number. After the third ring, his courage failed him and he took the phone away from his ear, just at the moment when there was a click and Elisabeth's voice said flatly, "Hello?...Hello?"
Rupert didn't answer. Slowly he put the phone back down.
"Feel better now?" Elisabeth's voice inquired.
Rupert turned and gave the First the same look Elisabeth had given her, if he had only known it. He made no answer.
"Of course you don't," the Elisabeth-First said cheerfully. "Now you know she's alive, it just makes things that much harder."
"I don't see how," Rupert said.
He had intended it to be a bitter rhetorical retort, but the First explained as if he had asked in earnest.
"Well," she said, "now you have to figure out what to do with her. I mean, she's a wild card."
"She's not involved," Rupert said, as if explaining it to a child.
"You're wrong about that. She's tried not to be, pretty much from day one, but she knows it's futile and you ought to know it too. After all, you're the one who's spent so much time and effort pursuing her."
"And she's right that this isn't her fight," Rupert said flatly.
"No," the First agreed, "it's yours."
"Then leave her out of it." Rupert hadn't meant to say that quite so loudly. But the others were outside, and no one heard him.
There was a long silence, then the First spoke equably. "You don't know Elisabeth like I do, you know." And as Rupert glared at her, she added, "I know her very well indeed. I am Elisabeth, you see. Or, rather, she is me."
"It's a lie," Rupert said.
"Is it?" The phantom Elisabeth took her glasses off and blew lightly on them. "Then what did she see a few years ago, when you tried to take her to a higher spiritual plane?"
The words were dragged out of him: "Her fears."
"True fears," the First said, with a gentle smile. "She's an intelligent woman; she knows you were trying to snow her."
"No," Rupert said, quietly.
"No?" The First-Elisabeth looked up, cocking her head. "Have it your way then." She put her glasses back on. "But do you ever wonder why she holds you at arm's length? Why she'll take any opportunity to keep you away from her?"
Rupert gave her no answer.
"All this time, and you don't understand her—admittedly misguided—impulse to protect your naivete?"
Rupert remained silent, but a muscle jumped in his jaw.
"She's afraid of what she can do to you. She knows her power is an illicit power."
Rupert folded his arms. "So what?"
The First wandered closer, making a circuit of the room. "Well...do you recall the reason she gave for not telling you your future?"
Rupert knew perfectly well, but he waited for the First to answer its own question.
"Something, if I remember, about Oedipus Rex?"
"You're not going to make me ask her to change her commitment," Rupert said, drawing a tight breath.
The First-Elisabeth snorted. "I'm not going to make you do anything," she said, with sagging disparagement. "That's not my point. My point is that Elisabeth doesn't realize that she's now part of the play too."
This thought had occurred to Rupert, more than once. "That doesn't matter," he said.
"Oh, but it does. You see, she thinks she can fight me all by herself. She thinks all she has to do is hold on long enough, and I'll go away and never bother her again. She has," the First smiled, "a very endearing stubbornness. Not unlike your own, really."
Rupert's stomach coiled and uncoiled. "It still doesn't matter."
"If you say so," the First said, giving an unconcerned shrug as it finished its circuit of the room. "It's just that—well, you know, I have a privileged access to her, and it's just a matter of time before she crumbles. I give it a few more days, and then her fears will be realized."
Rupert swallowed hardily. "She told me she could take care of herself."
"She wasn't lying," the First said. She gave him Elisabeth's loveliest smile. Rupert looked away.
"You could leave it the way it is, of course," the First-Elisabeth said. "But what are you going to do if someone with Elisabeth's kind of power takes a hand? And what if she doesn't take your side?"
With one last smile the First disappeared.
Rupert half-turned, looking for solace as if it might be a knickknack or vase sitting on the sideboard. All he saw was the phone.
He could call Elisabeth back, compare notes with her on what the First was saying. Obviously, he knew now, the First had been appearing to her too—or at least managing to offer suggestions to her in some veiled fashion. They could straighten out the lies together.
But maybe that was playing right into the First's hands. Suppose he tried to reassure her that she was not evil at heart; what if that was the last straw that drove her to darkness?
What if it was true that she was already of the darkness? The First told its strongest lies with the truth.
Rupert shut his eyes. It didn't bear thinking of. But one thing was clearly true—he would have to decide what to do.
The question was, what?
The phone rang, and Elisabeth hurried out of the bedroom, where she'd been making the bed after her prolonged nap, to pick it up.
"Hello?"
There was no answering voice.
"Hello?" she said again.
There was a click, and the line went dead.
Elisabeth put the phone down with a sour look. Now, on top of everything, she was going to have to get a caller ID device. She blew out her cheeks and surveyed her clean livingroom. Brian had done a very thorough job, scrubbing the kitchen back to a sanitary shine, tidying books and papers into neat piles, and running several loads of laundry. He was a good friend: but now Elisabeth didn't have anything material to do to distract herself.
Except work. Elisabeth was not too anxious to get back to the books; they had not been kind to her lately, not with the First prowling around, making observations from the peanut gallery. In fact, her eyes still felt gritty from the sleep that had made not the least dent in her weariness, and she doubted they'd stand up to prolonged study.
So instead of doing anything Elisabeth sat down heavily in her creaky desk chair and stared across the livingroom.
She wondered what she was going to do, when the storm finished. If the storm finished; and probably it would, as the others had done. She wondered if it would be feasible to continue her course of study as if nothing had happened, just as it was rapidly becoming infeasible to study as usual now. She wondered if Rupert, tired as he surely was and more than half-broken, would find it feasible to continue with her. Perhaps he would find that he would have to leave, would have to take up his work and do nothing else, or else burn out completely and make off for Tibet or something.
Perhaps he wouldn't actually survive.
Perhaps she would not.
Elisabeth had thought about it more than once. Her existence in this dimension had clearly introduced a lacuna, perhaps more than one. Perhaps it would be resolved if she were a casualty in this, the last great Sunnydale war. The important thing was that the First be defeated: and since she knew she could not bear a direct hand in that, the only thing left was to wait.
To hold on.
It was not even necessary to trust Rupert, or any of the others, to catch her; the only thing was the freefall. It was all that was left.
She was not in the least surprised when the next thing she heard was the voice of herself as the First. "'We're animals, and we don't change. We're Badgers, what's more, and we hold on.'" She heard her own soft laughter; but she did not turn around to look.
She sat without moving and quietly bid goodbye to hope.
Rupert had given up ever trying to sleep. He kept himself functioning by taking small cat naps in whatever chair wasn't either occupied or the center of the frenetic energy of shouting girls, and Andrew. If the First hadn't been going all out before, it was now: Buffy, Elisabeth, Jenny, his parents, dead Potentials, dead Watchers, Joyce, Angel, sometimes even Spike, all chattered at him endlessly, sometimes letting the meaning show behind their words, sometimes not. It was becoming difficult to distinguish between the living chatter and ruckus of the house and the stream of words coming from the various shades attending him. He was even beginning to forget that the First ever attacked anyone else.
There was one morning, however, when Rupert sat dozing over coffee, and the thought clearly came to him, in a voice oddly like his father's but unmistakably his own: You have no reason to believe what the First says about Elisabeth, or anybody else. It's meant to derail you from your course.
If only Rupert knew what his course was.
To him, his course seemed more like a demolition derby than anything else, with or without the First Evil. Rupert had always just gone with it, had always given his professional opinion as a Watcher and then sat back and let the shit hit the fan. It had worked before, and even when it didn't, he had always had the thankless jobs to fall back on. Not that anyone tended to notice that. They all fell upon his wisdom in emergencies, and then reviled him when he did not simply solve a problem for them. Rupert was tired. Not fed up, exactly, he told himself, just tired.
It had been so long since Rupert had given in to the urge toward self-pity: he was rarely troubled by the temptation to believe one deserves, or does not deserve, what happens to one. A Watcher couldn't afford to believe that; there was the doing, and there was the waiting; and that was all. And he was one of the only Watchers left—the last one, certainly, to train a called Slayer. Whatever happened, nothing would be the same.
Quite possibly they might all die. He might die.
The thought gave him neither comfort nor anxiety. But if he did not expect to survive, he might as well throw himself into whatever thankless task came his way.
This, he realized, was what Elisabeth had meant when she said she needed him free to risk his own life, without regard for her. At the time he had responded with near-tears of exasperated admiration.
Now, he felt nothing except the certainty of this little death, this little cutting-off. He had intended never to make use of Elisabeth's gift; but now he knew surely that he would.
It was no decision; it was hardly even a thought. Rupert lifted his coffee, sipped.
"He has forgotten you," the First told Elisabeth.
Elisabeth did not look up. "I have intended that he should."
"Everything's going exactly according to plan, is it?"
"Plan?" Elisabeth said, turning a page. "There's a plan?"
"'There seems no plan because it is all plan. Blessed be He!'" The First managed to turn the quote into a sneer. Elisabeth waited for the First to make commentary, either on C.S. Lewis or on the praise of God, but it did neither; the First was eminently practical.
"Do you ever wonder why you're here?" it asked.
Elisabeth rolled her eyes. "Forty-two," she said.
"Well, you've been so anxious to preserve the story as you know it." The First was using Elisabeth's own patient arguing voice, the one she used to nail down points in an essay before she wrote it. "That seems to argue a plan. So what are you doing in it?"
"I don't know," Elisabeth said. "I don't suppose it matters much."
"But there seems to be enough narrative wiggle-room for you to fit."
"Seemingly," Elisabeth said.
"No, really." The First wandered around so that it was before Elisabeth where she sat at her desk. "You're fitting this world like a hand in a glove. Don't you think you have a little part to play yourself?"
"No," Elisabeth said, refusing to look up.
"As you like," the First said. "But what happens if you sit on your hands, and your vital role goes on unplayed? Suppose you take no action, and it all falls apart? You know your chaos theory. Your role doesn't have to be bombastic to be essential."
"For want of a nail, etc.," Elisabeth said dryly.
"Well…more or less." The First shrugged.
"Funny." Elisabeth hung her arm over the back of her chair and looked up at herself. "A while ago you were saying just the opposite, that I wasn't important enough to kill."
"They're not necessarily mutually exclusive," the First said, narrowing her eyes. "Are you getting smart with me?"
"I don't see what I have to lose," Elisabeth said, giving her mirror image the full benefit of her sardonic look.
For a moment the First went very still; Elisabeth saw her own signs of anger thinning the lips and raising the shoulders. "Golly gee," she said. "Have I really pissed off the First Evil?"
All at once the First let its shoulders fall and smiled. "Not enough to kill you. Maybe enough to hurt you."
She tossed her head. "Cause you're not doing that already."
Elisabeth never thought her lips could smile so thinly, so venomously. "Ohh, I've only just begun to hurt you," the First whispered. "You may have been able to bluff the Watchers' Council, but you can't bluff me. I have no ancient code for you to cling to. I am power. And I can bring your whole world crashing down around your ears. Don't you remember what you saw under meditation? That was real, you know. I can bring that straight to the surface to rule you." And as Elisabeth glared, she snapped, "Do you think I can't? I'll bring your darkness to the surface, and then I'll send him to you primed to rescue you, and then he can watch me devour you. Will he be worth anything then?"
"No." The word burst out of Elisabeth beyond her control.
"Maybe you can't destroy the story you know, but he can. I can. And I will."
"You won't," Elisabeth said softly.
"We'll see," said the First. "At the very least I can destroy you. I think I will. I could use some recreation."
And it vanished.
"It's nice to know what you've got planned," Elisabeth said to the empty air.
Days passed, and the First would not let Elisabeth sleep. "Don't you feel yourself slipping?" she crooned in the small hours of one bleak morning.
Elisabeth could feel the relief on the other side of admitting it, but instead she poured her will into resistance. It was this as much as anything that kept her awake, and the First knew it. "People who resist me always follow this pattern," she said. "They bluff, they stay vigilant. And just when they've won, they turn around and throw themselves back into it. They want the completion of losing. It's like playing a scale up to the seventh and stopping—the musically-inclined just have to go up and play the octave, just to ease their minds. As soon as you feel I've gone, you'll turn and give yourself to me with open hands."
Elisabeth had almost lost her voice from lack of sleep; but she did not even try to retort.
"I notice you're up to seven phone messages now. Three of them from your teachers. Four from Brian. When are you going to call that poor boy back?"
"Shut up," Elisabeth croaked.
"They're still looking at you," Spike's shade said to Rupert. "They know you've gone off it."
"As if it matters," Rupert said, dragging his pen listlessly across the notebook page.
"Well," Spike snorted comfortably, "I always knew you were a bit strange upstairs. But then, I know who you're thinking about."
Rupert said nothing.
"All that gold mine of information, and you haven't got the nads to get it."
Rupert said nothing.
"She holds it away from you, like you can't be trusted. Who's she to play God?"
"Shut up—" Rupert almost added, "—Spike," but caught himself in time.
"Oh, right," Spike said dryly. "Everybody else is a fool at love, but you are noble. Don't you see she's playing you?"
"It doesn't matter."
Spike sputtered into a laugh. "Doesn't matter? Right. Believe that if you want. But while you're busy being noble and naïve, your little girlfriend is canoodling with me every night. You don't pump her soon enough, she'll be too far gone and you'll never reach her—and I don't mean to rescue."
Rupert's voice was hollow and rough in his own ears. "She doesn't need rescuing."
"That's a fact." Suddenly it was Ben talking to him, Ben idly wandering the room. "She doesn't need rescuing, just like I didn't. I didn't need rescuing, I needed destroying—isn't that right, Rupert?" Ben turned and looked him over. "Ooh, that's a good impression of the thousand-yard stare. But it doesn't fool me. You're listening." As if to prove his point, Rupert's eyes lifted hopelessly to Ben's face.
"So," Ben said, holding out his palms. "You got a girlfriend. She's got a special connection to the First Evil. Whatcha gonna do? Gonna just let her float out there unattended? Seems to me you can't really afford to do that. And after all, it's not like we're asking you to do anything drastic. You don't have to kill her. I mean, not unless you want to. Maybe you do want to. Nobody's listening to you, are they? You're not getting any further forward. Maybe you'd like to have somebody's neck under your hands. Somebody who's close enough to the darkness that pinching that life off'll do some good—"
"Enough!" Rupert's voice cracked.
"Oh, I don't think so," Ben continued. "I think it's time that you—and everybody else—understood what you're good for. You are the only one smart enough, and dark enough, to do the dirty work. And they always make you do it, don't they? Not by pointing at the mess and watching you dispose of it: just by walking away and assuming it'll get done. And let's face it, you're not worth much else. What do you think they're keeping you around for? You're nobody's hero."
Rupert shivered, resistance writ large in every line of his body.
"Well, it's up to you. I mean, the darkness is going to win anyway. I'm just saying there's something you could do about it. You might as well do something instead of waiting here for me to come and get you all. Sure, you might be doing the wrong thing; but maybe it's better to do the wrong thing than nothing. And think about this," Ben said, pausing at the kitchen doorway. "Whose hands would you rather have around her throat—yours, or mine?"
Rupert sat silent long after Ben had gone. He had resisted, all the way through Ben's speech. He could hardly remember, even, what he had said. But he could feel the poison of it in the tissues of his body. He would go to sleep, and let it work itself out of his system, and he would be free of the First's pernicious suggestions. He, not the First, had won.
Rupert slept the sleep of the just and weary, for once untroubled by visions or voices or poisonous insinuations.
In the morning, preparing to leave on another trip, he rearranged his flight itinerary to include a stop in England.
Part 4
Back to Fanfiction