Dust and Ashes, Part 5
by L. Inman
When enough daylight showed in her livingroom to compete with the lamps she had left on through the night, Elisabeth got up and took her brandy and Rupert's water glass to the kitchen, where she washed them thoroughly and set them to drain. Her left wrist hurt to turn; she supposed it must be a sprain, and decided she would go out and purchase an Ace bandage at the chemist's after she'd had her lunch with Brian. In the meantime, she wondered, what did one do for a sprain? Heat pack? Cold pack? At the very least, it was definitely a long-sleeve day.
She showered and dressed, moving her left arm sparingly. There was plenty of work to do, and since the First seemed to have decided it was done with her, there was no reason not to go on as if the world were not ending. How odd, that she should be so strong: her mind and body were light as a blown egg, and just as empty.
Perhaps she should eat something, she thought.
On another airplane Rupert reclined in his seat, staring blankly ahead. He had seen a brief resurgence of emotion a few hours ago as he waited for his plane to arrive: a twist of deep grief followed by a backlash of defensive anger; then both together had sunk in the murk of his psyche, and he had felt nothing since.
Today, his companion was the Mayor.
"Tsk—looks like it didn't turn out the way you planned after all. Oh, well! better luck next time. Maybe your real enemy won't have that pesky moral high ground for you to contend with." The Mayor shook his head. "Always happens when you mix love and work. Things get mixed up, and then you get a lonnng string of third parties lining up to play the game. It's just not pretty."
Rupert said nothing.
"Guess you're a bit tired today," the Mayor said. "Well, at least you accomplished something. You opened that little gate of No Turning Back and marched right on through." He chopped a flat hand straight ahead of his face. "I'm proud of you. At least you have that; I mean, I don't see her ever coming to understand your sacrifice."
Rupert turned his head slightly to the side but did not quite look at the First.
"You know who I mean. That other Slayer, what's-her-name."
"Buffy," Rupert said softly.
"Yes, that's it! I always forget. No, I don't think Buffy'll understand your level of personal sacrifice. Any time she sacrifices something it's all center stage and no one can miss it, but you? You just quietly let it go, and maybe occasionally one or two people'll notice. That girlfriend of yours, now—I think she has your number. Not that that matters anymore, eh? Ahh well, easy come, easy go. Who needs a girlfriend when it's the end of the world?" The Mayor chuckled.
Rupert made no answer.
Accordingly at "noonish" Brian appeared at Elisabeth's front door to find her dressed, but not ready. "I've got to finish copying this out, then I'll be ready to go," she said, ushering him in. She moved too quickly for Brian to comment, if he had one, on the circles under her eyes; a small touch of makeup had covered the worst of her haggardness, but could not quite disguise the eyes and the paleness of her skin. She knew she didn't look like someone who was supposed to be on the mend.
Brian followed her over to her desk and watched her as she reassembled a sheaf of papers and finished the list she had made of titles to get from the library when she had time. "Hand me that notebook over there," she said, pointing across them both to the table next the desk. He moved briefly to comply, but the next moment she found he had grabbed her left hand and was turning it over to expose the large bruise peeping from beneath the sleeve. "What's this?" His voice was quiet but sharp.
She let out a great sigh as he pushed up her sleeve to reveal the whole show—the black fingerprints Rupert had left on her pale flesh, unmistakable as an injury done with malice aforethought.
For a long moment all he did was stare dumbly at her arm. Then he raised wide eyes to her face. "What is this?" he repeated.
She pulled her arm free of his grasp. "Casualties of war," she said shortly, and turned back to face the desk.
He took her by the shoulders and made her face him. "Enough," he said. "Don't give me that cock-and-bull war-against-evil stuff again. This," he said, taking up her wrist again and holding it up between them, "wasn't done by some phantom."
She looked down at her own injuries. "No," she said. Her face felt leaden.
"Who did this to you?"
"It isn't that simple," she said, pulling free from him again. "It was all engineered by the First Evil—"
"The First Evil? The wife of the President of the United States?"
Trust Brian to zing her with a sarcastic joke at a time like this. Elisabeth rolled her eyes. "That's the First Lady. I'm talking about the First Evil, who's a lot older than Tipper Gore, for one thing—"
"If at some point you decide to tell me who did this to you, let me know, will you?"
She brushed her hair out of her eyes and glared at him. He glared back. "I am trying," she said over the ache beneath her tongue, "to tell you what is happening. Rupert...." She paused to swallow, and to her dismay Brian read perfectly the way her eyes skittered from his face to her wrist and away.
"Rupert did this?"
She was half-ready to make the headshake and face of denial, but couldn't even finish the gesture.
"Rupert," he said, in a soft hiss. "Where is he?"
"Brian—"
He had almost started away from her, as if to take to the streets and track him down, but at her voice he turned. "No really. Where is he, Elisabeth? The bastard can't be far."
"He's probably out of the country by now," Elisabeth said faintly. "Brian—just hang on a moment—"
"Elisabeth! You can't let him get away with this."
"He's not getting away with it." Her hard voice brought Brian to attention. "I assure you, he's getting all he deserves and more. Are you going to hear what happened, or not?"
Brian looked as though he found it highly doubtful that Rupert was being properly chastised, but he folded his arms and waited.
Elisabeth wished he'd stop looking so truculent before she began, but decided there was no point waiting. "The First Evil is looking for a way to destroy the story I know. I told you about that story; you remember?"
Brian nodded. But a new expression had crept into his eyes: not dubiety exactly, just—perhaps—a new willingness to interpret what Elisabeth said with his own caution. Elisabeth sighed inwardly. Perhaps there was something suggestive of mania in her bearing; if so, there was nothing she could do about it now, and—this frightened her—there was relatively little she could do if Brian determined to take matters into his own hands. She proceeded cautiously.
"Well, there are two things you need to know about the First," she said. "One is, it can't touch anything; it has to act through agents. Two is, it can only appear as people who have died." It seemed odd to her now that she had not explained this to Brian before; suppose the First had attacked him? It was bad enough dealing with it when you understood what it was. "And I," she said, "have died temporarily."
Brian was not a stupid man. "So it's been appearing to you. As yourself."
"Yes." Elisabeth suppressed a shiver.
"And nobody else can see it."
"Yes. And," she sighed, "from what Rupert said—"
"It's been appearing to him as you as well." Brian's face darkened. "You know, if this evil thing appeared to me as someone I loved, my natural reaction would be to worry that they'd died, not to—"
"I expect he probably did, at first," Elisabeth said, cutting him off quietly. "But there's this thing about the First...the subtlest of all the beasts in the garden. And Rupert has a lot of dead people in his life. I imagine they all ganged up on him and convinced him to—"
"To what, Elisabeth? Show up here and abuse you?" Brian paused, horror growing in his face. "What—Elisabeth—what exactly...did he do?"
Elisabeth stared, motionless, at the surface of her cluttered desk. "He tried to force me to tell him the rest of the story. He had been made desperate, he believed that the First couldn't be defeated without the information I could give him...But he couldn't quite go through with it."
Brian said harshly, "It looks like he got pretty far before he stopped."
Elisabeth's knees were shaking. Until the moment she had done it, she had not anticipated the horrible shame of confessing to her friend what had been done to her. Now that it was done, and the defiling wave of shame had passed through her, she felt weak in its wake. And for a moment she carried a blinding, burning hatred against Rupert for making her a victim all over again.
Brian was talking. "...extradition treaty, depending on where he is—"
Elisabeth looked up. "—Extradition? What....Are you out of your mind?"
Brian merely stared at her without even bothering to point out the irony of her question.
"This is so far beyond civil or criminal law—it's—there's not even a point, Brian. Besides, if I wanted to destroy the story, there's one foolproof way of doing it."
"The story be damned," Brian said. The Oxford veneer was wearing off his native Mancunian. "You can't let him get away with it."
"I told you," Elisabeth said, "he's not getting away with it."
"Well, it looks a damned lot like it from here."
"You don't understand what the First is doing to him—to us—"
"Elisabeth! God, you still think you're an 'us'? After what he did?"
"That's not what I meant. Hold your voice down." Elisabeth gathered herself as best she could and gave him a level stare. "You have to understand how irrelevant the normal authorities are for this kind of thing. I have to wait this war out, but other people are fighting, and dying. Horribly. And if the First Evil is not defeated, then it'll just keep happening, on an even bigger scale. If the First is defeated, and Rupert survives, then we'll talk retribution. Until then I'm keeping my head down."
"Playing his game, is what you're doing."
Elisabeth reddened. "I'm not playing anyone's game, Brian."
His hands had balled into fists. Elisabeth thought of the history he'd given her, of his years holding his own in backlot fights, but his stance seemed ineffectual compared to Rupert's lithe malignance. For some reason she found herself unaccountably furious at Brian. "I'm not playing anyone's game," she repeated, glaring.
"Oh no? It's not playing their game to lie down and take it, like you did with those other Watchers?"
"That—was—different," Elisabeth said, gripping her desk chair so that her wrist hurt. "And besides, I won that little skirmish."
"Skirmish? That's what you call it. And they're still walking around free men to this day."
"Well, not really," Elisabeth said. "The First exterminated them."
"Looks like he missed one."
She drew in a sharp breath. If Brian had been close enough she'd have slapped him, and he knew it.
Her voice came low and deadly. "You don't understand what you're talking about."
Now Brian was flushing too. "Oh yeah? Well, explain to me the difference, Elisabeth. Explain to me—" he pointed off to the side, as if in the direction of the Council— "what's different about Watchers abducting and interrogating you, and one Watcher, who's supposed to love you, showing up and betraying you and leaving bruises all over you."
It was all the worse that he had a point. "I'm not playing anyone's game," she said for the third time, carefully holding down her voice to keep it from shaking. "I'm waiting out the war."
Brian tossed his head. "So you're willing to put up with any sort of injustice just because there's a spiritual war on?"
"Not every injustice," Elisabeth said coolly.
Brian went very still. There was a silence, then he spoke, his inflections impeccably Oxford once more: "I see. So what it boils down to is, I'm not good enough to be in your little evil-fighting club. Or, I should say, not ruthless enough."
Elisabeth blanched. "Brian—that's not—"
"You know," Brian said, "I'm really not feeling very hungry. I think I'll go home. I have some marking to do." He turned, and strode deliberately to her door.
"Brian," she said, faintly, but she couldn't manage any stronger protest.
At her door he turned, anger and sympathy clearly warring in his face. "Call me," he said, "if I can be of any use." The door closed sharply behind him.
"You bastard," Elisabeth said to the closed door. She sat down shakily in her desk chair, buried her head in her bruised arms on the desk, and cried.
The last time Rupert had returned to the house on Revello, he had thought he couldn't possibly dread it more. Now, taking the front steps wearily one at a time, he decided not to think that anymore. It could always get worse.
They were glad to see him alive, of course; but they were also conserving their energy, as if to be too glad to see him might leave them too weak to face the next buffeting wave of battle. Also, as Xander said, being too happy might jinx it. Rupert ducked away from Xander's thoughtful stare and went to talk with Buffy.
He expected Buffy to say something about Elisabeth, either caustic or probing; but Buffy made no mention of Elisabeth whatsoever, and indeed seemed to have forgotten she existed. Which, under the circumstances, was quite all right with him.
He had just begun to think he could forget all about what had happened and throw himself back into the work here, when Willow caught him as he slipped down the corridor to the bathroom. One look at her big eyes and he knew he was caught.
"Did you go and see Elisabeth?" she asked him quietly, beneath the current of hubbub throughout the house.
The last thing Rupert wanted was to endure a sub-rosa interrogation from Willow in the corridor. "Yes," he said shortly. "For about ten minutes. Willow, if you could excuse me...."
He tried to move around her, but she did not budge. "You're not excused," she said, folding her arms. Rupert saw clearly the stubbornness on her face, felt with his sixth sense the wall radiating from her. Well, he could be stubborn, too. He glared down at her.
"She called here, you know."
"Yes," he said quietly, "I know."
"I didn't tell Buffy," Willow said, meeting his eyes. "I was waiting for you to do it."
"I don't have anything to tell," Rupert said.
"But you went and saw her...."
Rupert's gaze skittered away from hers. "Her information's no use to us," he said flatly.
He tried again to push past her, but her voice rose, stopping him. "How can you say that? Giles—she knows our whole story. Surely there's something in what she told you—if she told you...."
"No," Rupert said harshly. "Her information's no use to us. Leave it," he said, and successfully broke past her and took refuge in the bathroom, shutting the door with a snap and leaving Willow staring after him.
The next few days passed without much event for Elisabeth. She left only to buy a few groceries and a bandage for her sprained wrist. The sun came up and the sun went down, and she read, worked, dozed in her chair. Realities merged for her, dreams flashed across the screen of her mind and mixed with her waking moments, so that when the phone rang one afternoon she had no idea what day it was, or what she was supposed to be doing.
It was one of her fellow students. "Good God, Elisabeth, where have you been?" she said. "Nobody's seen hide or hair of you all week."
"Sorry," Elisabeth said thickly.
"You've fallen asleep over your books again, haven't you? Well, you've missed yesterday's study session. There's one tomorrow if you want to come to that."
"Right," Elisabeth said. She grabbed her calendar and worked out what day it was, then got off the phone and stared glassily at her messy desk. Tomorrow. She'd get some sleep and go to the study session tomorrow, though what she was meant to be studying she couldn't even remember. She highly doubted she'd be worth anything when she did go...worth anything...no—don't fall asleep—it's not safe—must hold on—
Rupert hid himself away in a dark room, pretending to work and shooing everyone away. Even Dawn tried to talk to him and ended up coming out with a wide-eyed grimace. For once the First seemed to have decided to leave him alone, but Rupert was not fooled: the First would return to the attack as soon as it judged Rupert to be letting down his guard.
He knew Willow was there before he looked up and saw her. He could feel her mind picking lightly at the edges of his battened-down consciousness, patiently, as how one should remove a stubborn price tag from a new purchase. "Giles," she said quietly.
He sighed in answer, and she came fully into the room.
"Tell me what happened," she said.
He shut his notebook abruptly and made as if to get up and leave, but he was just so damned tired. "I don't—" he said— "it's not—"
"Giles. Just tell me," Willow said.
There was no way to tell her: and yet he heard his own voice speaking, giving Willow everything in a flat, soft monotone: "I tried to force the information out of her. I only succeeded in hurting her. The First has driven her half-mad with visions of herself. She has nothing she can tell us. The story is changing."
There was a long silence. Then Willow asked, "For the better or for the worse?"
Rupert waited for the space of a few breaths, then gave his answer, light with despair.
"I don't know," he said.
After a very hot shower and a cup of turbo-swill, Elisabeth thought she might just make the study session intact. Her mind had turned into a palimpsest that was constantly erasing and rewriting itself, but that she could probably ignore enough to speak to others with a reasonable degree of coherence. She packed her satchel carefully, counting things over under her breath. Notebook—library books—disks—notepad—pens. All there. She slung it over her shoulder and left the flat without a backward look.
It had never seemed such a long walk to Magdalen Bridge before. Elisabeth was fairly sure she was on the right road—there were the landmarks she saw almost every day—but reality may have shifted for her, may have decided to buck her off, like the street in G.K. Chesterton's story. "I'm sorry," she told the Iffley Road. "I didn't mean to take you for granted." A passerby looked askance at her, but Elisabeth decided not to pay him any mind.
The Bridge, at last. Elisabeth crossed with the sense of escape, breathed deep, and headed toward the College. There, the porter's lodge. Sims the porter waved at her from the desk—a much huger distance than she had ever thought—and she waved back across the illimitable space with a wan smile.
She went out into the quad and had gone halfway across before she heard her name: "Elisabeth...Elisabeth! Over here!"
She turned, and turned again before she finally saw her friend coming towards her. "There you are. Good God. You look awful. Are you sure you're all right?"
"I'm fine," she heard herself say.
Her friend was frowning at her with far too much scrutiny. "You don't look fine."
"I am fine, really," she said. "Let's go." And she headed off across the quad without waiting to see if her friend was coming. Though she could not at all remember where it was she was meant to be going. Damn! Was that her face again, like that day across Radcliffe Camera? No, no—her imagination. Her friend was shouting after her, and what was the reason for that? Nothing particularly was happening, except perhaps the ground was a little closer than she was used to seeing it—it was approaching—oh, right, she was falling for some reason. And now she had collapsed and now it was going to take over—oh, it was going to take over and she couldn't stop it—
Everything went very gray for a while, and she felt herself borne up and carried. It was rather like floating in water, but perhaps not quite like that because in her ears was the fuzzing pressure you feel when you're under the water, not floating in it, and there was an echoing feeling in her body in response, filling every tissue, and she used to know what it meant—oh, yes, now she remembered—fear, it was fear she was feeling but she had been so saturated with it for so long that it didn't matter any more—except it did matter, because how on earth was she going to finish term like this?—there was a voice in her ears, muttering and whimpering, and it was that voice she had learned to hate so much, and she wished she could stop it but it kept on....
"Steady," said a doctor's voice, and the scene had changed to one with people in white coats and fluorescent lights and curtains and narrow beds. The insane asylum, perhaps? Elisabeth heard someone asking. No, just the infirmary, said a nurse, and then, you're going to be all right—it's exhaustion. Happens every year.
The First comes every year? Elisabeth heard her hated voice asking.
But she got no answer to this.
The fuzzy pressured sound was in her head and it wouldn't stop. She wasn't floating really, she was drowning, and all these busy people around her were busy but not doing anything, not even really looking at her and it was exactly like that damned Stevie Smith poem—
"I can't stand Stevie Smith," she said strongly.
"Yeah," said a voice, quavering, "she's such a bitch."
Brian. Brian looking her in the face, his eyes wide and frantic but focused. "But don't worry," he went on, "you're not drowning. I'm here. We're not going to let you drown." His hands were touching her, one holding her hand and the other stroking back her hair. Elisabeth choked into dry sobs.
"Brian," she mewled, "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I didn't think you were good enough for my evil-fighting club—"
"No, no. Dammit, don't say that. I've been regretting it ever since I said it. I was an ass to you and then I left you to—"
"No," she said, "I should have told you before."
The faintest of smiles quirked his lips. "Well, I won't argue with that," he said, and they laughed together. "But you're taken care of now," he said. "You're not to worry."
"I'll never finish term like this."
He stroked her hair. "Don't worry about that now. I'm taking care of it. Okay?"
"Okay."
Next to Brian she saw a doctor with a syringe. "What's that?" she asked, fearfully.
"It's just a sedative," Brian soothed her. "It'll help you sleep."
"No—" she said, "—no, I can't—"
"Yes you can," he said, touching her forehead softly. "I'll be right here the entire time. Just keep your eyes on me, right?"
She gathered her courage, nodded. She kept her eyes on Brian and felt the small sharp pinch of the needle in the soft hollow of her arm. Grayness flowed in, and she shut her eyes, and there came the familiar moment—All you have to do is let go—and she let go, and sank into an erasing darkness.
Part 6
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