Dust and Ashes, Part 8
by L. Inman
She had only been to his flat once before, to bring him a housewarming gift the summer after Buffy died, two lifetimes ago. She checked the address twice against the slip of paper in her hand before going up the steps to his front door.
He would not be there. He might never be there; and this was the place to wait.
She had not thought about what might happen if he had locked the door and left no key, glossing only vague ideas about asking his neighbors or his landlord for assistance. Now, standing before his door, she wondered at herself for coming all this way for what might very well be a fool's errand. Hitching her bag up higher on her shoulder, she reached for the latch and turned it.
It was unlocked. Elisabeth pushed it open an inch and stared at it in a vague shock. Then suspiciously pushed it further open and waited a moment before stepping into the darkness of the foyer.
Nothing happened. Elisabeth let her eyes adjust to the dimness: she saw the familiar limns of his furniture forward in the living area; an amphora stood with stone dignity in the foyer at her right; next to it a small table laden with mail gathered thick dust. More mail crackled under her feet, pushed from its place under the letterbox in the door.
She reached behind her and closed the door quietly, leaving herself alone with the flat's darkness. And that was when she saw the crossbow, suspended she wasn't sure how at eye level, poised to cover the entrance. Under her feet, under the mail, a rune glowed faintly, malevolently.
Elisabeth waited: either Rupert's home would kill her, or it would leave her alone, and at the moment either would suit.
She was rewarded when the darkness disgorged a small shape: a cat, dusty-black, with eyes somewhere between emerald and topaz. It came to her feet and sat down, blinking up at her. Elisabeth looked down and addressed it, clearing her disused voice:
"I didn't realize Rupert had a familiar."
The cat gave a double wink, whether in disdain at her stupidity, or regal acceptance, she wasn't sure.
"Or maybe," she mused, "you're some other sort of guardian provided for him."
The cat offered her no answer, but she was beginning to think its opinion of her was rising. At any rate it wasn't triggering the deathtraps or leaping to scratch her eyes out.
"May I come in?" she asked the cat.
For answer it twisted to its feet and walked away, as if to say, Do what you will.
Elisabeth shrugged and moved forward. No arrows flew, no magicks seized her.
It seemed that Rupert's home had found her acceptable.
She put down her bag in his bedroom and turned on the bedside lamp, thinking that the sight of Rupert's things would be more palpably evocative than his scent, which lay over the air in his flat like a damp, stale blanket. But she was oddly unmoved by the familiar shapes of the lamp, his bedstead, the comforter.
The living area was but little different. Elisabeth turned on all the lights she could find—the afternoon light was failing—and stood looking around her, taking in the jeweled colors of his Tiffany lamps and rich red drapes. He had a new armchair, plusher and more sturdy than his last; a purple chenille throw drooped over one arm and the seat. The whole room was primed to comfort the soul who inhabited it; but Elisabeth felt empty.
"Home sweet home," she said, and went dully into the kitchen, to put on the kettle.
Rupert settled himself gingerly in an unoccupied armchair, out of the way of the traffic of wounded and sleeping in the house. He was almost immediately seized with an urge to get up again, to go upstairs to Faith, or to Willow in the dining room; to go out to the back porch or the kitchen or go count weapons in the basement. The livingroom, unlit, carried an odd, dim grey light from outside that mesmerized him enough that he stayed where he was.
Willow passed through, saw him, and altered course. She was going to touch him, he saw, and sure enough, she did: slipped a hand behind his shoulder and smoothed the spot just below his neck. "Giles," she said, "there's time for you to sleep."
He shook his head automatically. "Can't," he said. "I can't possibly."
She accepted this, and went away wordlessly to the kitchen. Rupert leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
When Willow returned through the livingroom five minutes later, Rupert was profoundly asleep.
Elisabeth went out once, for groceries. She stocked Rupert's empty fridge with milk and cheese, juice and eggs; lined up ten tins of tuna (for both herself and the cat) on the counter. The cat seemed very grateful for this: Elisabeth noticed that a window had been left ajar for it to come and go, hunting as it pleased in the neighborhood, but the pickings couldn't have been very lush. She hummed to herself tunelessly as she tore off a hunk of one of the French loaves she had bought, sliced some cheese to go with it, and carried her meal and cup of tea to the armchair, where she curled up and ate silently.
Her physical needs were provided for, and this was enough to keep her suspended in a dull spiritual inertia. It was better not to feel things...well, not better, but Elisabeth could sense the darkness and pain curling at the edges of her consciousness and did not want to invite them any further into the midst of her attention. She didn't know, when it all broke past the recent smokescreens and alarums of her mental constitution, whether she would survive it.
This was more or less what she had come here to find out, but now it had come to the point and Elisabeth found herself helplessly clinging to numbness with a dull desperation that she knew would only make matters worse.
She leaned her head back against the upholstery of the armchair and closed her eyes. The cat came up into her lap in a short vault and settled itself down comfortably, tucking its paws in and squinting at her over its shoulder. As his comforting warmth joined hers, Elisabeth found herself lulled into a doze, and from thence into a sound sleep.
It had all happened before: Elisabeth lying on the bed, book propped open on her stomach, head on numerous pillows, the damp coolness of the country night flowing in through the open window. Rupert in the doorway, smiling, then coming forward to sit down on the bed and nestle her feet in his lap. Elisabeth reading, her breathing buoyant with his presence. The delicious strokes of his long fingers caressing her feet, soles and insteps, toes and ankles. The book lowering and finally falling, her gaze losing focus, their mutual presence carrying them to a simple, quiet place that would prove to sustain them almost long enough.
Almost long enough. The memory was now, without any change and yet with a fundamental change, deeply wrong.
Now, he held her feet and as before, he elected to give her a homemade pedicure: but now instead of eliciting her benevolence and amusement, it was an echo of future grief. He was washing her feet, his face in the lamplight carved into lines of almost medieval sorrow.
Elisabeth found she could speak. "Do you know the meaning behind the name of 'Maundy Thursday'?"
And he could answer, as they acted their memory, these new words, with sadness but without strain. "Maundy, from mandatum, commandment. The greatest commandment."
"I will have my turn," she said softly.
"I will weep," he said.
"Yes," she said, "you will."
The echo of their memory continued: he pulled out a bottle of blood-red nail enamel. "I am sorry I do not have any wine," he said, not looking up. "I have only blood."
"Like Winston Churchill."
He gave a small, bitter snort as he applied impossibly bright polish to her big toenail. "More like Neville Chamberlain."
"They are both England."
His voice, answering, was small and low. "I am only a man."
"That," Elisabeth said, softer, "is what I wanted."
They were not following the memory now: the country air pouring through the window of Rupert's house became the blatant insinuation of bright daylight infiltrating the empty halls of a brand-new, abandoned high school building. Elisabeth swung a sword with unaccustomed practice against a ragged, claw-nailed creature, and another, and another. She was he, but she had lost him.
Then the shape coming for her was the cat, steady-eyed and steady-tailed in the darkness. It jumped upon her belly and settled itself down into the hunkered shape of a loaf of bread, and Elisabeth found it difficult to breathe. The cat was glaring into her eyes: it was Death-in-a-shape, come to link her selves across dimensions and claim her forever—shimmering blue dazzling her eyes—faces wide-eyed surrounding her—
All you have to do is let go—
"I don't know if I can," Rupert said.
"You will be compelled to. It will be all right," she said.
"I am less than a man," he said.
"You are enough," she said.
Silence, and she repeated what she had said before. "You are what I wanted."
A droplet of rain fell on her foot. Gentle fingers wiped it off. "I will weep," he said.
"You will live to weep," she said, and as she said it, she felt her voice strong in her throat and her eyes clearing from grayness to the dim light of Rupert's flat in Bath.
The cat lifted its head sleepily to look at her. She looked back at it, back at the stillness of the living area. It was all very commonplace: and it was this that tore the last stitch of reserve from her heart.
Her chin fell forward, and she wept.
Rupert woke, his breath smacked back into him by the flurry of movement and voices that now surrounded him. He stood up slowly, blinking hard, and let himself be drawn into the hubbub.
It was all so very unnatural—this movement, this spate of planning and waiting, planning and waiting. He went about in it with almost more dreamlike abstraction than he had done while actually dreaming. Something, half within him, half—out there somewhere—had been settled, had been laid sealed on the table for him to open in good time.
It gave him no present comfort, but it was more or less enough.
"So how was your ten minutes of sleep?" Willow asked as she brushed by him.
Had it only been ten minutes?
For answer, Rupert shrugged, and nothing more was said.
She was caught up in the pain now: it burned through the cells of her body like spiritual borax, following her in her rising and her sitting, when she ate and when she slept, during black night and pitiful day. It almost mattered not, now, that the apocalypse was burning with a similar pain halfway round the world: she was caught up: the trial had begun: and she was found wanting.
Time passed, in sickening lurches, so that a few days later the detached thought came to Elisabeth that the battle, whatever its outcome, must have been fought by now.
It didn't matter. She paced the length and breadth of Rupert's flat, the pain seizing her, dragging her, body and soul, down into worse than death. There were casualties. And she was one.
Rupert went briefly to take the night air on the back porch, waiting in the darkness. Next to him stood Jenny Calendar, whom he had loved and lost, several lifetimes ago.
"You're mine, now, you know," she said. "And so is she."
Rupert gave a small, bitter smile. "And which 'she' would that be, now?" he said softly.
The First laughed, and became Buffy standing beside him. "Any she you happen to care about. I was talking about Elisabeth."
Perhaps it was true. But perhaps his dream had been truer.
Rupert began to laugh, quietly at first, but then a little louder, baring his teeth to the night. The First drew back from him. Perhaps it could sense that beneath the weary defiance and the touch of mania, Rupert's laughter sprang from a true mocking humor.
"See you in the morning, love," Elisabeth's shade said, and the First disappeared.
Her hands wandered, to touch things, trinkets on his shelves, the spines of books, the surfaces of fabric, the edges of glass. The small points of contact were scarcely enough to link her to something beyond the miasma of fuzzed agony consuming her. And then they were not enough.
She did not know how much time had passed when she sat empty-eyed on Rupert's bed, the consuming still going on, perhaps permanently. That did not bear thinking of.
In her hand she held the bottle of tranquilizers that had been prescribed for her. She stared at it with the madness of a berserker about to throw himself into the fray forever. The death you should have had two years ago....
There were enough of them to do that.
Brian Whitaker woke from a sound sleep to a familiar voice, and saw Elisabeth's form standing near the "doorway" of bookshelf and wall in his flat. He sat up.
"Elisabeth," he said hoarsely, "you came back."
Elisabeth did not answer.
"Elisabeth?" he said, wiping at his eyes and jaw and peering hard into the darkness.
"There are casualties," Elisabeth said. "And I am one."
"No," Brian said. "You're not a casualty. You're living."
"I, living?" Elisabeth gave an empty laugh Brian had never heard before. She moved casually a few feet into the room. "You know, I hadn't been planning to come to you," she said, "but it is fun to get a good laugh in at how terribly naive you are."
Brian stared warily at her. "I'm not sure what you're talking about," he said.
"No," Elisabeth's form agreed, "you haven't a clue. You are sleeping safe at home, and you haven't got a single clue what's happening to your friend—how close to the edge she is. You'll be too late to do anything for her."
"You've gone mad," Brian said softly. "That's what it is. Elisabeth—"
"You are a fool," Elisabeth said, coldness in every line of her voice and body.
Brian shucked off the bedclothes and got up to go to her. "It's all right," he said soothingly. "Let me get you something—" His hand should have found her shoulder, but instead he touched air, and something rotten stained his soul.
"Thank you for the offer," Elisabeth said mockingly, "but I have a date with an apocalypse this morning. I'll come back and devour you when I have the leisure."
And suddenly Brian was alone.
Ten minutes later he was hammering on the door of the vicarage, his sneakers untied, his hair wild. Anne answered, blinking and squinting, clutching a soft wrapper tightly about her. "Brian? Whatever—?"
"You have to tell me where she is. Where is she!"
"What happened?" Anne asked.
"Tell me where she is!"
"Tell me what happened," Anne said, steel uncoiling in her voice.
Brian was able to give little more than a very incoherent account of what had happened, but it was enough to give Anne the general idea. "You've received a visit from the First Evil," she said.
"The First Evil, fucking bollocks!" Brian shouted. A light went on in the block of flats next door. "She's on the edge."
"Is that what it told you," Anne said. "Well, if it's true there's nothing you can do about it."
"The hell you say," Brian said. "Tell me where she is."
"No," Anne said.
"Please," Brian said, and with that involuntary word he knew he had lost.
"No," Anne said. But her face had softened. She stood back to let him in.
Shaking so hard he could hardly move, Brian went ahead inside the vicarage.
The street grew quiet again, and after ten minutes the light next door went out.
Many hours and an apocalypse away from Brian's frenzy, Elisabeth shifted the focus of her eyes from the bottle of pills to the cat, sitting urgently before her, looking into her face.
"Just think what it would do to Rupert," she whispered.
She held the bottle down so that the cat could fit its teeth round it and carry it away.
"Hide it good," she said, as the cat disappeared through the doorway.
"All I have to do is let go," she told herself, getting up from Rupert's bed and padding into the living area. But she needed something to anchor that commitment, so that she could let go moment to moment.
She arranged a throw pillow on the floor, and laid before it a Prayer Book and psalter she had found tucked away on a shelf. She lit a candle, knelt, opened the book, and began reading psalms aloud, letting the weight of the words strengthen her voice.
Time passed as she read: her voice cracked on dryness, but she kept on, until she ran out of psalms and the whispered thread that was all that was left of her voice fell silent. The candle burned down, dripping, guttered, and went out. Elisabeth's eyes were closed. She put down the psalter and lifted her hands.
And there something fit that had merely made a tenuous contact before: she moved, outside the groove of time, from a palimpsest of selves to one self, kneeling, regardless of whether it made any difference, and lifting herself and what she knew of the world in her hands.
For a timeless moment she knelt still, in the place she was meant to be, silent, finished. Then she opened her eyes. The last thread of smoke from the burnt-out candle dissipated before her. She lowered her hands and looked around her, at the faint grey light creeping among the dark shapes in the flat.
It was morning.
After that, it was merely a matter of waiting: not painless, but peaceful at last.
Squinting against the bright afternoon sunlight, Rupert saw Xander coming down the concrete path to the door of the barracks room he'd claimed for himself. He moved quickly to avoid him, but not quickly enough: just outside the doorway Xander cornered him, gentle but insistent. "Hey, Giles," he said, as if to a spooked horse.
"Xander," Rupert said, trying to be nonchalant. "I was just going to go and talk to Buffy. We're planning to leave here soon, you know."
"Yeah, she told me," Xander said, not letting him go.
"There's a lot to do." Rupert made a motion to ease around him. "Excuse me."
Xander's hand came up and gripped his shoulder. "Hang on a minute there, guy," he said. "I need to talk to you."
Rupert rolled his eyes desperately. "Xander, can't this—whatever it is—be—?"
"Nope," Xander said calmly. Rupert was still the taller man, but Xander had been made somehow immovable by the passages of grief, and the difference in height fazed the younger man not at all. He broke the non-news of his purpose without preamble. "It's time for you to talk to somebody."
"There are things we have to do," Rupert said, not meeting Xander's eye; but it made no difference, Xander was no nearer to letting go of him.
"It's time for you to talk to somebody," he repeated. "It doesn't matter who it is. It can be one of us; it can be that Father Matthew guy you brought us here to. You'll probably never see him again, so maybe he's your man."
Rupert laced his reply with razor sarcasm. "I am not interested in talking about my feelings in some self-indulgent Californian manner with a shrink, a priest, or any of you lot," he said. "And I wish you'd drop this."
"I did," Xander said. "Several times. And nobody wants you to talk about your feelings."
Rupert brushed Xander's hand off his shoulder sharply. "Then what the hell is this all about?"
"It's not about the feelings," Xander said, unmoved. "It's about laying it out, before we go any further. It's about leaving the Hellmouth at the Hellmouth."
"Oh—" Rupert made a derisive noise.
"You're
gonna talk to somebody," Xander said, holding Rupert's eyes with his one steady
brown one, "before we leave here."
"Oh, fuck this for a—" Rupert
reached to shove Xander aside, but the other man gripped him and they struggled
for a moment. Rupert felt his dignity
slipping. He shook himself free of
Xander's grasp with a vicious, quick motion, and stepped back. They stood, breathing a little harder.
"Come on, old man," Xander said, beckoning him with both hands. "You think you can take the one-eyed guy?"
"It's not funny," Rupert said.
"Who's laughing?"
Rupert swung at him, a blow so pathetic it was just as well that Xander ducked it easily. "Is that all you got? Come on, Giles. That was sad."
His fists clenched, Rupert watched the other man's face for the right opening. "I could kill you in seconds," he said softly.
"You could try," Xander said.
They began to circle each other a little; Rupert had completely forgotten his mission to get around Xander and make his escape. "I'm beginning to think this is something you want," Rupert said.
"Your comebacks used to be so much better than that," Xander said. "The First really took it out of you, didn't it?"
"None of your business," Rupert said, not taking the bait.
"Maybe not," Xander said. "But it's your business. You ever going to attend to it, or are you just going to wither up on the vine?"
"If metaphors were cocktails—," Rupert said—
"—Watchers would ride," Xander finished.
Rupert almost dropped his hands. "That makes no sense," he said, his voice rising.
"One crazy man to another," Xander said. "It's not like you're really hiding anything, you know. Everybody knows you're cracking up."
"And who gives a merry shit?" Rupert inquired.
Xander stood still and gave him, to the life, the quizzical look Rupert had inflicted on him for years. "Um, hello?" he said. "Challenging you to a pointless fistfight here. What does that tell you? Giles, are you going to hit me or not?"
When he put it that dropped his hands to his sides.
The two men stood looking at one another for a moment.
"What do you want from me?" Rupert said at last, weary to the bone.
"I already told you," Xander said.
There was another silence. Then Rupert said quietly: "I doubt I could tell it and...."
"...survive?" Xander said. "Well, your survival prospects look pretty grim anyway, so what do you have to lose?"
Xander and Rupert shared a brief mordant smile.
Elisabeth developed a very simple routine, one that spanned days without hurry. She slept in the armchair long hours at a time, ate when she remembered, showered in the evenings, read psalms when it hurt. The cat stayed close, becoming part of the rhythm: she began to feed it, and then herself, morning and evening.
Her rhythm grew slowly, but it was already beginning to take to itself a center.
She was waiting.
Another airliner, another long flight. But this time the urgency was minimal, the mission spread to a farther reach of time than hours and days. Rupert kept his eyes closed for much of the flight, dozing lightly, resting.
He had tried, and failed, to get hold of Elisabeth. She was not answering her phone at home, and his inquiries at Magdalen College had proved equally fruitless. A faint thread of foreboding had crept into him, but after some consideration he decided the only thing he could do at the moment was go home. There he could gather himself for a concerted effort to find her, if she was still alive. If she would still see him. Though what he would say if he made it past all those things and saw her, he had no idea.
First, he would go home.
Elisabeth sat dozing in the chair. Her hands held no book, her mind lay within her still and quiet. It had already come to her that soon she was going to have to figure out what she would do, if Rupert wasn't coming back. But there was still time. She let her eyes fall softly closed and sank deeper into sleep.
The cat made a sharp move in her lap, raising its head. Elisabeth opened her eyes.
There was someone at the door. A scrape of footsteps, a rattle at the door handle, then a jingle of keys. The landlord, perhaps, Elisabeth thought: but she knew better.
Both she and the cat watched intently as the door opened and the late afternoon light spilled in past a tall shape. The door shut, and Rupert shuffled wearily into the living area, let his pack fall with a thump to the floor, looked up, and locked gazes with Elisabeth in the chair.
There was a complete and lasting silence until the cat broke it by leaping out of Elisabeth's lap and coming toward Rupert, stopping halfway to sit and watch him expectantly. But Rupert's eyes did not leave Elisabeth's.
Elisabeth cleared her throat and said, "Your home gave me its hospitality. I think I have you to thank for that."
He had no answer to this, except a faint straightening of the shoulders.
Elisabeth got up slowly, putting the chenille throw off her lap, and stood facing him in the silence.
Across his face flitted the aborted motions of his thought: the weariness, the relief and wonder of seeing her, the paralyzing attempt to find something to say. Her gaze took in the bow of his shoulders, the faint stoop of exhaustion in his frame. She said:
"I'm thinking now isn't the time for talking." She linked her hands in front of her gently. "I'm thinking it's more the time for you to have your shower and a week-long nap."
There was a faint movement in his lips, and his head made the tiniest backward cant. But he made no move to do as she suggested.
She lifted an encouraging hand to brush the air lightly. "Go on," she said. "It's okay."
Slowly he moved to take his eyes from her and look down at the cat, which had come to sit directly in front of him, waiting for its greeting. He knelt briefly to stroke its whiskers and exchange a silent hello; then he stood, a visible ache in every joint, and moved quietly off toward the bedroom.
She waited quietly in the chair, listening to the sounds of the shower, and then later those of shaving and tooth-brushing. She went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and stood there sipping it, thinking.
When the flat was silent again she ventured out of the kitchen and toward the bedroom, peering in tentatively.
He lay sprawled on the bed, still in his bathrobe, his hair damp, his face half-buried in the pillow, one stray hand limp on the coverlet.
She went forward, making no noise, and bent a little to study his face in the lamplight.
There were new lines: he looked his age and more, and his lips were drawn small and close, as of a man dead or grieving.
She felt a faint urge to touch him that only grew the longer she looked. But she did not know whether he was still hers to touch. Perhaps the sickness of battle had consumed the link between them. It was too soon to tell, and Elisabeth found herself unable to worry about it. The thing she had found, waiting, praying alone in Rupert's flat—this thing was now where she lived, and would live whether it was with Rupert or not.
It seemed clear, however, that she was willing to accept him, even on terms of certain difficulty.
She hesitated only once before reaching out to stroke a fingertip along the new silver at his temple. Then she eased the folded blanket at the foot of the bed out from under his feet, spread it over him, and went quietly from the room.
After gathering the few possessions she had brought, and making one last trip out for groceries, she donned her jacket and wrote Rupert a note at the table.
R,
I've gone home. You'll find fresh milk and eggs in the fridge, and tuna for the cat. He seems to like half a can morning and evening.
When you are ready, come to Oxford, and we will talk.
Yours,
E.
She stepped back to look it over once; then, straightening her shoulders and drawing a breath, she turned her back on it, said goodbye to the cat, hefted her bag, and let herself quietly out of Rupert's flat.
The air outside was cool and soft, and the world lay waiting before her, undestroyed.
Finis
Back to Fanfiction