Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 2

Her glasses were crooked on her face. And her head was placed at a crooked angle. She was lying on something hard and uneven, and when she opened her eyes, she thought the ceiling was crooked too. There was an urgent British voice in the background speaking into a phone, a slightly familiar voice. Whoever's there, she thought, turn the damned TV off. My head hurts.

"My head hurts," she mumbled aloud, her voice thick in her own ears.

"Just a moment," said the distracted voice, and suddenly there was that face again, looming from above. She cried out and tried to ward him out of her sight, but her hands weren't obeying her yet, and all she succeeded in doing was to startle the Giles-face into an even deeper look of concerned chagrin. "Good," he said, his voice still distracted, "you're coming round."

To her relief he disappeared again and went back to the phone. "Yes, it's a…an interesting situation. I'd appreciate your input, if you have the time….Yes…yes…right away…thanks, Willow…."

Willow. Elisabeth's vision swam again. Surely she was dreaming. That was it; she'd fallen asleep at the bus station and was dreaming about characters from….

"My head hurts," she groaned again, struggling to identify her surroundings and sit up at the same time.

The Giles-man turned from his conversation on the phone to put out an arresting hand. "No—no—don't try to get up yet…yes, she's awake…I—I'll see you soon. Yes. Goodbye."

He hung up and faced round to her again. "Here," he said, and moved quickly out of her vision, to return with a glass bouncing three-quarters full with water. "Here, take this." He reached out a hand to guide her, but pulled it back as she sat up on the packing cartons and put out a numb hand for the glass. He crouched awkwardly before her, watching her face. "I'm dreaming," she told him firmly, and pulled deeply at the water.

"Dreaming what?" he said.

"This," she said, gesturing with the glass and slopping water on her hand and on his shoe. "You."

"Steady," he said, watching the glass's movements.

"This is a dream," she informed him. "Sunnydale isn't real. I couldn't really be here."

He blinked. "How do you know that?"

"How do I know that?" Her eyes were beginning to smart. "Because it's a figment of a man's imagination—it's all—fairy tales—" She took another drink of water, to hide her growing tears.

"Steady," Giles said again. "Whatever it is, we'll figure it out soon."

"You don't understand." She shook her wobbling head. "You're not real. Unless…unless I'm not real…my backpack—"

She reached convulsively for it, lying forlornly near her feet where Giles had presumably dropped it after bringing her back here to recover. She pushed the water back into Giles's hand and tore into it, opening all the pockets and dumping it out onto the floor of the back room. Clothing, some of it dirty and sealed in Ziploc bags, tumbled out, along with a scattering of pens, makeup, coins, CDs, and paperback books. Her notebook. Her notebook, which—she fanned the pages—was empty but for the scribblings she'd done while on the bus to Sunnydale. None of her books had her name in them anymore, or her CDs. The flap of her pack, which should have had a card insert bearing an ancient address scrawled in ballpoint pen, was bare.

As if following a different track through the woods to the same destination, Giles asked, "What is your name?"

"Elisabeth," she said. "Elisabeth…but what's my last name? I don't remember!" Real panic closed her throat for a dizzying moment.

"Steady," Giles said for the third time, and she rounded on him.

"No, I won't be steady. I'm in Sunnydale, and my name seems to have disappeared, and I'm discussing it with Rupert Giles, and you don't seem to understand that this is a very big problem for me." She turned again and rooted desperately in her now-empty backpack for some scrap of paper with her name on it, but predictably, no such thing materialized.

Giles opened his mouth again, but she headed him off: "So no, I'm not going to be steady. In fact, I feel perfectly justified in freaking completely out." Her words sped so fast they blurred.

"Slow down, please," Giles said. "The only thing is to take this one thing at a time. Where did you come from?"

She straightened her glasses and glared at him. "You know, I hadn't considered how irritating a Rupert Giles might be in the actual flesh. I mean, not as bad a prat as Wesley, but my God—"

He opened his mouth again, whether to express wonder or indignation she could not quite tell, but she was on a roll anyway, and she plowed on:

"And you needn't get all offended, because either I'm your dream or you're mine, and one of us is going to wake up soon, and this won't be happening anymore."

"Now just hang on a minute!" For a moment they glared at each other silently, Elisabeth breathing hard, Giles burying a hand in his hair. "You know, it's quite possible that you are from another dimension and have strayed somehow into this one. We could both be real, you know." He saw her shut her eyes and begin to shake her head, and hurried on before she could protest. "Consider it. Consider it as a logical possibility, however improbable." Giles noticed he was still holding the water glass and set it down at their feet. "You say that in your world, Sunnydale is a fairy tale."

"In a manner of speaking."

"Then there was a point at which you crossed over from where it was mythic to where it was factual."

Elisabeth willed herself to breathe slowly. "All my identification is missing."

"Then let's not start there. Where were you before you came to Sunnydale?"

"On a bus…at a bus station. This morning."

"Did you notice anything strange during that time?"

"Well, no…nothing, really. Except for the little earthquake."

"What little earthquake?"

"The one that rocked the bus station just as the bus came."

"What was the bus number?"

Elisabeth thought hard. "17, I think."

Giles got up and went to the phone again. He looked in the battered phone book on the desk and dialed. "Yes…I'd like to know at what time Bus 17 arrived in Sunnydale this…" he glanced at her—she mouthed "afternoon"— "…afternoon. Yes, I'll hold….Are you sure?...You're certain?...Any other—really. Well, yes, yes thank-you-very-much….Goodbye." He put the phone down and turned back to Elisabeth. "According to their records, no buses at all have arrived yet this afternoon. And they have no record of a Bus 17 route."

Elisabeth was thinking now. "But if the bus was my ticket to another dimension—and I'm not totally accepting that premise yet, mind you—wouldn't it be tied in the Sunnydale dimension, rather than my own?"

"Not," Giles said, "if there was a—a sort of hazy period in which you and the bus were neither strictly here nor there. It's possible that you came down in this dimension and the bus remained in yours…."

"—And it wasn't complete until I stepped off the bus. The Schrodinger effect. Well." Elisabeth blinked thoughtfully.

"Schrodinger. Yes, exactly."

"And here I am." Elisabeth swallowed hard, remembered the water, and reached down for the glass.

Giles was pacing now. "But that still doesn't explain why, if Sunnydale is a fairy tale in your dimension, you are still able to recognize me by sight." He paused to look at her; but Elisabeth kept her eyes on the rim of her glass, drinking.

"Elisabeth," he said, after a silence.

She put the glass down and stared miserably at the floor. "It's…a modern version of the fairy tale…I—oh, I don't want to explain it."

Even without looking at him she could feel the palpable disapproval of his stare at her. "I will," she said quickly, "I will explain it. I know, I have to. But just—just let me shovel my brains together…please?" She worked her fingers up under her glasses and rubbed unmercifully at her eyes.

His voice, when it came, was gentler. "Well, we'll be able to get further, I'm sure, when the others get here."

Elisabeth's head jerked up, her glasses falling askew again. "The others? I thought it was just Willow."

"Well, she's bringing whoever can come at the moment."

"No." Elisabeth held up her palms. "No no no. Dealing with one of you is hard enough. I can't deal with all of you at once. No Xander, no Anya, and especially not Buffy."

Giles blinked in wonder, and opened his mouth, but asked instead, cocking his head: "Why not Buffy, in particular?"

Elisabeth gestured vaguely. "Because she…because she's—Buffy. She's going to freak, and that will only inspire me to greater heights of freaking. Not to mention she's likely to want to stake me first and ask me questions later."

He frowned. "Well, you may be misjudging Buffy a little bit. I mean, she's not entirely so precipitate as all that…." He trailed off, frowning. Then he turned his frown to her.

Elisabeth sighed. "Yes, I got there a second before you, amazingly. There's nothing here to prove I'm not a Big Bad of some sort, here to befuddle you…."

Giles looked at her. Then said, "Well, even if you're only a Little Bad, we're not going to mistreat you."

"Oh no," she said, suddenly remorseful, "I didn't mean—I didn't mean that." She caught the little touch of humor in his lips and relaxed somewhat. But then she remembered that she would have to Explain soon, and leaned her head back against the wall, trying to breathe evenly.

She didn't have much time to collect herself before the curtain billowed aside and Xander erupted into the room. "So what's the deal, Giles? where's the fire? Willow said—" He paused, trying to make something of Giles's sketchy attempts to gesture him into quiet. But Giles's efforts were too little too late: Elisabeth groaned and put her head down between her knees.

Giles raised his eyes to heaven and took off his glasses. "For God's sake, Xander, try to have a little delicacy. We have a person here who needs calm and quiet till we figure out what's going on."

"Oh," Xander said, noticing Elisabeth in her bent-double position. "Sorry. Willow said a stranger showed up who knew you."

"Yes, yes," Giles said impatiently, "and it appears she knows you too. When Willow gets here I'll explain more."

It didn't take long for Willow to get there. Like Xander, she hurried in talking at full steam. "I got here as soon as I could, Giles. And I brought a few things for you to look at." She dumped a heavy backpack on the floor, raising a faint cloud of dust. Elisabeth raised her head enough to look at it longingly: its every corner declared its owner—unlike her own, whose bulges and pockets seemed to be losing their significance with every passing moment in this dimension.

"Are we expecting anyone else, Willow?" Giles asked.

"Buffy," Willow said. "But she had an errand to run first."

"Brilliant," Elisabeth said under her breath.

"Well—in any case—" Giles gestured with his glasses in Elisabeth's direction. "Xander—Willow—this is Elisabeth. I believe she already knows you."

Xander waved, and Willow smiled—familiar gestures that left Elisabeth barely able to nod. "Hi," Willow said.

Elisabeth wet her lips. "Hi," she croaked.

"What did you bring me?" Giles asked.

"I brought you…" Willow laced her fingers and glanced nonchalantly at Elisabeth, "…those books you asked for."

"Good. If you'd…." Giles waved his glasses at a nearby table piled with books and papers, then put them on. Willow knelt to get the books out of her pack. "When Buffy gets here, we'll get into that," Giles said, looking about distractedly. His gaze finally lit on a curled and beat-up legal pad; he picked it up and began rooting about for a pen. Elisabeth picked up one of her own from the floor and silently held it up to him. "Ah, thank you." He clicked it and began scribbling on the legal pad. Then he looked up. "Right, there you are, Buffy."

Sure enough, Buffy had arrived. She moved through the doorway, dumping her backpack next to Willow's. "Yes," she said dryly, "I'm here. Let the fun begin." At that moment she spied Elisabeth breathing deeply and gripping her knees, and said, "Who's that?"

"That," Giles said, scribbling again on his pad, "is an item on our agenda. Her name is Elisabeth."

"Oh," Buffy said. "Hi."

Elisabeth pulled one shaky hand loose from her knee and used it to make a feeble wave.

"We're not certain," Giles went on, "but we think we've determined she's from another dimension; one in which we exist only as fairy tales."

Buffy wrinkled her nose. "You mean, in some other world we're a bunch of funny drawings in some moldy books?"

Elisabeth sucked in her lips to avoid a smile, and shook her head, mainly to herself.

"Elisabeth was just going to explain the nature of these fairy tales to us," Giles said, glancing levelly up from his notepad at her. Elisabeth shrank under his gaze for a moment, but drew in a breath and searched for a beginning.

"I…well, you know that these days, most stories have a visual element to them," she said shakily. "It's not so much about the written word anymore, and more about the power of an image."

"More's the pity," Giles muttered.

"So any fairy tale with punch these days," Elisabeth said, "is usually disseminated in picture form."

"We're a comic book!" Xander said, grinning. "Cool."

"No…." Elisabeth shifted miserably in her seat. "Sunnydale, and all of you, are part of a television series."

Giles pushed up his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Xander blinked. Willow looked around wide-eyed.

"We're a TV show?" Buffy yelped.

Elisabeth sighed. "Complete with actors, props, and a creator-mastermind."

"Let me get this straight—" But Xander cut Buffy off.

"Who plays me? It's not some boy-toy, is it?"

Elisabeth shook her head. "It's not like that. Up till thirty minutes ago, the guy who plays you was more real than you are."

"In her dimension," Giles elaborated, "the actors are us—or I should say—we are merely a script…is that right?"

Elisabeth put her fingertips to her brow and shut her eyes tight.

"But if they look just like us—" Xander mused—

"You see why I'm having trouble with this," Elisabeth said from behind her hands. "I'm expecting to wake up any moment now."

"This is wild," Willow said.

"This is fascinating," Giles said.

"This is ridiculous," Buffy said. "A TV show? Giles. It's—it's—"

"Ludicrous?" Elisabeth supplied, her head in her hands.

"Exactly." Buffy whirled from her to Giles again. "No dimension could be that stupid. This has to be a trick of some kind."

"Where I come from," Elisabeth muttered, "most people'd say the same thing about this dimension."

"What?" Buffy snapped at her.

Elisabeth shook her head without looking up.

"Now—hold on a minute," Giles said, glancing between them. "We don't want to freak completely out."

"Freak out?" Buffy repeated. "Giles, the last time you said that you'd been hitting the band candy."

Giles blushed. Elisabeth sucked in another smile, but not before Buffy caught her at it. "What?"

"So that really happened, did it?" Elisabeth said, unable to stop the smile anymore. "Man, that was a funny episode. One of my favorites, actually."

"What was so funny about the band candy adventure?" Xander said. Willow hushed him. "Not in front of Giles," she whispered. Giles turned a basilisk stare on her.

"Or at all, I should hope," he said, his color still high. "I'm with Xander—I fail to see anything funny about what happened then." He turned to Elisabeth, glaring. "And you're telling me that these occurrences in our lives have been made into stories for the consumption of the general public, who don't even read?" His voice sharpened into a near-shriek.

"Actually," Elisabeth said, "a large contingent of Buffy viewers are academics. Who do read. After a fashion. I used to be one of them."

"It figures the show would be named after Buffy," Xander pouted.

"This is out of control," Elisabeth groaned.

"I agree," Buffy said. "Which is why you'd better tell us what you're doing here."

"Now—" Giles began, but Buffy halted him with a raised hand, still looking at Elisabeth.

Elisabeth looked from her, to Willow perched on the edge of a table, to Xander straddling a chair, to Giles standing with arms crossed over his notepad. Then she looked up to heaven. "It'd be awfully convenient if I could faint again just now," she said.

Buffy folded her arms. "Too bad."

"I have to pee?" she tried.

Only Willow looked sympathetic.

"I don't know how I got here," she faltered at last. "I don't know what this is about. I don't even know my own name anymore. I don't have any proof that my story is true…maybe in my own dimension I got killed or something—" she shied away from that thought— "maybe…I don't know. I don't."

"It's just crazy enough to be true," Xander said.

Giles agreed. "I certainly can't think of a more bizarre situation."

"Magic doesn't even happen in my world," Elisabeth said. "Well, people say it does, but I've never seen it. Logically, I suppose that if technology can exist, then magic can—in theory…I—" She looked down at her shoes. At the scuffs on the toes: and then her vision warped, and she saw her own shoes, with her feet in them, lying sideways on a dark ground, with cries echoing around her. She glanced up, and saw two things at once: Buffy staring a hole in her, and a cloud of darkness too thick with worry and anguish to be real. Then she couldn't see Buffy at all. She heard her own voice: What? What is this? I can't…help me. And then her voice ended, drowned by a buzz of other voices, which rose and dimmed in a rhythm like a lurching ship. I'm going to be sick, she said—

There was the room once more: it had fallen crooked again, and her vision picked out the people in the gloom, all in poses half of hesitation and half of concern toward her. A hand was gripping her upper arm, bracing her partially upright; she realized that the hand was Giles's hand, and the room was crooked because her head was listing heavily to that side. Light grew in the room, and her eyes cleared enough that she could look over at the ex-librarian.

"I'd say," Giles said dryly, "that Schrodinger is not quite done with you yet."

*

Xander said: "Who's Schrodinger?"

Giles rolled his eyes.

"A theorist," Elisabeth mumbled, "who did work on the nature of time and destiny."

"So let me guess," Xander said. "This Schrodinger guy is behind all these things? The surge of vamp activity, and the chop suey of dimensions?"

"I wouldn't say Schrodinger had much to do with any surges in vampire activity," Giles said. "Just with—"

"With trying to deal," Elisabeth said.

"Well, I'm all for that," Buffy said. "What do we do?"

"There's very little we can do at the moment," Giles said, "except to research the possible causes of the increased activity and, possibly, look for an explanation for Elisabeth's presence in this dimension."

"Those books I brought you should help with the vamps," Willow said, "but they may not help you with the other thing. I'll go and see what I can dig up on dimension-crossing."

"I'll go with Willow. Anya may know something that will help."

Willow and Xander packed up and left together without much ado, leaving Buffy and Giles to look at one another over Elisabeth's listing head.

"So what do we do in the meantime?" Buffy asked him.

Giles drew a long, thoughtful breath. "Well…I think I'll finish interviewing Elisabeth and making notes. And—I think it'll be best if I take her home with me tonight, since you'll have extra patrolling duties."

"I'll keep my eyes and ears open," Buffy said, and hoisted her backpack. "See you later." The curtain billowed gently as she went out.

The room was quiet, except for the clock on the wall. Elisabeth gathered herself enough to sit up without Giles's help. He released her and went to pick up his notepad and pen. "Now," he said softly, "let me make a note of the times for our reference, while it's still somewhat fresh in your mind. You were to catch the bus at what time this morning?"

"10:40," Elisabeth said. "But the bus was late."

"How late?"

"I…don't know. I think it was half an hour when the quakes started."

"So then…" Giles made the notes on his pad, still crouched on the floor: "11:10 or thereabouts, the 3rd September 2000…."

"Three," she corrected him.

"Three what?"

"2003."

There was a silence while their eyes met.

"Ohhh," she murmured.

"Yes?"

"How could I have forgotten? Of course it's 2000 here. The magic shop…."

Giles frowned deeply. "Are you telling me," he said, "that your knowledge of the stories is three years ahead of what is happening right now?"

She gripped her knees hard. "Yes."

His gaze on hers was nothing to trifle with. "I think that that is a piece of information that we would do well to keep quiet for the time being."

She nodded.

He sighed and glanced around. "It's time to be going home. Can you walk?"

*

A/N: Once again, I make my disclaimers abjuring any ownership in the Buffyverse. It's a fan story.

Once again, please R/R.

Chapter 3