Shadow Though it Be: An Excursus – Chapter 20
It took several blocks' worth of road before Giles could stop fuming so visibly, and a few more before his feathers went down enough to ask Elisabeth calmly whether she wanted drive-thru hamburgers for lunch. Elisabeth had been watching the rain come down in sheets, listening to it rattle violently on the ragtop over her head, and reflecting on the way traffic signals sparkled in the rivulets of water pouring down the windshield, so she almost didn't hear him; but before he could ask again, the sense of his question got through to her and she answered noncommittally that she would like drive-thru hamburgers just fine. He grunted in response, and they were silent again until they reached the Doublemeat Palace and pulled into the drive-thru.
The barely-intelligible voice crackled over the intercom, asking what they wanted, and Elisabeth was forced to lean close to him to read the menu board. She caught the smell of him as she did so: the sage of his shop and dry-cleaned fabric, both scents dampened by the rain they'd been forced to run through after closing the shop. Elisabeth could still feel the occasional droplet rolling ticklishly cold on her scalp under her hair, and her glasses were smudged. She took them off and squinted, unthinkingly leaning a little closer. It wasn't till she heard him clear his throat at close range that she startled inwardly and pulled back. She gave him her order and began tugging at the hem of her T-shirt, trying to get enough slack to wipe her glasses on. With one fluid motion he pulled out his handkerchief and held it out toward her between two fingers, as he leaned toward the window and shouted their orders into the intercom over the rain.
With Giles thus preoccupied, Elisabeth accepted the handkerchief and, using it to clean her glasses, surreptitiously sniffed at the linen. She was startled to recognize the scent of—not more sage, but lavender. Familiar lavender. She searched her brain for the connection, then lifted the collar of her cardigan and breathed in its scent. Yes, Giles had applied lavender water to her clothing when he'd ironed it; the scent was sharper and cleaner than the usual sweet scent of her bath gels. Elisabeth shook her head and tried to nip her little smile in the bud as with a jolt Giles pulled forward to the cashier's window.
She had to stop cleaning her glasses to take the paper sacks of food he passed to her, and it took some maneuvering to bolster the two large sodas between her shoes, as the car's cupholders were too small for them. It was quite a bit awkward nevertheless, and in fact she had to keep a hand on top of the cups to keep them from tumping over onto Giles's clean upholstery. In the end, Giles gave up and parked in the Palace's parking lot, where they divided their orders and ate them on the spot, the rain drumming on the ragtop and the windows growing more and more thickly obscured with sticky white fog. Elisabeth, munching her cheeseburger, resisted the temptation to draw on her fogged window, as she was sure that was the sort of thing that would put Giles over the edge. She reflected further that the fogged-up windows were not likely to help him forget Anya's parting words, shouted at them over the rain and causing several hurrying passersby to glance up startled: "And don't forget what I said about the condoms! Oh—and make sure when you buy more that you get the right size. You don't want to make that mis—" At that point Xander had stuffed her into the passenger side of his car and cut off the tail end of her advice.
Now, Elisabeth stole a glance at her companion as she dragged a fry through a watery blob of mustard on her napkin. He was chewing slowly and staring morosely at his burger. As she watched, he swallowed and, instead of lifting the foil-wrapped burger for another bite, he lowered it, so that his hand was resting against the steering wheel. "I don't know why I brought you to this place," he said. "There're a hundred better places I could have taken you."
Elisabeth felt rather relieved that she didn't have to pretend to like her cheeseburger anymore. "Is there any cheese left over from last night?" she asked him.
"I think so." He brightened, but only for a second, and he made no move to turn the engine key.
Elisabeth felt a smile creeping up her face, and she turned it to him, waiting for him to look at her. He did finally, but instead of smiling back the lines deepened in his face and he scowled back at the burger in his hand. She was disappointed, but at least she understood.
"Tired of everything being so ridiculous?" she said.
His mouth moved a little, acknowledging her point.
"Can't even laugh about it any more?" She smiled sadly at him.
"No," he said, like a pouting child refusing a mother's comfort.
The grin started creeping back up her face again. She reached out tentatively and stroked his temple, smoothing a tendril of his hair that had been draggled by the rain. "Rupert," she said. He moved one shoulder in a halfhearted attempt to shrug her off, but made no real effort to stop her continued lazy movements, stroking his hair.
"Are you going to tell me it isn't so bad?" he grumbled.
"No," Elisabeth said, lengthening her stroke to include more of his damp hair.
"That it could be worse?"
"Well," she said, "I suppose it could."
For the first time a hint of a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth.
There was a little silence; then he rewrapped the foil of his burger and laid it distastefully on the dash. He pulled off his glasses and reached into his inner jacket pocket; Elisabeth took her hand away, to pull his handkerchief out from under the paper bag in her lap. "Looking for this?"
The movement in his mouth grew into something recognizable as a smile. "Yes," he said, gently taking the linen square from her hand.
She sat and watched him clean his glasses: he took his time about it, wiping each lens thoroughly and squinting through them to check for smears. By the time he'd finished and put them on, Elisabeth had a message waiting for him, written in the steam on her window: the words "Casanova Plan" with a circle and cross drawn over them.
He leaned forward to read the message, which was already filling with fresh steam, then grimaced, gave a groaning laugh, and bent to thud his forehead against the steering wheel. "I want to kill Anya," he moaned, without lifting his head.
Elisabeth picked up the paper bag and began stuffing their burgers into it. "Yes," she said, "I gave her an earful before you came out, but it made very little difference."
"Anya's problem," he said definitively, raising his head, "is that she doesn't understand the virtue of a terminal snog."
Elisabeth could appreciate the virtue of a terminal snog, as it was pretty much all she'd ever had; but she had a feeling that the man didst protest too much. But she knew better than to say so. She contented herself with a hearty laugh, leaning comfortably back in her seat.
"Well, let's go home," he said, reaching for his drink and taking a deep pull at the straw. "Let's go see if we can't make an omelet or something."
"Oooh, that sounds good," Elisabeth said, rolling the top of the paper sack down and stowing it at her feet.
"But first I'm going to have to put on the air and de-fog these windows."
"Yes, and a good thing, too," Elisabeth said. "I was starting to feel opportunistic again."
He paused in reaching for the engine key. There was a sudden stillness.
"What," he said casually at last, "Anya didn't scare it out of you?"
His eyes were fixed ahead on the dash; hers were on her finger-drawing on the window. "No, funnily enough," she said, in a tone to match his.
He turned to look at her. She kept her eyes carefully on the window; then, abruptly, she reached out a hand and clawed a swipe across the banned words. She turned back to meet his eye at last. "I've just put finger-marks all over your window," she said gravely.
"Yes," he said, more gravely still. "It's just dreadful. I work so hard to keep this car clean, you know."
"Yes, I know," she said.
The rain picked up again and drummed hard on the ragtop roof.
Elisabeth and Giles stared at one another silently for a long moment.
Then:
"Do you like omelets?" he said.
She raised an eyebrow. "If they're well made; yes."
"Good," he said, and finished the motion of reaching for the ignition. The BMW roared to life; Giles put the A/C on full blast, and with a violent throat-clearing, he put the car in reverse. Elisabeth drew a shaky breath and smoothed her T-shirt over her belly.
It took until they were nearly home for the fog to clear from the windows completely.
*
It was still raining torrentially when they pulled up at Giles's place; and again they had to run for it, Giles trotting, Elisabeth following him in a bounced walk, her damp cumbersome skirt flapping at her ankles. When they'd got the door open and bundled inside, Giles's first move was to go upstairs and change out of his suit; Elisabeth, meanwhile, headed for the bathroom and spent several quiet minutes sitting on the lid of the toilet, wiping her glasses free of the rain. She was damp, and cold, and the tickle of stray raindrops on her scalp made her feel as if there may be other things crawling under the surface of her skin. She sat there, holding her newly-mended glasses in her lap, and tried to gather the threads of her thought into a clean, untangled bunch.
How many times had she fled for refuge into Giles's bathroom this week? A fair number, she thought, recounting recent events in her mind. There was nothing particularly appealing about his white-tiled bathroom, except that he kept nice towels, and strong, soft lights, and a deep claw-footed tub—the ultimate refuge. And he had shared all this with her without cavil or even reluctance….
She was going to have to find some way to repay him in kind, something that would give him a reciprocal feeling of—safety—quiet—of refuge. Her mind flitted back to the kiss they'd created last night, skimmed over the surface of that memory like a startled waterbug…no, not something like that. That was different. That was something one did on equal ground, like a chessboard, in which each player had the same pieces….
You take white. White goes first, and you need all the help you can get.
—Egotistical much? she had said.
Or maybe, she thought, she should just thank him.
But not in idle words. It would have to be something deliberate.
She let the thought go, like Noah sending out the dove to find dry land, and got up to follow the sound of clattering in the kitchen.
Giles had changed into jeans and a moss-green sweater that was hardly less appealing than his dark-blue oxford shirt. He had pushed up the sleeves to cook, and was now cracking eggs into a large bowl. He eyed her as she came into the kitchen, carrying her glasses in one hand and massaging her damp-sweater-clad arm with the other.
"You know," he said, "if I thought any of my clothing would fit you, I'd insist you put on something of mine."
She smiled at the thought of herself in one of his large sweaters. "Thanks anyway," she said. She put her glasses down on the counter and backed up against it, rubbing hard at her eyes.
"You all right?"
"I'm fine. Just tired. I slept badly last night."
Giles made no answer to this, but even with her fingers pressed to her oily, twitching eyelids, she could feel him looking shrewdly at her.
She was tired of people looking shrewdly at her.
When she made no response to his look, she heard him move again; so she took her hands away from her face to see him rubbing the rest of the Gloucester cheese block against a mandolin cheese grater. The small curls of cheese dropped lightly, clump by clump, into the bowl. She was pleased to see that Giles, like herself, preferred a large proportion of cheese to egg.
He added a splash of milk and took a beater from the drawer. Elisabeth appreciated the swift motions of his arm, beating the eggs, but at the same time the quickness of his movements and the loud scrape and splash of egg in the bowl seemed suddenly overpowering to her senses. She half-shut her eyes, as if to block out the part of his motion that would overstimulate her.
"You know," he said casually, giving the bowl a few last scrapes before tapping the excess drips off the beater wires, "as I recall you had a very similar look in your eyes the first night you were here; which, you later told me, was when you noticed the first signs of an impending attack. Call me simple, but—"
"I'm not having an attack," Elisabeth said. "I'm just tired."
There was a brief silence while he poured the egg mixture into the hot pan he had waiting. "I wonder," he said, "if that's strictly the truth."
He made no further effort to prove his point, instead turning his attention to the omelet. Elisabeth watched him turn the pan handily and prod here and there at the edges of the cooking egg with his spatula.
"Dammit," she said finally.
She didn't say anything else, and he made no response except to tighten his lips sympathetically, keeping his eyes on his task.
It wasn't until he'd turned the omelet that he spoke again: "Can I do anything?"
"You can make me an omelet," Elisabeth said dully. "Then I think I'll try to take a nap."
"Okay," he said.
"Meanwhile," she sighed, "I'm going to go AWOL from my glasses and flop on the couch."
"You do that," Giles said, with a gentle smile.
She nodded, and, leaving her glasses on the counter, went into the livingroom to carry out her plan. It was easy enough to strip off the damp grey cardigan and pry her shoes off without untying them; easier still to unfold her blanket and huddle it around her, little caring whether she wrinkled her skirt by curling up on the couch.
Giles came in a little later with a plate for each of them, and they sat companionably on the couch and ate the omelet in a comfortable silence. When she had finished he took her plate along with his and washed up. He came out then, turning off the kitchen light behind him at her request, and settled himself at his desk with a stack of books ("Let me know if you need anything," he said; and, "Okay," she said).
To her own mild surprise, she found herself dropping off within minutes, and in the few moments before sleep took hold of her, the faint sound of the rain and the scritch of Giles's pencil gathered themselves to a fullness in her consciousness. This fullness morphed slowly into the raging numbness she had learned to endure before sleep.
There was darkness and quiet; and the darkness was the cold burnt aftermath of scalding pain. There was a certain peace in darkness like this, like Emily Dickinson's lines about the calm blank eyes of despair. There was a voice, muttering, slightly querulous, and oddly familiar. She searched her mind for the match, and drew blanks until she finally recognized that the voice was her own. She was asking someone for help; my backpack, she said, I'm looking for my backpack. She moved forward, toward the place where the voice came from, but her voice seemed to oscillate from one direction and then another, and she was blind. She moved aside and walked into a body, a not-warm body, which grabbed her; she flailed to get away, but her arms were pinioned. She tried to cry out, but her voice got stuck in her throat, and she stretched out hands—
Someone was saying her name—a voice she trusted, though it aroused a faint sadness in her.
"Elisabeth."
The dream changed, mainly by announcing itself as a dream. She saw her notebook had fallen down the crack of the couch, and she reached to dig for it. Her hand met an obstruction, and she couldn't see it there anymore. Swallowing panic, she lifted her head and attempted to get her eyes open.
"Elisabeth."
Her eyes were open, but she wasn't waking up. She hated when this happened. She was still digging down the couch for her notebook, but realized suddenly that it wouldn't have any reason to be there, as she was pointed to her right, at the meeting-place between cushion and settle-back, whereas her backpack and notebook were lying under the coffee table to her left. She lifted her eyes and saw Giles leaning over the back of the couch, looking intently at her but not as yet reaching toward her.
"Are you all right?" he asked her.
She still wasn't properly awake. She uttered, "Still—dreaming—" and shook her head, hard, to clear it. When she was able to open her eyes and see straight again, she found that she had twisted herself up in a half-sitting position in her sleep, tangled in her own blanket.
Giles had come to sit on the edge of the couch at her feet. She sat up and pushed the blanket off her arms; took several breaths; and gradually reality stopped bearing that distressing resemblance to shattered water.
"Well," she croaked out at last, "my nap-taking plan didn't work so well."
"You were dreaming," he said. "You were talking about your backpack."
"Was I?" she said, startled. "I heard myself say something like that, but I wasn't feeling the voice." She studied her hands for a moment, reclaiming herself. "It was like I was two people for a little while. I guess I really am." She gave a short laugh. "I'm not used to thinking of that as anything but a—a metaphor to describe my odd psychology."
She paused to swallow and take a few more breaths.
Giles said: "I had forgotten."
"Forgotten what?" She looked up at him.
"Forgotten what position you were in. You seem to be so—" He broke off.
"Stable?" Elisabeth supplied, bitterly.
He lowered his chin in a look of gentle reproach. "I was going to say, so much a part of this world."
She met his eye miserably for a moment, then said, "D'you ever get tired of people finishing your sentences?"
He smiled a little, but she could tell she was not off the hook. Finally he spoke, and proved her right.
"Pride I can understand," he said. "Self-flagellation I can understand too. But put limits on it, Liz. And if it comes to instability, you're in good company."
In another lifetime, a speech like that would have made her cry with the relief of gratitude. As it was, the flicker of feeling turned over in her chest and quirked up her lips into a little smile. The faint urge she had felt a moment before, to challenge him, even to hurt him for knowing her, died mercifully; and she let him read it in her face, finally unafraid.
"Now," Giles said, "would you like brandy or water?"
"Tea," she said.
His face cleared. "Tea it is, then. An excellent idea. I think I'll take a cup with you."
*
They sat and sipped hot fragrant tea and listened to the voice of the rain, whispering and plinking on the other side of the window. Elisabeth's eyes no longer felt so oily, and she shut them gratefully to sip again at her steaming tea.
When she looked up at Giles, she saw that he was frowning at the curtains. "I hope this doesn't keep up. There's nothing more unpleasant than a patrol in the rain."
She didn't answer him; he turned after a moment to glance at where she was curled, knees up, on the other end of the couch.
She made herself say the words. "Do I have to go?"
"You don't want to?" His eyes searched her face, gently.
She shook her head.
"That's rather intelligent of you. Unfortunately, I'm afraid you don't have much of a choice."
She had known that would be the answer; she said dully, "Because I have to help find the focus."
"You have to help draw the focus," he amended, apology in his voice. "Since we don't know the locus of the energy, we need all the factors in one place if possible. Of course, it also helps Buffy to have a group patrol once in a while, especially at times like this when there's a lot of vampire activity and she's got pressing concerns elsewhere. But don't," he added, "tell Buffy that I said that I was glad for an excuse to call a group patrol."
In response Elisabeth held up a silent right hand.
And because she knew it was coming, she leaned her head down against the back of the couch and waited for him to ask: "Can you tell me what happened?"
"His name was Tom," she said, after a moment.
"The
vampire?
She nodded.
"He told you his name?"
"No. His friend came up and addressed him."
"How did you meet him?"
A little snort of a mirthless giggle escaped her throat; this was sounding like a dating quiz game. "I was looking over my shoulder to see if Buffy was following me, and I walked into him on the sidewalk."
"Were you armed?"
"I had a cross."
"Did you use it?"
So she told him how she'd twigged that he was a vampire; how she'd belatedly remembered to use the cross in her hand; how the vamp had disarmed her and lifted her into the air; how the cavalry had come in the form of the other vampire, bringing news of Buffy's fighting prowess. "So, Mr. Watcher," she said dryly at the end of this recital, "what should I have done differently? Other than sticking close to Buffy, of course."
He did not rise to the gibe, but instead answered, with equanimity: "There's probably very little you could have done, under the circumstances, unless you'd had some holy water to throw in his face. But that would only distract one vampire; it wouldn't have protected you from any subsequent attacks." He took another sip of tea and thought it over. Elisabeth let him turn over the matter without answering him; she returned her attention to her own tea and breathed the relief of confession.
Without warning, Giles put down his tea, got up from his seat, and crossed the room behind her to a cabinet, where she heard him rummaging in a drawer. He came back holding a leather pouch whose contents rattled familiarly. He sat down and drew from it a long, finely-honed stake. She shrank from it at first when he held it out to her, handle first. "'Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand?'" she said.
"No," he replied with a smile. "Just a stake."
Tentatively she took the stake from him and turned it over in her palm. "Show me how you hold it," he said.
Instinctively she grasped it point down, with her thumb toward the top and her wrist cocked outward. "How's this?"
"Fairly good. Does it feel right?"
She looked a mute question at him and he answered her by pulling out two more stakes and holding them toward her. She took each of them in turn and weighed them lightly in her grip, finally deciding that the first one was her favorite.
"I'm struck how phallic these things are," she said suddenly, holding the stake point up before her nose.
"Well, they're weapons," Giles said, diffidently.
"Yes. Wielded by a girl, the chosen one." Elisabeth was sure the irony of that had never been lost on the Watcher's Council, but she refrained from saying so. "On the one side, darkness, perversion of goodness, raw soulless power; on the other, the Slayer...and Mr. Pointy." She wiggled the tip of her stake at him with a little smile.
He gave her a hooded glance and returned the other stakes to the bag. "Well, if you're up for it, we may as well give you some training now. Put down your Mr. Pointy, and I'll show you some escape moves." He set down the bag and got to his feet, draining the last of his cup of tea.
"Oh, my stake's not going to be called Mr. Pointy," Elisabeth said, getting up and following him into the kitchen with her cup. "I'll give it an auspicious name, like Macbeth." She giggled.
Giles snorted, and took her teacup from her outstretched hand, to rinse in the sink with his.
"Or—I know. Like my ancestor Robin the Bold. That's it. My stake's name is Robin the Bold." She giggled again.
"Well, the next phase of your training won't be involving Robin the Bold," Giles said repressively, though she was fairly sure she wasn't imagining the twitch at the fine corner of his mouth.
Elisabeth grinned at him and followed him out of the kitchen and into the main room, where he pulled the chairs out from the table and shoved it aside. Watching him, Elisabeth chafed her now-bare arms nervously. "So what does this phase of my training involve?" she said.
"Have you ever wrestled?" he asked her.
She shrugged. "I've roughhoused with siblings and cousins, but otherwise, not really."
"Taken any self-defense courses?"
"A few quick lessons from a friend." She shrugged again.
"Then you'll show me what you know. I, of course, will play the vampire." When she cringed, he said, "Are you going to go squeamish on me?"
She straightened her spine. "Of course not."
"Very well then." Giles moved the last chair out of the way, removed his glasses, and set them on the desk. "First, I will show you a few basic holds and how to get out of them; then, we'll move to defensive attack."
She gave him a terse nod. "Right."
"Right." He beckoned her forward, and she went toward him and into his grasp. She found herself quickly pinioned from behind, in a grip that masqueraded as ungentle. His large hands held her wrists crossed in front of her, and his arms had her corralled close. "Show me how you would get out of that," he said, his voice cool and impersonal.
She thought about it for a moment. She knew fairly well what she would do, but the problem was, he didn't smell right—he didn't smell of stone, and his presence was warm. This is important, Elisabeth told herself sternly. This is training.
So she dropped like a child squirming out of a parent's grasp, threw the back of her head into his thigh, and when he grunted and tipped forward involuntarily, she wrenched her arms out of his grip and scrambled backward away from him.
She stood up faster than he did, panting slightly; when he came up from rubbing his thigh, he had a faint smile on his face. "Your friend gives good lessons," he said. "And you seem to know what you're doing. The only problem is, you telegraphed what you were going to do five seconds before you did it. If I'd been a real enemy, I'd have had a countermeasure ready in the time it took for you to try to escape. Never hesitate," he said.
"Right," she said, catching her breath.
"Never—hesitate," he repeated, looking her hard in the eye. "I can't possibly stress that enough."
She nodded, to show she understood.
They tried several more holds, and with each successive lesson Elisabeth grew in confidence, so that finally, in a close scuffle, she managed to place a foot behind one of his and trip his knee from behind; he went backward and put a hand down before regaining his balance. "Very good," he said, making her flush. "Now let's try a defensive attack." He brushed off his hands from the last one and then held them up, as if preparing for a wrestling bout. "Assume you're unarmed," he told her. "Assume your escape route is behind me. What do you go for?"
She looked him over appraisingly. "I'd say the eyes, the throat, or the groin."
"Try one," he suggested.
So (remembering his dictum never to hesitate) she made a fist and drove it at his throat, but he caught it, deflected it, and used it to put another hold on her. "You're still telegraphing," he told her. "Try it again."
She tried it again, and again he read her, preempted her, trapped her in a hold; again he let her go. "Try it again."
This was beginning to remind Elisabeth of their chess match, and she said so. "Little wonder," he said; "chess is quite applicable here. So is poker. You have a poker face, I know; use it. Try again."
She glared at him, tried again, was foiled again.
"You're too tentative," Giles said flatly, letting her go for the third time. "You won't succeed if you don't put aside your inhibitions."
"I don't want to really hurt you," she said angrily.
"And I told you to put that thought out of your head. You let me worry about me."
She stood, fists clenched, breathing hard at him.
"This used to be my job, remember," he said testily.
"I'm not the Slayer," Elisabeth said, jaw taut.
"Evidently," he said.
She didn't know exactly what happened next, except that some synapse seemed to click in her mind and she found that she'd already gone for him, had closed with him, had caught him unguarded at the throat and tripped him from behind (it'd worked before), and he went crashing down, rattling the dishes in the drainer with his impact; she rolled out of the way, then returned savagely to the attack before he could get up. By the time she actually came to herself she found she was sitting on his chest with his left elbow pinned under her skirt-clad knee, as Buffy had done to her; her left hand gripped his hair and her right was drawn back to hit him. He saw it and made an involuntary resigned wince; and the synapse unclicked. She scrambled backward off him, shaking, and stood back against the wall to watch him recover from a distance.
For a moment all he did was wince and blink. Then he dragged his head up and propped himself slowly on his elbows. He smiled, still blinking painfully. "Much better," he said. He sat up and ran a hand through his hair; looked up, and saw her face.
"That was good," he said again.
His words did not have the desired effect; Elisabeth's eyes filled, and she continued to shake, her fists still clenched and held close together at her chest. She swallowed, and swallowed again, and began to recover.
"I'm much less worried about you now," he said, frankly. He was still sitting on the floor.
Her voice trembled. "That wasn't strategy," she said. "It was blind fury."
"Better blind fury than blind fear," he said, meeting her eye. "Now you know you can do it; which was the whole point of the exercise."
He raised a knee and began to push himself to his feet, grunting. Belatedly she jumped to help. "Thank you," he said, his lips twitching into a near-smile as he straightened his back with an audible crackle. "So, now what shall we do? Shall we play a game of chess?"
"I thought we already were," Elisabeth said. She had recovered enough to fold her arms comfortably and regard him with a little smile.
He smiled back.
When he actually spoke, his voice held the faint irony that made her heart beat faster. "You'll do," he said.
She didn't know whether to exult or be terrified; so she wound up doing both, looking straight back at him.
After a long moment she said: "D'you think your day's taking a turn for the better?"
"Well," he said thoughtfully, "I have a new bruise on my backside." He rubbed the offending part of his anatomy. "But at least you didn't knock me unconscious…and on the whole—yes, yes I think so. You?"
She twisted her mouth and raised her eyes, thinking. "On the whole?...I think maybe. Yeah."
The shadow of a speech crossed Giles's face, and in its wake he blushed a little. Elisabeth said: "What?"
He stammered a little, getting it out. "I—I was going to say—to ask, I mean—if you'd stopped at all feeling opportunistic."
Elisabeth knew where the wind lay, now. She tried to put a stop to the little smile that threatened to wring her mouth. "The question you should be asking," she said, with mock severity, "is, 'Do I appreciate the value of a terminal snog?'"
He sputtered and burst out laughing. "Very well," he said when he recovered. "Do you?"
"I have a great appreciation for the terminal snog," she said gravely. "The terminal snog is my old friend. But I thought you wanted to play chess."
"We can't do both?" he said, with a thin feral smile that made her stomach jolt.
"You mean, both at once?" she said. She found that at some point one of them had taken the other's hand, and they had moved to face one another closely.
"Yes, I mean both at once," he said, as if this were obvious. "That is, unless you're still throwing the game away."
"Try me," she said quietly, and at her tone his expression elevated. He bent his face close to hers, and her eyes fluttered shut.
The phone rang, splitting the quiet of the flat.
Elisabeth's eyes sprang open, and Giles startled visibly.
"Shit!" he said, and turned away. Elisabeth grinned, but swallowed it when she saw that he was really perturbed. He kicked the back of the couch, kicked the chair, and stormed into the kitchen, cursing all the while. The phone rang again, and a third time, and Elisabeth realized that he was too startled and irritated to answer it; so she went over and picked up the receiver herself. "Hello?"
"Elisabeth?"
"Buffy?" ("Shit!" said Giles.)
"Yeah. Um, is that Giles swearing in the background?"
"Ah…yeah," Elisabeth said, glancing back into the kitchen. "He's having a bit of a day."
"You mean, more of a day than when I saw him last?"
"Yeah. We had an unfortunate lunch at the Doublemeat Palace—"
"Ew," Buffy said.
"Yeah—"
"I seriously need to have another talk with Giles about his dating skills."
Elisabeth smothered a laugh, watching Giles fume in the kitchen out of the corner of her eye. "And," she added quietly, "I don't think he's quite gotten over Anya's parting words to us when we closed the shop."
"Oh God. Yeah, Xander told me and Will that she was going all TMI. Oh—TMI means—"
"I know what TMI means," Elisabeth said, amused, "and yes, that's what she was doing."
"Poor Giles," Buffy said.
"Yeah." Elisabeth had almost forgotten to be nervous, talking to Buffy. "On the bright side, the training session went okay."
"Good," Buffy said. "Listen, I only called to tell Giles that we're going to meet at the Rosedale Cemetery at eight. So—"
"Right, I'll tell him."
"Okay."
"See you later this evening."
"Yeah."
Elisabeth put down the phone and turned to Giles, who had gone into the hallway between kitchen and livingroom and put his forehead to his upraised arm against the wall. "She says Rosedale Cemetery, eight o'clock."
He made no sign that he'd heard her.
She went closer to him. "Rupert, did you—"
"Yes, I heard you."
She hesitated, then said, "Are you okay?"
A faint groan was her only answer.
He didn't lift his head, but it seemed he could sense her sympathetic smile, for he gave a small growl a few seconds later.
She smiled wider, and reached for his free hand. "Come here," she said. He resisted, scowling, at first, but eventually let her lead him into the room and toward one of the chairs which she pulled toward him. "Sit."
"What? why?"
"Sit," she ordered, pointing at the chair seat.
He glared at her, then moved to put his backside in the chair, but she grabbed his arm before he sank too far. "No, not that way, the other way." At her indication, he turned and straddled the chair, grumbling.
"What are you doing?" he said, as she laid her hands on his shoulders.
"I'm giving you a chair massage."
"Oh." His voice sounded more puzzled than acquiescent.
"Haven't you ever had a chair massage before?"
"I—I don't think so. How do you massage a chair?"
She snorted. "Ha ha. I'm massaging you while you sit in a chair. Now hush."
He said fretfully, "I don't see how a massage is going to help anything."
"Didn't I just tell you to hush?"
He made another little growl, but otherwise went quiet.
She started easy, letting her hands reclaim their muscle memory from the years past in which she had done this for friends. "I suspect knots," she said softly, mostly to herself, as she probed the broad muscles of his shoulders with careful fingertips. "And judging from your posture, I would put them right about…here." She dug gently into the soft flesh under his left shoulder blade, and her fingers found what they were looking for: a corded knot under the surface of the muscle that shifted under her touch like a twanged guitar string. He flinched.
"Didn't know that was there?"
"No," he murmured.
"Thought not," she said. She worked lightly at it with her thumb, then said, "Here—" and lifted the hem of his sweater. He helped her pull it over his head; she smiled to herself and put the sweater on the desk in a heap next to his glasses, then turned back to resume her ministrations over his T-shirt. She glanced around at the side of his face; he had shut his eyes, but he had not at all melted into her touch. "Relax," she said softly. "It helps."
He drew a breath, which he clearly thought constituted relaxing.
Elisabeth bent her attention to her work. Clearly this was not ten minutes' work sitting in front of her. She decided to work slow, so as not to tire her hands before she was finished. She began with long, slow strokes along the furrow of his spine, followed by broad circles moving outward, with the heels of her hands, followed once again by smaller circles within them. She wrung the muscles as best she could, to loosen them before she set to work on the knots themselves; and although he had become more acquiescent since she began, he was nowhere near pliable enough for her to continue on the broad scale.
Her fingers sought out the knotted cords in the muscles between his shoulder blades: there were a lot of them, and they were all connected to one another, a taut and unruly web beneath his flesh. She went after them with the angles of her thumbs, and each time she pressed one of the nexus points she heard him stifle a grunt of pain. "Well, now I believe that you've never had a chair massage," she said. "Or any kind of massage at all."
"I wouldn't go that far," Giles grunted.
She leaned into his lumbar vertebrae with the heel of her hand, releasing a dull snap. "Don't they have chiropractors on the Hellmouth?"
"Chiropractors," Giles snorted, "those quacks."
"Said the proprietor of a magic shop," Elisabeth retorted with a grunt of her own, as she worked her way up his spine.
"My services are actually useful." He was gripping the back of the chair and wincing.
From the top of his spine she radiated her pressure across his shoulders, without answering him: Her own muscles were beginning to protest, and she couldn't quite spare the breath.
He went on, punctuating his sentences with small grunts of pain. "And furthermore, how am I supposed to be able to search for a proper massage therapist and keep up my shop at the same time? And besides, in a country that doesn't know what a Turkish bath is—ow!"
For Elisabeth, to save words, had smacked him lightly with the backs of her fingers across the back of his head.
"What was that for?"
"For not relaxing when I told you."
He growled mutinously, but otherwise kept quiet.
Despite his grumbling, however, Elisabeth found that he had become much more pliable than before; he was moving both with and against her strokes, and it was giving her a much easier resistance to work with. Presently he made a little growl that could have been one of pleasure; she worked up to his neck, and when he bowed his head and made the little growl again, she knew she'd been right.
The skin of his neck was seasoned and creased, not young. Nevertheless she handled it gently, and was rewarded to feel him draw a long, shuddering, childlike breath and give up the tension there. She smoothed his skin up through the base of the skull, then bent a little to glance at what she could see of his face.
His eyes were softly shut now. She smiled: finally. This was what she had wanted; an opportunity to give back to him out of what she had. She decided to keep that part of it her secret, and make the gift as rich as she could.
She moved the stroke of her hands again down his back and up to the knots at his shoulder blades, which were considerably less rigid now; thinking encouragements at him: You get these from the way you hold yourself, ready for defense at all moments. Just for a moment—let it go. Just for the present let your eyes go soft behind their lids, and be safe. Be at home. Briefly she felt an urge to say these things to him, but thinking them at him seemed to be enough; as she worked he drew another long breath and let it out, and his shoulders let out with it. Elisabeth's hands were on fire now, from unaccustomed effort and friction, but she kept up her work, using her knuckles to rest her fingertips. When she moved for the first time to wring and smooth the muscles of his arms down to his wrists, his fingers when she reached them were like water. She shouldered a straggling tendril of her hair out of her face, smiling to herself.
She worked on him until she could no longer feel any knots in his muscles, then smoothed her hands down his back lightly and, to finish, laid her hands against the sides of his head and massaged his temples, ever more lightly, then took her hands away like a conductor guiding a last lingering note into silence.
For a long moment his only movement was a soft little breath.
"Are you asleep?" she asked him quietly at last.
A little "mm" was his only answer.
"You have time. Maybe a little nap is in order." She reached down and took his limp hand; he rose obediently with her help and let her walk him to the couch, where he flopped down with his face in the pillow he'd lent her and his sock feet resting on the lamp table next to the couch arm. She tugged her blanket out from under him, making him grunt, and draped it loosely over him. She watched him settle down; he seemed to melt almost instantly into sleep, so that when she spoke his name a few moments later, there was no response.
Satisfied, Elisabeth went into the kitchen and made herself a second cup of tea; then took it to the livingroom and sat down in the easy chair to relax, to rest her aching hands, and to watch Rupert Giles sleep. It was a good sleep, too, she could tell: not only were his eyes soft (or at least the one eye she could see was), but his mouth was soft as well, and half the creases in his face seemed to have vanished.
The rain was letting up; but while the sound of it was still in her ears Elisabeth put the tea down on the coffee table long enough to pull out her notebook and flip through its pages to her notes for a sonnet, untouched since she'd abandoned it on the bus to Sunnydale. She sat and stared at the half-formed phrases for a long while, then put the book patiently away—it would come—and got up to dig out her jeans and black shirt from last night (for another night's patrol it wouldn't be too bad). In the bathroom, changing, she discovered as she shook her creased black skirt that she'd popped a seam at the thigh, probably straddling Giles's chest during their infuriating training session. Clucking her tongue at herself, she carried the skirt back out to the livingroom, dug out her sewing kit, which resided in an old cough-drop tin, and sat down to mend it.
When that was done, she put kit and skirt away, rinsed out her tea cup, and puttered around a little before going to check on Giles.
He was still quite out. Not even her hand smoothed along his back stirred him. Elisabeth was pleased.
It was getting close to dinner time. She thought about what she might do, and finally decided that she'd look up pizza delivery services. A delivered pizza would save her and Giles eating omelets for the second time, and would also give Giles more time to sleep. It was while she was running her fingers down the column of numbers in the phone book that she realized: she didn't know the flat's phone number. Damn. And she wasn't about to wake up Giles just to find it out. She stood, her face in a thoughtful scowl, turning over the possibilities in her mind. Then decided, finally, to let it ride till Giles woke up on his own. She went back to her seat in the easy chair and breathed out, to relax.
A knock sounded at the door.
Elisabeth glanced sharply at Giles, but he didn't even twitch. Swiftly, she got up and went to the door, stood on tiptoe to look through the peephole, and then pulled it open.
Standing before her, in a shiny red rain slicker and with Tara wielding a large umbrella at her back, was Willow.
"Hey," she said.
*
Chapter 21