Chapter 5

AN: After a long pause here comes an update. I rewrote this chapter several times, it might appear a little "edgy" on some parts as I had to cut out some things that would make too long, hopefully it's still possible to follow it.

Sunnydale

Buffy was back. Suddenly and without any warning. Out of the blue one evening, few weeks after the beginning of the school there was a knock on his door, and when he opened it there she stood, offering him the familiar look, showing equal parts guilt and a plead, a hope to be accepted back. He stared at her for a long moment, without showing any emotion on his face, trying to process all the impact this reunion would have on his and their situation. When he finally uttered the words "Welcome home, Buffy," it was as if some parts in him that hadn't been working in the past weeks finally fell together, clicked. He felt happy and proud even as he walked into his kitchen to fetch some refreshments for her and the Scoobies and briefly took off his glasses and closed his eyes for a moment as if to relish this small triumph.

It took him a while until Buffy finally confessed to him what had actually happened in the manor with Acathla, how Willow's spell had worked at the last minute, how Angel had got his soul back and how she had to kill him to seal the opening vortex of the demon and thus to save the world once more. She seemed to be slowly adjusting to her life back in Sunnydale, they talked about where she had been and Buffy described her one and last adventure in LA where she destroyed an underground demon sect and that had given her the push and woken in her the desire to return home at last.

Giles smiled absentmindedly when she finished, remembering his own youth and where the path had led him to at the same age and after another disastrous demon encounter. He was pleased that Buffy didn't end up the way he did, that she hadn't joined a chaos worshipping gang or fell in with some other sort of unsavoury youths that would summon demons and allow them to kill innocent people.

She had asked about Helen, of course she had, right on that first evening in his apartment. He had almost anxiously expected her to. And though he noticed Willow shaking her head at Buffy in alarm as if to prevent her from bringing it up, he knew Buffy would wonder where Helen was, if only for a moment and then forget it, shrug at the best and then move on.

He was all the more surprised when on an afternoon as they were both sitting in the library, doing some noncommittal research, after a while of silent reading Buffy leaned back in her chair and furrowed her brows and tilted her head thoughtfully. "But you were so good together, so... cute," she said all of a sudden, frowning a little at her own choice of words. "I mean, your kids would have been the uber-weirdos... but still."

Giles looked up at her and it took him a few seconds before he understood what she meant.

"Helen and you," she said in a tone as if stating the obvious, as if the previous hour where they had been reading on the behaviour of the Taroga demons hadn't affected her thoughts at all and as if this was the topic they have been actually discussing and he was the slow one this time.

Giles furrowed his forehead a little, then took off his glasses, taking his time to answer. He pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket to unnecessarily clean them. "I-uh... I thought so too," he spoke in a calm voice, yet clearly a little confused and taken aback by the fact that Buffy brought this up again, "but-uh... obviously... she didn't see it like that."

"Hm," Buffy shrugged, weighing his reply a little while longer, but after that she returned to her reading.

Swiss Alps

Few days after Helen's arrival at Márkos' hut they were both sitting on a clearing near the inn, but far enough to not be disturbed. The day before she had given him an abridged and not exactly accurate account of the events that had passed since their parting over six years ago, keeping some stuff of the more delicate nature to herself as she felt he didn't need to know everything and she didn't feel like talking about that. Márkos hadn't said anything when she had finished, and now too he was merely puffing his pipe and with furrowed brows staring at the ground in front of him.

His silence was making her uncomfortable, if not to say mad and she finally asked: "Do you really believe that I can be helped? That you can change my condition?"

When he wasn't replying, she moved closer to him and spoke – not louder, but almost in a conspiratorial whisper – from her experience she knew that would rather get her his attention: "Do you think you have the power to reverse the ritual? Because I don't remember its exact terms-"

"I don't need to know about that," he interrupted her and made an impatient gesture with his hand. "At least not now," he added and got up to his feet to look down at her. It made her feel like a schoolgirl for a moment. He was scrutinizing her in silence for a long while, pondering as to how he should proceed with her, where to start. "As for your other question – you have come with me, haven't you? Given that, you yourself obviously believed that I can help you," he stated, yet when Helen opened her mouth to say something, he continued in a casual, appreciative tone, "a remarkably wise decision indeed that I – to be honest – had not expected from someone as silly as you."

She merely offered him a glare.

"There is still one thing I'm not clear about," he said after another long puff.

She raised her brows questioningly.

"Why did you do it?" He asked in a half-whisper, almost hissing the question at her, his eyes piercing through hers.

She didn't reply, just stared back at him, her face expressionless.

"Severus would certainly not have wanted you to-"

"For Merlin's sake!" She exclaimed exasperated, "when will you stop assuming he was any reason I did that?! I had not decided to get off this world because of a broken heart or something equally trashy and romantic!"

"But surely you wouldn't have gone through with it if Severus had been still alive," Márkos pointed out.

Helen sighed. She was one step from getting up and walking out on this whole arrangement, she was tired of talking about it, and disappointed too that Márkos whom she held in high esteem should think and believe the same assumptions Rita Skeeter had been spreading, those same cheap assertions everyone else has fallen for. She cared little about everyone else, it did bother her of course, but not that much that she would seek to explain to the whole world the truth, to correct their opinion. But it was different with Márkos. Márkos bugged her. "Ugh, for pity's sake!... I don't know!" She threw her arms around her in a helpless gesture. "Yess, I might not have done it if he was alive. But I also might not have done it had I got out of my bed with my left foot on that morning instead of my right one..." She paused. "Don't you understand?" She raised her eyes at him at last. "It was something I had been playing with in my thoughts over months, years even, Márkos – like... wanting to go undertake a cruise in the Mediterranean or-or a trekking tour to the Himalayas – it's in your head since some point but you keep telling yourself – not just now, not today, maybe some other time, until finally one day you wake up, shrug and pick the phone to call the Himex."

He looked at her incomprehensively and she shook her head. "I don't know how to explain it to you so that you'd understand-"

Suddenly he interrupted her impatiently. "I got it – you wanted to kill yourself."

Helen shrugged at those words. It sounded all wrong from the mouth of someone else, like something utterly terrible and ugly although that wasn't how she had seen it back then, or even now when looking back..., to her it was not a crime, but a deliberate life choice – that actually consisted of ending it.

"What I don't understand is why you did that ritual," Márkos continued, "why didn't you just... poison yourself or something-"

"I wanted to die a muggle," she cut him off in a slightly raised voice.

He frowned and gave her a disbelieving glare. "Then you are even more stupid than I thought," he said after a while.

She looked at him, hurt, and got up to her feet. "I don't need this," she murmured and was about to return to the inn and leave him stand there. He should find himself someone else to gnaw at.

"Magic isn't something you can throw away like that," he said louder. "Surely you must have known that."

She stopped without turning around and took a deep breath again. "You're missing the point, Márkos." She had cared less about whether it would really work or not then, it was the gesture that counted in her eyes all the same. "Might be that you can't put it away, but at least I'd have got points for the effort," she added dryly and turned around at last.

"I had seen terrible magic performed... exhibited... on my friends, on innocent people, on children...," she spoke slowly and in a heavy, quiet voice, yet underlining every word, "and I felt... filthy and-eh... dirty...," her face turned into an odd grimace as she tried to recall what it was like after the battle, "... every time I used it afterwards... and I didn't want to be a part of it anymore... I didn't want to have anything to do with magic. I wanted to get rid of it." She looked at him defiantly, then said with a trace of self-mockery: "And on that sunny day in March I woke up, remembered the book with the ritual and thought – Hey, I can do both at once."

"And now?" Márkos asked.

She looked at him incomprehensively.

"Do you still feel that way?"

She dropped her gaze before saying hastily: "I no longer think about it." It was almost the truth.

"That's good," Márkos said sternly. "Because you can't change being a witch, my dear. You were born it, it's in your blood. Whether you like it or not it flows through your veins – and you can't kill off that part without destroying the rest, it doesn't work that way... just as you can't change the colour of your eyes, or the sound of your voice or the fact that you hate spinach... or...," he paused briefly and the corners of his mouth unexpectedly twitched into a faint smile as he continued, "... the fact that you are awful at washing dishes and other chores..."

She looked at him bemused. He had forbidden any kind of magic inside the inn, they had to do everything by their bare hands. She hated doing the dishes and hated him even more for making her. Also almost every time it reminded her painfully of her first night with Giles.

"You can go on with life, trying without using magic, you can live without ever eating spinach or – at least after we're done here – without ever doing the dishes again, but you cannot change the predisposition."

She rolled her eyes. Why was he telling her this?

"Also, you need to get rid of the concept that magic is bad," he continued instructively, "because it isn't. Like most things that had been here before the rise of the human race it is in itself neither good nor bad, it's how man chose to use it. Every single thing, however good and useful at some times can – in the wrong hands – be turned into something destructive, evil even... like-eh...," he paused looking for some analogies, "like-eh... an axe", – he spotted an axe not far from them, "for instance – you can kill people with it, destroy things, but you can also... chop wood," he frowned realizing it wasn't the best choice to illustrate his point.

Helen smiled. "Yes, but unlike with magic, people aren't born with an axe attached to their arms. They can pick it, or put it down."

"But it's been a general perception since centuries that magic – most of the time – does improve our lives, wizards have created great things in this world that others couldn't." Márkos continued in his adamant defense of the wizarding powers.

It was almost like listening to Hermione, Helen thought. "Not another magic is a gift speech," she murmured.

He silenced her with another strict look. "It is no more a gift than being born with ginger hair, it's something you have, it's not a choice between making the best of it or ignoring it. It's not a mere talent, a vocation, it's a part of what you are, how you were born, an essential part of your being. Embrace it."

She looked at him unimpressed. "I honestly don't know why you are telling me this. I said I no longer mull over it."

"Yet you had clearly mulled over it quite a lot after Severus died," he pointed out in that annoying tone of his voice that was suggesting he knew her better.

Helen chewed on her cheeks to swallow the initial curse, then looked him straight in the eyes: "Ok, now I'm gonna say this one last time, 'cause-ah... – any more would suggest that I think you're daft... or that you in fact are daft: Severus' death and my own later dealings were too separate events. Entirely unrelated to each other..." Suddenly she broke off and took her eyes off him to stare at the ground as if she had just realized something. She remembered Márkos' words from a few weeks ago – he spoke of the survivor's guilt. She shrugged it off and raising her head again she said: "It wasn't the grief over him that drove me afterwards..." She frowned and looked blankly somewhere past Márkos, searching for words, trying to assort the rush of thoughts that suddenly invaded her mind. "Besides, it wasn't supposed to go down like that," she said and when she saw him rise his eyebrows in question, she exclaimed petulantly, "what would you know about it?! You weren't there!"

For now Márkos decided to put the talks aside and to concentrate on strengthening Helen's magic. On one afternoon she laid exhausted on the ground, her eyes closed, her nose had just stopped bleeding after Márkos had let her perform what felt like thousands of spells, saying he wanted to observe and to check something.

"You see the ritual did work alright, and you said it wasn't possible to get rid of one's magic," she said in a flat voice.

Márkos made an impatient smacking noise. "Don't be stupid. If that ritual had worked you would be dead by now. And clearly you haven't lost your magic either, you could perform almost any spell," he pointed out, then paused, looking thoughtful,"... except for the patronus for some reason," he murmured.

"So what else have you observed then?" She asked.

"Hmmm, it looks more to me as if your body – or some part of you – is fighting it, probably subconsciously."

After some time Márkos came to the very plain conclusion that Helen could only be helped if she wanted to – that is if she would indeed change her attitude towards magic. He could perform some enchantments himself to better her condition, he even knew one or two potions that could be of some use, but he thought that all those nosebleeds and the dizziness as the aftermath of her spells were simply the expression of the fact that some part of her, her mind or whatever was still "blocked", still felt guilty about using magic, - or possibly even guilty about something else. So it is survivor's guilt, he thought on one afternoon as he was again observing her doing some spells.

He decided against questioning her much further. He was guessing that on the night of the battle something must have happened that set it off – and it was not the fact that she killed Bellatrix Lestrange or other Death Eaters, no. Despite her assurances he was convinced it had to do with Severus in some way.

After a few days of increasing tensions between the two of them and of not getting anywhere with her magic Márkos resolved he would try another approach. It was on an evening in early November, the numbers of guests frequenting the inn were getting smaller with the approaching winter, so that they all had a little more free time for themselves, as attending to the visitors wasn't as demanding as in the late summer: Helen, wrapped in a thick woolen cardigan and an even thicker scarf around her neck, was sitting at a table outside nearest to the house where the light from a lantern on the wall would still provide enough light for her to read yesterday's newspapers, drinking beer from a large jar she has taken into her possession over the past few weeks. Márkos stood in the entrance of the house to see if there were any other customers, then approached her.

"That's fifteen sickles and twelve knuts," he said sternly, pointing at her jar.

She raised her eyes from the papers and looked at him entirely unimpressed. "I'm not paying your for the beer," she said shortly before returning back to reading the article in the sports section about some upcoming tennis star. "Besides, you haven't paid us a single wage for working here since we've been here, so consider this my way of getting what's rightfully mine," she muttered. "Anyway, be glad it's just beer. I was thinking about whiskey first, but couldn't reach the bottle..."

He said nothing, but sat down on the bench opposite to her and merely watched her for a moment, while she pretended to be deepened in reading. Yet after a while the stare she could feel fixed on her became too annoying and she looked up at him again.

"Why have you come?" Márkos asked her finally.

She let the papers fall on the table with a fluttering noise, then pretended to think hard about the answer. "Well... it must be the self-destructive part in me, I couldn't help it," she said.

He ignored the sarcasm. "You could have left, anytime." He said referring to their regular arguments during the past days and to the fact that they haven't yet achieved the slightest change in her condition, and that yet despite all that she was still here.

Suddenly, she didn't know why, where this huge bulge came from that appeared out of nothing in her throat, why the corners of her mouth were being pulled downwards, why her eyes were beginning to burn. She blinked a few times, not daring to speak.

"Either you still haven't given up the thought and still believe that you can be helped – which would of course also mean that somewhere deep down you want your magic back to normal – or you're just staying because you don't know where else to go," he spoke slowly, in an almost kind tone, so unlike him that it almost made Helen burst in tears, hadn't Márkos hurried to add: "In which case you can go pack your things, because then I cannot help you."

The left corner of her mouth twitched into something of a weak smile as her fingers kept playing with the newspaper.

"Anyway," he said, "I didn't mean that. I wasn't asking why you've come here, but why you've come here."

"I-eh... don't understand," she said puzzled.

"Why did you leave? The Hellmouth? The-eh... Sunnydale?"

Immediately she dropped her look again and felt her face getting hot. She had told him before bits about her life in Sunnydale, about the Hellmouth, and about Giles too.

"Because... I felt I shouldn't be there. I-it wasn't the right place for me, I had put other people's life at risk before, and-ah... I felt that my staying there might put everyone in danger."

"Ok. Let me get this straight," he began with an earnest face, "you assume you are a danger to everyone around you, everyone who is in one way or another close to you..."

She looked at him miserably.

"... so you decide to come to Hogwarts, a school, and be a teacher, and live under one roof with hundreds of young students who are around you almost twenty-four hours a day seven days a week... You see it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It would rather imply that you either care very little about the wellbeing of all those innocent children or...," he made a meaningful pause, but just as she opened her mouth to protest he spoke not without a mocking undertone, "or that you had just... invented... that whole idea of being a danger to have an excuse to leave."

"No!" She said loudly and outraged, "no! I-... I didn't-..." Yet the right defense wouldn't come into her mind. It all had made such perfect sense to her before, all the reasons why she had to go, it all had matched, she had puzzled herself a perfect, reasonable explanation for her leaving, and yet she couldn't get it together right now – and began to panic, she couldn't remember the perfect excuse suddenly, it all crumbled down the moment Márkos spoke. He saw how her mind was frantically working as if searching for the lost sense that in fact had never been there. He was just hoping she would realize that at last. She just kept furrowing her brows and staring at the papers in front of her, opening and closing her mouth again.

"There were the nightmares," she said after a while, but it sounded lame rather than like a logical explanation even to her. And then she told him about the dreams she had been having since around the time Rodolphus Lestrange paid them a visit, how she dreamt terrible things that were happening to Giles mostly, but also about her apocalyptic dreams with scenes of what she could only imagine would happen in hell. She had been trying to ignore them, she never before accorded a special meaning to dreams, because she generally believed they weren't a portent of the future, but simply games of the mind that was still trying to process certain events from the past. Until she saw the cherry tree painting from one of her dreams in the manor where Acathla was destroyed and where Giles had been tortured by Angel.

When she finished, she didn't even dare to look Márkos in the eyes. She smiled sadly. "You probably think I've lost it completely now."

Márkos merely made a strange sound that she couldn't interpret in any way, but kept his eyes fixed somewhere behind her, his look blank.

"It was just...," she said, then shook her head, trying again to remember the feelings she had when she left Sunnydale, and she shivered a little at the picture and the memory of Giles and of their last evening together.

Four months earlier

She heard footsteps outside and hurried to open the door. There he stood, looking beaten and the sadness and helpless resignation in his eyes were breaking her heart so much, that for a brief moment she forgot about what was ahead of her and that she was about to leave tonight. He shook his head almost imperceptibly and tried a weak smile. She tried too, then stepped aside to let him in and closed the door behind him. He threw his jacket and his travel bag carelessly on the floor with a tired sigh, then turned around to face her again. She avoided his gaze and wanted to walk past him to the kitchen to make some tea. He reached for her arm however and gently pulled her closer to him. Laying his hands on her shoulders and caressing her arms, he looked her deep in the eyes.

"If it weren't for you-," he began to speak slowly, looking for the right words to express what she, what her being here meant to him, "if you weren't here... now... I don't know what I would do, what I would become," he paused, then laughed weakly thinking he was being a little too theatrical, "let's just say I would probably despair, and that would be the better case," he smiled sadly, for some reason he thought of Ethan and his former "friends".

She smiled uncomfortably and managed to disentangle herself from his grip under the pretext of making some drinks. She could sense his confused look following her to the kitchen.

Later they would sit down on the sofa and Helen made them both a glass of Whiskey. He gave her a full account of his journey and then something occurred to him and seemed to have cheered him up a little and he got up to his feet, saying: "At least I've got something for you."

Helen, whose heart had been throbbing in her chest so fast and so loud because of what she had to do, watched him rise and walk away to retrieve something from his travel bag. She saw her moment and quickly pulled the small phial out of her pocket, opened it and frantically poured out its content into his half empty glass. She winced as he spoke on his way back to the sofa, and let the empty phial slip out of her fingers: "I saw this at the airport in Seattle…" She quickly covered the phial on the floor with one foot and tried to kick it under the sofa, then smiled at him nervously as he sat down again and offered her a small square object. For a moment she just stared at it blankly, unable to silence the scream inside her head as something in her seemed to be protesting against her doing. When she finally took it from him after an oddly long moment, she read the cover of the cd -

Robert Tear sings

English songs

by Sir Hubert Parry & Ralph Vaughan Williams

"It's not an opera," he said quickly, "I-I just thought-uh...," he began to stammer, suddenly unsettled by the lack of any reaction on her part, "I-I thought-uh... in case you're-uh... homesick," he smiled a sheepish smile.

She swallowed and nodded somewhat awkwardly, avoiding his eyes and gazing at the present. "Thank you," she whispered at last, seemed to hesitate for a moment, then leant over to kiss him on his cheek. After her lips barely brushed his skin a quiet sigh, a moan rather escaped her as she felt her body's immediate response even to such a brief touch. He heard it and it was him who leant now over to her and stroked her face, fixing her eyes at last.

"It's only a little thing," he said, "but when I saw it-," he paused a little here and there was something in his eyes Helen had never seen in them before, she couldn't place it, the intensity and the new warmth of his look, "I thought of you, at once... And despite myself, and despite everything else, after the utterly pointless, wasted journey - at that moment at least I smiled."

She smiled nervously back before saying: "Let's drink to that," and she grabbed her glass and watched Giles reaching for his own, without taking this strange intense look off her. Again the scream in her head, only this time much louder as her eyes followed his hand that put the glass on his lips, and finally he drank the tempered whiskey. Although she knew this particular sleeping draught was not only famous for being very strong, but also absolutely tasteless and thus undetectable she wondered for a moment whether he would notice anything.

That was the worst thing she's ever done, she thought now, staring blankly at Márkos as she was remembering. She had been so focused on herself then that she did not actually realize or even think about how much she would hurt him.

Later that night they were lying in bed and the sleeping draught was already taking hold of Giles. Helen was just stretching out her arm to switch off the lamp on her bedside table, knowing that she would be getting out of the bed in a short while, pack her things and run, when he half asleep suddenly murmured "I love you"...

That whole evening has passed off in her mind, and now for the first time since she'd left – she regretted.

Márkos saw something in her eyes that he would be too careful to call awakening just yet. But there was hope. He decided to take it slowly, to give her a few days time on her own to process this talk. He hoped that she wouldn't just shut down again, put it all inside some invisible drawer in her head, close it and throw the key away so that she wouldn't have to think about it.

On one early morning they were all sitting at a breakfast table, both Helen and Harry looking tired and yawning in turns, while Martha and Márkos were watching them amused. Helen couldn't help but laugh after what felt like the hundredth yawn. "I'm sorry, I didn't sleep well," she said.

"Hmpf," Harry made an odd sound while swallowing his toast, "I could hear that," he murmured.

When she looked at him in surprise, he added: "I heard your moaning."

"Oh," she looked flustered, "I'm sorry."

He hurried to say: "I couldn't sleep myself, so, it's ok." He took another bit, then continued lightly: "Weird dreams about vampires and horcruxes and Voldemort, I could pass on those."

Martha winced a little at the last name, and hurried to get up to her feet to cover it, and to clean up the dishes. Harry finished his breakfast too and left to help her prepare the breakfast for the few guests who would soon come down.

"How is he doing?" Helen asked Márkos, motioning towards Harry who just disappeared in the door.

"You know I don't discuss my other pupils," he said dryly without taking his curious eyes off her.

She sensed the question in them and sighed quietly. "Bad dreams too."

"They don't mean anything, my dear," he made a gesture with his hand as if waving those nightmares away was the easiest thing to do.

She hesitated. There was something on her tongue that she hadn't quite finished saying the other day. And even though the whole thing with leaving Giles seemed to make less and less sense to her now, there still was this one thought at the bottom of it all that would always reemerge, especially after nightmares like these.

"I thought... I thought he would be safer without me," she said in a hardly audible voice.

Márkos waited for a moment whether she would say anything else.

"You think I made a mistake by leaving," she said. It wasn't a question, it was a statement as she thought she knew what he was thinking.

However, he shook his head briefly. "I understand that you would leave him because of that." He got up to his feet and motioned her to do the same as they could hear the first guests descending the stairs. Soon the tiny dining room would be filled with happy chatter in different tongues that would be making plans about their routes for the day.

"My task it is now to convince you that that basic assumption is wrong," Márkos continued when they left the inn and made their way towards their usual training spot.

"He lives on a Hellmouth, Helen. He's never safe," he said at last as they sat down on a tree trunk. It was beginning to snow again. The sun was hidden somewhere behind the peaks and then behind the clouds above them. It was a fresh, cold morning, but Helen liked it. She thought she could never get enough of this alpine air. "He would, however," the grey-haired old wizard made a meaningful pause, "be safer having a powerful witch around."

They resumed their training in the following days, and Márkos dared to get his hopes up that Helen might indeed regain her power and wizarding strength which seemed to have been merely blocked and paralysed by her inner attitude rather than really seriously maimed in the aftermath of the ritual. He saw that she still had doubts, she wasn't convinced entirely just yet, her usual inner insecurities were still partially preying on her mind. Especially the episode with Rodolphus Lestrange, who had come to Sunnydale for the sole purpose of finding her, and who wouldn't have minded to kill everyone else who would get into his way. It was only sheer luck that Giles, that neither of them were seriously harmed during those few days, though she painfully remembered Giles' moans as the cruciatus curse from Rodolphus' wand hit him, and the anguish she had felt, even for a short moment, when Rodolphus had cast the killing curse and she thought Giles might be dead, and it would have been her fault. Claudius had already died for her, and she felt it wasn't worth it. However, Márkos managed to twist these doubts by pointing out that she also saved Giles' life before and with her magic more than once prevented greater harm coming to him and the party around the slayer.

Gradually on this way he managed that with the days passing Helen was more and more eager – he wasn't quite sure after what, but he noticed her growing restlessness, but not the depressive, melancholy kind, rather than some increase of energy, of will and desire to do something. The apathy was falling off her. And she was making considerable progress with her magic. Márkos had decided to work with her on "good" spells at the start, not defense or offensive spells, but rather some useful and harmless enchantments that would, however, not be too simple, but require a certain degree of creativity too, and only later when she would appear comfortable enough he would proceed with working on her fighting skills. For instance he even went against the rule number one that forbade the use of any spells within the guesthouse, when he allowed her to tune the old piano in the dining room with magic.

Since a few days she had been playing in the evenings, and though she had started with her usual melancholy tunes, after one of the guests had – rather harshly – asked her to play something cheerful for a change, saying they're not having a funeral here, she willy-nilly switched first to some ragtimes and at last gave in even to the demands of the locals and played and sang some folk tunes, occasionally accompanied by Martha, who – to everyone's surprise – turned out to be a very ardent accordion player.

These evening "performances" became so popular as the Christmas was approaching that Márkos was beginning to fear Helen might want to set root here, when after one such dinner and a particularly exalted applause, most probably strengthened by the generous serving of the punch and mulled wine on Martha's part, Helen sat down next to him on a bench at the back of the room, exhausted, with rosy cheeks and still smiling around her. "I think it's time for me to leave," she said, her eyes sweeping over the faces of the mellow crowd.

Márkos raised his eyebrows in a surprise, though not unpleasant. The Christmas would soon be upon them. In the past couple of weeks, since their last long talk her condition improved considerably.

"I know my patronus is still a great miss," she said into his ear as the room was so loud it was almost impossible to have a normal conversation. He pointed towards the door and they got up. Outside the snow was now falling in large furry flakes, and despite the late hour the white snowy ground around them seemed to sparkle and lighten the darkness the inn would normally be drowned in.

"... but you know that that has never been my strength even before," she said.

Márkos nodded and took the pipe out of his pocket. He remembered that even during her first stay she rarely managed a decent patronus, mostly, just like now only a shapeless greyish cloud of mist would appear, and it didn't matter whether she used her wand or not. But otherwise, he had to admit, she has come very far in a short time. Her nosebleeds had become less and less until they disappeared entirely, she no longer felt like hangover even after several apparitions.

"Yeah, you should work on it though," he murmured. "It can be a very useful instrument to you, not merely in a fight... On the other hand, given everything else I've seen from you in the last week I don't feel you would be entirely lost without a patronus."

Helen smiled to herself. Was that actually a trace of appreciation in that sentence?

It was typical for Márkos that he did not ask her where she wanted to go. He merely asked that she stay for one more week, until Christmas, and she did not argue with that. In fact she was a little uncertain as to where to go and what to do. No, she knew exactly where she wanted to be, only a part of her was terribly scared of it.

But Márkos didn't seem to care. On the next day she had a free morning, but as the weather was so foul after a short walk she stayed in and was now sitting on the bed in her small attic room reading a book when he knocked on her door and entered at the same time. This was a surprise as he never before came here.

"Is something wrong?" She asked, straightening up on the bed.

"No, no," he shook his head and laughed.

Helen found there was something odd about him. Did she perhaps forget that she was on duty in the kitchen right now?

"I need you to do something, to-to-eh... to complete your stay and your training, to make sure you'll be alright and not-eh... slip back into the-eh...," he paused when he noticed her baffled features. He murmured something to himself that she couldn't hear, then cleared his throat to start again.

"I need you to bring me the book with the ritual you had performed, now would be good," he said dryly, withstanding her suspicious look.

"Why?" She asked slowly. "You said yourself it couldn't have really worked."

He didn't move an eyebrow. "I need to be sure." And when she opened her mouth to object, he gave her his sternest look, turned around and left the room.

Helen shrugged. She pondered over it for a moment. The volume in question, full of rituals on dark magic was, at least as far as she knew, still at Giles' place. Yet she could hardly just show up at his doorstep, saying, Hi, sorry I'd left, oh, and do you by any chance still have the good book?

She looked at her watch. It would be three o'clock in the morning in Sunnydale. She bit her lip reluctantly, staring blankly at the door. Then she had a thought. Her heartbeat got racing at the prospect that she might see him in a few moments. She put the book aside and got out of the bed. One more time she looked at her wand lying on the bedside table, then closed her eyes for a split of a second and turned on her spot.


AN: Thank you for reading, I know, some kitschy parts here. I'm not sure the whole Helen's "transformation" or "awakening" is entirely comprehensible here, as it was originally supposed to be much longer and more detailed, but I ran out of energy and then thought I'd rather not make it too tiresome. Next time back to Giles, already writing the next chapter...

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