Roots (T, gen)
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giles_shortsTitle: Roots
Rating: T
Challenge: Home
A/N: Inspired by The Case of Death and Honey by Neil Gaimain.
Part of the Sanctuary universe (a prequel, of a sort, if you like), but can be read as a stand alone. All you need to know is that Giles has a magic garden left to him by his mother.
---
If the months that followed her death had been strange, then the ones that followed her resurrection were more so. He didn’t stay in California. Couldn’t. Not after all had been said and done. It was all too surreal, watching the corpse that wasn’t walking, talking. Breathing. It was strange and wrong. After all, how could you grieve for the undead?
He couldn’t stay. So, he didn’t.
He simply made his excuses, as transparent as glass, and that was it; Giles returned to his shabby flat in Bath. To the post that had piled up in the box and the out of date milk in the fridge. To the answering machine filled with messages from his employer, his therapist, his aunts (none of which merited a reply).
And life went on. She lived, and so did he, in his own small, unassuming way. He made no new friends, nor reacquainted himself with any of his old ones. Instead, he sat in his arm chair and read until the sun dipped below the horizon, his escape from the realities of the day broken only by the occasional need for tea and to receive the greasy takeaways from the shop two streets over.
Christmas came and went, the new year beginning with more of a whisper than a bang. And in the spring, when the snowdrops were wilting and the daffodils just beginning to bloom, he let out his flat and left the city for good.
---
In 1979, Marion wrote the following:
He came home on a Tuesday. March. The narcissus were in bloom and the golden willow by the far wall had taken on a sickly cast. Coppiced too early. A problem of my own making.
His grandmother brought him to me. To the cottage I kept out in the countryside, no longer able to face the hubbub of the capital, or the ghosts that haunted the empty rooms of what had once been my home.
‘The boy’s clean and sober and all yours, Marion,’ Edna said.
Boy. I smiled at the thought. He was anything but that. Full grown and nearer thirty than eighteen, tattoo at the crook of his elbow and the shadow of a beard upon his jaw. His hair was longer than he used to wear it, curling about his neck and ears. Gone, too, were the shirts and blazers of his childhood, replaced now by torn denim and too much leather. Boy? No. A man.
And yet he seemed such a fragile thing, holding himself so still, as though his bones were made of spun glass, his skin of tissue paper. In his eyes, there lurked a shadow that had not been there before. One that broke my heart.
I said, ‘Can you dig?’
He nodded.
‘Then we have work to do.’
---
In the spring, the bluebells bloomed. Great carpets of purple and blue chased across woodland floors and crept from under hedgerows, lending colour to a landscape only just beginning to green again. Hyacinthoides non-scripta, the fairy flower, dooming those who pick the blooms to a life of wandering, forever lost. A feast for the eyes as much as for the bees who visited upon occasion, gathering pollen in their baskets as they went.
The bumblebees that lived on the edge of the valley were like no others. Striped fire-engine red and black, and larger than their cousins that lived in the Severn Vale and the Forest of Dean, they made their nests in the hollows of the willow trees that lined the lane. Giles listened to them hum and buzz as he walked the winding road home, wire and twine and a new pair of secateurs in his rucksack. One foot in front of the other. One step, two, upon the dirt track that carved its way through the hedgerows like a river.
Halfway home, the cottage that stood alone upon the hill no more than a mile or so now, Giles stumbled upon a rock half-concealed in the verge. It went skittering loudly along the road and into a puddle, the birds that roosted within the willow branches launching from the trees in fright. Scattering to the winds in a rush of beating wings as he cursed, his trouser legs splattered with mud. He sighed.
A woman came careering over the fields, collie at her heels. Giles heard her before he saw her. The sound of her squelching footfalls and her excitable dog rose above that of the bees and the startled birds.
‘Hey!’ said the woman. ‘Are you alright?’
She was mid-thirties, at a guess. Possibly forty. Her hair was long and dishwater blonde, tied back in a thick plait that fell past her shoulder blades; she stood tall and matronly, dressed in sturdy boots and a yellow cagoule that stretched too tightly across her broad shoulders; her face, not so much pretty as striking, was suffused with a light blush from the exertion.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Hmm. Shame you can’t say the same for your trousers.’
‘No. I suppose not.’ Giles gave the woman a wry smile. ‘At least I was on my way home, rather than my way out. Silver linings, and all that.’
‘That’s the spirit. Got far to go?’
The buzzing of the bees began to quieten as they spoke, the lane becoming still and silent save for their words and the panting of the dog. Giles watched as it trotted over towards the verge, worrying the bark of the nearest tree with its nose, tail wagging.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just to the house on the hill over there.’
‘Orchard House?’ she replied with surprise. ‘That wreck?’
‘That’d be the one, yes.’
Her eyes, a startling blue, seemed to narrow for a second before her face cracked into a grin.
‘About time someone took it on again. My name’s Elaine,’ she said, chivvying the dog away from a willow with its silent nest. ‘And this is Bracken.’
Despite the longing for isolation that had driven him from the city, the knot of grief that seized his chest, made it difficult to breathe, he held out a hand in welcome and smiled.
‘Rupert.’
---
Those first few days were difficult. He didn’t speak and barely ate. Barely slept. He lived on dry toast and water, sleeping only when exhaustion claimed him, his mind consumed by nightmares, the dark circles under his eyes deepening into a purplish-blue, almost like bruises.
His recovery would be slow. Slow like the growth of the trees and the creep of moss. The magic was long gone from him, but the after-effects still shadowed him like a ghost, dogging the steps of his guilty conscience. It would ease, given time.
There was nothing to be done except wait. So, I did.
Each day I renewed the wards around the house, tended to the beds, coaxed the stray vines back into their spiralling paths. My Clematis cultivars were beginning to bloom, buds unfurling into a sea of blue and purple and white that rippled in the breeze. Wallflowers clambered across the brickwork by the kitchen. And the apple trees that gave my house its name were shedding petals across the lawn.
Those first days were hard, but during this time, he wasn’t idle. He planted bulbs for me. Cut back the limbs of the trees I couldn’t reach. Dug the foundations of what would become the pond where my water lilies would grow. Clipped the willow for basket weaving.
It wasn’t until the fifth day after he came home that he spoke.
‘Mum,’ he said, holding out a shaking hand to me. Blood dripped from his finger, the liquid a violent scarlet against his dust-caked skin. The shears fell limply from his fingers onto the willow pile as I took his injured hand in mine, assessing the damage.
‘Stitches, I think,’ I said. The split stretched from the tip of his index finger to the middle of his palm, and it was deep. ‘Come on, let’s get you seen to.’
I set my secateurs aside, wiping my hands on the skirt of my apron before unfastening it.
‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
He looked at me then. Met my gaze for the first time in almost a decade, familiar green eyes wide and wild behind his spectacles. My eyes in what might have been his father’s face; the only part of me that ever made a mark. They were pleading.
Later, when we returned, he broke the willow he had cut for me across his knee, hand in bandages, and I wove the strands together.
---
Life was slow in the country. Time seemed to move with all the speed of treacle, the future more of a suggestion than an inevitability. The minutes stretched impossibly between each tick of the clock, as though adapting to the unhurried pace of his work as he gradually returned the house to its former glory.
Dust sheets were removed, carpets beaten, furniture waxed. In the mornings he varnished the floors and painted the ceilings, and in the afternoon he sorted through the boxes of bric-a-brac stacked in the attic and under the stairs. Within a week, the house began to take on a lived-in air once more. It was then and only then, when the walls were dry and the ornaments dusted, that he moved onto the garden that grew wild within the cottage’s spell-bound outer walls.
Elaine called that first week, hair flat from the rain and a Victoria sponge cake nestled between bits of paper towel in an old Roses tin. Giles welcomed her in, the wards that surrounded the house dropping with a surreptitious snap of his fingers, and they ate large sugar-dusted slices over a pot of chai, his mother’s blend, their conversation stilted but not unpleasant.
She returned again the following week as he was clipping back the buddleia that had swamped the fountain, rock buns in her tin and a smile upon her round face. And so started a new tradition, their tentative friendship blossoming much like apple and cherry trees that peppered the eastern reaches of the lawn. On Tuesdays, when the sun shone, they took tea together on the paved patio that stretched across the western face of Orchard House. When it rained, they took tea inside in his study, the first room he fully restored.
Over the weeks that passed, Elaine told him the following:
She was a vet, large livestock mostly with the odd housecat here and there, and had a husband name John. One dog, no children. They lived in the cottage beyond the river with wisteria that climbed the easterly wall and ivy that snaked over the gutters and into the thatch. She was thirty-eight years old. And John was dying.
A problem with his heart, she told Giles one afternoon over a slice of lemon drizzle. He’d been getting worse for years, and now? Well, it was only a matter of time. All good things came to an end eventually, though sometimes prematurely.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he played mother, pouring the tea into the waiting cups.
‘Why?’ She gave him a sharp look. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘It just seemed like the right thing to say,’ Giles replied easily, placing his hands in his lap to disguise the tremor that ran through them.
Elaine settled back into the chair, watching as a bumblebee, one of the curious red and black ones that populated this side of the valley, bobbed across the flowerbeds at her feet.
‘It doesn’t make it any easier,’ she said. ‘Knowing.’
‘No.’
A silence fell between them. One that spoke more than words ever could.
‘Does it get any easier?’ she said after a while.
Giles thought of California. Of the girl he’d left there and the coffin in Restfield that lay empty beneath the dirt. He thought of other graves too; ones filled with the bones of people he knew, loved, once upon a time. His chest felt tight with pain, with grief.
‘No. It doesn’t.’
---
Edmund’s death was the end of an era. We met late, married late. I was nearing forty when I bore him a son. A single son, and no daughters. One that would carry on the family tradition, in all its barbarism, preparing girl-shaped fodder for the canons that rang unstoppable throughout the centuries.
A single son who left as I buried his father and the girl I had loved as a daughter deep down in the dirt. Who returned when the apple tree I planted upon their graves bore its first fruit.
I remember Edna and I watched them bring Edmund’s body home. My boy was long gone, and my husband’s all-too-still form lay in a coffin of midnight-coloured wood. They brought the girl back too, her plot freshly dug beside Edmund’s own. There was nowhere else for her to go. Nowhere else I’d let her rest than beside the man who couldn’t quite save her.
‘How can you be so calm?’
The cigarette between my fingers had shaken as I took a drag, the smoke burning my lungs on the way down. The day had been cold and grey. It matched the woman who stood beside me, peering down into the as-yet unmarked grave, her wrinkled face set.
‘I’ve seen more than one son buried,’ his mother replied, not unkindly. ‘It is the price we pay. Edmund knew the risks.’
‘There has been too much death,’ I said as the Councilmen lowered the coffin on ivory ropes. ‘No more, Edna. No more. I’ll not see my son suffer the same fate.’
‘That’s for the boy to decide.’
And she was right, loathe as I was to admit it. To see the truth of the statement, then or now.
Edmund’s death had been the end of an era, and no-one knew it but the pair of us, his mother and I, stood side by side at his graveside. Rupert was gone. I would not love again. Edna had no more sons left to give.
All I had left was the hope that this would be an end. That Rupert would run and never come back.
But he did. He came back broken, expecting me to heal him so he could return to the path carved out for him by lineage and tradition. The same path that had killed his father and the girl he considered a sister. That had killed me, too, in its own small way.
---
The bees that lived along the roadside were industrious, flitting from flower to flower in both rain and shine, only the first frost of the year enough to drive them back into their nests to shelter, seeking sleep rather than death. They produced little in the way of honey, storing just enough in pots to see the queen and her workers through the winter. The honey they made was deep red, tar-like, with an oil-slick sheen to it that spoke of the unnatural. The weird.
They came into the garden, too, on occasion. Slipping between the cracks and the crevices in the barriers, both magical and physical, that encircled his home. There was hole in the far wall, beneath the window of the bedroom that had belonged to his mother. Out of sight, hidden behind a hedge of box and yew, the bees ventured out into the garden when it rained in the valley beyond the be-spelled walls.
It was as Giles cleared back the hedge that he discovered the hole. Stretching out a hand towards the wall, to the cracks where the bumblebees slipped in and out of the masonry, buzzing black and red pompoms coasting on the breeze, Giles felt the tell-tale prickle of magic. It danced across his fingers, chasing up faded white scar that stretched from his palm to the tip of his index finger and across the multitude of cuts and scrapes that littered his knuckles from his tousle with the overgrown rose bushes in the garden proper.
Curious.
He stood for a few long minutes, watching the path of the bees across the garden. Seemingly random at first, the longer he watched, the more their paths seemed to coalesce into a pattern that centred upon the golden willow hidden shyly behind the summerhouse. Slowly, he reached towards the trunk, watching as the bees cleared a path for his fingers, humming gently. Honey, red and thick like that found in the willow trees in the lane beyond oozed from a knot in the trunk, running between the cracks and ridges that scored the bark.
Giles dipped his fingers in the honey, bringing them to his lips to taste the sticky substance, the feel of magic like static against his skin. Almost like it was knitting together the places where his skin had split. Healing his hurts.
It tasted of smoke and tea and spice. His tongue became numb, as did his finger. And when he swallowed, he felt the knot of dread, of grief, begin to unfurl in his chest for the first time in months.
Breathing deeply, Giles took a step back from the tree, watching as the bumblebees went about their work once more. Climbing up and down the tree, pollen baskets full, their humming rising and falling like a heartbeat.
Gently blowing the bee that had landed upon his sleeve back into the air, he nodded to himself and strode out across he garden towards the kitchen. He returned with a small bowl filled with sugar water and placed it down before the crack beneath the windowsill where the bees came in and out, a curious smile upon his face.
The weeks passed. Spring threatened to become summer, the garden changing around him each day, bringing new sights and scents. He built a herb garden to the west of the pond, sowing basil and coriander and parsley in raised beds made of railway sleepers. He took tea with Elaine on Tuesdays, rain or shine. And in the quiet moments before dusk, he collected the honey the bees in the willow left dripping down the bark for him each day.
---
I dream of flying. Not of soaring like a bird amongst the tree tops, but of smaller things. Of the flight of butterflies, their stained-glass wings shimmering in the sunlight. Of bats, small and fox-like, flitting between night-blossoming flowers. And of dancing bees that hum as they work, pollinating gardens and forests and meadows.
Rupert, when he dreams, dreams of falling. Has since he was a little boy, small enough to cradle upon my lap as I chased the nightmares away.
He wasn’t so little anymore. No. Now he towered over me as we stood by the willow withies, weaving together, his hand almost healed. His soul, too.
‘Gran says I’m to start on Monday,’ he said as he bent the withe into an arch. ‘Just admin, but she reckons, given enough time and hard work, I might make it onto the research team. Maybe even end up with a Potential to train.’
‘And this is what you want? To be a Councilman? A Watcher?’
‘Yes. I want to make a difference. To do some good after all the bad.’
I nodded. ‘It’s what your father would have wanted.’
We worked a while longer, the spring air beginning to hold the promise of summer heat. I would weave, and he shape, and together we begin to build beautiful things. Living, growing sculptures for my garden. My sanctuary and now his.
‘Mum?’
‘Rupert?’
‘You don’t want me to go, do you?’
I stopped, set down my tools and reached for him. For my son, grown now and so very like his father in appearance, only with my eyes. His jaw was sandpaper-rough beneath my palms, his skin warm and not nearly so pale as it had been all those weeks before.
‘I can’t make your choices for you, Rupert. They’re yours alone to make, the good and the bad. But I’ll love you no less, whatever you decide.’
‘I don’t have nightmares anymore,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘No. Now,’ he said, ‘In my dreams, I still fall, but there are always hands there to help me back up.’
---
Fairview
Leyford, Gloucestershire
May 20th, 2002.
Dear Elaine,
I hope this letter finds you well. I’m afraid I have had to return to California and I do not know how long I will be gone. Unforgivably rude of me, to leave without so much as a goodbye cup of chai.
I have enclosed a jar of honey from the bees I keep in my garden that hope both you and John will enjoy as penance. The colour of it is distinctive, I grant you, but I beg you to try it, if out of novelty only. Two teaspoons on toast usually does the trick, I’ve found.
My mother always said it was the perfect salve for a broken heart.
Your friend,
Rupert Giles.
Rating: T
Challenge: Home
A/N: Inspired by The Case of Death and Honey by Neil Gaimain.
Part of the Sanctuary universe (a prequel, of a sort, if you like), but can be read as a stand alone. All you need to know is that Giles has a magic garden left to him by his mother.
If the months that followed her death had been strange, then the ones that followed her resurrection were more so. He didn’t stay in California. Couldn’t. Not after all had been said and done. It was all too surreal, watching the corpse that wasn’t walking, talking. Breathing. It was strange and wrong. After all, how could you grieve for the undead?
He couldn’t stay. So, he didn’t.
He simply made his excuses, as transparent as glass, and that was it; Giles returned to his shabby flat in Bath. To the post that had piled up in the box and the out of date milk in the fridge. To the answering machine filled with messages from his employer, his therapist, his aunts (none of which merited a reply).
And life went on. She lived, and so did he, in his own small, unassuming way. He made no new friends, nor reacquainted himself with any of his old ones. Instead, he sat in his arm chair and read until the sun dipped below the horizon, his escape from the realities of the day broken only by the occasional need for tea and to receive the greasy takeaways from the shop two streets over.
Christmas came and went, the new year beginning with more of a whisper than a bang. And in the spring, when the snowdrops were wilting and the daffodils just beginning to bloom, he let out his flat and left the city for good.
In 1979, Marion wrote the following:
He came home on a Tuesday. March. The narcissus were in bloom and the golden willow by the far wall had taken on a sickly cast. Coppiced too early. A problem of my own making.
His grandmother brought him to me. To the cottage I kept out in the countryside, no longer able to face the hubbub of the capital, or the ghosts that haunted the empty rooms of what had once been my home.
‘The boy’s clean and sober and all yours, Marion,’ Edna said.
Boy. I smiled at the thought. He was anything but that. Full grown and nearer thirty than eighteen, tattoo at the crook of his elbow and the shadow of a beard upon his jaw. His hair was longer than he used to wear it, curling about his neck and ears. Gone, too, were the shirts and blazers of his childhood, replaced now by torn denim and too much leather. Boy? No. A man.
And yet he seemed such a fragile thing, holding himself so still, as though his bones were made of spun glass, his skin of tissue paper. In his eyes, there lurked a shadow that had not been there before. One that broke my heart.
I said, ‘Can you dig?’
He nodded.
‘Then we have work to do.’
In the spring, the bluebells bloomed. Great carpets of purple and blue chased across woodland floors and crept from under hedgerows, lending colour to a landscape only just beginning to green again. Hyacinthoides non-scripta, the fairy flower, dooming those who pick the blooms to a life of wandering, forever lost. A feast for the eyes as much as for the bees who visited upon occasion, gathering pollen in their baskets as they went.
The bumblebees that lived on the edge of the valley were like no others. Striped fire-engine red and black, and larger than their cousins that lived in the Severn Vale and the Forest of Dean, they made their nests in the hollows of the willow trees that lined the lane. Giles listened to them hum and buzz as he walked the winding road home, wire and twine and a new pair of secateurs in his rucksack. One foot in front of the other. One step, two, upon the dirt track that carved its way through the hedgerows like a river.
Halfway home, the cottage that stood alone upon the hill no more than a mile or so now, Giles stumbled upon a rock half-concealed in the verge. It went skittering loudly along the road and into a puddle, the birds that roosted within the willow branches launching from the trees in fright. Scattering to the winds in a rush of beating wings as he cursed, his trouser legs splattered with mud. He sighed.
A woman came careering over the fields, collie at her heels. Giles heard her before he saw her. The sound of her squelching footfalls and her excitable dog rose above that of the bees and the startled birds.
‘Hey!’ said the woman. ‘Are you alright?’
She was mid-thirties, at a guess. Possibly forty. Her hair was long and dishwater blonde, tied back in a thick plait that fell past her shoulder blades; she stood tall and matronly, dressed in sturdy boots and a yellow cagoule that stretched too tightly across her broad shoulders; her face, not so much pretty as striking, was suffused with a light blush from the exertion.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Hmm. Shame you can’t say the same for your trousers.’
‘No. I suppose not.’ Giles gave the woman a wry smile. ‘At least I was on my way home, rather than my way out. Silver linings, and all that.’
‘That’s the spirit. Got far to go?’
The buzzing of the bees began to quieten as they spoke, the lane becoming still and silent save for their words and the panting of the dog. Giles watched as it trotted over towards the verge, worrying the bark of the nearest tree with its nose, tail wagging.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just to the house on the hill over there.’
‘Orchard House?’ she replied with surprise. ‘That wreck?’
‘That’d be the one, yes.’
Her eyes, a startling blue, seemed to narrow for a second before her face cracked into a grin.
‘About time someone took it on again. My name’s Elaine,’ she said, chivvying the dog away from a willow with its silent nest. ‘And this is Bracken.’
Despite the longing for isolation that had driven him from the city, the knot of grief that seized his chest, made it difficult to breathe, he held out a hand in welcome and smiled.
‘Rupert.’
Those first few days were difficult. He didn’t speak and barely ate. Barely slept. He lived on dry toast and water, sleeping only when exhaustion claimed him, his mind consumed by nightmares, the dark circles under his eyes deepening into a purplish-blue, almost like bruises.
His recovery would be slow. Slow like the growth of the trees and the creep of moss. The magic was long gone from him, but the after-effects still shadowed him like a ghost, dogging the steps of his guilty conscience. It would ease, given time.
There was nothing to be done except wait. So, I did.
Each day I renewed the wards around the house, tended to the beds, coaxed the stray vines back into their spiralling paths. My Clematis cultivars were beginning to bloom, buds unfurling into a sea of blue and purple and white that rippled in the breeze. Wallflowers clambered across the brickwork by the kitchen. And the apple trees that gave my house its name were shedding petals across the lawn.
Those first days were hard, but during this time, he wasn’t idle. He planted bulbs for me. Cut back the limbs of the trees I couldn’t reach. Dug the foundations of what would become the pond where my water lilies would grow. Clipped the willow for basket weaving.
It wasn’t until the fifth day after he came home that he spoke.
‘Mum,’ he said, holding out a shaking hand to me. Blood dripped from his finger, the liquid a violent scarlet against his dust-caked skin. The shears fell limply from his fingers onto the willow pile as I took his injured hand in mine, assessing the damage.
‘Stitches, I think,’ I said. The split stretched from the tip of his index finger to the middle of his palm, and it was deep. ‘Come on, let’s get you seen to.’
I set my secateurs aside, wiping my hands on the skirt of my apron before unfastening it.
‘I’m sorry, Mum.’
He looked at me then. Met my gaze for the first time in almost a decade, familiar green eyes wide and wild behind his spectacles. My eyes in what might have been his father’s face; the only part of me that ever made a mark. They were pleading.
Later, when we returned, he broke the willow he had cut for me across his knee, hand in bandages, and I wove the strands together.
Life was slow in the country. Time seemed to move with all the speed of treacle, the future more of a suggestion than an inevitability. The minutes stretched impossibly between each tick of the clock, as though adapting to the unhurried pace of his work as he gradually returned the house to its former glory.
Dust sheets were removed, carpets beaten, furniture waxed. In the mornings he varnished the floors and painted the ceilings, and in the afternoon he sorted through the boxes of bric-a-brac stacked in the attic and under the stairs. Within a week, the house began to take on a lived-in air once more. It was then and only then, when the walls were dry and the ornaments dusted, that he moved onto the garden that grew wild within the cottage’s spell-bound outer walls.
Elaine called that first week, hair flat from the rain and a Victoria sponge cake nestled between bits of paper towel in an old Roses tin. Giles welcomed her in, the wards that surrounded the house dropping with a surreptitious snap of his fingers, and they ate large sugar-dusted slices over a pot of chai, his mother’s blend, their conversation stilted but not unpleasant.
She returned again the following week as he was clipping back the buddleia that had swamped the fountain, rock buns in her tin and a smile upon her round face. And so started a new tradition, their tentative friendship blossoming much like apple and cherry trees that peppered the eastern reaches of the lawn. On Tuesdays, when the sun shone, they took tea together on the paved patio that stretched across the western face of Orchard House. When it rained, they took tea inside in his study, the first room he fully restored.
Over the weeks that passed, Elaine told him the following:
She was a vet, large livestock mostly with the odd housecat here and there, and had a husband name John. One dog, no children. They lived in the cottage beyond the river with wisteria that climbed the easterly wall and ivy that snaked over the gutters and into the thatch. She was thirty-eight years old. And John was dying.
A problem with his heart, she told Giles one afternoon over a slice of lemon drizzle. He’d been getting worse for years, and now? Well, it was only a matter of time. All good things came to an end eventually, though sometimes prematurely.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he played mother, pouring the tea into the waiting cups.
‘Why?’ She gave him a sharp look. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘It just seemed like the right thing to say,’ Giles replied easily, placing his hands in his lap to disguise the tremor that ran through them.
Elaine settled back into the chair, watching as a bumblebee, one of the curious red and black ones that populated this side of the valley, bobbed across the flowerbeds at her feet.
‘It doesn’t make it any easier,’ she said. ‘Knowing.’
‘No.’
A silence fell between them. One that spoke more than words ever could.
‘Does it get any easier?’ she said after a while.
Giles thought of California. Of the girl he’d left there and the coffin in Restfield that lay empty beneath the dirt. He thought of other graves too; ones filled with the bones of people he knew, loved, once upon a time. His chest felt tight with pain, with grief.
‘No. It doesn’t.’
Edmund’s death was the end of an era. We met late, married late. I was nearing forty when I bore him a son. A single son, and no daughters. One that would carry on the family tradition, in all its barbarism, preparing girl-shaped fodder for the canons that rang unstoppable throughout the centuries.
A single son who left as I buried his father and the girl I had loved as a daughter deep down in the dirt. Who returned when the apple tree I planted upon their graves bore its first fruit.
I remember Edna and I watched them bring Edmund’s body home. My boy was long gone, and my husband’s all-too-still form lay in a coffin of midnight-coloured wood. They brought the girl back too, her plot freshly dug beside Edmund’s own. There was nowhere else for her to go. Nowhere else I’d let her rest than beside the man who couldn’t quite save her.
‘How can you be so calm?’
The cigarette between my fingers had shaken as I took a drag, the smoke burning my lungs on the way down. The day had been cold and grey. It matched the woman who stood beside me, peering down into the as-yet unmarked grave, her wrinkled face set.
‘I’ve seen more than one son buried,’ his mother replied, not unkindly. ‘It is the price we pay. Edmund knew the risks.’
‘There has been too much death,’ I said as the Councilmen lowered the coffin on ivory ropes. ‘No more, Edna. No more. I’ll not see my son suffer the same fate.’
‘That’s for the boy to decide.’
And she was right, loathe as I was to admit it. To see the truth of the statement, then or now.
Edmund’s death had been the end of an era, and no-one knew it but the pair of us, his mother and I, stood side by side at his graveside. Rupert was gone. I would not love again. Edna had no more sons left to give.
All I had left was the hope that this would be an end. That Rupert would run and never come back.
But he did. He came back broken, expecting me to heal him so he could return to the path carved out for him by lineage and tradition. The same path that had killed his father and the girl he considered a sister. That had killed me, too, in its own small way.
The bees that lived along the roadside were industrious, flitting from flower to flower in both rain and shine, only the first frost of the year enough to drive them back into their nests to shelter, seeking sleep rather than death. They produced little in the way of honey, storing just enough in pots to see the queen and her workers through the winter. The honey they made was deep red, tar-like, with an oil-slick sheen to it that spoke of the unnatural. The weird.
They came into the garden, too, on occasion. Slipping between the cracks and the crevices in the barriers, both magical and physical, that encircled his home. There was hole in the far wall, beneath the window of the bedroom that had belonged to his mother. Out of sight, hidden behind a hedge of box and yew, the bees ventured out into the garden when it rained in the valley beyond the be-spelled walls.
It was as Giles cleared back the hedge that he discovered the hole. Stretching out a hand towards the wall, to the cracks where the bumblebees slipped in and out of the masonry, buzzing black and red pompoms coasting on the breeze, Giles felt the tell-tale prickle of magic. It danced across his fingers, chasing up faded white scar that stretched from his palm to the tip of his index finger and across the multitude of cuts and scrapes that littered his knuckles from his tousle with the overgrown rose bushes in the garden proper.
Curious.
He stood for a few long minutes, watching the path of the bees across the garden. Seemingly random at first, the longer he watched, the more their paths seemed to coalesce into a pattern that centred upon the golden willow hidden shyly behind the summerhouse. Slowly, he reached towards the trunk, watching as the bees cleared a path for his fingers, humming gently. Honey, red and thick like that found in the willow trees in the lane beyond oozed from a knot in the trunk, running between the cracks and ridges that scored the bark.
Giles dipped his fingers in the honey, bringing them to his lips to taste the sticky substance, the feel of magic like static against his skin. Almost like it was knitting together the places where his skin had split. Healing his hurts.
It tasted of smoke and tea and spice. His tongue became numb, as did his finger. And when he swallowed, he felt the knot of dread, of grief, begin to unfurl in his chest for the first time in months.
Breathing deeply, Giles took a step back from the tree, watching as the bumblebees went about their work once more. Climbing up and down the tree, pollen baskets full, their humming rising and falling like a heartbeat.
Gently blowing the bee that had landed upon his sleeve back into the air, he nodded to himself and strode out across he garden towards the kitchen. He returned with a small bowl filled with sugar water and placed it down before the crack beneath the windowsill where the bees came in and out, a curious smile upon his face.
The weeks passed. Spring threatened to become summer, the garden changing around him each day, bringing new sights and scents. He built a herb garden to the west of the pond, sowing basil and coriander and parsley in raised beds made of railway sleepers. He took tea with Elaine on Tuesdays, rain or shine. And in the quiet moments before dusk, he collected the honey the bees in the willow left dripping down the bark for him each day.
I dream of flying. Not of soaring like a bird amongst the tree tops, but of smaller things. Of the flight of butterflies, their stained-glass wings shimmering in the sunlight. Of bats, small and fox-like, flitting between night-blossoming flowers. And of dancing bees that hum as they work, pollinating gardens and forests and meadows.
Rupert, when he dreams, dreams of falling. Has since he was a little boy, small enough to cradle upon my lap as I chased the nightmares away.
He wasn’t so little anymore. No. Now he towered over me as we stood by the willow withies, weaving together, his hand almost healed. His soul, too.
‘Gran says I’m to start on Monday,’ he said as he bent the withe into an arch. ‘Just admin, but she reckons, given enough time and hard work, I might make it onto the research team. Maybe even end up with a Potential to train.’
‘And this is what you want? To be a Councilman? A Watcher?’
‘Yes. I want to make a difference. To do some good after all the bad.’
I nodded. ‘It’s what your father would have wanted.’
We worked a while longer, the spring air beginning to hold the promise of summer heat. I would weave, and he shape, and together we begin to build beautiful things. Living, growing sculptures for my garden. My sanctuary and now his.
‘Mum?’
‘Rupert?’
‘You don’t want me to go, do you?’
I stopped, set down my tools and reached for him. For my son, grown now and so very like his father in appearance, only with my eyes. His jaw was sandpaper-rough beneath my palms, his skin warm and not nearly so pale as it had been all those weeks before.
‘I can’t make your choices for you, Rupert. They’re yours alone to make, the good and the bad. But I’ll love you no less, whatever you decide.’
‘I don’t have nightmares anymore,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘No. Now,’ he said, ‘In my dreams, I still fall, but there are always hands there to help me back up.’
Fairview
Leyford, Gloucestershire
May 20th, 2002.
Dear Elaine,
I hope this letter finds you well. I’m afraid I have had to return to California and I do not know how long I will be gone. Unforgivably rude of me, to leave without so much as a goodbye cup of chai.
I have enclosed a jar of honey from the bees I keep in my garden that hope both you and John will enjoy as penance. The colour of it is distinctive, I grant you, but I beg you to try it, if out of novelty only. Two teaspoons on toast usually does the trick, I’ve found.
My mother always said it was the perfect salve for a broken heart.
Your friend,
Rupert Giles.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-03 12:51 am (UTC)I decided to cast Dame Diana Rigg in my head to play Marion. Her voice and her physical presence just come through so well. I will accept no other!
Elaine's character is a really nice touch here because her loss is just as hard, watching her husband die, but it differs from Giles' experience of losing Buffy suddenly. Elaine's experience with dealing with her husband succumbing to cancer is also in direct contrast of Marion's experience with her son. Giles heals from his experiences and addiction, Elaine's husband will die from his illness.
Just beautifully written! Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2018-10-28 11:06 pm (UTC)The depth and texture you've brought both to the present and to the past give the story such richness and you make me ache not only for past and present Giles, but for all the characters - for Edna and Elaine, for Marion and Edmund.
There is so much story is such a relatively short piece - Bravo, this was wonderful.
Here from buffyversetop5
Date: 2018-10-29 05:42 pm (UTC)