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Voices in the Dark
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.
Part IV
She’s out there, somewhere in the poisonous night, ready as always to stand alone against whatever hell-crazed monstrosity a black fate has chosen to cough up this week. She doesn’t sneak out any more, we’re past that, but she still comes in quietly to avoid waking me. Before, it was to keep from getting caught, but now she’s just being thoughtful, letting me sleep.
Or so she believes. Our roles have reversed; now I sit up with no lights on so she won’t catch me out of bed when she returns. She can’t change her destiny, and I can’t ask her to ignore her duty. I’d give anything short of my soul to take that responsibility from her, bear it in her place, but that’s not an option. All I can do is let her be what she is, not add any pressures of my own to those she already has to face. If I have trouble sleeping when she isn’t here, that’s my problem. I won’t make it hers.
Part of me knows it’s pointless to rail about the injustice of a reality where the only thing I can offer my daughter is to stay out of her way — the world is what it is, it doesn’t shape itself to our wishes — and another part just wants to go ahead and scream anyway. I wanted so many things for her … but then, she’s become so much more than I ever could have dreamed, so I suppose that can be said to balance out. For the longest time I kept myself unaware of the truth of what was happening in her life, and as a result was equally blind to just how special she is. I really don’t know how to express it to her now, I’m always afraid it’ll come across as overblown and embarrassing (or worse, that the fear will break out in spite of everything I can do, and put another burden on her), but I’m sure she knows how proud of her I am. She has to know.
I’ve argued with myself over whether or not I should tell Hank. Regardless of the state of things between us, he’s her father, and technically has as much right as I do to know the truth. (I had the most awful nightmare once, right in the middle of an exhibition at the gallery it came back to me: him standing next to me at her funeral, almost crazy with grief, unable to comprehend how such a horrible thing could have happened. He doesn’t deserve that, nobody deserves to be blindsided that way.) I never really settle the matter with myself, but I do keep coming up with the same answer: if she wants him to know, she’ll tell him herself. She has to deal with so much, maybe it would just stretch her too thin to have to handle that, too.
God knows, she hid it from me long enough.
Sometimes I look back on how it used to be, and almost yearn for the ignorance that protected me then. It’s ridiculous, but my concerns were so wonderfully trivial: she was having problems at school, she always ran out without getting a proper breakfast, her boyfriend seemed a little too old for her. (Tell me about it. Six times my own age, if I understand her right.) I was totally useless to her — and I’m such a great help now! — but at least I didn’t spend every waking moment in fear for her life.
Well, I can’t go back to that, wouldn’t if I could. When that insane Kralik kidnapped me as bait to lure her in, I got a long, clear look at the kinds of things that move in her world. I had seen glimpses before (most memorably the invasion of her welcome-home party by walking corpses), but nothing compared to sitting helpless while that murderous genial maniac chuckled reminiscently about eating his mother. I knew the bait would work, knew she would come for me, and hated myself for being made into a weapon against my own daughter. Not that it was the first time, or the last; I did turn her over to be burned at the stake, after all, and I have some kind of dim memory of trying to brain her with a pickaxe. But if I keep my eyes open to what’s going on around me, I at least have a chance to avoid being used against her again.
Kralik … after I thought it was all over, Giles burst in to save us from a threat I’d never seen coming. Maybe she could have taken that last vampire on her own, certainly she’s faced worse, but I’m not sure; I’ve never seen her so exhausted, not even when she was in the hospital delirious with fever. But whether or not he was needed, Giles was there. He’s everything I’m not, he understands her world and he’s able to help her in ways I can’t imagine. I envy him and resent him and … and …
Yes. Well. There it is, isn’t it? The thread that ties so many different issues together. The man who can give her what I can’t. The man who is more a father to her than her own father. The man who has seen me at my worst, repeatedly, and remains tactfully silent about it. The man who represents the area where I’ve failed her yet again.
I think it was the night of the band candy that brought it into focus for me. Like everyone else, I had always accepted the image he projected: prim, formal, bookish, repressed. When the psychopharmaceuticals in the band candy wiped away the facade, I saw a different man. Ruthless, fearless, animal-alive, dangerously masculine. And what did he see? a giggling trollop, worthless for anything more than a few minutes’ recreation. He’s far too much the gentleman to make any reference to that mortifying night, but I don’t know how he can look at me without contempt showing in his eyes. Not that I can meet his eyes for more than a few seconds, on those occasions when we can’t avoid one another.
I burn with shame every time I think of it, but I could get past that. In a way, keeping things formal between us makes it more awkward, because I know he’s seen me without the mask, and is only honoring the pretense. If I allowed — or helped — something personal to develop between us, such intimate knowledge would be less stark, a natural part of an intimate relationship. And it wouldn’t be pretending, not for me; he’s decent and brave and brilliant and dedicated, and I think … I think he may love her as much as I do. There’s no denying he shares more of her life, her real life, than I ever could.
It would be good for us. It would be good for her. We could pool our efforts, coordinating together to meet her needs, allowing her to integrate her two separate lives, providing for her the solid home she deserves. I want so much to be able to do that for her, and I won’t deny that I want it for myself.
But I can’t. I can’t. It would just be lighting a fuse. I saw Kralik, I saw the children-turned-demon at the book burning, I saw the shambling dead fighting their way up the stairs after us. I may not understand her world, but I’ve seen it. She matches herself against things that would wipe me from the earth in a heartbeat, and she wins. Time and again, she wins.
But she only has to lose once.
In fact, that “once” has already happened. Only for a few minutes, she assures me, she came right back, but still: she died. It’s a miracle she’s still here, and I’m grateful for it, but they’re called miracles because most of the time they don’t happen. Keep playing the odds, and eventually the odds catch up with you.
The nightmare. The funeral. The two of us standing together at her grave.
No. No. It has nothing to do with reason, it goes beyond right and wrong. Knowing he had prepared her for the mission that killed her, sharing my home and table and bed with the man who sent my daughter to die … I couldn’t. I’d tear us apart, destroy us both, and I simply don’t have the courage to begin it, knowing what waits at the end.
And because I don’t, I rob her of something that would enrich her life and probably would prolong it. That’s the kind of mother she has, that’s how far beneath her I am. She’s a crusader, and I’m a coward.
She wasn’t a beautiful baby, but her eyes … I lost my heart to her the first time I saw those eyes. I had such dreams for her: not that she would do great things (how could I have foreseen just how far she would go?), but grandchildren and long life and happiness. Now I stare out the window at the deathly blanket of darkness, and pull the robe tighter around myself, and I’m still cold.