Shoe Money Tonight

by L. Inman

Buffy wandered through the dark shadows of one barracks room to another, checking on the girls as they slept. All was quiet, save for one sleeping form twitching, then twisting over on the squeaky mattress. The night air was close, but cool enough; in the next room the windows were open, and Buffy was headed there. It might not hurt, she thought, to do a patrol, though it was hard to remember that non-Hellmouths didn’t need such thorough patrolling—and Faith, when she wasn’t heavily sleeping, was prowling the perimeters of the old church camp like a caged panther. Or, Buffy amended to herself, rather like the panther who keeps forgetting there isn’t a cage. Buffy felt sure she had run across a poem about that, back in her other life, in college.

Faith was sleeping now: unmoving, unsprawled, giving nothing away. She had, like Buffy, been maintaining a catlike sleep nights, but exhaustion was beginning to produce a lumplike sleep that wore off slowly. Faith was not okay. Nobody was.

Buffy passed Faith’s bed, the last one before the door to the next room. In it, moonlight streamed in through the uncurtained open transom windows onto the bed her sister occupied. It was quiet in here too; but when Buffy crossed the moonlight toward the bathroom, Dawn said, “Buffy?”

Buffy turned. Dawn’s face was in shadow. “Yeah?”

“D’you want me to keep watch so you can sleep?”

Buffy smiled a little in the moonlight. These tendrils of rueful affection were her strongest emotions, and she appreciated them as she would small green shoots in a nuclear wasteland. “Thanks. But I’m all right. Faith will probably get up in an hour or two. You go to sleep.”

“Okay,” Dawn said, and was silent.

Buffy visited the bathroom (one of the taps dripped in the silence), and came back to the bed next to Dawn’s, to perch on its iron-rail foot in the moonlight and—not think. Instead she soaked in the silence, deceptively unpalpable as the water-thick moonlight. She had reveled in this kind of night, when she was a child and the air was not scented with duty. Buffy perched unmoving so long that when Willow’s shadow fell through the doorway she moved and found that her legs ached.

Willow came to her; Buffy shifted so that she could perch next to her. The moonlight fell on Willow’s face: there was a thoughtful line between her brows. But for a while she said nothing.

“Everything quiet?” Buffy asked, voice low.

“Yeah,” Willow said.

Another silence fell, until Willow spoke her thought. “Buffy...how long are we staying here?”

“Well,” Buffy answered slowly, “Father Matthew said we could stay as long as we needed. And I think we just need to rest and recoup. I mean, it’s not the Ritz, but it’s quiet. And safe. As things go.”

“Yeah,” Willow said, “I guess I just got to feeling anxious about what we’re going to do next. I feel kinda....”

“Restless,” Buffy said.

Willow nodded.

A sound broke the silence: a sharp rat-tat against glass. Buffy and Willow sat up, alert; and the sound came again. This time Buffy caught sight of movement outside the window, and when the sound came again she was able to match it to the glint of a pebble bouncing off the glass. She stood and went to look outside, answered Willow’s questioning look with an eyeroll, and with Willow behind her found the squeaky old door to the outside and slipped through it as quietly as she could.

They sauntered over to where Xander stood in the dusty compound with a handful of pebbles. “What are you doing?” Buffy hissed.

“Ah,” Xander said lightly, “I am rousing my female friends with pebbles. Just like in the movies. I always wanted to do that.”

Buffy and Willow frowned at each other, then back at him. “You do realize,” Willow said, “that that rarely wakes up the people you want it to.”

Xander let the rest of the pebbles fall and wiped his hand on his jeans. “Well, it worked for me just now.”

Buffy got to the point. “What do you want?”

For answer Xander reached down and lifted a six-pack cardboard tote of Heineken. Buffy made out the label in the moonlight and squinted at Xander in confusion. “Beer?”

“Beer,” Xander said definitively. “This way, ladies.” He picked up a second carton and set off down the path toward the barracks at other end of the compound, where the male contingent (small as it was) had been sleeping.

“Why do I think this is a recipe for disaster?” Buffy said to Willow.

Willow grimaced. “Probably because it is. But—watch me follow him....”

Buffy sighed and joined Willow on the path behind Xander’s broad shadowy back.

Xander led them through the darkness to what they recognized as the smaller building Giles had staked out for himself. A faint warm light glowed in one of the windows. Inside, they found that Giles had nested in a fashion distressingly similar to that of vampires: his bed was unkempt, his old army pack disgorged clothing onto the smooth cement floor, and an empty Scotch bottle lay where it had rolled against the wall when Giles had consumed it the first night they came.

Giles himself sat tailor-fashion on the floor next to the kerosene lantern, shuffling a pack of cards. His hair was combed, his knit shirt and jeans were relatively wrinkle-free; and he was barefoot. Buffy and Willow shared the briefest of glances as Giles looked up. The light from the lamp glinted sharply off his glasses.

“Ah, Buffy, Willow,” he said. “So glad you could join us.” He bowed the cards, and they slithered neatly together under the long arches of his fingers.

Buffy frowned thoughtfully down at him as Xander moved to place the beer strategically on the floor and settle himself down with Giles. “What’s the deal?” she said. “Yeah,” Willow echoed faintly behind her.

Xander looked up, one dark eye and one darker patch taking them in. “Poker night,” he said simply.

Buffy and Willow looked at each other again, then shrugged and went to settle themselves down as well. “You do know I don’t know poker,” Buffy said with the ghost of a smile.

Xander grinned. “Neither do we.”

“I’m best at shuffling the cards,” Giles said, his inflection almost childlike; but when he looked up at them his eyes were as incisive as ever.

“Um, I don’t mean to be a bear,” Willow said tentatively, “but—don’t we need chips to play poker?”

For answer Giles reached behind him and drew over an enormous plastic bag which he dropped unceremoniously in the center of their circle. Its contents rattled pleasantly; Xander reached in and pulled out—

“Pistachios?” Buffy said.

“Yup.” Xander cracked the pistachio and popped the meat into his mouth.

“Don’t eat them,” Giles remonstrated.

“Like you haven’t been,” Xander said. “And anyway, I thought we could eat them and play with them.”

“Yes,” Giles objected, “but then we have the difficulty of accounting for the two shell halves.”

“You were the one who said we should use the pistachios,” Xander countered.

“I don’t care,” Buffy said wearily, “as long as it isn’t kittens.”

There was a short silence, which Willow filled with: “Yeah. Pistachios better than kittens. Kittens, too gamy.”

Everyone gave her a look.

“So,” Xander said, picking it back up where they’d left off, “we just use one half-shell of the eaten ones for a counter, how’s that?”

“And have you doubling your starting stake by eating them on the sly and slipping in the other half?” Giles glared at him, and unthinkably the cards escaped his nimble hands and flew out to slather the bag of pistachios. Still glaring, Giles reached out vaguely to gather them up again.

Buffy seized her chance: she rocked forward and grabbed a Heineken, twisted off the lid under the tail of her T-shirt, and thrust the bottle into Giles’s hands. Startled, he took it without thinking, then gave Buffy an even more startled glance. She gathered up the cards before he could protest and began to shuffle them herself, applying all the Slayer zen she could muster to the task; she certainly wasn’t going to be outdone by Giles in the art of card-shuffling. Though it was Xander, she reflected, who used to shake pennies out of Dawn’s ears and work the pick-a-card-any-card trick till they were all sick of it.

“We can use every half-shell,” she said, glaring at the testosterone storm brewing across the circle. “Whole nuts count double. Xander, have a beer. Giles, drink up.”

“Right,” Giles mumbled, and took a deep swig.

“Sure thing,” Xander muttered. He snagged himself a bottle and worked the lid off barehanded, his mouth sulky.

Without being told Willow reached for the other carton near her and drew out bottles for herself and Buffy. Buffy paused regally in her shuffling to screw off the cap of her beer and down a swig, never wincing at the taste. She was fairly certain the bitter taste had been in her mouth before she touched the beer.

Buffy put down the cards before she lost them everywhere. “Xander, cut the deck.”

“You’re supposed to ask the person to your left to cut,” Giles said.

“Right—left,” Buffy said airily. “Always forget the diff. Anyway, Will’s going to parcel out our starting stakes.”

“Right,” Willow said, and grabbed the bag of pistachios.

Giles submitted to this breach of poker order; and as Willow counted pistachios out carefully to each of them, the others talked it over and decided finally on seven-card stud, as it was the simplest version of poker they knew. Giles explained the basic rules according to Hoyle, which to no one’s surprise he quoted.

Everybody sucked. That was supposed to be the point, but it wasn’t funny yet, even though they all managed light laughs at their mistakes. The level in their bottles sank; Giles was the first to get a second, closely followed by Buffy; but the easy camaraderie that was supposed to come with the munching of nuts and the drinking of beer and the call-and-response of card-playing was taking its sweet time showing up. Xander’s single eye was glazed over his cards, and his face was soft like that of a child that had tired itself out crying. Willow sat ramrod-straight, her face inscrutable as if she were performing a difficult spell. Giles’s glasses perched unattended on the end of his nose; the kerosene lamp pricked out two glints of light where his eyes waited under heavy lids, threw into relief the cross-hatchings in his crow’s feet, picked up the new filaments of silver at his temple. Buffy too was sitting up straight, her face (she hoped) blank and mysterious, like the stone face of the Sphinx. Her hand completely sucked, and she had gotten mixed up again—what exactly was a straight, and how did one acquire it?

Willow was winning, though nobody knew why. In an attempt at jocularity, Xander said, “You’re not using magic to read our minds, are you, Will?”

Willow jerked her head up and stared, as if he’d struck her. “No!”

“We’d know if she was,” Giles said, his voice weary and disparaging as how often before. Xander stared at him: Buffy waited, willing him not to stand up and tell Giles to throw down. Willow turned her wounded stare on Giles, who stared doggedly at his cards. “Whose turn is it?” he said, irritation uncoiling in his voice.

It was all unraveling too quickly for Buffy to do anything but watch helplessly.

“I can’t believe you think I’d do that,” Willow said, to both of them.

“I,” Xander said, in a hopeless attempt at majesty, “was making a joke.”

“Some joke,” Willow said, her eyes firing up. She had forgotten her hand completely, and Buffy shied her eyes away from the numbers and faces of the cards.

“Whose turn is it,” Giles said, closing his eyes.

“Mine,” Buffy said quickly, but they all ignored her, even Giles.

“You’re the one with the brains,” Xander said, rounding on him. “Why don’t you tell us?”

Buffy stared at Xander uneasily; it made no real sense for Xander to go after Giles like this, but Buffy knew—too well—the urge to break the man, just to do it, just to do it. “Xander,” Willow said, and Buffy knew she was thinking along the same lines. Willow knew that urge too. This, Buffy thought, was what she’d done to them.

“What?” Xander said, fully worked up now. “He knows you and I so well—”

“You and me,” Giles corrected him softly. “‘He knows you and me’.”

Xander drew a sharp breath. For once, Buffy sat paralyzed, with no thought of moving to stop the blow that Xander was surely going to try to deliver next second. Willow drew her breath in a hiss. Panic rose and seized Buffy’s throat.

“Mine!” she cried, louder than any of them. Willow and Xander looked up at her, and Giles’s attention seemed to shift to her, though he never lifted his eyes from his cards. “It’s my—” she belatedly modulated her voice— “turn.” Shaking, Buffy put two cards face down on the cement. “Give me two cards, please.”

Xander stared at her, his remaining eye very dark.

“Xander,” Buffy said, but she couldn’t manage to make it sound like an order. She could not look at any of them.

Xander slowly reached for the deck and dealt her two cards, carefully, like they were made of glass. Buffy arranged them very neatly in her hand, which had now gone from bad to worse.

Xander sat back. He wasn’t finished. “I guess we can wait till later for the pronouncement of wisdom,” he said, with a venom that made them all go very still for a split second. Xander dropped his chin quickly, regret already writing itself on his face.

Giles moved suddenly, to rearrange his hand; but he said nothing, and Buffy ratcheted in a breath. Willow moved tentatively to advance a half-shell.

Except then Giles spoke. “I’ve never included that description of my capabilities on my Watcher’s CV.” His voice was even and rancorless, his eyes still on his cards. Xander’s chin dropped further. Giles removed a card, steady-handed, and placed it down. “One card, please, Xander,” he said softly.

Xander dealt him the card as one would give a bouquet to a widow at the funeral, then forced his attention to his own hand.

Buffy rearranged her own hand uselessly. Tears spilled hot down her face, but she made no move to wipe them lest she draw their unavoidable notice. This was what she had done to them. She had used them up, and now they were like those women in besieged Jerusalem Buffy had read about in the Bible on some research stint, squabbling over their children, the evening’s meal. I’ve never included that description of my capabilities in my Watcher’s CV: that was meant for her, not an accusation but a full acknowledgement of his failure, even though she was the one—

Buffy cleared her throat as noiselessly as she could. It was her turn again. She spoke, she knew not what, passing the turn quickly to Willow. Play continued in this way, silent as Buffy fought her losing battle with the tears. They were all steadily not looking at her, and she knew she had no cover.

It was Buffy’s turn again, and they all waited for her, heads down, palpably willing her to be all right so they could play through it, play their way out of the siege and back to the land of milk and honey, if such a place existed.

The silence stretched: and Buffy laid her cards down, face up, a hopeless hand, and the silence came back around to snap them like a misfired rubber band.

“I can’t,” Buffy said, her voice wobbling. “I can’t do this.”

She looked around at them. Willow’s face was a study in wide, wet-eyed misery. Xander raised his maimed gaze to her without lifting his chin. Even Giles had looked up from his hand: their eyes met, and fresh tears welled in her eyes.

“I suck at poker,” she said, looking at them all. The new tears slid down her face unabated.

They all seemed to droop at her words, defeated; they had not withstood the siege.

“Can we,” Buffy sniffed helplessly, “can we—play Go Fish instead?”

Their eyes came back to her face at this unlooked-for conclusion. At first there was no response, then a sound bubbled from Giles. They looked at him in horror, and it wasn’t until they saw the flash of his teeth that they realized he was laughing.

Giles drew his shoulders in and leaned his head back and laughed openly, taking off his glasses so they could all see the wetness gathering in the creases under his eyes. Buffy laughed too, and at the same moment began crying afresh.

Xander threw down his hand. The cards scattered over the morass of pistachio shells. “I’m about ready for some Go Fish action myself,” he said. His voice was taut but there was a hint of a smile in his grief-hard mouth.

Willow sniffed and gave a little shrug. She tossed down her cards too. “Count me in.” She began to wipe her eyes on her sleeve.

At last Giles dropped his cards and squirmed to get his handkerchief out of his jeans pocket. “Go Fish it is.” Instead of drying his wet face, he took his handkerchief to the lenses of his glasses.

Buffy gathered up all the cards, wiping at her face rather uselessly. Xander started sweeping the pistachio debris out of the circle. “There’s more beer,” Willow said, still sniffing as she reached for the carton. “We each get three.”

“Hit me,” Xander said. Willow handed him one.

Giles put his glasses back on in time to receive his third beer. “Thank you.”

“Buffy?”

“Thanks.”

Buffy handed the deck to Giles, and he shuffled the cards once, then again, then again, then a fourth time.

Xander bounced impatiently. “C’mon, Giles, we don’t need to shuffle the cards fifty gazillion times.”

Giles dealt to him first, with a flick of the wrist that left Xander bobbling to catch his card without showing its face. They all laughed.

They played, Willow smiling coquettishly over her fanned cards (“D’you remember when you had to sing Madame Bovary in that nightmare?” Xander said; “Madam Butterfly,” Giles said, shutting his eyes in a grinning wince); Buffy pausing to down the last of her second beer without taking a breath, the bottle totally upended (“And when Cave Buffy kayoed Parker with that branch?”—at which they all clinked bottlenecks and cheered); Xander accidentally showing his cards (“Just like his card tricks.” “Hey.” “Remember his fishstick theatre?” “Xander: spell ‘bitch’ for us, please.” “Shut up.”); Giles growling when Buffy (with a wicked, Joyce-like smile) heisted three of his books (“Don’t you think he sounded remarkably like a Fyarl demon just now?” Willow said, and Giles pelted her with nut shells).

Once, on Xander’s turn, he asked Willow if she had any aces: “Just drew it,” Willow said ruefully, and handed it over: the ace of hearts. “Heart,” she said to him, as he took the card.

A little silence fell, as pregnant with their pleasant secret now as it had been with their misery before. They all shot little furtive glances round at one another; and play continued without a hitch. But Buffy’s breath returned to her in a rich oasis.

Once, hours later, they paused to see Faith in the doorway, taking a long drag on a cigarette. “What you guys playin’?” she asked.

“Go Fish,” Giles said, with a perfectly straight face.

Faith busted out a rare laugh. “I believe it,” she said.

They glanced at one another, and Buffy said: “Wanna play?”

Faith framed them with the angles of her thumbs, the cigarette between two fingers. “I’d spoil the picture. Anyway, I thought I’d do a walk of the perimeter. I’ll catch you later.” And she disappeared before any of them could blink.

They returned to the game, sobered; but by tacit agreement they did not push the talk to serious things. Instead, they followed up Go Fish with Crazy Eights, then Old Maid...and then Giles was waking them all with gentle hands: daylight had come, gray in the sky out the window, and the birds were shouting in the trees surrounding the compound. “Wakey wakey,” he said, his voice gravelly with beer and sleep. “Time to go to bed.”

Buffy lifted her head from Xander’s knee; helped Willow to her feet. The poker night was broken up at last, and they all dispersed to their separate beds, gritty-eyed and mumbling.

The last thing Buffy heard as she collapsed into her own bed was Dawn clucking over her.

Her last thought before sleep claimed her was of Jerusalem.

Finis

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