indri

SUMMARY: What happened to Giles in Season Seven?
SPOILERS: For almost all of the televised Buffy and Angel. Guaranteed free of spoilers from the comics, as I haven't read them.
RATING: PG13 for adult themes and violence.
WRITTEN: Begun September 2004, recommenced September 2009, largely completed October 2009.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Some dialogue is quoted or closely paraphrased from "Lie to Me" and "Restless" by Joss Whedon, "Bring on the Night" by Marti Noxon and Douglas Petrie, "Storyteller" by Jane Espenson, "Lies My Parents Told Me" by David Fury and Drew Goddard, and "Dirty Girls" by Drew Goddard. Thanks to my beta readers, peasant_, shapinglight and revdorothyl.

2. Glass

It's only as he turns onto Revello Drive that he realises he hasn't rung Buffy. Among all the other calls he's been making, he simply forgot. He pulls up in front of the house, and sees that the windows on the ground floor are boarded up. There are other, smaller signs of recent struggle. It's Sunnydale's way of saying, "Welcome back."

"Here we are," he says. "Please take in your things. I'm sure we'll all be grateful for a cup of tea and a shower."

"So this is where the actual Slayer lives," says Annabelle, clutching her bag, as Kennedy looks unimpressed.

"Look!" says Molly, as they go up the drive. "There's glass all over the lawn. We'd tidy that up in England."

Kennedy frowns. "Are we sure this place is safe?"

The strangest thing happens as Giles approaches the house: England disappears. The months and years he's spent trying to get away from this place simply up and vanish. His flat, the pub in Bath, the tentative fingerlings of his new-old life in England: these fall away from him like a dream. He's never left Sunnydale, ever.

Buffy opens the door before he even knocks. And he's glad, always, always glad, to see her, even when she's looking as tired as he feels.

"Giles," she says.

The girls swarm in the door, in front of him, faking a nonchalance he knows they don't feel.

"I'm afraid we have a slight apocalypse," he says.

Inside, the gang's all there: Buffy, Dawn, Willow, Anya and Xander. Even, for some reason, that rat Andrew tied to a chair. Giles knows his part and he knows his audience. This is his job, to stand in front of frightened children and tell them of their doom.

Within thirty-six hours, Annabelle's dead.

3. Spade

Xander fetches a blanket from the back of his car. "This is all I've got," he says. It's a faded bedsheet with characters from Peanuts on it. Charlie Brown plays football. Lucy stands with her hands on her hips. Snoopy lies on the top of his kennel and contemplates the sky. "I try to keep plastic sheeting in the trunk, for moving demons, but with everything going on right now, I've run out."

"It will have to do," Giles says.

They wrap Annabelle's body in the Peanuts cartoons. Her blood seeps through a little, and a lock of her hair protrudes from the top. Xander takes her shoulders and Giles grasps her knees. With a practised heave they haul her body into the back seat.

"Want a coffee?" Xander asks as he drives. "We could stop by the Espresso Pump."

"I'd love one," Giles admits, "but we have a corpse of a young woman in the back seat."

"It's no problem," Xander says. "I'll pick one up."

Xander's a young man now, Giles supposes. A surprisingly handy one, at that. Boarding up windows, repairing doors, shepherding teenage girls, and fetching coffees for knackered survivors of imperilled mystic orders.

Giles downs the double espresso.

Annabelle's parents live in Walthamstow. He calls them when he gets back to Revello Drive. It was her fourth day in his care and her second in America. "Yes. No. I'm sorry. I thought..."

Buffy still looks terrible after her fight with the Turok-Han. He wants to hold her hand or touch her cheek, but she's so covered in bruises he's sure it would hurt. Molly is standing in the lounge, looking at Annabelle's things as if she's not sure whether she should move them. From outside, he can hear Xander's spade hitting earth.

Willow takes the next call. "I can't hear you," she says, "can you talk louder?" Then she hands the phone to Giles.

"It's someone from the Watcher Council," she says.

4. Shoes

Dr Lydia Chalmers, senior Watcher, the woman who wrote her thesis on William the Bloody: her voice sounds very weak on the telephone.

She's in hospital, she says. She doesn't know who else in London is alive or how she survived. That's not important right now.

"Roger claims he's in charge now," she says, "but he can't... There's nothing he can do. Mr Giles, it's up to you and your Slayer now. You have to carry on. You'll need..."

And then there comes a pause so long that Giles starts to wonder if the connection's been lost.

"You'll need funds." She gives him the account number and a password for some US-based Council money.

"There are some SITs unaccounted for," she says. "They may still be alive. The closest one to you is in Seattle. Can you get there?"

"I'll head to the airport straight away."

"Good," she says. After another long pause, she provides an address.

"You never think," she says then, "that you live in the End Times." He waits a long time for her to say more, but she's silent for minutes until the phone's abruptly hung up.

The name of the girl in Seattle is the improbable Violet Greene.

He hasn't unpacked, of course, and it's still only early evening. His next call books a flight. Buffy just smiles thinly as he leaves.

He has time to think, on the plane. He considers the First. Is it really as bad as all that? Hasn't he been here before, mortally worried for Buffy, facing a foe they don't yet know how to fight? Invulnerable mayors, demons who cannot be injured by weapons forged, goddesses in high-heeled shoes? And they've always got through it before. Apart from those two times she died.

Of course it's been worse, he chides himself. There was that terrible summer when she was gone. And the terrible autumn, when she came back.

It's snowing in Seattle. He doesn't know whether that's seasonal or not. It's also 10:30 p.m. and his coat's not nearly warm enough. He struggles with another hire car and another fold-out map to get to Bellevue. East along South 176th Street, he thinks. He needs to find the ramp to Interstate 405.

If the First came to him, what shape would it take? Surely it would it come to him as Jenny? Or as Randall? Perhaps it would turn up as Quentin just to piss them both off.

Travers is almost certainly among the dead.

Bellevue turns out to be a rather nice part of town, with large detached houses with good-sized lawns, for those who like that sort of thing. The Greenes open the door in their dressing-gowns. The hallway behind them is untidy with boots, magazines and cases for musical instruments.

"I'm looking for Violet," he says, "I'm from the Council of Watchers."

The Greenes glance at each other before turning to him.

"But Vi's already gone," they say.

5. Van

He pulls over to the side of the road, cursing the ill-lit road signs, his map and the falling snow. He thinks this is the right way, but it's hard to tell, the roads are so featureless in this weather. He passed the last of the street-lamps a good while back, and now he's just climbing upwards, into the foothills of the Cascades, past trees but perilously few houses. The low clouds obscure any moonlight to be had.

Council safe-house, his arse.

And what if this is a goose-chase, a ruse of whoever it was picked up Vi? No good to think of that -- if that's the case, she's already dead.

The next road he turns onto is little more than a track, gritty and unsealed, with a sheer drop of ungaugeable depth on the right-hand side. A couple of turns later, he finds a pile of tires with "Lot 49" painted on them in white.

This is it then. He turns into the barely-discernible drive and crawls up the slope for another half mile. He finds a carpark, which little more than a cleared space among the trees.

Two vehicles are there already: a compact hire car and an elderly white van. Giles shivers in his thin coat as he inspects them. The van smells stale and metallic: drying blood.

From further along the drive he can hear a sound that isn't the wind in the trees, a sort of heavy thumping.

A Bringer rounds the corner, clutching some car keys, looking as if he's forgotten to pick something up. Giles punches him before he has a chance to unsheathe his knife. The Bringer tries to stab Giles with the keys instead, but Giles floors him with a blow to the head. Giles breaks the Bringer's jawbone with a solid kick, seizes the knife, and swiftly finishes the job. He pulls the Bringer into the underbrush, thinking, one down, many million to go...

The keys fit the van. As he unlocks the door, he realises his hand is aching. He hopes he didn't break anything too important punching the Bringer. Perhaps he can drive back one-handed or using his elbow?

The back of the van has traces of blood and cloth, and little clumps of things he has no intention of examining. It also includes a great deal of useful equipment. Axes. A toolkit. A petrol can.

Giles binds his injured hand in a handkerchief. He puts the toolkit and the petrol can in the passenger seat. He fetches the blood-spattered robe from the Bringer and pulls it on.

He gets a clear view of the house as the van rounds the corner. It probably once resembled a modest wooden holiday home. Now the decorative cladding has been stripped off, revealing the concrete-and-steel safe house underneath. The Bringers are trying to break down the door. Thank God, there seem to only be three of them.

Giles drives up behind them, gripping the petrol can. He floors the accelerator.

6. Hat

Afterwards, Vi asks, "How did you scare them away, exactly?" She's wrapped in a thick greatcoat that Giles envies and she's wearing a small wool hat. David's behind her, carrying their luggage.

"Fire," he says. "Ah, you'll probably want to step this way." In the dark, it's hard to see what the wet pools are made of. He wonders if she'll notice the smell in the air or the tracks in the snow where he dragged the bodies away. He thinks he needs to win a fraction more of her trust before he can say, "I ran them over and then set them on fire."

"I think I've lost my flute," she says. "My parents'll kill me."

David says, "Oh, the Council will get you a better one. It's lost in the line of duty, after all."

David Clerkwell's eighteen. He'd be good-looking if he wasn't so gormless. "Of course, I'm not a Watcher yet," he'd said. "I'm in training." ("Like me!" said Vi.) "Or I would be, except I'm taking a gap year. But then my mum rang to tell me about the trouble with the SITs. So I looked up the nearest one I could find."

Giles doesn't know whether to berate him for his stupidity, his presumption, or his bravery. He decides not to say anything at all.

They take David's car back towards SeaTac. Giles nurses his hand and lets David drive down the snow-covered roads. He's astonished to find that it's only two in the morning. It feels much later.

"So I started in New York," David's saying. "And I know everyone says it's fantastic, but it really was! I expected the skyscrapers and the yellow taxis and so on, but then there's these ornate churches with copper roofs and climbing gargoyles. Have you been there?"

"Oh sure," Vi says. "My aunt lives there. She used to take us to the museums."

"The dinosaurs!" says David.

"The whole Egyptian temple in the Met," says Vi. "And the swords! I loved them as a kid."

"I didn't see those," David admits.

"They were so shiny and... full of purpose. And you know I thought that even before I knew I could be a Slayer."

"I was in New York," Giles volunteers, "the night before last, I think."

"What did you see?"

"The magnificent interior of a 1947 airport. David, please take the next left."

By the time they near SeaTac, David's account has reached Chicago. "I hadn't known it was on a lake."

They stop to get a very late dinner at an all-night Applebee's. "And in Wisconsin," David says, "they sold cheese hats."

"Cheese hats?" Vi asks, sceptically.

They've ordered, but the food's yet to arrive. David unzips the small suitcase he has with him and pulls out what looks like a flat sheet of plastic. He finds the mouthpiece and starts to blow.

"Look, David, Vi," Giles says, "can you both keep a lookout?" He gestures towards the restroom sign. David nods, still blowing, while Vi thumps the table with her fist and looks serious.

Giles checks the carpark afterwards but sees nothing to cause alarm. There's a payphone handily situated next to the windows, so he can keep an eye on the teenagers while he calls Lydia. It's stopped snowing, but it's still bitterly cold.

Lydia sounds very weak again. She says, "I have a list now of some of the casualties." In a measured tone, with occasional pauses for breath, she reads out the names. These are people that Giles has known since they were children, or who knew Giles when he was small.

David's parents are both among the dead.

Giles's food is cold by the time he gets back inside. Vi is slurping up a drink as she elbows David. "Show him!" she says.

David pulls out an inflated piece of orange plastic in the shape of a cheese wedge, with an indentation in the middle. He places it on his head and grins.

Vi says, "Now isn't that the cheesiest thing you ever saw?"