Halfway There, Chapters 10 to 13
Sep. 20th, 2010 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indriSUMMARY: 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.
10. Shirt
The flight to Phoenix is unusually quiet, and he doesn't realise why until he notices the date on the boarding pass: it's Christmas Day.
He gets a little sleep on the plane. He picks up his bag, steeling himself to do battle with the hire car companies once more.
But when he arrives, there's a couple of people standing next to the gate, holding a sign marked "Giles". There's a man around Giles's age, and a teenage girl.
"Mr Giles," the man says, "this is my daughter Chloe. Thank you so much for coming."
The man holds himself stiffly. His shirt is bulky in places which suggest bandages. "They came after her in the mall. Your Dawn Summers called and said you could help."
"I don't want to go," says Chloe.
"You'll be safer with him, sweetheart."
"I want to be here. I want to be here with you and mom."
"Your mom's in the hospital!" her father hisses. "She's been stabbed because of you!"
Giles says, "Chloe, there are many other girls in Sunnydale who are experiencing what you're going through. We can look after you and you can look after each other."
"Are you going to wait," her father asks, "until your brothers are hurt too?"
Chloe has a little backpack and a wheeled suitcase covered in rainbow stickers. She grips Giles's elbow as they go to buy tickets to California. On the plane she pretends to sleep under the airline blanket but her body wracks with sobs.
Anya's on lookout when they get to Revello Drive. "Oh goody," she says without enthusiasm. "Another one who'll want to share the bathroom. Weren't there supposed to be four?"
There's a group camped out around some candles on the living room floor. Willow is carving out some lumps of fruitcake and Buffy's putting little marshmallows into mugs of hot chocolate.
"This is Chloe, everyone," says Giles. "Merry Christmas!"
Chloe looks around at the boarded-up windows and suburban furniture. "This is it?"
"Welcome to Slayercamp," says Buffy. She looks and sounds a little less like a human bruise than she did the day before yesterday. "Or should that be Potential-Slayercamp?"
"It's just like Girl Scouts," Xander says, "only the bonfires are made of our enemies. And not all of us are girls."
Vi and Molly are huddled on the sofa. Kennedy sits cross-legged on the floor. "I'll show you around," Molly says to the new girl.
Giles takes a seat next to Buffy. "I'm sorry I haven't brought a present."
"Doesn't matter," Buffy says. "You've been busy. I'm just glad that you're here."
Ah yes, Giles thinks, because I wasn't last year.
11. Window
Giles had a rather nice life in Bath. He had a flat in one of its Victorian terraces, in easy walking distance to the city centre. There was a record shop around the corner, a chippie down the road, and a mini Tesco's next to an off-license. He spent wet afternoons nosing around the museums and sunny ones walking the Cotswolds. He bought a motorcycle and took it to small local gigs in Bristol and Bath, and caught the train to London for bigger shows. He had a generous pension from the Council, much of his back pay, and the income from The Magic Box.
He chose Bath because it was a small, pretty city, and it was not Oxford and it was not London. It was also about an hour's drive from where Olivia lived, a fact that had turned out to suit them both very well.
He had sent her a note as soon as he felt a bit settled in, and she had happened to be unattached. So she'd turned up on his doorstep one morning, with her usual dubious expression, saying she had an hour to spare before she had to head off to a meeting.
"It's not a Hellmouth here, is it?" she'd asked, standing at the flat's living room window as if she expected to see the Gentlemen floating past.
"Nothing of the sort," he'd said, "that I know of." He took a couple of steps closer to her, to look out at the terraces and chimneystacks and Fiat Puntos. "I've left that behind."
After that, she'd come and visit him on weekends, or he'd go and visit her. Not every weekend, as her business was often demanding, and, in truth, he liked that she was busy and needed only a little of his time. It was very nice to wake up next to someone in the morning, but he was always a little relieved when she had gone, and he'd spend a few minutes each time putting the coffee mugs back in the right place and picking up her newspapers. He'd lived too long on his own now to want to share full-time with someone else. He didn't want to justify how he spent his evenings to anyone but himself, whether he was watching bad amateur productions of Shakespeare, or indexing demon tomes while singing along to The Dark Side of the Moon. Olivia's feelings were similar in kind, if not in specifics. She said that every time she'd moved in with a man, she'd ended up doing all the housework, and Giles could bloody well wash his own shirts.
He needed to have a project to work on, he knew, to keep himself happy and occupied, and to assuage the guilt that he felt on having left Sunnydale. He started work on a study of dimensional portal spells and began to describe himself as an independent scholar. For a time he also researched accounts of Slayers and their field Watchers, but that had been too close to the bone for him to continue.
He'd spent his last Christmas largely in his dressing gown and pyjamas. He'd made himself pancakes in the morning, served American-style with maple syrup and bacon, and had sat in the armchair between the radiator and the TV. He watched a couple of old movies, and spent some time trying out his new guitar. He experimentally roasted a poussin for Christmas lunch, then showered and shaved in time to look suave when Olivia arrived at eight.
After years on the Hellmouth, England felt safe. The soft grey light and the intermittent rain were a pleasure after the harsh sunlight and the improbably cyan skies of southern California. Oh, England had its problems too, but he felt a kind of nostalgia for the football hooligans, the tabloid press, and the small-time drug dealers who loitered near the park. He spent weeks at a time without being knocked on the head.
12. Bucket
When Beljoxa's Eye tells them the problem is the disruption in the Slayer line, Giles hears it and believes it. It's as he feared.
He and Anya return to the house to find people in a jubilant mood. Buffy has slain the Turok-Han! One of the SITs, Eve, is missing, but Giles decides to wait until the morning to ask why.
Downstairs, the SITs excitedly retell each other what they saw. How strong she was! How she fought back! Upstairs, Buffy is in her bedroom, carefully tending a wounded member of the undead. She gestures him into the room and he fetches a chair. Spike's lying with his eyes closed, but Giles can't tell if he's conscious or not. Spike doesn't flinch as Buffy washes the caked blood from the scars on his chest. Giles averts his eyes: it feels too intimate to watch politely.
"So, what did you find out?" she asks. "How do we kill the First?"
"It's as we thought," he says, "we can't. We can merely wound it."
"Giles, that's not what I want to hear," says Buffy.
"It's, it's Evil," Giles says. "It just is. It's everlasting and unconquerable."
Buffy's probing for broken ribs now, and suddenly Spike pitches forward to throw up lumps of black blood into a carefully positioned bucket. Buffy passes him a glass of water to wash his mouth out.
"That's loser talk," says Spike. "There's nothing this Slayer can't kill." His eyes take on a pleading look.
"We're not dealing with a demon," Giles says, "or a God. We're dealing with a personified reification of what has always existed and will always exist, as long as there are conscious beings to be conscious of it."
"I'm a personification of thirst," says Spike, "and you can still chop off my head."
"If we can't kill it," says Buffy, "maybe we can capture it somehow. Bottle it."
"Put it in a lamp," says Spike.
"Well, possibly. That's the, um, lead I'll follow then. But Buffy, the Eye said something more, about the reason for the First's strike." Giles signals that he doesn't really want to say this in front of Spike, who has collapsed back onto the bed.
"Anything you can say to me you can say in front of him," she says.
He sighs. "The First is taking advantage of an instability in the Slayer line, of something that's never happened before."
"There's been of two of us for six years," Buffy says. "Isn't it moving kind of slow?"
"That event, although unprecedented, was entirely natural. That wouldn't be enough to disturb the line."
"Oh," says Buffy, "you mean the big Willow mojo to summon me back?"
"I'm afraid so."
Buffy shrugs. "We'll deal. We always deal, Giles."
Yes, thinks Giles, until the day we don't.
13. Apron
He calls Lydia, but she's still unable to answer the phone. So he asks Dawn where he should head to next. "Shanghai," she says.
He looks at her. "What about Hawaii? Or Egypt or Brazil?"
She shakes her head. "They were all alive before, but the way the Bringers work, we don't know that now for sure. But we have one on Doctor Chalmer's list that the Coven seer could confirm. And she's in Shanghai." She passes him an address. "Your flight's at two."
"Is that a.m. or p.m.?" he asks.
"A.M.," she says.
So he heads back to LAX.
Fifteen hours non-stop to Hong Kong, flying economy, in a centre seat with nowhere to stretch his legs. He should have booked business class, he thinks: it's the Council's money. He'll do that on the way back.
He folds himself up in the cramped seat and eats what's put in front of him. Sleep doesn't come, so he flicks through the selection on the in-flight TV.
The man on his left is a businessman from Ghangzhou province. His factory makes aprons. Is Mr Giles's business related to aprons in any way?
"I work for an NGO," Giles says. "In emergency services. We have not much call for them, no."
"Surgical aprons," the man presses.
Giles smiles and takes his business card.
The man in the right-hand seat does not look at Giles. He's been asleep since shortly after they got on board.
The aeroplane's lights dim sometime after another random meal of noodles. Mr Liew of the aprons rummages in his bag and then heads down the aisle with a toothbrush.
Mr Right-Hand-Side wakes up then, stretching luxuriously, his hand narrowly missing Giles head. The man's Caucasian, with dark and wavy hair.
"Remember me?" asks Ben.
Giles's heart thumps. "We haven't met," he says.
"Oh, but you killed me, an innocent, and vulnerable---"
"I mean, I haven't met you, the First. Ben I obviously have met, and killed, for reasons I still regard as necessary though deeply unfortunate. And it wasn't me who placed Ben in danger, but Glorificus, who frankly didn't care."
Ben turns into Jenny.
"Ah, Jenny," he says. "Yes, Jenny. But I didn't kill her either."
"Rupert," says Fake Jenny, "I have a message."
"This is obscene," Giles says. "Why do you do this? You know I know this isn't her."
"Buffy will pay for her weakness," Fake Jenny says. She turns back into Ben. "And so will you."
The First disappears.
Mr Liew returns to his seat. He puts away his toothbrush and pulls out a small pillow. "Where is our third passenger?" he asks.
"I think he got upgraded," Giles says, hoping Mr Liew cannot hear the tremor in his voice.
But at least now he can stretch his legs.
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.
10. Shirt
The flight to Phoenix is unusually quiet, and he doesn't realise why until he notices the date on the boarding pass: it's Christmas Day.
He gets a little sleep on the plane. He picks up his bag, steeling himself to do battle with the hire car companies once more.
But when he arrives, there's a couple of people standing next to the gate, holding a sign marked "Giles". There's a man around Giles's age, and a teenage girl.
"Mr Giles," the man says, "this is my daughter Chloe. Thank you so much for coming."
The man holds himself stiffly. His shirt is bulky in places which suggest bandages. "They came after her in the mall. Your Dawn Summers called and said you could help."
"I don't want to go," says Chloe.
"You'll be safer with him, sweetheart."
"I want to be here. I want to be here with you and mom."
"Your mom's in the hospital!" her father hisses. "She's been stabbed because of you!"
Giles says, "Chloe, there are many other girls in Sunnydale who are experiencing what you're going through. We can look after you and you can look after each other."
"Are you going to wait," her father asks, "until your brothers are hurt too?"
Chloe has a little backpack and a wheeled suitcase covered in rainbow stickers. She grips Giles's elbow as they go to buy tickets to California. On the plane she pretends to sleep under the airline blanket but her body wracks with sobs.
Anya's on lookout when they get to Revello Drive. "Oh goody," she says without enthusiasm. "Another one who'll want to share the bathroom. Weren't there supposed to be four?"
There's a group camped out around some candles on the living room floor. Willow is carving out some lumps of fruitcake and Buffy's putting little marshmallows into mugs of hot chocolate.
"This is Chloe, everyone," says Giles. "Merry Christmas!"
Chloe looks around at the boarded-up windows and suburban furniture. "This is it?"
"Welcome to Slayercamp," says Buffy. She looks and sounds a little less like a human bruise than she did the day before yesterday. "Or should that be Potential-Slayercamp?"
"It's just like Girl Scouts," Xander says, "only the bonfires are made of our enemies. And not all of us are girls."
Vi and Molly are huddled on the sofa. Kennedy sits cross-legged on the floor. "I'll show you around," Molly says to the new girl.
Giles takes a seat next to Buffy. "I'm sorry I haven't brought a present."
"Doesn't matter," Buffy says. "You've been busy. I'm just glad that you're here."
Ah yes, Giles thinks, because I wasn't last year.
11. Window
Giles had a rather nice life in Bath. He had a flat in one of its Victorian terraces, in easy walking distance to the city centre. There was a record shop around the corner, a chippie down the road, and a mini Tesco's next to an off-license. He spent wet afternoons nosing around the museums and sunny ones walking the Cotswolds. He bought a motorcycle and took it to small local gigs in Bristol and Bath, and caught the train to London for bigger shows. He had a generous pension from the Council, much of his back pay, and the income from The Magic Box.
He chose Bath because it was a small, pretty city, and it was not Oxford and it was not London. It was also about an hour's drive from where Olivia lived, a fact that had turned out to suit them both very well.
He had sent her a note as soon as he felt a bit settled in, and she had happened to be unattached. So she'd turned up on his doorstep one morning, with her usual dubious expression, saying she had an hour to spare before she had to head off to a meeting.
"It's not a Hellmouth here, is it?" she'd asked, standing at the flat's living room window as if she expected to see the Gentlemen floating past.
"Nothing of the sort," he'd said, "that I know of." He took a couple of steps closer to her, to look out at the terraces and chimneystacks and Fiat Puntos. "I've left that behind."
After that, she'd come and visit him on weekends, or he'd go and visit her. Not every weekend, as her business was often demanding, and, in truth, he liked that she was busy and needed only a little of his time. It was very nice to wake up next to someone in the morning, but he was always a little relieved when she had gone, and he'd spend a few minutes each time putting the coffee mugs back in the right place and picking up her newspapers. He'd lived too long on his own now to want to share full-time with someone else. He didn't want to justify how he spent his evenings to anyone but himself, whether he was watching bad amateur productions of Shakespeare, or indexing demon tomes while singing along to The Dark Side of the Moon. Olivia's feelings were similar in kind, if not in specifics. She said that every time she'd moved in with a man, she'd ended up doing all the housework, and Giles could bloody well wash his own shirts.
He needed to have a project to work on, he knew, to keep himself happy and occupied, and to assuage the guilt that he felt on having left Sunnydale. He started work on a study of dimensional portal spells and began to describe himself as an independent scholar. For a time he also researched accounts of Slayers and their field Watchers, but that had been too close to the bone for him to continue.
He'd spent his last Christmas largely in his dressing gown and pyjamas. He'd made himself pancakes in the morning, served American-style with maple syrup and bacon, and had sat in the armchair between the radiator and the TV. He watched a couple of old movies, and spent some time trying out his new guitar. He experimentally roasted a poussin for Christmas lunch, then showered and shaved in time to look suave when Olivia arrived at eight.
After years on the Hellmouth, England felt safe. The soft grey light and the intermittent rain were a pleasure after the harsh sunlight and the improbably cyan skies of southern California. Oh, England had its problems too, but he felt a kind of nostalgia for the football hooligans, the tabloid press, and the small-time drug dealers who loitered near the park. He spent weeks at a time without being knocked on the head.
12. Bucket
When Beljoxa's Eye tells them the problem is the disruption in the Slayer line, Giles hears it and believes it. It's as he feared.
He and Anya return to the house to find people in a jubilant mood. Buffy has slain the Turok-Han! One of the SITs, Eve, is missing, but Giles decides to wait until the morning to ask why.
Downstairs, the SITs excitedly retell each other what they saw. How strong she was! How she fought back! Upstairs, Buffy is in her bedroom, carefully tending a wounded member of the undead. She gestures him into the room and he fetches a chair. Spike's lying with his eyes closed, but Giles can't tell if he's conscious or not. Spike doesn't flinch as Buffy washes the caked blood from the scars on his chest. Giles averts his eyes: it feels too intimate to watch politely.
"So, what did you find out?" she asks. "How do we kill the First?"
"It's as we thought," he says, "we can't. We can merely wound it."
"Giles, that's not what I want to hear," says Buffy.
"It's, it's Evil," Giles says. "It just is. It's everlasting and unconquerable."
Buffy's probing for broken ribs now, and suddenly Spike pitches forward to throw up lumps of black blood into a carefully positioned bucket. Buffy passes him a glass of water to wash his mouth out.
"That's loser talk," says Spike. "There's nothing this Slayer can't kill." His eyes take on a pleading look.
"We're not dealing with a demon," Giles says, "or a God. We're dealing with a personified reification of what has always existed and will always exist, as long as there are conscious beings to be conscious of it."
"I'm a personification of thirst," says Spike, "and you can still chop off my head."
"If we can't kill it," says Buffy, "maybe we can capture it somehow. Bottle it."
"Put it in a lamp," says Spike.
"Well, possibly. That's the, um, lead I'll follow then. But Buffy, the Eye said something more, about the reason for the First's strike." Giles signals that he doesn't really want to say this in front of Spike, who has collapsed back onto the bed.
"Anything you can say to me you can say in front of him," she says.
He sighs. "The First is taking advantage of an instability in the Slayer line, of something that's never happened before."
"There's been of two of us for six years," Buffy says. "Isn't it moving kind of slow?"
"That event, although unprecedented, was entirely natural. That wouldn't be enough to disturb the line."
"Oh," says Buffy, "you mean the big Willow mojo to summon me back?"
"I'm afraid so."
Buffy shrugs. "We'll deal. We always deal, Giles."
Yes, thinks Giles, until the day we don't.
13. Apron
He calls Lydia, but she's still unable to answer the phone. So he asks Dawn where he should head to next. "Shanghai," she says.
He looks at her. "What about Hawaii? Or Egypt or Brazil?"
She shakes her head. "They were all alive before, but the way the Bringers work, we don't know that now for sure. But we have one on Doctor Chalmer's list that the Coven seer could confirm. And she's in Shanghai." She passes him an address. "Your flight's at two."
"Is that a.m. or p.m.?" he asks.
"A.M.," she says.
So he heads back to LAX.
Fifteen hours non-stop to Hong Kong, flying economy, in a centre seat with nowhere to stretch his legs. He should have booked business class, he thinks: it's the Council's money. He'll do that on the way back.
He folds himself up in the cramped seat and eats what's put in front of him. Sleep doesn't come, so he flicks through the selection on the in-flight TV.
The man on his left is a businessman from Ghangzhou province. His factory makes aprons. Is Mr Giles's business related to aprons in any way?
"I work for an NGO," Giles says. "In emergency services. We have not much call for them, no."
"Surgical aprons," the man presses.
Giles smiles and takes his business card.
The man in the right-hand seat does not look at Giles. He's been asleep since shortly after they got on board.
The aeroplane's lights dim sometime after another random meal of noodles. Mr Liew of the aprons rummages in his bag and then heads down the aisle with a toothbrush.
Mr Right-Hand-Side wakes up then, stretching luxuriously, his hand narrowly missing Giles head. The man's Caucasian, with dark and wavy hair.
"Remember me?" asks Ben.
Giles's heart thumps. "We haven't met," he says.
"Oh, but you killed me, an innocent, and vulnerable---"
"I mean, I haven't met you, the First. Ben I obviously have met, and killed, for reasons I still regard as necessary though deeply unfortunate. And it wasn't me who placed Ben in danger, but Glorificus, who frankly didn't care."
Ben turns into Jenny.
"Ah, Jenny," he says. "Yes, Jenny. But I didn't kill her either."
"Rupert," says Fake Jenny, "I have a message."
"This is obscene," Giles says. "Why do you do this? You know I know this isn't her."
"Buffy will pay for her weakness," Fake Jenny says. She turns back into Ben. "And so will you."
The First disappears.
Mr Liew returns to his seat. He puts away his toothbrush and pulls out a small pillow. "Where is our third passenger?" he asks.
"I think he got upgraded," Giles says, hoping Mr Liew cannot hear the tremor in his voice.
But at least now he can stretch his legs.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-09-20 03:53 pm (UTC)One nitpick, with regard to the scene in the Phoenix airport: an American would say "Your mom's in the hospital" rather than "Your mom's in hospital." (One could, I suppose, argue that since we're in Giles's POV, we're hearing -- as he does -- what he expects to hear, but he's generally a more reliable observer than that.)
no subject
Date: 2010-09-21 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-28 11:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 05:00 am (UTC)*snorts* I think Anya would get along well with Chloe's father.
He spent weeks at a time without being knocked on the head.
Ha! Reason enough. I enjoyed the description of how Giles and Olivia managed their relationship.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 10:54 pm (UTC)That whole evocation of England works really well - not glamorous but mundane, as it actually is for those of us who live here, even in tourist places. I love the way Spike still has backchat for Giles even in his present state. And tgis really does show how easy it is for Giles to become disconnected from what is happening in Sunnydale, which makes his later actions more explicable.
Ben is Jenny?
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 02:11 am (UTC)I love that Giles had this reactin, even in the face of Jenny, calm, cool and collected.. even if he wasn't on the inside. Perfect!
no subject
Date: 2010-10-24 09:54 am (UTC)¡Yay! Extra seat! It's the little things...