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.

19. Sandwich

Ethan meets them in JFK this time.

"Are you under a geas to wander airports for the rest of your days?" Giles asks him.

Ethan shrugs. "Why, are you?" He proffers his hand to Chao-Ahn, who sensibly shrinks back.

"She doesn't speak any English," Giles says. "She has only the faintest idea why she's travelling with me."

"A Slayer-to-Be then?"

"They're calling them 'Potentials' these days."

Ethan shakes his head. "This modern slang," he mocks.

"And have you brought me any useful information?"

They have an hour before the flight to LA, so the three of them sit around a cafe table. Giles gives Chao-Ahn some US dollars so she can buy herself something, but he doesn't let her out of his field of view.

"All my sources point towards the First making a tactical withdrawal," says Ethan. "Licking its wounds, so to speak."

Giles nods. "Anya heard much the same thing. Anything more on how to injure it?"

"That's more tricky. Previous attempts have generally left people as pools of goo."

"If anyone had successfully injured the First, it wouldn't want people to know."

"And it's had centuries to erase the knowledge from the records, yes."

"Look, do you know anything about mobiles? I can't get mine to work." He puts it on the table and Ethan peers at it with the same sort of mild disgust that Giles feels.

"Which carrier are you with?"

"Carrier?"

"Which phone company did you sign up with?"

"Ah," says Giles, "the shop assistant didn't mention that bit."

"It would probably help."

Giles sits back in his chair. Chao-Ahn has reached the head of the queue and is pointing at sandwiches and muffins. "Do you remember Arnold Chalmers?"

"Was that the chap who tried to drag you back to Oxford? Balding on top, Zappa moustache?"

"That's the one. His daughter died yesterday. From the bomb blast. Little Lydia. That's why I stopped off in London."

"Was Arnold caught in that too?"

Giles shakes his head. "He died a few years ago. Leukaemia, I heard."

Chao-Ahn comes back with her food. Giles checks the receipt to make sure she's been given the right change.

"Just about everyone I know from then is gone now," Giles says. "Isn't that the same for you?"

"I haven't really stayed in touch," says Ethan.

Giles arrives in Los Angeles after his fourth long-haul flight in five days. In Sunnydale he hands Chao-Ahn over to Vi and Molly. No-one in the house knows Cantonese either.

"I'll add it to my list," says Dawn, "after I finish Turkish. OK, five calls while you were gone."

One is from Annabelle's parents, who are threatening to sue. One is from Olivia, to check he's not dead.

"I told her you looked fine four days ago," says Dawn.

One is from the Coven, who have found a promising archival lead but haven't yet got any solid information. One is from someone claiming to represent Chao-Ahn's parents.

"They want to send her money," says Dawn.

The final call was from Chloe's dad. Dawn hops about a bit and frets over a folded note. "Chloe was out training when he called, and I asked him if he didn't want her to call him back, but he just asked me to pass on the message. And I couldn't do it."

"Do what? Pass on the message?"

She passes him the folded note. Her voice goes up an octave. "I couldn't do it."

Chloe's mother has died of injuries sustained in the Phoenix Bringer attack.

20. Mattress

He dreams of Jenny. Not of Jenny as she actually was, but of Jenny possessed. Eyghon-Jenny. First-Jenny. Vampire Jenny, even. He thrashes at the leering Jennies.

And wakes to find himself in the front passenger seat of a large 4WD. SUV. Whatever they're called.

"Are you all right?" asks Molly.

"Yes," he says. "Eyes on the road!"

They're already on the edges of the desert, and night is falling. He switches on the heater and the high-beams. He is unbelievably tired but doesn't want to go back to sleep.

Rona, Vi and Chao-Ahn are in the seat behind him. Chloe and Amanda are in the third row. Kennedy has stayed home, sick.

"Just another hour," he says. He tries to keep his eyes open.

He dreams then that he is back in the London squat where he once lived. There's the peeling ceiling, the mattress on the floor, the pile of books and black magic gear he kept stacked in the corner. A late summer sunset ruddies the walls. He feels disembodied, floating.

"Mr Giles! Mr Giles!" It's Rona driving this time. The stars have risen. "There's no more road."

Giles steps out of the 4WD, onto the desert sand. The cool air wakes him up a little. "I'll drive this part," he says.

Thirty minutes later, the SITs are building a fire.

"God," says Rona, "it's just good to be out of that house!"

"Breathing fresh air!" says Vi.

"It's kind of fun," Amanda says.

Even Chao-Ahn looks interested. Only Chloe is, understandably, subdued.

Giles sits cross-legged, pretending to study his tome. His eyes close, and then he's sitting in front of another pentacle, three a.m. in a children's playground. Randall, Deidre, Tom, Philip and Ethan are all there, but Stan isn't, because he's pissed at Ethan tonight. Dee's falling out of her dress and most of them are already looking out of it. Giles leans forward to start the spell that summons Eyghon.

He jerks awake. The SITs are all seated quietly now around the fire. He thinks, better cast the right spell, and starts to conjure the First Slayer instead.

21. Mugs

The SITs are all away having their mystical experience when Xander, Anya, Dawn and Andrew arrive. Much to his surprise, they literally throw themselves at him. They've been worried that he's the First.

"We couldn't remember you touching anything," Dawn says.

"And you're not driving!" says Anya. "You love driving."

"I'm also very, very jet-lagged," Giles says. "And as for not touching anything, there's only been my clothes, mugs, packets of cereal, take-away coffee, the near-infinite number of hire cars to the airport, towels, the bathroom door--"

And, he thinks, I helped carry Annabelle after she died.

"Okay, okay," says Anya. "We panicked. But we had a call from a guy called Robson. He thought you were dead."

"I thought he was dead," says Giles. "In fact, I'm fairly sure he was."

"How can you be sure?" asks Anya.

"He had no pulse. He'd stopped breathing."

"Oh," says Dawn.

"We, uh, better get back to the car," says Xander.

"Yes," says Giles, "I think you'd better."

They run back across the dunes. Giles wonders what's going on in Sunnydale that the First wants to keep them away from.

22. Sleeves

Willow doesn't end the world that night after all, even without Xander or Giles to stop her. Apparently it was Kennedy's turn to persuade her to spare the Earth.

"Nice work," he says to Kennedy when he hears, but she gives him an odd look.

"I think that what we're finding," says Giles, to an assembled group of SITs and Scoobies in the Revello Drive living room, "is that the First is operating in increasingly sophisticated ways. We have to remember, it's been doing this a long time."

"It has many tricks up its non-existent sleeves," says Anya, with a note of professional approval.

"May I remind you that it can look like anyone you know who's died, and sound like anyone you know. Or even," says Giles, rather pointedly, "like anyone you don't know."

"Can also smell like someone you know," shouts a voice up from the basement: Spike and his supernatural hearing. "Couldn't fool a vampire long otherwise."

"Right," says Giles. "So: sight, sound, smell--"

"But not touch," Spike calls out. "Not taste."

"And it can also produce the illusion of objects," Giles says.

Andrew nods. "Otherwise all the ghosts would be naked."

"For example."

"Can the First tell what we're doing?" asks Dawn.

"It knows everything that dead people know," says Willow.

"OK then," says Kennedy, "so who around here's dead?"

"I am," calls Spike.

"Me too," says Buffy. "I mean, I was."

"So whatever kind of plan we have," says Xander, "Buffy's going to know. And the First will know it too."

"Ooh," says Buffy, "so what we need is a plan so good that it can't think of a way to stop it, even when it knows what it is."

"Yes," says Giles, tiredly, "an unstoppable plan would be the ideal."

He takes Chao-Ahn to the mall so she can spend her parents' shopping money, and so he can sign up for a mobile phone carrier. He learns he can program people's numbers right into the phone, which sounds useful. Except, of course, that almost everyone in his well-thumbed address book is now dead.

Everyone's larking about when he gets home. Xander has a date, Buffy's "investigating" the handsome school principal, and Giles has some idea now about Kennedy and Willow. What do they think they are doing?

And then there's Spike, without his chip.

23. Slippers

At four a.m., Giles still can't sleep. His body no longer has any idea what timezone he's in. Warm milk hasn't helped, so perhaps it's time for some scotch.

He pauses outside the door to the basement. In slippers and dressing gown, he pads down the stairs. Spike's lying there, lit only by the gleam from the hallway upstairs. Pale skin, pale hair: Buffy's latest folly.

"Come to bring me a drink, have you, Rupert?" Spike asks. He sits up, bringing the planes of his face into the light. Giles is pleased to see that Spike's still securely chained to the wall.

"I don't approve of what Buffy's done," says Giles.

"Doesn't matter," says Spike. "Decision's made."

"The First could still trigger you at any moment--"

"Then help me," says Spike. "Get it out of my head. Help me not be its bitch any more."

"You've had so many second chances--" says Giles.

"Help me," says Spike, "and I'll go. Once I'm safe."

Giles takes a long sip of his scotch. "All right," he says.

24. Spoons

"Ready?" says Dawn. And then she reels off a stupendous list of cities, countries, names and addresses.

"What, all of these?"

"The Coven's had a total breakthrough. They've contacted other seers all over the world--"

"All right, but I can't possibly get to all of these places all at once."

"No," says Dawn, "but I figured there had to be a fastest way to get to them all--"

"And that's when she asked me," says Anya. She's sitting on the sofa, picking at some biscuits. She hands Giles a sheaf of printouts. "That's your itinerary."

Giles takes the fistful of papers into his hand and has a look. "And I start about -- now," he says.

He goes to fetch his bag from upstairs, discreetly ignoring the way Willow and Kennedy are having a snog in the back room.

Downstairs, he looks for the phone he still hasn't set up yet. He finds it in the kitchen, with Chao-Ahn, who is confidently going through the Chinese pages of the instruction booklet, tapping away at its buttons. She snaps the handset shut, triumphant, and hands it to him.

"Thank you," he says.

In Atlanta, the Potential Slayer lives with her grandmother in a flat above a shop. The grandmother doesn't want her to go. Giles sleeps in the hire car overnight, until the girl leaves for school in the morning. Feeling like a pedophile, he draws up beside her and gives her his phone. She talks to Buffy, Dawn, Kennedy and Vi, and then she gets in back of the car.

"If this is anything else, I can stab you, right?"

In Montreal, the girl lives in a flatshare with her three best friends. They insist that all four go with him. "Anywhere she goes, we go too," they say, except, of course, in French. This lasts as far as Sunnydale's outskirts, where the latest hire car is driven off the road by Bringers. Giles fights the Bringers almost single-handed, with a tire-iron and then with the Bringers' own knives. The Potential helps with a hockey stick. Her friends take a look at the scary man with his glasses askew, his blood-covered clothes, and the tire-iron in his hand, and bid them adieu.

In Stockholm, he and the Potential are chased down the narrow streets of Gamla Stan. They are backed into a dead-end and have to break a window into the back of a cafe. He fights the Bringers with pots and spoons so that the Potential can get away, but for once, a Bringer has excellent aim when throwing its knife. Then there's nothing more Giles can do.

In Frankfurt am Main, he waits for his flight to Sofia. He practices saying, "You are in grave danger," in Bulgarian. Olivia calls him on his shiny new phone. "Should I forward the bills from your flat?"

In Plovdiv, the girl has a monolingual Watcher who has kept her alive by locking her in a nuclear bunker. "I could have been the last girl in the world," she says (in English, which she speaks), "but not known in it there." Her Watcher is killed by a gunshot wound to the head on the way to the airport. Giles and the Potential are then delayed for six hours by the police. Anya has the new itinerary faxed to him when they pass through Charles de Gaulle.

In Cairo, the girl's already dead, but her parents travel with him as far as Amman, where they convince the parents of a second Potential to let her go with him.

Every time, he takes the girls back to Sunnydale, stopping only long enough for a cup of tea and a shower. He starts to resent perfectly ordinary things, like Andrew baking brownies, or Xander watching TV.

From Nairobi, he calls up Roger Wyndam-Pryce. "We have twelve Potential Slayers who've reached Sunnydale, two of whom have died, but none when in our care." He rubs tiredly at his eyes. "How are you scoring?"

Roger agrees that the Council's three surviving Slayers-in-Training will join their fellows in Sunnydale.

Karachi, Hyderabad, Ho Chi Minh City, Bali... Anya's itinerary ruthlessly ignores anywhere far from an airport or where Giles might run into visa problems. Even LAX is too far from Sunnydale. She starts to book him onto connecting flights to the town's airport when she can. She sends him a pack of fake US entry permits for the girls from countries which aren't part of the US visa waiver program.

Buffy and Kennedy are trying to turn the girls into an army. He watches them from the bathroom of Revello Drive as he shaves. Out in the back garden, they stab phantom vampires in formation.

His phone sings out -- quite literally, as Chao-Ahn picked a crooning piece of Cantopop as the ringtone. He quickly dries his hands and picks it up.

The voice on the line has a thick accent and the quality of the sound is very poor. He has a hard time understanding her. He thinks she says, "I am a friend of Rosalind and Mrs Fong's? They think I have what you need.

"It's called the Prokaryote Stone."