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.

25. Velvet

It takes some effort for Anya to route him through Melbourne. "Flights there take far too long. And it's very far from anywhere with a Potential. Except Perth," she says. "You can go out through Perth."

It's autumn in Australia. He meets his contact in a cake shop in St Kilda, not far from the beach: fat seagulls waddle on the pavement outside. She's small, dark-haired, perhaps in her late sixties. Her accent's certainly Slavic, possibly Serbo-Croatian. Beyond that, he can't tell.

She won't give him her name. "I only let my friends find me," she says. "But you are a friend of friends and I can help you."

She orders a Turkish coffee and a slice of blackforest gateau. "You need something to clear a mind with, unyoke it from another's will?"

"Yes," he says. "It's not for me, but for a--" He baulks. He can't call Spike a friend, or an enemy really, or even a fellow warrior who fights the good fight. "It's for someone controlled by an ancient evil," he says. "He's not possessed, but -- brainwashed? We're not sure."

She nods, as if that's the sort of thing she hears about all the time; perhaps it is. From a small brocade purse, she draws out a velvet jewellery bag. She passes it over the table. "It needs to go in the brain."

"What, with a knife?"

"Magic is better," she says.

He takes the stone out of the bag. It feels warm in his hand.

She folds his hands over the stone. "It doesn't like light," she says. "Bring it back to me when you're done."

"How will I find you then?"

"If you defeat the First," she says, "I'll know to call."

The girl in Perth dies before he leaves Melbourne. He hears the news report on the hire car's radio: a young woman, stabbed through the heart, found floating in the Swan River.

Then Xander rings to say Chloe's hanged herself.

26. Beer

Giles is surprised to find Ethan in Tullamarine. "Isn't Australia a little out of your way?"

"I thought you'd want to hear my news." Ethan grimaces as he stretches his neck and shoulders. "I hate those trans-Pacific flights."

They take a booth in a cafe with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the airfield. Giles watches the planes leave and land.

Ethan says, "I've met the First."

Giles raises his eyebrows. "What form did it take?" he asks.

"It took several. Randall first, then Dee for some reason, then a couple of people you haven't met."

"What did it want?"

"It was trying to persuade me to stop working with you."

"Right," says Giles. He looks towards the cafe counter. "Do they have something to drink here?"

"Beer," says Ethan.

Giles buys a couple and proceeds to drink them both. "So we must be getting close to something." He can't think what. "I saw the First as well, on a plane."

"What did it look like to you?"

"Jenny, and someone you've never met. It was unpleasant but not very convincing."

"What did it want then?"

"To make me doubt Buffy." He takes a swig of his beer. "Which shows that the First doesn't know me very well." He asks Ethan, "So what have you been looking at? What are you close to that it doesn't want me to know?"

"Some archives. And some people who are hard to reach."

"People?"

"Well, demons, a few of whom claim to represent some of the banished Elder Ones. Most of them are nutters, but there are one or two... Not all of the oldest creatures are happy that the First's still in this dimension, which they're locked out of."

"Frying pan and fire," says Giles, rolling his eyes. "All right, it's something we might be able to use. I'll ask the Coven."

Ethan snorts. "I don't think the Coven's going to keep that sort of company."

Giles checks his watch. "Right," he says, "time I got to the gate." He checks his itinerary. "Singapore in eight hours."

"Actually, I'll meet up with you again in Changi. One of my contacts is a geomancer near the Malaysian border."

"All right," says Giles. "Six a.m. local, Terminal 2? And here's my mobile number, in case you can't make it." He leaves Ethan the slip of paper.

"Be seeing you," says Ethan.

Giles scowls.

27. Cigarette

As Giles queues to get on the plane, he wonders what it would be like to have sex again with Ethan. It's been twenty-five years, but he's pretty sure he remembers how. Not that he would, of course, because he can't trust Ethan enough to have a drink with him any more, but it's a thought to keep him entertained on the long flight over.

He's too tired to drive safely when he arrives in Singapore, so he hires a van and a driver, the kind who earns a living showing tourists around in five different languages.

"Can you speak Cantonese?" asks Giles.

Half an hour later, they're at the correct address, and Giles has learnt a dozen key phrases (he's always a little slower learning languages with tones). He asks the driver to come back in an hour.

It's well after ten at night. The air is warm and very humid. He's stuffed his coat and jumper deep into his duffel-bag, but he's still sweating into his shirt and wool trousers.

He's looking for a ninth-floor flat in a large block of apartments. Of course, the lift's not working and he has to climb nine sets of stairs up a damp concrete stairwell.

No-one answers the door when he knocks. She might be out, or perhaps it's too late at night to welcome visitors. He picks the lock and immediately knows that he's too late: it's the smell. But he goes on in anyway, in case there's someone left to save.

It's a bedsit apartment, what they call "an efficiency" in the US. It has no curtains, and moonlight pours through the window and an open balcony door. There's not much furniture, just a beanbag and a small TV, plus a kitchen sink and a stove. The girl's sprawled face-down on the beanbag, which has gone dark from her blood. She looks like she's been dead for days.

Giles steps quickly through to the balcony, to swallow in fresher air. He pushes the door shut behind him with his sleeve. The girl's left a packet of cigarettes out on a ledge, and he takes one to get the taste of her death out of his mouth. This is where she would have stood to smoke, he thinks. Most of the view is of the neighbouring blocks of flats, but there's a gap between two of the buildings to the south. Through the gap he can see the lights of the city sloping down toward the sea.

28. Jeans

They won't let you smoke in Singapore airport unless you stand inside a glass box, puffing away next to your fellow smokers. From outside, the glass room is filled with dark silhouettes and bluish air. It's a salutary lesson of some sort, Giles thinks.

He sits on a bench not far from it, eating pork pastries for his breakfast.

Ethan turns up at six a.m. on the dot.

"How'd you go?" asks Giles.

"My contact was uncooperative, at first," says Ethan. "But I persuaded him to talk."

"And?"

"There's an immortal I should talk to in England."

"Sounds like a good night's work," says Giles.

"I hope so. You?"

"Crap," he says.

Ethan looks about them. "No rescued Potential today?"

"Dead for days," Giles says, "and no-one had found her." He wipes the last pastry crumb from his lips. "Look, I'm booked on a nonstop back to LA. Sixteen bloody hours without anyone to bring back. But I've got an old address in Honolulu, so I'm thinking of breaking up the flight in Hawaii. Want to come along, give me a hand?"

"Shouldn't I be hightailing it to England?"

"World's round," says Giles. "You can get there east or west."

Ethan grudgingly agrees to come.

Changi's a shopping mall as much as it is an airport. Giles has no trouble buying a couple of changes of clothes better suited to Honolulu's climate. T-shirts, jeans, and a pair of chinos. He changes in the airport loos.

"Off we go," says Giles.

29. Keyring

They're in a tourist part of town with high-rise hotels, palm trees and restaurants. The corner shops sell surfboard keyrings, plastic leis and liquor. The air smells of the ocean, Japanese food, and exhaust fumes. It's evening.

The address Giles has turns out to be for a hotel. "Bugger," he says.

"Probably a tourist then," says Ethan. "Could have left weeks ago."

"Let's have a look around."

There's a downstairs pool, an upstairs pool, and a wide bar with views of the ocean. A gym, a restaurant, a clothing shop. Hundreds of hotel rooms.

"We're never going to find her in here," says Ethan.

"Oh?" says Giles. "Forgotten your tricks, have you?"

Giles pays cash for a room on a middle floor. He pushes its furniture against the walls while Ethan sets out his gear on the floor. Ethan draws a large circle on the beige carpet with garnet sand from a bag. "You have to stay out of the circle," he says. "I need the curtains closed and the smoke detector off, there's a good chap."

Giles stands on a desk to disable the detector and then pulls the curtains shut. He takes a chair to sit in the bathroom doorway, as he watches Ethan at work. Giles flicks off the lights as Ethan lights candles.

Then Ethan closes his eyes and starts to chant. This one's in Late Middle English. "We seek/ One who is gifted/ One who will be chosen/ A girl."

Ethan's eyes have taken on an unearthly reddish glow. The candles snuff out, and the room is illuminated only by his eyes. When he blinks, the darkness is abrupt.

"Room 1401," he says.

30. Juices

The fourteenth floor looks just like all the others. Room 1401 is on the left, past the laundry and the lifts. They reach it and hear screams from inside. Giles slams his shoulder into the door and the flimsy wood gives way. Ethan follows behind.

The first thing he sees is a startled Japanese couple seated at a table, with room service dinner in front of them. The woman's in her thirties, too old to be a Potential any more. But out on the balcony is a young woman in a hotel uniform, struggling with two Bringers.

She pulls free, knocking one off-kilter. Giles runs over and slams his fist into the Bringer as the girl flees to the neighbouring balcony. The other Bringer clambers after her.

Giles shouts to Ethan, "She's heading for the fire escape. Meet us there!"

He follows the Bringer and the girl from balcony to balcony. She's well ahead of them both, taking the fences like hurdles. She reaches the fire escape just before Ethan does and starts pulling herself up.

Giles stretches out to catch the robe of the second Bringer, dragging it back to where he can punch it. He throws it through a plate-glass window into somebody's room.

The girl's reaching the top of the fire escape. She grabs hold of the final rung. Which is when a third Bringer appears above her and plunges its knife into her shoulder. She lets go of the ladder.

She does not fall as Buffy fell, in a perfect swan-dive backlit by the dawn. She bounces against the fire escape, tumbles, and smashes her head against a balcony rail before falling the long distance below. But she makes the same sound, a kind of wet cracking, when she hits the pavement. Or so Giles thinks.

Giles throws up. He throws up his in-flight curry and his breakfast pork pastries, and the glasses of scotch from the night before. He keeps on throwing up his stomach juices and then nothing at all, but he keeps retching. There's the sound of an ambulance from below.