Halfway There, Chapters 31 to 37

[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.

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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.


31. Tarpaulin

Giles is in quite another hotel by the time Ethan finds him. He's found a seat on a terrace which looks out on a view of palm trees and the ocean. Or it would, if it weren't night and the moon weren't set.

Giles is already quite drunk. He slouches in his chair, savouring the smell of the wet air and the burn of the Laphroaig on his lips. He feels very slow. Ethan seems to be waiting for him to speak.

"Buffy died," Giles says, "a couple of years ago. Her death was mystical, but her body fell several stories and a building partly collapsed. I was down on the ground, among the debris. We were all there -- Willow and Xander, Tara and Anya and Dawn and Spike.

"And Buffy was just dead. The back of her body had been crushed by the impact. I tried to roll her over, but bits of her came away in my hands. We had to get a tarpaulin and a spade to make sure we got all of her.

"We buried her and made her a nice headstone. We spent quite some time just sitting around the house, not talking, or suddenly leaving the house, or weeping. We did our best to fill her place and keep the demons down, for a few months at least. And then I decided to go home. My gig had ended in the traditional way and my job description had been Buffy, not the Hellmouth. So I got myself a nice flat in Bath and an on-again off-again girlfriend whom I'm pretty sure is off-again right now. I did all the kinds of things I always imagined I'd do when Buffy was gone, except that I'd never properly allowed myself to imagine them when she was alive.

"And I told myself, 'Well, that's the worst thing that's ever going to happen to you in your life. It will never be that bad again.'

"They brought her back from the dead, Ethan. Her 'friends'. Selfish, stupid, heartless little children. I mean, I thought we were stupid, summoning demons for a high? But bringing back the dead -- how could anyone ever possibly think that could turn out well?"

"She'll die again sometime," Ethan says.

"And I'll have to live through all that again," says Giles. "Or I'll be the thing the First has to kill to reach her."

"Don't you think then," says Ethan, "that it would be a mercy to end the Slayer line, to--"

Giles launches himself at Ethan, fists flying. But he's drunk and Ethan sidesteps him neatly. Giles ends up on the floor.

Ethan says, "I only meant that then there wouldn't be an endless line of doomed girls and their devoted Watchers. And most Slayers aren't as effective as she is: they just do a kind of demonic spot-cleaning. Your Buffy's unique, Rupert. A freak coincidence of an active Slayer with a world-class witch as best friend."

"Well, I like to think I've had something to do with it," says Giles, from the floor.

"Why ever did the Council entrust Ripper Giles with her delicate moral upbringing?"

Giles laughs. "Look, could you help me up to bed? I don't think I can stand."

"I'll call for some staff," says Ethan, quickly. "I have my flight to catch, remember?"

"Oh," says Giles from his spot on the floor.

"I'll see you again when I have some news."

Giles nods up at him. "Good luck."

32. Toothpaste

Giles wakes around noon the next day. He's hungover and hungry, but he feels obscurely better. It's the first time in months he's had an uninterrupted night's sleep in a proper bed.

He takes a leisurely shower, stretching himself under the hot water and shampooing his hair. He shaves in front of a hotel mirror from which he can catch glimpses of the afternoon ocean. He digs out his toothbrush and toothpaste from his duffel.

It's while he's brushing his teeth that he comes to his realisation.

Ethan Rayne is dead.

33. Carpet

"It's chaos here!" says Anya, her voice made even more tinny down the phone. "The school principal opened a dimensional portal and we had to go rescue Buffy. We had to rescue Buffy! It's topsy-turvy, Giles."

There's a voice in the background: Andrew. "The Slayer of the Vampyrs does not need rescuing! She rescued herself. She just needed our help."

Dawn grabs the phone. "The book in the bag was totally Sumerian, Giles, but from what Buffy said, they spoke modern Swahili."

"What book?" asks Giles. "Who? No, don't tell me -- if it's all sorted out, you can let me know when I get back."

Anya says, "And now there's a riot at the school!"

Giles feels very calm, very tactile. He can feel the hotel carpet under his feet and the soft air floating in through the window. All the things the First can't feel or touch.

"Is there any urgent news?"

"Buffy did want to speak with you, but she's gone out. And I've paid the hire car companies for the additional costs you incurred in Seattle and Austin. Now, where are you?"

"Waikiki," he says.

Anya curses him. "Hawaii? Australia? Giles, you can't keep picking these isolated places. You need to stick to densely-populated continents with excellent airline infrastructure which are covered by the visa waiver program. Anything else is inconvenient and expensive." He hears her tapping away at a keyboard. "I can route you to San Francisco, there's a new potential Potential there."

"Do it," he says.

He should have been able to tell from the start it wasn't Ethan.

"It's done," says Anya. "We'll see you soon."

He waits for hours in Honolulu Airport and no-one comes to talk with him at all.

34. Paperback

Adrienne picked him up at a gig in 1973. She road-tested him in a newsagent's doorway, then took him home to her squat. She was wide-hipped, with dishwater-blonde hair and a pleasing stamina. She was a very sensible girl in some ways, was Adrienne, the only one of them to hold down anything like a proper job. She did volunteer work for political causes.

Giles remembers waking up in the afternoon, pulling on some jeans, and going to have a look around. It was an end terrace, long neglected, smelling of incense, paint and mold. The floorboards were mostly intact, nailed down here and there with pieces of packing crate or covered with carpet scraps. The ceilings needed a lot of repair.

The stairwells were what smelt of paint. They were covered -- floor, walls and ceiling -- with intricate symbols, stick figures, and faux-naive artwork, some of which was amusingly pornographic. Later, he learnt it was Randall who painted the stairwell. Deidre would sometimes bring him t-shirts to paint, which she'd then take to sell on the Portobello Road.

On the floor above there was a window bay on the landing, piled high with mildewed paperbacks of all sorts. He turned a few over: Moorcocks and Highsmiths, Shame Dame and Sin on Wheels.

There were two doorways off the landing. Through the first he found a couple still asleep (that had been Deidre and Tom). Through the second he found a grand old room that was probably once a formal drawing room. It was all bare boards and peeling wallpaper by then, but a pair of thick curtains still hung next to tall windows.

Sitting on the floor was a man about Ripper's age and height, wearing a tie-dye waistcoat and a pair of jeans. He had a cup of tea next to him and a set of stones and candles that he was carefully arranging. Giles recognised the pattern as one of the better-known elemental pentacles. He walked up and pushed the last stone into place with his bare heel.

The other man looked up.

35. Bicycle

Randall died four months later. Possessed by Eyghon, he'd gone on a rampage. They chased him down the high street towards the canal at four a.m. Ethan cast a spell to exorcise the demon, but it hadn't worked. So Ripper beat Randall's head in with a piece of bicycle frame.

Giles remembers standing there, panting, feeling the first of the shoulder pain from where he'd torn his muscles. The street sounded impossibly quiet at first, and then he started to hear a few distant noises: the canal waters, a barking dog, and the whir-and-clatter of an early-morning milk cart. Ethan and Deidre looked over Randall's remains. Tom and Philip-the-new-guy had run away hours ago.

Stan died next, losing control of his car at sixty miles an hour on the motorway near High Wycombe.

Adrienne died in the early nineteen-eighties, of breast cancer. Giles went to see her in the oncology ward, where she was dosed up to the eyeballs on morphine. He didn't think she recognised the man in the tweed suit.

Eyghon killed Tom, Deidre, and Philip in 1997.

He last saw Ethan alive in January 2000, when he was manhandled into an Initiative military van, his destination a rehabilitation centre in the Nevada Desert. Giles wonders now what that meant, and to what extent he is responsible for whatever may have come after.

The remaining survivor of the Camden Town squat watches the sun rise over the Pacific as he eats his airline omelette from an aluminium tub. The white noise of the aircraft's movement drowns out the sounds of his plastic knife and fork on the metal. The airline pilot calls out the weather forecast for San Francisco: "Cloudy, and with early-morning fog."

36. Swing

On the other side of the Bay Bridge is an address in El Cerrito. The girl's not at home, her housemate tells him.

"It's important that I see her straight away," says Giles. "It's about an inheritance." She directs him to a park up a hill.

It's spring in California. Giles walks up the wooded hill, feeling the climb in his legs and back. At the top, he finds a swing leaning out over a drop on the steepest side of the hill. There's a girl there, standing on the seat, swinging backwards and forwards over the void. The view is astonishing: sunlight rippling over San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

"Caridad Suzio?" he asks, looking up at her. "I'm afraid I have to change your life."

At LAX, he gets out of the airport as soon as he can, even though it means missing the connecting flight to Sunnydale.

Xander calls then. "We got a call. You want to get to the San Bernardino bus station."

A Greyhound was ambushed by a group of robed and masked men, but the driver and passengers successfully fought them off. There are three slightly wounded, one of whom is a Mexican citizen, a teenage girl.

It's the Slayer-in-Training from Cuidad Juarez.

37. Pizza

"Hundreds of Turok-Han," says Buffy. "Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. More than I could see, Giles."

They're sitting on the bench in the back garden of Revello Drive. From inside the house comes the enthusiastic sound of dozens of teenage girls eating Benny's Dial-and-Go Pizza.

She says, "I can't kill them on my own. And these girls, they're good, but they're not Slayers. That's why I need him. I need to have all my warriors with me."

Giles doesn't think Spike will make much difference against a hundred thousand Turok-Han. Buffy's always been the better fighter and Buffy has only managed to kill one.

"Buffy," he says, "some people don't change however much you want them to."

"It's not how much I want him to," she says, "it's how much he wants to. And he does, Giles."

"Buffy--"

"Thank you," she says in a tone that shuts down the conversation, something she's been doing more often of late. She looks at the Prokaryote Stone in her hands. "I'll take this to Willow."

She goes inside, leaving Giles alone in the garden. He stays to make a few phone calls he'd rather make in private.

First, he rings Annabelle's parents. "My sympathies for your loss are deep and sincere in ways I can barely begin to express. I understand, I truly do. But no matter how many times you call me, I cannot bring your daughter back. And you wouldn't want me to if I could."

Second, he rings Chloe's father. "I'm sorry to say that your daughter has died. She died bravely, fighting a foe which has taken many and to which no-one is immune. I am so very sorry."

Then he rings Olivia. "I won't be coming back," he tells her. "This work I have to do will never end. I have to be here, on the Hellmouth. Anything else is me running away."

Olivia says, "That's just a little bit shit, Rupert."

Willow comes to the door. "Giles, we're ready."

He goes downstairs to face Spike.

Comments

[quinara]

Olivia says, "That's just a little bit shit, Rupert."

This is a perfect, understated ending to another great run of chapters. :) A bit like Giles, I kept hoping that Ethan Rayne wouldn't be dead, but, yeah, he really was. That was fantastic.

[shapinglight]

Hi. Just to let you know that I'm very excited to see you finally posting this fic. I thought it was wonderful, and I'm looking forward to reading it again.

[indri]

I've rewritten some bits since you last read it, thanks to your advice and a year's perspective. Thanks again for your help.

[shapinglight]

I've just re-read this chapter. I do have an impression of subtle changes, but mostly I'm just bowled over again by how good it is.

[yourlibrarian]

Er, but how did Ethan get out the door of the room?

All the things Giles has to shoulder, and of course his mind would go to the first and last time he'd seen Ethan.

Also, just a small note, while Anya may simply have been echoing Giles' own terms, they'd be called rental car companies in the U.S.

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

An interesting thing about this characterization of Giles is that he almost always can see the forest. He's not distracted by much. So when the pieces fall into place, immediately his mind goes to the important thing, which is that another comrade (however estranged) has fallen. A moment of silence for my favorite sociopath...