Halfway There, Chapters 38 to 42
Sep. 26th, 2010 10:13 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.
38. Jeans
William the Bloody is chained to the wall. A hundred and twenty years of savagery and mayhem in a t-shirt and jeans.
The Prokaryote Stone is poured into Spike's eye and finds its way into his brain. Spike is still for a while, then explodes into violence. Buffy's thrown across the room and Dawn's injured.
And Buffy still can't acknowledge how dangerous this is.
The school principal talks with Giles afterwards: he's Nikki Wood's son, raised by Bernard Crowley. He wants to kill Spike. He seems to think he can succeed where his Slayer mother failed.
Giles agrees to give him the opportunity to try.
39. Firecrackers
It's not just Spike, he thinks, it's all of them. All of them have a trigger. The First's being trying to set them off like firecrackers.
He and Buffy are out in a graveyard. It's like old times, in some ways. The stars are twinkling and the vampires are restless and unending.
"I don't know what I'm doing here," she says.
"You're practising your basics, Buffy," he says.
The basics include: one kills one's undead paramour as soon as he becomes a danger. Giles genuinely does not doubt that Buffy will do this once she sees the need, but she's blind to the obvious, that the need is already here. Perhaps if Spike kills the Principal, it will be a little clearer.
A vampire wakes and Buffy dances with a grace that makes him smile in wonder, once again.
Giles may doubt the number of Turok-Han Spike can single-handedly take on, but there are well-documented records of how many unarmed humans he can kill in relatively short periods of time. The number is quite large.
If Spike were triggered when Buffy was not nearby, he could probably kill many or most of the Potentials, plus Xander, Anya, or Dawn before one of the humans got in a lucky hit or Buffy arrived. The loss of so many Potentials would be a setback if not entirely disastrous, but he has to factor in the time needed for Buffy to get through the initial emotional impact.
And the First "let slip" that it "wasn't time" for Spike yet? Hundreds of thousands of years of cunning and it just happened to let that go? So Spike will either be triggered very soon or is a complete red herring.
If Spike is a red herring, then who is the First trying to distract them from? It knows how to play people. Who would be the most effective weapon? Dawn, just possibly, but only because no-one, Giles included, is really sure what it means for her to have been the Key.
Buffy knocks the vampire down, but does not kill him, at Giles's request. He asks Buffy if she'd be willing now to kill Dawn, to save the world.
"If I had to...," she says, "to save the world. Yes."
But it's Willow who's a much more likely prospect. Giles has done his best to help Willow and so has the Coven. Kennedy seems to be providing a much-needed stabilising influence. But if the First can trick Giles so thoroughly, with his years of experience and self-knowledge, how much more vulnerable is Willow? And where is it that she's gone to, without explanation and on extremely short notice?
And there's Giles himself, of course. What was the fake Ethan supposed to persuade Giles to do? What has Giles been distracted from? Or has the whole charade been arranged so that Giles would be emotionally unbalanced at a critical time? He's still going through the numb phase, but this will soon be followed by the alcohol phase and the maudlin phase, interspersed with episodes of self-recrimination and self-pity. It feels like the last straw.
What does the First have in mind for him?
"So, you really do understand the difficult decisions you'll have to make? That any one of us is expendable in this war?"
"Have you heard my speeches?" Buffy mutters.
This isn't a world he'd wish for Buffy to live in, but it's the one they have. The hard decisions have to be made.
This is the way it's been since the beginning, before time.
It's terribly simple.
40. Tea
Buffy says, "I think you've taught me everything I need to know." She shuts the door before he can get another word in. He stands there for a while, looking at the white paint, wondering what has just happened. He considers knocking on the door and following her in, but his mind feels as if it has just hit a wall too. He's tired and confused.
He goes down to the kitchen and makes himself a cup of tea. He doesn't drink it, but it gives him a reason to be in the kitchen and it gives his hands something to do. He should review the situation, he thinks. Instead he stirs sugar that he doesn't want into his tea with a spoon.
He's not alone in the kitchen, of course. SITs go in and out, looking for biscuits or making themselves bowls of cereal or mugs of hot chocolate. They move around him as if he isn't there, but their manner becomes quieter, more subdued, when they notice him. They must think he's old. Old and wise, that's what he's supposed to be, drawing from his decades of hard-won experience to advise his charges on the best course of action.
Giles's first supposition: Spike will kill Wood. Spike is a century-old demon, with deeply-ingrained demonic reflexes, and, placed in a position where his life is threatened, he will lack the necessary self-control to curtail his lethal violence. Supposition proved false.
Giles's second supposition: The First will retain control over Spike. The First has been playing mind-games with people for thousands of millennia. It is unconquered and unconquerable. A jumped-up, badly-dressed, and not particularly intelligent vampire should be easy prey. This supposition has also proved false.
Giles's third supposition: Buffy will understand why she should kill Spike and, while regretful, she will be grateful to her long-time mentor for his insight. Supposition false.
Giles's underlying supposition: That he has any idea what he's doing. Proved false.
He might as well admit it -- he doesn't know what he's doing any more. His judgement is shot, his acuity has vanished, and he's undergoing some sort of personal meltdown. Any moment now, he's going to be overwhelmed by doubt and self-pity, and he'll start to drown in it. He can't prevent it, only sit through it, perhaps with his eyes closed and clutching the chair.
Once the worst of it is over, he goes to call Rosalind at the Coven. No-one picks up, so he checks the number and dials again. Again, he gets no answer. After he gets no response from Rosalind's mobile and then Althenea's, he gives up.
He gets some fitful sleep and in the morning presents himself to Anya to ask where the next SITs are for him to rescue. He can do that part, sometimes.
By then, Dawn has realised the Coven are no longer answering calls. She's rung around and has confirmation of a sort: The Coven's been attacked, as have many other nodes in the worldwide network of seers that they've recently strung together. It's not yet clear how successful the attack was.
The next two places for him to go are Reno and Vancouver, Anya says.
"Are you sure you want to go?" asks Xander. "This is starting to sound kind of endgamey."
"I should be able to bring in another one or two," he says. "And besides, there's a source I want to tap."
41. Coffee
Fake Ethan is seated in an LAX passenger lounge, where he appears to have a wheeled carry-on suitcase and a copy of an inflight magazine. He sips from a fake paper cup of fake coffee.
"Ah, Ripper," says Fake Ethan, gesturing for Giles to sit opposite. Giles takes the seat next to him instead.
Fake Ethan is a marvellous reproduction, up close or at a distance. The skin tone, shape of his ear, the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. He's wearing an impressively maroon shirt.
"How was your flight?" asks Giles, not really listening to Fake Ethan's reply. "And your trip? I did some research and found a reference to something called the Deeper Well. But I couldn't find out more than its name."
Fake Ethan then tells him a long and exciting story about his hunt for the Well, his adventures locating it, and his cleverness in extracting vague and unhelpful hints from the Well's keeper.
Giles nods along. He should have taken the seat opposite. From here, he keeps wanting to slap Fake Ethan on the back, or tap his knee, or punch his head in. Fake Ethan actually looks a little uncomfortable at having Rupert this close.
"Do you think I should go and visit this Drogyn person to find out what I can?" asks Giles.
Fake Ethan chuckles. "If you think you can be more persuasive than I can. But if I were you, I'd be looking a little closer to home."
Why did the First decide to impersonate Ethan, of all the people Giles once had known? It's a curious choice. It's hardly unlikely that Giles and Ethan would touch in some way. Most of Giles's strongest memories of Ethan are dominated by touch, whether it was the warmth and weight of Ethan's body as they dozed together on a mattress, or the shudder Giles had felt through his foot as he broke one of Ethan's ribs. The First must have all of Ethan's memories, and yet it didn't understand this. What other blind spots does it have?
He'd like to kill this Fake Ethan. He'd like to feel its ribs smashing too, the impact of his fists and boots on flesh and bone. He feels denied.
He says to Fake Ethan, encouragingly, "Closer to home?"
"Well," it says, "there's a rumour going around... We know the First is manipulative. That's the chief weapon in its arsenal, not these showy Turok-Han. If I were the First, what would I think was the best way of destroying the Slayer line? Not the Turok-Han and certainly not the Bringers."
"No?"
"Willow," he says. "She could destroy them and all of us in an instant. You have to kill Willow."
Giles recalls that the thought occurred to him only the day before. It had seemed quite reasonable then. "How?" he asks.
"Well, she trusts you. She won't be on her guard. And it has to be something quick enough that she can't kill us all with her dying breath. Poison," suggests Fake Ethan, "given with a soporific."
Giles says, "I don't know how to make that." As if in a pantomime, he says, "I suppose you do?"
"Yes," says Fake Ethan, "but I'll need some time."
"Let me know when you have it," Giles says, before he leaves LAX.
The Denver Potential has an army husband and a three-month-old child. "Your daughter will be safer without you," Giles explains, but the woman won't leave.
The Potential in Vancouver was in a traffic accident a year ago. She can barely walk and spends six hours a day on rehabilitation exercises. Giles doesn't ask her to come.
He goes back empty-handed to Sunnydale to find that Willow's returned.
And she's brought Faith.
42. Fabric
It's a rogue's gallery stepping in and out of Revello Drive now. The renegade Slayer, Faith. The notorious vampire Spike. Anya, the Vengeance Demon whom all Vengeance Demons looked up to. Willow, who almost destroys the world every time she gets upset. Dawn, who -- mostly innocently -- opened a rip in the dimensional fabric. And on a much smaller scale, there's repentant demon summoners Ripper Giles and Andrew Wells, plus two freelance demon fighters in Xander and Robin Wood, and roaming packs of Potential Slayers. They lack only the werewolf guitarist, the doomed white witch, the original souled vampire, and, ah, Cordelia.
Giles sits on the sofa and tries to work out the odds of any one subset wiping out the others. He's just reached the part in his grief where he wants to get terribly, terribly drunk.
A man dressed as a priest stabbed a Potential and gave her a message for Buffy. He says he has something of hers.
Buffy says, "It could be a girl, a Potential trying to get to us."
"Could be a stapler," says Giles.
That night, another two Potentials die: Molly and the one from Plovdiv. He makes another two phone calls after looking up the word for "condolences" in Bulgarian.
Althenea calls to say that she and many of the Devonshire Coven members have survived and have fled to a place on the Brittany coast. Rosalind, however, died en route.
Rona has her arm broken and Xander loses his left eye.
So it goes.
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.
38. Jeans
William the Bloody is chained to the wall. A hundred and twenty years of savagery and mayhem in a t-shirt and jeans.
The Prokaryote Stone is poured into Spike's eye and finds its way into his brain. Spike is still for a while, then explodes into violence. Buffy's thrown across the room and Dawn's injured.
And Buffy still can't acknowledge how dangerous this is.
The school principal talks with Giles afterwards: he's Nikki Wood's son, raised by Bernard Crowley. He wants to kill Spike. He seems to think he can succeed where his Slayer mother failed.
Giles agrees to give him the opportunity to try.
39. Firecrackers
It's not just Spike, he thinks, it's all of them. All of them have a trigger. The First's being trying to set them off like firecrackers.
He and Buffy are out in a graveyard. It's like old times, in some ways. The stars are twinkling and the vampires are restless and unending.
"I don't know what I'm doing here," she says.
"You're practising your basics, Buffy," he says.
The basics include: one kills one's undead paramour as soon as he becomes a danger. Giles genuinely does not doubt that Buffy will do this once she sees the need, but she's blind to the obvious, that the need is already here. Perhaps if Spike kills the Principal, it will be a little clearer.
A vampire wakes and Buffy dances with a grace that makes him smile in wonder, once again.
Giles may doubt the number of Turok-Han Spike can single-handedly take on, but there are well-documented records of how many unarmed humans he can kill in relatively short periods of time. The number is quite large.
If Spike were triggered when Buffy was not nearby, he could probably kill many or most of the Potentials, plus Xander, Anya, or Dawn before one of the humans got in a lucky hit or Buffy arrived. The loss of so many Potentials would be a setback if not entirely disastrous, but he has to factor in the time needed for Buffy to get through the initial emotional impact.
And the First "let slip" that it "wasn't time" for Spike yet? Hundreds of thousands of years of cunning and it just happened to let that go? So Spike will either be triggered very soon or is a complete red herring.
If Spike is a red herring, then who is the First trying to distract them from? It knows how to play people. Who would be the most effective weapon? Dawn, just possibly, but only because no-one, Giles included, is really sure what it means for her to have been the Key.
Buffy knocks the vampire down, but does not kill him, at Giles's request. He asks Buffy if she'd be willing now to kill Dawn, to save the world.
"If I had to...," she says, "to save the world. Yes."
But it's Willow who's a much more likely prospect. Giles has done his best to help Willow and so has the Coven. Kennedy seems to be providing a much-needed stabilising influence. But if the First can trick Giles so thoroughly, with his years of experience and self-knowledge, how much more vulnerable is Willow? And where is it that she's gone to, without explanation and on extremely short notice?
And there's Giles himself, of course. What was the fake Ethan supposed to persuade Giles to do? What has Giles been distracted from? Or has the whole charade been arranged so that Giles would be emotionally unbalanced at a critical time? He's still going through the numb phase, but this will soon be followed by the alcohol phase and the maudlin phase, interspersed with episodes of self-recrimination and self-pity. It feels like the last straw.
What does the First have in mind for him?
"So, you really do understand the difficult decisions you'll have to make? That any one of us is expendable in this war?"
"Have you heard my speeches?" Buffy mutters.
This isn't a world he'd wish for Buffy to live in, but it's the one they have. The hard decisions have to be made.
This is the way it's been since the beginning, before time.
It's terribly simple.
40. Tea
Buffy says, "I think you've taught me everything I need to know." She shuts the door before he can get another word in. He stands there for a while, looking at the white paint, wondering what has just happened. He considers knocking on the door and following her in, but his mind feels as if it has just hit a wall too. He's tired and confused.
He goes down to the kitchen and makes himself a cup of tea. He doesn't drink it, but it gives him a reason to be in the kitchen and it gives his hands something to do. He should review the situation, he thinks. Instead he stirs sugar that he doesn't want into his tea with a spoon.
He's not alone in the kitchen, of course. SITs go in and out, looking for biscuits or making themselves bowls of cereal or mugs of hot chocolate. They move around him as if he isn't there, but their manner becomes quieter, more subdued, when they notice him. They must think he's old. Old and wise, that's what he's supposed to be, drawing from his decades of hard-won experience to advise his charges on the best course of action.
Giles's first supposition: Spike will kill Wood. Spike is a century-old demon, with deeply-ingrained demonic reflexes, and, placed in a position where his life is threatened, he will lack the necessary self-control to curtail his lethal violence. Supposition proved false.
Giles's second supposition: The First will retain control over Spike. The First has been playing mind-games with people for thousands of millennia. It is unconquered and unconquerable. A jumped-up, badly-dressed, and not particularly intelligent vampire should be easy prey. This supposition has also proved false.
Giles's third supposition: Buffy will understand why she should kill Spike and, while regretful, she will be grateful to her long-time mentor for his insight. Supposition false.
Giles's underlying supposition: That he has any idea what he's doing. Proved false.
He might as well admit it -- he doesn't know what he's doing any more. His judgement is shot, his acuity has vanished, and he's undergoing some sort of personal meltdown. Any moment now, he's going to be overwhelmed by doubt and self-pity, and he'll start to drown in it. He can't prevent it, only sit through it, perhaps with his eyes closed and clutching the chair.
Once the worst of it is over, he goes to call Rosalind at the Coven. No-one picks up, so he checks the number and dials again. Again, he gets no answer. After he gets no response from Rosalind's mobile and then Althenea's, he gives up.
He gets some fitful sleep and in the morning presents himself to Anya to ask where the next SITs are for him to rescue. He can do that part, sometimes.
By then, Dawn has realised the Coven are no longer answering calls. She's rung around and has confirmation of a sort: The Coven's been attacked, as have many other nodes in the worldwide network of seers that they've recently strung together. It's not yet clear how successful the attack was.
The next two places for him to go are Reno and Vancouver, Anya says.
"Are you sure you want to go?" asks Xander. "This is starting to sound kind of endgamey."
"I should be able to bring in another one or two," he says. "And besides, there's a source I want to tap."
41. Coffee
Fake Ethan is seated in an LAX passenger lounge, where he appears to have a wheeled carry-on suitcase and a copy of an inflight magazine. He sips from a fake paper cup of fake coffee.
"Ah, Ripper," says Fake Ethan, gesturing for Giles to sit opposite. Giles takes the seat next to him instead.
Fake Ethan is a marvellous reproduction, up close or at a distance. The skin tone, shape of his ear, the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. He's wearing an impressively maroon shirt.
"How was your flight?" asks Giles, not really listening to Fake Ethan's reply. "And your trip? I did some research and found a reference to something called the Deeper Well. But I couldn't find out more than its name."
Fake Ethan then tells him a long and exciting story about his hunt for the Well, his adventures locating it, and his cleverness in extracting vague and unhelpful hints from the Well's keeper.
Giles nods along. He should have taken the seat opposite. From here, he keeps wanting to slap Fake Ethan on the back, or tap his knee, or punch his head in. Fake Ethan actually looks a little uncomfortable at having Rupert this close.
"Do you think I should go and visit this Drogyn person to find out what I can?" asks Giles.
Fake Ethan chuckles. "If you think you can be more persuasive than I can. But if I were you, I'd be looking a little closer to home."
Why did the First decide to impersonate Ethan, of all the people Giles once had known? It's a curious choice. It's hardly unlikely that Giles and Ethan would touch in some way. Most of Giles's strongest memories of Ethan are dominated by touch, whether it was the warmth and weight of Ethan's body as they dozed together on a mattress, or the shudder Giles had felt through his foot as he broke one of Ethan's ribs. The First must have all of Ethan's memories, and yet it didn't understand this. What other blind spots does it have?
He'd like to kill this Fake Ethan. He'd like to feel its ribs smashing too, the impact of his fists and boots on flesh and bone. He feels denied.
He says to Fake Ethan, encouragingly, "Closer to home?"
"Well," it says, "there's a rumour going around... We know the First is manipulative. That's the chief weapon in its arsenal, not these showy Turok-Han. If I were the First, what would I think was the best way of destroying the Slayer line? Not the Turok-Han and certainly not the Bringers."
"No?"
"Willow," he says. "She could destroy them and all of us in an instant. You have to kill Willow."
Giles recalls that the thought occurred to him only the day before. It had seemed quite reasonable then. "How?" he asks.
"Well, she trusts you. She won't be on her guard. And it has to be something quick enough that she can't kill us all with her dying breath. Poison," suggests Fake Ethan, "given with a soporific."
Giles says, "I don't know how to make that." As if in a pantomime, he says, "I suppose you do?"
"Yes," says Fake Ethan, "but I'll need some time."
"Let me know when you have it," Giles says, before he leaves LAX.
The Denver Potential has an army husband and a three-month-old child. "Your daughter will be safer without you," Giles explains, but the woman won't leave.
The Potential in Vancouver was in a traffic accident a year ago. She can barely walk and spends six hours a day on rehabilitation exercises. Giles doesn't ask her to come.
He goes back empty-handed to Sunnydale to find that Willow's returned.
And she's brought Faith.
42. Fabric
It's a rogue's gallery stepping in and out of Revello Drive now. The renegade Slayer, Faith. The notorious vampire Spike. Anya, the Vengeance Demon whom all Vengeance Demons looked up to. Willow, who almost destroys the world every time she gets upset. Dawn, who -- mostly innocently -- opened a rip in the dimensional fabric. And on a much smaller scale, there's repentant demon summoners Ripper Giles and Andrew Wells, plus two freelance demon fighters in Xander and Robin Wood, and roaming packs of Potential Slayers. They lack only the werewolf guitarist, the doomed white witch, the original souled vampire, and, ah, Cordelia.
Giles sits on the sofa and tries to work out the odds of any one subset wiping out the others. He's just reached the part in his grief where he wants to get terribly, terribly drunk.
A man dressed as a priest stabbed a Potential and gave her a message for Buffy. He says he has something of hers.
Buffy says, "It could be a girl, a Potential trying to get to us."
"Could be a stapler," says Giles.
That night, another two Potentials die: Molly and the one from Plovdiv. He makes another two phone calls after looking up the word for "condolences" in Bulgarian.
Althenea calls to say that she and many of the Devonshire Coven members have survived and have fled to a place on the Brittany coast. Rosalind, however, died en route.
Rona has her arm broken and Xander loses his left eye.
So it goes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-10-02 05:50 am (UTC)Rona has her arm broken and Xander loses his left eye.
So it goes.
Given his days, that's really all that can be said.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-17 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 09:19 pm (UTC)Perhaps if Spike kills the Principal, it will be a little clearer., Cold. And rings true. The endless list of the dead is just... ouch. How else can you cope?
The plan to kill Willow, that Giles sees through? Makes sense. Both ways.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-24 11:36 am (UTC)