FIC: Drum Taps (Giles, Willow, Faith), FRT

[mediumrawr.livejournal.com]

Title: Drum Taps
Author: Rawr
Rating: FRT
Characters/Pairing: No Pairing; Giles, Willow, Faith
Time: At least several months after the current Season 8 canon, by my reckoning.
Summary: Giles sends Willow an e-mail. With links. Clearly, the world is coming to an end.
Warnings: This story doesn't explicitly delve into anything mature, but it does hint obscurely at several characters' unsavory pasts. Sorry.
Author's Note: Ah, yes. This fic took three tries to write. Originally it was an extremely claustrophobic Giles/Faith story with a much higher rating. I stumbled around that for almost a month, and it eventually evolved into this. Which I finished writing about an hour ago. In my head, this story is entirely about Giles. On paper, it seems to have come out somewhat differently. I apologize.
Posted for summer_of_giles
Feedback: I can't know what to improve without feedback. I can't know what I did right without feedback. Please, please, please.


Okay, so getting an e-mail from Giles was weird enough. But that e-mail itself contained two hyperlinks - of course Giles had to call them “hyperlinks” - to one of the sites on magic she had been fascinated with early on in her career.

But that wasn’t really the weird part. It was the links. The first, to an entry on an ancient rite of binding, one that imposed massive locks on a person’s mind. Not good magic. She’d known that before even seeing the page, because Giles was the one who’d stopped them from doing it to her. And then there was the second link, to a poison - one not even native to this dimension. The poison wasn’t specifically related, but as soon as she saw it she went from confused to scared. The poison targeted inhibitions and mental blocks. Something had been bound, and had gotten loose.

The e-mail ended “Willow: come now. I will hold it off as long as I can.”

What the hell was it? It wasn’t like Giles to be curt and uninformative, when a thousand words of precise explanation would do.

So she went to his home in London with a soft pop. She’d always liked Giles’s sense of style; even when it was precisely clean, everywhere he stayed seemed to have the feeling of old, musty books. She’d taken comfort in them before she’d met Giles, but - there was a note, on his table. It was an index card, and a pen left uncapped beside it. The handwriting was scratchy, rushed, and very small, but it said this:

Willow -

Find me at Faith’s.

Do not flinch.

Curiouser and curiouser - and, okay, that was probably not the allusion to be making when one had a relationship with the supernatural - was the supernatural, really - as closely as she did. Not as much so as Buffy or Faith or the others, but you only let the raw energies that gave substance to the void run through your body and mind a certain number of times before it changed you.

Faith’s. So Faith was in London, again? Willow had heard they’d paired up for some adventure a while back, but she couldn’t imagine that working out. Giles was associated with words like orderly and immaculate, words that had never met Faith Lehane, nor particularly minded that fact.

So Willow didn’t know exactly where Faith was staying, but that wasn’t a problem. This was Giles’s house. House? The British had all kinds of weird words for things. Maybe she was supposed to call it something different? In any case, Giles lived here, which meant that the information she wanted was somewhere, probably the most likely place of all. Willow went straight for the planner, which was next to the telephone.

In the back, in much neater handwriting, was an entry for Faith’s, on a page immediately following one for Xander and immediately prior to one for Tara. Oh, God. Tara.

Willow allowed herself three breaths to get herself back under control. She hadn’t thought about Tara in a long time. She’d thought she’d moved on. Sometimes she envied Tara for being able to leave everyone else to deal with the grief. Three breaths done, so Willow turned back to the page. She found Faith’s address, even recognized the street name, though it wasn’t even in London proper, but way out in the boonies. There had been a nice, dirty, empty alley off of that street... and she was there with a soft pop just like before.

“Careful,” she said, out loud. She wasn’t talking to anyone.

So she walked a block, trying to figure out what Giles wanted, and another block, trying to figure out why he’d called her, when he lived and worked surrounded by greater minds, with greater power between them than she would ever dare to touch. For the third block she gave up, and admired the architecture. Of course it wasn’t a terrific neighborhood - Willow could imagine Faith getting into fights with Giles, him demanding that she let him put her up in a better neighborhood, and Faith refusing, laughing at his concern. Willow missed them all terribly, she knew. But not one of her friends had died since she’d struck out on her own.

It turned out that Faith had a house of her own, and not a bad one. Maybe she had accepted Giles’s charity, after all. That didn’t seem like her. There were lights on inside, but the blinds were drawn. No one responded when she knocked, though she tried four times. Then she tried the knob and found it unlocked. She opened the door. “Faith?” she called.

Nothing.

“Giles?” she called.

Nothing.

“It’s Willow... Faith?”

A muffled sound came from somewhere inside, off to the right. Willow stepped inside, into a sort of controlled clutter that was very, very Faith. Probably the only things in the house cleaned frequently were the bedsheets. There was no more sound, so Willow went, slowly, toward where she thought it had come from. Through the - very small - foyer, down a thin hallway, and there was the living room. And there, sitting on the floor, was Faith. She wasn’t crying, but it was a near thing, and she had her knees curled up and her arms wrapped around them protectively.

“Faith?” said Willow.

Faith said “He’s gone.”

“What-” Willow stopped. Faith needed help, or comfort, or something, so Willow went and crouched down by her side. She reached out a hand and touched Faith’s shoulder.

Faith stayed just where she was. She looked like she was about to cry. Up close, Willow could see scratches on her face.

“Faith, tell me what happened.”

Faith took a breath, and then another one, and then she nodded. “He came over here in a hurry. I picked up some guy at the bar, and we were, you know, just getting to it when he came in. He said something had happened to him. That was after he threw the guy out. Said he’d been poisoned or something.”

Oh. Oh. Ripper. “Faith,” said Willow. “Where is he?”

“He said to keep him here. Said you’d know what to do.”

Willow had no idea what to do.

“And then he - I don’t know. He was different. Knew things he couldn’t have-”

Willow nodded. Definitely Ripper.

But Faith was looking at her, and her eyes were drawn open to show the pain and fear. “You don’t understand. He knew things I’d never told anyone.”

“What happened?”

“He - I couldn’t - “ said Faith, and then she turned away again, staring at her own knees. “Then he went to leave, and I tried to stop him. And he said something, and it was like glass or something, cutting, and I let go. And he just laughed at me.”

“Is he-”

“I don’t know where he went,” Faith said. Some of the fear was fading to bitterness. That was good. Bitterness could be used. “He just left.”

“When?”

“Half an hour ago.”

Willow nodded. “Where’s the computer?”

She just needed to figure out exactly how this poison worked. The good news was that it seemed the poison itself was made harmless by its own process. But the rite of binding was deep, old magic. If Giles had had this in his mind, and it was gone now, then his magical ability, his personality, his memory, all would have been changed. The ruins of its imprint would still have been there. She could work with that.

“Listen,” said Faith. “Maybe we should call B, get her down here?”

“No,” said Willow. No Buffy. “Giles wouldn’t want her here.”

“Well, yeah, but we’re fighting Giles. What he wants isn’t-”

Willow turned back to glare at Faith. “We’re not fighting Giles. We’re fighting the thing he’s afraid of.”

Faith did not respond at all to that.

Willow said “Hang on,” and grabbed Faith’s arm. Then, with a soft pop, they were in Giles’s foyer. Teleportation was incredibly handy. “We’ll just need to do a simple location spell. Giles’ll have everything here.”

“No need,” said Giles, behind her.

Oh. Giles. Behind her.

Then pain - a magical assault - fighting back by instinct at first, then compartmentalizing the pain, hiding it away where she could ignore it, and finally being able to pay attention. Ripper was creative, though. She couldn’t get a handle on him. Finally she just focused on his direction and shoved, as hard as she could, and she saw, through the red in her eyes, Giles tumbling backward through the door, and then he was making his way down the street.

“What the hell was that?” asked Faith.

“After him,” said Willow, raggedly. She knew then why Giles had wanted her here. There wasn’t another witch Willow had ever met who’d be able to stand up to an attack like that one.

Faith was still staring at her.

“After him!” And then she realized why Faith was waiting. “I’ll catch up.”

First, she had to catch her breath.

One breath. Then another. Then another. Sometimes it was hard to remember how, with the magic. And this Ripper was good. If she’d been any other witch, surprised that way... which made it all the more important that she stop him before he came upon another witch.

Willow picked herself back up. She’d never be able to catch up with Faith on foot, so she lifted herself up about six inches above the ground and started floating off in the right direction. It was nighttime. Probably no one would notice. It was just a trick of the light, really, she imagined herself saying, not me flying around. Oh, and I was trying out a different hair dye. And... I have really bad acne sometimes. That looks like veins. Yeah. Oh well. Couldn’t be helped.

She covered four blocks that way, and then there was Faith speaking to a couple of stuffy-looking guys and - oh. She touched down beside them, which made an even grander entrance than she’d intended.

“Willow.”

Willow frowned. “Kennedy,” she said, to the last member of the conversation. “Didn’t know you were around here.”

“Couple months now,” said Kennedy.

“Yeah,” said Faith. “So now we've got the whole lovey-dovey thing done... so Kennedy and some of the Watchers were responding to that show you put on back there and they saw me chase a dude in there. So I told them to wait for you. And that’s all they know.” Willow looked at ‘in there’. It was a warehouse. Of course it was a warehouse. It was always a warehouse.

“Good,” said Willow. She turned to Kennedy. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah,” said Willow.

“Excuse me?” said the first of the two stuffy guys. “Miss Rosenberg? Mister Harris wishes to speak to you.” While Willow was stifling a laugh at the ‘Mister Harris’, he pried the earpiece out of his ear - that must have been one of Mister Harris’s improvements to the old stuffy guy organization - and handed it to Willow. Willow shoved it over her ear, trying not to think about earwax.

“Xander?”

“Yo, Will. What are you doing in this hemisphere?”

“Just taking care of business.”

“So that was you doing all that magic that we picked up ?”

Willow cringed. “Well, most of it.”

“Most of it?”

“More than half.”

“Will?”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell is going on?”

Willow looked at Faith, and Kennedy, and the two stuffy men. “Ripper.”

Silence. Then “Ah.”

“I’ll take care of it, Xander.”

“Right.” Silence again. Then “Will?”

“Yeah?”

“When you’re done, tell Giles he can call anytime.”

Willow pursed her lips. She had absolutely no idea why Giles would be calling Xander, of all people, after all this, but then she was kind of out of touch with the others. “Will do.”

“All right. Don’t be a stranger.” And then he was gone.

Best friends, right?

Willow handed Stuffy Guy Number One back his earpiece, and then she walked up to the door of the warehouse. She opened the door, and she walked inside, and she closed the door behind her.

It was empty, thank God, and spacious. Not much for ventilation, but at least there were no winding corridors or anything. Just her, here, and Ripper, there, perhaps fifteen paces away.

He said “Knew I couldn’t run. Not from you.”

Willow frowned. This man was disconcerting. His stance was wrong, and his mannerisms, and the sound of his voice. None of it was quite Giles.

“And I can’t fight you, either. But you might see reason.”

“Say what you have to say,” said Willow.

“I’m not one of your horrible villains. I’m not exactly a saint, but I’m not going to try to end the world.” Ripper grinned. “Hell, I won’t even kill anyone. You’ve let worse people live, haven’t you?”

Willow shook her head. “You’re not Giles.”

Ripper laughed. “There is no Giles, like you want. There never was. You know that. He’s no more than the construct of that rite I showed you, a carefully bound version of me projected onto my own face. Not a real person.”

“Giles has saved all our lives, many times.”

“The Giles that you know was invented by meddling Watchers who couldn’t accept that their poster boy was his own man.”

“That’s not true,” said Willow. And she knew it wasn’t, or not exactly. Not the whole truth.

“Even if it isn’t, you’ll never get that Giles back,” said Giles. “The rite’s broken now. You’d never remake it perfect. I’ll always be different from who you want me to be.”

“Even so,” said Willow. She remembered Giles’s words, on the note. Do not flinch.

Ripper sighed, and drew himself up to show her he was unafraid. “I suppose you’ve considered, then, that I’m a person myself. A whole person, destroyed by this.”

Do not flinch.

“You know what that makes this, Willow.” He paused. “It makes it murder.”

Do not flinch.

And she closed her eyes, found her magic, and invaded Giles’s mind. At first he just groaned. Then, when she pushed through to the place where the roots of the spell would be found still in his mind, she could feel Giles’s body shiver in pain. Then she started to build it back up again, and that was when the resistance started. At first she hardly noticed at all, but soon she felt as if she were pushing through a swamp just getting started. Then he struck back, into her mind, and she’d nearly blacked out from the pain in the instant it took her to react. But it only took her an instant, and then Giles had crumpled.

She finished the rite in silence.

Then Willow heard a sound, and saw Faith waiting at the door, looking at her.

Willow found herself very tired, but she said “What he said-”

“It wasn’t true,” said Faith, voice filled with certainty. “I know it wasn’t true.”

Willow nodded tightly. It was hardly so simple as true and false, but she lacked the energy to explain complicated concepts to Faith right now.

Faith said “The thing is, I know it’s not true. Because if it were true, it would mean... it would mean there’s no redemption. No forgiveness.” She paused. “You know.”

Willow knew.

They waited in the warehouse, the three of them. Willow dozed, and when she woke she checked her roots in a pocket mirror Faith produced. Still black, but at least the veins were gone.

When Giles woke up, the look in his eyes was more like Giles than it was like Ripper. But something of it was something none of them had seen anymore. “Thank you,” he said to Willow and to Faith, as he struggled to his feet. “No one knows?”

“We kept it in the family,” said Faith.

“And you didn’t tell Buffy?”

“Not a word.”

“Thank you,” said Giles again.

“Xander says to call,” said Willow.

Giles, smiling, said “Dear boy.” Before he left, he told Willow, his voice filled with a little too much emotion, “It was a good thing you did. It really was.”

And Willow believed him, even though her roots refused to fade from black for the next three days.