Fic: Before You Lay Me To Sleep Part 2

[0-ruthless-0.livejournal.com]

Title: Before You Lay Me To Sleep
Author: 0_Ruthless_0
Setting: Post destruction of the Watcher's Council
Pairing Giles/Ethan
FR: Low M again?
Disclaimer: Not mine. Pity...

Link to Part 1: http://summer-of-giles.livejournal.com/223860.html

Part II – Love…

 

 

Love on the rocks
Ain't no surprise
Just pour me a drink
And I'll tell you some lies 

Ain't got nothing to lose
So you just sing the blues
All the time

He heard the sound of footsteps outside moving up the hallway towards the small room, and reacted on instinct as panic won out, a sudden flair of it in his chest, and he pulled back, as though Ethan had stung him, pushing away.

Voices, and the footsteps passed with no hesitation. Ethan simply looked at him, sighed and shook his head, but didn’t comment. As though it was exactly the reaction that he’d been expecting.

He wanted to give Ethan his words back, wanted to give his own sincere apology, but that was something that the other had never accepted. All that it would be able to do, was make an awkward situation even more awkward.

Words had almost always been the cause of all the recrimination between them.

And Ethan’s body language and expression had become closed off just as quickly as it had once opened up for him. He was reaching out to grab his jacket from off the back of the chair that he’d tossed it over on coming into the room, and in a few more seconds he would turn towards the door and slip back out into the cold rain.

And that would probably be the best outcome that he could hope for, it ought to be what he wanted to happen.

 

“Don’t,” the force in the word surprised himself, “don’t walk out; please Ethan, not again. Not tonight.”

Not again. Those words were out, too, before he could pull the back. Not again, of course referring to the night, some three weeks after the God-awful fuck-up which had been Eyghon, when he’d woken to find Ethan’s drawers, and his half of the wardrobe cleaned out.

He saw a flash of defensiveness flit through Ethan’s expression, and Ethan drew himself up straighter as he circled the chair, turning it around to face Rupert, and lowering himself into it, “Well did you honestly think that I was going to sit around and wait for you to walk out on me?”

His tone of voice was bordering on argumentative.

“I was going to ask you to come with me, you bloody ...” he cut the insult short. After all, it took more than simple words to change the past.

Ethan flinched, and broke away from Rupert’s glare, looked down at his hands as he linked his fingers together, “No you wouldn’t have.”

Then he glanced up for a fraction of a second, looking almost hopeful, as though the words that he was saying could make Rupert’s statement any less true, as though he didn’t want to hear what really was.

“Ethan…”

“No. Don’t you Ethan me. You gave up the drugs, and the magic, and everything else. You’d cut yourself off from the rest of our old circle of friends, and you’d sent your bloody letter to your gods-damned Council hierarchy. You told me that those bastards would be there next week, and the next step would’ve been for you to fuck off with them.”

He’d never realised how deeply Ethan’s insecurities had run. He’d never realised that this was what Ethan had thought. All the years that they’d been tearing shreds from one another, they’d never actually talked. Not about this.

Although, he supposed now, that he should have worked it out, from what little Ethan had accidentally let slip about his child-hood when he was drugged or drunk or high on shared magic. An emotionally and occasionally physically absent father, and a mother who had bordered on abusive wouldn’t have done anything for the other man’s self-confidence, and most of the time, with how well he played the role of the guy that didn’t have a care in the world, it had been too easy to believe the illusion.

He’d taken for granted that Ethan would have known him well enough to know, or at least fathom a part of what he’d been doing.

And a few things now, were all of a sudden making a frightening, sickening, dark sense.

Stupid, stupid, stupid; he silently berated himself, even as he spoke out loud to the man standing before him.

“I gave up all the rest of it because I knew that I couldn’t give up you. I loved you, I, I…”

His tirade, which was quickly dissolving into a stammer anyway, was cut short, as Ethan’s expression fell, “No…” the other almost yelled it, his eyes widening a little as he did so, as though simply by putting as much verbal power into it he could make it false.

What he was hearing – it was impossible. He didn’t want to hear any more of it, but he felt like a spectator at the scene of an accident. Wanting desperately to be able to look away from the horrors being perpetrated, but locked there by a sicking fascination.

“Yes. They weren’t just coming to talk to me, Ethan. They were coming to talk to us. To give us our options.”

And Ethan gave it one last desperate attempt.

“Who are you trying to fool, Ripper?”

Rupert heaved a long-suffering sigh, “I’m not trying to fool anyone. I’m just telling you what’s true.”

“How am I meant to believe this?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, looked, tilting his head back, “Christ, Ethan. I… I can’t force you to. But there was time, once, in your life, in our lives, where you would have. Not only believed me, but known the truth of what I’m saying already, yourself.”

“I’m not sure that I can… trust you… Rupert.”

He found himself wrestling with a familiar rise of ire, which left him wondering how it was that Ethan never failed to bring out his inner thug. He rose, and took a step forward forcing the other to tilt his head back awkwardly in order to keep an eye on him, “I never bloody asked you to trust me. And it wasn’t me that fucking sought you out tonight. It wasn’t me that wanted to drag up the fucking past again for another go-around in the light. You know better than to ask things when you don’t really want to know the damned answers. When have I ever told you anything that wasn’t the bloody truth?”

The anger was draining, leaving nothing but an empty, hollow feeling in its wake. He slumped back, missed the edge of the bed, and found himself sitting on the floor with his back pressed against the hard, wooden frame. Drew his knees up, and encircled them with an arm, the other palm left flat against the ground for support, “I’m too old for this, Ethan. I’m too old, I don’t want to fight with you, and I’m sick of seeing you in every bloody shadow that passes over the corner of my eye. I’m sick of wondering about could-have-beens, and should-have-beens, and whys, and wherefores.

“I… I want you to stay but you staying doesn’t mean anything if you’re unwilling to trust me.”

Ethan heard the words, registered them, and turned them over in his mind. That Rupert had said stay, and hadn’t hurriedly amended the word tonight onto them. It could be something. Or it could be no more than just another false hope. Another false hope, set out to give him an equally false sense of security. Although as far as his view of the world stood, Rupert had never been the cruel one…

“When we were younger you were one of the only people in my life that I ever trusted. These days, Rupert, I trust myself and I alone, so don’t take it personally. If there was anyone that I ever wanted to … to trust, then it’s you.”

Rupert craned his neck back so that the back of his head was resting against the mattress, closed his eyes raising his left hand in order to massage at the fingers of it with his right, a gesture, a habit that that had been left behind after the night he’d spent in Angelus’s hands.

“Then why did you even come here? Honestly, Ethan, if…”

“I… I may not trust you, but that doesn’t make a single damned shred of difference to the fact that I still love you.”

Ethan’s words were sharp, short, and irate. And now, it seemed that all of the cards were finally on the table.

“…you’re kidding me…”

“No,” Ethan shrugged, looked pointedly at the tacky coat-hook on the back of the door, over which Rupert had hung an old well-worn leather jacket, “I… I honestly don’t think that I ever stopped, Rupert. You… you were the first person to ever treat me like I was… important, like I actually meant something, like I mattered to someone at some stage of my fucked up life in this screwed up world. You made me feel… human, I suppose.”

Giles opened his eyes, looked at his oldest friend, and his oldest foe for a few seconds, unsure of what to say to this fresh revelation.

Ethan… the Ethan that he remembered didn’t love people, he either found them convenient, or they got in his way, and that was that. No extremes, and no in-betweens.

Or at least that was what it had seemed like.

Was it possible, really, truly possible, that all of the years of contention between them had been caused by nothing more than a couple of damned misunderstandings? He startled himself with a sudden, almost mad burst of a chuckle, which left Ethan looking at him, head tilted slightly to one side, with an expression that bordered on concerned. Of course it was bloody possible. After all, just look at how many other parts of his life had been fucked over because of things like that.

Closing his eyes, he thought longingly of the bottle of whiskey that was tucked into his suitcase, which had been left down in the car, in an Ethan-based moment of distraction. Even if getting drunk wasn’t really an option at this late stage of the game, at least it would have given him something other than the presence of the other man to focus on. And if he’d had it on-hand earlier… well, then, maybe the conversation wouldn’t have gotten this far. Maybe old patterns would have sustained, and they’d both have been stumbling out of here the next morning after nothing more meaningless than a quick fuck in the dark, over almost before his senses had time to catch up with what was going on, and, again, no words passed between them.

He felt, rather than heard Ethan’s movement which brought him to standing in front of him. There was no clock in the room. Instead, the time was measured by him in heartbeats, and moments that drew out for what felt like small infinities. For once in his life, words, which he had always been able to rely on, seemed to have failed him.

“You’ve gone awfully quiet on me all of a sudden, Rupert,” Ethan’s tone sounded tentative, nervous, as though he were bracing himself for the almost-inevitable eruption, which always seemed to be waiting for them at the end of the tracks.

Or, perhaps not for that, Giles though to himself, as he finally opened his eyes and raised his head. It could just as easily have been his fear at having finally given voice to his old, long-burred thoughts, those ones that he’d reflexively never shared with another soul until now, not even with the one whom they concerned.

Fear of rejection, perhaps? Once he’d have swept such a question under the rug, forgotten about it, returned to the task at hand. But this was the task at hand.

“Cold?” he asked, still stepping cautiously around Ethan’s previous statement.

“Not at all. What gives you that impression?”

It didn’t take long at all for a note of defensive caution to spring up in his voice, and, for what wasn’t the first time and certainly wouldn’t be the last he found himself wishing that he had the ability to read Ethan’s mind without some form of magical connection between the two of them.

Slowly, he pushed himself back to his feet, as he regained his finetuned control over himself, “You’re shivering, is why.”

“Oh. I hadn’t realised. Other things on my mind, you know.”

And that tone was actually bordering on the verge of Ethan’s usual sarcasm. And slowly, the world was starting to right itself again.

He wanted to get this sorted tonight, damn it. If he didn’t at least give it a go, then it was highly unlikely that he would get another shot at it. But he could tell that Ethan was a few wrong words away from closing down again, giving it up, and walking out through that beckoning door. He wanted, hell, needed to be closer, but didn’t want to put Ethan back on his guard. Which left only one real option.

“Sit down. Please.”

There was no argument, and Rupert lowered himself onto the bed, cross-legged, beside him. The position was one that hadn’t seemed anywhere near as awkward as he remembered it being when he was younger, but still, it was worth it to finally be on the same level as Ethan again. He raised a single arm, slipped it across the back of the other’s neck and drew him loosely against his side, waiting for that fine tremble to subside, before trusting himself with words again.

“You did matter to me. Still do, as a matter of fact. God knows I’ve never been able to put you out of my mind, stop thinking about you. Wondering where you are and worrying about what you’re doing. How you were getting by. I’m not the type that could ever stop caring about someone once I loved them, in spite of the fact that I may have wished it otherwise. Even with the wars we waged against one another you were an essential part in forming who I was. If I didn’t still care, then why…” he took a breath, and steadied himself before continuing, “why else did you think I got so angry, so, so defensive whenever you showed up?”

“I never really though about it, I suppose. Didn’t want to. And besides, as far as I was concerned, I was there to cause havoc anyway, you know. It didn’t really matter to me how I went about it, as long as I saw you every once in a while, made sure that you were still standing. And… having you pissed off at me, even if that meant you thrashing me again, least it meant that I was getting through to you, that you couldn’t just turn your back and brush me off like some bothersome insect.”

Ethan leaned a little closer, and Giles felt the tension that he’d been holding slowly dissipate.

“Do you have any idea what it did to me, having to… hurt you?”

“There were times you seemed to enjoy it.”

“I had to drink myself to sleep, Ethan. It was the only way that I could.”

“Don’t suppose a sincere apology would help matters, at this stage?”

“You? Sincere?”

He saw the flash of relief on Ethan’s face, understood it instantly. This was starting to feel a little more like they were used to, now. 

He found he was being offered a perfectly insincere smile, “Oh yes, I can do honest quite well these days, you know.”

He allowed himself a tiny snort, and Ethan’s expression became serious again, as he drew away and stretched his muscles, repositioning himself so that he was leaning back against the smooth wooden headboard of the bed, and Giles followed him, biting back a sigh of relief as he straightened his legs slowly from that awful cross-legged position.

Ethan looked towards him again, met his gaze with no obvious hesitation.

“You know, Rupert, I could work at the trust part of things if I had a reason to.”

“Stay?” he enquired, unable to keep his own hesitance from his voice, and desperately hoping that Ethan didn’t get the wrong message, take it the wrong way.

“But for how long? Until you have an attack of guilt tomorrow morning? Until your old Slayer, or one of the others asks you why I’m around?”

He bit back a sigh. Typical Ethan, really. And if he couldn’t handle this then their entire conversation would be rendered pointless. It would be easy to lie, to say something pointless such as ‘until the end’ when he honestly didn’t know that he would feel the same in a month, or a year. Even though he suspected he might, he was nearing emotional exhaustion.

“I think, amongst other things, that would have to be something that we worked at.”

And, miracle of all miracles, Ethan actually seemed satisfied with that reply, because he slowly nodded, and offered him a tiny, worn-looking smile,

“I suppose we could.”