All of That, and More

February, 1996

At Heathrow, Giles shook Merrick's hand a final time, parting from the old man in a mutual silence born from equal parts British reserve and the certain knowledge of all their futures must hold.

No goodbyes remained to be said. In truth, all the words that ought to have been spoken, or were capable of being expressed, had passed between them the night before.

They'd referred to their meeting as a birthday party, but it hadn't been a party, or even a celebration, really--two bachelors together in a dimly lighted London flat, a bottle of good scotch, of which they'd drunk far too much. Shared memories, also, of which there'd been more than a surfeit.

Before Merrick's excellent whiskey had even begun to take its toll, Giles had wondered vaguely how he'd come to this state of existence: no wife, no family, sharing the forty-second anniversary of his birth with the man who'd begun as his strictest critic and ended as his teacher--his mentor, even, one might say.

Yes, one certainly might say. Giles breathed slowly, carefully, fighting melancholy as he watched the old lion make his descent toward the aircraft that would shortly bear him away. Merrick seemed diminished somehow, despite his height, a fragile, tweed-clad shape lost within the great grey maw of the ramp.

You fool, Giles chided himself, If you'd not drunk so much scotch last night, you'd be the better for it this morning.

Merrick might have told him the same thing, had he not gone away. To America. To...

"Bugger this," the ghost of Ripper said within him, but Ripper had been gone too long for Giles to let him have a voice now. He would conquer this aching sadness as a Watcher must. He would act as he was meant to act, just as Merrick had taught him, discovering in himself the strength to remember his mentor with fondness, with appreciation for the man's intellect and courage. He must see this as an act of meaning, the culmination of a life's work.

"Bollocks," the voice of Ripper informed him.

Giles removed his glasses, rubbing his fingers over his eyes hard enough to make his vision blur for some seconds afterward. "Shut up," he told Ripper, even though no such person existed, or would ever exist again. He could miss Merrick, that was allowed. Anyone who'd truly known the man would miss him.

Not that many could, or would, claim such a distinction. Truly, Merrick was one of the odder men Giles had ever known, quite a statement given both his own profession and his vocation: neither archeologists nor Watchers could be called the most normal of beings. Not to so much as mention the rare birds who flitted through the back corridors of the British Museum, for five years now his home-from-home. His ears echoed constantly with their cries of "Mr. Giles, sir--utter disaster!" or "Dr. Giles, it's that damn cat again!"

Giles turned his back to the departure gate, refusing to watch any longer, moving with soundless haste down Heathrow's dully-coloured corridors as he attempted to ignore the wave of prescience that shook through his body. Yes, Merrick was gone. He would not see the old man again, and just now he'd a flight of his own to catch, one that might well carry him into an equal or greater darkness.

Giles knew that his mentor wasn't sorry to return home--Merrick had been born in the state of California, up north, amidst mile upon mile of grape vines and mustard plants. He'd spoken of his boyhood, watching eagles soar over the vineyards, and of driving southward, into drier lands that bordered on the ocean. In all his travels, Giles had never seen the Pacific Ocean, had difficulty even imagining its turbulent blue-gray waters, bordering on beaches of yellow sand.

Maine, his own destination, was another foreign land to him. Expect snow, he'd been cautioned, and unimaginably bitter cold--the February temperature in London, which now seemed close to bone-chilling, would be mild by comparison. Giles rather suspected that nothing in his hastily-packed suitcase would be sufficient to keep him warm, yet somehow didn't care. Helena's letter burned in his jacket pocket.

Giles kept having to touch the fabric that concealed her brief missive, not for reassurance, but almost as if he hoped the soft, smudged paper would have somehow disappeared, that its words would not be real, though he knew they must be: Helena was dead. Another had been called.

Another had been called. Another young girl, only fifteen years old, the same age Helena had been when Moira went to her, the same age he and Moira had been when first they met.

He well remembered the day, twelve years past, when the news reached him through the rumour mill, and how he'd gone to Merrick's study, demanding to know, could it possibly be true, and why, if it was, had Moira been chosen over him? If he was too young to be an active Watcher, why wasn't she? Merrick, he recalled, had sent him away, and he'd gone out angrily to stalk about the grounds of the Watchers' Compound until he reached the running track.

Moira was there, as he'd know she would, in fact mustbe, running her damned hurdles, round and round--stride, tuck, fly. As always, it pleased Giles to watch her. Yes, even now, eight years past her Olympic triumphs, he loved the flash of her long legs as she ran, the perfect grace of her form, the concentration and drive she brought to everything she did: her studies, her spells, making love. Even living in squalor, their early days in London, she'd reminded him of Bast, the cat-goddess of ancient Egypt: feline, unknowable, worthy of worship. And worship her he had, with his body, his adoration.

"Em," he'd called softly, as Moira came off the track. She'd glanced up, her green eyes even stranger than his own.

"Oberon and Titania," Merrick called them, perhaps for their unusual looks, or their quarrelsome, mercurial ways, for their mutual, continuous flouting of tradition, the way they drew and repelled each other, like the moon and the sea.

Standing at the edge of the track in her unitard and trainers, Moira had continued to gaze at him, and Giles realized she'd been weeping, that she trembled as if with some terrible chill. Moira never wept; only once before had he seen her tears. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to take her in his arms, her sweat-drenched body pressed against his, to kiss her with passion and feel the burning, fervent pressure of her lips and tongue. They had gone back to his rooms and made what might have been called love, but was in fact a wordless coupling of loss and desperation. They'd come together, violently, and both cried out in anguish at their mutual release.

When she'd gone, Giles actually thought he would never see her again, and though they had spoken often, by telephone, those conversations never seemed quite real. By the end, her voice had been a stranger's, the familiar Oxford accent in tatters, her sentences disjointed and nonsensical. Then, Giles had spoken to her gently, talking of his life, his work, of normal, prosaic things. She'd no longer needed anything else from him, only to hear his voice.

Prague had been hellish, the month with the two women in his flat nearly as terrible. Moira had at first been horribly ill, unfailing in her tenderness toward her Slayer, yet in so much physical pain she could not bear to be touched, could hardly find the control to speak. Then there had been Helena: her restless peregrinations, the way she would alternate stony silences with bouts of unceasing babble. She would go out Slaying with perfect, animal instinct, but had to be coaxed into every small act of ordinary life--into sleeping, washing, swallowing even small amounts of food--each victory such a struggle that, at the end, the cumulative attempts all but wore him out. Night after night he'd sat up on the sofa, holding her tight in his arms, and tighter, until at last her head dropped to his shoulder, and she subsided into troubled sleep. His life had become an unending sequence of frustration, regret, pain, and yet, perhaps through his care for her, Giles had come to love the young woman, as he'd always loved her mentor.

When word came at last from the Council that they must leave London once more, bound for a place he heard of only as "Pottersville," he remembered the two clinging to one another, and Helena's tears. "This is the end," she'd sobbed, "This is the end." And Moira stroked her hair, saying, "Yes, love, but it isn't so bad. Courage, my dearest, courage."

Giles had torn himself away from them and raged his way into the Watchers' Compound, demanding of the Council that they must, at last, let the women go.

Like robed judges, the Twelve had gazed down from their high seats in the Council Chamber, answering gently, indulgently, "The two are Slayer and Watcher, what else should they do? Are we to be without a Slayer?" He reminded them of Moira's suggestion, of the way she'd theorized that a new Slayer might be called without the loss of the old. The Twelve smiled again, and reminded him of their traditions, the way things were done--the sublime beauty of a Slayer sacrificing herself to save others.

Moira and Helena had vanished between one hour and the next, and Giles never knew where they'd gone to--despite all his entreaties, the Council would not say where on earth Pottersville lay--until the tattered letter arrived at the museum, penned in the Slayer's painful, childish scrawl: "Please, Rupert," she'd written. "Come here, for our Emmy. I'm probably dead now. We've killed them all in Pottersville. It's in Maine. Ask for Father Seamus O'Casey. He'll know. Love, Lena." Followed by a series of X's and O's. Hugs and kisses.

Helena's letter arrived the day of his birthday, part of a neat stack of mail already slit open by his secretary, Elspeth. She'd returned to his office an hour later, expecting dictation, only to find him staring at the smudged envelope, tears in his eyes. "Sir?" she'd said softly, but Giles couldn't answer, couldn't think how to explain. She'd sat across from him, touching the hand that held the letter, and he'd used the other hand to cover his face, not wanting her to see him weep.

"Bad news, sir?" she asked at last, but Giles couldn't think how to respond. She was kind, and he could tell her nothing of his life, and so he had muttered something about a death in the family, and gone to the director's office to arrange a leave of absence. That accomplished, he'd called Merrick, who'd news of his own--Giles was meant to go to California, the new Slayer had been discovered there.

"I've just had a letter from Helena Penglis," Giles had answered, and read the little note aloud.

"What's happened to your training, Giles?" the old man responded, but his voice was kind, and he'd stepped in with the Council, taken the burden of the call upon himself--and somehow either made the old, grey men believe the situation in Maine warranted further investigation, or called in favours from some part of their number whose bodies yet contained vestigal hearts.

So much said, here Giles found himself, flying London to New York, New York to Bangor, unable to imagine the frail, tense woman Moira had become without her Slayer by her side. Unable to imagine what, if anything, he should say to her. That this journey had been Helena's dying wish must be enough.

Numbly, he boarded his flight, numbly found his seat, fitting his long legs into the cramped space and not noticing the discomfort. He'd brought a paperback of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, a book someone he'd loved once recommended as her favourite, but although the novel remained open on his lap, and he read, Giles could make no sense of the words.

"Business or pleasure?" the man beside him asked: jolly, corpulent, like the American Santa Claus sans beard.

"I beg your pardon?" Giles answered softly.

"Are you goin' to the Big Apple for business or pleasure?" the man repeated, patiently, with no slacking of his obvious good humour.

Giles turned upon the hapless American a look so grey and haunted, he could see the shadow of it fall across the poor man's face. "Business," he said, after a pause. "Yes, business."

When it became clear that the flight would not entirely fill, the man moved away to another seat.

Giles stared out the window during takeoff, though he disliked flying, and actually preferred to ignore the details. Odd, that--he'd wanted very much, as a boy, to be a pilot, to control one of the fighter planes that streaked across the skies above his Salisbury home, launched from the nearby American airbase. He'd imagined himself in uniform, tall and commanding, skilled in all things aeronautical. Perhaps he hated these commercial jets because, inside them, he was helpless. Since Eyghon, he'd hated for anything to lie outside his control.

"But you can't control everything, Rupert. You can control nothing, really. You have to accept that it's so." Eva had said those words to him, long before she'd moved out of their flat--that defection occurring the night of Moira and Helena's return. Eva had been red-haired, sweet as cherries, a little plump, warm and soft to cuddle up to on a December night. He'd dared to give her a ring at Christmas, and she'd been so happy, shining with her joy.

Two days later he'd flown to Prague, and two weeks later, Eva was gone, the ring left behind on the dining table, along with everything else they'd shared. Her glowering brothers, big narrow-eyed Norwegians, had come for the rest. Eva had a gift--she touched things, and she knew. She'd touched him, and she should have known: what he was, and what he would be. That his life belonged to another woman, one he had not yet met. Perhaps her natural sweetness had forced poor Eva into false hope. She'd touched Moira's hand, and been sick, and run away. She wouldn't let him near her.

Now here it was, bleak midwinter--what had C.S. Lewis written? "Always winter and never Christmas?" Christmas seemed, in fact, a million years away, as if it had never been--as if his three jolly little widowed aunts and a handful of friends from the museum had never come round for the roast goose and plum pudding Eva had been so proud of getting right. As if she had never sat on his lap after opening her present and hugged him so tight his ribs creaked, whilst their friends laughed and smiled--as if the two of them hadn't made sweet slow languorous love on the hearthrug after the others had gone, Eva still wearing the green paper crown from her Christmas cracker. One of his perfect, happy days, lost and never to come again.

Forget this, old man, Giles ordered himself, put his head back and shut his eyes. Almost before he knew it, the pilot announced their approach to New York. The Americans scrambled with their customs paperwork, then they were on the ground, and he hurried toward the next leg of his flight, through a vast, seething, anonymous crowd.

The airport in Bangor seemed tiny and deserted by comparison with that in New York. He saw no identifiable foreigners, few faces that weren't white, and a great many people bundled up like Inuit in their thick outerwear, which only added to his fears about the insufficiency of his own clothing. Already, Giles felt chilled, and though his training had taught him how to limit the effects of cold or heat, a vast chasm of difference lay between the chill of a November night in England, and the lethal cold of a winter's day in Maine. Shivering, he sought out the rental agency, and requested the four-wheel-drive vehicle he'd reserved for his stay.

The trim, dark-haired agency clerk glanced at this wool topcoat and modest luggage. "Either you're a better packer than I am, or you'd better stop somewhere and get yourself some real cold-weather gear. I'm serious. We don't like visitors to freeze to death in our fair State, and five minutes outside will turn you into an icicle, even with the heat cranked up full blast. The cold snap we're in right now is even killing natives."

"Thank you," Giles lied. "I shall be glad to take your advice."

"You're English, right?" Displaying amazing speed, she entered his information into her computer, then tore off the resulting printout with practiced ease. "Okay, here's what we have." She pointed out the features of his vehicle, including the tire chains in the boot. "You have put on chains before, right?" she asked him doubtfully.

Giles glanced at her namebadge, gazed into her ice-blue eyes and assured her that yes, Ms. LeClare, he had indeed.

"You should have come to see us in June. Or July. It's nice here then."

"I've a friend ill, in hospital. I've come to bring her home."

"I'm sorry." Her eyes flashed. "Girlfriend, huh?"

"Something like that." Giles wondered why the young woman looked disappointed. "Can you tell me how to find the offices of the Catholic Archdiocese?"

Ms. LeClare laughed. "Well that's a new one! Most guys just ask me if I know the name of a good bar, or how to get to the ice hockey arena."

"I'm a little different."

That statement earned him another laugh. "Yeah, I can tell." She pulled out a yellow marking-pen and drew out the route on a city map. "It's actually kind of a funny question, because my mom works there." For a moment, she nibbled the end of her pen. "Look, if I'm not being nosy, what did you want from them? If it's just info, mom could give it to me over the phone, and spare you a trip. If you're looking for spiritual comfort, though, I can't help you there."

"It is information, actually. I'm trying to locate a priest. A Father Seamus O'Casey, formerly posted to a town called Pottersville?"

"No prob." She dialed the telephone with the same rapidity she'd displayed on her computer keyboard. "Maman! Ca va? Good. No, I don't think you can say that to him. Why? Because you'd burn in hell for all eternity, that's why."

Giles attempted to suppress a smile, and Ms. LeClare winked at him.

"Look," she said, "I have a customer here who desperately needs to locate a priest. No, Ma, a particular priest. Father Seamus O'Casey, from up Pottersville? Uh-huh. No shi....kidding. Really? Can you grab him?" She put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Mom's grabbing him for you."

"He's actually there?" Giles felt stunned, as he often did by the unexpected.

"Oh, hi," Ms. LeClare continued. "Umn, Rupert Giles. Tall, English, tres, tres bon. 'Fraid not--trying to find his girlfriend. Okay, thanks a whole bunch, Maman. Bye now, see you tomorrow at Remy's. Yes, you do. Bye!"

She hung up the phone. "I guess you need my map after all."

"Thank you." Once more, Giles looked down into her eyes. "That was extremely kind."

"What, like you don't have girls doing stuff for you all the time?"

Giles blushed a little. "Ah--actually, no."

"That's so cute!" she told him, and laughed a final time, putting the map, keys and rental agreement into his hand. "Good luck, Mr. Giles. Drive carefully, and remember to dress warm."

"Thank you again, Ms. LeClare. I shall."

He stepped out onto the concourse, looking for the shuttle that would convey him to his vehicle. By the time it arrived, less than a minute later, he'd already begun to shiver uncontrollably.

"You're not dressed for this, buddy," the driver said.

"So I am becoming aware." At the lot the shuttle lingered, the driver making sure Giles's vehicle would actually start in such extreme weather. Fortunately, it did, and Giles let it run for a few minutes, studying the map, committing the route to memory. He'd a fair ability to convert written or drawn instructions to reality, and thought he could find his way with little difficulty. He only wished Ms. LeClare had not been correct, and that the Jeep's heater would do something to ameliorate the bone-aching cold.

Giles drove carefully and a little slowly, accustoming himself to both the weather and the disorienting sense of driving on the wrong side of the road. As he'd expected he found the Archdiocese with little effort, parked and hurried to the reception area. Inside, he found a trim, older woman with salt-and-pepper hair, quite obviously the mother of his own Ms. LeClare.

"Mr. Giles?" she said quietly. "Father O'Casey's in the Ladychapel. I'll take you there."

He followed her neat, straight-backed figure out through an unmarked door, down corridors and into the much larger space of the cathedral. In one of the side chapels a smallish man knelt before a figure of the Virgin. Giles waited silently until the priest crossed himself, and rose. Seeming to sense the Watcher's presence at once, he turned.

"Father O'Casey?" Giles asked quietly.

"Mr. Giles." It wasn't a question. The priest was a spare, neat man, native Irish, perhaps ten years older than Giles himself. His brown eyes looked weary and haunted. He didn't offer to shake hands.

"Is..." Giles began. "Did..."

The older man regarded him, then said with sudden violence. "You lot should have brought them home. By God, how do you sleep at night?"

"I don't," Giles admitted. "Not often." He slipped into one of the pews, facing the crucifix. For the better part of his life he'd carried crosses or crucifixes wherever he went, day or night. He believed in the existence of evil--had seen its presence demonstrated time and again--and yet he'd never, since his youth, felt the love of God, wasn't even sure that God existed, did not, in fact, know what made holy water holy.

Once, he remembered, he'd put that question to Moira, wondering how, with her very different beliefs, she should answer him. With a laugh, she'd told him, "Rupert, you just boil the the hell out of it." Some moments had passed before he'd recognized that as a joke.

Giles couldn't remember, now, how many years had passed since they'd spoken to one another with their old ease and humour. Neither could he believe that they might ever do so again.

"You are a man without faith." The priest lowered himself, carefully, into the pew beside Giles. He looked as if his back hurt him, and perhaps it did--certainly it did, if the priest had been required to move Moira, dead or alive, any great distance--she was close on six feet tall and, for a woman, muscular with it, despite her sleekness.

"Without faith in God, or in yourself," Father O'Casey continued, as Giles's mind wandered, although the priest's words came to him clearly, and sharply enough to wound. "Without faith in your calling, or in those for whom you work. Without the courage of your convictions to stand up against human wrong and say 'no, this must not be.'"

Giles folded his hands and leaned against the pew in front of him, feeling tears leak into the woven nest of his fingers. All the priest said was true, and more besides: he'd lost his faith, his sweet, whole-hearted boyhood belief, the night his father and Augustina died, the night of beautiful Augustina's Cruciamentum, and never got it back again. He'd known violence and hatred, had committed criminal acts and summoned demons. He often felt hatred and disgust for himself, and yet couldn't believe, utterly, that he was a bad man. He'd been innocent, even good, as a boy, and for this second half of his life had attempted to act with courage, integrity, honour. He'd a scholar's passion for knowledge and a hatred of ignorance, had tried to be a good friend to those few he called his friends, and had never, in that time, taken a woman except in the deepest affection--even Eva, who'd left him in anger, could not actually fault his behavior toward her, only that his calling, in the end, had stood before their love.

"For God's sake," Giles said, still weeping, in a broken voice he didn't recognize as his own. "Only tell me if she's alive."

For many minutes, the priest remained silent, then at last said, "Come with me."

He led Giles through a warren of corridors, through doors and up steep flights of stairs, until at last they stood in a bright white room beneath the eaves of quite another building. Stark wintry light shone down from a round window overhead, and a radiator bubbled and hissed against one wall. He wondered if this was some sort of nun's cell, the wooden floor uncarpeted, its only furniture a chair, a pre-dieu, a plain, narrow bed with pale blue blankets. A crucifix hung on the wall above the bedhead, its Christus looking particularly tortured.

Glancing down from the tormented figure, Giles saw Moira sleeping, the butchered remnants of her glorious auburn hair in elf-locks on the pillow, her fair skin so pale it seemed luminous, whiter than the linens. She appeared younger than he had ever seen her look, and that illusion of youth made him believe something he had never believed before--that she might once have been a child.

A ring of pale bandage surrounded Moira's throat. But she breathed. At least she breathed. The snowy sheets rose lightly over her chest.

Giles went to his knees beside her, hand hovering over her cheek, her breast, her shoulder, not daring to touch. Again, he found himself weeping.

"You should never have let them go," the priest repeated.

"I didn't intend to," Giles answered, his voice no less broken than it had been inside the church. "They slipped out while I pleaded to our masters for their lives, and I didn't know where to find them. Until I got Helena's letter, all I had was the word "Pottersville." There are hundreds." The weariness of the last weeks came back on him. "I searched and searched, but I couldn't discover them."

He thought of Merrick in California, the little blonde girl he'd been sent to meet, who should have been his. Merrick had showed him her photograph: yellow hair, bright eyes, soft little girlish shoulders beneath a scandalously brief top. Buffy, she was called. Buffy, hardly a name for a Slayer--more a name for a tiny ginger kitten. Helena had never looked like that. Even at fifteen, she'd been hard-eyed, rangy, tough--and yet, see what had become of her?

Giles removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. He'd failed Moira, no doubt of that, failed poor, daft Helena. There must have been something he ought to have seen, something he ought to have done. If the Council ever gave him a Slayer of his own, he would not fail her--he would see himself dead before the day he looked upon her lifeless body.

He felt guilty, that he would want such a thing still, after this--to have a Slayer. To train a Slayer, knowing what her life must be. God help him, though, he did want it, and not just as a duty or a burden--Giles wanted and needed it down to his soul. Was that for atonement, the knowledge that he would be kind and decent to his charge, where many were merely harsh taskmasters?

Or, as he feared, was the desire some vestige of Ripper, his old, bad self? That fascination with evil, that willingness to dance between the fire and the darkness--he hadn't cast a spell in nineteen years, and yet he wanted to do so, wanted it badly, as an alcoholic craves drink. With his Slayer's life on the line, Giles knew that he would--and could bury the shame over breaking his fervent vows of abstinence under the certainty that what he'd done was for her, only for her.

Giles could hear Ethan's voice in his head, the voice of the serpent, the tempter, the seducer. "I know what you are, Ripper. I know what you want, and what you are."

"No," he answered, trying to rid himself of those evil, beautiful words. He would never have to listen to Ethan again, or to feel those cruel, supple hands glide over his skin. He would never, never have to be Ripper again.

Moira's eyes had opened, watching him. Her lips formed words only Giles could read, though not even a whisper passed between them. "My Chevalier Mal Fete," she called him. That was Launcelot, the ill-made knight, the greatest knight of Camelot: brave, valiant, guilty, suffering, a good man too flawed to look upon the Holy Grail.

At the end, Giles had become neither himself nor the man the Council created: too kind in his nature to accept everything they taught him, their callous, casual acceptance of what was, and what had always been; too trapped in his own creation to tell them entirely to go to hell, and follow his own road, his own better instincts. Moira understood him too well. She had always understood him too well.

Giles bent to gently touch her cheek. He kissed her cold lips chastely, his tears falling onto her skin, perhaps in place of those she could not, herself, weep.

"It may be," the priest murmured, "The words I said... I have misjudged you."

When Giles turned again, after a little while, his face was a Watcher's mask, smooth and calm and pleasant.

"No, Father," he answered, in his Watcher's voice, which was quiet, and controlled. "No, you were quite correct. I am, indeed, all you said. I am all of that and more."