ISABIG, ooh, official harrassment! I'll take your harrassement any time...um, did that sound bad?
Sassette, thanks. There are so many layers of difficulty to peel through here, but I'm trying.
Please read the disclaimer!
Title: Terra Firma Chapter 9: Two Sorcerers
Author: Tulipp. Email:
tulipp30@yahoo.comFeedback: Please. Distribution: Please let me know.
Spoilers: Everything.
Rating: PG in this part.
Pairing: W/T.
Summary: Giles has a long overdue talk with Willow.
Disclaimer: All characters and various plot events that set up this story belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, etc. I am borrowing them and making no money.
Extra Disclaimer: What I know about magic would fill the part of the hat where the rabbit isn’t. Apologies to anyone who finds that my take on all things magical is pure bunk. Same goes for addiction; I’m only talking about magic here, not anything else.
Note: I am taking great liberties with Giles’ past here; if you question the plausibility of certain elements here, I urge you to go watch “A New Man.”
Acknowledgments: Thanks always to Ruby for beta-reading. And in this part and all others, thanks to J, my own personal mad plotter.
Terra Firma
Chapter 9: Two Sorcerers
We’re just a couple of sorcerers,
And the night is still our time:
A time of magick.
--Ethan Rayne
“I don’t understand,” Willow said slowly. “Giles, why didn’t you tell me before?” She tried to look away, but her eyes kept shifting back to him. To his face, his arms. Were his hands a little larger than she’d remembered, the veins standing out more boldly blue against his skin? Did his eyes glint more gray than she’d once noticed? Was the line of his jaw harder, tauter?
No. He was the same Giles he had always been. It was just this new disclosure, this sudden revelation, that colored him darker, more brutal, in her eyes. He had killed Ben, had pinched his nose and covered his mouth and watched the life snuff out inside him. Giles had killed, too.
Too. He had killed too. For a second, just one second, she had forgotten.
She felt the familiar stab of nausea, the dizzy reminder, but this time, it wasn’t because she had remembered. It was because she had forgotten. And for a second, someone else had been the villain. And it had been a relief. She had been the bad guy for so long. So, so long. She clutched her stomach with one hand.
“Ah,” Giles said. He removed his glasses with one hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. “After Buffy died, well, I didn’t think it mattered. I think I was very wrong about that.”
Willow felt suddenly tired. Exhausted.
“Willow,” Giles said now. He sighed. “I’m afraid that’s just the beginning of what I have to tell you.” He stood. “The rest of it…well, I….” He turned, sinking his hands into his pockets. He took a few steps toward the back wall and stood for a long moment. Then he straightened his shoulders and turned to face them.
“You remember Ethan Rayne, yes?” he asked her now.
Willow nodded. “The costume shop,” she said. “And the band candy, and the mark of Eyghon, and…Buffy’s mom on the car….”
Giles coughed.
“Buffy and I talk, you know,” she said, the corners of her mouth lifting. “At least we used to.”
“At any rate,” Giles continued. “I take full responsibility for everything that happened later, but in the beginning….well, in the beginning, I was seduced. Ethan seduced me.”
There was a brief silence, and then Willow spoke. “Metaphorically,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” Giles turned around, his eyebrows raised.
“Metaphorically?” she repeated. “You mean he seduced you metaphorically.”
“Ah,” Giles said again. “Yes, well, um. That.” He looked over her head at the knife rack on the wall, suddenly appearing very interested in the weapons hanging there. Willow watched him uncertainly.
Giles sighed. “This may come as a shock to you,” he said. “But, well, it wasn’t… precisely metaphorical.”
****
It was a good story, Willow thought. Or, well, it would have been under different circumstances. Now, it was…disturbing. In more ways than one.
Buffy had told her, years ago, about the group of friends with whom Giles had called forth Eyghon, the tattoos on their arms a reminder that he—and his friends—had to pay a terrible price for tampering with the forces of black magick. They had killed their friend. And later, all of them—except Giles and Ethan Rayne—had been killed, too.
The rest of it was new.
It called to mind an England of fog and cobblestones, an England Willow had read about in the gothic novels she’d read on summer nights before Buffy had moved to town. Mist and murder. Magick. She knew she was romanticizing it, but she couldn’t help it.
Giles had left the others behind, had slipped out of Ethan’s bed one gray morning, taking with him a leather jacket and memories of black magick. Willow imagined Giles paused at the doorway, his hand gripping the tattoo to draw out the pain. She imagined his eyes traveling the perimeter of the room, memorizing the dirty handprints on the wall above the mattress, the rusty electric tea kettle, the crumpled trousers on the floor. She imagined his mind tucking away the sex and the lust with the squalor, packaging it tidily away. She imagined him squaring his shoulders as he left the room and not looking back.
A few months later—he did not say what he had done during that time—Giles showed up on Quentin Travers’ doorstep.
The Watchers’ Council welcomed him, of course. They’d expected him long before, and they looked at him speculatively, but they took him in. To learn. To train. To carry on his family heritage.
To watch.
But there were surprises. The Council had, traditionally, trained one Watcher at a time. That was their way. But it was the seventies, and in the wake of England’s faddish educational experimentation, the Council had decided, at the urging of Professor Berlin—one of their most respected demonology experts—to accept a second candidate. It was a gamble, but the Council felt buoyed by Professor Berlin’s enthusiasm. Perhaps it was time to expand. And as it happened, Professor Berlin had just the right candidate, a rogue magician from the streets.
And so it was that when Giles walked into a dank basement library one morning, the air thick with the mildew of ancient texts and the heavy smoke of unfiltered cigarettes, he found Professor Berlin waiting for him, eyes bright and lips pinched in the smile that Giles would later come to associate with plans. Dark plans. And Professor Berlin wasn’t alone.
“It was Ethan, of course,” Giles had said. “He’d already begun worshiping Chaos by that time, but I was too blind to see it.”
He hadn’t gone into much detail about the year that followed, but Willow’s imagination had supplied atmosphere and description to fill in the gaps. The tension between the two men: the abandoned lover and the deserting loved.
Ethan’s slick sense of triumph.
Giles’ sick sense of futility.
The years of intense study and magickal practice that followed, Giles reading into the small hours with Ethan across the table and Professor Berlin smiling down at them from his stool near the stacks.
“He hummed incessantly, the Professor,” Giles had recalled. “Stravinsky, I think it was. It used to drive me quite mad until I realized that I could use it to my advantage. Focus. Block out both of them and really be in the texts.”
In the end, Giles said, it was the focus that was his undoing. It allowed him not to see the long gazes that passed between Professor Berlin and Ethan, the empty hours when they had slipped out, and he was left alone with a cooling mug of tea and a pile of books. It allowed him not to question the instructions the Professor gave him, instructions that increasingly—as the months wore on—became more intricate.
They practiced incantations. They performed spells. They experimented with harnessing darkness and communicating with demons and casting runes. Some mornings Giles would wake with itchy skin and a pounding head and not be able to remember the details of the night before through the insect-screen of magick that clouded his thinking.
“Nothing had changed,” Giles said. “I thought I had left that life behind me, but I hadn’t. I was the same. I was tempted. I was ready to be seduced all over again. The only difference was that I told myself the Council had approved it. And if they had approved it, it must have been all right. And….”
“What about Ethan?” Willow asked.
Giles sighed. “And Ethan had moved on. I didn’t want to see it, but he’d set his sights on the Professor. No, the seduction this time was all magick. Somehow, that made it…makes it…worse.”
“You were tricked,” Willow said. She pressed her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around her legs, pulled into herself, into the corner of the sofa.
Giles smiled sadly. “No,” he said. “No, I wanted to be tricked. Don’t you see…I wanted the black magick, the darkness. I wanted the power. I wanted it all. But I didn’t want….”
“The responsibility,” Willow interrupted softly. Giles looked at her for a long moment, his eyes hooded. And then he took a breath and continued.
The Council had assigned Giles and Ethan a joint project. A fledgling Slayer, a young girl from South London whose African parents had been honored when they’d learned of their daughter’s sacred duty. And who had cried when they’d learned she was to be sent to New York.
It was a trial for the two junior Watchers. An experiment.
They had traveled with the girl to the States, Ethan and Giles and Professor Berlin. They had established themselves in a fifth-floor walk up and set to work. And for awhile, things had gone well. Too well. Ethan was studious and docile. The Professor was unexacting and supportive. He made hot drinks for the four of them after late patrols.
“I thought we were learning our trade,” Giles said. “Practicing. Becoming better. Becoming Watchers. Under the guidance of the Professor, you see. If he was there, then we couldn’t do any harm. We had a calling. We were going to transform the art of Watching with magick.
“I didn’t see that Ethan had gotten to him. That he had almost gotten to me….”
Ethan and the Professor had suggested a spell. A three-way trance that would call on a primal dimensional shifter, a protective force that would enhance the Slayer’s essence. Augment her strength. Protect her. They had studied the spell for months, the three of them, immersing themselves in Sumerian texts. They had so immersed themselves that they hadn’t noticed the Slayer pulling back, retreating from their tight circle. They didn’t notice that she grew more distant, less focused.
In the days just prior to the trance, Giles had realized that he hadn’t seen the Slayer for some time…days, perhaps? But he had ignored the warning of her absence, pushed back the uncertainty he’d felt, the suspicion that perhaps…. But no. The Professor would guide him. And Ethan had changed. They had both changed. And if they could harness this force, well, they could do anything.
“Thank God it didn’t work,” Giles said. “At least there was that.” Slightly before entering the trance, he’d had a pang of misgiving. He had glanced over and seen Ethan’s slow smile at the Professor, seen a look pass between the two men that he hadn’t understood.
He hadn’t registered the glance until they’d been trancing for a day and a night. His muscles rigid, his head thrown back in concentration, he had felt recognition coming from a faraway place in his gut. But he knew. Perhaps it was an effect of the force they were trying to harness, a primal wisdom settling in and clarifying something he should have seen long before. Ethan and the Professor had other plans. He felt the bite and sting of magick and knew that it wasn’t for the Slayer. It was for themselves.
Somehow, he had broken the trance, struggled to his feet. Ended it.
“When we came out,” Giles’ voice had gone dead quiet. “There was a note on the floor. It had been slipped under the door.” He stood, wiped his palm across his face. “It was from her. I knew before I’d even picked it up. I just knew.”
Willow imagined, with a sense of foreboding, that she’d knocked, the Slayer. She had banged on the reinforced steel door. She imagined the girl’s knocking eventually slowing, stopping. The Slayer slumping, her fist still balled up. Maybe she had leaned against the door for a moment, pressed her cheek against the cool metal. Maybe she had been tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of it being so hard. Maybe she had been carrying that note around for awhile in case she changed her mind. But standing there, deflated, her fist unclenching, she had made a decision.
Willow shook herself, turned back to Giles.
The note, he continued, had been dated the day before. It had asked for a sign. From either Watcher, a sign that would give her the will to go on. To slay.
“She wanted meaning,” Giles said now. “She wanted to know that there was a reason to go on, a reason to keep fighting. Just a word, she said. A word to tell her that her fight was not futile, that there was a higher purpose. She could keep going with that word.”
She had never gotten a reply, of course, never heard that word. And she had given up. On a subway underneath Manhattan the night before, she had given up her fight.
Willow didn’t move. She reminded herself to take a breath.
“That’s not all,” Giles said now. He turned to face them, meeting Willow’s wary gaze directly. She shook her head.
“There was a massacre that night,” Giles said slowly, as if he hadn’t heard her. “In Greenwich Village. One subway stop away from the station where they found her body in the train, where her neck had been snapped.” Willow’s mouth opened, but she didn’t speak.
“Vampires killed thirty-nine people that night,” Giles said. “In a disco. Thirty-nine lives lost. Thirty-nine plus one.”
Willow’s palms felt clammy. She rubbed her hands on her jeans, trying to wipe it off, the sick feeling, the knowledge. She stared at Giles, wordless. His eyes rested on a spot on the wall just over her head.
“The Council reacted,” he said. “They fired the Professor, and they sent Ethan down on the spot. But not me…. I was very lucky. I got probation. I came from a solid family, you see, a family that had been in the Council for generations. They said that I had made an honest mistake. They took me back, and I trained again. I trained for nearly twenty years, until Buffy was called.”
Willow’s shoulder sagged. It was too much, information overload. She was out of practice. She leaned back against the sofa, realizing as she did so that she had been sitting on the edge of her seat the whole time. Her muscles felt stiff and unused. But there was something….
“But Giles,” Willow could hardly get the words out. “Buffy….I always thought she was your first Slayer.”
Giles pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose with a finger and looked at Willow. He smiled, the first genuine smile Willow had seen all day. It softened his eyes.
“No,” he said quietly. “Buffy was my second chance.”
****
Willow clutched her arms around herself, trying to squeeze away the uncertainty that had settled into her chest, her arms. She didn’t know what to think. What in all that Giles had told her was the important information?
“Giles,” she said suddenly. Her voice was louder than she’d intended it, more urgent. She took a breath, concentrated on the feel of the rough cotton of the shirt clutched in her fingers, and she started again.
“Giles, why did you tell me all that?” He didn’t answer right away.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to right the wrongs I’ve done,” he said finally. “To atone. For the terrible things I did as a boy. As a young man. Things I should have known not to do.” He paused. “Things I knew not to do. And I still….” His voice trailed off.
“Is it enough?” Willow asked finally, her voice like gravel. Images she had forced out of her consciousness for months peeled themselves out of the corners of her mind. Black thread on lips and naked fear and exposed membrane. And underneath all that, the memory of her own hatred. It pulsed under her skin.
“Giles, is it enough?”
Giles lowered himself back onto the sofa, next to her. She wasn’t sure she would be able to meet his eyes through the images that had skinned the top layer of calm from her mind, so she focused on his cotton trousers. The fabric was worn at the knee, the white threads showing.
She felt panic rise in her throat at his nearness. If she could just relax, breathe deeply…. If she could just concentrate on those white threads, just let go of the moment and relax into that white place, it would be okay. She could make it go away. She could be calm there.
But Giles put a hand on her knee, and the touch shocked her. “It has to be enough,” he said. “It’s all there is.”
Willow felt the warmth of his hand on her knee, the finger shapes of sense and solace and…. And then she knew. It was sense, and solace, and understanding. Giles understood. She raised her eyes to his.
“It doesn’t disappear, Willow,” he said. “The regret. The fear. It never goes away. But the magick doesn’t go away either. I made a choice in 1977. I knew then that I was capable of darkness, of killing. That I had been responsible for the deaths of a great many innocent people. But I knew….”
Willow felt weak. “What?” she asked. The training room receded until it was only herself and Giles. Two faces. And the video clips of pain that played restlessly on the back wall of her mind. “What did you know?”
“I knew that if I just stopped, if I ignored the magick, if I ignored my knowledge…that more innocent people would die. I had a responsibility, Willow. I couldn’t undo what was done; I could never make it right. But I could spend the rest of my life trying.”
“But Giles,” Willow said, her shoulders sagging again. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to be comforted, to be bolstered by his words. She wanted it desperately. “I’m addicted, remember? As in I’m an addict. I can’t handle it.” Her mouth twisted in disgust.
Giles rubbed the back of his neck. “It seemed so, didn’t it?” he mused. “When Buffy told me that you had quit the magicks altogether, I agreed that it seemed like the right thing. And certainly, when you ingest pure magick as you did…it’s like a drug. But Willow…it’s like a drug. it isn’t a drug. It’s still magick.”
Willow swallowed hard. “Then why,” she started to ask, but she couldn’t ask the question. Even asking it would let herself off the hook. She sank back against the cushions and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Witches sometimes experience what we think of as addiction,” Giles said. “But the idea of addiction, well, it’s…it’s a framework. A lens, if you like. And it doesn’t fit in your case. It’s too easy an answer.” Willow cast her eyes about the room, looking for something to focus on, something solid and familiar.
“But Tara,” she said weakly.
“Tara understands this,” he said. “I talked to her a few days before she died…did you know? No, I don’t suppose you did.”
Willow felt dizzy. Her body seemed to itch from within, and the room spun without. It had only been a day since she’d got Tara back. Was every moment…every single moment from now on…going to be the moment her world shifted, the moment everything changed?
“I’ve made so many mistakes,” Giles said, and she forced herself to look at him. “I should have seen it in you years ago. The signs were there all along…even at the beginning, when your spells went wrong, it was so clear. But I didn’t want to see it. I saw you heading down the same path I’d traveled, and I thought if I just turned my ahead away, I could make it stop. And by the time I realized, well….”
He looked down for a moment.
“It’s not a gift, Willow,” he said softly. “It’s a struggle. I’m not going to lie to you. You have to be stronger than you ever thought you could be. Every day you walk the line between dark and light. Every day you make the choice to use magick the right way, to resist the easy answers. The darkness. Every day, you…you remember. And”—his voice had grown quiet, and Willow strained to hear him—“and it’s bloody hard.”
Willow couldn’t read Giles’ expression. It was tender, but his eyes were gray with regret, and his mouth turned down at the corners.
“We’re the same, you and I,” he went on. “And sometimes we have to do the things that others won’t do. That others can’t do. The things that are too hard. I can try to bury it in research, and you can try to hide it with addiction, but it doesn’t work.”
He smiled at her, and the smile was sad and hopeful and knowing. “You and I, Willow,” he said. “We’re sorcerers.”
To be continued in Chapter 10, “One Step Forward.”
Edited by: Tulipp at: 8/1/02 9:48:56 am
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