FIC: AS WE GO FORWARD, (Giles gen, FRT) Part 6/8
TitleIC: AS WE GO FORWARD, (Giles gen, FRT) Part 6/8: As We Go Forward
Author: Kelly B - kaymickbee
Rating: FRT
Pairing: Giles gen, some B/G subtext
Timeline: End of season seven. Spoilers for entire run of series as well as season 4 of Angel
Disclaimer: Joss/Fox/ME own it; According to Joss, all the best fans write fanfic.
SUMMARY:This is an epilogue of “Chosen,” which follows the new Slayers out of Sunnydale through Giles’ eyes. This portrait focuses on the immediate aftermath for Giles, Buffy, and the Scoobies as they regroup in L.A.Feasibly serves as a prequel to my story “Something Else,” which I may actually finish someday.
FEEDBACK: is lovely. This is my first fic in a very long time.
Distribution: This is for the 2007 summer_of_giles. Distribution is open if proper credit is given.
A/N: This assumes the characters’ knowledge that Angel Investigations has taken over Wolfram & Hart.
6. The First Encounter
Giles was not sure what time it was, only sure it had seemed like hours, and despite his fatigue, he couldn’t sleep. He was grateful for the room-darkening shades and the silence. Xander and Willow were coma-like in the next bed. Dawn was curled into a fetal ball, snoring. Buffy was face-down next to him, unmoving. Quietly, Giles lifted himself from the bed, took the half-full bottle of wine on the night stand, and slipped into the bathroom.
He removed his clothes while carefully avoiding the mirror. Like all the others, he’d taken a beating the previous day. But he was decades older and couldn’t view his battle scars with the same sense of accomplishment. Sometimes, especially now, he just felt beaten. And old.
He filled the tub, simultaneously filling he room with steam and wincing at how the faucet seemed to be screaming in the still of the early morning. He winced again as he lowered himself into the hot water and finally felt the physical brunt of months on the run -covert information hunting and running the makeshift Potentials underground railroad while having little rest, minimal nutrition, and bringers and ghosts constantly on his trail.
Giles hadn’t been sure that an evil force could have drained him more than Willow had just the previous year. That encounter with her, even the months leading to it, had changed him at his core. He could no longer trust his instincts; they had told him to get out of the way and leave Sunnydale. He could no longer believe in purity, for Willow had seemed nothing but sincere and good to him, all the time, until her resurrection spell on Buffy. It had sunk deeply into him that everyone was not only capable of stupidity, but of evil. It made him realize that the children he’d felt responsible for were no longer children, and they were just as stupid as sometimes just as evil as he had been during his worst times.
The First got to him early. It had showed its face in all the right ways meant to break him. It first came to him as Jenny, only to find that particular wound, while painful, was from another life, and there were too many covering it to cause him much consternation. Then it had tried resembling his father, scolding him for those same stupid choices of his youth, the ones Jenny had forced him to face. Didn’t work, and it was the same when it took on Randall. Somewhat sadly, Giles realized that there were so many losses in his life, those three were no longer close enough to rattle him.
Then a new onslaught of ghosts attacked him. They came in one night, the night after he’d watched the Council headquarters collapse to the ground with so many friends inside. After they pleaded with him, one by one, Quentin showed up, telling Giles he had been wrong and Giles had been right. Convention and tradition be damned. Rebellion was the wave of the future. “Just ask me,” Angelus said, appearing before him with Giles own blood on his hands. “Rebellion worked wonders for me, and for your little girl, too.” And then came the one that finally rocked Giles: The First as Buffy, in the clothes they’d buried her in, blaming him in sharp, stabbing epithets for everything from her father’s abandonment to her mother’s death to the fact that, left alone, she’d been forced to turn to Spike and let him do whatever he’d wanted to her. Giles swung for the first, landed on the floor, and turned back to see the face of dear, gentle Tara laughing at him, the foolish old man who’d thought he let everything fall apart when in actuality, he had no power over any of it.
Giles left the dank room he’d been hiding in, didn’t sleep for four days, then decided that the First had no power over him in its incorporeal form, that its only control was when it employed the bringers and whatever other tangible forces it could muster. And he knew, he knew, it would use Spike. And he’d determine to kill Spike himself.
And he’d lost Buffy in the process of attempting that very task.
And Spike had quite possibly saved all their lives that day.
Dawn would call it a sucky day, and he couldn’t help but feel the same.
Trying to push it away, he reached for the glass of wine he’d poured and leaned against the hard plaster of the tub, wishing there were bubbles. Robson had teased him during a brief tenure as roommates that he was an effeminate for using bubbles. In reality, Giles liked to have his scars covered as he bathed.
They were vast, some were aging, some were simply agonizing to recount. His entire chest was marked from his time as Angelus’ hostage, when he was methodically burned and stabbed just long enough to emit a response. There was the jagged, deep puncture scar that nearly killed him when they were on the run from Glory, another jewel in his Watcher’s crown of wisdom. There was a series of more mystically-inflicted scars along his abdomen from Willow throwing him around. There were several of which he’d forgotten the origins.
Lots of battles, lots of mistakes. He didn’t want to feel old, and he certainly didn’t want to feel hardened, but every encounter, personal, mystical, good versus evil, seemed to be turning him that way.
He longed for the life of purpose and loyalty he had once found in Sunnydale. He closed his eyes and tried to reach for it.
Author: Kelly B - kaymickbee
Rating: FRT
Pairing: Giles gen, some B/G subtext
Timeline: End of season seven. Spoilers for entire run of series as well as season 4 of Angel
Disclaimer: Joss/Fox/ME own it; According to Joss, all the best fans write fanfic.
SUMMARY:This is an epilogue of “Chosen,” which follows the new Slayers out of Sunnydale through Giles’ eyes. This portrait focuses on the immediate aftermath for Giles, Buffy, and the Scoobies as they regroup in L.A.Feasibly serves as a prequel to my story “Something Else,” which I may actually finish someday.
FEEDBACK: is lovely. This is my first fic in a very long time.
Distribution: This is for the 2007 summer_of_giles. Distribution is open if proper credit is given.
A/N: This assumes the characters’ knowledge that Angel Investigations has taken over Wolfram & Hart.
6. The First Encounter
Giles was not sure what time it was, only sure it had seemed like hours, and despite his fatigue, he couldn’t sleep. He was grateful for the room-darkening shades and the silence. Xander and Willow were coma-like in the next bed. Dawn was curled into a fetal ball, snoring. Buffy was face-down next to him, unmoving. Quietly, Giles lifted himself from the bed, took the half-full bottle of wine on the night stand, and slipped into the bathroom.
He removed his clothes while carefully avoiding the mirror. Like all the others, he’d taken a beating the previous day. But he was decades older and couldn’t view his battle scars with the same sense of accomplishment. Sometimes, especially now, he just felt beaten. And old.
He filled the tub, simultaneously filling he room with steam and wincing at how the faucet seemed to be screaming in the still of the early morning. He winced again as he lowered himself into the hot water and finally felt the physical brunt of months on the run -covert information hunting and running the makeshift Potentials underground railroad while having little rest, minimal nutrition, and bringers and ghosts constantly on his trail.
Giles hadn’t been sure that an evil force could have drained him more than Willow had just the previous year. That encounter with her, even the months leading to it, had changed him at his core. He could no longer trust his instincts; they had told him to get out of the way and leave Sunnydale. He could no longer believe in purity, for Willow had seemed nothing but sincere and good to him, all the time, until her resurrection spell on Buffy. It had sunk deeply into him that everyone was not only capable of stupidity, but of evil. It made him realize that the children he’d felt responsible for were no longer children, and they were just as stupid as sometimes just as evil as he had been during his worst times.
The First got to him early. It had showed its face in all the right ways meant to break him. It first came to him as Jenny, only to find that particular wound, while painful, was from another life, and there were too many covering it to cause him much consternation. Then it had tried resembling his father, scolding him for those same stupid choices of his youth, the ones Jenny had forced him to face. Didn’t work, and it was the same when it took on Randall. Somewhat sadly, Giles realized that there were so many losses in his life, those three were no longer close enough to rattle him.
Then a new onslaught of ghosts attacked him. They came in one night, the night after he’d watched the Council headquarters collapse to the ground with so many friends inside. After they pleaded with him, one by one, Quentin showed up, telling Giles he had been wrong and Giles had been right. Convention and tradition be damned. Rebellion was the wave of the future. “Just ask me,” Angelus said, appearing before him with Giles own blood on his hands. “Rebellion worked wonders for me, and for your little girl, too.” And then came the one that finally rocked Giles: The First as Buffy, in the clothes they’d buried her in, blaming him in sharp, stabbing epithets for everything from her father’s abandonment to her mother’s death to the fact that, left alone, she’d been forced to turn to Spike and let him do whatever he’d wanted to her. Giles swung for the first, landed on the floor, and turned back to see the face of dear, gentle Tara laughing at him, the foolish old man who’d thought he let everything fall apart when in actuality, he had no power over any of it.
Giles left the dank room he’d been hiding in, didn’t sleep for four days, then decided that the First had no power over him in its incorporeal form, that its only control was when it employed the bringers and whatever other tangible forces it could muster. And he knew, he knew, it would use Spike. And he’d determine to kill Spike himself.
And he’d lost Buffy in the process of attempting that very task.
And Spike had quite possibly saved all their lives that day.
Dawn would call it a sucky day, and he couldn’t help but feel the same.
Trying to push it away, he reached for the glass of wine he’d poured and leaned against the hard plaster of the tub, wishing there were bubbles. Robson had teased him during a brief tenure as roommates that he was an effeminate for using bubbles. In reality, Giles liked to have his scars covered as he bathed.
They were vast, some were aging, some were simply agonizing to recount. His entire chest was marked from his time as Angelus’ hostage, when he was methodically burned and stabbed just long enough to emit a response. There was the jagged, deep puncture scar that nearly killed him when they were on the run from Glory, another jewel in his Watcher’s crown of wisdom. There was a series of more mystically-inflicted scars along his abdomen from Willow throwing him around. There were several of which he’d forgotten the origins.
Lots of battles, lots of mistakes. He didn’t want to feel old, and he certainly didn’t want to feel hardened, but every encounter, personal, mystical, good versus evil, seemed to be turning him that way.
He longed for the life of purpose and loyalty he had once found in Sunnydale. He closed his eyes and tried to reach for it.