Fic: Flickers, Intermittent (Giles/Faith/Wesley, Adult) 1/1
Title Flickers, Intermittent
Author Brutti ma buoni
Rating Adult
Characters/Pairing Faith/Giles/Wesley
Word Count 2000
Setting It's after the Apocalypse. If you want to picture the Apocalypse, picture the start of Battlestar Galactica mixed with the mindwipe tech from Dollhouse. The bad kind of Apocalypse.
It makes no sense that they lived when others died. They fought in the front line, along with the rest.
One might have bet that Faith would live. She may be damaged, deeply so, but she has an indestructible air. Wesley, by contrast, has the appearance of a man who has died many times, and Giles finds it hard to credit that he should still, somehow, be alive.
The vampires are dead. The Slayers too, apart from this single last example. Most of the demons are gone. Giles cannot fathom why providence has decreed that two Watchers should be among the last festering fragments of humanity to survive, for all the good they can do in this new world.
*
Wesley rocks. It is how he usually ends the day. Giles worries about it, but what can he do? Psychiatry went out of the window with the apocalypse. He's not located anyone with the expertise to help Wesley since. But then, who could help the man who stood beside the abyss when it formed? Who watched his lover, the cenotaph of the love of his life, split into infinity by the powers she tried to control? She took the world with her, the opposite of her attempts and making the death of the planet much faster, much surer.
Giles is morally certain that Illyria's last act was to save Wesley, somehow. Certainly, he'd been the only survivor within fifty miles of that first blast, and no other explanation seems possible for how the nearest, most exposed human could have survived.
Giles misses the days when he could research such theories. He has no means of confirming hypotheses now, though he’s regarded as the fount of wisdom for the entire surviving human race. Four books have survived with him, and he wishes passionately that one of them was not Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Firstly, because it is not helpful, of course. Secondly, because it is neither the start or the end of the story, and the first and last will never be read again.
There are the three of them, the survivors they protect, and the OtherSide. Who will win.
*
Faith crosses the compound to sit beside Wesley. She's washed some of the latest OtherSide's guts off her face and hair, but she's scarcely daisy fresh. Not that it matters. Wesley's sensory powers seems to have been burned away with Illyria, or else he simply doesn't care any more about the routine filth they endure.
He retains some senses, though. Giles watches Faith draw Wesley up against her, pressing her breast to his mouth. Efficiently unzipping them both and straddling Wesley, just enough flesh bared to get him into her. Giles winces, reflexively, at the possibilities of flesh catching and tearing in two close-tangled zippers.
Wesley is so bloody vulnerable like this. Giles has remonstrated with Faith at times, trying to get her to back off. Sex isn't therapy. And yet, it's the only thing that seems to get through to Wesley when he zones out, as though touch is the only sense he has left. Giles has eventually argued himself into silence and hypocrisy. If it helps, why shouldn't Wesley find some surcease between Faith's energetic thighs?
Giles isn't jealous. It will be his turn soon enough, with one or other, or both. It passes the time. It feels like living. Little else does.
*
Giles is fairly certain that there will be no more children of Earth. He and Wesley have been fucking Faith turn about since they first found this hideaway, and she's shown no signs of conceiving. Nor have any of the women about the place. Unless pre-existing sterility was some kind of protection against the blast (which is a ludicrous hypothesis but yet another one he cannot rule out on the evidence available for analysis), it seems probable that they were all neutered by the flaring death of Illyria. Or some other element of apocalypse, to be fair. Enough powers burst over Earth that day to shrivel the testicles of all mankind.
He's glad of it. Half the survivors in the compound are women, half men, and they've been living here for almost a year. Normally, they would be breeding by now. They have minimal medical supplies, and less hope. The cancer patient who miraculously escaped the blasts died in agony three months later, cursing her survival. The tetraplegic man died after a week, his lungs struggling and labouring into silence. Anything short of a perfectly smooth labour in a perfectly healthy woman would be hellish.
There's a toddler, about three years old now, whose parents didn't make it to the compound. It's a boy, and nameless. No one has taken responsibility for naming him, though between them all, he's getting fed and (broadly) clothed. If all goes well (if the compound holds against the OtherSide; if the crops grow; if the biofuel plant holds out; if the water stays clean; if there is no more radiation and no more blasts), then that boy might just live to be the last human to die of old age.
No more children. No more new life. It is, decidedly, for the best.
*
Faith and Wesley are done. She's coming in for food, and today there is some, which is good for Giles and for Faith. Tonight there will perhaps be laughter, before the guard duty shifts change and they go to spend the dark hours waiting for pain and danger.
She's sniffing appreciatively already. He's used a little of their remaining cinnamon. It's getting musty, no point in hoarding any longer. So today, their stew of roots will have a flavour of the Levant. Even Wesley eats with some appetite.
It’s a day like many others, but better than most.
Giles takes what he can get.
*
That night the patrols are quiet. They bed down around dawn, all three tucked into a single bunk, as happens on rare occasions. It’s warm this way, down to Giles’s bones, as he’s sandwiched between the two of them in the happiest place.
Faith slings a leg over his hip. Wesley’s arm reaches round to clasp her raised thigh. They could sleep like this. Or else, perhaps, they will shift by degrees into a slow, rocking, leisurely screw. A few twitches of clothing, a few shifts of limbs and hips, and they could all three be making love.
He suspects it won’t happen like that just now. But it’s a happy thought to take into oblivion.
*
The OtherSide take out a patrol, next night. Two men and two women don’t return, and the one who does make it back wishes she hadn’t. Gut shot, with peritonitis an inevitability. Wesley puts her down, with mercy, behind the henhouses. It’s his turn for death duty.
Faith heads into the darkness, weapons gleaming. Giles musters the rear-guard, trying not to think about what is probably happening outside. OtherSide used to be human too. He tries to believe it’s no worse than putting down gunshot victims; merciful when the alternative is considered.
She returns triumphant, and he hates that, and berates himself for hating it. Vampires were once human, and he tolerated Slayer triumphs over the undead. The fact that OtherSide still have a circulatory system isn’t enough to make them pitiable. It’s good that the latest killers have been killed. It’s the only way this compound will survive.
He has however another hypothesis, which he has chosen not to share with the others, that the compound acts as a beacon, or that OtherSide tell stories of it. Certainly, since they set up a permanent home they have been more troubled with attack than in the months when they scurried among the debris.
They had to settle eventually. He remembers how hard it was getting to find food, and how difficult to hide the group of followers they’d acquired. How terrifying it was to be responsible for forty-odd helpless souls with no perimeter to guard. The compound is the best option. It has to be. Food, water and thick walls. And weaponry.
So it goes.
*
There is a sound outside the compound, ten days later.
It is a human sound. Not OtherSide. It’s a long time since anyone found the compound. They’ve become sloppy about the drill for anything short of killing. But it doesn’t matter, because this isn’t a starving straggler, not someone who’d survived alone by doing unspeakable things for months past, alone. It’s a smart soldier, wearing a coherent uniform, driving a vehicle.
Giles hasn’t seen or heard a functioning engine since the blasts. Nor, to his knowledge, has anyone in the compound. They gather, gawping, protocol forgotten.
“You human?” It’s the first thing out of the soldier’s mouth. That reassures Giles he isn’t a hallucination. The army of his memories wasn’t so forthright.
Faith rallies enough to get most people under cover. Wesley approaches the fence with the bravado of a man with bugger all to live for. “Yes. We are human. We survived. Who are you?”
“I’m with the government.”
Wesley gives a short laugh. There is no government. The radio waves have been silent since shortly after the blasts. Like everything else.
The soldier jerks his chin, accepting the unspoken. “I’m part of a government project. We were underground when… We’re out now. Thought we’d see how we could help.”
Giles doesn’t quite know why he bothers to ask, but research wins out. “Your underground operation. Does it have a name?”
“The Initiative.”
*
They invite the soldier - Majeski - into the compound, of course. Whatever Giles’s reservations about the Initiative, or Faith’s strong anti-authoritarian feelings come to that, surviving humans are precious.
His news is almost incredible and the compound occupants sit in open-mouthed childishness as he tells his story. The survival of the Initiative at all is a miracle, let alone multiple branches, now brought to life by Majeski's words. Underground laboratories in half the continental US, fully staffed. Young, fit men and women, no doubt, given the military's usual hiring policies. That makes hundreds more humans than Giles had hoped. They have been underground, safely away from the blasts. There might actually be hope for a human future.
But not from Giles’s exhausted stragglers in this ramshackle compound built of defiance and despair. Majeski's stories are of discipline, order, rigour and hierarchy. It sounds like another world.
*
It is a measure of the human spirit and its endless capacity for stupidity that they actually consider refusing the Initiative's offer. Not the other survivors; they are delighted to be saved. Why wouldn't they trust the saviour soldiers?
But Wesley, Giles and Faith sit in the compound, awaiting the last transport, and they are… worried.
“’M not sure this is good news. Not for me.” Faith has a history of anti-authoritarianism. It’s hardly surprising she’s wary of giving up their self-sufficiency, doomed though it is.
Giles should know better. He tries, anyway. “It will be good to have support. Better weapons. More books. Perhaps even some help for-“ Wesley, he doesn’t say, though Faith knows it, and of course Wesley does too. He may be destroyed beyond saving, but he’s all too lucid with it most days. “But…”
“Are you suggesting we shouldn’t go?” Wesley sounds cool, making the suggestion that will certainly kill them all soon enough.
“No. God, no. We must go. But I shall miss this solidarity. This independence. Miss you.”
“Fuck that.” Faith shakes her head. “They have showers. That's gotta be factored in. So we’re all going. Together. I need my honour defending from all those soldier boys.”
It’s a poor joke, which raises not a flicker from Wesley or Giles.
Giles looks at the soldiers beckoning them to the transport, and stands, reluctantly. They will go. But when they go, they are going into a future that's not theirs. The Initiative, those underground soldiers who have spent the past months in safety, they will bring the future. Not these few blasted, irradiated, shocked and broken humans who have suffered on the surface. Humanity may even survive, if the soldiers were well enough protected, but it'll be a humanity under discipline and military authority.
"You're right. Together. Can't let the army be the only survivors." He holds out his hands to them both.
Wesley looks up, with the flicker of something Giles would once have called a smile. "Yes. We must bring some non-conformity into their lives."
Faith laughs, loud and long. "Yeah. You and Giles, Wes. Rebels to the core." But she knows what he means. They all do.
So the Initiative isn't all bad. It's given Wesley a spark, however fleeting.
They choose to go onwards.
*
Author Brutti ma buoni
Rating Adult
Characters/Pairing Faith/Giles/Wesley
Word Count 2000
Setting It's after the Apocalypse. If you want to picture the Apocalypse, picture the start of Battlestar Galactica mixed with the mindwipe tech from Dollhouse. The bad kind of Apocalypse.
It makes no sense that they lived when others died. They fought in the front line, along with the rest.
One might have bet that Faith would live. She may be damaged, deeply so, but she has an indestructible air. Wesley, by contrast, has the appearance of a man who has died many times, and Giles finds it hard to credit that he should still, somehow, be alive.
The vampires are dead. The Slayers too, apart from this single last example. Most of the demons are gone. Giles cannot fathom why providence has decreed that two Watchers should be among the last festering fragments of humanity to survive, for all the good they can do in this new world.
*
Wesley rocks. It is how he usually ends the day. Giles worries about it, but what can he do? Psychiatry went out of the window with the apocalypse. He's not located anyone with the expertise to help Wesley since. But then, who could help the man who stood beside the abyss when it formed? Who watched his lover, the cenotaph of the love of his life, split into infinity by the powers she tried to control? She took the world with her, the opposite of her attempts and making the death of the planet much faster, much surer.
Giles is morally certain that Illyria's last act was to save Wesley, somehow. Certainly, he'd been the only survivor within fifty miles of that first blast, and no other explanation seems possible for how the nearest, most exposed human could have survived.
Giles misses the days when he could research such theories. He has no means of confirming hypotheses now, though he’s regarded as the fount of wisdom for the entire surviving human race. Four books have survived with him, and he wishes passionately that one of them was not Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Firstly, because it is not helpful, of course. Secondly, because it is neither the start or the end of the story, and the first and last will never be read again.
There are the three of them, the survivors they protect, and the OtherSide. Who will win.
*
Faith crosses the compound to sit beside Wesley. She's washed some of the latest OtherSide's guts off her face and hair, but she's scarcely daisy fresh. Not that it matters. Wesley's sensory powers seems to have been burned away with Illyria, or else he simply doesn't care any more about the routine filth they endure.
He retains some senses, though. Giles watches Faith draw Wesley up against her, pressing her breast to his mouth. Efficiently unzipping them both and straddling Wesley, just enough flesh bared to get him into her. Giles winces, reflexively, at the possibilities of flesh catching and tearing in two close-tangled zippers.
Wesley is so bloody vulnerable like this. Giles has remonstrated with Faith at times, trying to get her to back off. Sex isn't therapy. And yet, it's the only thing that seems to get through to Wesley when he zones out, as though touch is the only sense he has left. Giles has eventually argued himself into silence and hypocrisy. If it helps, why shouldn't Wesley find some surcease between Faith's energetic thighs?
Giles isn't jealous. It will be his turn soon enough, with one or other, or both. It passes the time. It feels like living. Little else does.
*
Giles is fairly certain that there will be no more children of Earth. He and Wesley have been fucking Faith turn about since they first found this hideaway, and she's shown no signs of conceiving. Nor have any of the women about the place. Unless pre-existing sterility was some kind of protection against the blast (which is a ludicrous hypothesis but yet another one he cannot rule out on the evidence available for analysis), it seems probable that they were all neutered by the flaring death of Illyria. Or some other element of apocalypse, to be fair. Enough powers burst over Earth that day to shrivel the testicles of all mankind.
He's glad of it. Half the survivors in the compound are women, half men, and they've been living here for almost a year. Normally, they would be breeding by now. They have minimal medical supplies, and less hope. The cancer patient who miraculously escaped the blasts died in agony three months later, cursing her survival. The tetraplegic man died after a week, his lungs struggling and labouring into silence. Anything short of a perfectly smooth labour in a perfectly healthy woman would be hellish.
There's a toddler, about three years old now, whose parents didn't make it to the compound. It's a boy, and nameless. No one has taken responsibility for naming him, though between them all, he's getting fed and (broadly) clothed. If all goes well (if the compound holds against the OtherSide; if the crops grow; if the biofuel plant holds out; if the water stays clean; if there is no more radiation and no more blasts), then that boy might just live to be the last human to die of old age.
No more children. No more new life. It is, decidedly, for the best.
*
Faith and Wesley are done. She's coming in for food, and today there is some, which is good for Giles and for Faith. Tonight there will perhaps be laughter, before the guard duty shifts change and they go to spend the dark hours waiting for pain and danger.
She's sniffing appreciatively already. He's used a little of their remaining cinnamon. It's getting musty, no point in hoarding any longer. So today, their stew of roots will have a flavour of the Levant. Even Wesley eats with some appetite.
It’s a day like many others, but better than most.
Giles takes what he can get.
*
That night the patrols are quiet. They bed down around dawn, all three tucked into a single bunk, as happens on rare occasions. It’s warm this way, down to Giles’s bones, as he’s sandwiched between the two of them in the happiest place.
Faith slings a leg over his hip. Wesley’s arm reaches round to clasp her raised thigh. They could sleep like this. Or else, perhaps, they will shift by degrees into a slow, rocking, leisurely screw. A few twitches of clothing, a few shifts of limbs and hips, and they could all three be making love.
He suspects it won’t happen like that just now. But it’s a happy thought to take into oblivion.
*
The OtherSide take out a patrol, next night. Two men and two women don’t return, and the one who does make it back wishes she hadn’t. Gut shot, with peritonitis an inevitability. Wesley puts her down, with mercy, behind the henhouses. It’s his turn for death duty.
Faith heads into the darkness, weapons gleaming. Giles musters the rear-guard, trying not to think about what is probably happening outside. OtherSide used to be human too. He tries to believe it’s no worse than putting down gunshot victims; merciful when the alternative is considered.
She returns triumphant, and he hates that, and berates himself for hating it. Vampires were once human, and he tolerated Slayer triumphs over the undead. The fact that OtherSide still have a circulatory system isn’t enough to make them pitiable. It’s good that the latest killers have been killed. It’s the only way this compound will survive.
He has however another hypothesis, which he has chosen not to share with the others, that the compound acts as a beacon, or that OtherSide tell stories of it. Certainly, since they set up a permanent home they have been more troubled with attack than in the months when they scurried among the debris.
They had to settle eventually. He remembers how hard it was getting to find food, and how difficult to hide the group of followers they’d acquired. How terrifying it was to be responsible for forty-odd helpless souls with no perimeter to guard. The compound is the best option. It has to be. Food, water and thick walls. And weaponry.
So it goes.
*
There is a sound outside the compound, ten days later.
It is a human sound. Not OtherSide. It’s a long time since anyone found the compound. They’ve become sloppy about the drill for anything short of killing. But it doesn’t matter, because this isn’t a starving straggler, not someone who’d survived alone by doing unspeakable things for months past, alone. It’s a smart soldier, wearing a coherent uniform, driving a vehicle.
Giles hasn’t seen or heard a functioning engine since the blasts. Nor, to his knowledge, has anyone in the compound. They gather, gawping, protocol forgotten.
“You human?” It’s the first thing out of the soldier’s mouth. That reassures Giles he isn’t a hallucination. The army of his memories wasn’t so forthright.
Faith rallies enough to get most people under cover. Wesley approaches the fence with the bravado of a man with bugger all to live for. “Yes. We are human. We survived. Who are you?”
“I’m with the government.”
Wesley gives a short laugh. There is no government. The radio waves have been silent since shortly after the blasts. Like everything else.
The soldier jerks his chin, accepting the unspoken. “I’m part of a government project. We were underground when… We’re out now. Thought we’d see how we could help.”
Giles doesn’t quite know why he bothers to ask, but research wins out. “Your underground operation. Does it have a name?”
“The Initiative.”
*
They invite the soldier - Majeski - into the compound, of course. Whatever Giles’s reservations about the Initiative, or Faith’s strong anti-authoritarian feelings come to that, surviving humans are precious.
His news is almost incredible and the compound occupants sit in open-mouthed childishness as he tells his story. The survival of the Initiative at all is a miracle, let alone multiple branches, now brought to life by Majeski's words. Underground laboratories in half the continental US, fully staffed. Young, fit men and women, no doubt, given the military's usual hiring policies. That makes hundreds more humans than Giles had hoped. They have been underground, safely away from the blasts. There might actually be hope for a human future.
But not from Giles’s exhausted stragglers in this ramshackle compound built of defiance and despair. Majeski's stories are of discipline, order, rigour and hierarchy. It sounds like another world.
*
It is a measure of the human spirit and its endless capacity for stupidity that they actually consider refusing the Initiative's offer. Not the other survivors; they are delighted to be saved. Why wouldn't they trust the saviour soldiers?
But Wesley, Giles and Faith sit in the compound, awaiting the last transport, and they are… worried.
“’M not sure this is good news. Not for me.” Faith has a history of anti-authoritarianism. It’s hardly surprising she’s wary of giving up their self-sufficiency, doomed though it is.
Giles should know better. He tries, anyway. “It will be good to have support. Better weapons. More books. Perhaps even some help for-“ Wesley, he doesn’t say, though Faith knows it, and of course Wesley does too. He may be destroyed beyond saving, but he’s all too lucid with it most days. “But…”
“Are you suggesting we shouldn’t go?” Wesley sounds cool, making the suggestion that will certainly kill them all soon enough.
“No. God, no. We must go. But I shall miss this solidarity. This independence. Miss you.”
“Fuck that.” Faith shakes her head. “They have showers. That's gotta be factored in. So we’re all going. Together. I need my honour defending from all those soldier boys.”
It’s a poor joke, which raises not a flicker from Wesley or Giles.
Giles looks at the soldiers beckoning them to the transport, and stands, reluctantly. They will go. But when they go, they are going into a future that's not theirs. The Initiative, those underground soldiers who have spent the past months in safety, they will bring the future. Not these few blasted, irradiated, shocked and broken humans who have suffered on the surface. Humanity may even survive, if the soldiers were well enough protected, but it'll be a humanity under discipline and military authority.
"You're right. Together. Can't let the army be the only survivors." He holds out his hands to them both.
Wesley looks up, with the flicker of something Giles would once have called a smile. "Yes. We must bring some non-conformity into their lives."
Faith laughs, loud and long. "Yeah. You and Giles, Wes. Rebels to the core." But she knows what he means. They all do.
So the Initiative isn't all bad. It's given Wesley a spark, however fleeting.
They choose to go onwards.
*