Fic: Complete and Radiant (Anya & Giles, 1/?)
Title: Complete and Radiant (1/?)
Pairing/Characters: gen, ensemble
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~4000
Summary: A year after the end of Sunnydale, Anya's ghost attaches itself to Giles' body. Not, alas, in the fun way. Assuming there is a fun way.
A/N: I swear I was going to finish this, and then I looked up one day and realized I was due to post and only had the first chapter done. OH WELL. Have a beginning.
According to Andrew, it started when Giles looked up-- during an otherwise ordinary diatribe about the paperwork concomitant to employing fifteen hundred teenagers-- and said:
"Hallie was always telling people about this one guy, he'd stopped sending child support checks along to his wife, and she cursed him to cut himself every time he touched a piece of paper that wasn't for the alimony. She was very pleased with that one. Personally, I would just have choked him on his own stamps, but..."
Then he began to weep.
"Mr. Giles?" Andrew said, so sympathetically that the peak of his hair seemed to quiver like fresh meringue.
"So sorry," Giles said, staring at the far wall. "I don't know who's come over me."
Andrew said, "It sounded like--"
"Yes," said Giles. "Yes, it did."
According to Buffy, it started when Kennedy died.
It was almost exactly a year after the Hellmouth went kaput, and Kennedy went down fighting a tentacle-thing in Venice. Willow had been in Brazil; they were taking time apart, or something, but when she heard she did something that made the Venetian canals smell like flowers for three consecutive days, which no one wanted to talk about.
It turned out that Kennedy's family actually owned a villa near the city, so they buried her on her own land, with Italian sun beating down on the funeral. Giles, who had been with her when she was killed, stood at the edges looking probably more upset than he even realized, in a British kind of way. Buffy spent the ceremony itself with Willow, because Willow seemed to appreciate it, kept giving her watery smiles as if to say, "no big, this is only the second girlfriend I've violently lost in as many years!"; but afterwards, she went to him.
He looked kind of surprised. She tried not to feel guilty about that.
"Hello, Buffy," he said.
"Hiya," said Buffy.
They stood around for a minute trying to remember how to start a conversation without a minor apocalypse as an icebreaker. Not that she wasn't grateful about the apocalypse thing, she thought, thinking how red Willow's hair had looked in the light.
Eventually, she said, "Are you okay?"
"Oddly enough, I was going to ask you that," said Giles, with a wry sort of smile.
"I'm okay," said Buffy. She looked down. "I wasn't--" she paused. But Willow was on the far side of the cemetery, and it had been a couple of months since she'd talked to him about anything other than Dawn. "I was never Kennedy's biggest fan," she said, finally, feeling tired. It was warm and green around the grave.
"Sometimes that makes it worse," said Giles, but he didn't seem too concerned, and she realized that he hadn't actually answered her question. "And Willow?" he said. "Speaking of Kennedy's fans."
She gave him her patented "don't think I don't see that elegant segue, buster" look, but said, "She's coping. I think Clean Sewers For Venice 2004 kind of took it out of her. And she and Kennedy weren't as-- as--"
"As serious as she and Tara," he supplied.
"Yes," said Buffy, and added, "She wasn't even as old as I was when I died," and despite herself watched his face.
He said, in a weird flat voice:
"Well, no one can accuse Willow of cradle-robbing now. Coffin robbing, maybe. She was always better at that!"
Then he doubled over.
Buffy caught him by the arm, and looked over his head to see-- Willow, closer now, her hair white as the light where the sun touched it; which was everywhere. Then she stepped into leafy shade, and the illusion passed.
"What…" Giles gasped.
He straightened up, a pained expression on his face. Buffy made an executive decision and kept hold of his arm. He let her support his weight, so that was peachy all round.
"Let's get you home," she said, and he didn't argue. Just looked at her, with sunlight in his eyes.
And according to Xander, it started when he got a call at 3:00 a.m. in Cairo, and answered it with "Remind me to get you a timezone chart for your birthday, Dawnie."
There was no response. He could hear someone breathing, softly, the slow undeniable push of air somewhere on the other side of the world.
"Hello?" he said.
They hung up.
Were crank calls part of the Slayer training regime now? He lay back down on his itchy mattress-- Egyptian cotton, his ass-- and imagined some baby Slayer picking his temporary phone number out of all those listed in the Council's address book. Some stranger putting off sleep. It was hard. It had been a while; these days, when he pictured Scotland, it tended to sprout palm trees.
He rolled onto his back. In the dark, he couldn't see the ceiling, but he was pretty sure that somewhere in all that plaster it had a leak.
But before all that-- before he began remembering the exploits of dead vengeance demons he'd never met, before Kennedy died screaming, and before Xander decided to make Cairo his base of operations for that future foreseeable with only one eye-- Giles dreamed that he was back in the Magic Shop, as it had been before Buffy died.
In the dream it was just coming on dusk, and all the dead girls were there: Tara and Anya and Buffy. Their faces to the window and the darkening street.
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," he told them, running his hand through his hair.
"It's cool," Buffy said. "Slow and steady totally wins the enigmatic dream sequence race."
Giles gave her a look. She smiled at him. After a moment, he sat down next to Tara, who patted him on the shoulder.
"We're waiting on someone," she explained. Her eyes were terribly clear.
Anya said nothing at all. She seemed preoccupied, although she too was looking at him now, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. Her hair was darker than it had been when she died and drawn back from her throat. She stood in the place where he had somewhat melodramatically kissed her, one hand resting lightly on the counter.
The door opened: the sound of the bell was not what it had been. And there was Willow, sixteen again, her mouth an open O of delight, moving silently. She lead someone by the hand into the light.
Jenny closed the door behind her carefully.
"Hey, England," she said.
"Hello Jenny," he said.
"This time," Willow was telling Anya, "I'm going to pay."
"Oh, sure," said Anya. "And afterwards I just bet you'll fully refit the shop, using proceeds from your lucrative hobby of murder!"
But she bent down and rummaged for something behind the counter. When she rose she was holding an Orb of Thesulah. It glowed in her grip like the cloud layer over a city; distantly gold.
"Thank you," said Willow, and looked at Anya as if she was going to touch her. Jenny had a hand on her shoulder. She whispered something in Willow's uncovered ear, her red mouth held close as a flower to the curve of listening skin. She's a child, Giles thought, with a flash of irritation at himself, and then: Wait a moment.
Neither Buffy nor Tara was looking at him. They had their eyes trained on the blue of twilight, the visible sky. Tara was humming, softly, open-mouthed, and every crystal in the store vibrated to the pitch of her throat.
"We're all bodies, Rupert," said Jenny. Her lashes curled like wet silk against the skin around her eyes. He wanted very badly to argue with her: to cite demons and Buffy and how for weeks after his bed had smelled of roses. When the First had come to him in her shape she had flinched away from his touch, her shoulders curling in as they had after Eyghon-- a last parenthesis.
"This has gone on long enough," he announced, rising.
Willow turned. She lobbed the orb to him, underhanded. She could have been Ethan, tossing an apple in the summer heat of Oxford's unsuspecting streets. Sometimes the apples had bloomed in midair.
Without thinking, he caught it. His fingers smeared bloody against the glass.
When he woke it was soundless. His hand ached like winter. He rolled over, and found that it was morning, though the sky was for the moment only darkly blue.
Life went on, for some of them.
In the aftermath of Kennedy Willow drifted through the Edinburgh HQ, her sleeves rolled up and her forearms naked as a page. Giles remembered Moloch, and how Willow had loved him while the rest of them bumbled around in self-defense against a world they hardly understood. Nuclear war and economic havoc and medical equipment gone silent in the dark.
For his part, he dealt with Kennedy's parents and Kennedy's half-sister. They came to collect her things, and were calm throughout; he got the vague and unfair impression that they were not in the habit of expressing emotion in the presence of anyone who received a monthly paycheck and sat in an office every day. They might, he thought, have preferred somebody like Buffy, although these days Buffy did both. She had offered to go, as a matter of fact. He'd said no, and she had looked both glad and angry; but as long as there were still things he could spare her he would, now that she no longer needed him to spare her anything. The perversity of age.
There were other matters to be sorted out. Kennedy had died battling something rather larger than her, and although it had shortly after been eviscerated by her partner Slayer and an enchanted scalpel, it still had pockets of worshippers in Venice. Faith, back from Cleveland, had had a brief personal crisis after accidentally slaughtering a couple of cultists in an ambush gone wrong, until Buffy had taken her aside and explained about the Religious Fanatics Exception, which also applied to slayers and to power-crazed zookeepers and to Willow. Some kinds of people were too dangerous to submit to societal judgment, and always would be. Amanda, before she had been torn apart in the basement of Sunnydale High, had wanted to add marching band members to the list.
No one had seen either Faith or Buffy for a couple of days since. One hoped they were getting it out of their system. One tried not to speculate as to which systems.
And he was here: acting like a man possessed.
"Did you feel something?" Andrew was asking excitedly. "Such as a supernatural presence, or a current running through you, or maybe a chalky aftertaste?"
"Mostly just as if I had suddenly lost all control of my mouth," said Giles, glaring.
"What about a pressing desire to make that one last goodbye to your friends and loved ones that you never got to say before getting tragically, uh, bisected?" said Andrew, undeterred.
"Bisecting can be arranged," Giles tried, but Andrew was now speaking directly into the presumed ether about Xander's nonexistent dating life. The worst part was, it actually seemed to be making him feel better. Something in him, anyway.
"Andrew?" he said, finally. "Get me Willow."
As it turned out, she was standing right outside the office door.
"Hi Giles," she said, without a trace of shame.
"Um," he said, "yes. Are you busy?"
"Nope," she said. "Idle Willow, that's me."
"Well," said Giles, "good. I was wondering if there was something you could help me with."
"What did you have in mind?" she asked.
The library of the Council of Watchers and Slayers was still only a shadow of its former self; the body of what had been lost when the London HQ had blown up was irreplaceable. But COWAS' collection grew daily, and they had a respectable number of texts devoted to esoteric forms of mind control and body snatching, both of which, for some reason, came up with startling frequency where the Slayers were concerned. Dawn hypothesized that it was an incidental side effect of Slayers all being, in her words, "hot young thangs"; Giles had to admit it seemed more plausible than the official theory, which was that their primal power held a kind of dark magnetism for the transcorporeally inclined (Andrew).
However.
Between the latest field notes on succubi and Nostradamus' description of a man consumed by the anthropomorphic personification of his grief, Giles found the ritual he was seeking. He checked out the text, feeling furtive, and ignoring the nagging voice which said that he was the head of the organization and would never again have cause to smuggle grimoires off its shelves. Probably. There were parts of him that had crystallized, like insects in clear amber, and he would always be a little ashamed when in the presence of great power.
Willow followed him. She seemed subdued; he was reminded of her weeks of silence, in the summer after she tried to end the world, when she did nothing but pull flowers up through miles of quiet earth.
The look she gave him when he handed her the book, though, was that of a master chef assigned a recipe. For making a bowl of cereal. "Giles," she said, as if hearing his thoughts, "I don't need an ingredients list to send you on an exciting field trip into your head. Whoo-ee, brain-girl, remember?"
"For my peace of mind," he said, dryly, and she inclined her head: maybe yes, maybe no. Her smile near to sweet.
They did the ritual in her private lab; he sat in a circle of herbs while she chanted, speaking up only to correct her Latin. He had a candle in a brass holder. And, at some point, almost without him noticing it, the world split: like a body before a sword.
There was a feeling like falling--
He was back in the Magic Shop.
Night, now, closed up, with rubble barely outlined in the gloom. Evidently his mind was in need of some drywall.
He wasn't alone.
"Anya?" he said, softly. His throat was unexpectedly tight.
She stepped out of the darkness with her hands held out in front of her, like open books.
"I think I've worked it out," she said, looking up at him with dark eyes. "Why I'm here."
She was close enough now that the light of his candle touched the side of her hair, the far edge of her ear.
"It's the bond of small business ownership," she said.
Giles stared at her.
"Trumps minor obstacles like mortality all the time," she said.
"This sort of thing happens… often?" he managed. "Trumping?"
As soon as he'd said it he thought perhaps there were other things he should have asked first; but her head tilted like an answer to all of them. The shadow of hair diffuse on her shoulder.
"Usually in the other direction," she allowed. "You'd be amazed how many murder-suicides are grocers."
"I think perhaps I wouldn't," said Giles, recalling childhood ambitions.
"No, you really would," said Anya. "Quantity aside, these people were brutal. A thousand years of demon-ing, and it would never have occurred to me to put a radish--"
"Amazing," said Giles.
"Exactly."
They were silent.
With care, he set the candle down on the ground at his feet. He had the distinct feeling that the floorboards came into existence only as light spilled over them; but when he stood, Anya hugged him hard, and she was solid in his arms although he could not see her face.
She stepped back, the light cupping her jaw. "So," she said, "how long have I been dead?"
"A little more than a year. Anya--"
"What spell is this, anyway?" she said. "I can feel it, you know. Buzzing. Grimkin's Auto-Invocation?"
She was more sensitive than he.
"Uh," he said, "a very recent derivative-- a coven in Texas found a way to stabilize the projected environment. The candle. The spell ends when it's extinguished. Er, obviously," he added, seeing the look she was giving him. It was easy to forget that she had won the right to vengeance as much by ingenuity as by anger, once. As a human-- the second and third time-- she had largely avoided magic, in all its forms. Maybe it was too paltry, after the kind of power she had lost. Maybe she had wanted to forget how weak she had been born.
"I don't remember where I was," she said. "I must have been somewhere, but I can't remember."
He fought the urge to polish his glasses. "What do you remember?" he asked, sitting down beside the candle. After a moment she joined him, carefully. She wrapped her arms around her knees. It was continuously surprising to see her move, like wind in a locked room.
"Dying," she said. "Andrew. You know, I've been stabbed lots of times, but rarely diced. It was like when your book fell to pieces when I touched it, I remember thinking that. That someone was going to pick me up and I was going to fall apart in their hands. Stupid."
"Not really," he said. "And then?"
"And then I was--"
She rubbed two fingers against the place where her neck met her shoulder. She was wearing a dress like she had on the day that Willow had tried to end the world, with a wide white collar, and the candle picked out no stain.
"I saw my funeral, or something, but it was so quick. I thought I was in Purgatory at first," she said. "What with the fog, and the mildew, and then Andrew being right there-- he did die, right? Andrew? Without me to protect his vulnerable nerd butt? Except, no, he couldn't have, because you're obnoxiously alive and nostalgic, and you were talking to him. I could hear your voice but I couldn't see you."
"That was Scotland," said Giles, weakly. Anya nodded in the manner of one whose long-held prejudices have been wholly confirmed.
"Scotland," she said, making air quotes with her fingers. "Okay. And I thought, well, this isn't so bad, and I started thinking about Hallie, because she was dead too. I was going to explain to Andrew that we should find her, quickly, because believe me she puts the raptor in birdbrain and she is completely unequipped to navigate the exciting new vistas of the violently dead," Anya said, speaking rapidly and without looking at his face, "and then you were back."
He felt a chill run through him.
"And I was just the ghost in your squishy old man brain," she finished. The candlelight was reflected in her pupils, like far-off suns. She was watching the wick, and her face moved like paint in the light.
"Don't go," she said. "Please. Not yet." She had wept with his eyes but her own were red-rimmed.
"Of course," he told her, and was surprised by his own vehemence. He reached across the space between them and touched her hand. It was somehow more surreal to feel her skin dry under his fingers than to have her embrace him with all her usual force. He rubbed her wrist and she bent her head towards the motion.
After a while, she said, "I would have picked Willow to haunt. If anyone had asked for my opinion."
"This isn't exactly a traditional haunting," said Giles, thoughtfully.
"Are you sure?" she asked. She gave the debris-filled shop a meaningful glance.
"That's just a metaphor," said Giles, although in fact he wasn't sure, now that she mentioned. "No, this is-- this is--" His tongue felt thick in his mouth; he looked at the twisting candleflame and felt exhaustion creeping through his limbs.
"Willow," said Anya, again.
"Yes, well," said Giles. "As hauntee--"
"No, I mean, she's doing this," said Anya, looking up at the invisible rafters, past the boundaries of the light. "Isn't she? I can tell."
"Oh," he said. "Well, yes." That was certainly true. It was not exactly a difficult guess.
Anya nodded. She laid her head on his arm.
"It's nice to be back in my body," she said, "even if it's only for a little while, and while stuck in a psychic projection of the gutted carcass of my former livelihood."
"Succinctly if gruesomely put," said Giles.
"It's a knack," said Anya.
"How aware are you of the world, when not, er, steering, as it were?" he asked.
"I can feel everything," she said. "I think. But not all of it makes sense."
Her breathing was slow on his shoulder.
"I don't think it used to hurt this much," she said.
Willow was looking down at him with open curiosity.
Her hair was feathering pale at the tips, and Giles realized he couldn't tell whether she was experimenting with bleach and he hadn't noticed until just now or whether the spell had used more power than she expected. "So?" she said. She had broken the circle and snuffed the candle.
"It's Anya," he said. He could still feel her behind his eyes. He ached.
Willow said, "Wow," and then, "wow," and then, "wait, can she hear me? Anya, if you can hear me, this is amazing! I mean, kind of awkward, obviously, but…"
You think? said Anya, like a bell in his head.
"I think perhaps I'll just… pass out," he said, firmly.
"Sure," said Willow, but she was still beaming, and when she helped him up he felt her touch the back of his skull lingeringly with one hand. "That was some spell. Oh my god, Anya. Do you know why-- or, heck, I mean, how--!"
"I'm a veritable fount of ignorance," he said. "Willow, these are excellent questions, but perhaps-- after--"
"Right. Right! Stupid me. Here, come on, I'll just…" at which point he lost the thread.
There was a couch in the back of the lab, and he lay down on it gratefully, ignoring the delicate smell of formaldehyde that came off it in clouds when pressed. He closed his eyes. He listened to Willow walk away.
It's funny, said Anya, the weight of her a whisper in his chest. I always thought that if I came back from the dead it would be as a bloodsucking fiend. I had big plans to bite Xander.
A pause.
Technically, of course, I could still--
"No," Giles said, and went to sleep with her smile on his lips.
Pairing/Characters: gen, ensemble
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~4000
Summary: A year after the end of Sunnydale, Anya's ghost attaches itself to Giles' body. Not, alas, in the fun way. Assuming there is a fun way.
A/N: I swear I was going to finish this, and then I looked up one day and realized I was due to post and only had the first chapter done. OH WELL. Have a beginning.
According to Andrew, it started when Giles looked up-- during an otherwise ordinary diatribe about the paperwork concomitant to employing fifteen hundred teenagers-- and said:
"Hallie was always telling people about this one guy, he'd stopped sending child support checks along to his wife, and she cursed him to cut himself every time he touched a piece of paper that wasn't for the alimony. She was very pleased with that one. Personally, I would just have choked him on his own stamps, but..."
Then he began to weep.
"Mr. Giles?" Andrew said, so sympathetically that the peak of his hair seemed to quiver like fresh meringue.
"So sorry," Giles said, staring at the far wall. "I don't know who's come over me."
Andrew said, "It sounded like--"
"Yes," said Giles. "Yes, it did."
According to Buffy, it started when Kennedy died.
It was almost exactly a year after the Hellmouth went kaput, and Kennedy went down fighting a tentacle-thing in Venice. Willow had been in Brazil; they were taking time apart, or something, but when she heard she did something that made the Venetian canals smell like flowers for three consecutive days, which no one wanted to talk about.
It turned out that Kennedy's family actually owned a villa near the city, so they buried her on her own land, with Italian sun beating down on the funeral. Giles, who had been with her when she was killed, stood at the edges looking probably more upset than he even realized, in a British kind of way. Buffy spent the ceremony itself with Willow, because Willow seemed to appreciate it, kept giving her watery smiles as if to say, "no big, this is only the second girlfriend I've violently lost in as many years!"; but afterwards, she went to him.
He looked kind of surprised. She tried not to feel guilty about that.
"Hello, Buffy," he said.
"Hiya," said Buffy.
They stood around for a minute trying to remember how to start a conversation without a minor apocalypse as an icebreaker. Not that she wasn't grateful about the apocalypse thing, she thought, thinking how red Willow's hair had looked in the light.
Eventually, she said, "Are you okay?"
"Oddly enough, I was going to ask you that," said Giles, with a wry sort of smile.
"I'm okay," said Buffy. She looked down. "I wasn't--" she paused. But Willow was on the far side of the cemetery, and it had been a couple of months since she'd talked to him about anything other than Dawn. "I was never Kennedy's biggest fan," she said, finally, feeling tired. It was warm and green around the grave.
"Sometimes that makes it worse," said Giles, but he didn't seem too concerned, and she realized that he hadn't actually answered her question. "And Willow?" he said. "Speaking of Kennedy's fans."
She gave him her patented "don't think I don't see that elegant segue, buster" look, but said, "She's coping. I think Clean Sewers For Venice 2004 kind of took it out of her. And she and Kennedy weren't as-- as--"
"As serious as she and Tara," he supplied.
"Yes," said Buffy, and added, "She wasn't even as old as I was when I died," and despite herself watched his face.
He said, in a weird flat voice:
"Well, no one can accuse Willow of cradle-robbing now. Coffin robbing, maybe. She was always better at that!"
Then he doubled over.
Buffy caught him by the arm, and looked over his head to see-- Willow, closer now, her hair white as the light where the sun touched it; which was everywhere. Then she stepped into leafy shade, and the illusion passed.
"What…" Giles gasped.
He straightened up, a pained expression on his face. Buffy made an executive decision and kept hold of his arm. He let her support his weight, so that was peachy all round.
"Let's get you home," she said, and he didn't argue. Just looked at her, with sunlight in his eyes.
And according to Xander, it started when he got a call at 3:00 a.m. in Cairo, and answered it with "Remind me to get you a timezone chart for your birthday, Dawnie."
There was no response. He could hear someone breathing, softly, the slow undeniable push of air somewhere on the other side of the world.
"Hello?" he said.
They hung up.
Were crank calls part of the Slayer training regime now? He lay back down on his itchy mattress-- Egyptian cotton, his ass-- and imagined some baby Slayer picking his temporary phone number out of all those listed in the Council's address book. Some stranger putting off sleep. It was hard. It had been a while; these days, when he pictured Scotland, it tended to sprout palm trees.
He rolled onto his back. In the dark, he couldn't see the ceiling, but he was pretty sure that somewhere in all that plaster it had a leak.
But before all that-- before he began remembering the exploits of dead vengeance demons he'd never met, before Kennedy died screaming, and before Xander decided to make Cairo his base of operations for that future foreseeable with only one eye-- Giles dreamed that he was back in the Magic Shop, as it had been before Buffy died.
In the dream it was just coming on dusk, and all the dead girls were there: Tara and Anya and Buffy. Their faces to the window and the darkening street.
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand," he told them, running his hand through his hair.
"It's cool," Buffy said. "Slow and steady totally wins the enigmatic dream sequence race."
Giles gave her a look. She smiled at him. After a moment, he sat down next to Tara, who patted him on the shoulder.
"We're waiting on someone," she explained. Her eyes were terribly clear.
Anya said nothing at all. She seemed preoccupied, although she too was looking at him now, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. Her hair was darker than it had been when she died and drawn back from her throat. She stood in the place where he had somewhat melodramatically kissed her, one hand resting lightly on the counter.
The door opened: the sound of the bell was not what it had been. And there was Willow, sixteen again, her mouth an open O of delight, moving silently. She lead someone by the hand into the light.
Jenny closed the door behind her carefully.
"Hey, England," she said.
"Hello Jenny," he said.
"This time," Willow was telling Anya, "I'm going to pay."
"Oh, sure," said Anya. "And afterwards I just bet you'll fully refit the shop, using proceeds from your lucrative hobby of murder!"
But she bent down and rummaged for something behind the counter. When she rose she was holding an Orb of Thesulah. It glowed in her grip like the cloud layer over a city; distantly gold.
"Thank you," said Willow, and looked at Anya as if she was going to touch her. Jenny had a hand on her shoulder. She whispered something in Willow's uncovered ear, her red mouth held close as a flower to the curve of listening skin. She's a child, Giles thought, with a flash of irritation at himself, and then: Wait a moment.
Neither Buffy nor Tara was looking at him. They had their eyes trained on the blue of twilight, the visible sky. Tara was humming, softly, open-mouthed, and every crystal in the store vibrated to the pitch of her throat.
"We're all bodies, Rupert," said Jenny. Her lashes curled like wet silk against the skin around her eyes. He wanted very badly to argue with her: to cite demons and Buffy and how for weeks after his bed had smelled of roses. When the First had come to him in her shape she had flinched away from his touch, her shoulders curling in as they had after Eyghon-- a last parenthesis.
"This has gone on long enough," he announced, rising.
Willow turned. She lobbed the orb to him, underhanded. She could have been Ethan, tossing an apple in the summer heat of Oxford's unsuspecting streets. Sometimes the apples had bloomed in midair.
Without thinking, he caught it. His fingers smeared bloody against the glass.
When he woke it was soundless. His hand ached like winter. He rolled over, and found that it was morning, though the sky was for the moment only darkly blue.
Life went on, for some of them.
In the aftermath of Kennedy Willow drifted through the Edinburgh HQ, her sleeves rolled up and her forearms naked as a page. Giles remembered Moloch, and how Willow had loved him while the rest of them bumbled around in self-defense against a world they hardly understood. Nuclear war and economic havoc and medical equipment gone silent in the dark.
For his part, he dealt with Kennedy's parents and Kennedy's half-sister. They came to collect her things, and were calm throughout; he got the vague and unfair impression that they were not in the habit of expressing emotion in the presence of anyone who received a monthly paycheck and sat in an office every day. They might, he thought, have preferred somebody like Buffy, although these days Buffy did both. She had offered to go, as a matter of fact. He'd said no, and she had looked both glad and angry; but as long as there were still things he could spare her he would, now that she no longer needed him to spare her anything. The perversity of age.
There were other matters to be sorted out. Kennedy had died battling something rather larger than her, and although it had shortly after been eviscerated by her partner Slayer and an enchanted scalpel, it still had pockets of worshippers in Venice. Faith, back from Cleveland, had had a brief personal crisis after accidentally slaughtering a couple of cultists in an ambush gone wrong, until Buffy had taken her aside and explained about the Religious Fanatics Exception, which also applied to slayers and to power-crazed zookeepers and to Willow. Some kinds of people were too dangerous to submit to societal judgment, and always would be. Amanda, before she had been torn apart in the basement of Sunnydale High, had wanted to add marching band members to the list.
No one had seen either Faith or Buffy for a couple of days since. One hoped they were getting it out of their system. One tried not to speculate as to which systems.
And he was here: acting like a man possessed.
"Did you feel something?" Andrew was asking excitedly. "Such as a supernatural presence, or a current running through you, or maybe a chalky aftertaste?"
"Mostly just as if I had suddenly lost all control of my mouth," said Giles, glaring.
"What about a pressing desire to make that one last goodbye to your friends and loved ones that you never got to say before getting tragically, uh, bisected?" said Andrew, undeterred.
"Bisecting can be arranged," Giles tried, but Andrew was now speaking directly into the presumed ether about Xander's nonexistent dating life. The worst part was, it actually seemed to be making him feel better. Something in him, anyway.
"Andrew?" he said, finally. "Get me Willow."
As it turned out, she was standing right outside the office door.
"Hi Giles," she said, without a trace of shame.
"Um," he said, "yes. Are you busy?"
"Nope," she said. "Idle Willow, that's me."
"Well," said Giles, "good. I was wondering if there was something you could help me with."
"What did you have in mind?" she asked.
The library of the Council of Watchers and Slayers was still only a shadow of its former self; the body of what had been lost when the London HQ had blown up was irreplaceable. But COWAS' collection grew daily, and they had a respectable number of texts devoted to esoteric forms of mind control and body snatching, both of which, for some reason, came up with startling frequency where the Slayers were concerned. Dawn hypothesized that it was an incidental side effect of Slayers all being, in her words, "hot young thangs"; Giles had to admit it seemed more plausible than the official theory, which was that their primal power held a kind of dark magnetism for the transcorporeally inclined (Andrew).
However.
Between the latest field notes on succubi and Nostradamus' description of a man consumed by the anthropomorphic personification of his grief, Giles found the ritual he was seeking. He checked out the text, feeling furtive, and ignoring the nagging voice which said that he was the head of the organization and would never again have cause to smuggle grimoires off its shelves. Probably. There were parts of him that had crystallized, like insects in clear amber, and he would always be a little ashamed when in the presence of great power.
Willow followed him. She seemed subdued; he was reminded of her weeks of silence, in the summer after she tried to end the world, when she did nothing but pull flowers up through miles of quiet earth.
The look she gave him when he handed her the book, though, was that of a master chef assigned a recipe. For making a bowl of cereal. "Giles," she said, as if hearing his thoughts, "I don't need an ingredients list to send you on an exciting field trip into your head. Whoo-ee, brain-girl, remember?"
"For my peace of mind," he said, dryly, and she inclined her head: maybe yes, maybe no. Her smile near to sweet.
They did the ritual in her private lab; he sat in a circle of herbs while she chanted, speaking up only to correct her Latin. He had a candle in a brass holder. And, at some point, almost without him noticing it, the world split: like a body before a sword.
There was a feeling like falling--
He was back in the Magic Shop.
Night, now, closed up, with rubble barely outlined in the gloom. Evidently his mind was in need of some drywall.
He wasn't alone.
"Anya?" he said, softly. His throat was unexpectedly tight.
She stepped out of the darkness with her hands held out in front of her, like open books.
"I think I've worked it out," she said, looking up at him with dark eyes. "Why I'm here."
She was close enough now that the light of his candle touched the side of her hair, the far edge of her ear.
"It's the bond of small business ownership," she said.
Giles stared at her.
"Trumps minor obstacles like mortality all the time," she said.
"This sort of thing happens… often?" he managed. "Trumping?"
As soon as he'd said it he thought perhaps there were other things he should have asked first; but her head tilted like an answer to all of them. The shadow of hair diffuse on her shoulder.
"Usually in the other direction," she allowed. "You'd be amazed how many murder-suicides are grocers."
"I think perhaps I wouldn't," said Giles, recalling childhood ambitions.
"No, you really would," said Anya. "Quantity aside, these people were brutal. A thousand years of demon-ing, and it would never have occurred to me to put a radish--"
"Amazing," said Giles.
"Exactly."
They were silent.
With care, he set the candle down on the ground at his feet. He had the distinct feeling that the floorboards came into existence only as light spilled over them; but when he stood, Anya hugged him hard, and she was solid in his arms although he could not see her face.
She stepped back, the light cupping her jaw. "So," she said, "how long have I been dead?"
"A little more than a year. Anya--"
"What spell is this, anyway?" she said. "I can feel it, you know. Buzzing. Grimkin's Auto-Invocation?"
She was more sensitive than he.
"Uh," he said, "a very recent derivative-- a coven in Texas found a way to stabilize the projected environment. The candle. The spell ends when it's extinguished. Er, obviously," he added, seeing the look she was giving him. It was easy to forget that she had won the right to vengeance as much by ingenuity as by anger, once. As a human-- the second and third time-- she had largely avoided magic, in all its forms. Maybe it was too paltry, after the kind of power she had lost. Maybe she had wanted to forget how weak she had been born.
"I don't remember where I was," she said. "I must have been somewhere, but I can't remember."
He fought the urge to polish his glasses. "What do you remember?" he asked, sitting down beside the candle. After a moment she joined him, carefully. She wrapped her arms around her knees. It was continuously surprising to see her move, like wind in a locked room.
"Dying," she said. "Andrew. You know, I've been stabbed lots of times, but rarely diced. It was like when your book fell to pieces when I touched it, I remember thinking that. That someone was going to pick me up and I was going to fall apart in their hands. Stupid."
"Not really," he said. "And then?"
"And then I was--"
She rubbed two fingers against the place where her neck met her shoulder. She was wearing a dress like she had on the day that Willow had tried to end the world, with a wide white collar, and the candle picked out no stain.
"I saw my funeral, or something, but it was so quick. I thought I was in Purgatory at first," she said. "What with the fog, and the mildew, and then Andrew being right there-- he did die, right? Andrew? Without me to protect his vulnerable nerd butt? Except, no, he couldn't have, because you're obnoxiously alive and nostalgic, and you were talking to him. I could hear your voice but I couldn't see you."
"That was Scotland," said Giles, weakly. Anya nodded in the manner of one whose long-held prejudices have been wholly confirmed.
"Scotland," she said, making air quotes with her fingers. "Okay. And I thought, well, this isn't so bad, and I started thinking about Hallie, because she was dead too. I was going to explain to Andrew that we should find her, quickly, because believe me she puts the raptor in birdbrain and she is completely unequipped to navigate the exciting new vistas of the violently dead," Anya said, speaking rapidly and without looking at his face, "and then you were back."
He felt a chill run through him.
"And I was just the ghost in your squishy old man brain," she finished. The candlelight was reflected in her pupils, like far-off suns. She was watching the wick, and her face moved like paint in the light.
"Don't go," she said. "Please. Not yet." She had wept with his eyes but her own were red-rimmed.
"Of course," he told her, and was surprised by his own vehemence. He reached across the space between them and touched her hand. It was somehow more surreal to feel her skin dry under his fingers than to have her embrace him with all her usual force. He rubbed her wrist and she bent her head towards the motion.
After a while, she said, "I would have picked Willow to haunt. If anyone had asked for my opinion."
"This isn't exactly a traditional haunting," said Giles, thoughtfully.
"Are you sure?" she asked. She gave the debris-filled shop a meaningful glance.
"That's just a metaphor," said Giles, although in fact he wasn't sure, now that she mentioned. "No, this is-- this is--" His tongue felt thick in his mouth; he looked at the twisting candleflame and felt exhaustion creeping through his limbs.
"Willow," said Anya, again.
"Yes, well," said Giles. "As hauntee--"
"No, I mean, she's doing this," said Anya, looking up at the invisible rafters, past the boundaries of the light. "Isn't she? I can tell."
"Oh," he said. "Well, yes." That was certainly true. It was not exactly a difficult guess.
Anya nodded. She laid her head on his arm.
"It's nice to be back in my body," she said, "even if it's only for a little while, and while stuck in a psychic projection of the gutted carcass of my former livelihood."
"Succinctly if gruesomely put," said Giles.
"It's a knack," said Anya.
"How aware are you of the world, when not, er, steering, as it were?" he asked.
"I can feel everything," she said. "I think. But not all of it makes sense."
Her breathing was slow on his shoulder.
"I don't think it used to hurt this much," she said.
Willow was looking down at him with open curiosity.
Her hair was feathering pale at the tips, and Giles realized he couldn't tell whether she was experimenting with bleach and he hadn't noticed until just now or whether the spell had used more power than she expected. "So?" she said. She had broken the circle and snuffed the candle.
"It's Anya," he said. He could still feel her behind his eyes. He ached.
Willow said, "Wow," and then, "wow," and then, "wait, can she hear me? Anya, if you can hear me, this is amazing! I mean, kind of awkward, obviously, but…"
You think? said Anya, like a bell in his head.
"I think perhaps I'll just… pass out," he said, firmly.
"Sure," said Willow, but she was still beaming, and when she helped him up he felt her touch the back of his skull lingeringly with one hand. "That was some spell. Oh my god, Anya. Do you know why-- or, heck, I mean, how--!"
"I'm a veritable fount of ignorance," he said. "Willow, these are excellent questions, but perhaps-- after--"
"Right. Right! Stupid me. Here, come on, I'll just…" at which point he lost the thread.
There was a couch in the back of the lab, and he lay down on it gratefully, ignoring the delicate smell of formaldehyde that came off it in clouds when pressed. He closed his eyes. He listened to Willow walk away.
It's funny, said Anya, the weight of her a whisper in his chest. I always thought that if I came back from the dead it would be as a bloodsucking fiend. I had big plans to bite Xander.
A pause.
Technically, of course, I could still--
"No," Giles said, and went to sleep with her smile on his lips.