Title: Conversations With Dead People: Giles
Author: Am-Chau Yarkona
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not my characters.
Summary: Elena asked for stories about who else the First Evil visited during
the episode "Conversations With Dead People". Like, for example,
Giles.
Some time in 2001, military base
"That's enough! Stop right there!" a random guard—tall, heavy, armed with something black and nasty—barks.
The prisoner, desperate for the open air, for freedom and chaos, doesn't stop.
Just once, a shot rings out in the echoing corridors, and the prisoner will be finding out if there is chaos after death.
No names for his next of kin have ever been taken, and so no one is notified. A nameless prisoner who dabbled in dark arts; and a nameless grave in ground unprotected from dark forces. It's easy. Too easy.
November 12th, 2002, Westbury, England
Giles sat alone in big garden room. It was really a living room, but the place had two, and this one's windows looked out at the sunset over the garden, so they called it the garden room. Bored, he looked up from the book he was trying to read, and noted the time on the grandfather clock opposite—one minute past eight.
Funny. He hadn't heard it strike.
The house was mostly empty—on Tuesday evenings, it seemed, everyone had a reason to be out, expect him. He thought Kathryn was probably still around, in her room or the library, but it didn't seem like a good idea to go and look for her. She was more than a little wild—he liked that about her; it reminded him of Ethan—but there was quite a high chance she wanted to be alone.
The book in his hands was heavy, and he started to put it down. The pages ruffled, in a way that pages shouldn't unless there's a stiff breeze—and then there was, a powerful blowing in the still air of the room, cracking at the thick paper and disturbing the dust motes.
"What…" he started, slamming the book shut, trying desperately to remember what this reminded him of… something about demon summoning, the presence of evil… Ethan, again. Why couldn't he stop thinking…
… that Ethan was there, the air still again as it should be, and Ethan, three-dimensional, as wiry and grinning like usual, standing there in front of him on the expensive Persian rug, and saying, "Hey, Ripper. Good to see you again."
Giles stared for a moment, and then said, slowly but firmly, "You're not real."
"There's no way you'll ever know for sure." Ethan wondered round the room, peering at the bookshelves as if working out how much petrol would be needed to send the whole lot up in flames.
"No, I don't expect I will," Giles said, and made a visible effort not to shudder. "Do you have a message, or are you just here to taunt me?"
"Oh, I have a message," Ethan smirked, a curl of the lips as familiar to Giles as the pang of emotion it caused in his chest. "But I thought I'd get in a little taunting while I was here."
"Why don't you get on with it, then? Where were you planning to start—my parentage?"
"No, I was thinking of insulting the size of your…" Giles' face registered that he'd followed that thought to its natural conclusion, and Ethan finished with "hamster," just to watch the two ideas collide.
"You know," Giles said, slowly and speculatively, "if you were the real Ethan, I'd be trying to kill you by now."
Ethan smirked. "Nah. If I was the real Ethan, you'd be sitting there trying to work out whether you wanted to shag me or kill me, or both. Which tells me… that I'm real."
It wasn't a point Giles would—or could—argue. "Message, Ethan. You said you had one for me."
"I could have been lying."
"All too likely. However, I prefer to think that since the message is bad news, you're going to give it to me."
"What makes you think it's bad news? It could be the Slayer and her pals are all fine, just waiting for you to go back and feed them Jaffa cakes."
"But it isn't. If they were fine, you'd have told me, and then taunted. No; there's bad news."
"Okay, then," Ethan shrugged. "You win. If bad news is what you want, bad news is what you'll get. The world is ending, buddy. And not in a pretty, funny, hitch-a-lift-out way, either. Evil's coming, evil so big and bad it can't be defeated, and everyone's going to die."
Giles nodded. "That sounds more like what I'd expect to hear."
"There's more," Ethan smiled, and Giles remembered working hard to produce that look, years ago. "It's going to be fun."
"I doubt that."
"Oh, it is. Everyone of note is on our side, and they're all going to enjoy themselves. Even the Slayer's friends will help—that vampire with the good taste in hair dye, for one. The armies of darkness are arising, Ripper—or is it Rupert, these days? So much tamer, so much less inclined to take action."
"I don't…" Giles began—but Ethan was gone. Carefully, he picked up the dropped and forgotten book, smoothed down the crumpled page, and sat there.
He wouldn't let the First Evil be right. It wasn't going to be that way.