Title: Curtain's Fall 5/?
Section: I Casting Call (5/11)
Author: Magpie and Wolfling
Email: magpie@moracle.co.uk and wolfling@sympatico.ca
Show: Buffy
Rating: NC-17
Category: angst, hurt/comfort
Warnings: spoilers up to the end of Chosen
Pairings: Giles/Ethan
Series: Of Old Mystics, sequel to Charades
Summary: The roles have all been filled and the players move into place.

Author Notes: This is the last story of the Old Mystics Series, sequel to Charades. We expect this to be rather long -- long enough that we've developed it into subsections: I Casting Call, II Dress Rehearsal, III Opening Night, IV Grand Finale, and V Encore. Many thanks to Mad Poetess and Wesleysgirl for betaing :) Previous stories in the series can be found
http://www.myarseisnotpansy.co.uk/piedm/mystics.html. Thanks to all the people who have sent us feedback.

Ethan couldn't resist taking hold of Rupert's hand as they walked from the stables towards the house, their dogs trotting beside them. It had been a long ride around the borders of the twenty acres as they'd boosted and tweaked the wards together, but it had been highly enjoyable.

Every time the pair of them worked magic together, it was better than the last. They were learning to merge their magics almost effortlessly now. The wards had been substantially improved. No one would be able to enter the property without Rupert, Ian and Ethan knowing immediately. Chaos would have a hard job entering at all, having to pass over a threshold of pure order to do so.

Even knowing what he and Rupert were capable of, the ease and power of the magic they'd applied today had impressed Ethan, and he was feeling quite exuberant. He squeezed Rupert's hand. "We deserve a reward for our good work this afternoon."

"Did you have something particular in mind?" Rupert asked him with a small smile.

"Hmm, something decadent involving just the two of us. Does this mansion by any chance have a huge sunken bath somewhere?"

Rupert looked at him and chuckled. "You have rather grand illusions about my childhood home, don't you?"

Ethan grinned. "More like optimistic fantasies. Not even a hot tub?"

"I learnt heating spells to have consistently hot water in my shower. What do you think?"

"Bugger," Ethan said wistfully, pausing outside the kitchen door. "So what hidden treasures *does* Buckham Hall contain?"

"There's the attic," Rupert offered after a moment's thought.

Ethan considered that. "Might be nice to see it for real; compare it to the dream."

"The dream was quite accurate, at least to my memories of it." Rupert led them through the kitchen and upstairs.

They reached the third floor and an area Ethan hadn't yet seen. It was quite dusty, and the rooms they passed held the large white phantoms of covered furniture. Skunk ran around like a mad thing investigating everything, while Giddy stayed closer to his master. "Can you imagine if we'd been children together here?" Ethan asked. "What a playground this place could have been."

"It was." Rupert smiled in fond remembrance. "Although it would have been more entertaining with you as a playmate, I'm sure."

"This is exactly the sort of old place that should hold a magical wardrobe," Ethan said, giving in to whimsy. "And of course I'd be the one who snuck through and ate the Turkish delight, drawing us both into Big Trouble in little Narnia. You'd be the squeaky clean sword-wielding hero one. Lion's pet."

"I never had any luck finding a magical wardrobe," Giles replied, completely straight-faced, although Ethan could sense the humour lurking just below the surface. "I think my father must have made sure all such pieces of furniture were properly warded."

"Miserable of him, that." Ethan began to think about the matter more seriously. "It would be a relatively easy task, I suppose, to install a portal on the wood at the back of a deep wardrobe. Enchant it to work only when it was raining outside of course -- a simple matter of barometric pressure. Sadly, I know of nowhere quite like Narnia that it could lead to. Eternal winter and white-clad dominatrices there are a-plenty, but leonine Christ figures seem in short supply." He chuckled and then realised they'd stopped walking in front of a small, unassuming door at the end of the corridor.

Rupert opened it, revealing a very narrow stairway going up. "It's not exactly a portal to a magical world, but there were times when I was little that I pretended."

Ethan picked up Skunk to stop her getting underfoot, craning his head away from her enthusiastic licking. Gwydion padded up the stairs first, and the men followed. Ethan was aware of a sense of childish excitement, maybe because of the conversation they'd just had. When the uncarpeted wood creaked loudly, he jumped.

The stairs led directly up into the attic room. It was long, cold, filled with vast quantities of boxes and junk, and illuminated only by beams of sunlight shining through cracks in the roof. At least until Rupert found the light switch anyway, after which dust motes danced under bare electric bulbs. Ethan stared out over the room with a feeling akin to finding a treasure trove. Deja vu, too, was present. "Exactly like the dream."

Rupert was looking around with an expression of fond remembrance. "It hasn't changed as much as I would have expected. Or at all, really."

Keeping tight hold of Skunk, whom he didn't quite trust up here, Ethan asked, "Take me to where I found you in the dream?" Rupert smiled and led him deeper into the room. The floor was boarded, but not covered by carpet or rug, and as in the rooms below, there was a lot of canvas sheeting protecting larger items from dust.

"I think I must have looked under every one of those sheets at one time or another," Rupert commented as he led Ethan on a weaving path between the shrouded objects. "Curiosity was always a vice of mine. Most of the things stored here are completely mundane, but you'd be amazed at what an imaginative mind could make of them." He glanced at Ethan and smiled. "Or maybe you wouldn't."

He ducked down, bending almost double to make his way between two large covered objects, brushing the sheet out of the way as he did so.

"This was a lot easier when I was ten," he commented wryly. They came out into a small clear spot that Ethan instantly recognised from the dream. "And here we are."

"We are rather big for this space now," Ethan agreed, looking around the hidey-hole, which felt smaller still as Giddy pushed his way in. "What a wonderful den. I bet you snuck up here for hours at a time."

Rupert sat down and crossed his legs, fitting himself better in the small space. "Hours," he confirmed. "It would've been days in the winter if I could've got away with it."

Ethan saw the edge of something intriguing sticking out from under one the canvas walls to the den. He dropped to his knees, ignoring the inevitable crack of his joints, and put Skunk down. "Be good," he told her sternly. "You can look around and smell things, but no pushing things over or going into places that we couldn't get into after you." As she yapped once and scampered off, he called after her, "And no eating anything, no matter how interesting it smells!"

Lifting the canvas to reveal the old wooden chair beneath it, piled high with yet more boxes, Ethan discovered to his great joy, a little cache of boyish treasures hidden on the floor between the legs. There were old wizened conkers on strings, a penknife, matchboxes containing goodness knows what, a balsa wood plane, a notebook, pens and pencils, ancient tubes of sweets Ethan hadn't seen the like of in decades and -- he pulled out the closest item -- a copy of Wind in the Willows.

"Oh Ripper," he said softly. "I wish I'd really known you then."

"I'd forgotten about these things," Rupert said, taking the book from Ethan with a fond smile. "My own stash of sacred items." Gwydion hunkered down beside his master, and between the three of them, there was no more floor space.

Ethan took out the notebook. There were doodles of fighter planes on the cover, which made him smile. He thought twice about opening it though, and offered it to Rupert. "What secrets might lurk in here, Biggles?"

Rupert turned his smile on the notebook as he took it and flipped through the pages; Ethan caught a glimpse of more doodles set among childish but neatly written words. "Nothing earth shattering, although it often seemed so at the time. I've kept a journal almost since the time I learned to write." He offered it back to Ethan. "You can read it if you'd like."

Ethan took the book back and looked down at it, stroking his fingers over the cover but not opening it. The part of Rupert he'd never known lay inside. "I'll take it downstairs with me when we go, if I may," he said seriously.

"Of course. It's just gathering dust up here."

"I wish I'd known you then," Ethan said again, filled with a strange and piquant angst. It almost seemed more unfair that he'd missed the years of Rupert's childhood than it did the quarter-century of adulthood they'd spent apart.

"So do I," Rupert agreed softly. He reached out and picked up the old penknife. "I wonder how things would have turned out if we had."

"If I'd had you then..." Ethan paused, thinking it through. "Things would have been very different. Chaos would never have got a hold on me."

"And we would have got in trouble regularly for sabotaging fox hunts," Rupert said with a grin, sitting down on the floor.

Ethan chuckled, and then sighed. "You would have been forbidden to have anything to do with me, of course."

"A little rebellion might have been good for me."

"Yes. You needed more fun and companionship." Ethan smiled. "And maybe your parents would have taken pity on poor impoverished me, or recognised my innate talents or something, and taken me in to live here with you. And I would have blossomed in a proper family environment to grow up to become a bastion of respectable society. Or at least the partner of one." He winked at Rupert. "And we'd all live happily ever after."

"We're working on that last bit at least." Rupert leant his head back against the wall, his eyes unfocusing. "Judging from the scamp you were in the dream, I feel safe to say that you would have charmed my mother entirely. And my grandmother would have appreciated your spirit." He rested his hand on Giddy's head, absently petting.

Ethan sat down properly, crossing his legs. "I think I would have liked your Gran, had I met her in better circumstances. She seemed very like you -- strong and determined, yet full of human feeling."

"She was very much my favourite relative for most of my life," Rupert said. "Save for the time when she was insisting I follow the family destiny when I was doing all I could to run away from it."

Shuffling around on his arse, uncaring of dust, Ethan moved until he was as close to the side of Rupert as this small space would allow. Giddy stirred a little to get out of the way of Ethan's legs. Leaning forward, Ethan kissed Rupert's earlobe, allowing his tongue to play over the Rom earring that Rupert had been wearing almost continually since Christmas. "She kept this for you," he murmured. "And from what you said, she seemed to regret keeping us apart. Or at least regret the necessity to do so."

"I'm sure she did." Rupert sighed. "I still wish she hadn't felt the need to meddle, whether for 'my own good' or not."

"But..." Ethan frowned. "Don't you believe what the coven has told us -- that being apart during those years was the only thing that stopped us... that stopped us being like Ian and Derek?"

Rupert shook his head. "I believe if we had continued on blindly, without knowledge of the danger, then yes, we quite likely would have ended up in very dire straights. But if they had deigned to warn us -- seriously warn us, and show us the result if we didn't get our acts together -- do you really think we wouldn't have made the changes needed?"

"I'm not sure I would have believed them back then." Ethan hung his head. "After all, not even poor Randall was enough to make me take heed."

"You don't think Ian would have been able to...?" Rupert asked, sliding an arm around Ethan's shoulders.

"He wasn't around then. Around us, I mean. *You* could have made me behave, but I'd have done it through fear of you leaving otherwise, rather than because I really believed that the risks weren't worth the taking."

"That may have been enough at first," Rupert said softly.

Ethan sighed heavily, slumping back against a box. "Rupert, you know what I'm like, what I've always been like. Even now, I'm the one who constantly gets us into trouble. I would have tried to be good in the scenario you propose, but..." It was a big but.

"I think," Rupert said slowly, "that you've been told so often from childhood onwards that you're nothing but trouble, that you have problems seeing yourself in any other light."

There was probably some truth in that, but which had come first, the troublemaker or the reputation? "My Nan used to say it was in my blood, that I was a, um, a topsy-turvy boy. I set things on their heads and then people could see them differently. Said people, of course, didn't always appreciate their altered vista."

Rupert visibly considered that before answering. "That's quite an accurate description actually. But you do understand that that's not the same thing as being nothing but trouble, don't you?"

He gave Rupert a wry look. "Trouble follows me. And indeed precedes me and holds me by the hand. You *know* that. I can't even do something simple like have a pleasant ride in the countryside without acting the fool and stirring up ill feeling."

"I don't know about that -- we just got back from a pleasant ride in the countryside and the only thing stirred up was the power levels on the wards." Rupert reached a hand up, letting his fingers brush lightly through Ethan's hair. "Sometimes, I think, you're like a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"What do you mean?" Ethan asked, moving his head towards Rupert's fingers. "You think I only cause trouble because I'm convinced I will?"

"More like you're convinced everyone thinks you're going to cause trouble so you oblige them. That way you're not being falsely accused." The fingers continued carding through Ethan's hair gently.

"I always try to give people what they want," he replied with a wry chuckle. "Do you think they would have liked each other?" he asked. It hadn't seemed such a wild tangent in his head. "My Nan and your Gran, I mean."

"I think they would have got along famously," Rupert replied with a smile. "Much to the discomfiture of everyone around them."

Ethan smiled too, imagining that. It was a nice thought. He ran his hand over Rupert's leg. "Shall we explore some more? I'm getting a little chilly."

"Of course." Wry humour entered Rupert's voice. "I don't know how long I can sit like this anymore without stiffening up."

"It would be a bit of a squeeze in here," Ethan replied in an innocent tone. "Not to mention the likelihood of boxes tumbling down on us at inopportune moments."

Rupert gave him a startled look. "What?" he said, the word carried on laughter.

"You thought you might be stiffening," Ethan explained with a wink, before rising to his feet. He held out a hand to his husband.

"One track mind," Rupert mock-grumbled, taking Ethan's hand and letting him pull him to his feet.

"That's entirely your fault," Ethan insisted. Probably because she heard them moving, Skunk suddenly appeared in the small space. She was covered from her head to the tip of her fluffy tail in dusty spider webs. Ethan looked down at her with fond exasperation. "And *you* take after your master rather too much," he scolded.

Giddy was looking at Skunk with interest. Rupert laid a hand on his dog's head. "Don't you get any ideas," he warned.

Skunk yapped, happy to be the centre of attention, and scrabbled with her paws up Ethan's legs. "Get down," he told her firmly. "No more cuddles for you until you've visited the shower."

"Do I have another shower duet to look forward to?" Rupert teased.

"You could always join us. Giddy too. Why not explore the wonderful world of the outrageous topsy-turvy boy? It's fun!" Laughing, Ethan began to push his way back through to the rest of the attic.

"I don't think our shower is big enough for that much exploration," Rupert chuckled.

His thoughts still lost in their respective childhoods, Ethan decided he'd try to get to the far end of the room, where he'd entered during their shared dream. Before he could try to find a way however, Gwydion pricked his ears and padded off determinedly around a tall stack of shrouded furniture. "Did you ask him to fetch something?" Ethan asked, curious.

Rupert shook his head, frowning as he stepped after his dog. "Gwydion, come here," he called out, but Giddy ignored him.

Skunk yapped seriously at Ethan as if trying very hard to tell him something, and with a sigh, he bent to pick her up, brushing off the worst of the debris in her fur first. Together, they followed Rupert.

Gwydion led them on a long winding trail through the attic before finally sitting down in front of a low sheet-covered object. Pawing at it, he turned and looked at Rupert and barked.

"Do you think Little Timmy has fallen down the well?" Ethan asked, bemused by the dog's behaviour.

"Shall we see?" Rupert asked, moving forward and lifting the sheet up. Underneath, there lay an antique trunk.

"Oh," Ethan breathed. He let Skunk down to the floor and then knelt. "I remember this," he said, running his hands over the lid. "It was full of clothes." He looked up at Rupert with a smile. "We had to open it together, if I remember rightly."

His words shook Rupert out of just staring at the trunk. "In the dream, yes," he said, stepping forward. "I don't know why I'm so shocked to find this here -- it's not like strange foretellings aren't becoming old hat to us."

"Then you haven't seen this trunk before? Apart from in the dream, I mean?" Ethan reached out with his magic sense to investigate the chest, but it wasn't there... he couldn't see it other than with his physical eyes.

"No, I haven't, and I thought I knew all of this place's secrets." Rupert was looking more bemused now than anything.

"It's warded," Ethan told him. "Or made of some special wood that blocks my perceptions, anyhow."

Rupert knelt beside Ethan and ran a hand over the top of the trunk. His fingers followed the filigree there, tracing out initials in the design. "It looks like it was my grandmother's."

Ethan laughed loudly. "Somehow, I can't quite believe that this is coincidence."

"I don't think anyone would." Rupert looked up at him. "Shall we?"

"Together," Ethan said with a broad grin, feeling far more excited than a potentially disastrous box-opening should permit. Skunk barked and bounced around the trunk, and even Giddy was wagging his tail madly, sniffing around the where the lid met the base of the trunk.

Together they each put a hand on the latch of the trunk, and together they lifted the lid.

As they did so, there was a whoosh of musty air, as if they were breaking the seal on some ancient tomb, and then a surge of magic, which to Ethan's rather too open senses was rather heady. He half-expected to look inside and see a pile of costumes, but that wasn't what the trunk contained.

Books, some of them quite obviously journals, filled the trunk, as well as large, well stuffed manila envelopes, scrolls, wooden boxes, various other small objects -- many quite clearly magical -- and on the very top a small white envelope addressed to 'Rupert and Ethan'.

Ethan snorted with irrepressible mirth and patted Rupert's back theatrically. "You know, sometimes I can almost see the strings."

"Yes, it does tend to engender the feeling of being the very last to know about our own lives, doesn't it?" Rupert replied absently, as he reached out and picked up the envelope. "That's my grandmother's writing."

"I assumed as much. Are you going to open it?" Assuming an answer in the affirmative, Ethan turned and sat down with his back to the chest. Skunk immediately jumped onto his lap, and Ethan was so dust-covered himself by now that he let her.

"That would be the best way to find out what's in it." Still Rupert just stared at the envelope.

"Dearheart?" Ethan asked gently, stroking his hand up Rupert's arm. "May I assume that you're not sure you *want* to know what's in it?"

Rupert gave a half-shrug. "I've never held with the saying 'ignorance is bliss', but I find myself strangely reluctant to find out what my grandmother knew. Rather silly, isn't it?"

"No, not at all." Ethan tugged a little on Rupert's arm. "Come down here and sit with me. We don't have to open it yet. Let's just talk about it."

With a faint smile and a sigh, Rupert complied, leaning against the chest beside Ethan.

Ethan moved close and put his hand on Rupert's leg, squeezing comfortingly. "We are not obliged to do anything with this you know. We could put it back in the trunk, close it up and never come up here again."

Rupert gave a small laugh at that. "I doubt there is anything more guaranteed to drive me crazy than not knowing when the knowledge is within my reach." He shook his head. "Which leaves me rather in a catch-22 situation here, doesn't it? I want to know, but I don't want to know." He reached out and stroked Gwydion's coat, the dog having settled down beside them. "What it all boils down to I guess is that I don't want to find out something that would destroy my memory of my grandmother."

"What might do that?" Ethan asked. "Let's get the worse possible scenario out in the open."

"Worst possible scenario? That would be finding out that she knew all along and manipulated me without my knowledge or care of what I would go through." Rupert gave a rueful smile. "In other words, that she treated me like the Council used to advocate treating the Slayer. My grandmother was always the one who encouraged me to think of the Slayer as a person first, weapon second, no matter what Council tradition said. I don't want to find out that belief didn't apply to me as well."

Ethan nodded. "Well, we can knock that one on the head for a start."

"She sent you away."

"Because if she hadn't, one or both of us would have died. I know you don't believe that would've happened, but I..." Ethan paused and looked down. "I have no argument with that conjecture of the Coven's."

"It wasn't her decision to make," Rupert continued stubbornly. "She should've given me -- us -- all the information and then trusted us to make the right choice. Even if we couldn't have been together then, things would have been so different if we had just known it was only temporary."

"No." Ethan wasn't sure how he knew this, but it felt like fact to him. "We weren't strong enough then. Not in any sense. Doc killed Derek, Rupert. Do you really believe I could have protected you, had he gone after you in turn?"

"I'm not exactly without defences of my own, you know."

"Neither were they."

"If we had known we wouldn't have spent two decades sniping at each other. If we had known..." Rupert hesitated then continued with a sigh. "You wouldn't have changed me into a f'yarl demon, and I wouldn't have let the Initiative have you."

"Those things were necessary," Ethan said stubbornly, holding onto that belief like a life belt.

Rupert didn't answer, but his expression remained troubled.

"Rupert, I..." Ethan scrubbed his hands over his face, trying to separate his genuine intuitive convictions from his emotions. It was no easy task. He sighed. "I can understand why you're unhappy. Truly, I can. All your life you've been steered by a suffocating destiny, which you've alternatively rebelled against and submitted to, until you found a more or less comfortable compromise. To find your life has been even less free than you'd thought must be... disturbing."

It was different for Ethan. While many aspects of this destiny they shared scared him, on the whole he rather liked being the subject of prophecy. It meant that he had significance, that he wasn't just a troublesome nobody fated only for oblivion. It meant that he had Rupert, who he didn't believe he would have without both the destined link and the prophecy caretakers. And yes, said caretakers probably had counted Rupert's grandmother amongst their numbers.

"You see those in the know about our destiny as obstacles keeping us apart," Ethan continued quietly. "I see them as people who have done everything in their power to make sure we can be together. Now obviously, they've done this so that we can fulfil the prophecy and save the world, but I don't care about their reasons. I care only that, thanks to them, we *are* together."

Rupert leant over and kissed him, sliding a hand to the nape of Ethan's neck to hold him in place while he did so. "I never lose sight of that -- that we are together now. That's the most important thing and I never forget that or take it for granted. It's just..." He sighed, obviously searching for the right words. "If destiny's the path fate lays out for you, it's damned hard to walk it or avoid it if you don't know it's there."

Ethan stroked Rupert's face, tracing the lines there. "Haven't you ever had to send the children blind into somewhere because it's safer for them that way?"

"Actually holding things back from Buffy and the others never turned out well," Rupert said wryly.

"But you tried at times?"

"At times. You were there the first time -- when Eyghon came back."

Ugh. Ethan screwed his face up. "Ah. I seem to remember doing my best to undo all your good obfuscation work at the time. I'm sorry."

Rupert waved the apology off. "Considering it was Willow who came up with the way of defeating him, it was a good thing the obfuscation didn't work."

Ethan really didn't want to talk about that time anymore, especially after his slightly tense telephone conversation with Buffy earlier during which he'd had to rather forcefully remind her not to shoot the sodding messenger. She had been understandably unhappy to hear about the attack on Dawn, and the tentatively revealed possibility that the Key was part of their prophecy had pleased even less.

He returned to the original subject. "Your Gran always steered your life. Even before you discovered this box and intuited her knowledge of the prophecy, you already knew she did that, so that hasn't changed. But you also knew she loved you, and rightly or wrongly tried to do what she thought was best for you. I don't believe that's changed either."

"You're right," Rupert conceded. "I just... I don't like to think that for love of me she cast you out to the wolves."

Ethan shrugged. "If I can forgive her, can't you?" Of course, it helped that Ethan believed that Rupert's grandmother had, by her actions, stopped Rupert becoming just another fatality of the war against dark-Chaos, much like Derek had been. And looking at it that way, it was very easy to forgive the woman.

"I don't have much choice, do I?"

"Of course you have a choice," Ethan pushed Skunk gently from his lap and twisted around. He wrapped his arms around Rupert and held him. "To loosely quote someone much wiser than me, we seem to have little choice in the larger aspects of our lives currently, but that doesn't mean that we're helpless slaves to fate."

Rupert chuckled, and Ethan could feel his mood lightening. "That does sound very familiar somehow."

"I like to quote the great mystics when I can." Ethan kissed Rupert's cheek. "Now, would it be easier for you to be on your own when you open it?" As they both knew he was going to.

"It's addressed to both of us," Rupert pointed out, looking down at the envelope, then sliding a finger along the flap to open it. All four of them -- two humans, two dogs -- sat in almost reverent silence as he slid out several sheets of ivory notepaper, each covered in a neat, old-fashioned handwriting.

Rupert cleared his throat, and began reading aloud...

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