Title: Strange Attractors 1/6
Author: K.V. Wylie
Pairing: Giles/Ira Rosenberg (Willow's father)
Spoilers: Spoilers to Season 6 BtVS
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Ethan arrives in town, pursuing plans of revenge against Giles, and discovers that Willow's powerful magical ability has been inherited from her father. Ira Rosenberg, a deeply religious man, distrusts magic, but Ethan is fascinated by him, a fascination that results in a crisis of faith for both men. Meanwhile, Giles is thinking of converting to Judaism.
Disclaimer: Permission to use these characters relating to BtVS & AtS, has not been given. Joss, Twentieth Century Fox, UPN, WB & Mutant Enemy own TM and copyrighted them. This is purely for fun, and no copyright infringement is intended

Note: First story in series is...In Giles' Living Room
Second story is...Going Towards Yes

The more I see pleasures about me
So much more I feel torment within me
As from the hateful siege of contraries
All good to me becomes bane
And in Heaven much worse would be my state."
  John Milton
  "Paradise Lost"

Ethan Rayne looked up at a second story window of a suburban house, and smiled. He'd approached the house in the darkness and from the back. The occupants inside didn't know he was here. It was his way.

He'd crept through an adjoining yard, liking the neighbourhood tendency for broad- trunked trees that hid his slender frame completely. He wasn't so sure about the neighbourhood music - Frank Sinatra pap at one house, and Emmylou Harris twang screeching from another. The latter he could hear too clearly.

"To know, know, know him, is to love, love, love him. Just to see him smile makes my life worthwhile."

Ethan tried to ignore the music as he gazed at the window. He knew who was up there.

Ripper.

"I'll be good to him. I'll be true to him. Everyone says there'll come a day when I'll walk alongside of him."

"Ripper, old man," he said out loud and deliberately off-key.

After escaping from the army base in Nevada, Ethan had gone to ground. His recuperation had been in the company of demons, the dredges of the demon world actually. The ones who were too pathetic to be a threat and were, therefore, beneath the notice of pretty well anything. Hidden in their midst, Ethan recuperated quite well.

He'd also spent the time plotting. He'd worked out two excellent schemes, and two passable ones. All of them involved the ruination of one Rupert Giles.

"We will always find each other," Ethan had once told Ripper, and the other man had been unable to disagree. A finely-stretched vibration lay between them, a signal to which Ripper ignored and Ethan listened. The signal had brought Ethan here, to a city in the back ass of a Canadian province, to this yard where a winter wind blew hard across his back.

It hadn't been an easy journey for Ethan. A few times, he'd lost the trail. In the past year, something had come into the signal's oscillation. A new ripple was in the pond, and Ethan eventually determined the presence of a lover. A constant one. Not one of the fly-by-nights that had been Ripper's style since, well…Ethan smiled…since *him*.

"Why can't he see how life should be? Someday he'll see that he was meant for me."

Ethan winced and seriously considered spells to blow a power line.

"Janus," he started, but the music cut off.

"Ah, the universe is finally listening to me," he murmured.

He turned his attention back to the window.

Ripper blamed him, and he blamed Ripper. That difference was that Ripper also blamed himself. He wallowed in guilt, drew it over him like a wet quilt. Ethan shed guilt. He let the past lie, other than learning what not to do twice.

Revenge was the only thing Ethan had carried through the years. At some point or another, he believed, events had to go in his favour, and he wasn't averse to pushing the process along.

A noise from the second floor caught his ear. "The lover appears," he thought.

Ethan waited an unreasonably long time, braced against the cold, until the sounds settled into frantic movements and pushes against bedsprings.

"My dear, there's life in you yet," Ethan murmured, but as he waited, head tilted like a cat, the new disturbance in the pattern took on a definite form. The smile disappeared from Ethan's face.

The new disturbance was male.

"Returning to your roots, eh?" Ethan mused. "And I'd lay money you're not taking the bottom with this one either."

He waited until the actions upstairs were finished, and five minutes more, before bending to work the back door lock.

The door opened silently. Ethan crept inside and took a few moments to orient himself. He was in a mudroom near a humming freezer. To his right was a kitchen, before him a hallway, and upstairs a dripping tap.

He went into the kitchen, his senses so heightened he could taste flour and feel against his tongue the edges of butcher knives in the block. Glass shimmered from the dining room. The living room blew dust at him. At last he found the front door and stood there, eyes closed, mapping the locations of hiding places and exits in his head.

Then he turned his attention to the stairway.

It curved. Ethan went up, hugging the hopefully less-used inside arc, testing each stair for squeaks before allowing his full weight on it. The single flight took forty minutes, but it was time well-spent. Ripper's hearing was unusually acute. The smallest noise would be an undoing.

All the doors on the second floor were closed, which didn't matter to Ethan. He knew where his old mate was. He always knew. As for the other man, Ethan could hear him breathing. The inhalations of the two sleeping men were in sync, and Ethan tucked the observation away. Even the unlikeliest bit of knowledge could come in handy.

'Door number four,' he thought. 'Let's make a deal.' He turned the doorknob slowly.

Moonlight shone through open blinds, and the men hadn't dressed after their lovemaking. Ethan's first look at the new male in the equation was a good one.

He lay against Ripper, one arm resting across Ripper's hip. Middle-age was settling at his stomach, and his copper-coloured hair was receding. Bifocals were on the table by his side of the bed. He was unremarkable. Ethan could almost dismiss his importance.

Almost. This unremarkable man had managed to disturb the connection between Ethan and Ripper. Not even the otherwise powerful Slayer had been able to accomplish that.

Ethan closed his eyes and listened.

Underneath the static, a small feeler quivered, a tendril of something clamped down and clamped down very hard.

Ethan drew in the feeler's aura. Magic drew to magic, and Ethan drew it to him. The smallest flame burned in the other man, the tiniest unfired charge hovered around the DNA, but size didn't matter if it the potency was right. Ethan recognized a spark here that could blow out a world.

He opened his eyes, frowning at a Deja-vu feeling that insisted an aspect of this magical signature was familiar, though he'd never seen this man before. He was sure of it.

Then it came to him.

Copper-coloured hair. The little witch in Sunnydale.

The grin hit Ethan's face so hard, it hurt his cheekbones. 'The little witch's father,' he thought. 'Oh Janus, this is *too* good!'

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Giles gave up trying to clear steam from the bathroom mirror, and put down his razor. "How can you stand this heat?" he muttered.

The shower shut off. "Did you say something, Rupert?"

"Every morning, it's the same. I can't see to shave. That's it, then. I'm letting it grow."

Ira Rosenberg stepped under the warming light and began drying himself. "So you've said twice before. One of us has to shave, or the static becomes unmanageable."

"Your turn. Get rid of the beard."

"We'll see who gives in first," Ira said, eyes twinkling.

"Celibacy is not a hardship for me," Giles said, and kissed Ira to stop the retort. "That's the last one until you lose the scruff, and I hope you get horny because you're not getting any."

"This 'scruff' has been on my face for over twenty years," Ira said. "I am not cutting it off."

"What are you like under there?" Giles asked with a gentle poke at Ira's cheek.

"I can't remember." Ira admitted. He hung his towel neatly and went into the bedroom to dress.

"Perhaps I won't like the look of you," Giles called after him and heard a laugh in return.

Giles stepped into the shower. Ira had left the soap precisely in the middle of the soap dish and lined the shampoo and conditioner bottles evenly in the caddy. Every morning, he did the same, but the sight of it now made Giles think of Ethan, the only other man Giles had known with the same meticulous habits.

Then Giles paused, an unpleasant feeling running through him. Ethan hadn't crossed his mind for over a year.

A sting of soap in his eyes brought him back to the present. He finished his shower and went into the bedroom to dress.

"What's this in the dust?" Giles asked, looking at the top of a bureau.

"I thought you had written that," Ira said.

"If I'd written anything, it would be 'your turn for this job'. This is a mathematical equation." Giles peered over suspiciously. "You didn't do it?"

"No, Rupert. Perhaps the cleaning service?"

"We told them to stay out of our bedroom."

"They're not listening to us."

"We haven't had concerns about that before, Ira."

"Who else could it have been?" Ira started out the door. "I'll be late tonight. I have two student conferences. You have a dental appointment. Don't forget."

Giles murmured distractedly in reply as he copied what was written in the dust onto a piece of paper.

"Eleven-thirty, Rupert."

"One-thirty."

"Eleven-thirty," Ira corrected. "Remember what happened last time. That poor dental assistant is traumatized for life."

"And you don't think you exaggerate. Or nag."

Ira chuckled as he went downstairs. "I'll make a pot of tea for you."

The phone rang once and clipped off neatly. A few minutes later, Giles heard Ira call for him.

He picked up the received distractedly. "Hello."

Anyone listening would have heard the difference in Giles' tone immediately. Warmth entered it, and tension. "Good morning, Tara. How are you? Good. I knew you'd pass. And, uh, how is everyone else?'"

Giles braced the receiver between an ear and a shoulder as he finished buttoning his shirt. "The wedding is when? I'll try, but I don't think I'll be able to make it. Please give them my best…hmm? The book? It's, uh, going well." He changed the subject. "I have a question for you. The mathematical symbol which looks like a upended pitchfork, what does it stand for? Pardon? Wave? Would that refer to light? Perhaps. Yes, I avoided physics too when I was in university. "

They spoke for a few minutes longer. By the time Giles went downstairs, Ira had left to teach his classes at the university. The teapot was hot under its cozy though, and a plate of scrambled eggs and toast had been left in a warmed stove. Giles smiled…until he saw the note that said, "11:30" taped to the milk.

"You do so nag," he said.

He carried his breakfast to the sunny end of the kitchen, but as he ate, his mind turned back to the equation. It bothered him. The cleaners (various young women overseen by a tempting bit of maleness named George) had been quite diligent in avoiding rooms they'd been asked to stay out of. After all, such restrictions meant less work for them. George was the only possibility, though Giles couldn't see what the young man's motive might be.

After eating the toast, Giles opened his laptop and laboriously typed the equation into an internet search engine, nearly exhausting the small set of mathematical symbols his word processor possessed. The first hit returned the word, "Schrodinger."

"Who?" Giles mused to himself. He clicked on the website and found part of the equation, as well as a rather hyperbolic lecture on Quantum wave theory.

"If this is your idea of a joke, Ira…" Giles backtracked, and tried the next few sites listed at the search engine. Thirty minutes later, his tea was cold and he was no further ahead.

He gave up and dialed the university.

"Rupert!" sounded a melodious female voice at the other end. "Shouldn't you be working on your book? You bitch at me never to phone because I'll break your train of thought. Meanwhile, we're all still waiting to see if you've ever actually had one."

"I'm on the second chapter, Sheila."

"Only because you gave up on the first," she said, though not unkindly.

Giles dubiously considered a pile of papers at the far end of the table. "Not quite," he said. "I want to ask you something."

"No, Rupert, I will not do a threesome."

And that did make him laugh. "What about a foursome with Edwin Schrodinger?"

Got you, he thought when she fell into a surprised silence at the other end.

At last, Sheila said, "That's a little creepy, Rupert, considering the gentleman's dead."

"You know who he is?"

"I should hope so. I teach his equations. He was a brilliant and high-strung physicist who went head to head with Einstein over light beams, hence the reason he fell into his nervous state."

"I'm going to send you something. Would you please tell me what it is?" Giles emailed the equation.

He heard her keyboard. A moment later, she said, "It's a mathematical equation."

Giles sighed into the phone, and she laughed. "Rupert, part of it is Schrodinger's famous equation. See that upended pitchfork at the beginning? That's the symbol for the wave function."

"Which is part of light?"

"Yup, waves and particles, and probably other stuff we have yet to discover. Schrodinger's theory is that when we look at light waves, we cause them to collapse."

"Collapse," Giles echoed. "That doesn't sound good."

"In order to measure a light wave, we have to interfere with it, which causes the wave's death. The next part of your equation is frequency divided by momentum times mass. That's pretty common in Quantum functions, and in letters to Playboy," she joked. "The triangle standing on its point is used to represent an allowance for an unknown quantity."

Giles glanced at his computer screen. "It is enclosed in parenthesis with the number 63.546."

"Yes," Sheila answered. "Which means that the unknown quantity has or will have an effect on that number. The last part of your equation, 'equals 0', is something my first year students might try when they're stuck on a test. It's actually used more in Chaos theory progressions."

Giles stiffened. "Chaos? What does zero mean there? No options?"

"Actually it means, anything can happen now. That's what Chaos theory is, that all possibilities are wide open. Chaos theory has its beginnings in Quantum physics, and Schrodinger was probably its first father, though he'd shudder to know that. He thought he was a Determinist who'd found certainty."

Giles rubbed his forehead and asked apprehensively, "Does 63.546 have any special meaning?"

"Just a moment," she said. He heard her keyboard again. "It's the atomic weight of copper."

That only puzzled him for a moment. "Ah hell," he said.

"Rupert?"

"Nothing, uh, sorry," Giles said. "What do I owe you?"

"Latte, and no being cheap on the foam."

"Would you like cinnamon sprinkles too?"

"You know better," she teased. "Just bring me my latte."

After he hung up, he eyed the equation and muttered, "Unknown quantity indeed. I think I'll call you Ethan."

Saying the name out loud gave him a bad feeling, and Giles glanced around, half- expecting that the act of saying the name would conjure up said unwanted. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the room stayed empty except for him.

He swore softly again. He could either wait for Ethan to make a second appearance, or resort to magic to locate him. He hated waiting, however Ira disapproved of sorcery, and Giles carried enough bad memories to keep clear of it.

He walked to the window and gazed out. Worse than Ethan, his break and enter, and his calling card's implied threat against Ira, was the fact that Giles had never actually told Ira about him. Names had not come up between them. And now Ethan's would be the first.

"All right…if that's the way it has to be," Giles whispered. He closed his eyes and raised his head until the sun shone red through his eyelids. Then he sought Ethan.

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Ethan fell into the movement of students through the school hallways as easily as an eel gliding through a current. He let himself be carried along in the general tide for a while before stopping a fetching woman and asking, "Do you know where I might find Professor Rosenberg?"

"Oh *him*!" she groaned, and Ethan hid a smile. "His office is that way. Follow the smell of tight-ass." She gestured behind her.

Oh, if you only knew what he likes to do at night, Ethan laughed to himself. He hadn't needed directions; the magical spark of the little witch's father wasn't difficult to home in on, now that he knew what to look for. But he thought it wise to gather as much information about the lay of the land as possible. "He likes to torment his students?" Ethan asked her, while giving her an intimate smile.

"He's raised it to an art form," she said, giving him a second look. "You're English."

"Yes, and here to visit an old friend." He moved closer. "The professor hasn't been here very long, has he, Miss-?"

"This is his second semester," she said. "I'm Heather."

"Heather. An English name, and a lovely one."

She eyed him speculatively, and with that he knew she was ready to be charmed. Five minutes later, he knew everything she knew about Dr. Ira Rosenberg and a few tidbits on Rupert as well, for it seemed the two of them were living quite openly in this town. Ethan also had the girl's phone number and a promise that he would be most welcome…any night. By the time Ethan continued down the hall, he was a self-satisfied man indeed.

Someone yanked his sleeve. Ethan whirled around.

Confronting him was a wild-haired man. "I am Ezekiel and it is time for you to wake up."

Ethan pulled his sleeve free. "Excuse me?"

"You are a polliwog. Your heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent of your wickedness and pray God to save you from your sins."

Before Ethan could say anything, Ezekiel turned and grabbed a passing student. "Repent, blasphemer!"

The young man laughed as he went by. "You've gotta stop hanging around here, dude. You'll get arrested again."

Ezekiel reached for Ethan again. "I perceive that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of inequity. Give up your lies and debauchery and your addiction to foul trinkets of devil worship." He snatched a gold pen from Ethan's pocket and held it up like he was displaying an idol.

Ethan chuckled as he took his pen back. "I'll stick with the debauchery."

But as he continued down the hall, Ezekiel got the parting shot. "Know before Whom you stand, friend!"

Ethan looked behind him, but Ezekiel had moved on to another student.

"Indeed," he murmured as he rapped on the last door in the hall.

"Enter," came the response.

Ethan went in just as Ira looked up from behind his desk. He watched Ira's expression shift from surprise to a frown, then to suspicion.

'Good,' he thought. He hadn't been wrong about the little witch's father. It had only taken the man three seconds to get on his guard.

"You're not a student," Ira said.

"I'm Ethan Rayne, an acquaintance of Rupert's."

Ira glanced down, but Ethan felt an intense look sweep over him during the movement. He pretended not to notice.

At last, Ethan said, "You don't know my name."

"No."

"I was once Rupert's friend, the way you are now."

"If Rupert was here, what would he say?"

"He's old and I don't think he'd have enough breath to talk while he was gleefully smashing my face."

Ira stood, put his hands casually in his trousers pockets, and looked back up. "Why don't you go see him then, and get on with it?"

Ethan paused at Ira's seemingly emotionless tone. "May I?" He gestured at a chair, then sat. "You see, Rupert and I have this, well, connection. In twenty-three years we haven't been able to shake loose of it."

"And you wish to sever this association?" Ira asked.

"You're doing that for us, Dr. Rosenberg." Ethan caught a startled raise of an eyebrow. "There's power in you," he said softly. "I'm not interested in Rupert any more than I'm interested in having him put my nose on the back of my head. I came here to see you."

"Good day, Mr. Rayne. There's the door."

"Sorcery runs in families, Dr. Rosenberg. Your daughter inherited her capacity from you. Hasn't Rupert explained this to you?"

Coldly, Ira said, "Are you threatening me with my daughter?"

Quickly, Ethan said, "We both know what she does in her spare time. Well, most of her time actually. Your daughter dares too much on her own. She's doing the same thing Rupert and I did. We thought we were in control, and then…" Ethan lowered his voice. "We caused the death of our friend." He noticed Ira's shoulders tighten. "Rupert blames me and I blame him. The truth is in the middle. We both did it."

"Mr. Rayne, I know you're not interested in my daughter's welfare and I am not willing to hear your confession."

"I've been paying for twenty-three years. He got off. His father made phone calls, you see. There were no charges…for him. I, on the other hand, spent time looking at the inside of a jail cell. Afterwards, my life didn't start over. I was tossed out to the dogs. Since then, I've been waiting for him to take his due. Sooner or later, it has to happen."

"And you intend to get back at Rupert through me?" Ira asked in such an apparently bland tone that Ethan's estimation of the man raised a few notches.

"I'm not interested in Rupert," Ethan repeated.

Ira murmured in disgust.

"It's in you. You were born with it. You cause things to happen and you're not even aware you're doing it. Why hasn't Rupert explained this to you? There's danger in ignorance. Rupert knows that." Ethan glanced behind him. "He's looking for me, but he can't get past your static."

"Get out, Mr. Rayne."

Ethan went to the door. "I told you the truth. You know that I have. Can't you feel it? It's in the air between us. Taste it. It's on our tongues and in our throats. We've already begun to join, you and I. Those with true magic draw together." He frowned. "I can hear Rupert now. And, quickly, here's my second confession. I broke into your house last night."

"You *what*?"

"I sensed your power. I just wanted to look at you. I had to wait for a while. You and Ripper were busy boys." He moved fast through the door, aware of Rupert's proximity. "Here we go," he whispered, but, for some reason, he wasn't happy, and he didn't quite know why.

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