Title: The Waking 2/2
Author: Mad Poetess (abbyty@lycos.com)
Rating: R
Pairing: Giles/f, though it also includes Giles/Ethan
Spoilers: All of BtVS through Chosen
Distribution: List archives, my place; others, please ask.
My place: http://www.hawksong.com/~mpoetess/stakes
Feedback: is beloved.
Disclaimer: Joss owns BtVS and its characters; I, sadly, do not. Theodore Roethke's poem of the same title inspired the story's title and epigraph. I suspect Shel Silverstein deserves an apology at some point, as well.
Notes: Written for Wolfling's Giles-fic-a-thon, whose index is here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/wolfling/156930.html. Many thanks to Magpie and Justhuman for beta-above-and-beyond.
Summary: "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow; I learn by going where I have to go." Giles is loved.
He did come back, after he went away. She pointed it out to the willow, who scoffed at her. Yes, back, but back for days, then off again, and it wasn't as if he came out of the house when he *was* here.
But he came *back*, she said. Always. Because it was the only thing she had to say.
It wasn't much, as the seasons slowed down to move at their normal rate. Slower, even, with him gone away. Autumn dragged forever into winter, and small neighbor boys sneaking over to steal her fallen fruits from the ground only reminded her of Rupert in a bad way. An emptiness like dry-rot that made her ache inside.
Winter, and she hid inside herself from the snow and the cold, whispering the things she knew of love, to keep them fresh. It burns. It itches. It makes you fear its loss. It tastes like apples and fire on your lover's lips. It breaks the inside of you, and puts you back together in a different shape. It stays, even when the loved one goes away. And he does come back.
Spring, and he didn't come back.
Summer, and he visited once, and stayed in the house.
Autumn, and winter, and spring, and summer, and winter and every day was longer than the next.
She called for him, with the voice of her rooted self. Sometimes in the night when she was certain his parents wouldn't hear, even in her other, human voice. He never answered, could not hear. She knew it, but she did so anyway.
She reached for him, as well, the only way she knew. She could not follow him to wherever he'd gone away; her two-footed body was bound to her tree and could barely reach the edge of the road, even if she had known which way to go when she got to the crossroads in the distance. But she could reach with her other body, out into the world. Down, and out. Deep into the soil, past worms, rocks, she reached with her roots. She didn't know what direction, could not feel him, far away, so she reached in *every* direction. Splitting. Growing. Pushing ever outwards.
Finally, finally, he came home. Near the end of the fourth long, slow autumn. At dusk, when his parents had driven away somewhere hours ago and the house was dark and empty, Rupert came walking --out of the woods, not down the path. Back to her -- but he wasn't alone.
"What's the matter, Ripper -- afraid to go inside? Scared they left the maid behind to tell tales on us when they get back?" It was a boy -- a man, she supposed, as her boy was a man now, and this one stood as tall as him, though thinner. There was darkness snapping in his eyes, a teasing whine in his voice like the far-off buzz of dragonflies in summer.
"We -- they -- haven't got a maid, you prat. Just don't want the neighbours thinking someone's breaking in, ringing up the police. Or even telling my folks I was here, if they see that it's me. Just wait back here a bit, 'til it gets dark." Rupert ducked beneath her shade, and the other man followed, rolling his eyes.
"Who cares if they ring the cops? We'd be out of there before they ever showed. And who cares if they know it's you -- not like they don't know where you aren't. The college has to have called weeks ago -- you think stopping off home to steal some of your dad's books is really going to put the final nail in your dead-to-them coffin?" The other man laughed, and it sounded like branches breaking. She felt a brief inexplicable desire to do that -- break one off on his head.
"Shut it, Ethan. My family's none of your business. Did you come out here just to wind me up, or what?"
"I thought I came to pay your trainfare with fairy gold. Fairy paper, really, though it'll still be leaves in the morning."
"No, that's why I brought you, not why you came along."
"I'm wounded to the quick; here I thought you were taking me home to meet the Mater and Pater." The young man clutched his fingers to his heart. "You're ashamed of me, aren't you. Admit it."
"Frequently."
Ethan grinned. She didn't like his grin. It was sharp and sly and full of secrets. "That's all right, then. Had me worried for a second."
Rupert -- *her* Rupert, looked back at him, and grinned the same sharp grin. Somewhere in her topmost branches, the tree began to quiver. "You make as little sense as possible, don't you."
"I do try. Sensible's predictable, you know. And predictable makes you slow. Slow makes you..."
"Dead." There was all the weight of a long-gone boy's anger in that word, but none of the fire. It slipped out and hung there, and for a second his face looked as grey as his father's had, those many years ago.
"Well. Not quite what I was thinking, but as good as, anyway. I was going for boring."
The grey was gone, and there was that grin again. That grin on Rupert. It burned, but wrongly. Ate at the center of her trunk, a feeling half familiar, from long ago. One that had, back then, aborted itself when a girl hung upside down from her branch. Not now. Now the fear raged through her veins, the channels that carried water from her roots now shooting something else entirely through her body.
"You never go for boring." Rupert's hand fell on the other man's shoulder and those black-snap eyes turned hot, like pitch in the sun. His hand snaked out to grasp at Rupert's neck, and Rupert pushed him hard against her trunk. Pushed him, and then... and then put his mouth against Ethan's and they were *kissing*.
He was *kissing* her Rupert. Here, against her skin. How dare he, this stranger. This ... this... Blind worms! Slugs and snails! Root rot!
She'd drop that branch on him now, if she could get away with it, but it would mean crawling out human-shaped and breaking it off. She settled for what she *could* do -- she let the anger overtake her limbs, and rained down conkers on his head.
On both their heads, she realized, bent close together as they were, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to feel sorry that Rupert got pelted as well.
Ethan raised his face up first, peering suspiciously up into her branches. "That was... interesting. Considering the air's been perfectly still. You've not got an infestation of monkeys around here by any chance?"
Rupert lifted up his face and blinked. "Not that I know of."
The...blindwormrootrotsnailslug put his hand against her trunk for a moment, and she felt... dizzy. She hadn't known she could feel dizzy, but that must be what this was, this feeling like the wind was blowing so hard through her branches that the world beyond turned fuzzy and grey.
"*Very* interesting." He slithered out from Rupert's arms and reached up to grab a bough. Climbing her! And not to hang upside down, she suspected, though even if he did, she knew this angry fearful burn would never fade. Not with this one.
He didn't hang upside down, though. He moved sure-footed, up and up, touching her every so often with that same dizzy surge of being *looked* at. Read, like a book, like she was pressed and bound and dead beneath his hands. Up, and up, while Rupert watched, impatient, from below. Towards the kestrel's nest, and suddenly she knew where he was going.
"What are you doing, Ethan? Get down before you break your fool neck."
"Someone doesn't like us very much, I think." She hit him with another seed. "No -- someone just doesn't like me," the other called down. "I wonder why." And he reached for the hole in her trunk, the little leaf-stuffed hideaway that no one, not even the birds, ever touched.
Her hand snapped tight around his wrist before she had the chance to think about it, almost before she knew she was out of her skin. He stared up at her, where she crouched above his head. You *never* let humans see, she heard her mother whisper inside her. Yes, but this was more important than that.
She leaned down and brought her face so close to his that she saw her own self in his eyes. "Do *not*," she hissed at him, quick like an angry snake. Quiet as she could so that Rupert below wouldn't hear, wouldn't peer closer to see. She tightened her fingers around his wrist, squeezing with all the strength that her rooted form could used to send those roots searching outward for water, for food, for Rupert. His eyes narrowed, and he looked about to speak, so she said it again. Whispered it close to his ear. "Do *not*. Go *away*."
They stared at each other for a very long second, and she wondered if Rupert would hate her, if she broke the branch that this one perched on, sent it crashing down.
"all right," said the rootwormsnailslug *thief*, in a voice loud enough for Rupert to hear. "I'll go. But I'm taking him with me, you know."
She dropped another conker on his head, from high above. "He comes back," she told him, and let go of his wrist, melting into her trunk.
"Ethan, what are you on about? Or maybe it's what are you *on*? Come down here."
"On my way, Ripper; don't burst a vessel." He shinnied quickly down her body, and for Rupert's sake, she resisted the urge to move a low branch just enough to make him trip at the end. To remind him that she meant what she'd said. Go. Go now.
When he reached the ground, he pulled Rupert away from her trunk. Away from her roots. Towards the house.
"Come on; it's dark enough now. Let's get out of here."
"You're crazy, you know. It's just a horse-chestnut tree. Used to be my favourite place to play when I was a kid."
"Just your childhood playmate? Nothing more than that? I think I should be jealous; it certainly has strong feelings for *you*." He was too far away now to hit with a seed, so she poked her head out of her trunk to glare at his back.
"You *are* crazy."
"But never boring."
"That'd be why I brought you with me."
"I thought it was the fairy gold?"
"That too." Rupert paused before the door, reaching in his jacket pocket for something. "You never said why you came along, though."
"To make sure that you don't stay, of course. So your parents didn't trap you in their nets again, send you back to Watcher school."
Rupert's hands stopped moving. "Not going to happen," he said, his voice low. "That's...not me. Not anymore; maybe never was." He pulled something shiny from his jacket.
Ethan's voice was sharp, loud enough to be heard even over the creak of the back door opening. "You're not bored -- you're *afraid* of it, aren't you!" There was something of gloating, and something of satisfaction in the sound of his laugh, and she wasn't just jealous, now. She *hated* him.
Rupert turned, half in the doorway, looking back, and she ducked her head inside her skin again, though she doubted he could see her from that distance. "You--" Bright fury, for just a second, the fire that hadn't been there when his face was grey. Then gone, as quick as it came, his face falling into a shadowed smile. "You did just come along to piss me off."
"Well I'm good at it; seems a shame to waste the talent..."
Their voices faded as they moved inside and the door closed behind them. She watched the house, but it stayed dark, until finally they emerged, bags over their shoulders, black guitar-case in Rupert's hand. They left by the back gate, Ethan making sure, she noticed, to keep them out of range of falling seeds.
'He does come back,' she said to herself, as the night grew darker, colder. 'He did. He does. This is nothing. He does come back to me.'
Early in the morning, when the kestrel was just waking in its nest, she slipped her skin again, and climbed up to that secret little hole. She reached inside, and held the prize that she had hidden within, in the palm of her hand. One conker, polished smooth and brown, several seasons past its prime. Not safe anymore, not here.
She folded her fingers around it, and whispered -- the last thing she could think to teach it. She wind-hissed the words aloud, even if, shaking, she was unsure if she was a liar, after all. "Love comes back. Love always comes back."
Then she held it out to the kestrel, and asked the bird to fly with it, far away.
*****
When he came back to Oxford, Rupert's parents sold the house. Moved into a smaller, cosy place not far from his college. They said that the old one was too big to manage with just the two of them anymore, and they'd rather live somewhere closer to the Council headquarters in London, so his father needn't commute so far to work.
But he knew they did it to keep an eye on him. Make sure he didn't drop out of school, out of his Watcher training, off the face of the earth, again.
He didn't tell them there was no danger of that. Or rather, he did, but not so well that they believed him. He couldn't, without explaining why, and he wasn't about to do that. To tell them about Eyghon. About Randall. About Ethan, who'd given him the same damned disappointed look when he left London that his tutor gave him when he showed back up at school. That his father gave him a week later when *he* arrived in Oxford.
Seemed he was always disappointing someone. But at least this way, he wouldn't be playing with fire. Even if he failed -- the freezing fear that had made him run to London in the first place, that Ethan, for some reason, could pluck from his brain as easily as he could pluck a wallet from someone's pocket -- at least Rupert would be *trying* to keep someone safe. Not running so far and so fast from that responsibility that he got Randall killed, instead.
Somehow it didn't make things easier, that he was doing the right thing, now. He half suspected there *was* no right thing, never had been. That it was all some cosmic joke, and somewhere, someone was laughing hard at him. In his blackest moods, he consoled himself with the thought that if he'd grown up to be a fighter pilot, he probably would have crash-landed on top of an orphanage.
In brighter, later times, he rather wished his parents had kept the house he'd grown up in. It would have made a nice place to go home to, just every so often, when things got too much. That wouldn't be the same as running away had been. Just a little trip out to the horse chestnut tree with jam sandwiches, to think for a while.
*****
Love comes back, she had said, but this time, he didn't come back. Counting by seasons hurt too much, so she started to count by years. One winter. His parents left, and they never came back either. Two winters. Three. The kestrel died; a pair of black rooks took its place.
Boys grow up, the willow said again. Gently; there was no mocking now. They do not live forever anyway, you know. Would you have wished to see him go grey, like his father? Small and shrunken, as the old ones get? Best that he has gone while he was still what they call pretty, is it not?
She did not answer the willow. She'd stopped talking to it years ago; she wished she could stop listening to it too.
No, she answered in her heart, in the still-green center of herself. No, it is not best. Yes, I wish to see him go grey, grow old. Silver as aspen leaves. Small, wrinkled, frail, I do not care. He is mine. I want him here.
She reached again, with her roots. Out and down, down and out. Years and seasons, trying to find him again. Under the ground, she couldn't tell where she was, could not see in the dark, but she could tell if he was there -- or wasn't. He always wasn't, and so she pushed on.
Sun and rain. Children climbing in her branches, new houses closing in on her garden. She saw it all, but could not bring herself to care. For all the distance that she traveled underground, she felt more root-bound to the earth than ever, seldom stepping from her skin anymore, to feel the sunlight, the wind on her other body.
Once, the other one came to see her. At night, when the lights were off in the house that no longer belonged to Rupert's family, he came. It was many years later than she'd seen him last, but she recognised the blackness of his eyes. The shape of his face beneath the lines. She shook her branches at him, though it was spring and there was nothing she could drop upon his head.
"Oh, hush, old thing," he told her, peering up. To see if she would watch him from above, no doubt, but she would not give him the sight of her other form, not now. Not when the thing he'd tried to steal so long ago was gone. Long gone and far from here. "I didn't come to hurt you or steal your pretties. Just came..." He walked slowly around her trunk, touching it carefully. Softly. "Really I don't know why I came. Seemed like the thing to do, somehow. Don't dare go near him *now*, so why not drop in on his past."
When his fingers passed across the slashes of Rupert's name, she heard him sigh. It sounded very old, that sigh. Did that mean her boy was old, somewhere, as the willow had said? Did he have as many lines? It didn't matter at all, of course; he would still be beautiful -- but she would have liked to be able to see him in her mind as he was now.
Ethan touched her again, tracing the letters with his hands. "So. He carved himself in you as well, did he?"
That was too much. He went too far. She slid free from her trunk enough to hiss at him, a wordless order to leave.
"all right, all right. I'll go. You are a possessive thing, aren't you. Well, if he ever comes back, I wish you joy of him. He's gone cantankerous in his golden years."
Then he was gone, and she was all alone again.
Not long after that -- a year or two at most -- something else, something terrifying, happened. A clear spring day in England, and underneath the earth, she was pushing, pushing, reaching, as always -- and suddenly, the world... *screamed* at her. Or perhaps she just screamed so loud that it echoed back at her from everywhere.
Something was reaching, reaching *back* at her. Reading her like Ethan had, that once. Like a dead flat book. *Knowing* her. Something sad and raging that touched... everything at once, it felt like. Every sorrow that she knew; her loneliness, her need. Every year she'd spent alone, reaching, whispering that love comes back. Every hated moment when just for a second, she didn't believe it.
She screamed, and in the fire of her scream, she thought she heard every other voice in the world scream as well -- including his. Somewhere he screamed in sorrow, anger, pain, and it made her hurt that smallest fraction more.
Through the earth, through her blind seeking roots, she heard one voice not screaming. Dire and angry, blacker than the dark beneath the grass. "Oh, you poor bastards...your suffering has to end."
Her tree-body shook. Her human body cowered inside it, deep within her heart, and she thought the world would end. And then... it did.
Not the world, but the pain. The suffering, the screaming... stopped. The day was still and warm, and there was silence in her mind.
His voice was silent too, though, and for that, though the fear was gone, she wept.
Then reached. And reached.
*****
"You call them *what*?" Dawn asked, her face twisted up in that half-amused, half-dubious look that said she suspected he was putting her on.
"Conkers," Rupert repeated patiently. Was it a prerequisite of teenagers everywhere that they have not only the ability but the moral imperative to turn every remotely susceptible word into an innuendo? He stifled a laugh at himself; of course it was. It certainly had been for him at this age. "Horse chestnuts, more properly." Which, by the look on her face, was hardly an improvement.
"And you play with them by banging them together."
"If you don't stop making that face, young lady, I'm going to clean my glasses at you, and then where will you be?"
"Slightly out of focus and a little to the left of where you think I am?"
Rupert scowled lightly at her, and dropped the nut to the earth again. "You did ask about what it was like growing up here, you know. Not that I grew up in Devon, but..."
"You see one conker, you've seen 'em all?"
He sighed. "More or less. There was a tree very much like this behind my parents' house when I was young. Don't you have a sister you're supposed to be terrorising?"
Dawn pointed off towards another tree, where Buffy, Willow, and Kennedy sat cross-legged at its base. "Willow's giving them the 12-step, root-systems, how I learned to stop being evil and connect with everything in the world in a *happy* way, speech. Only this time with visual aides, since we're, you know. Here. Where it happened. Which is cool. But pardon me if I still like to be out of blast radius when she does the great big magic things. I trust her -- I do. I just...get a little spooked."
Rupert watched as the grass in front of Willow and the two Slayers shifted, slightly, and a small green plant appeared. In seconds, it had shot high into the air, and a bright yellow sunflower had sprouted at its top. At least she wasn't repeating herself, he thought with a smile, as the plant shrunk down again and disappeared into the soil.
"That, I would say, was one of the smaller magic things. Although in some ways, you're right -- because they're all great big." He walked toward the other girls, and Dawn walked at his side, despite her professed desire to stay out of the path of Willow's demonstration.
"Right. Everything touches everything else. Every little thing you do can change the world. I get it." She sounded tolerantly bored, but a glance at Dawn's face showed a half-serious smile. "No, really. I get it. Kind of hard not to, when you're off chasing down all the girls all over the world that your sister turned into superheroes just by handing Willow an axe."
"That on the other hand would be one of the great big magic things. In all senses of the words." They reached the tree, and the girls looked up at them.
"Hey guys -- you missed the commercial for Super-Willow-Gro Fertilizer," Buffy said.
"No Paraguay this time, Giles," Willow assured him, a bit uncertainly. "Just Iowa. I sent it home again, though."
"I saw," he corrected her, and smiled to let her know it didn't bother him. He knew as well as she did -- perhaps better, though her confidence in herself had increased tenfold since she'd activated the potential Slayers -- the difference between this sort of magic and the things that she had done in her sickness and her grief. He was in no fear of becoming bangers and mash if he displeased her. "I'm glad you sent it home; it wouldn't have fared very well here, I'm afraid. Not sunny enough."
"So you just, what... reached all the way across the world and found a sunflower, and brought it here?" Kennedy asked, her face set in a frown of concentration that was becoming familiar; it happened every time she tried to understand the way Willow's magic worked. Which was much more often, since she'd seen the power that Willow had channeled that final day in Sunnydale.
"Not exactly, hon. I didn't *bring* it -- that would've caused all kinds of trouble. I just reached *out*. Down into the ground. And kind of... *asked* it if it wanted to come see England for a bit." Willow put her hands on the earth by way of demonstration.
"You talked to a plant and it actually listened?"
"Sure. I mean, I'm not saying a philodendron is ever gonna take Jon Stewart's place on the Daily Show, but they're alive. They have a... a spirit to them, even if it's not just like ours." She closed her eyes, and set her fingertips deeper in the grass; perhaps even down into the dirt. "Everything has a spirit, something you can touch, or talk to if you know the right words. You, me, this tree, the bird that's about to drop something nasty in Dawn's hair..."
Dawn stepped backwards with a squeak, and looked up, then glared back down at Willow. "Not funny."
"Was too," Willow answered without opening her eyes.
"Kinda yes," Buffy agreed.
Kennedy knelt in front of Willow, staring down at her spread fingers in the ground. "So you're connected to the whole world right now? You're like radio station K-WILL!"
Willow giggled. "Something like that. But not much more than anybody else is -- I can just hear things a little better.
*****
Reaching. Reaching. She was always reaching, and so used to it that in the moment that she sensed him, she didn't even realize at first. Then she thought she must be wrong -- for of all the roots that she had spread, had pushed out through the earth, this was one of the closer ones. Far closer than he'd seemed that day the world had screamed and for an instant she had felt him.
But it was him. It was Rupert, somewhere so near that she knew, if she just grew faster, reached harder, she could get there. Could be where he was.
She moved through the soil as fast as Rupert had, that night that he'd run toward her, head down, and hit himself until he bled. She pushed like a blind, burrowing worm, if that worm could travel with the force of a tree's love, with the power of her human form breaking free of the trunk of her tree, rushing down, down into that one root. She might burn herself out; she could feel as she pushed that the fire of her passage was eating away at that power, channeling it into her tree-body forever. She might never step out of her bark-skin again, but she would reach him this time.
Something new about love, or something old rather, that she hadn't had words for before, though she'd been living it all along. Something she'd never had time to teach before she sent her own seed far away: if love does not come back, you go to it.
Then, seconds away, she heard a voice. Soft, female. Questioning. 'Hello?'
It echoed up the root to the tree -- up *all* the roots, to the tree. Made her freeze in place, her soul-self seeking vainly to hide inside a trunk now miles away from the root that it traveled through. Because that voice was the voice that had almost ended the world -- the one full of fury and sorrow that had brought her Rupert to her, for a second's screaming pain. And now it stood between her and him. Blocking her way.
'No,' it said. 'Oh, no, please. Don't be afraid. I'm...I'm not like that anymore. I'm so sorry.'
She stayed where she was, huddled tight inside her root, afraid to move. Afraid to believe it. The power was still there; it boomed within in the voice, made her chitter inside like a terrified sparrow.
'Please...' And the power touched her. Stroked along her root, and opened itself up to her, as she had once been opened wide to it. There was fear, and sorrow, and pain, all the things that had raged at her, yes, but also kindness, softness, newfound hope, like a seedling growing up into the day.
And every place that voice, that power, touched her, she could see Rupert on the other side. The places where he had touched this one. Where he had carved his name into this one's skin as well, though not as fiery or as deep as he'd touched her. The places where he'd touched this power, had touched the ones it loved, and it had touched others... connections like roots reaching outwards, crossing, all around the world.
'You see? I won't hurt you,' it said to her. 'I just wanted to say hello.'
Slowly, carefully, she pushed out a tendril of root towards the place where the body that owned the voice sat. Where Rupert stood beside it. Where the earth was soft from the passage of some other plant, not long ago, and it was easy to push free, and up into the sun.
'Hello,' she said back to that voice. 'I think you know someone I love.'
*****
Willow's eyes flew open, and she stared -- not forward at Kennedy, who watched her worriedly, but up, blinking into the sunlight, at Rupert.
"Ah... Giles? There's somebody here who wants to talk to you."
finis