TITLE: 'All Mimsy were the Borogoves.' 8/12
AUTHOR: Pythia
FEEDBACK: Always appreciated
DISCLAIMER: The Slayer and her Watcher are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Sandollar Productions, Kuzui Enterprises, 20th Century Fox Television and the UPN Television Network. 'Jabberwocky' and 'Alice' were written by Lewis Carroll. Geoffrey wandered by and took up residence when the story demanded it, and Ari has been delightfully mine for the past two and a bit years. The story is written for the pleasure of the author and readers, and has no lucrative purpose whatsoever. Please do not reproduce this story anywhere without the author's consent.

Posting Notes: *-* indicates emphasis. {-} indicates thought. [_] identifies thought-speech

They talked for hours - or rather, Davenport talked for hours, his words tumbling out as he warmed to his subject and his company. Giles was content to sit and listen, Ari sprawled across his lap while he relaxed and felt safer than he had for days. The old man had spent half a century without human companionship, and it was hard to deny him his eager hunger for simple conversation. The cats, for all the care they had shown him, and the respect they obviously held for him, were still *cats* - creatures with a mindset far removed from human perceptions and human emotions.

Somewhere, in that long and rambling discussion in which Giles learned far more about the mirror world than he had done in all the days and weeks he'd spent there, the two men moved from wary acquaintance to a sense of comfortable friendship. They had a great many things in common; much more than just their mutual membership of the ancient order which had shaped them both. They had been taught in the same schools, been raised according to the same traditions, and they spoke the same language, albeit one separated by a generation. The surface impression - that Davenport was not the most stable of personalities - was quickly overtaken by an understanding of just how stable and self certain he had to have been to have survived all those years of isolation and exile. He admitted, at some point or other, that his hold on his sanity had shifted and shivered over the years; that there'd been times when he'd neglected his hygiene and his appearance, had once wandered naked and alone through rooms crowded with life on the other side of the mirrors just to satisfy the fact that he could - and had even once gone out into the dark with the sole intention of letting something end his desperate existence. But those had just been phases, ways of working through the pressures and the challenges of his strange imprisonment, and he claimed to have woken from those moments of madness to a much greater certainty of himself and his place in the world.

Giles wasn't so sure about that - but he could understand the need to cry out in the oppressive silences, to declare war on the world in preference to drowning in loneliness and frustrating torment. There'd been moments - even in the few short weeks in which he'd been wandering the maze - when the anger and the agony of being trapped, of being walled away from life and human contact, had threatened to overwhelm him. If he hadn't been so busy fighting to recover his past, working through those fragments of memory and battling for the pieces that, even now, lay out of his reach … if he had had, like Davenport, to face the knowledge that he, and he alone, was the one responsible for his fate … would he have struck out in equal fury and frustration, or would he have simply succumbed to despair?

He didn't know. He liked to think that he was stronger than that, but he couldn't be sure. Couldn't be sure of anything really, not while his memory was so fragmented and the events that had brought him to this place remained a baffling mystery.

The old man rambled on, telling tales of his early explorations, of adventures spent hiding from creeping jabberwocks while he searched for familiar landscapes on the other side of the mirrors. They were tales peppered with references to cats long gone, and to people and places that held disconcerting familiarity. Giles had visited the many of the locations Davenport spoke of, had studied in the Council's libraries and had even been trained and tutored by some of the men his current company had once viewed as friends and colleagues.

His years of exile had clearly mellowed the old man's resentment of the order that had once denied him his chance to shine. He spoke of his life working for the Council with nostalgia and regret. His views on life - and on Watchers and Slayers in particular - had been changed and tempered by his involvement with the Walkers and the dangers they faced every day. The nobility of spirit which Ari's affectionate description had credited him with had been forged over long years fulfilling the very destiny he'd been denied in the real world. Here, he had come to learn the reality of service, of duty, and of sacrifice. He'd taken on the mantle of Watcher to an entire slew of chosen ones - and he'd spent his time productively, recording their observations, cataloguing their foes and teaching each new generation the lessons they needed to help them survive.

"They always were inducted by their mothers," Davenport explained thoughtfully. "That's how the line passes, from one generation to the next. The teaching was done through memories and legends and allegorical tales. I started writing them down. Took elements of one to add to the detail of others - and found I had a whole history, swirling around inside a vast repertoire of myth and exaggeration - and yes¸ young man, I know I am a little guilty of it myself," he said, fixing Ari's one open eye with a firm stare, "but I have lived with your people a long time. You all encourage me."

[This,] Ari remarked, butting his head back against Giles' chest and squirming happily, [you did not exaggerate.]

"No," the old man smiled with wry self-mockery. Since the *this* Ari was referring to was his current supporter and everything the cat had decided he represented, Giles was more than a little bemused by both their reactions. "They love my tales of the Slayer," Davenport confided with a sly wink. "Her heroic deeds, her noble sacrifices - and her ever faithful, ever loyal Watcher, the one who guides her, supports her, and is equally noble in word and deed and dedication to his cause."

"Oh." The exclamation was somewhat faint; the Watcher concerned cast a slightly nervous glance around their attentive audience. "You mean, they think I …?"

"Oh, they *know*, " Davenport assured him with amusement. "Very perceptive creatures, the Walkers. Read you in instant. Know you better than you know yourself."

"Well, um - "Giles shifted a little uncomfortably in his chair. "I'm no … hero. I know that much. But, my Slayer is very special, and I think - I - I hope I've always tried to do the right thing where she was concerned." He paused, looking at the old man with slightly embarrassed distress. "You know - many of the Watchers in the diaries …"

"Ah, ah, *ah*," Davenport interrupted firmly. "Let us aspire to the ideal, not dwell on those who might have … failed to meet some of its expectations. *You* have not disappointed them. Which is something of a relief for me, I have to say."

It was something of a relief for Giles, too, although he really didn't think he could justify occupying the kind of pedestal that the old man's stories seemed to have put him on. He wondered why Davenport would have bothered creating such a mythical vision of the Slayer and her Watcher when he seemed so contemptuous of the Council - and then remembered the part he'd skipped over in his story, the words which had held respectful sympathy.

{My brother's Slayer broke. My brother with her … }

"Your brother was a good man," Giles offered softly, putting two and two together and coming up with a younger son who had envied and resented the fortune of his older sibling - until he had witnessed the man's loss and the grief it had caused him. "And - I'm guessing here, but - a dedicated Watcher, too."

"Too dedicated, according to some in the order. 'Got too close to the child,' they said. What would *they* know? Never having - watched, the way we have."

{We.} The smile at the inclusion was a wry one; Davenport might never have been trained as a Watcher, never been assigned a Slayer, or even a Potential to Watch over - and yet, from what he'd been saying, he probably had more right to call himself one than many who'd claimed the title over the years. Giles wasn't entirely sure he wasn't one of them.

"So, what do you watch for, here in Looking Glass house?" he asked curiously, looking round the foyer with interest. He was a little amused to note that most of their feline company had fallen asleep at some point during their rambling conversation. Davenport sighed.

"This and that," he said, reaching for the jug on the table so that he could top up his glass of water and frowning as he realised it was empty. He put it down again with a slightly martyred sigh. "You know about the jabberwocks, of course. I try to avoid those as a rule. Then there are the siligoths … and the bandersnatch - "

"Met some of those," Giles interjected, recalling the encounter with a shudder. The old man raised an eyebrow at him.

"Bandersnatch? Really? My, my. And you escaped with barely a scratch? I can see why Ari was impressed. Nasty pieces of work. But cowardly. They hate fire. A lot of things in here do. It's something to do with the light, rather than the heat, I think. Light has power in this place. You would do well to remember that."

"I will." The Watcher's thoughts slid to the magic he had managed to recall the night the jabberwock came so close, and he mentally repeated the incantation, relieved to find he could still remember it.

"The dandygyre are particularly susceptible in that regard. You won't find them creeping around in the daytime. But you might stumble over a mome rath or two. They're fairly harmless compared to most, although they do like to gather at the edge of vanity mirrors, sucking in self-confidence and reflecting it back as self doubt. If you've ever looked into a mirror and thought 'I'm getting old,' or 'I'm putting on weight' … even though you know it's not true? There'll have been mome rath lurking behind the glass somewhere."

Giles nodded warily, filing the information away for future reference. It always helped to know what you might be facing. "So," he said, "jabberwocks, siligoths, bandersnatch, dandygyre and mome raths. A positive menagerie of menace. No vampires?"

The old man laughed. "You're in a world of mirror images, Rupert. How can there be vampires, here? They don't have a reflection. No …" His face sobered and his eyes grew grim. "There are demons here - but they're far more dangerous than the undead. They don't suck blood. They devour life. That's all a reflection is, you know … a vision of your lifeforce. Since vampires aren't, strictly speaking, alive, they don't reflect in mirrors. But for those who *do* … well," he concluded with a tight smile, "the jabberwocks are bad enough, but - let's just say that - looking into a mirror that a visszatük haunts may not be good for the soul."

"A visszatük?" Giles echoed thoughtfully, struck by the familiarity of the word. "I think I've come across a reference somewhere …"

"Been reading your books in a mirror?" the old man asked, the question quietly amused. "I suppose you might have been. All that 'reverse writing' that people used to do to hide the truth. You can't always trust a reflection, Rupert. Not even your own. If you've heard of the visszatük, it's likely that one of them has marked you as his own. Shown you his name in a mirror sometime. His name, and possibly some of his nature. Maybe *he* was the one that brought you here."

"And that's … bad." The Watcher frowned, wishing he could remember the events that had trapped him here, in this strange, distorted world.

"Very." The old man's smile wasn't pleasant. "The visszatük are emptiness. Despair given a will of its own. They're things born of the dark, like the jabberwock - born of it, and hungry with it - but unlike their brutish cousins they are subtle, cunning things. They don't have a shape of their own - they haunt mirrors, pick a victim and take *their* form, feeding on them through the glass."

"Like the mome raths."

Davenport's bark was more a snort of contempt than laugh; it woke up several cats who looked around in alarm. "If you like. If you like to think a vampire feeds the way a mosquito does. No, *no*. They take *everything*. And they drain their victims slowly. Over weeks. *Months*. A slow descent into numbed despair. The more they feed, the stronger they become."

"Good Lord," Giles reacted, his blood running cold at the thought. There'd be no defence against such a thing. You wouldn't even know what was killing you.

"They're not common," Davenport assured him, taking pity on the look of horror which had settled on his face. "And if the Walkers catch them getting solid enough to hurt they tear them to shreds. I have every reason to believe it was a visszatük that stole away that first cat, all those centuries ago. They hate them with a passion."

[It is never to happen again,] Ari announced, sitting up with determination. He also put out all his claws and Giles winced as they sank into his skin.

"Ow," he protested, throwing the cat off his lap and glaring at him with irritation. "Ari! That hurt."

The cat had the grace to look abashed, reaching up to the arm of the chair so that he could strop his claws on the fabric. [We hunt them wherever we find them. When they have flesh to rend we rend it. When they have blood to spill, we spill it. Let them drift as mist, let them starve in the dark. They must *never* grow strong enough to cross over again. Never.]

"Except - " Davenport had also sat up and was now staring at his visitor with horrified realisation. "One has, hasn't he?" He leant forward to grasp at his company's arm, his hand shaking with reaction. "That's why … That would explain … Merciful heavens - that's *it*, isn't it? One of them *has* grown strong enough. Strong enough to take, not just your form, but your place in the world. A way to trap you *here*, where he belongs. What was in that book, my boy? What were you reading? Researching? *Think*, young man! If you have released a visszatük into *your* world, everything - everyone you care about is in mortal danger. He will suck the life from them. Take their joys, their pain, their feelings - everything that makes them human, that makes living worthwhile. And once they are nothing but empty husks, they'll simply lie down and die."

"Oh dear *Lord*," Giles whispered, his eyes going wide with terror. The memories he'd fought so hard to recover rose up to mock him with heart wrenching clarity. Images of his friends - his *family* - danced through his head. Buffy smiling at him with that indulgent, knowing look that she saved purely for him … Xander, laughing at one of his own jokes … Willow's shy pride when she knew she'd helped save the day … Young souls filled with life and energy, a tempting feast to a creature accustomed to leaching what little sustenance it could find reflected in a mirror's glass. He half rose to his feet, his hand reaching for the hilt of his sword. "I have to get back. I have to get *out* of here."

"Easier said than done." The old man's grip tugged him down again. Davenport's eyes were pleading for thought and caution rather than emotional reaction. "The visszatük must have stolen your life. That's why you are struggling to remember it. It will know what you know, be acting as you would, hiding itself in you. It will be an almost perfect imitation - and one whose flaws will almost certainly have been overlooked in the hopelessness its feeding will have inspired. No-one will be looking for you and *it* will know to avoid the glass. You'll have to find someone who will find *him*. Find a window into your world, find one you love and stay with them. Stay with them until you can glimpse yourself beside them … Get *them* to call you back if you can.

"And even then," he concluded bleakly, "you will need a way to reclaim what is yours. To drive the visszatük back here - or better yet, destroy it completely. Better if you do that - or else you'll never be able to look into a mirror again."

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