TITLE: 'All Mimsy were the Borogoves.' 10/12
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
She was done with him.
No - more than that. She wanted nothing more to *do* with him.
He'd ignored her wishes, overridden her decisions, conspired behind her back, betrayed her and turned the last of her certainties, the last of her trust, into little more than bitter ashes in her mouth, into the words she'd spat at him with anger and disillusionment.
She thought she'd feel better once the door was closed, once she'd shut out that look - the look of pained disappointment and martyred necessity - which had been a painful reflection of her own inner turmoil. But she didn't.
If anything, the finality of that firmly closed door had made her feel worse.
Much worse.
When had it all gone wrong? When had he ceased to be her rock and turned into yet another drain on her energies? When had the tensions between them shifted and tightened until everything she did disappointed him and everything he did seemed to add to the burdens she carried?
When had she started to feel so *tired?*
Buffy sighed and turned away from the door, acutely conscious of having lost something infinitely precious and utterly indefinable. She didn't want to think about that, right here and then. Didn't, in fact, want to think about anything at all. She was too numb, too drained, to want to consider the hows and the whys and the whens.
And the 'what if's' were definitely off the list for a while.
Her turn into the room had put her in sight of her wardrobe mirror and the pale, pinched reflection of what she'd become. She wasn't sure she wanted to face that, either, but she lacked the energy to do anything that would prevent the painful image from mocking her every move.
"Oh God," she muttered, sinking onto the edge of the bed and wondering if she had energy left for *anything* anymore. She ought to have been feeling a raging anger. *Ought* to be contemplating hate and the pain of betrayal and all that sort of stuff - but all she really felt was tired.
Empty.
*Alone.*
Well, not totally alone. A movement caught her eye and she looked down to find a sleek black and white cat in the process of jumping onto the bed. That was a little weird, but not completely unlikely, since Miss Kitty had always been given free run of the entire house. Maybe one of the other girls had brought a cat with them - although Buffy couldn't remember anyone mentioning pets. She'd certainly never seen this particular animal before. It was a very handsome cat, too.
"Hello, puss," she registered quizzically. "Where did you come from?"
The cat paced across the coverlet to join her, proving its substantiality by rubbing its cheek along her arm. Not a manifestation of the First, then, which was something of a relief. If she'd been a little less sunk into apathy, she'd have probably picked it up and evicted it - a little less forcibly than she had her Watcher, perhaps, but firmly enough to send it on its way. As it was, she lacked even the motivation to expel an uninvited guest, and she found herself fondling the warmth of its ears as it paddled and purred at her side.
"At least someone's happy," she sighed bitterly. The cat's comforting presence was making her feel a little better, and she didn't want better. Didn't want to feel, or think, because doing either brought her back to
"*Giles?*"
She froze in place, her fingers buried in fur, her eyes staring at the mirror across the room. The mirror, and the image it contained, faint and translucent beside her own.
A moment of anger crackled through her like a flare of fire. How *dare* he! How dare he use magic to spy on her - or worse, use it to try and force her to talk when she'd made it perfectly clear that the time for talking was over.
Done.
She half rose to her feet, then sank down again, the impulse to storm out and make her point with violence draining away as her eyes adjusted to the vision - and began to make a little more sense of what she was seeing.
It *was* Giles. No doubt about it. More than mere illusion, or hallucination and it certainly wasn't the First, because he wasn't dead, even if an uncharitable part of her heart had wished him so a short while ago. But nor was it the man she'd just shut out of her bedroom - and her heart and her life. That man - a weary, rumpled figure, weighted with the cares of the world - was nothing but a pallid reflection of the person currently leaning on - no, *in*, her mirror.
It was almost as if he were standing on the other side of the glass, standing there wearing one of those quiet smiles of his, a sword dangling from his left hand and his right pressed up against the glass, his fingers splayed out as if he were trying to push his way through to reach her.
Sword.
Buffy's mind did several somersaults, reassessing the situation as she registered exactly what she was looking at. Forget the heavy jacket and the dowdy sweater; *this* was Giles in a soft tan over-shirt and a pair of jeans that could have been painted on, they fit so perfectly. He wasn't wearing his glasses, and there seemed to be some sort of wound on his cheek, but she didn't really notice that because she was on her feet and moving closer, moving close enough to look into those warm, loving, laughing eyes
"*Giles,*" she whimpered, reaching her hand to match the one pressed up against the inside of the glass. He wasn't even a true reflection. Not solid, like her and the rest of the room. Just a soft, semi-translucent image, the sort of thing you might catch reflected in a window - but she could *feel* him, feel his presence with a certainty that she hadn't felt for weeks. Hadn't felt, in fact, since he'd first arrived on her doorstep trailing all those girls.
She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against the mirror, swallowing a sob. It wasn't real. It couldn't be. It was just her mind playing tricks after all, offering her hopeless illusions: memories, perhaps, of better times. Times when he was her Watcher and hers alone, when he had more to offer than regretful words or cold condemnation.
Times when all he offered her was his support and respect
"Mrrow!" The cat had jumped down from the bed and was standing beside her, rubbing against her leg. His persistence made her look down - which meant she was just in time to see it jump up - and jump *into* the mirror.
Into that half glimpsed, not quite there impression that was somehow behind the glass.
She stepped back in alarm, witness to something utterly impossible. The man in the mirror had also stepped back, dropping his sword so that he could catch the cat as it leapt up into his arms. He looked almost as startled about it as she was.
"Oh my God," Buffy breathed, *really* staring now. The man and the cat stared back. "*Giles?*"
He smiled, a wry, 'I think she's got it' kind of smile. 'Buffy,' he acknowledged gently - or rather, his image mouthed gently, since no sound reached her at all. The smile widened, and he added something else, something she didn't get, because lip reading had never been a skill she had much need of before.
"I can't hear you," she told him, resisting the temptation to shout, because that would be ridiculous, and besides, everyone would come running to see what the problem was. She didn't want to attract anyone's attention; she still wasn't sure what was going on, and she didn't want to shatter what seemed to be a very fragile connection to .. to *whom*, exactly?
"Are you Giles?" she asked, hoping that *he* had the lip reading thing cracked because they really, really needed a conversation right there and then. "My Giles?"
He nodded, somehow managing to convey a sense of chagrin, apology and pained resignation all at once. That was convincing, if nothing else had been. It was a typically Gilesian expression, most of which was centred in his eyes. It occurred to Buffy, watching them, that *that* was where the difference was; the man she'd spent the evening with had long since shuttered his feelings away, locking them in and rarely letting them show.
"Okay," she breathed, her heart racing in a way she didn't think it had done for weeks. "But if you're in *there* then who do I have - out here?"
'Long story,' he mouthed, then looked down at the cat in his arms and asked it a question - one she had no hope of following, let alone interpreting. That was a little weird, but no weirder than her trying to have a conversation with what seemed to be a mirror image of her Watcher - *inside* her mirror. A moment later the cat was jumping down from his hands and walking back into the room, just as solid and real as it had been before. Buffy stepped back to let it out, watching it with wary eyes as it leapt up onto her dresser and sat itself down next to Mr Gordo.
[I'd sit down if I were you,] it suggested, in a soft warm voice that was more idea than exclamation. [This may take a little while to explain ]