TITLE: The Watcher: Ghost Story 1/3
AUTHOR: vatwoman
RATING: PG (I think!)
SUMMARY: First of what I hope will be a set of stories featuring Giles `fighting the good fight' back in Britain after going home again (twice) in season 6. This one is basically a two-hander and is set after he's come home the first time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Joss Whedon owns Giles and everything/everyone else `Buffy.' No copyright infringement intended. Anna (and anyone else I invent) is mine.
FEEDBACK: Will be gratefully received, at: vatwoman@yahoo.co.uk
DEDICATION: Hey, Sally!

She hated this, the betrayal of it; that perfect moment between waking up and awareness of surrounding, of self, kicking in. That moment when you feel everything is right with the world. That moment before the terror starts.

Three in the morning and she was huddled beneath the bedclothes, hiding from the dark, like a frightened child. Her eyes darted upwards, to the ceiling, as another insane barrage of crashes resounded from the studio above her. She closed her eyes, wrapped her arms around her head, heart hammering, and sucked in, in great gasping breaths, the warm, damp, air from around her. She was bathed in cold sweat.

Then that sound, again. Again, but this was still new; bedroom door, hinge creaking, slowly opening. More sounds. Little things: the rattle of the latches on the drawers of the dresser and wardrobe; shoes being rearranged; a scent bottle smashing, the perfume quickly penetrating her cocoon.

And the tiny tremors running through the bed-frame; a vibration echoing the energy disturbances in the room.

Her skin crawled and a helpless shudder wracked her body. Footsteps solid and slow. It was by her bed. Next to her. So cold. "Soon." The word was a sibilant hiss in her ear that froze the blood in her veins. As the whispered words of the Lord's Prayer fell from her lips the room emptied with a shrieking rush of air, leaving her trembling and drained, with the safety of dawn still hours away.

>>>>>>>

"Your mother would've been glad to see you standing there."

She'd been surprised to see him. She'd known that he'd gone to America but had been unaware that he'd returned. She'd recognised him immediately, not simply because of where he was – standing in front of his father's grave – but because he looked so like his father. One of her first commissions, so long ago.

"I beg your pardon?"

He turned, a puzzled expression on his face, and up close the resemblance between father and son was even more striking. Then the late afternoon sun caught his eyes. He brought up a hand to shade them allowing her to see them properly – and in them she saw everything in him that was his mother: she smiled.

"I said that your mother would've been glad to see you standing there."

The puzzled expression became a frown. "I'm sorry, you are?" There was a coolness to his voice, like an audible `do not disturb' sign.

"Anna Freer."

The frown deepened as it became the visible stamp of memories being sifted. "My mother spoke of you."

Anna nodded. "I came to know her quite well before she died. I liked her very much."

"So did I." A moment spent decision-making. "It's obviously a little redundant but still …" He held out his hand. "… Rupert Giles." They shook hands, cold in the rapidly chilling air of a late autumn afternoon.

"May I?" She gestured to his mother's grave with the small bouquet she held in her hand. He waved her on and she bent down to add to his spray of carnations with some of her own; all of them the yellows that Francesca Giles had loved most. She stood and murmured, "Excuse me," as she stepped past him to lay the remaining flowers on his father's grave.

"You didn't know him, surely?"

She brushed away some stray leaves from the grass below the headstone then straightened, wiping her hand on her jeans.

"No, not really. I took a study of him a long time ago."

For a moment he seemed taken aback, then his expression cleared. "I'm sorry, I'd forgotten. I haven't read my mother's letters for some time. You're a photographer." He paused as he searched his memory for what he knew of her. "A rather famous one."

"I suppose so, but then I was just out of university working in a studio here in Bath, helping with the school, wedding and passport snaps and doing my own work in any free time that I had."

Giles tucked his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "And my father?"

"Passport photo, initially. He saw some of my portrait work in the studio and came back for a sitting." She offered up a small smile at the memory. "His picture was part of my portfolio for a long time afterwards. You look very like him."

"So people tell me." He turned his head away, caught by the glow of the fading sunlight in the churchyard. "I've never understood this need to analyse a child's face to find the features of the parents." He brought his gaze back to her. "A child is its own person."

Anna nodded. "I agree, but it's also born of parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and so on … all that history …"

They held each other's gaze, leaving her to wonder when, exactly, this conversation had turned into a test of each other's convictions.

"The photograph of my father …" Giles asked. "… I don't recall ever having seen it. What happened to it?"

She hunched into her jacket as the sun disappeared behind the church and the temperature took an immediate fall.

"I kept it. He didn't want it. I once asked your mother why not. She told me that it had unnerved him."

He barked out a laugh. "Unnerved him?" His voice hardened. "My father didn't have a nerve in his whole body." He spared a look at his father's grave, "No nerves. No feelings." and turned back to the woman standing by his side. "Which, I'm sure, you must have already known; or is there something about my relationship with my father that my mother didn't tell you."

Anna took a step back, conscious of how far this conversation had strayed into personal matters. "I'm sorry." The apology came readily to her lips. "I've offended you." She spun on her heel and headed on past him up the path.

"Wait!"

They stood facing each other, separated by a dozen yards, dark shadows creeping across the ground between them. She watched as he took off his glasses and rubbed a finger across an eyebrow before replacing them once more. From this distance his expression was unreadable; his body, however, radiated a palpable tension.

"Thank you for your friendship with my mother, I know she valued it."

"As I did hers."

He nodded and, in his turn, moved to leave.

And maybe what they'd just said to each other was an olive branch of sorts. And maybe she really needed to believe that that was true. And maybe that was why she found herself trusting him beyond all reason. And maybe that was why she said aloud what she'd never imagined she'd ever say out loud to anyone, even herself.

"Mr Giles?" The quizzical look on his face encouraged her on. "Your mother once told me that demons are real and that they walk among us. Do you believe that?"

He stared at her – a moment of utter stillness, utter nakedness - then he closed his eyes and dropped his head back. She could see his hands, buried in his pockets, clench into fists. When he once more brought his gaze to hers he looked to her as if he'd aged another lifetime.

"What do you need me to do?"

And maybe trusting him beyond all reason was exactly what she was meant to do.

"Come to my house? After supper; about nine?"

"And you live …?"

"At the old doctor's house."

"Across …"

"… the street from you. Yes."

As his chest rose and fell she wondered if he even realised that he'd sighed. Or that with the very depth of the breath he'd taken, he seemed to have girded on armour.

"Very well. About nine."

"Thank you."

This time she did leave, carrying on deeper into the graveyard, walking a path that she had come to know so well. As she moved to pass around the far side of the church she glanced back over her shoulder. He was as she'd first seen him, standing tall and still at his father's grave.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

He took a long swallow of tea and grimaced as the unpleasant coolness of it hit his throat. The clock chimed the quarter hour – quarter to nine and he'd been standing here, at his window, staring at her house, for almost an hour.

It was odd how, since he'd returned to his home in Bath, he hadn't really noticed the house - seen it, but not seen it. Regency, of course; a beautifully proportioned confection of the pale stone so favoured by the builders of that period, set off by walled grounds and wrought iron gates. The doctor's house, she'd said. He'd remembered it immediately. The house had carried that name when he was a boy. He supposed that it always had.

And now it carried secrets within it. Whatever it was that Anna Freer wanted to speak to him about, he was sure she had never spoken of it before, to anyone – but then demons are not the usual topic of conversation at the dinner table.

Except that they were, and had been, for virtually all of his life: demons, spirits, ghosts, ghouls, vampires and all the things that go bump in the night. Back in Britain a week and he'd already returned to the nightmarish world that he'd sought to escape by leaving Sunnydale.

Run from.

He'd run from Sunnydale, his heart left pulverised and bleeding on the ground beside Buffy's body.

The calamitous beauty of her death was burned into his brain – how else could he see it every time he closed his eyes: the perfect parabola of her fall; the shimmer of her hair as it caught the pale light from the rising sun; and the way, for one heart stopping moment, she seemed to be falling into the safety of his out-stretched arms. He still found it odd that there were no sounds associated with those last moments; instead, a perfect silence

And a Watcher without a Slayer is a broken thing.

The first time she'd died, when the Master had drained her, her swift revival to stand in front of him alive and apparently well, had left him little chance to even register the fact that she'd been gone. His entry in his diary that day had been an invocation of thanks to every deity whose name he knew. One year later, when she'd run away after killing Angel, and she'd been lost, as good as dead to him, their bond, something that they'd never managed to acknowledge, had been torn to pieces in the maelstrom of pain, anger, guilt and grief that they'd both felt. But he'd carried on; for the sake of the others, for the sake of the work. For the sake of a vow he'd made fifteen years before Buffy had even been born.

He'd always wondered if it would be enough, protecting this sorry world, when he finally lost her from it. The answer had come to him in the false bonhomie of his interaction with the Gang and, especially, in the way that he'd gradually pulled away from Dawn. He'd persuaded himself that she needed a woman's presence in her life now that both Buffy and Joyce were gone and so he'd asked Willow and Tara to move in to the Summers' house. He'd persuaded himself that his decision had had nothing at all to do with the bleak emptiness of his heart.

There was no part of him that didn't ache with a soul deep weariness. He'd wanted so desperately to just walk away from Anna Freer, her question unanswered, and, God help him, he had no real idea why he hadn't done so.

Perhaps, in the end, his agreement to assist her had come from the unexpected torrent of forgotten and half-forgotten memories that had been invoked by her recollections of his parents. It would be too much to expect that his mother had not talked about him to Anna and it made him wonder what she'd told her about his life. Or his father's life. Or her own life.

His father's slayer had lived with them throughout the brief period that she'd been active: a period punctuated by moments of desperate danger and terrible anguish. Kate had died in his mother's arms, grieved by her as deeply as if she'd been her own flesh and blood, whilst his father, nerveless to the last, had mourned his slayer as one would the loss of a favoured sword: his diary entry that day had been no different in style or tone from all those that had gone before it.

`The Council fights evil and the Slayer is the instrument by which we fight.' Quentin Travers's words; ones that Marcus Giles had lived by and his slayer, died by. No `broken thing' for Marcus Giles – and Rupert Giles, son and heir to a heritage he would have repudiated in a heartbeat, had hated him for it.

She'd switched on every light in her home. The brilliant glow spilled across the driveway and lawns at the front of the house. Only the uppermost floor was still in darkness. He didn't think that a coincidence. Experience told him that the problem to be dealt with was connected to that floor.

Experience. His mouth twisted into a tight, mocking, smile. He'd spent almost forty years of his life dealing with these `problems' – it really was long since past time that he quit.

The chimes sounded nine o'clock.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

When she opened the door to him he realised that their earlier meeting had left him with no clear memory of what she looked like. Now, dressed, as she was, in camouflage trousers, a khaki t-shirt and air-ware combat boots, she looked like she was ready to go to war. The heels of her boots gave her an added inch of height bringing her virtually to his 6' 2." Her deceptively slim body was rounded out by a toned musculature – he wondered if she ran. The hair, he remembered. A short mussed look that probably didn't come cheap but it was the colour that grabbed the attention: white. Completely. With her dark eyes and slightly olive skin, it made for an arresting combination.

"Mr Giles?"

"… Rupert, please; or Giles. People have taken to simply calling me Giles."

"How very `Inspector Morse' of you." Giles frowned and then inclined his head, smiling very slightly as he caught the reference. "Please?" She gestured him across the threshold. The shudder passed through him like a bolt of lightening. Caught by its power he stopped, rooted to the spot, and found that he had to force air into his lungs.

>>>> dipped in fire and ice … spikes driven into the body … red rain, acid on the skin … the scourge of the whip … a turn of the screw … body arching in agony … the red mist … the shrieking of a billion souls pained beyond endurance … the smell of it, rank and foul … the delighted laughter of a single voice <<<<

"Aaah!" He was released with a shocking suddenness and fell to one knee on the floor. He rested there, on one knee, on one hand, gasping for breath. "Oh, god."

Anna crouched beside him. With an effort of will he turned his head towards her, in question, to find that she was nodding. "Every time I step in the door."

"Wh …" He clutched his chest and felt his heart pounding impossibly quickly. "Wh … what … do … what do you feel … de … describe it to me."

"Heat. Cold. A terrible draught of cold, rank, air. And evil; absolute evil."

"Yes." He gasped in agreement. "Wh… when … when did it start?" With all his muscles trembling uncontrollably, he still couldn't move.

"A couple of weeks ago."

"Weeks?"

He sat back on his heels with his eyes closed, still panting. She sat with him until he regained his senses and then helped him to his feet. Staying where she was she watched as he walked to the bottom of the staircase and looked up. "It only goes up one floor." He faced her once more. "How do you get to the attics?"

"End staircase." She pointed to her right, the east end of the house. "On the first floor."

"Alright …" He puffed out a breath. "… I think I've had enough demonstrations for the time being." He glanced up the stairs once more. "Let's talk."

Anna nodded and led the way into the morning room. The lights, whilst on, were less harsh here and there was still a warmth to this room which was absent now from so many other rooms of this house.

"Coffee?" She'd made it just before he'd arrived conscious of needing something to do to calm her nerves.

"Please."

"How do you take it?"

"Just milk, thank you."

He turned towards her as they sat together on the sofa. She settled in cross-legged beside him.

"I've known this house all my life. My parents bought it before I was born. It became mine five years ago."

"And what was the house like then?" Giles took a drink of his coffee. "Any unusual occurrences, disturbances of any sort?"

"No," Anna shook her head, "None. It's always been … was … a very happy home."

"Have you done any research on the house? Has anyone?"

"The house?" The confusion was fleeting, followed by a flood of comprehension. <I haven't told him anything yet and he's accepted this.> Relief stunned her into stillness.

"Ms Freer? Anna?"

She blinked owlishly at him.

"Yes?"

"The house?" He repeated gently. "Has anyone researched its history?"

"No." She shook her head.

"First order of business tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow." Anna nodded. "Yes. Tomorrow." Her voice sounded oddly faint, as if her words had been pushed out with the last of the air in her body. She pressed a hand to her chest and felt it rise and fall with her breathing: she was breathing. This wasn't a dream. He believed her. <He believes me.> "You believe me." She whispered. Helpless to prevent the tears forming she turned her head away trying to save him the embarrassment of having to suffer them.

"Anna?" His voice was very soft, as was the hand he laid on her arm. She turned back to him, to the conviction in his eyes. "Yes, I believe you."

"I thought I was going mad." She swallowed heavily to clear the lump in her throat that had caused this whispered confession to come out as a rasping gasp.

Giles moved his hand away and took another sip of his coffee. He lowered his eyes to contemplate the muddy liquid, allowing her a moment to regain her composure, which she did with a ruthlessly efficient wipe of her fingers across her cheeks. He remembered that he'd once been able to do that – bring himself back from the verge of an emotional breakdown. Something else that he'd lost.

"Tell me what's changed."

Understanding him, she nodded, "A couple of months ago I took the decision to move my studio from London back to Bath; here. I had the attic rooms knocked together to make a single space."

"The workmen – did they report anything strange while they were here?"

"No. They were in and out in less than a fortnight. It all went very smoothly."

"And after they'd left?"

"Little things. Things not where I'd put them. The occasional odd sound; tapping, banging, and the like."

"Mmm – hmm. All over the house or just in the studio?"

"Just in the studio, at first. I thought, perhaps, that I was just imagining it." She swallowed a mouthful of coffee and pulled a face when she found that it was only lukewarm. She got up, went to the table to refill her cup and slowly stirred in some sugar as she carried on with her story. "Then the incidents started becoming more noticeable; furniture moving, doors opening and closing of their own accord, things being thrown across the room, footsteps."

Giles frowned. "Footsteps?"

"Heavy. Male." He raised an eyebrow at that but made no comment. "And the incidents … they've moved. Before they were confined to the studio, now they're happening on the first floor."

"And the front door." He reminded her.

"Yes." She shuddered. "I'm sorry about not warning you but I had to know if someone else could feel it, or if it was just me."

Again, a frown pulled lines into his brow. "But surely your other visitors …?"

"… I don't have visitors."

Her voice was remarkably cool and even. No explanation. No qualification. Just the simple statement of something that was. She'd left him with no room to do anything but move on – so he moved on.

"Have you seen it?"

Anna placed her cup on the coffee table and pushed her hands into her pockets. She looked faintly embarrassed.

"No, but then I've hardly gone looking for it." She pulled a face. "Truth is, I've become very well acquainted with the underside of my duvet." She blushed, but bravely met his eyes. "It frightens me." She held his gaze for a few more seconds perhaps looking for … what? Some sort of judgement of her? Seeing none, she joined him once more on the sofa. "What do you think it is?"

Giles took a final swallow of his coffee, put his cup down, stood and started pacing. "Gut reaction tells me it's a poltergeist." He gave her a questioning look.

"German. Means `noisy spirit.'" She frowned. "Aren't they reputed to be most commonly found in homes with children, teenagers. Disturbed teenagers?"

"Yes, although they can and do crop up almost anywhere." He stopped moving and stared into the middle distance.

"What is it?" Anna asked.

"The psychic attack as you enter the house …" He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, then replaced them in order to look at her, "… is more typical of a possession - and there's a malevolence to it that concerns me."

"It spoke to me."

"I'm sorry?" Her voice was so low that he thought he'd misheard her. "It spoke to you?"

"Last night."

Giles took a step forward then stopped himself before she could find his movement towards her a threat.

"What did it say?"

" `Soon.' "

"Where were you?"

"In bed, under the duvet." She snorted out a self-mocking breath. "What does it mean, `soon'?"

"I don't know." Giles admitted. The clock in the hall chimed ten. He automatically checked his watch. "When does it normally become active?"

"A little later. Eleven, twelve o'clock."

"And never during the day?"

She shook her head. As he turned away from her and looked out into the hallway she rose and joined him. The bright lights made the hall seem almost inviting, but she knew better.

"I don't think your mother ever told me what you do for a living … what do you do?" The question lay between them as they continued to stare into the space beyond the confines of their room.

"I own a magic shop. In a town called Sunnydale. It's in California."

"Oh, and that's why you know about ghosts?"

"Yes."

She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, the movement bringing her back into the moment. "So what do we do now?"

"Let's see what we're dealing with."

He sounded brisk to the point of being abrupt. She had no idea if it was required of her that she should be equally keen. Her uncertainty sharpened the tone of her reply. "Fine."

They climbed the stairs together and Giles stopped them as they gained the upstairs corridor. It ran away from them, left and right.

"The staircase?"

Anna pointed to the east, down the corridor to their right.

Giles faced that way narrowing his eyes as he took in the scene before him. Brightly lit, the corridor was completely non- threatening. It wasn't until he allowed his senses to expand beyond the physical that he could sense anything of the entity invading the house. It came to him as a twist in his heart. There was a blackness in it, a terrible place of shadows and pain. And rage. Such rage.

"What is it?" Anna stepped up to his shoulder, concerned at his stillness. She followed the line of his gaze down the corridor, but saw nothing except the staircase to the studio.

"I can feel it …"

"… feel it?"

"Yes," Giles nodded, his attention still focussed on the far stairs "A little."

"Sensing ghosts – this is a pre-requisite of being a magic shop owner?" She was whispering, just as he was, and didn't know why.

"No, not really." He replied only half listening to her. His breathing slowed and steadied out as he drew on the centre of power within himself. A summoning by effort of will alone was tricky at best, suicidally dangerous at worst – and he had to protect Anna. He feared she'd been harmed enough as it was.

"Why all the mirrors?"

Side by side now and there was a concentration within him that she could feel: the air around them shivered.

"I collect them. They're all antiques."

"Get rid of them. Sell them if you must. Destroy them if you can, but get rid of them."

"Why?"

He closed his eyes, shutting down that sense. He'd already lost both the taste of the coffee in his mouth and his ability to smell the perfume that she was wearing.

"Mirrors have no soul: it's why they can be turned to unsavoury purposes."

"That sounds like something out of `Snow White!' " she mocked, unable to help herself.

"Didn't my mother let you into the secret? Fairytales are real."

She saw a tiny smile pull at his mouth and wanted to respond to the insanity of his statement, but her reply stalled. His arms moved slowly; hanging by his sides he turned them outwards and spread his palms, fingers stretched out, every part of him concentrated on the end of the long corridor.

There was a moment when he could feel the movement of the air across his palms and when he could hear her voice, but all was now quiet and still. He opened his eyes and smiled at the wonder of the sight before him. A giddy rush of colours, the intoxicating pull of the design, as simple and as complex as the Universe in all its glory: the inside of his spell. The inside of his power.

He sighed into the embrace of it, a power that had been absent for so long from his spell-casting. He'd almost forgotten the balm of its gentle embrace.

Ethan had always spoken of the depth of night behind his power. Giles had always known that his own power had none of the darkness in it that Ethan spoke of – instead, it was riven with sunlight and joy and gentleness of heart.

But he'd lost that. Ethan, Eyghon, Jenny, Buffy: his heart hadn't been gentle for so long now. How strange, then, that the sunlight should be with him again, here in this place, when his heart was in pieces on a foreign shore.

`Spirits of air, spirits of light,
Bring forth the stranger to our sight.'

Such a simple spell, but the power was in its simplicity. He re- opened his eyes and caught the echo of his whispered words as the air carried them to their destination. Anna was still by his side, and he smiled at her in reassurance.

"Watch."

Two minutes. Five. The house settled around them, creaking and groaning as old houses do. Ten minutes.

It looked like a pool, if a pool could stand on its end, shimmering in the push of air across its surface. Then there were ripples, drawn from the outer edge inwards, slow at first and then more quickly, faster, until the pool became whirlpool.

And disappeared.

A man stood there - dark, swarthy, with eyes as dead as time.

"What do you see?" Giles asked.

Anna licked her lips, She could feel her insides quivering: here was the thing that was haunting her. There was something haunting her. She took a shaky breath. "I see a man. About 30 years old. Medium height – I can't tell. Dark hair. Well built. Clothes look … late Victorian, perhaps?"

"Good. I see the same." He touched her wrist. "Are you alright?"

"Ask me tomorrow after I've had a chance to fall to pieces!"

He nodded and stepped forward.

"Who are you? What do you seek?" No response. "Who are you? What do you seek?"

It took a step forward. Then another. Then another. It reached the first mirror and the glass shattered into a million tiny shards. Another step, and another. Another mirror. Then it came on them at a full run, glass exploding before it like confetti. A shriek fell from its obscenely grinning mouth and it launched itself into the air, conjuring a jagged shard of glass into its grasp.

"Down!" Giles screamed and turned himself into and over her, pulling his jacket up over their heads. "Aaah!" The glass cut into his body, slicing through the skin of his back and side.

The rank smell of it rushed past them; the shriek an almost sonic boom of noise.

"Up!" He pushed at her, urging her out from underneath him. "Out!" He grabbed her hand and headed for the staircase, dragging her along with him. They all but fell down the stairs, glass showering down on them as crazy blasts of wind threw it after them.

The front door was ahead of them - dead-bolted - and Anna couldn't steady her hands enough to turn the bolt in its seat.

"Oh, god! Oh, god!"

Giles moved from protecting her back. "Let me." He reached out and found his hands were shaking as badly as hers. One second – and he took it. Willed his hands back into his control and yanked open the door.

They escaped into the cleansing silver of a moonlit night.

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