TITLE: The Watcher: Absolution pt.1 - `Til You Loved Me 7/7
AUTHOR: vatwoman
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, UPN etc own Giles and anyone else in the Buffyverse, Anna and everyone I invent are mine.
FEEDBACK: Will be gratefully received on list, or at: vatwoman@yahoo.co.uk

It was late and the hammering on the door echoed through the quiet house. They looked at each other, knowing.

"I'll go." Giles nodded his thanks and turned back to the book he'd been studying.

Anna took the long walk to the front door, pulled it open to find a young policewoman standing there, almost invisible in the pouring rain.

"May I help you?"

"Is Mr Giles in, please?"

"He's here, yes."

The constable nodded. "Detective Inspector Conlon's compliments … he'd like to speak to Mr Giles."

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm not at liberty to say."

"There's been another killing?"

The constable's face smoothed out - she'd been trained very well. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm not at liberty to say."

Anna narrowed her gaze, but the young officer didn't blink. "Please wait there."

"Yes, ma'am."

Anna closed the door, turned, and saw Giles standing at the end of the hallway, his glasses dangling from his lifeless hand. "Mark wants to see you."

Giles nodded. "I heard."

"It's number five, isn't it?" Anna asked, saying aloud what she hadn't wanted to say at all.

"Yes, I assume so." He came up the hallway, pulled his long waxed coat from the coat stand and shrugged into it.

"Why do you think he's asked to see you?"

"I imagine it's to tell me that this is *my* fault. Mine and Barry's."

Anna shook her head. "No, I don't believe Mark could be that cruel."

"Why shouldn't he be? He thinks we're lying and until he gets the rational explanation he expects he'll go on thinking that we're lying, and that he's perfectly justified in blaming us for every single one of these deaths." He looked away for a moment and then back. "I was just about to look into possible locator spells to find this creature. I've marked some pages in the main texts. Could you check them for me, please?"

"What am I looking for?"

Giles pulled up the collar of his coat and shoved his hands into his pockets. "What they can find and what they can't. Who and how many people they need to perform them. Any odd restrictions on their use - full moon in the sky, summer solstice - that sort of thing."

"Alright, and I'll check the database, too."

"Thank you." He turned away and opened the door. The police car was sitting there, and as he stepped into the street the constable got out of it and opened the back door for him. He was almost inside the car when Anna called him. "Yes?"

She opened her mouth to speak, stopped, started again. "Take care."

Giles frowned, wondering what it was she'd wanted to say, but thought she shouldn't. Or couldn't. He nodded and got into the car. Once he'd buckled himself in, the car pulled off. It was warm inside the vehicle, a cocoon against the cold and wet outside. Every time they stopped at lights or a junction he heard the rain pounding down on the roof, like the rat-tat-tat of a drum beat calling him to war. Except that this was the wrong war, but it was one that watchers had been forced to fight time and time again: belief against disbelief.

The collective weariness of the ages made him lean back and close his eyes. When he opened them again, minutes later, it was to be dazzled by the brilliant white lights illuminating the lonely back street of the latest killing.

Giles watched the scene from inside the car - his lack of movement holding his driver similarly frozen in her seat - and it could have been the scene from a dozen police procedurals, but for the silence. Silent, it took on a surreal balletic quality as dozens of police and forensic staff, busy with their allotted tasks, seemed to dance around one another in a dizzying blur of black, yellow and white.

Conlon was standing by the open flap of the tent that had been erected over the latest victim. He was talking with a colleague - Giles didn't recognise him - nodding slowly as he listened to what he was being told. The hand Conlon dragged down his face had nothing to do with the rain - Giles could see that utter despair had settled on the man. He got out of the car.

The rain hit like an assault, soaking him within seconds, and all but deafening him to the sounds around him. Unable to see out of his glasses, he took them off and carefully slipped then into a coat pocket. The rain felt astonishingly cold on his now unprotected face. He closed his eyes against it, waiting to become accustomed to the unnaturalness of it, but with his eyes closed his other senses came to life. Smell. He could smell the sickly, sweet, metal-tinged scent of blood.

"Look at it, Mr Giles. That was once a woman."

*This* Giles could understand. This anger and disgust. In this Giles could say that he and Conlon were brothers, no matter what differences they might have. He looked at the body and saw it had once been a woman, and that regardless of what horrors he'd seen before in his life, he knew he'd rarely seen worse.

"Why am I here?" He didn't turn away from the body. To do so after such a little time seemed like disrespect.

"So you can look at this and tell me again the bullshit that you and Adam Barry have been shovelling."

A student, maybe, Giles thought. A bag of belongings lay strewn on the ground beside her, pens, a notebook, a file, wallet, and keys, spilling out of the half open flap. She had a hole in the sole of her left shoe. Her foot must have been wet all day. "It's not bullshit. It's the truth."

"The truth? How the hell can it be the truth?"

"Because it is."

"You listen to me ..."

"No!" Giles stepped up into Conlon's face, suddenly spitting out his words. " *You* listen to *me*! Dinosaurs once roamed the planet. Man is descended from apes. The world is *not* flat. The earth revolves around the sun. And demons are real. This ..." he pointed to the body laid out on the ground behind them, "... is number five. An Apostle demon will take twelve victims. In six months time, it will take twelve more. Six months after that, twelve more. And unless it's stopped it will do this *forever*. Do you understand? *Forever*. And it's up to me, and people like me, to stop creatures like this. So what you believe or choose not to believe is of no interest to me, Inspector, and I don't have the time or the energy to waste on trying to persuade you that what I'm telling you is the truth. You're only of value to me insofar as you have manpower at your disposal that I can use."

"This is a police matter. My officers aren't at your beck and call."

Giles stepped back. "You're a fool, Conlon."

"You're right. I *am* a fool! A fool for not throwing you and Adam Barry into jail for obstructing this investigation!"

"Go ahead! Do it and you'll have your twelve bodies! That'll look good on the end of year statistics, won't it?"

"You can go to hell!"

"Interesting. That's something you believe in, is it?" Giles mocked.

The two men stared across the gap that separated them, one of physical distance and opposing ideologies. The thunder boomed around them. The unrelenting rain fell in torrents.

"Is there anything else, Inspector?"

The mild tone of Giles's question surprised them both, and drew from Conlon an oddly gentle answer. "No. Thank you for coming." Giles nodded and turned away. "Mr Giles?"

Giles slowly turned around and let Conlon see the barely banked anger in him. He shook his head in denial of Conlon's question. "I have nothing more to say to you." He broke off and cast his eye over the desperate scene before him. "I'm done with this."

As he spun away the tails of his long coat flared out around him, spraying off water in a shimmering cloud. The heels of his boots echoed on the cobblestones, the sound hollow and hard.

He waved away the offer of a car home and flagged down a cab. The driver talked as he drove, droned on and on, and Giles let him, his brain paying the man just enough attention to grunt in the right places.

He was shivering, whether from cold or shock or anger he had no idea, bone deep shivers that shook his whole body, making his muscles clench in a painful, pitiful attempt to hold him steady. There'd been so much blood.

"Stop the car!"

"What, mate?"

"Stop the bloody car!"

The cab screeched to a halt. Giles scrambled out, his feet sliding on the slick road surface, and vomited into the gutter. Once. Twice. Three times until his stomach, empty, protested the effort. He fell to one knee, reached down and balanced himself with a hand, and hung his head. The last remaining watery contents of his stomach dripped from his nose and mouth.

"Here."

A hand appeared over his shoulder offering him a bottle of water and a handful of paper handkerchiefs. "Thanks." Giles took them, opened the bottle and took a swallow, washing the water around his mouth before spitting it out. He got to his feet. The cabbie took the water to give Giles a chance to blow his nose, and then handed it back to him. Half the water was gone by the time Giles lowered the bottle from his lips. "Do you want this back?"

"Nah, you keep it. Looks like you need it more than I do." Giles pulled up a smile, nodded his thanks, finished the water, and handed back the empty bottle. The cabbie tossed it into the car. "Bad, was it?"

"What?"

"Where I picked you up? The police thing? I'm thinking it was a murder."

"Yes, it was bad."

The cabbie nodded. "Seen a few in my time - kids with knives and guns."

Giles nodded in return. "Sorry for making you stop like that."

"Better you throw up out on the street than in the car."

"There is that."

"You ok? You want to get going again?"

Giles looked around him, realising for the first time that they'd stopped only a street away from his own. "I'm fine now, but I think I'll walk the rest of the way. What do I owe you?"

The cabbie stuck his head into the car and read the meter. "£3.70."

Reaching into his coat for his wallet, Giles pulled out a £10 note. "Keep the change."

"Thanks."

"And thanks for the water."

"No problem. Safe home."

Giles nodded his head, turned and started down the street, raising his hand to acknowledge the blast on the horn as the cab drove past him.

Five dead, seven to go. Giles could hear the words in his head, the rhythm of the syllables matching the cadence of his strides. <Five dead, seven to go> Six syllables. Four strides. Four strides marching him forwards in place and in time. This wasn't like any other demon he'd faced. The sheer relentlessness of the process it was going through allowed him no respite. For every period of twenty-four hours that passed there would be a body to be faced at the end of it. It had taken hours to identify the demon, hours more to realise that the little he knew about it was next to useless, and in that way two more lives had been lost. He needed time and information, and had precious little of both.

The lights from the upstairs rooms of his house glowed brightly out of the wet gloom as he turned into his street. He stopped at the street corner, looked up and saw Anna there, in the living room, back to the window, reaching to take a book from off a shelf. She opened it, flicked the pages, stopped and began reading. As he watched, she stretched and rolled her head in that classic movement designed to ease tension in the neck. She was tired. They both were. They needed sleep, but the thought that because tonight's victim had already been taken it might somehow be alright to try and get some rest fuelled the fury of his despair.

He crossed the street and let himself into his home, turning to quietly close the front door behind him. He leaned his hands on the door and felt the wood beneath his palms. He wondered how it could be so solid when the world was spiralling out of control.

He lashed out viciously at the brass kick plate on the bottom of the door, crashed his boot into it again and again, leaving streaked marks like scars across the shiny metal. He spun around and fell back against the door, breathing heavily. His chest felt tight and his stomach rolled, making him swallow hard as the bitter taste of bile hit the back of his throat. He was hot, too hot, and … he wrenched at the buttons of his coat, managed to pull it open, stripped himself of it, took the three steps to the coat stand, and thrust the coat onto the hook. He missed. Tried again, and missed. Again, and missed. Missed. Missed. "Oh, fuck it!" He hurled the coat to the floor. He leaned on the door and hung his head.

When he looked up again he saw Anna standing at the other end of the hallway, caught in the pool of brightness cast by the spotlight above her head, and he found himself remembering the conversation they'd had when he'd come back from Glasgow. She'd told him that despite what had happened to her in her life, she lived in sunlight; something, she'd said, she wasn't sure was true of him. He remembered how much, at that moment, he'd *wanted* it to be true of him, and in remembering, he realised how much he wanted it to be true of him *now*.

He held out his hand to her, palm up, and slowly curled his fingers in on themselves. "It's so bloody dark in here, Anna."

She came down the hall, bent, gathered up his coat and hung it on the coat stand, reached him, took his fist in her hands and wrapped her long fingers around it so tightly that he could feel the metal of her rings pressing into his flesh. She brought his hand to her mouth and kissed each knuckle in turn. Looked into his eyes and reached out to smooth away the frown-lines at the top of his nose, in a gesture that she'd used the night she'd asked him out and hadn't used since.

"Open your hand," Anna demanded of him. Demanded, because she knew he thought he didn't deserve to claim a place in the light. His fingers unwound themselves and she cradled his hand in hers, left into right. Reached down for his other hand, and took right into left. They were so different from hers, these hands of his, scarred and callused, as they were, by his calling. She touched her lips to both palms. "Tell me. Tell me everything."

He slid down the door, pulling her with him, and sat on his heels. He began talking. About the body, the way it had looked, and how it had made him feel. About the lack of information that was making him hesitant. About his fear of not being strong enough to do this by himself.

While he spoke she stroked his cold face, his wet hair, and could feel him shivering. "Take some of my strength." She touched her brow to the side of his head and kissed him, softly, over and over, on his ear, neck, and cheek.

He shook his head. "It's not going to be enough."

"Then take all of it." He started to shake his head again, but she stopped him with her hand on his chin. She turned his face towards her. "It belongs to you."

He kissed her then, a desperate thing with all his fear in it, and let her kiss him back. Her lips found his hurts, the dark, lonely, frightened places in his soul and poured light into them. Poured *herself* into them. Making him hers in a way he'd thought would always be denied him.

He pulled away from her, just far enough to see her eyes and he said it again, and knew that this time it was true. "I love you."

This time she held his gaze and there was no stumbling unease from her as there had been with his earlier declaration. "I know." She thumbed the dark smudges of fatigue under his eyes. "Jules called. He wants to speak to you."

"Did he say why?"

"No."

His face clouded and he frowned. "Phone." He started to get up, but Anna stopped him. She reached into the pocket of her trousers, pulled out her mobile and handed it to him.

He nodded his thanks and dialled Jules's number.

<"Prideaux.">

"It's Giles."

<"Ah, how was it?">

"Bad, Jules." He breathed deeply, "Tell me you have good news."

<"I have news, whether it is good or bad I cannot be the judge.">

"I don't understand. What news?"

<"We have found a source. Someone who was researching this demon."> Jules hesitated. <"Mon cheri, it is your father.">

"My father?" Giles looked at Anna, his face loose with bewilderment. "How is that possible? His watcher diaries …"

<"… tell us nothing. He left some private papers and personal diaries with the Council.">

"I had no idea."

<"As I did not. I understand that the watcher assigned to study the papers died and we have only now rediscovered them.">

"Rediscovered them?"

<"Yes, we have turned the Council's resources inside out for you, Rupert.">

"What do they say?"

<"I do not know, but the work on the demon is there. It will have to be interpreted. We have sent the papers to you. The courier is on the way."> There was a long silence. <"Rupert, are you there">

"Yes, I'm here."

<"It is your father. This will be hard for you, I know.">

"No, Jules, I don't think you do." Giles heard Jules sigh.

<"You need to know that you are mentioned in your father's papers.">

"I'm sure I am." Bitterness tightened his voice.

<"Will you keep me informed of your progress?">

"Of course. I'll call you later."

<"D'accord. Au revoir.">

Giles snapped the phone shut and handed it back to Anna.

"What did he say?"

"The Council's found some papers that they think will help. My father's papers." He stared off into space. "It seems that after all these years, my father and I are going to get better acquainted."

END
18th April 2003

To be continued in `The Watcher Absolution pt. 2 - The Naming of Wounds'
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