Tweet
London, 1973
This is a bloody brilliant party, thought Ripper. Bloody best party...ever. S'the bloody centre of the bloody marvelous world.
F'only said world would stop spinning. The world...yeah. Want to get off that. Stop it.
But ... Good party. Bloody great.
Ripper was leaning on a pile of cushions in a darkened room, with a huge joint in one hand and a murky looking glass of punch in the other. It contained rum, martini, orange juice, and possibly absinthe. His tongue certainly felt as though some of the skin was being stripped off each time he took a sip.
On second thoughts, maybe it was meths.
As he leaned back on the soft, soft cushions, he chatted to a woman with amazingly pert breasts. He was a little too out of it to really concentrate on seducing her though. As he turned his head to smile at her, the world wibbled, and her face shifted, as if a purple veil had passed across it.
Maybe it wasn't meths.
"Why are your eyes yellow?" he murmured.
"Shh!" she said, hushing him with a finger on his lips. A light touch. Her hair hung in dark ringlets around her face, and her eyes seemed to shine with a light from the inside.
"Lie back and enjoy the ride, Ripper," she said. She snuggled closer and he felt her hand on his chest, pushing up his t-shirt. He squirmed in pleasure.
"A'right then," he said. He placed his drink clumsily on the floor, took a last drag on the spliff, chucking that too, and pulled her closer.
"I'll give you a night to remember..." whispered the woman, then she put her lips to his and the world seemed to explode with pleasure.
But the next morning, Ripper didn't remember a single thing.
June 2003, the M6 motorway
"We've gone on holiday by mistake!" said Andrew. He was gazing out the window at the drizzling rain, as the battered old 2CV puttered along the motorway towards the Scottish border.
"Will somebody please stop him?" said Giles, wearily. Not only had he been driving for five hours straight, but Andrew was sitting in the passenger seat. The boy had been quoting Withnail and I ever since they passed Penrith. It was wearing to say the least. "I'm rather fond of that film and I'd rather not have it ruined forever."
Andrew ignored him and pressed his face excitedly against the window, as they passed some youngish girls. "Scrubbers! They love it!"
"Permission to use violence?" said Dawn with a bright smile. She leaned forward menacingly over the back of Andrew's seat.
"I don't believe you have to ask my permission for anything," said Giles. "Though you will have my gratitude." He looked sideways at Andrew again, who was pressing his nose up against the glass like some overgrown child. Not so much like as identical to, he thought.
Dawn clenched her fist and raised it. Andrew cowered down in his seat as she leant over him.
"I have a heart condition! If you hit me, it's murder!"
Dawn punched him on the arm. "No. Quoting. Withnai. And. Il!"
"Owww!" Andrew squealed.
She punched him again.
"I wasn't quoting that time!"
"What, no one says "ow" in the movie?" said Dawn.
"Well," said Willow. She was studying the map in the back. "I know this might be hard to believe after the bladder-busting, soul-destroying last few hours...we are nearly there. I texted Xander and Buffy, they're in the chopper."
"How come we don't get a chopper?" whined Andrew.
"Because we could only afford the one, and it only holds two," said Willow.
"Well, couldn't we get a better car? This one sucks. It sucked even before it was, like, a bazillion years old. And I think someone peed in the glove compartment."
Giles thought to himself that he had got this car from his friend Bill, a sorceror from Cornwall who had some erratic toilet habits after a few pints of home brew, so that was not entirely unlikely.
Andrew folded his arms and pouted. But at least he stopped talking.
Giles had to admit that the second-hand citroen had seen better days. And those days had probably been before he was born. But, at least it hadn't broken down or - like that yellow school van did after a few hours' drive through the desert - caught on fire. The 2CV had carried them all the way from the coast, and around various places in England, clearing up demon hotspots as they went.
He was growing fond it it and, as he sputtered along the motorways, he realised that his days as a shiny red car owner were an aberration. He was, by his nature, a man who belonged in a used car. Accepting that was, perhaps, a sign that his mid-life crisis was well and truly over. Though he had no idea where the retreating tide of that crisis had washed him up.
Strange shores. Oh brave new world that has such people, innit? He smiled a little. But seriously, old man. Where are you going? Where is all this heading?
On a literal level, he knew perfectly well where he was going, thanks to Willow's map-reading skills. It was soon time to turn off the motorway.
As they crossed the border, Giles took them the last stretch towards their destination along narrower roads. The countryside was beautiful in the afternoon light. Rolling heathland gave way to bigger hills as they moved north.
Everyone was exhausted. They still hadn't really had a chance to rest since the Hellmouth collapsed. There was much to do, and much to avoid talking about. They'd already met with many of the new slayers, and Vi and some of the others were organising squads at various points around the globe. But for the moment, most of the slayers were still with their parents, awaiting instructions. They couldn't exactly whisk hundreds of girls away if they had nowhere to whisk them to.
They still lacked a centre of operations, not to mention the money to house and feed most of the young slayers. The slayer units in play so far were getting by on Giles's savings and what he and Willow could embezzle from various Council accounts. The enchantments on the majority of those accounts were powerful enough to keep Willow busy for the next century. Tight bastards.
Scooby discussions on the topic of a permanant base had so far been fairly half-hearted. Buffy wasn't, she said, ready yet to commit to one place. Then Xander had made a joke about Buffy's relationships that Giles hadn't quite felt he was allowed to laugh at, given the shaky ground of his relationship with Buffy at present.
Giles had been the one to suggest the trip to Scotland, after a tip-off from a contact in Glasgow about some trouble in the highlands. It wasn't the greatest threat to the world ? certainly nothing close to an apocalypse ? but the others were fairly easy to persuade. The next girl they were due to rendez-vous with was in Aberdeen, so they could go there after their mission (which was more like a holiday, compared with what they'd been through lately), once they'd cleaned up this little nest of evil.
Giles suspected that the others, like him, craved the simplicity of a good old demon hunt. Since they were still working out their priorities, and how everything was going to work, and all the "what next" questions still seemed somewhat fuzzy, they might as well do some good.
"Back to basics, as it were," he had told them. "Though without the unfortunate 1990s Tory Party implications."
No one had got that. Sometimes the cultural barrier was insuperable.
A craving for a simple fight wasn't all that was driving him. In the back of his mind, there was the niggling hope that fighting side by side might just bring about a rapprochement with Buffy. Perhaps, working as slayer and...whatever he was now...together, she might remember? That they were a good team, once upon a time.
Perhaps. But, although the defeat of the First and the slayer spell gave a sense of "we're all in this together" once more, he would be a fool to believe that Buffy had forgiven him.
Giles drove on, quietly wrapped up in his thoughts, through heather-clad hills.
Suddenly, there it was, looming ahead of them from behind a hill: the castle.
There were various oohs and ahs.
"Dracula would have serious ancestral pile envy," said Dawn.
"Dracula had piles? I didn't think vampires had that."
"Andrew..." Giles began, then thought better. The more time he spent with Andrew, the more he realised that engaging him only encouraged his flights of pig-ignorance. And actually, the boy was turning out to have some useful, if scattergun, knowledge in that strange little head of his.
Dawn peered through the window up at the battlements. "And... we definitely think it's demons, living here? Not ghosts? Cause, if I was a ghost, that would be prime real estate."
"Not unless ghosts have become corporeal and started to flay local villagers alive with large machete-like weapons, no," said Giles.
He shivered slightly in memory of the photographs his contact had shown him. He had seen many things in his life, and was inured to many horrors, but badly mutilated bodies still had the power to make his blood freeze. "No ghost I know of could do what was done to those people," he said.
"Patrick Swayze totally could," objected Andrew. "Or...the stay-puft marshmallow man was BADASS!"
"Oh, it's just behind that copse!" said Willow, cutting him off.
"The Stay-puft Marshmallow man??"
"That's where Buffy said she'd land."
"Oh."
Giles slowed the 2CV to a sputtering halt just behind the trees.
Up above, Buffy and Xander were circling, looking for the very same spot. As Buffy saw the castle come into view, she couldn't help smiling. If you had to fight gruesome man-flaying demons, might as well do it in style. This was a castle you could imagine being a home for princesses, princes, kings, and those scullery maids who usually turned out to be the actual princesses, revealed by their small feet and pea allergies.
"Princesses are lame," said Buffy, under her breath.
Xander gave her a curious look. "Reckon we're almost good to go down here," he said, through the headset.
They were sitting side by side in the cockpit of a helicopter on loan from some discreet sub-agency that Riley put them in touch with. They smiled at one another, both amused by their situation.
Buffy had been hesitant at first to allow Xander to fly the helicopter, but, he'd pointed out, out of the two of them, he was better equipped. At least he could drive a motorised vehicle of some kind, even if his depth perception was not of the best. Luckily, the chopper had all kinds of radar bells and digital control whistles, so it was more like playing a computer game. 2-D-tastic.
Buffy nodded in assent and Xander took them over the copse. They could see the car below them now. Buffy waved, though they were too high up for the others to see her. And she really hoped that wasn't a metaphor.
"This whole...having equipment more sophisticated than a sword...thing. Still weird?" asked Xander, peering more closely at the slayer.
Buffy shrugged. "Whatever gets the job done."
"Simple answer, well put," said Xander.
Simple... Unlike the situation between her and Giles, which she wasn't going to think about. Thinking led to anger, anger led to hate, hate led to suffering, and suffering led to...well, it was a bad in itself, no matter where it led. Things should be easy now. So, she'd make them easy, with the not thinking, and the not confronting.
I am so emotionally healthy, she thought, with a bitter smile. But where could she start, really? Was there anything really to start with? Spike, the cause of their friction, was gone... maybe she could just put it all behind her.
Yeah. Right. It was that simple. Spike was the only reason she was mad at Giles. Mm, hm. Nothing to do with the fear that burbled in her gut when she thought of how ruthless he could be. This is the way wars are won. Or the way he reminded her ? looking at her with those stern blue eyes - that she was equally capable of putting the mission before the people she loved.
Oh yes. She and Giles could just forget it all and go back to being slayer and watcher, and the good guys would always be distinguishable by their white hats, and no one would ever grow old or die. Or other lies her watcher had told her.
She caught Xander looking at her, somewhere between sympathy and curiosity. Like he knew what she was thinking. Jeez, did he have to be all sensitive and attuned to her like that? She knew he knew that she was troubled, and she'd rather not discuss Giles with Xander, because he might suggest some kind of talking about it, and that would be... but luckily, practical stuff intervened.
"Oh, it's time," said Xander, peering at the monitor. "I'm taking us down," said Xander.
"Go on then, Top Gun!"
"You can be my wingman," Xander offered.
"No-o-o," said Buffy, wagging her finger at him. "You can be mine."
"That an offer?"
Buffy blushed. "Just land us, willya?"
A few moments later, the chopper landed at the agreed location. Agreed location, thought Buffy, as she hopped out of the helicopter when it touched down. I think this military helicopter's rubbing off on me.
This is a bloody brilliant party, thought Ripper. Bloody best party...ever. S'the bloody centre of the bloody marvelous world.
F'only said world would stop spinning. The world...yeah. Want to get off that. Stop it.
But ... Good party. Bloody great.
Ripper was leaning on a pile of cushions in a darkened room, with a huge joint in one hand and a murky looking glass of punch in the other. It contained rum, martini, orange juice, and possibly absinthe. His tongue certainly felt as though some of the skin was being stripped off each time he took a sip.
On second thoughts, maybe it was meths.
As he leaned back on the soft, soft cushions, he chatted to a woman with amazingly pert breasts. He was a little too out of it to really concentrate on seducing her though. As he turned his head to smile at her, the world wibbled, and her face shifted, as if a purple veil had passed across it.
Maybe it wasn't meths.
"Why are your eyes yellow?" he murmured.
"Shh!" she said, hushing him with a finger on his lips. A light touch. Her hair hung in dark ringlets around her face, and her eyes seemed to shine with a light from the inside.
"Lie back and enjoy the ride, Ripper," she said. She snuggled closer and he felt her hand on his chest, pushing up his t-shirt. He squirmed in pleasure.
"A'right then," he said. He placed his drink clumsily on the floor, took a last drag on the spliff, chucking that too, and pulled her closer.
"I'll give you a night to remember..." whispered the woman, then she put her lips to his and the world seemed to explode with pleasure.
But the next morning, Ripper didn't remember a single thing.
June 2003, the M6 motorway
"We've gone on holiday by mistake!" said Andrew. He was gazing out the window at the drizzling rain, as the battered old 2CV puttered along the motorway towards the Scottish border.
"Will somebody please stop him?" said Giles, wearily. Not only had he been driving for five hours straight, but Andrew was sitting in the passenger seat. The boy had been quoting Withnail and I ever since they passed Penrith. It was wearing to say the least. "I'm rather fond of that film and I'd rather not have it ruined forever."
Andrew ignored him and pressed his face excitedly against the window, as they passed some youngish girls. "Scrubbers! They love it!"
"Permission to use violence?" said Dawn with a bright smile. She leaned forward menacingly over the back of Andrew's seat.
"I don't believe you have to ask my permission for anything," said Giles. "Though you will have my gratitude." He looked sideways at Andrew again, who was pressing his nose up against the glass like some overgrown child. Not so much like as identical to, he thought.
Dawn clenched her fist and raised it. Andrew cowered down in his seat as she leant over him.
"I have a heart condition! If you hit me, it's murder!"
Dawn punched him on the arm. "No. Quoting. Withnai. And. Il!"
"Owww!" Andrew squealed.
She punched him again.
"I wasn't quoting that time!"
"What, no one says "ow" in the movie?" said Dawn.
"Well," said Willow. She was studying the map in the back. "I know this might be hard to believe after the bladder-busting, soul-destroying last few hours...we are nearly there. I texted Xander and Buffy, they're in the chopper."
"How come we don't get a chopper?" whined Andrew.
"Because we could only afford the one, and it only holds two," said Willow.
"Well, couldn't we get a better car? This one sucks. It sucked even before it was, like, a bazillion years old. And I think someone peed in the glove compartment."
Giles thought to himself that he had got this car from his friend Bill, a sorceror from Cornwall who had some erratic toilet habits after a few pints of home brew, so that was not entirely unlikely.
Andrew folded his arms and pouted. But at least he stopped talking.
Giles had to admit that the second-hand citroen had seen better days. And those days had probably been before he was born. But, at least it hadn't broken down or - like that yellow school van did after a few hours' drive through the desert - caught on fire. The 2CV had carried them all the way from the coast, and around various places in England, clearing up demon hotspots as they went.
He was growing fond it it and, as he sputtered along the motorways, he realised that his days as a shiny red car owner were an aberration. He was, by his nature, a man who belonged in a used car. Accepting that was, perhaps, a sign that his mid-life crisis was well and truly over. Though he had no idea where the retreating tide of that crisis had washed him up.
Strange shores. Oh brave new world that has such people, innit? He smiled a little. But seriously, old man. Where are you going? Where is all this heading?
On a literal level, he knew perfectly well where he was going, thanks to Willow's map-reading skills. It was soon time to turn off the motorway.
As they crossed the border, Giles took them the last stretch towards their destination along narrower roads. The countryside was beautiful in the afternoon light. Rolling heathland gave way to bigger hills as they moved north.
Everyone was exhausted. They still hadn't really had a chance to rest since the Hellmouth collapsed. There was much to do, and much to avoid talking about. They'd already met with many of the new slayers, and Vi and some of the others were organising squads at various points around the globe. But for the moment, most of the slayers were still with their parents, awaiting instructions. They couldn't exactly whisk hundreds of girls away if they had nowhere to whisk them to.
They still lacked a centre of operations, not to mention the money to house and feed most of the young slayers. The slayer units in play so far were getting by on Giles's savings and what he and Willow could embezzle from various Council accounts. The enchantments on the majority of those accounts were powerful enough to keep Willow busy for the next century. Tight bastards.
Scooby discussions on the topic of a permanant base had so far been fairly half-hearted. Buffy wasn't, she said, ready yet to commit to one place. Then Xander had made a joke about Buffy's relationships that Giles hadn't quite felt he was allowed to laugh at, given the shaky ground of his relationship with Buffy at present.
Giles had been the one to suggest the trip to Scotland, after a tip-off from a contact in Glasgow about some trouble in the highlands. It wasn't the greatest threat to the world ? certainly nothing close to an apocalypse ? but the others were fairly easy to persuade. The next girl they were due to rendez-vous with was in Aberdeen, so they could go there after their mission (which was more like a holiday, compared with what they'd been through lately), once they'd cleaned up this little nest of evil.
Giles suspected that the others, like him, craved the simplicity of a good old demon hunt. Since they were still working out their priorities, and how everything was going to work, and all the "what next" questions still seemed somewhat fuzzy, they might as well do some good.
"Back to basics, as it were," he had told them. "Though without the unfortunate 1990s Tory Party implications."
No one had got that. Sometimes the cultural barrier was insuperable.
A craving for a simple fight wasn't all that was driving him. In the back of his mind, there was the niggling hope that fighting side by side might just bring about a rapprochement with Buffy. Perhaps, working as slayer and...whatever he was now...together, she might remember? That they were a good team, once upon a time.
Perhaps. But, although the defeat of the First and the slayer spell gave a sense of "we're all in this together" once more, he would be a fool to believe that Buffy had forgiven him.
Giles drove on, quietly wrapped up in his thoughts, through heather-clad hills.
Suddenly, there it was, looming ahead of them from behind a hill: the castle.
There were various oohs and ahs.
"Dracula would have serious ancestral pile envy," said Dawn.
"Dracula had piles? I didn't think vampires had that."
"Andrew..." Giles began, then thought better. The more time he spent with Andrew, the more he realised that engaging him only encouraged his flights of pig-ignorance. And actually, the boy was turning out to have some useful, if scattergun, knowledge in that strange little head of his.
Dawn peered through the window up at the battlements. "And... we definitely think it's demons, living here? Not ghosts? Cause, if I was a ghost, that would be prime real estate."
"Not unless ghosts have become corporeal and started to flay local villagers alive with large machete-like weapons, no," said Giles.
He shivered slightly in memory of the photographs his contact had shown him. He had seen many things in his life, and was inured to many horrors, but badly mutilated bodies still had the power to make his blood freeze. "No ghost I know of could do what was done to those people," he said.
"Patrick Swayze totally could," objected Andrew. "Or...the stay-puft marshmallow man was BADASS!"
"Oh, it's just behind that copse!" said Willow, cutting him off.
"The Stay-puft Marshmallow man??"
"That's where Buffy said she'd land."
"Oh."
Giles slowed the 2CV to a sputtering halt just behind the trees.
Up above, Buffy and Xander were circling, looking for the very same spot. As Buffy saw the castle come into view, she couldn't help smiling. If you had to fight gruesome man-flaying demons, might as well do it in style. This was a castle you could imagine being a home for princesses, princes, kings, and those scullery maids who usually turned out to be the actual princesses, revealed by their small feet and pea allergies.
"Princesses are lame," said Buffy, under her breath.
Xander gave her a curious look. "Reckon we're almost good to go down here," he said, through the headset.
They were sitting side by side in the cockpit of a helicopter on loan from some discreet sub-agency that Riley put them in touch with. They smiled at one another, both amused by their situation.
Buffy had been hesitant at first to allow Xander to fly the helicopter, but, he'd pointed out, out of the two of them, he was better equipped. At least he could drive a motorised vehicle of some kind, even if his depth perception was not of the best. Luckily, the chopper had all kinds of radar bells and digital control whistles, so it was more like playing a computer game. 2-D-tastic.
Buffy nodded in assent and Xander took them over the copse. They could see the car below them now. Buffy waved, though they were too high up for the others to see her. And she really hoped that wasn't a metaphor.
"This whole...having equipment more sophisticated than a sword...thing. Still weird?" asked Xander, peering more closely at the slayer.
Buffy shrugged. "Whatever gets the job done."
"Simple answer, well put," said Xander.
Simple... Unlike the situation between her and Giles, which she wasn't going to think about. Thinking led to anger, anger led to hate, hate led to suffering, and suffering led to...well, it was a bad in itself, no matter where it led. Things should be easy now. So, she'd make them easy, with the not thinking, and the not confronting.
I am so emotionally healthy, she thought, with a bitter smile. But where could she start, really? Was there anything really to start with? Spike, the cause of their friction, was gone... maybe she could just put it all behind her.
Yeah. Right. It was that simple. Spike was the only reason she was mad at Giles. Mm, hm. Nothing to do with the fear that burbled in her gut when she thought of how ruthless he could be. This is the way wars are won. Or the way he reminded her ? looking at her with those stern blue eyes - that she was equally capable of putting the mission before the people she loved.
Oh yes. She and Giles could just forget it all and go back to being slayer and watcher, and the good guys would always be distinguishable by their white hats, and no one would ever grow old or die. Or other lies her watcher had told her.
She caught Xander looking at her, somewhere between sympathy and curiosity. Like he knew what she was thinking. Jeez, did he have to be all sensitive and attuned to her like that? She knew he knew that she was troubled, and she'd rather not discuss Giles with Xander, because he might suggest some kind of talking about it, and that would be... but luckily, practical stuff intervened.
"Oh, it's time," said Xander, peering at the monitor. "I'm taking us down," said Xander.
"Go on then, Top Gun!"
"You can be my wingman," Xander offered.
"No-o-o," said Buffy, wagging her finger at him. "You can be mine."
"That an offer?"
Buffy blushed. "Just land us, willya?"
A few moments later, the chopper landed at the agreed location. Agreed location, thought Buffy, as she hopped out of the helicopter when it touched down. I think this military helicopter's rubbing off on me.
Comment