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Nov. 5th, 2005 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgreyHarrogate, Part Six
Gunn sat down on the double bed and smoothed out the coverlet. He had pulled the drapes open after someone had closed them again. It felt all kinds of weird being in this dead girl’s room, contemplating sleeping in her bed. Changing the linen wasn’t enough to get rid of the scent of her shampoo and perfume and talcum powder, and the thing was she’d expected to be coming back. That was what the whole room was screaming at him; she’d just gone out for the evening, that was all. She hadn’t been fighting vampires or demons or taking on an evil law firm, she’d just been going out to meet a friend someplace and now this room was waiting and waiting and she wasn’t ever coming home.
There were books everywhere, not just novels, poetry and plays too. Used ones, mostly, and softcovers, some of them with their original prices still printed on them. ‘5s net’. Shillings, Giles had told him. The equivalent of five new pence or twelve old pence. Twelve pence going into five pence didn’t work with any fractions that Gunn knew; damn but these people had needed decimalization badly. He opened the book on the top of the pile by her bed. Still expecting the dead girl to tell them something about who had killed her. He glanced down the page quickly, letting sentences catch him unawares, as if that made them truths.
This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is heavier, there were no hills of that size there.
But I find it impossible not to look for actual persons known to me and not seen since; impossible not to look for myself.
Gunn closed his eyes briefly. No, don’t tell me about me. Tell me about who killed you.
A last attempt at enlightenment through illogical hocus pocus of the kind he would never admit to practising to any living thing; not now the one person he could have shared it with had gone to join the dead. This was definitely only something he would ever tell Fred. She could make anything scientific and logical, even things that were crazy. If she were here right now she’d even be able to find a word for what Wesley was that made it seem okay. Willow had some of that quality about her, too, and he was starting to find it all kinds of comforting. Then he thought of Fred in that bed, surrounded by men who loved her but who hadn’t managed to save her. The way she’d looked at them as if they would be bound to find a solution, because they were all her heroes and her brothers, and there was nothing to fear as long as they were close by.
Someone has that war stored up in metal canisters, a memory he cannot use, somewhere my innocence is proven with my guilt, but this would not be the war I fought in.
He closed the book, trying not to feel as if he’d let down another girl who needed him to save her. He’d been in a hospital bed in St Matthews when Alicia had been murdered, and yet what had it all been for, everything he had done since he had decided you either picked up a crucifix and went to church and prayed really hard or you picked up a fuckin’ stake and rammed it straight into the heart of the next undead son-of-a-bitch you found? Everything he had done and Angel had done and Wes and Cordy and Fred and Lorne had done to make the world a better place, and people just kept dying. And maybe this was how cops felt, like what the fuck was the point if they worked their asses off every day and innocent girls still ended up dead?
Maybe Wes could have conjured up a nice comforting hallucination right now, but Gunn had a memory come to him instead. Sitting up in that hospital bed with this dark hole inside him that could never be filled because what he’d done could never be undone. Realizing this must be how Angel felt every single day and wondering how, if he did, he didn’t just stake himself and make this feeling go away. Angel standing by his bedside and Gunn not wanting to even meet his eye, or anyone’s eye, ever again; remembering that cold deranged dislike in Wesley’s eyes, the man so measured in his revenge as he’d stuck that scalpel in his gut.
I understand not wanting to go back, not wanting to be who we were. I understand it. And I can forgive it. But you knew what was happening to her. You knew who was responsible and you didn't say anything. You let her die. I'm less forgiving about that.
He flinched at the memory, rubbing his face over his hands as if he could brush it away. Angel standing at the end of his bed looking as if he wasn’t going to give him an inch, wasn’t ever going to forgive him either and then those words that were so matter-of-fact, so painful, so much what he needed to hear:
I know you feel bad about your part in what happened to Fred. And you should. For the rest of your life, it should wake you up in the middle of the night. And it will...because you're a good man. You signed a piece of paper, that's all.
But I knew. Not about Fred, but...when I signed, I knew there would be consequences.
You know, the thing about atonement is, you never run out of chances... but you gotta take 'em. You can't hide hide in some hospital room and pretend it's all gonna go away... 'cause it never will.
Gunn straightened back up, looking at the sun floating in on a swirl of dust, the mirror with the cards and photographs stuck around the edge, the framed photographs on the sideboard, the books and pens and pile of clothes dumped on a chair. All the things this girl had left behind, who, if she couldn’t be saved, could at least be avenged.
“No, it never does, does it, Angel? It never goes away.” He went out into the sitting room where Wesley was researching something at the girl’s table. He would have found it hard not to treat the place like a shrine, tip-toeing around her possessions, but Wesley had cleared her books away and found a new notebook from somewhere and was working in that. For the sake of Giles’ mental health, that was probably the right approach, but it still looked callous. And there was the whole matter of Giles looking as if he had come that close to punching Wesley once already today. Gunn was really hoping he and Giles could learn to get along without butting heads, but if Giles hit Wesley, Gunn was going to have to hit him back, just because, and he really wanted to avoid that if he could.
“Wes, I don’t know if we should be moving her stuff yet. Giles may want to do that himself.”
Wesley looked up at him for one of those long strange pauses where Wesley seemed to be trying to work out who Gunn was, at least he guessed that was what it was about, that intent stare before he answered him.
“Would you rather have your possessions preserved exactly where you left them or the people who killed you brought to justice?”
Gunn shrugged. “Change ‘brought to justice’ to ‘chopped up into little bitty pieces’ and I’m there.”
“They didn’t just cut her throat and leave her to bleed to death. They captured the blood in some kind of receptacle.”
It was definitely better that Wesley said this kind of thing when Giles wasn’t around or Giles was going to hit him for sure. “So?” he prompted.
Wesley held up an exercise book. “This was inside her course work. She wasn’t writing an essay about Structuralism, after all. She was working on some spells. I don’t think she can have been much more than a dabbler in the magical arts because these are very basic spells. I imagine her powers were quite weak. That might be why they needed so much of her blood.”
“Wes, I get that you’re just doing your job but it’s probably not a good idea to talk about that girl’s blood in front of Giles. Okay?”
“He has an emotional connection, I understand that.” Wesley looked back at the books in front of him. “I remember feeling that.”
Gunn felt a stab of hurt at that ‘remember’. He had never really known how Wesley felt about him after the death of Fred. There had been that long cold year of enmity between them, but that had felt like it was more on his side than Wesley’s. That was partly what annoyed him so much. Wes was there making eyes at Fred without wanting to pay the price for it, not wanting to come right out and tell Gunn that if it came down to making off with his girl or getting his friendship back, Gunn’s friendship was nowhere, but still wanting to look like the good guy in front of Fred, the one who was ready to be friends again. Then they’d done all kinds of…bonding under the influence of Jasmine, and even after all the warm fuzzy love had been banished and they were running for their lives from the army of the indoctrinated, he had still cared about Wesley just as much. It had felt as if their friendship was the only thing that had come through their time as possessed worshippers of a rogue goddess unscathed.
Even in Wolfram & Hart, there had been distance, it was true; Gunn had believed in what they were doing, making the machinery work for them, felt empowered by the new knowledge in his head; whereas Wesley had still only seemed to believe in Angel; but Gunn had felt they were still keeping the friendship going. And then had come Fred’s death and that scalpel in his guts and maybe that had been the time for them to both cut their losses. But it was never that damned simple with family. And by that point they were the only family they had left: Gunn, Wesley, Angel, Lorne, hell, even Spike and Illyria had been members, whatever back door they had come in by. Which was maybe why Wesley had sent Illyria to break Gunn out of hell and why Gunn hadn’t felt even a twinge of resentment when Wesley had made him that half-assed apology from his window seat on the crazy train. So he’d known he still cared about Wesley, even a Wesley who had stabbed him, even a Wesley who was at least half-insane, drunk as often as not, and so exhausted with grief that the kindest thing anyone could have done for him was take a leaf out of deranged Angel’s book and hold a pillow over his face until he stopped kicking. The thing with Wesley was that he was a functioning crazy person, just like he was a functioning drunk; stick him full of single malt and shut him in a room with the walking corpse of the woman who had loved him and there would still be a part of him problem-solving like the sanest Watcher on the planet. Supposing Watchers actually came in sane.
Which meant that even if he was seeing Illyria and Cordy and Christ knew what else dancing around him all day long, it didn’t mean there wasn’t some part of his brain that was working perfectly well. Which could also mean that he felt no emotional connection to Gunn any more but that he might still be capable of solving this case.
“He knew this girl since she was a baby. It would be like people talking to us about…Fred’s organs melting like it wasn’t important.”
“Well, it isn’t now.” Wesley returned to the books, tone unexpectedly crisp. “She’s dead. Does the method really matter?”
“I seem to remember it mattered to you at the time.” He didn’t sound bitter because he wasn’t, but he did sound hurt because he guessed some part of him still was.
Wesley glanced up at him briefly. “I was irrational with grief.”
Gunn expelled a breath he seemed to have been holding in for a while. “Yeah, well, it’s good you’re over that.” He sat on the table and looked down at what Wesley was working on. His handwriting looked saner than the rest of him put together, all neat and tidy and in perfectly straight lines. “You got a theory?”
Wesley didn’t look up. “I already told you, I think they killed her for her blood.”
“What?” Gunn gaped at him. “That’s not what you said.”
“Didn’t I?”
“You said they might be using her blood for something, you didn’t say that was why she was killed.”
Wesley nodded solemnly. “I see your point. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Still, even if she were killed for reasons that were entirely personal, if the blood was sold to a cult of some kind then they would seem to be a starting place to work back to the murderer, wouldn’t you agree?”
Sighing, Gunn slid down from the table. “I think I should get the beds ready for everyone. Put away some of her stuff. You okay sharing cause I figure there’s no one else out of the four of us that probably can? I was thinking Willow should have the little room and Giles have the sofa bed – seeing as how I don’t think you or I would be comfortable sharing with him.”
There was a long pause before Wesley blinked and looked up at him again. “Didn’t we used to share?”
“At Cordy’s a couple of times when she took the couch.”
“And in the Hyperion?”
Gunn grimaced. “That was Jasmine-time, Wes, we don’t need to talk about that. That’s not relevant to now.”
Wesley picked up his pen and bent back over the books. “I remember that you snore.”
“Only when I’ve been drinking,” Gunn protested, indignant for the ten seconds it took until he realized that he and Wes had managed a conversation that was halfway sane. He patted him gingerly on his bony shoulder. “You stick with the hocus pocus research, okay? I’ll do the whole…domestic thing.”
When he looked back from the spare bedroom and that sad-looking little camp bed, Wesley was still turning pages and making notes. For the first time since he had woken up in the hospital bed, wondering where the alley and the rain and the damned dragon had got to and how in the name of all that was holy he wasn’t dead yet, Gunn wondered if maybe they could still find a way to do some good after all.
***
The sound of traffic was politely muted in the long dining room at the back of Rosemary’s house; a background murmur behind the jingling of the wind chimes. The French windows were open so they could gaze out into the garden in which it wasn’t quite warm enough to sit. Clouds swept across the square of mown glass at regularly spaced intervals; a breeze ruffling the leaves of the flowers and shrubs in the deep borders and rippling the surface of the little pond in which the red-orange glint of goldfish could just be glimpsed. Willow watched an unfamiliar bird alight on a stone birdbath and sip delicately from the greenish water. She took another nervous gulp of tea, and looked at the empty places in the room that no one had taken when they chose their chairs. She guessed she was probably sitting in a dead woman’s seat right now, on the edge of a couch that had looked more comfortable than it was; that careful space around the green velvet chair with the big tapestry cushion, only the newspaper on the comfortable-looking faded blue couch with the silk shawl draped over it.
The sense of mourning pervaded the room; also fear. Even if she hadn’t been a witch, she thought she could have picked that up. She remembered that feeling after she had found the dead boys in the home room; vampires invading their personal space and enjoying doing it. How it had felt as if nothing would ever be safe again. And how that hadn’t begun to compare with how she had felt when Angel had become Angelus; someone who knew them all so well and how to hurt them the most.
She took another sip of tea to gather her nerves and then leaned forward. “I know this must be very difficult for you, but if you could tell me anything…? Anything at all, that might throw some light on…”
A small bird-like woman in her forties darted her a sharp glance. “You claim to be a witch and you really don’t understand the misogynistic impulses that lead men to oppress empowered women? You don’t comprehend the castration-complex at the root of these crimes?”
Willow sighed. “I actually took psychology. I took it with a crazy teacher who was building a Frankenstein’s monster in a back room of her secret military demon-hunting operation, but I did take it. And those reasons are probably why some unbalanced men decided to kill your friends. But, just on the off chance that…”
“You think this has anything to do with magic?” the woman demanded contemptuously. “Do you think witches were burned because of magic? Do you think so-called ‘sorceresses’ are chopped up with machetes in Africa because of magic?”
“The police are looking for a cult of neo-Christian psychotics who have translated their fear of women into murdering them for any reason they can come up with in the Bible.” Willow could hear her voice rising slightly and worked to get it back down to the kind reasonable understanding tone that she always tried to use with Wesley. “As they’re exploring that angle already, I thought it might be worth taking a look at the other options, that’s all.”
“There are no other options.” The woman sat back in her chair with a flick of her hair, as if Willow were an insect that had just landed on her skin.
Willow reminded herself that fear always made people scratchy, but also decided that if she had to go on being the one who was always nice and tolerant and talking people down from their stressed-grieving-irrational place while everyone else got to act out, then she was probably going to need to indulge in some primal scream therapy before too long, or, perhaps, kick something.
“We don’t need to close our minds to possibilities, Joanna,” Rosemary said. “Isn’t that what this group is about? Being open to other ways of looking?”
“But this isn’t a game.” Joanna’s voice was so ragged with fear it reminded Willow of those visualization exercises they had done back in her old wicca group. Joanna was a paper kite with a snapped string snagged on a thorn bush right now.
“What we do here isn’t a game either, Joanna.” The woman in the corner had hair henna’d an unlikely shade of orange and a deep soothing voice but had already talked about Willow’s aura rather more than Willow had enjoyed.
“Yes, it is,” Joanna snapped. “It’s not serious. It’s not…magical. And now Alicia and Karin and Dora are dead because of our stupid games.”
“Karin and Dora had genuine power, Joanna.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense.”
Willow sighed. On another day she might have wanted to explore why a woman came to a wicca group who didn’t believe in witchcraft but now she really didn’t have time for this denialist crap.
“Karin came from a family of witches, Willow,” Rosemary told her. “The Prestons are famous in Knaresborough for their psychic abilities. They have been for generations. They’re supposed to be descended from Jennet Preston.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” Joanna snorted.
“What about Alicia?” Willow pressed.
Rosemary shrugged elegantly. “I can’t say I noticed anything unusual about her but Karin thought that she had some latent ability.”
Joanna said with a sneer: “I think we all know the real reason why Karin was interested in Alicia.”
Willow thought that Joanna was making herself very hard to love right now. The words oh yes, because it’s not as if a lesbian could ever want to be friends with another woman without wanting to jump her bones were having to be swallowed like ground glass.
“Giles thought so too. And her mother is quite a powerful witch so it seems likely that it would have been passed on. I just wondered if she had mentioned any specific spells?”
Rosemary looked a little shocked. “We don’t do ‘spells’ here, dear.”
“Research then?”
“She and Karin were researching something,” another woman put in. Willow was almost sure her name was Mary. She sounded tired and when the sunlight fell across her face as another cloud scudded by and passed on, Willow saw that her eyes were red-rimmed. “Dora thought there was some kind of…”
“Interruption in the Force,” Joanna said with heavy-handed sarcasm.
Mary ran a hand through her short blonded hair. “Karin said it was like knowing Pluto was there because of the irregularities in Neptune’s orbit. Not something sensed but an awareness of what one knew reacting to something else. She thought there might be some people casting spells of unusual power. She and Alicia were trying to work out where the spells were being cast and by whom. It seemed a very harmless interest for them.”
Willow thought of Sunnydale and how dangerous new sorcery could be if one felt it tingling the edges of one’s own awareness. In the world of herbal tea sipped from earthenware hand-thrown pottery, it had probably felt like an entertaining fantasy, but she had been one of the people who sensed that something was wrong and who tried to do something about it. The only difference between her and Karin and Alicia was that she had been able to do her investigating with a Slayer at her side.
“They were quite excited about it,” Rosemary conceded.
“Did they give any details to anyone?” Willow pressed. “Any idea of what was out there and how it…felt to them?”
Mary sighed. “I spoke to Karin on the phone the weekend before she… She said that she knew it was something particularly powerful because she couldn’t find it. She said that she and her grandmother had performed all the usual ‘revealing spells’ and nothing was showing up, and she thought their ‘energy’ might be wrong, so she was going to ask Alicia to help her in case that made a difference. I thought it was…rather silly. Something must be even more powerful than they thought it was because they couldn’t find it? It seemed like the worst kind of denial affirmation. I told her I had to get the Co-Op before all the Guardians sold out and I was stuck with The Times again.” She pressed a tissue to her eyes, her shoulders shaking before she snatched a breath. “I’m sorry, I just feel so incredibly guilty.”
“Unless you know any super-powerful witches who could have put helped them with that revealing spell, I don’t think it would have made any difference,” Willow reassured her.
“Oh please,” Joanna said shortly. “This is all such nonsense. Alicia, Karin and Dora were killed by misogynist psychopaths and that’s an end to it. And the sooner everyone here stops pretending to be a witch, the better her chances are of not ending up the same way until these people are caught.” She held Willow’s gaze. “And that goes for you too.”
Willow rose to her feet. “Don’t worry. I never pretend to be a witch. I should get back. One of my friends is quite…high maintenance at the moment.”
Joanna looked slightly more sympathetic. “Bad breakup?”
“Bad resurrection.” Willow picked up her purse. “He think we’re hallucinations and he’s still pre-brain death, you know how it is when you pull someone back from the dead. There are always complications.” She handed a postcard with her current address to Rosemary and hers and Giles’ cellphone numbers. “If any of you think of anything that might be useful or see anyone who looks suspicious, please give me a call.”
She walked out into the daylight, feeling that the chances of Alicia having been murdered by some random psychopath had just receded considerably. If Karin Preston had been correct, there was something dark and powerful stirring in Harrogate, and something that knew enough to hide itself from ordinary incantations. She took out her phone and was calling Giles even as she walked to the bus stop.
***
Giles walked back into Alicia’s flat to find Gunn wielding a vacuum cleaner against the ugly patterned carpet in the sitting room while Wesley obliviously made notes at Alicia’s little table. The doors to the two bedrooms were open and he could see that the windows had been opened, letting in dust and traffic noise and a profusion of sunlight and also letting out the last scents of Alicia, giving him a sharp pang of loss. He noticed that the camp bed had been made up in the boxroom and the sheets and duvet cover changed on the double bed in the main bedroom. A neat pile of duvet, sheets and pillowcase lay stacked in readiness next to the sofabed. The air smelt of the lemon-scented jaycloths with which Gunn had evidently been wiping everything that wasn’t actually moving.
“I see you’ve been busy.”
Gunn switched off the vacuum cleaner. “Just trying to make the place…you know...”
The words ‘less like a shrine’ remained unspoken. Giles raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure you’ll make someone a wonderful little wife some day.”
Wesley sniggered but when Gunn turned to glare at him, Wesley pretended to be checking a cross-reference. Gunn pushed the vacuum cleaner back into cupboard in which Giles noticed an ironing board had also been jammed. Gunn asked: “Did you find out anything?”
“I visited some of Alicia’s friends, and apparently her boyfriends were all pot-smoking layabouts who fancy themselves as future rockstars but whose only real talent was an ability to look good when naked. What is the matter with young women today?”
Gunn switched on the kettle. “Yeah, cause her mother was so selective in her choices. Weren’t you like black magic dabbling crazy rock guitarist guy yourself back in the day?” He held up his hands. “And for all I know you had the whole ‘looking good naked’ thing going for you, too, but I don’t want to know. Tea?”
“I’ll have you know I was…” Giles broke off as honesty derailed his indignation. “Exactly as you described. And yes, I’d love a cup. Wesley?” He noticed there was still a macaroon left on the plate that Jean had brought up earlier and snagged it before turning to the other Englishman. “Tea?”
Wesley took an unfathomably long time to look up from his book, look at Giles, look at Gunn, take in the arcane significance of the kettle and then say: “Yes, please.”
“What is he waiting for?” Giles demanded of Gunn as he followed him into the galley kitchen so beloved of bad seventies house conversions. “I keep feeling as if there’s a secret password we’re supposed to be giving him to confirm our identities. Should we start wearing name tags?” He noted that Gunn was using the last of the milk in one of the Devonware jugs that had accompanied the sandwiches and made a mental note to pick up a fresh carton when he went out next. It felt like a very long time since they had eaten those sandwiches. His stomach seemed to agree with him as it rumbled a complaint.
“You just need to give him time,” Gunn sighed, handing over a cup of tea that was surprisingly exactly the way Giles liked it. Giles took another sip and had it confirmed. Eight years he had tried to train Buffy and Xander to make a drinkable cup of tea without success and in the interim Wesley had apparently managed to teach Gunn perfectly. That was rather galling.
Gunn took Wesley his tea, putting it down on the table by his elbow. “Tea, Wes. Don’t spill it.”
Wesley looked up at Gunn for a long surprised moment and then blinked. “Thank you.”
Gunn sighed and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re welcome.”
Willow burst in through the door in a blaze of red hair and dangling tapestry handbag, clearly out of breath from running. “Giles, you need to switch on your cellphone!”
Giles guiltily checked his coat, snatching up the annoyingly fiddly little Nokia that Dawn had persuaded him to buy to discover that it was indeed switched off. “Damn. Sorry.”
Wesley murmured: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…” without looking up from his reference books.
“Yes, that’s quite enough from you, Wesley.” Giles glanced at Gunn. “I swear he’s winding us up half the time with the whole crazy thing.” When he turned to Willow it was to find her with her hands on her hips, tapping her foot impatiently. “And I gather you spent your time rather more fruitfully than I did.”
“We need to do a revealing spell,” she said breathlessly, grabbing Giles’s hand and beginning to tug him towards the couch. “We need to do it right now.”
“Mister Giles…”
Giles turned to find Judith Philips smiling at him from the open doorway. “There’s afternoon tea if you’re hungry. We’re reserving a table for you while you’re here so you can come down any time you want and have a bit of something.”
Giles could feel his stomach rumbling again but Willow had seemed so eager to do the spell at once. He turned to her. “Willow, would you mind…?”
But she was already gazing at Judith Philips wistfully. “Afternoon tea? Like little scones and strawberry jam and cream and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off?”
Judith beamed at her benevolently, apparently making the usual mistake of assuming that Willow was a decade younger than her actual age. “If you want, my dear. Table Seven. Alicia always liked that one best.”
Willow let go of Giles’s arm. “Let’s do the spell later. Wesley probably needs some tea.” She went over to where Wesley was working and took his hand. “Come on, Wesley, it’s time you had some scones and jam and things.” To Giles’s astonishment, Wesley looked only slightly perplexed by being pulled to his feet and towards the stairs by a determined redhead, going with Willow with so little resistance that Giles could only presume that Cordelia had trained him so rigorously to obey women without argument that it had lodged too deep even to be dislodged by general psychosis.
Over her shoulder, Willow called: “I’ll tell you what I learned while we’re eating.”
Giles exchanged a glance of resignation with Gunn who shrugged and said in a rather too perfect mimicking of Wesley’s accent: “Afternoon tea, it is then.”
The teashop clientele had thinned out a little but the room was still more than half full. There was the oddly familiar bustle of middle-aged women carrying trays of cakes and sandwiches and teapots and milk jugs around to the tables, greeting regulars with cheery enquiries after children and grand-children. The room felt longer and narrower than earlier, the light suddenly inadequate with each table now clustered with customers. The noise level was an acceptable background murmur but it still felt like a ludicrously public place in which to have a strategy meeting.
Judith was there in a moment to take their orders. Giles opted for the broccoli and stilton soup leftover from lunchtime and quickly reheated for him in the microwave, while Willow encouraged Wesley and Gunn to eat the cream teas she had already ordered for them. She was entirely delighted by the two plates of sandwiches, the wholemeal salmon and transparently thin and crustless white cucumber selection, and seemed to think that a scone with jam and cream on it was the apex of epicurean delight. Gunn took one bite out of his cucumber sandwich before looking at it in disbelief. “Where’s the food value?”
Willow hushed him and pushed him the plate of salmon sandwiches instead. “Try one of these.”
Gunn lowered his voice to hiss intently: “I’m serious, I can’t mix it up with scaly demons on this pansy-assed British food. No wonder everyone around here is five feet nothing and couldn’t pick up an axe with a fork-lift. They don’t do burgers or hot dogs?”
“It’s afternoon tea,” Willow insisted. “It’s not a proper meal. Now eat your scone and look as if you like it.”
Giles nodded his appreciation as the waitress went past and Gunn pulled out another smile as well, Willow also beamed while Wesley ignored all of them and continued to write on his napkin with the pen he had still been holding when Willow grabbed him.
“So…” Gunn leaned back in his chair, which promptly rocked alarmingly, Giles having to grab his arm quickly to pull him back – although not before he had joggled the elbow of a woman sitting at the table behind them. Gunn had to break off and apologize, using more boyish charm that made the woman forgive him pretty much everything as far as Giles could see, and the woman’s balding fiftyish husband scowl horribly. Gunn turned back. “So – this whole Preston thing, what’s that about?”
As Willow had a mouth full of scone, Giles answered for her: “Jennet Preston was one of the Witches of Pendle – probably the most famous witches in English legal history. They were believed to have been responsible for the deaths by witchcraft of seventeen people all based in and around the Forest of Pendle.”
“There were thirteen of them,” Willow added. “Eleven of them were hanged: Jane and John Bulcock, Isobel Robey, Katherine Hewitt, Anne Redferne, Anne Whittle – ”
“Alias Chattox,” Giles put in.
“Alice Nutter, Alizon, Elizabeth and James Device and Jennet Pendleton.”
“Elizabeth Southerns, alias Demdike, died in prison awaiting trial and Margaret Pearson was found guilty of witchcraft but not murder and received a sentence of one year’s imprisonment.”
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 10:06 am (UTC)I was re-reading, and I was wondering: why is it exactly that Wesley has that long lag before he responds to people?
no subject
Date: 2005-11-13 02:56 am (UTC)My, but you do humour well
Date: 2006-07-28 03:38 am (UTC)My goodness but you have an amazing way with words. I have rarely seen fanfiction where the humour is expressed so well. Perhaps it is that your Englishness speaks to mine or just that you have a very rare gift – I suspect the latter.
Just wanted to say I have been reading your stories all week and am having a lovely time. Your characterisation is fabulous, the voices are perfect and the stories are great fun. Please, don't ever stop.
Ozmuse
Re: My, but you do humour well
Date: 2006-07-28 08:49 am (UTC)