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[elgrey]

Harrogate, Part Nine

 

When Giles didn’t complain about the commercialism of areas of outstanding natural beauty and simply paid the car park fee without complaint, Willow knew that he must be as tense as she had feared. There were a few people around, but less, she suspected, than would usually be visiting this place in summer. The murder had evidently cast a pall over even this breath-taking landscape. There was a description from an old guide book:

 

These celebrated rocks, one of the wonders of Nidder­dale, are situated on a piece of elevated ground, about sixty acres in extent, on the north side of the valley of the Nidd. Placed at an elevation of nine hundred and ninety feet above the level of the sea, and exposed to the fierce action of the elements on every side; these rocks present a most singular appearance at a distance... No description can do justice to them; their grotesque singularity and rugged grandeur alike defy the pen of the poet, and the pencil of the artist. Produced by a violent disruption of nature, when the crust of the earth has been rent asunder, and these heavy masses of millstone grit upheaved and piled around in random confusion, afterwards washed and worn into crevices, and their forms rounded and smoothed by the waves of a sea beating on and around them; the softer parts have yielded to the action of these elements, which the harder have resisted, hence their strange and uncouth forms, which fill all beholders with amazement.

 

On another day, she was sure she would have felt amazement. But today her overwhelming feelings were of grief for Giles and the women who had died here and something that felt remarkably like…fear. There was a breeze, but that wasn’t what chilled her as she got out of the car. She felt it at once; that ominous sense of something dark and powerful in the vicinity. She had caught a whiff of some of the same sense of power in the bookshop but it had been mixed in with the pulse of magic from the books, and the sense of the building itself and had assumed it was to do with the lingering energy of the two witches themselves. But this was unmistakably a bitter tang of the darkest power. She turned to Giles. “Do you feel it?”

 

“I have a sense of it.” He turned a slow circle. “This is a place so steeped in history and the supernatural that one might expect a little…atmosphere, but this is so…”

 

“Dark?” Willow suggested. “Powerful?”

 

Giles scented the air. “Intangible.”

 

“I was going for ‘slippery’ myself,” she admitted.

 

Gunn rolled his eyes. “Okay, this is getting way too like when Spike and Wesley used to start talking about scotch. So, tell me, is the magic in the air oaky, fruity or smoky and does it have a good peaty finish?”

 

“More like an odour of brimstone and sulphur with an afterburn of hellfire.” Giles plucked Wesley’s coat out of the back of the car and shook it out. “Put your coat on, Wesley. It’s cold up here.”

 

“And again with the ‘he’s not six’ thing,” Willow murmured, but low enough for Giles to ignore her if he chose to.

 

“I mean it’s particularly cold because someone has been practising dark magic and he will be even more susceptible than we are given his current condition.”

 

Wesley allowed the man to help him on with his coat before veering away from Giles as quickly as possible to walk next to Gunn, presumably in case the Englishman attempted to make him wear mittens or retie his shoelaces. Willow didn’t think he was that much better off with Gunn, as he immediately straightened the collar of Wesley’s coat and by the way he was frowning over Wesley’s still unkempt-looking hair seemed dangerously close to getting his comb out again.

 

“Will you just leave him alone?” Willow pleaded. “He has enough to put up with, what with the dead people talking to him, without you two going into motherhen mode. You didn’t see people fussing at Haley Joel Osment, did you?”

 

Gunn shuddered. “Don’t.”

 

“What…?”

 

Wesley looked up. “He’s scared of Haley Joel Osment.”

 

“I’m not ‘scared’ of him. He just creeps me out – him and that Dakota Fanning. It’s the thought of being alone in a house with them and their unblinking little eyes. If they were my kids I’d make them sleep in the yard.”

 

“If they were your kids I’d seriously question your wife’s fidelity,” Wesley observed. Giles, Willow and Gunn all looked at him in surprise and he returned their gaze unblinkingly. “What?”

 

“That was just…almost normal,” Gunn admitted.

 

“I can go and talk to Illyria if you’d rather…?” Wesley offered, jerking his thumb at a huge pile of rocks that looked eerily like a dancing bear, nearby which Illyria was presumably standing, at least in Wesley’s confused consciousness.

 

“No, it’s cool.” Gunn caught his elbow and steered him back towards the path. “Just stay close in case these weirdos are still around.”

 

As they walked along the path, past bracken that rustled a threat as they passed it, as if every frond reverberated with waiting vipers, Willow could sense the dark power even more strongly. And yet it was curiously elusive. When she tried to concentrate on its source, it dissipated, like light dissolving; like a word she had forgotten and would never be able to remember. She tried closing her eyes, reaching out to that power, trying to find its source, and yet she could only sense it, not find it. Opening her eyes in frustration, she saw Giles was also grimacing as he tried to concentrate.

 

“It doesn’t want to be found,” he observed.

 

“They must be using some kind of shielding spell.”

 

“Yes, they can’t prevent us from sensing that there is something dark and dangerous out there, but they’re keeping it hidden.”

 

“No wonder those witches had their Spider senses tickled. We need to perform a counter-spell.” She patted her purse in which she had all the ingredients in readiness, and a few extra in case they found they needed to perform some revealing spells too.

 

On another day it would have been so beautiful up here. The incredible rock formations and the green beyond, fields and bracken, and dry stone walling; when the sunlight broke through the clouds it arrowed to the ground in needle-points of light. And yet…behind the old power of a place of mystical convergence there was this new bitterness, as if there was an open grave near at hand, a smell of some otherworldly corruption on the point of breaking through.

 

As they drew nearer to the place where it had happened, Giles became more and more tense; she could see him steeling himself to endure it. She remembered Buffy dying right in front of them; that terrible feeling of helplessness as they watched her running, knowing she was going to jump, knowing there was no way to stop her or save her; knowing she would die; her broken body lying on the ground like a fallen bird. Giles should never have had to see that. He should never have had to see this either. She felt so sorry for him the tears blurred her vision; making the landscape look rainswept and grey.

 

It was more of a cleft than a cave, a precarious scramble over green-napped boulders of gritstone and there was the darkness of a crevice between two great shoulders of rock. Willow looked up at Giles and felt her heart turn over, wishing that Wesley would look up now and see this expression on Giles’ face, just look at it and comprehend the enormity of the loss he was feeling, but Wesley was writing in his notebook and didn’t raise his head. Giles hesitated, steeling himself to take another step, and then he climbed over the uneven pile of rocks, and passed out of the sunlight into the blackness where Alicia had died.

 

Willow knew he wanted to be alone, and let him have a moment, taking the crystals and hyssop and feather from a white cockerel and nails from a horseshoe used to ward off evil spirits, and laying them out on a flat stone. She had read the police report on the death; the Watchers’ Council had been breaking rules for so many years that Giles had never seemed to mind her hacking into the police computers either in Sunnydale or in England. So, she had read all the grisly details, and knew that Giles had too. That had been difficult enough to have to read, but being here, where it had happened, the details were dancing in front of her eyes, the knowledge of who had died first, the way they had died…

 

She looked around to see if Wesley seemed sane enough today to help her with the incantation, but he was holding a conversation with someone who wasn’t there beside a towering block of eroded gritstone. It seemed to be a quiet and polite conversation, not stressful, but nevertheless there was the whole talking to dead people factor. She heard him say: “…just wondering if you’d heard from Spike? No, I haven’t seen him…”

 

Gunn ran a hand over his bald head and sighed, catching Willow’s eyes. She gave him a grimace of sympathy. “I could do that spell…?” she offered. “The separating reality from hallucinations one.”

 

“Maybe he just needs to see a psychiatrist. Don’t the Watchers’ Council have their own shrinks?”

 

“It seems like a good idea,” Willow admitted. “But I don’t think they do. A lot of Watchers are all…British, so they probably think they’re supposed to run on stress and suppressed rage.”

 

“I need to find Lorne.” Gunn sat down on a nearby stone. “I should have looked for him.”

 

“I don’t think he wanted to be found. I saw some of what happened – pictures in my head of all your last goodbyes when Cordelia or whoever it was sent me off to save you – and Lorne told Angel not to look for him. He told him he wouldn’t find him if he did. I think he really needed to find himself before he could deal with any of the rest of you.”

 

“Yeah, we tend to have that effect on people.” He looked up at the sky, the rain clouds the colour of lead, the sunlight splintering through in such glorious shafts of gold. “Short of Gwen giving Wesley electrotherapy, I’m out of ideas.”

 

“I heard she gave you some of that,” Willow admitted innocently.

 

Gunn coughed. “Yeah, well… maybe a spell might be a better way to go. As long as you’re sure…”

 

“It won’t hurt him, Gunn, I swear.”

 

“No, I mean as long as you’re sure we’re actually…real – because if I’m a figment of his imagination I don’t want to know.”

 

Willow realized she had never fully comprehended just how disorientating an experience it was to be dragged back from the dead, when even being dragged back from the nearly-dead could leave someone as confident as Gunn this uncertain. “You’re real, Gunn, both of you.”

 

“It’s just… you know when you’re going to die. It doesn’t feel like any other wound you’ve ever had. You’re so cold. It’s like someone took all the blood out of your veins and put ice there instead, and then they filled you full of sand and stuck a hole in you and it’s running out now, and this is it, and there’s no coming back from this. The pain’s not even that much of an issue, because you’re dying, and you’ve never felt like this before because you’ve never been this before; you’ve never been a dead man ‘til now.”

 

Willow reached out and took his hand. “You’re not a ghost.”

 

Gunn gazed out at the rocks. “‘Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not here. I did not die.’”

 

“You really didn’t.”

 

“We didn’t have a grave for Fred. There was nothing to put in it. Her body was still walking and talking, so we never got a chance to say a real goodbye. And Cordelia… She told me once she wanted her ashes scattered over the shoe department of Niemen Marcus on a sale day. That was funny when she was alive. Wasn’t anything like as funny once she was gone.” He looked into her eyes. “What I’m trying to say is that Wes and me, we’re not that different. He’s talking to dead people but I think I’m one small step away from being where he is.”

 

She tightened her grip on his hand. “You’re not alone, Gunn. You and Wesley are with us now. We’re a team. We’re going to help people and solve mysteries and…”

 

“Have our own theme music?”

 

It was a relief to see that smile on Gunn’s face. “I’m serious,” she insisted. “We’re the…Tea Shop Detectives now, the four of us.”

 

Gunn glanced over at Wesley. “Sanity not a requirement for this particular agency then?”

 

She waved a dismissive hand. “It’s…optional.”

 

“Like having any detecting abilities?”

 

“Yes, that’s optional, too. A lot of things that you would imagine would be a basic requirement are optional with this particular agency.” She let go of his hand and rose to her feet reluctantly, steeling herself to face Giles’s pain, but knowing it had to be done. “Can you watch my crystals for me?” As Gunn nodded, she touched his shoulder briefly, and walked around the ragged shin-barking rock that guarded the entrance to the cleft, and stepped into the shadows with Giles.

 

The sense of evil was so strong here that it was almost choking; a dank after-scent of sulphur still in the air; a darkness so overpowering that she felt she could reach out and touch it. Concentrating, she closed her eyes and tried to follow its trail; at once it vanished in a whiff of smoke, leaving her blundering in darkness without a path or a light. This wasn’t just a place where evil had been done, where there had been the rawness of terror that elicited no mercy, the screams that had been stifled and the sounds that escaped gone unheard by anyone except the glide of screech owls scouring the darkness for prey; this wasn’t just a place of pain and death and that slow outgoing tide of life ebbing with each trickle of spilled blood; this was a place where magic of the darkest kind had touched the stones and left its shadow with theirs.

 

Giles had one hand touching the cold rock. One didn’t have to be a witch to feel the intensity of his pain. One look at his face and she was in tears again. She couldn’t prevent the salt sting of them trickling down her face as she gazed up at him. “Oh, Giles, I’m so sorry.”

 

He stared out at the blocks of stone, scatterings of rocks leading the eye to the moors beyond; moors Alicia would not have been able to see because she had died in darkness, by the light of burning torches, like the witches of old.  He was half in shadow, the daylight barely finding its way in here to perfectly bisect his face.

 

“It was my fault,” he admitted quietly. “I was the one who got her into witchcraft. At the time it seemed like the lesser of two evils. A way to get her to reconnect to her power, to herself… It was my fault.”

 

“It wasn’t.” Willow put her arms around him, afraid of that frozen look on his face. “You can’t blame yourself.”

 

“I should and I do. There are some mistakes I’m obviously doomed to keep on making.” He touched her hair gently. “But I want to find the people that did this, Willow, and then I want to send them to the darkest hell dimension in which demons have ever lived.”

 

She looked up at his face again and he was still gazing out at the world Alicia would never see again, and she had never seen him look so close to breaking. She felt a chill go through her and tightened her grip on him, as if she could anchor him here if she only held him long enough.

 

***

 

The phone was ringing as they headed up the stairs back to Alicia’s flat. Giles speeded up his pace, twisting the key in the lock and picking up the phone as he was still opening the door wider for the other three. “Hello…?” He dreaded it being a friend or relative of Alicia’s who had not yet heard the news. There had already been one extremely painful call like that and he wasn’t ready to face another on today of all days.

 

“Giles…?”

 

Buffy’s voice was at once a shock and a reminder of how just how much he missed her. “Buffy. How lovely to hear from you. Is everything okay?”

 

“No, everything is not ‘okay’. You’re going through a horrible experience and you won’t let me help. Giles, I’ve called and called.”

 

In the background he could hear Dawn saying: “And he’s not letting me help either. Tell him that.”

 

He found himself half-smiling, despite the images of that cave burned into his mind’s eye. He could still smell the stench of fear and blood and death in his nostrils, and the singed cloth of his cuff from when their counter-spell had recoiled like a serpent and almost burned them both alive. If Willow had been a little less powerful, or an instant slower in her reactions, they would both be little piles of ash right now. Buffy’s voice felt like a radio station broadcasting from the world of the living; something he was glad to tune into but which still felt very remote from his present experience. “There’s just nothing you can do.”

 

“Yes, there is. I can fly over and help you find the bad guys. I shared my power, you know, I didn’t lose it. I’m still the Slayer, just not – the only Slayer.”

 

“Buffy, honestly we’re handling things. I swear. But it is very good to hear your voice.”

 

“Why won’t you let me help?” He heard the ache in her voice. “You’ve helped me so much. Why can’t I help you?”

 

“Because I think that just as you needed to learn how to get along without me, I need to learn how to get along without you.” He sighed as he sat down in the nearest chair, aware of Gunn and Willow tip-toeing around trying not to overhear or to interrupt his call, and of Wesley, perfectly oblivious, sitting back down at the table and opening his disgustingly tatty old book. “I can’t have you running to save me every time I’m in danger. I need to learn how to do things for myself. I did manage to get along without you for nearly forty years, after all, and for only some of those was I either too young to go out by myself or involved in the raising of demons.”

 

“Let me talk to Willow. She’ll agree with me.”

 

“I’m sure she will, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t. Buffy, honestly, I’m fine.”

 

“You don’t sound fine,” she said hesitantly. “You sound about as far from fine as anyone can get without actually being – you know – dead.”

 

He took off his glasses and pinched the bride of his nose to try to stop that embryonic headache from taking hold. “It’s been a rough day.”

 

“Please, let me come.” She sounded like a little girl asking for permission and it was so very hard not to just give in.

 

“Buffy, I can’t…” he admitted. “I can’t bear the thought of you and Dawn being in any kind of danger right now. It’s bad enough that Willow is here. But the fact is – she is here, and she’s a very powerful witch, far more powerful than the women who were killed. And Gunn has been fighting vampires for half of his life and Wesley – ”

 

He could imagine her wince. “How is Wesley?”

 

“He’s…still adjusting to not being dead. It’s taking rather longer than we hoped.”

 

“It does take a while. It kind of feels like you left a part of yourself somewhere else and you’ll never get it back.”

 

Giles felt his heart contract at the thought of all she had been through. “Do you ever get it back?”

 

“Yes. You actually do. It just takes…time, and people. Patient people with lots of time, and I mentioned the ‘it taking time’ part, right?”

 

“You did, yes.”

 

“You know things could be worse,” she suggested.

 

“How exactly?”

 

“At least he’s not sleeping with Spike.”

 

Giles laughed, and wondered how close he was to crying. He put his glasses back on. “And you can’t imagine how grateful I am for that.”

 

“We miss you,” Buffy said. “We miss all of you. I told Xander he should be home by now. I have all these things in Rome I want to show him. And there are girls here who are pretty and single and…alive. I’d marry him myself just to keep him here right now.”

 

“I think he’s someone else who needed some time.”

 

There was a pause before she said wistfully. “I don’t understand why loving someone always has to be so painful. I don’t understand why it can’t be hugs and puppies, just for once. I mean why can’t your friends just be okay and not lose the people that they love and why can’t you not lose the people that you love too?”

 

“Well, I think probably not dating the undead is a good place from which to start. How is the…um…Immortal?”

 

“The same,” she admitted.

 

“Too much of a good thing to give up despite being manifestly unsuitable as a life-partner in every possible way?”

 

“Pretty much.”

 

“You know, you’re not setting the best example for Dawn.”

 

“Like I keep telling her, I’m only making all these mistakes so that she won’t have to. And I also have a ‘Don’t Do What I Do, Just Do What I Say’ t-shirt for special occasions.”

 

“One day, Buffy, I would really like to hear that you’ve settled down and married a nice chartered accountant called Geoffrey. It really would be the most tremendous weight off my mind.”

 

“Willow said you wanted Dawn and me to become celibate and spend our time in meditation and reflection.”

 

“Well, that would be the best possible outcome, of course, but I’ll settle for Geoffrey and a life of tranquillity. The roses around the door would be optional.”

 

“I don’t think I’m a ‘roses round the door’ kind of gal these days. I think Angel pretty much made that an impossibility. But, hey, I’m ludicrously over-protective and picky about Dawn’s boyfriends, so, that’s got to help, right?”

 

“And I’m sure she’s very grateful for it.”

 

“So far, not so much, but I just know she will be one day.”

 

Dawn’s: “Don’t count on it” was perfectly audible down the line.

 

He smiled again. “It really is very good to hear from you.”

 

“And think how much nicer it would be to see us, in person, if you only let us come…”

 

“Not this time, Buffy,” he said gently. “This time I really need to do this by myself.”

 

“I don’t like you doing things by yourself,” she reminded him. “I like you doing things with me, where I can keep you safe, and make sure nothing happens to you.”

 

He bowed his head, unable to repress another smile. “Sometimes you have to let them fly the nest, Buffy, however hard it may be.”

 

When he put the phone down he found Willow handing him a mug of tea. “It’s hard for her,” the girl explained. “She really doesn’t like you getting into danger and you are kind of a concussion-magnet. You can’t blame her for being anxious.”

 

“I know.” He sipped the tea and realized it was exactly what he needed. “But I really don’t think that Buffy and Dawn would help the current situation. Dawn would want to adopt Wesley and make him her special project and Buffy would inevitably want to have sex with Gunn and I really don’t…”

 

“Wait, wait, back up…” Gunn waved a hand. “I’m not seeing the problem here.”

 

“You were the one that talked about not hiding behind a super-powered cheerleader, weren’t you? Or was that a different conversation I overheard in Westbury?”

 

“Yeah, but no one said anything about a super-powered cheerleader who wanted to have sex with me, because I think that makes a world of difference.”

 

“Well, I think you were right the first time and it’s time for the ordinary mortals to do their part to make the world a better place. Buffy’s earned her holiday. The rest of us need to decide what we’re going to do next.”

 

Willow looked up from reading over Wesley’s shoulder. “Oh, I already know that.”

 

As she beamed at him, Giles felt decidedly less than relieved. “Why am I now feeling the all-too-familiar sensations of misgiving and unease?” As he also looked over Wesley’s shoulder, he noticed that in the middle of his many incomprehensible spell symbols – ones that appeared nowhere on the book page from which he was apparently transcribing them – Wesley had written ‘tautology’ before going on with another symbol. Recently back from the dead and imperfectly sane he might be, but the hair-splitting school swot he had once been was clearly still alive and well in this Watcher.

 

Willow said brightly: “Because you’ve realized what I’ve realized.”

 

Withdrawing his attention from Wesley’s scribbling with some difficulty, Giles focused on her: “Which would be…?”

 

“That as we can’t find a way to track down the killers, we need them to come after us. Actually, we need them to come after me…”

 

***

Comments

[emeraldteal.livejournal.com]

Lovely descriptions of the landscape :) Also love Giles & Gunn mother-henning Wesley :)

And I think here you meant 'managed to get along without you'...

“I can’t have you running to save me every time I’m in danger. I need to learn how to do things for myself. I did manage to get along with you for nearly forty years, after all, and for only some of those was I either too young to go out by myself or involved in the raising of demons.”

[elgrey.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've fixed it on this page now. Thanks so much for spotting it and I'm glad you're enjoying the fic so far. :)