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Banner by Aadler
By the Rose-Wreath’d Gate
by Aadler
Copyright July 2020
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.
Giles frowned, studying the small slip of paper he held, and reached out to press the intercom button on his desk. “Mrs Gahagan?”The reply came back, crisp and no-nonsense. “Yes, sir?”
“I’ve a call note here,” he said, “but no message. Nor a name, for that matter, only initials: T.C.”
“Ah, yes.” Even through the mechanical intermediary, Giles could clearly hear the tartness of her tone. “That would be The Cow.”
“The —?” Giles stopped, removed his glasses, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “Mrs Gahagan, that is no way to speak of a prominent member of one of the most respected Council families.”
Her answer came in the characteristic sing-song cadences of the Welsh, along with a satisfaction she made no attempt to conceal. “Mayhap … but you knew exactly who I meant, then, didn’t you?”
She’d hit the mark there, so he skipped past trying to deny it. “And the message?”
“She didn’t leave one. Just wanting, again, to reach you.” This time it was irony that came through the intercom. “And as always, I said you weren’t available.”
Giles hid the sigh. “You know very well I’ve been here all afternoon.”
“Aye, doing actual work. Not asking to be wittered at by a soppy cow.”
“Mrs Gahagan.” He paused, consciously moderating the sternness he could hear working to get out. “However protective you may feel regarding my position and responsibilities, I am the one who will decide whether or not I’m available.”
“Indeed, sir.” Now her tone was pure saccharine. “Shall I be calling her back for you, then?”
His lips thinned. “No, thank you. I shall make my own calls. And my own decisions.”
“Very well, then. If there’s nothing more you need —” And she clicked off.
Giles sat back in his chair, looking about the office as if for inspiration, a reaction typical to so many of his interactions with the woman who handled his calls and appointments. None of the other Council functionaries seemed to know how old she actually was (though she appeared immovably fixed somewhere in the span between sixty and eighty), or how long she’d been ‘in charge’ here (though they likewise couldn’t seem to recall a time when she hadn’t been in residence as gatekeeper). There was no such ambiguity when it came to dealing with her: she was collectively known as ‘the Gorgon’ — in whispers, kept well distant of any possibility of her hearing — and regarded with an uneasy mixture of awe, consternation, and dread.
Giles himself resisted her efforts to ‘manage’ him with unflagging determination. He was not, however, entirely immune to the effect she had on all who came into contact with her.
He looked again at the paper slip he held, and shook his head. Patricia Hulett-Carruthers was no cow, soppy or otherwise. She was, in fact, attractive, intelligent, educated — in both classical and supernatural venues — poised, amiable, of good family and with her own store of formidable determination. Substantially but not prohibitively younger than himself, widowed through the culling of the Council by the First Evil’s machinations, she had held off a succession of discreet, well-mannered suitors while she unhurriedly surveyed the array of choices available to her. With his own unsought ascension to Council leadership, his stock with her — likewise unsought — had risen to acceptable levels. Though never saying so, or needing to, she was presenting the possibility of a political marriage, wherein her personal talents and the prestige of her name would operate to complement and reinforce his sudden new stature.
It could have come across as cold-blooded, even mildly repugnant. Giles felt no such reaction. Patricia knew what she had to offer, knew its value, and knew that he would see it as well. She would expect him to consider the potential affiliation as evenly and objectively as she did. He appreciated and in fact respected this kind of natural, sensible restraint, and had no doubt that if he chose to accept her perfectly decorous and controlled overtures, they would make a good working team, well-matched and compatible in aims and personality, and growing ever closer in mutual regard and affection.
He also couldn’t fail to recognize that, much as he valued such attributes now, they weren’t quite the ones which had excited him in the past. Not in all of his prior relationships, perhaps, but definitely those foremost in his memory.
* * *
You don’t know me. Nobody knows me.
Giles had over the course of his life heard many individuals utter those words, usually with snarling defiance or scornful smugness. Deirdre Page was the only one who had ever said them happily, reveling in the pleasure of being who she was. Her boundless sensuality, her unfettered hedonism, had been one of the central facets of their group, had in many ways animated it and served as the point around which so many diverse and self-centered personalities — Thomas, Philip, Randall, Ethan, Giles — had coalesced. She wasn’t the only woman the members of the crew had enjoyed, but she was the only woman in the crew, and somehow it had all revolved around her, almost from the beginning. Other women were diversions; she was the center.
And, oh yes, she had slept with all of them.
Not some squalid, undiscriminating orgy, no; it was part of the glittering kaleidoscope of their lives, a dancing endless maelstrom of drugs, liquor, petty crime, parties, music, magic, sex. She took each of them as the mood struck her … but always singly, always for her own pleasure, and always with enough privacy that she and her lover of the moment could devote themselves fully to imaginative, orgasmic delights. (And she had been imaginative indeed, and spurred them to exercise their own imaginations for yet more.) The men had ecstatically accepted the heady joy of her body whenever it was offered, while somehow knowing that it would always be her choice, that any who tried to claim her for himself would be instantly shut out. They were playthings to her, and they gloried in it, impatiently occupying themselves with lesser temptations till the next time she turned to one of them for yet another bout of transcendent, incomparable rapture.
Giles had already known other women by then, even some who were rather less than staid, but Deirdre had been the first he had ever met who sought out her own gratification with such eager, grasping, dedicated abandon (and taught some of that to him, truth be known). The later disastrous explorations with Eyghon … Giles often wondered whether that had come about because Ethan couldn’t bear not being the center of attention, or because they all were only too susceptible to the lure of having, regularly and ‘controllably’, what they enjoyed so wonderfully but so sporadically with Deirdre herself.
In the aftermath of Randall’s death, they had all been so shaken (except, again, Ethan) that they had abandoned the heedlessness of youthful pleasure-seeking and sought out the stability and penance of responsible lifestyles. Giles had seen Deirdre only twice in the years since, and been horror-struck at the transformation of the woman he had known. Her hair, her dress, her speech, her very way of movement, had been constricted, constrained, compressed, buried in steel bands of ‘respectability’. He had felt an almost despairing grief at seeing the loss of all she had been … but also understanding, for he had crushed Ripper into quiescence just as brutally, and for exactly the same reason.
Even so, he still felt the loss.
In his newer growth, he had come to understand that there was more to life — even to a relationship with a woman — than sexual obsession. All the same, there had been no especial compulsion to do without it entirely.
Passion wasn’t enough. He needed more.
…
Not, however, less.
* * *
Jenny Calendar had been an entirely different experience. Far less extravagantly, she had evinced much of the same free-spiritedness that had so characterized Deirdre. More controlled, less uninhibited (though only by such an extreme comparison could she be considered ‘inhibited’ in the least!), Jenny had shown a similar sense of whimsy, an enjoyment of taking pleasure from life and reaching out for more, a refusal to be hemmed in by inapt and unrealistic rules. She had from the very beginning challenged him, unsettled him, shaken him, confounded him. (It was also quite clear that she believed herself to be trying to loosen up an essentially conservative personality; she’d had no idea of how much violence and volatility he still struggled to conceal and suppress.)
At the same time, she was a part of the world to which he had chosen to devote himself. He had been appalled and fascinated by the very concept of ‘technopagan’: on the one hand, he had harsh experience with operating in these labyrinths without the surety of proven limitations, while on the other the possibilities were unexpected and intriguing. The upshot of it, however, was that they both understood the unseen currents flowing about them, and had found dissimilar but not-incompatible methods for navigating those currents. His antics with Ethan had been irresponsible, self-indulgent, vulgar, and ultimately tragic; Jenny’s practices, difficult as they might be to reconcile with his own methods and approaches, were an alternative means of taking on the responsibility of limiting some of the chaos that beset a hapless and unwary world.
They were so different. They had so much in common. It was exhilarating.
It was, of course, promptly bollixed by Eyghon, and Ethan, the literal demons of Giles’s past returning with a vengeance. Even putting said demons to rest (though Ethan still roamed regrettably free and unkilled) hadn’t returned them to ‘normal’; fresh from the memory of being possessed, Jenny had literally shuddered away from Giles’s touch, and it had been far from certain that she would ever be able to bear his presence again.
And — again, of course — the moment an affiliation between them had again become possible, Jenny’s own past had stepped in to kick it all to pieces.
Giles had spent years layering and armoring himself in responsibility, and had only recently and barely begun to relax the ruthless self-control to which he had subjected himself for so long. It hadn’t occurred to him that quirky, unconventional, free-wheeling Jenny Calendar might have secret responsibilities of her own, or that those might conflict with the loyalties that Rupert Giles could not under any circumstances bring himself to forsake. Yet it had been so, and despite her agonized efforts to atone for and repair an injury she had never intended, the breach between them had held until the last moment … seeming to relent only in what had turned out to be the final day of her life.
(And almost Giles’s as well. He had been only too willing to die in his berserker onslaught at the factory, so long as he could kill Jenny’s murderer in the process. Not to be; and, even more ironically, he had eventually been forced to accept that it was a good thing that he’d been unable to kill Angelus, as that would have circumvented future world-savings by the vampire’s souled other-self.)
Still.
With Deirdre he had experienced untrammeled sexual ardor untouched by the faintest suggestion of commitment. With Jenny, he and she had together built a careful, delicate structure of commitment that had never — not yet, not quite — completed itself with sexual intimacy. A consummation devoutly to be wished, and seeming all but inevitable at the last, but prevented (by malice. murder. sadism. evil. Angelus.) from … consummating.
It was progress. Growth. So much more than the so-much-less he’d had with Deirdre.
But, God! it had hurt so bloody badly.
* * *
Joyce Summers, now, had been a conundrum.
A stereotype, on the surface. Divorced mother of a teenaged daughter, matronly hairstyle and sensible fashion and a practical automobile, respectable job and PTA and conscientious community involvement and utter unstinting domesticity … not a parody, but definitely a type, to which she had determinedly conformed herself. Like practically everyone in Sunnydale, she had maintained a protective blindness to the supernatural realities around her, dismissing them by almost embarrassing contortions of logic when she bothered to be aware of them at all. On being confronted by that reality in terms she couldn’t fail to recognize — her daughter wanted by the police for murder, a vampire dissolving to dust before her eyes, another sitting in her living room making breezy conversation about thwarting the end of the world — she had so forcibly attempted to deny it that she had driven that daughter away.
Yet she had previously attacked the same vampire with a fire axe, even before knowing what he was. And she had challenged Giles during the summer he had spent searching for Buffy, blaming him for helping to hide the truth she had been all too willing to overlook. And she had helped to lead a vigilance committee against the supernatural threats that suffused Sunnydale. (Yes, she’d been motivated by yet another spell, and that motivation twisted into a threat and then a weapon, and almost killed her own daughter in the grip of it; all the same, when she had seen a need, even one artificially created by demonic influence, she had taken on a leadership role.)
And — another ‘yet’ — once she had accepted the truth of the world around her, she had continued to devote her every effort to an almost obsessive pretense that it wasn’t really there. No longer denying it, but pointedly, ceaselessly ignoring it. Surrounded by the luridly fantastic, she had made her home — and herself — as mundane as they possibly could be made.
A confusing, contradictory woman. Difficult to know how to deal with, since her focus continued to be so inconsistent; easier by far to work around her without allowing her to impinge on practical necessities.
Right.
This facile, all too comfortable perspective had been forcibly punctured by the events of what they came to think of (without ever speaking of it, if that could be avoided) as Band Candy Night. Then the conventional suburban matron had shown herself to be imbued with a desire to seize at life that would have been quite familiar to Deirdre, and a spirit that had allowed her to … not match, but keep up with … Ripper himself. Frenzied sex on the hood of a police car hadn’t even been the most prominent feature of that revelation; no, what stood out to him was how they’d been reaching out to each other for the same thing, that they were driven by the same forces, that they were — unexpectedly, all but incomprehensibly — kindred at this fundamental level.
And that, in the morning, they had looked at one another and then turned away by shared decision.
They were making a choice, and for the first time Rupert Giles felt he understood Joyce Summers. His duty was as a Watcher, but hers was as a mother … and, if she couldn’t protect her child from the supernatural, then she would provide a haven from it. She had chosen to be ordinary, suppressing everything else within her for that purpose, because this was a way to provide the Slayer with the closest she would ever have to a normal life. Though not in the form one would normally think of in such terms, this was self-sacrifice, and consciously shaped as such, and applied with pitiless, unrelenting dedication.
Extraordinary in her total, deliberate ordinariness. A conundrum indeed.
The sex, however brief, had been memorable. More than that, they had — in a very real sense — shared a daughter, an arcane but quite conscious form of joint custody. That kind of thing made an impression that lingered.
He had never loved her, not even close. He still missed her sometimes, though, which he hadn’t expected but which didn’t feel in any way wrong.
* * *
In contrast to all the others, Olivia Williams had been his student, in the time before the death of Merrick Jamison-Smythe had brought Giles to the States as substitute Watcher to the unpromising American Slayer. Through the single term in which they worked together, Olivia had always acted with impeccable personal and professional propriety … which was just as it should have been, and any attempt at flirtation would have struck him as unseemly and unappealing. Nor did she appear to have been restraining herself, more that she treated the teacher-student relationship as exactly what it was, drawing from it as much value as she could without complicating or compromising it by trying to crowd in anything more. She had shown talent, even promise, and so — upon having to withdraw his sponsorship so precipitously on leaving England — Giles had written her at length to address matters she would need to take into consideration now that he was no longer available to offer his direct guidance. She had written back with thanks and further questions, and the correspondence had continued from there.
It wasn’t that a relationship had grown and blossomed through such a remove, they had simply got to know one another quite well. In the beginning, the letters had been both a welcome link to his old life and a novel diversion; over time, he had come to enjoy being able to express his feelings and opinions to someone he didn’t have to deal with on a daily basis. With an ocean between them, they had become familiar, comfortable, steadfast friends.
A deeper involvement, beginning during her first brief visit to America’s west coast, had been neither utterly predictable nor entirely unexpected; they had both known by then that it was possible, waited to see if it felt natural, and then proceeded from there. It had worked as the normal progression of something already in existence, friends seeing if they could become more, and pressing onward when they found they could. The sex itself was likewise comfortable … which sounded dismissive, but wasn’t. They liked each other, they enjoyed each other, and now they were exploring each other with leisure and ease and affection. In installments of visits, as her professional ties in the States brought about further trips.
(She never did reveal to him how she had come to hear the nickname ‘Ripper’. The mystery had vexed him slightly, and she had playfully withheld the secret purely for the fun of doing so.)
The odds had always been against it working out in the long term, given the age difference and the necessity of keeping his profession secret. Still, it had gone well for some months, enough that he had delicately begun bringing magical theory into their casual conversations as a means of testing her intellectual flexibility and laying a foundation for a more comprehensive revelation of mystical reality. And that might have been enough, if he had started it just a bit sooner or if her first exposure to the supernatural had been less … extreme. She hadn’t simply withdrawn from him, but she had needed enough time to consider at proper length whether it was possible or advisable to continue onward with him. There had been no more visits, and letters had regressed to carefully casual. The relationship itself had no formal termination, only a series of postponements that eventually solidified into an established fact.
Just as well, as it turned out. The events of the next several years — the hellgod Glory’s relentless, destructive search for her lost ‘Key’, Buffy’s death and resurrection, Willow’s descent and halting reformation, the First’s assault on the Council itself — would have been strenuous and increasingly perilous for her. Even given those facts, he suspected that, if she had known how the matter would eventually resolve, she would have chosen to address the situation differently.
Of a certainty, he would have done so. Even if it couldn’t continue, what the two them shared had deserved a better ending.
* * *
Coming out of his reverie, Giles glanced at the clock, noted the time, and nodded to himself. He picked up the cryptic call-slip and folded it precisely, placing it on his desk in a spot to catch his attention in the unlikely event that the matter somehow slipped his mind.
There it was, then. The progression of significant relationships in his life had left a particular stamp on him, each adding facets and increments of appreciation and preference. They had formed the man he currently was — or, at the very least, that aspect of him that made choices when it came to personal relationships with women — and it was on the basis of that journey, and his present place in it, that he would reach a decision regarding the situation in which he now found himself.
Not that there had ever been more than a modicum of doubt in that regard. Because the four women he had spent the past hour musing upon? They weren’t the only ones in his history.
Nor even the most recent.
* * *
With his thoughts now sorted and the working day having come to a close, Giles straightened his desk and departed by a separate door without troubling to notify Mrs Gahagan; his habits were regular and well-known, he would have called to advise her only if he wouldn’t be leaving at the normal time. A brisk walk to the nearest square, a cab the rest of the way (he was entitled to a driver of his own, but availed himself of that privilege only when the benefit was worth the bother), and he was home at his current flat, only slightly larger — but considerably better located — than the one he’d kept before his first departure to America.
As he mounted the stairs, the aroma from the kitchen told him he was arriving in time for another attempt at shepherd’s pie. (The taste had been more than adequate for some time, it was the structure that continued to prove recalcitrant.) He entered, to find Anya bustling about in a full-skirt-tailored-blouse-frilly-apron ensemble almost comically evocative of Loretta Young, even if the wearer was utterly in earnest. “Oh, fooey,” she said on seeing him. “I thought I’d have another ten minutes at least.”
He smiled at her with unfeigned fondness. “I’ll sit back with a spot of brandy, stay out of your way while you finish.” Then, cocking an eyebrow toward the oven, he added, “With the timing on this, you must have been teleporting back and forth from the office for much of the afternoon. Didn’t you worry about someone noticing?”
She waved that away, using the other hand to rub at a smudge of flour on her cheek (and only smearing it further). “You should know by now how far everybody goes out of their way to avoid me.” Setting her face into severe planes, she said in the familiar sing-song, “ ‘And what would you be looking at now? Have you some pressing duty here nobody’s notified me of? Off with you!’ ” In her Gahagan persona she used a trivial glamour to order her appearance, but the accent was one of the myriad she had mastered over more than a millennium spent dispensing retribution around the world, and Giles smiled again at the scenario she’d drawn for him. “And off with you,” she added. “I’ll let you know when everything is ready. Shoo, go on.”
She called him in when the table was set, and they took their meal together in an easy companionship that was fast becoming a fixture of their dealings with one another. She would have to keep working on the shepherd’s pie (delicious, but she aspired to a particular texture in the crust that continued to elude her), but the rest of her arrangements were beyond reproach. As they relaxed with tea at the end — she liked to steep it a few minutes longer than Giles preferred, but it remained entirely acceptable — he observed quietly, “I genuinely am concerned with, with unnecessary application of your abilities. Your long-term plans for D’Hoffryn would be fatally compromised if he became aware of your continued survival, and I … dislike the thought of anything drawing his attention to you.”
Anya considered it, her gaze focused somewhere past the top of her teacup. “I’m careful,” she said. “I spent a long time learning how to be sneaky, and I know how to watch my back.” She looked to him. “But, yes, this really is long-term, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to be more careful. Even if I’m mostly doing it just to keep you from fretting like somebody’s maiden aunt.”
He nodded approval. “Your consideration is appreciated,” he said. “And nice touch there, balancing it with the hint of insult. Otherwise I might think you’re going soft.”
“Did that,” she said flatly. “Didn’t like it much. And I’m glad you like me the way I am, instead of always wanting me to be something else.”
Giles chuckled. “You fascinate me, horrify me, and dazzle me by turns,” he told her genially. “If that’s your intent, you’re striking dead center.”
“Gotta be me,” she said, nodding.
Giles gave the moment a … moment … to solidify properly, then said, “In your, er, working guise, I’ll want you to make an appointment for me to meet with Mrs Hulett-Carruthers. I hope I can rely on your judgement to choose a time and venue that serve to set the necessary tone.”
Anya’s features smoothed into the absence of expression that, he had learned, signified danger. “And just what tone would that be?” she asked, her voice equally unrevealing while she watched him with unblinking intensity.
“Courteous,” Giles said to her. “Decorous. Professional. Indicative of appropriate respect, without straying into undue familiarity.” He looked to Anya. “She could be a valuable ally. I would like to have her as such, without … without giving the impression that more than that might be in the offing. She has been honest as to her position, and deserves honesty in return, but delivered in a form that offers no offense.”
Anya visibly turned over what he had said, her expression not changing. At last she observed, “You’re two of a kind, you and her. I’d have thought you’d fit together perfectly.”
“We very well could,” Giles agreed. “She has a great deal to recommend her, and only one small flaw. That one, however, is pivotal.”
She nodded slowly, thoughtful now and faintly quizzical. “Hm. And this … little flaw?”
Giles shrugged. “I don’t want her.”
One more nod, and Anya settled back into her chair. “Well, all right, then. I’ll start thinking about what kind of meeting to set up.”
“There’s no rush,” Giles said. “But in the meantime you might, er, consider treating her with a bit less than your usual asperity.”
Anya gave him a flashing smile. “I’ll work on it. But let’s be honest: if the Gorgon starts being too nice to her, it could make her suspicious.”
“Well, yes,” Giles agreed. “We wouldn’t want your reputation to suffer. As I said, I’ll rely on your judgment.”
“Got it.” Anya stood suddenly. “Time for all that tomorrow. Are you ready for bed?”
He gave her an amused tilt of an eyebrow. “Allow me a moment to properly finish my tea,” he said. “Then I’ll be right with you.”
“It isn’t that big a cup,” she said pointedly. “So don’t take too long.” Then she turned and started for the bedroom, her body moving beneath the light dress in a manner that … definitely caught the attention.
The Watcher and the (now renegade) vengeance demon, Giles mused to himself as she vanished from view. Certainly unexpected, and unSUSpected till the night of lost memories in the Magic Box. Now here they were, in a connection that still might prove disastrous; but, if so, it was a disaster he was entirely willing to risk.
Done with the tea, he stood and moved to join her in the bedroom. Unbidden, a snatch of verse came to his mind, the conclusion of one of Browning’s works:
… and stood by the rose-wreath’d gate. Alas,
we loved, sir — used to meet.
How sad and bad and mad it was —
but then, how it was sweet!‘Mad’ without question, he thought with amusement. ‘Sad’ and ‘bad’ … well, there might be turns at that as well. ‘Sweet’, however, would serve for now, and perhaps for quite a bit longer yet.
– end –