The Watcher's TaleBy Medea
Chapter Four
9. VengeanceHe taunted me about it constantly.
We may make a vampire of you yet, he said at one point.
Angelus knew exactly the potential for violence that was simmering within me, and I've no doubt he amused himself with schemes for unleashing it permanently. His fascination with the human mind and just what will break it was infamous; witness Drusilla. But as evil as he was, Angelus was refined and subtle in his interests. This much was recorded in The Watchers Chronicles, and I'd seen it first-hand in the cruelest possible manner.
He'd provoked me to the point of a mad, suicidal assault on a lair of vampires with rose petals, a little opera, and the body of my estranged, beloved Jenny strewn across the bed.
The artist in him must have loved the sharp contrast, like vivid, dramatic lines in a painting. He drew on the feelings of love I harbored toward another and crafted them through pain and loss into hate.
And he knew.
Angelus knew it was there to draw out again, there to be channeled into another mad, suicidal assault, this time on the Watchers Council.
He knew exactly how much Buffy meant to me, and what I could be persuaded to do to avenge her murder.
The worst of it is that he was frighteningly accurate. I hated him. For me, he had always represented the embodiment of pure evil. Yet I found myself all too willing to think just like him. Evil had a new face. Or rather, eight new faces: the seven murderers on the Council who cut Buffy's life short...
...and mine.
Despite all my shortcomings in life, I've tried never to be a hypocrite. When I stared Thomas Lytle in the face and forced paper down his throat until he choked to death, I knew it was murder. I accepted that darkness with open arms, took it in willingly. Willow had no choice when she was turned, no power to stop the demon from taking up residence in her body.
Which of us is more evil, then?
For ten days, I lived among vampires. I hunted with them, killed with them, took pleasure in the torture of human beings. About the only thing I didn't do was drink blood.
I did it all with my soul intact; all for the sake of a precious, fearless life that had been commended into my care, only to be cut short by a poisoned needle.
It struck me as ironic that I, a Watcher by training, was part of a lair – if only temporarily. Indeed, I was perhaps the only human ever to be so intimately integrated into a vampire community. That is, without being food.
Some of what I experienced coincided with what I’d read in various chronicles. Angelus, as the dominant master vampire, did insist on absolute submission to his authority and he maintained the hierarchy through violence. It was everything I would have expected, given what I knew about the Order of Aurelius.
But some moments were completely unexpected.
Despite the deadline imposed on us by the Powers That Be, we nonetheless spent a fair amount of time waiting. Vampires can be quite patient, and while fledglings might be content to throw themselves at the first available neck, the Old Ones make hunting an art form. They have a studied eye for human behavioral patterns and are willing to wait for just the right opportunity.
That doesn’t mean they waste time.
Angelus spent several hours on the phone with various financial agents in London while we were waiting for Henry Lloyd and his associates to crack. I learned that Angelus had, and Angel still has, quite an impressive portfolio, although Angel is reluctant to touch it. Among other things, he acquired considerable stock in the Suez Canal Company even before Disraeli’s buyout in 1874. I’m not sure how he managed that, but the gleam in Angelus’s eyes was dark enough when he alluded to certain ‘obligations’ the Rothschild banking family owed him that I decided I didn’t want to know.
As it was, I learned many things I would have been quite content never to know.
Did you know there’s a sort of vampire equivalent to Truth or Dare? Spike called it something like Good Turn, Bad Turn. The rules were simple. Macabre, but simple, as I discovered one evening when they accompanied me to a local pub. I’d merely wanted a quiet supper, but Angelus saw an opportunity to torment me.
Spike and Angelus agreed on a target for the evening. The winner would get to kill that unfortunate person. They proceeded to outdo each other with challenges to perform small acts of kindness for their intended victim – to do the person a good turn, as it were. Apparently compelling each other to do acts of kindness was so loathsome as to be the vampire equivalent of daring someone to drink an entire bottle of vinegar or lick the floor by the urinals in the men’s lavatory. It would continue until one of them suggested something so nice that the other couldn’t bear to do it and forfeited the game.
The winner got to eat the target.
I don’t remember what they challenged each other; I tried to distance myself from the whole, obscene affair as much as possible. Spike seemed reluctant to play. He glanced at me guiltily from time to time, and I couldn’t really hear the tasks he set for Angelus. On the other hand, Angelus made certain I heard his comments as the game proceeded.
Soon, I lost my appetite. The food was dry, tasteless, and caught in my throat. How could I eat, knowing that even if I warned her, the girl they’d chosen would die later that night? Of that, I had little doubt. Short of staking Angelus, I had little hope of stopping him, and I couldn’t stake him. We shared a mission.
That was the key to the slow, silent torture of my soul, and Angelus reveled in it. The game, the entire display, was his reminder to me that I had a price and for ten days, he’d bought me.
My ethics in exchange for revenge.
I left my meal unfinished, paid, and walked back to the flat, knowing full well that I had left an innocent to be killed later that night by my companions.
I don’t think I would have survived if it hadn’t been for Willow.
He taunted her as much as he taunted me, although she was better equipped than I to withstand it. And through it all, she was my anchor.
Are you all right, Giles? She would ask when he wasn’t around.
Even if he was, after some of our bloodier acts of revenge she would quietly check in with me.
How are you holding up?
After we torched the Council’s Library...after I’d murdered a colleague in cold blood, I felt so odd...empty, weary, restless, raging. Outwardly, I imagine it must have seemed that I'd shut down. I couldn't really perceive my surroundings. I was lost in myself.
We left the place in flames and drove back to our temporary base. Angelus made some sort of remark about having worked up an appetite. I was too numb to respond to his goading. I couldn't even look at him, but I imagined him leering behind my back as I made my way from the car up the steps to our flat. I remember hoping that he would just take Spike and go. That was the state I was in: so desperate for solitude that I gave no thought to the people Angelus was likely to kill if he stayed out. If only he would just leave.
For better or worse, I got my wish. Angelus and Spike went out to prowl London's streets for a few hours. Willow stayed behind.
She didn't hover, thank goodness. She left me to myself. Oh, I knew she was there, keeping watch over me, but her presence never intruded, not even at the periphery of my consciousness. It's frightening how stealthy vampires can be. I've known about it for years, it's one of the standard facts listed in all the literature on them -- but there's a vast difference between knowing and experiencing. Even when she put some music on -- Beethoven, I think it was one of his later string quartets -- it was as if the music was simply there. I'd neither heard, seen, nor felt her fiddling with the stereo.
I sat in the drawing room for God knows how long, just...staring...at nothing. The room around me was a grey blur; all I saw was Lytle’s face, the look of horror in his eyes as he choked around the pages I’d forced down his throat.
As he watched me kill him.
It chilled me.
Yes, the Powers That Be had sanctioned these...executions.
It didn’t make me feel any better about being a killer.
There was nothing I wanted more than to forget everything, to close my eyes and imagine that none of it had happened. That Buffy hadn’t died.
I think I must have sighed, either that or given some other signal, because Willow was instantly at my side. Like the music; I never heard her approach, she was just there.
I don't know what made me ask her. It was a question I'd thought of asking her hundreds of times before, but there hadn't ever been a moment when it didn't seem awkward. Until then. That night, I just needed to know.
Does it bother you to kill? I asked her.
Do you feel anything?
No, she said.
She actually said no, and for a split second my world shattered.
However, what she said in the very next instant was the very balm that my soul needed. Willow acknowledged that, as a vampire, she wasn't bothered by killing in exactly the same way I was. She reminded me that what I was feeling -- remorse, hollow anguish, bitterness -- all of it was proof that I was still human.
Furthermore, she pointed out, if I weren't human, if I didn't still possess a sense of justice and compassion, I'd be out celebrating our very artful slaughter with Angelus.
A vampire might be the last person you'd ever expect to give a benediction, yet this is what it was. Willow hadn't denied that what we'd done had been horrible, she hadn't pretended that there wasn't very good cause for me to be questioning myself. Nonetheless, she'd expressed faith in me.
What a strange turn life had taken, indeed, when a vampire could voice greater faith in my character than I myself felt.
I remember crying then. I just sat there, shaking, my face buried in my hands as Willow comforted me, resting her hand on my back and offering me what amounted to a confession of sorts.
Willow told me how she'd felt, or rather, how little she'd felt in her early days as a vampire. She described how disorienting it had been. Her mind remembered the details of her human life, yet emotionally she was detached from all but the strongest drives of the demon: lust, hunger, self-preservation. Oh, she understood the concept of love well enough, but in the way that someone might understand it after reading a dictionary definition.
She said it had taken a fair amount of effort to re-train herself to feel anything like compassion or kindness.
You can probably guess the question that was at the forefront of my mind: why would she have bothered to make the effort at all?
Willow had asked herself the same thing many times and knew that a great deal of the credit went to Angel and his influence. But she confessed that she'd also wanted me to be proud of her.
Quite curious, isn't it? A fledgling vampire with a self-admitted inability to feel human emotions, and she was concerned about the approval of a human mentor from her previous life.
There were the obvious explanations. Willow ascribed it in part to her weak demon, which allowed her former, human sense of self to assert itself, and that sense of self had been closely tied to her network of friends. She also suspected that her Wiccan ties to the natural magic rendered her more capable of compassion for the living world than she'd initially realized.
However, I was completely unprepared for her other theory: that it had something to do with vampire nature itself.
Vampires are creatures of power and hierarchy. Willow told me that this was one of the earliest revelations she'd had about her kind. They readily seek status through conquest, but also have a deep-seated, abiding desire for recognition, both from the minions who serve them as well as from their sires.
Without a sire, Willow's craving for recognition was directed at the dominant vampire in her existence -- Angel -- but also toward those she'd cared for in life. Her friends.
Me.
In earnest, Willow assured me that as empty as I might be feeling at that moment, as disconnected as I might believe I was from anything good or human after what I'd done to Lytle, she'd been even further beyond the pale. I had a soul; she hadn't, at least when she'd first been turned.
I was still absorbing this when she administered the most powerful balm of all. Giles, she said, it was partly because of you that I found my way back from complete soullessness, that I can feel or care anything at all about humans. I won't let you lose yourself in this vengeance. I owe you that.
With just a few, sincere words, Willow made me feel human again.
Not because she'd reminded me of my potential for goodness, but because she made me see how limited my outlook had been. The image of Willow stalking human prey had haunted me since the night I'd watched her from the alley. I'd been tortured by the thought of how far she'd fallen from the Willow who had been so dear to me in life.
In some part of my mind, I had reduced Willow to that act which was a part of her nature, but for me was evil, pure and simple.
But I had a troubling insight as Willow sat with me in that London flat trying to reassure me that I was a force for good in the world, that although I might be in the midst of committing terrible acts of vengeance, the balance of my life had been spent serving the greater good. I had judged Willow by human standards, as if humanity and humankind's interests were the measure for the entire universe. Not until my own hands reeked of blood and death had I truly appreciated how difficult and lonely it must be for a vampire to go against everything in her nature and govern her impulses out of concern for the welfare of human beings.
To the demon, humans are its natural food supply. What a supreme effort it must have taken at first, before Willow had fully developed this sense of connection that she calls her soul. All for the sake of people who had mattered to her when she was human.
Willow sat with me for a while longer, although we both knew that the crisis had passed. As I calmed down, a tremendous fatigue overtook me. I was asleep before Angelus and Spike returned.
After that night, my nerve didn't fail me until the very end of our mission, despite the ghastly brutality of what we did to people who had once been my colleagues. Indeed, my talk with Willow had given me pause to think of the vast array of choices available to each individual. Willow had not been so limited by her circumstances that she'd blindly followed the most obvious path. And neither was I.
I'd shed enough of the blood of others in the name of vengeance.
I couldn't do it any more. But my own blood could still call Henry Lloyd to account for his actions.
Odd thoughts run through your mind when you've been stabbed in the back.
Most immediately, you think of the pain.
And then you think of the pain.
Eventually, a few insights creep in amid the excruciating agony, but above all, there is the pain.
I had quite a bit of time to think as I lay bleeding on the floor of St. Paul's. I knew what it felt like to be dealt a mortal wound. The sensation was forever seared into my memory. And the things we'd done to those Watchers...the things I saw Angelus and Spike do in the cathedral...dear God, my knife wound was merciful.
Never again would I be able to take a life without feeling it right down to my core.
I ached in my very soul from the weight of our revenge, and yet I watched to the bitter end. I wouldn't let myself look away when Spike set Henry Lloyd aflame, and for a split second, I pitied the man who had orchestrated my Slayer's death.
I was numb...empty...and so alienated from everything I'd ever believed in that for the first time in my life, I couldn't think of a reason to go on, other than existing for the sake of existence.
Oh, Willow managed to bully a little reluctant optimism into me, and I'm sure you can appreciate the irony of a vampire earnestly striving to restore a human's faith in the value of life. Dear Willow. Ever the determined one.
But even she couldn't assuage my self-doubts. For all Willow's faith in me, her efforts alone weren't enough to persuade me that I still had something to contribute to the world. No, that came rather unexpectedly from a well-intentioned, if often naïve, colleague of mine who came with his youthful idealism to rebuild from the ashes.
10. Interlude
Silence reigned as Willow stood at Giles's bedside and grappled with what she could possibly say about his life that would do it justice. There was much she didn't know, and what if she said the wrong thing?But, then...how could she say anything about Giles that Hypnoi didn't already know? She suspected that the elusive, wandering demon saw quite a bit of what went on in the world.
A worrying thought occurred to Willow: what if this was about that "experimental" period Giles went through in his twenties when he'd summoned Eyghon?
"This is not a judgment," Hypnoi stated, obviously following her thoughts. "Think not of his life, which has attained its measure and now lays bare. Think of yourself."
Willow chuckled inwardly and wondered which self she was supposed to consider. She'd had two lives so far, in a manner of speaking, and Giles had been important in both of them.
A long-forgotten image popped into her head: a floppy hat she'd worn in high school, bedecked with a huge, artificial flower. It had been the object of some of Cordelia's crueler remarks. Willow remembered one day in particular, when Cordelia had made an especially mean comment about Willow's "Sesame Street fashion sense". Suffering the painful sting of peer ridicule, Willow had taken refuge in the library. Giles hadn't seemed to notice her mood and merely welcomed her help with research on a demon that had eluded Buffy during one of her patrols. When Willow had found a crucial piece of information that he'd overlooked, Giles had not only thanked her for her "invaluable assistance", but he'd actually smiled at the sight of her girly, flowered hat and observed that her cleverness was surpassed only by her ability to bring cheer even to the most tedious research.
Willow had grinned uncontrollably for the rest of the day. Just when she'd felt like a geeky, unwanted outcast, Giles had made her feel special because of what she could do.
She never felt self-conscious about that hat again, no matter how much Cordelia mocked her.
As the warmth of her memory faded, Willow frowned. She couldn't sum up all that Giles had done for her in something so trivial as a hat.
Her gaze flicked to Hypnoi.
Was that a grin on his face?
She let out a soft growl of irritation, then closed her eyes and let a montage of images wash through her mind. These were clearer, more vivid, and enhanced by occasional scents, sounds, and preternatural impressions: her experiences as a vampire. The hospital room faded, and suddenly she was in an ethereal dream world, moving slowly toward the Magic Box, conscious of Spike beside her.
The remembered ache in her heart told her exactly which moment from her past she was revisiting.
She and Spike were inside the shop now, glaring in shock at Megan's Watcher, Smythe, while Giles stood to the side, his expression strained with remorse. An unintelligible chorus of whispers rose in her mind and muffled the heated exchange, but Willow remembered all that had been said, word for word. She was conscious of pleading with Giles and growing angry when he would not be swayed. She saw Spike gesture contemptuously at Smythe and remembered how fiercely he had claimed credit for Megan's progress as a fighter. A cold lump rose in her throat as memory-Spike shifted to gameface and lunged at Smythe, only to be restrained by Giles. Finally, and worst of all, she felt the rage stiffen her spine as she and Spike cast a final, betrayed glance at Giles and stormed out into the night.
With jarring suddenness, the cacophony of whispers stopped and Willow found herself in the familiar surroundings of Giles's apartment. He sat at his desk with his back to her, head bowed and shoulders hunched. This was no memory of hers. Instantly, Willow's guard went up.
"He sat long in doubt that night."
Hypnoi's gravely voice floated beside Willow's left ear as he circled around her and approached Giles, who sat as if frozen to his seat.
"What the hell is happening?" Willow demanded softly, following Hypnoi as if drawn. She came to stand before Giles and looked closer. His head rested against his palms, which covered his eyes. A tremor, so slight she almost missed it, ran through his frame and a thin, damp trail glistened on one cheek.
"The memory is not yours, although you have determined the moment," Hypnoi answered. "This is a fragment of what he has spoken to us. You are not compelled to answer; advocacy must be freely given. He doubted his choice; should he have chosen differently?"