Giles/Ethan: Michaelmas

[doyle]

The things that come out of me being bored: Puppet-Angel and Mr. Gordo. Puppet Angel and Nina. Puppet Angelus and a chainsaw.

Everyone must read lyrajane's beautiful Connor/Wes story, Falling

And I finally finished my Unconventional Ficathon entry.

Title: Michaelmas
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Giles/Ethan
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For hermionesviolin who wanted Giles/Ethan set during Giles's student days at Oxford. (I actually lost my signup, so if you requested darkfic... oops?) My meta discussion on canon Giles at this point in his life and why he isn't quite Ripper yet is in this post, also called See Doyle Fanwank.



In the summer before he enrolled at university, Giles's parents had taken to warning him about falling in with the 'wrong sort of people'. Giles had counted the days till he could leave home and tried not to look as painfully bored as he felt as his father and mother described the degenerates who might try to lead him astray.

Later, he had to wonder if they were simply very lucky guessers, or if Ethan's description had been on the news. No, it had to be the former. If Ethan had made the telly he wouldn't have been able to resist bragging about it. He still had that clipping from the Daily Mail about a suspected Satanist coven in Southhampton. The two-page article was accompanied by a photograph of an altar and an inverted pentagram painted onto the floor - in human blood, the journalist broadly hinted, adding a shocked, saddened end note about the state of Britain today. Ethan, not-actually-a-Satanist-just-curious coven of one, said that the blood was sandalwood gloss from B&Q and that it wasn't as if he'd summoned anything major. Just a minor demon, nothing at all, really, and he'd managed to banish it again eventually, and most of those cats looked like they had mange anyway.

Giles had asked what Ethan was doing in Southhampton to start with, considering his accent didn't sound like he'd ever been within fifty miles. On the other hand, the accent Giles adopted around Ethan and his friends was far removed from the one he used when he rang his mother, so he had to wonder...

The clipping was dated 1970, three years ago; Ethan wouldn't have been sixteen yet, assuming he wasn't lying about his age, and making the bigger assumption that the whole thing wasn't one of his fabrications. Ethan just started into another one of his stories, neatly bypassing the original question. Giles half-listened, looking at the pictures on the old newsprint and wondering if one of the neatly identical houses in the black-and-white cul de sac was home to a Mr. and Mrs. Rayne.

Ethan, naturally, claimed his father was a mage and a personal friend of Crowley's, and that his mother, before her death, had been a Spanish contessa, except on the days where he mixed up his own stories and said his parents had abandoned him when he was a baby, or that his father was a shopkeeper in Droitwich.

"They're all right," Giles said shortly when he was prodded for information about his own family. "Just ordinary, I suppose."

They'd known each other for six or seven months - three of those in what Giles's mother would term the Biblical sense - when Giles, drunk enough or high enough to forget twenty years of indoctrination, blurted out that his father worked for the Watcher's Council.

"Oh?" They'd used a basic glamour to liberate a few bottles from the off-licence. Ethan poured a generous measure of Famous Grouse into a paper cup for himself and passed another to Giles. "You mean your dad works for the TV people? Mary Whitehouse, nobody ever swears and queers don't exist, that sort of thing?"

Giles grinned, reaching for the middle of the three cups being held out by the trio of Ethans in front of him. "Not really."

He was never sure, later, what exactly he said that night, but in between the rambling and the odd fits of melancholy or the giggles he evidently told Ethan about Watchers and Slayers, finding time to fit in a few comments about vampires and how they were less fictional than one might expect. The next morning he woke up half falling out of Ethan's sagging single bed, a two-hour bus journey away from his lecture on the Plantagenets, with his head feeling like Albert Steptoe was living inside it. Ethan gave him water and paracetamol and a shrewd, calculating look that made Giles's insides twist and the tiny version of his father inside his head say, "Well, we told you so. Now look what you've done."

He left as soon as the room stayed still long enough for him to lace up his boots, brushing off Ethan's offers to walk him to the station, as well as any and all attempts to kiss, grope or otherwise molest him as a fond farewell.

The train was delayed for almost half an hour, time he spent getting some extra self-flagellating in. It was easy to not want to be a Watcher and to hate the Council when he was doing it on the inside of his head. Spilling their secrets to a gleefully anarchic eighteen-year-old warlock who at times seemed to know absolutely everyone in the world, including some serious magic users, strayed a tad too far on the side of bloody stupid ideas.

Well, there wasn't a lot he could do about it now. He'd go back to Oxford, catch up on the lectures he'd missed, pass his exams, become a Watcher and watch himself in the mirror slowly turning into his father.

And not see Ethan again. That was the important bit.

He stared out the foggy window and sighed.

**

Not seeing Ethan again was fine in the abstract. In a theoretical world where Ethan ceased to exist when he wasn't within sight, it'd be easy. A month without his trips to London reminded Giles that, compared to Ethan, most of his other 'friends' were achingly dull, and far less inclined to sleep with him, but he would have gotten over that. Met some nice female humanities student from a good background and had a normal, boring relationship where rows about who was going to chalk the sigils on the floor just didn't happen.

The problem with this was that it supposed Ethan would go away.

"You didn't come to see me."

Giles, if he was absolutely honest with himself, wasn't all that surprised to see Ethan sitting on his bed as if he owned the place. He could have teleported from Bethnal Green or tried the more conventional route of getting the train down from London, wandering across the campus and jimmying the lock on the door. Either would leave him looking equally pleased with himself at having caught Giles out, so he wasn't going to get the satisfaction.

"Hello, Ethan," he said, putting his books on the desk and stripping out of his coat.

"It's been four weeks," Ethan complained. "I'm being neglected."

"Queeny doesn't suit you," Giles said, nudging him aside so he could sit on the bed too. "And I was going to ring you," he lied. "I've had exams."

Ethan looked startled at the idea. In Ethan's private universe, it seemed, exams were in the same realm as TV licences and paying for booze - bad things that only happened to other people. "You didn't revise for them, did you? Ripper, what do they teach you in this insane Brideshead-Revisited place? Just do a spell to get top marks and come clubbing with me."

It was worrying how sensible that idea sounded. His father's moralizing about the terrible wrongs of cheating was up against seven months of exposure to Ethan's personal philosophy, which boiled down to Thou Shalt Not Get Caught, and Ethan just made a much more attractive argument.

Ethan, in fact, was quite attractive in general. That had worried Giles for weeks, early on in their association, right up until the point where 'fuck it, I've had a lot to drink and he's up for it' had outweighed latent terror about fancying another boy. Now that he thought about it, he'd been off his face the night Randall had thrown an arm around his shoulders and said, "Let's go to London, there's a friend of mine you have to meet", too.

Giles was beginning to think his parents had a point about binge drinking impairing the judgement.

"What do you need a degree for, anyway?" Ethan asked. "I thought Watcher-ing ran in families."

"It does," Giles said cautiously, sure that he hadn't said that during his exclusive tell-all interview. Ethan had been doing his homework, and that was a deeply worrying thing.

"I'm just saying," Ethan said, "if you're only going to spend your working life perving on a teenage girl, doesn't seem a lot of point wasting three years learning dates and writing essays."

"It isn't just that," he said, letting the perving statement go unanswered. "It's about learning research skills and the ability to sift through data for what might be important." It was suddenly crucial that he convince Ethan that he really did want to be doing this degree. Ethan had a bad habit of verbalizing what Giles didn't want to say. In this case, he was casually pointing out exactly what Giles had been thinking since halfway through his A-Levels.

Ethan said, "You're not even a year older than I am. How can you possibly know what you want to do for the rest of your life?"

The best way to deal with that question was to pretend it had never been asked. "Ethan, you can't tell anybody about the Council and Slayers and things, all right? It's important."

Normally if he wanted to make Ethan keep something top secret he would have told him to tell everybody he liked, and broadcast it on the nine o'clock news if possible. This time he was banking on sincerity and the hope that Ethan would recognize that this really was important.

If he did, he didn't show it. "Fine," he said, letting it drop with no more than a shrug and an, "It's not all that interesting anyway. Let's talk about something else." He leaned across the bed at an alarming angle. When he bobbed back up he was brandishing a Woolworths bag.

Giles took it. The flat shape inside had to be an LP, which meant Ethan had broken their unspoken but longstanding rule about not doing anything as daftly soppy as buying each other presents. Unless, as was extremely likely, he was taking the piss. Giles gave him a suspicious frown. "It's Donny Sodding Osmond, isn't it?" Stuff his worries over Ethan blabbing about the Council, giving him an album by any of the Osmonds was grounds for murder.

But it was Quadrophenia, and Giles sat back against the wall. "Oh," he said. He'd wanted this one, had meant to buy it himself once he got a chance to go down the town. His parents' Christmas presents to him, whenever he finally went home to get them, would be functional things. A new edition of Rothcaine's Demons in the Field, or a set of textbooks. Music would never occur to them. They'd helped him move his record player and his music collection and his guitar, and they'd still never think of it.

"Thanks, Ethan," he said quietly.

"Put it on now, if you want," Ethan said. He was already going through another bag he'd produced from somewhere, pulling out marker pens, alcohol, a plastic container that had to be blood from the butcher's. "Bloke who gave me this ritual was a bit hazy on the details, but I think the forces we're going to be calling up like music. Probably."

**

The post-spell high, and the spell-influenced sex, left them both too drowsy and comfortable to move from the heap of blankets and duvet that had once been a neatly-made bed. They slept for a bit, until Ethan got restless and prodded Giles into telling him a story. What he ended up telling was an abridged and somewhat incoherent version of his autobiography. He was aware that he was telling Ethan even more about Watchers, and couldn't make himself give a shit.

What seemed to fascinate Ethan the most was not that there was a whole school in Hampshire devoted to turning out Watchers, but the idea that Giles had gone to boarding school.

"Are you telling me," he said, "that you came through seven…"

"Ten."

"Ten - you got packed off to boarding school at eight? God - ten years living round the clock entirely with other boys, and you'd never had a homosexual experience before we met?" He looked distraught. "You're ruining my faith in the whole public school system."

"We did have to fag for the sixth-form boys," Giles admitted, to cheer him up. "They're always talking about changing that."

Ethan stroked his side. Giles guided his hand to the deep scratches he'd put there, wondering how loud they'd been. There wasn't a specific university law against dark magic, as far as he knew, but the buggery had to be against the rules.

"Why didn't you go home for Christmas?" Ethan asked. "Randall said you were staying here by yourself."

It was the first year he'd stayed at school for the holidays. "My father had to work," he said. And since he'd told Ethan everything else anyway, he said, "The Slayer was killed last week. The new girl's an American. My father's in charge of sorting out her new Watcher, making the flight arrangements and things." Christmas dinner would have been just him and his mother, listening to lectures about how he was going to have to knuckle down and work harder if he was going to be as successful as his father, and he would have been thinking about Ethan, pretending he was just worried he was going to do something stupid, so he could pretend he didn't miss him.

"Bloody Yanks," Ethan said in a faux-posh accent that was uncannily like Giles's fathers. "Taking our jobs and our women and our vampires."

Giles was startled into laughter. "Coming over here flashing their chocolate and their tights…"

"Nylons."

"…their nylons, and shagging plucky British girls."

"Or spunky young British lads," Ethan said, stretching himself out. "Equal opportunity shaggers, the Americans."

Giles said, "Voice of experience?", not believing a word of it. Ethan just raised his eyebrows and smiled, leaving it to the imagination.

The record had long since finished. Neither of them could be bothered to get up and turn it over.

"Do you even want to be a Watcher?" Ethan asked.

Giles spent a long time studying the ceiling. Someone else had had this room last year. Someone else would be in residence in six months' time. He doubted they'd summon demons here, or spend the Michaelmas holidays having debauched sex with a thin, sharp boy who asked too many direct questions. "No," he said, because he'd never said it before.

"Come and live with me, then," Ethan said, as if it was the most natural suggestion in the world. "You can go on the dole or sponge off your parents or, I don't know, spend Saturday night down at the docks. Better than here."

"Don't be stupid," he said, but it was arguing by reflex. Ethan's flat wasn't even big enough for two of them, unless they shrunk themselves to the size of white mice.

He should have been thinking about when he would go and see his parents in the new year, or how much work he'd have to do in the incoming Hilary term. He should have been thinking about the girl in America who was being told, maybe right this minute, that she was the One In All the World.

He should not have been making plans to get his music collection and his guitar to London.

"Come on, Ripper," Ethan drawled, nipping at his ear. "It'll be fun." Justification enough for anything, if you were Ethan.

Giles wasn't the same person on his trips to London. The accent, the attitude, everything down to his walk. He'd thought it was the place or the people - maybe it was the magic, or just the way Ethan had almost instantly taken to calling him by that nickname.

The flat really wasn't big enough. They'd have to do something about that.

His parents were never going to forgive him for this.

He grinned.

"Right then," he said. "Let's."

END

Comments

[47-trek-47.livejournal.com]

This is lovely! :) Loved Ethan complaining about being neglected, and the way he wouldn't leave him alone. Nice tie-in to the way Ethan always seems to be showing back up.

Although, my first reaction to the whole thing was "Giles/Ethan isn't *unconventional*! It's canon!" And the thing is, I truly believe that. Hmm...

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was my reaction when I got my assignment - "some mistake, surely?" *g* Glad you liked!