Giles knows his colours. They’re the only things that can stain the black.
This story was originally a part of the Remix... Redux challenge. The original version, ‘Childproof Tops’ is by Beth C.SHADING RAINBOWS
By Cherry Ice
He remembers a time when a rainbow was worshipped. He watched from the shadows of the times as their priests preached of peace and harmony, free love and free speech. He watched them dance in the rain, bead necklaces clacking and peace signs held high overhead. He watched them sleep on ratty blankets on the fresh green grass, bright yellow dandelions waving boldly around them from amongst the midst of roses, lilies, and geraniums.
He watched them sing, but all he could hear was the dark voice following along, whispering words he couldn't hear. He watched them touch their rainbow, but he worshipped ones of his own -- refractions off oil skims on puddles, in back alleys behind bars; red and yellow, green, orange, and violet, blue little pills that were all that stopped the song from having words that would capture and snare him.
He didn't know the words, but late at night -- when night shrouded the sun that spilled the rainbows -- he caught himself humming the tune.
Later, it was functionality that people lived by. Practicality, five minute fixes, and self sufficiency. So he hid his rainbow in the slew of self-medication around him. He hung in the shadows, and people saw what they expected to see in the empty spaces. It stopped them being scared of what lay beneath.
They all filled in the empty spaces with what they wanted to see.
***
Clinically white. Shining plastic stamped in black: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
Neat little compartments -- nicely labelled. He knows what lays in each; Red, green, blue, orange-and-yellow, white, red-with-a-stripe, and a light, sky blue, respectively. The children would smile and cautiously avert their eyes if he tossed that day's pill back with a mouthful of tea. He thought they might have accepted his offer of a cup if they'd known the strength of the mix that regularly graced his cup.
Old habits die hard.
Jenny would laugh, and took her whiskey without the tea. She used to sit smiling on his couch with a mug of spirits and not much else. She'd pluck the organiser from his fingers and set it on the side table. She'd tease him about the case, telling him it made him look downright geriatric. He'd kiss her to shut her up, because he didn't know why he needed them and she always wanted to know.
He couldn't just tell her that if he missed a day the shadows started singing rainbow songs.
He woke up one morning to find her propped on her elbows in the mess of linen, frowning down at him. The concern in her eyes was palpable, and the rising sun through the blinds stained his hands with strips of red.
All she'd tell him was that he talked in his sleep. All he remembered was another curious period of empty that seemed to compartmentalise itself away so neatly. She brushed past him in the halls after that, ducking her head down farther in the book she always seemed to have on hand, perhaps against just such and occasion. She didn't return his calls, and it was with abstraction that she spoke to him at staff meetings.
Maybe he trained Buffy too hard, and maybe he pushed Willow too far on the hacking, and maybe he leaned on his rainbow until Jenny showed up on his porch, drenched from the rain. He pulled her inside and wrapped her in deep blankets that fluffed around her liked clouds, and sat her on his couch. He hurried to the kitchen, pouring hot tea and liquids from old amber bottles, and when he returned she had his pill box clenched tightly in her hands. Her fingers were as white as the sterile plastic.
"You never told me," she accused, and he thought she wasn't shaking from the drenching. "Why," she said. The box broke beneath her hands, and his rainbow went skittering and rolling across the hardwood floors. "You never told me why," she said again, and he was wrapped up in the mess of her, wet clothes and warm skin and heavy cloud blankets.
He couldn't find a way to tell her that he couldn't, that he couldn't divulge what he didn't know. That all he ever remembered was waking up with blood on his hands and matted through his hair, and Ethan's laughing eyes.
Maybe it was better she knew more than he.
***
Starlight spinning, and spinning, she gives him a new box to replace the one she's broken. Wood older than he instead of sterile plastic, new and brittle. Polished stones in the place of shakily stamped letters. Agate -- Blue lace, for peace and happiness. Red, for its calming properties. Amber, to help control --
There seemed something vaguely off about using red as a calming agent.
Kunzite to help find the center. Moonstone for protection. Turquoise to heal his soul and spinel for energy.
It lasted for a week, a month, a day, before the range of the rainbow wasn't enough. When he found the box and the stones shattered across his floor in the rose petals and blood on the wall.
It was better -- Before the pills and after, between Ethan and the Watcher's council, he moved with the times. Powders and pills, long white lines and heating spoons. Anything to keep the things that he knew and the voices that were more than figments out in the night, where they belonged.
He moved deeper and deeper into it, following the small oasis of light cast by track marks and rainbows he could hold within his mind.
The Council threw him through detox, shattered the light -- but, really, it was never any more than a reflection of light -- and forced an array of pills on him.
Synthetic bright, and they hurt his eyes.
***
Roses red. When she died, all he could hear was laughing. Dug his face into her hair, her artistically arrayed hair and tried to shut out the laughing and the blood on the wall.
He thought it was Angel's laugh. The high, shrill note ringing with lunacy. He tried to erase it with the silence of Jenny's heart, but it echoed all the louder. Holding her hand, the record played on. Something dark whispered under it. Slipping beneath his skin.
Ancient, irreplaceable scrolls hit the floor with Tylenol, pens, morphine and charms, but his rainbow was gone and the stones lay shattered across the floor.
The voice rose from a whisper to a laugh, and he stared at the roses on the floor. Hypnotized. Immobile. The petals grew nearer and nearer, swallowing up the world while the dark voice sang, and he saw
--Jenny. But not Jenny. Not really. Night-dark hair and Spanish eyes and a leaping smile, but wilder and just as doomed. She dances away from his touch. She is young, and so is he. They both wear the rebellion of times as a second skin. Red rose twined in her hair. He placed it there. Marked her. She runs, uttering mock screams, and they awake a hunger in him deeper than the night. He can hardly wait until they're real.
He takes her in the garden and she smiles. The rose bushes draw drops of blood along her skin and he drinks them up as he slides his tongue along her body. She can't hear the voice that drowns out the stars. She writhes at his touch -- play seduction -- until she starts to thrash, and the screams against his hand have terror behind them.
He wakes up in his London flat. His head pounds until it shakes the night before from his memory. Ethan sits on the side of Rupert's cot in ripped jeans, feet and chest bare. Hands him a mug of scotch and an elusive smile.
"Drink up, mate," Ethan says laconically. "You've had a night of it." --
So there are roses on the stairs and Jenny's dead in his bed and maybe it's not Angel's voice that taunts him.
***
After the funeral -- after the dark and crumbling earth and the hollow words -- he finds Ethan in his apartment. Sprawled across his couch, worn as the leather, as if he belongs there. All Giles can think of is her sitting there, staring up at him with the exact same eyes.
"Get out," he says, and hangs his black coat carefully by the door. That suit has been worn thirteen times. Thirteen times, whether it be in the sun or the night or with a glass of amaretto in silent respect.
Thirteen times is too many, but he is quite keen on making it fourteen. Thirteen is a bad number.
"Get out," he repeats, because he has not heard the other man move.
"Is that any way to treat an old friend?" Ethan asks, voice wounded but eyes laughing.
"When were you last my friend?"
"Always, Ripper. Always." His voice twists, deepens with the nickname, and
Giles thinks he hears something growl.
Giles pours himself a drink. Mixing liquids from decanters beneath his counters indiscriminately into the bottom of a tumbler. Dark brown, dried blood, old wounds and new earth; screw ice and screw the taste. Downs three inches in seven seconds and fills it up again. "Tell me what you want so I may thump you and we both may move on," he gasps as he finds the bottom of his glass a second time.
"Tut tut, Ripper. I come here, risking life and limb -- might I add -- to comfort you in your time of trouble, and you've been nothing but rude."
"You only come here for two reasons, Ethan. When you want trouble, or when you want something else."
"You've had a rough time of it, old mate, and I understand that, but you're really being unforgivably rude. You're on your third drink and you haven't even asked me what my poison is."
Ethan is standing right behind him when he turns, and his nearness would make Giles start, if he didn't have himself too well trained into the impulse to hit him.
Something dark whispers in his ear and before he knows what he's doing -- but he made the choice, something made the choice -- he lays Ethan out across the floor. He skids on the terra cotta tiles, and slowly raises a hand to his mouth. It comes away wet.
The floor around him is covered with shards of glass, Giles realizes numbly. There is a small stream of blood running from the split knuckles on his right hand, and in his left there is more of the sparkling. The light reflects, falsely bright and cheerful, from pieces embedded deep into his skin.
He has broken the tumbler, he sees. His left hand is a mess of blood and glass and spilled spirits. The light passes through them and refracts into rainbows. All he can do is stare at his hands in stunned familiarity.
Ethan climbs to his feet, working his jaw. The humour is gone from his face, and his voice is dark when he speaks. "Really, Ripper," he says, and something in the pitch of his intonation resonates with the dark thing that sings inside of Gile's head. "Ripper, that's about enough. I came here as a friend, and perhaps, if you apologise nicely..."
"Get out," Giles says, still staring down at his hands. "Leave here, and don't come back."
Ethan sighs, and there might be something almost sad in it behind the vindictiveness and the gloating. "Have it your way, then." He drops a stack of files to the counter in distaste, and turns on his heel.
"What--" Giles starts, concentration breaking from the whisper blood makes as it travels across skin.
"What? What 'What'?" Ethan asks.
"What is--" A general wave in the direction of the thick files, and blood spills to the floor.
"Why, everything that you've never wanted to know," Ethan says with hard lips and laughing eyes. "Just remember, old mate, this could have ended very differently.
"You asked for this."
***
The folders are a forcibly muted blue. The same as grace any filing cabinet. These are worn and faded, normal seeming, but would be an exception in what he knows as an otherwise impeccable filing system -- The Council is built on order and rules, and they can no longer function outside their carefully drawn lines.
'Giles, Rupert.' Alphabetically by last name, of course. The ink was once black, but due to a rickety hand and time, it has faded to a shade of blue. The corners are worn, and there are cross references to 'Summers, Buffy' and 'Sunnydale -- See also: Hellmouth.'
All this is normal. The Council keeps files on all of their Watchers. Successes sometimes, but all the failures. Skills and weaknesses, the networks they can be counted to draw upon in times of strife.
The one labelled 'Ripper' is much thicker, and is the uncustomary one. Not slotted between 'Rionara, Jennifer,' and 'Riquotish Demons' as would be par, but paired up so it sits in the 'G's. It is a darker and brighter blue, but more worn by hands. It would stand out well in a cabinet or shelf of files identical to the first.
He leaves bloody fingerprints on the folder and the worn papers. On medical reports and surveillance photos, old prescriptions and chemical breakdowns of multicoloured pills.
He finds what should be a police report. Witness statements and psychological findings, autopsy reports and photos of a badly mangled corpse. He thinks it used to be a man.
He knows it used to be a man.
Someone laughs.
There are stories in here, but no fairy tales. Carefully typed sheets paper-clipped to the photos. A watcher too obsessed with his slayer, a young wife neglected and lonely. He came home with lipstick on his collar. She sank too deep, didn't pay enough attention to herself, the lines society had drawn for her, or the vows she had taken. He drank too much, hoping the haze would draw a line between those two worlds. It didn't work, and a demon killed the slayer. She died in the watcher's arms and he drank more.
Tracked down the demon and found him with his wife, no longer so young and no longer so lonely.
He killed the demon, of course. Didn't kill his wife. Not then, anyways, but he killed her a little each day, just enough that she could hide it with long sleeved blouses and foundation. The child didn't know. Couldn't know and wasn't responsible -- for his true parentage or for the lies and obsessions that had brought them all this far -- but so many things at that age could be explained away by clumsiness and rough housing on the playground.
The worlds blur before Giles' eyes, and he realizes in detached amusement that it is because his hands are shaking. He pours himself another whiskey, because the smell seems to cling to the story, and continues to sift through the papers with hands like leaves.
Maybe the child was a little too much like his real father. Maybe he wasn't, to start, but the watcher drove him there, killed his mother too much, and the child split. Maybe the violence and the humanity just couldn't live in the same skin, and heavy fists bruised and tore the carefully built wall, until one day it came shattering down.
The man in the photos is ripped to pieces.
Ripped apart.
Following, there are chemical and metaphysical breakdowns of coloured pills, psych evaluations, hypnotic sessions and lists of reconstructed memories. Constant monitoring for regression.
There was a pool behind his childhood home, Giles remembers. The memory is always very safe. Full of love, and if it's not the safety of love, it's the safety of knowing no one could hurt you, ever again. Victory. He remembers boats bobbing across it at night, except for that at the time of this thought he was too old to play with toys, no longer really a child, and boats didn't glisten like that, flop and squelch, or bob and list so.
There must have been a harvest moon, because the reflections off the lapping water, of the watchers moving cautiously, were stained red. An owl, perched in the oaks rattling beneath the tenebrous blue sky, laughed at him through the howling in his head.
***
The last light of the lingering day. Jenny gone and his slayer kills the man she loves. Takes off, leaves her friends confused and alone, her mother despondent. He searches, but she does not want to be found, and he thinks he may be traipsing down that road as well, albeit with a great less drama. There are papers stained with blood in the chest by his bed, beneath the holy water and crosses, but he fears he cannot hide or exorcise them.
The sun is setting because the day is ending, and he doesn't know what he'll find in the dark. When the clouds or the horizon swallow the sun and there is nothing to cast a rainbow for him. He doesn't know if he'll be able to stand by himself when haunts kick up the fierce night winds.
He drinks his whiskey without a shot of tea. Keeps up appearances and pours it from the pot to a china cup and obediently swallows one sip at a time as he leafs through locator spells and encyclopaedias of demons from before time began, telephone directories and Reader's Digest. He wonders if Buffy's happy. If she's dealt with the death of an Angel, and those that her refusal to act sooner caused.
He wonders if she leaves a trail of harvest moon water behind her.
It is just one colour of the rainbow. It's a single stripe, but it has eaten the rest.
Sitting on the roof top with a record player and a teacup of good whiskey; sitting in the last of the mauve and orange and flamingo pink, he wonders if he'll ever be able to stop painting it. Stop pulling out the capsulated paintbrush, and washing over the base of red with an array of colours. He wonders if he'll gain that control before the night steals the canvas away, and he is left flinging brightly coloured paint into the void.
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