FIC: Daybreak Postponed (9/12-ish)

["C S Armitage" <soren_nyrond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

TITLE: Daybreak Postponed [approximately] (9/12)
AUTHOR: Soren Nyrond
DISCLAIMER: All characters in this part belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy -- etc etc as in part (0/12). Some ideas have been borrowed for elsewhere to illuminate this story: they did once belong to Other Companies (and still do, I imagine), but since they are by way of being generic concepts, Idon't think anything's awry.
SUMMARY: Going Underground. Also some snuggles.
ARCHIVING:: Talk to me -- there may need to be re-edits on some of this, thanks to kind feedback.
SPOILERS: None - none of this ever happened in the ME-world
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Molto gratitude for the nice feedback, guys.  
  
 
 
DAYBREAK HAS BEEN POSTPONED

By Soren Nyrond

Part Eight - Darkness Has Fallen

 

Giles ducked to the back of the room, and bent down.

"Quickly," he said: "Through here. Elspeth - we'll need the books."

>From among the heavy gloom of the unnatural shadows, he had unearthed a cat-flap-like aperture hidden behind two of the chairs, which led down and under the wall. Samantha swarmed towards it with all the enthusiasm she'd been showing to cuddling up to Xander. Willow and Buffy followed,and Xander, recovering his senses a little, went along, tried to suppress the emotions arising from a four-square view of Buffy's denim-clad butt as she squirmed through the hole.

Elspeth grabbed the book Willow had been reading from - Pursuivant on Cults of the Final Desecration - and, hearing voices right outside the door, tossed it to Giles, and went to delay whoever it was.

 

 

"Ah, Miss Jennings - are you -- ?"

"I was just looking for you, Mr. Trenchard. Do you know at what stage Mr. Travers will be ready to explain what is happening ?"

If Quentin Travers had an obvious flaw, it was his lack of inter-personal skills. He could not, it was whispered, have spoken to even themost mild-mannered of men, without provoking at least dislike if not hostility. As the aspirant Head of the Watcher's Council, it was a potentially fatal flaw. So, he had Godfrey Trenchard.

Elspeth looked directly into his eyes as she spoke, and balanced on her feet, ready to block him, briefly, whichever way he tried to go past her.

If Trenchard had ever been a real Watcher (that was, one with aSlayer to mentor) no-one knew of it. But he was a witty and charming man who projected an essence of bonhomie and culture. He was, body and soul, Travers' man; he was also, it was widely believed, capable of little more than intermittent independent ratiocination. "Thick as a brick" was how Georgiana Mountcurzon had phrased it, before her sudden assignment to a potential Slayer deep in the Malaysian jungles of Borneo.  

But Trenchard was, within Ravenslaut Hall, Travers' right-hand man and general enforcer. And now he wanted to get into the room that Elspeth was guarding.

He ducked to the left and then to the right, but she managed, deftly, to stay in front of him.

"Surely you were at the meeting this morning ?" he said, tryingto divert her.

"I know that he was going to call a meeting this morning, but nothing seemsto have come of that," Elspeth replied. She schooled her face to innocence and waited to see how Trenchard would respond.

After all, given that he presumably knew Travers had used hypnosis at the morning's meeting (something Giles had explained to Elspeth, after reversingits effects), he had to allow for the fact that the hypnosis might have had a different effect .

"Excuse me - " He pushed past her and raked his eyes round the room. Thenhe turned back to her.

"Miss Jennings, I do apologise - " (turning the charm on full-flood) "-onlywe had a report of vermin in here. Allow me - you were going -- ?"

And, with a slightly strained grace, Elspeth had to allow herself to be ledaway.

 

 

"Where are we ?"

"Keep your voice down."

"Sorry - where are we ?"

"Somewhere under the Hall."

Suddenly, up ahead, Xander heard a muffled sound, and then a series of jumbled comments of the "ouch", "mind that elbow", and "sorry , was that you ?"variety.

"Giles - I think something's happened - "

He got no further: his questing hands, feeling the way ahead, had encountered a void, but his propelling feet hadn't stopped in time, and he found himself projected out, and down, and onto a wriggling pile of bodies. At a guess Buffy, Willow and this Samantha girl.

"Buff, Will, is that you ?"

"Actually, to be exact, it's me, but - "

"Oh, sorry, Samantha."

 

Eventually they sorted themselves out. They had fallen into some kind of sub-basement, but one equipped with mattresses or something similar. They waited, but Giles made no appearance, and they were uneasy about shouting for him. Finally it was agreed (by a majority of three to one) that Xander, as the one with the putative G.I.-type experience, should be the one to go back and reconnoitre.

"What are you guys going to do ?" he asked the pitch darkness.

"Don't worry," Buffy's voice told him: "We'll think of something. Don't forget, sooner you go, sooner you'll be back."

For some reason that caused a fit of stifled giggling, but Xander had learned that it was wisest to ignore such things, if you didn't want to learn unspeakable things and be tortured about it later.

 

 

It was cramped, but it was about as safe as Rupert Giles could imagine. In effect it was a custom-built coffin, with an air-vent, and an internal light (for what good that did in the current situation - to his best guess it now had about the strength of a failing 25-watt night-light). It was hidden off the sou-terrain passage beneath the library annexe, and whilst he knew that several others knew the passage existed, he was almost certain no-one knew of this little addition. It had been painstakingly dug out by three student-Watchers shortly before Giles had himself graduated, and "officially" the entire passage had been sealed off shortly after DoctorGlieve had discovered it, when his lozenges had rolled off the arm of his chair.  

So, he had betaken himself there, to peruse Pursuivant, and to pray that Elspeth had escaped interrogation. Buffy and the other youngsters ought to be all right - the passage eventually debouched into the kitchen cellar (or had done in his day), so they would be able to get food for themselves.  

For himself Giles was confident he could go several hours without sustenance. Thankfully he had, in any event, a couple of the cereal bars in his pocket as a snack, while he looked through the book. He was familiar with Pursuivant as an authority, and he had, of course, recalled the general tenor of the Rite of the Dark Voracious, but it appeared, from the brief glance he'd had before they had been interrupted, that there might well be more to look into than Willow would have had time to do.

 

He settled himself more comfortably and, from his other pocket, he removed two slimmer volumes he had slipped from Library shelves (whilst Elspeth hadbeen recovering from his removal of Travers' hypnotic control). Whilst not recognised as authorities by the Council, Giles had both on his own shelves in Sunnydale and had always found them to be sound in their advice. Baxter and Moncrief were Victorian writers who had specialised in demonic rituals in the Indian sub-continent, and whilst the title Fairy-tales of the Pennine Hills seemed, frankly, irrelevant to the gravity of a Watcher's role,Giles knew a little more about that book. For instance, that the author had lived in the heart of Bowland and that he had carefully recorded not just fairy-tales in the frivolous sense, but also the far older and darker tales of boggarts and subterranean entities which had once been the common-place of the hearth-fires.

He was just settling to Pursuivant when he heard a scurrying sound from thepassage. It might be Buffy or one of the others, but he could see no reason why they would have come back. Equally the wainscot aperture might havebeen discovered and Travers might have sent someone down. As a precautionhe switched the light out and lay as silent as he could in the swathing darkness.

 

 

Elsewhere there was also darkness, and warmth, and closeness, and soft caresses. And sometimes those caresses became more urgent and frenzied. And sometimes one pair of hands would fall passive, when the waves of sensation became too much, for the moment, to bear. But always there was love, and loving, and sorority.