DEAD-icated to the few, the proud, the profane


"NOOOOOOOOOOO FUT--AAAAAAAAAAH…." blared the incessant warblings of Malcom McLaren’s bastard offspring from the decrepit speakers of the ramshackle 8 track. Their odiousness permeated the sticky stench wafting above, mingling with the smell of fags, incense and Ol’ Buddah Gold. Just another typical evening’s fare at Crusty Bunker’s Pub(l)ic…that Crusty, such a wag for a horny toaded Batrnadonban of a demon. And he made the best blood pudding this side of purgatory, I’d wager.
Not many demons these days bother with the real thing –blood, that is.

Young Master Ripper, loopy Rupey, paid no heed to none of the usual hue and cry that had wanderered into Crusty’s to escape the doom and gloom of a rainy post-Jubilee bash. Hard to pay attention, really, when you’re head first in a faceful of bangers and mash.
"Rupey! Rup-ert!!!" saucy wench Olivia, she of the ebony hue and post-modern modeling blues, screeched into her prone lover’s ear. "You make me come all the way to Soho to meet you here –in this – in this …"
"Fetid festering pustule," Crusty offered, ever the helpful proprietor with a smile on his face and a tentacle down your pants.
Olivia pulled Giles’ scruffy hair by the roots and yanked his face out of his plate. Rupert opened his eyes slowly. Squinting through the smoky haze, he could almost spy an apparition, a shimmering wave of blondish beauty. "Buffy? Did it work…??"
"Buffy???!!!" Olivia pealed with laughter. "Do I look like a buffy? Where’s Msr. Francaise?"
Ripper looked up at his sometime lover and part time soul mate, "’livia, luv – where… are we?"
She withdrew her hand coldly, "We? You, lover – you. The next time you party with your mates, Jimmy Page and …" She always did buy his Led Zeppelin stories. Ah, Olivia, so truly naïve about the nature of the world, he grinned. "You can do so by yourself. I have to be on a 5:15 au Milano au courant. Arriverdici, Rupey. Ciao."
Ripper calmly lit up another Lucky. "And a fine la dolce veni vidi vici to you too, luv." He gestured down the bar to a spikey, wild haired, punked out blonde pale masher and his anorexic waif of a companion, "Crusty – lemme have one of what those blokes are yarbling."
"Master Ripper…that’s the hemoglobically challenged, I’ll have you know, mate. That’s the red red vino – blood – that they be having …" Crusty whispered confidientally.
Ripper glanced up at the mirror hanging above the bar. Damn, if that Crusty didn’t know his biz whiz. Slamming his shillings on the oaken bar, Giles laughed lustily, "Be dad if that’s the case—make mine a double – only with some Smirinoff’s as well!"
The spikey haired lad caught the call and waved over. "If you best be seeking ABSOLUT-ion, mate," he wagged a bottle, "then this be yer best call to redemption as opposed to having a soul."
"That is if YOU did have a soul –which we all know – you bloody well don’t!" Ripper mocked.
The spikey one whispered to his wan, wide eyed skeletal date and with a swirl of his long, black leather cloak, they were off. "Don’t let me see you lingerin’, mate," Ripper fingered his crucifix albeit an inverted one in the manner of Alastir Crowley.
"New Yawk City’s where it’s at now, old school tie – Ramones rule!" he brandished his fist, punking it up. "God save the queens –you and the rest of yer Nancy boys …"
Crusty leaned in, plunking some olives in a martini with his patented tendril flip, "Now don’ be a mixin ‘ it up here, not now, not in my place, yawng mawster Giles…’sides there’s a few frollies and lancshires round back been waitin’ to see you."
Giles’ eyes darted towards the backroom, "Lancshires? Who?"
"Mawster Travers and his ward…you know…the precog… ah, you know …the beauty?"
"Beautiful Dreamer??"
"Aye, she be the one, laddie. Something all very state secret-y and hush hush ‘bout the Council…"
"Blast them – why won’t they ever leave me alone! I want nothing to do with them and their…"
"Mister Giles…it’s your calling," Quentin Travers interrupted. "Your father and his father’s father before him and his father’s…"
"Well, I ain’t doin’ no filthy watchin’ – not now – not no more. I’ve seen the future and it’s no good to me – no good to me at all!" His temples pulsed with visions of future passed. "It’s my life and I’ll do what I want!" Giles gulped the Bloody William, pounding his fist on the bar. "And baby sitting kick boxing slayerettes all Lolly Lolly Hazed ain’t my pet-I-cular brew of home blend."
A lithesome dark beauty, her golden eyes ablaze in the din, spoke quiety as she sidled up to her guardian. "I see Ethan Rayne’s hand in this, Quentin…"
Giles snapped, "Well, it sure is hell ain’t no little fluffy bunny, the dark Lord of Carfax Abbey— I can make up my own bloody mind. I have seen the future and it does NOT work."
Dreamer took Giles’ hand, "You have NOT seen my future or yours…"

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

PRESENT DAY:

The gaping jaws of the Hellmouth herself opened wide and engulfed all Sunnydale…all manners of hellspawn, demons, scatalogical nuisances reigned forth in the Kingdom of the blind, the damned and the demented. From the firey, bubbling sulphurous wasteland of a million year old festering wound, came forth a torrent of such horror as the world had never known-- not even in its wildest, most phantsmagorical picture play thrills.

Xander wielded an axe and a gun and a sword—but mostly his own barbed wit. "And so like – where’s Our Little Miss No Show? Hello – world ending – Slayer, anyone?"
Anya, Willow and Tara, the Power of Tre Illuminati, maintained the forcefield, containing the
Multitude of Terrors. Willow blurted, "Forget her – where’s Giles? He’s the only one who can read backwards Aramaic…"
"And he does it with such aplomb," Anya glowed at the thought of Aramaic…especially in reverse.
"Anya! Hey – over here—me main squeeze fighting, dying…brevity is the lack of breath!" A scaly arm threw Xander against the slimy walls of mucousy membrane. "We need the Buff! The Justice League! And the Lone Stranger!"
Willow looked to Tara, grasping her pallid hand tighter. "Do you think this has something to do with that Young Giles flashbacked from the past?"
Tara demurred, "Maybe he came from a parallel past – another dimension.."
Anya chuckled, "Like you’d know about other dimensions…"
"No," Willow defended her true love, glaring at Anya, "but you would!"
"Wait – wait – I get it," the Xan Man extricated himself from the phlegmy wall. "Like in Superman – the post Byrne era– when they had the Crisises of Infinite Universes – all the parallel worlds…destroyed…only one world…one universe…"
"And?" Anya grew impatient with Xander’s incessant comic book riff.
"Yeah – all the parallel universes…gone –no alternate realities…"
"You wish," Anya mocked.
"But there were still these pocket universes – remnants of whole universes…locked in ..."
"Is this metaphysics or Metamucil?" Anya snapped.
"Wait – he may have a point – based on Hawking’s Theory of Fractles," everyone stared at Willow.
"It was on the Net…uh…Nova…uh…Bill Nye the Science Guy?"
Tara held Willow’s hand tighter. "We believe you, hon – just right now we need more myth in our magic."

And in the hue of a distant sun blotted out by the falling darkness, Giles the elder, Giles the ancient, Giles the dead, began to rise from within the crypt that entombed him.
"Noooooooooooooooo," he wailed. "What have I become?"
The torn and tattered remains of Buffy Summers, who would have been his Slayer had he had been her Watcher, laid at his feet… bloody, unmoving and soon-to-be undead as well.

The darkness became day, all rolled up and inside out, spewing a howl of unimaginable pain as the world, the universe, ended …whimpering in the pale, lonely void of nothingness.

"Looks like it’s gonna be a good day, after all," Ethan Rayne laughed, his mirth reverberating through the vastness of squalid hell on earth.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

1977

"Oh bloody hell!" Ripper yanked his hand out of Dreamer’s. Rivulets of sweat poured down his feverish brow.
"What did you see, Rupert?" Dreamer whispered in hushed empathy.
"Yes, Mister Giles – what exactly did you see?" Quentin Travers belaboured the point.
A shaken Giles glanced from the glowing precog to his would-be mentor in watching. "I saw the future – the horror, the horror of it all…"
"Was it the same future you visited ever so recently?" Dramer laid a calming hand upon his shoulder.
"Yes – No – it was terrible -- all horribly wrong. Everyone died and the world ended – all because of me and …"
"And?"
"Or rather – what I didn’t do – and who I didn’t become," Rupert gasped heavily, reliving the images before his eyes over and over again.
"That’s not exactly THE future, Giles. But one of many possible futures that may or may not occur," Travers confided.
"One man – one person – can make all the difference in the world between the two possible futures you visited. One, where under your charge the world was saved time and time again not only by your Slayer but by you and her friends as well. And the other, where you turned a deaf ear to your higher calling and the world paid the price for your callous indifference…by ending in a maelstrom of fire." Dreamer’s golden eyes burned into his, reflected in the luminosity of awakening.
"But why me?" Gile stuttered.
"Let me paraphrase by way of Shakespeare…for want of a Watcher, the Slayer was lost, for want of a Slayer (and not just any Slayer, mind you – but the Slayer by which all will be measured against) …" Travers murmured stodgily.
"Yes, I see… the world was lost. And all because I shirked my duties to …," Giles shook his head slowly, squinting through the haze of Crusty Bunker’s, "…to dally in the arcane arts for want of pretty polly and …the pettiness of the flesh."
Travers slapped him on the back, "Laddie, no need to join a monestary! We may watch but we do also do, I’ll have you know."
Dreamer gazed into Giles’ round eyes.
"Yes, I see," he hesitated. "No – I do see! See more clearly than I ever have before." Giles declared, envisioning his destiny as a gentleman within his proper sphere.
"Youth, Dreamer – why is it wasted on the young?" Travers laughed.
"So that we can have fond memories of bygone days in the inky blackness of the long night," she smiled.
"Indiscretions of a youthful dolt, I’d say," Giles grinned. "That sounds much more charming and erudite than Portrait of the Artist as a Young Warlock."
Beautiful Dreamer took his hand and led him out into the pale moonlight as Travers followed.
"Portrait of the Artist as an Aging Librarian might be much more apropos, in your case, Rupert."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

PRESENT DAY

Giles slowly sipped the Starbucks that Xander handed him. "Yes…uh…thanks. Tasty. What is it?"
"Mojo Go Go-Gos morning blast. Thought it might be in order after last night," Xander nodded.
"Im a Mojo Go-Go man, myself. Just the thing after a night after nectar of the working man."
"Brewed hops in your case but mine…owwwwww," Giles grimaced.
Buffy smiled, "Bit of a nasdsat hung over, are we, droogie? Knocked on the Gulliver by ol’ Massa Johnny Walker?"
"And just where exactly did you pick up that aberration of the Queen’s English from - again?"
"From you. Or rather young you – you know the you that was young that was with you when you were young…"
"Buffy, please – your analysis of the nature of the doppelganger in question is rather redundant." Giles held his throbbing head.
"That’s our Giles!" She hugged her hung over ex-watcher.
"Didn’t you take the aspirin I gave you last night?" Willow piped in, glancing at her cherubic lover, Tara.
"Yes, but –"
"Still stressed? Have got for what ails you?" Willow cheerfully dug into her Hello Kitty purse.
Giles looked nervously over from Xander to Buffy.
Willow threw bottle upon bottle down onto the table, "Stress – Xanax. Panic attacks – Valium – or is that the other way around? Weight loss – phen fenn –without the bad phen just the good fenn. Uppers? Downers? Reds? Blacks?"
She looked up into the stern, disapproving faces of her friends. "Viagra?"

THUS ENDETH PART THE SECOND
Being of two parts and this being the second of two
Therefore…
thusly then
this is…
The End


Appropriation of copyrighted characters and grossly misusing them in a humorous manner is protected under the United States Law of Satire and is Non-Libelous in Nature. So there!