Light flooded the room, for they were now in a room. Giles shielded his eyes from the sudden brightness, then became newly confident as their surroundings took shape.
They were back within Council Headquarters, not in Giles’ spartan office, but the casually stylish environs of the staff canteen which served as an informal meeting place at any hour. Giles addressed the ghost without fear, this was his territory and he was damned if he was going to allow anyone or anything to intimidate him in this place.
‘Given what has passed tonight, can I assume that you are the Ghost of Christmas Future?’
The ghost answered not, but the upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the ghost had inclined its head. That was the only answer Giles received.
It was Christmas and it was the future, for only in a time yet to be could Fred be sat, as he was, at one of the tables. Giles was pleased to see that the young man whom he currently regarded as by far his most promising trainee had succeeded in all that was necessary to become a Watcher. He doubted that more than a single year had passed from the present day, for Fred and his two companions, with whom he was sharing a plateful of mince pies, were little changed.
‘No,’ stated Fred, ‘I don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's dead.’
‘That’s no surprise,’ drawled Parvez - another trainee, known to Giles as a rather doubtful candidate, who had evidently pulled himself together and met the required standard. ‘If I worked those hours, I’d die.’
Becky, who had been one of the very first graduates of the new Council, giggled affectionately. ‘Of course you would. You have to be the laziest Watcher of all time.’
‘Shit way to go though,’ said Fred thoughtfully as he chased an errant crumb around his plate with moistened fingers. ‘How long d’ya reckon he was lying there?’
‘Who cares?’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ said Parvez blithely. ‘No one does or someone would’ve missed him.’
Leaning over the back of one of the many empty chairs, Giles looked across to the ghost.
‘Am I supposed to be shocked by their attitude?’ he said. ‘Watchers have to develop a certain matter-of-factness about death, we see enough of it.’
Then compassion drove him to ask:
‘Is there truly no one who feels emotion caused by this man dying?’
The ghost acknowledged Giles’ words with a snap of its fingers.
********************
As the faces around him became discernable, Giles found himself next to two people, in whose company he always felt distinctly uneasy. Gilbert Deller and Eloise Attwood had been Watchers as long as Giles: their absence from the old Council building on the day of the explosion had ensured their survival. Though they had hidden that fact from him until The First had been defeated and Giles had returned to London to try to recreate a thousand year old institution from memory alone.
Giles neither liked nor trusted them, though in the last three years had found their experience and expertise invaluable. The Council may well serve a higher purpose than the trivial everyday concerns of man, still it required souls to function, and therefore had always contained as much decency and as much corruption as does any profession. The history of the Council was riddled with the attempts of its workers to seize control of the considerable financial, political and magical power that made up its assets in order to exploit them for personal gain. Giles had yet to uncover a single tangible proof, but had long suspected the two senior Watchers to be sowing the seeds of rebellion.
Attwood and Deller were laughing, their faces glowing with triumph.
‘Well I thought he’d never die,’ crowed one to the other.
‘Wonderful isn’t it?’ Attwood’s voice became shrill in her delight. ‘This changes everything.’
Deller snorted with glee. ‘And on December 24th as well,’ he was laughing with such ferocity that he could barely complete his sentence aloud. ‘I hated him so much and then he gives us this wonderful present!’
They exploded into fresh peals of mirth.
Giles turned away from them sickened. This wasn’t pragmatism in the face of death, this was obscenely revelling in another’s demise.
‘That wasn’t the emotion I meant and you know it’ he accused the ghost. ‘Let me see some tenderness connected with death.’
Click.
********************
They were returned to the house where Giles had previously witnessed the muted Christmas toast. This time Dawn, hair slightly longer and jet black, was sat at a table, books and laptop open before her, tears streaming down her face.
Willow bounced in.
‘Have you seen my…?’ The question died on her lips when she saw that Dawn was quite undone. ‘Oh Dawnie.’
‘I’m not crying,’ sniffed Dawn. ‘Staring at this screen all day hurts my eyes.’
She began to sob in earnest as Willow, biting her lip in an attempt to hold back her own tears, opened her arms and held her tight.
‘It’s been a year, it wasn’t so bad when it was a year since Mom…’ hiccupped Dawn. ‘I don’t remember it feeling so bad.’
‘Ssshh,’ soothed Willow. ‘We’ll get through this.’
‘I was beyond late. All the way home I kept thinking ‘Buffy’s going to be so pissed that I’m late on Christmas Eve - especially the first since…’
Despite knowing that Willow and Dawn couldn’t hear him and that the ghost would answer him not, Giles was unable to prevent himself from asking. ‘Since what?’
‘But she wasn’t waiting all angry, she’d patrolled and they’d killed her.’
Dawn and Willow wept softly as Giles rounded on the ghost.
‘Why show me this? I said that I would stop Buffy patrolling, this will not happen,’ his voice faltered with uncertainty. ‘I can’t lose her again.’
For the first time Giles welcomed the ghost’s abrupt method of changing locations, whatever else the future held it could not be so disturbing.
*******************
How wrong he was. The ghost now flashed them through visions of a future entirely without hope. Deller and Attwood artfully, insidiously, spitefully spread their poison and created a faction that went across all levels of the Council. Giles looked on in horror as he saw lines being drawn, loyalties declared and the Council implode in a bloody and protracted civil war.
Potentials were torn apart by sniggering attackers lost in dark magic, eyes entirely black. Willow smilingly opened the door to what she believed were friends who proved to be dissembling enemies concealing knives. Watchers gave their slayers false information leaving them fatally vulnerable. The explosion triggered by Xander turning his ignition key blew out all the windows in the street and lit up the night sky. Slayers and Watchers alike abandoned their duties across the globe and ran, trying in vain to hide from recognizable adversaries and unseen magics.
Click. Giles and the ghost were in a narrow cell like room. Fred, beaten almost beyond recognition and shaking uncontrollably was signing a piece of paper, making laboured strokes with a pen his shattered hand could scarcely hold.
‘There,’ he said to Deller in a hollow voice. ‘I’ve confessed, can I be killed now?’
Click, click, click. Each scene more horrific and intolerable than the last.
Click. Dawn was waiting for the tube, the underground station seemingly deserted until two men emerged from the shadows and made towards her with a calculated air of menace…
‘Enough!’ cried Giles. ‘Please have mercy.’
Click. They were in the same misty, murky, colourless nowhere wherein the ghost had first appeared. It was some moments before Giles could find his voice.
‘Where am I in all this? I thought this was to be a foretaste of events I shall experience. Why am I not fighting? What is my future?’
Click. A churchyard and a neglected grave with an inscription and two dates carved into it. Giles read them and learned that he had no future, not one of any length. In three hundred and sixty five days from this extraordinary spirit filled night, he would be dead.
The incidents the looming, silent ghost had shown him fell into place.
‘It was me, they were discussing in the canteen, wasn’t it? My death Deller and Attwood were laughing over. Without me there is a power struggle, without Buffy our allies are compromised. Without the Council there is chaos.’
Words seemed useless, as did all else. The most hellish and violent future conceivable awaited those he cared about and he would abandon them to their suffering, the will to live betrayed by a body worn down by nearly four years of unrelenting stress that followed hard upon seven of frequent hurt and sleepless nights.
Giles knelt, tracing his fingers over the dates 9-3-54, 24-12-06. A thought came to him, a comforting thought, a good thought, a powerful thought. He turned to face the ghost.
‘This can be changed. I may yet change these shadows by an altered life. Is that not so? Why show me this, if I am past all hope? Tell me!’
Reaching out to the ghost, pleading to have his fate reversed, Giles saw a transformation in the ghost’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and finally dwindled away into nothing. As did the ground upon which Giles knelt so that he was falling, falling, falling, towards heat, towards flames, towards an eternity without redemption. A sudden impact knocked the breath from his body, however he had landed not in a lake of fire, but atop his bed.
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