'Giles' Home' offering
Feb. 12th, 2018 02:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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giles_shortsHello all!
This is my first post in this group, and it's not even vaguely a drabble. However, with an okay from LittleOtter73 andQuaggy, I wanted to share the first small section of my Giles backstory addendum fic that ties in with my larger ongoing AU Ineluctable. It's set while he's at university but before the 'rebellion' times, it is in fact an exploration of possible events that set things in motion. And the the first sections are very much about the childhood home of Rupert Giles. When the whole fic is done I'll put it up on AO3, but this is a little preview for this group ;))))
He went home for the funeral. He wasn’t told then, and later never sought out, exactly what had happened. If it was bad enough that the family, a Watcher family who knew the disciplines and the arts and the sacrifices called for, was given a bland and abbreviated account then he didn’t want know the details that had been kept from them in kindness. What he knew was that Edmund Francis Frobisher Giles died in the line of duty protecting his Slayer, on the last Monday in November 1976, in the vicinity of Carlisle, in the midst of a bitter snowstorm. A gang of vampires and their pet necromancer had tried to use their death magicks and the looming influence of Mars, Neptune and Mercury to raise the old Raven King from his lost kingdom, a plot that would have also ripped open the gateway to the Old Powers in the North. A plot that was well armed and well manned but successfully, brutally prevented. Only the Slayer survived to tell the tale. She was found taking shelter in St. Michael’s Church the next morning, bloodied and half-conscious. Rupert had been then just a month past his 20th birthday, deep in his studies at Christ Church, his mind on revising and keeping up with his new friends’ social demands while dodging the proctors after curfew, not Watcherhood, not the bitter inheritance, and the endless War.
He had made the proper arrangements with his tutors and the Dean and came down from Oxford on the train. He sat silently and dry-eyed in a humid compartment, carrying with him a small valise and the permeating sense of running ahead of catastrophe, despite the fact that he knew that catastrophe had already visited and could not be fled.
No one met him at the station, he had to make his own way. In the cab he realized that he hadn't remembered to notify his mother what day he was coming. He hadn't spoken with her at all after the quiet, halting call early in the morning after it had happened. “Ru,” she had said, reverting to a nickname long left behind, “Oh, Ru. Your father has died. Rachel told them... she promised that it was quick. She said that he was very brave and he didn't suffer.”
The townhouse was besieged with relatives when he arrived. He rung the bell like a visitor and Mrs. Hounslow let him in and stared at him with red-rimmed eyes and startling pity. She took his valise told him that his mother was with his Uncle Magnus and his wife, Felicity, their youngest child, and Lady Adela his grandmother, in the upstairs sitting room, and they would all surely be glad to see him.
“That poor Rachel is also here,” Mrs. Hounslow added in a grave and confiding undertone, though the front hall was empty. The tone gave him pause and would not understand until later why that was. “She’s resting in her room. We've hardly had sight of her since Mr. Giles, that is, Mr. Magnus Giles, brought her. I only thought it fair to warn you. I'm not sure if your mother would think of it. The poor dear is in quite a state.”
“Oh,” said Rupert, bewildered. He wasn't sure if it was his mother or Rachel being referred to as being in ‘quite a state’ and he wasn't sure that he wanted to know. “Thank you, Mrs. Hounslow. I suppose I'll go on up.”
Rupert stood at the foot of the stairs for a time and tried to prepare himself for what lay ahead, but that was impossible as he had no idea what that might be. He hadn’t gone home for his birthday, he’d been too buried under revising, and even if he had gone, his father wouldn’t have been there. Edmund Giles had been assigned an active Slayer, Rachel Gold, three years before, when she was called, and had been increasingly occupied away from the family ever since.
The upstairs sitting room was the informal family space, compared with the stiff and spotless parlour downstairs meant for impressing visitors. The room was tall and long but it never felt spacious. It was arranged into two rooms, in a sense, with worn black-green leather chesterfields and a large, velveteen wingback all arranged around the broad Victorian stone hearth with its long mantle and brass fender, with dark, cluttering end tables interspersed between. All of this was set on a very large and fine but well worn red and cream turkey carpet. This end of the room stood stolid and dim and insulated within the glow of brass and milky glass shaded deco style torchiers, which stood guard in the shadowed corners of the hearth wall, and barely lit by a well draped pair of windows that overlooked the street. This was the space one walked into, its timelessness, a crowded fireside fastness giving the impression that it was the entire sitting room.
Yet the room continued on, parallel to the front of the house, with a second pair of windows, as well as a pair of modern armchairs with teak arms, a wide, flat ottoman, a credenza with the first record player he had learned to use as a boy, playing his first records bought with saved up pocket money, a small roll top desk where he had done his first school assignments, and a small-screened but massive television set on its stand, pushed up against the wall. This second, further room made the den, a place where he had spent many quiet hours, tucked in an armchair or sprawled on the floor with a book and the radio or a record playing during school holiday afternoons, left to his own devices while his mother visited and organized, and his father was out at Headquarters. It was where he and Granny Adela had sat to watch the Doctor fight the Daleks Saturday evenings those few boyhood years before he had gone away to Hallowsfrith and Granny had moved back to the farm house in Somerset. It was not a room he associated with his father in the least, either half of it.
His father lived, had lived, in the dark-paneled study, within the ramparts of books and knowledge and decorous conversation, peopled with stern faced Council visitors. Or in the dining room, interrogating Rupert’s education and interests over breakfast and dinner. Or out at the Farm, where Edmund himself had grown up. Or at the grand and meticulous office his father had kept at the Council building, which Rupert had seen only a few times, but was where he had always liked to picture his father while he knew he, Edmund, was ‘working.’ Rupert had realized in the last few years that his father likely did not do much of his work behind a desk, but it was a nice thing to picture. In fact, the townhouse was a place that he mostly associated with the partial or complete absence of his father, not his presence at all.
He hadn't expected, therefore, to feel the new lack of his father's presence there that strongly. There was a difference though, between the absence that expects communication and eventual return, and the absence that very starkly does not. This new absence is cold, like a dry, wafting chill through the house, or like a fallen silence in an ear accustomed to constant, subtle sound. The feeling clung to his skin as he moved through the home of his childhood, and when he stepped into the so familiar sitting room, he had the strong feeling like deja vu in reverse that he stepped into a new, slantwise and wrong version of it.
His mother and grandmother sat at the ends of one chesterfield, both looking pinched and dull and pale. Granny Adela looked old to him, for the first time in his life. His mother’s eyes and nose were red, her face unmade up and unfocused. She looked bewildered, tired and without her usual polish she seemed to him unfinished, defenceless. She stared absently into the fire. On the other sofa were his Uncle Magnus and Aunt Helen, Magnus reading the paper or pretending to, and Helen bravely trying to make conversation with Granny Adela, who was not apparently in a receptive frame of mind. In the second room within the room, his little cousin Felicity, now ten or eleven and gawky and sullen with it. She sat on the floor directly in front of the television set, with the sound turned down so low Rupert wondered if even she could hear it. The sheer inner drapes were all pulled shut, deadening the already thin light of the November afternoon. None of the lamps were lit. The white and blue flicker of the television tubes gave the far corner an eerie cast. It was a quiet yet ghastly tableau, and felt frozen, as though his family were locked into a fairytale enchantment. Such a thing did not, at the moment, seem out of the question, but he knew it was just a fancy.
“Hello, Mother,” he said, hesitant and directed more to rug at his feet than anything. “I've just come in. Mrs. H. said you'd all be here.”
They all welcomed him and made a fuss, even Felicity who abandoned the television set to come greet him, even though barely knew him and had always been shy of him, or uninterested in him, in the past. Now he supposed he was a more exotic object, a university student and a sufferer of sudden tragedy both at once, just the kind of thing he would have also found fascinating a child of ten. He found himself seated in the honored position of the russet brown wingback chair that was usually reserved for his father on increasingly rare family afternoons -- even when Edmund was away neither he nor his mother were in the habit of taking it over. It gave him a skittish feeling of usurpation. His father’s presence still lingered in the arrangement of the objects of the side table, his father’s spare pair of reading glasses, a paperback copy of the recent John Le Carre novel, a small, heavy green glass ashtray for the infrequent cigar.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” his mother said, plaintive while also scolding, “When I called again at the lodge to tell you about the arrangements, the porter said you’d gone. I was worried.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said. Then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Clearly he had arrived, and surely it had been obvious where he had been going when he left the college.
He talked with his family about when the funeral was to be, and what other family was coming, and which other Watchers were flying in or had sent their condolences. They talked about his schooling and Felicity’s prep for St. Hilda’s entrance exams and the health of the horses at the Farm. They did not talk about his father’s death or his apparent heroism, or what had happened under the bad auspices of snow and stars. He wondered in the back of his mind as they talked about his father’s Slayer, resting or hiding somewhere upstairs. He’d met her once, very briefly, the summer he’d come home from Hallowsfrith for the last time, but he couldn’t picture her clearly. All he had was a hazed image of a tallish, skinny girl with black hair. She had been careful and withdrawn, incurious about her Watcher’s family, and at the end of the afternoon she had gone away again. Rachel Gold had never, so far as he knew, stayed with them before.
Dinner was held early, none of them wanting to prolong the day, and taken in the dining room despite the fact that Rupert suspected most of them would rather retreat to their rooms and have something brought up on a tray. The dining room was a long and dark space of wood panelling and soaring ceiling, slightly too narrow and always drafty. The good china was used, and the silver, as though a death and mourning was a formal affair -- he supposed it was, that particular Victorian ideal persisted. The linen tablecloth was perfect white linen damask, it’s faint sheen and the way it gave back the glint and shadow of the small chandelier over head hypnotized him slightly in his bleary state, as it often did at family dinners. Granny took his father’s place at the head of the table, and Uncle Magnus took the foot. Felicity was put next to him, but she was already bored of his steady quietude, apparently bored altogether with awkwardness and loss and grieving for an uncle she’d barely known. She fidgeted in the creaky sprung seat of her dining chair and swung her feet so that her heel made a steady metronome tap against the stringer between the chair’s legs.
He wished that he and his mother had been left alone by the rest of the family in order to tend to their bereavement in private, so that they could be honest instead of polite and gracious. Then again he had no idea what he’d actually say to his mother given the chance. How he could possibly ask her about all the things about his father’s life and his death that worried him. She wasn’t a Watcher either, so maybe even she didn’t know. It was Magnus and Granny who lived within the great barrier of silence, numbered among the secret society -- and Helen too, who had worked as an archivist at headquarters before she married. And yet the very fact that they were Watchers or had been, that they had had the training, and seen the War, and had taken their duty-bound turns deep within that other world made him feel starkly unable to approach any of them with his ignorance and his doubt. He felt, now, in the wake of his death, that his father was the only person on earth he could have or should have spoken to about it, and now that was impossible. Yet he also vividly remembered the certainty he’d had while Edmund was alive that he absolutely could not bring it up with him. Rupert still could recall feeling the involuntary near-painful muteness he’d had in his confusion, in spite of having Edmund, this perfect resource within reach all the while. The should-haves and the never-could-haves made a winding reverberation inside him, like a tightening spring.
None of it had seemed so close to the surface or so very real when he was a boy, not even while learning the lore at school. At the college it had slipped away from him entirely, for Oxford was a different country, a dream country where pure thought and good argument mattered and demons were old superstition and the Council was nothing but a silly club in Town that stodgy fathers and uncles belonged to. But he was awake now, raw and trapped in limbo, and even his skin felt the wrong size and shape. Rupert excused himself from dinner as soon as was decently possible.
This is my first post in this group, and it's not even vaguely a drabble. However, with an okay from LittleOtter73 andQuaggy, I wanted to share the first small section of my Giles backstory addendum fic that ties in with my larger ongoing AU Ineluctable. It's set while he's at university but before the 'rebellion' times, it is in fact an exploration of possible events that set things in motion. And the the first sections are very much about the childhood home of Rupert Giles. When the whole fic is done I'll put it up on AO3, but this is a little preview for this group ;))))
He went home for the funeral. He wasn’t told then, and later never sought out, exactly what had happened. If it was bad enough that the family, a Watcher family who knew the disciplines and the arts and the sacrifices called for, was given a bland and abbreviated account then he didn’t want know the details that had been kept from them in kindness. What he knew was that Edmund Francis Frobisher Giles died in the line of duty protecting his Slayer, on the last Monday in November 1976, in the vicinity of Carlisle, in the midst of a bitter snowstorm. A gang of vampires and their pet necromancer had tried to use their death magicks and the looming influence of Mars, Neptune and Mercury to raise the old Raven King from his lost kingdom, a plot that would have also ripped open the gateway to the Old Powers in the North. A plot that was well armed and well manned but successfully, brutally prevented. Only the Slayer survived to tell the tale. She was found taking shelter in St. Michael’s Church the next morning, bloodied and half-conscious. Rupert had been then just a month past his 20th birthday, deep in his studies at Christ Church, his mind on revising and keeping up with his new friends’ social demands while dodging the proctors after curfew, not Watcherhood, not the bitter inheritance, and the endless War.
He had made the proper arrangements with his tutors and the Dean and came down from Oxford on the train. He sat silently and dry-eyed in a humid compartment, carrying with him a small valise and the permeating sense of running ahead of catastrophe, despite the fact that he knew that catastrophe had already visited and could not be fled.
No one met him at the station, he had to make his own way. In the cab he realized that he hadn't remembered to notify his mother what day he was coming. He hadn't spoken with her at all after the quiet, halting call early in the morning after it had happened. “Ru,” she had said, reverting to a nickname long left behind, “Oh, Ru. Your father has died. Rachel told them... she promised that it was quick. She said that he was very brave and he didn't suffer.”
The townhouse was besieged with relatives when he arrived. He rung the bell like a visitor and Mrs. Hounslow let him in and stared at him with red-rimmed eyes and startling pity. She took his valise told him that his mother was with his Uncle Magnus and his wife, Felicity, their youngest child, and Lady Adela his grandmother, in the upstairs sitting room, and they would all surely be glad to see him.
“That poor Rachel is also here,” Mrs. Hounslow added in a grave and confiding undertone, though the front hall was empty. The tone gave him pause and would not understand until later why that was. “She’s resting in her room. We've hardly had sight of her since Mr. Giles, that is, Mr. Magnus Giles, brought her. I only thought it fair to warn you. I'm not sure if your mother would think of it. The poor dear is in quite a state.”
“Oh,” said Rupert, bewildered. He wasn't sure if it was his mother or Rachel being referred to as being in ‘quite a state’ and he wasn't sure that he wanted to know. “Thank you, Mrs. Hounslow. I suppose I'll go on up.”
Rupert stood at the foot of the stairs for a time and tried to prepare himself for what lay ahead, but that was impossible as he had no idea what that might be. He hadn’t gone home for his birthday, he’d been too buried under revising, and even if he had gone, his father wouldn’t have been there. Edmund Giles had been assigned an active Slayer, Rachel Gold, three years before, when she was called, and had been increasingly occupied away from the family ever since.
The upstairs sitting room was the informal family space, compared with the stiff and spotless parlour downstairs meant for impressing visitors. The room was tall and long but it never felt spacious. It was arranged into two rooms, in a sense, with worn black-green leather chesterfields and a large, velveteen wingback all arranged around the broad Victorian stone hearth with its long mantle and brass fender, with dark, cluttering end tables interspersed between. All of this was set on a very large and fine but well worn red and cream turkey carpet. This end of the room stood stolid and dim and insulated within the glow of brass and milky glass shaded deco style torchiers, which stood guard in the shadowed corners of the hearth wall, and barely lit by a well draped pair of windows that overlooked the street. This was the space one walked into, its timelessness, a crowded fireside fastness giving the impression that it was the entire sitting room.
Yet the room continued on, parallel to the front of the house, with a second pair of windows, as well as a pair of modern armchairs with teak arms, a wide, flat ottoman, a credenza with the first record player he had learned to use as a boy, playing his first records bought with saved up pocket money, a small roll top desk where he had done his first school assignments, and a small-screened but massive television set on its stand, pushed up against the wall. This second, further room made the den, a place where he had spent many quiet hours, tucked in an armchair or sprawled on the floor with a book and the radio or a record playing during school holiday afternoons, left to his own devices while his mother visited and organized, and his father was out at Headquarters. It was where he and Granny Adela had sat to watch the Doctor fight the Daleks Saturday evenings those few boyhood years before he had gone away to Hallowsfrith and Granny had moved back to the farm house in Somerset. It was not a room he associated with his father in the least, either half of it.
His father lived, had lived, in the dark-paneled study, within the ramparts of books and knowledge and decorous conversation, peopled with stern faced Council visitors. Or in the dining room, interrogating Rupert’s education and interests over breakfast and dinner. Or out at the Farm, where Edmund himself had grown up. Or at the grand and meticulous office his father had kept at the Council building, which Rupert had seen only a few times, but was where he had always liked to picture his father while he knew he, Edmund, was ‘working.’ Rupert had realized in the last few years that his father likely did not do much of his work behind a desk, but it was a nice thing to picture. In fact, the townhouse was a place that he mostly associated with the partial or complete absence of his father, not his presence at all.
He hadn't expected, therefore, to feel the new lack of his father's presence there that strongly. There was a difference though, between the absence that expects communication and eventual return, and the absence that very starkly does not. This new absence is cold, like a dry, wafting chill through the house, or like a fallen silence in an ear accustomed to constant, subtle sound. The feeling clung to his skin as he moved through the home of his childhood, and when he stepped into the so familiar sitting room, he had the strong feeling like deja vu in reverse that he stepped into a new, slantwise and wrong version of it.
His mother and grandmother sat at the ends of one chesterfield, both looking pinched and dull and pale. Granny Adela looked old to him, for the first time in his life. His mother’s eyes and nose were red, her face unmade up and unfocused. She looked bewildered, tired and without her usual polish she seemed to him unfinished, defenceless. She stared absently into the fire. On the other sofa were his Uncle Magnus and Aunt Helen, Magnus reading the paper or pretending to, and Helen bravely trying to make conversation with Granny Adela, who was not apparently in a receptive frame of mind. In the second room within the room, his little cousin Felicity, now ten or eleven and gawky and sullen with it. She sat on the floor directly in front of the television set, with the sound turned down so low Rupert wondered if even she could hear it. The sheer inner drapes were all pulled shut, deadening the already thin light of the November afternoon. None of the lamps were lit. The white and blue flicker of the television tubes gave the far corner an eerie cast. It was a quiet yet ghastly tableau, and felt frozen, as though his family were locked into a fairytale enchantment. Such a thing did not, at the moment, seem out of the question, but he knew it was just a fancy.
“Hello, Mother,” he said, hesitant and directed more to rug at his feet than anything. “I've just come in. Mrs. H. said you'd all be here.”
They all welcomed him and made a fuss, even Felicity who abandoned the television set to come greet him, even though barely knew him and had always been shy of him, or uninterested in him, in the past. Now he supposed he was a more exotic object, a university student and a sufferer of sudden tragedy both at once, just the kind of thing he would have also found fascinating a child of ten. He found himself seated in the honored position of the russet brown wingback chair that was usually reserved for his father on increasingly rare family afternoons -- even when Edmund was away neither he nor his mother were in the habit of taking it over. It gave him a skittish feeling of usurpation. His father’s presence still lingered in the arrangement of the objects of the side table, his father’s spare pair of reading glasses, a paperback copy of the recent John Le Carre novel, a small, heavy green glass ashtray for the infrequent cigar.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” his mother said, plaintive while also scolding, “When I called again at the lodge to tell you about the arrangements, the porter said you’d gone. I was worried.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he said. Then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Clearly he had arrived, and surely it had been obvious where he had been going when he left the college.
He talked with his family about when the funeral was to be, and what other family was coming, and which other Watchers were flying in or had sent their condolences. They talked about his schooling and Felicity’s prep for St. Hilda’s entrance exams and the health of the horses at the Farm. They did not talk about his father’s death or his apparent heroism, or what had happened under the bad auspices of snow and stars. He wondered in the back of his mind as they talked about his father’s Slayer, resting or hiding somewhere upstairs. He’d met her once, very briefly, the summer he’d come home from Hallowsfrith for the last time, but he couldn’t picture her clearly. All he had was a hazed image of a tallish, skinny girl with black hair. She had been careful and withdrawn, incurious about her Watcher’s family, and at the end of the afternoon she had gone away again. Rachel Gold had never, so far as he knew, stayed with them before.
Dinner was held early, none of them wanting to prolong the day, and taken in the dining room despite the fact that Rupert suspected most of them would rather retreat to their rooms and have something brought up on a tray. The dining room was a long and dark space of wood panelling and soaring ceiling, slightly too narrow and always drafty. The good china was used, and the silver, as though a death and mourning was a formal affair -- he supposed it was, that particular Victorian ideal persisted. The linen tablecloth was perfect white linen damask, it’s faint sheen and the way it gave back the glint and shadow of the small chandelier over head hypnotized him slightly in his bleary state, as it often did at family dinners. Granny took his father’s place at the head of the table, and Uncle Magnus took the foot. Felicity was put next to him, but she was already bored of his steady quietude, apparently bored altogether with awkwardness and loss and grieving for an uncle she’d barely known. She fidgeted in the creaky sprung seat of her dining chair and swung her feet so that her heel made a steady metronome tap against the stringer between the chair’s legs.
He wished that he and his mother had been left alone by the rest of the family in order to tend to their bereavement in private, so that they could be honest instead of polite and gracious. Then again he had no idea what he’d actually say to his mother given the chance. How he could possibly ask her about all the things about his father’s life and his death that worried him. She wasn’t a Watcher either, so maybe even she didn’t know. It was Magnus and Granny who lived within the great barrier of silence, numbered among the secret society -- and Helen too, who had worked as an archivist at headquarters before she married. And yet the very fact that they were Watchers or had been, that they had had the training, and seen the War, and had taken their duty-bound turns deep within that other world made him feel starkly unable to approach any of them with his ignorance and his doubt. He felt, now, in the wake of his death, that his father was the only person on earth he could have or should have spoken to about it, and now that was impossible. Yet he also vividly remembered the certainty he’d had while Edmund was alive that he absolutely could not bring it up with him. Rupert still could recall feeling the involuntary near-painful muteness he’d had in his confusion, in spite of having Edmund, this perfect resource within reach all the while. The should-haves and the never-could-haves made a winding reverberation inside him, like a tightening spring.
None of it had seemed so close to the surface or so very real when he was a boy, not even while learning the lore at school. At the college it had slipped away from him entirely, for Oxford was a different country, a dream country where pure thought and good argument mattered and demons were old superstition and the Council was nothing but a silly club in Town that stodgy fathers and uncles belonged to. But he was awake now, raw and trapped in limbo, and even his skin felt the wrong size and shape. Rupert excused himself from dinner as soon as was decently possible.
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Date: 2018-02-17 03:40 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed this story for many reasons. The main reason is DETAILS. It is just chock full of rich details, from the back story of Giles' dad's death to the rich details of the rooms in the house to the little personality tidbits of his cousin Felicity to Giles' observations about his gran. You even bring in details of the farm, which is outside of the location of the fic. Well done!
I also love the tone of the fic. It's bleak as it should be, but a few . You feel it in every character. It makes Giles mother, who feels cold to begin with, but even colder in the wake of her husband's death. And my heart goes out to Edmund Giles' Slayer, who is tucked away and no one is tending to her, she doesn't even join the family for dinner and no one really spares her a though... it adds to the bleakness and to the isolation that each of the characters is facing.
Great piece! Thanks for sharing! :)