Title: Uncommon Torment
Author: Athenae
Category: Post-ep for "Helpless." Some B/G subtext if you look for it, plus Travers/Other
Rating: R, for language, violence, implied sex
Disclaimer: They're not mine, and in the case of Travers, I'm extremely glad of it.
Summary: A partial history of Quentin Travers that attempts to answer the question of what crawled up his rear end and died before the events in "Helpless."
Acknowledgements: The title comes from the Latin meaning of "Cruciamentum."
The fire at the Sunnydale Arms had been out for hours. Giles stirred the ashes, but all he got for his troubles was a faceful of soot, and the acrid smell of smoke made his eyes sting.
The old boarding house had been abandoned for years, but after tonight, its decrepitude was complete. The parts of the walls that weren't spattered with blood or peeling with paint had fallen down completely. Through the ceiling of what had once been a drawing room, moonlight struck the rubble like a spotlight.
"I thought I might find you here."
Giles looked up slowly. "Well, you're quite a prescient man then, aren't you?"
Despite the soot, despite the dirt and splinters, Travers' suit was spotless. He raised a supercilious eyebrow at Giles as he circled around the room and Giles felt his dishevelment, the sweat and streaks of dirt on his white shirt, the untied tie. The stench of defeat clung to him, he knew it, could almost smell it himself.
"You needn't worry about her," the councilman continued. "She'll survive on her own. She's stronger than any Slayer in a long time. Soon, she'll have forgotten all about this."
"You are a heartless bastard, Quentin."
"You have no idea," Travers replied, chuckling.
Giles sat down heavily, feeling a spring in the threadbare chair poke his back, and looked up at the older man in disgust. "How does one get to be where you are," he wondered. "Where you're so blinded by your books and your rules and your council meetings and their parliamentary procedures that you have no idea what a Watcher's life is about anymore?"
"I thought I might find you here, feeling sorry for yourself, is what I was going to say earlier," Travers said, smiling coolly.
"You're too involved, Rupert, and what's more, you know it. How can you be any good to the girl if you're frantic with worry over her every minute? You're like a hen with one chick. You can't think clearly when she's in danger."
"I would be more concerned if I could. If I could so coldly weigh her life in the balance. Or any of their lives."
"That's our job, Rupert," Travers said patiently, producing a book of matches and looking around for some parts of the floor to use as kindling. "What we were trained for. Of course, you can't help but care for her, but you must not let that interfere with your judgment."
"They're children, Quentin. Children, these girls. They need more protecting than we give them."
"Yes," Travers said, stacking the wood in the fireplace. "That is why it is all the more important that you retain your perspective."
"Oh, what the bloody hell do you know about it?" Giles muttered, staring at the dead embers in the grate. "You haven't worked with a girl in four decades."
Travers froze, his back to the room, staring at the mantle. "You're right enough about that," he said.
Seeing he'd struck a nerve, Giles stood, taking the matches from his old mentor's white-knuckled hand. He bent, struck the match and breathed in the sulfur, feeling the warmth of the fire taking hold. Then he faced his colleague. "What was her name?"
"Aileen." Travers sat down on a stack of crates by the fire. "Aileen O'Dunne."
"And she was beautiful?" Giles goaded.
"Yes."
"And brave."
"Yes, damn you."
"And you trained her and you schooled her and she died, didn't she?" Giles fixed his eyes on Travers, merciless now. "Like all of them die, sooner or later," mimicking Travers' impersonal tone.
"She was almost too old when she was called," Travers said suddenly. "Seventeen.
"From Ireland, the daughter of a Dubliner family, a clan of mystics whose ancestors preceded the Celts."
She looked down at him, red curls escaping her ponytail, green eyes alight with wicked pleasure. "Bested you again, Mister Travers," she said, dropping her fencing foil at his feet and offering him a hand up off the ground.
"You're getting old," she aggravated. "You can't keep up with me."
"We'll see about that," he replied, snatching up his rapier and advancing.
It was a tango, their chase across the field behind his house, and every time he gained on her, she simply laughed, parried, and drove him back, until once again, he was looking up at her with his backside in a clover patch.
"You're right," he finally conceded, breathing heavily. "I can't keep up with you."
She collapsed onto the grass beside him, her lithe body radiating like a heating coil in the early spring chill.
"So now what do we do?"
"She was assigned to me, and I took her training seriously. She was willful. Obstinate. Incredibly immature at times. At times, I feared we'd found her too late, that her bad habits were too ingrained to be overcome.
"But she was so strong. And so fearless. We quarreled over methods more often than not, but I never had to convince her of the necessity, or nobility, of her task. Once she accepted her calling, she never looked back."
She swirled the whiskey in her crystal glass, its amber glow the precise color of her hair. He ached to run his fingers through it, like a miser through his gold.
"Two of them in one night," she said, smiling up at him from his library chair. "I think that calls for a celebration!"
"Let me guess," Giles tried to keep the sarcasm from his voice and failed. "You developed a 'father's love for the child'?"
Travers glared at him, hatred flickering across his face in the firelight. "No."
"I'd taken her to my home in Dorset to train her. We'd been working for eight months when she began agitating to return home, but somehow, I always found a reason to delay our journey."
"Acting like the Lady of Shalott will only result in me treating you that way," he snapped.
"Lovely metaphor, Quentin," she shot back. "I suppose you fancy yourself Lancelot?"
He cursed the heat he felt in his cheeks. "I only mean ..."
"I know what you mean, and you're being unreasonable," she argued. "You keep me locked here, isolated. I have no friends. There's no telephone. I can't contact my family. Quentin, this is cruelty."
"I'm trying to prepare you," he said coldly, ignoring the stab of compassion he felt at the pain and frustration in her face. "This is a lonely life, Aileen. You must get used to being alone and not become a martyr to your self-indulgence."
"Must I get used to you, as well?" she asked, eyes burning into his. "Must I get used to your constant harping, your corrections? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, sometimes I don't know why you need me at all. You could start a fight in an empty house!"
"No matter how loathsome my company, Aileen, I am your Watcher, and you have a responsibility to —"
"I have always fulfilled my responsibilities," she said icily. "I simply didn't realize those responsibilities included being imprisoned here like a virgin sacrifice!"
He sighed. "Do you think you'll be any less lonely at home, Aileen? Do you think I'll allow you to halt your training, just because you're living in your parents' house again?"
"I don't know!" she said, pacing, fingering the ends of the violet ribbon that bound her black dress to her waist. "I only know I can't stay here another minute. There's nothing here for me but you, no one else for me to talk to, nowhere new to patrol, Quentin! Think of all that's out there, all the work there is for me to do, and here we sit in the countryside, while I slay vampires even dimmer than the farm folk they once were!
"Sometimes I think we're hiding here deliberately. As if you don't trust me enough to take me where any real danger is."
She stopped walking and looked him full in the face, pleading.
"Quentin, you told me yourself that often Slayers don't have long to live. I don't want to spend my life hiding, not even with you."
Somewhere between her words, he had stopped breathing.
"I want to do what's necessary, not what you think I can handle." She brushed her hair back. "And I want to feel my family's land beneath my feet again, to walk through the ancient city."
He crossed the room and took her hands in his. She stared at their intertwined fingers, and then looked into his eyes.
"Take me home, Quentin. Please."
"Why didn't you want to go to Dublin?"
Travers raised his eyes, and Giles was stunned at the emptiness in them.
"Because I knew what was waiting for her there."
"Aileen!"
"Padraig, you old bastard!" She threw her arms around the burly bartender.
"God, girl, you've gotten thin. That Brit school starve you, did they?"
"The food in that country is shyte," she confided with a giggle. "Dish us up some stew and pour us a pint, will you?"
"Who's us?" The tall, balding man asked, suspiciously.
He stepped forward, over the threshold, and presented his hand. "Quentin Travers. Aileen's ... teacher."
Padraig regarded him silently, then turned to Aileen. "He's yer teacher, is he?"
She put her arm around him. "It's all right, Paddy. You can trust him." To him, she whispered, "You're on my turf now, Mister Travers."
He smiled into her dancing eyes, feeling as though he was seeing her for the first time. "Yes, it seems I am."
"We stayed in that pub all night," Travers said, voice growing quieter and quieter. "Her cousin owned it. Fed us for free. I'd never seen her eat like that. I'd never heard her talk like that, either, with the vocabulary of a dockhand. It seemed that everyone who came through the door was her oldest friend. She told them all she had been in boarding school in England, and that I had been her literature tutor. Not unlike your librarian pose, really."
Giles felt himself blush.
"They all told me stories of Aileen's childhood," he continued, smiling at the memory. "How she broke her wrist punching the neighborhood bully when she found him torturing a kitten in an alley. How she climbed trees and spied on the nuns in the convent nearby. How she stole candy from the local shops and gave it to the children in the Liberties.
"And she talked, herself, as she never had, about her parents' deep love for this troubled land, and how her earliest memories were of their lessons in doing what is right, and working for good in the world, and using whatever skills one possessed for the betterment of everyone. She talked about her grandmother, who she said was the most beautiful woman she'd ever seen, a pagan priestess of incredible magnetism and power.
"She talked about her brothers, who wrestled with her and teased her and hit her, but would defend her to the death from any outsider.
"We stayed there so long, she began to fall asleep on the bar."
"Aileen? Aileen?"
She snapped awake instantly. "What? What is it?"
He laughed at her, gently. "You were drowsing there."
Padraig cleared their dishes away, casting Quentin a look only slightly warmer than the impaling stare he'd received when he first walked in. "Time to go home, darlin'" he said. "Sun's nearly up. You'll need to be catching a train soon. Your mum will be worried."
"God," she yawned, leaning one elbow on Quentin's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Paddy. I didn't mean to monopolize your clientele. Or your taps."
He grinned at her. "Never you mind, lass. We're all just glad to see you home."
They stumbled out the door, blinking in the near-dawn haze that cast a veil over the narrow street. Above them, the wooden pub sign swung. The Unicorn, it was called. He would remember that, days later, and curse himself for ignoring the omen.
"You know," she said, teasingly, as they started down the block towards the train station. "I talked my tongue out of my head tonight, and you barely said a word. You're not much for sharing, are you, Quentin?"
Damn it, he was blushing again. "We lived in the same house for eight months, Aileen. What could you possibly wish to know about me that you do not already?"
She stopped walking, the echo of her boot heels sounding a few more phantom steps. "Hmm, let's see now." Her brogue somehow thicker here, in its natural environment.
"I know you speak five languages, but not which one you speak the best. I know you're widely read, but not your most beloved book. I know you've lived all over the world, but I don't know which place is your favorite."
Maybe it was all the drink that made him careless. Maybe it was the thirty-six hours they'd been awake, the rich food they'd eaten, the caramel-colored jacket she was wearing. Maybe it was the fact that they'd lived in the same house for eight months, but he could count on one hand the number of times he'd touched her in kindness.
He took hold of her shoulders and turned her so that she was facing away from him, and with one hand lifted her hair from the back of her neck.
"The language I speak the best is Persian," he whispered, his breath against her skin, his lips inches from the ridge at the top of her spine.
"My most beloved book is Herodotus. The Histories."
She was trembling now, but strangely enough, for the first time in her presence, he was not.
"And my favorite place is here," he said, pulling down her jacket, pressing his lips to the groove between her shoulder blades. "Here."
He turned her around again, looking into green eyes grown dim with tears. "Here. By your side."
Giles could hardly look at him. In all the years of their professional relationship, he'd always thought of Quentin Travers as something only slightly higher than a vampire. And now, it seemed he had a soul.
"I took her home to her family," Travers said, his voice fraying. "We stayed on their farm on the outskirts of the city for a week. They treated me like a relative."
Aileen's oldest brother clapping him on the shoulder, telling him to make an honest woman of his sister …
"Then I took her back to Dublin. We were there for four nights."
He wanted to mint coins with the curve of her back imprinted, to build a monument to the hollow at the base of her throat.
"On her 18th birthday, I took her to the Abbey Theatre. For years, Rupert, I've tried for years, but I cannot remember the play."
She wore red velvet. She kissed him. She told him she would marry him if he asked her.
"I'm nearly twice your age."
She kissed him again.
"I'm your Watcher."
"Shh. Shh. It doesn't matter."
"After the curtain came down, I took her to the Council."
"Why, man? Giles burst out, unable to contain his frustration any longer. "Why didn't you run with her? Good God, didn't you know what would happen to her, what they would do?"
And then, Giles felt the crumbling wall against his back, and Travers' forearm on his throat.
"You think I didn't know?" the older man growled, squeezing his windpipe tighter, with a force that belied his years. "The council was all I knew. From a boy, this was all I knew. And I might not have wanted it, but I trusted them. As you trusted them.
"Don't think I don't know you, my boy." Travers stepped back and turned away, breathing heavily. "Don't think I don't know you ran away from the council in your youth. Don't think I don't know you came crawling back, having killed enough of your friends to satisfy your lust for rebellion.
"Don't think I don't know what it's like to do wrong, thinking if only you have someone else to blame it on, it will come out being right!
"We all walk the same path on the council, Rupert. We all walk the same ten miles of hell."
He had confidence in her, despite his fear. Just the week before, between them they had defeated a fire demon, and she had laughed as he trimmed the scorched ends of her hair with his clippers.
So he waited in their newly rented flat, for her to limp back in, bloodied, perhaps feeling a bit betrayed, but unbowed.
"The vampire ripped out her stomach," Travers said evenly. "Devoured her from the inside out. She did not have a vital organ that was not damaged in some way. And yet …"
She lingered for an entire day in a white hospital bed. They'd made up a story. An animal attack. She'd been walking alone in the city, foolish girl, and someone's rabid dog had gotten to her.
Travers lifted his eyes to Giles', and the contempt in his face humbled the younger man for once.
"Is it possible you think you were the first to face this?" he wondered. "Are you capable of such vanity?"
"I love you, Aileen. I'm so sorry."
Travers sat down again, and stirred the embers in the fireplace.
"I've never forgiven her," he said roughly. "I've never forgiven her for dying. For not finding a way, despite the loss of her strength, despite her diminished capacity, to defeat him. For not being able to do what your Buffy did tonight."
"In nomine Patris et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti …"
"Part of me hates her for that, and always will."
Her oldest brother held him responsible, and beat him bloody behind the convent after the funeral. He lay there in the mud, feeling the blows, her laughter ringing in his ears.
"I see her sometimes," Travers said. "Even now. I see someone with her walk, the set of her shoulders. I see someone with her hair."
"So that's why you do this."
Giles sat back down, regarding his former teacher with something like disgust, and something like envy.
"That's why you play attack dog for the Council. Why you force Slayer after Slayer into this —"
"This archaic exercise in cruelty?" Travers sneered, but his voice had no bite.
"Because if you didn't, if you ever admitted to yourself that it was worthless, that all it does is destroy young women at the peak of their power and set our cause back years, then what did she die for?
"If you ever in the past forty years told the Council they were wrong, you'd have to admit you were wrong to trust them. If you ever let the Council stop it, you'd have to say that it wasn't enough to hate her for dying."
"You'd have to hate yourself for killing her."
"You bloody fool, I'm trying to warn you."
Giles couldn't help but laugh, and Travers rose, and turned towards the door.
"You'll understand someday, my boy," he said, not looking back. "You can't prevent her death. The only thing you can do is delay it for a while, try to give her some happiness, some comfort before she dies. But ask yourself before you do: is caring for her worth the price you'll pay?
"She'll die young, and you'll grow old, and bitter, a teacher with no more lessons to give. Stirring the ashes of your memory, searching for the fire.
"And so you'll join the Council, and keep the books, and hope that someday, the Watchers you train will heed your life as the caution it is, and save themselves from torment, if they cannot save their Slayers."
Travers' hand was on the doorknob when Giles spoke.
"You're wrong, Quentin. You're wrong about us both. We're stronger than that."
Travers seemed to stiffen, but he left without a word. Giles picked up the bucket of water sitting near the fireplace, and sloshed it over the last of the glowing embers, plunging the room into darkness.