Here ya'll go. :) Thank you so much for the reviews! I hope to keep hearing from ya'll. :) Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter. There's more "Anne" material, and no I still don't own that stuff. LOL.

Chapter 12

When Giles woke, he didn't know where he was. The floor was cold and hard, the light was dim, and not too far off he heard a mass of clanging and banging and screeching. The memories of the last day or so came back in clumps, as he sat up slowly and realized he was facing a wall of heavy bars.

Lily had managed to disappear on him, and with what little amount of time he'd had before dawn, he hadn't found her. He'd stumbled into his apartment building when morning came, narrowly avoiding the sunlight, and remembered only then that he hadn't stopped by to give Erin any kind of update. Then, of course, he'd been trapped inside all day—which was more frustrating then than it had ever had a chance to be before.

He'd gone out as soon as there were enough shadows to provide reasonable cover, and looked in every place Lily had mentioned the night before—the places she and Ricky frequented—but the girl was nowhere to be found. He resorted to asking anyone else there if they had seen her, and after enough questioning one young woman told him she'd seen Lily that morning, and that it had looked like she was heading for one of the local shelters.

Giles had followed the directions another young man gave him when the girl didn't know for sure, and had found his way to a small cubbyhole of a place that called itself Family Home.

Strangely enough, the two men at the door hadn't seemed to want to let him in, and that was when he'd been sure something was wrong.

Rupert twisted on the cold cell floor and saw Lily behind him, sitting on the same floor against the edge of a cot and staring despondently into a distance that held nothing at all. The cot itself was taken—by a skeletal corpse.

Moving at all gave him a sharp reminder that he'd been cracked on the back of the head hard enough to knock him unconsious, and he remembered the rest.

Acting on instinct, he'd fought his way inside and found Lily at the side of a small pool in a back room, clad in a neutral-colored shift. With her was a surprisingly familiar face—one Giles had seen about the neighborhood more than once in the past weeks. He'd heard the man talking to several young people, telling them about this shelter. He'd seemed like a religious man, but...whatever was going on here felt decidedly evil. The pitch-black water in the pool already seemed to indicate that.

Lily had looked up in surprise, and the well-dressed man—Ken, if he remembered correctly, from more than one overheard conversation—had whirled on him quickly.

"Excuse me, but this is private moment. If you could just—"

"What's going on here?" Giles had demanded.

But before the conversation could get any farther, Lily had been sucked into the pool.

There had been a brief scuffle, of course. Giles had tried to go after her and Ken had tried to stop him. They'd both fallen in, and that was when he'd discovered that the pool was no pool, but a portal. Anything after that was fuzzy, thanks to the guards below that had obviously been demons. Otherwise he didn't think the one that had knocked him out would have been strong enough to do it.

Now they were here—not that he knew where 'here' was.

Lily, though she wouldn't look at him, seemed to realize he was awake. "Always knew I would come here, sooner or later. I knew I belonged here," she said quietly, resigned.

"Where?"

"Hell," she whispered.

"You aren't dead, Lily. This isn't hell."

"Isn't it?" Ken's voice said from behind them. They both looked, and saw not a human face, but the orange-brown face of a demon with the same eyes. That was when Giles remembered the fall again, and how Ken had been furious that the fight and the fall had dislodged his human mask. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to glue that thing on?!" he'd shouted then. Now he just smirked at them coldly.

"What is hell, but the total absence of hope? The substance, the tactile proof of despair. You're right, Lily. This is where you've been heading all your life—just like Ricky."

"Ricky?" she asked, suddenly showing sign of life.

Ken sighed with false sympathy. "He forgot you; took him a long time—he remembered your name years after he'd forgotten his own—but, in the end..."

"Years?" Lily all but squeaked.

Giles knew immediately what the demon was going to say next, or had an idea anyway, and he knew why Ricky had been old and dead when he'd found him.

Ken shrugged. "Oh. Interesting thing. Time moves more quickly here than in your reality. A hundred long years will pass here...but on Earth, it's just a day."

Rupert pushed himself to him feet, ignoring the slight urge that still remained to be dizzy, and glowered. "You trick them into coming to you. You offer hope, but you drop them here and take it all away," he accused angrily.

He remembered, in a flash, the work floor he'd seen when he had Lily had tried to run. They'd been stopped when they came out on the edge of the balcony above it, and that was where the guards that were even more grotesque than Ken had caught up to them. Then everything had gone black until he woke in this cell only minutes ago.

"That's all you do, isn't it? You work them until they're too old, and spit them back out into Earth's dimension to fend for themselves."

"That's the plan," Ken agreed mildly. "Only you can include yourself now. True, you're a little older than the usual demographic, but we can't very well let you go while you're still sane, now can we?" He glanced back at Lily. "See, Lily...you'll die of old age before anyone wonders where you went, not that's anyone will. That's why we chose you."

Then he focused on Giles once more, and smirked again. "And you...I've seen you. Back in L.A. you've been in town for weeks, but what do you do? Not much. I'd wager you're running from something just as much as she and all the others like her are. I doubt there's anyone to care about you, either. Even if there is, they'll never find you."

Not that they would be looking. If he never came back...what would they assume? They would think he'd given up—that he was gone, or too afraid to return. They might mourn, eventually, when they finally lost any hope, or they might just move on. They might forget him, after a while, or at least choose to.

Oh god, what had he done? Giles wondered. If he never left this place they really would be left to wonder what had become of him, and he couldn't bear the thought of that wondering turning to hate...if it hadn't already.

Ken laughed and walked away, leaving Lily and Giles in the cell with the half-dressed corpse.

After a moment or two Rupert swallowed, and turned to look at Lily behind him. "What happened?" he asked gently. "Why did you follow him?"

She only glanced at him briefly before staring into nothing again. "He said Ricky was at Family Home, but...before I could see him I had to go through a Cleansing." She gave a small shrug and whispered, "I was so stupid."

"No...you weren't."

It was all he said, before he sat down again. He wanted to say more—anything. He wanted to comfort her, but that would have to wait. He didn't plan to stay here, but if he was going to get them out there could be nothing left to suspicion. He couldn't tell her that he planned to do anything at all.

So they sat in silence.


Hours later the guards came, rousting the new prisoners from their cells and herding them down from the holding area to the work floor. Lily went quietly, head down, and Giles followed close, already looking for opportunities. When they stopped, they weren't in full view of the rest of the floor, and apparently these demons' previous experiences with frightened human seemed to have given them the impression that the rest of the guards could return to their duties elsewhere, and one guard with a metal-embedded club was more than enough to keep a small group of new workers in check.

"You work, and you live. That is all," the guard began immediately, swinging his club menacingly. "You do not complain, or laugh, or do anything besides work. Whatever you thought, whatever you were...does not matter. You are no-one now. You mean nothing." He walked up to a small young man at the end of the line, and asked a simple question: "Who are you?"

The boy blinked. "Aaron?" he said uncertainly.

It was the wrong answer, and Giles knew it before the boy did—though it didn't take him long to find out. The demon immediately swung his club into Aaron's side, and Rupert flinched as the guard beat the boy to the ground.

When the demon straightened, he looked at Lily. "Who are you?"

"No-one," she answered quickly.

The guard smirked and moved down the line, repeating the question. Giles's jaw was already clenched, and when the demon got to him, he was ready. A relatively out-of-the-way spot, only one guard in the immediate area...

It was now or never.

"Who are you?"

He suddenly brightened. "Rupert Giles, to be precise, but it's more dependent on who it is you're asking; friends from my youth only called me Ripper—"

The demon snarled in anger and swung, but Giles caught the club, wrenched it from the guard's hands and delivered a swift kick to the gut that doubled the thing over long enough for him to bash it's head with the stolen club well enough to knock it out, even if it wasn't dead.

He looked back at the huddle of people behind him, and dropped the club. "Unless you'd all like to stay here, I suggest you follow me."

They all looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, but then they jumped into action. Giles moved to help the boy who'd been hurt, but a couple of the others were already helping him up, which was encouraging. That left Rupert free to lead the group as they wound their way, staying out of sight, to the base of a set of metal steps that led up to the balcony he and Lily had been on before when they'd seen the work floor for the first time. There were two guards up there now, keeping watch on the entrance to the corridor that led back to the portal.

"What now?" Lily asked anxiously.

"We'll need a distraction." He thought for a moment. "When those guards leave their post, you'll need to get these people up the stairs and out of here. Can you do that?"

"What? You're leaving us?" she cried.

"I'm the distraction, Lily. There's no other way."

"But—"

He pulled in air and pushed it out again in a sigh, aware that as they'd crept here and he hadn't been speaking he hadn't been using any at all, in an attempt to be as quiet as possible, and that he was lucky none of the frightened people around him had noticed.

"Don't worry. I'll be there if I can, but don't wait for me."

She swallowed. "I-I don't know if I ca—"

"You can. I know you can," he told her firmly. "But you won't be able to if you won't trust yourself. You can do this. Now get farther out of sight until the guards are out of the way."

Lily hesitated, looking at him for a moment. "I'm sorry I yelled at you before; you were right..."

"It's all right. Go."

"Well I just wanted to say it, you know, it case we die—"

"Go!" he hissed quietly.

She nodded, managed a small smile, and herded the rest of the group back into the shadows.

Giles took a moment, and then he ran.

He wasn't in the uniform nondescript clothing the rest of the workers were wearing—he was in jeans and a collard shirt instead—and no-one else was moving any faster than the slow crawl of the work. He attracted attention immediately, and every guard he passed started after him. He ran, taking down or tripping up every one that he could as he went, but he didn't turn to really fight until he found a square of open space large enough to sustain a good fight.

It took another moment or two, but the guards from the balcony came down, and from the corner of his eye Giles saw Lily and the others head quickly up the metal steps and slip into to the corridor that would lead them to the way out of this horrid place.

At the sounds of the skirmish Ken came rushing out onto the balcony from another corridor, and Rupert nearly smirked to himself, thinking about the shocked look on the demon's face that he didn't have time to look at now.

"Humans don't fight back!" Ken shouted suddenly. "Humans don't fight back! That's how this WORKS!"

Giles was angry—angry at Ken and his minions for stealing these people's lives, angry at himself for staying away from Sunnydale for so long, still so angry at Angelus, and at Drusilla...

He paused long enough to spin and glare menacingly up at Ken, and since Lily and the others had gone and nothing was stopping him, for the first time he could remember he let his face shift to its vampire visage of his own free will. "I'm not human."

He didn't wait to let Ken register that shock before he focused again on the fight.

A thin pole he'd snapped from a piece of machinery served well enough for stabbing and for knocking demons down like bowling pins, until it bent. After that, he used the bent version as a club until one of the guards came at him with a multi-bladed weapon that he kicked out of the demon's hand and took for himself.

There had never been this many vampires at once, back in L.A. He had to admit that the action felt good. The exhilaration simmered in his blood, and part of the reason it was so strong was the demon inside him that wanted a fight, but he knew that wasn't all of it. He was enjoying this, and he found, finally, that to a certain degree he didn't mind that he did.

It took a another minute or two for him to notice that Ken was gone, and when he realized where the demon might have gone he finally broke off from what was left of the guards and sprinted for the stairs.

"One of you fights, and you all die!"

Giles froze at the voice. When he looked up Ken was back at the edge of the balcony...and he had Lily, a knife to her throat. He shifted his face back, but he didn't know if it had been quickly enough. Ken glared down at him.

"I don't care what you are. Those are still the rules."

Rupert swallowed, and he didn't move as two of the remaining conscious guards each took an arm and held him in place.

Ken let go of Lily now, pushing her behind him. "That...was not...permitted," he ground out angrily, just to be sure his point was across.

Giles answered coldly. "No, but I rather enjoyed it."

"You've got guts. I think I'd like to slice you open and play with them. Now that I think about it, that's a good idea, too. If you're a vampire, you'd still be alive to feel it."

He grimaced. If Lily hadn't seen anything, she'd certainly heard that.

Now what?

Ken chuckled darkly, and looked out at the rest of the work floor and those that labored there. "Let everyone know! This is price of rebellio—" Then he cut off and screamed, because Lily had pushed him off the balcony from behind. He hit the ground hard, and lay still.

In the seconds before there was any reaction, Rupert stared up at Lily in surprise. She stared down at him in return, but the expression on her face was unreadable.

Then she fled back the way toward the portal, and the guards reacted to their leader's death.

Giles broke away from the guards holding him before they could figure out just what they were supposed to do, and instead of fighting his way through the rest of them to the staircase he grabbed a chain that dangled near the edge of the balcony and used it to pull himself up. He stepped off on the balcony seconds later and ran in the direction Lily had gone.

He found the whole group stopped at a gate that had fallen from the ceiling, cutting the corridor off and keeping them from the portal. A few of them were trying to lift it, but they weren't getting very far. Giles moved in to help. As soon as he started to lift it it began to move some, and when they realized he had it the others got out of his way.

Lily had quickly backed as far away from him as she could get the moment he'd rounded the corner and came upon them.

He could worry about that later.

It was hard, but he got the gate up enough of the way, and the group of prisoners scrambled under it. Giles was about to slip under himself and let it down, when something tackled him out of the way.

He landed on the side of the gate he'd wanted to be on, and he heard a cry of pain as he sat up and realized it was Ken who'd barreled into him—the demon who wasn't quite as dead as Rupert had thought a moment before, and who was now pinned to the ground because two of the spikes on the bottom of the gate had gone through his legs.

The nearly-free group of humans was already at the portal, hoisting each other up and through back to L.A. Ken was sputtering in fury even through the pain he must have been in. "You've ruined—you've—"

Wearily, Giles stood and scooped up a club that had been left in the corridor after the skirmish there'd been when he'd fallen through to this dimension. He approached Ken and stared at him for a few long seconds. Finally, he spoke.

"If my Slayer were here, I'm certain she would think of something incredibly witty to say. I don't have the patience to try."

Then Giles put the demon out if his misery.


When Rupert turned back to the portal, everyone else was already up. Luckily, jumping high enough to catch the edge wasn't a problem. It was just a few feet over his head. Granted, that would have been absurd more than two months ago, but now...

He pulled himself up and out, tumbling onto the floor of the back room of Family Home. He glanced back at the dark pool that was the portal, but as he watched it disappeared—bricking itself over and solidifying into the normal bottom the shallow pool must have had before it had been forged as the connection point between two dimensions.

"I guess that means we won't be getting anybody else out, huh?"

"Unfortunately." Giles stood, dusting off his knees, and looked for the voice. His eyebrows went up when he found the only person left in the room besides himself. "Lily."

She stared him down, strangely unafraid now. "You're a vampire."

"Yes," he answered quietly.

"The only vampires I ever saw before never wasted time pretending to be nice...so I don't understand."

"It may sound rather ridiculous, but I'm...different."

"How?"

He looked at her for a moment. "If you saw what—or even if you didn't and you only heard Ken, still...why didn't you leave with the others? Before I could come up?"

"They left because they wanted to get back to something. Without Ricky I...don't have anything to go back to. It doesn't matter if you kill me; I just wanted to know why you helped me."

"I would never hurt you."

She cocked her head at him. "You killed Ken."

Giles winced. "He was a demon."

Lily shrugged. "I wasn't complaining; I was just...saying."

They both stood in silence, until he answered her other questions. "I don't know why I helped you," he admitted, not quite looking at her. "Helping people...it used to be very much a part of what I did, every day...but I was human then."

"How long ago was that?"

"Just two or three months ago, actually. I'm not sure I'm even very used to not being human, much less used to being what I am..." He trailed off, unsure of why he was telling her this.

She chewed her lip for a moment. "Is that why you're different?" she asked finally. "Because you haven't been a vampire very long?"

Giles shook his head. "It's much more complicated than that, I'm afraid."

She shrugged again, and sat down on the edge of the closed pool. To do that, she had to come closer, and she didn't seem angry or afraid, or...anything he'd been afraid would still be there.

So he told her how it worked—vampires and souls, and how he had one. He didn't go into anything else, such as how he'd been in Sunnydale, or who he knew there, or what he'd devoted his life to, or any other details that would tell her more about what was out there. There was no reason to bother her with that; she knew more than enough already. He explained just enough that she could understand.

"I'm sorry that you had to find out like that. I never meant to scare you."

She laughed uncertainly. "Getting sucked into some unnamed hell dimension or whatever that was scared me a lot worse. I guess it's okay...I mean, you'd just met me and everything. You probably don't go around broadcasting that you're...you know..."

"That much is quite true."

"Yeah..."

She got up, and when they looked at the first clock they found they discovered that it wasn't even midnight yet. Here it had been only minutes, really, since they'd gone through the portal. Erin would still be on duty at the coffee shop, and Giles remembered that he'd never let her know how the search for Lily was going. He suggested they go there, and the girl seemed happy with that idea.

The streets were just as dark and damp, but they didn't seem so cold anymore. Not that it had bothered him before, but he thought he could tell a certain difference. Maybe it was just him.

The silence was surprisingly comfortable, but at length Lily broke it anyway.

"So...if you haven't been a vampire very long, I mean...don't you have a family or something?"

"No, no family...or not in the conventional sense, but...I suppose I had one. I do have one..."

"Which is it?"

He stopped, and she stopped with him, looking at him curiously.

"I do have a family," he told her quietly, even as he realized it for himself. "Of a fashion."

"Then what are you doing here?"

Giles blinked at her in surprise. "I don't know."


"Rupert! Lily!" Erin called, as soon as she saw them. Before Giles had much time to react she'd come out from behind the counter and hugged him fiercely, just for a moment. Then she let go, and took a step back awkwardly and cleared her throat. "Right, well...what on earth happened? Neither of you came back last night, or all day, and with these streets I was half afraid you were both lying dead in a dumpster somewhere."

"No no, we're fine," Giles said. "It's simply taken this long to find her."

"When I want to get lost, I...get lost," Lily explained briefly.

"Apparently so." She looked them both over. "So you're all right?"

"I did just say that," Rupert reminded her.

Lily shrugged. "I'm fine; I just over-reacted, before. I didn't want to believe him."

Erin sighed. "I know, dear, and I'm so sorry about what happened. If there's anything I can do..."

Giles was the one to answer, because he wasn't sure Lily would ever ask for herself. "Actually, it would help tremendously if you know of somewhere she could stay. I haven't been here long enough to know where to look." Not for anything besides the places where the homeless loitered, anyway.

It seemed she'd already been thinking about this. "I've got some extra room, if she wants to stay with me for a while." She looked at Lily. "And I think the boss is about to start looking for a couple of new people, if you need a job. There are other places around here too, if that doesn't work out. A little time, and I'm sure we could get you fixed up."

"Really?" Lily asked, finally smiling a little, uneasily. "I-I mean, I wouldn't want to cause anybody any trouble."

"You wouldn't be any trouble; a little company would do me some good, anyway." Erin smiled and looked back to Giles. "How's that, Rupert?"

"It sounds wonderful. I just want to know that she'll be all right if I—well, I think I'm going to be leaving."

"Leaving?" Lily echoed.

"Yes, leaving the city." He looked pointedly at Erin. "Not that being here has been unpleasant, but...I believe it's time I went home."

Her expression faltered, but then she smiled gently again. "Oh...you're sure?"

He managed an anxious chuckle. "Not at all."

"Well you know where to find us," she shrugged. She looked at him for a long moment. "Take care of yourself, British man."

Giles smiled back at her, and tried not to think too much about what could have been. He went back the next night, and Lily was there with Erin. The girl thanked him for everything he'd done whether he really wanted the thanks or not, and he said his goodbyes to the both of them.

Then he walked back to his already-empty room of an apartment, glanced in one last time to be sure he hadn't left anything behind, and went back down to his car.

Soon L.A. was behind him.


School and senior year were now less than two weeks away, and Buffy almost wished it would all just disappear. They'd survived the summer just fine, but the thought of starting school without Giles in the library and never far off was just too strange. It didn't help that she wasn't looking forward to those make-up exams, either.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd gone on patrol on her own. Even if it wasn't all of them every night, there was always someone. They were all out here now, though tonight she'd managed to at least seperate herself from the others for a little while. They weren't far off—just on the other side of the cemetary—but she welcomed the quiet that she could hear herself think in.

Not that having the others out here bothered her, or that she had much she really wanted to think about...but just having the quiet was nice now and then.

Of course, quiet was impossible once the vampires inevitably showed.

Buffy heard the scuffle from a distance, and couldn't tell if it a pack of vamps attacking a civillian or her friends taking on a vamp or two. Either way, she burst into a run. She crossed half the cemetary in seconds and came around a hedge, though she didn't quite understand what she saw when she got there. It was dark, none of them were quite facing her and the fight was moving a bit too quickly for her to tell, exactly, but she was pretty sure all three combatants were vampires. Granted, they sometimes fought among themselves, but three of them going at it out in the open in the cemetary wasn't usually the way it was done.

She'd only been watching from the shadows for a moment, not sure whether to get in the middle of it, when the tallest of the three—the one she'd already noticed because he'd quite obviously had the most hand-to-hand training in life—shoved one into a splintered tree branch, and drove a stake back into the chest of the other. Both promptly dusted, leaving the tall one alone.

Wait. A stake?

That was when he turned, and the moonlight fell across his face. Buffy recognized him even before his face had shifted back to normal. She stepped out of the shadows on impulse, but once she'd done it she was frozen in place, because she didn't know what to say.

Beyond the relief she didn't know what she felt, either.

Giles saw her after a moment, but he didn't say anything either. He just looked at her, imploringly, as if waiting for some sort of permission to speak.

So Buffy smiled at him, and that much came easily. "Hey."