Title: To Live in Hearts (4/?)

Author: Rev. Alixtii O'Krul V, TRL of the Church of St. Jesu the Heretic, Discordian

Rating: R for slashy indulgences.

Spoilers: All of Buffy and Angel.

Timeline: Futurefic. Eleven years after " Chosen."

Characters: Faith, Dawn, Giles, Kennedy. (In future chapters: Shelia, Ira, and Buffy as well, probably.)

Pairings: F/K, with overtones of W/K and possibly F/X.

Summary: "To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die." – Clyde Campbell.

Feedback: Yes, please. Medium of exchange, y'know?

Distribution: Just tell me about it.

Disclaimer: There was once a man named Joss Whedon...

Warnings: Angst, slash, character death.

Bath England—May 2014

Rupert Giles, K.C.M.G., tapped his fingers against the table impatiently as he perused the Tradescan Codex for the nth time. "What were you planning on serving for dinner, Lucy?" he asked idly, not looking up from the ancient text.

"Ham, sir, if that's all right."

"Our guests are Jewish, Lucy. We're going to have to give them a kosher meal."

"Thank the Lord you reminded me, sir," she said. "There's still time to plan a new meal. Do you think chicken would be okay, sir? Perhaps in a picante sauce?"

"Your chicken is delicious, Lucy," he assured the cook. "I'm sure it will be fine."

"Very good, sir." There was a pause, and then the servant spoke up again. "When do you suppose the mistress will return with them, sir?"

"Their flight is supposed to arrive at three o'clock," he told her, "and it's at least a 2-hour drive back from London. They'll probably get back just in time for dinner."

Lucy didn't say anything more and when he looked up, she was gone, leaving him alone with the codex. There wasn't any reason to be reading it, not really. Dawn was looking over it, correlating the data with the prophecies, and there wasn't any major events due any time soon. Certainly there wasn't any reason to reread this particular passage.

Jhe sisterhood. Slayers. Watcher. Youth. Witch. Place of worship. The other. Life/death. Lovers. Transformation. Darkness. Burning. (In the margin was a scrawled "Apocalypse?" in Dawn's handwriting.) The world. Sovereign. Lovers. Life/death. Endings/beginnings. The world,

If only the hybrid of Etruscan, Egyptian, and Sumerian the codex was written in used some type of consistent grammatical structure, it may have been easier to interpret the prophecy, to have seen the great tragedy coming. Well, the exact nature of the tragedy; it had been pretty clear to everybody involved that the prophecy hadn't been about ice cream and puppies.

Giles knew it was useless to second-guess their actions of six years ago, In retrospect, what the prophecy had been trying to say seemed so clear. But who could have guessed that "the other" had meant Xander, or that its presence next to "life/death" meant he would sacrifice his life to save Kennedy?

Life/death. The concept existed in virtually every culture, that of life and death locked together in an eternal cycle, although only a few languages actually had a word for it. Dawn preferred the proto-Bantu, shanshu, although what significance it held for her Giles had never really managed to figure out.

Based on the small amount of information they had, it would have been impossible to correctly decode the prophecy, but Giles refused to absolve him self of blame. It would have been too easy to accept that the past had been pre-destined, that things couldn't have worked out in any other way.

He refused to believe that. Well, that wasn't precisely correct. It wasn't that he necessarily believed in free will or being able to make one's destiny or any such stuff. He had seen too many prophecies fulfilled for that to be the case. It's just that he didn't believe the truth of predestination in any way mitigated guilt.

People deserved to suffer for their crimes. He didn't care if they had a traumatic childhood during which they had been sexually abused by alcoholic parents. He didn't care if they loss their soul and rose again with a demon in control. And he sure as hell didn't care if their actions had been foreseen in some prophecy somewhere.

It would be so easy to blame his failure on the prophecy. But it wasn't the prophecy's job to make sure that Willow and Xander didn't die. It wasn't the prophecy's responsibility to make sure Kennedy didn't lose her lover. And the prophecy didn't have to share a life with the young woman he had placed in command to watch as those events happened, look her in the eyes every morning. He should have been there. He should have sent more Slayers. Shouldn't have sent Xander. Told Willow to go to the other side of the planet and hide under a rock somewhere.

Never mind that the prophecy would have found a way to fulfill it self.

The prophecy was what it was. It had been Giles' job to protect the children, and he had failed. That was the way it was, too.

He shut the codex. That had been quite enough self-pitying. They had two guests, and soon would have two more. Across the world, hundreds of Slayers were engaged in a dozen different apocalypses. (And Eliot had said April was the cruelest month…didn't he have any idea what May brought each year? Certainly not flowers.) There was so much he could be doing instead of staring at a prophecy which had been fulfilled a half-dozen years past.

Willow and Xander were dead. And as much as he might at times wish otherwise, nothing was going to change that.

Faith ran into Kennedy in the library—well, the largest of the many rooms in the Giles-Summers mansion which could fall under that classification, considering Faith doubted greatly whether there was a single room in the large house that wasn't full of books. Some of the servants' quarters, possibly.

Faith glanced at the cover of the book Kennedy was reading. Something about Tantric sex. At least it wasn't the damned Tradescan Codex—Faith had caught Giles reading it when she had stopped by the kitchens to steal a snack. She leaned over the back of Kennedy's chair, stealing a glance at the pages over Kennedy's shoulder. "Wow," she said. "Is that even possible?"

"I can do it," Kennedy said as she turned to the page. "I imagine you could, too. Someone not a Slayer? Probably'd not be flexible enough."

"Right," said Faith, suddenly uncomfortable. What do you say after all that? She drifted over to the wall and began to browse the shelves. It was probably too much to hope to find a spy novel?

"Faith," Kennedy said uncertainly from behind her book, "about the other day."

"Yes?" She remembered it quite clearly: Kennedy's body pressed against her so tightly that Faith could feel the fall and rise of the Slayer's chest as she breathed, Faith's lip against the girl's forehead.

"Thank you," Kennedy said, flipping the book around so that it lay upside down on her lap, her place kept. "For being there for me. For everything."

Faith walked back ober to Kennedy, squeezed the younger Slayer's shoulders. "That's what being a Slayer means," she answered. "We look out for our own."