Eaten by Weasels (eatenbyweasels) wrote in ebw_buffyslash, @ 2008-03-22 18:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | 12, angst, arsebaby, giles/ethan, humour, illyria, yuck! |
It's No Sacrifice. Giles/Ethan, Illyria. 12
Here’s a story that didn’t get written up in time for dovil’s arse-baby-athon. It’s dreadfully schmoopy and depressingly clean, but hopefully not without wit. So, bearing in mind enchanted candy and sacrifices to demon snakes, who in the Buffyverse would you least entrust with a baby? Illyria begs to differ....
It’s No Sacrifice
Illyria stands, head tilted, as Ethan opens the door to her. The air ripples slightly; the wards that keep Ethan under comfortable if sometimes lonely house arrest, lifting for a moment to let Illyria pass though into the pleasant little flat.
“This is the assignment of which you were notified.” she tells him, without preamble, holding out a fretting baby and looking at Ethan expectantly. “The humans Angel paid to pretend affection for it have been transformed into hamsters. “
“Really?” Ethan feigns an innocent expression, then realises he is in fact innocent and allows himself to look interested. “ By whom, might I ask?”
“It is not your concern. It is, however, inconvenient, as I must now visit a pet store to purchase a small prison and a tiny wheel in which the small beasts may run round and round, under the wretched delusion that their efforts will lead them to anywhere but inside the wheel. Please take the infant and attend to it. It is becoming malodorous.” She waggles the baby expectantly in Ethan’s direction and Ethan’s eyebrows shoot up in alarm as he takes in the full implication of Illyria’s visit.
“You want me to babysit?” he exclaims in horror. “I thought you wanted me to put a spell on it or something. Look, dear, I’m a warlock, not a nanny. Go dump it on Angel - he’s its bloody father, after all.”
“Angel refuses to care for it.” scowls Illyria. “He keeps it near only out of guilt for Angelus’ ill-received violation of Xander, who has returned to Africa rather than look at it.”
Ethan winces as he recalls Harmony‘s cheerfully colourful account of the rather too public incident. “ What about your ruggedly insane friend Mr Pryce? “ he tries. “Surely demon spawn are right up his alley. Figuratively speaking.”
Illyria‘s face clouds for an instant, with what an uninformed observer might mistake for concern. “Wesley is unwell today. He would merely poke the infant with pencils and mutter to himself. And Spike would compose yet another mocking poem entitled “Ode to an Arse-Baby, Number Seven”, which he would then recite aloud. The distraction would be intolerable.”
“And you? God-King scariness aside, wouldn‘t the feminine touch be more appropr....”
“I shall be occupied in the reading of many books on the correct care of hamsters and how to make them worship me.” interrupts the sovereign deity herself. When Ethan fails to make any move to accept the child from her arms, Illyria’s customary frown deepens and she strides over to the comfy sofa. There she deposits the baby and a bag of nursery equipment. “There is rehydrated, lactated nourishment mixed with blood in the false-breasted bottles. “ she briefs Ethan, solemnly. “ It is probably administered by mouth.” Looking quite satisfied with her insight, she again faces Ethan, who is staring at her in panic.
“Ethan. Try not to sacrifice the infant to a demon snake. I do not fully understand why, but the prospect fails to entertain me.” lectures Illyria as she turns on her clompy heel and stalks towards the door. Pausing, without turning back, she adds, quietly: “It senses it is unwanted, and grieves.”
Ethan slumps down on the sofa next to the baby, which is still whimpering and clenching its little hands into fists. He hears the click of the door as Illyria takes her leave in search of world dominance of hamsters. “Buggery!” he mutters, Illyria’s last words gnawing at him as he reluctantly views the abandoned scrap of half-humanity. Awkwardly, he leans over and picks up the child, his face gurning with both distaste and with the unexpected fear that he might harm or drop it. “ Welcome to the leper colony.” he murmurs, holding the small body in what he hopes is a comfortable position and wondering how long he can pretend not to have noticed the whiff of a baby in need of a change.
*
Ethan’s seen and smelt a lot of terrors in his time, but few things have turned him turn quite as pale as that dirty nappy. Do all babies create a fair impersonation of Vesuvius erupting in their underwear, he wonders, or is it just demon thing? He fights off the urge to comfort himself with a large scotch and instead rummages in the bag and pulls out one of several made-up bottles of formula. It feels about tepid, the batch having presumably been made up that morning, and he cautiously offers the teat to the baby half-propped on his lap. The creature - which, the nappy change informs Ethan, is female - immediately lunges and grasps the teat between her jaws, guzzling ferociously as her brow crinkles into faint ridges. Ethan raises an eyebrow as the blood-laced formula is drained in under a minute.
“That rivals Ripper downing a pint of Greene King.“ he tells the little monster. “You might only have half the bumps of a true vampire, my dear, but you have all the table-manners of one.” The baby burps ferociously, as if to back-up the theory. “There, there. Better out than in.” chimes in Ethan, a trifle disturbed to find himself echoing the words of the grandmother who raised him.
So what, wonders Ethan, do you actually *do* with a baby, sacrificing it apart, when you weren’t dealing with the essentials? He rummages in the bag for further clues and produces a rather well-chewed dolly which, when new, must have borne an amusing resemblance to a certain Miss Buffy Summers. The baby - restored to her human visage after her feed - spots the doll and immediately vamps out again, her little limbs waggling frantically. Cautiously, Ethan brings the toy within her grasp. The baby all but tears it from his hand and begins to worry it like a terrier with a slipper, giving out little snarls that slowly quieten to growls as she settles to the task of Slayer-shredding.
When Ethan can mostly feel, rather than hear the continued rumble and shake of “Buffy’s” mauling, he gratefully presumes a state of infantile contentment and reaches to retrieve his book, which he’d abandoned on the coffee-table when Illyria had arrived. It’s not a spell book or anything remotely mystical. Because Rupert - and Ethan hates that he has Rupert to thank for his “acquisition” from the Initiative by Wolfram and Hart - had personally seen to it that Ethan wasn’t to be allowed any such “dangerous” literature. Ethan’s permitted book, then, is a gripping tale of piracy; a muscular arse-nazi of an outlaw captain, who, with his band of attractively stubble-chinned brigands, board and bugger a frigate-full of fresh-faced naval cadets. “Ex Libris Harmony Kendall”. Interesting girl, that.
It’s a while before Ethan suddenly realises that he’s not the only one quietly laughing at the naked flogging scenes. He stops short in his reading, craning his neck to look down into the face of the baby. “You read that, didn’t you?” he asks, in quiet amazement. “ The bit where the rope-end catches Billy amidships?”
The baby’s eyes glow yellow and the little mouth broadens into a wide smile that betrays tiny fangs where the human teeth have not even begun to press their way though the gum. Ethan puts down his book and slowly brings his hand up to trace his fingers along the vestigial brow-ridge. “ Your demon understands what I’m saying. Am I right?” he murmurs. The baby blinks and coos at Ethan, seeming to appreciate either his tactile acceptance of, or his understanding of, its demon facet.
Ethan knows what it is to be trapped. Here - this flat - is a thousand fold improvement on the chilly strip-cell in which he lay at the mercy of those khaki-clads’ batons, or worse, those white-coated sadists with their probes and charts, but it is a prison. Just as the weak, comfortable body of this human infant must be to the stifled demon within. Ethan continues to stroke gently along the downy brow, watching the vampire features melt away under his touch. The golden irises calm to muddy baby-brown and the mouth softens to a pale cupid’s bow. He’s not a little surprised in his newfound infant!demon calming skills. A bigger surprise still is the surge of empathy and……. yes, protectiveness that assails him as he looks into the tiny face. “Sadistic and self-serving.” Surely, that was Ethan Rayne; not a single cells-worth of nurture in his body. Vainly, Ethan sniffs the air for indications of Illyria having hexed him with some sort of Mary Poppins spell. Because there’s no other reason for Ethan suddenly to decide that bare-bottomed brutality on the high seas isn’t proper fare for an infant of however advanced and demonic a sense of humour.
The baby laughs and snarls, kicking tiny feet excitedly in the air, as Ethan instead treats her to fancifully embroidered yarns of magic and pranks and of a time when stuffy old Rupert had been called Ripper and the two young men had revelled in the mayhem they kicked up around them. The tiny features pop in and out of gameface in reaction to the more or less hair-raising parts of the narrative, and Ethan realises that he is actually rather enjoying himself with....???? “Bette Blue didn’t tell me your name.” realises Ethan, aloud to his charge. “Angel or Xander *did* bother giving you a name, I take it?” Not that the baby - who gives a little growl of displeasure or maybe distress, at the mention of those names - could tell him, of course. Besides, the bearer of the answer might be locked in a hamster cage on Wesley’s desk by now, becoming squiffy on whisky fumes and falling off its wheel.
“Well, while you’re here, I’ll call you ….” Ethan hesitates for a moment, and almost comes up with the name of his gran, but….. “Deirdre.” he decides, suddenly. “She was a friend of mine and Ripper‘s, a long time ago. She was a wild child, like we were. She loved loud music and French cigarettes and dancing naked in the rain.” Ethan smiles, a little sadly, as the infant studies him with curiosity. “I think she’d be rather tickled to have a half-demon named after her. Even if it’s just for an afternoon.”
The afternoon in question passes surprisingly quickly. More tales are told, “Buffy” is tortured into entertaining shapes and postures and fed through the jaws of the crownless skull that graces the mantelpiece. Ethan discovers that it’s nice to have someone with whom to share his secret Teletubbies addiction; especially someone whose reactions support his conviction that Tinky-Winky is in fact a Prewfink demon and that big purple body is in no way a costume. It’s a matter upon which he swears Deirdre to secrecy; Angel and poor loony Pryce’d spoil the fun if they found out.
There’s another bottle and another nappy change - during which Ethan apologizes chivalrously to Deirdre for the indignity; he’d have come up with a nappy-refreshing spell for her, but the wards Wolfram and Hart placed on the flat prevent him from conducting even a mystical arse-scratching without an application in triplicate. As Ethan notices the baby’s eyes become heavy-lidded, he stretches himself along the sofa and places Deirdre on her tummy - his gran always said Ethan slept on his tummy as a baby - atop his chest. “ Right, young lady.” he tells his guest, conspiratorially.” Here’s the deal; if you can sleep for two hours, I’ll teach you a thought-spell you can do to turn Angel’s hair orange.”
The muddy eyes flicker, just briefly sparking yellow. Ethan’s almost certain that Deirdre winks at him before yawning and settling down against his chest for a nap. Must be catching, thinks Ethan, because he could do with forty winks himself. This babysitting business does rather take it out of you....
Ethan doesn’t hear Illyria, newly installed God-King of captive hamsters, re-enter the flat, a reluctant Giles in tow. It’s a pity, because Ethan misses Illyria’s very first - very slight - genuine smile, as she analyses the unfamiliar contentment of the human and the half-demon, asleep together on the sofa, each smelling a little less of frustration and loneliness. Giles also misses the event, absorbed as he is in wondering if Ethan-as-cot-mattress is one those LSD flashbacks he thought he’d seen the last of in 1989.
“You starve for each other, yet you imprison Ethan and avoid him.” Illyria cocks her head in curiosity as she snaps Giles out of his mental meandering. “Why do you waste your last years and his?”
“And this is your business for what reason, precisely?” Giles appreciates the accurate analysis even less than the memento mori.
“Yearning and loneliness stink of carrion, denial of flatulence”
“Pardon me, I’m sure. Perhaps you should open a window.” retorts Giles, crossly.
“The window is already open.” points out Illyria and gestures towards the slumbering pair. “ I believe Wesley was not in the grip of his insanity when he informed me that humans desire a child to have two parents.”
Giles stares at her, glances at Ethan and the baby and back at Illyria, before breaking out into a harsh laugh. “ Just playing God for old times sake, then? “
Illyria bristles. “It is as good a parental match as I predicted. Look! Ethan did not sell or slaughter the infant.” she points out, indignantly. Giles blinks at Illyria’s rather loose definition of good parenting, and continues his protest:
“Illyria, even if.... Ethan and I.... we’re too old to become her parents. We might become too infirm or die before she can grow up.”
“And if Wolfram and Hart ensured that neither you nor Ethan would age while she was in your care?”
Giles falls quiet, glancing from Illyria, back to the couch and the slumbering face of his abandoned love, as Illyria calmly recounts his thoughts for him.
“ You can reclaim some of the time you could have been with Ethan. Sixteen, even twenty years, Rupert Giles, of companionship and anti-socially loud sexual activity.”
Giles blinks. “ Wolfram and Hart acquired Ethan’s intelligence files from the Watchers’ Council.” explains Illyria, helpfully. “These included a secretly-filmed videotape dated 1976, in which you and Ethan copulate loudly on a snooker ta....”
“Yes, I recall the incident, thank you!” interrupts Giles, urgently, ignoring the twitch in his trousers at the long-buried reminder of a particularly good shag. The world blurs reassuringly as a very necessary bout of spectacle-cleaning ensues. “And what has Angel to say about this delightful family unit you appear to have planned for us?”
“Angel was happy to offload the task of finding the infant a home. He will, however, be threatened and displeased at his unwanted offspring being raised to appreciate the power of magics.” Illyria warns, po-faced.
“Yes. Yes I suppose he might be, at that.” murmurs Giles, a smile tweaking the corners of his mouth for the first time since he followed Illyria into the flat. “And if Angel is threatened and displeased enough to try to intervene?”
Illyria’s mouth twitches, almost imperceptibly. “Tell me, Rupert Giles; do you know how to care for a vampire hamster?”
THE END