Fortress Around Your Heart - Prologue
DISCLAIMER: The title references one of Gordon Sumner's master-works. :-)
THANKS: Lesley for the architectural advice!
NOTES AND SUMMARY: Yes, it's that AU again; this story will be the conclusion of the Giles & Spike (& Wes!)-verse fic. The Prologue merely refers to Our Heroes, but they're comin'. 'Will' refers to William/ Spike and not Willow.19 DECEMBER 2007. LONDON. EARLY EVENING.
The parchment was so thin that a breath might tear it. Imran Cumberbatch slipped on a pair of gloves so that he could open the scroll without bruising it.
The faded brush strokes– done by some anonymous priest-clerk nine hundred years ago– were hard to see. Cumberbatch had some experience in these matters, though, and he anchored the ends of the scroll with his fingertips, angling the paper so that the desk lamp illuminated the words. The aged material glowed golden– a treasure, certainly.
He still couldn’t read all of it. The six lines were in a code used long ago by the Order of St. Giles; amusingly appropriate, since it had been Rupert who found the initial mention of the scroll’s prophecy in an obscure text in the CoW archives. Through cross-referencing a series of books and incunabula only he would have thought to pull together, Wesley had determined the location of the scroll: stored in a sorcerer’s ruin in Cornwall, a site that the Council had known to be lost to dark magicks. Buffy and Will had negotiated with, then fought the demon guardians of the ruin in order to recover the fragile golden thing for Council scrutiny.
Cumberbatch couldn’t say why he felt that the project needed immediate attention, but his Watcher intuition told him that the information might be time-sensitive. However, Darren Cunningham, the specialist in British Prophecies, had taken a fortnight off (an important series of games for Arsenal, apparently); the others concerned were on call tonight.
Thus it fell to Imran, who did no fieldwork any more. Not that he ever had done nearly as much as Rupert or Will or Wesley, to be honest. He worked with paper.
He looked at what he had managed to decode so far:
The dead shall rise again, howling blood not breath
The six who should not be, oppose the walking death
She-wolves return to bite the hands that hurt one solstice eve
Years passed–The parchment tore just on this line. Dashed convenient, Imran thought: oh yes, let’s rip out where the identification of year might be, wouldn’t want the prophecy to be helpful, now would we?
"Imran, you’re talking to yourself again."
He looked up to see his wife coming toward him with a cup of hot chocolate, which she placed at his right hand. His Rosemary took such care of him. "Was I? Just a little frustrated with the translating, you know." He took a sip of the hot liquid. "Oh, this is good."
"Mmm. I put in a touch of cinnamon for you, I know how you like that."
She went over to her own desk. Their flat just north of Hyde Park wasn’t very big, but it had a study large enough for the two of them to work. This was his favourite part of their marriage: after supper, when it was just the two of them, isolated from the outside world by stuccoed brick walls and lamplight. On nights like this, when the wind screamed with cold outside the windows, he felt as if they were enclosed in their own fortress. Here they could rest.
Rosemary took out her own Council files and spread them over the oak. He loved the way she focused on them, her fingers playing with the edges. He loved her fingers.
Cumberbatch took another sip of the hot drink, then said, "Might I get something for you, Rose? A biscuit to accompany the chocolate, perhaps?"
"You could begin the year-end performance reviews for Special Projects and for Buffy and the lads, rather than fuss with that old parchment. I know that they all get alpha-plus, but it has to be written down. My department doesn’t appreciate our administrators slacking." She softened her words with one of her sweetest smiles, but he knew better. His wife was absolutely serious.
At the Council of Watchers, nobody ever messed with Human Resources. But perhaps he would risk it, just this once. Let the translation go for one night, ignore the reports: tonight he would be a husband, not a Watcher.
Unlike the others, he had that luxury.
He carefully rolled up the scroll and deposited it in its case, took off his gloves, then walked over to his wife. His fingers went to her shoulders then massaged. He pressed in where he could find knots, working through her tension. And she purred in a way her co-workers had never heard.
He leaned forward so that he could whisper in her ear. "A proposal for you. Shall we take our hot chocolate in bed?"
Rosemary rested her head against his shoulder. "It’s only eight-thirty, Imran." He speared his fingers up through her hair, caressing her skull in the rhythm he knew she liked. She moaned, then said, "Yet I don’t really care. Just keep doing that."
Smiling, he helped her from her chair; hand in hand (but carrying their chocolate), they went up to their private space. Their 18th-century bed– the only extravagance such a sensible couple had– was even more of a fortress than their study.
This evening, he didn’t intend them to rest within it.
***
A few blocks away, at the corner of Connaught Square, a humanoid figure wearing a trench-coat paced out a triangle on the pavement. No passers-by looked at him; no home-owners peered at him from their windows; no cars stopped to gawk.
To gaze at the Nullat demon was to gaze on blankness wrapped in a Burberry.
The demon took a plastic bag out of his pocket. From it he gathered a handful of ashes– human, freshly burnt– and tapped out a measure on each point of the unseen triangle. Then he pulled out another container for liquid. From it he poured out a dollop of blood– also human, also fresh, he’d killed the girl himself– onto each bit of ash.
The December wind made the black smoke wisp up from the burial piles.
The Nullat stepped back and thrust his gloved hands in his pockets. "Return threefold cursed, creatures of evil," he said softly.
The smoke swirled, just for a second, then blew up into the night air. The Nullat demon assessed the shadowy outline of a structure in grey and indigo, a true illusion made out of the remnants of dark fires. He smiled– he had indeed come to the right place. He so appreciated the modern need to recover the past. This evening, antiquarians’ work had assisted his own.
The 'triple-trees' of Tyburn, the gallows that had dealt out death to the vicious and the unlucky alike for nearly a millennium, now rose against the manicured park square of twenty-first-century London.
On each of the transparent points of the death-fortress swung the smoky image of a body. Three executed assassins, called back to serve the needs of him and his employers.
"Arise threefold cursed, threefold strong, creatures of evil." He didn’t have to wave his hands or do anything unseemly; he’d leave that to the puny humans who dabbled in forces larger than themselves. The words alone were enough to cause the insubstantial spirits to slip loose from the smoke-ropes that had ended their lives. The three figures, ashes of hellfire, slipped down and then re-formed beside him.
The wind howled around him, tearing the air. In each gust the Nullat could hear the inhuman rage of creatures long denied, could catch the scent of blood. "What can we kill for you, how can we kill," the spirits cried.
"I’ll have work for you soon enough, when the time is right," he promised. Then he pulled his hand out of his coat pocket and checked his personal digital assistant. Ah, he had another appointment to keep.
The Nullat demon started to walk toward Oxford Street, followed by howling wind and swirling ash. Nothing– no door, no wall, no fortress– could have kept out the creature and the evil which accompanied him. But he was blankness wrapped in a Burberry, smoke obscuring even the outlines of his body. No one noticed him pass.
This evening he would disturb no one’s rest. It wasn’t time yet.