ASH in a turkish bath, talking about his penis. ASH in a turkish bath, talking about and lifting the towel...no, I am not going there.

Not out loud, anyway.

Anne, BTW, did I say thanks? For enjoying Amanda?

Well, Deb, now I want to read Matty Groves!

I wouldn't fancy trying to wrestle with a tiercel over pastry.

No. But if you wrote about it, you must tell billytea. He'd be delighted to see a tiercel in action, especially if crullers and jelly donuts are involved.

Is billytea a falcon fancier, or an astringer? Sensational! I worked with them when I was younger - well, actually, when the earth was still cooling.

More "Needfire."

I told him what I think he was hoping to hear. I owed him that; besides, it was no less than the truth. "I've loved you since the first day I walked into the Carolan, and you took off your glasses, and didn't hide your eyes from me."

"Have you? Truly?"

"Truly. Even more than I've come to hate your father. Why do you think I stayed?"

• * *

It seems impossible, looking back at this remove of time, that Richard Giles could have lived in such close proximity to us for so long, and not realised that his only child and the girl he feared, and couldn't control, and so clearly wished elsewhere, had fallen in love.

In fact, he realised nothing. I've often timed it, moving slow and damaged down the near-empty years with little else to occupy my mind but those moments, bright as a kingfisher's plumage. Rupert and I took each other in that punt on the Cherwell when I was three months short of my sixteenth birthday. The cataclysm, the end of life as I had lived it, happened on the night of my eighteenth birthday. The math is inescapable: for twenty seven months, Rupert and I slipped through the connecting bathroom door between our bedrooms at night, me bucking against him, Rupert vulnerable and beautiful and somehow completely dominant as he pinned me, both of us learning quickly, of necessity, to stifle any sound, even as my nails left imprints in the flesh of his back and I felt his heart against me like bottled thunder. That need for silence, the understanding of what might happen should Richard come to know, added an extra spice.

Sometime during the winter of my seventeenth year, Richard caught the flu. I had trained for years as Slayer, killed whatever had come my way that required killing, and stifled my yawns at the waste of energy needed to wield the stake when all I really needed was a simple spoken command, and the vampire would sprinkle into something that looked like beach sand, pebbled and grainy. Sometimes, cleaning out a nest when I was beyond Richard's eye, I would conserve my energy and break the rules: the spell, three French words, would freeze them where they stood. The stake wasn't even required. I would stand, smiling, and watch the look of outraged surprise echo in every ridged, distorted face before the command executed and they disintegrated.

In fact, I was never the Slayer so much as I was two other things: a very potent witch, in the way only one born of the blood can be, and a thorn in my Watcher's side. I close my eyes now, trying to remember a moment between us of genuine liking. There was nothing. I was polite, as befitted the relationship as written. He was polite, as was expected of an upper-class Englishman in his dealings with his ward. But beyond that, there was nothing from the man who was supposed to watch my back, and from the only thing I'd had resembling a parent in the flesh from the age of eleven.

We knew, of course, that Rupert had been chosen to become a Watcher. He was born to it, and born for it; unlike his father, he showed every attribute a Watcher should have, all tempered with something his father lacked: the ability to care, to love. More and more, Rupert came on the piratical forays his father would arrange, sending me in to clear a lair of demons here, a coterie of vampires there. Richard would take what he found there, all the esoterica, the arcana, the books and amulets and charms. Once he took an eye, left behind in the damp grass when I drove my stake through a particularly pugnacious vampire. The eye was made of something he hadn't seen, and he was right to take it, but I sang under my breath and he heard me. The song was The Twa Corbies, about a pair of ravens stealing body parts from a newly-dead knight. For a moment, there was genuine hate in the air between us.

When Richard came down with flu, he at first denied it. He hated being sick, resented it furiously, refused to admit it. I was to find out why that evening, when a report from the common room at Magdalene made it clear that something was moving through the college, feeding, and must be dispatched.

Richard lay in bed, feverish, coughing. His glasses, for once, were on the night table beside him. I told him not to worry, I would do what needed to be done.

"Take Rupert." He tried to focus on me, and failed. "Take him and let him be a Watcher for once."

He is a Watcher, I thought, a far better one than you could ever be, but I said nothing, merely nodding. Richard muttered something, and we leaned over him, his son and his ward, trying to hear him.

"Don't let the bitch use her filthy sorcery," he said clearly. His eyes were somewhere between us, vague, fevered; I felt Rupert's indrawn breath at my side. "Watch her. I know she uses it. The Council wants it stopped - she's a corrupted excuse for a Slayer. You watch her."

Oh my, Deb! that's amazing. I especially like the "bottled thunder", but it just kept building from there.

eta punctuation because, though I'd like to keep her in the cellar with a computer, food and handy dandy shackles, so she writes Just For Me!, she's not really my Deb.

Thankee, thankee. More to come, obviously....

deb, I love the picture of Rupert and me sneaking around for silent, intense nights of loving... Wait, did I say me? Oh, dear...

Am, that's a fabulous crossover! What a thought, Hawkeye and James together... But, 'Insubordinance' wouldn't that be 'insubordination'?

Is billytea a falcon fancier

billytea is a one-man animal encyclopedia. He's like our very own Steve Irwin, except sane.

Insubordinance

Man, I was having such a good time with that story, I missed that. Saw it as "insubordination."

Which, entre nous, is what the fruitcake who taught one of my high school gym classes used to shriek whenever she was crossed. Her favourite word. I'm not sure I ever heard her say anything else.