yup - too. Thanks, ma'am.

I'm a getting scared, Deb.

Me too. I may have to read the next bit peeking between my fingers.

he as seeing her through a red mist

He *w*as?

Perkins, that's weird; it's "was" in the original doc. Huh....

Huh. Maybe we have a W thief around here.

Iw donw't kwnow wwhat youwr tawlkinwg abwout.

heheheheheheheh BWAH!

(ssshhhhh. be ve y ve y k iet: e're hunting abbits!)

(And I just now realised that I was being MushMouth in the previous post (but one)). Howbe youbwe bwee dobwing?

[link]

V!Giles. There'd have been more, but Hubby came in to chat. A friend of ours is contemplating marriage, but the girl has brought up the point that she is in beginning stages of MS and our friend has already had a serious bout of cancer. Said friend wanted my opinion of 20 years down the line in a marriage where deteriorating health is a major issue. So Hubby actually asked the question, "If you had it to do over, knowing what you know now, would you," and I gave him an honest answer. No. He took it much better than I thought he would. I also said that I didn't think the two youngsters would really let that stop them, because I had no idea how bad it could get when I was younger, and idealism often trumps cold practicality.

On the mini-vacation, Hubby is offering to drive if we can get another friend's truck, and then napping in the bed of the truck there in the depths of the parking garage while I sit about and stare at the people, which he finds brain-drippingly boring. A day-long nap could possibly do him some good. It would cramp my dream of freedom a little, because I'd be thinking of him being bored, but it would get me out of town.

Oh, yeah, there's fic, see above.

No more Spike, I'm afraid (but thanks for the encouragement, everybody!), but there is the rest of Giles talking to FE.

- - -

"There's no way you'll ever know for sure." Ethan wondered round the room, peering at the bookshelves as if working out how much petrol would be needed to send the whole lot up in flames.

"No, I don't expect I will," Giles said, and made a visible effort not to shudder. "Do you have a message, or are you just here to taunt me?"

"Oh, I have a message," Ethan smirked, a curl of the lips as familiar to Giles as the pang of emotion it caused in his chest. "But I thought I'd get in a little taunting while I was here."

"Why don't you get on with it, then? Where were you planning to start—my parentage?"

"No, I was thinking of insulting the size of your…" Giles' face registered that he'd followed that thought to its natural conclusion, and Ethan finished with "hamster," just to watch the two ideas collide.

"You know," Giles said, slowly and speculatively, "if you were the real Ethan, I'd be trying to kill you by now."

Ethan smirked. "Nah. If I was the real Ethan, you'd be sitting there trying to work out whether you wanted to shag me or kill me, or both. Which tells me… that I'm real."

It wasn't a point Giles would—or could—argue. "Message, Ethan. You said you had one for me."

"I could have been lying."

"All too likely. However, I prefer to think that since the message is bad news, you're going to give it to me."

"What makes you think it's bad news? It could be the Slayer and her pals are all fine, just waiting for you to go back and feed them Jaffa cakes."

"But it isn't. If they were fine, you'd have told me, and then taunted. No; there's bad news."

"Okay, then," Ethan shrugged. "You win. If bad news is what you want, bad news is what you'll get. The world is ending, buddy. And not in a pretty, funny, hitch-a-lift-out way, either. Evil's coming, evil so big and bad it can't be defeated, and everyone's going to die."

Giles nodded. "That sounds more like what I'd expect to hear."

"There's more," Ethan smiled, and Giles remembered working hard to produce that look, years ago. "It's going to be fun."

"I doubt that."

"Oh, it is. Everyone of note is on our side, and they're all going to enjoy themselves. Even the Slayer's friends will help—that vampire with the good taste in hair dye, for one. The armies of darkness are arising, Ripper—or is it Rupert, these days? So much tamer, so much less inclined to take action."

"I don't…" Giles began—but Ethan was gone. Carefully, he picked up the dropped and forgotten book, smoothed down the crumpled page, and sat there.

He wouldn't let the First Evil be right. It wasn't going to be that way.

Olivia looked as finely drawn as a Goya etching.

Beautiful. I love how the story is moving from funny to creepy. That's hard to pull off, but it's working well in this story.

The world is end, buddy. And not in a pretty, funny, hitch-a-lift-out way, either.

Shouldn't it be "The world is ending?"

Very nice Ethan and Giles.