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Entry tags:	keptverse, pieces

The Pieces: Giles
This is part 6 of a 7-part sequence. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5).

I apologise for the long delay! Part of this was a bit of a discussion I had with Poisontaster (which worked out all right in the end, but we hadn't ever actually talked about my writing FPF in the Keptverse: cleared the air/clarified things, basically, this is definitely not-official not-supported fanfic, but it's cool.) But that was last week. Most of the delay was I've had this hideously awful cold and it's eaten my brain and I was fighting to get part 6 and part 7 written and get at least 300 words into "End Game" before I posted part 6. But I did and I have and here you are. I am so sorry.

The previous stories in this series (my Keptverse) began with The Games (six parts) and continued with The Network (one part), The Players (seven parts), and The Gambler (seven parts). The whole series will terminate with the next sequence, "End Game", which is being written! Yay.

The story may be regarded as fanfic set in poisontaster's Keptverse. There is a species of cast list here.

Part 6 - Giles

Giles waited outside each cell. Benton went into each one alone. They would deliver their joint report by the end of the day, but Benton knew as well as Giles that the slaves were gone. They were runaways: Commerce would take their contracts back, mark them in the face, and probably resell them for factory work, given their youth. Dana would report them dead: Sam would send them, boxed and drugged, on a foreign delivery plane from this or another state.

Why would I mind?

Benton played a good guy better than anyone Giles knew. The girls had all been locked up alone now for 72 hours, wearing the same clothes they arrived in, given only minimal food and water. Giles was their nightmare. Benton could be their best friend.

Why indeed?

Two girls who had no good set of futures ahead of them. The slaves were at least going to a country where slavery was illegal: even if the other girls were sent home, it would be because Gerard saw a use for them.



In the kitchen, Willow was hunched over her laptop at one end of the table, and Ray at the other. Willow looked up as Giles came in and smiled.

Ray half-glanced up, saw them, and turned his attention back to his computer. Benton went to stand behind him: Ray moved as if to cover the screen, and then sat back in his chair. He looked angry. He didn’t say anything.

“Where is Sam?”

Ray lifted his chin. “I should know?”

“Probably still in the office,” Willow said.

“We need to make our report, but then we can go home,” Giles said.

“I finished doing the arrest reports,” Ray said. He twisted to look up at Benton. He sounded challenging.

“Of course,” said Benton.

Willow glanced down the table at Ray, visibly worried, but said to Giles, “An hour?”

“We could collect a pizza from Giordano’s on the way home.”

“Could we have a stuffed crust with cheese and sausage?” Willow asked, as brightly as if she didn’t still have shadows under her eyes.

Ray and Benton were still looking at each other. They did not appear to be about to kiss and make up any time soon. Giles glanced away. “If we can pre-order,” he said, and picked up his laptop. “Benton, we should go sort this out with Sam.”



“Okay,” Gerard said. “Benton, go tell George. He’s running the numbers tonight, he’ll tell me tomorrow. Then go home. You and Ray. You need a rest. Tell Ray to bring doughnuts tomorrow, okay?”

“Yes, Sam.” Benton paused a moment, on his feet, looking at Sam: Giles had the oddest feeling he would have said something, if Giles had not been there, and for a moment he wondered if he should offer to excuse himself. “I’ll tell Ray. Doughnuts. Take care of Willow, Giles.” He was gone.

“How’s the girl?” Gerard asked.

For a moment, Giles thought Gerard meant one of the prisoners – He literally could not think which one of the four Gerard was asking after. Then he understood, just as Gerard corrected himself: “How’s Willow doing?”

“She’s – ” Giles hesitated. Not throwing up. Looking better. Investigating high-level security systems. Cracking top-security databases. “Fine, I suppose.”

“We’ll know who our next pattern of arrests should target by Friday. I wouldn’t talk to her about the work you’ve been doing this week.”

“When are the girls leaving here?” Giles asked.

There was a pause: a little longer than a beat. “You don’t need to know that,” Gerard said.

“Are you planning to send us away?”

Gerard didn’t move for half a minute. He was staring at Giles, and the lines on his face looked graven deeply in. He was older than Giles – how much older, Giles had never considered. He stood up and turned to look out of the window: it was dark outside, the distant city lights the only illumination, and it seemed as if he was looking at his own reflection. He put his hand up on the glass, and stood there for another minute, without speaking.

“I don’t want to lose either of you,” Gerard said finally. “You do good work.” He came back to the desk and stood beside it, looking down at Giles. “I don’t know what the hell you did before this, but you are a damn fine interrogator. And Willow – kid’s a fucking genius. I don’t want either of you messed up by this. I want you both to go home. Don’t come in tomorrow. Either of you.”

“Wait,” Giles said. “What are you planning to do tomorrow?”

“What the hell do you think?” There was a familiar, amused snap in Gerard’s voice.

“Get rid of Richard,” Giles said.

“The dangerous dildo?” Gerard really was amused. “No. Richard’s staying here. I don’t want either of you here tomorrow. It’s got nothing to do with Richard, it’s got nothing to do with anything I’m planning to do. Interrogating these four kids, it’s been rough on you. Take a day. Stay with Willow. Call in on Thursday.”

“Tomorrow’s the day Adam thinks they’ll start – the decimation.”

Gerard nodded. “It is.”

“You know that for sure?”

“No,” Gerard said. “But I think Adam’s right. Giles, this is an order: you and Willow are not coming in to work tomorrow. Willow can take her laptop home, in case she wants to crack any secure databases or whatever it is she does to relax. Go.”

Giles stood up. Gerard was moving past him to the door. “Come on,” he said. “I want to make sure you and Willow are out of here. You know, Giles, you should marry that girl.”

That came out of nowhere. Giles pushed his glasses further up his nose. “I think you misunderstand the circumstances,” he said, stiffly.

“I do not. You’re still a British citizen.”

“The UK has closed its borders – ”

“If what we’re doing works, that’s not going to matter. I’m talking passports, not romance. I’d marry George for his passport, if he’d have me.” Gerard turned his head and Giles saw that he was smiling, the close-lipped cold smile that left no clue if this was a joke or not. But he sounded serious.

If what we’re doing works? Giles hadn’t thought about it. He was too used, he supposed, to lurching from disaster to disaster, always averted, never coming to an end. He thought about that now, about being home, The familiar grey tang of the London streets, the stony view from the British Library – would he even be able to get his old job back? The four years in California, this year in Chicago – would he be able to look back on these years and think They were hell – past tense? Going home to a country where slavery had been abolished by Act of Parliament two centuries ago, where American tourists were no longer allowed to parade with their leashed slaves through the city as if it belonged to them –

If what we’re doing works, they still won’t. Giles followed Gerard through the door into the other side of the house, still thinking about that: he had not, at any time, thought about their success in concrete terms.

He wondered if Willow had. If he should ask her. If he should tell her what Gerard said.

“What the hell?” Gerard said, surprised and cold.

It was a moment before Giles realised why Richard’s presence at the kitchen table would surprise Gerard. Willow was sitting at the table in the chair opposite Richard’s; she had the look on her face of peaceful, slightly smug satisfaction, that must have infuriated most of her schoolteachers: Willow had not been a popular child at Sunnydale High, either with the students or the staff.

Ray had been sitting at the other end of the table: he was getting to his feet as Gerard came in. He said “I got Richard out of the cell, Sam. Will told me she had a couple of questions to ask him.”

Benton, at his side, said nothing. But he looked decidedly more peaceful than he had even half an hour ago.

Gerard went round the table and bent down, leaning one hand next to Willow’s laptop. He looked across the table at Richard, and Giles saw him frown. Richard was sitting with his hands on the table in front of him, and there was something odd about how he was sitting: his head and his shoulders were up.

“What part of ‘ask me before you interrogate Richard’ wasn’t clear?” Gerard asked, and glanced at Ray.

“It wasn’t an interrogation,” Willow said. She was smiling more widely now. “I just had to ask Richard one question. I wanted the names of everyone he ever leant his personal house keys to. Here’s the list.”

Giles bent his head to look at the screen. Curious now, Giles moved away from the door. He wanted to see Richard’s face.

“See?” Willow said, practically crowing. “The Waverley town house had the same security system as we have here, only the civilian version. It’s different levels with different keys in the civilian version, if you’ve got the right set of house keys the access code isn’t sixteen digits, it’s only four, anyone could memorise four, and look who’s on the list!”

Gerard was looking at Richard. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I see.”

Richard’s eyes held more hope than Giles felt one person should have been able to bear. Giles almost looked away.

“The night Lady Helen Waverley was murdered,” Willow said. “There was no forced entry, but there wouldn’t have been – Doctor Kimble leant him his car, you see, Sam, it was there in the police evidence all along, Kimble had house keys on his car key fob, the slaves were all locked in their quarters for the night before Lady Helen left for the reception they were going to, and Doctor Nichols just let the one-armed man in with a borrowed set of keys!”

Richard’s head jerked back. His hands spread out on the table. His mouth opened, though no words came out. There was no more hope in his eyes. Giles did look away, for a moment, as if from a car smash, and then, reluctantly, looked back again.

“Speculation,” Gerard said. He circled the table, as if leisurely, and put his hand on the back of Richard’s neck.

“No,” Willow said. Giles thought he should stop her, and also that it was too late: like trying to stop an avalanche with a word. “Doctor Nichols is the only name on the list who had access to the house keys, who’d been visiting them for years and could easily have got the code, who falsified the Provasic data, he was the patentholder, he went to the same tennis club, he probably killed Doctor Lentz, too – ”

“Lentz is dead?” Richard’s voice was hoarse and wavery. His head tilted, as if he were trying to squint up at Gerard and still keep an eye on Willow. “Chuck didn’t kill Helen… the man I fought wasn’t Chuck.”

“The one-armed man,” said Benton. His hand, Giles saw, was resting on Ray’s shoulder. “Nichols wanted you dead because you knew RDU90 didn’t work, Doctor Kimble.”

“Lentz was the patentholder,” Richard said. His voice was dazed. “Lentz. I warned Chuck about Lentz… last week?”

“Last Thursday,” Gerard said. His hand was still resting on the back of Richard’s neck. “I got an e-mail from Doctor Nichols about half an hour, maybe less, after you finished talking to him. He wanted to buy you. I figured it was a rescue bid. I told him no.”

Richard was staring at Gerard, upward and sideways. “Chuck couldn’t buy me. I didn’t ask him to.”

“He runs a test lab at the hospital,” Gerard said. The tone of his voice was quiet, almost intimate. “I figured he’d buy you for the lab, then divert you into other service.”

“No,” Richard said. He sounded, briefly, confident. “He couldn’t do that. We have all sorts of safeguards in place at Chicago Memorial, ever since Doctor Wilson used to buy ex-bodyslaves with hospital funds, and claim they were for chemotherapy testing…” His voice trailed off, no longer confident. He was shaking, visibly. “…so now when test slaves get bought, they go directly to the Final lab with the cages, there isn’t any divert.”

“I could show you the e-mail,” Gerard said. “Doctor Nichols tried to buy you, for the lab.”

“No,” Richard said. But it wasn’t a denial. It was only a last, lonely protest. He shuddered with his whole body, and bent his head, not looking at any of them.

“Ray,” Gerard said. “You brought Richard down here without asking me… why?”

“Hell,” Ray said. “That’s our girl, that’s Willow – she said she didn’t think Richard was guilty.” He shifted his feet, and his hands moved, as if nervously, but his eyes stayed steady. “If he didn’t do it, he didn’t deserve what we were doing to him. You know that, Sam.”

“Yeah,” Gerard said, after a moment. “I know it.” He took his hand away from the back of Richard’s neck, but stood for a moment staring down at Richard’s face half-turned to his. When he looked back at them, his expression was still unreadable. “I know it. Richard, don’t move. Ray, Benton, get out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow at eight. Bring doughnuts. Giles, you heard what I said upstairs. You and Willow. Go.”

There was a pause. Giles didn’t move because he couldn’t: it was too abrupt, too strange. Richard is mine. Richard’s staying here.

“Vattene, bambini,” Gerard said.



They sat on the daybed together, the pizza box between them, the TV on: the news was almost comforting, almost meaningless.

“We don’t have to go into work tomorrow,” Giles told Willow.

Willow didn’t look smug any more. She glanced up at Giles, and nodded, and picked up another piece of pizza, stuffing it into her mouth as if it provided a bulwark against tears.

“I wondered,” Giles said, trying to sound as impersonal as he could, “if you’d consider getting British citizenship with me?”

Willow finished that slice of pizza. “We just went,” she said, after a moment. “We didn’t stop to argue with Sam. Or ask him any questions.”

“No,” Giles agreed.

“Do you think Richard’s going to be there when we come back on Friday?”

“Yes,” Giles said, trying to sound more confident than he felt.”

Willow gave him a look. Giles picked up another piece of pizza, for something to do with his hands, and said, more emphatically, “Yes, I’m sure of it. Now, what about British citizenship?”

“What?”

“I looked it up. I can give you British citizenship. There’s a one-day waiting period and the licence costs thirty dollars, cash. Shall we?”

It would be something to think about tomorrow that didn’t touch on decimation.

to Part 7