Title: The Fire of Your Faith
Author: Fleur
Characters: Giles and Xander in the Wishverse.
Summary: Giles pays for his sins.
Author's Notes: The title comes from a quote by Abraham Kuyper, "When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith."

Rupert Giles wasn't entirely sure how his life could, in fact, be any worse - unsure enough, in fact, that he didn't care that he was jinxing it simply by thinking those words.

Living in Sunnydale now was living in one of his boyhood nightmares without ever a hope of waking. So much death, destruction, despair, and every part of it somehow his fault. The sort of place where he would wake up each day almost wishing he hadn't.

It was made worse, too, on the days he had to call outside the town; speak to the Council, for instance. When he spoke to people outside of the madness who didn't understand what it was like; who didn't understand his failure. People living in places where everything was fine. A part of him truly did want to leave. Wanted to go back to England, to the museum perhaps, or working in the Council archives. There were certainly many ways to live a life more ordinary than his own.

But he couldn't leave. He would never leave.

When he had been sworn in as a Watcher, with it had come immense responsibility to fight or die trying. He honestly believed he'd been assigned to Sunnydale for a reason, and in some dark reaches of his heart he still believed he could make a difference here.

Lately it seemed he was wrong.

When he took his glasses off at night and reached for the whisky and wished for a miracle, it never came, and he blamed himself. When each day there were more deaths, more bodies to burn, he blamed himself. And in the darkness, when he imagined screams coming from across town, he wondered if all of this were somehow punishment for his own sins.

And he had to smile. Still a trace of his old arrogance, then.

But the fact was that he deserved this life. He'd failed to stop the Master's rising, and he'd failed when he was a boy, and now he fell prey to his own dark addictions each day, and though Giles and Sunnydale had long been forsaken by any God, he still thought that perhaps this was his penance.

Despair drove desperation, and certainly, 'desperate' was exactly how Giles would describe his latest trick, his latest act of contrition.

He went at dusk, a few times a week, with his face covered and shaded. Though the vampires he met in this house were the weaker in town, there was risk - huge risk - involved, and Giles certainly never neglected his precautions more than he already had.

It was surprising, he thought, that when the vampires had such control over this town (he didn't allow his despair to call it complete), there was still such an underbelly. He'd seen these houses in London and for a short time had allowed himself to become addicted, and now, caught in a nightmare, he slipped back into old discomforts. This place, where people would come and pay the demons to feed from them. Even the thought closed Giles' eyes with shamed fingers.

Giving over his money he went inside and up the stairs, the same way he did each time. He sat, and waited, and the same vampire as always came over to him, eyes lowered.

And as he did every time, behind Giles' glasses, he examined the man - not a man, Good Lord, he's hardly more than a boy - for some flicker of recognition, and again, as he did every time, he got none.

A tall boy. Perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and the very thought twisted something inside him. Dark hair, dark eyes, starved thin. The starvation had never escaped Giles' notice, and worse still was the reason behind it - that in Sunnydale, the vampires were running out of a food supply. They were running out of humans.

The boy knelt, effortlessly shifting into his vampire visage and taking Giles' arm with pale hands. Even the demonic features looked skeletal, and Giles fought nausea, looking away as the vampire lowered his head and sank his teeth into the mark on Giles' arm; a twist of two sins, past and present.

Giles closed his eyes and his mind, feeling the blood shift. The boy was never desperate, never took more than he needed, and though it was an awful thought, and inasmuch as one could a soulless demon, Giles in fact trusted him.

People came here for the euphoria while Giles came to bleed dry his sins. Every drop the boy took from him was a drop of Giles' failure to be a Watcher.

Today, though, he couldn't bear the confession, and he said, quietly but firmly, "Stop."

The vampire raised his head, and growled.

"I need a minute," Giles lied as he leaned back. This was allowed; understood, in fact. People here became light-headed rather easily.

The boy, the vampire, the creature sat back on his haunches, his features shifting back to human. Simple illusion but only skin-deep, and Giles, who had rarely a chance to examine a vampire this closely, shuddered when he looked into the flat, dead eyes of a corpse.

"What was your name," Giles asked, quietly, still keeping up his facade of light-headedness.

The vampire didn't have to answer, though he did, in a voice just as quiet as Giles'. "Xander."

He had wanted the name to sound familiar; had needed to know the boy before he'd turned to this. Perhaps to justify his own punishments, if he could recognise this as a person he'd failed. But the name wasn't familiar. And this wasn't someone he knew. This was a vampire who he paid to drink from him, because more than failing at his job, Rupert Giles was beginning to consider the idea he'd failed as a human.

Quietly, he asked, "What happened to you?"

Again there was no hesitating from the boy. "Vampires attacked the school one day, burned down a whole wing."

It had only been two weeks earlier that vampires had come into the school during second period, covered in blankets, and killed so many people that Giles had locked himself in the office that night and refused to come out. There had been signs, there had been obvious indications that something was going to happen and Giles had missed them entirely. He should have known; he should have saved those children and here one was, the direct product of Giles' own folly. The Council had said it was too bad.

"I got injured pretty badly," the vampire went on, and Giles frowned as he looked up again. "A friend of mine turned me to save my life."

Spoken without a trace of irony, and Giles closed his eyes again. He'd done this to the boy.

"She's gonna come back for me when I'm strong again," he said, the vampire said, the creature said, Xander said.

Giles couldn't bring himself to reply through his too-tight throat. He offered his arm again and leaned back as the vampire drank.

This life was hell and he couldn't start to grieve because he would never have a chance to stop. This vampire on his arm, this creature who had been a schoolboy only weeks earlier, had more hope in his life than Giles did, and the thought cut deeply. Giles puled his arm away.

Sated, the boy stood, and appeared human again by the time Giles followed suit. This was a strange moment, the final two soldiers in a battle shaking hands, not enemies, but nowhere near comrades. Foreign species. Giles felt only pity.

"I'm sorry," he said at last, and he was. Sorry for this boy's death, sorry for the state of his life, sorry for the state of this town, sorry for this entire world that Giles had sworn to protect.

Xander smiled and it grew colder. "I'm not."

He walked out then, the moment passed, and Giles went out in silence, and vowed never to return.

When he thought of leaving or of defeat or of despair in the next fortnight, and he thought of them everyday, the thought that countered it all was the thought of the black-haired boy, a starved vampire regaining his strength because he'd been turned and thought it was a fate better than death.

A long time ago, Giles had thought any fate better than that of death, too.

Now he wasn't sure, because he lived a hell, and perhaps he'd learned a lesson from the boy.

This was the fate worse than death.

And if it killed him, Giles was going to be the one to change it, because even when he had nothing else, he had to believe there was something better.