Sometimes, late at night, Giles thinks about torturing Angel. Only late at night, only in the dark, so that he can turn the bedside light on after a while and make it stop.
It would be easy enough to kill him. He doesn't think Buffy has any idea how terribly easy it would be, now that she's led Angel to trust him. A word of greeting and the stake driven home. He'd gather up the dust to pour on Jenny's grave.
But he can think about that in the daytime. One day he may even have to do it. It will mean Buffy can't, or won't, which isn't anything to wish for.
It's only at night that he thinks about capturing Angel alive. He wonders how much Angel trusts him. Enough to let him get close enough to knock Angel out, one way or another. A sharp blow to the head would do it, but he's not sure he's strong enough.
There are drugs, but he knows of few that work on vampires, and none that he's sure would work on a vampire with a soul. There's magic, but even in his fantasies he knows better than that. He's back to the knock on the head; it only has to stun Angel long enough for him to get the chains on.
The details vary, after that, from night to night. There are a few constants: a hot fire to make Angel sweat. Wrapping Angel's wrists with piano wire so that when he strained against his bonds they would bleed. Taking a hammer to Angel's hands. Washing the wounds in holy water.
He's learned a great deal from his books. There's quite a long record of the creative things vampires and demons and overzealous humans have done to one another. Some of the books have helpful diagrams.
He knows how to do it so it makes Angel scream. He knows how to make sure that it leaves scars that Angel will carry long after Giles is dead. And, he fervently hopes, buried. But he doesn't trust himself to do it so it hurts enough.
Ethan could do it. Ethan would think it was funny. He would love it that Giles had finally come to him asking for a favor. Ethan would do it for the fun of watching Giles toss aside all his own principles, or so Giles would owe him a debt he could collect at the worst possible moment, or simply as a sacrifice to his mad god. And if he balked, he suspects Ripper has one thing Ethan would still want if he could get it.
He thinks he could do it, even in this bed where he can still feel Jenny's weight on the covers like a ghost sleeping in his arms. Ethan is nothing like Jenny. Threats and blows and a rough fuck that would leave the sheets bloody would not wake her sleeping ghost. He's not sure how far he'd go, with the memory of Angel still fresh, but then Ethan likes that kind of thing, doesn't he?
Ethan would sit on the sofa with the bruises starting to form on his skin and smile that lovely bitter smile and stir four sugars into his tea. Ethan would track down Angel, in some clever way that involved as little personal risk as possible. Ethan would want to know why Giles hates Angel, and Giles is afraid that he would tell him. Ethan would insist on stripping him and looking at all the new scars, tracing them with the palms of his hands. Ethan can look at anything.
Giles could find Ethan tonight, get out of this bed that smells of flannel and sweat and get dressed and get on the telephone. He doesn't think Ethan would be that hard to find. But he won't.
Ethan would have a clever plan, and Giles is afraid he knows what it would be.
After all, it's not Angel's body that's vulnerable. All the torture Giles can imagine (or remember) would only be kicking a corpse. But there's a human soul trapped in that body, and there's one way to make it bleed.
And Ethan doesn't like Buffy at all.
Buffy. He stares at his own hands clenched around handfuls of blanket. He would believe he was damned for these thoughts, if he still believed in a God with the power to save or damn.
He doesn't want to think about what Ethan would do to her, but it's better than thinking about what he could do to her himself. His hands tying the blindfold around her eyes. Leading her to Angel's crypt, talking of training exercises, talking of nothing in particular, leading her by the hand. Tying her with the knots he learned in Boy Scouts. Tugging the blindfold off her eyes so she can see Angel already chained to the wall, gagged to keep him from warning her. Watching the look of horrified betrayal spread across her face.
"I just want you to know one thing," he would say to Angel before he starts. "That this is because of you."
Much later, after he finished by snapping her neck and laying her (ever so gently) on Angel's bed with her arms open in a lover's welcome, he would turn to Angel, showing him hands covered in blood. He would drink his fill of the horror in Angel's eyes before he staked him and stood shivering in the rain of dust.
And this is Buffy he's thinking about, and he hates Angel for making him think about her broken and bleeding at his hands. He allows himself that, to hate Angel quietly in the privacy of his own head. He seduced Buffy, and broke her heart, and if she didn't stop him when she could have, it's only to be expected.
Yes, she waited to stop him until after he killed Jenny and . . . hurt . . . Giles and then let that appalling Drusilla creature crawl through his head, but he isn't angry at her. He's sure he's not. He is her Watcher, a sacred trust he would never betray no matter how he has been betrayed himself. She is his Slayer.
He would die for her, and may yet. He would kill for her, and probably will.
He will almost certainly bury her, the price of being a Watcher. They never told him that as a child. You can save the world, and all you have to do is love a girl and watch her dying by inches.
And that's his cue to turn the light on, before he gives in to the tightness in his chest and winds up with red eyes and a headache that will last into the afternoon.
"Fiat lux," he murmurs, flicking on the lamp and groping for his glasses. "Let there be four a.m."
He goes to the kitchen to make a cup of tea; the whiskey bottle is tempting but he knows better than that, too. He puts four sugars in the tea and makes a face at the taste. He sits by the window with the drapes open wide and drinks the tea and waits for the sun to rise. He takes some comfort from the fact that so far, it always has.