Fic: Hard Decisions

[unfeathered]

I just realised the posting day for the Buffy/Doctor Who fic exchange over at sonic_hellmouth has past - and the fic I wrote is the first one up! You can visit it over there too - and I suspect the others will be well worth a look too. I'm looking forward to seeing what was written for me!

Title: Hard Decisions
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Doctor Who
Author: unfeathered
Characters: Rupert Giles, Ninth Doctor
Rating: G
Word Count: 1,508
Spoilers: Buffy: late season 5/Doctor Who: pre-season 1
Disclaimer: Not mine
Summary: Giles and the Doctor discover that though their worlds are very different, they both have very similar decisions to make.
Beta: the wonderful and very patient jadesfire2808
Author's Note: A gift for beatrice_otter for the Buffy/Doctor Who Crossover Ficathon over at sonic_hellmouth.
Prompt: Giles and the Doctor: How to Save the World.



"You see, the problem is," Giles admits, rubbing a hand over his eyes, glasses already removed and resting on the table between them. "The problem is we can't stop her. Glory. She's a Hellgod. No-one can stop her. None of us are strong enough to stop her."

The Doctor leans his chin on his hand and frowns into his beer. He's rather enjoying having the distraction of someone else's problem to solve. Even a Hellgod seems like small fry in comparison to hordes and hordes of Daleks. "But you use magic? It actually works?"

He's having a hard time with that, despite the fact that the first thing he saw when he stepped out of his TARDIS was Giles beating off said Hellgod with a whip that crackled golden power as he wielded it. Power that obviously wasn't anything as mundane as electricity, nor even the artron particles it resembled.

He'd hesitated, unsure who was the good guy and who was the bad guy, though the way Glory was stomping and crashing around, destroying anything within several feet, meant he hadn't been in doubt for long. A bit of jiggery-pokery with his sonic screwdriver, and he was soon joining in to drive off the evil bitch from Hell.

As a thank you, Giles had bought him a drink in the one bar in Sunnydale that served something resembling decent beer. They've spent an hour or so drinking and making small-talk, skirting the questions that arose from their encounter – what Glory was, what the TARDIS was, where the Doctor had come from.

The beer has gradually relaxed their inhibitions and now they're finally talking. Giles is going first because the Doctor asked first: he's seen Glory, seen what Giles is up against, and he's curious.

Giles puts his glasses back on and gives the Doctor a scathing look. "What did you think you were looking at there?"

The Doctor squirms a bit. "Dunno. But I've never come across magic that was actually magic and not some trick, or that couldn't be explained by science."

"I suppose one could explain magic by science," Giles muses, gazing into his pint. "I'm sure there is some literal explanation. I'm not a scientist, though. I just use it, and hope it works."

"It seemed to," the Doctor agrees, with a grin.

"It drove her off, yes. But we can't hold her off forever. We have something she wants, and she's getting closer to finding it."

"What is it?"

Giles sips his beer. "The Key. An ancient magical Key that will allow her to open the gateways between dimensions. She wants to go home."

"Is that so bad?" The Doctor shrugs. "Sounds like if she wants to go home, it'd be a good idea to let her."

Giles' lips tighten. "It's not that simple. It won't just open the gateway to her dimension. It'll open the gateways to all dimensions. They'll bleed into each other and there will be Hell on Earth."

The Doctor exhales slowly. "I see." He raises his eyebrows, eyes on Giles'. "Destroy the Key, then."

Giles meets his gaze, and there's a coldness and a weariness there that make the Doctor flinch, because he knows they're reflected in his own.

"Yes," Giles says slowly. "I'm starting to believe that that might be the only way to stop her. But it can never be anything but a last resort."

"What's the problem?"

Giles swallows slowly, takes his glasses off, cleans them and puts them back on again. His eyes eventually find the Doctor's again. "The Key is disguised as a young girl. The only way to destroy it is to kill her."

The Doctor whistles through his teeth, and looks down at his pint. He swallows hard, and says, voice trembling slightly, "Not an easy decision to make."

He tries to keep too much depth of understanding out of his voice, but Giles is hard to fool. "One you've got to make too?" he asks, voice unexpectedly gentle, and the Doctor has to fight from being overwhelmed by the sudden wave of emotion that crashes over him.

He nods, and doesn't look up from his beer.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" Giles asks.

He doesn't. He really doesn't. He's had a nice cosy hour or so where he's managed to forget about the massive decision hanging over him. The decision that will change the fate of Gallifrey – and the universe – forever.

But Giles has answered his questions, divulged his story, and he owes Giles at least a bit of an explanation in return. Even so, he begins with a bit of a tangent, because it's just too much to go straight into talking about destroying his home world.

"I'm an alien," he announces with a rather manic grin, to cover his awkwardness. Not that it does cover it, he knows that, but it's what he always does anyway.

"Oh, really?"

The Doctor was expecting a bit more disbelief than that, especially after his own incredulity over the magic stuff. "Yeah. Y'know that blue police box I arrived in? She's a time-travelling spaceship."

"Well, that makes a change," Giles says dryly. "The last alien we encountered was a creature from the moon. It comes after people who are mentally unstable. Most alarming, that was. It… sneezes over its victims."

The Doctor's eyebrows shoot up and he grins. "Snot monster. Sounds like fun."

Giles smiles back half-heartedly. "No, not really," he says tiredly, and raises his eyebrows. "So. You were saying…?"

The Doctor raises his eyes slowly to Giles' and says grudgingly, "There's this big war being fought by my planet. The Time War. We're fighting a race of aliens called the Daleks, which look sort of like giant pepperpots with a plunger on the front. It ought to be funny, but they're a lot more dangerous than they look. They're very efficiently rolling across the universe annihilating planets and civilisations and they have to be stopped."

Giles' lips twitch at the pepperpots description, but otherwise his gaze is steady, and apparently understanding.

"Can they be stopped?"

"We don't know. We've tried everything we can think of, except for our very last resort."

"Which is?" Giles whispers.

"Destroy my home planet. Wipe it out of time and space as if it never existed – and take the Daleks along with it."

He hears the words come out of his mouth, cold and unimpassioned. It's as if they're being spoken by someone else. He doesn't think he's actually said them out loud before.

Giles digests this for a moment. "That makes my problem seem rather insignificant in comparison."

The Doctor instantly shakes his head. "No. Killing anyone, one girl or an entire civilisation, is never, ever insignificant. It's the same decision. The scale's just different."

"Killing's never easy…" Giles echoes softly. "And killing someone you know…"

"You know this girl?" the Doctor cuts in, because he hadn't picked that up before.

"She's the sister of a close friend," Giles answers simply. "She's fourteen years old. She was created from a ball of energy, but she has the memories of a fourteen year-old girl, and she was implanted in our memories too. To all intents and purposes, she is Buffy's sister." He looks at the Doctor, eyes clear and grave. "They lost their mother recently. If Buffy has to lose Dawn too, it's going to devastate her."

The Doctor thinks about that for a moment, about families and destruction and doing what's right even when it hurts.

"I think your decision's actually harder than mine," he says eventually. "If I have to… execute this plan – " and that's a cruelly appropriate choice of word if ever there was one " – there won't be any of us left to mourn."

"That's one thing, then." Giles gives him a commiserating smile, then cocks his head to one side. "I don't suppose this Time War of yours will reset things so that Glory never came here?"

The Doctor shakes his head. "Sorry, it's a bit more complicated than that."

"Shame. It would be nice to rewind this last year."

The Doctor grimaces down into his beer. "Yeah. It would at that."

After a minute, Giles looks up at him with confusion in his eyes. "There's still one thing bothering me. Why did you come to Sunnydale?"

"Was looking for a decent pint."

"And you came to America?"

The Doctor shrugs. "Was aiming for England. TARDIS got pulled off course."

"Ah, the ever-reliable Hellmouth." Giles sighs. "Well, at least this time it attracted something good rather than evil. I'm glad it did."

The Doctor gives a rueful little smile. "Me too."

Giles pauses, then looks at him and raises his eyebrows. "Are you going to do it?"

The Doctor doesn't ask what he means; he doesn't have to. He just raises his own eyebrows and counters with, "Are you?"

"Let's just hope that neither of us has to," Giles says mildly.

"I'll drink to that," the Doctor smiles, and they raise their glasses in a commiseratory toast.