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Part 6
Gabriel clambered over a pile of unstable rubble and hopped to the ground on the other side. The sub-train car had stopped automatically at an old, unused depot. Exiting the depot, he had climbed a metal ladder up to a well-concealed exit hole. Climbing out onto the surface, he was reminded that nowhere in this cursed future lent itself to peaceful contemplation. The land here looked the same as everywhere else, blasted and ruined, with what appeared to be the remains of a city nearby. It had fallen into ruin long ago, by the look of things.
All of the taller buildings had been obliterated and most of the smaller ones were buried in mountains of broken glass and rubble. Some of the streets were still passable, however, having been cleared out gradually over the years. He had no idea where he was going, he just wanted to get away. One direction seemed as good as the next. He followed one of the streets further into the city, morbidly fascinated by the skeletal remains of the once teeming metropolis. At times, Gabriel's keen ears and sharp eyes caught signs of the city's inhabitants, some human, some not. They moved furtively through the gloom, scurrying away at the first sign of his approach, like rats.
Gabriel drew one of his pistols and held it cautiously close to his body as he walked. He caught the eye of a pitiful creature as it dug through the refuse and it froze, fearfully, before disappearing into the darkness. He shook his head sadly. It made his heart ache to see that much of the human race had been reduced to derelicts and scavengers, consumed by despair and living in perpetual darkness.
A wave of familiarity washed over him and he stumbled with the force of it. It was similar to the feeling he had gotten when he had first seen Alex or Buffy only it was easily ten times more powerful. What could set off such a reaction? A shiver ran up his spine as he ventured a guess. He could feel the source of the sensation hidden somewhere in the rubble.
Gabriel slid down a steep piece of upturned pavement in a cloud of dust and clattering rocks and landed roughly on his feet. No more than a hundred feet ahead of him was the broken stub of a building that had once been quite tall and extravagant. The top portion had been ripped away, as if by some careless giant's fist, and the walls were cracked and crumbling. Shards of stained glass littered the ground. It was the church from his dream. Closing his eyes, he sensed the source of the strange sensation inside the building, a presence that was both familiar and frightening.
Gabriel's chest tightened in anxiety and his right leg started to throb with dull pain. Readying his weapon, he crept forward quietly, circling the building. The regular entrances to the building were blocked by rubble and debris, but he spotted an opening in the side wall.
Gabriel ducked through the opening and crept into the interior of the ruined building. Inside, it was dark and gloomy, but most of the debris had been cleared away and there were a few pieces of salvageable furniture arranged around the large central chamber. A broken staircase led up to what had once been another floor, but most of the upper level had collapsed, leaving only a small landing.
"Hello?" he called into the emptiness, feeling the presence closer than ever now.
"Who are you?" a voice growled irritably from the landing.
Gabriel whirled around, hopping back toward the broken wall, and brought both pistols up. A weathered old man crouched on the edge of the landing, peering down at him suspiciously. He recognized the man immediately and his leg gave another peculiar throb.
"Just a wanderer." Gabriel answered, slowly lowering his weapons, wondering if the man recognized him, as well.
"There's no one here but me." The old man pulled himself back away from the edge, eyeing the young man suspiciously. "I'm a wanderer, myself. And I don't like visitors."
"I noticed." Gabriel opened his arms in a non-threatening posture and advanced slowly. "I'm sorry if I woke you, Wanderer, but I need to talk to you."
The gray haired man fumbled inside the bundle of rags he wore and quickly produced a scuffed and battered pistol. "Not one step further." He aimed the weapon at Gabriel's midsection.
"You're going to kill me just for waking you up?" Gabriel frowned, raising his hands slowly into the air.
His Second Sight revealed an aura of shimmering green and gold light rays around the man. Every living person's aura was unique, like a fingerprint, and Gabriel shuddered as he knew, without a doubt, that he would see the same gold and green light rays if he looked into a mirror. He finally knew what had happened to his future self. Peter's seventh son.
The man's gray hair hung to his shoulders in a wispy and disheveled mass and his clothes were little more than a collection of dirty rags. His bloodshot eyes were sunken and rimmed with dark circles and his jaw was outlined with patchy, gray whiskers. With a shudder that confirmed his suspicions, Gabriel noted that the man's irises were green with a tiny halo of gold. Just like his own.
"I've killed for less. But you didn't wake me." The old man kept the pistol trained on him, "Sleep and I had a little falling out years ago and since then, we don't see each other much. Sit down."
Gabriel hooked the leg of a rickety chair with his toe and pulled it over, carefully keeping his hands in plain view. "So are you going to shoot me or not?" he asked conversationally, easing down into the chair.
"I might." The old man's voice carried a steely edge.
Gabriel sighed to himself and lowered his hands, absently fingering a small splinter that was sticking out of the arm of the chair. "Then I guess you should know that the firing mechanism on that gun is broken off."
The vagabond allowed his arm to fall to his side. "Yeah, I know." He admitted with a sigh, letting the pistol clatter to the floor. "The PL-55 isn't state of the art anymore, but it does the job in keeping the rabble away." He regarded Gabriel for the first time without a clouding veneer of anger. "You've got guts, kid. What's your name?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you." He answered, a knot of anxiety turning in his stomach.
"Try me." His older self challenged, "I'm pretty perceptive sometimes."
"Why don't you come down here so we can talk face to face?" Gabriel asked him.
"And walk right into your trap?" the man cackled madly, "Forget it, I wasn't born yesterday!"
"I could shoot a hole through you at any time." Gabriel assured him, patting one of the guns at his waist, "If I wanted you dead, you would be."
The old man shrugged, unconcerned, and climbed stiffly down a rope which hung from the landing for just such a purpose. "Why do you want to talk to me?" He asked as he lowered himself to the floor. Gabriel noted that he limped a little, on his right side, "I don't talk to people from around here. But you're not from around here, are you?"
"No, I'm not." Gabriel shook his head, "That's why I need your help."
"Oh, you need my help, do you?" the old man crowed to himself, "First you just want to talk, but now you want my help. I've got to warn you, kid, my help doesn't come cheap."
Gabriel's eyes narrowed and his fists clenched around the arms of his chair. He was beginning to see why Angel had hated him so much. "I'm getting real tired of this little verbal dance, old man." He growled, "Look at me. I mean really LOOK at me and you'll know why I'm here."
The old beggar narrowed his eyes shrewdly and stared intently at Gabriel. The young man recognized the look of concentration and knew that he was focusing the Second Sight.
"I know who you are. I KNOW who you are!" he bounced to his feet and stumbled with his slight limp, leaping forward and grabbing Gabriel's chair by the arms.
He leaned forward, his weathered, dirty face a mask of intensity. Gabriel recoiled a little from the crude brutishness of the man. The stink of him was purely offensive. Beneath the matted, dirty, gray locks and filthy brows, the man's scrutinizing eyes danced with a wild light.
"Good." Gabriel gasped a little around the stink, "Now maybe we can get somewhere."
"How?" his older self asked, backing off a little in shock, at a loss for further words.
"I'm not really sure myself." Gabriel answered, more comfortable now with the distance between them, "Needless to say, I'm here."
"So then why are you HERE?" his chin jutted in challenge. He had that wild look in his eyes again.
Gabriel sighed roughly in frustration. The man's misplaced paranoia was getting annoying.
"You're wearing a Resistance uniform. Did they send you?" the elder threw his head back with a bitter smile, "I thought those tired old fools would have given up looking for me by now." Gabriel noted how he edged subtly closer to the exit hole in the wall.
"They did. A long time ago. They think you're dead. Up until now, so did I." He assured his older self. "I just had to get away from there for a while."
"Had a bit of a problem, did you?" Old Gabriel stopped moving toward the doorway and folded his arms across his chest with a smirk, "I see the atmosphere at the base hasn't changed much."
"I saw this place in a dream." Young Gabriel murmured, looking all around him, "but it was different."
"The Saint Peter's church has always been a safe place for me." A peculiar glint appeared in his bloodshot eyes, "Maybe our meeting was supposed to happen."
Gabriel didn't answer, shifting uncomfortably from side to side, watching his elder self.
"You're disappointed, aren't you?" Old Gabriel read his face plainly, "I guess I don't blame you."
"I need answers." Gabriel regarded the older man seriously. "I have to know what happened. Why did you leave them?"
"You really don't know, do you?" the old beggar sneered at him. When Gabriel didn't answer, he started pacing a wide circle around his younger self.
"I guess they don't even talk about me, huh?" he snorted, "Like they can erase me from existence just by pretending. Idiots."
He continued to walk in circles, muttering to himself under his breath, apparently carrying on both sides of a conversation.
Gabriel cleared his throat, interrupting the man's self-absorbed yammerings. "I thought you were going to tell me why you left."
The old man stopped in mid step, once again aware of Gabriel's presence.
"They never knew, but the Emperor wasn't the one who brought the demons to earth." He said, his voice heavy with guilt. "It was me. I went back and used the Sword of Seals to open the Hellmouth."
The last of the fog that had clouded Gabriel's memory since he had arrived in this time period lifted and a burst of memories flooded his mind.
"You went back for HIM, didn't you? You wanted to save Father." Gabriel remembered fighting the Kevares demon alongside Buffy in the mayor's office, but there were two separate memories of how the battle ended in his mind. In the first, his father had been dragged through the portal by the dying demon, just as he had remembered before he had invoked the gypsy spell. There was a second, however, where Gabriel had rescued the Sword of Seals and used it to reopen the portal and rescue his father. Both seemed equally real in his mind.
"Yes." The elder Seventh Son nodded, recognizing the revelation his other self was experiencing, and eased down to sit on the dirty floor. "But something went wrong. The Hellmouth didn't close. I was so concerned with getting out of there before anyone found us that I didn't even notice. I took him to a privately purchased property in Eastern Canada, so that no one would ever find us. Two months later, the first attacks began and the war started."
"So you - I - am the reason for all this?" Young Gabriel drew in a deep breath and released it slowly. His heart thumped painfully in his chest as the realization set in. "It's all my fault?"
"All OUR fault." The old man clarified, "Now do you understand why I'm not the man you hoped I would be?"
"I'm beginning to." He sat down across from his older self, "The files I read on you said you joined the Resistance. But not until thirteen years later. Where were you all that time?"
"Peter was very ill." The grizzled old man shook his head sadly, "Time in the Hellmouth works much faster than here. He was only in there for less than a day in our time, but, to him, it was more like a year. His mind was . . . not well."
"And you stayed to care for him." Gabriel reasoned, knowing that he would have done the same thing. "But why didn't you join the Resistance and take him with you? He would have been taken care of there."
"It didn't take long for me to figure out how the demons had gotten through. I lied to myself, pretended that it would all go away soon." The elder relaxed into the tale, having committed every moment of it to painstaking memory. "Then, as the war dragged on, I thought of it as someone else's responsibility. After that, I told myself that they just didn't need me. Truthfully, I was just afraid. I didn't want them to find out what I did. Especially her."
"Buffy." He nodded, knowing again how his other self would think, "So what made you finally join?"
"When Father died, it was almost like the past had gone with him. I felt like I had a clean slate again. I'd been following the movements of the Resistance through news reports and pirated communications signals for years. I decided it was time to take a more active roll. I almost didn't make it, though. I remember approaching the central office in Washington and I was so nervous that I almost turned and ran. Imagine it, thirty two years old and I was about to run away from a building."
"What stopped you?"
"It probably sounds like the foolish meanderings of a senile old man, but it was her." his eyes grew wistful and the seemingly perpetual scowl that was etched into his features lifted. "I thought of her and it gave me the strength to go on. She recognized me instantly when they took me to her. She plowed right through a nest of armed bodyguards and threw her arms around me. After that, I had no doubts. I joined the Resistance."
"But you left again two years later? Why?"
"You don't miss a trick, do you, kid?" the old man smirked, "I thought I had forgotten my guilt, sent it to the grave with my father. But every time I saw someone die, or heard of the destruction the demon army was causing, I secretly blamed myself."
"Like when your squad was ambushed."
The elder Gabriel's eyes clouded with remembered pain.
"That was the beginning of the end for me." He said, "I came face to face with the Emperor for the first time since his Ascension. He had a new friend with him. She killed every one of them right in front of me and then shattered my leg. Oz's Blue Squadron barely got me out of there in one piece."
"The Emperor's friend? Fides?" Gabriel guessed.
"That's what they call her now, but she used to have a different name." the elder arched a scruffy eyebrow, "How well do you remember your Latin?"
"Fides?" Gabriel whispered softly, "Fides means . . . Faith."
"The Emperor shared the secrets of his Ascension with her." He nodded thoughtfully, "I don't think anyone else even knows who she really is. Or was."
He pawed around inside his tattered shirt and found a flat, metal flask and uncorked it. Pressing the neck of it to his lips, he quickly tipped it back and took a swallow.
"I started volunteering for every mission that came up, taking greater and greater risks. I was looking for Fides, to avenge my teammates. Or maybe I was hoping that the demons would kill me because I was too afraid to do it myself. Who knows?" he continued, "Buffy knew something was wrong with me, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her. When Uncle Rupert died, it was just too much. I disappeared without a word to anyone. I figured that everyone would be better off with me out of the way. I had planned to kill myself. Instead I started drinking. The rest, as they say, is history."
"So then Angel was right." Gabriel looked at him, crestfallen. "You are a coward."
"He WOULD say something like that." The old man spat bitterly, "Self-righteous bastard. What were you expecting? You, of all people, should mind what you say. In the same circumstances you would have done the same thing. In fact, you already have."
"No!" Gabriel jumped to his feet, angrily, "I would have tried harder. I would have done SOMETHING to help. Anything, instead of burying my head in the sand and drinking my life away!"
"What's the matter Gabriel? You wanted to see your future and here it is." The old man raised the flask to him in a sarcastic toast, "You're not a hero. You're just a pathetic drunk."
"It doesn't have to be this way." He shook his head sadly, feeling disappointment and pity for his older self. "Come back with me. You can redeem yourself."
"Why should I?" he sneered caustically, standing and turning his back on Gabriel, "My life is already over. Go back to your Resistance buddies and leave me alone."
"Do it for her." Young Gabriel pleaded, "If you don't care about yourself, then do it for Buffy."
The old man stood perfectly still and silent for a long moment, his arms crossed around his torso, hugging himself against some unbearable pain.
"Before you showed up here, I hadn't thought of her in years." He explained in a low voice, "But there was a time when I could think of nothing else. This place used to be special for us in its better days, you know. I used to dream that we'd be married here."
"You know that she's . . . " Gabriel's voice trailed off. He wondered if the news might be enough to send the unstable man over the edge for good.
"Dead?" he cocked a wry eyebrow, peering back over his shoulder. "Yeah, I know. When it happened, I thought I was too drunk to feel anything, but I was wrong. We had a special connection, she and I. The pain came out of the night and hit me like a comet. I spent the next two hours screaming and vomiting. Not that that was anything new to me, of course. Look, kid, you're barking up the wrong tree. Go away."
The old man still didn't want to help. Gabriel found it so frustrating. How could he have become so callous? But Gabriel still had one more card to play.
"Did you know that she had a daughter?" Gabriel asked seriously, watching the man for some sort of reaction.
"A. . .daughter?" the old man turned around and froze. "Who . . . ? Who is . . . the father?"
"Do you have to ask?" Gabriel folded his arms across his chest, mirroring his older self, "She's almost twenty. Do the math."
The elder unfolded his arms, his face stricken, and reached his hands out to grasp the shoulders of his younger self.
"I-I didn't know." He whispered, his throat tight, "How could I have?"
"Now will you come back with me?" he took the old man's hand, seeing a tiny glimmer of change in him, "We're staging a raid on the Tower. We have a plan, but it's dangerous. They've developed a bomb that might be powerful enough to close the Hellmouth for good."
The older man's eyes narrowed and he rubbed his grizzled chin, deep in thought.
"Sounds dangerous." He considered, "Too dangerous. But there might be another way."
"What?" Young Gabriel asked, confused.
"I'll go with you." The elder asserted, "But we have to make a side trip first."
The young man checked his watch, "The squadrons leave in less than an hour. We have to get back soon."
Gabriel's older self smiled, a glint of strength in his eyes. "Trust me, it will be worth it."
Darlene entered the loading area's antechamber with Alex's newly-repaired helmet under her arm. Most of Red Squadron had already outfitted themselves and moved on to the sub-train bay, but Alex had stayed behind, waiting.
"Here, " Darlene smiled, tossing the helmet to her friend, "Marcus wanted me to remind you to duck next time."
Alex caught the helmet easily and sat it face down in her lap.
"Thanks, " she smirked, running her fingertips over the back of the helmet. Marcus was an amazing technician. There wasn't even a trace of the crack that had been there. "I'll try and remember that." She noticed a strange, wide-barreled handgun hooked into Darlene's belt. "What's that?"
Darlene hoisted the pistol in her hand proudly. It looked heavy despite it's small size.
"The latest in trial-wear." She beamed, admiring the weapon, "A hand-held grenade launcher. I've only got a few shells, but it should really pack a wallop when we need it."
"Good." Alex said as Darlene hooked the gun back into her belt, "I have a feeling we're going to need all the firepower we can get."
"Speaking of which," Darlene quirked a crooked smile, "where has our lovable sharpshooter gotten himself off to?"
"No one's seen him for hours." Alex shrugged to herself as she slipped on her helmet and tightened the strap, "I wonder what happened?"
Darlene sat down on the bench beside her and laid a consoling hand on her shoulder. "He'll be here, Alex. I promise. You've got to keep your mind focused on the mission. This is the big one, remember? Trust me, he'll be here."
Darlene was right, Alex realized. She couldn't afford to get distracted at a time like this. With the scope of the mission they were about to undertake, one man could hardly make a difference.
"It's almost time to leave." Darlene noted, checking her watch, "We should get out there before they take a head count. Don't want Head Director Angel getting pissed at us, do you?" She smirked devilishly to herself. "Though I wouldn't be too upset if he had to punish me. You think he's into spanking?"
"Do you ever get your mind out of the gutter?" Alex shook her head softly in bemused exasperation, "Let's go."
They stood and went out through the sliding hydraulic door into the wide launch bay. The last members of Gold Squadron were just loading themselves into a sub-train car. The car's motor roared loudly as it rumbled into the traffic tube and disappeared into the darkness. One more car slid into the empty space behind it and the door hissed slowly open.
Head Director Angel watched the proceedings grimly, his dark, brooding eyes missing nothing. Alex felt him watching her as she entered the room. Oz and Willow were there too, as they always were before she and Darlene went out on a mission. The rest of her squad stood off to one side in a small group, anxiously looking back and forth amongst themselves. The question on their minds was the same as the one on hers. Where was Gabriel?
"We can't afford to wait any longer." Director Angel announced darkly, "Red Squadron, load up. You'll have to do without him."
Darlene and her teammates filed slowly into the car and took their seats, leaving only Alex behind.
"Wait," Alex protested desperately, stubbornly refusing to board the car, "He'll be here. I know it."
Willow looked to her adopted daughter with a mixture of sadness and compassion in her eyes. Beside her, her husband pursed his lips and looked down at the floor in disappointment, his shoulders sagging in defeat. They had both hoped things would have been different this time.
"Gabriel isn't coming back, Alexandra." Angel informed her with deadly earnest. "He's gone AWOL. He abandoned everyone. Again."
"Again?" she pursed her lips, a dull ache tightening in her chest.
"There's no time to worry about it now." He placed his hand on her back and turned her toward the sub-train car, "This mission is too important."
She allowed herself to be ushered forward, her mind whirling in rapid thought.
"But he wouldn't DO this." She insisted, hesitating in the doorway, "I know him."
Angel stood outside the door, his face a mask of stone.
"No. You don't." he stated grimly, pressing the button to close the door and stepping back.
The door shut with chilling finality and the car's engine roared to life. Angel, Willow and Oz watched as the car disappeared into the transit tunnel and was gone.
"I thought things would be different this time." Oz's gravelly voice was heavy with regret, "He was like his old self again. I was sure it would be different this time."
Willow wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head sadly against his shoulder.
"It's not your fault, Oz." She stroked her hand along his shoulder, "Sometimes these things just happen."
Angel folded his arms tightly across his chest, his eyes narrow and dark.
"It just goes to show you." He grumbled bitterly, "History repeats."
The two men, one old and the other young, picked their way through another ruined sector of the city. The younger tried his best to keep up with his older self on the uneven ground.
"Where exactly are we going, Gab-?" Gabriel paused as he clambered over an unsteady pile of rubble, frowning. "What should I call you?"
The old man smirked at his dilemma.
"You might as well call me Wanderer." He said, "That's all anyone around here has known me as for the last twenty years anyway."
"All right . . . Wanderer." Gabriel nodded thoughtfully.
"Come on, it's not much farther." Wanderer urged insistently, "This way. This way."
As their detour got further underway, the old man was becoming more and more driven, pressing selflessly forward, his limp becoming less and less pronounced.
"We really should hurry." Gabriel checked his watch again nervously. The mission had been scheduled to launch in less than twenty minutes. Hopefully, they wouldn't be too angry with him if he arrived late.
"I TOLD you, this will be worth it." His elder self assured him, "Trust me."
They approached a particularly wasted area, dominated mainly by a shattered metal statue. It stood over thirty feet tall, its head and one arm broken off and its torso twisted and bent. A scorched plaque at the base of the statue identified it as a memorial of some sort, but most of the words had been scored beyond recognition and Gabriel could not read the name.
"Come here." Wandered beckoned, standing next to a towering pile of broken stone and metal. "Help me move this."
"This!" Gabriel exclaimed. "There must be a ton of rock there!"
"Keep your head on straight, kid." Wanderer gripped a large stone and pulled on it, rolling it away from the pile. "We only have to clear away the front. It won't take long."
Gabriel hooked his fingers into a conglomeration of cinder blocks and strained to lift it, tugging it back, clear of the pile. Within a few minutes, they uncovered something. It was the head of the statue, turned on its side. The face was that of an older man, perhaps in his early thirties, with a kind, open expression and a well-groomed tracing of beard around his jaw. Its features were battered and dented from years of neglect, but its identity was unmistakable. Gabriel had seen that face before, in the memorial room at the Resistance base.
"Xander." Gabriel stared at it in awe.
"Yeah," Wanderer commented shortly, seeming unable to look at its unblinking, unseeing eyes, "They put it up just after he got elected to the senate, but the demons trashed it a few months later in an attempt to break his influence on the people. I think it actually bolstered his position."
He got down on his hands and knees and reached under the head, into a narrow space formed between its cheek and the ground. Stretching, he closed his fingers around something and withdrew it.
"Ah," he smiled to himself, holding a small metal object up in front of his eyes, "Right where I left it."
Gabriel knelt to get a better look at the object. It looked like a bladeless sword made of bronze.
"Is-is that what I think it is?" he asked reverently.
"The Sword of Seals." Wanderer answered, "I hid it here before I went to Washington and joined the Resistance. I was afraid someone would recognize it and connect me to the Hellmouth. I'm kind of glad now that I was too superstitious to destroy it."
"If we can close the Hellmouth, the war will be over." Gabriel rose quickly, "Come on, we have to get back to the central base before they launch the mission."
"No time." Wanderer slipped the Sword into his tattered coat. "We'll have to try and meet up with them at the Tower. You came out here by sub-train, didn't you? If we can get to the tube in time, we should be able to catch them."
"Let's go."