A Storm in a Broken Tea Cup.

There's no typical reaction to idiots in wrinkled coats announcing themselves to be Angels of the Lord, but the easiest one is to break out in giggles (drunken giggles, granted, but you deal with what you have).

"How stoned are you, and why didn't I get the good drugs?" Rupert asks. (Ripper. Ripper. The name is still new and unfamiliar, but a dozens time better than the one written in his passport.)

Thirty years later he won't be laughing like that anymore, not even when the same angel will show up in his hotel room and announce that the world is ending. Then, he'll just close his eyes and consider burrowing his head under the pillow for all the eternity.

"Again?" he'll ask.

The wings are quite impressive, he'll admit that much, but in his current state (slightly drunk and really, really stoned), they just make him laugh that much harder. Even giggle. (Something must be done about the giggling, someone who calls himself Ripper can't giggle. Cackle, maybe, but not giggle.)

"I'm pretty sure some demons have wings, too. Can't fly, the lot of them, of course. Like penguins they are."

Self-proclaimed angel doesn't look all that amused.

"Summoning demons is not what was planned for you."

What the hell do they know, anyway.

Thirty years, and fourteen world ends (give or take) later, the angel will tell him the Apocalypse is coming.

"Maybe it's for the better," he'll say, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The world is overrated, and destiny is a bitch, turning her back on him. Maybe that's because Giles betrayed her. And maybe it's not about destiny at all. "Besides, with my luck, you're going to turn out to be the First."

There's one easy way to disprove this hypothesis. Touch of an angel, he'd laugh, if his sense of humour wasn't buried somewhere in the ruins of the old Council, wasn't gone under the bodies of co-workers he mostly hated and a father he never really knew. He hadn't even been to the funeral, escaping the Bringers was a priority at the time.

"Almost like the old times," he'll say.

"You cared more, then."

After Randall's death, the angel will visit him one night (no matter how many times he repeates this in his mind, it doesn't stop sounding ridiculous).

"You could have told me," he says, yells, all the dramatic display not making him feel any better.

"Would you believe me?"

Thirty years later, and he still doesn't believe in much. In Buffy, still, despite everything, maybe. In inescapable end of the world. The whole debacle between heaven and hell doesn't matter in terms of faith and belief, not when you're standing on the edge of the hellmouth, and it's just about to open and swallow you whole.

"Maybe it's for the better," he'll say, a little bit later, when he's completely sure he's not talking to the First, and much less sure he's conversing with an actual angel. "There are better worlds."

"Every world we lose is a tragedy, is an end," the angel will say, and Giles will shake his head and roll his eyes. Angels turn out to be even more highfalutin than vampires, and he thought that impossible after Angel. Angel. Highfalutin. Ha.

"Why am I so important?" he asks, two days after Randall's death, when he's tired with anger and not anger. He doesn't have strenght even to open his eyes, much less move, even though the floor is hard and uncomfortable.

"You're not."

Apparently his father was damn right, thinks Rupert (not Ripper. Never again Ripper.)

"I'm going back to the Council," he says. To himself, since the angel is gone, having gotten what he came for, apparently. Never even introduced himself, arsehole.

Thirty years later, he'll feel the time wearing down his bones, slowly turning them into ash. The angel will look exactly the same, same wrinkled coat, even. Time doesn't matter, and if you ask Giles (always Giles now, all who knew Rupert are dead now), nothing else does either.

"Why don't you just skip talking to me and go straight to Buffy?" he will ask.

"She wouldn't listen."

He'll almost laugh.

He'll make tea, which the angel won't drink. Giles will think briefly, that if the heaven doesn't have tea, he'll have to reconsider opposing hell. Of course, with his luck, hell will only have Lipton in teabags.

The tea leaves in his cup will settle themselves into a winged shape. Cheap parlour tricks. When he'll look up with some disgust, the angel will be gone.