TITLE: Anchor (Part 5/16)
AUTHOR: Kerry Blackwell
PAIRING: Genfic - B/S and X/A as on the show
RATING: R
SPOILERS: Through "Wrecked" on Buffy and "Dad" on Angel
TIMELINE: Imagine it's about six weeks after those episodes and the ones we saw didn't happen.
DISCLAIMER: All things Buffy and Angel belong to Joss Whedon, the WB, UPN, FOX and Mutant Enemy and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. I own only my genius (yeah, right!)
DISTRIBUTION: My site - White Hats - http://www.whitehats.co.nz (as soon as I'm well enough to code it and upload it) Any one else please ask first
FEEDBACK: Yes please!
THANKS: To Sarah for her editing assistance, and to Sarah and Ang for being ready to brainstorm with me when I begged appropriately.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I started this after seeing "Wrecked" and "Dad". My take on what could have happened next. It got totally Jossed immediately of course and since it takes me a long time to write anything, it got more and more AU as time went by. I had hoped to post it in the break, before anything _more_ happened, but I didn't manage it. Anyway, here it is. Just forget what happened after those two episodes and read my version. Please...

"Grrrrrrrrr."

"Practising being a vampire, Willow?" Xander asked, even though he knew it wasn't one of his better jokes.

She didn't even look up from the laptop, keeping her fingers flying over the keys as she spoke.

"Very funny, Xander."

Buffy resettled Rupert better on her shoulder and looked at her friend. "What's with the growlies?" The baby finally burped and she lifted him with a firm grip under his armpits to dangle him in the air. "Who's my favourite boy, then?" she asked rhetorically, her voice unusually soft. "Dinner all gone down, huh, little man?" Rupert smiled at her, and promptly threw up. She managed to pull him down just in time for everything to land on the tea towel that was acting as a bib and not all over the floor.

"You shouldn't have shaken up his tummy," Dawn told her disapprovingly.

"Maybe not," Buffy agreed ruefully as she took Rupert over to the sofa to clean up the mess. "What have you found, Willow?"

"I haven't," Willow said crossly. "That's the trouble. Nothing. Nada. Absolutely zip."

Anya took her nose out of a bridal magazine for a moment. "Nothing?" she repeated. "Mothers are usually extremely protective of their children." She gave Xander a worried look. "Aren't they? I shall be."

Xander turned slightly green once more, but managed to nod. "Usually," he agreed briefly.

"Well, there's nothing," Willow repeated. " It's like he just appeared out of thin air."

"Is he human?" Anya asked abruptly.

Buffy set the now clean baby on her lap and grinned unexpectedly. "If his bodily functions are anything to go by, he's most definitely human. He doesn't set off my Slayer senses," she added more seriously. "Yeah, he's human."

"So why isn't anyone looking for him?" Dawn asked fretfully. "Someone should be. He needs his mom and dad. Don't they _care_?"

No-one saw the sudden cloud that crossed Buffy's face, or the way she held Rupert just a little tighter for a moment.

"Remember, you saved him from Harmony," Xander pointed out suddenly. "He might be human, but there's _something_ supernatural going on. Maybe his parents can't go to the police."

"Maybe," Willow agreed doubtfully. "I can keep looking, but there is _so much_ stuff on the 'Net these days that there could be whole websites about him and I'd still miss them because I don't know what to search for."

"So what do we do next?" Buffy asked into the depressed silence.

When no immediate answers were forthcoming, Anya went back to her magazine. Willow keep up her browsing and Xander went to look over her shoulder.

Dawn watched Buffy; watched the way she was playing with Rupert, watched the still, peaceful expression on her sister's face and almost said nothing. She wanted to keep him. She wanted to see Buffy look like that forever, not go back to the shell of a human being she had been before Rupert had come into her lives.

She really hated this growing up thing; responsibility kept getting in the way of doing what you wanted. And it wasn't right, the way she had been forced to try to be the responsible one because Buffy wouldn't be.

So she nearly stayed quiet.

Nearly.

"You should call Giles," she said quietly.

Buffy looked up to stare at her. "Huh?" she said intelligently.

"You should call Giles," Dawn repeated.

Buffy looked at her silently for a long, long moment. "Giles left me," she announced finally, her voice tight and angry. Hearing the emotion in her voice, Rupert whimpered, and her face eased immediately as she tried to soothe him.

"Giles left me," she said again, but her tone was much calmer.

"So you're going to go on being all grumpy and angry?" Dawn asked, weeks of pent up frustration spilling out with her words. "That's really mature. Giles left me so I can be all angry and rude to my friends and ignore my sister and beat up on Spike who only tries to help. Grow up, Buffy. I'm the kid here, I'm not supposed to have to be the grown up. And if you can't be a grown up, you really shouldn't be looking after a baby." Her gaze fell on Rupert and she felt some of the anger easing. "Giles is the research person," she said more softly. "Calling him is the grown up thing to do. Be grown up for once, Buffy. Please."

Buffy was looking flabbergasted. Rupert kept fussing, and for once Buffy failed to notice. Willow stood quietly and took the baby, and her friend barely seemed to register it. She was still staring at her little sister.

"When did you grow up, Dawnie?"

"When you were growing down," Anya interjected helpfully, and Xander pulled her to her feet and almost physically dragged her off to the kitchen.

Buffy looked guilty. "There's just been so much _stuff_ in my life," she whispered.

"Mine too," Dawn pointed out. "And Willow's. And everyone's. At least we _noticed_ you; you didn't notice us."

"Buffy had more," Willow whispered, her own guilt in her voice.

Buffy swallowed, looking back over the last months with newly opened eyes.

It had all been this huge, black and murky cloud that she had been stumbling blindly through. Dawn was right. She hadn't seen anyone else's problems; it took all her energy just to get up in the morning. She hadn't taken on her responsibilities; that meant making an unspoken acknowledgement to the future, and all she had wanted was the past. The peace and love and stillness she had lost.

She'd treated Giles like a convenience; there to solve her problems so she could ignore them and wallow in her pain. No wonder he'd left.

She treated Spike like a convenience; someone, something, to make her feel alive when she felt like her emotions were lost in the dark, behind a thick sheet of glass. And she had envied him because he was dead and she didn't want to be alive.

For the first time, she realised where part of his anger with her must come from. Not her treatment of him, her insults and cruelty; it was the way she rejected the gift that she had been given and he had been denied. She had been given a true second change at life after her death as he had not, and she had hated it.

Why had he stayed? Why did he put up with her when he could have gone too, just like Giles had?

She felt sick and selfish, and about four years old.

She looked at Rupert, starting to drowse in Willow's arms, and her spirits lifted marginally. There were good things in the world too; new beginnings and fresh sunrises and babies, and hopefully it was never too late to try again.

"I'll ring Giles," she agreed softly.

The old grandfather clock in hallway finished chiming midnight as Giles unlocked the door and let himself into the flat. He was feeling pleasantly unwound, the after-effect of several beers downed at the local pub in friendly company.

Peter Carstairs was an old study-mate from his Oxford days – on his second and more successful enrolment. Giles had been amazed to bump into him while walking home from a consultancy visit at the Bath Museum that morning. They couldn't have seen each other in over twenty years, and their only contact in that time had been the odd Christmas Card. It had been a miracle they even recognised each other.

Carstairs had insisted Giles join him and his wife for dinner at a local restaurant. They had finished up at the nearby pub, downing the local ale and catching up on a lot of years.

Giles felt his answers had been short and uninformative, but Carstairs didn't appear to notice. He just filled up the conversation gap himself while his wife, Emily, sipped her wine and watched him with an amused expression on her face that suggested this was normal conversational practice for him.

It had felt odd, to be talking to someone who had no idea such bogeymen as vampires and demons and ghosts really existed. Odd, but pleasant.

Maybe he should try looking up some other old acquaintances, he reflected as he locked the door behind himself and slung his leather jacket on the coat rack in the hallway alcove. Or even attempt making some new ones. There was no rule that said his self-imposed exile should be lonely and friendless.

Tonight had been a good start, and he made himself a promise to himself not to let it be a once-off experience. Peter Carstairs lived less than fifty miles away and he had insisted Giles must come and visit with him and Emily. There were cousins and aunts and uncles and other members of his own family he had ignored for far too long and should make the effort to reconnect with.

The problem was that he had invested so much of himself in those five years in Sunnydale, that now, back home in England, he didn't quite know how to get all of himself back in his own possession again. If Buffy needed to find her anchor, so did he need to find his. A new one, here in England, that wasn't a petite blonde who drove him crazy as often as she made him so proud he felt he might burst with it. So far, nothing had proved even remotely strong enough.

He flicked off the hall lamp and was about to head for the kitchen and make himself a hot chocolate when he saw the light was flashing on the answering machine.

He had finally reached the point where he didn't need to get out the instruction manual to figure out how the stupid thing worked. Now, he found himself automatically cleaning his glasses as the tape rewound, wondering who had called him.

Somehow, he wasn't surprised when he set the message playing and heard Buffy's voice coming through the cheap little speaker.

"Hey, Giles. I… I guess you're out, huh? Stupid, of course you're out or I wouldn't be talking to a machine."

Giles couldn't help but smile. That was pure, vintage Buffy and he found his pulse racing as he waited to hear what she would say next. Would the speaker be Buffy or the wounded, petulant child he had left behind in America, shouting angry words after him as he left her to sink or swim?

"It's, um… three in the afternoon here. I have no idea what time that is for you. Sorry." There was a pause and he heard some mumbling in the background. "Oh, Willow says it's 11pm. She looked it up on the computer. I guess you're out living it up or something, right?"

Another voice in the background. Giles guessed it was Xander, but he couldn't hear what the young man was saying.

"Yeah, yeah, all right," Buffy mumbled. "Xander's telling me to get to the point." She hesitated, and when she spoke again her voice was clear, calm and collected.

"Giles, we have a situation here and we kind of need your help. We've been doing the research thing ourselves, but we're not getting very far and…" She broke off again, speaking to someone in the background, and this time he could hear what she was saying, even if it didn't make any kind of sense.

"Dawn, can you get Rupert more milk? I left his bottle on the table. Remember to warm it up."

Giles blinked, wondering if he was the one who had just gone insane, or if it was Buffy and the pressure had finally broken her completely.

There was a grumble in the background that grew louder as the speaker got closer to Buffy and the phone. "Yeah, yeah." A second later, Dawn's voice called cheerfully, "Hi, Giles!" followed by a scuffle as Buffy reclaimed the telephone.

"That was Dawn," she told him unnecessarily. "Anyway, about our problem. Giles, I staked Harmony Kendall the other night. She had a baby with her, and she was talking about auctioning him off to the highest bidder. I rescued him. Dawn's just getting him some more milk. He seems to like that better than formula."

Buffy had saved a _baby_? And she'd called him _Rupert_? Giles found himself laughing, the sound echoing strangely in the hallway.

"Anyway," Buffy continued, "we can't find out who he really is. He's human, but there are no missing persons reports on him or anything like that. Harmony had him, so we figure there's a supernatural connection, but we can't find it. We're kind of stuck."

Buffy's voice grew a little less certain. "So, Giles, when you get this, could you give us a call or something? Even if you can just give us an idea what to try next, that would be cool. And – hey!"

There was a sudden clatter of sound and Dawn's voice came on the line. "Come home, Giles. Please. We need you."

"Dawn!" Giles heard Buffy hiss in the background, and then she was the one speaking again.

"I… Giles, I want you to come home, too." Her voice firmed up again. "But I'm not going to ask you. I'm going to stand on my own feet like you said. So please, give me a call when you get this."

She didn't say anything else. The tape hissed as it rolled forward, but there was only silence, not the beep for the end of the message.

Finally, Buffy spoke again, her voice barely above a whisper.

"And Giles… I'm sorry. For everything, I'm sorry." There was a short, ironic laugh. "I have absolutely no idea how to fix it, but I'm sorry."

There was another moment's silence, then a click as she hung up, followed at last by the beep of the machine.

Giles stood in the dim hallway, his mind reeling. He tried to imagine Buffy caring for a baby and failed miserably. He had much better success picturing Buffy staking Harmony, who had been an annoying high school student and an even worse vampire.

Despite the fragmented nature of the phone call, he'd felt like he'd been listening to the Buffy he remembered. Perhaps not the unexpectedly mature woman she'd become before she jumped to her death, but Buffy all the same, rather than the walking zombie he'd reluctantly left behind in Sunnydale.

Hard as it was, tough a way to love as it had been, he was sure he'd been right to leave. Or less wrong than if he'd stayed, at least. He remembered Buffy's words, tempted to rewind the tape and listen to them again.

_ Giles, I want you to come home, too. But I'm not going to ask you. I'm going to stand on my own feet like you said._

He found himself smiling slowly, that feeling of pride in her returning.

When you've made up your own mind to walk again, there's nothing wrong with having a strong hand waiting to steady you if you need it.

While he couldn't immediately come up with any reasons why vampires might be planning to auction a human baby, he could think of a few places it probably hadn't occurred to the gang to look. He'd make that return phone call to Buffy.

But before that he had to book the first available seat back to Sunnydale.

_Because,_ he half-seriously rationalised as he tracked down the airline's twenty-four hour number, _I have to meet a baby called Rupert. Just to check he's holding up the dignity of our name._

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