Title: The Assistant 26/?
Author: Sweetdoggie
Email: (stirling_summer@yahoo.com)
Pairing: B/G
Rating: G
Summary: Buffy goes to college, Giles screws up.
Spoilers: Up to 4
Disclaimer: No permission has been granted to use the characters. They are owned by their creator, Joss Whedon, Twentieth Century Fox, UPN, WB, and Mutant Enemy. This story is non-profit and is intended solely as entertainment. No copyright infringement is intended.

Buffy was so mad, she was surprised smoke wasn’t coming from her ears. How dared he! She had placed her heart and her future in his hands and he was embarrassed by it. Was he ashamed of her? She was young, a great deal younger than him, but she had never let that bother her. He was her destiny and she accepted that. Now, suddenly, everything looked different. Maybe he didn’t want her anymore. Had it always been just sex with him? Was she just a conquest? She shook her head and tried to turn such foolish thoughts away. They shared the bond, she knew it was true. In fact, she had seen the evidence today when he had jealously demanded that she drop the class Riley worked in.

She didn’t know what to do. If he wanted her to come home, he was going to have to do some pretty fancy footwork to make up for this gigantic blunder. She walked down the street, heading for one of Sunnydale’s many cemeteries. It was still daylight and much too early for the undead to be roaming about, but she spent a good deal of her time in places like this and found it peaceful and soothing to walk amongst the grave stones.

She read the names on the stones as she walked along, wondering how many of them had died of natural causes. Here was one; Kelly O’Brien, Beloved Father, born 1918, died, 1988, or the companion grave, Jennette O’Brien, Dear Mother, born 1922, died, 1994. These people were almost incomprehensibly old when they died, she thought. She would never know the pain of old age, of feeling her body slow down, the thousand tiny aches that never exactly went away. Her hair would never turn gray, her eyes and hearing would never dim; her fate was to die young. She had come to terms with it, but sometimes it still saddened her.

She knew Merrick grieved occasionally for his lost strength and youth. If he hadn’t been so badly injured, she would now be married to a man forty years older than her. She would never have known Giles, never have loved him. Merrick wouldn’t have been ashamed of his young bride no matter what people said about them.

She wondered, if when she died, Giles would remarry? He would grieve, she knew, but you couldn’t live for decades in mourning. Life would go on. In a year, the pain of her passing would be fading, in two years, he wouldn’t think of her regularly anymore. In three years, he would look back and smile softly at the happy memories of times long gone. His friends would keep trying to fix him up with some woman they thought would be suitable and eventually he would give in and date one or two. He would be surprised to find out that he enjoyed being with one of them. In six months or so, he might ask her to marry him and then all the relics of his life with Buffy would be boxed away in tissue paper. In thirty or forty years he would die and strangers would come and look at his cherished keepsakes. They would wonder who the pretty blonde girl in the pictures was and would be surprised to find out that old Rupert Giles had been married once before.

Her thoughts depressed her. Maybe the cemetery hadn’t been the best place to think things through. She got up and debated about where to go. Maybe she should head back to the campus. The student union was open till midnight as was the library should she get some inexplicable urge to study. She broke into a jogging lope that took her back to campus in less than half an hour.

Perhaps she would work out for a while, that usually made her feel better. She went to her locker in the gym and pulled on a pair of sweats before heading over to the weight machines. She set them at one hundred pounds, too light for her really, but she couldn’t afford to draw questions about her unusual strength. Three thousand reps later, even her arms were quivering with fatigue. She set about doing leg lifts and assorted curls and managed to pass another two hours. The ribs she had broken the previous evening started aching and she decided that she had done enough. After a long cool shower, she was nearly ready to head home.

Buffy didn’t feel like walking anymore. She was tired and had a headache and just wanted to sleep, but hell would freeze over before she called Rupert to come pick her up. Thinking for a few minutes she made her way to a pay phone and called Xander.

“Hey, Buffy. What’s up?” her friend asked.

“Are you busy, Xand?”

“No. Just debating on whether I wanted to go Bronzing tonight. How about you?”

“Oh, long story, but I’m mad at Giles and I kinda need a ride home from college. I was wondering if you could come get me?”

“Sure, no problem. I hope you and Giles make up, though. Whatever the problem is, I’m sure you guys can work through it.” He told her he’d pick her up next to the Student Union in twenty minutes.

Buffy ambled over and waited under the clock tower. Xander arrived a little while later and she got in his car. “I’m not really sure I want to go home yet.”

He asked what had happened and she told him about Olivia and his denial of their marriage. “Wow, that’s really harsh.”

“So, I’m not being unreasonable here?” Buffy wondered.

“Nooo,” he said hesitantly, “But you should probably cut him a little slack. He really didn’t mean to hurt you, I’m sure.”

“Am I so awful that my husband should be embarrassed by me?”

“No! You know you’re not. If he didn’t have age issue things going on, I’m sure he would have loved to introduce you as his wife.”

“It wasn’t like all this was my idea, you know. I fought for almost a year after the bond kicked in before I married him. It wasn’t like the idea of being tied to a man twice my age did all that much for me, but I accepted it because it comes with the Slayer crap and since you can’t actually get out of it, you have to just go along with it. I was OK with the marriage when I thought we were in it together, but now, if he’s ashamed of me, what am I supposed to think? It’s OK for us to have sex because we do that privately but I’m not good enough to take out in public? Is that why most of our dates are out of town? I thought it was because he didn’t want my work interfering with our free time; now I’m wondering if it’s so nobody he knows would realize we were together?”

“I’m sure that’s not the reason, Buffy. Giles is a good guy, not a hound. You know that. He loves you.”

“I know he does,” Buffy consoled herself slightly. “But I also think he’s ashamed of me. I’m not smart and educated like he is. You should have seen Olivia, Xand. She looked like a model and you could tell she was smart and sophisticated. She looked sleek, like a cat.”

“He married you, though, and apparently he’s known her since he was young. If he’d wanted her, er, wanted to marry her, at any rate, he could have done it. He didn’t know he’d be called to be your Watcher. In fact, from what you guys have told us about his relations with the Council, he was probably surprised as hell to be anybody’s Watcher.”

She nodded. “True, all of it. But how can I go back to that house knowing he doesn’t want to admit to his friends that I’m his wife?”

“Well, I guess you have to ask yourself, do you love him?”

“Yes, of course, and I believe he loves me back. But this other thing…I just don’t know.”

“Yeah. Harsh.”

“Do you think, should I call Merrick and Mom? I really need old people advice on how to handle this, but I don’t want to seem like I’m tattling on Rupert.”

“Maybe you should talk to him first?”

She looked glum. “I don’t know. I, uh, I kinda slapped him.”

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So, want to go to the Bronze?” Xander asked her tentatively.

“No, but I guess I wouldn’t mind getting some coffee. Want to go to the Espresso Pump?”

“I could handle that.” He put the car into gear and they drove the few miles to the coffee house.

He bought them both frothy flavored coffees and they found a table in the back.

“Should I go home tonight?” she asked him.

“Geez, Buffy. Don’t put me in the middle of your argument. I love both of you.”

“Sorry, you’re right. But I need some advice and I just don’t know who to ask. I mean, normally, I’d go to Giles. That’s sort of out of the question now.”

“I don’t know, Buffy. I guess part of being a grownup is you have to make your own decisions about stuff—even when its yucky stuff like this.”

She sighed deeply. “I know. I was just hoping for an easy answer. Could you take me home?”

He put his hand on hers. “I love you, Buffy, and I love Giles too. You guys love each other and you’ll get through this. I know it looks bad now, but things will get better. Concentrate on making it better. You can do it.”

She took the hand that clasped hers and brought it to her cheek. “Thank you, Xander. I love you too. Sometimes, I think, well, if I had just been an ordinary girl without a destiny, maybe we could have, I dunno, dated or something.”

“Thanks, Buffy. It’s sweet of you to say that, but I know you’re Giles’ girl all the way.”

She leaned over and gently kissed his cheek. “Take me home, Xand.”

Buffy walked to her front door in trepidation. Standing on the porch, she hesitated about entering her own home. Slowly, she opened the door and stepped inside. Her husband was sitting on the couch. “Buffy! Are you all right? I was so worried about you!”

“I’m fine. I just had to work a few things out for myself. I’m sorry I slapped you. Physical violence isn’t a place I want to go with you.”

“I deserved it. I acted like a stupid fool. Can you forgive me?” He looked very hopeful.

“I don’t know. You hurt me really badly. I can’t let myself think about what you did or I’ll get mad again. I, I’m going to sleep in one of the spare rooms till I decide how I feel about this.”

“Please, Buffy. You know I love you.” He looked so shamefaced she wanted to just forget everything, but she knew that wasn’t being fair to either of them.

“Rupert, I’m twenty years younger than you and it’s something you’re going to have to come to terms with. Now, the chances are that I won’t get much older, but even if I live to be forty, I’ll still be twenty years younger than you. For some reason, this embarrasses you. I know I’m not sophisticated and worldly like your friend Olivia, but I don’t think it’s fair that you should expect me to be. I’m not quite nineteen yet.”

He gazed at her, stricken by her words. “Buffy, I am not ashamed or embarrassed by you. I’m embarrassed by me. I’m a man on the verge of entering middle age and I have a child bride. I should be embarrassed. When I was a young man, only very slightly older than you are now, I used to ridicule older men who chased after young women. It was disgusting. Now, I’m one of them.”

“Giles, you do not chase after young women. Did you ever even look at Willow or Cordelia? They’re both very pretty.”

He looked horrified. “No! That would be perverted, they are just children!”

“Willow’s a month older than I am, Cordelia’s two.”

“But they aren’t you! You’re so mature for your age plus there is the bond forged by the magic of the Slayer and the Watcher together…”

“Yes, the bond—that we share. The thing that made us get married, that wouldn’t let us stay apart. We didn’t feel drawn to each other the minute we met. That took time and getting to know each other, didn’t it?”

“Yes. Quite true.”

“Remember how Merrick made us sit down and begin to iron out our quarrels? We started giving each other more of a chance and, for my part, at least, I learned that I liked you.”

“I learned to like you too, Buffy. You were so brave, so stalwart in the face of overwhelming odds; I was quite taken aback by it all. You hate being the Slayer yet you do your duty and still joke about it. I admire your ability to face the direst catastrophe with a witty rejoinder”

She listened to him before continuing. “Gradually, even before the bond kicked in, I realized that I loved you. It wasn’t necessarily romantic in nature, but I loved you. You were dear to me. Your little mannerisms, the cute way you pinch your nose when you’re annoyed, that little cough you give when you think one of us is getting out of hand. I don’t know, there’s a million things about you that I love. Now, with your actions, I feel like that is built on sand. I think, did he ever really care about me?”

“Buffy! Of course I care about you. I love you and worship the ground you walk on. I’m sorry, terribly sorry I was such a fool earlier. Be angry at me, but please, please, don’t stop loving me.” He sank to his knees in front of her and grabbed her around the waist, pressing his face against her tummy. She could feel the wetness of his tears soaking her clothing.

Automatically, she stroked his head. “Things need to change between us, Rupert. I know you love me, and I know you’re sorry for this afternoon, but what everything comes down to is, I can’t be your dirty little secret anymore. You need to look inside yourself and make up your mind to either acknowledge me or to leave me, but we can’t go on with you hiding me.”

He said nothing but continued to sob into her. She stepped back and pulled his hands from off her waist. “Goodnight, Rupert.”

He heard her go upstairs and into one of the spare rooms. Continuing to kneel on the floor, he buried his face in his hands. “God, I’ve made such a mull of this.”

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