Title: Being the Watcher: A Sequel
Author: Sweetdoggie (stirling_summer@yahoo.com)
Pairing: B/G
Rating: G
Summary: Giles replies to Buffy’s essay: Sequel to Being The Slayer
Spoilers: Up to 6
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.
Note: This is for all you guys who kept asking for a sequel. I hope you like it.
Rupert Giles gently placed the essay on the table after reading it. His Buffy was finally growing up. She wasn’t particularly happy about that, he could tell, but she was doing it and that was something that many people never even tried to accomplish let alone succeed at. She had worked very hard on her essay, he could see. He owed her a response that looked into his own heart as she had looked into hers. Walking to his desk he drew out a crisp sheet of paper and uncapped his favorite pen. He stared blankly at the sheet for a while before he began to write.
When I was ten, my father told me I was going to be a man with a destiny. I was going to be a Watcher like him, like his mother before him. This filled me with dismay and anger, even as a child because, of all the things in the world that I didn’t want, it was to be anything like my father. I know I’ve told you this before, but I never really explained the why of things. I believe I would like to do that now.
My father wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t indifferent, or temperamental, or violent. He didn’t drink to excess or beat mother or anything like that. He was a Watcher and that sort of thing just wasn’t done. He lived his calling, you see. He was a Watcher with all that entails. He had married at age fifty, older than I am now, in fact. He married a Potential who had passed her eighteenth birthday without being called. She had been in his care since she was five year old. I can hardly imagine it, but I suspect she may have loved him. I was born a year after they married. I think he married her for the sole purpose of breeding up more Watchers or even potential Slayers because she miscarried seven times before I turned nine years old. He was livid when the doctors told her no more pregnancies. I remember that.
He looked at me when he brought her home from the hospital. He was so angry. He had always been disappointed in my academic pursuits but it hadn’t mattered quite so much when he thought there would be other children to mold. I could read and speak Latin and Greek before I was five, but he thought I should have had at least one other language under my belt by that time. I wanted to play but there were always lessons. Sometimes, I didn’t mind that—it isn’t a bad thing to be able to fence or box and I learned those skills from the time I could walk and hold a sword, But mostly, I remember the hours and hours of study till my back felt permanently bent and my head was splitting with pain. He didn’t care. When I complained to him, he would just look at me and ask if I would complain when my Slayer’s life depended on my skills.
Strange to say, I didn’t hate him. He was a brilliant scholar and a fine athlete. He insisted that I do my absolute best and then pushed me to do better. I could never please him, though I did try.
You may wonder where my mother was during all of this. The best answer I can give you is: in the background. She loved me but she had been raised as a Slayer, raised by my father, no less. It was all business for him. The year I turned twenty, my mother decided to try one last time to have another child. She was only thirty-nine. It should have been possible. My father was seventy-two, but the thought of having another child to be a Watcher drove him on. When I was twenty-one, my mother died—hemorrhaged to death from the complications of a miscarriage.
Suddenly, it was just too much for me. I ran away from home. Which is rather ludicrous when you consider my age. I wasn’t a child. I left school, left the Council, left all I knew behind. I went to London: an ample playground for trouble, had I but known. I met Ethan and my other friends. We predictably got into all sorts of trouble. You know about Eyghon. That was the worst of it. When Randal died, I ran away again. I went back to the Council and begged them to forgive me. My father refused to speak to me again, but the rest of them decided that I was valuable enough that twenty years of scholarship shouldn’t be chucked out. They told me I would never be more than a researcher. I had disgraced my calling and would never be worthy to have a Slayer.
That suited me, rather, though they didn’t know it. I built my career as an archeologist and an employee of the British Museum. I earned a curator’s post and settled in. It was a good life and if I were occasionally lonely, well, there were a few women like Olivia, who now and then would have mercy on me. Then one day, I walked into my office after lunch and there were two Council representatives waiting for me. They told me Merrick was dead and I was being given his Slayer because they didn’t want to waste someone important on you.
They assumed that you wouldn’t last long since you weren’t trained, you see. I was told to take a leave of absence from my job—they didn’t think it would be necessary to resign. They said they would take care of the details. My luggage was already packed. My passport was pushed into my hand with a file on the new Slayer. I was driven to the airport and was on a flight to New York before supper that night. Two days later, I was in Sunnydale in an apartment set up by the Council. They had arranged my job as the school librarian and sent me a large shipment of books to use as the basis for my research. I had been there one week when you walked into the Library.
When you told me you didn’t want to be the Slayer I was truly astonished. I couldn’t imagine it. Years of indoctrination hadn’t prepared me for a reluctant Slayer. You wanted a life! How very ironic, really. I realized that you were a real person and it shocked me to my core. My mother had been a Potential and though she lived forty years she was never as real as you. I had known other Slayers, other Potentials, none of them had your zest, your verve. I determined to keep you alive no matter what.
Well, Dearest, you know how that went far better than I. The Master killed you and it wasn’t I who brought you back, but a callow schoolboy. I never told you how much that burned my soul. I went home that night and wept till my eyes were swollen shut. I realized then that I loved you. You were sixteen and had faced death with honor and an incredible valor that still makes my heart swell with pride. So brave, love. So very brave! Courage isn’t the absence of fear, you know. It is going on in spite of that fear. Oh Buffy! You have the heart of a lion.
Our years together were filled with one example after another of your bravery, your gallantry, your astounding luck! Do you know how many people, how many Slayers and Watchers died by Angelus’ hand alone? I won’t tell you how many, but the fact that you defeated him should earn the world’s eternal gratitude. The Mayor, evil behind a benign façade. How terrifying, yet banal he was. I believe that he wasn’t even the worst thing you faced that year. In my heart, and I think in yours as well, Faith was much harder on you than he. You ground him into the dirt, Buffy and you stopped a rogue Slayer, something more dangerous than any vampire or demon we have ever encountered.
We have never really talked about your eighteenth birthday and the foul test I gave to you, how I betrayed you, or even how you forgave me. I knew you did when you let me wash your wounds that night. I could never tell you how much, how very much that meant to me, Buffy. You just gave me forgiveness. I didn’t have to ask, to beg you like I was prepared to do. You looked up at me, tears and blood on your beautiful face, and you forgave me. Buffy, you owned me from that moment.
You went away to college. I wanted to draw back from you some in the hopes that you would begin to see me as a man and not just as a Watcher. Olivia came to Sunnydale at a time when I was feeling particularly low and you know how that went. Your words cut me to the bone that night. I realized that an attractive young woman such as you would have absolutely no interest in a man like me. I was a failed son, a failed student, a failed Watcher and a failed friend. You took me back again after I turned you away but I drew apart still more.
You found young Finn and barely knew I existed. I thought that was as it should be. You needed more happiness in your life and I believed he could give it to you. Can you forgive me for that bit of idiocy? When he left you, I was deeply torn. I knew he hadn’t been right for you, but I didn’t want you to hurt either. I prayed every night that you would turn more towards me. We seemed to draw together again somewhat I thought.
Then suddenly, there was so much pain in your life. Dawn, your mother, Glory—and what did I do? I offered to kill your sister! I would have done it, you know, for you. I wanted to spare you the pain of killing her even though she wasn’t human. I thought we were all doomed. Truly, I didn’t suppose we had a chance in the world of defeating a God. But we did. You beat her. You beat a God. And then you died.
I watched your body fall through the mystical energies and I saw it suck the life out of you, out of us, I should say because when you died, so did I. What was left moved and talked and even breathed, but it wasn’t a real person anymore. Willow reanimated that filthy robot of you and I tried to pretend. But I have no experience at pretending, none at all really. One day it spoke to me in your voice and asked me why I stayed. That thing, that appliance with your face asked me a question that I couldn’t answer. So I left.
When they called me and told me what they had done, I was horrified. I know the dangers of resurrection spells. But my heart was overjoyed at the same time. You were back, you apparently had volition, and you remembered who you had been. It was enough, I thought. When I saw you again, God Almighty, when I saw you I couldn’t believe you were real. I almost poured out my heart at the first sight of you, but we weren’t alone and I was content to simply be there with you again.
I thought you were withdrawn, that you needed time to adjust. You had been in Hell, I thought. I didn’t realize that to you, you still were. When you finally told me where you had really been, my soul crumpled in agony. I knew you would have to heal on your own. Oh my beloved, how my heart bled for your suffering. You begged me to stay and I wanted to. If you had looked at me even one time with a particle of love in your eye, death couldn’t have driven me from your side. But you talked about need, not love and I saw that as long as you needed me to be your crutch, you would never love me as a man. I left you and my world for the past year has been bleaker than you can imagine.
Buffy, your words have given me hope once again. Can you truly love me? Can I come home at last, beloved?
He read over his words and signed it simply Rupert Giles. He put it in an envelope and walked down to the post office. He paid a pretty penny to Express Mail the letter to her. In twenty-four hours, she would know all that he had hidden from her for the past seven years. His heart beat on hope alone. If she changed her mind now, he didn’t want to go on living. He went slowly back to his flat and watched the children playing in the small park across the street. They, like himself and every other person on this planet, lived solely because of the courage and strength of heart of one small woman named Elizabeth Anne Summers.
He stayed home by the phone the next day though realistically he knew it was too soon for a response. He was getting ready for bed just before midnight when there was a knock on his door. Grabbing a cross, he slowly swung the wooden panel back. Someone was standing on his step, someone very small and very blonde. “B, B, Buffy?” he whispered in disbelief.
She looked into his familiar green eyes, reached up and pulled him into her embrace. He automatically wrapped her in his arms and when the warm reality of her body pressing softly into his registered, began dropping kisses all over her upturned face. He dragged her back into his flat and kissed her and held her and cried on her as she did the same to him.
“How?” he asked, not able to form a complete sentence to save his life.
“Willow,” she explained simply. “She owed me. I told her I wasn’t taking any chances on losing you again.” She grabbed his shirtfront. “You belong to me and I’m never letting you go again!”
“Oh, God! Oh, Buffy! I love you so.” He knelt in front of her till she pulled him up.
“I love you, Rupert Giles. I will never love anybody else but you for as long as I live and when I die, I will still love you, so get up, my dearest Giles. Get up and take me home.”
The End