Title: Let that be a Lesson to you…part 10/11
Author: Sweetdoggie
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.
Giles came home the next evening after work carrying the baby and another suitcase of clothing for himself. He had stopped at the drug store and purchased another pack of diapers. Willow seemed to work her way through them with alarming speed.
Buffy was very glad to see him. The children, still pale and lethargic were ecstatic. He came into the bedroom and wanted to hug them all but Buffy kept them back. He settled for setting in a chair and reading to them for several hours. She was exhausted from forty hours of single parenting and immediately took him up on his suggestion of a hot bath. She fell asleep in the tub and he eventually had to go in and wake her. He helped her dry off, toweling her as gently as if she were one of the children before slipping her into a soft nightie. He carried her to their bed and tucked her in before seeing to his own shower.
Their days settled into a pattern of endless drudgery. Buffy took the role of primary caregiver for the children seriously, but it was exhausting. Giles helped her as much as he could, but working without help in the store was beginning to wear him down as well.
“Maybe you should hire a temp,” she suggested. “You know, just somebody to mind the shop. You could get somebody from one of those agencies that send people to fill in during emergencies. They don’t expect to stay forever and if it’s less than a million dollars a day, it’s reasonable.”
He tended to agree with her assessment of the situation and called a temporary agency right away. They sent him a presentable young man who had a variety of clerking experience. Giles spent several hours showing him the basics. “I shall be here so if you need assistance you are free to ask me.” He left the boy alone and proceeded to research for the rest of the afternoon. Tommy, the temporary clerk, picked up the gist of the business rapidly. Giles realized that if he didn’t have Anya, somebody like Tommy would make a good substitute.
He and Buffy had put their own romantic courtship on hold. Both of them were much too tired to do more than cuddle in bed every night. They felt like they were marking time, or as Buffy put it, doing time. About a month after the Changing, as they had begun calling the incident, he found a text that said the effects of any spell performed by the rock were permanent. He came home dragging. Buffy took one look at his face and pushed him down on the couch.
“What is it?”
He told her.
“No! I’m not buying that! There has got to be some way of reversing this. I don’t want to raise my friends as my kids.”
“No, nor I, but I simply can’t find any more information.”
“Well, there’s got to be a way.”
He was silent.
“Giles?”
“What about us, Buffy? What about you and me?”
She looked sad. “I know this isn’t how you wanted to spend your life, Rupert. I won’t blame you if you want to leave.” She looked ill at the thought of trying to cope without him.
“Buffy, I love you. You are my life. I’ve given this a great deal of thought. I know, it’s too soon for us to talk about this, but sometimes circumstances dictate necessity rather than social convention.” He paused and looked at her.
She was totally lost. What on earth was he talking about? She had understood everything through his declaration of love, but after that she felt like she had stepped off a cliff into another universe where the words made sense but had no meaning. “Huh?”
“I believe we should get married. The children need a real home with a real mother and father and we can’t offer that unless we are truly together. I want to be with you all the time, Buffy. We could make a good life. I know I’m not your ideal man. I’m too old and much too worn, but I do love you terribly. You would never want for anything, especially love, if you became mine.”
“Giles…” she paused marshalling her thoughts, “I love you. I want to be with you too and not just because I don’t want to raise four kids on my own. You aren’t too old, you’re just the age you are and that’s fine. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’d love to marry you and it’s not just because of the kids. I don’t know a better man.”
He reached out and grasped her hands. “Then let’s go out tomorrow and get married. I can’t give you a honeymoon because we have nowhere to leave the children, but no woman will ever be more loved.”
She kissed him tenderly. He needed the reassurance that she wasn’t simply taking him as a husband to be the father of the children they shared or as a convenience to her as the Slayer. His arms went around her and they reclined back against the couch. He pressed his body against her and she could feel his passion rising.
She would have made love with him there on the couch, so driven was she by his attentions. His hand had slipped under her T-shirt and was lightly caressing her smooth stomach.
“I can’t wait to make you mine,” he whispered softly against her ear.
“I can’t wait to be yours,” she replied. “I’ll belong to you and you to me and that’s how is should be.”
He wanted to make love to her right then, but knew that the couch wasn’t the place, especially since the children could come in at any moment. He could hear them playing in the study. He simply held her in his arms, content or nearly so. This wasn’t how he intended to have a family but he supposed that as unusual as their lives were anyway, he should have expected it.
They sat on the couch and held each other, knowing that soon they would join their bodies and their lives and if things weren’t exactly as they would wish, they would be good enough.
Buffy got up to prepare dinner and Giles went to check on the children. All of them marched back to the kitchen to watch Buffy. Giles had even brought the baby along. She gave Anya and Tara a bowl of green beans and had Giles show them how to snap them. She sat down and began peeling potatoes. “You know, I can’t keep doing the guy’s homework forever, Giles. If you really think there’s no way of getting them back, I had better withdraw them from class and say they decided that they had missed too much. Xander’s going to lose his job if he already hasn’t and I guess you had better get Tommy to stay on at the store permanently.” She picked up another potato. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell them at the daycare place since I told them the arrangement was going to be temporary and the opening for our kids wasn’t long term either.”
“Surely there are other daycare centers in town?” Giles asked.
“Yes, of course there are, but they want a lot more money. Do you think I should quit school and get a job?”
“No, I bloody well don’t!” He had raised his voice to emphasize his point. The children looked at him.
“Daddy said a bad word.” Anya mentioned casually.
“Bloody. Bloody. Bloody. Bloody. Bloody.” Xander repeated.
Giles looked at Buffy apologetically. “Sorry, love.”
Xander was humming and playing with a tiny car. “Bloody table. Bloody car. Bloody. Bloody. Bloody.”
Buffy threw up her hands. “You said it, you get to fix it.”
She listened, highly amused, while Giles gave a long-winded speech about proper language and etiquette. The little boy listened attentively.
“Now, Xander, what do you say?”
“Bloody. Bloody. Bloody. Bloody.” The boy sang happily, pleased to show off his new word.
Giles dropped his head into his hands. “Buffy?” He looked up at her pleadingly.
She leaned over and ruffled Xander’s hair. “Xander, if you say that word one more time, the vampires will get you. They love it when little boys say their favorite word.”
Xander shut up instantly and looked terrified. “Daddy? No! I sowwy.”
Giles was appalled at Buffy’s methods. “Xander,” he hesitated. His technique of explanation had failed miserably while’s Buffy’s more direct appeal to the boy’s sense of self-preservation had done the trick. He sighed in helpless frustration. “Your mother and I will always do our best to protect you. You know that.”
Xander slid out of his chair and came over to Giles. He held his tiny arms up, waiting to be cradled in Giles lap. The former Librarian picked up the child he now thought of as his son and held him close. He breathed in the distinctive scent of little boy and closed his eyes tightly, afraid of tearing up.
“Do you really think threatening the children is the best method of instilling discipline?”
She shrugged. “No, it’s probably awful and he’ll have nightmares for weeks, but I can’t spank him and he’s too young to reason with.”
“I suppose you are right. It just grieves me that we have to resort to such methods.”
“What did your folks do with you when you learned your first swear word?”
“My father made me eat a bar of soap. I was violently ill for several days.”
“And you think my methods were harsh?”
He smiled at her. “Why do we have to be so strict with our children?”
“Because if you let them run wild, there’s hell to pay later. If Willow had been taught to obey, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now. What happens if we don’t discipline the kids and then something happens?” She shook her head. “We live on the Hellmouth and we have four babies to think about, Giles. They need to understand that instant obedience could save their lives.”
“They will rebel. It’s what I did, after all.”
“Hopefully, we can show them that we love them and their rebellions won’t be quite so dramatic. I care about teaching them things that will save their lives, Giles. You do realize that by the time they are teenagers again, I’ll most likely be dead? It will be up to you to raise them.” Her chin quivered momentarily. “I’m never going to get to see my friends again and even if I did live long enough to see them grow up, they won’t be the same people I knew.”
He stretched his hand across the table. “I’m sorry, Buffy. I should have locked the rock up where Willow couldn’t get at it. This is my fault.”
She snorted gently. “It is in no way your fault. Willow is young…” she looked at the baby, “younger now, but she was an adult and in full control of her faculties. You told her not to touch it; you told the others not to touch it. She didn’t listen and neither did they.”
“I should have done something…” his voice dropped off as he wondered what he could possibly have done short of locking the sphere away in the safe…which wouldn’t have done any good because Willow knew the combination. He sighed. “I suppose you are correct, love, but it grieves me to lose our friends.”
“Me too, Giles. Willow, and Xander have been in this with us since the beginning. Tara and Anya are newcomers but still family. Now, more than ever, I guess.” She picked up a potato and began cutting it into quarters. “When they do grow up, will they get their old memories back?”
“I have no idea. Probably not or if they did, the information would be so old as to be meaningless. They will have established new relationships, new memories that will supercede the originals.”
“How sad. Well, at least Xander won’t be raised by drunks this time, and Willow will have parents who actually realize she’s alive. Tara won’t be brought up to fear her magic and to think of herself as something less than human. Anya won’t be sold off into slavery at age ten. I guess it’s a chance for a new beginning for all of them. Maybe they’ll be different people when they grow up. Will you train them to be Watchers?”
He looked startled. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead, I’m afraid. Willow certainly has the potential. I don’t know about the others.”
“They’re all smart, caring people, Giles. Xander has never been encouraged to think he could make something of himself, Anya has a history of abuse and violence, and Tara had her self-esteem virtually destroyed. You can mold these kids anyway you want.”
“It would be good, I suppose, to raise them as Watchers—the right kind of Watchers. People who put their Slayer first and the Council second instead of the reverse. But, Buffy, I don’t want to force our children to be something that I didn’t want to be.”
“If they don’t want to do that when they’re grownup, then we can deal with that. It will be OK. The important thing is, we raise them to be the best people they can be and to always live up to their potential. We know how great they can be; we know their faults already. We can steer Willow toward learning to control her magical abilities better, we can build up Xander and Tara’s self-esteem, we can teach Anya that vengeance isn’t the best way to resolve disputes.”
He gave Xander one last hug before setting the boy back down on the floor. “I hope we can, love. I’m certainly no role model for young children.”
She looked at him incredulously. “Tell me you don’t know that all of us practically worshiped you in high school?”
He looked startled. “Worshiped me? That’s why I was subjected to a constant barrage of insults about my clothing, attitudes, language, and even my food choices?”
“We all loved you. Teasing is allowed when you love somebody. You were the closest thing to a father that Xander ever knew, Anya too, though her demony ways took a while to mellow out. Willow thought you were absolutely perfect, except for not liking computers…but that turned out OK because she got to be computer girl for you. She had the hugest crush on you like you wouldn’t even believe.”
“What about you? What did you think of me all those years ago?” He was deeply curious.
“At first, I thought you were a total bastard. You slammed that book of vampires down in front of me and it was all I could do not to deck you. When we met at the Bronze that night, I couldn’t believe you were hanging around there. I left Willow so I could talk to you—there was something about you that drew me, God knows why. After I got Will and Xand back to the Library, I started to see that you were just dedicated, not mean or cruel. You had so much energy back then. It was weird for me to see somebody so hyped about the Hellmouth. During those first few weeks, I watched you carefully. I may be challenged when it comes to relationships, but I saw what a good man you were. Sure, you were strangely bent about the whole Slayer thing, but you impressed me with your knowledge and, well…” she paused.
“Go on,” he encouraged.
“I liked your accent.”
“What a good thing I’m British then.” He grinned at her. “Do you know when I first started associating with you children, I could barely understand you?”
She laughed and stood to finish preparing supper.