“I’m worried,” Buffy said.
“Hmm?” Giles was distracted. Was that a water spot up there in the corner, or just a trick of the light? He tilted his head and squinted.
“Giles? Attention for a moment, maybe?”
The light, he decided. Or perhaps not. It took him a few moments to pull his attention away and turn it onto his Slayer.
“I’m sorry, what were you saying? And does that look like--”
“Giles, forget the funky ceiling. This place still has disturbing vampire tingles, anyway.”
“Does it really?”
She threw up her hands.
“So not the point I’m trying to raise here!”
“Sorry. I rather like it, is all.”
It had personality. And a sense of history... something sadly lacking in most dwellings in these parts.
“I’m worried about Willow. And ew, Giles, three people just died here, like, a week ago. It’s morbid.”
A nice den downstairs, with bookshelves already built in, and an actual, if small, dining area.
“Well, the same can be said for most--” Then he really heard what she’d said, and forgot all about the house. “Worried about Willow?”
“And finally, his train arrives at the station.”
“What about her?”
“Well, it’s just, she’s been really... withdrawn lately. I’m wondering if she’s taking the whole Tara thing harder than she’s letting on. And she’s been reading some really odd and disturbing books. You should, like... talk to her or something.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Geeze, Giles. What are you, two? Anyway, because the rest of us, Anya included, already tried to talk to her, and she won’t say anything.”
“Odd and disturbing?”
“Yeah. Like, I took a peek in one of ‘em, and it was like, a whole thing about this nutty guy, like, sacrificing his firstborn child or something. Which would make me more concerned if Willow had a firstborn child, but she doesn’t, so I figure we’re ok for a little while at least.”
“Dear lord,” he said, his head spinning. What was Willow getting herself into? “I should--”
He headed for the door, a surprised Buffy trailing after him, protesting his haste.
By the time he reached the Magic Box, his heart was hammering in his chest. He nearly knocked the bell off its hinges on his way in the door, startling Anya and a few customers, but paying them no mind, just hurrying to the back of the shop and the table where Willow sat. And finding her not there.
“Oh, hey,” Buffy said, “that’s the book.”
It was lying open, in front of the chair Willow normally occupied. He reached for it, turned it towards himself.
And then went limp with relief, after reading only a few words.
“What? So?”
“Jacob Hills’s diaries,” he said.
There was a pause, and then Buffy said, “And... that’s supposed to mean?”
“They’re... more or less an ethics text.”
“Ethics? So, what? The message is ‘I sacrificed my son for fun and profit, but it didn’t work out, so I don’t recommend it?’”
He was staggered for a moment, then pulled himself together and said, “Well. Um. More or less. Although, he never actually--”
And then, a soft voice came from the direction of the training room.
“Giles?”
Willow, standing just beneath the loft, hanging back like a shy child. He pulled away from diary and table. Formed his lips into a smile for the benefit of Buffy and Anya.
“Just, um, looking for a book. Which, ah, isn’t here. At home, I believe.”
He left the shop then, and drove home, his head still spinning slightly as he began to understand.
He’d been watching her, the past few weeks. She had stayed away from him, she’d left Tara. She’d been reading, more than usual, and now... now he knew what it was she was reading. Jacob Hills. And probably others. Maybe Milo Jennings, Annette DeCanto. The histories, the accounts, that she’d avoided or maybe ignored. The books he’d never given her when he should have, perhaps, about powerful magics, gone horribly wrong. People dead, lives destroyed, realities thrown out of balance. He’d feared exposing her to even the idea of such dark magics... but how could one know the risks if they had never been shown them? If they’d only seen the light, how could they truly know of the darkness?
He should have shown her, when she’d been so young and earnest, and only wanted to learn.
Now, he knew, the books would bite like whip lashes. Knew every word would tingle with the power of potential autobiography, the guilt within them internalizing and turning on her own self.
Even for him, they had been like a gauntlet of fire, and his heart had never been as open as hers.
He pulled up to the curb in front of his apartment and dropped his forehead on his hands on the steering wheel, eyes shut, heart aching.
Willow. Oh, poor, dear Willow.
***
The next day, she left her books on the table when she went to class. When she came back, lying atop the rest of her stuff was a book she hadn’t seen before. Volume twelve of Hills’s diaries, which Nej’k had been unable to find.
She slipped it into her bag, but she didn’t read it. Not right away. Couldn’t stand to. Couldn’t stand any more of it: the horror and then the anguish. Plus, the next day, Dawn found out about being the Key, and everything went a little nuts for awhile. She finally picked it up again the night before the baby shower. She figured she should read it, and then give it back to him.
She noticed the difference immediately.
Hills had turned himself over to the Watcher’s Council and his spirit had been imprisoned in a mystical dungeon in a neighboring dimension for one hundred years, where time passed differently. He’d written the diaries there, when he’d had nothing to do but regret. Five years had passed in the “real” world when he was returned to his own dimension and body.
This diary was written fifteen years after that.
In it, he spoke of the son he had nearly destroyed growing to strong adulthood. He spoke of forgiveness from his former wife, of being accepted back into his father’s house. He spoke of the joy of watching his sister’s children playing, and feeling the summer breeze, and listening to the waves at the ocean.
The last entry was a few pages from the end of the book. He said he prayed others would learn from his mistakes, never see their loved ones in pain because of their actions.
But what was most remarkable about the last entry was an old, folded sheet of paper, tucked in between the pages.
She laid it flat gently and saw writing in a hand very different from Hills’s. The text made her heart stagger.
“Rupert-
“Redemption is the most vital part of punishment. There is a word for punishment without redemption.
“Torture.
“Such a thing is not of any use to anyone.
“- E. R. G.”
She traced her finger over the letters in his name, up there at the top of this note, and felt a small shimmer of hope.
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