tarnished -- part one -- trekker |
Chapter Ten | |
Family |
He tugged the sleeves of his sweater down one more time before he opened the door and stepped out of the car. His body apparently deemed this one of those overly-athletic activities, and he hissed a breath at the sharp pains from... well, various places, the major one being somewhere he was trying not to acknowledge at the moment, just as he was hoping that his sleeves managed to stay low enough to hide the angry red marks from the handcuffs and his collar high enough to hide the dark, tell-tale horseshoe of pinpoint bruises at the base of his neck.
And today probably wasn't really the best day to be visiting his younger nephew and niece, really, but he hadn't seen them since the time he'd gone home to try to talk the Council into giving them information on Glory, which was nearly a year ago, and then only for a part of a day.
His sister and Robson hadn't invited him back since he'd been rehired by the Council, and he didn't think that was a coincidence, so this apparent olive branch was not something he wanted to turn down. Even if he really rather wanted to curl up in bed and mutter dark imprecations about Ethan.
Instead, though, he was walking up the stairs to the door of his sister's rowhouse in London.
He knocked on the door, and a moment later, it burst open and he found himself staggering under an armful of nine-year-old.
"Uncle Ru!"
He proudly managed not to scream in pain as Brianna's knee knocked firmly against the mantle bruise on his ribs.
"Ow," he said, instead of screaming, then covered for it with the expected, "My you're getting big."
He settled her a little less precariously in his arms and she said, "Will you play football with me?"
Inwardly, he cringed at the very notion in his condition, but what could he say, really, but, "Certainly. If there's time."
"Yes!" she said, and bounced a bit.
"Bri-ee," her older brother said, coming to the door, "Mum told you not to do that."
"Hello, Morgan," Giles said, smiling as he shifted Bri over a bit. He had to admit a certain extra fondness for the boy. Bri was wonderful, as well, of course, but she had boundless energy and an apparently inability to sit still for more than a moment, and a deep fondness for all things sport-like. Morgan, on the other hand, was, well, bookish.
Morgan smiled for a moment, and pushed his glasses up his nose, then stepped back and held the door open.
He glanced up at the sky, then down at Giles, then nodded, and said, "Come in."
"Good show," Giles said, glad to see the children were well-conditioned to not give out invitations willy-nilly, even if it was perhaps a bit paranoid to worry about such things in broad daylight.
Better safe than sorry, of course.
He stepped into the darker front hall just as his sister, Maureen, stepped out of the kitchen.
"Rupert! Come in. I see my offspring have already attached themselves to you like the leeches they are."
"Hey!" Bri said. "I'm not a leech. I'm a remora."
"Nature programs," Maureen said, with a smile.
Giles returned the smile, trying to tell himself that pain was entirely in the eye of the beholder.
"Come on," Maureen continued, "Dinner's ready."
He followed her to the dining room, carrying Bri and trailed by Morgan, and gratefully let Bri down at the table. Bri scampered around the table, taking obvious pains to accidentally collide with her slower-moving brother along the way, and then took her seat with a clatter of barely-restrained momentum. Morgan just glared and rubbed his arm, then pointedly took his seat quietly and sedately.
"Children, really," Maureen said.
But before she could continue, a voice came from behind them, "Giles, old chap! Good to see you."
Giles turned and caught the offered hand in a firm handshake, smiling.
"Robson."
"So, still inciting discord and riots in the Council, then?"
"Ah, well, you know me," Giles said, though his smile slipped a bit at the hint of an edge in his old flatmate's inquiry.
"Right, of course. My doing, I suppose. Failed spectacularly at rehabilitating you."
A joke, but not a joke, really. Robson had been his flatmate during his last term at Oxford, the term after the London debacle. He'd been an upstanding student and promising rising Watcher, and there had been no doubt in either of their minds why the two of them had been put together.
Though the Council probably hadn't planned on them hitting it off.
"Oh, yes," Giles said, trying to pretend they were just joking, "I blame my surviving rebel spirit entirely on that time you coaxed me off to the campus pub during finals."
Robson chuckled, as they both turned to take their seats at the table. His voice stayed light as he said, "Little did I know I was creating a monster."
Fortunately, they spent the rest of the meal talking about much more neutral subjects, and then Giles took the children out to the zoo and then to a park. He kicked around a football with Bri while debating vampire lore with Morgan.
It was enjoyable. They were good kids, and he liked them. Wished he could have seen them more often. There was just one thing nagging on his mind that he didn't ask about until later, when Maureen was tucking the kids in bed, and he and Robson had settled in Robson's study.
"Where's Nora?" Robson's Potential Slayer.
"Ah, she's off for the week. Little training mission in the Alps."
Giles smile was tight as he said, "Ah, safely away from my dangerous influence, then, I see."
Robson laughed, but only for a moment, then he said, "Look, Giles, I like you, you know that. It's just your methods I disagree with."
"Right. Of course. My methods. My methods which are what, exactly? Treating the Slayer like the human being she is? Keeping her alive? Letting her have loved ones and a life of her own?"
"Oh, well, it sounds so nobel when you put it like that. But is it? Really, Rupert?"
"Of course it--"
"All I'm saying is... she's a Slayer. Her duty, her destiny, her life is all about the kill. About killing."
"Killing demons--"
"Yes, demons, but still, it's about the hunt and the slaughter. Just how human do you think one can be, and live that life? Day in, day out, every night?"
Giles had a flash of Buffy saying, 'I don't like what it's doing to me.'
"So, what are you saying?" he said, carefully, "That it's *right* to take a young girl who never asked for this life and to strip away all she is and all she could be? To forge a life into nothing but a weapon?"
"We're not in the business of being humane, Giles. You certainly used to know that."
Giles was quiet for a moment, then said, "It was what she wanted, Robson."
"But she was a child, Rupert. They don't know what they need."
"No. No, I was willing to believe that for awhile, but you weren't there. You didn't see her, before she faced the Master. She was a girl, a person, and I couldn't let her-- It wouldn't have been right. Maybe, *maybe* it would have hurt less, but it wouldn't have been right."
"A Slayer with a family, with friends, is nothing but a Slayer with a weakness. A massive weakness."
Giles stared.
"Listen to yourself, Jethro. Listen to yourself! How would you feel if, if Bri were called? If someone demanded that she give you up, your whole family, and become some automaton doomed to die?"
"That's why they don't live as long, Rupert, the ones who were called untrained. You know that."
Giles stood and walked away, fingered the spines of the books on Robson's shelves.
"You're wrong. Buffy drew her strength from her family, she fought harder for her friends. She's probably the greatest Slayer the world will ever know."
"Every Watcher--"
"She met every challenge she faced. She defeated a god."
"Did she? Or did she give up?"
Then Giles' own voice echoed in his head, 'No, she couldn't.'
***
He was tired by the time he got home to his flat, but he went straight to his boxes and began rooting through the Watcher's Dairies, pulling out a few volumes as he went, then he sat down on the couch and pulled the nearest he'd set aside into his lap.
It was Bernard Crowley's last Dairy, covering the six months up until his Slayer Nikki Wood's death. Wood, who was one of the few Slayers who rivaled Buffy for living the longest after being called. Wood, who was one of only two Slayers on record to have a child.
Giles opened to the first page, and the first line he saw was, "She has been melancholic, lately, and distressed. She confided to me that she feels overwhelmed. God knows she has a right to, between her boy and her Calling.
"It isn't right, a Slayer having this burden, but there is no one else to take the child, and she refuses to give him up. I don't blame her for that, either, I believe it's a strength, but still I worry. The weight of the world is a heavy enough burden for any one person to carry, regardless of strength or speed or skill. A Slayer should be free to focus her energies on that alone.
"This extra responsibility that she has to carry is a cruel twist of fate."
Giles gently closed the journal and set it aside again.
Then stood quietly, and went to the kitchen to make tea.
Crowley was wrong. Could have been wrong. He was toeing the Council line, at least. It didn't mean that all Slayers with families were under pressure, or even that Wood had been...
Although, from what he'd heard murmured half-audibly at Headquarters, Crowley was ranked right up there with he himself for unorthodoxy. Nikki Wood had been a Potential Slayer, raised by Crowley since she was thirteen. They had assumed after she turned eighteen that she wouldn't be called and Crowley had sent her off to college in New York, letting her live the rest of her life the way she wished to.
She'd been twenty-one when she had been called, the oldest any Slayer had ever been by over two years.
She had been involved with a college classmate, became pregnant two months after she was Called, and the boy left her, unable to deal with her powers and her destiny. She'd refused to give the child up, in spite of the Council's vehement protests. Crowley had traveled back to England to plead her case, and there was still talk of that meeting, which had apparently ended in incredibly dramatic fireworks, the likes of which the hallowed halls of the Council had never seen before (though Giles suspected that was an exaggeration, really).
So, somehow, Wood had continued Slaying, survived pregnancy (it gave Giles a headache just *contemplating* what it might be like trying to protect a pregnant Slayer) and had a child.
The water boiled and he dealt with it distractedly, thinking about Buffy and Dawn and house payments and jobs. Then thinking about vampires and demons and Hellmouths and apocalypses. About how his father had simply left them for two years to Watch his Slayer. No phone calls, no letters. Any news of him they'd received had been through the Council, because even Watchers, supposedly, didn't need distractions.
What if they were right? What if it wasn't fair? What if he had been making things harder on her? How much easier could it be on her if he had simply taken that responsibility away?
Never mind the fact that doing so would have been incredibly difficult, would it have made a difference for the better?
He'd always assumed the answer was no, but in that past year, as she'd dealt with college and her mother's illness and tried to mother her sister and not lose her boyfriend, all the while fighting a *god*... how much better off would she have been without all of that on her mind? Even before she'd died, she'd been run down, she'd been so tired.
After she'd died, Dawn had told him something, that he hadn't understood before. Odd that it had taken him so long to think of it.
She'd said Buffy understood, before she died, what her vision quest had meant.
"Death is your gift."
He'd thought about that a great deal over that summer. He'd assumed, finally, that she meant her death was her gift, that she had given to save her sister and save the world.
But what if that hadn't been her meaning? What if death had been not a gift she'd given, but one she received? Rest. Heaven.
What if she meant that her life had become so hard she'd wanted out?
God, that would certainly fit with her behavior after being resurrected...
And was that his fault? He'd allowed her to overwhelm herself, left her in a position where everything was so difficult that death seemed the attractive alternative?
He forgot about his intent to avoid alcohol, and laced his tea liberally with scotch before heading back to the pile of diaries waiting for him in the living room.
tarnished -- part one -- trekker |