Chapter Text
The dream of being a grocer never really lets you go. You might realise that fighter pilots aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and you might avert the end of the world, and you might avert the end of the world again (and again), but the little shop that lives in your mind never goes away. And so when Rupert Giles decides at last to retire, he breaks the news gently to his slayer and his many slayerettes, in a much healthier and more consultative way than the last time he tried leaving California. It’s different this time. Giles is a little older and things, in general, are a lot better, and the people who love him best agree it’s a good time to go.
“The farm shop business eh?” Says Xander, stroking the moustache that he has grown, the moustache that Anya has threatened to curse with fiery death, “Will you let me visit? Will you let me touch all the food and make little puppets out of the sausages?”
“I should never have told you about Punch and Judy shows…” sighs Giles. Fifteen years, fifteen years of him, and he knows it’s true that he’ll do shows with the sausages. He might be mature enough to pay for them now but he’s not too mature to make the sausages tell dick jokes. Just to make it clear that despite the facial hair, he really hasn’t grown up at all, Xander takes two donuts and introduces them intimately to each other.
“Stop it, stop it,” says Anya, slapping at his wrist, “Not in front of Jason.”
Fifteen years of fighting alongside the slayer, watching her die, having her watch them die, everyone accepted eventually that they would need a lot of therapy. Robin found a demon with a background in CBT and in the quiet space between apocalypses they all found time to meet him in his burrow. It was him who suggested Anya adopt her first rabbit. So Jason is a scooby now.
Giles clears his throat and gets back to the speech he prepared so carefully. “I have put in an offer on a shop with a cottage attached and a little bit of land around it in Sussex, in England, and I heard early this morning that my offer had been accepted. I haven’t made a secret of the fact I’m interested in retiring, or semi-retiring, back in England. I wanted to tell you all as soon as I knew something concrete and, well, now I do.“
The kitchen and living room of the Summers house never quite managed to be redecorated. Maybe when you keep having to repair it as many times as they all had, you get too attached to recreating the way it’s always been to want to make changes. So Spike sits with his arm around Buffy at the same table she told her mother she was a slayer, and he squeezes her hand when Giles says the word ‘retiring’. Behind them, Faith and Robin lean on the kitchen counters to keep their distance from the rabbit. Jason breaks away from Anya’s grip to hurry across Dawn to Willow, sitting with her feet up on Tara’s lap, and inadvertently making a perfect bridge for the rabbit to climb into Tara’s arms. He’s always seemed to like Tara best. It’s something about her calm and contentment.
Spike’s eyes stay on Buffy as she swallows down everything Giles is saying. She always tells him he needs to calm down with worrying about her, since they’ve both watched each other die enough times to be immune to it by now, but he tells her never to joke about that, and she keeps saying it so he’ll hold her tighter.
“Well I suppose we knew it was going to be sooner or later, didn’t we?” She says slowly, “And thank you for telling us like this, you know, all together.”
“When are you gonna be gone?” Says Dawn.
“You’ll be here for our wedding anniversary right?” Willow asks. The worry comes from the idea that this would be their first anniversary without everyone there, which could tip them over into a worse timeline than the one they’ve worked so hard to get to.
“Of course I will, Willow,” Giles says with so much warmth it’s plain to see he’s considering staying after all. Willow and Tara had a small wedding at the bridge in the park, to avoid having too many people looking at them, with a string quartet playing a song a few regulars passing by in the park seemed to recognise without being able to place where they’d heard it before. They had Buffy as the maid of honour, Anya and Faith as bridesmaids, Dawn as a complaining far-too-old flower girl and Spike as a flower demon who was delighted to be there in his blanket at the tree line. Giles would have to be back in the park to celebrate for many, many years, at least until the hordes of hell swallowed the bandstand again. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“There will be administrative procedures to go through, Rupert,” says Anya, “For you and I, and also for Jason, Freddy and Ghostface who I won’t allow to be stiffed in this deal.”
“I still say you should let me slay the bunnies,” Faith hisses to Robin, who pulls her closer and says “Calm, slayer,” with both his voice and his big seen-everything eyes.
“Can you tell us more about the shop? Do you have any pictures? I’d love to see them.” Tara can always be relied on to get a conversation back on track, and the bunnies have taken them stranger places.
“We’ll have plenty of time to go through everything,” Giles says, and there’s a little relief in his voice because this could have gone so much worse. “My flights aren’t booked yet and I don’t want this to be a painful departure, or a departure that’s more painful than it needs to be, for anybody. I hope this doesn’t shake the conviction, in any of you, that you are all the best family and the best career I could ever have asked for. I don’t intend for this to be the end of anything, just a start… a start of…”
“You did always want to be a grocer,” Buffy has a small smile on her face, a smile that is working on being acceptance and happiness for him.
“You did?” Says Willow, “I thought you wanted to be Mr Fantastic.”
A fragment of donut flies across the table to hit Spike in the chest, leaking strawberry goo across a black t shirt that has had enough bloodstains removed from it for one lifetime. Immediately he has his vamp face out and he’s reaching for the marmalade to enact something horrific, and Giles jumps in to say,
“Children, children.” Around the ages in the room vary from Dawn at twenty five to Anya now pushing twelve hundred, but the safety that comes with a settled kind of existence, hard-won and never taken for granted, enables you to act more like a child than you would at the building site, at the magic shop, at Dawn’s constellation of temp jobs or Buffy and Robin’s offices at the high school. “Children, I hope to get prepared for the move over the summer and then take possession of the cottage and the shop in September, a week after Willow and Tara’s anniversary. There’s a certain amount of fixing up to do in the shop, as I’m sure you can imagine, before I’ll be in any state to have guests. But the good news is that the cottage has a sort of annex out behind it which the previous owners had got a fair way converting into an Airbnb. Which means I shall have at least five bedrooms at my disposal and that part of the property barely requires any work at all. All this to say, I was hoping to invite you all to come out and visit me, for Halloween.”