Work Text:
Giles rather assumes, at this point, that he will never have children of his own.
He’s getting too old, now, for one thing. Fifty seemed to sneak up on him from behind, but now that sixty is looming large on his horizon, it seems even that was a very long time ago. And then of course there is the fact that the women he meets and might be interested in tend to be of his own age. They have, therefore, naturally and quite understandably already raised their own children if they wanted them, and have no desire to start all over again just because some old fool finally got around to realizing that he actually thinks he might enjoy bringing up someone who isn’t chosen to save the world.
So there will be no nappies, no late night feedings, and no fussing over schools for Rupert Giles. Which is probably for the best, he thinks, because having teenagers, now twenty-somethings, still under his care though he hasn’t had an official reason to look after most of them for years is more than enough responsibility to be getting on with.
* * *
One.
He sometimes thinks that, if they’re paying any attention at all, British Telecom must suspect he’s some kind of international spy. That, or, God forbid given the current political climate, a terrorist. Always getting phone-calls from strange and out of the way places at odd hours of the night, throwing around strange, arcane terms that are obviously code for other things -- because who could believe the sorts of things the words actually say? He wonders sometimes if the old Watcher’s council had contacts in Scotland Yard who could be helpful in this sort of situation... and whether any of them would accept him as the new leader, if they do exist.
This time, the call that wakes him in the middle of the night and drags him from his bed, mumbling curses under his breath as he fumbles first for his glasses and then the blasted ringing phone, is from Brazil. Willow, then, since Kennedy never phones him.
Sure enough, the voice on the other line carries Willow’s standard, perky phone manner. “Hi, Giles! Did I get you at a bad time?”
He looks at the clock. Quarter past three. He’ll be up again in four hours whether or not he goes back to sleep, and Willow does tend to be talkative, as well as completely forgetful of the time difference between them. But there’s something overly-cheery in her tone that makes him worry, makes him remember all those other times when he wasn’t there for her for one reason or another - because he was busy, because she was clever and self-sufficient, because Buffy obviously needed him more, because he was in England... “Of course not, Willow. How are you?”
She chats about nothing for a while, about the weather and about her work and about some new books she found in a little antique store. He lets the words wash over him while he putters about and puts the kettle on, because at this point it’s clear he might as well make a cup of tea and admit to being awake. And then, apropos of exactly nothing, she says, in her most cheerful voice, “So, Kennedy and I are breaking up.”
Giles nearly drops the teapot.
“Breaking up? Willow...”
“It’s okay, Giles.” She’s dropping the act, now - her tone is less manic and even over the phone he can tell that she’s tired. “We’ve been talking about it for a really long time, and... it’s cool. I mean, we’re both okay with it. Well, now we are, I mean.”
“Why on earth would she--”
She interrupts him so gently that he’s shocked right out of what had felt like the beginning of a tirade. “I’m breaking up with her, Giles. It’s not... there’s nothing big. We didn’t have a big storming fight, and I didn’t do any unethical magic spells on her or anything, and she didn’t do anything wild and insane... er than usual for a slayer, or for Kennedy, anyway. The point is, it’s not about me being a witch or her being a slayer or me being a Watcher or any of it. We’re just...” He could swear he hears a sniffle, here, but over the phone he can’t be entirely certain, and it breaks his heart to know that she might be crying but that he can’t be sure. “We’re just not working out, I guess. Not really. You know how it is.”
And of course he does. A lifetime of relationships that ended badly or just wrong stretch out before him in his mind’s eye, and yes, there are the tragedies, like Jenny Calendar, and the dramatic blow-ups with the ones that were a bad idea to begin with, like Ethan. But there were also the ones like Olivia and so many others who just... didn’t work, for one reason or another, through no one’s fault at all. No big story, nothing to stop time or write a great piece of literature about, just two people who stayed together for a time, and then decided they didn’t quite fit as well as they’d thought.
And then he realizes that he hasn’t said anything, and that, now, he’s quite certain he can hear Willow crying softly on the other end of the line.
“Willow?” he asked softly.
A sniffle. “Mhmm?”
“Do you... Do you want to come home?” He pauses, and then, just to be sure, adds, “Back here, I mean. To England.”
A long pause, another sniffle, and the sound of something - a tissue? - brushing the telephone receiver. “Mhmm...”
“All right.” He stands up, though he’s not sure why - maybe it just feels more powerful, more in control, less like he’s grasping helplessly at straws here for something to do, something to help. “I’ll buy your ticket. Can you have your affairs in Brazil settled by Tuesday?”
Another muffled “Mhmm.” This one comes through a haze of full-on tears. They seem to have been released by relief.
“All right. I’ll email you the information as soon as I have it, then.” He turns on the computer as he speaks - a cheap but sturdy PC that Willow herself had convinced him to buy and coaxed him through the basic function of before going off on her travels with Kennedy. He’s still awkward with the damned thing, but it hasn’t tried to possess him or evince the personality of a known hell-demon just yet, so he figures he’s making progress with it. One thing he does quite like about it is the ability to purchase airline tickets online, without any potential for a well-meaning airline employee asking about his relationship to the young woman in whose name he’s making the purchase.
“Thanks, Giles.”
“Any time, Willow. You know that, don’t you?” He leans on the table for a moment, feeling absurdly old. “You know that you can come back here any time.”
“Uh-huh.” He can almost hear the nod and the weak little self-mocking Willow-smile that goes with it. “I know.”
“Good. Oh, and Willow?”
“Uh-huh?”
“You... you know I have to ask.”
“The spellbooks are put away,” she assures him. “I haven’t opened them since we started having problems, I promise. Cross my heart.”
The twisting in his stomach settles down, at that. She could still be lying, of course, but she’s made such progress since her last relapse that he feels he can trust her this time. She sounds too tired, anyway, to be faking it. “That’s very good, Willow. I know... I know it’s hard. And I’m proud of you.” He considers that statement for a moment. “Not just for the spellbooks, you know, Willow. I’m very proud of you in general. It takes... it takes a great deal of courage to end a relationship, even if you know it’s the right thing to do. Particularly when you’ve had relationships end very badly for you in the past. And because you are a remarkable, brave young woman.”
“Yeah...” The vague affirmative carries with it the memory of Oz, of Tara, of a thousand mistakes and hard lessons.
“I really am exceptionally proud of you,” he repeats. Because sometimes he’s keenly aware that he didn’t say it enough when she was young, when all his attention was on Buffy and he occasionally forgot the eager, intelligent young woman who helped him so much, and also because it simply bears repeating.
“Thanks, Giles. For everything.”
* * *
Two.
The over-stuffed backpack is heaved onto his sofa, and before he knows what’s happening he has an armful - but only one, she’s so shockingly small still, despite being taller than her sister - of enthusiastic twenty-three year-old. “It is so cool of you to let me crash here, Giles!”
“Of course... er... any time, really.” He pats Dawn awkwardly on the back. She’s just graduated from university, and is taking the opportunity to tour Europe with a backpack before she goes back for more. But first, she’s stopped off to stay with him.
“And really, it’s just for a week, I promise. I mean, I totally don’t want to invade on your space or whatever. But Anna and Will and Chelsea aren’t out for another week, and Diana has to see her parents before she can meet us in Rome, so I thought...” She trails off for a moment, looking a little confused. “I guess I thought everybody else saw their parents at graduation, and... I had Buffy, I mean, she was great to come and all, and Xander was there, too, and he did this really silly thing with my cap, I’ll have to show you the pictures, but...”
With that pause, the years of maturity and growth are removed from Dawn’s face. She’s no longer an elegant twenty-three year-old who just been accepted to law school and means to become a Human Rights lawyer ‘because Buffy isn’t the only one who can save the world.’ She’s just a scared fourteen year-old whose mother has died and whose sister is fighting a seemingly endless battle against evil, and who is beginning to realize that she is not, in fact, even altogether human. With a sick lurch, he vividly recalls telling Buffy that he would kill Dawn if he had to. If it came down to it, the choice between this girl and the world... Perhaps he really is going soft, as Quentin always accused, but he can’t imagine speaking those words now.
“Dawn?” Giles prods, as softly as he can.
“I called my dad the other day.”
Ah.
He remembers himself at her age, then - thinks for the first time in several years of running away from Oxford, of his time in London and of the overwhelming guilt and horror at all that he and his friends had done, the feelings that that drove him back to his family home, to his father’s study. The prodigal son, not at all sure of his welcome after the extreme indiscretion of his time away. It had been weeks before they spoke civilly again - years, even, before his father would say more than the daily niceties at the breakfast table and so on, and those only to placate Giles’ mother, who would abide neither absolute silence nor rudeness in her dining room.
“What happened?” Giles asks softly.
Dawn grimaces, her slim arms folded over her chest. “Before graduation, I just... I don’t know. I guess I wanted him to know that we made it without him. And he was congratulating me, and saying that I should come meet him in Prague - he’s in Prague, now? He was in Barcelona the last time he talked to us, but that was, what, ten years ago?” She snorts. “Whatever. Anyway. He’s telling me I should come meet him in Prague and he and Carol will take me out for dinner to celebrate. And he’s trying to catch up and all, asking me about Buffy, and... and I just couldn’t handle it. So, um... I hung up on him.” She seems to think about this for a moment. “Don’t tell Buffy. About the calling or the hanging up.”
“Of course I won’t, but Dawn--”
“So he’s got my number, now. Because of caller ID, right? And he called back, right away, like he thought maybe we just got disconnected, so I shut my phone off.” Dawn holds up the phone, matter-of-fact. It is, indeed, turned off. “So I start thinking about it on the way here, right? And it’s like... is this it? I want to be a lawyer, Giles. I’m going to law school in the fall, and... what am I going to do? Hang up on the opposing counsel if they say something I don’t like? That is so high school, and I am so over it, but he... he made me do it! It was like I panicked! I haven’t panicked since I was sixteen! Well, except the week before the LSATs, and that was different... but seriously, Giles. What the fuck.”
She shakes the phone as though it’s responsible for all of this, and then tosses it down onto the sofa next to them.
Giles takes a deep breath, somewhat at a loss amid the rush of information. “Are you upset because you called him, or upset because you hung up on him?”
“Both.”
“All right...”
“It’s just so stupid.” Dawn crosses her arms over her chest and pouts dramatically. “Why do I still care? He hasn’t been around, he hasn’t so much as called Buffy or I in years. And now because I’ve called him, he thinks he’s back in good with us? Yeah, right. We’ll just forget all about everything, right?” A snort. “And the worst part is, I feel dumb because I called him. And I guess... I mean, Buffy’s always saying that he’s our dad, right? But... I mean, what does that matter? So he contributed sperm that fertilized both the eggs we came from - so what? Since then, he’s pretty much just abandoned both of us. I mean, you washed the dishes and answered the phone for Buffy when Mom died. You were there for my high school graduation. Apart from having sex with mom and then divorcing her, what the hell has he done that’s so god-damned special?”
Giles stares blankly at her for a moment, then takes off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Dawn... while I... erm... While I do appreciate the, ah, emotional complexity of what you’re going through at the moment, I do wonder if we... couldn’t perhaps dispense with the mention of sex?”
It had all been so much easier when the children were all horrified by the thought of mentioning sex or anything vaguely adult around him.
“Oh. Right.” Dawn frowns, and picks a bit of fuzz off his sofa. “Sorry.”
“You needn’t apologize.” He sighs. “It’s difficult, of course. But... if I might take the extremely grown-up tactic of pointing out the benefit of age in this discussion, your father will not always be alive for you to resent him, Dawn. That may be part of why you felt the impulse to call him to begin with. As you go through these... these rites of passage in your life, you begin to realize the inevitability of age, and, by extension, the toll of the aging process on those around you. That does not mean that you have to forgive him--” Far from it, Giles thinks, because while he no longer has an active desire to punch the other man, he would hardly like to see Hank Summers become a part of his daughters’ lives again after all that he ignored them through... “But I would not be angry at yourself for feeling as though you might. Or even if you decide that you must, if only to be content with yourself.”
Dawn looked at him in a peculiar way, and then, to his surprise, nodded. “You know... I think four years of reading college history texts made most of that actually make sense.”
“I’m so grateful,” Giles grumbled.
“And Giles?”
“Yes, Dawn?”
She grins sheepishly at him. “Sorry I said ‘fuck.’”
* * *
Three.
“Where is he? Where?”
The nurse behind the reception desk resists a strange unconscious desire to step backward. The woman - almost a girl, she can’t be more thirty and has a youthful look to her pixie features - facing her down from the other side of the desk is a small, lightly-built and fashionably-dressed blonde, and she herself has started down all manner of knifey thugs in her time working casualty. This girl isn’t armed, she isn’t drunk, she isn’t shouting... she’s just unbelievably intense, and her dark eyes are immensely wide and horrified. That, at least, the nurse can understand. Worried family members are a standard part of the job.
“You’ll have to give me a name, Miss.”
“Giles, Rupert Giles. He called yesterday, he said he’d been admitted here, something about his heart...” The girl looks positively shaken.
“That’s all right, Miss, I’ll have his room number up in just a moment... are you his daughter?”
The girl looks shocked - almost confused - for a moment, and then relaxes and shakes her head. “No, no... just... a friend. He was my teacher. I mean, my librarian, my--” She trails off, scrunching her hair up in her hands. “I just got in on a red-eye from California, I’m sorry.”
“That’s no trouble at all, Miss. He’s in room A-205.” The nurse plans to ask if there’s anything else the girl needs, but she’s disappeared before she can finish the sentence. “Miss! Miss, there’s no running in hospital!”
The girl doesn’t even slow down.
* * *
“Giles!”
When she pushes into the little hospital room, the first thing Buffy notices is how old he looks. There are circles under his eyes, and that’s pretty normal for Giles, but the lines on his face seem to have doubled since the last time she saw him, and the cold hospital light makes him look pale and blotchy, and weirdly unnatural. Unhealthy. Of course he’s unhealthy, he’s in the hospital, but...
“Buffy? Buffy, what are you doing here...?”
There’s something in her throat, blocking up her voice, and she has to swallow twice before she can get out more than a squeak. “You call up at two in the afternoon and tell me you’re in the hospital with an undiagnosed heart problem, and you don’t expect me to get the next flight to England?”
He sighs. “Buffy, I’m--” A cough interrupts him, and he winces, pressing his chest. “It’s not that I’m not thrilled to see you, but you must have literally gone straight to the airport. That’s hardly necessary... These things do happen when one gets to my age, I’m afraid...”
She hands him the glass of water that was sitting by his bed. “Okay, sure, but... that doesn’t mean I’m not going to come running. I ended up in the hospital all the time in the bad old days, and I seem to recall Mr Watcher showing up pretty damned quick every time. Um. I didn’t have time to bring grapes. Or a card. Or balloons, but I could probably run back out to the gift shop if that nurse out front won’t kick me out for running.”
“Running?” He gives her The Look, and for a weirdly blissful moment she’s sixteen again, and forever doing things that horribly embarrass his stuffy British sense of dignity, and god, it’s wonderful. It’s so Giles.
“Yeah, well, a girl’s gotta keep in shape, right? It was a long flight.” She tries on a grin, and is relieved when he returns it, weak though his looks. “Giles, what happened?
“Er... nothing drastic, I’m afraid. Nothing... nothing unusual.” He glances past the curtain to the open door into the ward, and then lowers his voice. “Nothing supernatural, Buffy. I told you, these things do happen when you get to my age.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Buffy says flatly, thinking of her mother. Giles seems to see where her thoughts are going, because he presses his lips together, frowns, and takes a slow sip of water before he continues.
“A mild heart attack, Buffy, that’s all. I’m afraid that running the Watcher’s Council hasn’t been giving me as much exercise as I got chasing after all of you back in California. I haven’t kept up on my health as well as I should have, and I’m afraid this was my body’s way of... reminding me, I suppose. A relatively gentle reminder, all things considered.”
“So it’s okay? You can go home? I can call a car - we can go back to your place, and I’ll make you tea,” Buffy offers quickly.
“No, Buffy. I’m afraid it’s not that simple. I will have to have a... small surgery.”
“Surgery,” Buffy repeats. That was how it started, back in Sunnydale, with her mother...
“A very routine operation, Buffy. They’re holding me for observation until then. It’s nothing to be worried about, I assure you.”
“But you--”
“Buffy. Breathe.”
She not only breathes. She laughs. And then, when the panic has all been laughed out, she sits on the edge of his bed and awkwardly squeezes his hand - the one that doesn’t have a tube taped into it. “Super-slayer Buffy - I can save the world, but if someone’s in the hospital I turn into a total nutjob. Aren’t you glad I came out to help you feel better?”
He only smiles, and says, “Yes. Yes, I am.”