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akainagiThreads (Part 1)
Author: AkaiNagi
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Genre: BtVS, x-over with Stephen King’s Insomnia.
Status: WIP, rewrite/repost
Summary: Buffy returns from Los Angeles carrying a curse, one she must face alone. But when she disappears again, will anyone, even her Watcher, keep faith in her?
Somewhere between Sunnydale and Los Angeles, Buffy Summers had both ended and begun.
So many things in her life had ended. Sometimes she felt like her life itself had ended. Maybe this was what it felt like to have your soul sucked out. Maybe the real difference between Buffy and the creatures she was born to destroy was not the absence or presence of a soul, but rather the self-awareness that it was gone. Vampires seemed to revel the absence, gorging themselves with the hedonism of a happy drunk on a really good bender. She just felt like she had outlived the most vital part of herself.
Maybe the unsouled lacked reflections so they couldn’t see what they’d become. She started consciously avoiding mirrors. She was afraid of what might see (or not see) looking back.
She had fled from Sunnydale with a crushing weight on her shoulders: the weight of the decisions she had made, and the decisions she had failed to make. The fate thrust upon her and the fate she had made by her own actions. She was not the person she had always thought she was. Would the old Buffy have sent the man who loved her through the gate to Hell? Stabbing him literally and figuratively in the heart? The old Buffy had loved Angel. The new Buffy couldn’t forgive Angel for the Angelus he had become. Of maybe she just didn’t want to think about her own causative role in that transformation. She walked through her existence tortured by the past; by paths taken, and those not taken. And she was afraid of the future.
The nightmares followed hard upon. Variations on a theme; an instant relived over and over. The gaping maw of Hell, with Angel falling into its depths, propelled by Buffy’s own hand. Or sometimes the dreams would be of Angelus, torturing her friends and family; visiting pain on them joyfully, gleefully. Over time the latter images began to overwhelm the former. The pain of Angel’s descent and damnation still cut deep. But somewhere in the course of that lost summer, that pain was overwhelmed by the agonizing realization that she had failed her friends and family twofold. She had set the wheel called Angelus in motion, and then she had fled. She had left her loved ones broken and bleeding, while she crawled off to lick her own wounds.
And then it occurred to her that they might not even know if she was alive or dead.
She made that realization somewhere on a long stretch of highway, in the middle of the night, hunched down in the seat of a Greyhound bus. She was glad for the dark, and for her window seat. She pressed her forehead against the glass, and no one even noticed her tears.
Every day that passed compounded her guilt. More and more her dreams of Angelus were supplanted by images of her mother’s tearstained face, her friends broken and bleeding, her Watcher wondering if his charge would ever return.
In that context, she had not considered sleeplessness to be a bad thing. She did not even notice it at first. Her waking hours had been filled with nearly as many demons as those hours she spent dreaming. She was so wrapped up in hurt and guilt and self-pity that she didn’t question why sleep became more elusive. When she did notice, she was primarily grateful. The images that her waking mind supplied were still painful, but far less so than her brutally vivid nightmares. Her demons stalked her waking hours, in dreams they moved in for the kill.
And none of these demons were the slaying kind.
So when she began waking before the harsh buzz of her bargain-priced alarm clock, she thought little of it. She spent the extra few minutes lying in the uncomfortable bed, and staring at the cracked ceiling, imagining the ceiling in her room at home. Wondering if she would ever see it again. Wondering if the day would come when she would feel clean enough to grace the sheets of her own bed.
By the middle of the summer her 5AM wake-up call had rolled back to 4:30. By the end of July it was before 4AM. By the time she turned her eyes back to Sunnydale, she was waking even earlier. The unexpected clash with L.A.’s baddies had driven home that she did indeed have a purpose in life. She had a responsibility, as a daughter, as a friend, and as a Slayer. Even thought she still felt unclean in a way that had nothing to do with the state of her body. Even if the demons still filled her rapidly dwindling nights.
***
In the back of his mind, or perhaps in the back of his heart, he had always known this day would come.
The day when he would have to acknowledge what his elders and betters on the Watchers’ Council had always taken as a foregone conclusion.
That Rupert Giles, as Watchers go, was an abject failure.
No thanks to himself, his Slayer had survived into a second year. Survival of one's Slayer being the bare minimum requisite for his job. On some days ensuring that survival had been easier than on others. Giles had done what he thought was his best to train her in the physical sense, although she had always been a natural in that area. He had supported her in the capacity of a ‘walking encyclopedia of badness,’ as Buffy had so glibly termed it. He had watched her rise to meet her destiny, and he had watched her grow as a Slayer.
While he had stagnated; always assuming that his role was to propel her from behind, rather than walk forward with her, hand-in-hand.
It was a basic Watchers’ Precept, set forward in black and white: a Watcher and Slayer, unbonded, lacked a united front against the darkness. Lacking a bond, it was a superficial partnership. He had convinced himself it would be enough. He had thought Buffy’s own prodigious talent would be sufficient. But an earthly partnership was not enough to combat the unearthly forces that surrounded them on all sides, like a great gaping maw. The Hellmouth; waiting for the chance to devour the Chosen One and all who walked with her.
It was with a profound sense of irony that he remembered the high-handed way he had lectured to Buffy in the Bronze two years ago; their acquaintance merely hours old at that point. All that hogwash he had spouted about ‘honing’ her senses to locate vampires. He was one to talk. Two years his slayer, and now that she had disappeared, he hadn’t the slightest idea where she was. Whether she even yet lived on this earth.
She must, he told himself. For to think otherwise made his heart constrict in his chest in a way that was too painful to bear.
In the course of this interminable, miserable summer, he had an abundance of time to ruminate on his failings. His relationship with Buffy had begun with blazing contention. She had rebelled against him from the start. It had infuriated him. And at the same time it had engendered kind of admiration. She met him with fire; the same kind of fire Giles had turned on his father so many years ago. Like her he had chafed under the yoke of his responsibility; under the expectations of others. Unlike Buffy, he had thrown off that yoke with a vengeance, and it had taken him years to own up to his destiny. At times his Slayer seemed little more than a child, and at other times she astonished him with a clarity of purpose and a determination that belied her years.
When their initial contention had morphed into an at-times grudging respect, he had been pleased. Her biting sarcasm, inane pop-culture references and fits of temper still made him grind his teeth at times. In fact they had a whacking great argument her sophomore summer when he made several irate remarks about her priorities and dedication to her calling. She then introduced him to her seldom used, fairly extensive and surprisingly creative library of profanity. (He learned later that her parents’ relationship had been more volatile than he had ever imagined.) He still vividly remembered standing in the middle of the darkened Sunnydale Cemetery, fairly slack-jawed and maybe just slightly impressed, watching her seethe with righteous indignation. He really hadn’t meant to start laughing. He remembered thinking that he probably shouldn’t be laughing at furious teenage girl with superhuman strength and a deadly weapon, but by then he was sitting on the damp grass quite incapacitated with mirth. When he finally choked down the last of his laughter, he found that he had underestimated her yet again. Not only had she not staked him, she was sitting several feet away, likewise debilitated and giggling uncontrollably. They were lucky no vampires had interrupted their terminal case of amusement, or they would have been caught quite a loss.
It wasn’t until later that night, after they amicably parted ways, that he realized he had questioned her dedication to the cause mere months after she had literally laid down her life in its pursuit.
She had died. Cut down by the Master. So, in the end, he had failed even that most basic duty of a Watcher: to keep his Slayer alive. And when she returned, miraculously whole, he had buried his failure with relief. He had thanked a hundred Gods that he knew of, but did not really believe in. He redoubled his efforts in her training, and in retrospect it had been to an overbearing degree. No wonder Buffy had resorted to vulgarity.
Now facing the possibility that he had failed his Slayer for a second time, he realized that he had shirked his responsibility yet again.
He was her Watcher. He should know where his slayer was at all times, so the Watchers’ Precepts dictated. But he had thrown out the rulebook the day that he met Buffy Summers. So much was difficult to apply to one so advanced in years. Buffy was positively aged for a Slayer. She was strong, independent, and frustratingly willful. Nearly a woman grown. To attempt to force a formal bond on her was something he could never bring himself to do. Advisable as it might have been in hindsight.
Now he wished that he had. He would give anything to know where she was at that moment. To know she was safe and whole. To go to her side, if not to bring her home, then simply to be with her. Then perhaps the gaping emptiness in his chest would ease.
He was a coward. The harmony and balance he had reached with Buffy had been hard-won. And when it was finally achieved, he found himself loathe to give it up. That his fiercely independent Slayer would balk at being permanently tied to her Watcher was an understatement. Part of him had always considered the idea of a formal Watcher/Slayer bond on par with the Cruciamentum: another way of subjugating a Slayer to the will of the Council. He had been wrong. And that knowledge sat like lead in his chest.
And now? Now he sat in his darkened flat, nursing a cup of tea that, like most everything else tasted like bitter defeat. Now he only wished for certainty, after months of uncertainty tinged with despair. He had feared what would happen if he pushed the bond on her. Now he lived cursing of the fact that he did not. If she resented him, even hated him, he could have survived. At least she would be here to hate him. He could survive anything but the day when he might have face the fact that he had again failed his Slayer, and this time there would be no second chances.
A soft knock at the door served to rouse him from a semi-doze and from his most recent bout of self-loathing. He set down his book next to the now cold cup of tea. Taking a moment school his features lest his morose mood show on his face, he rose to answer the door. It would be the children: no doubt reporting in after an evening of substitute slaying. The term children was now more one of endearment than any statement of fact: their competence in filling in for Buffy had proved anything but child-like. He was thinking to himself how blessed he was to have them in Buffy’s absence when his world was suddenly thrown off axis and his heart seemingly stopped in his chest.
He had to remind himself to breathe as he took her in. She appeared to him even more petite than usual. Small and fragile, her face was filled with trepidation. She seemed almost like she might flee if startled. Her posture was tense and guarded, but her gaze was completely open, her eyes impossibly bright in the dim light. He took her in as Xander blathered on in the background, and as the reality of her set in. A warmth started to fill that part of him that had been so empty these long months. He knew that he would again be thanking those hundred deities that he might just start believing in, because she was here, she was home, and she was alive. And he said the only thing that he could think of to say. It was far less than he wanted to say, but he tried to inject those few words with all he couldn’t bring himself to convey in speech.
“Welcome home, Buffy.”
As a soft, tremulous smile lit her features, he knew he had succeeded.
***
For a man with an encyclopedic vocabulary Giles said very little to her the night she showed up on his doorstep three months too late and flanked by Scoobies. Buffy hadn’t really known what to expect. During her self-imposed exile, she paid lip-service to the fact that he must be worried about her. But in her grief over Angel, her anger toward Angelus, and her loathing towards herself for not being able to reconcile the two, she apparently had failed to understand the magnitude of the pain she was causing. The pale, drawn features and haunted eyes of her Watcher drove the point home like a punch in the gut.
Over the past two years she had become quite adept at Giles-reading. His facial expressions were always subdued. Maybe that was a British thing? His eyes had always been the most expressive part of his face. That was a Giles thing. Those eyes told her everything from ‘I am mildly annoyed at you” to “I’m proud of you, but I’m too English to say it’ to ‘your footwear is appallingly hideous.’
So she watched his expression go from hollow and pained, to disbelieving, to hopeful and then his face softened into the smallest, yet loudest smile she had probably ever seen. He said something then, but she couldn’t remember what, and it was, and it didn’t matter because she had seen it in his eyes. She let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding, and then damned if her own vision didn’t get just a little blurry, and her throat was tight and she wanted to thank him and apologize to him all at once, but she couldn’t because she was not going to start bawling on his doorstep.
And now they’re all sucking down tea in Giles’ living room, and Xander is running his mouth nonstop between cookies, and she can hear herself answering questions, but her voice sounds about a million miles away. And the whole time Giles watches her with the same soft, unreadable expression, and maybe in another situation she might feel uncomfortable under that unrelenting gaze. But now it’s the only thing she has to hang onto. So she clings to it, and even when Giles looks toward Willow or Cordy or Oz or Xander (who still hasn’t shut up), and even when he ducks back into the kitchen to get more cookies, his eyes always gravitate right back to her. His attention is gentle and undemanding, and she is so grateful because if she didn’t have some way to ground herself she would probably end up killing Xander, and she didn’t come all the way back from L.A. to get charged with homicide again. She knows it’s not Xander’s fault. He’s trying – they’re all trying, but they’re trying too hard, and she’s spent too many hours alone counting cracks in the ceiling of a run-down tenement, and she feels like she’s talked more in the last three hours than she has in the last three months.
And when Giles suggests they call it an evening, she’s embarrassingly grateful, even if she doesn’t show it. The list of things she needs to thank him for is growing longer. Maybe one day it will be long enough to balance out all the apologies she owes him.
She hangs back partly to distance herself from Xander’s rambling and partly because she’s suddenly afraid to walk out this doorway and back out into the world. She’s afraid to go back to that house; to be greeted by a woman whose accusations are hidden behind a cracking veneer of maternal concern. She’s also just realized something that has been skirting across her mind since she crossed the Sunnydale city limits: she’s not the same person she was three months ago. She’s not even the person she was three hours ago. For a fleeting moment she wishes she was back in Los Angeles, alone and insulated and numb. And when she hears Giles at her shoulder she curses herself for even thinking that.
One more for the apology list.
The Scoobies are already out on the sidewalk. Someone calls her name (Willow, maybe?). She sound grates on her like sandpaper. With great effort, she steps forward anyway. And when she turns to say goodbye the look of naked concern in Giles’ eyes is too damn much and her vision starts to blur again. Will she ever be able to stand on his doorstep without bawling?
Shit.
She congratulates herself on her remarkably steady voice, even though she’s not quite sure what she says. Thank you? Maybe one of those million apologies she owes him? And then she flees. And if she isn’t one hundred percent successful swallowing the lump in her throat, at least it’s dark enough that no one probably notices.
Then there is the walk home, punctuated by more meaningless, forced conversation. She has to fight the urge to run, knowing that if she starts running, she’ll probably never stop.
When she gets home, she locks herself in her room. She doesn’t even make it to the bed. She curls up on the floor and cries. Not silent tears, but great heaving sobs that hurt her chest. She hasn’t cried like this for months. She’s been numb for so long, she vaguely wonders if all this pain is worth it.
By the time she’s done her throat is raw. She climbs into bed, more exhausted than she’s ever been. She looks at the clock. Maybe she’ll finally be able to sleep.
She doesn’t.
Author: AkaiNagi
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Genre: BtVS, x-over with Stephen King’s Insomnia.
Status: WIP, rewrite/repost
Summary: Buffy returns from Los Angeles carrying a curse, one she must face alone. But when she disappears again, will anyone, even her Watcher, keep faith in her?
Somewhere between Sunnydale and Los Angeles, Buffy Summers had both ended and begun.
So many things in her life had ended. Sometimes she felt like her life itself had ended. Maybe this was what it felt like to have your soul sucked out. Maybe the real difference between Buffy and the creatures she was born to destroy was not the absence or presence of a soul, but rather the self-awareness that it was gone. Vampires seemed to revel the absence, gorging themselves with the hedonism of a happy drunk on a really good bender. She just felt like she had outlived the most vital part of herself.
Maybe the unsouled lacked reflections so they couldn’t see what they’d become. She started consciously avoiding mirrors. She was afraid of what might see (or not see) looking back.
She had fled from Sunnydale with a crushing weight on her shoulders: the weight of the decisions she had made, and the decisions she had failed to make. The fate thrust upon her and the fate she had made by her own actions. She was not the person she had always thought she was. Would the old Buffy have sent the man who loved her through the gate to Hell? Stabbing him literally and figuratively in the heart? The old Buffy had loved Angel. The new Buffy couldn’t forgive Angel for the Angelus he had become. Of maybe she just didn’t want to think about her own causative role in that transformation. She walked through her existence tortured by the past; by paths taken, and those not taken. And she was afraid of the future.
The nightmares followed hard upon. Variations on a theme; an instant relived over and over. The gaping maw of Hell, with Angel falling into its depths, propelled by Buffy’s own hand. Or sometimes the dreams would be of Angelus, torturing her friends and family; visiting pain on them joyfully, gleefully. Over time the latter images began to overwhelm the former. The pain of Angel’s descent and damnation still cut deep. But somewhere in the course of that lost summer, that pain was overwhelmed by the agonizing realization that she had failed her friends and family twofold. She had set the wheel called Angelus in motion, and then she had fled. She had left her loved ones broken and bleeding, while she crawled off to lick her own wounds.
And then it occurred to her that they might not even know if she was alive or dead.
She made that realization somewhere on a long stretch of highway, in the middle of the night, hunched down in the seat of a Greyhound bus. She was glad for the dark, and for her window seat. She pressed her forehead against the glass, and no one even noticed her tears.
Every day that passed compounded her guilt. More and more her dreams of Angelus were supplanted by images of her mother’s tearstained face, her friends broken and bleeding, her Watcher wondering if his charge would ever return.
In that context, she had not considered sleeplessness to be a bad thing. She did not even notice it at first. Her waking hours had been filled with nearly as many demons as those hours she spent dreaming. She was so wrapped up in hurt and guilt and self-pity that she didn’t question why sleep became more elusive. When she did notice, she was primarily grateful. The images that her waking mind supplied were still painful, but far less so than her brutally vivid nightmares. Her demons stalked her waking hours, in dreams they moved in for the kill.
And none of these demons were the slaying kind.
So when she began waking before the harsh buzz of her bargain-priced alarm clock, she thought little of it. She spent the extra few minutes lying in the uncomfortable bed, and staring at the cracked ceiling, imagining the ceiling in her room at home. Wondering if she would ever see it again. Wondering if the day would come when she would feel clean enough to grace the sheets of her own bed.
By the middle of the summer her 5AM wake-up call had rolled back to 4:30. By the end of July it was before 4AM. By the time she turned her eyes back to Sunnydale, she was waking even earlier. The unexpected clash with L.A.’s baddies had driven home that she did indeed have a purpose in life. She had a responsibility, as a daughter, as a friend, and as a Slayer. Even thought she still felt unclean in a way that had nothing to do with the state of her body. Even if the demons still filled her rapidly dwindling nights.
***
In the back of his mind, or perhaps in the back of his heart, he had always known this day would come.
The day when he would have to acknowledge what his elders and betters on the Watchers’ Council had always taken as a foregone conclusion.
That Rupert Giles, as Watchers go, was an abject failure.
No thanks to himself, his Slayer had survived into a second year. Survival of one's Slayer being the bare minimum requisite for his job. On some days ensuring that survival had been easier than on others. Giles had done what he thought was his best to train her in the physical sense, although she had always been a natural in that area. He had supported her in the capacity of a ‘walking encyclopedia of badness,’ as Buffy had so glibly termed it. He had watched her rise to meet her destiny, and he had watched her grow as a Slayer.
While he had stagnated; always assuming that his role was to propel her from behind, rather than walk forward with her, hand-in-hand.
It was a basic Watchers’ Precept, set forward in black and white: a Watcher and Slayer, unbonded, lacked a united front against the darkness. Lacking a bond, it was a superficial partnership. He had convinced himself it would be enough. He had thought Buffy’s own prodigious talent would be sufficient. But an earthly partnership was not enough to combat the unearthly forces that surrounded them on all sides, like a great gaping maw. The Hellmouth; waiting for the chance to devour the Chosen One and all who walked with her.
It was with a profound sense of irony that he remembered the high-handed way he had lectured to Buffy in the Bronze two years ago; their acquaintance merely hours old at that point. All that hogwash he had spouted about ‘honing’ her senses to locate vampires. He was one to talk. Two years his slayer, and now that she had disappeared, he hadn’t the slightest idea where she was. Whether she even yet lived on this earth.
She must, he told himself. For to think otherwise made his heart constrict in his chest in a way that was too painful to bear.
In the course of this interminable, miserable summer, he had an abundance of time to ruminate on his failings. His relationship with Buffy had begun with blazing contention. She had rebelled against him from the start. It had infuriated him. And at the same time it had engendered kind of admiration. She met him with fire; the same kind of fire Giles had turned on his father so many years ago. Like her he had chafed under the yoke of his responsibility; under the expectations of others. Unlike Buffy, he had thrown off that yoke with a vengeance, and it had taken him years to own up to his destiny. At times his Slayer seemed little more than a child, and at other times she astonished him with a clarity of purpose and a determination that belied her years.
When their initial contention had morphed into an at-times grudging respect, he had been pleased. Her biting sarcasm, inane pop-culture references and fits of temper still made him grind his teeth at times. In fact they had a whacking great argument her sophomore summer when he made several irate remarks about her priorities and dedication to her calling. She then introduced him to her seldom used, fairly extensive and surprisingly creative library of profanity. (He learned later that her parents’ relationship had been more volatile than he had ever imagined.) He still vividly remembered standing in the middle of the darkened Sunnydale Cemetery, fairly slack-jawed and maybe just slightly impressed, watching her seethe with righteous indignation. He really hadn’t meant to start laughing. He remembered thinking that he probably shouldn’t be laughing at furious teenage girl with superhuman strength and a deadly weapon, but by then he was sitting on the damp grass quite incapacitated with mirth. When he finally choked down the last of his laughter, he found that he had underestimated her yet again. Not only had she not staked him, she was sitting several feet away, likewise debilitated and giggling uncontrollably. They were lucky no vampires had interrupted their terminal case of amusement, or they would have been caught quite a loss.
It wasn’t until later that night, after they amicably parted ways, that he realized he had questioned her dedication to the cause mere months after she had literally laid down her life in its pursuit.
She had died. Cut down by the Master. So, in the end, he had failed even that most basic duty of a Watcher: to keep his Slayer alive. And when she returned, miraculously whole, he had buried his failure with relief. He had thanked a hundred Gods that he knew of, but did not really believe in. He redoubled his efforts in her training, and in retrospect it had been to an overbearing degree. No wonder Buffy had resorted to vulgarity.
Now facing the possibility that he had failed his Slayer for a second time, he realized that he had shirked his responsibility yet again.
He was her Watcher. He should know where his slayer was at all times, so the Watchers’ Precepts dictated. But he had thrown out the rulebook the day that he met Buffy Summers. So much was difficult to apply to one so advanced in years. Buffy was positively aged for a Slayer. She was strong, independent, and frustratingly willful. Nearly a woman grown. To attempt to force a formal bond on her was something he could never bring himself to do. Advisable as it might have been in hindsight.
Now he wished that he had. He would give anything to know where she was at that moment. To know she was safe and whole. To go to her side, if not to bring her home, then simply to be with her. Then perhaps the gaping emptiness in his chest would ease.
He was a coward. The harmony and balance he had reached with Buffy had been hard-won. And when it was finally achieved, he found himself loathe to give it up. That his fiercely independent Slayer would balk at being permanently tied to her Watcher was an understatement. Part of him had always considered the idea of a formal Watcher/Slayer bond on par with the Cruciamentum: another way of subjugating a Slayer to the will of the Council. He had been wrong. And that knowledge sat like lead in his chest.
And now? Now he sat in his darkened flat, nursing a cup of tea that, like most everything else tasted like bitter defeat. Now he only wished for certainty, after months of uncertainty tinged with despair. He had feared what would happen if he pushed the bond on her. Now he lived cursing of the fact that he did not. If she resented him, even hated him, he could have survived. At least she would be here to hate him. He could survive anything but the day when he might have face the fact that he had again failed his Slayer, and this time there would be no second chances.
A soft knock at the door served to rouse him from a semi-doze and from his most recent bout of self-loathing. He set down his book next to the now cold cup of tea. Taking a moment school his features lest his morose mood show on his face, he rose to answer the door. It would be the children: no doubt reporting in after an evening of substitute slaying. The term children was now more one of endearment than any statement of fact: their competence in filling in for Buffy had proved anything but child-like. He was thinking to himself how blessed he was to have them in Buffy’s absence when his world was suddenly thrown off axis and his heart seemingly stopped in his chest.
He had to remind himself to breathe as he took her in. She appeared to him even more petite than usual. Small and fragile, her face was filled with trepidation. She seemed almost like she might flee if startled. Her posture was tense and guarded, but her gaze was completely open, her eyes impossibly bright in the dim light. He took her in as Xander blathered on in the background, and as the reality of her set in. A warmth started to fill that part of him that had been so empty these long months. He knew that he would again be thanking those hundred deities that he might just start believing in, because she was here, she was home, and she was alive. And he said the only thing that he could think of to say. It was far less than he wanted to say, but he tried to inject those few words with all he couldn’t bring himself to convey in speech.
“Welcome home, Buffy.”
As a soft, tremulous smile lit her features, he knew he had succeeded.
***
For a man with an encyclopedic vocabulary Giles said very little to her the night she showed up on his doorstep three months too late and flanked by Scoobies. Buffy hadn’t really known what to expect. During her self-imposed exile, she paid lip-service to the fact that he must be worried about her. But in her grief over Angel, her anger toward Angelus, and her loathing towards herself for not being able to reconcile the two, she apparently had failed to understand the magnitude of the pain she was causing. The pale, drawn features and haunted eyes of her Watcher drove the point home like a punch in the gut.
Over the past two years she had become quite adept at Giles-reading. His facial expressions were always subdued. Maybe that was a British thing? His eyes had always been the most expressive part of his face. That was a Giles thing. Those eyes told her everything from ‘I am mildly annoyed at you” to “I’m proud of you, but I’m too English to say it’ to ‘your footwear is appallingly hideous.’
So she watched his expression go from hollow and pained, to disbelieving, to hopeful and then his face softened into the smallest, yet loudest smile she had probably ever seen. He said something then, but she couldn’t remember what, and it was, and it didn’t matter because she had seen it in his eyes. She let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding, and then damned if her own vision didn’t get just a little blurry, and her throat was tight and she wanted to thank him and apologize to him all at once, but she couldn’t because she was not going to start bawling on his doorstep.
And now they’re all sucking down tea in Giles’ living room, and Xander is running his mouth nonstop between cookies, and she can hear herself answering questions, but her voice sounds about a million miles away. And the whole time Giles watches her with the same soft, unreadable expression, and maybe in another situation she might feel uncomfortable under that unrelenting gaze. But now it’s the only thing she has to hang onto. So she clings to it, and even when Giles looks toward Willow or Cordy or Oz or Xander (who still hasn’t shut up), and even when he ducks back into the kitchen to get more cookies, his eyes always gravitate right back to her. His attention is gentle and undemanding, and she is so grateful because if she didn’t have some way to ground herself she would probably end up killing Xander, and she didn’t come all the way back from L.A. to get charged with homicide again. She knows it’s not Xander’s fault. He’s trying – they’re all trying, but they’re trying too hard, and she’s spent too many hours alone counting cracks in the ceiling of a run-down tenement, and she feels like she’s talked more in the last three hours than she has in the last three months.
And when Giles suggests they call it an evening, she’s embarrassingly grateful, even if she doesn’t show it. The list of things she needs to thank him for is growing longer. Maybe one day it will be long enough to balance out all the apologies she owes him.
She hangs back partly to distance herself from Xander’s rambling and partly because she’s suddenly afraid to walk out this doorway and back out into the world. She’s afraid to go back to that house; to be greeted by a woman whose accusations are hidden behind a cracking veneer of maternal concern. She’s also just realized something that has been skirting across her mind since she crossed the Sunnydale city limits: she’s not the same person she was three months ago. She’s not even the person she was three hours ago. For a fleeting moment she wishes she was back in Los Angeles, alone and insulated and numb. And when she hears Giles at her shoulder she curses herself for even thinking that.
One more for the apology list.
The Scoobies are already out on the sidewalk. Someone calls her name (Willow, maybe?). She sound grates on her like sandpaper. With great effort, she steps forward anyway. And when she turns to say goodbye the look of naked concern in Giles’ eyes is too damn much and her vision starts to blur again. Will she ever be able to stand on his doorstep without bawling?
Shit.
She congratulates herself on her remarkably steady voice, even though she’s not quite sure what she says. Thank you? Maybe one of those million apologies she owes him? And then she flees. And if she isn’t one hundred percent successful swallowing the lump in her throat, at least it’s dark enough that no one probably notices.
Then there is the walk home, punctuated by more meaningless, forced conversation. She has to fight the urge to run, knowing that if she starts running, she’ll probably never stop.
When she gets home, she locks herself in her room. She doesn’t even make it to the bed. She curls up on the floor and cries. Not silent tears, but great heaving sobs that hurt her chest. She hasn’t cried like this for months. She’s been numb for so long, she vaguely wonders if all this pain is worth it.
By the time she’s done her throat is raw. She climbs into bed, more exhausted than she’s ever been. She looks at the clock. Maybe she’ll finally be able to sleep.
She doesn’t.
