Fic: Remnants
Character/Pairing: Giles, General
Rating: PG
Summary: Willow, Xander and Dawn remember Giles after his death, while gathering at his house. Future fic, angsty.
Disclaimer: All these characters and the lovely Buffyverse belong to Joss Whedon. No infringment intended.
Notes: Some of the ideas & context for this were influenced by chrisleeoctaves's lovely Eulogy. Thank you to carmen_sandiego for partial beta and suggestions. (cross-posted at buffy_fanfic and tweedandtea)
* * *
Giles died nearly three years after Buffy did. It's the right order of things, they conclude later: slayer first, then watcher. She was forty six, he was seventy six. To the rest of them, at first, those numbers seem small. Then they really think about it, and they add up everything those years contained, and it seems more like twenty lifetimes instead of two.
Xander drives the three of them to the house, the morning after they leave the hospital.
Willow has a spare key Giles gave her years ago, when she first moved to London. The lock on the door sticks a bit when she opens it. They take their shoes off and set them on the mat just inside the door. It’s quiet. Dawn opens curtains in the front room, and the light catches some dust in the air.
They look around and scatter to different rooms, looking for remnants to collect.
* * *
Willow had thought the obituary would be the easiest job to start with, because it's a small piece. It turns out to be just the opposite; she doesn't know how to fit someone like Giles into this few words.
She looks at the objects around her in the sitting room, for inspiration. A couch like the one in Sunnydale that they used to sit on when they were researching (god, how badly must he have wanted the place to himself, some nights?), and the shelves that hold his personal library. She wonders for a moment how long it took him to build it, and how much he lost along the way.
A thought comes to her, to make tea. It’s what Giles would do. It helped him think, he always said.
Willow gets up from his couch, sets her notebook on his coffee table. In the kitchen, she sees the kettle resting on the stove. She lets the water run to cold into the sink for a second or two, then fills it, and turns on the burner.
While the water heats she opens cupboards, trying to remember where he kept the tea. Before she finds it she finds Hobnobs and Shredded Wheat and unopened cans of soup, and a whole cupboard full of spices. She takes out one jar, then another, just to smell them. When she gets to sage she remembers a dinner Giles made her once: he'd run out of the herb and turned to the spells cupboard for emergency supply. (She’d teased him for ages after about his “magical” way with food.)
The tea's in the last cupboard she looks in. She pulls out a tin from the front and removes the lid to smell it. Earl Grey. There's a teapot on the shelf above it. She rinses it out with hot water and drops two tea bags in.
Willow thinks about the empty page she left on the coffee table as she watches the kettle. Words come to her mind, but they're not the right ones, not exactly. She doesn't know what word to use for how it felt when Giles trusted her enough to teach her again when all she wanted was punishment. She doesn't know how to describe how the man who held doors open for you and always stayed to help wash the dishes, could be the same man who not only lived through seven straight apocalypses but helped you live through them, too.
The kettle whistles and she fills the pot. The sharp aroma of bergamot rises up with the steam. She stands at the counter and breathes it in, and memories keep washing over her.
Watcher, teacher, mentor, counsellor. Leader, partner, protector. Friend. She knows they're not the wrong words, but they still can’t be the right ones because there's still so much missing. They seem so normal, and she just can't use normal words to describe someone this extraordinary.
* * *
Dawn comes down the stairs and finds Willow in the kitchen, holding the doors of one cupboard open, and just staring into it.
“Oh, tea. Good idea.”
Her voice brings Willow round again, and Dawn gets the feeling she interrupted something, interrupted thoughts. “I thought it would help,” she says sheepishly.
Dawn starts to pull cups from the open cupboard. “Still early. Think we'll get much done today?”
Willow pours. “Maybe. We'll see how much we find.”
* * *
Xander's sorting through Giles' home office, looking at all the papers and records. There will still be plenty more at the Council - because even though Giles was officially retired years ago, he never did fully leave - but most of the important things are here.
It still feels strange to Xander when he does something like this. He's the responsible one now. He puts things in order because he’s capable. He’s forty-nine years old and still coming to terms with being a grownup.
The critical material is on the computer and he leaves that for Willow, not just because she's the best at that sort of thing but because he knows how important it is for her to do it. So he opens drawers of files and notes, and starts cataloguing. A paperless office never worked for Giles; the demons never went electronic, after all, and neither did he.
After a point he starts to think how little there is for him to organize, because it's already all in place. The surprises are the little memos that slipped forgotten in the crannies. There's an old shopping list on the back of an envelope (milk, crackers, dish soap, and scotch tape), and some phone numbers tacked up on the bulletin board. Xander saves them for when they make the rest of the calls.
He finds a few shoeboxes tucked away tidily on top of the file cabinet. They're sturdy but worn around the corners, showing several years' use. After flipping the lid off of one he flicks through the contents as if it's the card catalogue from high school. He smiles, discovering postcards. Some are blank (must have been souvenirs), some of the senders he recognizes and others aren’t even in English.
In the next box he finds more letters, but it's mostly cards. He opens one: it's a birthday card, with some flowers on the front, garden variety Hallmark. The signature on the inside is from Buffy. (He touches her name with the tips of his fingers.) The next one is the same, and the one after that. There are dozens. She must have sent him one every year, he realizes.
Xander frowns, because after he looks at a few more, something seems a little off. The postmarks on the envelopes are all wrong, and the messages inside them don't say “happy birthday”, they say “thank you”. When it finally clicks he stops and just stares at the cards. The reason they seem wrong is because Buffy didn’t send them on Giles' birthday, she sent them on hers. And they all say thank you, every one of them.
He hears Willow come in to check the computer, but Xander can't say anything because he's still comprehending what he's holding. He can't come to grips with it because it's too huge, too private. It's so important that he can't understand how he didn’t know about it before, but he feels like he shouldn't, like he's found something that was only meant for two people to see.
Willow’s standing next to him and looking concerned, and Xander still doesn't know what to say. Mostly he's glad that she's there to put her arms around him when he finally does begin to fall apart.
* * *
“How much is there to do still?” Willow asks him when he gets it together. There's a mug in her hand, he finally notices, meant for him. He takes it.
Xander sits back and looks at the shelves. “It's hard to tell. There's a lot I keep stopping to look at.”
“I know. I keep remembering things.”
“We could probably spend the rest of our lives here doing nothing but remembering.”
Willow smiles a little. “True.”
He drinks the tea. It’s warm and comforting. He starts to feel practical. “So we'll just go one piece at a time.”
* * *
Dawn takes care of the closet. She knew she wanted it as soon as they got to his house, and had been very ready to fight the others for it if it had come to it.
She reaches up for the cord that's attached to the switch on the inside and pulls. Fluorescent light falls on the two rows of garments on either side of her and the foot-worn carpet. She touches the sleeves of all the jackets, fingers the cuffs of the shirts.
There's a feeling Dawn has about this job, that it has to be done carefully, but that isn't the only reason she wanted it. She did the same thing when it was her mother, when it was Buffy. Somehow she thought it would feel different this time because this is the third time and even though it's easier than the first it's still the same, in the end. The people are different, but the remnants are the same, and she wants to be surrounded by them again because it's the last chance she has.
All the familiar things are there. Black shoes, brown shoes, some that shine clean and some that missed their last polish. It's the unfamiliar that takes her by surprise: a tuxedo she only saw him wear twice, three times at the most, and a pair of sneakers that look far from new.
There are more things in the dresser, in some boxes under the bed and on the top shelf in the closet. It doesn't seem right to pack them away, to think that these things won’t ever be worn again, but it's what has to happen. She lingers on things, smoothing her fingertips over cotton and wool pullovers, silk ties and tweed jackets. The minutes roll by until she’s sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor surrounded by neatly folded piles of garments, all these traces of Giles.
It’s the box on the top shelf that has the real find, in with some things that don't at all match with what's sitting around her. The shirt's all polyester, unnaturally smooth and unnaturally coloured, with a collar that points almost to the shoulders. Dawn is pretty sure it predates his watcher days; hell, she's pretty sure it predates her. It's so bright and horrible and so completely wonderful that she grins.
Dawn feels her eyes are wet, but she's smiling when she looks at the shirt, and it's weird, because even though these things are so normal, they're Giles' life, right there in front of them. She feels like she's meeting him but still saying goodbye, and missing him and loving him like she always has and it's all just too hard to explain.
* * *
Xander finds Dawn upstairs, in the bedroom. She's surrounded by clothing, some of it's folded, some of it's not. He can't tell if there's a method to the madness yet.
He taps on the door frame and she looks up. “Hungry?”
She rolls her shoulders briefly, stretching them out, and makes a frown. “Now that you mention it, I really, really am.”
“We can order something.” He steps in the room, where he can find places for his feet. “What's the story?”
“You’re looking at it.” She lets out a breath. “I don’t know what to put away, or what to pack. I feel like saving it all.”
“Do you think we can save some?”
Dawn starts to nod a little. “You know… maybe.” Her face brightens a little. “Wait. There's something I thought of…”
She steps back over to the closet, looking for something.
* * *
Willow's on the sofa again, and her notepad and pen are still where she left them, still untouched. Instead, she's pulled out books and left them open on the coffee table, on the sofa, stacked on the floor.
There are codices and anthologies and diaries and so many things that they used to have at their fingertips. She recognizes a demon here, an incantation there. There are bookmarks and slips of paper between the pages. She knows it's silly but she can't bear to touch them because she doesn't want to lose his place. There’s a trunk she hasn't opened yet, but she knows what's there, the crossbows and the knives, the things that should be scary but they had all become used to by now.
It kind of makes her laugh, because this isn’t any normal kind of nostalgia she's facing here, but it's still so right, because to her, this is just as much the real Giles as the rest of it. But when it comes to it, she realizes that she can't talk about it. She doesn't want to share it with the world because it was never something the world needed to know about; that was the whole point. Then she starts to think that there aren't any words for it, because maybe there doesn't need to be any.
* * *
Xander and Dawn appear at the bottom of the stairs. Willow looks up and blinks, because she notices something different about them. Mostly, it's the shirt Dawn's wearing.
A curious smile slowly forms on Willow’s lips. “Where did you find that?”
Dawn grins. “Upstairs.” She gives a turn. “You like it?”
“Yeah. It reminds me of…” she trails off.
“Giles?” Dawn answers gently.
Willow nods. She notices Xander then. He's wearing a blazer that's familiar to her now, too.
“What do you think?” he asks her.
She gets up and has a good look. “It fits.” She sounds less surprised than she might have thought.
“Dawn found it.” He straightens the collar.
“You look like a Watcher.”
He grins. “Only took me twenty five on the job.”
Dawn steps toward Willow, holding out a cotton pullover. “We found something for you, too.”
Willow pulls it over her head and slips her arms in the sleeves. It's big and completely doesn't fit at all and she’s never felt more comforted by anything in her entire life. She hugs Dawn tight. Xander squeezes her shoulder, and smiles. They all seem more comfortable now.
Willow lets out a breath. “We can't leave here yet... We're not done. There's still so many pieces.”
“So we'll stay.” Xander says calmly, as if he's already come to the same conclusion. “As long as we need. And do this right.”
* * *
Dawn orders the food. They clear off the kitchen table and spread out takeaway containers and fill plates.
Xander looks through the LPs and puts one on the player. It's scratchy and they don't recognize all the songs, but they like it.
He asks Willow what she decided to write, and she says she doesn't quite have an answer yet, because she doesn't know how to say goodbye. He remembers what he found today and tells her maybe it's not about saying goodbye; maybe it's about saying thank you. She smiles and tells him she likes that.
Willow finds a bottle of Glenmorangie in the liquor cupboard and pours three glasses. They sit in the living room, surrounded by the remnants they've found, and raise a toast while they remember, and say thank you.
* * *
Rating: PG
Summary: Willow, Xander and Dawn remember Giles after his death, while gathering at his house. Future fic, angsty.
Disclaimer: All these characters and the lovely Buffyverse belong to Joss Whedon. No infringment intended.
Notes: Some of the ideas & context for this were influenced by chrisleeoctaves's lovely Eulogy. Thank you to carmen_sandiego for partial beta and suggestions. (cross-posted at buffy_fanfic and tweedandtea)
* * *
Giles died nearly three years after Buffy did. It's the right order of things, they conclude later: slayer first, then watcher. She was forty six, he was seventy six. To the rest of them, at first, those numbers seem small. Then they really think about it, and they add up everything those years contained, and it seems more like twenty lifetimes instead of two.
Xander drives the three of them to the house, the morning after they leave the hospital.
Willow has a spare key Giles gave her years ago, when she first moved to London. The lock on the door sticks a bit when she opens it. They take their shoes off and set them on the mat just inside the door. It’s quiet. Dawn opens curtains in the front room, and the light catches some dust in the air.
They look around and scatter to different rooms, looking for remnants to collect.
* * *
Willow had thought the obituary would be the easiest job to start with, because it's a small piece. It turns out to be just the opposite; she doesn't know how to fit someone like Giles into this few words.
She looks at the objects around her in the sitting room, for inspiration. A couch like the one in Sunnydale that they used to sit on when they were researching (god, how badly must he have wanted the place to himself, some nights?), and the shelves that hold his personal library. She wonders for a moment how long it took him to build it, and how much he lost along the way.
A thought comes to her, to make tea. It’s what Giles would do. It helped him think, he always said.
Willow gets up from his couch, sets her notebook on his coffee table. In the kitchen, she sees the kettle resting on the stove. She lets the water run to cold into the sink for a second or two, then fills it, and turns on the burner.
While the water heats she opens cupboards, trying to remember where he kept the tea. Before she finds it she finds Hobnobs and Shredded Wheat and unopened cans of soup, and a whole cupboard full of spices. She takes out one jar, then another, just to smell them. When she gets to sage she remembers a dinner Giles made her once: he'd run out of the herb and turned to the spells cupboard for emergency supply. (She’d teased him for ages after about his “magical” way with food.)
The tea's in the last cupboard she looks in. She pulls out a tin from the front and removes the lid to smell it. Earl Grey. There's a teapot on the shelf above it. She rinses it out with hot water and drops two tea bags in.
Willow thinks about the empty page she left on the coffee table as she watches the kettle. Words come to her mind, but they're not the right ones, not exactly. She doesn't know what word to use for how it felt when Giles trusted her enough to teach her again when all she wanted was punishment. She doesn't know how to describe how the man who held doors open for you and always stayed to help wash the dishes, could be the same man who not only lived through seven straight apocalypses but helped you live through them, too.
The kettle whistles and she fills the pot. The sharp aroma of bergamot rises up with the steam. She stands at the counter and breathes it in, and memories keep washing over her.
Watcher, teacher, mentor, counsellor. Leader, partner, protector. Friend. She knows they're not the wrong words, but they still can’t be the right ones because there's still so much missing. They seem so normal, and she just can't use normal words to describe someone this extraordinary.
* * *
Dawn comes down the stairs and finds Willow in the kitchen, holding the doors of one cupboard open, and just staring into it.
“Oh, tea. Good idea.”
Her voice brings Willow round again, and Dawn gets the feeling she interrupted something, interrupted thoughts. “I thought it would help,” she says sheepishly.
Dawn starts to pull cups from the open cupboard. “Still early. Think we'll get much done today?”
Willow pours. “Maybe. We'll see how much we find.”
* * *
Xander's sorting through Giles' home office, looking at all the papers and records. There will still be plenty more at the Council - because even though Giles was officially retired years ago, he never did fully leave - but most of the important things are here.
It still feels strange to Xander when he does something like this. He's the responsible one now. He puts things in order because he’s capable. He’s forty-nine years old and still coming to terms with being a grownup.
The critical material is on the computer and he leaves that for Willow, not just because she's the best at that sort of thing but because he knows how important it is for her to do it. So he opens drawers of files and notes, and starts cataloguing. A paperless office never worked for Giles; the demons never went electronic, after all, and neither did he.
After a point he starts to think how little there is for him to organize, because it's already all in place. The surprises are the little memos that slipped forgotten in the crannies. There's an old shopping list on the back of an envelope (milk, crackers, dish soap, and scotch tape), and some phone numbers tacked up on the bulletin board. Xander saves them for when they make the rest of the calls.
He finds a few shoeboxes tucked away tidily on top of the file cabinet. They're sturdy but worn around the corners, showing several years' use. After flipping the lid off of one he flicks through the contents as if it's the card catalogue from high school. He smiles, discovering postcards. Some are blank (must have been souvenirs), some of the senders he recognizes and others aren’t even in English.
In the next box he finds more letters, but it's mostly cards. He opens one: it's a birthday card, with some flowers on the front, garden variety Hallmark. The signature on the inside is from Buffy. (He touches her name with the tips of his fingers.) The next one is the same, and the one after that. There are dozens. She must have sent him one every year, he realizes.
Xander frowns, because after he looks at a few more, something seems a little off. The postmarks on the envelopes are all wrong, and the messages inside them don't say “happy birthday”, they say “thank you”. When it finally clicks he stops and just stares at the cards. The reason they seem wrong is because Buffy didn’t send them on Giles' birthday, she sent them on hers. And they all say thank you, every one of them.
He hears Willow come in to check the computer, but Xander can't say anything because he's still comprehending what he's holding. He can't come to grips with it because it's too huge, too private. It's so important that he can't understand how he didn’t know about it before, but he feels like he shouldn't, like he's found something that was only meant for two people to see.
Willow’s standing next to him and looking concerned, and Xander still doesn't know what to say. Mostly he's glad that she's there to put her arms around him when he finally does begin to fall apart.
* * *
“How much is there to do still?” Willow asks him when he gets it together. There's a mug in her hand, he finally notices, meant for him. He takes it.
Xander sits back and looks at the shelves. “It's hard to tell. There's a lot I keep stopping to look at.”
“I know. I keep remembering things.”
“We could probably spend the rest of our lives here doing nothing but remembering.”
Willow smiles a little. “True.”
He drinks the tea. It’s warm and comforting. He starts to feel practical. “So we'll just go one piece at a time.”
* * *
Dawn takes care of the closet. She knew she wanted it as soon as they got to his house, and had been very ready to fight the others for it if it had come to it.
She reaches up for the cord that's attached to the switch on the inside and pulls. Fluorescent light falls on the two rows of garments on either side of her and the foot-worn carpet. She touches the sleeves of all the jackets, fingers the cuffs of the shirts.
There's a feeling Dawn has about this job, that it has to be done carefully, but that isn't the only reason she wanted it. She did the same thing when it was her mother, when it was Buffy. Somehow she thought it would feel different this time because this is the third time and even though it's easier than the first it's still the same, in the end. The people are different, but the remnants are the same, and she wants to be surrounded by them again because it's the last chance she has.
All the familiar things are there. Black shoes, brown shoes, some that shine clean and some that missed their last polish. It's the unfamiliar that takes her by surprise: a tuxedo she only saw him wear twice, three times at the most, and a pair of sneakers that look far from new.
There are more things in the dresser, in some boxes under the bed and on the top shelf in the closet. It doesn't seem right to pack them away, to think that these things won’t ever be worn again, but it's what has to happen. She lingers on things, smoothing her fingertips over cotton and wool pullovers, silk ties and tweed jackets. The minutes roll by until she’s sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor surrounded by neatly folded piles of garments, all these traces of Giles.
It’s the box on the top shelf that has the real find, in with some things that don't at all match with what's sitting around her. The shirt's all polyester, unnaturally smooth and unnaturally coloured, with a collar that points almost to the shoulders. Dawn is pretty sure it predates his watcher days; hell, she's pretty sure it predates her. It's so bright and horrible and so completely wonderful that she grins.
Dawn feels her eyes are wet, but she's smiling when she looks at the shirt, and it's weird, because even though these things are so normal, they're Giles' life, right there in front of them. She feels like she's meeting him but still saying goodbye, and missing him and loving him like she always has and it's all just too hard to explain.
* * *
Xander finds Dawn upstairs, in the bedroom. She's surrounded by clothing, some of it's folded, some of it's not. He can't tell if there's a method to the madness yet.
He taps on the door frame and she looks up. “Hungry?”
She rolls her shoulders briefly, stretching them out, and makes a frown. “Now that you mention it, I really, really am.”
“We can order something.” He steps in the room, where he can find places for his feet. “What's the story?”
“You’re looking at it.” She lets out a breath. “I don’t know what to put away, or what to pack. I feel like saving it all.”
“Do you think we can save some?”
Dawn starts to nod a little. “You know… maybe.” Her face brightens a little. “Wait. There's something I thought of…”
She steps back over to the closet, looking for something.
* * *
Willow's on the sofa again, and her notepad and pen are still where she left them, still untouched. Instead, she's pulled out books and left them open on the coffee table, on the sofa, stacked on the floor.
There are codices and anthologies and diaries and so many things that they used to have at their fingertips. She recognizes a demon here, an incantation there. There are bookmarks and slips of paper between the pages. She knows it's silly but she can't bear to touch them because she doesn't want to lose his place. There’s a trunk she hasn't opened yet, but she knows what's there, the crossbows and the knives, the things that should be scary but they had all become used to by now.
It kind of makes her laugh, because this isn’t any normal kind of nostalgia she's facing here, but it's still so right, because to her, this is just as much the real Giles as the rest of it. But when it comes to it, she realizes that she can't talk about it. She doesn't want to share it with the world because it was never something the world needed to know about; that was the whole point. Then she starts to think that there aren't any words for it, because maybe there doesn't need to be any.
* * *
Xander and Dawn appear at the bottom of the stairs. Willow looks up and blinks, because she notices something different about them. Mostly, it's the shirt Dawn's wearing.
A curious smile slowly forms on Willow’s lips. “Where did you find that?”
Dawn grins. “Upstairs.” She gives a turn. “You like it?”
“Yeah. It reminds me of…” she trails off.
“Giles?” Dawn answers gently.
Willow nods. She notices Xander then. He's wearing a blazer that's familiar to her now, too.
“What do you think?” he asks her.
She gets up and has a good look. “It fits.” She sounds less surprised than she might have thought.
“Dawn found it.” He straightens the collar.
“You look like a Watcher.”
He grins. “Only took me twenty five on the job.”
Dawn steps toward Willow, holding out a cotton pullover. “We found something for you, too.”
Willow pulls it over her head and slips her arms in the sleeves. It's big and completely doesn't fit at all and she’s never felt more comforted by anything in her entire life. She hugs Dawn tight. Xander squeezes her shoulder, and smiles. They all seem more comfortable now.
Willow lets out a breath. “We can't leave here yet... We're not done. There's still so many pieces.”
“So we'll stay.” Xander says calmly, as if he's already come to the same conclusion. “As long as we need. And do this right.”
* * *
Dawn orders the food. They clear off the kitchen table and spread out takeaway containers and fill plates.
Xander looks through the LPs and puts one on the player. It's scratchy and they don't recognize all the songs, but they like it.
He asks Willow what she decided to write, and she says she doesn't quite have an answer yet, because she doesn't know how to say goodbye. He remembers what he found today and tells her maybe it's not about saying goodbye; maybe it's about saying thank you. She smiles and tells him she likes that.
Willow finds a bottle of Glenmorangie in the liquor cupboard and pours three glasses. They sit in the living room, surrounded by the remnants they've found, and raise a toast while they remember, and say thank you.
* * *