Title: You're Gonna Kill That Girl
Written for: voleuse at genfic_minis (prompt: teaching, a stray cat, and The Ramones)
Rating: PG
Warnings: canonical character death
Summary: For Buffy, Giles breaks all the rules.
"It is imperative not to get too attached. Personal feelings could impair your judgment—and consequently, harm your Slayer."
It was a nasty cut. Giles dabbed at it gingerly with a piece of gauze, suppressing a "tsk" when Buffy fidgeted.
"Ouch," she said.
"Hold still and it'll be less painful."
She held still. When he pressed the gauze against the gash on her forehead again, her glare told him that not moving had not, in fact, made it less painful.
"Oh, for goodness' sake! It's a minor wound and it'll be healed by tomorrow evening." The hint of a shrill note in his voice irritated him. He forced himself to be calm, trying to let the tightness in his shoulders ease. An excess of concern would do no good here.
Buffy's eyes drifted, unfocused, over a spot behind him, somewhere in the library's shelves.
"Just in time to pick up a couple new ones," she said with a resigned quirk of the lips. "It's amazing how quickly getting punched in the face gets old."
He continued dressing the cut with extra gentleness, even though he knew that refraining from putting more pressure on it would only prolong the bleeding.
"A Watcher who lacks impartiality endangers not only his Slayer, but also himself."
"I saw her walking down the street," the kid said. Cold sweat glistened on his face in the glow from the streetlight. "Then this guy—he jumped down off the roof. He knocked her right off her feet."
"Go home," Giles said. Despite the urgency spurring him on like a siren, he made sure the boy had headed off in the other direction before stepping into the darkness of the alley. He'd lost sight of Buffy more than ten minutes ago; long enough for a struggle to have occurred—and ended.
He blinked, eyes adjusting. A blacker patch of night was leaning against the wall.
"A Watcher ought to know better," the shadow said. "Maybe when you're gone, she'll get a smarter one to replace you. I'm really doing her a favor, if you think about it."
The vampire stepped forward, close enough for Giles to make out the distinctive malformed face and the fangs adorning a charming, predatory smile.
"Kids can be vampires, too," it said. "If only you'd thought to check."
A clammy, remorseless hand seized his throat. He choked, finding the cross in his pocket, and thrust it against the vampire's forearm. There was a hiss and Giles' spine connected sharply and suddenly with the wall, his head singing from oxygen deprivation.
The vampire shook itself like a dog and growled. Then it exploded into a thousand fragments.
"Are—are you all right?" Giles said foolishly at Buffy's silhouette as it emerged from behind the settling dust.
"Seems like I should be the one asking you that. I thought you were supposed to hang back during actual patrols? I slay, you watch, that kind of drill."
Giles huffed, shrugged, picked himself up with very little help considering the circumstances. "It's only your fourth week," he said. "I thought you might need back-up."
Out under the streetlights, he noted the dark bruise running down her neck and under her shirt.
"I think back-up would be more useful with a crossbow or maybe an ax," Buffy said wryly.
He smiled vaguely, checking her over for more injuries with surreptitious glances. Later that night, he would patch them both up as well as he could, and then send her into the fray once more.
"Not to mention that a poor decision may put the entire world at risk."
"Giles, I'm sixteen years old. I don't want to die."
His heart stood still, skipped a beat. All objections perished on his lips. He felt a helplessness so profound the whole world might vanish into it without a trace. And it would—because he knew with the sinking despair of utter self-awareness that he could never, never send Buffy down into that pit to die at the Master's hands. Damn the prophecies—damn the world. He wasn't sure the kind of world that demanded the sacrifice of a child deserved to be saved, anyway.
Even as the certainty of failure settled over him, his mind flipped through his assets as through a catalogue. He had some weapons and a not insignificant amount of experience. A sliver of magic picked up behind the Council's back, an ally or two to hold the line after he… well. What he didn't have was the heart to force the Slayer to fight this battle; but perhaps sacrificing his own life fighting it for her might atone for his weakness. Perhaps not. It would have to be enough.
Because God, he couldn't stand to see that look on her face.
"The Watcher must remain rational, using all available resources as efficiently as possible."
He knew it was silly. Vampires could be uncannily stealthy and he was no match for Angelus in any case.
On the other hand, Giles told himself as he let his eyes sweep across the dark windows of the Summers residence, in a way this was exactly what his job consisted of. Watching. At least if Angelus was going to kill her tonight, there might be some warning.
He kept a confused vigil through the hours, thoughts drifting again and again to Jenny no matter how much he tried to rein them in. He still ached at the horror of that scene. The bruise marring his eye prickled slightly in the cool air as if in sympathy. He leaned against a tree, half-dozing, half-wishing for a drink of something hot and bracing.
He was startled once by a sudden movement on the sidewalk. A black cat trotted silently past, head turning, yellow eyes glancing over him indifferently. The sight of them sent a chill down his spine. It wasn't bad luck, he told himself, that was just superstition. He'd never read anything anywhere that conclusively linked black cats with luck.
Still, in the sleepless nightmare of those dark hours, he couldn't quite shake the feeling that it was an ill portent. He looked at the quiet house and thought of everything Angelus had taken and could still take away from him.
When the first rosy fingers of dawn crept over the horizon, he staggered away home. Too tired to research, too tired to go hunt down his Slayer in the waking hours, he slept until afternoon.
"Such an attachment may make a Watcher all but useless should the worst—inevitably—occur."
As soon as he saw her lying there, he knew it was the end. The end of her, the end of his calling, the end of the constant undercurrent of fear. There was nothing more to be afraid of now that it had happened.
He heard Spike sobbing somewhere close by. He felt no tears welling himself; instead, there was a vast emptiness like the sky, unfurling out until everything in the world was merely a wrinkle in the landscape of that emptiness. Maybe it was sorrow and maybe it was disbelief. He had geared her up, sent her out into uncertain battle so many times, he'd half-thought it would never end. She would always come back.
He'd grown so confident she could return even from death that he'd forgotten the danger every time he pushed her to face it. A whole underworld of evil out there spent its nights dreaming of slitting her throat, whispering to itself ikill that girl/i, over and over, ikill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill that girl/i. The phrase echoed in his head like a refrain. He'd become so used to the song he'd forgotten how real it actually was.
Now he was unprepared. He had nothing but silence to offer the moment of Buffy's death. No tears, no eulogy. He listened to the vampire weep in his place.
"Since all of these rules are straight out of basic training, Giles," Travers said, not dropping his lecturing tone, "one has to wonder why you were apparently unable to follow any of them. You let your feelings get in the way of your job. If you'd kept better control of the Slayer from the beginning, she might still be alive today and we wouldn't be in this uncomfortable situation now."
There was a murmur of agreement from the two other men in the room. They were already set against him, of course. He could hardly muster up a spark of energy to care. The quiet emptiness was still there, insulating him from the wrath of his colleagues.
"Yes, they're terribly helpful rules," Giles said, fingers tracing idle circles on the tabletop, "except for the fact that they're completely worthless."
Travers allowed a long moment of silence to pass before saying, with mocking disingenuousness, "Didn't you ever consider that your incompetence was going to get the girl killed?"
Giles' fingers stilled and he looked up. "She was the Slayer," he said. "Death was her destiny. Living a friendless and isolated life was not."