TITLE: He Could Not Weep
FANDOM: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
SETTING: Season 2, just after Passion
DISCLAIMER: It belongs to Joss Whedon, that mad, irritating little genius. Soul torturer!
AUTHOR'S NOTES: I wrote this right after watching Passion, so I'm awfully angry with Angel, and emotional, and hearing my sister watch the last of Angel season 5 in the next room is kind of making angry. Just thought you'd like to know. But, uh, please read and review. Constructive criticism is very good for the writer's soul.
After... after everything, Giles stayed in a cheap motel nearby the school. Buffy, Willow and Xander gave him space, but after a few weeks, they started leaving little things, well-meaning things, he knew, but it still hurt to see them. Little apartment for rent ads, more books for him to look through. In a way, a small, silly, stupid little way, he didn't want to move on. He didn't want to go on without Jenny. Not when they'd been so close, to each other, to forgiveness, to going to back to being as they once were. And she was lost, forever.
"Giles?" Buffy asked timidly after another afternoon of being told to just go on, there was no training today.
"Yes?"
"Um... I was thinking... do you, like, want someone to be with you to look for a new apartment? 'Cause me and Will, and Xander and Cordelia could come, if you wanted. I mean," she laughed nervously, "Xander and Cordelia might be kind of annoying, but Will and I are good judges of character, and your new apartment would have to have good character--Well, actually, maybe not me so much, you know, having the good character judging power, but Will, definitely, and I could come along and make witty comments. If you, um, wanted," Buffy finished lamely. Awkwardly.
Giles silently shelved books. "I don't want a new apartment, Buffy."
"You don't? But... what about--"
"I do not want a new apartment." Giles turned away, and he supposed Buffy must have left quietly, because he did not see her when he turned around, which relieved him somewhat. Stiff upper lip, England Jenny's voice said in her sly tone. The sly tone that constantly made him a little nervous and a little excited, as though she were constantly intending a double entendre.
Giles couldn't really explain to anyone else the reason for not wanting a new apartment. He knew Buffy would think him mad, certainly. Jenny and he had had very... pleasant times in his apartment. There had been relaxing together, laughing together, thinking together, analyzing together, everything together. Giles knew with all his head knowledge that he would not always be like this, like he was now, with memories of Jenny constantly swirling in his head, and he didn't want to move to a new place and forget all the things that had happened between them.
This knowledge irritated him. He had read so much over so many years and he knew the grieving process backwards and forward, and he knew what was happening, and he didn't want to. He wanted to feel and to not think.
It was not possible, though. For Rupert Giles to turn off his overanalytical brain was akin to asking the earth to stop rotating just for a moment, if you please.
Giles sat at his desk, amidst piles of books and dust and papers. He pulled off his glasses and laid them next to Jenny's book of spells, the one with the the spell to uninvite vampires. He covered his eyes with his hands, and Rupert Giles could not weep.