Summary- Joyce Summers has little reason to like Rupert Giles. The fact that her daughter is in a hospital bed isn't helping anything.

Setting- Season 4

Rating- PG

Author Note- This came to me as a simple sentence and a notion: "Watchers are well named." and the idea of Giles being helpless to prevent some calamity to Buffy. I started pondering who the POV for it might be and settled on Joyce as I had never written for her before and I was curious how it might turn out. I started this in 3rd person-past and it quickly became apparent that it was not right. I switched to 1st person-present tense and the words just flowed. It was amazing. As usual, I'm taking a little artistic license and pretending that, while the events of "Band Candy" happened, Giles and Joyce did not have sex. Personal preference.

Disclaimer- Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, et al own these wonderful characters and I am grateful that I am allowed to play in their sandbox.

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Bedside Manners

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It occurs to me that Watchers are well named. He stares out into the street, unable or unwilling to look at the pale form on the hospital bed. His fist rests against the window frame, clenched tight. White knuckled. Staring out into the night like some motionless gargoyle. He still smells of smoke and blood and brick dust and a thousand other, subtle, unnameable things that make my stomach roil. The same things my daughter had smelled of when I first saw her, lying so pale, in this bed. He watches the night now and earlier in the evening, he watched her nearly die. A hundred times-more-he has watched my daughter face her death.

My daughter... normally so full of life, so unrelentingly strong, lying motionless, surrounded by tubes and machines and it is his fault that she is there. His fault that any of this happens. And he won't even look at her.

I almost itch to throw him out of this room. To strike him. To fist my hands into his shirt and shake him. Force him to turn and look at what his interference has brought to our lives, to look at that bed and what it holds. To demand to know what right he has to any of this, what right he has to watch as she nearly dies.

Anger rises in my throat. Resentment for all that he represents. Watcher. Interferer. Nuisance. Interloper. Memories of him at my doorstep, collecting my daughter for a night of patrolling. Memories of her skipping out the door, carelessly calling back that she was going out to meet him and she'd be back later. And later... returning with blood on her face and in her clothes. Caked with dust that makes my skin crawl to touch it. The look on her face, through the blood and grime, that says that against all logic and sense she loves this life of hunting. That she is happy.

That she can enjoy this is one of the things that most frightens me.

I chide myself, a little unwillingly. I cannot place the blame entirely at his feet. My daughter is-the charitable and entirely insufficient word would be "stubborn". Had been so even as a small child. She has always been the one to find her own path, following where her instincts led. Inevitably finding the most difficult, though ultimately correct, course of action. And now that stubborn child has grown into an equally stubborn adult.

I cannot even blame him for her calling, her destiny. Even though my daughter's double life has been going on for far longer than I've been fully aware of it, I remember the sequence and timing of odd events and I know that he appeared long after they began. If the Watchers are well named, then so too are the Slayers. Without him, she would be taking on college and demons alone.

I am frightened more by this idea than by the thought that she enjoys her work.

I want so very badly to blame him for all of this but I know I cannot truthfully do so. The anger drains away, leaving only weariness in its wake. My enemy is not this man staring out into the night, this man whose troubled eyes I can see reflected in the window pane, behind the glint of his glasses. My enemy, the force that has wrested my daughter from any semblance of a normal life, that places her in harm's way on a nightly basis, is at best the same creatures that she fights. At worst, it is the caprice of fate. Regardless, it is nothing I am capable of combating.

I study the lines of his back as he stands at the window, muscles in his shoulders tense under the fabric of his shirt. I remember the way her friends left, reluctant but accepting that it was not their place to remain. He had stayed, his stony gaze defiant, almost daring anyone to try and make him go. As though he would shatter if he did. As though being forced to do anything but remain in this room would destroy him.

I think on his steadfast refusal to look at the bed. Didn't I have the same temptation? Haven't I so many times? The impulse to ignore truth in the desperate, insane hope that if I did not look directly that it wouldn't, couldn't be true? In this as well, I cannot be angry at him.

I think of all the times my daughter has talked of this man to me. I know that she cares deeply for him as she does for all those she has claimed as her own. I know that, should anything happen to me, she will be well looked after. Not left alone. It is said that friends are the family you choose and my daughter has chosen well. She speaks differently, however, of her Watcher than she does of the others. She loves all those that belong to her with a heedless joy but there is a special depth of feeling reserved for him.

I have known for some time that there is a bond between them, a link borne not of coincidence or mere shared interest. But now as I study him, examining the tension in his limbs and the desolation in his face, turned to the window where he thinks he cannot be observed, I understand why he will not, cannot, look at her so pale and broken on the bed. I understand the further truth.

He loves her.

More than the paternal, more than as a guardian. This man loves my daughter with all the devotion of the old stories. The sort of love that means he would die for her.

I find myself wondering if he realizes.

It should probably anger me. The knowledge that a man my own age harbors any sort of romantic inclinations toward my daughter, knowingly or otherwise, should disturb me. I should be furious. But there is no anger, no fury, no righteous indignation. Perhaps there would have been in another life, another place and time. Instead, here and now, in this life with the danger that surrounds us on a daily basis, there is weary relief that another cares for my daughter so deeply. There is gratitude that, in spite of the vagaries of fate, there is a chance for her to have even a hint of a normal life after all. Unusual certainly, but what about my daughter has ever been anything but?

"You love her."

My voice, though I nearly whisper, is almost too loud in this room, silent for so many hours but for the beeping of the monitors. He startles and turns toward me, away from the window, his eyes unreadable behind the glasses. There are stitches in his forehead and a smear of dried blood on his temple. I can't help but wonder if it's hers. He gazes at me wordlessly.

I rise from my chair and move closer to him, stopping on the other side of the window. He holds himself very still, as though unsure of my intentions, green eyes watching carefully. I don't blame him. "You love her, don't you? I don't mean simply caring about her. She has friends for that. You really love her."

He hesitates for a moment before he speaks. "Yes." His voice is hoarse. Choked. "Yes, I love her. She is everything to me." I look over at the bed, at the still form that I wish desperately would spring to its customary light and life. Everything to him. As she is to me. And in that moment, the last wisps of uncertainty in my heart settle. I know what I have to do and it is easy.

"I don't like you." I can see him flinch out of the corner of my eye and there is no satisfaction in seeing it as there once might have been. He draws breath as though to speak but I forge ahead. "You as good as take my daughter away from me at all hours of the day and night. You take my daughter and you go into danger." Another flinch. "But you also give her joy. Happiness like I haven't seen from her in far too long. Happiness like no one else gives her, not even her other friends. She loves you. I can't deny that. And for that reason alone, I want to like you better." I look back at him where he is still gazing at me with those unreadable eyes. "You are as much a part of her life as I am and, as much as I don't like the vampire slaying, I have to admit that she'd be out there doing it even if she had never met you. And I'm grateful for the fact that you are there to help her."

He scoffs then, softly, a desolate sound, and turns back to the window, but not before I can see the mask has cracked and his eyes hold pain so sharp my breath catches in my throat. "Bloody great help I was tonight." It is painfully clear, now, that I never needed to hate this man for what happens to my daughter on his watch. He hates himself enough for the both of us and more. He paces away, weary sadness in every line of his tall frame and slumps into one of the chairs on the far side of the bed. Broken. Defeated. "I wasn't fast enough." His voice matches his posture, the tone of a man who has faced the loss of that which he cherishes most, what he most dreads to lose. "Never bloody fast enough."

"And what if you hadn't been there at all?" He flinches violently and I regret my carelessly chosen words. His pain tears at me in a way I would never have expected before tonight. I am surprised to find that I am almost desperate to soothe the ache and the fears I can sense in his soul. I cross the room again and sink into the other chair, twisted slightly to face him. "From what I understand, you were the one who got her out. No one else was there with her." The knowledge of what would have happened had he not been there nearly chokes me but I push it back. The worst didn't happen. My daughter still lives because of this man. Many times over. How many times has he saved her? How often have they saved each other? I will never know the total count and I don't want to. Even without his love for her and hers for him, that would be enough. I reach out and place my hand gently on his forearm as it rests on the arm of his chair. The fabric of his dress shirt is singed and sooty, stiff and dirty with unknowable things. He jerks at my touch but doesn't move away. "She still lives. She is there in that bed, breathing, because of you. You brought her out. You brought her here. You saved what matters most in the world to the both of us." I pause for a moment. "Have you ever told her?"

He shakes his head mutely. He looks so terribly tired. I wonder, briefly, what it will do to this man if we lose her. It is difficult enough, painful enough, to imagine what it might be like for me, a sorrow so deep even the idea of it sears the soul. But looking into his haunted eyes, something in me quails at the idea of grief as immense as what will engulf him then.

"If-" My voice cracks and I falter. No. I try again, pouring every ounce of conviction I possess into my words, desperate to shore him up with reassurance. "When she wakes, tell her. Tell her the truth of how you feel. There are no guarantees in life, especially not in the work the two of you are called to do. Tell her. Don't waste any more time."

He leans forward slightly and brushes her pale fingers where they lie on the worn hospital blanket with his own. A gentle touch, then firmer as he lifts and cradles her hand in his own. "Thank you." His voice is choked with too much emotion. "Thank you for this."

My response is simple. "Thank you for my daughter." There is nothing else to say.

We wait with desperate hope, my hand on his arm, his hand on hers, for what the morning will bring.