Title: Mori
Author: Athenae
Summary: Post-ep for "The Gift." Giles makes funeral arrangements
Disclaimer: They aren't mine. I make no money from them.
Spoilers: Duh.
Acknowledgements: The poem at the end is A.E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young."
When the funeral home director — an unctuous man in his thirties with dyed black hair — asked him what sort of clergyman might be presiding at the service, Giles stared at the scuffed coffee table in the man's disheveled office and resisted the urge to strike him.
He and the others had never talked about religion. Willow's Judaism had always been more cultural than spiritual, and all but disappeared when she began to deal in magicks as a way of understanding the world. God or gods alone knew what Xander had picked up from his Protestant, unpleasant parents.
Anya believed in D'Hoffryn and department store shoe sales, sandals being, she told him once, the best thing humans had ever come up with.
Their true communion was one another. The library and magic shop their churches. Their worship a nightly walk among the dead things faith traditions barely mention anymore.
He had no memory of Buffy attending any church. Neither did Dawn. He himself … cast back just a little and his ears filled with the twittering of sparrows nesting in the beams of his great-grandmother's old chapel, far out on the grounds of her Somerset estate.
The little stone building — Romanesque, gray, overgrown with weeds and reedy ash trees — had once been the Giles family's own church, just for the inhabitants of the great house and all its servants. A priest came regularly to say Mass there, just for them, a sign of their wealth and privilege.
By the time he was old enough to like climbing up its crumbling walls and playing knight near its ruined altar, no one had used it for prayer in decades. His family's Catholicism, like Willow's Jewishness, was a matter of tradition, not belief.
It was hard to hold stock in the simplicity of Roman doctrine on Sunday when, Monday through Saturday, you slew vampires, his father once said sardonically.
He would like to take Buffy to that chapel, lay her body on the worn marble table, strip her bare. Make of her muscles and bones a blood sacrifice to his childhood God, the Old Testament deity whose laws were not mocked without consequences.
To the New Testament God of his adolescence he would rail about sin and redemption, about the wages demanded of a tiny blonde girl whose silly mortal failings should have been redeemed by flesh a thousand times over. He would ask how much punishment she, and by their love for her all of them, were expected to endure, and he would ask who set the price they paid with her fall.
He would like to bury her beneath the ash trees that grew in the church's nave, splintering the marble floor into a hundred mosaics. He would like to leave her with the sparrows and the leaves that turned golden and fell, every autumn, with the blankets and blankets of snow.
He would go there, Christmas morning, and crown her resting place with holly.
He would go there, in the summer, and pour honey wine upon the ground.
He would guard her tomb as knights once guarded the resting places of the kings, and someday a child like the one he had been would find his bones, spine worn white by rain and wind, propped up against the doorway arch, forever at her side.
He told the tacky man at the funeral home that she was Catholic, that she wanted a priest, one who could sing the old High Mass. And he met with the man they recommended, and he asked innocuous questions about Buffy, what he should say in his homily, and Giles stared at him so hard the man turned red and stuttered.
"Just read the Mass of Christian Burial," Giles said. "I'll take care of the rest."
And after the kyrie and before the agnus dei, Giles stood before her friends assembled all in the brutal sunlight of the California day. Anya, out of the hospital too soon. Willow, hair so red against her black dress she looked like a poppy blowing in the fields. Tara, holding Dawn. Xander, always her brother, steadfast as no other man in her life had been.
And he read to them a poem he re-named, with a small, mental apology to its author.
"To a warrior," he said, "dying young."
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the marketplace
Man and boy stood cheering by
As home we brought you, shoulder high
Today, the road all runners come
Shoulder high we bring you home
And set you at your threshold down
Townsman of a stiller town.