I was reading Giles's wiki page since I didn't really keep up with the comics and I decided I wanted to write something from the perspective of Giles as he's struggling to accept his destiny as a watcher and dealing with the fall out from everything that happened with Eyghon. I imagine he was kind of conflicted.
Christmas 1981 and Rupert Giles is blasting down the M1, heading back to London from an extended stay in Edinburgh.
It's getting dark and he'll need to stop soon but he isn't tired and he doesn't mind driving through the night. He gassed up in Boroughbridge and now he's back on the road and its night again. Two days left until Christmas day.
The moors look like open chasms in the dark and his mind is on Heathcliff and Catherine as he drives. Ghosts and envy. Murder and secrets.
The radio is playing Johnny Mathis on low and he hates it. His voice echoes in the car and dark and comes in in static bursts but he doesn't turn it off.
All across the land, dawns a bright new morn. Croons Mathis.
He keeps his eyes on the road and feels a strangely disconnected feeling. He came up this way a few years ago when his band was still intact and maybe they were never really good but it seems so intensely severed in his mind that for a moment he's thinking of someone else.
Someone years younger and foolhardy.
He wonders what Ethan's doing.
Probably nothing good.
He's a Watcher now. Like he was always supposed to be and its funny how well the shoes fit once he finally tried them on.
He went back to school, finished his degree and now he's doing everything hes supposed to. Everything he always should have done and everything he desperately didn't want to do.
His father's pleased and he knows he should be as well but sometimes he still resents just how good he is at it.
Christ, starched collars and elbow patches! He thinks though that maybe he was a fool for thinking this wasn't the right way to go.
Since last year he's been playing his part and its not exciting but it's easy and he hates that. He hates how natural it all comes because it means he never had a chance to pick his own life. Being a watcher is just who he was born to be and Ripper. . . what the hell did he think he was playing at?
It's embarrassing now and as he passed into South Yorkshire he thinks about how there was a real Ripper going around at just the same time as he was calling himself that. The real Ripper, murdering and raping women. How fucking juvenile and shameless was he? How utterly infantile to think that was a cool nick name. He tries to remember just how many women had been killed but he can't recall. It took the police forever to catch him. Too bloody long.
He feels shame now and the urge to shed his youth.
They'd caught the Yorkshire Ripper though and he thought that fitting in a totally selfish way. No more Rippers.
1981 was turning out to be a busy year. Riots in Brixton and Manchester, the Royal wedding, his own acceptance of fate.
Giles drives and keeps his mind from straying too far. He's going to do well in the Watchers, it all seems so natural that theres no way he couldn't and he doesn't know it but in sixteen year's time he's going to get the highest honor a watcher can get and be assigned to a slayer.
And just three years after that he'll loose his job.
Giles doesn't know that either though and hes still just a young man, trying desperately to separate himself from his youth and mistakes.
By the time 1997 rolls around 1981 will be a far distant memory. He'll remember the wedding and the riots, the real Ripper, he'll remember the hunger strikes and maybe sometimes he'll remember a guilt ridden, conflicted young man trying to make himself at home in the tweed he swore hed never wear. He won't think of him often though because its a messy year and 1997 will bring a whole new mess of emotion and things to think about.
By 1997 he'll be a new man and he'll be in sunny California, the land the Eagles and the Mamas and the Pappas sang about. He just has no idea yet and as he heads south he thinks of other things.
Girls in Devon and their bright, southern faces, streets in London and his childhood home. He thinks of translations and books and spells and all of the things he's resigned himself to and he heads south towards London and Christmas and all of the things that ring so absolutely normal to the world.
He thinks of The Who's new song You Better You Bet and think's it's a good song, it got a lot of radio play but it's a different world without Keith Moon. It's a different world for all of them now, him included.
In 1997 it'll be a different world again. The trip down the M1 is forgotten and the Christmas one of pasts. He doesn't think of Heathcliff or Catherine and he thinks of Ethan a whole lot less than he used to.
Weddings and riots, rippers and Johnny Mathis. The M1 and the M25. Joyrides and arrogance. Spells and dead friends. He doesn't think of them like he did in 1981 and strikes and Mazes and Eyghon and Ethan are all better left in the history books.
At least, he thinks he can keep it that way in 1997. For a while.
Christmas, 1981 and Rupert Giles blasts down the M1 back to London, home for the holidays and who he was always destined to be.
Thanks for reading.
Events mentioned in 1981: Royal wedding, Yorkshire Ripper arrest, Brixton and Manchester riots, Bobby Sands hunger strike in HM Prison Maze. The Who lost drummer Keith Moon in 1978.