"Hate," his father had told him once, "Hate can keep you alive Rupert, but it will not sustain you. It will burn you up inside until there is nothing left of you. Then you become the hate." As he rose off the stone floor entrance to Mary King's close Rupert Giles burned with savage hate. His arm was broken so severely that the bone was near to the point of protruding but had not quite managed to break the skin. Beyond all his physical pain he was blazing with white hot anger. He cried barbarically skyward for an undetermined amount of time until the night had become so completely silent that his voice went unanswered by anything but the ambivalent dark.
He fell forward onto his good arm, cradling his injury against his chest. He was gasping, drawing in one ragged breath after another. Virginia had done this to him, thrown him down the stone steps and locked the gate behind her. The Watchers council had always been relentless but now he truly understood the depths that they would go to in order to attain their goals. He had always been a goal of theirs. Giles rolled over onto his back with no small amount of effort and shut his eyes tightly trying to focus his thoughts. It was no use, after a few minutes he started screaming again, "Virginia! Virginiaaaa!" Until finally he lost consciousness and stillness overtook his body and mind. For three years he had run from her. She was unyielding in her pursuit. He was falling deeper into a cavernous darkness, a black sleep from which he was not sure he wanted to wake.
Rupert's parents had both been members of the Watcher's council. Like his predecessors, Rupert's father had been groomed for the quiet studious life of a member of the council. All was for the posterity of humanity, the preservation of the Slayer line, and sustaining of the balance. His father believed in that cause very deeply. He believed in the equilibrium of things. He had often told his son that harmony only existed in the middle way between two extreme forces. To Giles' father, anger was the same thing as compassion, and that hate was the same thing as love. His mother was more practical. Tall, beautiful and very serious she believed in Science. "Science," she told Giles as a boy, "Is how we work out what can be believed and what must be dismissed. This is very important Rupert, because of what do we do."
"What do we do?" The child had asked his mother, she smiled and took her him up onto her lap. On the table top in front of them was a dissection dish containing the venom glands of a Slavote' demon. She had cut them open long ways and pinned the edges down into the black wax. Inside were iridescent purple sacks.
"You see these sacks," she used a pen tip to puncture one of them, a gold liquid flowed out of the puncture onto the tray, the smell was alarming. "This is a powerful poison and I'm going to isolate its chemical qualities and make an antidote." His mother always took the time to explain things to him. He loved her very deeply for that. He would listen intently as she would talk about the mating habits of one type of demon and the natural environment of another. She was the only person he knew who did not hate demons. She saw them as parts of nature needing to be understood, and not robotically killed. He remembered being woken by late night arguments between his parents. She had pity for demon kind and the council did not approve. Rupert was only ten years old when both of his parents were killed in an automobile accident. The loss was taken badly by many in the council. In the beginning days there was a lot of anger and hushed arguments that were hidden from his view. It was decided that he would stay on with the council and continue the path that his parents had laid out for him.
The watcher's council entrusted Rupert, body and soul, to a young councilwoman named Virgina Kensington. American by birth, Virginia had come to Britain as a young child to live with her grandmother. She was a hard woman, brilliant, ambitious, and thoroughly resented being saddled with a prepubescent boy child which she viewed as preventing her from doing field work. Virginia wanted desperately to be the next Slayer's Watcher. Until that point Watcher's selected for service had been predominately male. Virginia wanted to be a trail blazer. She was obsessed with the slayer-line and drilled him incessantly with names and dates. By the time Rupert was 15 he thoroughly hated her.
Rupert rebelled. He spent his every waking moment down at the airfield watching the RAF pilots taking off and landing their F86-Sabers. He also had a girl, Rita, from the local village whose father worked in the aircraft hangar as a mechanic. One night he let Rupert come into the hangar and help him flush the brake lines of a Vickers Valiant, a retired bomber that the Royal air force was decommissioning. Later, with face and hands smudged with engine grease, he made love to Rita under an oak tree. Her soft cocoa butter scented limbs enclosed him into a peaceful and satisfied sleep as the sun went down around them. It had been the greatest day of his life.
The next morning Rupert's teacher was beside herself with anger. Rupert told her that he had decided not to become a Watcher. She stood silently fuming as he told her that wanted to join the Royal Air Force and to be a pilot. He wanted to marry Rita and most of all he never wanted to see Virginia or the council libraries again. He told her he had had it with her lessons and with demons and slayers. Virginia did not speak for a long time. Her green eyes burned with an angry light like two supernovae extinguishing all life for light-years around. He had always feared her as a child, and even though he did not show it now, he was still terrified of her. She descended on him very suddenly, her hand flying out to strike him. He raised his arms up to protect himself but it was too late, she landed a hard slap across his jaw. Giles' cried out, he reeled back from her and managed to regain his footing just before falling down. He looked at her in shock. As many times as they had fought she had never struck him.
Virginia's expression contorted, her face changed in an instant, the red fury had melted away and turned a pale shade of remorse. Then, Giles witnessed another first as fat tears gathered up in the cornered of her eyes. Without warning one salty stream fell down her cheek. She covered her mouth with both of her hands "Oh God…" she exclaimed, "Oh God Rupert. I'm so very sorry." The last of her words came like a whisper. For a flashing instant Rupert pitied her, but the damage had been done. He gathered the only belongings he cared about into a small duffle bag. Virginia watched silently as he packed unable to find the words to stop him, every time she tried to speak her words would die in her throat and she would not say anything. He left, brushing past her without a word or a glance.
The next door he arrived at was that of Rita, and she would not go with him. Her mother was ill, and someone had to take care of her father. Also, as much as she loved him, she couldn't see herself marrying a white man. What would people say? His heart broke as she shut the door on him. Passing the garage Rita's father waved at him pleasantly. Rupert told him he was leaving home.
"I'm sorry to hear it son," The old man said, nodding with the knowing only older people can do "Where are you going to go now? There is a whole lot of world out there for a young man like you."
"I don't care where I go, as long as it's as far from this bloody place as possible." He answered
Rita's father laughed gently. Rupert liked him a great deal. The man's calm patience worked a bit of magic on the anger Rupert felt and for a few minutes all the aggression had lifted from him. Rita's father put a hand on the younger man's shoulder and offered him something he had not had the benefit of receiving since he was 10 years old. A father's approval. After that he reached into a long wooden crate and pulled from it an old RAF leather bombers jacket from 1942, the original RAF patch still sown on it. He shook off the layers of time and storage filling the garage with an unmistakable smell of old leather. "This," he said "Was given to me by a great man, he was very young when he died but he too was wandering the world, looking for his destiny."
"You are very kind, but—"Giles started, but the old man raised a wrinkled palm. He wouldn't hear any protests, Rupert took the jacket. The leather was still soft and supple to the touch. Without thinking he brought the jacket up to his nose and breathed deeply. "—did he ever find what he was searching for?"
Rita's father shook his head, but his smile stayed:
"No, he found a German pilot who was a better shot."
Rupert stayed that night in the old man's garage, unwilling to go back into the house and see Rita, and was gone before the sun rose with his duffle bag in one hand and his leather jacket slung over the left shoulder of his white t-shirt. Giles approached the local train platform 5 miles away with a cigarette clenched tightly between his teeth, smiling the sardonic side smile that would become his trademark. By nights end he would be any other bloody place in the world besides here, with any bloody body besides Virginia. He was on his way to find out if there was more for him in life besides being a Watcher. For the first time in his life since his parents were killed Rupert Giles felt absolutely free.