Chapter 3:

Days passed. The construction was well underway and Giles went to the construction site many times to make sure things were progressing as they should and the building was taking shape as it used to look. He was nearly driving the foreman batty with his incessant questioning. At this stage the building was only a frame and barely that. It was impossible for the man to know exactly what the building's shape would be on the inside. He gave very detailed plans to the foreman, demanding that everything be exactly as it was in his very polite manner until the other man responded less politely, asking Giles to leave and let him get back to work.

He hadn't heard from Liliana since she left his flat and didn't dare call her. He tried to invent a reason but they all sounded flimsy and, well, as flat as they were. It was only an excuse to talk to her again, to try and ration out how it came to this. He still wasn't sure if he wanted to be in their lives because of a selfish desire to know them or because he wanted to be a benefit to them? Would it benefit them to have the father they never knew suddenly appear when they were already men grown? They were as old now as he had been when they were conceived. He hadn't yet made a decision.

He knew all this very well but he needed and ear to listen to him, someone who wouldn't judge so he did the only thing he knew to do when he needed an ear to hear. He drove the short distance to his favorite pub and took a seat on a bar stool in the darkened corner of the establishment. This was unofficially his seat, claimed whenever he came into town. The bartender made sure to make this clear when he came in and it was occupied.

"Oi! Liam! Pint of a good lager and keep it coming."

"Thinking man's beer. Bad day, Rupert?"

"You could say that."

The bartender was a man with salt and pepper hair though he was in his sixties at least. They were passingly familiar with each other. Liam with Rupert's career path and on the job woes (and lack of a social life though he never mentioned that) and Rupert with Liam's two kids and an ex-wife that likes to bleed him dry when she thinks she can get away with it. He was one of the few that hadn't questioned Giles' job description when he let it spill in a drunken haze. Ever since then he found Liam to be a sound and sympathetic ear. He'd have preferred his father but short of driving to Bath and speaking to the man's bones that wasn't going to happen.

"Wanna speak on it, Rupert?"

"Oh, I've mucked things up as I usually do." He breezed, taking a healthy swig off his pint. He sounded a damn sight more casual than he felt but sighed before too long. "Did you know I have children, Liam?"

The bartender stopped and stared, surprised. In all the time he'd known his patron he'd never heard tale of children or a girlfriend. It seemed the man would ever be full of surprises. He took his towel and flipped it over his shoulder, staring honestly at the Watcher.

"No. Can't say I did."

"Neither did I. Ah…what I mean to say is that I didn't know I had twins and I've never met them."

"That doesn't sound t'all like you."

"It wouldn't have been if circumstances were otherwise. I regret my folly, Liam. I let her down. I let the lot of them down. I feel like I'm a ruddy failure."

"Hold on there, Rupert." He slid the man a shot of Scotch which the other took gratefully. He'd seen the Watcher in all sorts of states over the years but never this out and out depressed before. Whatever it was he thought he'd done it must be pretty bad to work him up so sorely. "Can't be bad as all that. I've never even heard you mention a girl before."

"No wonder there." The younger Brit replied, slinging back his shot with the ease of experience. He didn't even make a face as the liquor burned its way down to his belly and warmed him from the inside out. Liam sensed this was important and did something he'd never done for another patron in his life. He went and kicked the other drinkers from the bar and closed the door behind them, locking it when he did. He flipped the sign to closed and came over to sit on the stool beside Rupert like a proper friend. "Alright then, go on." He urged. Rupert saluted him with his half full pint and gulped down the rest of the brown liquid before he took a breath and continued.

"Her name is Liliana but I called her Lilla when we met. We were both children and I didn't have an idea in my head of what it was to be a man."

The older man nodded, sipping at his own pint of lager with the leisure of an observer, being outside of the crisis. This was all very personal and very new to his understanding of a man he'd been speaking to and serving for the past twenty years, at least. He cared about the guy at the very least and to be honest, the idea of him having a social life was just a little bit like him sharing a secret since Liam had never once heard mention of anything outside of work. Looking at the sad look in the jade eyes of his companion he knew the pain of this ran deep. "Go on."

"The moment I saw her, Liam, I was drawn to her. Something about her fire and her passion just drew me in like a moth and I couldn't help but be lost in it. Before then I'd been a bit of a rebellious little prick but with her? I wanted to be better. Stupid, right? We only spent about two months in each other's company. She comes from a long line of Watchers like I do. Longer, even, than my own heritage. She loved the idea of what she'd become. It was the only thing she wanted – to follow in her mother's footsteps and the mother before her. We were so completely different."

His head drooped and he stared into his empty glass, sweeping the cup around in his hand to watch the remnants of his drink swish around in circles. He was staring at her in his mind's eye, mulling over their very brief courtship. The movements of his hands were completely unnecessary, something to simply keep them occupied. Liam was patient and let him work through this until he was ready to speak again. He imagined the situation, recalling brief romances of his own youth and how exciting they were. Somehow he didn't imagine this as a brief fling.

"Being with her is impossible to describe. We spent hours chatting at the club or alone in my flat. We literally tumbled into bed as if we simply couldn't help ourselves. She must've gotten pregnant almost immediately. A month later she told me and all hell broke loose."

The bartender reached over and grabbed up the bottle of scotch, pouring him a new shot. He imagined he knew where this was going considering previous knowledge but didn't interrupt. He quietly tended, as was his job.

"The Council had a fit, if you can imagine." Indeed, Liam could. Rupert spent a good long time talking about the Council and their rules and what happened if you crossed them. "There's a rule I learned of only that day involving the Council and small children. Apparently you're not allowed to be a Watcher with even a potential Slayer if you have small children. Pregnant women aren't admitted into the Academy. When the Council found out, and they did, they put me to trial for taking advantage of her and forced us to choose between keeping up our family traditions as potential Watchers and choosing to leave it behind to care for the child."

His tone now was terrible, wavering as he spoke. It was the first time he'd told anyone aloud. It was one thing to witness what happened from the sidelines and quite another to hear his side of it. He'd been a young man fresh from his flirtation with the dark side and panicked. They talked long hours, both of them, now with a different purpose in mind. The decision laid before them was difficult, both afraid and heartsick. Giles could see the shame this would bring to his family: father and grandmother both well respected among the Council. Liliana only saw her inability to follow in her dead mother's footsteps. In the end, though, she conceded to forgo her dream so he could keep his own. She gave up being a Watcher to raise their children.

"She chose…to let me keep my family pride and opted to raise the child herself. The Council gave her a generous stipend to do this. As part of the agreement I was barred contact from her and never knew what happened. I should have tried harder to reach her! I should never have let them dictate my life!"

He slammed the glass down, the thick bottom making an impressive sound in the silence. Liam watched his reaction, wide eyed, and said nothing. That was a horrible thing to go through. "How old were you?" he asked softly at long last.

"Twenty four. She was only nineteen."

The bartender shook his head. "That's a damn shame. What brought this bubbling up again? How did you find out she had twins?"

"The Council is no more, as you might imagine after the explosion. I'm trying to build it up again." He realized how much he hadn't been able to explain to Liam since his return to London. "She found me. Through circumstance we're both striving toward the same goal. She showed up at my flat yesterday and it didn't…she was cold. I heard pain her voice and saw it in her eyes but she was keeping her wall up. I'd never seen that wall before. We didn't talk much about the past but she did tell me I have two twin sons, Alistair and Roland. They grew up knowing very little about me and why should they? I've never been here for them! I'm sure I faded to being a dream to Liliana, too, after a while. I was always off doing something else and created another family without as much as a thought to them."

"I don't believe you never thought of them, Rupert." The other answered kindly. Irrationality in inebriation was something he heard quite often.

"No. You're right. I thought about them more than I let on when I had a spare moment to think of something. I never imagined twins, though. I wrote her for years before I finally gave up. In the years that followed I started so many letters but by the time I had the courage to send them again it had been too long. I couldn't disrupt her life. And, anyway, she doesn't want to bring up the past with me. I'd be a fool to try and make up for this lost time. The children are fully grown, twenty five soon enough if my math is right."

"That's rough, mate. Whatcha gonna do?"

"I don't know. For a beginning drinking myself into a stupor seemed like a good idea. I keep trying to invent reasons to ring her but in the end I just can't. I don't know why. I'm worried I want to put myself in their lives for my own selfish reasons. I can't decide if it's their best interests I have in mind. I promised to think about it but I'm wondering if I should just let her get on and forget about this."

"Now see here!" Liam burst out, demanding his patron's attention. "This is nothing like you, Rupert. You made a mistake and you're living it and no one can ask more of a bloke. If you want to know them you should ask. No harm ever came of asking."

"Perhaps you're right, Liam. Those are my children and I want to meet them at the very least. Let them make their own decisions about me. They are adults, after all, and capable of thinking for themselves. They deserve the chance to be angry or accepting of me just as she does."

"There you are! Good on ya."

Rupert rose from his bar stool, wobbling a little as he did and paid Liam for the drinks and tipped him well for the ear and the advice. The bartender simply walked him to the door and switched the sign to open again, unlocking his pub. The Watcher simply slipped out into the city, sight unseen, and walked back to his flat. It wasn't very late, perhaps ten o'clock, but the first thing he did was pick up the phone and punch in the numbers before he could lose his nerve. The phone was answered after just two rings and the voice sounded similar to the one before but had a rougher quality to it, like his own when he was younger.

"Hello?"

"Hello. This is Rupert Giles calling for your mum. This is Roland isn't it?" he chanced a guess. A long pause.

"Roddy. The name's Roddy. No one calls me Roland." His voice dripped with disdain. Another shorter pause. "Who're you?"

"I'm…" he wasn't sure how to answer and was torn between the truth or a simpler lie. "I'm trying to reform the Council and she's helping me out. May I speak to her?"

"Sure. Hang on." The phone was muffled with a hand but there was a loud "Mum! Phone!" that couldn't be stifled by his hand. Then the phone was plunked onto a table, audibly, and Liliana picked it up a few moments later. She immediately shot off an apology for her son's phone manners. Roddy apparently also got Rupert's rebellion gene.

"Quite alright, Lilla." He responded smoothly, sounding much less nervous than he felt. Butterflies all but wrestled in his stomach speaking to her and he felt like any moment he'd become as tongue tied as a school boy. Ah, well, courage old man. Get to the point if you're not sure you can manage it. "I needed to speak with you."

"We are speaking."

"Uh, I hadn't meant, specifically, over the phone."

"Whatever do you want to talk about that it has to be in person?" she sounded confused.

"Please, Lilla, come round tomorrow."

She sighed softly. "Didn't I tell you there's nothing to say?"

"You told me to think about it and I have. I just wanted to talk to you about some things first. I don't know if there's anything to say but there might be. Anyway, I owe it to you and the boys and to myself to see."

She sighed and he could see her closing her green eyes and nibbling her lower lip as she did when she was nervous. "Tomorrow, then."

"Brilliant!" He stopped, quieted, but the smile didn't leave his lips. "Meet me at my flat tomorrow. Let's say around noon?"

"Alright, Rupert."

He hung up the phone and let out a long shuddering breath. If there was a way to fix this situation, he would. He was practically dancing as he changed for bed and steeped a cup of tea. He picked up a book from the shelf, his favorite, The Legend of Camelot, and put it on the table beside his favorite chair.. Tonight he felt like dwelling in the realm of a Utopia. Perhaps not in reality but certainly in idea and he could take it for what it was supposed to be as opposed to what it turned into.