“Giles isn't going anywhere, Will. He's still the librarian.” —Buffy, Helpless

***

"There is a certain dramatic irony that's attached to all this. A synchronicity that borders on predestination, one might say…"

Giles snorted inelegantly into his tumbler of scotch at the remembered words. “Dramatic irony,” he huffed to himself, thinking ‘you sound like the worst kind of poofter!’ That made him laugh a little, and he was disgusted to find the sound perilously close to a sob.

Not quite sure what to do with himself, and suddenly feeling out of his element once Wesley had been carted away and he had ascertained for himself that the children were all safe and unharmed, he’d wandered off with the dispersing crowd. It had been disturbingly easy to do, and while he was grateful that no one had thought to ask the school librarian why he smelled of gunpowder and satisfaction, he was also a little saddened to find out just how simple it was to walk away.

Which was how he found himself sitting at his desk now, watching the room darken with the coming sunset, his notes and scribbles, mostly inaccurate, on the Ascension now being held down by a very large bottle of O’Ban single malt. A very large and mostly empty bottle.

Some still sober part of him glanced over at the door, to confirm that the locks on it were in place as night came on, and when he found that he could barely see them, he blamed it on the encroaching darkness and not the scotch. When he knocked over the desk lamp trying to turn it on, he blamed that on the darkness, too, and sighed when he realized he’d have to stand to reach the main light switch.

“No one can accuse Rupert Giles of not being up to the job,” he muttered, sucking the last of the liquor from the last of the ice cubes in his glass. But his first attempt at rising had him sitting right back down as a wave of dizziness made him reach for the desktop to keep from tipping over. “Or falling down on the job,” he told himself sternly, only faintly distressed to find his tongue tripping over the words, making them come out more mushy than authoritarian.

A second attempt to rise was more successful, although he found himself clutching the bottle for support. He supposed that it was a balance thing, and so took extra care to hold it away from his body as he slowly turned towards the light switches, looking like a tweedy tightrope walker.

How he wound up on the couch was a bit of a mystery. He was sure that he was heading for the main light switch at the foot of the stairs because he knew how to create light in the darkness—had known it for years. He was sure he hadn’t fallen down at any point because the O’Ban bottle was still in his hand, although it was totally empty. And he was sure he’d been facing the right direction when he first got the idea to turn on the lights, because it would have been foolish to attempt any sort of job while slumped on a sofa.

A mystery then; he was good at those.

“I suppose it’s just a hobby now,” he murmured. Much like it had been the summer before, and the summer before that. While it was true that the students were not in attendance over the summer holidays, the staff at any high school still had a job to do…still had a job….

He let the bottle slip from his fingers, winced when it landed on his foot, kicked feebly at it with more regret than anger, and barely thought about picking it up when it rolled under the coffee table.

He closed his eyes and wondered if Ethan had been right all along; chaos certainly seemed to be the name of the game now, what with no longer being employed by the Watcher’s Council, and now, not even having the dim satisfaction, the simple pleasures he’d found among the stacks. The sorting and cataloguing and…

“Bloody hell,” he grumbled to no one.

The last of the light faded from the room, and when his second attempt at table lamp operations ended as badly as the first, he groaned over the broken glass sounds of Tiffany meeting hardwood, and fell back on the sofa cushions, an arm thrown over his eyes.

“Giles?”

‘I really need to work on that girly yelp,’ he thought nonsensically as he leaped from the couch at the sound of his name, staggered, and sat right back down again.

Buffy was kind enough not to giggle. Instead, she moved closer to the couch, almost hesitantly, a mixture of confusion, concern and something needier darkening her eyes. Her hair was a frizzy blonde halo in need of a brush where the front door wall sconce’s light backlit it, and Giles wondered muzzily if he’d psychically willed the light to come on, since he didn’t remember leaving the couch.

“Uh, the door was unlocked—I was patrolling and I—“

He hadn’t seen her that awkward since before all this. In fact, he didn’t think he’d seen her this awkward ever. It unnerved him for a moment; piercing the scotch-fog he’d wrapped himself in like a lighthouse beacon. One rational bit of thought told him he should send her home, that he wasn’t fit for any company, let alone his Slayer’s attentions. The liquor soaked rest of his mind was divided between being a congenial host, as if it were a bloody tea party, and of course, the maudlin vote, which reminded him in Travers’ voice, of his “father’s love for the girl.”

“Buffy, I didn’t hear you come in. Are you all right?” There, he thought. Just the right tone of concern, coupled with good manners.

“Was that English?” Buffy replied, having heard mostly garbled mush coming from her Watcher. “Some special English, from England?” She continued walking forward as she spoke, and Giles saw that she was in the same clothes she’d worn to graduation, and he could still smell smoke on her.

She sat on the couch next to him and gave him a critical eye. He stared right back, squinted briefly, then removed his glasses, which allowed him to squint again until there was just one of her. Maudlin and Rational were still battling in his brain, and had apparently not left anyone to attend to the physical aspects of his being, so while he could feel himself sobering on the inside, he still thought rising from the couch might be the height of folly. Instead he closed his eyes and sighed.

Buffy sighed even more noisily, causing him to open his eyes again at once. Unhappily, he watched her spy the bottle under the table and reach for it; the wooden stakes in her jacket pocket came together with a light clicking. The bottle made a more ominous noise as Buffy set it on the coffee table next to the copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that Willow had given him. ‘British? Magic? Authors in sensible shoes? What’s not to love,’ she’d promised him. And Oz had heard that there was going to be a werewolf in the third one. He might have been tempted to actually read the thing had Xander not called him Snape for nearly a fortnight. Disgusted, he’d left the book exactly where Willow had set it down, and not touched it since.

Another sigh from the Slayer pulled him out of his musings, and he realized she was looking at him expectantly. He wondered what she wanted from him. Was he to be the librarian, stodgy, dull, full of unwanted wisdom? Was she looking for her lost Watcher, to tell her what to do next, what forces of darkness still awaited her? He didn’t know what to say, what role to put himself into, so he opted to stay with half-drunk and maudlin, and turning away from her, he said:

“I blew up my place of employment.”

She didn’t seem surprised, or disappointed, or concerned. Instead, she also looked away, focused on the coffee table, and replied:

“I broke up with my vampire.”

There didn’t seem to be more to say after that, and a silence followed. Not an awkward silence. Rather this seemed almost meditative. Giles found his glasses in his lap and slipped them back on. Buffy slid out of the leather jacket she was wearing and tossed it over the arm of the couch. The stakes again made their lethal wooden clacking sound, at once dangerous and so completely familiar.

‘We’ve lost so much,’ Giles suddenly thought, and one last smashed bit of him wanted to cry over it. ‘But we are here. We are alive. My Slayer is alive.’ That thought sobered him more than he thought possible. And in the best possible way.

He thought he might well be hung over enough to shoot himself tomorrow. He considered calling up his friend Olivia. He supposed that he’d have to organize the books they’d removed from the library at some point.

But he knew what he had to do now.

“Kiss my ass, Quentin,” he muttered and smiling gently at Buffy, he reached for the book on the coffee table, and then held an arm out to her.

Tears shimmered in her eyes but did not fall, and she matched his soft grin with one of her own as she fitted herself into the curve of his shoulder. He opened the book, and spoke slowly, willing away the drunken slur by sheer force of will. Mostly.

“Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four Privet Drive. Mr. Vernon Dursley had been woken in the early hours of the morning by a loud, hooting noise from his nephew Harry's room…”