Essential Fragility
By K.V. Wylie
We have escaped to here. Buffy bought me this notebook and Willow a package of pens. "You should still keep a journal, Giles" Buffy said, "even if you're no longer a Watcher. Even if no one will ever see it but you."
I think I was getting on their nerves and they were seeking means to keep me occupied. Either that or they were worried about me. I'm not the same person I was before, but neither are they for that matter. Everything has gone. We are completely in the unknown, what we are and what we are to each other. We have been forced to each other. We have no where else to turn. There is only we three. And I'm not sure we're coping.
At first, I couldn't fathom writing on these pages and this notebook stayed blank for some weeks. I was determined to leave everything behind, every habit, every twitch, anything visibly associated with the man I used to be. I wanted it all gone, behind us, back in Sunnydale, in that hellhole where all our losses came. I wanted nothing to do with how I lived there, especially no more reminders such as this journal represents.
But habits do not die. They go underneath, then they surface. They are imprinted somewhere in my psyche for, here I am, writing about nothing whatsoever. I pulled this book to me and, as I write, I notice Buffy has glanced over twice, a gratified smile on her face. At least she smiles. I don't anymore. Neither does Willow. I can't in the least figure out how Buffy does. She is stronger, by far, than I am.
Rupert Giles
October 9, 1999
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This notebook stayed closed for too long again. It sat on the table. We ate meals around it and inadvertently rolled the pens to the floor so many times that it became almost automatic to sit and reach down for a dropped implement. When I put a cup of tea on it tonight, Buffy took it, opened it, and read it without asking for my consent. However, we don't have much left in the way of secrets.
We have decided, the three of us, to keep a record. Why? I don't know. We don't know. We don't intend sending this anywhere. We certainly don't intend that anyone but ourselves should even know about it. We will write but reading our words would be too much. What goes in here will stay in here, unchanged. The necessity for us is the action. It is an anchor, some routine, some stability. We have drifted this past summer, ending here, in this city, in this flat. A journal will be our place marker. We do need our defining habits after all.
"You are to be the first entry, Giles," Buffy told me and I didn't bother to correct her grammar, nor did I bother to point out that I had already written the first, two weeks ago now. Appropriately, hers is the first name mentioned.
We are the only ones left from Sunnydale: Buffy Anne Summers. Willow Leah Rosenberg, Rupert Eric Giles. We are the only survivors of the Ascension, if survivors is the right term. We are simply here. We exist but not much else. It is Willow who feels it the hardest, who is the most beaten down.
The Mayor didn't survive his own Ascension. Perhaps his own fault, some miscue, some forgotten part of his spell, some tribute overlooked. We fought. We had a plan, carefully worked out, a way to fight him. We readied ourselves and looked in horror as everything came down on our heads. We didn't win. He didn't win either but that is irrelevant. We have lost all.
Graduation day began with such a calm blue-sky and ended in the dark. There is nothing left. No people, no school, just a burnt patch of ground. Buffy told me the word Sunnydale exists in an atlas she saw, but there is no other evidence of it. The hellmouth, destroyed from the fallout of an Ascension out of control, did not go easily. When it started, I grabbed the two dearest to me. At the end, I held Buffy in my right hand and Willow in my left. They were all I could hold.
The dead: Alexander Harris, Cordelia Chase, Oz - did I ever know his family name? I'd ask Willow but perhaps it's better not to. Both of Buffy's parents (Joyce and Hank Summers, the latter having made the trip to see his daughter's graduation). The list of dead continues: Willow's parents, Amy Madison, Principal Snyder, the Mayor, and everyone in Sunnydale, screaming as the hellmouth opened beneath them and the sky caught on fire above.
Those we could not find: Angel, Wesley Wyndham-Price, Faith. It was a gruesome task but we looked through the bodies and we dug graves for the people we knew.
The Watcher's Council ignores me. Two telegrams, returned unwanted. There are only the three of us, and now this journal. We have gone from place to place, moving like the lost.
Buffy and Willow know what this entry will be and have left, a vague excuse about needing to buy milk as they went out the door. They don't want to see the words. They don't want to see my face as I record this. We have agreed that this is to be an honest record from the three of us, but I get the brutal entry.
Did I say we were empty? Gutted is more like it. Dear God, it hurts to write.
Rupert Giles
October 23, 1999
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I had to use an atlas to see how we went, to see how we'd moved between Sunnydale and where we are now. I know that we, (Willow, Giles and I) walked and then took buses but I didn't really understand what we'd done until I looked it up on some maps at a library. Giles said our route looks convoluted. He always uses words I have to look up. To me it looks like circles. I traced it out and it looks like we could only go so far before we had to start back, only we never went all the way back, and eventually we just arced out to here. I tried not to see the word Sunnydale but it's a long word and hard to avoid. Finally I put my finger over it while I figured out how we'd gone.
Maybe I should start by saying that Giles put some stones in the place where my mom and I used to live, where our house used to be. He and Willow said a prayer while I cried. Without realizing it, he'd put the stones where the front door had been. I didn't think I'd cry for my dad too but I did. Then I felt so weird afterwards, like it hadn't really happened. I knew this was some alternate world, like where Willow's vamp came from. This was Anya's doing and Giles would do a spell and then I'd run from the library all the way home to find my mom drinking warm milk in the living room while she waited up for me.
Giles did the same at Willow's, made a marker with some stones. She cried and cried. After Giles said a prayer, he lifted her up and carried her away from it. We didn't bother looking for his place. We found a bit of clean ground beside an overturned truck and stayed there. When daylight came, we started walking.
We walked down the highway, all the way to Rapier. Around noon, a few cars passed us but nothing else. No police, no fire trucks. No nothing, just some old cars that we saw return later.
They didn't even stop. They must have seen us. Then Giles said maybe it was just as well. Maybe they had something to do with the Mayor. His people, or maybe his enemies, come to gloat.
We left the road, just in case, going across fields, and came into Rapier sideways. It wasn't much of a town - a diner, a bank, a gas station, and, bizarrely, a lot where some guy was selling RV's. Giles used the bank machine and found it took his card as if his bank was still standing somewhere. So he emptied his accounts and we pocketed money in our burnt sweaty clothes. He said it would be safer to spread it among the three of us. Willow didn't have any pockets so she ended up putting 50 and 100 dollar bills in her socks. I remember, when we went into the diner, she paid out of one of her socks. Not that the waitress didn't have a reason to stare at us before.
Giles ordered tea, toast, and scrambled eggs, but we couldn't get much of it down. After Willow paid, we went back outside and I suddenly puked it all up. I remember Giles held me and didn't say anything when he wiped it off his shoes.
We took a bus to Stockton. Giles and I left Willow in a motel room while we bought some clothes at Wal-Mart. Jeans and sweatshirts and running shoes, in and out in ten minutes because he hadn't wanted to leave Will alone at all. She'd hardly spoken since…..it all happened and hadn't said a word since Rapier. We left her sitting on the bed and got back to find her still sitting there. Just sitting. Not a word.
Giles was a gentleman and said Willow and I should shower first. When we undressed, all these wadded 100 dollar bills fell on the bathroom floor and I remember kicking them out the door and Giles picking them up and placing them in a row on the dresser. After he showered, he left to send a telegram to the Watcher's Council. While he was gone, I tried watching the black and white tv in the room and kept waiting and waiting for Anya's spell to end. Finally Willow turned off the tv. When Giles came back, he found us on the bed, and we were sobbing so loudly that he could hear us from the motel office. But that's the point when I knew, when I *really* knew. It had really happened and there was no spell and I would never see my mother again.
No Anya. No other world. No vampire Willow. My mother is dead.
Buffy Summers
October 26, 1999
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I get two entries in a row because Willow won't yet and Giles is asleep. It's late and it's dark. I used to spend nights in a cemetery. Now I spend them watching over Will and Giles.
I borrowed that atlas from the library and have it in front of me right now. I've already done the way we went once so I'm not going to do that again. I just want to see where we are.
We're more north than I thought. We're in Burton, Ontario, factories, docks and shopping malls. That's what's here. Forty minutes by bus to Lake Ontario where we go a lot. Giles sits on the sand and reads, and Will and I walk by the water until our shoes get too wet and gritty.
We were in Denver for a while and also in Kansas City, but it didn't work out for us in either place. Giles didn't want to use our real names, in case some of the Mayor's people were around. But, without his name, he had no degree either and could only get jobs that didn't pay much or were only night shifts. I didn't do any better. Plus, too, we had to find hours that left one of us with Willow all the time. Giles and I were really worried about her. She'd cry or she'd be so quiet you couldn't hear her breathe. There was nothing else - just tears and silence. I came back from work one day to find Giles practically spoon-feeding her, trying to get her to eat, and the look of anguish on his face was almost as bad as the blank one on hers. That's when he said we had to do something. We couldn't go on like that. And the motel manager was starting to wonder, an older guy with two girls, always paying in cash. This was in Kansas City and, after I came in that day, we just packed our stuff. Giles had a, well I wouldn't say friend, but he knew someone in Detroit who owed him a favour. This guy thought we should go into Canada. Giles pushed for England. He said he had a house there and a cousin, estranged but still living. What he really wanted, though, was to show up on the Watcher's Council's doorstep and make somebody pay.
We also found out from this guy, whether it's true or not, that the Council had written us off, officially declared us dead in the ruin in California. A new hellmouth had opened in Jordan after the death of their king, and a new Slayer and Watcher were there. Giles and I didn't exist.
That's when Giles started on about England, angry as hell, angrier than the night I found him at the factory, but I looked at Will, sitting on the end of the couch in a little ball. I knew she couldn't go much further. Canada was 3 hours to the border. Add 1 hour for this guy to get us fake Citizenship papers. So I told Giles we were going to go to Canada, find one spot, and stay there. When Willow got better, we'd think about England.
We kept our first names but used Orwell as the last name on the papers. Apparently the word was a code between Giles and Angel, an author they both liked.. If Angel…..if he'd survived, he'd find us by it. We got on a bus, played returning tourist at the border, and left the States.
We travelled through Windsor, St. Catherines, and Toronto. I decided our direction. When we got to this city, and I saw a ton of smoking factories, I said to Giles there had to be some half decent work here. Hit and miss. I picked this place for the smoke. We stepped off the bus, bought a newspaper, and went apartment hunting.
The second place we went to had a balcony. Willow went onto it while we were talking to the superintendent. I didn't see her, just Giles suddenly bolting past me. I found out after that he was worried she might jump, but when he grabbed her arm, she said, "Look, Giles, a mountain," and she smiled. It wasn't much of a mountain. Cars travel up and down it daily, but the sight of it made her smile. That's why we picked this apartment.
It needs paint, badly, and there's someone with a loud stereo on our floor, but there are 3 bedrooms and the view of the mountain, and it's cheap. So here we are.
With his citizenship papers, Giles found a half-good job in a factory. A few weeks later, he got a pretty good one with the city as a maintenance man. It's bizarre to think of him changing light bulbs and cleaning floors at government offices and ice rinks. It's even weirder to see him in work shirts. The first time he put one on, Will frankly stared at him and asked, "Giles?" But his is a decent wage and comes with a health and dental plan and some sort of tuition bonus for 'dependents in school'. After the plan kicked in, he enrolled both Will and me in university. He walked her back and forth to classes the first day, and I did the next. After that, she seemed ok with it and went on her own. Now I think she enjoys it. I hope she does anyway. Giles and I would do anything to make it ok for her.
She takes engineering and I'm taking accounting part time and working at a restaurant. Between my tips and Giles' pay, we don't go hungry and I've even started a savings account. I handle our money. Giles simply hands his paycheck over, now that he knows how well I can do this. I'm rather proud of it, actually. I took care of my own bills and stuff that summer I ran away and did really well. I even got ahead on the rent a little.
Will does the dusting and dishes, because Giles and I both hate those jobs. He does the laundry, he and I share the cooking, and we all grudgingly do the rest of the cleaning. We keep our schedules on a calendar taped to a kitchen cupboard. We always know where the other two are. I used to hate the 24-7 deal, Giles making me account for every minute of the day. Now it's a comfort.
We have it all worked out. Giles works, Will goes to school, and I take care of us. When Will's finished school, we're going to England and we're going to kick those Watchers on the Council from Land's End to Newcastle and right up to the Orkney Islands. (I know the way because I've got the atlas in front of me.)
They thought they'd leave us to die, those bastards. But we didn't.
Buffy Summers
October 30, 1999
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It's my turn. Buffy keeps pushing this notebook to me every time we sit at the table. I don't know what to write about but Buffy's determined we all should. She says neither she nor Giles read it. This book is just to write in and that I can put down anything. I have no idea what they've written about and I don't want to look. I turned to an empty page and started.
I'm glad she's so strong, so able to keep going. I'm not. I'm not griping that she is, though it's tiring sometimes. Every once in a while I just want to stop and hide away a little, but if I do that, I'll start thinking about things and it'll start to hurt all over again. Sometimes, for no reason, I just want to scream.
Right now, it's 7:30. It's still light out and I have calculus equations to work on. Buffy's in her room doing a spreadsheet for one of her classes and Giles is working until 11. Tomorrow is Tuesday, when the movies are only 2 dollars to get in, and Buffy says we should go to one, do something fun. The last time I went to a movie, it was with Oz, Xander, and Cordelia. It doesn't seem right to go without them.
It's November. A lady in the elevator this morning said that there was snow by this time last year. We only had snow once in Sunnydale. It covered everything but melted within a few hours. I wonder what winter will be like here, having to go to school on cold mornings. Giles said that, in London, storms come that leave everything in ice. I wonder if that will happen here.
I want to make sure Giles gets a winter coat. He's out the most, on his way to work or coming back or running errands. Sometimes I think he goes to a bar after work. Not for long but it's time lost that I don't see on his schedule. An hour maybe, here and there. When he comes in, he smells like smoke, scotch too if I get close enough before he has a shower. I don't say anything because he pushes himself hard and maybe this is his way of dealing with it. But he always did push hard. I think he always drank a little too.
He doesn't look like Giles. If you were to see him…..before…..and see him now, without knowing the middle, you'd think it was another man. He doesn't shave unless he has to go to work. He doesn't wear suits. He doesn't own a tie. We'd get him one, if we thought he'd wear it. It was just jeans and workpants until Buffy got mad at him one day and said she was tired of looking at him. She called him a slob. (I didn't.) She dragged him to a mall to pick out clothes and tried to get him to go into a men's store, but he sat on a bench and wouldn't budge. We ended up in Zeller's and the compromise was corduroys, which are still jeans (Buffy says) but he wouldn't go any further. She got him a brown and a black. If he's on afternoon shift, she goes into his room in the morning and says this shirt, those pants, until it's time to change for work. They used to argue about it, him saying that if she didn't like to look at him, to look somewhere else, but this is about more than what he wears. Buffy saw an ad in the newspaper for a librarian, and one a few days later for a teacher, but he wouldn't apply. She even typed up a resume but Giles tossed it out with a final, "No." I think he doesn't mind the job he has and maybe that's why he wants to stay. Or else it's that he's on his own mostly if he works afternoons. On the day shift, no one notices janitors anyway. He says he walks by people and they don't see him. I thought about it and don't recall much about the janitor at Sunnydale High either, so I see what he means. And I know how he feels. I sit at the back in my classes, near the door. Those people where Giles works probably don't have any clue about who's walking by them, about who he really is.
Willow
November 1
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It's a quiet bright day. We've gone to the lake though it's a little cool. The weather, and it being a weekday, have given us a nearly deserted beach, some women and children by the parking lot but no one else.
Willow wishes to learn how to defend herself. It's the first time she's asked for anything, so Buffy is diligently teaching her the beginning moves of Taekwon-Do. They're doing this on the sand and I have refrained from informing Willow what the consequences will be. It's harder to move on ground that shifts under your feet. Buffy and I trained on sand once and my calves ached for three days afterwards.
I woke this morning to the sound of Willow crying. I rushed to the kitchen, dizzy from getting up too quickly, found her sobbing horribly, and Buffy standing bewilderedly by her, a yogurt container in her hand. It was one of those drinkable yogurts the two of them like, with a twist off cap. Buffy had pulled the cap with her teeth in a manner that Xander used to, and the sight of it caused the tears. We are never prepared for the innocuous moments that bring it all back.
This shore reminds me of Skegness. Seagulls, boulders, sand with stones all through it, and the smell of dead fish and factory pollution. But it's the nicest view we have. The only other is Willow's mountain which we can see from the balcony. The rest of this city is buildings and so many people, I almost think I'm in London. The money has the Queen on it as well, so we could be in England but for the colour of the bills. Purple for a tenner. Blue for the five. Greens and pinks for the rest. What a lot of dye they must go through at the mint.
I glanced up at a child's squeal and note that the two women with their strollers have come down the walk and are paused at the sight of Buffy and Willow on the sand. We probably appear to be a father and his two daughters but I am always uneasy when we are noticed. I also worry about Buffy, whose temper is now ever at the surface. She is quick to defend against any perceived threat.
Finally, the women are continuing on, giving in to a toddler's demand for new scenery.
Is it right for us to stay so clear of people? I don't feel as if we're out of harm's way but would I know if we were? I have little experience with being safe. I also have little experience with the life such as we lead now. It's extraordinarily difficult to get used to being purposeless. In a sense, this is the kind of life Buffy always told me she wanted. School, a job, a place of her own. Everyday activities, the same as other people's. No patrolling. No duties associated with being the Slayer. No hellmouth. No demons trying to kill her night after night. But she seems as lost as I. Both her hopes and mine are in one place, and that place is Willow. Ironically, Willow is the one of us with the least hope.
It has been only five and a half months since the Ascension. Willow has had no time to heal. Perhaps we should try to reclaim some semblance of a so-called normal life. I think Buffy has started in this direction for she said something this morning about a movie the two of them went to last night. Coming up is the American Thanksgiving. We let the Canadian one go by. Perhaps, for the twenty-sixth, Buffy and I could attempt to cook a turkey, buy cranberries or whatever else is appropriate. I'll need to discuss it with her first for this could be a good idea or a rather bad one. Willow may have a history of Thanksgivings spent with Xander or her family or some such, and a celebration might cause her more pain. We live in a minefield, the three of us.
Rupert Giles
November 3, 1999
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