beer_good_foamy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beer_good_foamy) wrote2007-10-19 07:30 pm
beer_good_foamy) wrote2007-10-19 07:30 pm
Meta: "Mission Accomplished" DVD commentary and various philosophizin' on Buffy and Giles
My thoughts on BtVS! Let me show you them!
Sorry. For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seraphcelene's fic metathon, here's a commentary track for my fic "Mission Accomplished" which also doubles as meta on Slayerhood and the Watcher/Slayer relationship. Should be interesting, I hope.
Comments look like this. The original uncommented fic is here.
Title: Mission Accomplished
Author: Beer Good (beer_good_foamy)
Rating: PG13, possibly R
Word Count: ~3000
Timeline: 1975 and Post-"The Gift"
Summary: The first, last and hardest duty of all Watchers. Buffy has been dead for 24 hours, and there is nothing more for Giles to do... no, wait, he has one last job. One last mission to send his Slayer on.
Mission Accomplished
Now, first of all, I'm sure anyone geeky enough to read this ;-) remembers the last few seconds of "The Gift". I want you to think about the expressions on the scoobies' faces as they stand over Buffy's dead body. Xander is probably still mostly in denial, trying to come up with some way this didn't just happen. Willow has realized what's happened and is starting to fall apart completely, leaning on Tara. Spike is a complete mess. Giles, though... is calm. He's weeping openly, but he's not surprised.
Part of the impetus for this fic was the realization that Giles must have known all along that this was going to happen; that he'd one day find himself standing over a dead Slayer. This goes all the way back to his speech over Buffy's grave in "Nightmares", and onward to his comment in "Bargaining":
GILES: Nothing. I just can't help but wonder if ... she would have been better off without me. Buffy.
BUFFYBOT: I don't think that's true. You were very helpful to her.
GILES: Right. Yes, I was a perfect Watcher. I did what any good Watcher would do. Got my Slayer killed in the line of duty.
I've kept returning to the hours/days/months between "The Gift" and "Bargaining" in fic. This particular piece sprung out of this drabble, whichbashipforever kindly asked me to expand on – and I don't think I've ever been so satisfied with a request fic. It's also kind of a companion fic to my first fanfic, which also took place during the same timeframe (only with a much weirder plot).
This fic is about Giles preparing Buffy's body for the grave, but since I wrote it for BtVS's 10-year anniversary, I'd like to think that it's also about more than that. So a-ramblin' I shall go, and I hope there'll be something worth reading here.
Sunnydale, 2001
The morning sun woke him up. They hadn't pulled the drapes in the living room, and the sun on his face felt curiously normal after yesterday's chaos and despair – as if it thought it could warm him up. Giles sat up on the couch, ran his hand through the unwashed grey on his head and got to his feet. Stairs, one by one, creaking under his feet. With one hand on her doorknob, he hesitated; turning it was the last thing he wanted to do. He tensed up as if expecting it to shock him.
Finally he snapped out of it and opened the door. Duty called.
The word "duty" is important here. He's doing a job. He's completing a calling, something he's been trained for.
Oxford, 1975
Originally, I had planned a very brief flashback to Giles as a Watcher-in-training, but it took over more and more as I started writing, largely thanks to this character:
The man who stepped in front of the class was in his mid-60s, green cardigan under his tweed jacket, grey hair going on white and sideburns that would have made him looked like a kindly old grandfather if it were not for his disfigured face. Scars criss-crossed it like a spider's web, bringing out the hardness in his eyes.
"Good morning. My name is Wing Commander Forsythe. And before you ask, yes, I got these scars in combat, and no, it was not vampire-related. My Lancaster was shot down over Hamburg. These, however..." He pulled up his cardigan, causing the class to gasp as he revealed a torso just as battered as his face, "...are vampire-related."
Here's the big blooper of this fic. Originally, Forsythe was a major... only as was pointed out in the comments to the original fic, the Royal Air Force does not have majors; he would have been a flight lieutenant. But "flight lieutenant" just doesn't have the same authority, so I promoted him.
He didn't acknowledge their reaction, just took his time to tuck the shirt and cardigan back in place before continuing. "I am here today because I am the most experienced Watcher alive. I've had three Slayers under my care. I have taken part in more battles than I care to count. I personally know some of your parents would not be alive today if it were not for me; I also know some of your parents would be alive if they had listened to me. So trust me when I say that I know what I am talking about."
We know, of course, that watcherdom is at least partly hereditary. And it's a high-risk job, as Forsythe himself is proof of – perhaps more so than the Watcher handbook would have you believe. (And of course, yes, Forsythe's external scars signify that he's also scarred on the inside, blah-de-blah-de-blah.)
He paused, looking out over the classroom. Dead silence, rapt attention.
"I am here to speak to you about the most important and difficult task you'll ever face as a Watcher."
Sunnydale, 2001
California was never perfectly silent. Today was the quietest day this house had seen in five years, at least now that Dawn was finally asleep; there was no talking, no radio or TV blaring, it seemed even the birds were quiet.
In that other longish fic I wrote post-"The Gift", I had Tara dope Dawn up with the pills the doctors gave her when she was insane. I see no reason why not; Dawn would have been a complete mess in the days after Buffy's death, I think.
Most of the neighbourhood had gone off to work or to school. But in her room, there was the unsteady hum of the air conditioning, set to Max; nobody wanted to say it out loud, but it was summer and they all knew what happened to bodies in warm temperatures. At least this way they could spare a few hours to prepare her. It was freezing in here, but when he sat down at her bedside and put his hand out to touch her she felt colder still. He supposed that was a good thing.
This is part of the reason I like to return to post-"The Gift" fic; it's a very "The Body"-ish thing – they obviously have to do it all themselves, since they must keep Buffy's death a secret. Before they have time to deal with their grief, they must take care of a bunch of practical problems; how to get Spike out of the sun, how to get Dawn, Tara and Anya to the hospital, how to get Buffy back to the house... and how to get her into the ground. They can probably steal a coffin (you KNOW that someone in Sunnydale is making a fortune off those things, and probably charges extra for lids that open from the inside too) but I don't see them embalming her in the kitchen sink; so they need to be quick about it.
Also, there's a few small hints that there's another world out there, a normal world where people go to school, a world that almost ended 24 hours earlier. We'll get back to that at the end.
He let his hand linger on her arm, tracing the weird angle it took just above the elbow. He wanted to set it, to make sure it healed right; it was something he'd helped her with before. Train her, send her into battle, fix her up when she gets back, repeat. It's what a Watcher does. Until she can't be fixed.
Buffy didn't die from the fall, we know that; we see her die in mid-air – that's how they're able to bring her back, mystical deaths and all that (as we know, bringing someone back from a natural death is nigh-impossibleexcept for Warren, apparently). But even if her body was dead when it hit the ground, it must have been smashed up a bit. I'll get back to this, too.
Oxford, 1975
"Death. Is. Inevitable. You know this in your minds, but you still need to learn it. The oldest Slayer on record reached the ripe old age of 37 and spent the last three years on the run from the Council; the youngest was 13 and had been active less than half an hour. These are extreme examples, but..."
We know that the Council is not above killing rogue Slayers. Can you imagine a girl who's been fighting under the old council for 20 years, and deciding she wants to retire before her reflexes start to go completely...? They wouldn't like that.
Forsythe turned to the blackboard, writing down numbers. 18 years, 24 days. 1 year, 143 days. He tapped the chalk against the numbers.
"This, as I'm sure you've been told, is the average life expectancy of a Slayer. A little over 18 years of age, with less than 18 months active duty. Some will survive for several years longer than that, others will perish within a week, but they WILL die. As Watchers, you cannot hope to keep this from her: she may be just a girl, but do not assume that she is stupid. If you can get her to want to fight for her life, for a few more precious weeks of it, she will be a good soldier – but she will always be a soldier and as cold as it may sound, her ultimate fate will always be one and the same. And you need to be there every step of the way to prepare her for it."
The old man put the chalk down.
"That's the easy part. The hard part concerns yourselves."
Sunnydale, 2001
He looked at her face and tried not to think of all the different expressions he'd seen on it. All the laughter, the sadness, the fury, the silliness was gone, replaced by a look of peace so profound it almost made him forget how broken the rest of her was. He wanted to find consolation in that, not have to think about whether a skilled undertaker could have made her look good enough to put in an open coffin. It was a moot point anyway; there would be no undertaker, no parading mourners, no ceremonies... nor any consolation, he supposed.
He stood up and stretched, feeling numb. Funny, he had expected his back to hurt more. The gash in his side where the knight's spear had pierced him hurt like hell, he'd torn a couple of stitches carrying her the four miles back to the house; but his back, which had been troubling him for a few weeks even before all of this, hadn't acted up for a second. It struck him now that it was the first time he had had to do that; no matter how badly hurt she’d been, she had always made it back by herself before. She was always so strong, how could she have been so small that it felt like carrying a child? Somehow it felt impossible; at his age, he shouldn't have been that strong. He shouldn't have been able to do it.
I wrote a drabble about this too – it even used to be the prologue to this fic, but I realized it wasn't really needed.
And also, of course, "carrying a child" because Buffy is like a daughter to him, but also because he's so used to her being stronger than him. And just what is it he shouldn't have been able to do – we're not feeling a little bit guilty at having done our duty, are we, Rupert?
As he opened the closet, he almost regretted that he hadn't let Willow do this. Reliable, unbreakable Willow; she had been frantic for something to do until Tara had come up with the idea of sending her to LA. He supposed she was still in shock and he wasn't sure she should really be driving, but she needed something she could do, something she could fix. And besides, by all rights this was his job.
Tiny bit of Willow character study there; Willow's need to fix things, of course, eventually a) contributes to bringing Buffy back, and b) sends her off the deep end.
There were so many shoes and dresses, most of them still in the boxes they had wound up in when she gave up the student life and moved back home to take care of Joyce. There were even some with price tags still on them, bought for back-to-school money and never used.
Buffy gave up a lot to take care of Joyce, then Dawn; put her own life on indefinite hiatus (not unlike what she had to do permanently when she became the Slayer). And as far as Giles knows here, that life will now never be resumed.
For a while, he toyed with the idea of pink. Somehow he had always thought of her as pink; he wasn't quite sure if she wore it more often than any other colour, it just... seemed that way. (He should have paid better attention, taken his eyes off his bloody books...) Eventually, though, he succumbed to tradition and settled for the somber, black dress she had bought for Joyce's funeral but then dismissed as too impractical. He smoothed it out and hung it on the closet door.
I play around a bit with colours in this. So that's pink and black; I'll get back to that in a minute. Also, here's Giles' guilt bubbling up to the surface again; I'll get back to that too.
Oxford, 1975
"You are responsible for your Slayer's life, and thus for her death. When she dies, it is likely to be... should be because of a decision you make. Perhaps you will have made a mistake, but even if you do everything right – in fact, especially if you do everything right – you will sooner or later find yourself in a position when her death becomes unavoidable."
Here's another little bit of the fucked-upness of the traditional Watcher/Slayer relationship: if the Watcher does his job, he WILL get her killed. He's supposed to give her orders (remember Giles' frustration with Buffy back in s1?), she's supposed to follow them, and sooner or later one of those orders will lead to her death.
Wing Commander Forsythe looked intently at the class of Watchers-to-be, somehow managing to make it seem like he was meeting the gaze of everyone in the room at the same time.
"Make no mistake. Your duty is not to keep her alive; it is to fight a war. If your Slayer survives you, you have failed. If your Slayer retires, you have failed. If your Slayer ends up paralyzed from the neck down and living out her life in a hospital bed, you have failed. Only when one Slayer dies is the next one chosen."
Sunnydale, 2001
He started undressing her, carefully; he didn't want to bend her arms or legs the wrong way. But it was impossible. The blood had dried and stuck to her skin, making the white shirt too stiff to work around the broken bones. He had to cut her loose.
This is partly meant to be "The Body"-ish realism – another little way that the physical world messes up what's supposed to be an easy task – and of course, also, he DOES have to cut her loose in more ways than one since she's, well, dead. The question is who it is that he'll have to cut loose...
Only when he put the scissors down and stripped the shreds of clothing from her body did it hit him that she was now naked. Obviously, it's a natural consequence of undressing someone, but somehow he hadn't thought that far. Her nakedness had never been something he had thought about, except for the occasional moments spent "wigging out" about just how close she and Angel, or she and Riley, were getting.
Because of course, Giles and Buffy mean so much more to each other than just Watcher and Slayer. For all intents and purposes, Giles is Buffy's adopted father, and this is much more to him than just dutifully burying a dead soldier. Which leads us to this (IMO ever-so-slightly overwritten) bit:
Seeing it now almost broke him; the grief, the unfairness, the sheer fucking impossibility of it hit him like a shot to the gut and he had to struggle not to... cry? Scream? Laugh? Vomit? He wasn't sure what would happen, just clenched his teeth so he wouldn't find out. It wasn't just the hard physical evidence of how young she had still been, or how thin she had become over the last few horrible months since her mother's death; no, what horrified him was how wrong he had been just a few minutes ago. Yes, there were broken bones. Yes, there was blood. But not nearly as much as he had thought, considering. She was still almost... beautiful. Broken, but not shattered, as if the Slayer's strength remained even in death. As if it had always been there and now it was the only thing left, as if everything he had done as her Watcher, all his preparations, all his theories, everything he had put her through, all the sacrifices he'd had her make... pointless.
You'd think a normal girl, a human girl, would have been smashed from falling off that tower; Giles is trying to bury Buffy, and the first thing he sees is more evidence that she's The Slayer – that she's built to be a supernatural warrior who can take more punishment than anyone else. No wonder it spooks him a bit. Because of course, Giles loves Buffy. But he also knows, as per Forsythe's speech above and his comments in "Bargaining", that to some extent it's his training, his keeping her a Slayer, that has lead to her death.
And here's where we get to a longish red section. Season 5 is all about double natures; everyone is at some point two different-but-same things. For starters, most of our main characters are on the threshold between youth and adulthood. Everyone has moved out of their parents' basements and is trying to find out who they are now, one foot on either side.
WILLOW: Why can't I just dress like a grownup? Can't I be a grownup?
Hell, Xander even gets to be two different-but-same versions of himself in "The Replacement", Dawn is both a somewhat bratty kid and an ancient field of energy, and of course the season's big bad is two different characters in one body.
And since the show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this is very much true for Buffy. And I'm not just talking about the Buffybot either.
BUFFY: You ever heard the expression, "biting off more than you can chew"? Okay, um, how about the expression, "Vampire Slayer"? (...) Wow, been a long while since I met one didn't know me. You should get home.
TEEN: How d'you do that?
BUFFY: It's what I do.
TEEN: But... you're just a girl ...
BUFFY: That's what I keep saying.
The theme for the season, as set up in "Buffy vs Dracula" isn't so much Buffy The Vampire Slayer vs a monster, but Buffy vs the Vampire Slayer. Just like we had Buffy and Faith representing two sides of Buffy in s3, we now have – as hinted in "The Replacement" – Buffy split into two different and, it seems, mutually exclusive characters: The Slayer (or, as per s7, demonic) side, personified by the First Slayer...
BUFFY: I'm starting to feel like being the Slayer is turning me into stone. (...) To slay, to kill. It means being hard on the inside. Maybe being the perfect Slayer means being too hard to love at all.
...and her human, side, personified by... well, Dawn.
GILES: She's not your sister.
BUFFY: No. She's not. She's more than that. She's me. The Monks made her out of ME. I hold her and I feel closer to her than... It's not just the memories they built, it's physical. Dawn is a part of me. The only part that I...
And while Dawn isn't just Buffy's innocent side (just like Faith wasn't just Buffy's dark side in s3 – both are characters in their own right) the theme of different-but-same holds up; deep down, Buffy and Dawn are both very much Joyce's daughters (Dawn arguably slightly more so – doesn't "Band Candy" Joyce remind you a lot of a certain teenager we know? - but still) and superpowers and age difference aside, they often really do act very much alike.
DAWN: Whatever, Joan.
BUFFY: Whatever, Umad.
DAWN: Boy, you're bossy!
BUFFY: Boy, you're a pain in the -
DAWN: Do you think we're -
BUFFY: Sisters?
No wonder Buffy can't let Dawn die; she is the destiny-free normal-life girl Buffy was never allowed to be. Well, apart from that pesky keydom, that is. That's what she does on top of that tower, she reconciles those two sides and does exactly what the Slayer is supposed to do: she kills the demon and saves the innocent human.
Which brings us to Giles' and Buffy's relationship. This, of course, is also double; father/daughter, watcher/slayer. And as has been pointed out, those two roles seem incompatible.
QUENTIN: Your affection for your charge has rendered you incapable of clear and impartial judgment. You have a father's love for the child, and that is useless to the cause. It would be best if you had no further contact with the Slayer.
But what I'm trying to do here is to do something of the same for Giles as what season 5 did for Buffy; setting up Forsythe to battle the same questions Buffy did – that the Watcher's job, in a sense, risks being just as deadening, as inhuman as the Slayer's. In fact, according to the rulebook, it should be. Even a Watcher who loves his Slayer must have her killed (and again, if he doesn't, we know the Council is more than happy to.) How do you reconcile that?
He quickly pulled a blanket over her and stumbled across the hall to the bathroom, splashing cold water in his face to stop the bile from rising. For several minutes he sat on the toilet seat, waiting for his hands to stop shaking. When they did, he filled a bucket with warm water and liquid soap, grabbed a sponge from the bathtub and returned to her room.
Oxford, 1975
The commander sat down on the desk, grimacing briefly as his hip settled against the hard wood. "Those old fogies in the Council elite will have told you never to get emotionally attached to your Slayer, correct?" He clearly didn't expect an answer, and no one dared even break a smile at the fact that most of their teachers were a good 10-15 years younger than the old bomber pilot. "They will have told you that it makes you incapable of rational decisions, that it puts you and the Council at risk, that it's simply not The Proper Thing To Do. Those are all good reasons. They are reasons that have been preached by the leaders of the Council for centuries. But I have earned the right to say whatever the hell I please, and I am here to tell you that this is complete and utter bollocks."
There were surprised murmurs among the students. The old man continued.
Sunnydale, 2001
"The old man continued" and we cut back to Giles, who's hardly feeling like a young man on this particular day.
Dip sponge in bucket, squeeze water out of sponge, apply sponge to her naked skin, rub gently until it was clean, repeat. Don't think about what you could have done, don't think about what you didn't do, don't think about what you did do, repeat. The blood and dirt ran off her and stained the bedspread; he moved a stuffed pig out of the way of the spreading grime (toys, she still slept with TOYS) and kept washing her. It was bad enough that she was going to sleep IN dirt from now on; he'd be damned if he would let any of it touch her. The muck stuck to his hands, got under his fingernails (dip sponge, squeeze sponge) but when he was finished she was clean. Pale, white as snow apart from the few wounds. Not pink. White.
Awww, look at the pretty colours. Here's where I overanalyze my own text a bit, but I do believe there is power in symbolism and memes (yes, I read Eco) and I like to use little hints and clues like these in most of my fics. I don't know if anyone catches them, but I like to think that even if they don't do so consciously, they help add ambience.
So far, we have pink (the colour Giles thought of when he thought of Buffy), white (the colour of her skin when he's done cleaning her), and black (the dress he'll bury her in).
Pink has a couple of connotations; it's more or less the healthy skin colour on a white person, for starters – it means rosy cheeks, embarrassment, love, excitement, sex... life. On a somewhat more symbolic level, it's obviously also a girly colour and Buffy does wear pink fairly often, at least in the earlier seasons – conspicuously often around Faith, for instance, as if to contrast her from Faith's dark denim and leather. As far as I recall, she doesn't wear it much post-season 5. But I digress. Pink is the colour of Mr Gordo, whom Giles moved out of the way to keep him from getting smudged – see The Adventures of Mr Gordo for a good comment on him which is quite relevant here. There's also, on an even more symbolic level, the question of just WHY all girls wear pink and all boys wear blue – the fixed gender/power structures, if you will. Which, of course, reflects back on the Watcher/Slayer relationship, which as far as we know has looked roughly the same for thousands of years and doesn't really look to be changing much as of "The Gift".
White is the colour of innocence; Giles tries to wash the dirt/guilt off Buffy and it sticks to him instead as she grows paler. Yes, as a Watcher he sent her do her death, but there's also the fact of how Buffy died; when you go right past the whole sacrificed-herself-to-save-the-world thing, she still committed suicide - with all the guilt/blame issues that brings. And I'm not entirely sure Giles wouldn't prefer to think of himself as a killer rather than Buffy as a someone who killed herself, someone who was that unhappy (and as much of a heroic act it was, we know that Buffy was struggling beforehand.
BUFFY: I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world, if these are the choices, if everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point. I just wish... I just wish my mom was here. The spirit guide told me that Death is my gift. I guess that means a Slayer really is just a killer after all.
And of course, white is also the colour of death; a completely white body is only white because the blood has seized pumping. If BtVS is a metaphor for life's big questions, then here's a thought: the only time your personal demons stop coming, the only time life gets really simple, the only time you're truly innocent... is when you're dead.
Black is pretty obvious: black is mourning, black is death, but it's also evil; again, Giles' guilt – he'll take the white (innocent) Buffy and dress her in black (death). It's what any good Watcher does. Black is night, the time of the monsters and Slayers, but also the time when the innocent sleep. Black is the absense of light. Black is nothing. But black is also serenity (and Serenity - Take me out to the black, tell'em I ain't comin' back...), peace, freedom from intrusion... darkness can protect.
DRACULA: You think you know ... what you are ... what's to come. You haven't even begun... Find it. The darkness. Find your true nature.
Her limbs had stiffened and he could barely move them to get the dress on. He took a deep breath and forced them to bend, ignoring the sickening noise as her dead muscles stretched and bones ground against each other.
She had always been so much stronger than she should have had to be.
He could put her through one more beating. She could take it.
Oxford, 1975
"Trust me, lads: I am the only one in your entire training who will tell you this, because there are too many people here who owe me their life to shut me up – as much as they wish that they could. The hard part isn't to disconnect yourself from humanity, but to do the job without doing so. Your duty is to take care of her, to support her, to fight for her, even love her... and send her to her death."
I never for a second believed that Giles and Buffy were the first Watcher/Slayer pair in the history of mankind to come closer than just commander/soldier.
The commander picked up a folder and pulled out a black and white photograph of a blonde in her late teens which he held up to the class. "This is Jennifer. She had been under my guidance for a year when she took on a nest of vampires. She staked four before the remaining two killed her." Another picture. "This is Katinka. I smuggled her out of the Soviet Union to be trained. She died in cruciamentum." A third, and his hand shook visibly as he held it up. "This is Charlotte. She was 15 when she was called. We worked together for three and a half years before she was captured and turned by a vampire in Liverpool four years ago. I staked her myself – you've seen the scars. It was my last action as an active Watcher."
He looked at the picture himself, and for well over a minute the room was silent as the old man seemed to forget they were all there.
As previously said, Forsythe has scars both inside and out.
Sunnydale, 2001
As he brushed her hair, willing his hands steady, Giles thought about what Tara told him before they left the Magic Box.
"You're a killer."
He hadn't spoken to Tara since... since. He didn't know if she remembered it, and he didn't think he wanted to know. After all, the Council had given him his job back, just before telling him about the person he would end up killing. Reinstating him as a Watcher just in time to have his Slayer killed in battle.
And yet he'd worked with... for... because of her for years after they fired him. Because he couldn't bear not to. He had built his entire life around her, to the point where he found himself thinking he was doing her job for her. (Ben gasping against the palm of his hand, twitching, dying...) That should have been it. But meanwhile she was up there, so high above, doing what she had to do. What even all his training, all his preparations, all his efforts couldn't help her with. In the end, she did it on her own.
Because this is one of the most fascinating things about Buffy as a character to me; that her strength, her heroicness – such as it is – isn't because she has superpowers. It comes from within.
BUFFY: You're not the source of me.
Time and again, whenever she's offered a way out, she chooses to stay and keep fighting not because the council tells her to but because that's who she is. Let's not forget that crucial Buffy & Giles episode "Helpless", for instance. It's not the Slayer that saves the day in "The Gift", it's Buffy Summers. And, while Giles is probably not ready to think about that just now, she once again did so by explicitly disobeying Giles'orders helpful suggestions.
Oxford, 1975
"There's..." Forsythe seemed to shake out of his reverie. "There's hardly a day goes by when I don't wish I could have done more for them. Helped them. Saved them. But our duty is not to save individuals; it is to save the world. I flew 23 missions over German cities, and it's quite likely that I've killed more women and children than most vampires ever will – but there are some things we must do, simply because the alternative is worse. This is the way women and men have behaved since the beginning, it's ugly and nothing we can do will change it. All we can do, all we must do, is see to it that we remain men, not ..." He glanced at the picture again as he put it back in the folder, his voice shaking slightly. "...Not stuffy, heartless ol' toffs."
The idea is that Forsythe is is quoting one of his Slayers here – presumably Charlotte. What, you didn't think Giles was the first Watcher to be called on his tweediness?
Also, note the callback to "Restless" and the necessity of being "MEN". Manly men. Men in tights. (Sorry. I do not mean to imply that Watchers wear tights. Except of course Wesley.) Again, there's a little double thingy here; men as in humans as opposed to animals or monsters, but also men as in "those who call the shots and save the helpless girls".
"If we become machines killing without remorse, we become monsters ourselves, and then it's all pointless. If you do not think you can take this, you do not belong in this room. I am quite sure the Council can find some use for you; they always seem to need paper-pushers or cold-blooded killers. But I hope at least some of you have it in you. Class dismissed."
The old man left without asking if anyone had any questions.
In the third row, Ripper stifled a yawn. Sentimental old stuck-in-the-mud geezer.
...but obviously something stuck, since 25 years later his subconscious remembers it in "Restless", dreaming about his relationship with Buffy.
There's a point to be made here, I hope. Yes, Forsythe is one of the good guys. He played the game as well as he could. He couldn't see his girls as merely weapons or soldiers – to quote Buffy, he couldn't live like that, with everything stripped away - and he still grieves for them. But he was nevertheless playing the same game, like the old officer he was, following the same rules; he may have done it with more heart and compassion than most, but the end result was still the same. Jennifer, Katinka and Charlotte are dead.
So here's the irony: yes, young Rupert acts like an idiot here, and I'm sure if Giles still consciously remembers the lecture, he's ashamed for not getting was Forsythe was talking about. But there's a twist coming, because at the same time he and Buffy (and a bunch of others) will eventually prove Forsythe wrong. There ARE things they can do to change the way men and women have behaved since the beginning. Giles is a double nature, he's not just the tweedy, correct gentleman; there's something else in him, and the same thing that makes 20-year-old Ripper sneer at Forsythe and 45-year-old Giles grieve for Buffy will eventually lead to him grinning:
GILES: Buffy, what you said... it flies in the face of everything we've ever... of what every generation has done in the fight against evil. I think it's bloody brilliant.
Two years later, Sunnydale will be a hole in the ground and there'll be Slayers all over the world. If you want, you can do what Joss probably intended and read stuff into that which includes words like "patriarchy" and "emancipation".
In a way, I guess, it ties back to one of the few truly good scenes of the Buffy movie:
MERRICK: You do everything wrong.
BUFFY: I'm sorry, I take it back...
MERRICK: No, no, do it wrong. Don't play our game.
Sunnydale, 2001
And then it was over. He put the brush down and looked at her, making himself remember what she looked like before even her body was gone forever, blinking only when his vision blurred.
Outside the window, he heard laughter, children returning from school. At first he didn't understand how that could be; surely it couldn't be this late in the day already? But his watch said that it was. The world was moving on.
The world didn't end because she died.
Because she died, the world didn't end.
But in her room, it was still cold. Giles knew he should get up, that there was nothing more he could do. But his legs refused to move. He couldn't do this. He couldn't put a Slayer in the ground.
He sat there for a long time, looking at her, tracing the lines on her face, the curve of her lip (the way she would laugh), the little kink in her nose (the way she would frown), the shape of her eyes (the look she'd give him when he got too watcher-y) until he couldn't see the Slayer behind them.
Until he wasn't a Watcher anymore.
Until he was just Giles and she was just Buffy.
You may or may not notice that this is the only place in the whole fic where Buffy's name appears. Up until now she's been the Slayer.
Giles hasn't worked everything out. There's no resolution here, obviously, no happy ending; everything's still very fresh. But just like Buffy did at the top of that tower, he has – for now – found a way past the double nature of their relationship; he's not a Watcher doing a job, he's a man grieving for a girl he loved. He can't bury the Slayer, but he can cut the Slayer loose and bury Buffy as a human being.
There's (hopefully) a thread running through this fic which is a tribute to the basic idea of BtVS: to take the old power structures, the old "this is the way it's always been" and subvert it, turn it upside down. What this fic tries to do is to be about Giles trying to bury Buffy – obviously – but also, since it's presumably read by people who know how the series ends, to be read in the light of what was still to come in the upcoming two seasons, and that it would end with a complete turnaround on everything Forsythe ever knew. I think he would have liked that.
And that's about it, I guess.
Grr. Argh.
Sorry. For
seraphcelene's fic metathon, here's a commentary track for my fic "Mission Accomplished" which also doubles as meta on Slayerhood and the Watcher/Slayer relationship. Should be interesting, I hope.Comments look like this. The original uncommented fic is here.
Title: Mission Accomplished
Author: Beer Good (
beer_good_foamy)Rating: PG13, possibly R
Word Count: ~3000
Timeline: 1975 and Post-"The Gift"
Summary: The first, last and hardest duty of all Watchers. Buffy has been dead for 24 hours, and there is nothing more for Giles to do... no, wait, he has one last job. One last mission to send his Slayer on.
Mission Accomplished
Now, first of all, I'm sure anyone geeky enough to read this ;-) remembers the last few seconds of "The Gift". I want you to think about the expressions on the scoobies' faces as they stand over Buffy's dead body. Xander is probably still mostly in denial, trying to come up with some way this didn't just happen. Willow has realized what's happened and is starting to fall apart completely, leaning on Tara. Spike is a complete mess. Giles, though... is calm. He's weeping openly, but he's not surprised.
Part of the impetus for this fic was the realization that Giles must have known all along that this was going to happen; that he'd one day find himself standing over a dead Slayer. This goes all the way back to his speech over Buffy's grave in "Nightmares", and onward to his comment in "Bargaining":
GILES: Nothing. I just can't help but wonder if ... she would have been better off without me. Buffy.
BUFFYBOT: I don't think that's true. You were very helpful to her.
GILES: Right. Yes, I was a perfect Watcher. I did what any good Watcher would do. Got my Slayer killed in the line of duty.
I've kept returning to the hours/days/months between "The Gift" and "Bargaining" in fic. This particular piece sprung out of this drabble, which
bashipforever kindly asked me to expand on – and I don't think I've ever been so satisfied with a request fic. It's also kind of a companion fic to my first fanfic, which also took place during the same timeframe (only with a much weirder plot).This fic is about Giles preparing Buffy's body for the grave, but since I wrote it for BtVS's 10-year anniversary, I'd like to think that it's also about more than that. So a-ramblin' I shall go, and I hope there'll be something worth reading here.
Sunnydale, 2001
The morning sun woke him up. They hadn't pulled the drapes in the living room, and the sun on his face felt curiously normal after yesterday's chaos and despair – as if it thought it could warm him up. Giles sat up on the couch, ran his hand through the unwashed grey on his head and got to his feet. Stairs, one by one, creaking under his feet. With one hand on her doorknob, he hesitated; turning it was the last thing he wanted to do. He tensed up as if expecting it to shock him.
Finally he snapped out of it and opened the door. Duty called.
The word "duty" is important here. He's doing a job. He's completing a calling, something he's been trained for.
Oxford, 1975
Originally, I had planned a very brief flashback to Giles as a Watcher-in-training, but it took over more and more as I started writing, largely thanks to this character:
The man who stepped in front of the class was in his mid-60s, green cardigan under his tweed jacket, grey hair going on white and sideburns that would have made him looked like a kindly old grandfather if it were not for his disfigured face. Scars criss-crossed it like a spider's web, bringing out the hardness in his eyes.
"Good morning. My name is Wing Commander Forsythe. And before you ask, yes, I got these scars in combat, and no, it was not vampire-related. My Lancaster was shot down over Hamburg. These, however..." He pulled up his cardigan, causing the class to gasp as he revealed a torso just as battered as his face, "...are vampire-related."
Here's the big blooper of this fic. Originally, Forsythe was a major... only as was pointed out in the comments to the original fic, the Royal Air Force does not have majors; he would have been a flight lieutenant. But "flight lieutenant" just doesn't have the same authority, so I promoted him.
He didn't acknowledge their reaction, just took his time to tuck the shirt and cardigan back in place before continuing. "I am here today because I am the most experienced Watcher alive. I've had three Slayers under my care. I have taken part in more battles than I care to count. I personally know some of your parents would not be alive today if it were not for me; I also know some of your parents would be alive if they had listened to me. So trust me when I say that I know what I am talking about."
We know, of course, that watcherdom is at least partly hereditary. And it's a high-risk job, as Forsythe himself is proof of – perhaps more so than the Watcher handbook would have you believe. (And of course, yes, Forsythe's external scars signify that he's also scarred on the inside, blah-de-blah-de-blah.)
He paused, looking out over the classroom. Dead silence, rapt attention.
"I am here to speak to you about the most important and difficult task you'll ever face as a Watcher."
Sunnydale, 2001
California was never perfectly silent. Today was the quietest day this house had seen in five years, at least now that Dawn was finally asleep; there was no talking, no radio or TV blaring, it seemed even the birds were quiet.
In that other longish fic I wrote post-"The Gift", I had Tara dope Dawn up with the pills the doctors gave her when she was insane. I see no reason why not; Dawn would have been a complete mess in the days after Buffy's death, I think.
Most of the neighbourhood had gone off to work or to school. But in her room, there was the unsteady hum of the air conditioning, set to Max; nobody wanted to say it out loud, but it was summer and they all knew what happened to bodies in warm temperatures. At least this way they could spare a few hours to prepare her. It was freezing in here, but when he sat down at her bedside and put his hand out to touch her she felt colder still. He supposed that was a good thing.
This is part of the reason I like to return to post-"The Gift" fic; it's a very "The Body"-ish thing – they obviously have to do it all themselves, since they must keep Buffy's death a secret. Before they have time to deal with their grief, they must take care of a bunch of practical problems; how to get Spike out of the sun, how to get Dawn, Tara and Anya to the hospital, how to get Buffy back to the house... and how to get her into the ground. They can probably steal a coffin (you KNOW that someone in Sunnydale is making a fortune off those things, and probably charges extra for lids that open from the inside too) but I don't see them embalming her in the kitchen sink; so they need to be quick about it.
Also, there's a few small hints that there's another world out there, a normal world where people go to school, a world that almost ended 24 hours earlier. We'll get back to that at the end.
He let his hand linger on her arm, tracing the weird angle it took just above the elbow. He wanted to set it, to make sure it healed right; it was something he'd helped her with before. Train her, send her into battle, fix her up when she gets back, repeat. It's what a Watcher does. Until she can't be fixed.
Buffy didn't die from the fall, we know that; we see her die in mid-air – that's how they're able to bring her back, mystical deaths and all that (as we know, bringing someone back from a natural death is nigh-impossible
Oxford, 1975
"Death. Is. Inevitable. You know this in your minds, but you still need to learn it. The oldest Slayer on record reached the ripe old age of 37 and spent the last three years on the run from the Council; the youngest was 13 and had been active less than half an hour. These are extreme examples, but..."
We know that the Council is not above killing rogue Slayers. Can you imagine a girl who's been fighting under the old council for 20 years, and deciding she wants to retire before her reflexes start to go completely...? They wouldn't like that.
Forsythe turned to the blackboard, writing down numbers. 18 years, 24 days. 1 year, 143 days. He tapped the chalk against the numbers.
"This, as I'm sure you've been told, is the average life expectancy of a Slayer. A little over 18 years of age, with less than 18 months active duty. Some will survive for several years longer than that, others will perish within a week, but they WILL die. As Watchers, you cannot hope to keep this from her: she may be just a girl, but do not assume that she is stupid. If you can get her to want to fight for her life, for a few more precious weeks of it, she will be a good soldier – but she will always be a soldier and as cold as it may sound, her ultimate fate will always be one and the same. And you need to be there every step of the way to prepare her for it."
The old man put the chalk down.
"That's the easy part. The hard part concerns yourselves."
Sunnydale, 2001
He looked at her face and tried not to think of all the different expressions he'd seen on it. All the laughter, the sadness, the fury, the silliness was gone, replaced by a look of peace so profound it almost made him forget how broken the rest of her was. He wanted to find consolation in that, not have to think about whether a skilled undertaker could have made her look good enough to put in an open coffin. It was a moot point anyway; there would be no undertaker, no parading mourners, no ceremonies... nor any consolation, he supposed.
He stood up and stretched, feeling numb. Funny, he had expected his back to hurt more. The gash in his side where the knight's spear had pierced him hurt like hell, he'd torn a couple of stitches carrying her the four miles back to the house; but his back, which had been troubling him for a few weeks even before all of this, hadn't acted up for a second. It struck him now that it was the first time he had had to do that; no matter how badly hurt she’d been, she had always made it back by herself before. She was always so strong, how could she have been so small that it felt like carrying a child? Somehow it felt impossible; at his age, he shouldn't have been that strong. He shouldn't have been able to do it.
I wrote a drabble about this too – it even used to be the prologue to this fic, but I realized it wasn't really needed.
And also, of course, "carrying a child" because Buffy is like a daughter to him, but also because he's so used to her being stronger than him. And just what is it he shouldn't have been able to do – we're not feeling a little bit guilty at having done our duty, are we, Rupert?
As he opened the closet, he almost regretted that he hadn't let Willow do this. Reliable, unbreakable Willow; she had been frantic for something to do until Tara had come up with the idea of sending her to LA. He supposed she was still in shock and he wasn't sure she should really be driving, but she needed something she could do, something she could fix. And besides, by all rights this was his job.
Tiny bit of Willow character study there; Willow's need to fix things, of course, eventually a) contributes to bringing Buffy back, and b) sends her off the deep end.
There were so many shoes and dresses, most of them still in the boxes they had wound up in when she gave up the student life and moved back home to take care of Joyce. There were even some with price tags still on them, bought for back-to-school money and never used.
Buffy gave up a lot to take care of Joyce, then Dawn; put her own life on indefinite hiatus (not unlike what she had to do permanently when she became the Slayer). And as far as Giles knows here, that life will now never be resumed.
For a while, he toyed with the idea of pink. Somehow he had always thought of her as pink; he wasn't quite sure if she wore it more often than any other colour, it just... seemed that way. (He should have paid better attention, taken his eyes off his bloody books...) Eventually, though, he succumbed to tradition and settled for the somber, black dress she had bought for Joyce's funeral but then dismissed as too impractical. He smoothed it out and hung it on the closet door.
I play around a bit with colours in this. So that's pink and black; I'll get back to that in a minute. Also, here's Giles' guilt bubbling up to the surface again; I'll get back to that too.
Oxford, 1975
"You are responsible for your Slayer's life, and thus for her death. When she dies, it is likely to be... should be because of a decision you make. Perhaps you will have made a mistake, but even if you do everything right – in fact, especially if you do everything right – you will sooner or later find yourself in a position when her death becomes unavoidable."
Here's another little bit of the fucked-upness of the traditional Watcher/Slayer relationship: if the Watcher does his job, he WILL get her killed. He's supposed to give her orders (remember Giles' frustration with Buffy back in s1?), she's supposed to follow them, and sooner or later one of those orders will lead to her death.
Wing Commander Forsythe looked intently at the class of Watchers-to-be, somehow managing to make it seem like he was meeting the gaze of everyone in the room at the same time.
"Make no mistake. Your duty is not to keep her alive; it is to fight a war. If your Slayer survives you, you have failed. If your Slayer retires, you have failed. If your Slayer ends up paralyzed from the neck down and living out her life in a hospital bed, you have failed. Only when one Slayer dies is the next one chosen."
Sunnydale, 2001
He started undressing her, carefully; he didn't want to bend her arms or legs the wrong way. But it was impossible. The blood had dried and stuck to her skin, making the white shirt too stiff to work around the broken bones. He had to cut her loose.
This is partly meant to be "The Body"-ish realism – another little way that the physical world messes up what's supposed to be an easy task – and of course, also, he DOES have to cut her loose in more ways than one since she's, well, dead. The question is who it is that he'll have to cut loose...
Only when he put the scissors down and stripped the shreds of clothing from her body did it hit him that she was now naked. Obviously, it's a natural consequence of undressing someone, but somehow he hadn't thought that far. Her nakedness had never been something he had thought about, except for the occasional moments spent "wigging out" about just how close she and Angel, or she and Riley, were getting.
Because of course, Giles and Buffy mean so much more to each other than just Watcher and Slayer. For all intents and purposes, Giles is Buffy's adopted father, and this is much more to him than just dutifully burying a dead soldier. Which leads us to this (IMO ever-so-slightly overwritten) bit:
Seeing it now almost broke him; the grief, the unfairness, the sheer fucking impossibility of it hit him like a shot to the gut and he had to struggle not to... cry? Scream? Laugh? Vomit? He wasn't sure what would happen, just clenched his teeth so he wouldn't find out. It wasn't just the hard physical evidence of how young she had still been, or how thin she had become over the last few horrible months since her mother's death; no, what horrified him was how wrong he had been just a few minutes ago. Yes, there were broken bones. Yes, there was blood. But not nearly as much as he had thought, considering. She was still almost... beautiful. Broken, but not shattered, as if the Slayer's strength remained even in death. As if it had always been there and now it was the only thing left, as if everything he had done as her Watcher, all his preparations, all his theories, everything he had put her through, all the sacrifices he'd had her make... pointless.
You'd think a normal girl, a human girl, would have been smashed from falling off that tower; Giles is trying to bury Buffy, and the first thing he sees is more evidence that she's The Slayer – that she's built to be a supernatural warrior who can take more punishment than anyone else. No wonder it spooks him a bit. Because of course, Giles loves Buffy. But he also knows, as per Forsythe's speech above and his comments in "Bargaining", that to some extent it's his training, his keeping her a Slayer, that has lead to her death.
And here's where we get to a longish red section. Season 5 is all about double natures; everyone is at some point two different-but-same things. For starters, most of our main characters are on the threshold between youth and adulthood. Everyone has moved out of their parents' basements and is trying to find out who they are now, one foot on either side.
WILLOW: Why can't I just dress like a grownup? Can't I be a grownup?
Hell, Xander even gets to be two different-but-same versions of himself in "The Replacement", Dawn is both a somewhat bratty kid and an ancient field of energy, and of course the season's big bad is two different characters in one body.
And since the show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this is very much true for Buffy. And I'm not just talking about the Buffybot either.
BUFFY: You ever heard the expression, "biting off more than you can chew"? Okay, um, how about the expression, "Vampire Slayer"? (...) Wow, been a long while since I met one didn't know me. You should get home.
TEEN: How d'you do that?
BUFFY: It's what I do.
TEEN: But... you're just a girl ...
BUFFY: That's what I keep saying.
The theme for the season, as set up in "Buffy vs Dracula" isn't so much Buffy The Vampire Slayer vs a monster, but Buffy vs the Vampire Slayer. Just like we had Buffy and Faith representing two sides of Buffy in s3, we now have – as hinted in "The Replacement" – Buffy split into two different and, it seems, mutually exclusive characters: The Slayer (or, as per s7, demonic) side, personified by the First Slayer...
BUFFY: I'm starting to feel like being the Slayer is turning me into stone. (...) To slay, to kill. It means being hard on the inside. Maybe being the perfect Slayer means being too hard to love at all.
...and her human, side, personified by... well, Dawn.
GILES: She's not your sister.
BUFFY: No. She's not. She's more than that. She's me. The Monks made her out of ME. I hold her and I feel closer to her than... It's not just the memories they built, it's physical. Dawn is a part of me. The only part that I...
And while Dawn isn't just Buffy's innocent side (just like Faith wasn't just Buffy's dark side in s3 – both are characters in their own right) the theme of different-but-same holds up; deep down, Buffy and Dawn are both very much Joyce's daughters (Dawn arguably slightly more so – doesn't "Band Candy" Joyce remind you a lot of a certain teenager we know? - but still) and superpowers and age difference aside, they often really do act very much alike.
DAWN: Whatever, Joan.
BUFFY: Whatever, Umad.
DAWN: Boy, you're bossy!
BUFFY: Boy, you're a pain in the -
DAWN: Do you think we're -
BUFFY: Sisters?
No wonder Buffy can't let Dawn die; she is the destiny-free normal-life girl Buffy was never allowed to be. Well, apart from that pesky keydom, that is. That's what she does on top of that tower, she reconciles those two sides and does exactly what the Slayer is supposed to do: she kills the demon and saves the innocent human.
Which brings us to Giles' and Buffy's relationship. This, of course, is also double; father/daughter, watcher/slayer. And as has been pointed out, those two roles seem incompatible.
QUENTIN: Your affection for your charge has rendered you incapable of clear and impartial judgment. You have a father's love for the child, and that is useless to the cause. It would be best if you had no further contact with the Slayer.
But what I'm trying to do here is to do something of the same for Giles as what season 5 did for Buffy; setting up Forsythe to battle the same questions Buffy did – that the Watcher's job, in a sense, risks being just as deadening, as inhuman as the Slayer's. In fact, according to the rulebook, it should be. Even a Watcher who loves his Slayer must have her killed (and again, if he doesn't, we know the Council is more than happy to.) How do you reconcile that?
He quickly pulled a blanket over her and stumbled across the hall to the bathroom, splashing cold water in his face to stop the bile from rising. For several minutes he sat on the toilet seat, waiting for his hands to stop shaking. When they did, he filled a bucket with warm water and liquid soap, grabbed a sponge from the bathtub and returned to her room.
Oxford, 1975
The commander sat down on the desk, grimacing briefly as his hip settled against the hard wood. "Those old fogies in the Council elite will have told you never to get emotionally attached to your Slayer, correct?" He clearly didn't expect an answer, and no one dared even break a smile at the fact that most of their teachers were a good 10-15 years younger than the old bomber pilot. "They will have told you that it makes you incapable of rational decisions, that it puts you and the Council at risk, that it's simply not The Proper Thing To Do. Those are all good reasons. They are reasons that have been preached by the leaders of the Council for centuries. But I have earned the right to say whatever the hell I please, and I am here to tell you that this is complete and utter bollocks."
There were surprised murmurs among the students. The old man continued.
Sunnydale, 2001
"The old man continued" and we cut back to Giles, who's hardly feeling like a young man on this particular day.
Dip sponge in bucket, squeeze water out of sponge, apply sponge to her naked skin, rub gently until it was clean, repeat. Don't think about what you could have done, don't think about what you didn't do, don't think about what you did do, repeat. The blood and dirt ran off her and stained the bedspread; he moved a stuffed pig out of the way of the spreading grime (toys, she still slept with TOYS) and kept washing her. It was bad enough that she was going to sleep IN dirt from now on; he'd be damned if he would let any of it touch her. The muck stuck to his hands, got under his fingernails (dip sponge, squeeze sponge) but when he was finished she was clean. Pale, white as snow apart from the few wounds. Not pink. White.
Awww, look at the pretty colours. Here's where I overanalyze my own text a bit, but I do believe there is power in symbolism and memes (yes, I read Eco) and I like to use little hints and clues like these in most of my fics. I don't know if anyone catches them, but I like to think that even if they don't do so consciously, they help add ambience.
So far, we have pink (the colour Giles thought of when he thought of Buffy), white (the colour of her skin when he's done cleaning her), and black (the dress he'll bury her in).
Pink has a couple of connotations; it's more or less the healthy skin colour on a white person, for starters – it means rosy cheeks, embarrassment, love, excitement, sex... life. On a somewhat more symbolic level, it's obviously also a girly colour and Buffy does wear pink fairly often, at least in the earlier seasons – conspicuously often around Faith, for instance, as if to contrast her from Faith's dark denim and leather. As far as I recall, she doesn't wear it much post-season 5. But I digress. Pink is the colour of Mr Gordo, whom Giles moved out of the way to keep him from getting smudged – see The Adventures of Mr Gordo for a good comment on him which is quite relevant here. There's also, on an even more symbolic level, the question of just WHY all girls wear pink and all boys wear blue – the fixed gender/power structures, if you will. Which, of course, reflects back on the Watcher/Slayer relationship, which as far as we know has looked roughly the same for thousands of years and doesn't really look to be changing much as of "The Gift".
White is the colour of innocence; Giles tries to wash the dirt/guilt off Buffy and it sticks to him instead as she grows paler. Yes, as a Watcher he sent her do her death, but there's also the fact of how Buffy died; when you go right past the whole sacrificed-herself-to-save-the-world thing, she still committed suicide - with all the guilt/blame issues that brings. And I'm not entirely sure Giles wouldn't prefer to think of himself as a killer rather than Buffy as a someone who killed herself, someone who was that unhappy (and as much of a heroic act it was, we know that Buffy was struggling beforehand.
BUFFY: I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world, if these are the choices, if everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point. I just wish... I just wish my mom was here. The spirit guide told me that Death is my gift. I guess that means a Slayer really is just a killer after all.
And of course, white is also the colour of death; a completely white body is only white because the blood has seized pumping. If BtVS is a metaphor for life's big questions, then here's a thought: the only time your personal demons stop coming, the only time life gets really simple, the only time you're truly innocent... is when you're dead.
Black is pretty obvious: black is mourning, black is death, but it's also evil; again, Giles' guilt – he'll take the white (innocent) Buffy and dress her in black (death). It's what any good Watcher does. Black is night, the time of the monsters and Slayers, but also the time when the innocent sleep. Black is the absense of light. Black is nothing. But black is also serenity (and Serenity - Take me out to the black, tell'em I ain't comin' back...), peace, freedom from intrusion... darkness can protect.
DRACULA: You think you know ... what you are ... what's to come. You haven't even begun... Find it. The darkness. Find your true nature.
Her limbs had stiffened and he could barely move them to get the dress on. He took a deep breath and forced them to bend, ignoring the sickening noise as her dead muscles stretched and bones ground against each other.
She had always been so much stronger than she should have had to be.
He could put her through one more beating. She could take it.
Oxford, 1975
"Trust me, lads: I am the only one in your entire training who will tell you this, because there are too many people here who owe me their life to shut me up – as much as they wish that they could. The hard part isn't to disconnect yourself from humanity, but to do the job without doing so. Your duty is to take care of her, to support her, to fight for her, even love her... and send her to her death."
I never for a second believed that Giles and Buffy were the first Watcher/Slayer pair in the history of mankind to come closer than just commander/soldier.
The commander picked up a folder and pulled out a black and white photograph of a blonde in her late teens which he held up to the class. "This is Jennifer. She had been under my guidance for a year when she took on a nest of vampires. She staked four before the remaining two killed her." Another picture. "This is Katinka. I smuggled her out of the Soviet Union to be trained. She died in cruciamentum." A third, and his hand shook visibly as he held it up. "This is Charlotte. She was 15 when she was called. We worked together for three and a half years before she was captured and turned by a vampire in Liverpool four years ago. I staked her myself – you've seen the scars. It was my last action as an active Watcher."
He looked at the picture himself, and for well over a minute the room was silent as the old man seemed to forget they were all there.
As previously said, Forsythe has scars both inside and out.
Sunnydale, 2001
As he brushed her hair, willing his hands steady, Giles thought about what Tara told him before they left the Magic Box.
"You're a killer."
He hadn't spoken to Tara since... since. He didn't know if she remembered it, and he didn't think he wanted to know. After all, the Council had given him his job back, just before telling him about the person he would end up killing. Reinstating him as a Watcher just in time to have his Slayer killed in battle.
And yet he'd worked with... for... because of her for years after they fired him. Because he couldn't bear not to. He had built his entire life around her, to the point where he found himself thinking he was doing her job for her. (Ben gasping against the palm of his hand, twitching, dying...) That should have been it. But meanwhile she was up there, so high above, doing what she had to do. What even all his training, all his preparations, all his efforts couldn't help her with. In the end, she did it on her own.
Because this is one of the most fascinating things about Buffy as a character to me; that her strength, her heroicness – such as it is – isn't because she has superpowers. It comes from within.
BUFFY: You're not the source of me.
Time and again, whenever she's offered a way out, she chooses to stay and keep fighting not because the council tells her to but because that's who she is. Let's not forget that crucial Buffy & Giles episode "Helpless", for instance. It's not the Slayer that saves the day in "The Gift", it's Buffy Summers. And, while Giles is probably not ready to think about that just now, she once again did so by explicitly disobeying Giles'
Oxford, 1975
"There's..." Forsythe seemed to shake out of his reverie. "There's hardly a day goes by when I don't wish I could have done more for them. Helped them. Saved them. But our duty is not to save individuals; it is to save the world. I flew 23 missions over German cities, and it's quite likely that I've killed more women and children than most vampires ever will – but there are some things we must do, simply because the alternative is worse. This is the way women and men have behaved since the beginning, it's ugly and nothing we can do will change it. All we can do, all we must do, is see to it that we remain men, not ..." He glanced at the picture again as he put it back in the folder, his voice shaking slightly. "...Not stuffy, heartless ol' toffs."
The idea is that Forsythe is is quoting one of his Slayers here – presumably Charlotte. What, you didn't think Giles was the first Watcher to be called on his tweediness?
Also, note the callback to "Restless" and the necessity of being "MEN". Manly men. Men in tights. (Sorry. I do not mean to imply that Watchers wear tights. Except of course Wesley.) Again, there's a little double thingy here; men as in humans as opposed to animals or monsters, but also men as in "those who call the shots and save the helpless girls".
"If we become machines killing without remorse, we become monsters ourselves, and then it's all pointless. If you do not think you can take this, you do not belong in this room. I am quite sure the Council can find some use for you; they always seem to need paper-pushers or cold-blooded killers. But I hope at least some of you have it in you. Class dismissed."
The old man left without asking if anyone had any questions.
In the third row, Ripper stifled a yawn. Sentimental old stuck-in-the-mud geezer.
...but obviously something stuck, since 25 years later his subconscious remembers it in "Restless", dreaming about his relationship with Buffy.
There's a point to be made here, I hope. Yes, Forsythe is one of the good guys. He played the game as well as he could. He couldn't see his girls as merely weapons or soldiers – to quote Buffy, he couldn't live like that, with everything stripped away - and he still grieves for them. But he was nevertheless playing the same game, like the old officer he was, following the same rules; he may have done it with more heart and compassion than most, but the end result was still the same. Jennifer, Katinka and Charlotte are dead.
So here's the irony: yes, young Rupert acts like an idiot here, and I'm sure if Giles still consciously remembers the lecture, he's ashamed for not getting was Forsythe was talking about. But there's a twist coming, because at the same time he and Buffy (and a bunch of others) will eventually prove Forsythe wrong. There ARE things they can do to change the way men and women have behaved since the beginning. Giles is a double nature, he's not just the tweedy, correct gentleman; there's something else in him, and the same thing that makes 20-year-old Ripper sneer at Forsythe and 45-year-old Giles grieve for Buffy will eventually lead to him grinning:
GILES: Buffy, what you said... it flies in the face of everything we've ever... of what every generation has done in the fight against evil. I think it's bloody brilliant.
Two years later, Sunnydale will be a hole in the ground and there'll be Slayers all over the world. If you want, you can do what Joss probably intended and read stuff into that which includes words like "patriarchy" and "emancipation".
In a way, I guess, it ties back to one of the few truly good scenes of the Buffy movie:
MERRICK: You do everything wrong.
BUFFY: I'm sorry, I take it back...
MERRICK: No, no, do it wrong. Don't play our game.
Sunnydale, 2001
And then it was over. He put the brush down and looked at her, making himself remember what she looked like before even her body was gone forever, blinking only when his vision blurred.
Outside the window, he heard laughter, children returning from school. At first he didn't understand how that could be; surely it couldn't be this late in the day already? But his watch said that it was. The world was moving on.
The world didn't end because she died.
Because she died, the world didn't end.
But in her room, it was still cold. Giles knew he should get up, that there was nothing more he could do. But his legs refused to move. He couldn't do this. He couldn't put a Slayer in the ground.
He sat there for a long time, looking at her, tracing the lines on her face, the curve of her lip (the way she would laugh), the little kink in her nose (the way she would frown), the shape of her eyes (the look she'd give him when he got too watcher-y) until he couldn't see the Slayer behind them.
Until he wasn't a Watcher anymore.
Until he was just Giles and she was just Buffy.
You may or may not notice that this is the only place in the whole fic where Buffy's name appears. Up until now she's been the Slayer.
Giles hasn't worked everything out. There's no resolution here, obviously, no happy ending; everything's still very fresh. But just like Buffy did at the top of that tower, he has – for now – found a way past the double nature of their relationship; he's not a Watcher doing a job, he's a man grieving for a girl he loved. He can't bury the Slayer, but he can cut the Slayer loose and bury Buffy as a human being.
There's (hopefully) a thread running through this fic which is a tribute to the basic idea of BtVS: to take the old power structures, the old "this is the way it's always been" and subvert it, turn it upside down. What this fic tries to do is to be about Giles trying to bury Buffy – obviously – but also, since it's presumably read by people who know how the series ends, to be read in the light of what was still to come in the upcoming two seasons, and that it would end with a complete turnaround on everything Forsythe ever knew. I think he would have liked that.
And that's about it, I guess.
Grr. Argh.