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Banner by SRoni
Lesson the First
by Aadler
Copyright July 2017
Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of
Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.This story was done for the 2017 Summer of Giles.
Very well, then. Before I begin this recitation, I must be certain that you understand: nothing I am about to tell you has anything to do with the supernatural. It has an entirely different meaning, and I wouldn’t wish your understanding of what you hear to be compromised by expectation of something which will not, in fact, ever come. Are we clear on that? Good. On to it, then.The matter I will recount took place in the summer of … Do you know, I’m not really sure. It seems so long ago now; I can’t have been more than eight or nine years old, and probably not less than that, but I can’t seem to connect it to any other memories at the moment. Not that it matters overmuch, but there’s a bit of frustration in not being able to be more precise in something so mundane.
So, eight or nine, yes. We were spending much of the summer in a village in the country that year, though my father was seldom home. He hadn’t yet told me of the family’s connection to the Watchers — or the expectation that it was to be my vocation as well — but in retrospect it seems fairly clear that this brief relocation was effected so he could carry out some matter of Council business.
Now, things at that time were markedly more casual than they are now … outside the school year, at any rate. So long as I made my proper appearances at meals and engaged in no active vandalism — and, of course, made certain to be within the walls of the house at least thirty minutes before sunset — I was given free rein and left to my own devices. It was smashing fun, at first; I’d been to the countryside before, but never had this marvellous opportunity to explore at length and unsupervised. I made the entire village my range, learned the location and hours of every sweets shop, pestered the sheep in their meadows, climbed trees and splashed in frog-marshes … My father’s insistence on proper speech made me something of a target to the village lads at first, but his early tutelage in combat roughhousing (not that he had identified it as such) discouraged any nascent aggression in short order.
— No, this was not a matter of ‘Ripper’ manifesting at a precocious age. Nor did I ‘thrash the blighters’; I merely succeeded in convincing them that thrashing me would be a process they would find tedious, painful, and unsatisfying.
At any rate, the novelty of it all faded after the first few weeks, and I found myself becoming bored. I had sated myself with all the activities available, the area had no reliable television reception, and in those days I associated ‘books’ with ‘lessons’ and avoided them when possible. I was hungry for diversion, so that was when I finally roused myself to take note of the neighbors.
They weren’t ‘next door’ by any means: half a mile down the lane from our temporary abode, in the direction opposite the village. A modest home, more house than cottage, but not grand nor aspiring to be. It was somewhat back from the road, as those homes tended to be, and there was no fence, so I could see all there was to see. — Unless I went around back, but I wasn’t so lawless as that, not when I could be just as readily seen myself.
The house had … not a third storey, exactly, more a sort of odd protuberance at the top that offered an attic window, and it was at that window that I began to see the girl.
Now, I can recognise how this might be beginning to sound, but I assure you that the situation had none of the elements of Gothic melodrama. For one thing, the curtains were drawn back and the window was up, in full golden sunlight. The girl herself was no pale, thin waif with dark hair and huge, tragic eyes; no, she was blondish and looked to be freckled, and … describing her now, I’d say she rather resembled Jodie Foster before that actress reached adolescence. Sometimes she leaned out the window with her elbows on the sill, and sometimes she sat in it, sideways, as if it were a lounge. She liked the sun, you see. And, whenever she saw me, she waved.
I waved back, of course, but it was too far to converse without shouting, which I was reluctant to do. I’ve made myself sound something of a terror, but that was just childish brashness in a new environment. This, here, was familiar ground: private property, and the rules pertaining there had been painstakingly ingrained in me. So I didn’t shout, and as she hadn’t beckoned me in, I couldn’t enter their property; and, when I tried to signal that she should come out, she seemed not to understand.
In my memory this seems to have gone on for a good while, but in practical terms I doubt my patience would have held for more than a week. Currently at an impasse, I sought out my father during one of his times at home, explaining the situation — probably badly — and asking if he might do what I could not: approach the adult of the house and inquire if it were possible for his or her daughter to come out and play with me.
My father and I were on guarded terms at that time, reserved rather than stiff, with no dislike and some genuine if cautious affection, but no affinity whatsoever. I suspect he didn’t really know how to deal with a small boy, son or not; on my side, his early instruction regarding duty and responsibility (preparation for when it came time that the Watchers would assess me as a candidate, though I didn’t know it then) made me feel as if I were always being judged, and not at all sure I measured up. He was not unapproachable, however; he heard me out, gave it a bit of thought, and then said he would make the request and inform me of the result.
He made the call the next day. When he returned, his face had the expression I would see in the future when he had to deal with a matter he found distasteful or unwelcome but must consider objectively and decide without letting his feelings interfere. He gave me a curt shake of his head when I made to approach him, which conveyed no overt information about the situation itself but only meant Not now.
At dinner he told me that, no, it would not be possible for the girl to come out, or for me to go in and visit. I protested, asking for details, for reasons, and he said, “We’ll talk tomorrow,” which I very well understood to mean I’d get no more before then, and not even that if I attempted to press the issue.
It wasn’t until nearly dinnertime the following day that he spoke with me again; I believe it entirely possible that he had avoided me until he felt himself prepared to make a fair presentation. This had affected him deeply, in ways I wasn’t capable of understanding, but I was strongly impressed by the fact that it had so affected him, and I would think much about it in the ensuing years.
With a careful dispassion, he explained to me that he had been informed that the girl had a congenital heart defect; she was brought out to the country every year in the belief that it would be an aid to her health, but otherwise her parents were determined that she should be shielded from every potential form of risk, hazard, or stress.
Mind, this was not a huge disappointment for me; I’d seen something new and wanted to explore, to see if it was worth further interest. By now, I was substantially less interested in my original goal than in what I was seeing in my father. I expressed my curiosity, with careful respect, and …
My father was, I believe, not comfortable in the realm of feelings. He could cope with them readily enough, in others, but when it came to his own he was … either inarticulate, or distrustful of his ability to articulate them properly. He was too dutiful to dodge a necessary task simply from his own discomfort, however, and too proud to try and convince himself that it wasn’t necessary to explain matters of subtle emotion to an eight-year-old boy. As a result, it was only with difficulty that he at last communicated the pertinent points to me. I don’t remotely recall what he actually said, only the general sense of it all, so I’m afraid I must paraphrase and put those words in his mouth.
She’s not being permitted a life, is essentially what he told me. They dread her death, they’re obsessed with it, and so all they do — all they allow her — is focussed on avoiding it, delaying it, denying it. It colours everything she knows and experiences, it shuts out anything that might offer any relief from their concentrated monomania.
This matter had distressed him deeply, and it showed me a side of him of which I’d never before been aware. He had never struck me as a sensitive man, or even particularly imaginative: too busy dealing with matters of practical necessity, I suppose, to have time for such frivolities as that. This new view of him was a surprise to me, and I frankly didn’t know what to make of it.
Is she going to die, then?, I asked him.
Someday, I was told. We all die someday, and not many know the day before it arrives. My concern is not to how long she lives — which seems to be the only concern of her parents! — but to whether she will ever actually live at all.
It cost him considerable time and effort to express what I have so cavalierly summarised in these few bare words. Having at last done so, he had no desire to speak of it any further.
And so we never did.
* * *
When Giles had finished his recounting, the silence went on for some minutes before Olivia decided, apparently, that he was in fact done. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said at last.
Giles gave her a gentle smile. “For all the time we knew one another, I hid a fundamental part of myself from you: hid, by allowing you to believe it was all entertaining fantasy. You asked for some explanation, some clarification. This, I hope, can serve to explain … at least some of it.”
Once the Gentlemen had been vanquished, the others had finally gone to their own homes following the usual post-victory rehash/
celebration. With himself and Olivia once again left in privacy in his flat, Giles had naturally made tea; Olivia, contrary as always, had brewed up some of her beloved Turkish coffee. (“Black as night, sweet as love, hot as Hell” went the classical description; which could, Giles reflected, apply just as readily to Olivia herself.) She took a sip now, rolling the heavily sugared concoction over her tongue, and said, “I might need an explanation for the explanation, then.” Giles nodded. “You wished to understand how I could, seemingly, live in two worlds at once. What makes it work is balance, the arrangement of opposing forces to counter and support one another. This memory, and the, the sentiment that derives from it, is one of the forces that form my own … peculiar set of balances.” Seeing from her expression that she was still at a loss, he went on. “My father’s distress at the prospect of a young girl living out her life without ever having had a life …” He cleared his throat. “The parallels with the situation of a Slayer are, er, striking. I believe my father’s reaction was indicative of a conflict he himself felt about that, and I suspect the Council would have found him a rather poor choice for direct responsibility of a Slayer.” He replenished the tea in his cup, stirred, and set down the spoon. “Or, perhaps, he might have proven to be a very good one indeed.”
Olivia studied him searchingly. “Are you a good one?”
He smiled at her. “Still waiting for word from the jury on that, I’m afraid. But I … I do have a very good Slayer.”
Olivia thought on that, and at last she said, “So here we are.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Here we are.”
And then he sat with his tea, and she with her coffee, and waited to see who would next say what.
– end –