SOLDIER
by Branwyn

RATING: PG
TIMELINE: Screws up the end of season 5.
SUMMARY : Giles discovers that Dawn's blood is the key to Glory's ritual--before Glory takes her.
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Giles is not a sensitive male.

The years have whittled him into a man who is nothing more than he needs to be. The Watchers molded his childhood and left him in adolescence to something resembling freedom, going so far as to write off his year long absence from Oxford as a sabbatical: field work in the occult. *Research.* They had touched him when it mattered most, so that even in his rebellion he was only a permutation of what they'd created him to be. A warrior in denims instead of suits; one who called the creatures of darkness by vulgar names instead of Latinate euphemisms.

He had not changed when he came to Sunnydale. His adoration of Buffy was expected: a conditioned response to years of stimulus. Watchers are hewn into masts of hollow strength until their Slayer is called, and then they are filled with her. She is the molten core of their strength. Giles loves the children because they are tools by which he has preserved Buffy's life. She has lived longer than any Slayer before her because Giles allowed her a life worth fighting for. Other Slayers have died, and Watchers failed, because in the end duty is never enough. Giles discovered this at twenty, and this knowledge has saved Buffy.

Still, it would be untrue to say that Giles never came to love the children for their own sake. Not even the Watchers could extricate every scrap of the paternalism that might, in another world, have been prominent in his nature. He adores Willow, and when the children were still in high school he had often denied violent impulses toward Xander's father. And Dawn...she was a fetching child. She brought out the best in Buffy, had kept her going after Joyce's death.

"Giles...? You look sad. Or worried or. Something. Thinking about Glory?"

Dawn is in the passenger seat, hugging her Power Puff Girls book bag. Her face is turned toward Giles, the faintest hint of Buffy's patented pouty-frown on her lips. She waits for a reply.

She looks so. Human. Young. He looks at her from under the weight of heavy brows for some hint of what she is. Such poisonous blood should breed scales or horns, not a sweet face with puffy teenage features and wide eyes.

"I'm trying not to think about anything, actually." His usual shy, unfocused smile. "I've done too much of it lately."

"Okay. So...are we going?"

"Actually, why don't I just give you the money. Sun's already set--Buffy and the others will be waiting. You get our food, and I'll pull round in a minute to pick you up."

Dawn is closely watched these days, and she is chafing under the constant observation. She jumps at the chance to walk alone, even the seventy feet from Giles' car to Hot Dog On A Stick. Dawn looks quickly from him to the restaurant, and smiles brightly as she takes the ten dollar bill from his hand. "Thanks," she says, slipping out the car door and walking toward the plastic hot-dog shaped facade.

From the left, out of the shadows that grow in the new twilight, a tall woman with long blonde hair approaches the driver's side of Giles' car. His window is half-way down, and he meets her eyes over the glass. At his look, she stops, as though afraid to come nearer. She waits instead, until Giles gives her a tiny nod, and then proceeds past the car, toward the restaurant. Her steps are long and quick. She is rapidly closing the distance that separates her from Dawn, who is taking her time. Dawdling.

Giles has given the vampire strict instructions *not* to linger.

He is no more than he ought to be, and so he stares resolutely at his hands, which are folded in his lap. Turns the radio on, loudly--although Dawn will not be given time to scream. Thinks about Buffy, and her devastation. Concentrates on the sweetness that is Buffy, alive, able to grieve.

Dawn's only honest eulogy will be in his diaries, where she will be known to countless future generations of Watchers. A tool: ultimately proving more useful in death than in life. A cautionary tale: no one is too loveable to be sacrificed. A reminder: the intrinsic worth of individual lives never outweigh the worth of the function they perform.

Giles' function, at the moment, is to hang his hands on the steering wheel. He is crying, although the tears should have been scraped out of him along with everything else when they made him into this man. One who kills, not for passion or righteousness, or even duty. But for pragmatism. One who sees what must be done.

And no matter what, can do it.

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