HOME FIRES   by Jayne Leitch
Copyright 2002

Dear Diary, and don't I feel exactly twelve years old as I write that.  But I'm also feeling
the lingering effects of the wine Rupert plied me with over dinner last night, which
means I'm in no mood whatsoever to deny convention.

     Olivia Abeo-Granger, bowing to custom.  Somewhere my university roommate and
my mother are dying of laughter.

     Before I get started, I'd like to point out that I kept journals long before Bridget Jones
Mania turned Helen Fielding into even more of a millionaire and an American actress
into the soul of modern female Britannia.

     I just want it clear that I am no pretender to the Diary Club.  I closed the personal
journal long before the fad struck, and am opening it again because I want to, not because
Colin Firth says "fuck" so very beautifully that I feel the need to fantasize myself into his
arms while he does so.

     Bridget Jones has nothing to do with this.  Unless Ms Fielding neglected to mention
that her erstwhile heroine slays vampires while she's not shagging her boss.

     Oh, but I'm ahead of myself, Dear Diary.  Since it has been so long, I should probably
catch you up on everything I've learned over the past few years.  So here, in relatively
chronological order, I shall list the Things I Know Now That I Didn't Before:

     One: In-flight films are rarely anything better than torturous, especially when they're
about baseball.

     Two: The supernatural exists.  (Naturally.)

     Three: Vampires, vampire Slayers, witches, ex-demons and bald grinning things that
steal voices and cut out people's hearts are only a few of the colourful denizens of
nighttime California.

     Four: There is a reason why Rupert's always such a homebody after dark.  There is
also a reason why he entertains young, nubile blonde girls who interrupt when I'm
visiting.  (See #3.)

     Five: Being scared of said reasons is a horrible excuse for pretending to be too busy to
visit a man for close to two years.  Especially when said man is fantastic enough in and
out of bed to make any and all thoughts of Firthian fucking go right out of the head.

     Six: Death can, apparently, be avoided.  (Taxes remain inevitable.  So far.)

     Seven: Rupert Giles doesn't do well with the ordinary.

     Here, Dear Diary, now that the proper background has been established, we come to
the meat of the matter.  Because now that Rupert is back in England permanently, I feel
sure that I'll be seeing quite a lot more of him than when he was an ocean and a
continent, and therefore an extremely long plane ride, away.  (See #1.)  The only problem
would seem to be inherent in #s 2, 3, 4 and 6, because together they create the large and
unpleasant reality that is #7.

     To illustrate my thoughts on the matter, Dear Diary, I'll tell you about my evening.

     It began with a phone call three days ago, during which Rupert informed me that he
was back in the country, settling into an ancient flat in Bath and intending to stay settled
for the foreseeable future.  He followed this news with an invitation to dinner, which I
accepted; it really had been a long time since Rupert and I had spoken over anything
more than the telephone, and despite everything that happened during my last visit, I was
willing to at least try…something, as long as I tried it in a room with the man and not
over the American phone exchange.  Of course, it helped that I was in the right mind for
our particular brand of bridge-mending.

     So two days later--almost one full day before this writing, Dear Diary--I found myself
on his stoop with a bottle of wine in my hands and something like butterflies in my
stomach.  When he answered the door we kissed, and that was the moment I discovered
#5.

     Two years can really dull the edges of a woman's tactile memory, and if there were
some way to make me feel less like a giggling teenager while writing descriptions of
kissing techniques in a diary, I would be going into much greater detail right now.

     Rupert's new flat is comfortable, if still cluttered with half-unpacked boxes and stacks
of books and weapons.  He was his usual charming self, and played host exactly the way I
remember he used to.  He'd even cooked a masterful salmon dish for me, and unearthed
what passes for good tableware in a bachelor's world, even though many other things that
I'm sure are of more daily use and necessity to him were still in crates at the edges of his
rooms.

     He had a bottle of wine as well, already chilled.  I consider it very impolite of him to
have made me help him get through both his bottle and mine, especially since he knew
that my abstinence experiment was more than a year old and had unfortunate side effects
like leaving me with the tolerance of a hedgehog.

     It was very good wine, though, Diary.  And the experiment was getting tired anyway.

     So we ate, and we drank, and we talked about absolutely nothing out of the ordinary:
my work, his complaints about the draughts, my sister, his incident at Heathrow with a
customs official.  Eventually, we slipped into our old game of trying to make each other
blush by inserting unexpected off-colour jokes into the conversation.

     I'm still rather shocked that I'd somehow managed to forget about Rupert's Pink Floyd
story.  He enjoys springing it on me a little too much, I think, even though I know he
never uses it unless he knows he's losing.  Consolation tends to come with more of those
fantastic kisses that I'm so heroically refraining from describing, however, so I don't
mind.  Much.

     All told, it was a very *normal* visit, really.  We finished the wine without incident,
and when it became apparent that we were spending more time not talking than
otherwise--when, in fact, we found ourselves facing the urgent moral dilemma of staying
clothed over *not* staying clothed--we resolved the matter the way we always do.

     God, I've missed Rupert.  And no, Dear Diary, the sex has nothing to do with it.  (Very
much.  Well, maybe a little.)  The man himself, in his entirety--I really didn't know how
much I missed *him*.  He has little ways of doing things: pouring wine with his right
hand even though he's left-handed, knowing his books well enough to find any random
volume the second he needs it, taking off his glasses when he gets emotional as if no one
will be able to see him clearly if he can't see them...it's all so *Rupert*.  When I let
myself enjoy the entire package again, I realized that I was quite the idiot for staying
away so long, especially when my reasons were so flimsy.

     We made love and fell asleep with the window open.  Perfectly natural, exactly the
way we always used to, because one of us has always had an abnormally high internal
thermostat, and really, who wants to get out of bed to close windows?  I was comfortable
with him; I had no trouble falling asleep draped across his chest, and it wasn't until the
telephone rang in the early hours of the morning that I was forcibly reminded of precisely
whose company I was keeping.

     Unfortunately, the ring startled me awake enough that I couldn't help but register the
sound of Rupert's voice as he answered--but I didn't open my eyes or give any indication
that I hadn't immediately gone back to sleep.  Which is how I know that the caller was
Tara, from Sunnydale, saying something that Rupert very much didn't want to be hearing.

     After listening for a long moment, he got out of bed and carried the phone to the
corner of the room, and spoke quietly in an attempt not to disturb me.  Nevertheless,
before he left I felt his entire body heat and tense up; added to the sound of his voice, the
tight, much-too-aware-for-three-AM flatness of it, I had more than enough cause to be
shaken fully awake.  I'm a little ashamed that I didn't let him know I was listening, or go
to the bathroom or the kitchen--or anywhere--and give him some privacy, but I didn't.
His side of the conversation wasn't very telling, anyway; all I really overheard was a
repeated query as to whether some nameless "she"--or two different ones, perhaps--was
all right, and a few sparse, wordless, increasingly unhappy sounds.

     Until he said, "The warlock?" in the most carefully controlled tone I have ever heard.
Which was the moment I realized how very much I really didn't want to be listening.

     Warlocks had no place in our evening, Dear Diary.  While I know, thanks to #2, that
they do actually exist, it was nevertheless an extremely unpleasant jolt to realize that the
fact that we hadn't remotely discussed them didn't somehow logically extend to mean that
they had no effect on our lives.

     Two years ago--after we got our voices back--Rupert told me that warlocks and the
like have *always* been a part of his life.  A scarily intimate, all too real part of who
Rupert Giles is and how he fits into the world.

     I still remember what I told him in response to that, Diary.  Sprawled across his lap,
realizing that I had no idea who the man I was snuggled up to really was--and therefore
feeling incredibly awkward about the level of snuggling we were at--I said, "I'm a
freelance graphic design artist with a degree in economics and a large family inheritance.
My world is not based around demons and magic and fear, and I don't want it to be."
And I held my breath until, in response to *me*, Rupert nodded and smiled and said that
he understood.  And when I left for the airport that afternoon, the goodbye kiss he gave
me was phenomenal--but his glasses stayed off, and his eyes stayed shuttered.

     Which is why, for the past two years, the nearest we've been to each other was the
minimum required for a long-distance charge.

     I knew how tied he was to the gang in Sunnydale, Diary, which was one of the
so-called "nobler" reasons--excuses--I supplied for why I should stay away.  After all,
don't all the relationship books say that it's wrong to try to come between a man and the
commitments he's built his life around?  (Or something like that.  Since the relationship
books that address the issues of dating a man who's responsible for Watching a
demon-killing teenaged superhero tend to be scarce, I've had to make do with pop psych
manuals that address the issues of dating middle-aged divorces with problem children.
Still, Dear Diary, the basic theories should be broadly transferable, don't you think?)
Whoever they were when they came into Rupert's life six years ago, they're as good as his
family now; I know he won't admit as much to anyone, but it's true, and I've never had
any desire to be a homewrecker.  Which is how I was able to justify the occasional
long-distance bill, when before I'd spent an inordinate amount of time trying to justify the
occasional plane fare.  If I'd gone to Sunnydale, Rupert would have spent my entire visit
shutting out the kids, trying to keep their stuff from scaring me off--and even though I
would've appreciated the effort, I know for a fact that no one else would have.  And I also
know that I've never wanted to break the ties he has with those kids…

     I'm not fooling you, am I, Diary?  The "stuff" Rupert shares with the Sunnydale group
tends to be of the life-or-death variety, and I know damn well that, if push ever came to
shove, he would choose them every time--even on the occasions when it's *not*
life-or-death.  Hence the amazingly thorough rationale I seem to have developed to cover
my denial.

     Because of course, under all that sacrificial nobility for the sake of Rupert's other
relationships, there was a huge amount of breathless terror.  This group of people I was
trying to pass off as his adoptive family included a vampire Slayer, a vampire, a witch,
and a thousand-year-old ex-demon.  Rupert himself has a past with dark magic and a
present with demon-killing; God knows he has the scars to prove it, and more every time
I see him.  The only remotely normal person of the lot was a nineteen year-old boy who
lived in his parents' basement, and he slept with--and is apparently now engaged to--the
ex-demon.  These, Dear Diary, were the people--and things--Rupert spent his day-to-day
life with.

     They frightened me.  But worst of all was the sudden knowledge that I thought I'd
known Rupert quite intimately for eighteen years, but hadn't once been a part of the
realities of that day-to-day life.

     All of which led to those two years we keep coming back to, Diary.  Two years of
careful telephone conversations during which he would studiously avoid mentioning
anything even remotely supernatural, and I would studiously pretend that there was
nothing even remotely supernatural for us to be avoiding.  Of course, he would talk about
Buffy's end of year exams, or buying a shop, or Joyce's death, and I was fine with that;
this was his family stuff, and I could use it to bolster my resolve when I was close to
giving in and buying a plane ticket.  Glossing over the scary bits--like exactly what
*kind* of shop Rupert had bought--made it easier for me to pretend that all those stories
he used to tell me about magic and demons and monsters were *just* stories, that I really
didn't need to know how his hand had been mangled, that his idea of normal was *my*
idea of normal.

     Which was silly, because ignoring the scary bits means ignoring who he is.  For him,
warlocks and vampires and Slayers *are* normal.  They're his routine.  It would be
ridiculous to try to have the man he is without those bits; I know that.  Knew that the
second Rupert's mention of a warlock left me shocked and somehow, simultaneously,
totally unsurprised.

     The problem, Dear Diary, is that I don't think *Rupert* knows that.  He's trying to
segregate the supernatural from the rest-of-the-world-natural in his life, and I don't think
he realizes just how impossible a task that is--especially since the two have been
thoroughly and hopelessly entwined through the entirety of his adult life.  No matter how
hard he tries--or how much I wish he could succeed--he never will.  I understand that
now, but Rupert…

     The rest of the telephone call consisted of more incomprehensible sounds, mostly,
until Rupert instructed Tara to keep him apprised of whatever was happening and let his
voice go gentle as he told her to be careful.  He rung off with a vacant "Goodbye," and
there was a long pause before he returned the telephone to the bedside table and left the
room.

     When he came back, I pretended that I had just woken up, and asked muzzily about
the call.  He simply crawled back into bed, stroked his hands over my body, and
whispered that everything was fine.

     He had whiskey on his breath and his hands trembled, but I didn't stop him from
kissing me.  I should've.  When I looked into his eyes this morning and saw the
expression there, the closed, tired, resolved-not-to-speak *fullness* of them, I knew I
should've pried.

     As for why I didn't…it's possible to understand something intellectually, Dear Diary,
without believing it emotionally.  Some people like wrapping themselves in the cozy,
deluded realities they make for themselves out of denial and false security, and I'll
happily admit that I'm one who enjoys doing just that.  So while I knew, I *knew* that
Rupert was falling back into that world of magic and danger that to him is utterly normal,
I wanted to believe that it *wasn't*.  I wanted the gloss-over to continue, because I was
scared that, if I let him get into it, he would drag me with him into a life where true evil
isn't a matter of philosophy and monsters really do lie in wait in the dark.  I was scared
that, if I let him start talking about those areas of his life, he wouldn't stop, and it would
be just like the phone call from the night they buried Buffy--except this time I would be
in the same room with him when he fell apart.

     Diary, that conversation shook me enough that when he told me Buffy had been
resurrected and was alive again a couple of months ago, my response amounted to a
"That's nice, dear" and a rapid subject change.

     So when he came back to bed after Tara's call, I didn't pry.  And he didn't volunteer,
probably because he remembered how I had reacted the last time and didn't want to
spend the next two years walking on eggshells every time we spoke--or possibly having
to decide that two more years of eggshells just wasn't worth it.

     And it's all very stupid, because as I said, he *can't* simply shut off the scarier parts of
his life whenever he wants to, but he's trying anyway because he thinks that's the only
way to protect me or himself or the children back in Sunnydale--I don't know.

     I could just ask, really.  I would, if I weren't so afraid of what his answer would be.

     So there it is, Dear Diary.  Rupert made me breakfast this morning, we danced around
any number of topics, and then I dashed off to work where I am currently getting fuck-all
done because I can't get our goodbye kiss out of my head.  Not to mention all the other
things I've just rambled on about.

     All of which brings me to conclude that my life would be so much easier if the direst
secret I had to entrust to your pages was a politically incorrect lust for my boss.

     Or possibly Colin Firth.

     Alas.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I've been contracted to watch this horizon and will
be here until something happens. Over.
Tell them it will. Over.
   --Ken Babstock
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
End.