Sometimes, late at night, you wish for a normal life. A life of
quiet
scholarship, and tea with your great-aunt, who disapproved of your
"youthful
dalliances" with Ethan, and the "troublesome nature" of Olivia's race.
You
wish that Buffy had never met you. You wish you lived in the
real world.
And sometimes, when you can't sleep, when you find yourself focused
on the
feathers that keep displacing themselves from your brand-new pillows,
when
the only sounds you hear are the quiet hum of the refrigerator and
Xander's
incessant snoring in your ear, you try to place the moment when everything
changed, when this was the only trajectory your life could take.
You
struggle to puzzle out when your life became this strangely surreal
object tha
t needs the kind of examination you give it. You catalogue the
myriad aches
and pains that come from a lifetime of fighting, wince at the creaking
in
joints that never healed properly after yourÖ encounter with Angelus,
and
truly feel your age.
You wonder why you bother at all, why you keep fighting the good fight
instead of liquidating your assets and buying a one-way ticket to St.
Croix.
Xander throws an arm over you, and you briefly consider the wisdom
of two
one-way tickets, and then snicker quietly at the fact that you *are*
seriously considering this.
You speculate about whether this is life, or just a phase in it.
In your
younger days, you felt you could do anything you wanted, because real
life
had yet to begin. It was all just a game until you had to sit
down and
really be Rupert Giles. Now, things aren't as simple. You've
built a life
here, but you still don't know if it's yours. By all accounts,
this was
supposed to be a three or four year gig, doing your part before they
let you
get on with living. But now, all your long-term plans are worthless,
and you
wonder if perhaps that's the point. If you actually start living
when you
stop planning to live.
You remember when your father first told you what you were. On
a trip to
London, he took you out to a park in the middle of the night.
Without so
much as an explanation of why you were there, cold and yawning and
trailing
listlessly behind him, he stopped suddenly in front of a man, pulled
out a
stake, and killed him. You saw the ashes drift around him, and
when he began
a lecture on the nature of his work, all you could pay attention to
was the
dust of what used to be a person settling onto your father's expensive
coat.
You flinched when he touched you for weeks afterwards, and the nightmares
and
bedwetting took months to disappear. You know that if he hadn't
sent you
away to school soon after you would have found a way to escape on your
own.
When you first came to Sunnydale, you were jealous of Buffy and her
friends
for their apparent ease in accepting what they faced, but, looking
back at
your own history, you just wonder what stole their childhood before
the
vampires could.
You spent years running from this, and with good reason. You tried
every
thing you could think of to escape this fate or, at the very least
ignore it
until it asserted itself. And when you gained enough maturity
to face it,
you still let yourself believe that it wasn't going to define who you
were.
You thought you could gladly walk away when your job was done, became
infinitely pleased with yourself for your pragmatism in the face of
this life
that was not yours.
You don't know why you're still here, why you feel this is still your
life,
when you've been relieved of all duties. You like to believe
it's just a
lifetime of training that won't die, but you have an inkling that it's
something else. That you can't leave because you choose not to,
that your
perception of a normal life is skewed, because all the basics are already
here: home, family, someone to say goodnight to, a reason to get up
in the
morning.
And sometimes, when you look at it in the right way, it's enough.