Friend Of The Travelling Kind
Giles never meant to settle in the States. But after he'd tried returning home once already, he found that perhaps the idyll that England had remained in his mind was something of a lie.
Perhaps he knew that he'd left that part of his life behind. There was no need for him to remain a Watcher. He'd heard mutterings from the members of the Council of starting afresh, but Giles did not need that vindication anymore. He'd battled whatever demons his grandmother and father's legacy had granted him. Now, maybe once, he was ready to return to a life without them.
He'd thought about being a greengrocer again.
After the first flight, all they'd cared for was food, medical care and mourning. Then the drifting started in earnest. Dawn and Buffy headed for their father to claim a little of their inheritance. Willow and Kennedy went and became a scourge out west. Giles kept driving the bus. And he drove it across a continent, dropping off as he went. When he could drive no longer, he stepped out of the bus onto a fine shingle beach, the North Atlantic smashing against rocks further out to sea and thought he'd found a fine place.
It was colder here in the winter than he'd have thought, and bleak. Bleaker than the moors surrounding the Yorkshire Public School that the Watcher's ran. In fact, one morning, hunching over to run from the house to the car, bleak was not a harsh enough word. A new shop, a bookstore. Second-hand and antiquarian. Days of dusting and puttering and finding old treasures that were easy to slip onto shelves and lose to some other bounty seeker. Giles had rediscovered cardigans and slippers and all the things he'd swore that his midlife crisis had rid him off.
February came and sorted out the rough patch of weeds that Giles had attempted to garden. Frost and snow put paid to any thought of early snowdrops. It was then that he found someone living in the abandoned boathouse at the end of his property. The hints were there - strange guitar music wafted on by the winds, oddly organised piles of driftwood. But it wasn't until Giles had battered down the door in a fit of DIY that he found him.
"Hey. Did you save your albums?"
Oz was the first, when he looked back later. A bed for a few days, some meals and a hand in the shop toting some boxes. Then gone again, a neat thank you note lying on the kitchen table. He had never expected to find Faith out this way either. She had stayed for a few hours. On her way north to track a rogue werewolf, or at least that was what she'd said. No mention of Buffy, nor of where she'd found that rather interesting motorbike.
After that, he didn't know how they'd found him. A vacant eyed Ethan shuffling through a warm spring breeze, an old Riley dropping off some books he'd found. Even Quentin Travers' granddaughter, come to find out why her granddad died. Olivia shared his bed for a few sweet weeks of summer. An odd Watcher, some newer Slayers. Not after training or interest, just a stop on their journey. No Buffy, but Willow visited once. Where once there had been pain and anger, there was a feeling that was mostly serene.
Oz came back again the next year. And that time, he left some vinyl.