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Magic Box, Thursday

Giles was still feeling out of sorts from the weekend but was doing his best to get back to normal. So he went and got coffee and donuts and opened the shop as he normally did, leaving the bottle of scotch he kept there in its hiding place under the cash register.

The Magic Box was open.

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Dawn wandered in. "Hey. Got a few minutes for a pep talk?" She grabbed a duster and started cleaning out of pure habit.

Giles gave a genuine smile. "And by pep talk, you mean...?"

"Telling me that I'm not insane wanting to be a Watcher, which is apparently a job that not only involves concussions and torture, but also having to kill your slayer's vampire brother?"

"Ah." Giles took off his glasses and polished them. Deep and thorny subjects and he wasn't sure if he was in an emotional place to really be able to help. But he had to try. "Being a Watcher isn't easy. Being a Watcher with an active Slayer is probably the hardest job in the world -- at least if you're doing it correctly."

"Then I must be doing spectacularly, because wow, this is hard," she sulked, still dusting. "I mean, I killed Mel's brother. And when she left a message about staying away? I ignored it, even though he scared me worse than almost anything."

"How'd you do it?" She asked, very quietly. "How'd you deal with Angel, after?"

Giles looked down at his hands, flexing them. The broken bones still ached a little in bad weather. "I'm not entirely sure sometimes," he said honestly. "I just did because I had to."

"Why?" She turned around to face him. "Why not let someone else do it? Or give up, once she quit the Council?"

Giles shook his head. "It's never been about the Council -- which I'm sure Travers would say was blashphemy. It was about her -- Buffy. My Slayer. Being a Watcher to a Slayer is the hardest job there is because to be good at it, you have to put your heart into it. You have to train and help and nurture and care for this one amazing girl who has the weight of the world on her shoulders. YOu have to help her fight her battles and do whatever you can to keep her safe. And you have to do that knowing that the odds are almost certain that eventually you will fail and watch her die." He looked up at Dawn with a bittersweet smile. "There's only one way to do that, one reason. Love."

"How did you decide to do this forever?" Dawn wasn't sure she loved Mel, but she was one of her best friends. "I don't know if I can watch her die the way Buffy did, Giles. Or any other slayer. And then there's killing her brother. Somehow she doesn't seem to hate me, but it could have been bad."

"That's where the love part comes in. As a Watcher, you can walk away. Quit and run off and try to be a rock star or whatever else you wish. Slayers can't do that. They can't stop being Slayers. The question comes down to would it hurt any less if she dies when you're not there," Giles said. "As for killing her brother, there's things that Slayers must do and then there's things that if they do it would break them. Part of the job of a good Watcher should be making sure they don't have to do those things."

"No, it would probably hurt worse," she admitted after a few minutes, "because I'd always wonder what if, y'know?"

"How do you decide what will break them? Like, how'd you know Buffy could kill Angelus?" Which maybe wasn't the best example. "Or that going after Faith wouldn't break her?"

"I would've spared her facing Angelus if I could have," Giles said. "But I doubt at the time I could have managed an effective offensive against a fly, muchless a vampire. I tried to spare her going up against the Master as well." He gave a fond, bittersweet smile. "She knocked me cold with one sucker punch. She never did take well to people trying to decide what's best for her.

"Faith was a different thing," he added, thinking as much about himself and Ethan as about Buffy and Faith. "There are times that not facing something will break you more surely than anything else."

"How do you know when those times are?" She asked, studying him. "Like, should I have left Harth for Mel so she could be all issuey, or did I do the right thing completely by accident when I killed him, so she didn't have to have the guilts for the rest of her life?"

Giles smiled at her. "There isn't a manual that covers all situations," he said. "You just have to go with your instincts and trust that you're doing your best and that your best will be good enough." Until it's not, some traitorous voice whispered in his brain, but that was hardly the kind of thing Dawn needed to hear right now.

She made a face. "How can I do that? I have no clue what I'm doing and feel like I screw up all the time."

"Is your slayer still alive? Is she sane? Reasonably happy?"

"Yes, as far as I know, and maybe? I mean, I just killed her brother."

"As happy as the circumstances allow then. If so, you've done your job," Giles said.

"But I want to be good at it. I know I can't be as good as you, but that's what I'm shooting for." Oh, look. More dust.

"Sounds to me like you are good at it," Giles observed. "And I'm not sure I would use me as an example. In the end, I wasn't able to keep her alive."

Dawn bit down hard on her lip, really wanting to give Giles some kind of hope, or a warning, or something. "It wasn't your fault, Giles." She swallowed, "No one could have saved her, except me, er, Dawn."

Apparently she hadn't done the right thing in either universe.

Giles shook his head. "In my world, it had come down to either Dawn or Buffy. If it had been Dawn -- you -- that had died, it would have destroyed Buffy just as suredly. My failure was in finding an alternative."

Dawn didn't believe that Buffy would have been destroyed by her death. She just...didn't. But that was an issue for another time. "Maybe there wasn't one?"

"There's always an alternative," Giles said. "That's one thing you have to believe as a Watcher. You can never accept that a situation is hopeless."

"If it's a choice between leaving something for your Slayer to deal with and taking it on yourself, which is better?"

"I can't tell you one answer that will cover every situation," Giles told her. "But generally if you can spare your Slayer that's the choice I would make." He fixed her with a piercing gaze. "Just remember that losing her Watcher isn't something you want to put your Slayer through either."

Dawn suddenly came down with a case of the fidgets. "Not if I can help it, but better me than her, right?"

"Better neither of you," Giles said firmly.

"But if I have to choose..."

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Magic Box, Thursday

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